Tag: (T) English
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.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) at night, (E) children, (E) creature, (E) during the day, (E) ears, (E) eyes, (E) face, (E) hands, (E) hard, (E) head, (E) heavy, (E) know that, (E) long, (E) men, (E) mouth, (E) on, (E) round, (E) sky, (E) sun, (E) thin, (E) water, (E) women, (T) English, (T) French, (T) semantic molecules
Goddard, Cliff (2017). Ethnopragmatic perspectives on conversational humour, with special reference to Australian English. Language & Communication, 55, 55-68. DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2016.09.008
This paper argues that the ethnopragmatic approach allows humour researchers both to access the “insider perspectives” of native speakers and to ward off conceptual Anglocentrism. It begins with a semantic inquiry into the word laugh, a plausible lexical universal and an essential anchor point for humour studies. It then demonstrates how the two main modes of ethnopragmatic analysis, semantic explication and cultural scripts, can be applied to selected topics in conversational humour research. Semantic explications are proposed for three English specific “humour concepts”: funny, amusing, and humour. Cultural scripts are proposed for “jocular abuse”, “deadpan jocular irony” and “jocular deception” in Australian English. The semantic explications and cultural scripts are composed using simple, cross-translatable words.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) amusing, (E) funny, (E) humour, (E) laugh, (S) deadpan jocular irony, (S) jocular abuse, (S) jocular deception, (S) jocular provocation, (T) English
Tien, Adrian (2010). The semantics of human interaction in Chinese E-communication. In Rotimi Taiwo (Ed.), Handbook of research on discourse behavior and digital communication: Language structures and social interaction (pp. 437-467). Hershey: IGI Global. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-773-2.ch028
The current study investigates typical, everyday Chinese interaction online and examined what linguistic meanings arise from this form of communication – not only semantic but also, importantly, pragmatic, discursive, contextual and lexical meanings etc. In particular, it sets out to ascertain whether at least some of the cultural values and norms etc. known to exist in Chinese culture, as selected in the Chinese language, are maintained or preserved in modern Chinese e-communication. To achieve his aims, the author collected a sample set of data from Chinese online resources found in Singapore, including a range of blog sites and MSN chat rooms where interactants have kept their identities anonymous. A radically semantic approach was adopted – namely, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) model – to analyse meanings that arose from the data. The analyses were presented and compiled in the way of “cultural cyberscripts” – based on an NSM analytical method called “cultural scripts”. Through these cyberscripts, findings indicate that, while this form of e-communication does exhibit some departure from conventional socio-cultural values and norms, something remains linguistically and culturally Chinese that is unique to Chinese interaction online.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) leh, (S) Chinese CMC usage, (S) crude language, (S) downplay of mian zi ‘face’, (S) greater self versus smaller self, (S) non-preservation of guanxi, (S) pronominal highlighting, (S) small talk, (S) topic prominence, (S) what Chinese CMC users say, (T) English
Tien, Adrian (2013). Bootstrapping and the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese: A Natural Semantic Metalanguage perspective. In Dagmar Bittner, & Nadja Ruhlig (Eds.), Lexical bootstrapping: The role of lexis and semantics in child language development (pp. 39-72). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110308693.39
By means of a set of simple, indefinable concepts apparently existing in the heart of any language, and known as conceptual or semantic “primes”, Natural Semantic Metalanguage researchers explore certain hypotheses about the nature and identities of the innate concepts which may underpin language acquisition. Those hypotheses relate to the kind of conceptual/semantic knowledge/skill that may actually facilitate lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic acquisition, in a comparable way as conjectured by the Lexical Bootstrapping Hypothesis.
This chapter takes child Mandarin as the child language in question and examines evidence from naturalistic production data of ten young children acquiring Mandarin. Preliminary results indicate that the lexical exponents of all NSM primes are present in child Mandarin before the end of the fourth year. In addition, before a prime is lexically represented in production, it may first be conceptually present as core semantic elements in the meanings of common non-prime words. This phenomenon is termed “latency”. Our findings indicate that child Mandarin and adult Mandarin probably operate on lexico-semantically and lexico-syntactically commensurate systems, with the NSM accounting for their commensurability and, in turn, developmental continuity, though we have also taken various variables into consideration.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (T) English
Tien, Adrian (2015). Offensive language and sociocultural homogeneity in Singapore: An ethnolinguistic perspective. International Journal of Language and Culture, 2(2), 142-168. DOI: 10.1075/ijolc.2.2.01tie
Offensive language use in Singapore’s languacultures appears to be underpinned by cultural norms and values embraced by most if not all Singaporeans. Interviews with local informants and perusal of Singapore’s linguistic and cultural resources led to the identification of eight offensive words and phrases deemed representative of Singaporean coarseness. This set was narrowed down to a smaller set of common words and phrases, all Chinese Hokkien, all culturally laden. The finding that, although originally Hokkien, all of them are accessible not only to the Chinese-speaking population but also to speakers of Singapore Malay, Singapore Tamil, and Singapore English is compelling. The words and phrases studied in this paper are full-fledged members of the lexicon of these local non-Chinese languages, without loss or distortion of meaning. They are accepted as part of the local linguistic scene and of local cultural knowledge. At least in certain situations, people of different ethnic backgrounds who live and work together can rely on them as a testament of common identity which, in a curious way, gives voice to the sociocultural homogeneity this society unrelentingly pursues.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) cheebye, (E) Don’t kaopeh kaobu!, (E) lampah, (E) lanjiao, (S) tabooing the word cheebye, (S) tabooing the word lampah, (S) tabooing the word lanjiao, (S) unwarranted emotional outbursts, (T) English
Tien, Adrian (2015). The semantics of Chinese music: Analysing selected Chinese musical concepts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/clscc.5
Music is a widely enjoyed human experience. It is, therefore, natural that we have wanted to describe, document, analyse and, somehow, grasp it in language. This book surveys a representative selection of musical concepts in Chinese language, i.e. words that describe, or refer to, aspects of Chinese music. Important as these musical concepts are in the language, they have been in wide circulation since ancient times without being subjected to any serious semantic analysis. The current study is the first known attempt at analysing these Chinese musical concepts linguistically, adopting the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to formulate semantically and cognitively rigorous explications. Readers will be able to better understand not only these musical concepts but also significant aspects of the Chinese culture that many of these musical concepts represent. This volume contributes to the fields of cognitive linguistics, semantics, music, musicology and Chinese studies, offering readers a fresh account of Chinese ways of thinking, not least Chinese ways of viewing or appreciating music. Ultimately, this study represents trailblazing research on the relationship between language, culture and cognition.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) cai 采, (E) chi 遲, (E) dan 澹 / 淡, (E) daqi 大氣, (E) gu 古, (E) hanxu 含蓄, (E) hé 和, (E) hong 宏, (E) ji 寂, (E) jian 健, (E) jiān 堅, (E) jie 潔, (E) jing 靜, (E) li 麗, (E) liang 亮, (E) liu 溜, (E) mo 默, (E) nong 濃, (E) qing 清, (E) qing 輕, (E) qu 曲, (E) run 潤, (E) sheng 聲, (E) shi 實, (E) shici 實詞, (E) shiyin 實音, (E) su 速, (E) tian 恬, (E) wanyue 婉約, (E) wanzhuan 婉轉, (E) weiwan 委婉, (E) xi 喜, (E) xi 細, (E) xiu 休, (E) xu 虛, (E) xuci 虛詞, (E) xuyin 虛音, (E) ya 雅, (E) yi 逸, (E) yin yue 音樂, (E) yin 音, (E) yiyang duncuo 抑揚頓挫, (E) yuan 圓, (E) yuan 遠, (E) yun 韵, (E) zhong 重, (S) “sound” versus “non-sound” in music, (T) English, (T) semantic molecules
Tien, Adrian (2016). What does it mean to “commemorate”? Linguistic and cultural evidence from Chinese. The Irish Journal of Asian Studies, 2, 1-11.
What does it mean to “commemorate”? Is commemorate or its derivations in English understood and accordingly practiced in other languages and cultures? This article demonstrates, through the case of Chinese language and culture, that people do not all share the same understanding about “commemoration” or practice it as it is in the Anglo context. Even though commemorate is translated into Chinese as jì niàn and these words show certain linguistic similarities, jì niàn is not an exact translational equivalent of the English word. Furthermore, evidence is presented to show that jì niàn is likely a recent word in Chinese, based on contemporary Chinese notions of something like to “commemorate” that reflect possible influences from the West. In drawing evidence from conventional Chinese linguistic and cultural practices, this article illustrates how Chinese “commemorate” in ways that are indigenous to them. As part of this, semantic analyses using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) are performed on the Chinese words jì niàn and zhuī yuǎn, lit. ‘to recollect the distant past’. These are then compared with the semantic analysis for commemorate in English, for an in-depth appreciation of what makes Chinese understanding of something like “commemorate” unique.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) commemorate, (E) jì niàn, (E) zhuī yuǎn, (T) English
Tien, Adrian (2016). Compositionality of Chinese idioms: The issues, the semantic approach and a case study. Applied Linguistics Review, 7(2), 149-180. DOI: 10.1515/applirev-2016-0007
Idioms – or something like idioms – occupy a special place as a speech genre in languages. It is compelling that the issue of what idioms are (or are not) and how they distinguish themselves from other related, though different, linguistic and phraseological categories, are of concern to all. This paper first examines various linguistic issues concerning the idiom genre before going into a detailed discussion about the chengyu in Chinese, which is an approximate yet by no means identical counterpart of the idiom as it is understood in English. It is argued that, as phrasal structures, Chinese chengyus are not all lexically fixed, neither are they all semantically non-compositional. By virtue of the example of the sememe zhong, lit. ‘(bronze) bell’, and its incorporation into certain chengyus, it is demonstrated that the sememic constituents of a chengyu can be only not compositionally significant semantically speaking but also, they may well hold the key to the reason why the literal meaning of a chengyu should be closely integrated into its intended, idiomatic (figurative) meaning. Chengyus that incorporate the sememe zhong comprise an idiomatic analogy and, in fact, zhong as a lexical item is represented in the content of this analogy as a cognitively real element. This paper adopts the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework as the basis for semantic analyses of such chengyus.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) zhong 重, (T) English
Gladkova, Anna; Vanhatalo, Ulla; & Goddard, Cliff (2016). The semantics of interjections: An experimental study with Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37(4), 841-865.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716415000260
Abstract:
This paper reports the results of a pilot experimental study aimed at evaluating NSM explications of English interjections. It proposes a novel online survey technique to test NSM explications with language speakers. The survey tested recently developed semantic explications of selected English interjections used to mark either ‘surprise’ (wow, gosh, gee, yikes) or ‘disgust’ (yuck, ugh). The results provide overall support for the proposed explications and indicate directions for their further development. It is interesting that respondents’ preexisting knowledge of NSM and other background variables (age, gender, being a native speaker, or studying linguistics) were shown to have little influence on the test results.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) Gee!, (E) Gosh!, (E) Ugh!, (E) Wow!, (E) Yikes!, (E) Yuck!, (T) English
Durst, Uwe (2003). The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to linguistic meaning. Theoretical Linguistics, 29(3), 157-200. DOI: 10.1515/thli.29.3.157
After thirty years of language-internal, as well as cross-linguistic research, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) model developed by Anna Wierzbicka and her colleagues has turned out to be a most useful theoretical and methodological framework for semantic analysis in various linguistic, and even non-linguistic, domains. This paper argues that the NSM approach to semantics constitutes a new paradigm in linguistic research that is free from various shortcomings of other semantic frameworks. The first section provides a brief survey of the historical development of NSM theory from the early seventies up to the present stage [2003]. Its theoretical and methodological principles are outlined in sections 2 and 3, which also illustrate how, in some cases (e.g. HAPPEN), words that used to be explicated have been discovered to be primes. Section 4 illustrates its applications in various domains by means of examples from a number of languages. These include a range of ‘anger’-related words that are compared to one another.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (T) English, (T) English (synopsis)
Bułat Silva, Zuzanna (2009). How to use both the NSM and CL approaches to meaning – Portuguese lexeme paixão ‘passion’. Studia Linguistica, 28, 31-41. PDF (open access)
The aim of this paper is to show that the NSM approach to meaning can be used together with some methodological tools elaborated within Cognitive Linguistics. By combining NSM explications, based on reductive paraphrase, with prototype semantics, stating that meaning of a lexeme has a centric structure (with some senses more salient than others) we are able to refer more accurately to the peripheral senses of a given word. The radial network diagram makes it possible to isolate precisely the lexical unit we are interested in and describe it in terms of semantic primes.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
Tagged as: (E) paixão, (T) English
