ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the meaning of Argentine Spanish bronca (roughly, ‘rage/anger’), a word central to the emotional world of Argentines, and particularly of Porteños, the people from Buenos Aires (Argentina’s capital). To this end, I use the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to cultural-semantic analysis, which enables accurate, cross- translatable definitions using terms that reflect local perspectives embedded in emotions words. The analysis is grounded in examination of bronca occurrences in various sources, including newspapers, poems, and tango lyrics. Two distinct bronca senses are identified and defined.

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KEY WORDS: bronca, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), Argentine Spanish, emotion