Tag: (E) pour

(2018) Ten lectures on NSM


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

(2015) English – Physical activity verbs


Goddard, Cliff (2015). Verb classes and valency alternations (NSM approach), with special reference to English physical activity verbs. In Andrej Malchukov & Bernard Comrie (Eds.), Valency classes in the world’s languages, vol. 2 (pp. 1671-1701). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. DOI: 10.1515/9783110429343-020

This study examines five English physical activity verbs (eat, pour, dig, carry, cut) and, using a dedicated semantic template, proposes detailed semantic explications for the basic activity-in-progress meanings of these verbs. It then shows, with a different template, how these basic meanings can be transposed into perfective uses. The study examines and explicates 11 alternations (specialized constructions) involving the five verbs, showing in each case exactly how the alternations are related to the base semantics of the verb. In his demonstration, the author relies on the concept of derivational base, which is a new concept in NSM studies.

The general picture is that the specialized constructions are quasi-derivational in nature: the primary or semantically basic sense of the verb is embedded in a more elaborate configuration containing additional semantic material. Often much of this additional material is modeled on the semantics of verbs that belong to different semantic types (lexicosyntactic blending), but it can be partly idiosyncratic or non-predictable. Each specialized construction represents a kind of “word in construction” polysemy.

Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners