Wierzbicka, Anna. (2008). A conceptual basis for research into emotions and bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 11 (2), 193–195. doi:10.1017/S1366728908003362
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2011) English – Supernatural beings
Habib, Sandy (2011). Ghosts, fairies, elves, and nymphs: Towards a semantic template for non-human being concepts. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 31(4), 411-443.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2012.625599
Abstract:
The aim of this study was to devise a semantic template for non-human being terms. To achieve this objective, four non-human being concepts were analysed, and an explication for each concept was built. Comparing the explications yielded a nine-part semantic template. The usefulness of this semantic template is threefold. First, it eases the task of explicating non-human being concepts because the parts of the template can serve as guidelines to be followed while constructing the explications. Second, it eases the comparison between related non-human being concepts from different languages. Third, it reveals the devices that are embodied in the structure of non-human being concepts and that enable people to use these complex concepts without difficulty.
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Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2012) NSM primes, semantic molecules, semantic templates
Goddard, Cliff (2012). Semantic primes, semantic molecules, semantic templates: Key concepts in the NSM approach to lexical typology. Linguistics, 50(3), 711-743.
DOI: 10.1515/ling-2012-0022
Abstract:
The NSM approach has a long track record in cross-linguistic lexical semantics. It is therefore not surprising that it has a clear theoretical position on key issues in lexical semantic typology and a well-developed set of analytical techniques.
From a theoretical point of view, the overriding issue concerns the tertium comparationis. What are the optimal concepts and categories to support the systematic investigation of lexicons and lexicological phenomena across the world’s languages? The NSM answer to this question is that the necessary concepts can – and must – be based on the shared lexical-conceptual core of all languages, which NSM researchers claim to have discovered over the course of a thirty-five year program of empirical cross-linguistic semantics. This shared lexical-conceptual core is the minilanguage of semantic primes and their associated grammar.
In addition, NSM researchers have developed certain original analytical constructs that promise to enhance the power and systematicity of the approach: in particular, the notions of semantic molecules and semantic templates. This paper sets out to explain and illustrate these notions, to report some key analytical findings (updated, in many cases, from previously published accounts), and to extrapolate their implications for the further development of lexical typology.
This paper contains detailed explications of the English verb drink and its closest Kalam counterpart ñb ‘eat/drink’, as well as of the English verb cut and its Japanese counterpart 切る kiru.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2015) English – Physical activity verbs
Goddard, Cliff (2015). Verb classes and valency alternations (NSM approach), with special reference to English physical activity verbs. In Andrej Malchukov & Bernard Comrie (Eds.), Valency classes in the world’s languages, vol. 2 (pp. 1671-1701). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. DOI: 10.1515/9783110429343-020
This study examines five English physical activity verbs (eat, pour, dig, carry, cut) and, using a dedicated semantic template, proposes detailed semantic explications for the basic activity-in-progress meanings of these verbs. It then shows, with a different template, how these basic meanings can be transposed into perfective uses. The study examines and explicates 11 alternations (specialized constructions) involving the five verbs, showing in each case exactly how the alternations are related to the base semantics of the verb. In his demonstration, the author relies on the concept of derivational base, which is a new concept in NSM studies.
The general picture is that the specialized constructions are quasi-derivational in nature: the primary or semantically basic sense of the verb is embedded in a more elaborate configuration containing additional semantic material. Often much of this additional material is modeled on the semantics of verbs that belong to different semantic types (lexicosyntactic blending), but it can be partly idiosyncratic or non-predictable. Each specialized construction represents a kind of “word in construction” polysemy.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2016) English – Verbs of ‘doing and happening’
Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna (2016). Explicating the English lexicon of ‘doing and happening’. Functions of Language, 23(2), 214-256. DOI: 10.1075/fol.23.2.03god
This study proposes NSM semantic explications for a cross-section of the English verbal lexicon of ‘doing and happening’. The twenty-five verbs are drawn from about a dozen verb classes, including verbs for non-typical locomotion (crawl, swim, fly), other intransitive activities (play, sing), manipulation (hold), activities that affect material integrity (cut, grind, dig), creation/production (make, build, carve), actions that affect people or things (hit, kick, kill) or cause a change of location (pick up, put, throw, push), bodily reactions to feelings (laugh, cry), displacement (fall, sink) and weather phenomena (rain, snow).
Though the verbs explicated are specifically English verbs, they have been chosen with an eye to their relevance to lexical typology and cross-linguistic semantics (many are drawn from the Verb Meanings List of the Leipzig Valency Patterns project) and it is hoped that the analytical strategy and methodology exemplified in this study can be a useful model for research into other languages. The study demonstrates the application of the NSM concept of semantic templates, which provide a clear “skeletal” structure for explications of considerable internal complexity and which help account for shared semantic and grammatical properties of verbs of a given subclass.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2017) Danish – Ethnopsychology and personhood
Levisen, Carsten (2017). Personhood constructs in language and thought: New evidence from Danish. In Zhengdao Ye (Ed.), The semantics of nouns (pp. 120-146). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198736721.003.0005
Abstract:
This chapter analyses personhood constructs, a particular type of noun whose meanings conceptualize invisible parts of a person. The meaning of personhood constructs originates in cultural discourses, and they can vary considerably across linguistic communities. They are reflective of society’s dominant ethnopsychological ideas, and they co-develop with historical changes in discourse. Drawing on insights from previous studies, a semantic template is developed to account for the differences but also the similarities in personhood constructs. With a detailed case study on Danish personhood constructs, the chapter tests the template on the translation-resistant Danish concept of sind, along with two other Danish nouns: sjæl ‘soul’ and ånd ‘spirit’. The case study provides a model for how personhood constructs can be empirically explored with tools from linguistic semantics.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2018) English, Hebrew, Arabic – Folk religious concepts
Habib, Sandy (2018). Heaven and hell: A cross-linguistic semantic template for supernatural places. RASK, 48, 1–34.
Abstract:
The aim of this study was to devise a cross-linguistic semantic template for supernatural place terms. To achieve this objective, six supernatural place concepts were analysed, and an explication for each concept was built. Comparing the explications yielded a seven-part semantic template. The usefulness of this semantic template is threefold. First, it eases the task of explicating supernatural place concepts because the parts of the template can serve as guidelines to be followed while constructing the explications. Second, it makes it easier to compare related supernatural place concepts from different languages. Third, it unveils the devices that are embodied in the structure of supernatural place concepts and that enable people to use these complex concepts without difficulty.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2019) Emotions
Ye, Zhengdao. (2019).The semantics of emotion: From theory to empirical analysis. Pritzker, Sonya.E., Fenigsen, Janina., & Wilce, James.M. (Eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367855093
Abstract
This chapter provides a systematic account of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to emotion and “affective science,” especially how it addresses three methodological questions: (a) how emotional meaning can be explicated in terms that are psychologically real to people; (b) how culture-specific meanings can be convened authentically to another linguacultural community, so that important nuances in the conceptualizations of emotions can be appreciated by cultural outsiders; and (c) how commonalities and differences in human experiences can be identified and articulated? The chapter draws upon a wide selection of NSM work across many languages, including Bislama, English, Mbula (PNG), and Chinese.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2019) English – Evaluational adjectives
Goddard, Cliff, Maite Taboada, & Radoslava Trnavac (In press). The semantics of evaluational adjectives: Perspectives from Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Appraisal. Functions of Language, 26(3), 308-342.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.00029.god
Abstract:
The authors apply the NSM approach to the lexical-semantic analysis of English evaluational adjectives and compare the results with the picture developed in the Appraisal Framework (Martin & White 2005). The analysis is corpus-assisted, with examples mainly drawn from film and book reviews, and supported by collocational and statistical information from WordBanks Online. We propose NSM explications for 15 evaluational adjectives, arguing that they fall into five groups, each of which corresponds to a distinct semantic template. The groups can be sketched as follows: “First-person thought-plus-affect”, e.g. wonderful; “Experiential”, e.g. entertaining; “Experiential with bodily reaction”, e.g. gripping; “Lasting impact”, e.g. memorable; “Cognitive evaluation”, e.g. complex, excellent. These groupings and semantic templates are compared with the classifications in the Appraisal Framework’s system of Appreciation. In addition, we are particularly interested in sentiment analysis, the automatic identification of evaluation and subjectivity in text. We discuss the relevance of the two frameworks for sentiment analysis and other language technology applications.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2020) English — Evaluational adjectives
Trnavac, Radoslava, & Taboada, Maite. (2020). Positive Appraisal in Online News Comments. In Kerry Mullan, Bert Peeters, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 1. Ethnopragmatics and semantic analysis (pp. 185–206). Singapore: Springer.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_10
Abstract
This chapter investigates the linguistic expression of positive evaluation in English and describes a preliminary typology of linguistic devices used for positive evaluation. Using corpus-assisted analysis, we classify some of the resources that play a role in the expression of positive evaluation into phenomena in the lexicogrammar and phenomena that belong in discourse semantics and compare those resources to the ones deployed for negative evaluation (see the work on negative evaluation in Taboada et al. in Corpus Pragmat, 1:57–76, 2017). This general classification of evaluative devices overlaps with the planes of expression in systemic functional linguistics. Our data comes from a collection of opinion articles and the comments associated with them (Kolhatkar et al., in the SFU Opinion and Comments Corpus: A corpus for the analysis of online news comments, under review). We use a set of 1000 comments previously annotated for Appraisal (Martin and White in The language of evaluation. Palgrave, New York, 2005), including labels of Attitude (Affect, Judgement, Appreciation) and polarity (positive, negative, neutral). The central component of the chapter is the analysis of the resources used by commenters to express positive evaluation. We explore whether they make use of rhetorical figures, following up on our work with Cliff Goddard on the use of rhetorical figures in the expression of negative evaluation (Taboada et al. in Corpus Pragmat, 1:57–76, 2017). We then analyse the semantics of evaluative adjectives using the natural semantic metalanguage approach and follow our previous work on templates that capture different types of adjectives and fall into five groups (Goddard et al., in Funct Lang 26, 2019). Although our corpus analysis is limited, and it includes only a specific type of data (online news comments), the phenomena that we discuss are present across different genres of texts. While our previous work has focused on how to express negative evaluation, this chapter seeks to honour Cliff Goddard and his positive influence by studying how positivity is realized in language.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2020) English, Australian Aboriginal English, Bislama – Shame
Peeters, Bert (2020). Language Makes a Difference: Breaking the Barrier of Shame. Lublin Studies in Modern Language and Literature, 44(1), 27-37.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2020.44.1.27-37 (Open Access)
Abstract:
This paper argues against the reification of shame and the use of Anglocentric jargon to explain what it entails. It shows how the Natural Semantic Metalanguage can be used to define shame and set it apart from related concepts in Australian Aboriginal English and in Bislama, an English creole spoken in Vanuatu.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
