Marusch, Tina (2010). Natural semantic formalisms? A discussion of the naturalness in Wierzbicka’s approach to lexical semantic analysis. Master’s thesis, Technische Universität Chemnitz. PDF (open access)
The underlying assumption of this thesis is that NSM explications are only partly accessible to the intuition of native speakers. That is, although the analysis consists of natural language and the speaker readily understands every word in isolation, the composite meaning is much more difficult to comprehend. Apart from the alleged clarity and simplicity of the vocabulary, there are other factors influencing
comprehension, such as the complexity of the definition. Furthermore, the subtle differences in meaning are not efficiently enough brought out in the explications for test subjects to recognize the differences as such.
The thesis does not exclude the possibility that NSM paraphrases are a useful tool in lexical semantic analysis and that one can learn many things about meaning from them. For a trained linguist, who is familiar with the structure of the explications, the analyses, especially those of abstract concepts, will be very telling. However, the verifiability through the intuition of native speakers cannot be taken for granted.
Therefore, NSM practitioners cannot claim to avoid obscurity that afflicts many other semantic methods. The claim that NSM submits itself to a higher standard of verifiability than any other rival method cannot be upheld.
Although Marusch’s thesis adopts a rather critical stance vis-a-vis the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, as the outline above abundantly demonstrates, it is included in the database because it constructs its case on the basis of a number of slightly adapted explications that have been referred to in more recent NSM literature.
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