Browsing results for Language families
Published on July 3, 2017. Last updated on February 17, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff (1998). Universal semantic primes of space – A lost cause? LAUD Working Papers, Series A, General and Theoretical Papers, 434. PDF (open access)
Reissued in 2007 with divergent page numbering.
In recent years, a new wave of research on language and space has uncovered surprising variation in the linguistic coding of spatial relationships. It is now known that some languages, e.g. Tzeltal, exhibit remarkable lexico-grammatical elaboration of spatial relationships; that in many languages of Africa and Oceania apparently simple spatial relationships such as INSIDE and ABOVE are encoded by means of noun-like words, or by a combination of a preposition and a postposition, each of which may be independently meaningful. It has also been shown that children’s early acquisition of spatial terminology differs markedly between typologically different languages.
In almost all this recent work, the emphasis has been on cross-linguistic variation in spatial semantics. The question then arises whether there any semantic universals of space that are still viable in the light of the attested variation in formal realization and lexico-grammatical elaboration. In particular, what of the semantic primes of space proposed within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework, namely: WHERE/PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, INSIDE, ON (ONE) SIDE, NEAR, FAR?
After an introduction, the body of the paper has three sections. The first argues that three languages that exhibit markedly different spatial characteristics to English (Tzeltal, Longgu, Ewe) nevertheless still contain exponents of the NSM spatial primes. The second takes a fresh look at some of the new results on cross-linguistic variation in the acquisition of spatial semantics, with particular reference to Korean. The third surveys the grammaticalization of spatial meaning in a typological perspective, concluding that the items on the NSM inventory of spatial primes are all found as recurrent dimensions of grammaticalized meaning in a range of languages.
The overall conclusion is that NSM’s spatial primes are both viable and necessary for the description of spatial meanings within and across languages.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) move away, (E) move towards, (E) on
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 16, 2019.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1998). “Sadness” and “anger” in Russian: The non-universality of the so-called “basic human emotions”. In Angeliki Athanasiadou, & Elzbieta Tabakowska (Eds.), Speaking of emotions: Conceptualisation and expression (pp. 3-28). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110806007.3
Abstract:
The English words sad and angry (or sadness and anger) do not have exact equivalents in Russian, just as the Russian words грусть grust’, печаль pečal’, and сердиться serdit’sja do not have exact equivalents in English. How, then, are we to understand claims that ‘sadness’ or ‘anger’ are universal human emotions?
Emotions cannot be identified without words, and words always belong to particular cultures and carry with them a culture-specific perspective. The only words that are, in a sense, culture-independent are lexical universals, realized in English as good and bad, want, know, feel, think, and say, and so on. Any innate and universal cognitive scenarios that play a special role in human emotional lives all over the world would have to be identified via such lexical universals, not via culture-specific words such as sadness or anger. It may be true that ‘sadness’ and ‘anger’ are universally found in all cultures; but they are found there by native speakers of English. Observers looking at these cultures from a different cultural perspective will probably find something else.
Translations:
Into Russian:
Chapter 10 (pp. 503-525) 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 1 (pp. 15-43) 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
Tags: (E) anger, (E) angry, (E) gnev гнев, (E) grust' грусть, (E) pečal' печаль, (E) sadness, (E) serdit'sja сердиться
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 3, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1998). Russian emotional expression. Ethos, 26(4), 456-483. DOI: 10.1525/eth.1998.26.4.456
Translated into Russian as:
Вежбицкая, А. [Wierzbicka, Anna] (1999). Выражение эмоций в русском языке: заметки по поводу «Русско-английского словаря коллокаций, относящихся к человеческому телу». 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. 526-546). Москва [Moscow]: Языки русской культуры [Languages of Russian Culture].
This article examines Russian “emotional ideology” as reflected in the Russian language, and especially in the Russian collocational system. Colloquial collocations involving the human body, seen as an organ of emotional expression, are the focusfor comparingfolk models of the body and emotion in Russian and Anglo cultures. A theory of “cultural scripts” forms the basis of generalizations from the linguistic evidence.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 19, 2021.
Mostovaja, Anna D. (1998). On emotions that one can “immerse into”, “fall into” and “come to”: The semantics of a few Russian prepositional constructions. In Angeliki Athanasiadou, & Elzbieta Tabakowska (Eds.), Speaking of emotions: Conceptualisation and expression (pp. 295-330). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110806007.295
This paper examines the projection of a few spatial relations such as ‘an object being immersed in a deep container’, ‘a person coming to a place’ and ‘an object located in a place’ into the domain of emotions. In this paper I will attempt to describe what kinds of words referring to emotions and inner states can be treated as containers for those experiencing them in four Russian constructions with the preposition
V ‘in/into’ and different verbs. We will see that although all of these constructions present an emotion experienced by a person as if it were a container or a place, semantic constraints on X are different for
each of the four constructions. Differences in semantic constraints associated with the constructions are caused by differences in meaning between verbs used in the constructions.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 26, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (1998). Bad arguments against semantic primitives. Theoretical Linguistics, 24(2/3), 129-156. DOI: 10.1515/thli.1998.24.2-3.129
Semantic primitives have fallen on hard times. Though their existence was once widely accepted in linguistics, a variety of counter-arguments have since engendered widespread scepticism. This paper examines a selection of anti-primitives arguments with the aim of showing that they fail to apply to the semantic primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach.
The most serious of the faulty arguments invalidly link semantic primitives with ‘objectivism’, or with abstractness and non-verifiability, or with implausible views about language acquisition or language processing. Others rely on misanalysed linguistic ‘facts’, or simply fail to come to grips with the most credible pro-primitives position. The anti-primitives arguments are drawn from a broad range of sources, including the philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, language acquisition studies, and cognitive linguistics.
The paper includes explications of the English words break, happy, lie and on.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) break, (E) happy, (E) lie, (E) on
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 19, 2021.
Travis, Catherine (1998). Bueno: A Spanish interactive discourse marker. In Benjamin K. Bergen, Madelaine C. Plauché, & Ashlee C. Bailey (Eds.), Proceedings of the twenty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General session and parasession on phonetics and phonological universals (pp. 268-279). Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society. DOI: 10.3765/bls.v24i1.1222. PDF (open access)
This paper presents a semantic analysis of the Spanish discourse marker bueno (something similar to ‘well’, ‘OK’, ‘alright’ in English). Four discourse functions of bueno are identified and discussed. On the basis of these functions, it is suggested that bueno is polysemous, and following the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, two definitions to account for its range of use are proposed. It is argued that these definitions reflect the way in which the meaning of the discourse marker bueno is related to the adjective bueno, meaning ‘good’. Finally, we consider the role bueno may play in the communicative realization of the norms and values of the cultures in which it is used.
Tags: (E) bueno
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Durst, Uwe (1999). BAD as a semantic primitive: Evidence from Biblical Hebrew. Pragmatics & Cognition, 7(2), 375-403. DOI: 10.1075/pc.7.2.08dur
In an article entitled “Is BAD a semantic primitive?” (1996), John Myhill suggested that the concept ‘bad’ should be removed from the list of semantic primitives put forward by Anna Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard. Myhill argued (1) that ‘bad’ is semantically decomposable, (2) that there is no word in Biblical Hebrew that corresponds to the English word bad and, thus, no linguistic form that represents the primitive BAD in this language, and (3) that ‘bad’ is dispensable in the semantic analysis and can be replaced with other components without any loss or change of meaning. Discussing and illustrating some fundamental questions in the search for universal semantic primitives, the present author reconsiders these findings and finds a different answer to John Myhill’s question.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) becene, (E) leb rac, (E) rac cayin
Published on May 10, 2017. Last updated on May 1, 2019.
Bardzokas, Chrisovalandis & Dirven, René (1999). Conceptualizations in the domain of ‘happiness’ in English: The value of explications and cultural scripts. RASK (International Journal of Language and Communication), 9-10, 157-188.
Open access
Abstract:
In English, conceptualization within the domain of happiness involves a great many emotion words that may appear as nouns, adjectives or even verbs and that are often very close in meaning to one another. They can therefore be expected to be defined in highly circular ways in most current dictionaries. This paper investigates whether NSM can meet the requirement of describing each of the concepts in the domain of happiness in English in a non-circular and exhaustive way. One of the most remarkable results of the application of the NSM approach to the eleven happiness-related concepts selected is the very clear delimitation of and distinction between four groups of concepts: imminent states of happiness, “doing forms” of happiness, event-like forms of happiness, and transient states of happiness.
Rating:
Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
Tags: (E) bliss, (E) cheerful, (E) delighted, (E) exultant, (E) glad, (E) happy, (E) jubilant, (E) merry, (E) overjoyed, (E) pleased, (E) thrilled
Published on May 10, 2017. Last updated on August 19, 2018.
Bardzokas, Chrisovalandis (1999). The language of anger. MA thesis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
This dissertation offers an analysis of the hotly debated emotion concept of ‘anger’. For the purpose of this analysis, two influential models are put forward: the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (or NSM) as well as the cognitive processes of metaphor and metonymy introduced by Lakoff and Johnson. The results of the research are far from trivial. In terms of emotion analysis, the two models provide insight into the conceptualization of ‘anger’ and, specifically, comparative insight into the English concept of ‘anger’ and the Greek conceptual equivalent expressed in the word thymos. In terms of model evaluation, the two types of analysis yield results that can be readily contrasted and assessed on the basis of the kinds of insight they offer.
A revised version of Chapter 2 of this thesis – the one that specifically engages with the NSM model – has been published as:
Bardzokas, Chrisovalandis (2004). Contrastive semantics of English “anger” and Modern Greek “θymos”. LAUD Working Papers, Series A, General and Theoretical Papers, 582.
Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
Tags: (E) angry, (E) eknevrizomai εκνευρίζομαι, (E) furious, (E) irate, (E) mad, (E) nevriazomai νευριάζομαι, (E) orgizomai οργιζομαι, (E) thymonomai θυμωνομαι
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Peeters, Bert (1999). ‘Salut! Ça va? Vous avez passé un bon weekend?’ Journal of French Language Studies, 9, 239-257.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Enfield, Nick J. (1999). On the indispensability of semantics: Defining the ‘vacuous’. RASK (International Journal of Language and Communication), 9/10, 285-304.
This paper deals with the semantics of “vacuous expressions” in English and Lao.
Published on May 10, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Ameka, Felix K. (1999). ‘Partir, c’est mourir un peu’: Universal and culture specific features of leave taking. RASK (International Journal of Language and Communication), 9/10, 257-283. PDF (open access)
This paper aims to show the near-universal features of leave-taking in terms of the structure of the events that occur in terminating social encounters and in terms of the form of the language and the semantic fields to which the expressions belong. It will be shown that there are gradations in the importance or salience accorded to leave-taking in different cultures. This ranges from cultures in which there is apparently no recognisable or distinct closing phase of social encounters to less elaborate and more elaborate patterned routines of leave-taking. A second purpose is to describe the structure of the closing phase of encounters with specific reference to the southern Ghana cultural area. Two salient routine strategies that occur in closings in this area will be highlighted. Furthermore, the paper will describe the meanings encoded in some of the linguistic routines employed for leave-taking at night in Ewe, a specific ethnolinguistic group in this area.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) May God wake us up (Ewe), (E) Night has not yet fallen (Ewe), (E) When day breaks let's meet (Ewe), (S) leave-taking
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 3, 2018.
Hamid, Hazidi bin Haji Abdul (1999). Communicating meaning across cultures – A framework: analysis and evaluation of the work of Anna Wierzbicka, the critics and cultural scripts for Bahasa Melayu. Master’s thesis, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on October 14, 2018.
Wilkins, David P. (2000). Ants, ancestors and medicine: A semantic and pragmatic account of classifier constructions in Arrernte (Central Australia). In Gunter Senft (Ed.), Systems of nominal classification (pp. 147-216). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This study employs a descriptive method “in the mould of Natural Semantic Metalanguage as advocated by Wierzbicka and her colleagues” (p. 163).
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 18, 2018.
Ye, Zhengdao (2000). The language of emotions in Chinese: A study based on Hong Lou Meng. MA thesis, Australian National University.
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 September 10, 2018.
Langford, Ian (2000). Forensic semantics: The meaning of murder, manslaughter and homicide. Forensic Linguistics, 7(1), 72-94. DOI: 10.1558/ijsll.v7i1.72
The purpose of this paper is to show how the meaning of an expression referring to a crime can be stated in simple words that anyone can understand. Judges need to explain to juries the meaning of the crime that the accused is charged with, the accused needs to understand it, interpreter and translator need to understand it, and of course, lawyers need to understand the charge when advising clients and when preparing for trial. This paper shows how the forensic linguist can help people involved in the criminal justice system to understand the meaning of expressions referring to crimes. This can be done by a method of analysis which represents meaning through about sixty basic English words and a simple syntax known to all speakers of English.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) homicide, (E) manslaughter, (E) murder
Published on August 10, 2018. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Fabiszak, Małgorzata (2000). An application of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage to diachronic semantics. In Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, & Matti Rissanen (Eds.), Placing Middle English in context (pp. 293-312). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110869514.293
This paper is a methodological exercise in which Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), developed as a method of objective description in cross-cultural research, is applied to diachronic data concerning four Middle English emotion terms from the semantic field of ‘joy’. Wierzbicka’s framework provides the means for describing the data neatly, improves their processing, and contributes to the efficiency of their presentation. The application of her formal methodology has made the usage patterns characteristic of the analysed emotion terms more transparent and easier to generalise over.
Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
Tags: (E) bliss, (E) blithe, (E) delight, (E) joy
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Wong, Jock (2000). The semantics of Singapore English. National University of Singapore Centre for Advanced Studies Research Papers Series, 27.
Published on December 18, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Wong, Jock Onn (2000). The ‘mE’ particle of Singlish. National University of Singapore Centre for Advanced Studies Research Papers Series, 18, 25 pp.
The non-standard variety of Singapore English commonly known as Singlish has a set of particles the meanings of which have intrigued and also evaded many researchers. These researchers have described the meanings of the particles mostly with a functional approach, in which the functions of a particle under study are listed, and the meaning of the particle characterized in terms of these functions. Results have proved futile. In this paper, the meaning of the Singlish particle ‘mE’ (commonly spelt ‘meh’ elsewhere) is described using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, which involves corpus study, native speaker introspection, and a reductive paraphrase using semantic primitives to represent the invariant meaning. With this semantic model, the meaning of ‘mE’ can be clearly, precisely, and unambiguously stated in simple English. The semantic formula is shown to be applicable to all instances of use, thus achieving empirical adequacy.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) me (particle), (E) meh
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 22, 2018.
Peeters, Bert (2000). “S’engager” vs “to show restraint”: Linguistic and cultural relativity in discourse management. In Susanne Niemeier, & René Dirven (Eds.), Evidence for linguistic relativity (pp. 193-222). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/cilt.198.13pee
If ways of speaking are determined by the cultural values of a speech community, then it must be possible to find examples of communicative patterns reflecting such values. Taking this hypothesis as a starting point, the author analyses expressions supporting the existence of opposing cultural values in French and (Australian) English.
The French ideal is one of “engagement” in the interest of defending individual expression from the pressures of social constraint, whereas the Anglo-Saxon ideal is “not to commit oneself” in the interest of avoiding the risks associated with erroneous opinions and getting involved in other people’s business. Evidence for these orientations at the cultural level is found in each culture in a series of common evaluative expressions deployed by each group with respect to engagement and commitment. These differences in communicative ideology are then related to actual communicative norms such as patterns of interruption and to observed patterns of intercultural misunderstanding.
An earlier version of this chapter was published in 1998 and reissued (unchanged) in 2006 in the LAUD Working Papers, Series A, General and Theoretical Papers, 451. PDF (open access)
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) but, (E) mais, (E) well, (S) discourse interaction, (S) engagement, (S) interrupting, (S) restraint, (T) French
