Chappell, Hilary (1994). Mandarin semantic primitives. In Cliff Goddard, & Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.), Semantic and lexical universals: Theory and empirical findings (pp. 109-147). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.25.09cha
The approach taken in this analysis of Mandarin is that only a small subset of lexemes and expressions of a natural spoken language serves as a potential ‘key’ or metalanguage in directly representing basic conceptual building blocks, a framework of semantic analysis advocated and developed by Anna Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard. In the main section of the paper, the eight classes of primitives proposed by Goddard and Wierzbicka are discussed in turn for Mandarin: (1) substantives and pronouns; (2) mental predicates; (3) determiners and quantifiers; (4) actions and events; (5) metapredicates; (6) time and place; (7) meronymy and taxonomy; and (8) evaluators and descriptors. Most of the data are elicited for the purpose of creating the set of test sentences with the primitives in their canonical contexts in order to provide a comparative corpus. Where possible, I have supplemented this with data from transcriptions of recorded conversations and narratives to add utterances from natural contexts.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
