The primary aim of this dissertation is to explore a number of religious concepts in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. These concepts are English angels, the devil, God, heaven, hell, martyr, sin, and grace, as well as their Arabic and Hebrew near equivalents. These concepts are investigated from a linguistic point of view. Linguistic evidence is based mainly on usage data from corpora of everyday language. The corpora are the Corpus of Contemporary American English (410+ million words), Collins Wordbanks Online: English (500+ million words), ArabiCorpus (68 million words), and HebrewCorpus (150 million words). The description of the results is done by relying on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory, developed by Anna Wierzbicka, Cliff Goddard, and colleagues. To lay the groundwork, the dissertation establishes Arabic and Hebrew versions of NSM. In other words, it identifies the exponents of the 64 Natural Semantic Metalanguage semantic primes and maps out their basic combinatorial properties. Semantic explications of the target religious concepts are then developed in terms which are both comprehensible to ordinary people and translatable between the three languages in question. This enables a clear delineation of the similarities and differences among the folk religious concepts. The dissertation is primarily a contribution to linguistic semantics. It is the first detailed study of folk religious concepts from a linguistic vantage point, and it is the first detailed study of the Arabic and Hebrew versions of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. In addition, the results of this dissertation contribute to the fields of lexicography, corpus analysis, interfaith dialogue, cross-cultural communication, and religious education.

First and foremost, this thesis is an exploration of the lexical semantics of selected English social category words, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). It will explicate two sets of social category words, identify commonalities between the explications, and in turn identify sub-classes based upon the shared semantic structures. A subsidiary goal is to explore the syntactic and phraseological properties of each subclass, using online corpora and journals and newspapers from a variety of sources. The three corpora are the British National Corpus–Brigham Young University, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2004-, and Davies, 2008-, respectively), and Collins Wordbanks Online. The question of interest is the extent to which the syntactic and phraseological properties of human social category words can be accounted for by their semantic properties. The thesis makes no attempt to focus on any one particular dialect of English. It generally draws on written English from Australian, British and American sources; however, if it becomes apparent that there are strong differences between these dialects, these differences will be mentioned.

Danish is not only a language. It is a universe of meaning saturated with concepts, some of which are quintessentially Danish. This thesis tells the story of the Danish speech community, its distinctive social ethos and its culture-specific linguistic construals. It provides sociocognitive representations of Danish ways of speaking, thinking and feeling based on evidence from everyday words. Danish core values are explored through keywords such as 'hygge', roughly 'pleasant togetherness', 'tryghed' roughly 'security', and 'janteloven' 'the Jante law', words which are not only untranslatable into other languages, but which also act as discursive focal points for the Danish speech community. Indigenous terms for sociality, cognition and emotion are analysed based on their usage and collocational profiles as found in linguistic corpora of Danish texts. Equipped with the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, this thesis aims to disentangle the intricate meanings of Danish words and to situate these meanings in a broader cultural context. Contributing to the growing body of NSM studies and the emerging disciplines of cultural semantics and ethnopragmatics, this thesis is the first to systematically study Danish as a cultural universe by explicating Danish word meanings and providing cultural scripts for their associated values and attitudes. It is argued that words are products of cultural history, and that they have emerged to meet the conceptual needs of speakers. It is also argued that the worlds we live in are not linguistically and conceptually neutral, but rather that speakers who "live by Danish concepts" are likely to pay attention to their world in ways suggested by "guiding" Danish keywords and lexical grids. Finally, it is demonstrated how, equipped with semantic methodology, we can account for the meanings of even highly culture-specific and untranslatable linguistic concepts. This cultural-semantic and ethnopragmatic study of Danish breaks new ground with respect to the language-culture and language-cognition interfaces, but also more specifically, provides a new integrative sociocognitive framework for understanding Danish language, identity and cultural values. The findings extend to the fields of cross-cultural communication and cross-cultural education and call into attention the central role of language in the study of cultural values.