Goddard, Cliff (2010). The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. In Bernd Heine, & Heikko Narrog (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis (pp. 459-484). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2nd ed.
Goddard, Cliff (2015). The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. In Bernd Heine, & Heikko Narrog (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis (pp. 817-841). Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199677078.013.0018
The basic conviction behind the NSM approach – bolstered by scores of empirical studies – is that meaning is the key to insightful and explanatory descriptions of most linguistic phenomena, phonetics and phonology excepted. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is a decompositional system of meaning representation based on empirically established universal semantic primes, i.e., simple indefinable meanings that appear to be present as word meanings in all languages. The NSM approach offers a comprehensive and versatile approach to meaning analysis: highly constrained and systematic, non-ethnocentric, and capable of producing representations with high cognitive plausibility. Given the pervasiveness of meaning-based and meaning-related phenomena in languages (in lexicon, morphology, syntax, prosody, and pragmatics), the approach surely has a tremendous amount to offer linguistics at large. Of course, NSM is not a complete theory or methodology of linguistic analysis. If languages can be thought of as systems for correlating meanings with forms, NSM’s strengths lie on the meaning side of the equation.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
