Course in Pragmatics and Cognitive Semantics

Gothenburg University	Lecture 7: Lexical Primitives, Lexical Universals
Lexicon | Philosophical glossary | Relevant bookmarks | Semiotic terms | Webster | WordAnalysis | Word-online | Thesaurus | Class | Back to main page	Martinovski, biljana@ling.gu.se,

If polysemy is a norm in any language it means that it is very important to find out what are the semantic differences between the polysemeous meanings of a linguistic expression. This is can be done by analysing the contexts in which it may appear and the values it may take in these contexts. It also implies that the more polysemeous a word is the more frequent it is in the language. These polysemeous meanings as well as any other meanings, including grammatical relations, may be described with the help of a Natural Semantic Metalanguage consisting of lexical primitives.
Lexical primitives are basic lexical expressions
which are expected to be universally represented in the lexicon of all languages,
which are the most frequent words,
which are the first words a child acquires,
which are polysemeous themselves, and not satisfactorily decomposable.

By decomposing meaning Wierzbicka&Goddard come to the following list of lexical primitives:

Substantives (note that they are also mainly deictic expressions):
I, You, Someone, Somethings;
Mental predicates:
Think, Say, Know, Feel, Want;
Determiners and Quantifiers:
This, The same, Other, One, Two, Many, All;
Actions and Events:
Do, Happen (to);
Meta-predicates:
No, If, Can, Like, Because, Very;
Time-Space:
When where, After, Before, Under, Above;
Taxonomy and Partonomy:
Kind of, Have parts;
Evaluators and Descriptors:
Good, Bad, Big, Small;

Anna Wierzbicka's "universal semantics" and emotions

In numerous articles, chapters and books Wierzbicka has explicated her theoretical stance on how to analyze emotions. Emotions to her are a semantic domain (1995a: 235), to be investigated in a semantic metalanguage, i.e. in terms of indefinables or primitives (semantic universals) that are shared by all human languages. These universals are of a conceptual nature and comprise elements such as feel, want, say, think, know, good, bad, and so on (1992: 236; 1994: 140; 1995a: 236). It is Wierzbicka's declared aim "to explore human emotions (or any other conceptual domain) from a universal, language-independent perspective" (1995a: 236).

In her comparative study of language-dependent conceptualizations, Wierzbicka is able to document that "every language imposes its own classification upon human emotional experiences, and English words such as anger or sadness are cultural artifacts of the English language, not culture-free analytical tools" (1992: 456; 1995a: 236). Her analyses are good (and clear) examples for exactly this point, and her main argument is forcefully directed against most psychological theorizing within the James-Lange-tradition that starts from the assumption that emotions are bodily experienced feeling states, each categorically distinct, and built up in a clearly ordered sequence of events (see for recent critiques of this kind of theorizing from within psychology, though from quite different directions, Campos, Mumme, Kermoian & Campos 1994, Ellsworth 1994, Sarbin 1995).

While the suggested set of semantic primitives that is assumed to exist in every human language started out with only fourteen, it is currently estimated (Wierzbicka 1995b, Goddard in press) to have increased to about 35-60 elements. In the following two examples of the semantic explications of the abstract concept "GUILT" and the concrete concept "SKY" (from Wierzbicka 1995b: 293), all the terms mentioned in combination are supposed to be universals and as such parts of what has been termed the "Natural Semantic Metalanguage" (NSM):

X felt guilty =

X felt something

sometimes a person thinks something like this:

I did something

because of this, something bad happened

because of this, this person feels something bad

X felt like this sky

it is above everything

it is above all places

While the above explications resemble previous explications of situated and culturally shared meanings developed by Geertz (1973), Labov and Fanshel (1977), Much (1992) or Shweder (1991), it needs to be stressed that the explications within the NSM-framework are argued to operate from a non-contextual, culture free starting point. The linguistic ideology evoked not only is that this objective starting point exists [in the form of the NSM], but also that the human mind is innately equipped with it.

(source: The Role of Language in the Construction of Emotions by Michael Bamberg)

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