Browsing results for Main Authors
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 18, 2018.
Ye, Zhengdao (2013). Comparing the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to emotion and the GRID paradigm. In Johnny R.J. Fontaine, Klaus R. Scherer, & Cristina Soriano (Eds.), Components of emotional meaning: A sourcebook (pp. 399-409). Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199592746.003.0028
Three important starting points of the GRID paradigm are that (a) the words and expressions ordinary people use to talk about their emotional experience are central to emotion research, (b) emotions are multi-componential phenomena, and (c) the study of the commonalities of human emotion should be firmly grounded in cross-cultural research. All these positions find strong resonance in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to emotion. The aim of this paper is to introduce the NSM approach, compare it with the GRID approach, and explore the possibility of a joint effort between them in the quest for a better understanding of both the universals and the culture-specific aspects of human emotions. The examples discussed in the paper are drawn from English, Chinese, and Ewe, a West African language.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2013). Polish zwierzeta ‘animals’ and jablka ‘apples’: An ethnosemantic inquiry. In Adam Glaz, David S. Danaher, & Przemyslaw Lozowski (Eds.), The linguistic worldview: Ethnolinguistics, cognition, and culture (pp. 137-159). London: Versita.
Open access?
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 25, 2019.
Gladkova, Anna (2013). ‘Intimate’ talk in Russian: Human relationships and folk psychotherapy. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(3), 322-343.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2013.846453
Abstract:
This paper explores and describes communicative aspects of so-called ‘intimate’ relations in Russian. It illuminates the meanings of the social category terms друг drug ‘close friend’, родные rodnye ‘dear/kin’ and близкие blizkie ‘close (ones)’ and demonstrates their relationship to the culturally salient terms душа duša ‘soul, heart’ and сокровенный sokrovennyj ‘innermost, dear, hidden’. The paper contributes to our understanding of Russian relationships and social cognition and establishes connections between the meanings of these terms and selected Russian ways of talking. NSM is used to formulate semantic explications of the terms and cultural scripts.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) blizkij близкий, (E) drug друг, (E) duša душа, (E) govorit’ po dušam говорить по душам, (E) pogovorit’ po dušam поговорить по душам, (E) rodnye родные, (E) sokrovennyj сокровенный, (S) desired way of talking when one’s thoughts and feelings are openly revealed, (S) ways of talking about one’s dear and intimate knowledge
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 25, 2019.
Gladkova, Anna (2013). The Russian social category svoj: A study in ethnopragmatics. In Istvan Kecskes, & Jesús Romero-Trillo (Eds.), Research trends in intercultural pragmatics (pp. 219-238). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614513735.219
Abstract:
Terms for social categories provide a window into understanding culture. They conceptualize relationships and also relate to a culture’s communicative practices. The term for the Russian social category свой svoj possesses the status of a cultural key word. It is associated with important cultural rules of behaviour specific to people of this kind. It also exists at the intersection of other cultural rules, namely искренность iskrennost’ ‘sincerity’ and сокровенный sokrovennyj ‘innermost meanings’. The cultural scripts approach and NSM constitute reliable tools for describing these rules in terms that are universal, accessible and easily translatable into other languages.
The results of the study support the idea of a textual character of culture. Culture is best represented as a collection of rules or texts (Geertz), rather than by means of over-riding universalist concepts. The cultural scripts approach as it is implemented in ethnopragmatics is arguably the most adequate way to describe this variety of texts from a linguistic point of view.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) po-svojski по-свойски, (E) svoj свой, (S) feelings and thoughts, (S) interaction, (S) non-imposition, (S) relationships, (T) Russian
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 25, 2019.
Gladkova, Anna (2013). A cultural semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis of the Russian praise words molodec and umnica (with reference to English and Chinese). Yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics 2013, 249-272.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6250-3_12
Abstract:
Using data from the Russian National Corpus, this chapter explores the semantics and ethnopragmatics of two Russian praise words, молодец molodec and умница umnica. NSM is used to formulate semantic explications of the words in question as well as cultural scripts as a reflection of underlying cultural ideas. Cultural specificity of the terms is established by comparison with other Russian cultural key words and ideas as well as comparison with their closest pragmatic equivalents in English (good boy/girl) and in Chinese (乖 guāi). The investigation allows us to formulate culturally valued modes of behaviour in Russian.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) good boy/girl, (E) guāi 乖, (E) molodec молодец, (E) umnica умница, (E) umnyj умный, (S) non-imposition, (S) praise, (S) praiseworthy behaviour
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on June 25, 2019.
Gladkova, Anna (2013). “Is he one of ours?” The cultural semantics and ethnopragmatics of social categories in Russian. Journal of Pragmatics, 55, 180-194.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.06.010
Abstract:
This study illuminates the meanings of the Russian social category terms свой svoj ‘one’s own’, чужой čužoj ‘alien/stranger/foreigner’, наш naš ‘ours’ and не наш ne naš ‘not ours’ using written and spoken data of the Russian National Corpus. The paper contributes to our understanding of Russian relationships and social cognition and establishes connections between the meanings of these terms and selected Russian communicative styles. NSM is used to formulate semantic explications of the terms and cultural scripts.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) čužoj чужой, (E) naš наш, (E) ne naš не наш, (E) svoi ljudi свои люди, (E) svoj свой, (S) interaction, (S) relationships
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (Ed.) (2013). Semantics and/in social cognition. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(3) (Special issue).
All NSM-related work in this special issue is listed separately. Recommended search term: “Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(3)”.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 3, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (2013). The semantic roots and cultural grounding of ‘social cognition’. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(3), 245-256. DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2013.846454
Social cognition (roughly, how people think about other people) is profoundly shaped by culture. It cannot be insightfully studied except by methods that are able to tap into the perspectives of cultural insiders, while avoiding the pitfalls of conceptual and terminological Anglocentrism. This paper shows how the analytical concepts and techniques developed by the NSM approach to language description, such as semantic explications and cultural scripts, can meet these requirements. It argues that the metalanguage of semantic primes, the outcome of a decades-long programme of research, is well adapted to modelling local culturally grounded modes of social cognition in fine detail.
Semantics; Social Cognition; Sociality Concepts; Cultural Scripts; Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM); Cultural Key Words
Published on May 10, 2017. Last updated on August 31, 2018.
Barrios Rodríguez, María Auxiliadora, & Goddard, Cliff (2013). ‘Degrad verbs’ in Spanish and English: Collocations, lexical functions and contrastive NSM semantic analysis. Functions of Language, 20(2), 219-249. DOI: 10.1075/fol.20.2.04bar
The Lexical Function Degrad is a device used in Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) to select the appropriate verb for expressing ‘to become permanently worse or bad’ in combination with different nouns. For example, in English one says that fruit rots, milk goes off, shoes wear out, flowers wilt, and iron rusts; thus, the verbs rot, go off, wear out, etc. can all be considered “values” of Degrad. Comparing these verbs with their translation equivalents in Spanish shows that verbs in the two languages have somewhat different collocational possibilities. Are such collocational differences arbitrary or do they result from subtle meaning differences between the translation equivalents? In this study we undertake a contrastive semantic analysis of a selection of words in the Degrad domain, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method of semantic explication. We conclude that collocational preferences are indeed semantically motivated, but at the same time we recognize that Degrad is a valuable lexicological tool for verb classification, as well as for coordinating translation equivalents across languages at an approximate level. The paper aims to encourage productive engagement between two well developed approaches to lexical semantics, while at the same time demonstrating the explanatory power of the detailed “micro-semantic” analysis enabled by the NSM methodology.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) agostarse, (E) desgastarse, (E) estropearse, (E) gastarse, (E) go off, (E) marchitarse, (E) pasarse, (E) pudrirse, (E) rot, (E) wear out, (E) wilt, (E) wither, (T) Spanish
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on February 9, 2020.
Wakefield, John C. (2014). The forms and meanings of English rising declaratives: Insights from Cantonese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 42(1), 109-149.
Open access
Abstract:
The study reported in this paper exploited the existence of a pair of semantically related Cantonese question particles (咩 me1 and 呀 aa4) to learn more about the forms and meanings of the tones that mark declarative questions in English. First each particle was defined using NSM. Cantonese-to-English translations were then elicited from native-bilinguals to discover the English-equivalent forms of the particles. The NSM explications proposed for 咩 me1 and 呀 aa4 are hypothesized to apply equally to their English-equivalent forms. The results of this study provide empirical evidence that suggests there are at least two forms of rising declaratives in English with distinct meanings. It is argued that high-rising (but not mid-rising) declaratives express a prior belief in the negative form of their propositional content.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) aa4 呀, (E) me1 咩
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 1, 2019.
Ye, Zhengdao (2014). The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese. International Journal of Language and Culture, 1(2), 194-215.
DOI: 10.1075/ijolc.1.2.04ye
Abstract:
This paper undertakes detailed meaning analyses of 幸福 xìngfú, a concept central to contemporary Chinese discourse on “happiness”, and its opposite 痛苦 tòngkŭ (‘emotional anguish/suffering/pain’). Drawing data from five Chinese corpora and applying the semantic techniques developed by NSM researchers, the present study reveals a conceptualization of happiness that is markedly different from that encoded in the English concept of happiness. Particularly, the analysis shows that the Chinese conception of 幸福 xìngfú is relational in nature, being firmly anchored in interpersonal relationships. Loosely translatable as ‘a belief that one is loved and cared for’, 幸福 xìngfú reflects the Chinese idea of love, which places emphasis on actions over words and is intrinsically related to other core cultural values, such as 孝 xiào (‘filial piety’). The chapter relates semantic discussion directly to recent research on happiness and subjective well-being involving Chinese subjects, highlighting and problematizing the role of language in the emergent and fast-growing field of happiness research and stressing the important role of culture in global “happiness studies”.
More information:
Reissued as:
Ye, Zhengdao (2016). The meaning of “happiness” (xìngfú) and “emotional pain” (tòngkŭ) in Chinese. In Cliff Goddard & Zhengdao Ye (Eds.), “Happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures (pp. 65-86). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/bct.84.04ye
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) tòngkŭ 痛苦, (E) xìngfú 幸福
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 18, 2018.
Ye, Zhengdao (2014). Opposites in language and thought: A Chinese perspective. In Gabriella Rundblad, Aga Tytus, Olivia Knapton, & Chris Tang (Eds.), Selected papers from the 4th UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference (pp. 284-302). London: UK Cognitive Linguistics Association. PDF (open access)
There is a strong view held by many semanticists that ‘oppositeness’ is lexically embodied in every language. This suggests that antonymous thought may be an inherent feature of human cognition. However, in the available literature on the sense relations of opposites, most of the analyses in English focus on adjectives, in particular gradable adjectives. How ‘oppositeness of meaning’ is actually construed by speakers from other languages and cultures, in particular by those from non-Indo-European languages, has largely been unexplored.
This paper fills the gap by providing a Chinese language perspective. It first illustrates the critical role opposites play in the word and conceptual formation in Chinese. It then offers a fined-grained case analysis of two pairs of culturally salient complementary noun opposites designating social categories as a way of gaining insight into varied construals and conceptualizations of the nature of ‘oppositeness of meaning’.
A central methodological concern is how culturally distinctive ways of thinking about the relationships between the two members of a complementary pair can be reflected and captured. The paper proposes that the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), in particular its ‘cultural scripts’ theory branch, provides a possible solution. Related methodological issues discussed in the paper include subtypes of complementary opposites, cultural scripts vs. logical formulation, the issue of markedness, and the role of culture in the semantics of Chinese opposites.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (S) insiders and outsiders, (S) strangers and familiar people
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on July 26, 2020.
Habib, Sandy (2014). Dying in the cause of God: The semantics of the Christian and Muslim concepts of martyr. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 34(3), 388-398.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2014.898223
Abstract:
Martyrdom is unquestionably an important concept in the discourse of Christianity and Islam. This religious concept challenges the minds of many people, particularly because it calls believers to adhere to their beliefs even if they are tortured to death. Notwithstanding, countless martyrs populate the historical accounts of these two monotheistic religions.
This paper examines and defines the Christian and Muslim concepts of martyr and شهي shahīd, respectively. The focus is not on the English word martyr and the Arabic word شهي shahīd as such. The labels have been chosen for the sake of convenience. The explication of martyr represents the concept as perceived by Christians in general, irrespective of their mother tongues. The same goes for the Islamic concept of شهي shahīd. The explication represents the Islamic concept as perceived, not only by Arabic-speaking Muslims, but by Muslims in general. The paper delineates the similarities and differences between the two concepts and provides an NSM explication of each.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) martyr
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 1, 2019.
Levisen, Carsten (2014). The story of “Danish happiness”: Global discourse and local semantics. International Journal of Language and Culture, 1(2), 174-193.
DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2013.846455
Abstract:
According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the world. This paper takes a critical look at the international media discourse on “happiness”, tracing its roots and underlying assumptions. Adopting the NSM approach to linguistic and cultural analysis, a new in-depth semantic analysis of the story of “Danish happiness” is developed. It turns out that the allegedly happiest people on earth do not (usually) talk and think about life in terms of ”happiness”, but rather through a different set of cultural concepts and scripts, all guided by the Danish cultural key word lykke.
The semantics of lykke is explicated along with two related concepts livsglæde, roughly, ‘life joy’ and livslyst ‘life pleasure’, and based on semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis, a set of lykke-related cultural scripts is provided. With new evidence from Danish, it is argued that global Anglo-International “happiness discourse” misrepresents local meanings and values, and that the one-sided focus on “happiness across nations” in the social sciences is in dire need of cross-linguistic confrontation. The paper calls for a post-happiness turn in the study of words and values across languages, and for a new critical awareness of linguistic and conceptual biases in Anglo-international discourse.
More information:
Reissued as:
Levisen, Carsten (2016). The story of “Danish happiness”: Global discourse and local semantics. In Cliff Goddard & Zhengdao Ye (Eds.), “Happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures (pp. 45-64). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/bct.84.03lev
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) livsglæde, (E) livslyst, (E) lykke, (S) anti-materialism, (S) depression, (S) life dissatisfaction, (S) pessimism, (S) small things in life
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 1, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff & Ye, Zhengdao (2014). Exploring “happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures. International Journal of Language and Culture, 1(2), 131-148.
DOI: 10.1075/ijolc.1.2.01god
Abstract:
This introduction to a special issue of the journal IJOLC argues that the cross-linguistic study of subjective experience as expressed, described and construed in language cannot be set on a sound footing without the aid of a systematic and non-Anglocentric approach to lexical semantic analysis. This conclusion follows from two facts, one theoretical and one empirical. The first is the crucial role of language in accessing and communicating about feelings. The second is the demonstrated existence of substantial, culture-related differences between the meanings of emotional expressions in the languages of the world.
The authors contend that the NSM approach to semantic and cultural analysis provides the necessary conceptual and analytical framework to come to grips with these facts. This is demonstrated in practice by the studies of happiness-related and pain-related expressions across eight languages, undertaken by the contributors to the special issue. At the same time as probing the precise meanings of these expressions, the authors provide extensive cultural contextualization, showing in some detail how the meanings they analyse are truly “cultural meanings”.
The project exemplified by the special issue can also be read as a linguistically-anchored contribution to cultural psychology, the quest to understand and appreciate the mental life of others in a full spirit of psychological pluralism.
More information:
Re-issued as:
Goddard, Cliff & Ye, Zhengdao (2016). Exploring “happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures. In Cliff Goddard & Zhengdao Ye (Eds.), “Happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures (pp. 1-18). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/bct.84.01god
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 1, 2019.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). “Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective. International Journal of Language and Culture, 1(2), 149-173.
DOI: 10.1075/ijolc.1.2.02wie
Abstract:
This paper builds on findings of the author’s 1999 book Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals, which tentatively identified eleven universals pertaining to human emotions. The paper probes some of those “emotional universals” further, especially in relation to ‘laughing’, ‘crying’, and ‘pain’. At the same time, the author continues her campaign against pseudo-universals, focusing in particular on the anthropological and philosophical discourse of “suffering”. The paper argues for the Christian origins of the concept of “suffering” lexically embodied in European languages, and contrasts it with the Buddhist concept of ‘dukkha’, usually rendered in Anglophone discussions of Buddhism with the word suffering.
More information:
Reissued as:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2016). “Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective. In Cliff Goddard & Zhengdao Ye (Eds.), “Happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures (pp. 19-43). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/bct.84.02wie
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) cry, (E) douleur, (E) dukkha, (E) feel pain, (E) laugh, (E) suffer, (E) suffering, (E) weinen, (E) xiào 笑
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 7, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff (2014). On “disgust”. In Fabienne Baider, & Georgeta Cislaru (Eds.), Linguistic approaches to emotions in context (pp. 73-97). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
DOI: 10.1075/pbns.241.06god
Abstract:
This study relies on the NSM approach to explore conceptualisations of “disgust” in English via semantic analysis of descriptive adjectives (disgusted and disgusting) and interjections (Ugh! and Yuck!). As well as drawing out some subtle meaning differences between these expressions, the exercise establishes that there is no one-to-one mapping between the meanings of descriptive emotion lexemes, on the one hand, and expressive interjections, on the other.
More broadly, the study seeks to advance the semantic study of “disgust-like” concepts in a cross-linguistic perspective, first, by highlighting aspects of meaning that differ between the English expressions and their near-equivalents in other languages, such as German, French and Polish, and second, by proposing a set of touchstone semantic components that can help facilitate cross-linguistic investigation.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) disgusted, (E) disgusting, (E) Fu!, (E) pleased, (E) sad, (E) Ugh!, (E) Yuck!
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on February 17, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff (2014). Have to, have got to, and must: NSM analyses of English modal verbs of ‘necessity’. In Maite Taboada, & Radoslava Trnavac (Eds.), Nonveridicality and evaluation: Theoretical, computational and corpus approaches (pp. 50-75). Leiden: Brill. DOI: doi: 10.1163/9789004258174_004
The author develops a set of semantic explications of English modal verbs associated with necessity from the perspective of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach. He argues that this set of semantic explications would be applicable to account for the semantic differences between English modals of necessity. In terms of evaluation, he points out that evaluative meanings can be realized by modal expressions, for example have to conveys confidence, have got to has the semantic connotation of urgency, and must has the connotative meaning of desideration.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on August 5, 2017. Last updated on August 17, 2021.
Bullock, David (2014). Learn these words first: Multi-layer dictionary for second-language learners of English. http://LearnTheseWordsFirst.com
In this dictionary, the semantic primes of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) are used to build definitions for 300 semantic molecules. These primes and molecules are then used to define each of the 2000 words in the controlled defining vocabulary of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE).
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on August 31, 2018.
Goddard, Cliff (2014). Jesus! vs. Christ! in Australian English: Semantics, secondary interjections and corpus analysis. In Jesús Romero-Trillo (Ed.), Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2014: New empirical and theoretical paradigms (pp. 55-77). Cham: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-06007-1_4
Using corpus-assisted semantic analysis, conducted in the NSM framework, this chapter explores the meanings and uses of two closely related secondary interjections, namely, Jesus! and Christ!, in Australian English. The interjections Shit! and Fuck! are touched on briefly. From a methodological point of view, the chapter can be read as a study in how corpus techniques and semantic analysis can work in tandem; in particular, how interaction with a corpus can be used to develop, refine and test fine-grained semantic hypotheses. From a content point of view, this study seeks to demonstrate two key propositions: first, that it is possible to identify semantic invariants, i.e. stable meanings, even for highly context-bound items such as interjections; second, that it is possible to capture and model speakers’ awareness of the degree and nature of the “offensiveness” of secondary interjections, in a Metalexical Awareness component that attaches, so to speak, to particular words. Both these propositions challenge conventional assumptions about the nature and interfacing between semantics and pragmatics. A final question raised in the study is how linguists can come to terms with the fact that people use interjections not only orally but also mentally, in “inner speech”.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) Christ!, (E) Fuck!, (E) Jesus!, (E) Shit!, (T) English
