Goddard, Cliff (2001). Universal units in the lexicon. In Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, & Wolfgang Raible (Eds.), Language typology and language universals: An international handbook: Vol. 2 (pp. 1190-1203). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110171549.2.11.1190
It is impossible to proclaim with absolute certainty that any meaning is universally attested as the meaning of a lexical unit in all languages. The sample of languages on which we are able to obtain information and analysis of the necessary quality is too small. This does not mean, however, that no firm conclusions can be reached.
First, even a small sample of languages shows that only very few meanings have any chance at all of being universal. Many impressionistically “basic” items of English vocabulary (such as go, water, and eat) lack precise equivalents in other languages.
Second, it emerges very clearly that it is among the semantic primes identified within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach that the best candidates for the status of universal meanings are found. Of the 25 or so prime meanings we consider in this paper, all are strong candidates for universal status. On the other hand, of the 25 or so NON-prime candidates for universal status reviewed in this article, only ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘mother’, ‘day’, and ‘make’ seem to have much hope of being lexical universals.
Constraints of space prevent us from canvassing the entire inventory of 55-odd NSM primes. Aside from various predicates we do not examine (including say, see, hear, there is, have, live, die), there are entire “minidomains” of temporal, spatial, and “logical” meanings we leave untouched. Though it is too early to be conclusive, sufficient cross-linguistic evidence is available to indicate that all or most of them are plausible lexical universals.
