Wierzbicka, Anna (2012). When cultural scripts clash: Miscommunication in “multicultural” Australia. In Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky (Ed.). Intercultural miscommunication past and present (pp. 121-148). Lódz: Peter Lang.
No abstract available.
(2012) English, French, Polish – Emotions: pain
Wierzbicka, Anna (2012). Is pain a human universal? Conceptualisation of pain in English, French and Polish. Colloquia Communia, 92, 29-53.
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 6 (pp. 127-155) of:
Goddard, Cliff & Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Note (11 September 2018): Tags will be added as soon as possible.
(2012) English, Pitjantjatjara – Emotions: pain
Wierzbicka, Anna (2012). Is pain a human universal? A cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective on pain. Emotion Review, 4(3), 307-317. DOI: 10.1177/1754073912439761
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 6 (pp. 127-155) of:
Goddard, Cliff & Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pain is a global problem whose social, economic and psychological costs are immeasurable. It is now seen as the most common reason why people seek medical (including psychiatric) care. But what is pain? This article shows that the discourse of pain tends to suffer from the same problems of ethnocentrism and obscurity as the discourse of emotions in general. Noting that, in the case of pain, the costs of miscommunication are particularly high, this article offers a new paradigm for communicating about pain. It shows how the use of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) techniques can help in this area, as in other areas concerned with human subjectivity, and can lead to a greater understanding between psychologists, psychiatrists, medical practitioners, social workers, and ordinary suffering mortals.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2012) English, Russian – ‘Advice’
Wierzbicka, Anna (2012). ‘Advice’ in English and in Russian: A contrastive and cross-cultural perspective. In Holger Limberg, & Miriam A. Locher (Eds.), Advice in discourse (pp. 309-332). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/pbns.221.19wie
This paper argues that the English word advice encodes a language-specific perspective on the universe of discourse and that to analyse discourse in other languages and cultures in terms of this culture-specific English word would involve imposing on them an Anglocentric perspective. The paper introduces a different approach – the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach – based on 60 or so simple and universal human concepts. Using the NSM framework, the paper presents a comparative analysis of Russian and Anglo communicative norms and values associated with the English words advice and advise and their closest Russian counterparts, and demonstrates how the differences in the meanings of these words go hand-in-hand with differences in cultural practices, norms, and values. he paper concludes by proposing contrastive “cultural scripts” for English and Russian, which can be of practical use in language teaching, intercultural communication and education.
(2012) Understanding others requires shared concepts
Wierzbicka, Anna (2012). Understanding others requires shared concepts. Pragmatics & Cognition, 20(2), 356-379. DOI: 10.1075/pc.20.2.09wie
“It is a noble task to try to understand others, and to have them understand you (…) but it is never an easy one”, says Everett. This paper argues that a basic prerequisite for understanding others (and also for having them understand you) is to have some shared concepts on which this understanding can build. If speakers of different languages didn’t share some concepts to begin with then cross-cultural understanding would not be possible even with the best of will on all sides.
Everett stresses the great value of each language as a unique perspective on the world and a “repository of the riches of highly specialized cultural experiences”, and I fully agree with this. But to access those riches hidden in the thousands of the world’s languages we need to understand the meanings encoded in each language (both in its words and its grammar). We could not understand those meanings if we didn’t have a stock of shared concepts (acknowledged even by Whorf) with which we could build conceptual bridges between other peoples’ conceptual worlds and our own. Unfortunately, Everett seems unable to see this point and in his eagerness to depict the Pirahã people as radically different from the rest of the humankind he goes far beyond the linguistic evidence (as presented in his own publications on the Pirahã language) — as one can clearly see if this evidence is subjected to careful semantic analysis based on a coherent methodology.
For example, Everett claims that Pirahã has no word for “mother”, no words for “before’ and “after”, no words for “one”, “two” and “all” and no words comparable to ‘think” and “want”. These claims are based, I believe, on faulty semantic analysis, and in particular, on a determination not to recognize polysemy under any circumstances. As I see it, at many points this stance makes nonsense of Everett’s own data and distorts the conceptual world of the Pirahã. Since he does not want to recognize the existence of any shared concepts, Everett is also not prepared to address the question of a culture-neutral metalanguage in which Pirahã and English conceptual categories could be compared. This often leads him to imposing cultural categories of English (such as “evidence”, “tolerance” and “parent”) on the conceptual world of the Pirahã. The result is a combination of exoticism and Anglocentrism which doesn’t do justice to Everett’s long and intimate engagement with the Pirahã people and their language. Sadly, it blinds him to what Franz Boas called “the psychic unity of mankind”, reflected in the common semantic features of human languages and fully compatible with the cultural shaping of their lexicons and grammars.
(2013) Australian Aboriginal languages – Kinship obligations
Wierzbicka, Anna (2013). Translatability and the scripting of other peoples’ souls. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 24(1), 1-22. DOI: 10.1111/taja.12018
If anthropology aims at understanding ‘others’, then obviously anthropologists must be interested in the meaning of what those ‘others’ say. But to understand what speakers of a language other than our own say, we need to know what exactly the words and grammatical categories of that other language mean. This article argues that translating indigenous categories into academic English does not allow us to capture indigenous perspectives and leads to what Geertz calls “scripting other people’s souls”. Focusing on cognitive and cultural categories from Australian Aboriginal languages usually linked with English labels such as ‘kinship obligations’ and ‘odd-numbered generations’, the article shows how the ways of thinking encoded in these languages can be explicated from the insider’s point of view, in simple words and simple sentences directly cross-translatable into the indigenous languages themselves.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2013) Kayardild, Pitjantjatjara – Kinship terms
Wierzbicka, Anna (2013). Kinship and social cognition in Australian languages: Kayardild and Pitjantjatjara. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(3), 302-321. DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2013.846458
While many anthropologists these days dismiss the study of kinship terminologies as something that belongs – or should belong – to the past, from an Australian perspective kin terms must still be seen as an essential guide to the ways in which speakers of many languages understand their social world. This being so, establishing what these terms really mean – from an insider’s, rather than an anthropologist’s or linguist’s point of view – remains an essential task. This paper argues that while this task cannot be accomplished with traditional methods of linguistic anthropology, it can be with the techniques of NSM semantics. The paper shows how this can be done by re-analysing
some basic kin terms in Kayardild and in Pitjantjatjara.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2013) Polish – ZWIERZETA, JABLKA
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?
(2014) Emotions / Feelings
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
(2014) Imprisoned in English
Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Imprisoned in English: The hazards of English as a default language. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199321490.001.0001
(2014) Moral absolutes
Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Moral absolutes and the multiplicity of languages. In Anna Kozlowska, & Agnieszka Swiatek (Eds.), Znaczenie, tekst, kultura (pp. 119-138). Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kardynaka Stefana Wyszynskiego.
(2014) NSM and human cognitive development
Goddard, Cliff, Wierzbicka, Anna, & Fabréga Jr, Horacio (2014). Evolutionary semantics: Using NSM to model stages in human cognitive evolution. Language Sciences, 42, 60-79. DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2013.11.003
This study seeks to make a contribution to evolutionary science. It shows how the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) system of semantic–conceptual representation, developed for modern humans, can be ‘‘reverse engineered’’ to produce a plausible model of cognitive evolution from the time of the Last Common Ancestor (LCA) of humans and chimpanzees. We posit six stages of cognitive development, each with its own distinct repertoire of conceptual primes. The progression between the stages is seen as driven by natural selection in the service of enhanced cognitive operations for biological problem solving under changing anatomical, behavioural, environmental and social conditions. The paper draws on a range of evidence and leading ideas from archaeology, paleoanthropology and primatology.
Comparative cognition; Human evolution; Evolutionary psychology; NSM; Language of Thought (LOT); Chimpanzee cognition
(2014) Various languages – Semantic fieldwork
Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Semantic fieldwork and lexical universals. Studies in Language, 38(1), 80-126. DOI: 10.1075/sl.38.1.03god
The main goal of paper is to show how NSM findings about lexical universals (semantic primes) can be applied to semantic analysis in little-described languages. It is argued that using lexical universals as a vocabulary for semantic analysis allows one to formulate meaning descriptions that are rigorous, cognitively authentic, maximally translatable, and free from Anglocentrism.
A second goal is to shed light on methodological issues in semantic fieldwork by interrogating some controversial claims about the Dalabon and Pirahã languages. We argue that reductive paraphrase into lexical universals provides a practical procedure for arriving at coherent interpretations of unfamiliar lexical meanings. Other indigenous/endangered languages discussed include East Cree, Arrernte, Kayardild, Karuk, and Maori.
We urge field linguists to take the NSM metalanguage, based on lexical universals, into the field with them, both as an aid to lexicogrammatical documentation and analysis and as a way to improve semantic communication with consultants.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2014) Words and meanings [BOOK]
Goddard, Cliff & Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199668434.001.0001
Abstract:
This book presents a series of systematic, empirically based studies of word meanings. Each chapter investigates key expressions drawn from different domains of the lexicon – concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social. The examples chosen are complex and culturally important; the languages represented include English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri, and Malay. The authors ground their discussions in real examples and draw on work ranging from Leibniz, Locke, and Bentham, to popular works such as autobiographies and memoirs, and the Dalai Lama’s writings on happiness.
The book opens with a review of the neglected status of lexical semantics in linguistics and a discussion of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage methodology, which is used in all chapters. The discussion includes a wide range of methodological and analytical issues including lexical polysemy, semantic change, the relationship between lexical and grammatical semantics, and the concepts of semantic molecules and templates.
Table of contents:
- Words, meaning, and methodology
- Men, women, and children: The semantics of basic social categories
- Sweet, hot, hard, heavy, rough, sharp: Physical quality words in cross-linguistic perspective
- From “colour words” to visual semantics: English, Russian, Warlpiri
- Happiness and human values in cross-cultural and historical perspective
- Pain: Is it a human universal? The perspective from cross-linguistic semantics
- Suggesting, apologising, complimenting: English speech act verbs
- A stitch in time and the way of the rice plant: The semantics of proverbs in English and Malay
- The meaning of abstract nouns: Locke, Bentham and contemporary semantics
- Broader perspectives: Beyond lexical semantics
More information:
Chapter 3 builds on: NSM analyses of the semantics of physical qualities: sweet, hot, hard, heavy, rough, sharp in cross-linguistic perspective (2007)
Chapter 4 builds on: Why there are no “colour universals” in language and thought (2008)
Chapter 5 builds on: “Happiness” in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective (2004); The “history of emotions” and the future of emotion research (2010); What’s wrong with “happiness studies”? The cultural semantics of happiness, bonheur, Glück and sčas’te (2011)
Chapter 6 builds on: Is pain a human universal? A cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective on pain (2012)
Chapter 8 builds on an unpublished English original translated in Russian as: Следуй путем рисового поля”: семантика пословиц в английском и малайском языках [“Sleduy putem risovogo polya”: semantika poslovits v angliyskom i malayskom yazykakh / “Follow the way of the rice plant”: The semantics of proverbs in English and Malay (Bahasa Melayu)] (2009)
The proverbs explicated in Chapter 8 include: (English) A stitch in time saves nine, Make hay while the sun shines, Out of the frying pan into the fire, Practice makes perfect, All that glitters is not gold, Too many cooks spoil the broth, You can’t teach an old dog new tricks; Where there’s smoke there’s fire; (Malay) Ikut resmi padi ‘Follow the way of the rice plant’, Seperti ketam mangajar anak berjalan betul ‘Like a crab teaching its young to walk straight’, Binasa badan kerana mulut ‘The body suffers because of the mouth’, ‘Ada gula, ada semut ‘Where there’s sugar, there’s ants’, Seperti katak di bawah tempurung ‘Like a frog under a coconut shell’, Keluar mulut harimau masuk mulut buaya ‘Out from the tiger’s mouth into the crocodile’s mouth’, Bila gajah dan gajah berlawan kancil juga yang mati tersepit ‘When elephant fights elephant it’s the mousedeer that’s squashed to death’.
Tags listed below are in addition to those listed at the end of the entries for the earlier work on which this book builds.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2015) Australian Aboriginal languages – ‘Dreamtime’, ‘the Dreaming’
Goddard, Cliff & Wierzbicka, Anna (2015). What does Jukurrpa (‘Dreamtime’, ‘the Dreaming’) mean? A semantic and conceptual journey of discovery. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2015(1), 43-65.
This study proposes a detailed explication for the Australian Aboriginal Jukurrpa concept, phrased exclusively in simple cross-translatable words. The various components of the explication are justified. The authors do not claim to have necessarily arrived at a full, perfect or correct lexical-semantic analysis, although in principle this is the goal of semantic analysis. Rather, their purpose is to share a hermeneutic process and its results. The guiding framework for the process is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to meaning analysis.
Jukurrpa is the word used in Warlpiri for what is referred to in English as the Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’, or ‘the Dreaming’. The same concept is referred to in Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara as tjukurpa, in Arrernte as altyerre, etc. After a short introduction, the paper is organized around successive stages in the evolution of the current explication, which is partitioned into multiple sections and depicts a highly ramified and multi-faceted concept, albeit one with great internal coherence. The authors present and discuss four semantic explications, each built on – and, hopefully, improving upon – its predecessor.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2015) Cultural scripts
Wierzbicka, Anna (2015). Language and cultural scripts. In Farzad Sharifian (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and culture (pp. 339-356). New York: Routledge.
Cultural scripts are representations of cultural norms that are widely held in a given society and are reflected in language. To be faithful to the “insider perspective” and at the same time intelligible to the outsider, these representations are formulated in simple words and phrases that are cross-translatable between English (the main lingua franca of the globalizing world) and any other natural language. This mode of representation was made possible thanks to the outcomes of the decade-long cross-linguistic semantic research conducted within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage programme. Cultural scripts articulate cultural norms, values, and practices using this metalanguage as a medium of description and interpretation.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2015) English – SPOON
Wierzbicka, Anna (2015). The idea of a ‘spoon’: semantics, prehistory, and cultural logic. Language Sciences, 47(A), 66-83. DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2014.08.005
(2015) English, German – ‘Duty’
Wierzbicka, Anna (2015). Can there be common knowledge without a common language? German Pflicht versus English duty. Common Knowledge, 21(1), 141-171. DOI: 10.1215/0961754X-2818482
(2015) Ethics – A global charter
Wierzbicka, Anna (2015). Karta etyki globalnej w słowach uniwersalnych [A charter of global ethics in universal words]. Teksty Drugie, 2015(4), 257-279.
Abstract:
The Declaration toward a global ethic adopted by the Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1993 and UNESCO’s Earth charter (2000) both hinge on the notion that, in this era of increasing globalization, the world needs a “charter of global ethics”. The author develops this idea, engaging with the Dalai Lama’s suggestion that the “charter of global ethics” should be translated into all the languages of the world. This goal can be achieved if the norms of global ethics are formulated in a Minimal Language based on the universal “alphabet of human thought”, which emerges from several years of empirical study on many of the world’s languages. Two versions of the author’s “charter of global ethics” are printed here – a Polish version and an English one – and it is suggested that they could act as a platform for global dialogue on ethical norms for all of humanity.
More information:
Written in Polish. Revised and translated into English as:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2018). Charter of global ethic in Minimal English. In Cliff Goddard (Ed.), Minimal English for a global world: Improved communication using fewer words (pp. 113-141). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Reprinted as:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2017). Karta etyki globalnej w słowach uniwersalnych [A charter of global ethics in universal words]. In Jerzy Bartmiński, Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska, Marta Nowosad-Bakalarczyk, & Jadwiga Puzynina (Eds.), Etyka słowa: Wybór opracowań. Vol. 1 (pp. 523-538). Lublin: UMCS.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2015) German – Terms of address (HERR)
Wierzbicka, Anna (2015). A whole cloud of culture condensed into a drop of semantics: The meaning of the German word Herr as a term of address. International Journal of Language and Culture, 2(1), 1-37. DOI: 10.1075/ijolc.2.1.01wie
