Browsing results for WIERZBICKA ANNA
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 27, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). “Experience” in John Searle’s account of the mind: Brain, mind and Anglo culture. Intercultural Pragmatics, 3(3), 241-255. DOI: 10.1515/IP.2006.016
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 2 (pp. 25-93) of:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). Experience, evidence, and sense: The hidden cultural legacy of English. New York: Oxford University Press.
This paper is part of a larger study that focuses on the word experience and its semantic history. Its main point is that this word plays now, and has played for a long time, an extremely important role in the thought world associated with the English language, and that the changes in its use and meanings reflect, and provide evidence for, important cultural developments. The study argues that, to understand Anglo culture and see it in a historical and comparative perspective, we need to understand the meanings and the history of the word experience. It also argues that, given the role of English in present-day science and the importance of experience in present-day English, we need to understand the cultural underpinnings of this English key word.
The word experience plays a vital role in the ways of thinking of speakers of English; it provides a prism through which they tend to interpret the world. Its range of use is very wide and includes a number of distinct senses. However, through several of these senses (the more recent ones) runs a common theme, which reflects a characteristically ‘‘Anglo’’ perspective on the world and on human life. This is why the word experience is often untranslatable into other languages, even European, without being semantically distorted.
What, then, does the English key word experience mean and how exactly does it differ from its closest counterparts in other languages or in earlier varieties of English?
To answer such questions, one needs to engage in some rigorous semantic analysis, both synchronic and diachronic. This requires a suitable methodology such as that provided by the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 1, 2019.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). The concept of ‘dialogue’ in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. Discourse Studies, 8(5), 675-703.
DOI: 10.1177/1461445606067334
Abstract:
‘Dialogue’ is an important concept in the contemporary world. It plays a very significant role in English public discourse, and through English, or mainly through English, it has spread throughout the world. For example, the dissident leader Aung San Suu Kyi calls for ‘reconciliation and dialogue’ in Burma (or so she is reported to have done in English language news reports), the Russian pro-democracy groups ask Russian President Vladimir Putin to ‘begin a dialogue’ with them, Popes Paul VI and John Paul II are praised for opening the Catholic Church to a ‘dialogue’ with other Christian churches and other faiths (or criticized for not going far enough in this direction), and so on.
But what exactly does the word dialogue mean? NSM is used in this paper in an attempt to answer that question.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) dialogue, (E) threaten, (E) warn
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 27, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). English: Meaning and culture. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195174748.001.0001
It is widely accepted that English is the first truly global language and lingua franca. Its dominance has even led to its use and adaptation by local communities for their own purposes and needs. One might see English in this context as being simply a neutral, universal vehicle for the expression of local thoughts and ideas. In fact, English words and phrases have embedded in them a wealth of cultural baggage that is invisible to most native speakers.
Anna Wierzbicka, a distinguished linguist known for her theories of semantics, has written the first book that connects the English language with what she terms “Anglo” culture. Wierzbicka points out that language and culture are not just interconnected, but inseparable. This is evident to non-speakers trying to learn puzzling English expressions. She uses original research to investigate the “universe of meaning” within the English language (both grammar and vocabulary) and places it in historical and geographical perspective. For example, she looks at the history of the terms “right” and “wrong” and how with the influence of the Reformation “right” came to mean “correct.” She examines the ideas of “fairness” and “reasonableness” and shows that, far from being cultural universals, they are in fact unique creations of modern English.
Table of contents
PART I MEANING, HISTORY, AND CULTURE
1. English as a cultural universe
2. Anglo cultural scripts seen through Middle Eastern eyes
PART II ENGLISH WORDS
3. The story of RIGHT and WRONG and its cultural implications
4. Being REASONABLE: A key Anglo value and its cultural roots
5. Being FAIR: Another key Anglo value and its cultural underpinnings
PART III ANGLO CULTURE REFLECTED IN ENGLISH GRAMMAR
6. The English causatives: Causation and interpersonal relations
7. I THINK: The rise of epistemic phrases in Modern English
8. PROBABLY: English epistemic adverbs and their cultural significance
PART IV CONCLUSION
9. The “cultural baggage” of English and its significance in the world at large
Chapter 3 builds on: Right and wrong: From philosophy to everyday discourse” (2002)
Chapter 6 builds on: English causative constructions in an ethnosyntactic perspective: Focusing on LET (2002)
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags listed below are in addition to those listed at the end of the entries for the earlier work on which this book builds.
Tags: (E) (bare imperative), (E) (tag question), (E) (whimperative), (E) allegedly, (E) apparently, (E) assume, (E) believe, (E) believe (+ clause), (E) believe that, (E) bet, (E) certainly, (E) clearly, (E) conceivably, (E) doubt, (E) evidently, (E) expect, (E) facts, (E) fair, (E) find, (E) force (someone to do somthing), (E) gather (+ clause), (E) get (someone to do something), (E) guess (+ clause), (E) have (someone do something), (E) imagine, (E) indeed, (E) justice, (E) lie, (E) likely, (E) make (someone do something), (E) not fair, (E) obviously, (E) of course, (E) possibly, (E) presumably, (E) presume, (E) presume (+ clause), (E) probable, (E) probably, (E) reasonable, (E) reportedly, (E) sense, (E) suppose (+ clause), (E) supposedly, (E) surely, (E) suspect, (E) take it, (E) think (+ clause), (E) understand, (E) undoubtedly, (E) unreasonable, (S) accuracy, (S) agreement, (S) bare imperatives, (S) critical thinking, (S) demands, (S) directives, (S) emotions, (S) exaggeration, (S) expectations, (S) factuality, (S) good vs. bad, (S) I think vs I know, (S) justification, (S) literal meaning, (S) non-exaggeration, (S) opinions, (S) personal autonomy, (S) pressure, (S) silence, (S) think first, (T) English
Published on November 22, 2017. Last updated on August 16, 2021.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). Współczesne dylematy moralne przez pryzmat dwóch języków – angielskiego i polskiego [Contemporary moral dilemmas through the perspective of English and Polish]. Etnolingwistyka, 18, pp. 145-164.
Written in Polish.
The linguistic communities of Poles and English-speaking Australians live in their respective linguistic worlds and coherent “moral languages”. The two languages, however, differ from each other in their key words and concepts. As a result, the moral dilemmas of these communities also differ. The author, a speaker of English and Polish belonging to two “moral worlds”, analyzes a few key English concepts with no adequate Polish equivalents. Examples are taken from a discussion in the newspaper The Australian in 2006. Questions sent to the editor were answered by eminent figures (a writer, historian, editor, judge, archbishop), who used moral concepts expressed with English words and expressions privacy, invasion of privacy, entitled, to commit oneself, to move on, unreasonable, committed, evidence, fair and unfair or experience. The questions and answers are supplemented in the article with the author’s comments and precise explications in the form of “cultural scripts”. The latter are constructed from the elements of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, developed and used by the author for many years. It is concluded that “the way we think depends to some extent on the language we speak”. In order to liberate oneself from the grips of language, one must, while explicating the meanings of words, use universal primes.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). Universal human concepts as a tool for exploring bilingual lives. International Journal of Bilingualism, 9(1), 7-26.
Published on July 3, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). Sens et grammaire universelle: théorie et constats empiriques [Meaning and universal grammar: Theory and empirical findings]. Linx, 54, 181-207. DOI: 10.4000/linx.520. PDF (open access)
A slightly different version has also been published as:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). Sens et grammaire universelle: théorie et constats empiriques [Meaning and universal grammar: Theory and empirical findings]. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, 59, 151-172.
Written in French; no English abstract available.
Le titre – « Sens et grammaire universelle : Théorie et constats empiriques » – rappelle celui d’un ouvrage publié il y a deux ans par la maison John Benjamins, dans la Studies in Language Companion Series. Il s’agit d’un ouvrage coordonné par mon collègue Cliff Goddard et moi-même, et qui inclut, hormis nos propres chapitres, qui servent de toile de fond, des études détaillées – des portraits en
quelque sorte, réalisés par des auteurs différents – de six langues géographiquement dispersées, de nature très divergente, et appartenant à des familles linguistiques tout à fait distinctes. L’objectif de l’ouvrage était d’établir le noyau linguistique que partagent toutes les langues, et ce par des moyens empiriques, c’est-à-dire en étudiant un certain nombre de langues dissemblables et en identifiant ce qu’elles partagent – du point de vue lexical aussi bien que grammatical. Au bout des dix ans ou presque que mon corédacteur et moi avons consacrés au projet qu’il couronne, nous croyons largement avoir réalisé notre but. Ce que je vous propose aujourd’hui, c’est un résumé des constats les plus importants, classés dans trois rubriques : d’abord, le lexique universel ; ensuite, la grammaire universelle ; et enfin, la « métalangue sémantique naturelle ».
Published on July 3, 2017. Last updated on August 16, 2021.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). Preface. In Bert Peeters (Ed.), Semantic primes and universal grammar: Empirical evidence from the Romance languages (pp. 1-6). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.81.05wie
No abstract available.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 5, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). Semantic primitives. In Keith Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics. Second edition: Vol. 11 (pp. 134-137). Oxford: Elsevier.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). Shape in grammar revisited. Studies in Language, 30(1), 115-177. DOI: 10.1075/sl.30.1.05wie
No abstract available.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2007). Bodies and their parts: An NSM approach to semantic typology. Language Sciences, 29, 14-65. DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2006.07.002
This paper puts forward, on the basis of evidence and analysis, seven general principles of conceptualization of the body, reflected in the semantic organization of the ‘body and body-parts’ field
across languages. It supplies a large set of semantic explications of English body-part terms, and it shows how ethno-anatomies can be described and compared through the use of the natural semantic
metalanguage (NSM). It also returns to the controversial issue of the body-centric character of language
and cognition. One of its goals is to vindicate well-established semantic universals such as body and part. More generally, the paper argues that semantic typology requires a semantic methodology and it shows what a theoretically anchored semantic typology can look like.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 27, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2007). ‘Moral sense’. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 1(3), 66-85. PDF (open access)
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 7 (pp. 313-327) of:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2010). Experience, evidence, and sense: The hidden cultural legacy of English. New York: Oxford University Press.
The concept of ‘moral sense’ plays an important role in books on philosophy, psychology and popular science written by authors who write in English and who take the English language for granted. Yet there is no expression like moral sense in other languages, not even European ones like Spanish or German, let alone non-European ones, like Chinese. Nor was there any moral sense in English before the phrase was invented by so-called “British moralists” – Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume. This paper traces the origins of the modern Anglo/English concept of ‘moral sense’ in the influence of Locke’s empiricist philosophy on the eighteenth-century ‘British moralists’, and through them, on the language of British natural scientists, and especially Darwin’s.
Thus, the paper argues that when contemporary scientists of the English language like Dawkins, Hauser, and others write about ‘moral sense’ and present it as a panhuman characteristic evolved through biological evolution, they are looking at “human nature” and “human morality” through the prism of the English language. Seeing the phrase moral sense, and the discourse based on it, in a cross-linguistic and historical perspective can help us to stretch our imagination as to different possible conceptions of “morality” and to go beyond the culture-bound vision of what Dawkins calls “moral sense” and Hauser, a “universal sense of right and wrong”.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) moral sense, (E) sense of right and wrong, (T) English
Published on June 5, 2018. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2007). ‘Reasonable man’ and ‘reasonable doubt’: The English language, Anglo culture and Anglo-American law. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 10(1), 1-22.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 19, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff & Wierzbicka, Anna (2007). NSM analyses of the semantics of physical qualities: sweet, hot, hard, heavy, rough, sharp in cross-linguistic perspective. Studies in Language, 31(4), 765-800.
DOI: 10.1075/sl.31.4.03god
Abstract:
All languages have words such as English hot and cold, hard and soft, rough and smooth, and heavy and light, which attribute qualities to things. This paper maps out how such descriptors can be analysed in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework, in terms of like and other semantic primes configured into a particular “semantic schema”: essentially, touching something with a part of the body, feeling something in that part, knowing something about that thing because of it, and thinking about that thing in a certain way because of it. Far from representing objective properties of things “as such”, it emerges that physical quality concepts refer to embodied human experiences and embodied human sensations. Comparisons with French, Polish and Korean show that the semantics of such words may differ significantly from language to language.
More information:
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 3 (pp. 55-79) of:
Goddard, Cliff & Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The term schema, used in the 2007 version of the text, refers to what has since been called a semantic template.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) chaud, (E) cold, (E) eat, (E) gładki, (E) hard, (E) heavy, (E) hot, (E) light, (E) miękki, (E) rough, (E) salty, (E) sharp, (E) smooth, (E) soft, (E) sour, (E) sugar, (E) sun, (E) sweet, (E) szorstki, (E) twardy, (E) warm, (T) English
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on January 26, 2020.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2007). Is “remember” a universal human concept? “Memory” and culture. In Mengistu Amberber (Ed.), The language of memory in a cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 13-39). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.21.04wie
Abstract:
This paper argues that ‘remembering’ is not a universal human concept but a cultural construct, shared by some languages but not others. It also shows that culture-specific concepts like ‘remember’ and ‘memory’ can be explained and compared through genuinely elementary and universal NSM notions such as KNOW, THINK and BEFORE. To illustrate these general themes, the paper offers a detailed analysis of the Polish field of ‘memory’, linking Polish semantics with Polish history and culture.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (E) memories, (E) memory, (E) pamiątka, (E) remember, (E) wspomnienia
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on May 19, 2019.
Goddard, Cliff, & Anna Wierzbicka (2007). Semantic primes and cultural scripts in language learning and intercultural communication. In Farzad Sharifian, & Gary B. Palmer (Eds.), Applied cultural linguistics: Implications for second language learning and intercultural communication (pp. 105-124). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
DOI: 10.1075/celcr.7.08god
Abstract:
This chapter illustrates a number of potential practical applications of the NSM approach: as a guide to core vocabulary in the early L2 syllabus, as a means of writing cultural scripts and interpreting cultural key words for language learners, and as the basis for a culture-neutral international auxiliary language. Illustrative material is drawn from English, Russian, and Korean.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (S) deference, (S) expressiveness, (S) personal autonomy
Published on January 15, 2022. Last updated on January 15, 2022.
Wierzbicka, Anna. (2007). Do all languages have the same expressive power? An NSM perspective on semantic variation and universals. In Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest (ed.), Combat pour les langues du monde. Fighting for the world’s languages: Hommage à Claude Hagège, 483-496. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tags: (T) English, (T) Malay
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2007). Reasonably well: Natural Semantic Metalanguage as a tool for the study of phraseology and its cultural underpinnings. In Paul Skandera (Ed.), Phraseology and culture in English (pp. 49-78). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110197860.49
No abstract available.
Published on July 4, 2017. Last updated on August 16, 2021.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2007). NSM Semantics versus Conceptual Semantics: Goals and standards (A response to Jackendoff). Intercultural Pragmatics, 4(4), 521-529. DOI: 10.1515/IP.2007.026
No abstract available.
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on December 27, 2019.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2007). Theory and empirical findings: A response to Jackendoff. Intercultural Pragmatics, 4(3), 399-409.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/IP.2007.019
Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2007). Shape and colour in language and thought. In Andrea C. Schalley, & Drew Khlentzos (Eds.), Mental states: Vol. 2. Language and cognitive structure (pp. 37-60). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.93.05wie
“Colour” and “shape” are concepts important to the speakers of English and of many other languages. They are not, however, universal: there are many languages which have no words corresponding to the English words colour and shape, and in which questions like “what colour is it?” or “what shape is it?” cannot be asked at all. Clearly, speakers of such languages do not think about the world in terms of “colour” and “shape”. How do they think about it, then?
This study shows that by using an empirically discovered set of universal semantic primes which includes see and touch we can effectively explore ways of construal of the visual and tangible world different from those embedded in, and encouraged by, English.
Tags: (E) beginning, (E) bottom, (E) colour, (E) end, (E) ends, (E) envy, (E) feel compassion, (E) gungaltja, (E) gungarlcha, (E) hands, (E) high, (E) long, (E) low, (E) podłużny, (E) round, (E) shape, (E) short, (E) threaten, (E) top, (E) umbrella, (E) warn
