Goddard, Cliff (2003). Semantic primes within and across languages. In Dominique Willems, Bart Defrancq, Timothy Colleman, & Dirk Noël (Eds.), Contrastive analysis in language: Identifying linguistic units of comparison (pp. 13-43). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1057/9780230524637_2
This chapter adopts the standpoint of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory, originated by Anna Wierzbicka. The NSM theory of semantic primes is no ‘new kid on the block’. It is the result of a long and incremental programme of research. There is a substantial crosslinguistic literature dealing with the identification of semantic primes across languages, and some of the problems and solutions discussed in this literature are illustrated here. The chapter shows how semantic primes have been identified within and across languages, over several decades of empirical research, and how they can be used as a tool in lexical and grammatical typology and contrastive linguistics.
