Tag: (E) hard

(2007) English, French, Polish, Korean – Physical qualities

Goddard, Cliff & Wierzbicka, Anna (2007). NSM analyses of the semantics of physical qualities: sweet, hot, hard, heavy, rough, sharp in cross-linguistic perspective. Studies in Language, 31(4), 765-800.

DOI: 10.1075/sl.31.4.03god

Abstract:

All languages have words such as English hot and cold, hard and soft, rough and smooth, and heavy and light, which attribute qualities to things. This paper maps out how such descriptors can be analysed in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework, in terms of like and other semantic primes configured into a particular “semantic schema”: essentially, touching something with a part of the body, feeling something in that part, knowing something about that thing because of it, and thinking about that thing in a certain way because of it. Far from representing objective properties of things “as such”, it emerges that physical quality concepts refer to embodied human experiences and embodied human sensations. Comparisons with French, Polish and Korean show that the semantics of such words may differ significantly from language to language.

More information:

A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 3 (pp. 55-79) of:

Goddard, Cliff & Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The term schema, used in the 2007 version of the text, refers to what has since been called a semantic template.

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(2016) Semantic molecules

Goddard, Cliff (2016). Semantic molecules and their role in NSM lexical definitions. Cahiers de lexicologie, 109, 13-34. DOI: 10.15122/isbn.978-2-406-06861-7.p.0013

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach is well known for its use of reductive paraphrase as a mode of lexical definition (conceptual analysis) and for its claim to have discovered an inventory of irreducible lexical meanings — semantic primes — that are apparently universal in the world’s languages. It is less well known that many NSM definitions rely crucially on semantic molecules, i.e. certain non-primitive meanings that function alongside semantic primes as building blocks in the composition of yet more complex lexical meanings.

This paper considers aspects of the NSM theory of semantic molecules, including: first, the notion of molecules within molecules (e.g. ‘mouth → ‘water’ → ‘drink’); second, the distribution of semantic molecules in the world’s languages: some are universal or near-universal, e.g. ‘hands,’ ‘children,’ ‘water’, others are widespread but not universal, e.g. ‘money’, and still others are specific to particular languages or linguistic/cultural areas; third, the emerging notions of “small molecules” and lexicosyntactic molecules. The paper includes explications for about twenty-five semantic molecules that are posited to be universal or near-universal.


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