Holden, Josh (2018). Expressing concepts of FEEL, CAN, CAN’T, and PART in Denesųłiné. Working Papers in Dene Languages 2017, 55-72. Fairbanks, Alaska: Alaska Native Language Center.
This paper details the author’s attempt to elicit the semantic primes FEEL, CAN, CAN’T, and PART in the First Nations language Denesųłiné (Dene/Athabaskan language family, Northern Canada, with the goal of empirically testing NSM claims and shedding light on the Denesųłiné lexicon. If these primes are not found, it is shown how the concepts are expressed in Denesųłiné.
Although, in the author’s opinion, the findings suggest the need for changes to the current semantic prime inventory, they should not be viewed as discounting the NSM approach. Dene shows many cases where, even though one can posit the existence of an NSM exponent, there are still language-specific differences in denotational range and even meaning. One wonders how exact the correspondence must be, or even whether this exactness can even be verified without a deep, native-like knowledge of both source and metalanguage. Still, semantic primes as a concept may be useful in identifying a core of the lexicon where there is significant overlap in word meanings between languages, without these being true universals that can be elicited in the same core contexts.
The issues of translatability and equivalence raised by the NSM approach are also highly relevant to Dene language documentation, which is virtually always bilingual: a linguist translates words from the source language to English when glossing. The phenomenon of lexical incommensurability, in which a meaning in the studied language has no direct equivalent in the metalanguage language of description, can render any one-word translation culturally specific and therefore inaccurate as a representation of the source language meaning. This is problematic because future heritage learners and researchers will only be able to access the Indigenous lexicon through the prism of a flawed or incomplete English translation. Diligent cross-linguistic semantic analysis of the type that the NSM school proposes can help build a more authentic record of the lexicon. The NSM approach of explicating culture-specific meanings is therefore a valuable tool in language documentation efforts, although more empirical studies will be needed to test the universality of the semantic primes, and future revisions to the NSM inventory may be required in light of their results, and of the Denesųłiné data discussed here.
Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
