Wierzbicka, Anna (2002). Meaning and universal grammar: Theory and empirical findings. In Youngsoon Park (Ed.), Current trends and prospects of Korean linguistics in the 21st century (pp. 343-378). Seoul: Hankookmunhwasa.
(2002) Polish – NSM primes, NSM syntax
Wierzbicka, Anna (2002). Semantic primes and universal grammar in Polish. In Cliff Goddard, & Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.), Meaning and universal grammar: Theory and empirical findings: Vol. 2 (pp. 65-144). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
(2002) NSM primes and linguistic typology
Wierzbicka, Anna (2002). Semantic primes and linguistic typology. In Cliff Goddard, & Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.), Meaning and universal grammar: Theory and empirical findings: Vol. 2 (pp. 257-300). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
(2002) Metaphor, religion, religious understanding
Wierzbicka, Anna (2002). The semantics of metaphor and parable: Looking for meaning in the Gospels. Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, 6(1), 85-106.
Abstract:
Human communication relies largely on metaphors. This applies to literature, to politics, to everyday interaction, to religion and to ethics. In some areas of life – e.g. in ethics and religion – there are certain key metaphors whose meaning has been debated for centuries and no doubt will continue to be debated into the third millennium; and yet there is no widely accepted methodology with the aid of which such debates can be resolved and possible meanings clearly formulated.
This paper tries to show how the NSM approach can provide such a methodology. The focus is on three extended metaphors, all from the “Sermon on the Mount”: the metaphor of the left hand, the metaphor of a speck in one’s brother’s eye and the metaphor of building on the rock.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2002) English – LET
Wierzbicka, Anna (2002). English causative constructions in an ethnosyntactic perspective: Focusing on LET. In Nick Enfield (Ed.), Ethnosyntax (pp. 162-203). Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199266500.003.0008
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 6 (pp. 171-203) of:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). English: Meaning and culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
This chapter focuses on one area of ‘cultural elaboration’ in grammar, namely, on the elaboration of causal relations in modern English. Topics discussed include causation and patterns of social interaction, Natural Semantic Metalanguage as a tool for studying ethnosyntax, the meaning of causatives in a cross-linguistic perspective, German lassen constructions, and English let constructions, and comparison of Russian and German.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2002) English (Australia) – BLOODY
Wierzbicka, Anna (2002). Australian cultural scripts – bloody revisited. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(9), 1167-1209. DOI: 10.1016/S0378-2166(01)00023-6
This paper focusses on ‘‘the great Australian adjective’’ bloody and it shows that far from being meaningless, the humble bloody is packed with meaning; and that by unpacking this meaning we can throw a good deal of light on traditional Australian attitudes and values. It argues that the use of bloody furnishes an important clue to both the changes and continuity in Australian culture, society, and speech and also offers us a vantage point from which to investigate a whole network of Australian attitudes and values. Furthermore, the paper shows that the Australian use of bloody also illuminates some important theoretical issues, it demonstrates that frequently used and apparently ‘‘bleached’’ discourse markers do in fact have their own precise meaning, and that this meaning can be revealed by means of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), based on empirically established universal human concepts. It also shows that once the precise meaning of such discourse markers is accurately portrayed, it can provide important clues to the values, attitudes, and modes of interaction characteristic of a given society or speech community.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2002) English – Cultural key words: RIGHT, WRONG
Wierzbicka, Anna (2002). Right and wrong: From philosophy to everyday discourse. Discourse Studies, 4(2), 225-252. DOI: 10.1177/14614456020040020601
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 3 (pp. 61-102) of:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). English: Meaning and culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
One of the most interesting phenomena in the history of the English language is the remarkable rise of the word right, in its many interrelated senses and uses. This article tries to trace the changes in the meaning and use of this word, as well as the rise of new conversational routines based on right, and raises questions about the cultural underpinnings of these semantic and pragmatic developments. It explores the hypothesis that the “discourse of truth” declined in English over the centuries; that the use of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ as parallel concepts (and opposites) increased; and it notes that the use of right as an adjective increased enormously in relation to the use of true.
Originally, right meant ‘straight’, as in a right line (straight line). Figuratively, perhaps, this right in the sense ‘straight’ was also used in an evaluative sense: ‘good’, with an additional component building on the geometrical image: ‘clearly good’. Spoken of somebody else’s words, right was linked (implicitly or explicitly) with ‘true’. However, in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, right appears to have begun to be used more and more with reference to thinking rather than speaking. The association of right with thinking seems to have spread in parallel with a contrastive use of right and wrong – a trend apparently encouraged by the influence of the Reformation, especially within its Calvinist wing. Another interesting development is that, over the last two centuries or so, the discourse of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ appears to have found a competitor in a discourse of ‘cooperation’ and mutual concessions. Judging by both the frequency and range of its use, the word right flourished in this atmosphere, whereas wrong was increasingly left behind.
This article traces the transition from the Shakespearean response “Right.”, described by the OED as ‘you are right; you speak well’, to the present-day “Right.” of non-committal acknowledgement and it links the developments in semantics and discourse patterns with historical phenomena such as Puritanism, British empiricism, the Enlightenment and the growth of democracy.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2003) English (Singapore)
Wierzbicka, Anna (2003). Singapore English: A semantic and cultural perspective. Multilingua, 22, 327-366.
Abstract:
This paper examines some aspects of Singapore English, raising questions about Singaporean culture and national identity, and, more generally, about the nature of links between language and culture in a multilingual, hetero- geneous, and rapidly changing society. It argues that Singapore English is grounded in Singapore experience; in doing so, it takes up the notion of ‘interculturality’, proposed by the Singapore linguist Ho Chee Lick. Using the ‘Natural Semantic Metalanguage’, developed by the author and col- leagues, and based on empirically established universal human concepts, the paper offers a detailed semantic analysis of a number of Singaporean ‘key words’, and shows how their meaning reflects the unique Singaporean experience. The detailed semantic analysis of these ‘key words’, and of some other aspects of Singapore English, leads the author to posit some Singaporean ‘cultural scripts’, also formulated in universal human concepts.
Ratings:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2003) Emotions
Wierzbicka, Anna (2003). Emotion and culture: Arguing with Martha Nussbaum. Ethos, 31(4), 577-600. DOI: 10.1525/eth.2003.31.4.577
Martha Nussbaum’s account of human emotions, given in her influential 2001 book Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions is, in many ways, a balanced and insightful one. Her discussion steers prudently and carefully between, on the one hand, the excesses of cultural relativism and social
constructivism, and on the other, the crude universalism of biological and cognitivist accounts of emotion. And yet I do not find Nussbaum’s overall account fully adequate, and, in particular, I do not think she accords sufficient weight to the role of language in emotional experience or its interpretation. She acknowledges that language differences probably shape emotional life in some ways, but she goes on to say that the role of language has often been “overestimated” – without noting that it has also often been greatly underestimated.
In this article, I argue that despite her desire to strike a balance between extreme positions on emotion and culture, Nussbaum’s account of human emotions errs on the side of universalism. I focus on “grief,” which is her key example of a universal human emotion, and contrast the Anglo cultural perspective (some aspects of which Nussbaum assumes to be universal) with those reflected in other languages such as Russian, French, Chinese, and the Central Australian language Pintupi.
(2003) English — Reasonable
Wierzbicka, Anna (2003). ‘Reasonable man’ and ‘reasonable doubt’: The English language, Anglo culture, and Anglo-American law. Forensic Linguistics, 10(1), 1-22.
Abstract:
This paper investigates, in a historical and cultural perspective, the meaning of the word reasonable, and in particular, of the phrases reasonable man and reasonable doubt, which play an important role in Anglo-American law. Drawing on studies of the British Enlightenment such as Porter (2000), it traces the modern English concept of ‘reasonableness’ back to the intellectual revolution brought about by the writings of John Locke, who (as Porter says) ‘replaced rationalism with reasonableness, in a manner which became programmatic for the Enlightenment in Britain’. The paper also argues that the meaning of the word reasonable has changed over the last two centuries and that as a result, the meaning of the phrases reasonable man and beyond reasonable doubt has also changed; but since these phrases were continually used for over two centuries and became entrenched in Anglo-American law as well as in ordinary language, and since the older meaning of reasonable is no longer known to most speakers, the change has, generally speaking, gone unnoticed. On a theoretical level, the paper argues that meaning cannot be investigated in a precise and illuminating manner without a coherent semantic framework; and that a suitable framework is provided by the ‘NSM’ semantic theory.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2003) English (Australia) – Gender and sexism
Wierzbicka, Anna (2003). Sexism in grammar: The semantics of gender in Australian English. Anthropological Linguistics, 44(2), 143-177.
(2003) NSM primes
Wierzbicka, Anna (2003). Semantic primitives. In William J. Frawley (Ed.), International encyclopedia of linguistics: Vol. 4 (pp. 12-13). New York: Oxford University Press.
(2004) Bilingual lives, bilingual experience
Wierzbicka, Anna (2004). Bilingual lives, bilingual experience. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 25(2/3), 94-104.
(2004) Polish – NSM syntax
Wierzbicka, Anna (2004). Polish and universal grammar. Studies in Polish Linguistics, 1, 9-28.
(2004) English – Vocabulary of child rearing (GOOD BOY, GOOD GIRL)
Wierzbicka, Anna (2004). The English expressions good boy and good girl and cultural models of child rearing. Culture & Psychology, 10(3), 251-278. DOI: 10.1177/1354067X04042888
The expressions good boy and good girl are widely used in Anglo parental speech directed at children to praise them for their actions. Used in this way, these expressions have no equivalents in other European languages. In tracing the history of these expressions, and their negative counterparts bad boy and bad
girl, this paper seeks to show that they reflect a unique cultural model of child rearing, which links evaluation of a child’s behaviour with evaluation of the child him- or herself. It is argued that this model, which might seem natural and universal, but which is in fact culture-specific, has its roots in England’s and America’s Puritan past. Using the NSM semantic methodology, the paper explores the changes and continuities in this cultural model against the backdrop of broad linguistic usage.
(2004) Conceptual primes in humans and animals
Wierzbicka, Anna (2004). Conceptual primes in human languages and their analogues in animal communication and cognition. Language Sciences, 26(5), 413-441.
(2004) English – Emotions: happiness
Wierzbicka, Anna (2004). ‘Happiness’ in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. Daedalus, 133(2), 34-43. DOI: 10.1162/001152604323049370
Also published as:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2007). “Happiness” in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. Slovo a Smysl – Word and Sense, 8. HTML (open access)
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 5 (pp. 102-126) of:
Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199668434.001.0001
Progress in cross-cultural investigations of happiness and subjective well-being requires a greater linguistic and cross-cultural sophistication than that evident in much of the existing literature on the subject. To compare meanings across languages, we need a well-founded semantic metalanguage; and to be able to interpret self-reports across cultures, we need a methodology for exploring cultural norms that may guide the interviewees in their responses. It is the author’s firm belief that the Natural Semantic Metalanguage can solve the first problem and that the methodology of cultural scripts can solve the second. Together, they bring significant advances to the intriguing and controversial field of happiness studies.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2004) Cultural scripts, religion, religious understanding
Wierzbicka, Anna (2004). Jewish cultural scripts and the interpretation of the Bible. Journal of Pragmatics, 36(3), 575-599.
DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2003.09.002
Abstract:
When we read texts belonging to other epochs, lands, peoples and traditions, we must approach them in their proper cultural context and with some knowledge of this culture’s ready-made speech forms; in other words, we must try to understand the underlying cultural scripts that shaped the ways of thinking and the ways of speaking reflected in those texts. If these cultural scripts are to be made intelligible to us, they must be explained in terms that the culture alien to us shares with our own. The set of simple and universal human concepts that has been discovered in recent decades through empirical linguistic investigations can play a useful role in this regard; it can serve as a kind of a universal conceptual lingua franca to help minimize miscommunication and build cross-cultural bridges between readers and writers.
Mainstream Anglo culture, with its cherished traditions of rationality and empiricism, and with its emphasis on science and scientific discourse, values consistency, accuracy, logical formulations, absence of contradictions (on any level), absence of exaggeration, dispassionate reasoning, and so on. These are not the values of the culture of Hosea, or the culture of Jesus, just as they are not the values of the culture reflected in the stories of Sholom Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer. For the modern Anglo reader of the Bible, a cross-cultural commentary is not an optional extra, but a necessity. The cultural script model can be an effective tool for the purposes of cross-cultural understanding — in personal interaction, social life, business, politics, literature, and also in religion. In particular, it can be an effective tool for the interpretation of the Bible, as literature and (for believers) as the Word of God.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2005) Ethnopsychology and personhood
Wierzbicka, Anna (2005). Empirical universals of language as a basis for the study of other human universals and as a tool for exploring cross-cultural differences. Ethos, 33(2), 256-291.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.2005.33.2.256
Abstract:
Genuine universals of culture or cognition can only be formulated if we have at our disposal a universal language, and similarly, only a universal language can allow us to formulate generalizations about different cultures from a culture-independent point of view. In this article, it is argued that a universal, “culture-free” language suitable both for the study of human universals and the exploration of cultural differences, can be built on the basis of empirical universals of language. Furthermore, it is claimed that such a language has already been largely constructed, thus bringing the notion of a “universal language” from the realm of utopia to the realm of everyday reality. The article shows that this language (NSM) can be used to describe and explore both universal and culture-specific forms of human thinking, and in particular, to identify and compare personhood models across languages and cultures.
Translations:
Into French (with some cuts):
Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). Les universaux empiriques du langage: tremplin pour l’étude d’autres universaux humains et outil dans l’exploration de différences transculturelles. Linx, 54, 151-179.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/linx.517 / Open access
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
(2005) English – CULTURE
Wierzbicka, Anna (2005). In defense of ‘culture’. Theory and Psychology, 15(4), 575-597. DOI: 10.1177/0959354305054752
The concept of ‘culture’, as used in anthropology and related fields, has been under continual and mounting criticism for several decades. This paper argues that while this concept needs indeed to be
scrutinized and problematized, we are nonetheless much better off with it than without it. By rejecting it, we would jeopardize, in particular, the vital interests of immigrants, refugees and other crossers of cultural boundaries, who need to learn about cultural differences to be able to flourish, or even survive (socially), in a new environment. Drawing on autobiographical cross-cultural literature, the paper shows how the experience of transcultural lives and transcultural ‘selves’ vindicates the ‘culture’ concept, despite its limitations, and how this experience points to a need for crosscultural education, rather than for the abandonment of the concept of ‘culture(s)’. At the same time, the paper shows how the results of linguistic semantics and pragmatics, and especially those of the so-called ‘Natural Semantic Metalanguage’ (NSM) theory developed by the author and colleagues, allow us to better identify different cultural assumptions, values and understandings associated with different languages and to articulate
different ‘cultural scripts’ in a way which would reflect the perspective of cultural insiders while being intelligible to outsiders. It also shows how the theory of ‘cultural scripts’, which is an offshoot of the NSM theory of language and thought, helps to refine the ‘culture’ concept and to make it more theoretically viable and more workable in practical applications.
