Myhill, John (1996). Is BAD a semantic primitive? Evidence from Biblical Hebrew. Lexicology, 2(2). 99-126.
(1996) English – Courtroom
Goddard, Cliff (1996). Can linguists help judges know what they mean? Linguistic semantics in the court-room. Forensic Linguistics, 3(2), 250-272. DOI: 10.1558/ijsll.v3i2.250
This paper considers how linguistic semantics can assist judges in determining the ‘plain meaning’ of words for the purpose of statutory interpretation. It describes the main schools of contemporary semantics, showing that leading experts in the field differ enormously in their basic assumptions and methods. It gives a detailed critique of surveys as a research method in semantics, concentrating on a 1994 American study proposed as a model of how linguists can help judges. Although the author advocates Anna Wierzbicka’s reductive paraphrase approach and seeks to demonstrate its value for conceptual analysis in legal contexts, he argues that in view of the fragmented and under-developed state of lexical semantics it would be ill-advised for courts to recognize linguists as experts on word meanings.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1996) English – Musical metaphors
Yell, Michael Roderick (1996). Musical metaphors: Metaphorical structures in genres of discourse on music. BA(Hons) thesis, University of New England.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1996) English (Aboriginal), Maori – Emotions (shame)
Harkins, Jean (1996). Linguistic and cultural differences in concepts of shame. In David Parker, Rosamund Dalziell, & Iain Richard Wright (Eds.), Shame and the modern self (pp. 84-96). Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Shame is one of a set of ‘social emotions’ that have a strong influence upon the behaviour of individuals in relation to the society in which they live. Emotions of this kind, and related norms of behaviour, are socially constructed within a particular linguistic and cultural context. Serious cross-cultural misunderstanding can result from assuming that emotions, or the behaviour associated with them, will be the same for different cultural groups. For example, shame-like emotions in some contexts can strongly motivate people to conform, but in others they can increase a person’s alienation from and hostility to society. This essay examines shame-like concepts in some languages of Aboriginal Australia and the Pacific, showing how the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) method of analysing emotion words and cultural rules can pinpoint the cognitive and emotive elements contained within culture-specific emotion concepts, and can make some predictions about ‘scripts’ for behaviour associated with these emotions.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1996) English, Chinese – Cultural scripts
Wierzbicka, Anna (1996). *Contrastive sociolinguistics and the theory of “cultural scripts”: Chinese vs English. In Marlis Hellinger, & Ulrich Ammon (Eds.), Contrastive sociolinguistics (pp. 313-344). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110811551.313
(1996) Ewe – Body parts
Ameka, Felix (1996). Body parts in Ewe grammar. In Hilary Chappell, & William McGregor (Eds.), The grammar of inalienability: A typological perspective on body part terms and the part-whole relation (pp. 783-840). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110822137.783
The purpose of this paper is to describe the treatment of body parts (and other meronyms, that is, part terms in part-whole relationships) in the grammar of Ewe, a Kwa language of West Africa. It is assumed that language and, in this particular instance, grammar, is an embodiment and a reflection of conceptual structures of its speakers. Hence an analysis of the Ewe syntactic structures in which body parts participate should reveal the way in which these items are conceptualized in that language. To this end, the semantics of three adnominal constructions are investigated: an “alienable” structure signalled by the possessive connective ɸé, body parts occur as possessa in this construction; an “inalienable” construction which has no overt marking, body parts do not normally occur in this construction except in some cases with a first or second person singular pronominal possessor; and the syntactic compound marked by a high tone suffix. These compounds may be possessive or classificatory in function, and body parts tend to occur in the latter. The semantic ramifications of the property of body parts to assume grammatical roles distinct from the roles of their “owners” are also explored.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1996) German – Prepositions (AUS, VOR)
Durst, Uwe (1996). Distinktive Synonymik der Präpositionen ‘aus’ und ‘vor’ in “kausaler” Verwendung [The distinctive synonymym of the German prepositions ‘aus’ and ‘vor’ in their “causative” use]. MA thesis (Magisterarbeit), Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.
(1996) Japanese – Cultural scripts
Wierzbicka, Anna (1996). Japanese cultural scripts: Cultural psychology and “cultural grammar”. Ethos, 24(3), 527-555.
Abstract:
To describe a language we need to describe, first of all, its vocabulary and its grammar. The task of describing a culture can be approached in many different ways; one useful and illuminating way of doing so is through linguistics, by describing a society’s ‘key words’ (embodying key cultural concepts) and its ‘cultural grammar’, that is, a set of subconscious rules that shape a people’s ways of thinking, feeling, speaking, and interacting. This paper focuses more specifically on Japanese cultural rules.
Translations:
Into Russian:
Chapter 14 (pp. 653-681) of Вежбицкая, Анна (1999), Семантические универсалии и описание языков [Semantic universals and the description of languages]. Москва [Moscow]: Языки русской культуры [Languages of Russian Culture].
Chapter 3 (pp. 123-158) of Вежбицкая, Анна (2001), Сопоставление культур через посредство лексики и прагматики [Comparison of cultures through vocabulary and pragmatics]. Москва [Moscow]: Языки Славянской Культуры [Languages of Slavic Culture].
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1996) Malay – “Social” emotions
Goddard, Cliff (1996). The “social emotions” of Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Ethos, 24(3), 426-464. DOI:
Studies of cultural variation in emotional meanings have played an important part in the development of the interdisciplinary field of cultural psychology. It is now widely accepted that the language of emotion can be an invaluable window into culture-specific conceptualizations of social life and human nature. Such studies inevitably involve explorations in cross-linguistic semantics. Despite their undoubted value, however, from the point of view of linguistic semantics these inquiries have been informal in the sense that they have not utilized any rigorous framework for semantic analysis. It is the premise of this article that a suitably rigorous method of cross-cultural semantic analysis is the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) approach developed primarily by Anna Wierzbicka. The present study applies the NSM approach to a subset of the emotion vocabulary of Malay (Bahasa Melayu), the national language of Malaysia. The underlying theoretical question is the extent to which emotion concepts are culturally constituted. The related methodological problem is how to analyse and describe emotion terms in a way that does not take Western/English language emotion concepts as neutral or natural scientific categories.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1996) Polish, German – Interjections
Wierzbicka, Anna (1996). Między modlitwą a przekleństwem: O Jezu! i podobne wyrażenia na tle porównawczym [Between praying and swearing: A comparative study of Jesus! and other expressions]. Etnolingwistyka, 8, pp. 25-39.
Abstract:
Interjections such as Polish Mój Boże (‘Oh, my God!’), O Jezu (‘Jesus!’) or Matko Boska! (lit. ‘Oh, Virgin Mary!’) are usually neglected in descriptions of language for being “marginal” or “semantically empty” (or both at once). In this paper, these expressions are treated with due attention and a rich analysable semantics is attributed to them. A detailed comparison of Polish Mój Boże! and German Mein Gott illustrates the differences in the range of emotions present in each of the two expressions. It also indicates the need to conduct detailed comparative research on apparently equivalent interjections in various languages.
More information:
Written in Polish.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1996) Russian – Spatial metaphor
Mostovaia, Anna D. (1996). Spatial metaphor in grammar: Studies in semantics of selected Russian constructions. PhD thesis, Australian National University. PDF (open access)
The present study investigates how the abstract meanings of prepositional phrases, often treated as metaphorically motivated, can be accurately described. The semantics of a number of Russian constructions with the preposition в v ‘in, into’ is considered. The constructions fall into the following categories: (1) constructions where a noun after в v refers to a person’s internal state or an emotion; (2) constructions where a noun after в v refers to a category of property transfer (such as a gift or a reward); (3) constructions where a noun after в v refers to a social role (such as a teacher). For each construction, a number of semantic constraints (additional to the general semantic categories of emotions, transfers and roles) on nouns that can be used after в v ‘in, into’ are described, and a semantic formula in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage corresponding to the meaning of the given construction is proposed. A possible metaphorical motivation for each of the described semantic constraints is also discussed.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1996) Yankunytjatjara – THERE IS, FEEL
Goddard, Cliff (1996). Cross-linguistic research on metaphor. Language & Communication, 16(2), 145-151. DOI: 10.1016/0271-5309(96)00003-1
This paper takes issue with the assertion that there is no culture-neutral boundary between what is literal and what is metaphorical, and with the undercurrent of extreme relativism shown in a recent paper published in the same journal. It furthermore makes the point that, to study (and even to identify) the metaphoric systems of other languages, a coherent theory of semantic description is required. It is argued that, despite the enormous semantic differences between languages, there is solid evidence that they share a small set of ‘universal meanings’, which can provide a non-arbitrary and non-ethnocentric vocabulary for cross-linguistic semantics.
The claims contained in this paper are underpinned by discussion of the semantic primes THERE IS and FEEL in Yankunytjatjara.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1997) Biblical Hebrew – Emotion words
Myhill, John (1997). What is universal and what is language-specific in emotion words: Evidence from Biblical Hebrew. Pragmatics and Cognition, 5(1), 79-129. DOI: 10.1075/pc.5.1.07myh
This paper proposes a model for the analysis of emotions in which each emotion word in each language is made up of a universal component and a language-specific component; the universal component is drawn from a set of universal human emotions which underlie all emotion words in all languages, and the language-specific component involves a language-particular thought pattern which is expressed as part of the meanings of a variety of different words in the language. The meanings of a variety of emotion words of Biblical Hebrew are discussed and compared with the meanings of English words with the same general meaning; it is shown that a number of the Biblical Hebrew words (though by no means all) directly represent the biblical conception of God and the role of God combined with one or another of the proposed universal emotions.
Approximate application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
(1997) Chinese (Cantonese, Hong Kong) – NSM primes, NSM syntax (time, place)
Tong, Malindy, Yell, Michael, & Goddard, Cliff (1997). Semantic primitives of time and space in Hong Kong Cantonese. Language Sciences, 19(3), 245-261. DOI: 10.1016/S0388-0001(96)00063-0
This paper takes a subset of the semantic primitives currently proposed in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory and addresses two questions: Do these meanings have lexical equivalents in Cantonese? If so, does their combinatorial syntax conform to Wierzbicka’s hypotheses? The temporal primitives (WHEN/TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME) are all found to have clear Cantonese exponents which can be combined as predicted with other metalanguage elements–but for two exceptions: the combinations A VERY SHORT TIME and BEFORE/AFTER NOW are apparently not possible in Cantonese. We also argue that the Cantonese evidence suggests that
‘when-time’ (as in the phrase AT THIS TIME) and ‘frequency time’ (as in IT HAPPENED TWO TIMES) may be distinct semantic primes. As for the spatial primitives (WHERE/PLACE, HERE, NEAR, FAR, INSIDE, SIDE, ABOVE, BELOW), they all appear to have Cantonese exponents with the predicted syntax, but the tentative proposal that ON may be a universal primitive is challenged by the apparent lack of an equivalent expression in Cantonese.
(1997) Emotion research
Harkins, Jean, & Wierzbicka, Anna (1997). Language: A key issue in emotion research. Innovation in Social Sciences Research, 10(4), 319-331. DOI: 10.1080/13511610.1997.9968537
Linguistic evidence shows significant differences in the use of supposedly equivalent words for emotions in different languages and cultural settings, even in the case of emotions thought to be as basic or widespread as ‘anger’. This paper argues that such differences in usage often reflect differences in semantic content, and shows how the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) approach can provide a way of making explicit both the similarities and the differences in meanings of related emotion words. Stating the semantic components of a word’s meaning in this way also facilitates understanding of these emotion words in their cultural and social context, in relation to cultural values, norms of behaviour, and cultural identity.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1997) English – COME, GO
Goddard, Cliff (1997). The semantics of coming and going. Pragmatics, 7(2), 147-162. DOI: 10.1075/prag.7.2.02god
It is often assumed that the English motion verbs come and go can be glossed as motion towards-the-speaker and ‘motion not-towards-the-speaker’, respectively. This paper proposes alternative semantic analyses which are more complex, but also, it is argued, more descriptively adequate and more explanatory. The semantic framework is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach developed by Anna Wierzbicka, in which meanings are stated as explanatory paraphrases (explications) couched in a small, standardized and translatable metalanguage based on natural language. A single explication is advanced for come, and it is shown that this unitary meaning is compatible with the broad range of ‘appropriateness conditions’ on its use. The same applies to go. A novel feature of the proposed analysis for come is that it does not rely on the conventional notion that ‘deictic projection’ is a pragmatic phenomenon. Instead the potential for ‘deictic projection’ is analysed as flowing directly from the lexical semantics of come. This approach, it is argued, enables an improved account of semantic differences between near-equivalents for come and go in various languages.
(1997) English – KIND, CONSIDERATE, THOUGHTFUL
Travis, Catherine (1997). Kind, considerate, thoughtful: A semantic analysis. Lexikos, 7, 130-152. DOI: 10.5788/7-1-976. PDF (open access)
This paper presents a semantic analysis of three English words denoting positive character or personality traits, namely kind, considerate and thoughtful. These three words are closely related, and the differences (and similarities) in their meanings can be very difficult to pinpoint. It shall be shown that modern dictionaries demonstrate a great deal of circularity in their definitions of these words, reflecting the closeness of their meanings. An analysis of usage examples provides evidence on the basis of which their differences can be understood. Some of the differences that shall be noted are the following: kind and thoughtful necessarily involve doing something for another person, while considerate does not; kind involves not wanting anyone to feel bad, considerate involves not wanting anyone to feel bad as a result of one’s actions, and thoughtful focuses on a specific situation another is in, and not wanting them to feel bad in that situation; kind involves wanting to do something for another’s good, while considerate involves wanting to avoid something that may harm another; and both considerate and thoughtful imply some kind of thinking about another before one acts, as reflected in their morphology. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, as developed by Wierzbicka (1972, 1980, 1996) and colleagues, is used to propose definitions for these words, with the aim of exhaustively capturing their meaning. and clearly delineating their range of use. Such definitions can be particularly valuable to second language learners, and can provide a basis for cross-linguistic, and cross-cultural, comparisons of related concepts.
(1997) English – Prepositions in emotion construal
Osmond, Meredith (1997). The prepositions we use in the construal of emotion: Why do we say fed up with but sick and tired of? In Susanne Niemeier, & René Dirven (Eds.), The language of emotions: Conceptualization, expression, and theoretical foundation (pp. 111-133). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/z.85.09osm
On the basis of my findings I submit that the prepositions used in the construction X is adj./past part. ___ Y are indeed meaningful. The eight prepositions represent eight ways of construing a situation in which an emotion is related to its appraised object. The conditions under which combinations of emotion term, preposition, and following nominal are predictable, are conceptual, not structural.
While there is some NSM in this paper, it does not contain any fully developed explications.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1997) English – Property transfer verbs
Langford, Ian (1997). The semantics of legal speech acts: Property transfer verbs. BA(Hons) thesis, University of New England.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1997) English – T. S. Eliot
Mooney, Annabella (1997). Poetic primitives: An NSM analysis of the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Master’s thesis, Australian National University.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
