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
(2017) English, Turkish – Emotions
Karaaslan, Hatice (2017). A contrastive analysis of English anger-fury and Turkish kızgınlık-öfke. Karadeniz, 36, 119-136.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17498/kdeniz.357575 / Open access
Abstract:
This study investigates one particular area within the emotion lexicon of English and Turkish, focusing on two anger-related emotion terms in each of the two languages. It explores how the terms relate to each other intra-linguistically and whether, from a contrastive point of view, their cognitive scenarios match. The core meanings of the target concepts are claimed to show a high degree of correspondence; differences in immediacy and intensity do not (according to the author) appear to prompt the need for differentiation. The English emotion concept anger is said to match the Turkish emotion concept kızgınlık, and likewise for fury and öfke. Accordingly, the same reductive paraphrases can be used for the English words and for their Turkish counterparts.
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The claims contained in this paper need to be approached with caution: the so-called “high degree of correspondence” may not be high enough to warrant identical explications across the two languages. |
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Rating:
Crude application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
(1991) Yankunytjatjara – ‘Anger’
Goddard, Cliff (1991). Anger in the Western Desert: A case study in the cross-cultural semantics of emotion. Man, (N.S.) 26(2), 265-279. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2803832
This article sets out to show that by adopting a method of semantic description based on reductive, cross-translatable paraphrases (the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach) it is possible to elucidate the meanings of emotion concepts, and their similarities and differences across cultures, within a principled, formal framework. Using this approach, it explores the semantic differences between pikaringanyi, mirpanarinyi and kuyaringanyi, three expressions in the Aboriginal language of the Western Desert of Australia, each of which corresponds to some extent to the English concept of anger.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1989) NSM primes
Wierzbicka, Anna (1989). Semantic primitives – The expanding set. Quaderni di semantica, 10(2), 309-332.
Abstract:
The set of hypothetical semantic prim(itiv)es proposed in earlier works is shown to be in need of considerable expansion. This outcome is due primarily to the work of Cliff Goddard. The present paper surveys a set of 28 elements, including – in addition to survivals from earlier sets – several elements proposed by Goddard, and some by Andrzej Bogusławski.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1992) Emotions
Wierzbicka, Anna (1992). Talking about emotions: Semantics, culture, and cognition. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3/4), 285-319. DOI: 10.1080/02699939208411073
Translated into Polish as chapter 4 of:
Wierzbicka, Anna (1999). Język – umysł – kultura [Language, mind, culture]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
The author argues that the so-called “basic emotions”, such as happiness, fear or anger, are in fact cultural artifacts of the English language, just as the Ilongot concept of liger, or the Ifaluk concept of song, are the cultural artifacts of Ilongot and Ifaluk. It is therefore as inappropriate to talk about human emotions in general in terms of happiness, fear, or anger as it would be to talk about them in terms of liget or song. However, this does not mean that we cannot penetrate into the emotional world of speakers of languages other than our own. Nor does it mean that there cannot be any universal human emotions. Universality of emotions is an open issue which requires further investigation. For this further investigation to be fully productive, it has to be undertaken from a universal, language and culture-independent perspective; and it has to be carried out in a universalist framework that is language and culture-independent. The author proposes for this purpose the Natural Semantic Metalanguage based on universal (or near-universal) semantic primitives (or near-primitives), developed over two decades by herself and colleagues, and she argues that the use of this metalanguage facilitates such a perspective and offers such a framework.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1994) English – Emotions
Wierzbicka, Anna (1994). Cognitive domains and the structure of the lexicon: The case of emotions. In Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, & Susan A. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (pp. 431-452). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
In trying to discover how knowledge (or at least basic, “foundational” knowledge) is stored and organized in the human mind we can rely, in a considerable measure, on language. There may be concepts that are not lexicalized in natural language, but these are probably less common, less basic, and less salient in a given speech community than those that have achieved lexicalization; they are also less accessible to study. Words provide evidence for the existence of concepts. Lexical sets, sharing a similar semantic structure, provide evidence for the existence of cohesive conceptual wholes (or fields). If it is hypothesized that knowledge is organized in the mind in the form of “cognitive domains,” then conceptual fields detectable through semantic analysis of the lexicon can be regarded as a guide to those domains. These general assumptions are illustrated in this paper by reference to a specific semantic domain: that of emotion terms. For reasons of space, the discussion must remain brief, sketchy, and selective.
(1998) Russian – Emotions
Wierzbicka, Anna (1998). “Sadness” and “anger” in Russian: The non-universality of the so-called “basic human emotions”. In Angeliki Athanasiadou, & Elzbieta Tabakowska (Eds.), Speaking of emotions: Conceptualisation and expression (pp. 3-28). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110806007.3
Abstract:
The English words sad and angry (or sadness and anger) do not have exact equivalents in Russian, just as the Russian words грусть grust’, печаль pečal’, and сердиться serdit’sja do not have exact equivalents in English. How, then, are we to understand claims that ‘sadness’ or ‘anger’ are universal human emotions?
Emotions cannot be identified without words, and words always belong to particular cultures and carry with them a culture-specific perspective. The only words that are, in a sense, culture-independent are lexical universals, realized in English as good and bad, want, know, feel, think, and say, and so on. Any innate and universal cognitive scenarios that play a special role in human emotional lives all over the world would have to be identified via such lexical universals, not via culture-specific words such as sadness or anger. It may be true that ‘sadness’ and ‘anger’ are universally found in all cultures; but they are found there by native speakers of English. Observers looking at these cultures from a different cultural perspective will probably find something else.
Translations:
Into Russian:
Chapter 10 (pp. 503-525) of Вежбицкая, Анна (1999), Семантические универсалии и описание языков [Semantic universals and the description of languages]. Москва [Moscow]: Языки Русской Культуры [Languages of Russian Culture].
Chapter 1 (pp. 15-43) of Вежбицкая, Анна (2001), Сопоставление культур через посредство лексики и прагматики [Comparison of cultures through vocabulary and pragmatics]. Москва [Moscow]: Языки Славянской Культуры [Languages of Slavic Culture].
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1988) English – Metaphors of anger, pride and love
Goddard, Cliff (1988). Review of Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphors of anger, pride and love: A lexical approach to the structure of concepts. Lingua, 77(1), 90-98. DOI: 10.1016/0024-3841(89)90041-7
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1990) English – Emotions
Osmond, Meredith (1990). Unravelling the meaning of English emotion terms: Evidence from syntax. MA thesis, Australian National University. PDF (open access)
This thesis examines the meaning of various English terms of emotion , and attempts to show that aspects of their meaning can be related to their syntactic behaviour.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2014) Old Norse-Icelandic, Old English – Ethnopsychology and personhood
Mackenzie, Colin Peter (2014). Vernacular psychologies in Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.
Abstract:
This thesis examines the vernacular psychology presented in Old Norse-Icelandic texts. It focuses on the concept ‘hugr’, generally rendered in English as ‘mind, soul, spirit’, and explores the conceptual relationships between emotion, cognition and the body. It argues that despite broad similarities, Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English vernacular psychology differ more than has previously been acknowledged. Furthermore, it shows that the psychology of Old Norse-Icelandic has less in common with its circumpolar neighbours than proposed by advocates of Old Norse-Icelandic shamanism.
The thesis offers a fresh interpretation of Old Norse-Icelandic psychology that does not rely on cross-cultural evidence from other Germanic or circumpolar traditions. It argues that emotion and cognition were not conceived of ‘hydraulically’ as was the case in Old English, and that ‘hugr’ was not thought to leave the body either in animal form or as a person’s breath. Old Norse-Icelandic psychology differs from the Old English tradition; it is argued that the Old English psychological model is a specific elaboration of the shared psychological inheritance of Germanic whose origins require further study. These differences between the two languages have implications for the study of psychological concepts in Proto-Germanic: there are fewer semantic components that can be reliably reconstructed for the common ancestor of the North and West Germanic languages.
As a whole, the thesis applies insights from cross-cultural linguistics and psychology to show how Old Norse-Icelandic psychological concepts differ not only from contemporary Germanic and circumpolar traditions but also from the present-day English concepts used to describe them.
Rating:
Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
(2002) Emotions
Hasada, Rie (2002). The “Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)” method for explicating the meaning of words and expressions: A linguistic approach to the study of emotion. 東京外国語大学留学生日本語教育センタ [Bulletin of Japanese Language Center for International Students, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies], 28, 69-102.
Abstract:
The focus of this paper is on the application of the NSM method to the study of emotion terminology. The author shows how the NSM approach can solve problems that cannot be solved by other approaches, especially the problems of ‘translation’, ‘definition’, and ‘ethnocentricity’, which have occurred mainly in non-linguistic, psychological, anthropological, or philosophical work.
No new explications are proposed. The paper is essentially a state-of-the-art report on the NSM framework as it was shaping up around the turn of the century.
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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1997) Emotion research
Harkins, Jean, & Wierzbicka, Anna (1997). Language: A key issue in emotion research. Innovation in Social Sciences Research, 10(4), 319-331. DOI: 10.1080/13511610.1997.9968537
Linguistic evidence shows significant differences in the use of supposedly equivalent words for emotions in different languages and cultural settings, even in the case of emotions thought to be as basic or widespread as ‘anger’. This paper argues that such differences in usage often reflect differences in semantic content, and shows how the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) approach can provide a way of making explicit both the similarities and the differences in meanings of related emotion words. Stating the semantic components of a word’s meaning in this way also facilitates understanding of these emotion words in their cultural and social context, in relation to cultural values, norms of behaviour, and cultural identity.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(1999) English, Greek – ‘Anger’
Bardzokas, Chrisovalandis (1999). The language of anger. MA thesis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
This dissertation offers an analysis of the hotly debated emotion concept of ‘anger’. For the purpose of this analysis, two influential models are put forward: the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (or NSM) as well as the cognitive processes of metaphor and metonymy introduced by Lakoff and Johnson. The results of the research are far from trivial. In terms of emotion analysis, the two models provide insight into the conceptualization of ‘anger’ and, specifically, comparative insight into the English concept of ‘anger’ and the Greek conceptual equivalent expressed in the word thymos. In terms of model evaluation, the two types of analysis yield results that can be readily contrasted and assessed on the basis of the kinds of insight they offer.
A revised version of Chapter 2 of this thesis – the one that specifically engages with the NSM model – has been published as:
Bardzokas, Chrisovalandis (2004). Contrastive semantics of English “anger” and Modern Greek “θymos”. LAUD Working Papers, Series A, General and Theoretical Papers, 582.
Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
(2004) English, Greek – ‘Anger’
Bardzokas, Chrisovalandis (2004). Contrastive semantics of English “anger” and Modern Greek “θymos”. LAUD Working Papers, Series A, General and Theoretical Papers, 582. PDF (open access)
The emotion concept of ‘anger’ appears to acquire such enormous proportions in human emotionality that it has sparked off heated debate in relation to its purported universality or its language- and culture-specificity. To portray possible differences between anger-related concepts across languages and cultures, a nuanced and illuminating method of contrasting concepts is needed. The use of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (henceforth NSM) is proposed to this end. The research also carries out the laborious task of testing the applicability of the NSM framework in the investigation of the language of emotions generally. Similar tests involving other emotions have already been conducted by several other scholars; for the purpose of this paper, the implementation of NSM will be attempted in the domain of anger in comparison and contrast to that of Modern Greek θυμός thymos. Both domains are conceptualized in terms of several emotion words. Explications are proposed for the predicative use of the English words angry, mad, furious, and irate, and for the Greek verbs θυμωνομαι thymonomai, νευριάζομαι nevriazomai, εκνευρίζομαι eknevrizomai, and οργιζομαι orgizomai.
This paper builds on Chapter 2 of the author’s MA thesis:
Bardzokas, Chrisovalandis (1999). The language of anger. MA thesis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
