Browsing results for Indo-European
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 18, 2018.
Ye, Zhengdao (2013). Comparing the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to emotion and the GRID paradigm. In Johnny R.J. Fontaine, Klaus R. Scherer, & Cristina Soriano (Eds.), Components of emotional meaning: A sourcebook (pp. 399-409). Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199592746.003.0028
Three important starting points of the GRID paradigm are that (a) the words and expressions ordinary people use to talk about their emotional experience are central to emotion research, (b) emotions are multi-componential phenomena, and (c) the study of the commonalities of human emotion should be firmly grounded in cross-cultural research. All these positions find strong resonance in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to emotion. The aim of this paper is to introduce the NSM approach, compare it with the GRID approach, and explore the possibility of a joint effort between them in the quest for a better understanding of both the universals and the culture-specific aspects of human emotions. The examples discussed in the paper are drawn from English, Chinese, and Ewe, a West African language.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on July 18, 2017. Last updated on February 9, 2020.
Hashemi, Seyede Zahra (2013). Analysis of cultural scripts of objections and responses to objections in Persian and English within Natural Semantic Metalanguage framework. Modern Journal of Language Teaching Methods, 3(1), 17-25.
Open access
Abstract:
Language is the main medium for expressing other phenomena. It expresses the beliefs, values, and meanings shared by members of a society, so it is more than a system of sounds, meaning units, and syntax. Social rules and cultural values are embedded in language and since they are not the same in different cultures they must be learnt by second and foreign language learners.
In this study, a number of social functions in Persian are analysed using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework. The results are then compared and contrasted with those obtained for English. The functions in focus are objections, and response to objections. The results of this study indicates that: the NSM is applicable to the communicative interaction routines in Persian, the cultural scripts can be used to develop an awareness of cultural differences in the learners, and the model in question is suitable for cross-cultural contrastive analysis.
More information:
This is a study in ethnopragmatics, even though the term as such is not used.
Rating:
Approximate application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
Tags: (S) objections, (S) response to objections
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2013). Polish zwierzeta ‘animals’ and jablka ‘apples’: An ethnosemantic inquiry. In Adam Glaz, David S. Danaher, & Przemyslaw Lozowski (Eds.), The linguistic worldview: Ethnolinguistics, cognition, and culture (pp. 137-159). London: Versita.
Open access?
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 25, 2019.
Gladkova, Anna (2013). ‘Intimate’ talk in Russian: Human relationships and folk psychotherapy. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(3), 322-343.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2013.846453
Abstract:
This paper explores and describes communicative aspects of so-called ‘intimate’ relations in Russian. It illuminates the meanings of the social category terms друг drug ‘close friend’, родные rodnye ‘dear/kin’ and близкие blizkie ‘close (ones)’ and demonstrates their relationship to the culturally salient terms душа duša ‘soul, heart’ and сокровенный sokrovennyj ‘innermost, dear, hidden’. The paper contributes to our understanding of Russian relationships and social cognition and establishes connections between the meanings of these terms and selected Russian ways of talking. NSM is used to formulate semantic explications of the terms and cultural scripts.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) blizkij близкий, (E) drug друг, (E) duša душа, (E) govorit’ po dušam говорить по душам, (E) pogovorit’ po dušam поговорить по душам, (E) rodnye родные, (E) sokrovennyj сокровенный, (S) desired way of talking when one’s thoughts and feelings are openly revealed, (S) ways of talking about one’s dear and intimate knowledge
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 25, 2019.
Gladkova, Anna (2013). The Russian social category svoj: A study in ethnopragmatics. In Istvan Kecskes, & Jesús Romero-Trillo (Eds.), Research trends in intercultural pragmatics (pp. 219-238). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614513735.219
Abstract:
Terms for social categories provide a window into understanding culture. They conceptualize relationships and also relate to a culture’s communicative practices. The term for the Russian social category свой svoj possesses the status of a cultural key word. It is associated with important cultural rules of behaviour specific to people of this kind. It also exists at the intersection of other cultural rules, namely искренность iskrennost’ ‘sincerity’ and сокровенный sokrovennyj ‘innermost meanings’. The cultural scripts approach and NSM constitute reliable tools for describing these rules in terms that are universal, accessible and easily translatable into other languages.
The results of the study support the idea of a textual character of culture. Culture is best represented as a collection of rules or texts (Geertz), rather than by means of over-riding universalist concepts. The cultural scripts approach as it is implemented in ethnopragmatics is arguably the most adequate way to describe this variety of texts from a linguistic point of view.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) po-svojski по-свойски, (E) svoj свой, (S) feelings and thoughts, (S) interaction, (S) non-imposition, (S) relationships, (T) Russian
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 25, 2019.
Gladkova, Anna (2013). A cultural semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis of the Russian praise words molodec and umnica (with reference to English and Chinese). Yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics 2013, 249-272.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6250-3_12
Abstract:
Using data from the Russian National Corpus, this chapter explores the semantics and ethnopragmatics of two Russian praise words, молодец molodec and умница umnica. NSM is used to formulate semantic explications of the words in question as well as cultural scripts as a reflection of underlying cultural ideas. Cultural specificity of the terms is established by comparison with other Russian cultural key words and ideas as well as comparison with their closest pragmatic equivalents in English (good boy/girl) and in Chinese (乖 guāi). The investigation allows us to formulate culturally valued modes of behaviour in Russian.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) good boy/girl, (E) guāi 乖, (E) molodec молодец, (E) umnica умница, (E) umnyj умный, (S) non-imposition, (S) praise, (S) praiseworthy behaviour
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 25, 2019.
Gladkova, Anna (2013). “Is he one of ours?” The cultural semantics and ethnopragmatics of social categories in Russian. Journal of Pragmatics, 55, 180-194.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.06.010
Abstract:
This study illuminates the meanings of the Russian social category terms свой svoj ‘one’s own’, чужой čužoj ‘alien/stranger/foreigner’, наш naš ‘ours’ and не наш ne naš ‘not ours’ using written and spoken data of the Russian National Corpus. The paper contributes to our understanding of Russian relationships and social cognition and establishes connections between the meanings of these terms and selected Russian communicative styles. NSM is used to formulate semantic explications of the terms and cultural scripts.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) čužoj чужой, (E) naš наш, (E) ne naš не наш, (E) svoi ljudi свои люди, (E) svoj свой, (S) interaction, (S) relationships
Published on May 10, 2017. Last updated on August 31, 2018.
Barrios Rodríguez, María Auxiliadora, & Goddard, Cliff (2013). ‘Degrad verbs’ in Spanish and English: Collocations, lexical functions and contrastive NSM semantic analysis. Functions of Language, 20(2), 219-249. DOI: 10.1075/fol.20.2.04bar
The Lexical Function Degrad is a device used in Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) to select the appropriate verb for expressing ‘to become permanently worse or bad’ in combination with different nouns. For example, in English one says that fruit rots, milk goes off, shoes wear out, flowers wilt, and iron rusts; thus, the verbs rot, go off, wear out, etc. can all be considered “values” of Degrad. Comparing these verbs with their translation equivalents in Spanish shows that verbs in the two languages have somewhat different collocational possibilities. Are such collocational differences arbitrary or do they result from subtle meaning differences between the translation equivalents? In this study we undertake a contrastive semantic analysis of a selection of words in the Degrad domain, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method of semantic explication. We conclude that collocational preferences are indeed semantically motivated, but at the same time we recognize that Degrad is a valuable lexicological tool for verb classification, as well as for coordinating translation equivalents across languages at an approximate level. The paper aims to encourage productive engagement between two well developed approaches to lexical semantics, while at the same time demonstrating the explanatory power of the detailed “micro-semantic” analysis enabled by the NSM methodology.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) agostarse, (E) desgastarse, (E) estropearse, (E) gastarse, (E) go off, (E) marchitarse, (E) pasarse, (E) pudrirse, (E) rot, (E) wear out, (E) wilt, (E) wither, (T) Spanish
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on February 9, 2020.
Wakefield, John C. (2014). The forms and meanings of English rising declaratives: Insights from Cantonese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 42(1), 109-149.
Open access
Abstract:
The study reported in this paper exploited the existence of a pair of semantically related Cantonese question particles (咩 me1 and 呀 aa4) to learn more about the forms and meanings of the tones that mark declarative questions in English. First each particle was defined using NSM. Cantonese-to-English translations were then elicited from native-bilinguals to discover the English-equivalent forms of the particles. The NSM explications proposed for 咩 me1 and 呀 aa4 are hypothesized to apply equally to their English-equivalent forms. The results of this study provide empirical evidence that suggests there are at least two forms of rising declaratives in English with distinct meanings. It is argued that high-rising (but not mid-rising) declaratives express a prior belief in the negative form of their propositional content.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) aa4 呀, (E) me1 咩
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 19, 2021.
Vukoja, Vida (2014). Passion, a forgotten feeling. In Fabienne Baider, & Georgeta Cislaru (Eds.), Linguistic perspectives on emotions in discourse (pp. 39-69). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/pbns.241.04vuk
When contemporary sciences and humanities use the term emotion while discussing human mental-sentient dynamics, they usually don’t question its supposed status of a conceptual universal. Yet, despite its frequent usage, the term is surprisingly ambiguous, and its universality status is highly dubious. For
instance, it shows not to be particularly adequate for the analysis of the Croatian Church Slavonic lexis that expresses phenomena linked to the human mental-sentient dynamics. Instead, this lexis seems to be in concordance with the concepts pertaining to the medieval paradigm relying on the Latin terms passio (Eng. equivalent: passion) and affectus (Eng. equivalent affect). The paradigm is articulated in the most interesting way by Thomas Aquinas and unfortunately almost forgotten or unwarrantably confounded with the paradigm of emotions.
The third option in conceptualizing human mental-sentient dynamics (besides those that rely on emotions on one hand, and passions and affect on the other) argues that the concept FEEL is the most convincing universal candidate. Namely, the researchers of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage hypothesis present substantial theoretical evidence and ample amounts of corroborating data from typologically different languages of the world that back up such a proposal. This paper benefits from this finding, since the word FEEL, and NSM in general, proved to be an adequate tool for delineating similarities and differences between concepts of ‘emotion’, Lat. ‘passio’ and Lat. ‘affectus’.
Published on July 30, 2018. Last updated on August 21, 2023.
Horn, Nynne Thorup (2014). Child-centered semantics: Keywords and cultural values in Danish language socialisation. MA thesis, Aarhus University.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Danish child-view, including Danish language socialization practices, is perceived as particularly foreign and peculiar by immigrants and other cultural outsiders. Personal accounts from Middle-Eastern immigrants are supported by available information material offered by Danish integration services. Thus, the booklet Your child lives in Denmark, devised by the Danish child-oriented organisation Børns Vilkår ‘Children’s Welfare’, which is available in Afghan, Arabic, Danish, English, Somali, Turkish, and Urdu, advises immigrants in Denmark to bring up their children by talking with them, by avoiding coaxing them with sweets, and by giving them the freedom to be children. While this advice may make sense to a native member of Danish culture, they are unintelligible and meaningless to cultural outsiders. By means of semantic and ethnopragmatic analyses, the thesis seeks to concretize and clarify the meaning as well as the inherent cultural values and assumptions inherent in the culture-specific advice and the Danish child-view in general. More specifically, the thesis combines the theory of language socialization with the approach of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to identify and analyse cultural key words and core values in the Danish child-view and investigates if, and how, Danish children become socialized with these key words and their underlying values.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) fantasi, (E) pædagogisk, (E) trivsel, (E) upædagogisk
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 1, 2019.
Levisen, Carsten (2014). The story of “Danish happiness”: Global discourse and local semantics. International Journal of Language and Culture, 1(2), 174-193.
DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2013.846455
Abstract:
According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the world. This paper takes a critical look at the international media discourse on “happiness”, tracing its roots and underlying assumptions. Adopting the NSM approach to linguistic and cultural analysis, a new in-depth semantic analysis of the story of “Danish happiness” is developed. It turns out that the allegedly happiest people on earth do not (usually) talk and think about life in terms of ”happiness”, but rather through a different set of cultural concepts and scripts, all guided by the Danish cultural key word lykke.
The semantics of lykke is explicated along with two related concepts livsglæde, roughly, ‘life joy’ and livslyst ‘life pleasure’, and based on semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis, a set of lykke-related cultural scripts is provided. With new evidence from Danish, it is argued that global Anglo-International “happiness discourse” misrepresents local meanings and values, and that the one-sided focus on “happiness across nations” in the social sciences is in dire need of cross-linguistic confrontation. The paper calls for a post-happiness turn in the study of words and values across languages, and for a new critical awareness of linguistic and conceptual biases in Anglo-international discourse.
More information:
Reissued as:
Levisen, Carsten (2016). The story of “Danish happiness”: Global discourse and local semantics. In Cliff Goddard & Zhengdao Ye (Eds.), “Happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures (pp. 45-64). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/bct.84.03lev
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) livsglæde, (E) livslyst, (E) lykke, (S) anti-materialism, (S) depression, (S) life dissatisfaction, (S) pessimism, (S) small things in life
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 1, 2019.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). “Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective. International Journal of Language and Culture, 1(2), 149-173.
DOI: 10.1075/ijolc.1.2.02wie
Abstract:
This paper builds on findings of the author’s 1999 book Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals, which tentatively identified eleven universals pertaining to human emotions. The paper probes some of those “emotional universals” further, especially in relation to ‘laughing’, ‘crying’, and ‘pain’. At the same time, the author continues her campaign against pseudo-universals, focusing in particular on the anthropological and philosophical discourse of “suffering”. The paper argues for the Christian origins of the concept of “suffering” lexically embodied in European languages, and contrasts it with the Buddhist concept of ‘dukkha’, usually rendered in Anglophone discussions of Buddhism with the word suffering.
More information:
Reissued as:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2016). “Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective. In Cliff Goddard & Zhengdao Ye (Eds.), “Happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures (pp. 19-43). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/bct.84.02wie
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) cry, (E) douleur, (E) dukkha, (E) feel pain, (E) laugh, (E) suffer, (E) suffering, (E) weinen, (E) xiào 笑
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 7, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff (2014). On “disgust”. In Fabienne Baider, & Georgeta Cislaru (Eds.), Linguistic approaches to emotions in context (pp. 73-97). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
DOI: 10.1075/pbns.241.06god
Abstract:
This study relies on the NSM approach to explore conceptualisations of “disgust” in English via semantic analysis of descriptive adjectives (disgusted and disgusting) and interjections (Ugh! and Yuck!). As well as drawing out some subtle meaning differences between these expressions, the exercise establishes that there is no one-to-one mapping between the meanings of descriptive emotion lexemes, on the one hand, and expressive interjections, on the other.
More broadly, the study seeks to advance the semantic study of “disgust-like” concepts in a cross-linguistic perspective, first, by highlighting aspects of meaning that differ between the English expressions and their near-equivalents in other languages, such as German, French and Polish, and second, by proposing a set of touchstone semantic components that can help facilitate cross-linguistic investigation.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) disgusted, (E) disgusting, (E) Fu!, (E) pleased, (E) sad, (E) Ugh!, (E) Yuck!
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on February 17, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff (2014). Have to, have got to, and must: NSM analyses of English modal verbs of ‘necessity’. In Maite Taboada, & Radoslava Trnavac (Eds.), Nonveridicality and evaluation: Theoretical, computational and corpus approaches (pp. 50-75). Leiden: Brill. DOI: doi: 10.1163/9789004258174_004
The author develops a set of semantic explications of English modal verbs associated with necessity from the perspective of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach. He argues that this set of semantic explications would be applicable to account for the semantic differences between English modals of necessity. In terms of evaluation, he points out that evaluative meanings can be realized by modal expressions, for example have to conveys confidence, have got to has the semantic connotation of urgency, and must has the connotative meaning of desideration.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on August 5, 2017. Last updated on August 17, 2021.
Bullock, David (2014). Learn these words first: Multi-layer dictionary for second-language learners of English. http://LearnTheseWordsFirst.com
In this dictionary, the semantic primes of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) are used to build definitions for 300 semantic molecules. These primes and molecules are then used to define each of the 2000 words in the controlled defining vocabulary of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE).
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 31, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (2014). Jesus! vs. Christ! in Australian English: Semantics, secondary interjections and corpus analysis. In Jesús Romero-Trillo (Ed.), Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2014: New empirical and theoretical paradigms (pp. 55-77). Cham: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-06007-1_4
Using corpus-assisted semantic analysis, conducted in the NSM framework, this chapter explores the meanings and uses of two closely related secondary interjections, namely, Jesus! and Christ!, in Australian English. The interjections Shit! and Fuck! are touched on briefly. From a methodological point of view, the chapter can be read as a study in how corpus techniques and semantic analysis can work in tandem; in particular, how interaction with a corpus can be used to develop, refine and test fine-grained semantic hypotheses. From a content point of view, this study seeks to demonstrate two key propositions: first, that it is possible to identify semantic invariants, i.e. stable meanings, even for highly context-bound items such as interjections; second, that it is possible to capture and model speakers’ awareness of the degree and nature of the “offensiveness” of secondary interjections, in a Metalexical Awareness component that attaches, so to speak, to particular words. Both these propositions challenge conventional assumptions about the nature and interfacing between semantics and pragmatics. A final question raised in the study is how linguists can come to terms with the fact that people use interjections not only orally but also mentally, in “inner speech”.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) Christ!, (E) Fuck!, (E) Jesus!, (E) Shit!, (T) English
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 1, 2018.
Sinkeviciute, Valeria (2014). “When a joke’s a joke and when it’s too much”: Mateship as a key to interpreting jocular FTAs in Australian English. Journal of Pragmatics, 60, 121-139. DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2013.11.004
This exploratory study focuses on interactions containing jocular FTAs in Australian English in relation to cultural attitudes that are valued in an Anglo-Australian cultural context. ‘Not taking yourself too seriously’ is considered to be a preferred attitude in the English-speaking world, but what seems to make it even more prominent in Australia is not its humour potential, but rather a strong link with ‘mateship’, i.e. projecting equality. The results of this study show not only a difference between public and personal offence taken at FTAs, but also a clear connection that can be observed between the category of ‘mateship’ and public offence. Furthermore, a distinction between laughter (an omnipresent reaction in the analysed data), funniness and ‘mateship’ in relation to public offence is made. The findings are based on interactions from the television gameshow Big Brother Australia 2012.
Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
Tags: (S) taking the mickey, (S) taking the piss
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on January 15, 2022.
Waters, Sophia Elizabeth (2014). The cultural semantics of “sociality” terms in Australian English, with contrastive reference to French. PhD thesis, University of New England.
This thesis investigates the lexical semantics of nice and a set of other superficially “simple” sociality concepts (rude, polite and manners) in Australian English. When appropriately analysed, these words reveal much about the socially accepted and approved ways of behaving in Australian society. As expected of heavily culture-laden words, nice and rude lack precise translation equivalents in many languages and can be regarded as cultural key words. The comparative reference to French (for example, nice vs. gentil lit. ‘kind’, rude vs. mal élevé lit. ‘badly brought up’) highlights differences in ways of behaving and construals of sociality.
The thesis engages with the (im)politeness literature, and addresses the problem of transparent definitions of sociality words as they are used by ordinary speakers. This thesis enriches the current literature on (im)politeness and sociality by providing clear and accessible lexical semantic analyses of these words in Australian English, in a range of contexts, collocations and constructional frames in 24 explications. The methodology for the semantic analysis is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach. The lexical semantic analysis of the abstract noun manners pioneers the theoretical innovation of “manners scripts”, which are an extension of the cultural scripts approach.
A quasi-ethnographic approach was taken to compile the dataset of example sentences of Australian English and French sourced from the search engine Google. These form a purpose-built corpus of almost 3000 tokens.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) mal élevé, (E) manners, (E) nice, (E) polite, (E) rude, (E) table manners, (E) well-mannered, (S) expressiveness, (S) no elbows on the table, (S) no reaching, (S) not chewing with the mouth open, (S) not speaking with the mouth full, (S) saying excuse me, (S) saying hello, (S) saying please, (S) saying sorry, (S) saying thank you, (S) using cutlery, (T) French
Published on May 20, 2018. Last updated on August 15, 2021.
Sadow, Lauren (2014). Cultural scripts in practice: An investigation into applying cultural scripts as a pedagogical tool in ESL classrooms. Master’s thesis, University of New England.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
