This paper explores ‘the evaluative noget construction’ in Danish. The construction consists of noget ‘something’ juxtaposed by a noun in an evaluative frame such as e.g. Det er noget pjat, ‘It’s nonsense’. With a starting point in cross-linguistic studies on something, the paper moves on to explore core members of this evaluative class in Danish, providing a detailed semantic analysis of the construction’s core configurations. The affordance of noget ‘something’ to mean ‘something bad’ is a key to understanding the construction, and from this general premise the class of evaluatives take off in multiple negative directions, providing a snapshot of the Danish linguaculture of evaluation. The paper argues for a Cultural Construction Grammar that can bring together the lexicogrammatical integrationism of construction grammar approaches with the linguacultural holism of the research in ethnosyntax. The goal is to provide high-definition analysis of complex, language-specific constructions in a simple, globally translatable metalanguage.

Many human rights charters contain prohibitions on inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners and detainees. Terms like “inhuman” and “degrading” are difficult to interpret, but they are certainly not meaningless. It is important to attend to attend to the meanings of the words themselves, as well as to the decisions that courts have made about particular practices. Reflection on the meanings of these highly-charged terms reveals important complexity, which we can unpack in a way that enables us to better focus our debate about the proper treatment of prisoners and detainees. Focusing on the ordinary-language meaning of evaluative terms like “inhuman” and “degrading” also helps us approach the relation between rules and standards in law more thoughtfully, as we see why it is important not to let the evaluative meaning of these terms be superseded by the definitions established in the course of their application.