Zamblera, Francesco (2013). The Lithuanian Semantic Metalanguage and the polysemy of kažkas. Res Balticae, 13, 113-125. PDF (open access)
This article presents some preliminary questions towards the definition of the Lithuanian Semantic Metalanguage. For most primes, it is rather straightforward to find a Lithuanian equivalent, but there are some tricky issues, one of which this work will examine in detail;
it represents an apparent challenge to two of the most important primes (SOMEONE and SOMETHING), namely, the fact that Lithuanian has only one word meaning both, the lexical item kažkas. The issue is discussed in sec. 4 and 5, where I will propose that kažkas is in fact
polysemous and not ambiguous (so that Lithuanian has indeed two different concepts here, which happen to be expressed by the same word). After a short summary of the main points of the NSM theory (sec. 2), which is not intended to be exhaustive, sec. 3 presents the table of the proposed Lithuanian equivalents of the semantic primes, in the usual format. Finally, after a short list of possible further research (sec. 6), sec. 7 presents a Lithuanian Semantic Metalanguage text, the translation of the English NSM explanation of the Biblical concept of God, taken from Wierzbicka (2001, p. 21), a text which relies heavily on the contrast between someone and something.
