Tag: (E) cry

(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

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(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

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