Browsing results for Language families
Published on May 10, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Ameka, Felix (1987). A comparative analysis of linguistic routines in two languages: English and Ewe. Journal of Pragmatics, 11(3), 299-326. DOI: 10.1016/0378-2166(87)90135-4
It is widely acknowledged that linguistic routines are not only embodiments of the socio-cultural values of speech communities that use them, but their knowledge and appropriate use also form an essential part of a speaker’s communicative/pragmatic competence. Despite this, many studies concentrate more on describing the use of routines rather than explaining the socio-cultural aspects of their meaning and the way they affect their use. It is the contention of this paper that there is a need to go beyond descriptions to explanations and explications of the use and meaning of routines that are culturally and socially revealing. This view is illustrated by a comparative analysis of functionally equivalent formulaic expressions in English and Ewe. The similarities are noted and the differences explained in terms of the socio-cultural traditions associated with the respective languages. It is argued that insights gained from such studies are valuable for cross-cultural understanding and communication as well as for second language pedagogy.
Most of the routines selected for explication are used either to congratulate people when good things happen to them or to console, i.e. show empathy with people who experience something bad. One conversational routine in Ewe that is also included reflects an interesting social and cultural norm in Ewe society related to the use of the left hand instead of the right.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) Congratulations!, (E) Ewe congratulations and consolations, (E) I'm sorry!, (E) sorry, (E) thank you, (E) Well done!
Published on October 13, 2018. Last updated on October 19, 2019.
Bramley, Nicolette Ruth (1987). The meaning of ‘love’ and ‘hate’ and other emotion words in Japanese and English. BA(Hons) thesis, Australian National University.
Rating:
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 15, 2021.
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
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on October 19, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff (1988). Review of Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphors of anger, pride and love: A lexical approach to the structure of concepts. Lingua, 77(1), 90-98. DOI: 10.1016/0024-3841(89)90041-7
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) angry, (E) proud
Published on December 17, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Harkins, Jean (1988). English as a ‘two-way’ language in Alice Springs. MA thesis, Australian National University.
This thesis is a sociolinguistic study of the use of English by Aboriginal people in the Alice Springs town camps. It seeks to describe Aboriginal speakers’ English in its social and cultural context, with special reference to issues in the development of an English language programme at Yeperenye School. Chapter 1 gives a sociolinguistic sketch of the uses of English and other languages in the town camps, including language choice and codeswitching, and a review of literature. Chapter 2 examines variation in the noun phrase, including number marking, pronouns, possession, determiners and quantifiers, and prepositions, arguing that this variation can only be explained with reference to the speakers’ semantic system. Chapter 3 examines tense, aspect and mood, finding systematic differences in meaning which can explain differences from non-Aboriginal English, particularly in modal expressions. Chapter 4 examines the work of Bernstein, Halliday, Walker and others whose ideas have been influential in education, and demonstrates that there is no lack of logical connections in Aboriginal speakers’ English, through an examination of connectives, causal relations and ellipsis. Chapter 5 discusses the meanings of lexical items and grammatical constructions, pragmatic and illocutionary meanings, and argues that the processes of reanalysis and language change which have given rise to this variety of English are semantically based. Chapter 6 presents the conclusions of this study, including its theoretical implications and implications for education.
Published on May 10, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Ameka, Felix K. (1988). The grammatical coding of the terminal viewpoint of situations in Ewe: A semantic perspective. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 8(2), 185-217. DOI: 10.1080/07268608808599397
This paper investigates the expression of the terminal viewpoint of situations in Ewe (West Africa) by means of aspectual verbal modifiers. The analytic task of the study is to explore the subtle semantic differences encoded by three forms within the semantic space of the “end-point” of situations. It is argued that vɔ signifies that something has happened or has been done completely. When it is used without triplication in certain contexts and with triplication in others, it indicates that a situation is about to be completed. By contrast, sé indicates that a situation has been terminated and is incomplete, while kpɔ symbolizes the existential status of situations. To emphasize the non-manifest status of situations, kpɔ may be triplicated.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) kpɔ, (E) sé, (E) vɔ
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 17, 2019.
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
Tags: (E) (personal names), (E) Father, (E) given names, (E) madame, (E) mademoiselle, (E) miss, (E) monsieur, (E) Mr, (E) Mrs, (E) Ms, (E) nicknames, (E) Pan, (E) Pani, (E) Professor, (E) red, (E) salty, (E) Sir, (E) uncle, (E) vous, (E) vy, (E) woman, (E) wy
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 17, 2019.
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
Tags: (E) duša душа, (E) mind, (E) soul
Published on August 16, 2018. Last updated on October 19, 2019.
Hanrahan, Jo (1989). Verbs of love and dependence in the Japanese language. Master’s thesis, Australian National University. PDF (open access)
This thesis examines a group of Japanese words which express emotion, at the heart of which is the concept of ‘amae’ , the desire for love and attention from another person. The emotions expressed by the words discussed herein are common to all human beings and form the core of all cultures. It seems that human feelings of fondness vary, depending on the depth of the relationship existing between the people concerned. It is in the expression of these emotions that peoples differ. It is suggested that the differences are not in the way people feel, but in the way their culture conditions them to behave in communicating their feelings. Only the prototypical use of the verbs in which the concepts are expressed are defined in semantic primitives, although the peripheral uses are commented on separately.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) aisuru 愛する, (E) amaeru, (E) amayakasu, (E) horeru 惚れる, (E) kawaigaru, (E) koisuru 恋する, (E) meokakeru, (E) suki 好き, (E) tayoru, (E) toriiru
Published on May 10, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Bugenhagen, Robert D. (1989). Modality in Mangap-Mbula: An exploration of its syntax and semantics. Language and Linguistics in Melanesia, 20(1/2), 9-39.
In this paper I describe the encoding of modality in the Austronesian language Mangap-Mbula. Rather than relying upon the somewhat vague notion of “irrealis”, I propose an analysis in terms of three independent parameters – presupposition versus assertion, epistemic certainty/commitment, and factuality – and characterize these parameters using a more controlled semantic metalanguage. The latter parameter is somewhat deictic in nature, encoding a proposition which has been true at a specific time prior to the time of utterance or some other deictic center.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on October 14, 2018.
Wilkins, David P. (1989). Mparntwe Arrernte (Aranda): Studies in the structure and semantics of grammar. PhD thesis, Australian National University. PDF (open access)
This thesis is essentially a description of the grammar of Mparntwe Arrernte, the traditional language of Alice Springs, in Central Australia. The main aims of the thesis are two-fold: (i) to provide a comprehensive descriptive overview of the language and (ii) to give some indication of how the language conveys, reflects and responds to the socio-cultural concerns of its speakers. To fulfil these aims, chapters surveying broad areas of the grammar are interleaved with chapters that survey particular grammatical and semantic phenomena in detail. A major concern of the thesis is to describe the semantic, as well as the structural, details of the grammar. Where possible, natural language definitions are provided for grammatical elements and structures.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1989). Russian personal names: The semantics of expressive derivation. Folia Slavica, 9, 314-354.
Published on May 10, 2017. Last updated on September 15, 2018.
Ameka, Felix (1990-91). How discourse particles mean: The case of the Ewe “terminal” particles. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, 12(2), 143-170. DOI: 10.1515_jall.1991.12.2.143
The main claims of this paper are that particles have meanings and that these meanings can be discovered and stated in a linguistically precise manner. Discourse particles, in particular, have meanings in addition to the syntactic, discourse and communicative functions in terms of which they are usually described. It is argued that the syntactic and discourse functional levels should be augmented by a semantic explication of the particles that would constitute a reliable guide to their usage.
The claims are tested and supported through an analysis of the Ewe particles lá and ɖé. These particles have been characterized as phrase and clause terminal particles because they occur at the end of preposed dependent phrases and clauses and at the end of embedded relative clauses. The author contends that the particles have a unitary function: they mark a piece of discourse as forming the conceptual background to the rest, or part of the rest, of an utterance or discourse. Semantic representations couched in a Natural Semantic Metalanguage of hypothetical universal primitives are proposed for the various senses of the particles, which can explain the similarities and differences in their range of use. The paper concludes with a discussion of some cross-linguistic analogues of the Ewe particles.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) ɖé, (E) lá
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
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.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on October 19, 2019.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1990). The semantics of emotions: Fear and its relatives in English. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 10(2), 359-375. DOI: 10.1080/07268609008599447
This paper demonstrates that emotion concepts – including the so-called basic ones, such as anger, sadness or fear – 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 differ in various respects from so-called ‘classical definitions’; in particular, they do not adhere to the Aristotelian model based on a ‘genus proximum’ and ‘differentia specifica’. Rather, they 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, and they do not support the idea that emotion concepts are ‘fuzzy’. On the contrary, the small set of universal semantic primitives employed here allows us to show that even apparent synonyms such as afraid and scared embody different – and fully specifiable – conceptual structures, and to reveal the remarkable precision with which boundaries between concepts are drawn – even between those concepts which at first sight appear to be identical or only “stylistically” different. Upon closer investigation, human conceptualization of emotions reveals itself as a system of unconscious distinctions of incredible delicacy, subtlety, and precision.
Tags: (E) afraid, (E) alarmed, (E) anger, (E) anguish, (E) anxiety, (E) apprehension, (E) concerned, (E) disappointed, (E) dread, (E) fear, (E) fright, (E) frightened, (E) horrified, (E) joy, (E) panic, (E) petrified, (E) relieved, (E) sad, (E) scared, (E) terrified, (E) worried
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Osmond, Meredith (1990). Unravelling the meaning of English emotion terms: Evidence from syntax. MA thesis, Australian National University. PDF (open access)
This thesis examines the meaning of various English terms of emotion , and attempts to show that aspects of their meaning can be related to their syntactic behaviour.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) afraid, (E) angry, (E) annoyed, (E) anxious, (E) ashamed, (E) cross, (E) devoted, (E) fed up, (E) frightened, (E) furious, (E) grateful, (E) guilty, (E) indignant, (E) irritated, (E) obliged, (E) offended, (E) outraged, (E) proud, (E) sick and tired, (E) sympathetic, (E) take fright, (E) X is {adj. or past part. emotion term} about Y, (E) X is {adj. or past part. emotion term} for Y, (E) X is {adj. or past part. emotion term} of Y, (E) X is {adj. or past part. emotion term} to {verb}, (E) X is {adj. or past part. emotion term} to Y, (E) X is {adj. or past part. emotion term} with Y, (E) X is {past part. emotion term} by Y, (E) X is em-ed for {something that involves Y}, (E) X is em-ed over Y, (E) X takes NP(emotion), (E) X verbs others into doing Y, (E) X was em-ed at Y
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on November 11, 2018.
Harkins, Jean (1990). Shame and shyness in the Aboriginal classroom: A case for “practical semantics”. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 10(2), 293-306. DOI: 10.1080/07268609008599445
Aboriginal students in many parts of Australia talk about their experiences of difficulty and discomfort in certain fairly common classroom situations, for example when the teacher calls on an individual student to answer a question, or when a student is singled out for either reprimand or praise. The name for this experience, in most varieties of Australian Aboriginal English, is SHAME. The word SHAME is used by Aboriginal speakers in circumstances where non-Aboriginal speakers would not speak of being ashamed. This paper seeks to demonstrate that proper semantic analysis can lead us to a much clearer understanding and statement of the concept underlying the Aboriginal use of this word, and how it differs from related concepts such as ‘being ashamed’, ‘shyness’, and ’embarrassment’. Such semantic information can be of immediate practical use in cross-cultural communication situations such as the classroom.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) ashamed, (E) embarrassed, (E) shame, (E) shy
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on November 11, 2018.
Dineen, Anne (1990). Shame/embarrassment in English and Danish. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 10(2), 217-229. DOI: 10.1080/07268609008599442
The paper discusses one area of the emotion lexicon in Danish and English, namely a set of terms within the domain of ‘shame’/’embarrassment’. This set of terms constitutes a folk taxonomy, the internal relationships between these terms being a matter for empirical investigation. The paper relies on NSM to make semantic relationships explicit and easily comparable. English and Danish terms are discussed in turn, and comparisons are drawn between them.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) ashamed, (E) embarrassed, (E) flov, (E) forlegen, (E) have bidt hovedet af al skam, (E) ilde berørt, (E) past shame, (E) pinlig, (E) shy, (E) skamfuld
Published on May 10, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Ameka, Felix (1990). The grammatical packaging of experiencers in Ewe: A study in the semantics of syntax. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 10(2), 139-181. DOI: 10.1080/07268609008599440
It is now generally accepted that languages have different means of representing the same extra-linguistic or real world situation. It is furthermore assumed that these different means of representation reflect different conceptualizations of real-world situations. The purpose of this paper is to describe the different morpho-syntactic devices that are available in Ewe, a Kwa language of West Africa, for the presentation of the conceptualizations of an experiencer of an emotion or sensation.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) dó, (E) ɖé, (E) ná, (E) nyá
Published on May 10, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Bugenhagen, Robert D. (1990). Experiential constructions in Mangap-Mbula. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 10(2), 183-215. DOI: 10.1080/07268609008599441
A variety of constructions used to express experiential notions in the Austronesian language Mangap-Mbula are examined and their meanings explicated. By an “experiential situation” is meant a situation in which something “happens” to an animate entity – someone or something who is able to know that something is happening. Furthermore, the animate entity does not affect or produce any other entity, including himself/herself. Experiential situations are encoded in Mangap-Mbula by six overall construction types:
- uninflected experiential verbs with coreferential Experiencer Subjects and Objects
This subclass contains just five items, two of which are explicated: menmeen ‘happy (about)’ and kaipa ‘selfishly rejoice (over)’.
Since there are only a few verbs in the language which encode experiential notions, a number of other constructions are employed as well. They include:
- inflected experiential verbs with experiencer subjects
This subclass includes verbs of knowledge; verbs of perception, including –re ‘see, look’ and –leŋ ‘hear, listen’; verbs encoding semi-controllable physical states; the verb –mbot ‘stay, be at, be alive’; verbs encoding emotional responses, including –morsop ‘be startled’, –murur ‘be surprised’, and –twer ‘worried about, longing for’); verbs encoding uncontrolled physical states; the verb –moto ‘fear’; the verb –mbel ‘be in trouble’
- inflected experiential verbs with experiencer objects
- a construction involving the verb –kam, a polysemous form which can be variously glossed as ‘do, cause, receive, get’
- a construction in which the forms le– and ka– are added immediately following the verb
- body image expressions
More important than all of the above, however, are body image constructions, in which a body part plus a verb function together as a kind of composite predicate.
The final section of the paper is a study of the different encodings of the notion of ‘fear’.
Tags: (E) ka-, (E) kaipa, (E) kokena, (E) kuli- imoto, (E) le, (E) leŋ, (E) mbel, (E) menmeen, (E) morsop, (E) moto, (E) moto- ikam, (E) murur, (E) ni- imozooro, (E) re, (E) twer
