Browsing results for Austronesian
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 15, 2021.
Hill, Deborah (1987). A cross-linguistic study of value-judgement terms. MA thesis, Australian National University.
The purpose of this thesis is to try to establish the extent to which the words good, bad, true and right can be considered lexical universals. These words have been chosen because they are value-judgment terms that, individually, have been discussed at length by philosophers. It seems to be assumed by philosophers and semanticists that these words reflect concepts shared by speakers of all languages. By testing whether these words are candidates for lexical universals we can then see the extent to which this assumption is true.
On the basis of information from native speakers from 15 diverse languages, we can say that good and bad reflect language independent concepts (GOOD and BAD). However, in many languages, including English, the range of meaning of bad is narrower than the range of meaning of good. By looking at five of these fifteen languages we can see that the words right and true reflect concepts that are not language
independent. Thus, by taking a cross-linguistic approach, we can shed some light on the work done by language philosophers in the area of value-judgment terms.
The following languages are examined in this thesis: Arabic, Arrernte, Chinese (Mandarin), English, Ewe, Fijian, Finnish, Indonesian, Kannada, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 11, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1992). Talking about emotions: Semantics, culture, and cognition. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3/4), 285-319. DOI: 10.1080/02699939208411073
Translated into Polish as chapter 4 of:
Wierzbicka, Anna (1999). Język – umysł – kultura [Language, mind, culture]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
The author argues that the so-called “basic emotions”, such as happiness, fear or anger, are in fact cultural artifacts of the English language, just as the Ilongot concept of liger, or the Ifaluk concept of song, are the cultural artifacts of Ilongot and Ifaluk. It is therefore as inappropriate to talk about human emotions in general in terms of happiness, fear, or anger as it would be to talk about them in terms of liget or song. However, this does not mean that we cannot penetrate into the emotional world of speakers of languages other than our own. Nor does it mean that there cannot be any universal human emotions. Universality of emotions is an open issue which requires further investigation. For this further investigation to be fully productive, it has to be undertaken from a universal, language and culture-independent perspective; and it has to be carried out in a universalist framework that is language and culture-independent. The author proposes for this purpose the Natural Semantic Metalanguage based on universal (or near-universal) semantic primitives (or near-primitives), developed over two decades by herself and colleagues, and she argues that the use of this metalanguage facilitates such a perspective and offers such a framework.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) angry, (E) displeased, (E) displeasure, (E) glücklich, (E) grateful, (E) happy, (E) heureux, (E) joy, (E) liget, (E) pleased, (E) remorse, (E) sad, (E) song, (E) tjituru-tjituru, (E) watjilpa, (E) złość
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 17, 2019.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1994). Emotion, language, and cultural scripts. In Shinobu Kitayama, & Hazel Rose Markus (Eds.), Emotion and culture: Empirical studies of mutual influence (pp. 133-196). Washington: American Psychological Association.
Abstract:
This chapter explores the relationship between emotion and culture, and between emotion and cognition. It examines the concept of emotion, and argues that it is culture-specific and rooted in the semantics of the English language, as are also the names of specific emotions, such as sadness, joy, anger, or fear. It shows that both the concept of emotion and the language-specific names of particular emotions can be explicated and elucidated in universal semantic primes (NSM).
NSM provides a necessary counterbalance to the uncritical use of English words as conceptual tools in the psychology, philosophy, and sociology of emotions. It offers a suitable basis for description and comparison of not only emotions and emotion concepts but also of cultural attitudes to emotions. Different cultures do indeed encourage different attitudes toward emotions, and these different attitudes are reflected in both the lexicon and the grammar of the languages associated with these cultures.
The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part discusses the language-specific character of emotion concepts and grammatical categories; the need for lexical universals as conceptual and descriptive tools; the doctrine of basic emotions and the issue of the discreteness of emotions; and the relationships among emotions, sensations, and feelings. The second part, on cultural scripts (with special reference to the Anglo and Polish cultures), explores attitudes toward emotions characteristic of different cultures (in particular, the Anglo and Polish cultures) and shows how these attitudes can be expressed in the form of cultural scripts formulated by means of universal semantic primes.
Translations:
Into Polish:
Chapter 5 (pp. 163-189) of Wierzbicka, Anna (1999), Język – umysł – kultura [Language, mind, culture]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) (endearments), (E) emotion, (E) enjoy, (E) Gefühl, (E) Gefühle, (E) sensation, (E) sentiment, (E) sentimento, (E) sentimiento, (S) bad things happen to people, (S) compliments, (S) consideration, (S) emotions, (S) feelings, (S) good things can happen to people, (S) I don't think this, (S) I say what I think, (S) I think this, (S) saying what one thinks, (S) self-analysis, (S) self-control, (S) spontaneity, (S) tact, (S) verbal and non-verbal communication, (T) English
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 15, 2021.
Hill, Deborah (1994). Longgu. In Cliff Goddard, & Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.), Semantic and lexical universals: Theory and empirical findings (pp. 311-329). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.25.16hil
In general it has not been difficult to find lexical exponents of all of the proposed semantic primitives in Longgu. Indeed, in most cases (e.g. TWO, ALL, KNOW, WANT) there is a lexical representation which clearly corresponds to the primitive. However, making the link between the existence of an exponent (and, if present cross-linguistically, a lexical universal) and a primitive is clearly not as simple as finding the exponent. In the case of THINK, the evidence suggests that the meaning of the lexical exponent (una) is not centred around ‘think’ but around ‘thusly’. This somehow seems unsatisfactory and it raises the question of the expected relationship between a primitive and its exponent.
The ease with which lexical exponents of other primitives (IF, HAPPEN) are being replaced with other lexemes also seems unsatisfactory, even if it can be argued that this merely indicates the existence of two exponents of the same primitive.
The other points that have arisen from looking for these lexical exponents in Longgu have been ones of methodology and, in the case of PART OF, questioning whether the primitive is targeting a range of functions that are not captured by one lexical exponent in the language. The methodological problem was most evident in the case of OTHER. Despite the use of canonical sentences it remained difficult to separate the meaning conveyed by the English lexeme from the primitive.
These problems may not be insurmountable to deal with but the idea of finding lexical universals which correspond to semantic primitives would be all the more convincing if they could be adequately dealt with.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on April 2, 2018. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (1994). The meaning of lah: Understanding “emphasis” in Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Oceanic Linguistics, 33(1), 145-165. DOI: 10.2307/3623004
The meaning of the illocutionary particle lah, a salient feature of Colloquial Malay, as well as of Malaysian and Singapore English, has proved notoriously difficult to pinpoint. For instance, with declaratives it may convey either “light-heartedness” or an “ill-tempered” effect, and it may either “soften” or “harden” a request. In this article, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach of Anna Wierzbicka is applied to the analysis of lah. This involves developing a translatable reductive paraphrase explication. According to the proposed explication, which is the length of a short paragraph, lah offers an explanation of the speaker’s illocutionary purpose, which is roughly to correct or preempt a misapprehension or misunderstanding of some kind. The explication is shown to be flexible enough to predict the diverse effects that lah itself may convey in combination with other elements of an utterance, once Malay cultural norms of verbal interaction are taken into account.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) lah
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 19, 2021.
Mosel, Ulrike (1994). Samoan. In Cliff Goddard, & Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.), Semantic and lexical universals: Theory and empirical findings (pp. 331-360). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.25.17mos
Samoan data suggest that any classification of lexical universals into categories similar to word classes such as substantives and determiners may be problematic. A further problem is that the proposed canonical contexts cannot always be easily translated into idiomatic Samoan. In some cases all proposed lexical universals of a given canonical context have exponents in Samoan, but they are not combined to render the meaning of the canonical context in question.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (1995). Conceptual and cultural issues in emotion research. Culture & Psychology, 1(2), 289-298. DOI: 10.1177/1354067X9512009
As suggested by its title, Wierzbicka’s 1995 paper ‘Emotion and facial expression: A semantic perspective’ is an attempt to apply a uniform framework for semantic analysis to two domains of emotional expression – words and facial expressions – and to advance some hypotheses about how they are related. Wierzbicka argues that linguistic research shows that no emotion word of English (or any other language) has a simple and undecomposable meaning; rather, the emotion words of different languages encode complex and largely culture-specific perspectives on ‘ways of feeling’, linking feelings with specific kinds of thoughts and wants (prototypical cognitive scenarios). Essentially, the claim is that the meanings of words like angry, proud, lonesome, etc., embody little ‘cultural stories’ about human nature and human interaction. To uncover and state such stories in non-ethnocentric terms, however, requires a framework of semantic universals. We need to go beyond the ‘either-or’ question and seek both the universal core of communication, as well as the precise role of culture. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage is a new method that will assist us to reach that goal.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) amae 甘え, (E) marah, (E) tęsknota
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on October 19, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff (1995). ‘Cognitive mapping’ or ‘verbal explication’? Understanding love on the Malay Archipelago. Semiotica, 106(3/4), 323-354.
This is a review article of Karl G. Heider’s 1991 book Landscapes of emotion: Mapping three cultures of emotion in Indonesia. It is argued that a failure to grasp the nettle on the issue of translation, the exclusive reliance on a narrow range of artificial questionnaire-generated data and the lack of depth in the ethnographic commentary prevent Heider from making substantial progress toward his goal of understanding how culture influences emotion. For the purpose of modeling linguistic and cultural meanings, there is no escape from language, and the problem of translation must be faced fairly and squarely. Much progress has been made within linguistic semantics, especially within the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) approach led by Anna Wierzbicka, toward developing a systematic and non-ethnocentric approach to verbal explication. An attempt is made to show how this approach can be fruitfully and revealingly applied to the semantic analysis of some Malay emotion words.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) anger, (E) cinta, (E) fear, (E) frightened, (E) kasih, (E) kasihan, (E) sayang, (E) song
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 22, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (1995). Who are we? The natural semantics of pronouns. Language Sciences, 17(1), 99-121. DOI: 10.1016/0388-0001(95)00011-J
Working within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework of Anna Wierzbicka, this study proposes reductive paraphrase explications for a range of first-person pronominal meanings. A general explicatory schema is first developed for English we. It is then shown how this can be elaborated to accommodate the inclusive/exclusive distinction, dual number and trial number, and how it can be applied to minimal-augmented systems. Data is taken from various languages of Australia and Asia. It is argued that NSM explications are preferable to conventional feature analyses for two reasons: they are less subject to charges of arbitrariness and obscurity; and they are located within a comprehensive theory of semantic representation.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) 'ār عار, (E) kami, (E) kita, (E) nayin-nime, (E) ngagurr, (E) ngakorrbbarrah, (E) ngakorru, (E) ngali, (E) ngan'gityemerri, (E) nganana, (E) we, (E) yar, (E) yarrbbarrah, (E) yarru, (E) yukku, (E) yε, (E) ε, (T) English
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on November 11, 2018.
Harkins, Jean (1996). Linguistic and cultural differences in concepts of shame. In David Parker, Rosamund Dalziell, & Iain Richard Wright (Eds.), Shame and the modern self (pp. 84-96). Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Shame is one of a set of ‘social emotions’ that have a strong influence upon the behaviour of individuals in relation to the society in which they live. Emotions of this kind, and related norms of behaviour, are socially constructed within a particular linguistic and cultural context. Serious cross-cultural misunderstanding can result from assuming that emotions, or the behaviour associated with them, will be the same for different cultural groups. For example, shame-like emotions in some contexts can strongly motivate people to conform, but in others they can increase a person’s alienation from and hostility to society. This essay examines shame-like concepts in some languages of Aboriginal Australia and the Pacific, showing how the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) method of analysing emotion words and cultural rules can pinpoint the cognitive and emotive elements contained within culture-specific emotion concepts, and can make some predictions about ‘scripts’ for behaviour associated with these emotions.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) ashamed, (E) shame, (E) whakamaa, (S) reintegrative shaming
Published on June 28, 2017. Last updated on August 31, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (1996). The “social emotions” of Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Ethos, 24(3), 426-464. DOI: 10.1525/eth.1996.24.3.02a00020
Studies of cultural variation in emotional meanings have played an important part in the development of the interdisciplinary field of cultural psychology. It is now widely accepted that the language of emotion can be an invaluable window into culture-specific conceptualizations of social life and human nature. Such studies inevitably involve explorations in cross-linguistic semantics. Despite their undoubted value, however, from the point of view of linguistic semantics these inquiries have been informal in the sense that they have not utilized any rigorous framework for semantic analysis. It is the premise of this article that a suitably rigorous method of cross-cultural semantic analysis is the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) approach developed primarily by Anna Wierzbicka. The present study applies the NSM approach to a subset of the emotion vocabulary of Malay (Bahasa Melayu), the national language of Malaysia. The underlying theoretical question is the extent to which emotion concepts are culturally constituted. The related methodological problem is how to analyse and describe emotion terms in a way that does not take Western/English language emotion concepts as neutral or natural scientific categories.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) bangga, (E) benci, (E) cemburu, (E) cinta, (E) dendam, (E) geram, (E) hampa, (E) kasih, (E) kasihan, (E) kecewa, (E) malu, (E) marah, (E) rindu, (E) sayang, (E) segan, (T) Malay
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 19, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (1997). Contrastive semantics and cultural psychology: ‘Surprise’ in Malay and English. Culture & Psychology, 3(2), 153-181. DOI: 10.1177/1354067X9700300204
This paper argues that psychology has yet to come fully to grips with the extent of semantic variation between languages, and that it can benefit, in this regard, from certain developments in linguistic semantics. It outlines Anna Wierzbicka’s ‘Natural Semantic Metalanguage’ (NSM) approach to cross-cultural semantics, and demonstrates the approach through a contrastive study of ‘surprise-like’ words from two languages: Malay (terkejut, terperanjat, hairan) and English (surprised, amazed, shocked, startled). It is shown that there is no exact Malay equivalent to English surprise; and also that there is no semantic core shared by the various terms, only a loose set of cross-cutting and overlapping semantic correspondences. These results are at odds with the classic “basic emotions” position, which would have it that ‘surprise’ is a universal and discrete biological syndrome. The overriding contention of the paper is that Wierzbicka’s approach to linguistic semantics can furnish psychology with valuable new analytical and descriptive tools.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) amazed, (E) anger, (E) hairan, (E) marah, (E) shocked, (E) song, (E) startled, (E) surprised, (E) terkejut, (E) terperanjat, (T) Malay
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 15, 2021.
Hill, Deborah, & Goddard, Cliff (1997). Spatial terms, polysemy and possession in Longgu (Solomon Islands). Language Sciences, 19(3), 263-275. DOI: 10.1016/S0388-0001(96)00064-2
Lexical exponents of the proposed semantic primitives ABOVE, UNDER, INSIDE and ON THE SIDE are identified in Longgu (Solomon Islands). It is argued that the first three of these exponents are polysemous between a semantically primitive relational sense and a secondary topological sense. A number of issues relating to the morphosyntax of the exponents are discussed, including their status as ‘local nouns’, the significance of the fact that their basic syntactic frame employs the same system of person-number agreement suffixes as the inalienable possession construction, and the difference between this basic frame and a rarer ‘associative construction’. There is also a brief discussion of the status of the hypothetical primitive ON in Longgu.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on June 28, 2017. Last updated on October 19, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (1997). Cultural values and ‘cultural scripts’ of Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Journal of Pragmatics, 27(2), 183-201. DOI: 10.1016/S0378-2166(96)00032-X
This paper documents some Malay ‘rules of speaking’ and articulates their connections with Malay cultural values, using the new theory of ‘cultural scripts’ developed by Anna Wierzbicka. Aspects of the preferred Malay discourse style, which is normally described as refined, restrained, and charming, are shown to be linked with the Malay social emotion of malu ‘shame, propriety’, with the personal qualities of maruah ‘dignity, self-respect, pride’ and harga diri ‘self-esteem’, and with the ideal of senang hati ‘a heart at ease; (lit.) easy heart’. It is argued that the cultural scripts approach enhances descriptive accuracy, helps reduce ethnocentricm, and facilitates the integration of pragmatics and cultural semantics.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) halus, (E) kasar, (E) malu, (E) maruah, (E) senang hati, (S) apologies, (S) expressing feelings, (S) expressing what one wants, (S) speaking
Published on November 11, 2018. Last updated on November 11, 2018.
Mulyadi (1998). Makna malu dalam Bahasa Indonesia (Kajian “wacana kebudayaan”) [Shame-related meanings in Bahasa Indonesia (A study in “cultural discourse”)]. Linguistika, 6, 46-57.
Written in Indonesian.
This article discusses the meaning of malu in Indonesian. The two problems the author focuses on are the semantic description of malu and
its socio-cultural aspects. The analysis is based on the “cultural scripts” approach. The results show that the semantic explication of malu in prototypical scripts involves components such as ‘thinking, ‘feeling’, ‘wanting’, and ‘seeing’, while the sociocultural aspects include the norm of politeness in speaking as well as social relationships like intimacy and non-intimacy.
Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
Tags: (E) malu, (S) intimacy, (S) politeness
Published on December 12, 2018. Last updated on December 12, 2018.
Mulyadi (1998). Struktur semantis verba Bahasa Indonesia [The semantic structure of verbs in Indonesian]. Master’s thesis, Universitas Udayana, Denpasar.
Published on July 3, 2017. Last updated on February 17, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff (1998). Universal semantic primes of space – A lost cause? LAUD Working Papers, Series A, General and Theoretical Papers, 434. PDF (open access)
Reissued in 2007 with divergent page numbering.
In recent years, a new wave of research on language and space has uncovered surprising variation in the linguistic coding of spatial relationships. It is now known that some languages, e.g. Tzeltal, exhibit remarkable lexico-grammatical elaboration of spatial relationships; that in many languages of Africa and Oceania apparently simple spatial relationships such as INSIDE and ABOVE are encoded by means of noun-like words, or by a combination of a preposition and a postposition, each of which may be independently meaningful. It has also been shown that children’s early acquisition of spatial terminology differs markedly between typologically different languages.
In almost all this recent work, the emphasis has been on cross-linguistic variation in spatial semantics. The question then arises whether there any semantic universals of space that are still viable in the light of the attested variation in formal realization and lexico-grammatical elaboration. In particular, what of the semantic primes of space proposed within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework, namely: WHERE/PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, INSIDE, ON (ONE) SIDE, NEAR, FAR?
After an introduction, the body of the paper has three sections. The first argues that three languages that exhibit markedly different spatial characteristics to English (Tzeltal, Longgu, Ewe) nevertheless still contain exponents of the NSM spatial primes. The second takes a fresh look at some of the new results on cross-linguistic variation in the acquisition of spatial semantics, with particular reference to Korean. The third surveys the grammaticalization of spatial meaning in a typological perspective, concluding that the items on the NSM inventory of spatial primes are all found as recurrent dimensions of grammaticalized meaning in a range of languages.
The overall conclusion is that NSM’s spatial primes are both viable and necessary for the description of spatial meanings within and across languages.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) move away, (E) move towards, (E) on
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 3, 2018.
Hamid, Hazidi bin Haji Abdul (1999). Communicating meaning across cultures – A framework: analysis and evaluation of the work of Anna Wierzbicka, the critics and cultural scripts for Bahasa Melayu. Master’s thesis, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.
Published on April 28, 2018. Last updated on September 8, 2018.
Metom, Lilly (2000). An application and interpretation of Iban emotion concepts of shame/shyness, anger and apology using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage and concrete/abstract cultural continuum. In Michael Leigh (Ed.), Borneo 2000: Ethnicity, culture and society. Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial Borneo Research Conference (pp. 250-277). Kuching: Universiti Malaysia Sarawak.
Cultures differ in their style of communication. Iban culture is no exception. The style of interaction and communication of the Ibans is also unique; expressions of emotion in Iban cannot be simply explained or translated into English since meanings and use of the expressions are culture-specific. Furthermore, drawing on the fact that Iban people are more “concrete” in their relation with other members of the group, expressions of emotion such as anger, embarrassment, joy, fear and others are normally conveyed non-verbally. Hence, this paper explores and investigates how these emotion concepts are expressed and used in the daily conduct of the Iban people. Three categories of selected Iban emotions are explicated and analysed here, namely the emotion expression of shame/shyness, the emotion expression of anger, and the emotion expression of apology. In order to explain culturally the emotion words, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is used as an analytical tool to explicate the words, so as to avoid ethnocentric bias.
Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
Tags: (E) adat, (E) jaga adat, (E) kudi, (E) malu, (E) minta ampun, (E) pedis ati, (E) ransi, (E) sorry
Published on August 4, 2018. Last updated on September 15, 2018.
Mulyadi (2000). Struktur semantis verba penglihatan dalam Bahasa Indonesia [The semantic structure of verbs of seeing in Indonesian]. Linguistik Indonesia, 18(2), 77-89. PDF (open access)
Written in Indonesian.
This article deals with the semantic structure of the Indonesian seeing verbs related to seeing. Using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory, it finds that the semantic structure of Indonesian verbs related to seeing involves a combination of the elements MELIHAT ‘see’, MERASAKAN ‘feel’, MENGETAHUI ‘know’, MENGATAKAN ‘say’, and MEMIKIRKAN ‘think’. The clusters that form are MELIHAT/MERASAKAN ‘see/feel’, MELIHAT/MENGETAHUI ‘see/know’, MELIHAT/MENGATAKAN ‘see/say’, and MELIHAT/MEMIKIRKAN ‘see/think’.
Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
Tags: (E) melakukan, (E) melawat, (E) melayat, (E) melirik, (E) melongok, (E) melotot, (E) memandang, (E) membesuk, (E) memeriksa, (E) memperhatikan, (E) menatap, (E) menengok, (E) mengamati, (E) mengawasi, (E) mengerling, (E) mengintai, (E) mengintip, (E) meninjau, (E) menoleh, (E) menyaksikan
