nsm-approach.net

Wierzbicka, Anna (2005). W poszukiwaniu lepszego zrozumienia “słów eucharystycznych” Chrystusa [In search of a better understanding of Christ’s “eucharistic words”]. Znak, 604, 33-55.

Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Wierzbicka, Anna (2005). In defense of ‘culture’. Theory and Psychology, 15(4), 575-597. DOI: 10.1177/0959354305054752

The concept of ‘culture’, as used in anthropology and related fields, has been under continual and mounting criticism for several decades. This paper argues that while this concept needs indeed to be
scrutinized and problematized, we are nonetheless much better off with it than without it. By rejecting it, we would jeopardize, in particular, the vital interests of immigrants, refugees and other crossers of cultural boundaries, who need to learn about cultural differences to be able to flourish, or even survive (socially), in a new environment. Drawing on autobiographical cross-cultural literature, the paper shows how the experience of transcultural lives and transcultural ‘selves’ vindicates the ‘culture’ concept, despite its limitations, and how this experience points to a need for crosscultural education, rather than for the abandonment of the concept of ‘culture(s)’. At the same time, the paper shows how the results of linguistic semantics and pragmatics, and especially those of the so-called ‘Natural Semantic Metalanguage’ (NSM) theory developed by the author and colleagues, allow us to better identify different cultural assumptions, values and understandings associated with different languages and to articulate
different ‘cultural scripts’ in a way which would reflect the perspective of cultural insiders while being intelligible to outsiders. It also shows how the theory of ‘cultural scripts’, which is an offshoot of the NSM theory of language and thought, helps to refine the ‘culture’ concept and to make it more theoretically viable and more workable in practical applications.

Wierzbicka, Anna (2005). Universal human concepts as a tool for exploring bilingual lives. International Journal of Bilingualism, 9(1), 7-26. DOI: 10.1177/13670069050090010201

Embodied within every language is a unique universe of meaning. This raises some key questions about the conceptual universes of bilingual persons: What meanings does a bilingual person live with? How does such a person (in contrast with a monolingual person) think and feel? How are their thoughts and emotions related to their two different languages? In order to investigate these questions we need to listen to the subjective experience of bilingual people and, in particular, bilingual writers who have been able to reflect deeply on their personal experience and to articulate their own insights. We also need to analyze semantic differences between languages and try to link the “soft” subjective experience of bilingual persons with “hard” objective evidence derived from rigorous semantic analysis. Finally, we need to recognize that in order to compare the different meanings that bilingual persons live with, we need a common measure at our disposal. In this paper, I will argue that the “Natural Semantic Metalanguage” based on empirically established lexical and grammatical universals provides such a common measure, and I will try to show how the use of this metalanguage can help us to explore the conceptual worlds of bilingual people more effectively and more revealingly.