Wierzbicka, Anna (1992). Semantic primitives and semantic fields. In Adrienne Lehrer, & Eva Feder Kittay (Eds.), Frames, fields, and contrasts: New essays in semantic and lexical organization (pp. 209-227). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 5 (pp. 170-183) of:
Wierzbicka, Anna (1996). Semantics: Primes and universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The entire Lehrer and Kittay collection was transferred to digital printing in 2009 by Routledge (New York).
(Modified) excerpt:
Semantic primitives offer us a tool for investigating the structure of semantic groupings or fields. In particular, they can show us how to distinguish nonarbitrary semantic groupings from arbitrary ones; and how to distinguish discrete, self-contained groupings from open-ended ones. I illustrate these tenets with a number of examples pertaining to several different areas of the lexicon: (1) the names of “natural kinds” and “cultural kinds”; (2) speech act verbs; (3) color words.
