Beauty in Spanish: Semantics and Folk Aesthetics

Recent work on the semantics of beauty has been conducted mostly within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage framework and folk aesthetics, the study of linguistically encoded aesthetic meanings that show how speakers of a language and/or members of a culture think about beauty. In Spanish, research has been limited to the use of the adjective bonito (‘pretty’) (Gladkova & Romero-Trillo, 2014). Outside of this framework, the most important work in Spanish is the Ideographic and Semantic Dictionary of Positive Aesthetic Evaluation in Spanish (Curbeira Cancela & Urra Vargas, 2012). Using this work as our main source, we conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis of a sample of 96 Spanish adjectives (148 individual meanings), framed in terms of Conceptual Semantics (Jackendoff, 2002 & 2007). Semantic decomposition yielded results pertaining to general conceptual structures, qualia structure (Jackendoff, 2002; Pustejovsky, 1991), secondary qualities ascribed in aesthetic evaluation, degree, and semantic noun kinds. Quantitative analysis of feature occurrence revealed informative correlations between some of these pieces of semantic information, especially as they pertain to the distinction between human and non-human beauty, which point to some interesting implications and questions for Spanish folk aesthetics. Furthermore, this research highlights how lexical semantic analysis can provide insight into cultural phenomena like beauty standards or, more generally, value systems encoded in language.