Otomo, Asako, & Torii, Akiko (2006). An NSM approach to the meaning of tear and its Japanese equivalents. In Keith Allan (Ed.), Selected Papers from the 2005 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/als2005.html. PDF (open access)
This paper undertakes a contrastive analysis of verbs relating to the action of ‘tearing’ in English and Japanese; it employs the framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (hereafter, NSM) developed by Anna Wierzbicka and her colleagues.
Generally speaking, there is no exact semantic correspondence between the verbs of different languages. This holds true for verbs relating to the action of ‘tearing’ in English and Japanese. Tear has more than one rough equivalent in Japanese: saku, chigiru and yaburu all mean ‘tear’, but they differ in some respects. The Japanese verbs exhibit a more specialised meaning than English tear, in that they vary in object, manner, and projected result. This paper will demonstrate the difference in cognitive structure between these verbs.
We will use NSM to fully explicate the meanings of these words and to reveal the shared semantic structures and distinctive aspects of each verb under investigation. The NSM methodology, based on semantic primes and a grammar of combinability, enables us to explicate language-specific concepts in a precise manner, while at the same time remaining free of ethno-cultural and/or linguistic bias.
This analysis provides evidence that as far as the concept of ‘tearing’ is concerned, Japanese and English cause their respective speakers to develop and use language-specific cognitive structures.
