One of the most frequent answers to the question "How are you?"; something that Czechs wish each other on a daily basis; a highly valued personal quality. Pohoda is a polysemous and widely used Czech noun that has nearly exclusively positive connotations and refers to, inter alia, a sought-after kind of calm, comfort, and self-indulgence (Vaňková and Pacovská 2010). In my presentation - based on European ethnolinguistics (Bartmiński 2016; Vaňková et al. 2005), the NSM theory (Goddard 2018), and the data from Czech language corpora - I would like to show in what respect pohoda might be a Czech cultural key word; a key word that despite its relaxed surface tells a troubled story about totalitarian past and forcibly abandoned ideals.
References
Bartmiński, Jerzy (2016): Jazyk v kontextu kultury: Dvanáct statí z lublinské kognitivní etnolingvistiky. Praha: Karolinum.
Goddard, Cliff (2018). Ten Lectures on Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Exploring Language, Thought and Culture Using Simple, Translatable Words. Leiden: Brill.
Vaňková, Irena - Nebeská, Iva - Saicová Římalová, Lucie - Pacovská, Jasňa (2005): Co na srdci, to na jazyku: kapitoly z kognitivní lingvistiky. Praha: Karolinum.
Vaňková, Irena and Pacovská, Jasňa (eds.) (2010): Obraz člověka v jazyce. Praha: Ústav českého jazyka a teorie komunikace, Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy.