Goddard, Cliff (1990). The lexical semantics of “good feelings” in Yankunytjatjara. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 10(2), 257-292. DOI: 10.1080/07268609008599444
Recent work in cognitive anthropology has laid much stress on the role emotions in general play in regulating and organizing (or even, constituting) social life within a culture. At one level, we may see a system of interrelated emotion concepts as embodying shared understandings of human nature – as a model, or set of models, that people use to interpret each other’s actions and reactions. At another level, we can look to the way emotion words are invoked and deployed in social praxis; indeed, it can be fairly said that the ‘meaning’ (in the fullest sense) of emotion concepts and lexemes cannot be fully appreciated without an account of how they figure in the overall system of social action. This paper addresses the lexical semantics of three emotion verbs in the Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara dialects of the Western Desert Language. They are the most salient words in what might broadly be termed the domain of valued or positive feelings – mukuringanyi, roughly ‘want, like, care for’, pukularinyi ‘feel glad, gratified’ and ngalturinganyi ‘feel sorry, concerned for’. The paper uses the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) method of semantic description, which represents meanings as reductive, cross-translatable paraphrases, technically known as explications. The cultural significance of the specific P/Y concepts explicated in this paper should be obvious: they relate directly to the social category of walytja ‘kin, relations’, identified by Aboriginal people and anthropologists alike as pivotal to P/Y social life.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
