Browsing results for Malay
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 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 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 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 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 May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 27, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (2000). “Cultural scripts” and communicative style in Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Anthropological Linguistics, 42(1), 81-106. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30028746
The “cultural scripts” approach is a descriptive technique that has grown out of the cross-cultural semantic theory of Anna Wierzbicka. The author uses this technique to describe and make sense of aspects of Malay communicative style. The proposed Malay cultural scripts are linked with the importance placed on appropriate (patut, sesuai) behavior and on nasihat ‘advice’, and on the need to balas budi (roughly) ‘return good treatment’, to jaga hati orang ‘look after people’s feelings’, and to menghormati ‘show respect, deference’.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) menghormati, (S) absolutist orientation towards morality and ethics, (S) attitude towards old people as a social category, (S) attitude towards someone older, (S) behaving well towards other people, (S) being humble, (S) debt of gratitude, (S) importance of giving advice, (S) long memories and desire to revenge, (S) looking after people's feelings, (S) need to apologize, (S) personal autonomy, (S) returning good treatment, (S) returning kindness, (S) thinking before acting, (T) Malay
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (2001). Sabar, ikhlas, setia – patient, sincere, loyal? Contrastive semantics of some ‘virtues’ in Malay and English. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(5), 653-681. DOI: 10.1016/S0378-2166(00)00028-X
The words sabar, ikhlas, and setia arguably identify core personal virtues in traditional Malay culture. Using Anna Wierzbicka’s ‘Natural Semantic Metalanguage’ (NSM) approach, this paper undertakes a contrastive semantic analysis of these terms and their usual English translations, such as patient, sincere, and loyal. A number of significant meaning differences are brought to light, allowing an improved understanding of the cultural semantics of the Malay concepts.
Tags: (E) devoted, (E) faithful, (E) ikhlas, (E) insincerely, (E) loyal, (E) patient, (E) pietas, (E) sabar, (E) setia, (E) sincerely, (T) English
Published on December 12, 2018. Last updated on December 12, 2018.
Mulyadi (2001). Konsep emosi dalam Bahasa Melayu [Emotion concepts in Malay]. Dewan Bahasa, February 2001, 28-35.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 22, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff (2001). Hati: A key word in the Malay vocabulary of emotion. In Jean Harkins, & Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.), Emotions in crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 167-195). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110880168.167
Abstract:
The word hati is one of the key words of Malay culture: it functions as a conceptual focal point for an entire complex of characteristically Malay values, attitudes and expectations. By studying the meaning and uses of this one word we can learn a surprising amount about Malay culture – in particular, about the conceptualization of emotion in Malay culture.
The aims of this paper are threefold: first, to outline the range of use and collocational possibilities of hati, informally comparing and contrasting it with English heart; second, to advance and argue for an explicit semantic explication of hati in its core or central meaning (as in an expression like hati orang ‘a person’s hati‘); third, to explicate the semantics of five common fixed expressions involving hati, all of which designate what we might term feeling states or emotional reactions: susah hati ‘troubled, worried’, senang hati ‘relaxed, easy at heart’; sakit hati ‘annoyed, offended’, puas hati ‘satisfied (with someone)’, and kecil hati ‘feel hurt’.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) hati orang, (E) heart, (E) kecil hati, (E) puas hati, (E) sakit hati, (E) senang hati, (E) susah hati, (T) Malay
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (2001). The polyfunctional Malay focus particle pun. Multilingua, 20(1), 27-59. DOI: 10.1515/multi.2001.002
This is a study of the usage and semantics of the focus particle pun in contemporary Malay (Bahasa Melayu), the national language of Malaysia. Drawing on a sizeable corpus of naturally occurring textual examples, I propose a small set of semantic explications for pun, within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework. The polyfunctionality of pun, and its diverse range of translation equivalents and effects, is shown to be attributable partly to polysemy and partly to the operation of contextual inference.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on February 17, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff (2002). Explicating emotions across languages and cultures: A semantic approach. In Susan R. Fussell (Ed.), The verbal communication of emotions: Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 19-53). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
This chapter sketches out the integrated and meaning-based approach to the study of emotions that has been pioneered by Anna Wierzbicka. It seeks to bring together the study of the emotion lexicon of different languages with the study of different “cultural scripts” that are one factor (among others, of course) influencing the expression of emotions in discourse. More than this, it also aims to take in the encoding of emotional meanings by means of other linguistic devices, such as exclamations and specialized grammatical constructions, and even the encoding of emotional meanings in facial expressions and kinaesthetics. Because the Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on simple, universally available meanings, it provides a tool that enables us to undertake this very broad range of investigations across languages and cultures, while minimizing the risk of ethnocentrism creeping into the very terms of description.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) amae 甘え, (E) appalled, (E) cemburu, (E) outraged, (E) przykro, (E) sad, (E) unhappy, (S) apologizing, (S) causing 'bad feelings' in others, (S) cheerfulness, (S) displaying insincere good feelings towards someone, (S) emotional caution and sensitivity, (S) responding to favours in a positive way, (S) saying what you feel
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 19, 2018.
Hamid, Hazidi bin Haji Abdul (2002). Similar words, different meanings: A Natural Semantic Metalanguage exploration of cultural differences. GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies, 2(1). PDF (open access)
Anna Wierbicka and other Natural Semantic Metalanguage (henceforth NSM) practitioners often argue that anthropologists and psychologists, particularly Western, are wrong for applying concepts like mind, anger and depression to foreign cultures because these cultures do not have words with similar intention and extensions. Their critics on the other hand argue that the NSM critique is unjustified because, while other cultures do not necessarily have similar words, they must have corresponding concepts simply because people in these other cultures, like in Malaysia, experience feelings like these. This paper intends to show that the NSM critique is justified because these corresponding concepts can be similar to a certain extent but can also carry great semantic difference when broken down to their more basic elements of meaning. More importantly, this is done using analysis of the Malay language.
Approximate application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
Tags: (E) amok, (T) Malay
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (2002). Semantic primes and universal grammar in Malay (Bahasa Melayu). In Cliff Goddard, & Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.), Meaning and universal grammar – Theory and empirical findings: Vol. 1 (pp. 87-172). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.60.10god
My primary goal is to test whether the currently proposed NSM semantic primes have lexical exponents in Malay and whether they can be combined according to the current hypotheses about NSM syntax. Generally speaking the results are positive though I will propose several revisions to our picture of NSM syntax on the basis of the Malay data, at appropriate points in the chapter. Throughout the chapter, I will also try to note alternative polysemic meanings of the various lexical exponents and, where appropriate, the existence of language-specific constructions conveying the kinds of meaning combinations we are interested in. In this way I want to convey a better sense of the individual character of Malay as a language.
Overall, however, the majority of the current NSM proposals do hold up well so far as Malay is concerned. It is now clear that the syntax of the NSM metalanguage has a very rich – and in some ways very complex – texture. It therefore seems particularly intriguing that this rich and detailed texture appears to be shared by languages which are otherwise so different in their structure.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 9, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (2002). Directive speech acts in Malay (Bahasa Melayu): An ethnopragmatic perspective. Cahiers de praxématique, 38, 113-143.
The focus of the present study is the semantics and ethnopragmatics of a set of Malay speech act verbs. I hope to demonstrate that the lexical-semantic and cultural-pragmatic aspects of the analysis are mutually reinforcing and mutually informative. On the basis of cultural-pragmatic facts, I will discount polysemy for ajak ‘encourage, urge’ and pujuk ‘coax, comfort’, while lexical-semantic analysis of suruh ‘tell to do’ and minta ‘ask for’ will highlight the Malay cultural constraints against explicitly expressing the message ‘I want you to do this’. The conceptual structure and presuppositions of nasihat ‘advice, counsel’ will be shown to be strongly congruent with its characteristic forms of expression. In these and other ways, I hope to show not only that lexical semantics and cultural pragmatics are tightly intertwined in Malay, but also to illustrate the value of an ethnopragmatic approach to speech acts in general.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) ajak, (E) ask, (E) minta, (E) nasihat, (E) order, (E) pesan, (E) pujuk, (E) suggest, (E) suruh, (S) inhibiting people from expressing explicit directive messages, (T) English + Malay
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (2003). Dynamic ter– in Malay (Bahasa Melayu): A study in grammatical polysemy. Studies in Language, 27(2), 287-322. DOI: 10.1075/sl.27.2.04god
This paper undertakes a fine-grained semantic analysis of some of the multiple uses of the polyfunctional verbal prefix ter– in Malay (Bahasa Melayu), the national language of Malaysia. The analysis is conducted within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework originated by Anna
Wierzbicka, supported by examples drawn from a large corpus of naturally occuring Malay texts. The main goals are to accurately describe the full range of meanings, and to decide to what extent apparent differences are contextually-induced as opposed to being semantically encoded. In the end, seven
distinct but interrelated lexico-semantic schemas are identified, constituting a network of grammatical polysemy.
Published on June 28, 2017. Last updated on August 16, 2021.
Goddard, Cliff (2004). The atoms of meaning. IIAS Newsletter, 33, 17. PDF (open access)
Most linguists do not regard semantics (the systematic study of meaning) as a central part of their discipline. This is both strange and sad, because meaning is the link between language and communication, between language and culture, and between language and cognition. Lately, however, meaning-based approaches have been making a comeback within the broad movements known as cognitive linguistics and functional linguistics. This article concentrates on the leading meaning-based theory of language, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage or NSM theory originated by Anna Wierzbicka.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 31, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (2004). The ethnopragmatics and semantics of ‘active metaphors’. Journal of Pragmatics, 36(7). 1211-1230. DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2003.10.011
“Active” metaphors are a kind of metaphor that can be categorically distinguished from other metaphorical phenomena due to its reliance on “metalexical awareness”, detectable by linguistic tests as well as by intuition. Far from being a natural function of the human mind or a universal of rational communication, active metaphorizing is a culture-specific speech practice that demands explication within an ethnopragmatic perspective. The paper proposes an ethnopragmatic script (a kind of specialized cultural script) for active metaphorizing in English, and dramatizes its culture-specificity by ethnopragmatic case studies of Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara (central Australia) and Malay. Finally, in relation to English active metaphors, an attempt is made to demonstrate that expository metaphors have determinable meanings that can be stated as extended reductive paraphrases. The analytical framework is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory and the associated theory of cultural scripts.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) food for thought, (E) graceful, (E) language is a mirror of the mind, (E) soft, (E) the past is a foreign country, (E) unemployment is a contagious disease, (S) sensitive words, (S) use of 'active' metaphors, (T) English
