Wierzbicka, Anna (1995). A semantic basis for grammatical typology. In Werner Abraham, Talmy Givón, & Sandra Thompson (Eds.), Discourse, grammar and typology: Papers in honor of John W.M. Verhaar (pp. 179-209). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.27.15wie
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 14 (pp. 402-426) of:
Wierzbicka, Anna (1996). Semantics: Primes and universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Translated into Russian as:
Вежбицкая, А. [Wierzbicka, Anna] (1999). Семантическая основа грамматического описания и типология: переходность и возвратность. In Вежбицкая, А. [Wierzbicka, Anna], Семантические универсалии и описание языков, под ред. Татьяна В. Булыгиной [Semantic universals and the description of languages, ed. Tatyana V. Bulygina] (pp. 44-76). Москва [Moscow]: Языки русской культуры [Languages of Russian Culture].
(Modified) excerpt:
To compare languages (or anything else) we need a tertium comparationis (that is, a common measure). By using as its tools meaning-based categories such as “noun”, “numeral”, “plural”, “past”, “imperative”, “conditional”, or “reflexive”, linguistic typology has also recognized that in the case of language the necessary tertium comparationis is provided by meaning. However, categories of this kind were usually not defined, or if they were defined, their definitions were not adhered to, and in fact, whatever the definitions, the actual analysis was carried out on the basis of intuition and common sense. The treatment of the category of “reflexives” illustrated in the present paper is a case in point.
Among the meanings which linguistic investigations show to be grammaticalised most widely in the languages of the world , we can recognise
certain scenarios such as the “transitive” scenario or the “reflexive” scenario; and we can see that large parts of grammars are organised around such scenarios, and can be described with reference to them. Other widely grammaticalised meanings are of a different nature. All types of meanings, however, can be rigorously described and insightfully compared in terms of the same set of universal semantic primitives and of the metalanguage based on them. I believe that without such a metalanguage, grammatical typology has no firm basis and no precise tools with which it could fully achieve its objectives.
