Anna Wierzbicka, Words and the World

Abstract

This introduction to the Special Issue summarises Anna Wierzbicka's contribution to the linguistic study of meaning. It presents the foundations of the approach known as the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) developed by Wierzbicka. The current state of the approach is discussed in the article with the ideas of 65 semantic primitives, universal grammar and the principle of reductive paraphrase in semantic explications. It traces the origin of Wierzbicka's ideas to Leibniz. The framework has been tested on about thirty languages of diverse origin. The applications of the approach are broad and encompass lexical areas of emotions, social categories, speech act verbs, mental states, artefacts and animals, verbs of motion, kinship terms (among others), as well as grammatical constructions.

Review of Gunter Senft, 2017. Imdeduya: Variants of a myth of love and hate from the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea. Culture and Language Use. Studies in Anthropological Linguistics. Vol. 20. Аmsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 262 p

“…Среди «семантических примитивов», универсальных элементарных понятий, комбинации которых позволяют создавать многочисленные уникальные для каждого языка и культуры конфигурации (см. Gladkova, Larina 2018;Goddard, Wierzbicka 1994, Wierzbicka 1994 и др. ), А. Вежбицкая использует, в частности, и данные языков Папуа -Новой Гвинеи.…”

The Catalogue of Semantic Shifts: 20 Years Later

“…2 The most frequent case is unidirectional shift (A→B), other possibilities being bidirectional shifts (A↔B) and the shifts for which we cannot specify direction (A-B); see for more detail Zalizniak et al 2012: 647. 3 On the use of NSM in cross-linguistic semantic studies see Wierzbicka 1992, Goddard and Wierzbicka 1994, Gladkova 2005, Goddard 2008, Gladkova, Larina 2018 in the meaning being considered. Additionally, we constantly revise and adjust the sets of sematic labels, semantic shifts, and their realizations as the work on the database progresses.…”

A word in the context of a cultural and historical universe: Some case studies from the US political discourse

“…В-четвертых, в каждом языке есть слова, в которых заключено богатство культуры, и они имеют статус ключевых слов культуры (Вежбицкая 2001a). В-пятых, значение слова может быть интерпретировано (Gladkova, Larina 2018). В-шестых, семантический компонент заключает в себе информацию, относящуюся к культурному пласту того или иного сообщества (Wierzbicka 2015: 2).…”