Browsing results for Broad topics
Published on November 19, 2018. Last updated on November 19, 2018.
Годдард, Клифф [Goddard, Cliff] (2009). “Следуй путем рисового поля”: семантика пословиц в английском и малайском языках [“Sleduy putem risovogo polya”: semantika poslovits v angliyskom i malayskom yazykakh / “Follow the way of the rice plant”: The semantics of proverbs in English and Malay (Bahasa Melayu)]. Жанры речи [Zhanry rechi / Speech genres], 6, 184-207.
Russian translation of a paper presented at the Wenner-Gren Foundation Symposium on Ritual Communication, Portugal, 17-23 March 2007. Updated and published in English as chapter 8 of:
Goddard, Cliff & Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
No English abstract available. The proverbs explicated (in Russian) include: (English) A stitch in time saves nine, Make hay while the sun shines, Out of the frying pan into the fire, Practice makes perfect, All that glitters is not gold, Too many cooks spoil the broth, You can’t teach an old dog new tricks; Where there’s smoke there’s fire; (Malay) Ikut resmi padi ‘Follow the way of the rice plant’, Seperti ketam mangajar anak berjalan betul ‘Like a crab teaching its young to walk straight’, Binasa badan kerana mulut ‘The body suffers because of the mouth’, ‘Ada gula, ada semut ‘Where there’s sugar, there’s ants’, Seperti katak di bawah tempurung ‘Like a frog under a coconut shell’, Keluar mulut harimau masuk mulut buaya ‘Out from the tiger’s mouth into the crocodile’s mouth’, Bila gajah dan gajah berlawan kancil juga yang mati tersepit ‘When elephant fights elephant it’s the mousedeer that’s squashed to death’.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (T) Russian
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (2009). “Like a crab teaching its young to walk straight”: Proverbiality, semantics, and indexicality in English and Malay. In Gunter Senft, & Ellen B. Basso (Eds.), Ritual communication (pp. 103-125). New York: Berg.
My objective is to give a balanced, contrastive treatment of the textual semantics, cultural-historical positioning, and interdiscursivity of proverbs in two widely different speech cultures. In what follows, I look first at contemporary English, addressing the way proverbs, as instances of a language-specific category, can be identified on linguistic evidence. I propose a template in the NSM metalanguage to articulate the semantic framing inherent in the proverb genre (essentially, the semantic content of “proverbiality”) and demonstrate the utility of the approach with a full analysis of several English metaphorical proverbs (“A stitch in time saves nine”) and maxims (“Practice makes perfect”). I discuss aspects of the interdiscursivity of proverbs in English, with particular reference to the ethos of modernity. In the remainder of the chapter, I apply a parallel analysis and discussion to proverbs (peribahasa) in contemporary Malay, including the metaphorical Malay proverb Seperti ketam mengajar anak berjalan betul ‘like a crab teaching its young to walk straight’.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 22, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2009). The theory of the mental lexicon. In Sebastian Kempgen, Peter Kosta, Tilman Berger, & Karl Gutschmidt (Eds.), Die slavischen Sprachen/The Slavic languages: Eine internationales Handbuch zu ihrer Struktur, ihrer Geschichte und ihrer Erforsching/An international handbook of their structure, their history and their investigation: Volume 1 (pp. 848-863). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI : https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110214475.1.11.848
The main thesis of this article is that (contrary to what, for example, Chomsky claims) a great deal is by now known about the mental lexicon. First of all, there is currently a great deal of evidence that at the heart of this lexicon lies a set of sixty or so universal semantic primes, each with its own set of combinatory characteristics. Second, cross-linguistic evidence suggests that large sections of the mental lexicon have a hierarchical structure, with several levels of semantic molecules operating and thus allowing for great conceptual complexity to be combined with relatively simple semantic structures. Third, it is now clear that many sections of the mental lexicon are organized according to a certain pattern, or template, shared by a large number of words. Fourth, a large body of research has shown that the mental lexicon of the speakers of any given language includes many words whose meanings are unique to that particular language, and that such words – a language’s cultural key words – help bind the speakers of a language into a cohesive cultural community.
The chapter focuses in particular on the relatively new areas of semantic molecules and semantic templates. The illustrative material analysed is drawn from Polish and relates to emotions (including but not limited to emotions reminiscent of envy and compassion in English), speech acts (reminiscent of to order and to ask (someone about something) in English), names of animals (mice), and motion verbs.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) ask (someone to do something), (E) denerwować się, (E) doszed, (E) kazać, (E) martwić się, (E) mysz, (E) poszed, (E) prosić, (E) przeszed, (E) przyszed, (E) pytać, (E) współczuć, (E) wszed, (E) wyszed, (E) zazdrościć, (T) Polish
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 19, 2021.
Savage, André (2009). Que veulent dire les proverbes touareg? In Rainer Voßen, Dymitr Ibriszimow, & Harry Stroomer (Eds.), Études berbères IV – Essais lexicologiques et lexicographiques et autres articles (pp. 193-203). Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.
Published on May 10, 2017. Last updated on November 11, 2018.
Al Jallad, Nader (2010). The concept of “shame” in Arabic: Bilingual dictionaries and the challenge of defining culture-based emotions. Language Design, 12, 31-57. PDF (open access)
This paper aims at providing a theoretical framework for analysing, understanding, and describing the very complex emotion of ‘shame’ in Arabic. The complexity of this emotion is highlighted by problems of translatability, as shown by a survey of how Arabic ‘shame’ words are defined in four English-Arabic and Arabic-English bilingual dictionaries. The comparison of the various definitions highlights the need to define not only the emotion of ‘shame’, but also all other emotions and culture-loaded words in general, by means of universal language- and culture-free formulas. To test the proposed theoretical framework, a Natural Semantic Metalanguage-based system is used to define the ‘shame’ words addressed in this paper.
Approximate application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
Tags: (E) 'ār عار, (E) 'ayb عيب, (E) faḍīḥa فضيحة, (E) ḥayā حياء, (E) ḥishmah حشمة, (E) khajal خجل
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on February 9, 2020.
Wakefield, John C. (2010). The English equivalents of Cantonese sentence-final particles: A contrastive analysis. PhD thesis, Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Open access
Abstract:
Cantonese has a lexical tone system that severely restricts its ability to manipulate pitch. As a result, many of the speaker-oriented discourse meanings that are expressed through intonation in languages such as English are expressed in the form of sentence-final particles (SFPs) in Cantonese. Although this is widely known and accepted by linguists, apparently no study to date has made a systematic attempt to discover whether any of the more than 30 Cantonese SFPs have English intonational equivalents, and if so, what those equivalents are. To work towards filling this research gap, this study examines the English intonational equivalents of four Cantonese SFPs that divide into the following two pairs: particles of obviousness: 咯 lo1 and 吖吗 aa1maa3; question particles: 咩 me1 and 呀 aa4.
The English equivalent form of each of the four SFPs of this study is identified by examining the pitch contours of Cantonese-to-English audio translations, provided by Cantonese/English native-bilingual participants. A definition using Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is proposed for each SFP, which is hypothesized to apply equally to its English intonational counterpart. Following earlier proposals by Hirst regarding emphatic intonation, these pitch contours are proposed to be floating tones that exist as lexical entries in the minds of native speakers of English. Syntactic positions are proposed for the SFPs and their English equivalents adopting Rizzi‘s split-CP hypothesis.
The findings of this study have far reaching implications regarding the descriptions and classifications of intonation, as well as regarding the classifications of the various forms of suprasegmentals. This study used segmental discourse markers to discover their suprasegmental counterparts in English, exploiting a unique window through which to examine the forms and meanings of English discourse intonation, which is one of the least understood and most difficult to study aspects of English. This research has arguably provided the strongest and clearest evidence to date regarding the forms and meanings of the particular forms of English intonation with which it deals.
Rating:
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) aa1maa3 吖吗, (E) aa4 呀, (E) lo1 咯, (E) me1 咩, (T) Chinese (Cantonese)
Published on August 16, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Kornacki, Paweł (2010). Studies in emotions: Ethnolinguistic perspectives. Warszawa: Wydział Neofilologii UW.
Based on the methodology of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, the work analyses selected aspects of conceptualization and verbal expressions of emotions in contemporary Chinese (pŭtōnghuà) and Polish. Referring to intercultural anthropological and psychological research on emotions, its chapters discuss the importance of the Chinese cultural key word “heart/mind”, the semantics of words for bad feelings in Chinese, colloquial Polish speech practice, and the main conceptual elements of Early-Chinese and Indian cultural emotion models.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on February 17, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff (2010). Cultural scripts: Applications to language teaching and intercultural communication. Studies in Pragmatics (Journal of the China Pragmatics Association) 3, 105-119.
Cultural scripts provide a powerful new technique for articulating cultural norms, values and practices using simple, cross-translatable phrasing. The technique is based on many decades of research into cross-cultural semantics by Anna Wierzbicka and colleagues in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. This paper illustrates the cultural scripts approach with three examples of pragmatics of Anglo English: request strategies, personal remarks, and phatic complimenting in American English. It argues that the cultural scripts approach can be readily adapted for use in teaching intercultural pragmatics and intercultural communication, and shows with concrete examples (so-called pedagogical scripts) how this can be done.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (S) compliments, (S) expressive positivity, (S) personal autonomy, (S) personal remarks, (S) pleasant interaction, (S) requests, (T) Chinese, (T) English
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). On emotions and on definitions: A response to Izard. Emotion Review, 2(4), 379-380.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 11, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). The “history of emotions” and the future of emotion research. Emotion Review, 2(3), 269-273. DOI: 10.1177/1754073910361983
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 5 (pp. 102-126) of:
Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
This article focuses on the emergence of a new subfield of emotion research known as “history of emotions”. People’s emotional lives depend on the construals they impose on events, situations, and human actions. Different cultures and different languages suggest different habitual construals, and since habitual construals change over time, as a result, habitual feelings change, too. But to study construals we need a suitable methodology. The article assumes that such a methodology is provided by the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). It applies the NSM approach to the history of ‘happiness’, an emotion that is very much at the forefront of current debates across a range of disciplines. The article shows how the “history of emotions” can be combined with cultural semantics and why this combination opens new perspectives for the whole interdisciplinary field of emotion research.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) happiness
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 13, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). ‘Story’ – An English cultural keyword and a key interpretive tool of Anglo culture. Narrative Inquiry, 20(1), 153-181. DOI: 10.1075/ni.20.1.08wie
This paper draws attention to the fact that the word story, a unique English cultural key word and a key interpretive tool of modern Anglo culture, has played a significant role in the “narrative turn” in the humanities and social sciences. It discusses some of the implications of this fact. Because the uniqueness and centrality of English story has until now gone unnoticed, many semantic components associated with it have been projected onto other languages, which has lead to the positing of spurious human universals and to claims such as “story is a basic principle of mind”.
The paper also shows that the English word story is linked with a family of concepts that have no semantic equivalents in other languages and that are unique conceptual artefacts of Anglo culture. It argues that if we can pinpoint these concepts, we can also pinpoint the shared values and assumptions reflected in them. This can be done with the help of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) methodology.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) history, (E) story, (E) story telling, (E) tale, (T) English
Published on March 25, 2018. Last updated on August 16, 2021.
Roberts, Michael (2010). The lexical semantics of social categories: demonyms and occupation words in English. MA thesis, University of New England, Armidale. PDF (open access)
First and foremost, this thesis is an exploration of the lexical semantics of selected English social category words, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). It will explicate two sets of social category words, identify commonalities between the explications, and in turn identify sub-classes based upon the shared semantic structures. A subsidiary goal is to explore the syntactic and phraseological properties of each subclass, using online corpora and journals and newspapers from a variety of sources. The three corpora are the British National Corpus–Brigham Young University, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and Collins Wordbanks Online. The question of interest is the extent to which the syntactic and phraseological properties of human social category words can be accounted for by their semantic properties. The thesis makes no attempt to focus on any one particular dialect of English. It generally draws on written English from Australian, British and American sources; however, if it becomes apparent that there are strong differences between these dialects, these differences are mentioned.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 18, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff (2010). Universals and variation in the lexicon of mental state concepts. In Barbara C. Malt, & Phillip Wolff (Eds.), Words and the mind: How words capture human experience (pp. 72-92). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195311129.003.0005
Abstract:
The first two sections of this chapter provide an overview of NSM research and findings, with a particular focus on mental state concepts. The next two sections show how NSM techniques make it possible to reveal complex and culture-specific meanings in detail and in terms that are readily transposable across languages. Examples include emotion terms, epistemic verbs, and ethnopsychological constructs in English, Chinese, Russian, and Korean. The next section discusses the relationship between linguistic meanings (word meanings) and cognition and elucidates the theoretical and methodological implications for cognitive science. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that people’s subjective emotional experience can be shaped or coloured to some extent by the lexical categories of their language.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) bēi 悲, (E) believe that, (E) chóu 愁, (E) heart, (E) maum 몸, (E) mind, (E) sad, (E) sčitat’ считать, (E) unhappy, (T) English
Published on March 26, 2018. Last updated on August 16, 2021.
Stecconi, S. (2010). Per un’analisi di concetti chiave dell’ambito politico secondo il Natural Semantic Metalanguage: un confronto italiano-inglese. MSc thesis, Università Cattolica di Milano.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 13, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). Cross-cultural communication and miscommunication: The role of cultural keywords. Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(1), 1-23. DOI: 10.1515/IPRG.2010.001
The experience of immigrants and other people who live transcultural lives confirms that different societies and lingua-cultures have different tacit norms for interpersonal communication and that such differences matter a great deal in many people’s lives. Every lingua-culture inherits and transmits historically and culturally shaped ways of thinking. This applies to English-speaking societies no less than to any other. Given the massive scale of past and ongoing immigration to English-speaking countries as well as the growing domination of English in the global world, it is particularly important to recognize that English, too, is saturated with historically transmitted cultural assumptions. But it is above all “Anglo English” – the common core of the ‘‘Englishes of the inner circle’’ – that tends to be mistaken for a culture-neutral medium of communication. As a result, “Anglo English”, which greatly facilitates cross-cultural communication in today’s world, is also a major source of miscommunication and cross-cultural failure.
This paper takes as its starting point one of the most illuminating cross-cultural novels, Nabokov’s Pnin. The author surveys a number of ‘‘anomalies’’ in ‘‘Pninian English’’ that had an impact on Pnin’s life in America. Then the paper moves beyond Pnin, but stays with Nabokov, and explores one area of immigrant linguistic condition: the loss of cultural key words. The focus is in particular on the Russian key cultural concept of судьба sud’ba and on Nabokov’s continued reliance on this concept in his books created, through the English medium, by his post-Russian authorial self. The author’s overall purpose, however, is not to talk about Nabokov, but to illuminate the immigrant condition and the miscommunication inherent in cross-cultural communication. In her analysis, she relies on the ‘NSM’ methodology of semantic analysis, which allows us to analyse intercultural communication and miscommunication from a neutral, non-Anglocentric perspective.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) fate, (E) sud'ba судьба, (T) English, (T) Russian
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 25, 2019.
Gladkova, Anna (2010). A linguist’s view of “pride”. Emotion Review, 2(2), 178-179.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073909355014
Abstract:
This brief commentary on a paper published in the same issue offers a linguistic perspective on ‘pride’. On the basis of a semantic analysis, it demonstrates that the interpretation of pride put forward in that paper is Anglocentric and consistent with the contemporary use of the English word pride. It compares the English concept of pride with the Russian concept of гордиться gordit’sja and demonstrates their differences. It calls for a psychological account of ‘pride’ free from ethnocentric bias.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) gordit'sja гордиться, (E) take pride in
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 25, 2019.
Gladkova, Anna (2010). Sympathy, compassion, and empathy in English and Russian: A linguistic and cultural analysis. Culture & Psychology, 16(2), 267-285.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067X10361396
Abstract:
This corpus-based study contributes to the description and analysis of linguistic and cultural variation in the conceptualization of sympathy, compassion, and empathy. A contrastive semantic analysis of sympathy, compassion, and empathy in English and their Russian translational equivalents sočuvstvie, sostradanie, and sopereživanie uncovers significant differences in the conceptualization of these words, which are explained with reference to the prevalence of different models of social interaction in Anglo and Russian cultures, as well as different cultural attitudes towards emotional expression. The analysis uses NSM, which the author argues is a powerful tool in contrastive studies.
More information:
This paper has been plagiarized in the following publication:
Buyankina, A. S. (2015). Sympathy and empathy in English and Russian: A linguistic and cultural analysis. In С. А. Песоцкая [S. A. Pesotskaya] (Ed.), Коммуникативные аспекты языка и культуры: сборник материалов XV Международной научно-практической конференции студентов и молодых ученых [Communicative aspects of language and culture: A collection of materials of the XVth International Scientific and Practical Conference of Students and Young Scientists]: Vol. 3 (pp. 70-72). Томск [Tomsk]: Изд-во ТПУ [TPU Publishing House].
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) compassion, (E) empathy, (E) sočuvstvie сочувствие, (E) sopereživanie сопереживание, (E) sostradanie сострадание, (E) sympathy
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on October 27, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). Experience, evidence, and sense: The hidden cultural legacy of English. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195368000.001.0001
This book is based on two ideas: first, that any language – English no less than any other – represents a universe of meaning, shaped by the history and experience of the men and women who have created it; and second, that in any language certain culture-specific words act as linchpins for whole networks of meanings, and that penetrating the meanings of those key words can therefore open our eyes to an entire cultural universe. This book demonstrates that three uniquely English words – evidence, experience, and sense – are exactly such linchpins. Using a rigorous plain language approach to meaning analysis, the book unpackages the dense cultural meanings of these key words, disentangles their multiple meanings, and traces their origins back to the tradition of British empiricism. In so doing the book reveals much about cultural attitudes embedded not only in British and American English, but other global varieties of English.
Table of contents:
1. Making the familiar look foreign
Part II Experience and evidence
2. Experience: An English keyword and a key cultural theme
3. Evidence: Words, ideas, and cultural practices
Part III Sense
4. The discourse of sense and the legacy of “British empiricism”
5. A sense of humour, a sense of self, and similar expressions
6. A strong sense, a deep sense, and similar expressions
7. Moral sense
8. Common sense
9. From having sense to making sense
Part IV Phraseology, semantics, and corpus linguistics
10. Investigating English phraseology with two tools: NSM and Google
Chapter 2 builds on: “Experience” in John Searle’s account of the mind: Brain, mind and Anglo culture (2006)
Chapter 7 builds on: Moral sense (2007)
Chapter 10 builds on: Exploring English phraseology with two tools: NSM semantic methodology and Google (2009)
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) evidence, (E) experience, (E) sense
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on January 15, 2022.
Waters, Sophia (2010). The semantics of French discourse particles quoi and ben. In Yvonne Treis & Rik De Busser (Eds.), Selected papers from the 2009 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/als2009.html. PDF (open access)
Discourse particles are strewn throughout natural spoken discourse, revealing the speakers’ attitude towards what they are saying and guiding the interlocutors’ interpretation of that utterance. The majority of works in the area of the French discourse particles quoi and ben provide detailed analyses and place their primary focus on usage. Problems arise, however, when word usage is discussed without a systematic approach to semantics. The present study applies the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method of description to these particles, proposing definitive explications that can be substituted into naturally occurring examples of quoi and ben without causing any semantic loss. Explications, framed in the culture-neutral terms of the NSM, capture the subtleties of meaning conveyed by each discourse particle. They are presented in parallel English and French versions and are tested against a corpus of spoken French.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) ben, (E) quoi, (T) French
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Peeters, Bert (2010). “Un X peut en cacher un autre”: étude ethnosyntaxique [“Un X peut en cacher un autre”: An ethnosyntactic investigation]. In F. Neveu, V. Muni Toke, T. Klingler, J. Durand, L. Mondada & S. Prévost (Eds.), CMLF 2010 – 2ème Congrès mondial de linguistique française (pp. 1753-1775). Paris: EDP Sciences. DOI: 10.1051/cmlf/2010056
