Natural semantic metalanguage

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The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is an approach to semantics analysis based on reductive paraphrase (that is, breaking concepts/words down into combinations of simpler concepts/words, see Oligosynthetic language) using a small collection of semantic primes. The semantic primes (below) are believed to be atomic, primitive meanings present in all human languages. The concept has roots in the 17th century projects for ideal languages and the 18th century alphabet of human thought of René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz.

Words from ordinary language are analyzed in NSM by means of script-like explications as the following examples illustrate:

plants: living things / these things can't feel something / these things can't do something
sky: something very big / people can see it / people can think like this about this something: "it is a place / it is above all other places / it is far from people"
sad: X feels sad = X feels something / sometimes a person thinks something like this: "something bad happened / if I didn't know that it happened I would say: 'I don't want it to happen' / I don't say this now because I know: 'I can't do anything'" / because of this, this person feels something bad / X feels something like this
anger: I think this person did something bad / I don't want this person to do things like this / I want to do something because of this

Anna Wierzbicka originated the NSM theory in the early 1970s (Wierzbicka 1972). Starting with an inventory of only 14 primitives, the theory slowly grew. As of 2002, the list consists of 61 semantic primitives and is not yet regarded as complete.

Other eminent linguists who have participated in NSM research include Cliff Goddard, Felix Ameka, Hilary Chappell, David Wilkins and Nick Enfield. NSM is commonly used in cross-cultural semantics.

A grammar of the NSM is a work in progress. Such a grammar would describe how these primes collocate in any language, regardless of their morphological and syntactic grammar in particular languages. A partial, though detailed, description is found in Goddard and Wierzbicka 2002.

Contents

[edit] Semantic primitives

The English exponents of the Semantic Primitives (addition of LONG is proposed)

substantives 
I, YOU, SOMEONE, PEOPLE, SOMETHING/THING, BODY
"I" can't be paraphrased as "the speaker", since "I don't like the speaker" doesn't mean "I don't like myself." I isn't "the person experiencing this"; "I want to go" doesn't mean "the person experiencing a desire to go wants to go."
YOU has similar problems of ambiguous reference if paraphrased as "person spoken to". If someone asks "Are you speaking to me?", the response "I am speaking to the person I am speaking to" would not be considered an informative answer.[1]
mental predicates 
THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR, BE
speech 
SAY, WORD, TRUE
actions, events and movement 
DO, HAPPEN, MOVE, PUT, GO
existence and possession 
THERE IS, HAVE
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; TOUCHING
"logical" concepts 
NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF
intensifier 
VERY
augmentor 
MORE
quantifiers 
ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MANY/MUCH
evaluators 
GOOD, BAD
descriptors 
BIG, SMALL, (LONG)
taxonomy, partonomy 
KIND OF, PART OF;
similarity 
LIKE
determiners 
THIS, THE SAME, OTHER

The assumption that these primes are present in all languages was tested extensively against these 9 languages: Polish, Mandarin, Malay, Lao, Spanish, Korean, Mbula (Austronesian language), Cree (Algonquian language), Yankunytjatjara (Australian Aboriginal language).

[edit] Criticisms

NSM has been criticized from the point of view of Word grammar ("Re-cycling in the encyclopedia", Hudson & Holmes, in Bert Peeters (ed.) The Lexicon/Encyclopedia Interface. Elsevier, 2000. pp.259-290. ISBN 0080435912) on the grounds that trying to define concepts in terms of a set of base words is too difficult, uneconomical, and unnecessary.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Wierzbicka, 1996, pp.37-38

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage"
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