Wierzbicka, Anna (1967). On the semantics of the verbal aspect in Polish. In Robert Abernathy et al. (Eds.), To honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Vol. 3 (pp. 2231-2249). The Hague: Mouton.
(1985) English, Polish – Double life of a bilingual
Wierzbicka, Anna (1985). *The double life of a bilingual. In Roland Sussex, & Jerzy. Zubrzycki (Eds.), Polish People and Culture in Australia (pp. 187-223). Canberra: Australian National University.
(1985) English, Polish – Speech acts
Wierzbicka, Anna (1985). Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts: Polish vs. English. Journal of Pragmatics, 9(2-3), 145-178.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(85)90023-2
Abstract:
This paper discusses a number of differences between English and Polish in the area of speech acts, and links them with different cultural norms and cultural assumptions. It is shown that English, as compared with Polish, places heavy restrictions on the use of the imperative and makes extensive use of interrogative and conditional forms. Features of English which have been claimed to be due to universal principles of politeness are shown to be language-specific and culture-specific. Moreover, even with respect to English, they are shown to be due to aspects of culture much deeper than mere norms of politeness. Linguistic differences are shown to be associated with cultural differences such as spontaneity, directness, intimacy and affection vs. indirectness, distance, tolerance and anti-dogmaticism. Certain characteristic features of Australian English are discussed and are shown to reflect some aspects of the Australian ethos. Implications for a theory of speech acts and for interethnic communication are discussed. In particular, certain influential theories of speech acts (based largely on English) are shown to be ethnocentric and dangerous in their potential social effects.
Translations:
Into Polish:
Chapter 6 (pp. 228-269) of Wierzbicka, Anna (1999), Język – umysł – kultura [Language, mind, culture]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
More information:
A more recent publication building on this one is:
Chapter 2 (pp. 25-65) of Wierzbicka, Anna (1991), Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1986) Emotions
Wierzbicka, Anna (1986). Human emotions: Universal or culture-specific? American Anthropologist, 88(3), 584-594.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1986.88.3.02a00030
Abstract:
The search for ‘fundamental human emotions’ has been seriously impeded by the absence of a culture-independent semantic metalanguage. The author proposes a metalanguage based on a postulated set of universal semantic primitives, and shows how language-specific meanings of emotion terms can be captured and how rigorous cross-cultural comparisons of emotion terms can be achieved.
More information:
A more recent publication building on this one is:
Chapter 3 (pp. 119-134) of Wierzbicka, Anna (1992), Semantics, culture, and cognition: Universal human concepts in culture-specific configurations. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1986) English, Polish – Quantitative particles
Wierzbicka, Anna (1986). *The semantics of quantitative particles in Polish and in English. In Andrzej Bogusławski, & Božena Bojar (Eds.), Od kodu do kodu (pp. 175-189). Warsaw: PanÚstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 9 (pp. 341-389) of:
Wierzbicka, Anna (1991, 2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
(1986) Polish – Dative
Wierzbicka, Anna (1986). The meaning of a case: A study of the Polish dative. In Richard D. Brecht, & James S. Levine (Eds.), Case in Slavic (pp. 386-426). Columbus: Slavica.
Abstract:
The basic assumption of this study is that cases have meaning and that this meaning can be stated in a precise and illuminating way. This is of course also the position advocated and brilliantly implemented by Roman Jakobson. Further assumptions are: (1) that a case has one core meaning, on the basis of which it can be identified cross-linguistically (as, say, ‘dative’ or ‘instrumental’), and a language-specific set of other, related meanings, which have to be specified in the grammatical description of a given language; and (2) that all the meanings of a case — like all other meanings — can be stated in intuitively understandable and intuitively verifiable paraphrases in a semantic metalanguage based on natural language.
More information:
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 7 (pp. 391-433) of:
Wierzbicka, Anna (1988). The semantics of grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1986) Russian – Speech act verbs
Wierzbicka, Anna (1986). Two Russian speech act verbs: Lexicography as a key to conceptual and cultural analysis. Folia Slavica, 8(1), 134-159.
Abstract:
This article studies in some detail two characteristic Russian speech act verbs: donosit’ доносить and rugat’ ругать, comparing them with a number of related English verbs. The Russian verbs that were chosen are at once extremely interesting and extremely challenging, from a semantic as well as from a pragmatic point of view. The analysis reveals the precise semantic structure of both verbs and, at the same time, demonstrates the value of the semantic metalanguage on which it relies as a tool for a cross-cultural comparison of speech acts and speech genres.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1987) Various languages – Value-judgment terms
Hill, Deborah (1987). A cross-linguistic study of value-judgement terms. MA thesis, Australian National University.
The purpose of this thesis is to try to establish the extent to which the words good, bad, true and right can be considered lexical universals. These words have been chosen because they are value-judgment terms that, individually, have been discussed at length by philosophers. It seems to be assumed by philosophers and semanticists that these words reflect concepts shared by speakers of all languages. By testing whether these words are candidates for lexical universals we can then see the extent to which this assumption is true.
On the basis of information from native speakers from 15 diverse languages, we can say that good and bad reflect language independent concepts (GOOD and BAD). However, in many languages, including English, the range of meaning of bad is narrower than the range of meaning of good. By looking at five of these fifteen languages we can see that the words right and true reflect concepts that are not language
independent. Thus, by taking a cross-linguistic approach, we can shed some light on the work done by language philosophers in the area of value-judgment terms.
The following languages are examined in this thesis: Arabic, Arrernte, Chinese (Mandarin), English, Ewe, Fijian, Finnish, Indonesian, Kannada, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1989) Address forms and social cognition
Wierzbicka, Anna (1989). Prototypes in semantics and pragmatics: Explicating attitudinal meanings in terms of prototypes. Linguistics, 27(4), 731-769.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1989.27.4.731
Abstract:
This paper shows how pragmatic meanings encoded in different forms of address (such as titles, ‘polite’ pronouns, and personal names, including their expressive derivates) can be portrayed in a rigorous and illuminating way in NSM, and that such explications allow us to make the similarities and the differences between different pragmatic categories clear and explicit – both within a language and across language and culture boundaries.
It is argued that abstract features such as ‘solidarity’, ‘familiarity’, ‘(in)formality’, ‘distance’, ‘intimacy’, and so on do not provide adequate tools for the description and comparison of pragmatic meanings, because they are not self-explanatory and because they do not have any constant, language-independent value. (For example, the ‘distance’ implied by the English title Mr. is different from that implied by the French title Monsieur; and the ‘familiarity’ implied by Russian forms such as Misa or Vanja is quite different from that implied by English forms such as Mike or John.)
It is shown that many pragmatic meanings have a prototypical semantic structure: they present emotions and attitudes in terms of certain prototypical human relationships, rather than in terms of fully specified mental states and social relations. In particular, social and existential categories, such as children, women, and men, or people one knows well and people one does not know, provide important signposts in the universe of human relations encoded in language. The exact role such prototypes play in different pragmatic categories can be shown in a precise and illuminating way in verbal explications constructed in the proposed metalanguage.
Translations:
Into Polish:
Chapter 2 (pp. 49-81) of Wierzbicka, Anna (1999), Język – umysł – kultura [Language, mind, culture]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
More information:
More recent publications building on this one are:
Chapters 7 and 8 (pp. 225-307, 309-325) of Wierzbicka, Anna (1992), Semantics, culture, and cognition: Universal human concepts in culture-specific configurations. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1989) English, Russian – ‘Soul’, ‘mind’
Wierzbicka, Anna (1989). Soul and mind: Linguistic evidence for ethnopsychology and cultural history. American Anthropologist, 91(1), 41-58.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1989.91.1.02a00030
Abstract:
The Russian word duša ‘soul’ has a much wider scope of use than the English word soul and embodies a different folk psychology (fully congruent with what has been described as the Russian “national character”). The English word mind stands for an Anglo-Saxon folk category that has been reified as an objective category of thought. The decline and fall of the concept soul and the ascendancy of mind in English are linked with changes in the cultural history and in the prevailing Western ethnophilosophy.
Translations:
Into Polish:
Chapter 14 (pp. 522-544) of Wierzbicka, Anna (1999), Język – umysł – kultura [Language, mind, culture]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
More information:
A more recent publication building on this one is:
Chapter 1 (pp. 31-63) of Wierzbicka, Anna (1992), Semantics, culture, and cognition: Universal human concepts in culture-specific configurations. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1989) Russian – Personal names
Wierzbicka, Anna (1989). Russian personal names: The semantics of expressive derivation. Folia Slavica, 9, 314-354.
(1990) Emotivity in language structure
Wierzbicka, Anna (1990). *Emotivity in language structure. Semiotica, 80(1/2), 161-169.
Review of Bronislava Volek. Emotive signs in language and semantic functioning of derived nouns in Russian.
(1990) Polish – Antitotalitarian language
Wierzbicka, Anna (1990). Antitotalitarian language in Poland: Some mechanisms of linguistic self-defense. Language in Society, 19, 1-59. DOI: 10.1017/S004740450001410X
This article explores the concept of political diglossia, a phenomenon arising in totalitarian or semitotalitarian countries, where the language of official propaganda gives rise to its opposite: the unofficial, underground language of antipropaganda. The author studies one semantic domain – the colloquial designations of the political police and security forces in contemporary Poland – and compares them with the official designations. The semantics of the relevant words and expressions is studied in great detail so that the social attitudes encoded in them can be revealed and rigorously compared. To achieve this, the author relies on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage that she has developed over the
last two decades, which has already been applied in the study of many other semantic domains, in many different languages. The social and political attitudes encoded in the Polish expressions referring to the security apparatus are discussed against the background of Poland’s history. The author shows that language is not only the best “mirror of mind” (Leibniz) and “mirror of culture” and “guide to social reality” (Sapir), but also a mirror of history and politics.
(1990) Russian – Cultural key words
Wierzbicka, Anna (1990). Duša (soul), toska (yearning), sud’ba (fate): Three key concepts in Russian language and Russian culture. In Zygmunt Saloni (Ed.), Metody formalne w opisie języków słowiańskich (pp. 13-32). Bialystok: Bialystok University Press.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1992) Emotions
Wierzbicka, Anna (1992). Talking about emotions: Semantics, culture, and cognition. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3/4), 285-319. DOI: 10.1080/02699939208411073
Translated into Polish as chapter 4 of:
Wierzbicka, Anna (1999). Język – umysł – kultura [Language, mind, culture]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
The author argues that the so-called “basic emotions”, such as happiness, fear or anger, are in fact cultural artifacts of the English language, just as the Ilongot concept of liger, or the Ifaluk concept of song, are the cultural artifacts of Ilongot and Ifaluk. It is therefore as inappropriate to talk about human emotions in general in terms of happiness, fear, or anger as it would be to talk about them in terms of liget or song. However, this does not mean that we cannot penetrate into the emotional world of speakers of languages other than our own. Nor does it mean that there cannot be any universal human emotions. Universality of emotions is an open issue which requires further investigation. For this further investigation to be fully productive, it has to be undertaken from a universal, language and culture-independent perspective; and it has to be carried out in a universalist framework that is language and culture-independent. The author proposes for this purpose the Natural Semantic Metalanguage based on universal (or near-universal) semantic primitives (or near-primitives), developed over two decades by herself and colleagues, and she argues that the use of this metalanguage facilitates such a perspective and offers such a framework.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1992) Interjection
Wierzbicka, Anna (1992). The semantics of interjection. Journal of Pragmatics, 18(2/3), 159-192. DOI: 10.1016/0378-2166(92)90050-L
Translated into Russian as:
Вежбицкая, А. [Wierzbicka, Anna] (1999). Семантика междометия. In Вежбицкая, А. [Wierzbicka, Anna], Семантические универсалии и описание языков, под ред. Татьяна В. Булыгиной [Semantic universals and the description of languages, ed. Tatyana V. Bulygina] (pp. 611-649). Москва [Moscow]: Языки русской культуры [Languages of Russian Culture].
An expanded version of this paper was published earlier as chapter 8 (pp. 285-339) of:
Wierzbicka, Anna (1991, 2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
This paper argues that interjections – like any other linguistic elements – have their meaning, and that this meaning can be identified and captured in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage developed by the author and her colleagues. A number of interjections from English, Polish, Russian, and Yiddish are discussed, and rigorous semantic formulae are proposed which can explain both the similarities and the differences in their range of use. For example, the English interjection yuk! is compared and contrasted with its nearest Polish and Russian counterparts fu!, fe!, rfu!. The author shows that while the meaning of interjections cannot be adequately captured in terms of emotion words such as disgust, it can be captured in terms of more fine-grained components, closer to the level of universal semantic primitives. The role of sound symbolism in the functioning of interjections is discussed, and the possibility of reflecting this symbolism in the semantic formulae is explored.
(1992) Polish — Jewish culture
Wierzbicka, Anna. (1992). Wschodnioeuropejska kultura żydowska w świetle żydowskiej „etnografii mowy” [Eastern European Jewish Culture in the Light of Jewish “Ethnography of Speaking”]. Teksty Drugie 5(17) pp 5–25.
In Polish
(1992) Various languages – Emotion concepts
Wierzbicka, Anna (1992). Defining emotion concepts. Cognitive Science, 16(4), 539-581. DOI: 10.1207/s15516709cog1604_4
This article demonstrates that emotion concepts – including the so-called basic ones, such as anger or sadness – can be defined in terms of universal semantic primitives such as GOOD, BAD, DO, HAPPEN, KNOW, and WANT, in terms of which all areas of meaning, in all languages, can be rigorously and revealingly portrayed.
The definitions proposed here take the form of certain prototypical scripts or scenarios, formulated in terms of thoughts, wants, and feelings. These scripts, however, can be seen as formulas providing rigorous specifications of necessary and sufficient conditions (not for emotions as such, but for emotion concepts), and they do not support the idea that boundaries between emotion concepts are “fuzzy”. On the contrary, the small set of universal semantic primitives employed here (which has emerged from two decades of empirical investigations by the author and colleagues) demonstrates that even apparent synonyms such as sad and unhappy embody different – and fully specifiable – conceptual structures.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1994) English, Polish – Emotions and cultural scripts
Wierzbicka, Anna (1994). Emotion, language, and cultural scripts. In Shinobu Kitayama, & Hazel Rose Markus (Eds.), Emotion and culture: Empirical studies of mutual influence (pp. 133-196). Washington: American Psychological Association.
Abstract:
This chapter explores the relationship between emotion and culture, and between emotion and cognition. It examines the concept of emotion, and argues that it is culture-specific and rooted in the semantics of the English language, as are also the names of specific emotions, such as sadness, joy, anger, or fear. It shows that both the concept of emotion and the language-specific names of particular emotions can be explicated and elucidated in universal semantic primes (NSM).
NSM provides a necessary counterbalance to the uncritical use of English words as conceptual tools in the psychology, philosophy, and sociology of emotions. It offers a suitable basis for description and comparison of not only emotions and emotion concepts but also of cultural attitudes to emotions. Different cultures do indeed encourage different attitudes toward emotions, and these different attitudes are reflected in both the lexicon and the grammar of the languages associated with these cultures.
The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part discusses the language-specific character of emotion concepts and grammatical categories; the need for lexical universals as conceptual and descriptive tools; the doctrine of basic emotions and the issue of the discreteness of emotions; and the relationships among emotions, sensations, and feelings. The second part, on cultural scripts (with special reference to the Anglo and Polish cultures), explores attitudes toward emotions characteristic of different cultures (in particular, the Anglo and Polish cultures) and shows how these attitudes can be expressed in the form of cultural scripts formulated by means of universal semantic primes.
Translations:
Into Polish:
Chapter 5 (pp. 163-189) of Wierzbicka, Anna (1999), Język – umysł – kultura [Language, mind, culture]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1994) English, Polish, Japanese – Cultural scripts
Wierzbicka, Anna (1994). ‘Cultural scripts’: A new approach to the study of cross-cultural communication. In Martin Pütz (Ed.), Language contact and language conflict (pp. 69-87). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/z.71.04wei [sic]
According to Edward Hall, writing in 1983, one element lacking in the cross-cultural field was the existence of adequate models that enable us to gain more insight into the processes going on inside people while they are thinking and communicating. It is the purpose of the present paper to develop and validate a model of the kind that Hall is calling for. The model developed here, which can be called the “cultural script model”, offers a framework within which both the differences in the ways of communicating and the underlying differences in the ways of thinking can be fruitfully and rigorously explored. It is shown how cultural scripts can be stated and how they can be justified; this is done with particular reference to Anglo, Japanese, and Polish cultural norms.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
