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(1997) English – KIND, CONSIDERATE, THOUGHTFUL

Travis, Catherine (1997). Kind, considerate, thoughtful: A semantic analysis. Lexikos, 7, 130-152. DOI: 10.5788/7-1-976. PDF (open access)

This paper presents a semantic analysis of three English words denoting positive character or personality traits, namely kind, considerate and thoughtful. These three words are closely related, and the differences (and similarities) in their meanings can be very difficult to pinpoint. It shall be shown that modern dictionaries demonstrate a great deal of circularity in their definitions of these words, reflecting the closeness of their meanings. An analysis of usage examples provides evidence on the basis of which their differences can be understood. Some of the differences that shall be noted are the following: kind and thoughtful necessarily involve doing something for another person, while considerate does not; kind involves not wanting anyone to feel bad, considerate involves not wanting anyone to feel bad as a result of one’s actions, and thoughtful focuses on a specific situation another is in, and not wanting them to feel bad in that situation; kind involves wanting to do something for another’s good, while considerate involves wanting to avoid something that may harm another; and both considerate and thoughtful imply some kind of thinking about another before one acts, as reflected in their morphology. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, as developed by Wierzbicka (1972, 1980, 1996) and colleagues, is used to propose definitions for these words, with the aim of exhaustively capturing their meaning. and clearly delineating their range of use. Such definitions can be particularly valuable to second language learners, and can provide a basis for cross-linguistic, and cross-cultural, comparisons of related concepts.

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(1998) Japanese – Cultural values (OMOIYARI)

Travis, Catherine (1998). Omoiyari as a core Japanese value: Japanese-style empathy? In Angeliki Athanasiadou, & Elzbieta Tabakowska (Eds.), Speaking of emotions: Conceptualisation and expression (pp. 83-103). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110806007.55

This paper presents a semantic analysis of the Japanese concept of omoiyari, a key word representing core Japanese values. Omoiyari is essential to successful communication and the maintaining of harmonious relations in Japan. A full understanding of this word is extremely insightful into Japanese culture, revealing a great deal about the Japanese “indirect” communicative style; the importance of being “in tune” with others’ unexpressed desires and feelings; the “interdependence” on which group relations are based in Japan; and, in the light of all these factors, the Japanese perception of individuality, or “selfhood”. Furthermore, an understanding of omoiyari provides analysts with a tool with which to examine and describe Japanese culture, allowing them to adopt a kind of Japanese perspective, and thus to gain greater comprehension of some of the values and attitudes on which the society operates.

Omoiyari essentially represents a kind of “intuitive” understanding of the unexpressed feelings, desires and thoughts of others, and doing something for them on the basis of this understanding. Previous analyses of this word have been carried out without establishing an explicit definition of omoiyari, and it has been defined in terms of apparently “close” English equivalents. Such an approach is inherently flawed, as there is no one word for omoiyari in English. It is possible to fully define omoiyari in a way that makes its meaning accessible to non-Japanese speakers, and that is by using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage as developed by Wierzbicka and colleagues. This paper will present such a definition, established through an analysis of usage examples. This will then be compared with the meaning of one of its “close” English equivalents, and probably the word most commonly used to translate omoiyari, which is empathy. It shall be shown that, although these two words are similar in some respects, their meanings have much less in common than may be perceived through a superficial analysis, and that these differences reflect real differences in the respective cultures to which these words belong.

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(1998) Spanish – BUENO

Travis, Catherine (1998). Bueno: A Spanish interactive discourse marker. In Benjamin K. Bergen, Madelaine C. Plauché, & Ashlee C. Bailey (Eds.), Proceedings of the twenty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General session and parasession on phonetics and phonological universals (pp. 268-279). Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society. DOI: 10.3765/bls.v24i1.1222. PDF (open access)

This paper presents a semantic analysis of the Spanish discourse marker bueno (something similar to ‘well’, ‘OK’, ‘alright’ in English). Four discourse functions of bueno are identified and discussed. On the basis of these functions, it is suggested that bueno is polysemous, and following the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, two definitions to account for its range of use are proposed. It is argued that these definitions reflect the way in which the meaning of the discourse marker bueno is related to the adjective bueno, meaning ‘good’. Finally, we consider the role bueno may play in the communicative realization of the norms and values of the cultures in which it is used.

 

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(2002) Spanish – NSM primes, NSM syntax

Travis, Catherine (2002). La Metalengua Semántica Natural: The Natural Semantic Metalanguage of Spanish. In Cliff Goddard, & Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.), Meaning and universal grammar: Theory and empirical findings, vol.1 (pp. 173-242). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.60.11tra

(2003) Spanish – Subjunctive

Travis, Catherine (2003). The semantics of the Spanish subjunctive: Its use in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Cognitive Linguistics 14(1). 47-69. DOI: 10.1515/cogl.2003.002

This article presents an analysis of the Spanish subjunctive as it is used in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) of Spanish. One of the tenets of the NSM approach, as developed by Wierzbicka and colleagues, is its universality: that the lexicon and the syntactic patterns that comprise the metalanguage are found in all languages of the world. The use of the subjunctive in the NSM of Spanish potentially threatens the proposed “universal grammar” of NSM, as this form is not found in all languages and has a language-specific meaning. Following a discussion of the semantics of this form, I will consider the environments in which the subjunctive is used in the NSM of Spanish, namely with WANT (querer) with non-coreferential subjects, MAYBE (tal vez), NOT THINK (no pensar), and NOT KNOW (no saber). I will show that with WANT (querer) and NOT THINK (no pensar), the subjunctive does not encode a language-specific meaning, but is used to “index” a notion inherent in the proposition with which it occurs. With MAYBE (tal vez) and NOT KNOW (no saber), on the other hand, I will argue that the subjunctive does encode a language-specific meaning, and is therefore a more marked choice in these environments. The analysis shows that different syntactic structures across languages can be semantically equivalent, and the NSM notion of a “universal grammar” is supported.

(2004) Spanish (Colombia) – Diminutives

Travis, Catherine. E. (2004). The ethnopragmatics of the diminutive in conversational Colombian Spanish. Intercultural Pragmatics 1(2). 249-274. DOI: 10.1515/iprg.2004.1.2.249

This paper considers the cultural values manifested in the use of the diminutive suffix -ito/-ita in a corpus of conversational Colombian Spanish. It will be demonstrated that this suffix is highly frequent (occurring approximately 600 times in the 70,000-word corpus), and that from its core uses in relation to children and expressing small size it has taken on the pragmatic functions of expressing affection, hedging speech acts and expressing contempt.

Wierzbicka has shown that the frequent use of the diminutive in languages such as Russian and Polish plays a valuable role in realizing the cultural goal of the expression of good feelings towards others. The same can be said of its use in Colombian Spanish, but analysis of the diminutive in conversation reveals that it goes beyond this to realize a range of essential cultural ideals in interaction. Based on a semantic analysis of some of the central uses of the diminutive, I propose a set of cultural scripts to capture the role played by the diminutive in a variety of speech events, scripts which form an important part of the basis for interaction in Colombian society.

(2005) Spanish (Colombia) – Discourse particles: BUENO, PUES, O SEA, ENTONCES

Travis, Catherine E. (2005). Discourse markers in Colombian Spanish: A study in polysemy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

This book, a revised version of the author’s PhD thesis (Latrobe University, Melbourne, 2001) presents a semantic analysis of a set of four functionally related discourse particles that are particularly frequent in conversational Colombian Spanish. A corpus of four hours of spontaneous conversation is used to study the markers bueno ‘well, OK’, pues ‘well, then’, o sea ‘I mean, that is to say’ and entonces ‘so, then’.

Through a detailed analysis of numerous examples drawn from the corpus, and employing both quantitative and qualitative techniques, it is demonstrated that, contrary to popular belief, discourse particles are not just functional particles with indeterminate or context-based semantics. Rather, they have inherent meanings that can be identified and exhaustively defined with an appropriate semantic methodology, such as is provided by the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. This study illustrates that this approach, which has been widely applied to the semantics of the lexicon and the grammar, can be extended to the semantics of discourse-based features, supporting the notion that meaning of all aspects of language forms one semantic system. The author proposes four different meanings for bueno, three related meanings for o sea, three core meanings for entonces, and two-way polysemy for pues.

The research reported here also has implications for the study of polysemy, in that it operationalizes the little understood, but classical definition of polysemy of items with “a shared element of meaning”, and it demonstrates that the polysemous relations of discourse markers are centered around an invariant core that can be identified on the basis of their use in discourse. As one of the first corpus-based studies to present a semantic account of the multifunctional nature of discourse markers this book makes an important contribution to research on the relationship between semantics and discourse-pragmatics, and polysemy in discourse.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2006) Spanish (Colombia) – Terms of endearment, CONFIANZA, CALOR HUMANO

Travis, Catherine E. (2006). The communicative realisation of confianza and calor humano in Colombian Spanish. In Cliff Goddard (Ed.), Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context (pp. 199-229). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110911114.199

Interactional norms and practices are indicative of ways of thinking and of underlying cultural ideals. In this study, I focus on the widespread use of terms of endearment in Colombian Spanish and consider this linguistic practice in terms of the cultural model for relationships in Colombia. The use of terms of endearment such as mi amor ‘my love’, gordo ‘fatty’, fictive mamita ‘mummy’ and papito ‘daddy’ and so on reflects the high value Colombian culture places on displaying affection for others, and on verbally affirming the ties that exist in relationships. Similar ideals are evident in the extensive use of the diminutive, manipulation of the second-person singular pronoun system, complex greeting and leave-taking routines, and so on, some of which are briefly dealt with.

The cultural model is also represented in certain cultural key words, in particular in the terms confianza ‘trust’, calor humano ‘human warmth’ and vínculos ‘bonds’. Through a semantic analysis of these key words, and through a discourse-based analysis of the use of terms of endearment, I propose a set of cultural scripts that outline some of the ideals for interaction in Colombian society, in accordance with a cultural model for how to maintain good relations with others.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2006) Spanish (Colombia) – Discourse particles: BUENO

Travis, Catherine E. (2006). The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to discourse markers. In Kerstin Fischer (Ed.), Approaches to discourse particles (pp. 219-241). Oxford: Elsevier.

This paper presents an analysis of discourse markers based within the framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Wierzbicka, 1996; and references therein). It argues that discourse markers can only be fully understood if the meaning(s) they carry when used in different contexts are exhaustively defined. Within this framework, discourse markers are treated as polysemous, having a range of different meanings all of which share some element in common. The shared element of meaning can be considered a partial semantic invariant, and it is this that ties the uses of the marker together, while other components of meaning that differ account for the variation across the range of use. Such an analysis makes a clear distinction between what is encoded in the semantics of the marker and what is encoded in its pragmatics of use. I will illustrate how this can be done through an analysis of the Spanish discourse marker bueno (‘well’, ‘good’, ‘right’), based on a corpus of conversational Colombian Spanish.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(1997) Chinese (Cantonese, Hong Kong) – NSM primes, NSM syntax (time, place)

Tong, Malindy, Yell, Michael, & Goddard, Cliff (1997). Semantic primitives of time and space in Hong Kong Cantonese. Language Sciences, 19(3), 245-261. DOI: 10.1016/S0388-0001(96)00063-0

This paper takes a subset of the semantic primitives currently proposed in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory and addresses two questions: Do these meanings have lexical equivalents in Cantonese? If so, does their combinatorial syntax conform to Wierzbicka’s hypotheses? The temporal primitives (WHEN/TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME) are all found to have clear Cantonese exponents which can be combined as predicted with other metalanguage elements–but for two exceptions: the combinations A VERY SHORT TIME and BEFORE/AFTER NOW are apparently not possible in Cantonese. We also argue that the Cantonese evidence suggests that
‘when-time’ (as in the phrase AT THIS TIME) and ‘frequency time’ (as in IT HAPPENED TWO TIMES) may be distinct semantic primes. As for the spatial primitives (WHERE/PLACE, HERE, NEAR, FAR, INSIDE, SIDE, ABOVE, BELOW), they all appear to have Cantonese exponents with the predicted syntax, but the tentative proposal that ON may be a universal primitive is challenged by the apparent lack of an equivalent expression in Cantonese.

(1999) NSM primes and prime-related items in child language

Tien, Adrian (1999). Early lexical exponents & ‘related’ lexical items as manifestations of conceptual / semantic primitives in child language. MA thesis, Australian National University.


Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2009) Singapore English, Singapore Chinese – Shared Chinese-based lexicon

Tien, Adrian (2009). Singaporean culture as reflected by the shared Chinese-based lexicon of Singapore English and Singapore Chinese. In T. Shabanova (Ed.), Humanistic inheritance of great educators in culture and education (pp. 71-74). Ufa: BSPU.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2009) Mandarin Chinese – NSM prime HAPPEN

Tien, Adrian (2009). Semantic prime HAPPEN in Mandarin Chinese: In search of a viable exponent. Pragmatics & Cognition, 17(2), 356-382. DOI: 10.1075/p&c.17.2.07tie

HAPPEN is part of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) inventory of primes. Its most appropriate exponent in Mandarin Chinese was previously thought to be fa1sheng1. This article argues that fa1sheng1 is not the correct exponent of HAPPEN as it is marked for ‘adversity’ as well as what I call ‘serious mention’ or ‘noteworthiness’ of the event, i.e., that an event is sufficiently serious or noteworthy to fare a mention. This article puts forward you3, lit. ‘have, exist, happen’, and zen3(me)yang4 / zhe4(me)yang4, lit. ‘like how/like this’ instead, as allolexic exponents of HAPPEN in Mandarin Chinese. Though highly polysemous each in its own way, the HAPPEN sense of you3 and zen3(me)yang4 / zhe4(me)yang4 can, respectively, be shown to be semantically irreducible and pragmatically neutral. This article delineates some of the syntactic and contextual distributions attesting to the viability of you3 and zen3(me)yang4 / zhe4(me)yang4 as the Mandarin Chinese exponents of HAPPEN.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2010) Chinese – Human interaction in e-communication

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

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(2011) Mandarin Chinese – NSM primes in child language

Tien, Adrian (2011). Lexical semantics of children’s Mandarin Chinese during the first four years. München: Lincom.

Revised version of the author’s PhD thesis, The semantics of children’s Mandarin Chinese: The first four years (University of New England, Armidale, 2005).

If children’s early words or word-like “phrasemes” have any meanings at all, then it should be possible to study and analyse their meanings. But how can early words and meanings be rigorously studied and analysed? In examining naturalistic production data from forty-seven subjects acquiring Mandarin during the first four years, this innovative study takes a radical, semantic approach to words and their meanings in child Mandarin through adopting the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach.

Amongst our findings, lexical exponents of sixty-one or so semantic primes posited in NSM are present in child Mandarin before the end of the fourth year. Many of these are among the earliest and the most frequent words that children produce. In addition, combinatorial properties of these lexical exponents also support hypotheses advanced about universal syntax within the NSM framework, despite challenges posed by a few exponents.

Early vocabulary comprises a great many semantically complex, i.e. “non-prime”, words. Before an NSM prime acquires a lexical exponent, it may first be conceptually present as core semantic elements in the meanings of common non-prime words. This phenomenon is termed “latency”: a semantic prime is considered “latent” when it is first represented conceptually and expounded lexically only later in development.

On the whole, in adopting a representational system (NSM) that is commensurable with the adult system, this study demonstrates that there is, in fact, developmental continuity between the young child’s semantic system and the adult’s system.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2012) Chinese – Cultural key words

Tien, Adrian (2012). Chinese intercultural communication in the global setting, as reflected through contemporary key words in the Chinese multimedia. In Birgit Breninger, & Thomas Kaltenbacher (Eds.), Creating cultural synergies: Multidisciplinary perspectives on interculturality and interreligiosity (pp. 169-184). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

The author casts a closer look on Chinese-speaking communities and cultural key words, which he claims play an important role in intercultural competence. Chinese cultural key words allow one to gain various cultural glimpses on different aspects of modern Chinese culture and society.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2012) Singapore Chinese Hokkien – Evidence for an indigenized Singapore culture

Tien, Adrian (2012). Chinese Hokkien and its lexicon in Singapore: Evidence for an indigenised Singapore culture. In Rudolf Muhr (Ed.), Non-dominant varieties of pluricentric languages: Getting the picture. In memory of Michael Clyne (pp. 453-472). Vienna: Peter Lang.

More surveys of languages of Singapore have concentrated on Chinese Mandarin – one of the official languages – than any other Chinese “dialects” that are also spoken by at least some of the Singaporeans, notably Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese. In focusing on Singapore Chinese Hokkien, this chapter shows that (1) this dialect is, essentially, a pluricentric language, and its Singaporean version reflects a local or indigenized variety of Hokkien that exhibits differences with varieties of Hokkien spoken elsewhere, e.g. Taiwan; (2) at least for now, the status of Hokkien has remained more or less secure and has, in fact, continued to play a prominent role in Singapore language and culture, despite it being non-official and non-dominant; and (3) in fact, Hokkien has assumed an influential role in other languages spoken in Singapore, official or not, e.g. Singapore English (“Singlish”) and Singapore Mandarin etc. A case study presented here, based on the semantic analysis of a Singapore Chinese Hokkien lexicon, demonstrates the uniqueness of this lexicon in usage and in culture.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2013) Mandarin Chinese – NSM primes in child language

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

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(2014) Singapore English – Chinese-based lexicon

Tien, Adrian (2014). Chinese-based lexicon in Singapore English, and Singapore-Chinese culture. In Maria Grozeva-Minkova, & Boris Naimushin (Eds.), Globalisierung, interkulturelle Kommunikation und Sprache (pp. 473-482). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Also published as:

Tien, Adrian (2014). Chinese-based lexicon in Singapore English, and Singapore-Chinese culture. In Ewa Zebrowska, Mariola Jaworska, & Dirk Steinhoff (Eds.), Materialität und Medialität der sprachlichen Kommunikation – Materiality and mediality of linguistic communication (pp. 411-422). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Singapore sits at the crossroads between the East and the West, and its “unofficial” national creole, Singapore English (or “Singlish”), attests to the diverse linguistic and cultural amalgam consisting of primarily English and Chinese and, secondarily, Malay and Tamil. While English grammar serves as the backbone of Singlish, its lexical composition is strongly represented by loanwords or calques which originated from Chinese – not only Standard Mandarin but also Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese and Hakka dialects. These Chinese-based words in Singlish lexicon are worth studying because they demonstrate that the Singapore culture is both uniquely native and historically as well as culturally reflective of Chinese culture. To further substantiate the case, we examine a selection of cultural key words from Chinese-based Singlish lexicon using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) model as advanced by Wierzbicka and Goddard over the last 40 years. By using a set of 60 or so semantically unanalysable “primes”, this model allows us to decompose the complex meanings of cultural key words into configurations of semantic primes, thus making it possible to study, compare, and explain these words.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2015) Singapore languacultures – Hokkien-based offensive language

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

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