Goddard, Cliff, & Karlsson, Susanna (2004). Re-thinking THINK: Contrastive semantics of Swedish and English. In Christo Moskovsky (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. PDF (open access)
A more recent publication building on this one is:
Goddard, Cliff, & Karlsson, Susanna (2008). Re-thinking THINK in contrastive perspective: Swedish vs. English. In Cliff Goddard (Ed.), Cross-linguistic semantics (pp. 225-240). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.102.14god
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework originated by Anna Wierzbicka has long postulated THINK as a semantic prime, and a large body of cross-linguistic research demonstrates that lexical exponents of THINK can be identified in a diversity of languages. This result is challenged, however, by the apparent existence in Swedish and other Scandinavian languages of several basic-level “verbs of thinking”. In this study it is argued that the primary senses of Swedish tänka and English think are in fact semantically identical, and correspond to the semantic prime THINK as proposed in NSM theory. Semantic explications are proposed and justified for Swedish tro and tycka, and for the use of I think in English as an epistemic formula. In the process previous NSM assumptions about the semantic prime THINK are shown to have been incorrectly influenced by language-specific properties of English think. Likewise, the widely held Vendlerian view of the relation between thinking about and thinking that is challenged.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
