Browsing results for Indo-European
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 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 May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 13, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (2010). A piece of cheese, a grain of sand: The semantics of mass nouns and unitizers. In Francis Jeffry Pelletier (Ed.), Kinds, things and stuff: Mass terms and generics (pp. 132-165). New York: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195382891.003.0008
This chapter follows up earlier work of Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka in which they argued that there are numerous, subtly different, subclasses of mass nouns. These different subclasses presuppose, they claimed, different “conceptualizations” of the nature of a mass. The present chapter concentrates on concrete mass nouns in English, arguing that the formal linguistic properties of mass nouns are systematically correlated with their conceptual content and that this conceptual content can be clearly identified using the tools of Wierzbicka and Goddard’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage system. Some of the cognitive issues raised here involve the extent that there is unity to the notion of mass‐stuff and whether there is any necessary similarity in the relevant part of the mental lives of speakers of different languages, since clearly, languages differ in the types of words that they each treat as mass.
Published on September 6, 2018. Last updated on September 6, 2018.
Marusch, Tina (2010). Natural semantic formalisms? A discussion of the naturalness in Wierzbicka’s approach to lexical semantic analysis. Master’s thesis, Technische Universität Chemnitz. PDF (open access)
The underlying assumption of this thesis is that NSM explications are only partly accessible to the intuition of native speakers. That is, although the analysis consists of natural language and the speaker readily understands every word in isolation, the composite meaning is much more difficult to comprehend. Apart from the alleged clarity and simplicity of the vocabulary, there are other factors influencing
comprehension, such as the complexity of the definition. Furthermore, the subtle differences in meaning are not efficiently enough brought out in the explications for test subjects to recognize the differences as such.
The thesis does not exclude the possibility that NSM paraphrases are a useful tool in lexical semantic analysis and that one can learn many things about meaning from them. For a trained linguist, who is familiar with the structure of the explications, the analyses, especially those of abstract concepts, will be very telling. However, the verifiability through the intuition of native speakers cannot be taken for granted.
Therefore, NSM practitioners cannot claim to avoid obscurity that afflicts many other semantic methods. The claim that NSM submits itself to a higher standard of verifiability than any other rival method cannot be upheld.
Although Marusch’s thesis adopts a rather critical stance vis-a-vis the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, as the outline above abundantly demonstrates, it is included in the database because it constructs its case on the basis of a number of slightly adapted explications that have been referred to in more recent NSM literature.
No rating is provided.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 19, 2018.
Sibly, Anne (2010). Harry slapped Hugo, Tracey smacked Richie: The semantics of slap and smack. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 30(3), 323-348. DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2010.498804
This article analyses and compares the meanings of two English contact verbs: slap and smack. Although they are sometimes regarded as synonymous in their primary senses, evidence is adduced to show that each verb has a distinct meaning. Corpus data are used to identify the everyday patterns of each verb’s use and the analysis and discussion focus on the syntactic and semantic implications of these patterns. Attention is also given to the social and cultural factors that have influenced the way people think about the actions described by the verbs. Meanings are expressed in explications using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM); this allows direct comparison of their semantic content. Slap and smack are shown to share many salient semantic features but, at the same time, to have unique characteristics that make them capable of distinctive description. Their prototypical meanings provide a strong conceptual foundation for other senses, including metaphorical uses.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) slap, (E) smack
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 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 August 22, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (2010). Semantic molecules and semantic complexity (with special reference to “environmental” molecules). Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 8(1), 123-155. DOI: 10.1075/ml.8.1.05god
In the NSM approach to semantic analysis, semantic molecules are a well-defined set of non-primitive lexical meanings in a given language that function as intermediate-level units in the structure of complex meanings in that language. After reviewing existing work on the molecules concept (including the notion of levels of nesting), the paper advances a provisional list of about 180 productive semantic molecules for English, suggesting that a small minority of these (about 25) may be universal. It then turns close attention to a set of potentially universal level-one molecules from the “environmental” domain (‘sky’, ‘ground’, ‘sun’, ‘day’, ‘night’ ‘water’ and ‘fire’), proposing a set of original semantic explications for them. Finally, the paper considers the theoretical implications of the molecule theory for our understanding of semantic complexity, cross-linguistic variation in the structure of the lexicon, and the translatability of semantic explications.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) children, (E) day, (E) ends, (E) fire, (E) ground, (E) hands, (E) head, (E) hot, (E) legs, (E) long, (E) moon, (E) night, (E) podłużny, (E) round, (E) sky, (E) sun, (E) sweet, (E) tapu, (E) water, (E) women, (T) English, (T) Japanese, (T) semantic molecules, (T) Spanish
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
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 4, 2018.
Peeters, Bert (2010). La métalangue sémantique naturelle: acquis et défis [Natural Semantic Metalanguage: achievements and challenges]. In Jacques François (Ed.), Grandes voies et chemins de traverse de la sémantique cognitive (pp. 75-101). Leuven: Peeters.
Written in French.
For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, and of those who, on the basis of superficial readings, may have reached the hasty conclusion that the Wierzbickian approach had nothing to offer them, this article provides an overview that is as systematic as possible: it leaves out nothing that is essential, either with respect to what has already been achieved (the «achievements»), or with respect to what remains to be done (the «challenges»). In reality, the NSM approach provides all those who do not remain indifferent to the desire to be understood, as much by scholars as by untrained readers, with a way to overcome the «crossing the creek» syndrome referred to by Georges Kleiber (2001: 3): «This syndrome, noted for the first time in the Middle Ages among the Oelenberg monks (in Reiningue, near Mulhouse) is well-known: sufferers keep hopping from one rock onto another, without ever falling into the water, but they forget they need to cross the river!» The Natural Semantic Metalanguage is shown to be at once unique and multi-faceted, with the English and French versions being used to briefly present its lexicon and grammar. Before moving on to the challenges, the notions of «cultural script» and «culture» are briefly dealt with. We particularly insist on some of the most recent tasks NSM practitioners have embarked on. These include the formulation of a typology of pathways enabling one to deal more effectively with the issue of language and cultural values, the compilation of the list of semantic molecules to be used to increase the readability of semantic explications, and the elaboration of «semantic templates» for the explication of words belonging to specific semantic categories such as emotions, physical contact verbs, speech act verbs etc.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) boire, (E) drink, (E) eat, (E) mains, (E) manger, (E) sfogarsi, (S) commitment, (T) French
Published on June 25, 2017. Last updated on September 24, 2018.
Karimnia, Amin, & Afghari, Akbar (2010). On the applicability of cultural scripts in teaching L2 compliments. English Language Teaching, 3(3). DOI: 10.5539/elt.v3n3p71. PDF (open access)
In this study, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (henceforth NSM) was used to carry out a comparative analysis. The compliment response behaviour of native Persian speakers was compared to that of Native American English speakers to see if it can provide evidence for the applicability of the NSM model. The descriptive technique was the cultural scripts approach, using conceptual primes proposed in the NSM theory. The cultural scripts were presented in both English and Persian metalanguages. The data were taken from a corpus of 50 hours of recorded live interviews from Persian and English TV channels. The results show the applicability of the NSM model for cross-cultural comparisons. The paper concludes with the pedagogical implications of the development of the theory of cultural scripts for teaching L2 socio-pragmatics in general and compliments in particular.
Crude application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
Tags: (E) (making a compliment), (E) (responding to a compliment)
Published on May 10, 2017. Last updated on August 18, 2018.
Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2010). Przydatnosc eksplikacji metajezykowych w tworzeniu definicji leksykograficznych (na przykladzie definicji nazw uczuc w jezyku portugalskim) [On the usefulness of metalanguage explications for the creation of lexicographical definitions (exemplified through the definition of nouns of emotions in Portuguese)]. In Wojciech Chlebda (Ed.), Etnolingwistyka a leksykografia: Tom poswiecony Profesorowi Jerzemu Bartminskiemu (pp. 93-102). Opole: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego.
Written in Polish.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 17, 2018.
Гладкова, А. Н. [Gladkova, Anna] (2010). Русская культурная семантика: эмоции ценности, жизненные установк [Russian cultural semantics: Emotions, values, attitudes]. Москва [Moscow]: Языки славянской культуры [Languages of Slavonic Cultures].
Written in Russian.
This book is devoted to the study of the relationship between the Russian language and Russian culture with the help of a detailed semantic analysis of a number of terms of emotions, values and attitudes. The main idea that unites this research is that the meanings of some words and expressions reflect cultural-significant representations, that is, the meanings of these words contain ways of thinking that are shared by the native speakers. The cultural significance of the words and expressions being examined is demonstrated by the discovery of a semantic connection between their meanings and the meanings of a number of key words and ideas of the Russian language. The linguistic and cultural specificity of the words being studied is established by comparing their values with the meanings of their translated and culturally significant equivalents in English.
The book offers semantic interpretations of the researched words and expressions using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). It reports on first-time research aimed at determining the exponents of NSM semantic primes and their syntactic properties in Russian.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on August 9, 2018. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Wesoła, Justyna (2010). Hiszpańskie wykrzykniki w polskiej praktyce przekładowej [Spanish exclamations in Polish translation practice]. Łask: Oficyna Wydawnicz LEKSEM.
The nature of exclamations is still not fully explained, which means that their definition remains an issue for debate. The increased interest in these units observed in recent years has resulted in relatively numerous studies on exclamations and has contributed to a significant development of knowledge about their phonetic, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. However, there are very few works devoted either to the functioning of exclamations in text, or to problems associated with their translation.
This dissertation is the first attempt to analyse Spanish exclamations in the context of Polish translation practice. Its aim is twofold:
1. to characterize Spanish interjections in terms of: a) their frequency of occurrence (in diachronic perspective), b) their possible meanings (explicated in NSM), c) their mode of functioning in three different literary genres (drama, epic and lyric); and
2. to determine what methods are used in the translation of exclamations, and why, and to assign appropriate Polish translation equivalents to individual instances of exclamation.
In addition, an attempt is made to observe the individual preferences of authors and translators and to formulate some general conclusions about exclamations as a category.
