Wierzbicka, Anna (1976). In defense of YOU and ME. In Wolfgang Girke, & Helmut Jachnow (Eds.), Theoretische Linguistik in Osteuropa: Originalbeiträge und Erstübersetzungen (pp. 1-21). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
In 1976 terminology, I and YOU are “semantic primitives”; in more recent times, they have been referred to as semantic primes. They cannot be defined away in terms of other primes and they cannot be dispensed with in favour of some arbitrary indices, such as those used in the artificial languages of symbolic logic. Their status as semantic primes can be confirmed on the basis of empirical semantic studies.
