Goddard, Cliff (1994). Lexical primitives in Yankunytjatjara. In Cliff Goddard, & Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.), Semantic and lexical universals: Theory and empirical findings (pp. 229-262). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.25.13god
All the posited lexical primitives find good candidates in Yankunytjatjara, once polysemy and allolexy are taken into account. In general, the posited exponents are formally simple (monomorphemic) words or clitics; but sometimes they are affixes, and occasionally they are formally complex (i.e. apparently polymorphemic) expressions. There are still some uncertainties about allolexic variants of some primitives, and about how to express certain collocations that the theory predicts are possible. We are not yet in full possession of a Natural Semantic Metalanguage based on Yankunytjatjara. What has been done, however, is to establish its basic lexicon. There would seem to be no serious barrier to the construction of a full NSM based on Yankunytjatjara and mutually translatable with expressively equivalent NSMs of other languages.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
