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Goddard, Cliff (2018). Ten lectures on Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Exploring language, thought and culture using simple, translatable words. Leiden: Brill. DOI: 10.1163/9789004357723

These lively lectures introduce the theory, practice, and application of a versatile, rigorous, and non-Anglocentic approach to cross-linguistic semantics.

Table of contents:

1. Preliminary material
2. From Leibniz to Wierzbicka: The history and philosophy of NSM
3. Semantic primes and their grammar
4. Explicating emotion concepts across languages and cultures
5. Wonderful, terrific, fabulous: English evaluational adjectives
6. Semantic molecules and semantic complexity
7. Words as carriers of cultural meaning
8. English verb semantics: Verbs of doing and saying
9. English verb alternations and constructions
10. Applications of NSM: Minimal English, cultural scripts and language teaching
11. Retrospect: NSM compared with other approaches to semantic analysis

Chapter 3 discusses selected exponents of primes in Farsi (Persian). Chapter 4 provides an explication of a North-Spanish homesickness word (morriña). Chapter 7 provides an explication of Chinese 孝 xiào ‘filial piety’.

Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners