A resource base of publications using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. 1,100+ detailed notices, and counting!
Гладкова, А. Н. [Gladkova, Anna] (2009). К вопросу о семантическом статусе глагола считать [About the semantic status of the Russian verb scitat’]. Русский язык в научном освещении [Russian language in scientific coverage], 17(1), 201-227.
Written in Russian. No English abstract available.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
The (E) tag listed below is added on the basis of information in the title of this paper, which also proposes other explications.
Tien, Adrian (2009). Singaporean culture as reflected by the shared Chinese-based lexicon of Singapore English and Singapore Chinese. In T. Shabanova (Ed.), Humanistic inheritance of great educators in culture and education (pp. 71-74). Ufa: BSPU.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Ameka, Felix K. (2009). Access rituals in West African communities: An ethnopragmatic perspective. In Gunther Senft, & Ellen B. Basso (Eds.), Ritual communication (pp. 127-151). New York: Berg.
This chapter outlines different types of encounters that may occur between interlocutors in West Africa. Next, a particular type of encounter – a social visit – is described, its constitutive factors are drawn out and the linguistic routines that may be used in such situations are elucidated. A variety of conventional opening acts for negotiating interaction are studied next, and it is argued that “greetings” are but a subcomponent of openings. It is claimed that the enactment of well-being inquiries is an avenue for displaying cultural values such as inclusiveness and harmony in West African communities, and it is shown that expectations about the questions vary cross-culturally. Finally, attention is paid to changes due to cultural contact in the norms associated with greeting behavior in West Africa. The paper concludes with some reflections on the relationship between access routines and ritual communication.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tien, Adrian (2010). The semantics of human interaction in Chinese E-communication. In Rotimi Taiwo (Ed.), Handbook of research on discourse behavior and digital communication: Language structures and social interaction (pp. 437-467). Hershey: IGI Global. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-773-2.ch028
The current study investigates typical, everyday Chinese interaction online and examined what linguistic meanings arise from this form of communication – not only semantic but also, importantly, pragmatic, discursive, contextual and lexical meanings etc. In particular, it sets out to ascertain whether at least some of the cultural values and norms etc. known to exist in Chinese culture, as selected in the Chinese language, are maintained or preserved in modern Chinese e-communication. To achieve his aims, the author collected a sample set of data from Chinese online resources found in Singapore, including a range of blog sites and MSN chat rooms where interactants have kept their identities anonymous. A radically semantic approach was adopted – namely, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) model – to analyse meanings that arose from the data. The analyses were presented and compiled in the way of “cultural cyberscripts” – based on an NSM analytical method called “cultural scripts”. Through these cyberscripts, findings indicate that, while this form of e-communication does exhibit some departure from conventional socio-cultural values and norms, something remains linguistically and culturally Chinese that is unique to Chinese interaction online.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Wakefield, John C. (2010). The English equivalents of Cantonese sentence-final particles: A contrastive analysis. PhD thesis, Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Abstract:
Cantonese has a lexical tone system that severely restricts its ability to manipulate pitch. As a result, many of the speaker-oriented discourse meanings that are expressed through intonation in languages such as English are expressed in the form of sentence-final particles (SFPs) in Cantonese. Although this is widely known and accepted by linguists, apparently no study to date has made a systematic attempt to discover whether any of the more than 30 Cantonese SFPs have English intonational equivalents, and if so, what those equivalents are. To work towards filling this research gap, this study examines the English intonational equivalents of four Cantonese SFPs that divide into the following two pairs: particles of obviousness: 咯 lo1 and 吖吗 aa1maa3; question particles: 咩 me1 and 呀 aa4.
The English equivalent form of each of the four SFPs of this study is identified by examining the pitch contours of Cantonese-to-English audio translations, provided by Cantonese/English native-bilingual participants. A definition using Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is proposed for each SFP, which is hypothesized to apply equally to its English intonational counterpart. Following earlier proposals by Hirst regarding emphatic intonation, these pitch contours are proposed to be floating tones that exist as lexical entries in the minds of native speakers of English. Syntactic positions are proposed for the SFPs and their English equivalents adopting Rizzi‘s split-CP hypothesis.
The findings of this study have far reaching implications regarding the descriptions and classifications of intonation, as well as regarding the classifications of the various forms of suprasegmentals. This study used segmental discourse markers to discover their suprasegmental counterparts in English, exploiting a unique window through which to examine the forms and meanings of English discourse intonation, which is one of the least understood and most difficult to study aspects of English. This research has arguably provided the strongest and clearest evidence to date regarding the forms and meanings of the particular forms of English intonation with which it deals.
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Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Ye, Zhengdao (2010). Eating and drinking in Mandarin and Shanghainese: A lexical-conceptual analysis. In Wayne Christensen, Elizabeth Schier, & John Sutton (Eds.), ASCS09: Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science (pp. 375-383). Sydney: Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science. DOI: 10.5096/ASCS200957. PDF (open access)
Slightly revised as:
Ye, Zhengdao (2012). Eating and drinking in Mandarin and Shanghainese: A lexical-conceptual analysis. In Cathryn Donohue, Shunichi Ishihara, & William Steed (Eds.), Quantitative approaches to problems in linguistics: Studies in honour of Phil Rose (pp. 265-280), Munich: Lincom Europa.
There are many activities that humans cannot do without. Eating and drinking are two of them. But, do people conceptualize these ‘basic’ human activities in the same way? This paper provides a Chinese perspective from two varieties of Sinitic languages – Mandarin Chinese and Shanghai Wu, which is spoken in the Shanghai metropolitan area by approximately 14 million native speakers. Both of these forms of Chinese suggest two different ways of conceptualization. In Mandarin Chinese, a lexical distinction is made between 吃 chī and 喝 hē, comparable to eat and drink in English (but not exactly the same); whereas in Shanghai Wu one single lexical item čhyq is used to describe any activity involving ingestion. The paper conducts a detailed contrastive semantic analysis of these concepts, explores the motivations behind their figurative meaning extensions, and uses the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to articulate the conceptualizations reflected in these concepts. The findings of this paper are consistent with those emerging from crosslinguistic investigation of less familiar languages in recent times, in that there are variations in linguistic coding of eating and drinking. However, this paper also illustrates that one perhaps should not underestimate the variations of conceptualization within one ethnic group.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). Cultural scripts. In Louise Cummings (Ed.), The pragmatics encyclopedia (pp. 92-95). London: Routledge.
The theory of cultural scripts is an offshoot of NSM semantics. The term cultural script, first introduced in 1991, stands for a cultural norm articulated in NSM. Cultural scripts exist at different levels of generality and may relate to different aspects of thinking, speaking and behaviour. High-level scripts, sometimes called master scripts, are often closely associated with core cultural values. They articulate broad cultural themes that are typically played out in detail by way of whole families of related speech practices, which themselves can be captured by means of more specific scripts. The accessibility and transparency of cultural scripts written in semantic primes gives them a huge advantage over technical modes of description.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). Cultural scripts and intercultural communication. In Anna Trosborg (Ed.), Pragmatics across languages and cultures (pp. 43-78). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110214444.1.43
Insights from cross-cultural literature written in English by authors of non-Anglo backgrounds throw a great deal of light on the challenges of cross-cultural lives and cross-cultural encounters. NSM techniques allow the author to translate such experiential evidence into cultural scripts written in a controlled mini-language based on simple and cross-translatable words. The scripts can either portray how cultural insiders think, or they can specifically target outsiders and newcomers to a culture. The paper provides a large range of examples involving more than a dozen different languages in different social situations including, for example, Russian and English scripts for “making a request”, scripts against “criticizing the person you are with”, scripts for “pleasant interaction”, scripts against “blurting out what one thinks”, to mention just a few.
Although cultural scripts may be seen by some as stereotypes, their use, provided it is consistent with the “objective evidence” of lexical facts and the “subjective evidence” from bicultural writers, can lead to increased cross-cultural understanding and serve as a basis for intercultural training. The methodology of cultural scripts formulated in simple and universal human concepts can help explain shared assumptions and values embedded in ways of speaking in different languages and cultures and can at the same time be practically useful in intercultural education.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Goddard, Cliff (2010). Cultural scripts: Applications to language teaching and intercultural communication. Studies in Pragmatics (Journal of the China Pragmatics Association) 3, 105-119.
Cultural scripts provide a powerful new technique for articulating cultural norms, values and practices using simple, cross-translatable phrasing. The technique is based on many decades of research into cross-cultural semantics by Anna Wierzbicka and colleagues in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. This paper illustrates the cultural scripts approach with three examples of pragmatics of Anglo English: request strategies, personal remarks, and phatic complimenting in American English. It argues that the cultural scripts approach can be readily adapted for use in teaching intercultural pragmatics and intercultural communication, and shows with concrete examples (so-called pedagogical scripts) how this can be done.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). On emotions and on definitions: A response to Izard. Emotion Review, 2(4), 379-380.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). The “history of emotions” and the future of emotion research. Emotion Review, 2(3), 269-273. DOI: 10.1177/1754073910361983
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 5 (pp. 102-126) of:
Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
This article focuses on the emergence of a new subfield of emotion research known as “history of emotions”. People’s emotional lives depend on the construals they impose on events, situations, and human actions. Different cultures and different languages suggest different habitual construals, and since habitual construals change over time, as a result, habitual feelings change, too. But to study construals we need a suitable methodology. The article assumes that such a methodology is provided by the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). It applies the NSM approach to the history of ‘happiness’, an emotion that is very much at the forefront of current debates across a range of disciplines. The article shows how the “history of emotions” can be combined with cultural semantics and why this combination opens new perspectives for the whole interdisciplinary field of emotion research.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). ‘Story’ – An English cultural keyword and a key interpretive tool of Anglo culture. Narrative Inquiry, 20(1), 153-181. DOI: 10.1075/ni.20.1.08wie
This paper draws attention to the fact that the word story, a unique English cultural key word and a key interpretive tool of modern Anglo culture, has played a significant role in the “narrative turn” in the humanities and social sciences. It discusses some of the implications of this fact. Because the uniqueness and centrality of English story has until now gone unnoticed, many semantic components associated with it have been projected onto other languages, which has lead to the positing of spurious human universals and to claims such as “story is a basic principle of mind”.
The paper also shows that the English word story is linked with a family of concepts that have no semantic equivalents in other languages and that are unique conceptual artefacts of Anglo culture. It argues that if we can pinpoint these concepts, we can also pinpoint the shared values and assumptions reflected in them. This can be done with the help of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) methodology.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Goddard, Cliff (2010). A piece of cheese, a grain of sand: The semantics of mass nouns and unitizers. In Francis Jeffry Pelletier (Ed.), Kinds, things and stuff: Mass terms and generics (pp. 132-165). New York: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195382891.003.0008
This chapter follows up earlier work of Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka in which they argued that there are numerous, subtly different, subclasses of mass nouns. These different subclasses presuppose, they claimed, different “conceptualizations” of the nature of a mass. The present chapter concentrates on concrete mass nouns in English, arguing that the formal linguistic properties of mass nouns are systematically correlated with their conceptual content and that this conceptual content can be clearly identified using the tools of Wierzbicka and Goddard’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage system. Some of the cognitive issues raised here involve the extent that there is unity to the notion of mass‐stuff and whether there is any necessary similarity in the relevant part of the mental lives of speakers of different languages, since clearly, languages differ in the types of words that they each treat as mass.
Goddard, Cliff (2010). Universals and variation in the lexicon of mental state concepts. In Barbara C. Malt, & Phillip Wolff (Eds.), Words and the mind: How words capture human experience (pp. 72-92). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195311129.003.0005
Abstract:
The first two sections of this chapter provide an overview of NSM research and findings, with a particular focus on mental state concepts. The next two sections show how NSM techniques make it possible to reveal complex and culture-specific meanings in detail and in terms that are readily transposable across languages. Examples include emotion terms, epistemic verbs, and ethnopsychological constructs in English, Chinese, Russian, and Korean. The next section discusses the relationship between linguistic meanings (word meanings) and cognition and elucidates the theoretical and methodological implications for cognitive science. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that people’s subjective emotional experience can be shaped or coloured to some extent by the lexical categories of their language.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). Cross-cultural communication and miscommunication: The role of cultural keywords. Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(1), 1-23. DOI: 10.1515/IPRG.2010.001
The experience of immigrants and other people who live transcultural lives confirms that different societies and lingua-cultures have different tacit norms for interpersonal communication and that such differences matter a great deal in many people’s lives. Every lingua-culture inherits and transmits historically and culturally shaped ways of thinking. This applies to English-speaking societies no less than to any other. Given the massive scale of past and ongoing immigration to English-speaking countries as well as the growing domination of English in the global world, it is particularly important to recognize that English, too, is saturated with historically transmitted cultural assumptions. But it is above all “Anglo English” – the common core of the ‘‘Englishes of the inner circle’’ – that tends to be mistaken for a culture-neutral medium of communication. As a result, “Anglo English”, which greatly facilitates cross-cultural communication in today’s world, is also a major source of miscommunication and cross-cultural failure.
This paper takes as its starting point one of the most illuminating cross-cultural novels, Nabokov’s Pnin. The author surveys a number of ‘‘anomalies’’ in ‘‘Pninian English’’ that had an impact on Pnin’s life in America. Then the paper moves beyond Pnin, but stays with Nabokov, and explores one area of immigrant linguistic condition: the loss of cultural key words. The focus is in particular on the Russian key cultural concept of судьба sud’ba and on Nabokov’s continued reliance on this concept in his books created, through the English medium, by his post-Russian authorial self. The author’s overall purpose, however, is not to talk about Nabokov, but to illuminate the immigrant condition and the miscommunication inherent in cross-cultural communication. In her analysis, she relies on the ‘NSM’ methodology of semantic analysis, which allows us to analyse intercultural communication and miscommunication from a neutral, non-Anglocentric perspective.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Gladkova, Anna (2010). A linguist’s view of “pride”. Emotion Review, 2(2), 178-179.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073909355014
Abstract:
This brief commentary on a paper published in the same issue offers a linguistic perspective on ‘pride’. On the basis of a semantic analysis, it demonstrates that the interpretation of pride put forward in that paper is Anglocentric and consistent with the contemporary use of the English word pride. It compares the English concept of pride with the Russian concept of гордиться gordit’sja and demonstrates their differences. It calls for a psychological account of ‘pride’ free from ethnocentric bias.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Gladkova, Anna (2010). Sympathy, compassion, and empathy in English and Russian: A linguistic and cultural analysis. Culture & Psychology, 16(2), 267-285.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067X10361396
Abstract:
This corpus-based study contributes to the description and analysis of linguistic and cultural variation in the conceptualization of sympathy, compassion, and empathy. A contrastive semantic analysis of sympathy, compassion, and empathy in English and their Russian translational equivalents sočuvstvie, sostradanie, and sopereživanie uncovers significant differences in the conceptualization of these words, which are explained with reference to the prevalence of different models of social interaction in Anglo and Russian cultures, as well as different cultural attitudes towards emotional expression. The analysis uses NSM, which the author argues is a powerful tool in contrastive studies.
More information:
This paper has been plagiarized in the following publication:
Buyankina, A. S. (2015). Sympathy and empathy in English and Russian: A linguistic and cultural analysis. In С. А. Песоцкая [S. A. Pesotskaya] (Ed.), Коммуникативные аспекты языка и культуры: сборник материалов XV Международной научно-практической конференции студентов и молодых ученых [Communicative aspects of language and culture: A collection of materials of the XVth International Scientific and Practical Conference of Students and Young Scientists]: Vol. 3 (pp. 70-72). Томск [Tomsk]: Изд-во ТПУ [TPU Publishing House].
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Goddard, Cliff (2010). Semantic molecules and semantic complexity (with special reference to “environmental” molecules). Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 8(1), 123-155. DOI: 10.1075/ml.8.1.05god
In the NSM approach to semantic analysis, semantic molecules are a well-defined set of non-primitive lexical meanings in a given language that function as intermediate-level units in the structure of complex meanings in that language. After reviewing existing work on the molecules concept (including the notion of levels of nesting), the paper advances a provisional list of about 180 productive semantic molecules for English, suggesting that a small minority of these (about 25) may be universal. It then turns close attention to a set of potentially universal level-one molecules from the “environmental” domain (‘sky’, ‘ground’, ‘sun’, ‘day’, ‘night’ ‘water’ and ‘fire’), proposing a set of original semantic explications for them. Finally, the paper considers the theoretical implications of the molecule theory for our understanding of semantic complexity, cross-linguistic variation in the structure of the lexicon, and the translatability of semantic explications.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). Experience, evidence, and sense: The hidden cultural legacy of English. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195368000.001.0001
This book is based on two ideas: first, that any language – English no less than any other – represents a universe of meaning, shaped by the history and experience of the men and women who have created it; and second, that in any language certain culture-specific words act as linchpins for whole networks of meanings, and that penetrating the meanings of those key words can therefore open our eyes to an entire cultural universe. This book demonstrates that three uniquely English words – evidence, experience, and sense – are exactly such linchpins. Using a rigorous plain language approach to meaning analysis, the book unpackages the dense cultural meanings of these key words, disentangles their multiple meanings, and traces their origins back to the tradition of British empiricism. In so doing the book reveals much about cultural attitudes embedded not only in British and American English, but other global varieties of English.
Table of contents:
Part I Introduction
1. Making the familiar look foreign
Part II Experience and evidence
2. Experience: An English keyword and a key cultural theme
3. Evidence: Words, ideas, and cultural practices
Part III Sense
4. The discourse of sense and the legacy of “British empiricism”
5. A sense of humour, a sense of self, and similar expressions
6. A strong sense, a deep sense, and similar expressions
7. Moral sense
8. Common sense
9. From having sense to making sense
Part IV Phraseology, semantics, and corpus linguistics
10. Investigating English phraseology with two tools: NSM and Google
Chapter 2 builds on: “Experience” in John Searle’s account of the mind: Brain, mind and Anglo culture (2006)
Chapter 7 builds on: Moral sense (2007)
Chapter 10 builds on: Exploring English phraseology with two tools: NSM semantic methodology and Google (2009)
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Waters, Sophia (2010). The semantics of French discourse particles quoi and ben. In Yvonne Treis & Rik De Busser (Eds.), Selected papers from the 2009 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/als2009.html. PDF (open access)
Discourse particles are strewn throughout natural spoken discourse, revealing the speakers’ attitude towards what they are saying and guiding the interlocutors’ interpretation of that utterance. The majority of works in the area of the French discourse particles quoi and ben provide detailed analyses and place their primary focus on usage. Problems arise, however, when word usage is discussed without a systematic approach to semantics. The present study applies the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method of description to these particles, proposing definitive explications that can be substituted into naturally occurring examples of quoi and ben without causing any semantic loss. Explications, framed in the culture-neutral terms of the NSM, capture the subtleties of meaning conveyed by each discourse particle. They are presented in parallel English and French versions and are tested against a corpus of spoken French.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
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Crude application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner |
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Approximate application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner |
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Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner |
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Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners |
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners |