Goddard, Cliff (1999). Building a universal semantic metalanguage: The semantic theory of Anna Wierzbicka. RASK, 9-10, 3-35.
For some thirty years now, Anna Wierzbicka has been one of the most prolific, insightful, and lively scholars in the field of linguistic semantics. Her books and articles have ranged over diverse areas of lexical semantics, grammatical semantics, and pragmatics. At the level of theory, she is widely known for her insistence that universal semantic primitives exist as meanings of words in ordinary language. In recent years, her theory – now known as the ‘Natural Semantic Metalanguage’ (NSM) approach – has undergone considerable expansion and modification. This article presents an overview of current NSM theory, covering the expanded inventory of primitives, the novel concepts of allolexy and non-compositional polysemy, and new proposals about the syntax of the semantic metalanguage.
