Natural semantic metalanguage

The natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) is a linguistic theory based on the conception of Polish professor Andrzej Bogusławski. The leading proponents of the theory are Anna Wierzbicka at Warsaw University and later at the Australian National University who originated the theory in the early 1970s (Wierzbicka 1972), and Cliff Goddard at Australia's Griffith University (Goddard & Wierzbicka 1994, 2002).

Approach

Linguists of the NSM school rely on semantic primitives (or semantic primes; those are simple, indefinable, and universally lexicalized concepts) for analisys and reductive paraphrase (that is breaking complex concepts down into simpler concepts).

Research in the NSM approach deals extensively with language and cognition, and language and culture. Key areas of research include lexical semantics, grammatical semantics, phraseology and pragmatics, as well as cross-cultural communication.

Languages studied in the NSM-framework include English, Russian, Polish, French, Spanish, Malay, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Ewe and East Cree,[1] as well as Swedish.[2]

Semantic primitives

The declared NSM primes have stabilized as a list of irreducible meanings, coded here as English words with specific senses. These primes are hypothesized to be language universals, with most of them having been tested across a wide variety of languages without encountering disconfirmation.

It is very important to realize that some of the exponents in the following list have meanings in English that are not shared with other languages, but when used as an exponent in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, we are only concerned with the meanings that are universal.

The English exponents of semantic primitives[3]

substantives 
I, YOU, SOMEONE, PEOPLE, SOMETHING/THING, BODY
relational substantives
KIND, PART
determiners 
THIS, THE SAME, OTHER/ELSE
quantifiers 
ONE, TWO, MUCH/MANY, SOME, ALL
evaluators 
GOOD, BAD
descriptors 
BIG, SMALL
mental predicates 
THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR
speech 
SAY, WORDS, TRUE
actions, events, movement, contact 
DO, HAPPEN, MOVE, TOUCH
location, existence, possession, specification 
BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE IS, HAVE, BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING)
life and death 
LIVE, DIE
time 
WHEN/TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME, MOMENT
space 
WHERE/PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR, SIDE, INSIDE
logical concepts 
NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF
intensifier, augmentor 
VERY, MORE
similarity 
LIKE/WAY

Explication

An explication is a breakdown of a non-prime concept into prime ones.

E.g., Someone X killed someone Y:
someone X did something to someone else Y
because of this, something happened to Y at the same time
because of this, something happened to Y's body
because of this, after this Y was not living anymore[4]

Bibliography

See also

Notes

  1. "The natural semantic metalanguage approach", in Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis (2009) Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  2. Pedersen, Jan (2010), "The different Swedish tack: An ethnopragmatic investigation of Swedish thanking and related concepts", Journal of Pragmatics 42:1258–1265.
  3. "Natural Semantic Metalanguage: The state of the art", in C. Goddard (ed.) Cross-Linguistic Semantics (2008), p.33.
  4. Goddard, Cliff. "The Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach" (PDF). Retrieved 27 May 2013.

External links

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