A resource base of publications using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. 1,100+ detailed notices, and counting!
Ye, Zhengdao (2020). The semantics of migrant in Australian English. In Bromhead, Helen and Zhengdao Ye (eds.) Meaning, Life and Culture. pp 135-154. Canberra: ANU Press.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.22459/MLC.2020.07 (Open Access)
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Bromhead, Helen (2020). The semantics of bushfire in Australian English. In Bromhead, Helen and Zhengdao Ye (eds.) Meaning, Life and Culture. pp 115-134. Canberra: ANU Press.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.22459/MLC.2020.06 (Open Access)
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Wong, Jock O. (2020). The Singlish interjection bojio in Bromhead, Helen and Zhengdao Ye (eds.) Meaning, Life and Culture . pp. 99-114. Canberra: ANU Press
DOI: http://doi.org/10.22459/MLC.2020.05 (Open Access)
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Butter, Stella; Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2020). The comfort of home as an ethical value in Mike Packer’s Inheritance. In Bert Peeters, Kerry Mullan, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 2. Meaning and culture (pp. 85-101). Singapore: Springer.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9975-7_5
Abstract:
The loss of, and search for, comfort is at the heart of the 2010 social realist play Inheritance, in which the English dramatist Mike Packer explores the burst of the housing bubble in England by depicting the declining fortunes of a family. The pensioner Harry decides to buy his council house as an inheritance for his sons, but when the economic recession hits, the house is lost. This chapter gauges how the play negotiates meanings and sources of comfort by linking them with the theme of home. Packer’s play is notable for the way it connects the
characters’ understanding of comfort with specific forms of subjectivity, highlighting in particular how comfort may be understood as an ethical value and how neoliberal subjects reduce such ethical comfort to a sensuous appeasement achieved through appropriate technological devices. In order to tease out different dimensions and meanings of comfort in the play, we adopt an interdisciplinary approach, conjoining literary studies and linguistics. In presenting our results, we rely heavily on the method of semantic analysis known as the NSM approach. The interdisciplinary analysis is presented as a first step towards establishing the heuristic value of NSM methodology for enriching the study of literary negotiations of meanings and values while also showing how the inclusion of literary texts in NSM studies helps trace semantic meaning transformations in the wake of changing life worlds.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Peeters, Bert (2020). Language Makes a Difference: Breaking the Barrier of Shame. Lublin Studies in Modern Language and Literature, 44(1), 27-37.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2020.44.1.27-37 (Open Access)
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This paper argues against the reification of shame and the use of Anglocentric jargon to explain what it entails. It shows how the Natural Semantic Metalanguage can be used to define shame and set it apart from related concepts in Australian Aboriginal English and in Bislama, an English creole spoken in Vanuatu.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Goddard, Cliff, & Kerry Mullan (2020). Explicating verbs for “laughing with other people” in French and English (and why it matters for humor studies). Humor, 33(1), 55-77.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2017-0114
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This study undertakes a contrastive lexical-semantic analysis of a set of related verbs in English and French (English to joke and to kid, French rigoler and plaisanter), using the NSM approach to semantic analysis. We show that the semantic and conceptual differences between French and English are greater than commonly assumed. These differences, we argue, have significant implications for humor studies: first, they shed light on different cultural orientations towards “laughter talk” in Anglo and French linguacultures; second, they highlight the danger of conceptual Anglocentrism in relying on English-specific words as a theoretical vocabulary for humor studies.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Farese, Gian Marco (2020). The ethnopragmatics of English understatement and Italian exaggeration: Clashing cultural scripts for the expression of personal opinions. In Kerry Mullan, Bert Peeters, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 1. Ethnopragmatics and semantic analysis (pp. 59-73). Singapore: Springer.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_4
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This chapter presents a cultural semantic analysis of the differences in the expression of personal opinions between English and Italian. In English, personal opinions are generally understated, whereas speakers of Italian tend to purposely exaggerate when making a statement. As one might expect, opposite communicative styles can lead to cases of miscommunication in cross-cultural interactions. Such cases can be avoided if language learners are provided with efficient tools, which can help them improve their cross-cultural awareness and competence. Adopting the approach of ethnopragmatics, this chapter proposes the theory of cultural scripts as the optimal pedagogical tool to pinpoint the differences in the expression of personal opinions between English and Italian and show how scripts can be used effectively for cross-cultural training.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Farese, Gian Marco (2020). ‘Changing’ and ‘becoming’: new perspectives from cross-linguistic cognitive semantics. Cognitive Semantics, 6, 214-242.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/23526416-bja10009
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This paper examines the conceptual and semantic relation between ‘changing’ and ‘becoming’ in cross-linguistic perspective to demonstrate that: (i) the assumption that ‘becoming’ is conceptually and semantically related to ‘changing’ is invalidated in at least two cases in which the meaning of ‘becoming’ does not encompass ‘changing’; (ii) the main verbs of ‘becoming’ in different languages are highly polysemous and therefore not cross-translatable in all contexts of use; (iii) differences in meaning reflect different conceptualizations of ‘becoming’ across languages. These results emerge from a contrastive semantic analysis between the main verbs of ‘changing’ and ‘becoming’ in English (change, become), Italian (cambiare, diventare) and Japanese (なるnaru) adopting NSM methodology. This paper also makes a strong case for the epistemic nature of the predicative complements licensed by verbs of ‘becoming’ by showing that a semantic component ‘it is like this, I know it’ emerges consistently from cross-linguistic comparison.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Gladkova, Anna (2020). When value words cross cultural borders: English tolerant versus Russian tolerantnyj. In Lauren Sadow, Bert Peeters, & Kerry Mullan (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 3. Minimal English (and beyond) (pp. 73-93). Singapore: Springer.
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This chapter investigates the situation of language change in contemporary Russian with a particular focus on value words. Using data from the Russian National Corpus, it analyses the meaning of the word толерантный tolerantnyj, which has been borrowed from English. It compares its meaning with the English tolerant as a source of borrowing and the traditional Russian term tерпимый terpimyj. The chapter demonstrates a shift in meaning in the borrowed term, which allows it to accommodate to the Russian value system. The meanings of the terms in question are formulated using universal meanings employed in Minimal English, which makes the comparison transparent and explicit.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Waters, Sophia. (2020). The lexical semantics of blaguer: French ways of bringing people together through persuasion, deception and laughter. European Journal of Humour Research 8 (4) 31–47
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2020.8.4.Waters
Abstract
This study presents a lexical semantic analysis of the French verb blaguer and related expressions. This verb belongs to a suite of “French humour practices”, and French-English dictionaries translate it as ‘to joke’. However, Anglo-specific terminology such as “joke” does not match the conceptual semantics of blaguer and its related noun blague. Relying on Anglo- specific terms to categorise culture-specific practices perpetuates conceptual and terminological Anglocentrism. This study furthers the call to avoid the dangers of sustaining Anglocentrism in the theoretical vocabulary of humour studies (Goddard & Mullan 2020; Goddard 2018; Wierzbicka 2014a).
Working from the assumption that semantic categories reflect particular ways of speaking, thinking, and behaving, this study’s goal is to capture the insider perspective that French speakers have about the meaning of the verb blaguer and the noun blague. Making local understandings more obvious and accessible to cultural and linguistic outsiders will increase cross-cultural understanding and foster appreciation for the different ways that speakers construct and interpret their world with words (Levisen & Waters 2017).
The analytical tool for this study is the technique of semantic explication couched in the simple cross-translatable and culture-neutral words of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014). Carefully chosen example sentences are drawn from Google searches (google.fr) of authentic language use of the verb blaguer and the noun blague. Comparative reference is made to the verb ‘to joke’ from Australian English to highlight the differences in the conversational humour cultures of French and English speakers (Goddard & Mullan 2020; Béal & Mullan 2013, 2017).
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Goddard, Cliff. (2020). De-Anglicising humour studies. European Journal of Humour Research 8(4): 48–58
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7592/EJHR2020.8.4.Goddard
Abstract:
This Commentary has two main aims. The first is to argue that systematic approaches to “humour” have been hampered and skewed by terminological Anglocentrism, i.e. by reliance on terms and categories which are English-specific, such as ‘amusing’, ‘joking’, ‘serious’, and ‘mock’, and even by the banner term ‘humour’ itself. Though some humour scholars have recognised this problem, I contend that they have under-estimated its severity. Anglocentric terminology not only interferes with effective communication within the field: it affects our research agendas, methodologies, and theoretical framings. Needless to say, humour studies is not alone in facing this predicament, which at its largest can be described as the global Anglicisation of humanities and social science discourse.
While calls to make humour studies more conceptually pluralistic are laudable, they cannot fully succeed while ‘full’ Anglo English remains the dominant scholarly lingua franca. The second aim of this paper is to argue that considerable progress can be made by “de- Anglicising English” from within, using a newly developed approach known as Minimal English. This allows re-thinking and re-framing humour terminology and agendas using a small vocabulary of simple cross-translatable English words, i.e. words which carry with them a minimum of Anglo conceptual baggage. For illustrative purposes, I will discuss how complex terms such as ‘wit, wittiness’ and ‘fantasy/absurd humour’ can be clarified and de- Anglicised using Minimal English.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Forbes, Alexander (2020). Using Minimal English to model a parental understanding of autism. In Lauren Sadow, Bert Peeters, & Kerry Mullan (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 3. Minimal English (and beyond) (pp. 191-212). Singapore: Springer.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9979-5_8
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The challenges faced by families of children who have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder have been well-studied, as have the impacts on the family of this diagnosis. What a parent prototypically thinks when confronted with the word ‘autism’, however, has not been well-studied. This study reviewed liter- ature and examined multiple texts in order to posit two cognitive models held by the prototypical parent of an autistic child. These cognitive models are expressed in Minimal English, allowing readers to ‘get inside the head’ of a prototypical parent who hears that ‘X has autism’. Two scripts (cognitive models) are provided in this study: one noting perceptions of the autistic person and the other noting perceptions of other parents of autistic children. Script 1 reveals how the prototypical parent of an autistic child perceives an autistic person in relation to other people, including how the autistic person thinks, does things, feels and interacts with other people. It further describes how this prototypical parent assumes others perceive autistic people, and how the prototypical parent may want to do things in a particular way with an autistic person as opposed to non-autistic people. Script 2 reveals how the prototypical parent thinks of the parents of an autistic child, including assumptions of shared experiences, social isolation, and fear for the future. This innovative study breaks ground in the use of Minimal English and offers a new way forward for representing prototypical understandings of concepts.
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Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Barrios Rodríguez, María Auxiliadora (2020). Minimal and inverse definitions: A semi-experimental proposal for compiling a Spanish dictionary with semantic primes and molecules. In Lauren Sadow, Bert Peeters, & Kerry Mullan (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 3. Minimal English (and beyond) (pp. 191-212). Singapore: Springer.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9979-5_10
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This chapter reflects on the possibility of compiling a dictionary largely based on a metalanguage of semantic primes and molecules, using a type of definitions that I call ‘minimal and inverse’. It describes progress to date against the backdrop of two research projects I have been associated with in the last few years.
The first one is a collaborative project that has to date involved ninety student researchers working towards an NSM-based learning tool for students of Spanish as a second/foreign language. To find out whether NSM definitions could be put to good use in language learning materials, the student researchers have been subjecting different groups of informants to a number of test definitions over a period
of two academic years.
The second project, running in parallel with the first, is a pilot study, carried out by myself, towards a Spanish dictionary consisting of
minimal and inverse definitions. More than one hundred definitions have so far been constructed, essentially out of semantic primes and molecules. All have been tested on different groups of informants, but only sixty definitions have been found to be satisfactory.
The chapter includes an analysis of some of the data and a discussion of a range of methodological issues. Its main finding is that, on current
expectations, not only is it possible to build a small dictionary mainly based on primes and molecules using minimal and inverse definitions, but it can be extremely rewarding to engage in such a venture in the context of a collaborative project with student researchers.
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Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Wierzbicka, Anna. (2020). Addressing God in European languages: different meanings, different cultural attitudes. Russian Journal of Linguistics 24 (2). 259—293. DOI: 10.22363/2687-0088- 2020-24-2-259-293
Abstract
All European languages have a word for God, and this word means exactly the same in all of them. However, speakers of different European languages tend to relate to God in different ways. Each group has its own characteristic ways of addressing God, encoded in certain words, phrases and grammatical forms, which both reflect and shape the speakers’ habitual ways of thinking about God and relating to God. Often, they also reflect some other aspects of their cultural memory and historical experience. In this paper I will compare the meanings of the vocative expressions used for addressing God in several European languages, including “Gospodi” in Russian, “O God” in English, “Mon Dieu” in French, “Herr” in German, and “Boże” in Polish. But to compare those meanings, we need a common measure. I believe such a common measure is available in the “NSM” framework, from Natural Semantic Metalanguage (see e.g. Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2014; Wierzbicka 2014a and 2018a; Gladkova and Larina 2018a, b).
The data is taken mainly from well-known works of literature, such as Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Boris Pasternak’s poem “V bol’nice” (“In Hospital”) for Russian, Charles Peguy’s Le mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc and its English translation by Julien Green for French and English, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison poems and Heinrich Böll’s novel Billard um halbzehn for German. The results have shown that each European language offers its users a range of options for addressing God. Some of these options are shared, others appear to be unique to the language. All are underpinned by broader historical phenomena. The exact nature of all these links remains to be investigated.
Аннотация
Во всех европейских языках есть слово для обозначения Бога, и это слово имеет одинаковое значение. Тем не менее, носители разных европейских языков, как правило, обращаются к Богу по-разному. У каждой группы есть свои характерные способы обращения к Богу, зако- дированные в определенных словах, фразах и грамматических формах, которые отражают и формируют привычные способы мышления о Боге и отношение к Богу. Часто они также от- ражают некоторые другие аспекты культурной памяти и исторического опыта.Статья посвя- щена сопоставлению значений вокативных слов и фраз, используемых для обращения к Богу на нескольких европейских языках, включая «Господи» на русском языке, «O God» на ан- глийском языке, «Mon Dieu» на французском языке, «Herr» на немецком и «Boże» на поль- ском. Для сравнения этих значений необходимо единое измерение. Есть все основания пола- гать, что в качестве такого измерения может быть использован Естественный Семантическмй Метаязык (NSM) (см., например, Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2014; Wierzbicka 2014a и 2018a; Gladkova and Larina 2018a, b и др.). Материал для исследования был взят в основном из из- вестных литературных произведений, таких как роман Льва Толстого «Анна Каренина» и стихотворение Бориса Пастернака «В больнице» для русского языка, «Мистерия о милосер- дии Жанны Д’Арк» Шарля Пеги и ее английский перевод Жюльена Грина для французского и английского языков, тюремные стихи Дитриха Бонхеффера и роман Генриха Белля «Биль- ярд в половине десятого» для немецкого языка. Результаты показали, что каждый европей- ский язык предлагает своим пользователям различные варианты обращения к Богу. Некото- рые из них являются общими, другие представляются уникальными для того или иного языка. Все они обусловлены более широким историческим контекстом, конкретное влияние которого еще предстоит изучить.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Goddard, Cliff. (2020). Prototypes, polysemy and constructional semantics: The lexicogrammar of the English verb climb. In Bromhead, Helen and Zhengdao Ye (eds.) Meaning, Life and Culture. Canberra: ANU Press pp 13-32.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.22459/MLC.2020.01 (Open Access)
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Ye, Zhengdao. (2021). The semantics of migrant, immigrant and refugee: a cross-linguistic perspective. In Aleksandrova, Angelina and Meyer, Jean-Paul (Eds.) Nommer l’humain: descriptions, catégorisations, enjeux, 97–122. Paris: L’Harmattan.
This paper investigates and presents the meanings of words denoting people who change, either voluntarily or involuntarily, places where they live. More specifically, it contrasts the meanings of ‘migrant’, ‘immigrant’, and ‘illegal immigrant’ in three varieties of English (e.g. Australian, British and American), and provides a cross-linguistic perspective by discussing the major differences in meaning between yímin (’emigrant/immigrant’) and nánmin (‘refugee’) in Chimpse and their counterparts in English. The analytical and comparative framework used in this paper for contrastive lexico-conceptual analysis is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) (e.g. Wierzbicka, 1972, 1996; Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2014). The paper first discusses the larger context in which this methodology is situated (Sec. 2), as well as its basic principles (Sec. 3), before introducing NSM work on nouns for people and some of the key insights on which the present study is built (Sec. 4). Sec. 5 presents the analysis of the terms in question, and § 6 summarizes the implications arising from this study.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Gladkova, Anna, & Romero-Trillo, Jesús. (2021). Is ugliness in the mind of the beholder? The conceptualization of ‘ugly’ in English. International Journal of Language and Culture 8(1): 106–127
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00037.gla
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The paper explores the meaning and use of ugly in English. The study is based on corpus data from Cobuild Wordbanks Online and investigates the polysemy and the spheres of application of the concept. Through corpus analysis methodology, we investigate the most common collocations and the pragmatic and contextual uses of the term. Based on this analysis, our study proposes semantic explications of ugly in universal human concepts within the theoretical framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). We also analyze the most common collocations with the word ugly and clas- sify them into several meaning-based categories. A comparison between beautiful and ugly reveals that they are not identical in their distribution, which suggests different cognitive salience of the concepts. We also note the special role of ‘people’ and ‘nature’ in conceptualization and use of beautiful and that of ‘human actions’ in ugly.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Bromhead, Helen. (2021). Disaster linguistics, climate change semantics and public discourse studies: a semantically-enhanced discourse study of 2011 Queensland Floods. Language Sciences 85
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2021.101381
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Natural disasters, such as what are known in English as ‘floods’ and ‘wildfires’, are increasingly a topic of concern due to the climate emergency, and their vocabulary and public discourses hold much to be explored through linguistics. This article inaugurates the examination of public discourse about extreme weather events through semantically- enhanced discourse studies, an approach which is based on Natural Semantic Meta- language (NSM) and developed herein. Taking the example of floods in the particular geographic, cultural and historical environment of the Australian state of Queensland in 2011, this transtextual study draws on a public inquiry into the event and English as spoken in Australia, more broadly, along with media reports, and literature from hu- manities and social sciences. Five case studies of vocabulary and discourse patterns are presented to cast cultural and semantic spotlights on the public discourses. It is demon- strated that this approach can provide high resolution analysis of discourse and bring out cultural and historical factors at play in extreme weather language thereby contributing to disaster linguistics, climate change semantics and public discourse studies.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Goddard, Cliff, & Sadow, Lauren. (2021). “It’s the Economy, Stupid”: The Everyday Semantics of a Geopolitical Key Word. Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics, 5(2021), 226–238
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Despite its Anglo/Euro origins, there can be no doubt that ‘(the) economy’ is a key word in the discourse of global geopolitics. This study explicates the lexical/conceptual semantics of the expression in everyday English, using the NSM approach to meaning description. Unlike most dictionaries, we draw a distinction between two different senses: a “people-focussed”, experience-near sense (‘economy-1’), and a broader, more “educated” concept (‘economy-2’). Both senses can be regarded as folk concepts designating what philosopher Jeremy Bentham termed “fictitious entities” which belong to a certain mental ontology and support certain kinds of discourse. The results shed light on how and why ‘the economy’ has such a totalising power over many discourses: national, international and global.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Peeters, Bert (2021). From Cultural to Pedagogical Scripts: Speaking Out in English, French, and Russian. In Goddard, Cliff (ed.). Minimal Languages in Action. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan pp 171-193
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-64077-4_7
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners |