Ten Lectures on Natural Semantic MetaLanguage: Exploring Language, Thought and Culture Using Simple, Translatable Words [1 ed.] 9789004357723, 9789004357709

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Ten Lectures on Natural Semantic Metalanguage

Distinguished Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics Edited by Fuyin (Thomas) Li (Beihang University, Beijing) Guest Editor Jing Du (Beihang University) Editorial Assistants Jing Du, Hongxia Jia and Lin Yu (doctoral students at Beihang University) Editorial Board Jürgen Bohnemeyer (State University of New York at Buffalo) – Alan Cienki (Vrije Universiteit (VU), Amsterdam, Netherlands and Moscow State Linguistic University, Russia) – William Croft (University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, USA) – Ewa Dąbrowska (Northumbria University, UK) – Gilles Fauconnier (University of California at San Diego, USA) – Dirk Geeraerts (University of Leuven, Belgium) – Nikolas Gisborne (The University of Edinburgh, UK) – Cliff Goddard (Griffith University, Australia) – Stefan Gries (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA) – Laura A. Janda (University of Tromsø, Norway) – Zoltán Kövecses (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary) – George Lakoff (University of California at Berkeley, USA) – Ronald W. Langacker (University of California at San Diego, USA) – Chris Sinha (University of Portsmouth, UK) – Leonard Talmy (State University of New York at Buffalo, USA) – John R. Taylor (University of Otago, New Zealand) – Mark Turner (Case Western Reserve University, USA) – Sherman Wilcox (University of New Mexico, USA) – Phillip Wolff (Emory University, USA) Jeffrey M. Zacks (Washington University, USA) Distinguished Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics publishes the keynote lectures series given by prominent international scholars at the China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics since 2004. Each volume contains the transcripts of 10 lectures under one theme given by an acknowledged expert on a subject and readers have access to the audio recordings of the lectures through links in the e-book and QR codes in the printed volume. This series provides a unique course on the broad subject of Cognitive Linguistics. Speakers include George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Leonard Talmy, Laura Janda, Dirk Geeraerts, Ewa Dąbrowska and many others.

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/dlcl

Ten Lectures on Natural Semantic Metalanguage Exploring Language, Thought and Culture Using Simple, Translatable Words

By

Cliff Goddard

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017054588

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2468-4872 isbn 978-90-04-35770-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-35772-3 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Cliff Goddard. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Note on Supplementary Material VII Preface by the Editors VIIi Preface by the Author X About the Author Xi 1

From Leibniz to Wierzbicka: The History and Philosophy of NSM 1

2

Semantic Primes and Their Grammar 25

3

Explicating Emotion Concepts across Languages and Cultures 63

4

Wonderful, Terrific, Fabulous: English Evaluational Adjectives 94

5

Semantic Molecules and Semantic Complexity 126

6

Words as Carriers of Cultural Meaning 159

7

English Verb Semantics: Verbs of Doing and Saying 194

8

English Verb Alternations and Constructions 229

9

Applications of NSM: Minimal English, Cultural Scripts and Language Teaching 265

10 Retrospect: NSM Compared with Other Approaches to Semantic Analysis 304 Bibliography 343 About the Series Editor 357 Websites for Cognitive Linguistics and CIFCL Speakers 358

Note on Supplementary Material All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as handouts and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the web­site www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via a QR code for the print ver­sion of this book. In the e-book both the QR code and dynamic links will be available which can be accessed by a mouse-click. The material can be accessed on figshare.com through a PC internet browser or via mobile devices such as a smartphone or tablet. To listen to the audiorecording on hand-held devices, the QR code that appears at the beginning of each chapter should be scanned with a smart phone or tablet. A QR reader/ scanner and audio player should be installed on these devices. Alternatively, for the e-book version, one can simply click on the QR code provided to be redirected to the appropriate website. This book has been made with the intent that the book and the audio are both available and usable as separate entities. Both are complemented by the availability of the actual files of the presentations and material provided as hand-outs at the time these lectures were given. All rights and permission remain with the authors of the respective works, the audio-recording and supplementary material are made available in Open Access via a CC-BY-NC license and are reproduced with kind permission from the authors. The recordings are courtesy of the China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics (http://cifcl.buaa.edu.cn/), funded by the Beihang University Grant for International Outstanding Scholars.

The complete collection of lectures by Cliff Goddard can be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/ m9.figshare.c.3950929. © Cliff Goddard. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004357723_001

Preface by the Editors The present text, entitled Ten Lectures on NSM Semantics: Exploring language, thought and culture using simple, translatable words by Cliff Goddard, is a transcribed version of the lectures given by Cliff Goddard in November 2016 as the forum speaker for the 16th China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics. Cliff Goddard received his PhD from Australian National University and is currently Professor of Linguistics at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia, where he has worked since 2011. Before moving to Griffith University, he taught at the University of New England. Goddard’s research interests lie at the intersection of language, meaning, and culture. He has published widely in theoretical and descriptive semantics, pragmatics, intercultural communication, and Australian English. Much of his work has an interdisciplinary character, connecting with anthropology and psychology. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Goddard works primarily in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework. Among his major publications are three volumes co-edited with Anna Wierzbicka, the originator of the NSM framework: Semantic and Lexical Universals (1994), Meaning and Universal Grammar (2002), and Cultural Scripts (2004). He has published two sole-authored textbooks, both with Oxford University Press, UK: Semantic Analysis (2nd ed. 2011, first ed. 1998) and The Languages of East and Southeast Asia: An Introduction (2005). With co-author Anna Wierzbicka, his latest book is Words and Meanings (Oxford University Press, UK). The China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics (http://cifcl.buaa .edu.cn/) provides a forum for eminent international scholars to give lectures on their original contributions to the field. It is a continuing program organized by several prestigious universities in Beijing. The following is a list of organizers for CIFCL 16. Organizer: Fuyin (Thomas) Li: PhD/Professor, Beihang University Co-organizers: Yihong Gao: PhD/Professor, Peking University Baohui Shi: PhD/Professor, Beijing Forestry University Yuan Gao: PhD/Professor, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Ma Sai: PhD, Beijing Normal University

Preface by the Editors

ix

The text is published, accompanied by its audio disc counterpart, as one of the Distinguished Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics. The transcriptions of the video, proofreading of the text and publication of the work in its present book form, have involved many people’s strenuous inputs. The initial transcripts were completed by the following: Yu Shen, Yangrui Zhang, Jinmei Li, Hongxia Jia, Jing Du, Mengmin Xu, Chenxi Niu, Ning Guo, Shu Qi. Jin Mei Li and Hongxia Jia undertook revisions for the whole text. Then we editors did the word-byword and line-by-line revisions. To improve the readability of the text, we have deleted false starts, repetitions, most fillers like now, so, you know, OK, and so on, again, of course, if you like, sort of, etc. Occasionally, the written version needs an additional word to be clear, a word that was not actually spoken in the lecture. We have added such words within single brackets […]. To make the written version readable, even without watching the film, we’ve added a few “stage directions”, in italics also within single brackets: […]. The stage direction describes what the speaker was doing, such as pointing at a slide, showing an object, etc. The speaker, Professor Cliff Goddard, did the final revisions. The published version is the final version approved by the speaker. The publication of this book is sponsored by the National Social Science Foundation Award No.13BYY012, and by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (YMF-16-WYXY-010). Thomas Fuyin Li

Beihang University (BUAA) [email protected]

Jing Du

Beihang University (BUAA) [email protected]

Preface by the Author These lectures, delivered at China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics, December 2016, reflect my conviction that the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach can be rightly seen as a part of the cognitive linguistics movement. I would like to thank Professor Thomas Li for the invitation to participate. It was a honour to present in a series which has featured so many distinguished cognitive linguists over the years. Although the 10 Lectures in this volume are very closely based on lecture transcripts, they are not verbatim transcripts. I have tidied them up in various ways, while still preserving the oral quality. As for referencing, I have added a few additional in-text references to the lectures, but I’ve tried to keep these to a minimum. There is a large bibliography that will enable interested readers to locate other key works. I would like to express my appreciation to the Chinese students and scholars who attended the lecture series. I was greatly impressed by your knowledge, talent, and seriousness of purpose. The influence of Anna Wierzbicka’s brilliant scholarship will be evident throughout the series. I would like to thank Zhengdao Ye for valuable advice about the planning of the lecture series and Mee Wun Lee for help with editing the transcripts. Cliff Goddard

Griffith University June 2017

About the Author Cliff Goddard received his PhD from Australian National University and is currently Professor of Linguistics at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia, where he has worked since 2011. Before moving to Griffith University, he taught at the University of New England. Goddard’s research interests lie at the intersection of language, meaning, and culture. He has published widely in theoretical and descriptive semantics, pragmatics, intercultural communication, and Australian English. Much of this work has an interdisciplinary character, connecting with anthropology and psychology. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. For 15 years from the early 1980s, Goddard did extensive linguistic analysis and documentation of dialects of the Western Desert Language (Central Australia). He published a comprehensive Grammar of Yankunytjatjara, the Pitjantjatjara/ Yankunytjatjara To English Dictionary (revised second edition 1996), and a number of scholarly articles. In the 1990s, he shifted focus to Malay (Bahasa Melayu), and produced a string of studies on the semantics and cultural pragmatics of this language. After 2000, he broadened scope to take in a wide range of theoretical and typological studies, often in collaboration with other scholars. He has edited two collective volumes: Ethnopragmatics (2006, Mouton de Gruyter) and Cross-Linguistic Semantics (2008, John Benjamins). Goddard works primarily in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework. Among the major publications are three volumes co-edited with Anna Wierzbicka, the originator of the NSM framework: Semantic and Lexical Universals (1994), Meaning and Universal Grammar (2002), and Cultural Scripts (2004). He has published two sole-authored textbooks, both with Oxford University Press, UK: Semantic Analysis (2nd ed. 2011, first ed. 1998) and The Languages of East and Southeast Asia: An Introduction (2005). With co-author Anna Wierzbicka, he has a recent book Words and Meanings (2014) with Oxford University Press, UK. He is editor of Minimal English for Global World: Improved Communication Using Fewer Words (2018, Palgrave).

Lecture 1

From Leibniz to Wierzbicka: The History and Philosophy of NSM Thank you very much for the kind introduction! And I would like at the beginning to thank the organizers for inviting me, especially Professor Thomas Li (Beihang University), and the other universities who are cooperating to make this possible. Also Thomas’ talented and dedicated team that supports the entire forum. As you know, I am giving a series of ten lectures. The first Lecture is a philosophical and historical introduction to the main ideas. This is the plan of my lecture today: First, a quick overview of the current situation: what is this NSM theory, who are the main people, where are they, what are they studying … just a sketch. Then I want to go back in time, and tell a story about how the most important ideas were first conceived, in the European philosophical tradition. We will start with antiquity, the ancient Greeks, then jump to the Middle Ages, and after that to the most important philosopher for NSM, the 17th century philosopher Leibniz. Then we will move quickly into modern times, and that will be the end of the presentation. In Lecture 2, I will take you into the details of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, and explain the reasons for some of the important aspects of that metalanguage. This is Professor Anna Wierzbicka (fig. 1), the originator of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory. She was born and educated in Poland, so Polish is her native language, her first language. She came to Australia in the 1970s. She is now Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Australian National University. The slide shows a number of significant quotations. First: “All languages share not only a lexical core but also a grammatical core, so at the heart of all languages there is a kind of mini-language.” This mini-language is the NSM. It’s the intersection of all human languages, what all human languages have in common. What do all languages have in common? First, certain special words—a very small number of special words, indicating very simple ideas; and along with

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5640640. © Cliff Goddard. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004357723_002

2

Figure 1

Lecture 1

Anna Wierzbicka

these words, a very small grammar. That’s the basic idea of NSM: a mini-language. This mini-language has as many different versions as there are human languages. So, there is English NSM, Chinese NSM, Vietnamese NSM, German NSM, and so on. This shared core of all languages provides us linguists with a metalanguage that we can use to explain meanings and ideas (fig. 1, second quote). The final statement on the slide also captures an important attitude of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage linguists, namely, that meaning is human interpretation, that meaning is subjective, that meaning is anthropocentric. It is infused with a human perspective. It’s not just a matter of objective facts, correlating “sense data” with truth-conditions, or anything like that. This of course is very much in alignment with Cognitive Linguistics. The whole movement of Cognitive Linguistics is about something which is psychologically real, which is in our minds, which is part of our actual being. To continue my overview (fig. 2), you can see at the top left an earlier picture of Professor Wierzbicka, and this is a picture of her very first book in English, called Semantic Primitives. That was 1972. This is also an early book of hers, The Semantics of Grammar (1988). So just think, this was actually very early, relatively speaking—not many people were thinking about the semantics of grammar at that time. Wierzbicka was one of the first people to publish

From Leibniz to Wierzbicka

Figure 2

3

Early works by Anna Wierzbicka on NSM semantics

extensively on the connection between semantics and grammar. This book here Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis (1985) is really an amazing book. Unfortunately, it’s now out of print. Cognitive Linguistics is a broad movement, as you know, and there are many different approaches under the umbrella of Cognitive Linguistics. But to my mind it is very clear that the NSM approach is part of Cognitive Linguistics, not only because it shares basic assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics, but also because of the human side. Anna Wierzbicka was present at the Leipzig conference in 1980 where Cognitive Linguistics really got started. She published in the first issue of the journal Cognitive Linguitics. She has been a personal friend of Charles Fillmore, Ron Langacker, and other important cognitive linguists. In her early work, she researched topics which have now become normal in linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, such as prototypes and constructions, as well as doing extensive work on lexical semantics. Lexical semantics was really the origin of NSM, as we will see. I just got some figures from Google Scholar. Unfortunately, you cannot access Google Scholar in China, but it’s a very convenient way of getting citation figures of leading linguists. As you can see, Wierzbicka’s citation numbers are very large. And these indices, like the h-index of 67, are very high. So, on objective evidence, Professor Wierzbicka is clearly one of the world’s leading linguists. She is extremely famous in Russia and in Eastern Europe. She is a member of Russian Academy of Social Science, which awarded her the Dobrushin Prize in 2010. It’s actually a prize normally given to mathematicians,

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Lecture 1

Figure 3

Anna Wierzbicka is one of the world’s most prolific and most-cited linguists

Figure 4

Locations of Griffith University, Brisbane, and Australian National University, Canberra

but the Russian Academy was impressed by the logic and rigor of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, and honored her with this award. In the same year, 2010, she also received the Polish Science Foundation Prize, which is a very important award. Some people call it the “Polish Nobel”.

From Leibniz to Wierzbicka

Figure 5

5

NSM research community (continued next slide)

Now, some other information. This is Australia (Fig 4). I’d like you to know exactly where my home university is: Griffith University. Griffith University has one of its main campuses in Brisbane. That’s where Brisbane is (see map, top arrow), the state capital of Queensland. The Australian National University, where Professor Wierzbicka is based, is in Canberra, the capital city of Australia (see map, bottom arrow). Those are the two main universities in Australia which have NSM linguists. There are others in a number of other places around the world (see figures 5–7). The NSM research community has been steadily growing over the last 35 years. It is still strongest in Australia, but there are now advanced practitioners in many countries, including Poland, Denmark, Canada, Israel, Ireland, Spain, Singapore, and Finland. We find that there is steadily increasing interest in NSM. It is still a minority theory, but over the last 25 or 30 years, it has been steadily going up. So, this is very encouraging. Not only are there more and more linguists, and more and more publications coming out using this theory, but there is a tremendous interest in NSM research outside linguistics—for instance, in anthropology, in culture studies, literature studies, and other adjacent fields. This (pointing to fig. 5) is Professor Anna Wierzbicka; Bert Peeters, originally from Belgium, now in Australia; Felix Ameka from Ghana; Jean Harkins— Australian. Zhengdao Ye—she is probably the most important Chinese linguist using NSM, based at the Australian National University. Jock Wong also, he is Singaporean. Here is Anna Gladkova, originally from Russia, and so on.

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Figure 6

Lecture 1

Languages that have been intensively studied using NSM methods

Many languages have been studied using NSM. The method is very suitable for studying diversity of languages. This is a list of some of the languages (pointing to fig. 6). Carsten Levisen is Danish and is a very important NSM linguist these days. Auxiliadora Barrios Rodriguez is in Madrid, Spain. Sandy Habib is in Israel. Adrian Tien, originally from Taiwan, he is now in Ireland. He has written the most wonderful book on the semantics of Chinese music (Tien 2016). In my opinion, the NSM theory can claim to be the best developed cognitive approach to semantics. It’s a very comprehensive approach. It can be applied to many different areas of lexical semantics, also to grammatical semantics, and it can be applied to cultural norms and values. It is a very comprehensive and flexible system. Another good thing about NSM semantics is that NSM publications have a long “shelf life”. What I mean is, you can still read publications that are 15 or 20 years old and they still make sense, even though the theory has developed over the years. Because the assumptions are basically stable and because the metalanguage is based on simple words, the papers are still valuable. As you would know, in many schools of linguistics, there’s a constant turnover of highly technical concepts, which often means that once a paper is 5 or 6 years old, it’s basically incomprehensible; and also, that people are no longer much interested in reading it. Bill Croft once talked about the “kaleidoscopic” pace of changing linguistic terminology.

From Leibniz to Wierzbicka

Figure 7

More about NSM research

Figure 8

NSM homepage, bit.ly/1XUoRRV or search: Griffith + NSM

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Lecture 1

Figure 9 Recent NSM books

There is a website (NSM Homepage, see fig. 8) which you can access. This website has a lot of comprehensive information. There are pages of references with many hundreds of referreed publications listed. There are downloadable resources, which you can freely access. They include Tables of Semantic Primes in many languages, and a Chart of NSM Semantic Primes. I will show you this chart and talk about it in the afternoon lecture. It summarizes grammatical aspects of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. This (fig. 9) gives you a snapshot of some recent books on NSM. Here is Adrian Tien’s book on the semantics of Chinese music. This is my 2011 textbook Semantic Analysis. This is a good entry-level introduction, written for undergraduate courses, including advanced undergraduate courses, as a general introduction to semantics, but with an emphasis on NSM semantics. The latest book, by myself and Professor Wierzbicka jointly, is called Words and Meanings (2014, Oxford University Press). This book here by Professor Wierzbicka, Imprisoned in English (2014), is also a very important book. I’ll come to that in later lectures. As you can see, there are a lot of books, as well as lots of journal articles. Now to NSM. What’s it all about? What’s the basic idea? I will try to put it in a few simple sentences. If you want to explain anything to anyone, you have to use simpler words. So, if we want to explain meanings in one language or

From Leibniz to Wierzbicka

9

another language, if we want to answer questions like, “What does that mean? What does that person want to say when they use these words?”, we have to use simpler words. It seems like basic logic. But if we think that we should use simpler words, it implies that there should be some ultimately simple words. Because, if we start with some complicated words and we explain them using some simpler words, then we explain these words in turn using still simpler words, eventually we should reach the rock bottom. It’s sort of like chemistry. You know, there are so many substances in the world, all of them consisting actually of 90 or so elements. Only 90 elements are enough to make hundreds of thousands of physical substances. How did people find those 90 elements? They found them by experimentation, by trial and error. They tried to break down substances. People once thought that water was an element. Now we know it’s not, because we know that we can break water down into hydrogen and oxygen. Can we break down hydrogen? No. How do we know that? Because we tried and failed. So, the idea is that there should be some elements of meaning. We don’t know in advance how many. We have to find out by experiment. Now, those experiments, that process of experimental conceptual analysis, has been going on for 40 years. And the findings have changed over 40 years. Now this is what we have arrived at.

Figure 10 Semantic primes—English (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014)

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Lecture 1

This is a list of what we call semantic primes (fig. 10). That means semantic elements. Meanings which are so simple that they can’t be explained using even simpler words. On the right-hand side of the table, there is a list of linguistic labels, there for linguists to group the words together. But as for semantic primes, we are talking about meanings like: I and YOU, SOMEONE and SOMETHING, THIS, THE SAME, OTHER, GOOD and BAD, BIG and SMALL, THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR, SAY, DO, HAPPEN and MOVE. These are all proposed semantic primes, simple meanings. Intuitively, they sound very plain and ordinary, and I guess it is true. They don’t sound like very cultural meanings and that too is as it should be. They should not be meanings that belong to one culture or to one language only. They should be the shared elements of human cognition. This list (in fig. 10) is presented in English, but similar lists have been devised for about 25–30 languages. Of course, there are complications. For instance, consider the word for DO. In many languages the word for DO, as used, for example, to say ‘What did you do?’ or ‘This person did something bad’, … the word for DO can also be used to mean “make”. So, one has to be cautious. When we say that a word is, or represents, a semantic prime, we don’t mean that the word has just one meaning. It could have two or three meanings. One of those meanings is the basic one, the semantic prime, the other ones can be different. I will explain more about this in this afternoon’s lecture. So, the idea is that you can produce a list like this, a table of semantic primes, not only in English but in all other languages. Just to give you a feeling for it, this language (fig. 11) is Finnish. Finnish is not genetically related to other European languages. It belongs to a different language family. It has a very different language structure to English, but you can find all the semantic primes, or more precisely, what we call “exponents” of all the semantic primes in Finnish. “Exponent” just means the word which expresses the semantically primitive meaning. Sometimes there are two or more exponents for the same meaning. For instance, in English we have two words for OTHER. We have other, and we also have the word else. This is a property of the English language. In fact, other and else, we say that they just mean the same thing. You use else when you attach to an indefinite pronoun, like someone else, somewhere else, but you use other when you are attaching to a noun, like another place, another person. I will talk more about this in the second lecture. Equally, you can have a list of semantic primes in Chinese (fig. 12). This list is published on the NSM homepage jointly, by Jock Wong and Zhengdao Ye. I will discuss other aspects of the metalanguage later in the lecture series. That’s the introduction to NSM. Now I’ll explain the logic of my 10 lectures.

From Leibniz to Wierzbicka

Figure 11 Semantic primes – Finnish (Vanhatalo et al 2014)

Figure 12 Semantic primes – Chinese (Wong and Ye 2016)

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Lecture 1

Soon we are going to start in earnest on an overview of history of ideas connected with NSM. And in the afternoon, in Lecture 2, we will be looking at the actual Natural Semantic Metalanguage in some detail. That’s a part with some “hardcore linguistics”. Tomorrow, in Lectures 3 and 4, I want to show you that this metalanguage is good for doing certain hard areas of semantics, areas that are very interesting and very important to human life. One is the area of the emotions. Can we understand emotion words of different languages? The other area is specifically about English, about English words like wonderful, fabulous, terrific, marvelous, there are so many. These are evaluational adjectives and their meanings are very “subjective”. Can we pin down their meanings? In Lecture 5, I want to take up the question which will be on everybody’s mind: How can you explain so many thousands of meanings with a mere 65 semantic primes? This surely seems impossible. The answer is that it’s not just the 65 semantic primes, we can also use more complex words, like ‘fire’ and ‘water’, and ‘sky’ and ‘ground’ , and ‘head’ and ‘hands’, and so on. These words are not semantic primes, but they are still very basic words, very basic meanings. We call them “semantic molecules”. Lecture 5 is about semantic molecules, and how very complex concepts can be built up using semantic molecules. Lecture 6 is about words as carriers of cultural meanings. Then we come to two lectures on the semantics of English verbs. These two lectures, Lecture 7 and Lecture 8, should be very interesting for people who are interested in event structure and English verb syntax. Then we come to Friday. One of the things about NSM is that it has many practical applications, in language teaching, in interpreting and translating, and in a number of other fields. I think it’s a good thing that a linguistic theory should have practical applications. These are covered in Lecture 9. Finally, in Lecture 10 I will review everything and compare NSM to a number of other theories of meaning. That’s the plan. Shall we start with this (see fig. 13)? Back in the days of Ancient Greece, Plato is supposed to have compared thinking to writing in a mental book. He had the idea that when a person thinks or remembers things, they seem almost to “write down words in the soul”. If what is written down is true, then the proposition is true. What is being brought up here is the relationship between thinking and words, the relationship between cognition and words. Plato says it’s almost as if there were a scribe “writing words in the soul”. He also says that there is another artist at work “in the chambers of the soul”, which is the painter. He provides images. Actually, Plato seems to say that the words come first, and then “after the scribe has done his work”, the painter draws images. This passage anticipates debates which have gone on through the ages, concerning the

From Leibniz to Wierzbicka

13

Figure 13 Plato on thinking and reasoning

Figure 14 Aristotle on definitions

relationship between words and images in our thinking. This is still not settled actually. Surely both are involved in ordinary thinking. Even today in Cognitive Linguistics there are some who favour the more “propositional” approach, a language-like representation of meaning, and others who favor a more “imagistic” approach.

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Lecture 1

Now we jump ahead to Aristotle. All these philosophers of course considered many topics, but one of the important contributions of Aristotle was the idea that if you want to explain something, you should use simpler terms. When we make a definition, Aristotle says in his work Topica, we have to use terms that are “prior and more intelligible”. For a definition to be successful, the terms of the definition have to be prior and more intelligible. He says: “For the reason why the definition is rendered is to make known the term stated (he means, to make known the meaning of the words you are defining), and we make things known by taking not any random terms, but those which are prior and more intelligible”. Then: “someone who does not define through terms of this kind has not defined at all”. In modern terms, we can put it like this: “Words and concepts which are semantically complex and obscure must be explained using terms which are simpler and easier to understand.” Any definition which doesn’t observe those principles is pretty well worthless. Plato and Aristotle didn’t talk about two interesting questions (fig. 15). The first is this. Suppose we imagine that there is a kind of mental language, a language of the mind, Plato and Aristotle didn’t raise the question: “Is that mental language the same for all people, or do Greek people think in Greek, and Romans in Latin, and Chinese in Chinese?” The other question is: “Granted that it’s good to be able to explain things using simpler terms, how can we know which terms are simpler than other terms?”

Figure 15 Two important questions.

From Leibniz to Wierzbicka

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The first question was taken up by St. Augustine, also called “Augustine of Hippo”. In the 5th century he had the idea that we should distinguish mental speech, where we talk to ourselves; for example, if I say to myself “it’s getting late”, I’m sort of verbalizing in my mind, … That, of course, one does in one’s own language. On the other hand, St. Augustine says, there is a deeper level of thought, which he said occurs in a language which belongs to all humans, in words which do not belong to any single language, in words which are neither Greek nor Latin. This is the idea of the universal language of thought. As for the other question, how to find the simpler words, we have to jump ahead a long way, to the Middle Ages, to William of Ockham. This is the same person who is responsible for the principle of “Ockham’s Razor”. His idea is, we should take any human language and simplify it. We should remove all the unnecessary parts, and reduce the human language to the smallest subset. That means that, if you speak a European language, you have to get rid of all the genders, all the inflections, all the conjugations, all of the formal variations. As you know, European languages are like that. Chinese is not like that. In Chinese, every word stays the same in form. Now we jump ahead again to the 17th century (fig. 16). This is a period just before the Enlightenment, the time of the great rationalist philosophers: Descartes, Pascal, Arnauld, John Locke, and Leibniz. They all believed that

Figure 16 Leibniz and other 17th-century thinkers

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there must be some “simple ideas” shared by all people: the basic elements of thought. They all agreed on that. The difference between these philosophers was about the way we get those simple ideas. Some thought we are born with them, others thought we acquire them through experience. But regardless of that, they all believed in the existence of simple ideas. That’s what today we call semantic primes. Here is a great quotation from Arnauld: “I say it would impossible to define every word. For in order to define a word it is necessary to use other words designating the idea which we wish to connect to the word being defined. And if we wished to define the words used to explain that word, we would need still others, and so on to infinity. So consequently, we necessarily have to stop at primitive terms which are undefined.” Just simple logic. There should be some primitive terms, some undefinable terms, at the bottom of it all. Leibniz was the one who really took this idea further (fig. 17). Here is a famous quotation: “If nothing could be understood in itself, nothing could be understood at all.” He means that semantic primes or simple ideas, are the elements of understanding. They are what we understand things in terms of. We need to have these ideas in place in order to be able to understand other things. We can only say that we understand something if “we have broken it down into parts which can be understood in themselves.” He means that to fully understand a complex concept we have to decompose it into simple concepts.

Figure 17 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)

From Leibniz to Wierzbicka

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Figure 18 Leibniz’s quest for the “alphabet of human thought”

Leibniz believed that the number of simple concepts could be actually quite small, because as he says: “Nature usually achieves as much as possible with as few elements as possible.” This is a very advanced intuition from Leibniz. Also he says, “How very important this is, few people understand, because few people reflect how very important it might be to determine what the first elements in all things are.” Leibniz liked to speak about a “catalogue of simple ideas” (fig. 18). He also called it an “alphabet of human thoughts”. This is an analogy that doesn’t really work in Chinese, but if you think of European languages, you have the individual letters and you make words from these letters. His idea was you have simple concepts and you make complicated concepts from the simple ones. What was so different about Leibniz, compared to the other 17th century philosophers, was that he believed one could actually identify the simple ideas by experimentation, by trial and error. He was constantly throughout his life practising how to explain things using simpler words. Often he would write these definitions in the margins of his manuscripts. Many weren’t published till hundreds of years later, till people took those marginal notes and compiled them into a table of definitions. Leibniz’s approach is very modern. It is a linguistic approach, tackling the problem of simple ideas from a linguistic angle, rather than as a pure philosopher. The editor of his works later commented: “There are a great many

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Figure 19 The “cognitive” Leibniz

manuscripts among Leibniz’s papers which deal with elementary concepts and definitions … Convinced that he would never be able to complete the great task alone, how often he yearned for help!” This is indeed a very sad thing, because after Leibniz’s death his project was discontinued and wasn’t studied again for hundreds of years. A couple of other things about Leibniz (fig. 19). First, he was very interested in language diversity. He was very interested in Chinese, in fact. Leibniz was one of the European scholars who was most interested in reports coming from China. He was fascinated by Chinese characters, and by the nature of the Chinese language in which words have a fixed form, unlike as in Latin, in which every word might have 4, 5 or even 10 or more, different forms. He believed that when writing “universal grammar”, we should consult other languages and that this will be theoretically useful. Second, he was cognitive in his orientation: on my slide (fig. 19) he was the “cognitive Leibniz”. This is possibly the most famous quotation of Leibniz: “Languages are the best mirrors of the human mind.” Notice that he didn’t say ‘language’—says ‘languages’. The exact analysis of words, says Leibniz, “would show us better than anything else the workings of the understanding”. This is truly the idea that we should look into language and try to understand language, and in that way we can understand cognition. Jumping ahead again (fig. 20). A century or so later, probably the greatest figure in linguistics and anthropology was Wilhelm von Humboldt. He was the brother of the famous Alexander von Humboldt. Alexander was the most famous scientist in his day, but his brother Wilhelm was the most famous linguist and anthropologist. These two guys were amazing. They had a huge intellect.

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Figure 20 Wilhelm von Humboldt

They collected information from all over the world. Wilhelm von Humboldt collected materials on more than 60 languages. He published extensively on grouping languages together, and investigated many questions of language structure. He can be regarded as the founder of comparative linguistics, and also as one of the founders of anthropological linguistics. Here is one of his most beautiful quotations: “Every language draws a circle around the people to whom it adheres which it is possible for the individual to escape only by stepping into a different one.” He seems to be saying that every language is a sort of world unto itself, that there is a sort of universe of meaning, a universe of thought, inherent in every language. This is a very powerful idea. But at the same time he also sets out another idea: “To be sure, there is a midpoint, around which all languages revolve, and this midpoint can be sought and really found, and it should always be kept in mind in the comparative study of languages.” This “mid-point” shared by all languages—this is really the same idea as NSM, the idea that there is an “intersection of all languages”. The NSM project is to identify what words and grammar, what tiny collection of words and mini-grammar, is shared by all languages. OK, let’s speed up as we get into modern times (fig. 21). The ideas of von Humboldt and other German thinkers were physically transplanted into North America by Franz Boaz and then later by Edward Sapir, who is one of the greatest linguists, and also Sapir’s student Benjamin Lee Whorf. This was a period

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Figure 21 Mid- and late twentieth century

in American linguistics where they were fascinated by American Indian languages, the Native American languages. The idea of the relationship between language and mind was very active in Whorf’s famous book Language, Thought and Reality. When we get further into the 20th century (fig. 21), other things start to happen, diverging from the tradition I’ve been talking about. Logical semantics arose. Actually, logical semantics didn’t come from linguistics. It came from mathematics and philosophical logic, from important thinkers like Frege and Russell, and after them, in linguistics, from Richard Montague. They introduced what is now called “formal semantics”. Formal semantics began to influence linguistics. That was one development. This type of approach, i.e. formal semantics, is not cognitive. It has nothing to do with human mind. It’s to do with the relationship between language and the world, the objective reality. That was their key idea. That was one trend. The second thing that happened in the mid 20th century was generative grammar, especially Chomsky. The Chomsky mindset or impulse was very influenced by computer science, actually. Chomsky’s teacher was Zellig Harris who was, I suppose, what these days we would call a computational linguist. The idea was to use formal methods borrowed from computer science to describe the syntax of natural languages. Chomsky was never very interested in meaning; actually, he has fought it off over his whole career. He was prepared to open a small door for formal semantics—that has come into generative linguistics in the notion of logical form. But that’s all. Nothing cultural, nothing

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subjective. Nothing like the rich vocabulary that one can find in the dictionary, or anything like that. According to Chomsky, we should always keep that out there, and concentrate on formal syntax. Under Chomsky’s influence, there was a “divorce” with anthropology. Modern American linguistics “divorced” anthropology. For much of his career, Chomsky said he was actually doing cognitive psychology, Now he says he’s doing biology: biolinguistics. (You won’t find many biologists who agree with that, but Chomsky is a very independent thinker. He is convinced that he is doing a kind of biology.) As you know, generative grammar has become extremely technical, extremely abstract, and extremely formal. This is a quote I found from George Steiner (1992): “generative grammars have retreated into almost total formality, into a degree of meta-mathematical algorithmic abstraction so great to have hardly any bearing on the matter of actual speech.” One might disagree, or one might agree. This situation has a lot to do with the rise of Cognitive Linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics grew up as reaction against formal generative linguistics. The idea was to “bring back the mind”, to bring back human cognition, and to re-start linguistics. Especially in North America, the important early cognitive linguists were actually generative linguists, former students of Chomsky and others: George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Charles Fillmore, Leonard Talmy, and James McCawley. These are all people who broke ranks with Chomsky and tried to reenergize linguistics with a more psychological, more realistic, and more comprehensive approach. It’s worth mentioning, I believe, that there is also a European strand of Cognitive Linguistics, which is more philosophical, I would say, than the American style. If I can generalize, North American linguistics tends to be very empirical in its approach. So the idea is: “Here is a problem to be solved, how do we solve it? Where is the data?” This is the typical approach. The European approach is more philosophical: “Where does this idea come from? We need to understand our own process better”. It is more historical and more hermeneutical. Both tendencies co-exist in Cognitive Linguistics, and in my opinion, it’s a very good thing. Now, I can bring you close to NSM again (fig. 22). You remember that we had Leibniz. We had Leibniz in 17th century with his idea of finding the simple concepts by analysis of languages, by comparing languages, by experimenting with definitions. The poor man, after his death, this project was discontinued. There were also some skeptical receptions of it. In English-speaking world, Bertram Russell in particular never had any time for it. But it was in fact a marvelous idea and it was very important to Leibniz, in his own thinking. Leibniz

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Figure 22 Origins of NSM: Semantic primitives

was a remarkable polymath: not only a philosopher, but also a diplomat, an engineer, a mathematician. He worked in so many different fields. And he actually wrote that his success in so many fields was because of his idea that you could analyze ideas into simple concepts. That was his own testimony, that this had helped him through his entire career. Still after his death, the project fell into obscurity until the 1960s. In the 1960s, in Poland there was an important linguist called Andrzej Bogusławski. Bogusławski was inspired by Leibniz and began to try to popularize his idea of locating the basic elements of thought through the analysis of languages. He gave a series of lectures at Warsaw University in the 1960s. Attending those lectures, there was a brilliant young Polish linguist named Anna Wierzbicka. She had done her first PhD on literature. (In Poland you are required to do two PhDs before you can get an academic job.) Wierzbicka was inspired by Bogusławski, as she told her story in her autobiographical paper (1997). Here is a quotation: “The ‘golden dream’ of the seventeenth-century thinkers which couldn’t be realized in the framework of philosophy and was therefore generally abandoned as utopian, could be realized, Bogusławski maintained, if it were approached from a linguistic and empirical rather than a purely philosophical approach.” By the 20th century, linguistics was on the way to being a science, or at least, a pre-science. A great deal more information was available, a lot more grammars. Logic was also in the air. So, conditions were essentially favorable for Leibniz’s idea to be revived. Wierzbicka wrote: “I was immensely impressed

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by the program that Bogusławski set for linguistics, and I decided to devote myself to its pursuit.” In 1972, she published the book Semantic Primitives in English. Previously it was in Polish, but it was published in English in 1972. In this book, Wierzbicka actually proposes, believe it or not, a mere 13 semantic primitives. At that time, she thought that perhaps you can explain all linguistic meanings with as few as 13 primes—at least, you could explain many things. The chapters in that book dealt with emotions, with kinship terms, with parts of the body and other case studies. It was a very influential book. I’m going to be reviewing how we have moved on from there in the subsequent talks. What I want to do in Lecture 2, this afternoon, is to take it from there (see fig. 23). What happened between 1972 and the book Semantic Primitives, with its concrete proposals? How did the theory of NSM develop and change over the 45 years to bring us to the present day? I’m going to summarize the main findings about semantic primes, because, as you saw at the beginning, we no longer believe that they are very few in number, like 12 or 13. We think there are actually four or five times that number: 65 semantic primes. In other words, over the 45 years, the inventory of semantic primes has gradually increased in number, for good reasons, and we now have arrived at the modern version. Also, we now have a much clearer picture of the grammar

Figure 23 Lecture 2 A look ahead.

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of semantic primes. Even Leibniz did not talk very much about the grammar of semantic primes. He was mainly interested in identifying the simple ideas of cognition, but in fact we need to see how those ideas can fit together, how the ideas can be combined. And when we talk about combining, that’s grammar: grammar at its simplest, syntax at its simplest. We will also consider different languages, and how we can identify semantic primes in different languages. There are many issues of linguistic analysis that arise. Figure 23 shows the picture here. At the bottom left you can see an advance look at the current Chart of NSM Semantic Primes. At the bottom right is a reminder of the main recent books that you might get. This is Wierzbicka’s 1996 book. It has a massive number of citations, and is probably the single most important NSM book, in terms of influence. Next to it are pictured my 2011 textbook and also our most recent Words and Meanings. I’m very interested to hear your reactions, and look forward to discussion.

Lecture 2

Semantic Primes and Their Grammar This is the plan for this afternoon’s lecture, Lecture 2: I am going to give you an overview of semantic primes, starting with the idea of what is a semantic prime, i.e. what’s the definition of semantic prime. Then we will move to how we chose the semantic primes. Why have we got this particular collection of 65 semantic primes? I will use a couple of specific examples and spend some time on them, so that you can really get the idea. Then comes the question: What about other languages? How can we decide whether a particular language has got an exponent of a semantic prime? In other words, is there a good way, in this language, to express this particular meaning, or not? And also, we will survey different complications. Every language is different so naturally the exponents of the semantic primes are going to look different, not just in form but in some other ways as well. (i) Formal complexity. Some languages’ exponents of semantic primes are morphologically complex. (ii) Polysemy. Exponents of semantic primes can be polysemous. We have built up quite a bit of experience about the patterns of polysemy that are found in different languages. This is quite helpful in identifying exponents of semantic primes, and it’s part of lexical typology actually. (iii) Allolexy. Allolexes of semantic primes are variants, alternative exponents for a single prime. (v) How semantic primes are sometimes expressed by portmanteaus, i.e. several semantic primes packaged together into a single word. In the third part of the lecture, we’ll talk about the grammar of semantic primes. I can’t describe the entire grammar of semantic primes but I am going to give an overview, and then look at the grammar of several different semantic primes, namely, HAPPEN, DO, and SAY, and then at some complications and extensions in the relation to the semantic prime KNOW, and a short look at CAN and MAY. What I am trying to do is to take a selection of interesting case studies. By the end, you should have a good feel, so to speak, for the grammar

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5684101. © Cliff Goddard. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004357723_003

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Preliminary examples: primes in explications

of semantic primes. Then in Lecture 3 tomorrow, we can apply this to emotion words and see how it works in practice. Before we talk about identifying primes, I want to give you a quick lookahead to how semantic primes are used in explications (fig. 1). I’ve chosen explications that we are going to see in more detail later in the lecture series. So for instance, in Lecture 3 I will give you an explication for the English word pleased, as in I was pleased to hear you got the scholarship. It is a kind of emotion word, pleased. One of the semantic components of pleased is: ‘this someone thought like this: “something good happened before, I wanted this”’. That’s just one section of the semantic explication for pleased. As you can see (first section of the slide), it consists of three lines: ‘someone thought like this’, ‘something good happened before’, and ‘I wanted this’. All of these are phrased exclusively in semantic primes. Now a second example (see fig. 1 again). Later, when we do the lecture on semantic molecules, I am going to give explications for some body-part words, including the word mouth. Actually, the word mouth is a very important element in many meanings, including obviously ‘eat’ and ‘drink’, but also maybe ‘talk’ and ‘sing’. One proposed component for mouth is this: ‘when people say something to other people, this part of the body moves, other people can see it’. Again, all of these words: ‘when’, ‘people’, ‘say’, ‘something’,

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‘other’, ‘people’, ‘this’, ‘part’, ‘body’, ‘moves’, ‘can’, and ‘see’—these are all semantic primes. One last example before we go further. Actually, due to a last minute change, I am not going to include this explication in Lecture 7, but I have got some background material with me if you want to see it. (See the last section of fig. 1.) It comes from an explication for (to) hit (someone). It is a pretty complicated meaning, hit. One of the components is this: ‘often when someone does this to someone, it is like this: (and what follows is a sort of typical situation) ‘this someone feels something bad towards this other someone at this time’. (pointing to the last line in fig. 1). Even this small collection of examples shows you quite a few semantic primes in action. This is what we are heading towards. This is what we want in the end: a small vocabulary of expressive, versatile words that we can put together in various ways, so as to formulate a great number of possible semantic components. Now I want to talk about “what is a semantic prime?” and why the current list is as it is. As for the definition of semantic prime, I just repeat: it is a wordmeaning or concept which cannot be paraphrased in any simpler terms. It’s analogous to a physical element, such as hydrogen or oxygen, which is a substance that can’t be broken down into any other different substances. It resists decomposition. It is not possible to break it into parts. The definition of a

Figure 2

What is a “semantic prime”?

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semantic prime is analogous to the definition of a physical element. A semantic prime is like a physical element in that it is a concept that you cannot break down into simpler parts. You cannot paraphrase it. Paraphrasing means to say the same thing in simpler words. For instance, if I say that GOOD is a semantic prime, or that SAY is a semantic prime, or that DO is a semantic prime, what I am saying is that it is impossible to paraphrase the meaning of SAY, GOOD or DO using any simpler words. Of course in a sense, we can never be 100% sure that something is a semantic prime, because it is always possible, I suppose, that someone can devise a satisfactory paraphrase. As it is with the physical elements actually: we are (perhaps) not 100% certain, but we are 99.99999% certain that hydrogen is an element. Here is a nice quotation from Anna Wierzbicka’s 1980 book Lingua Mentalis: “it is impossible to show that a concept cannot be decomposed further, except by trying to decompose it, and failing. It is impossible to show that a concept can be decomposed except by trying to decompose it, and succeeding”. What I am trying to get at is that one’s initial impression that something is or isn’t a semantic prime might be misleading. Many meanings might seem to somebody “Oh, that must be so simple”, or alternatively “That cannot be so simple”. That’s not what NSM is about. It is not just based on our impressions. What counts is whether someone can show you the paraphrase. If you think that a given word is not a semantic prime, show me the paraphrase, and prove that it can be decomposed. If I say that something is a semantic prime and you don’t agree, show me a paraphrase for it. Every one of the current set of semantic primes has a kind of biography behind it: when was it first realized that an element like this was needed? Then, what efforts were made to decompose it? And if we try repeatedly to decompose it and in each case the word survives (I mean, it resists decomposition), then it becomes established, recognized as a semantic prime. The second point about the semantic primes is that it’s expected that they will be expressible in all languages. In other words, we expect that these basic concepts will “surface” in all languages as the meanings of words or expressions. Strictly speaking, that’s not logically necessary. It could be that some semantic primes are not expressible in some languages. But that would be a very strange outcome, because it would mean that in those languages people couldn’t verbalize their thoughts fully. There would be some very basic thoughts which they have in their minds, but can’t ever put into words. That would seem to be a very unusual claim. It would mean that this language is not

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fully adequate to represent the thinking of its own speakers. So our hypothesis, the NSM hypothesis, is universality: the hypothesis is that semantic primes, given that they are so very basic, will show themselves in all languages. In other words, that semantic primes are “lexical universals”. When you put those two criteria together, it means that to be a semantic prime a word or word-meaning must be resistant to paraphrase (i.e. impossible to decompose), and also that it should be plausibly present in many many languages. Of course, we can’t sample all the languages in the world—there are 6000 or so languages, let’s say. However, we can sample 5, 10 or 15 languages, and you would be amazed at how many plain words of English, or plain words of Chinese for that matter, turn out not to have equivalents in other languages. With our own language, we naturally assume that very common words have equivalents in the other languages. But very often, this is not true. The number of words which satisfy both conditions—resistance to paraphrase and apparent universality—is very very small in number. So, these two criteria narrow the range of possible candidate words greatly. As I said before, the current inventory of 65 primes is the result of a long process of investigation and experimentation. This process has had various different aspects. It has the aspect of conceptual analysis—trying to analyze lots and lots of words from different parts of lexicons. It has the cross-linguistic aspect—comparing our current hypotheses with what we know about a number of other languages. The inventory of semantic primes has changed over time and later I am going to describe some of these developments over time. But before that I want to give you some examples of semantic primes and discuss in more detail why they can’t be paraphrased. I have chosen four examples: SOMEONE and SOMETHING, which we will look at together, and then GOOD, and then SAY. Let’s start with SOMEONE and SOMETHING. I want to mention, at the beginning, that most people would probably take it for granted that in all languages people can say ‘who’, and ask questions like ‘Who did it?’, and that they can also say ‘what’, and ask questions like ‘What happened?’. So actually, that’s already an indication that SOMEONE and SOMETHING, which in their question versions are ‘who’ and ‘what’, respectively, are likely to be universals, because they are so simple that they come to the surface as grammatical words of a language. Even so, many logically-minded linguists linguists would say “Well, we don’t need both of them, because we can use the idea of … something like an ‘entity’.” Surely SOMEONE and SOMETHING have something in common, it might be said, as both refer to some kind of

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Lecture 2

Example 1: Why SOMEONE and SOMETHING are semantic primes

‘entity’ and therefore they are not primitive. So we have an entity, and that entity can be a ‘personal entity’ or an ‘impersonal entity’. Now, why is this reasoning no good, according to NSM? One reason is that if you look at these implied paraphrases, they are frankly ridiculous. According to ordinary usage, a sentence like ‘Remember that someone loves you’ is a good use of SOMEONE. Can anyone seriously propose that this sentence means ‘Remember that a certain personal entity loves you’. Surely it is obvious that in ‘Someone loves you’, the word SOMEONE is simpler and clearer than ‘a personal entity’. Likewise, consider a sentence like ‘I want to tell you something’. How ridiculous it would be to say that it means ‘I want to tell you an impersonal entity’. So, these paraphrases just don’t work. I mean, they don’t work to human intuition, and NSM is a human system. It is about what words and sentences mean to human beings. I would predict that no human being on the planet would really accept that ‘I want to say something to you’ means ‘I want to say an impersonal entity to you’. Likewise, consider: ‘something bad happened’. It is a very good sentence, right? Does it mean ‘An impersonal entity happened’. See what I mean? Aside from the fact that the paraphrases don’t work, we also know that the word ‘entity’ is a very “sophisticated” sort of word. It’s not a word that a young child or a person without a good education would know, right? It is a very abstract word. And there is another problem as well. Consider the words ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’ in the proposed paraphrases. What does

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‘personal’ mean, what does ‘impersonal’ mean? Clearly, they just mean whether or not someone is a person. And what is a ‘person’? SOMEONE! So if you try to say that SOMEONE is a ‘personal entity’ and ‘personal’ means SOMEONE, what’s the point? The terms ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’ are just bringing back the very distinction between ‘someone’ and ‘not someone’ that we wanted to get rid of. In short, the attempt to paraphrase the word SOMEONE fails in several ways. That means that we have start with SOMEONE, accept it as a semantic prime, and what’s wrong with that? It is very good to have a simple word like SOMEONE, corresponding also to ‘who’, as a semantic prime. It is a nice simple word which young children know, and which is translatable into all languages. And likewise, with SOMETHING. As far as we know, in all languages, it is possible to distinguish who-questions from what-questions. I want to talk about the morphology a bit later, because it is also very interesting that in English, and differently in Chinese, there is an overlap in form, i.e. the words SOMEONE and SOMETHING both have the form ‘some’ in them. That’s kind of interesting and we would like to understand that. But from a point of view of meaning, I hope to have made it pretty plausible that you can’t paraphrase the meanings.

Figure 4

Example 2: Why GOOD is a semantic prime

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Now let us move to the example of GOOD. Suppose you set out to paraphrase the meaning of GOOD, what can you do? It just seems impossible. Remember, a NSM paraphrase has to use simpler words, words that are simpler than GOOD. ‘Someone did something good’—how could it be paraphrased? All we can think of is words like ‘positive evaluation’. So in a technical way, we might talk about ‘positive evaluation’ and ‘negative evaluation’. However, it is pretty obvious that terms like ‘positive evaluation’ are not good paraphrases. The term ‘evaluation’ already involves the idea of whether something is good or bad. Plus, the term ‘positive’ is just another word for ‘good’. Plus, the expression ‘positive evaluation’ doesn’t translate readily in other languages, while ‘good’ does. On and on it goes. There is one possibility which deserves to be explored. Maybe we can paraphrase ‘good’ in terms of desirability, as some philosophers have set out to do. The idea is that when someone says that something is ‘good’, what they mean is that ‘people want it like this’. It is not completely bad, right? The trouble is, there can be things which are ‘good’ but which people don’t want. Or at least, certain people quite possibly want many things which are not good. It could even be the majority of people, supposing that we have a corrupt society, … in a corrupt society, it could be that most people want things which are not good. My point is that it doesn’t seem quite satisfying to say that ‘good’ simply means ‘as people want’. One could try to save the paraphrase by re-wording it with reference to God; i.e, one could say that ‘good’ means ‘as God wants’. But unfortunately to do that paraphrase, one needs the word ‘God’ and ‘God’ is evidently not a translatable concept existing in all languages. It must be a complex concept. And also, if you look at young kids, they already say and use the word ‘good’, before they even hear anything about God. Another difficulty is that there seems to be something “objective” about saying that something is ‘good’. If I say ‘This is good’, it seems that I am presenting my evaluation, not as what someone wants or as what people want. I seem to be treating ‘This is good’ (or ‘this is bad’ for that matter), as objective, without involvement of another thinker. This is another argument against the idea of decomposing GOOD in terms of wanting. What I am trying to summarize is: when we pursue the idea of paraphrasing GOOD in terms of WANT, it doesn’t really work out. It is much more satisfactory, much more clean-cut, and a more plausible conclusion to accept GOOD as an indefinable element. It’s a part of human thinking to form a thought like ‘this is good’ or ‘someone did something good’ or ‘people said something good about you’, rather than trying to explain that in some other way.

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The term GOOD is also necessary for explicating hundreds and hundreds of words. So all words like ‘pretty’, ‘nice’, ‘kind’, ‘happy’, and many other words in ordinary language, involve GOOD in their meanings somehow. There are even grammatical constructions in some languages which involve GOOD, such as so-called benefactive constructions. It is basically when you ‘do something good for someone’: some languages have special grammar to package up that meaning. In short, there are a lot of reasons for thinking that we can’t paraphrase GOOD i.e. explain it in simpler words, while at the same time we know that GOOD can be expressed in many languages, and it seems essential to have such a word in our vocabulary of semantic description. This means that we accept GOOD as a semantic prime until someone proves otherwise. You see, it’s all about paraphrase. Our final example is SAY. So let’s just start from the top (pointing to fig. 5): ‘she said something to me’. (Don’t worry about the past tense. Different languages may or may not mark the past tense.) But ‘she said something’ or ‘what did she say?”—this is the kind of context of SAY that I am interested in (pointing to the first three lines in fig. 5). How we are going to explicate SAY? It’s very very difficult. It seems that we have to inevitably resort to more complex words. Perhaps ‘express’: ‘to express something with words’, but the word ‘express’ is more complicated than SAY.

Figure 5

Example 3: Why SAY is a semantic prime

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There is one possibility which initially sounds quite promising. How about this? ‘X said something to Y’ = ‘X did something, because X wanted Y to know something’. So, if I said something to you, it’s ‘I did something because I wanted you to know something’. You see the attraction: words like ‘did’, ‘because’, ‘want’ and ‘know’, they are all very simple. So it is a paraphrase composed of very simple words. That’s good. But still, there is a problem. The problem is that the proposed paraphrase doesn’t mean the same thing as SAY. How can we tell? Well, there are a lot of things that I can do because I want you to know something which are not ‘saying’. I could, for instance, leave something on the table for you to see, right? I did something because I wanted you to know something—but I didn’t say anything. So, in other words, this would-be equation ‘X did something because wanted Y to know something’ doesn’t match the uses of SAY or the intuitive meaning of SAY. And so from that, we conclude that there are no possible avenues for explicating SAY SAY must therefore be a semantic prime. Now just pursuing some other points, it is notable that there are many “SAY verbs” in most languages. SAY is an important semantic ingredient of speech-act words like ‘promise’, ‘threaten’ and ‘ask’. They are verbs of saying. (Similarly, there are many verbs based on DO, and many verbs based on HAPPEN. The verbal lexicon tends to be partitioned according the fundamental semantic primes.) Sometimes you even get SAY built into grammar, as when some languages have so-called “hearsay evidential” constructions or particles. We use such constructions or particles to indicate something like ‘I know this because someone said something’. Sometimes people call it ‘hearsay evidential’. This aspect of grammar is well-known in linguistic typology. Do all languages have equivalents of SAY? I will discuss this in more detail later, but the answer is essentially “yes”, according to NSM linguists. It is true that some languages use the same word to express SAY as they use to express DO. That is, there are some languages which appear to use a single verb for both SAY or DO and this needs to be carefully considered. We believe, however, that this is a kind of polysemy, and that actually there are two separate words with the same form. Likewise, occasionally one finds SAY and WANT expressed by the same word. But, subject to this qualification, which will be discussed later, it appears that exponents of SAY appear in all languages. In particular, one can translate sentences like this into all languages: ‘She said something to me. What did she say? She said …’. During the question time, you might like to ask me about some other semantic primes and see if I can give you justification for them. What I’ve been trying to do so far is to show you the kind of reasoning behind the decision

Semantic Primes and Their Grammar

Figure 6

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Short “version history” of NSM

that a given word is (or is not) a prime. You can’t say “Look, I think this is not a prime, it doesn’t feel good to me”, you’ve got to provide a paraphrase to decompose it. And the paraphrase has got to be defensible. One way to give a picture of semantic primes and grammar is to look at short “version history” of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (fig. 6). The history of NSM can be divided into five different periods. The first period is from 1972 into the mid-1980s, maybe 12–13 years of work. It started with Anna Wierzbicka’s book Semantic Primitives. We can call this period Pre-NSM, because the term NSM was not used in those days. It was known as the “semantic primitives approach”. A characteristic of those early days is that the number of semantic primes was very small: 13 or 14 semantic primes. Most of them—such as I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING, WANT—are still regarded as genuine semantic primes, but there were two on the 1972 list which have not survived: IMAGINE and WORLD. Both were kind of borrowed from logic, because in logic people often talk about “possible worlds”. But we found out in later years that there are plenty of languages which don’t have such a word as WORLD, and also the same with IMAGINE. Those “failed” primes were replaced with better candidates. From mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, NSM1 was a very interesting period, which Wierzbicka has called the “Expanding Set” phase. This was a period where there was a serious re-think: “Do we have enough semantic primes to write clear and plausible explications?” If you look at some of the explications in this early work, especially in the book Lingua Mentalis (Wierzbicka 1980), some of

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the explications are very complex. They use very complex syntax and are actually hard to follow. The explications might sometimes be “logically correct” in a way, but they are hardly plausible as a model of how ordinary people think about things. Another thing that was quite important in the process, was that Wierzbicka had immigrated to Australia and she had become lecturer (and subsequently a Reader) in the Department of Linguistics at the Australian National University (ANU). That Department was headed by R.M.W. Dixon, who is a very famous linguistic typologist, and the department was extremely active in studying the languages of the world. It had field workers studying previously undescribed languages in Australia, in Papua New Guinea, the Pacific, and in Southeast Asia. And there were also very good scholars of Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indonesian and Malay, and other important national languages. So it was a very multilingual, cross-linguistic, typologically oriented milieu. I was also part of that milieu. In the mid-1980s I was in central Australia, studying an Australian Aboriginal language called Yankunytjatjara that I will talk to you about briefly later. Now that sort of context is a very good influence to thinking about the universality of the system. When you’ve got information, high-quality information, from good scholars on many different languages, it became clear that some of these languages did not have words for IMAGINE or for WORLD. These erstwhile primes just didn’t have equivalents in many other languages. In short, the combination of rethinking the inventory of primes and taking cross-linguistic facts into account jointly led to the revisions, as it says there (pointing to slide 8). In 1994 there was the first large cross-linguistic survey of semantic primes, reported in the book edited by Anna and me jointly: Semantic and Lexical Universals. In that book, information was presented on 17 languages. We asked experts on a selection of languages: “Can you locate exponents of these primes in your language?” At that time there were 37 semantic primes. “Can you say things like: ‘this is good’ or ‘someone did something’? We provided them with a list of basic sentences showing the expected uses of the semantic primes. Of those 17 languages, only two were European languages (English and French). So it is not true that the NSM theory has its origins just in European languages. Sometimes you hear people say that, or even that “it is all based on English”. This is factually incorrect and the SLU volume is good evidence for it. In the next period (NSM2, in fig. 6), there was a further expansion. As we moved towards 2007, gradually more and more primes started to come in, and at the same time there was also more emphasis being placed on grammar. One of the things for which NSM had been criticized in the previous years, and I think this criticism was valid, was that not enough detail had been provided

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about the grammar of the metalanguage. Critics were saying: “It’s not enough just to know that one can find words or phrases for these semantic primes in many languages. We need to be sure that one can combine the primes in the same ways in all these languages”. This critique forced us to define the grammar of semantic primes more precisely. We started to spend more time on the grammar of the metalanguage. Another important theory development at that time was theories of pragmatics based on NSM—the theory of Cultural Scripts. I am not going to talk about this at this moment, but it will come up in Lecture 9. Over the NSM2 period, there was a lot of activity, and more and more people began to get interested. If you would go back to 1972, there was one NSM linguist (or pre-NSM linguist), namely, Anna Wierzbicka. But by the start of the new century, the NSM research community had expanded considerably, I don’t know to how many people, but a couple of dozen I suppose. There were many very good scholars and lots of students. In recent years (the NSM3 period in fig. 6), the number of semantic primes has stabilized at 65. There have been no new semantic primes proposed in the past 5, 6 or 7 years. That’s why we think that most likely we have reached the end and we’ve found them all. Of course, one can’t be completely sure. It is always possible that there is an undiscovered semantic prime, and it’s also possible that one or two of the currently recognized primes is not necessary. It is an empirical question. But the fact that the list has stabilized gives us reason to think that maybe that’s the end. During the NSM3 period, we did a lot of work on semantic molecules, so this goes back to the question raised by Thomas (who had earlier raised a question about the explication of the word mandarin, i.e. the fruit). With many complex meanings, like the meanings of words for physical objects, words like mandarin or food or even head or hair, all of these words have very complex meanings, which means that one can’t explicate them directly in terms of semantic primes alone. You also need other words, like ‘hard’, ‘sharp’ and ‘round’. These are so-called “semantic molecules”. We began to realize how very important it was to have a good theory of semantic molecules. We needed to identify the minimum number of semantic molecules that are truly necessary. NSM is always concerned with being minimal. We try to be as constrained as possible. We realized that some semantic molecules are, or could be, be universal. Could it be that all languages have a word for ‘sky’, for instance? Could it be that all languages have a word for ‘hands’? (Although it is known that in some languages the word for HAND would cover the forearm, or even the whole arm). I have a whole two-hour presentation on semantic molecules coming up in Lecture 5.

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Also there was something called the theory of semantic templates. We recognize that for many complex meanings, the explications are pretty long. It could be 6–10 lines of semantic text. But it turns out that words from the same semantic domain tend to follow the same pattern of explications. If you look at body-part words, like eyes, hands, knee, shoulder or whatever, there is a sort of pattern. Likewise for various kinds of verbs, there is a sort of pattern. First comes one kind of component and another kind of component, then another kind of component … this is called the template. The concept of semantic template is very pertinent for grammatical semantics because it helps us to understand event structure. So these were the sort of activities happening in the NSM theory in the NSM3 period. Very recently, since 2014, there have been some new innovations. Some are small adjustments to the inventory of semantic primes. We have changed the “identity”, so to speak, of one prime. We used to believe that the semantic prime HAVE was the foundation for what linguists call “alienable possession”; for example, when people have things like a car, a pen or a jacket, when they own things. We regarded HAVE as a semantic prime. In retrospect, it wasn’t a very good choice, because English have is extremely polysemous: people can have all sorts of things. It has since been decided it is much better to use the word MINE, as in the combination It’s mine (see Goddard and Wierzbicka 2015). So, we now think that in its simplest form “possession” is in fact egocentric and the word mine actually appears quite early in child language. It now seems clear that just using MINE as a semantic prime, we can explain alienable possession constructions generally (see Goddard and Wierzbicka 2015). We have also adjusted the grammar of some primes, and that’s on-going because we want the metalanguage grammar to be equally workable for all languages. This is a world map (fig. 7). Not all the languages where we have studied semantic primes are shown, but most of them, I suppose. The reason what I am saying is a bit imprecise is that there are some languages where we have heard that there was a problem with a particular semantic prime. Like, you have a linguist saying “There is no prime for FEEL in Tibetan”. In that case, we often investigate, try to get original information about that language and resolve the problem, without documenting the entire inventory of primes in that language. The languages shown in the map (fig. 7) are those for which all or most semantic primes have been reliably identified. You can see that there are a lot of languages and that they are quite widespread. There are many different linguistic types. There are some Australian languages, like Yankunytjatjara. There are some Native American languages, such as East Cree. There are some languages in Africa, such as Ewe and Amharic. Amharic is a Semitic language. There are

Semantic Primes and Their Grammar

Figure 7

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Sample of languages other than English studied in the NSM framework (locations approximate)

plenty of European languages. Farsi or Persian is also an Indo-European language. Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese, also Lao and Vietnamese, neither of which is genetically related to Chinese. Some languages from Papua New Guinea and the Pacific. So you can see, that’s a big spread of languages but you can also see that many parts of the map have nothing. For instance, in the Indian sub-continent and most of South America and North America. The reason for those gaps is we haven’t had the opportunity to get high quality of information on those languages. We really hope that we can fill in these gaps over time. But even the sample we have got at the moment includes more than 6 language families, and it includes languages from every continent. We think it is a reasonably good start. If you want to see tables of semantic primes in 20 languages, you can get them on the internet at the NSM homepage, on the page called Downloads. Let’s go back to the table of semantic primes (fig. 8) and take another look at it. This table is presented in English. Just a few observations. In English, as you know, the verb be is used for three different semantic primes. I think it’s more precise in Chinese with a different word for BE SOMEWHERE, but in English we use the verb to be for BE SOMEWHERE, and we also use the verb to be if we want to say ‘She is my mother’, for instance. We use the same verb (She is here. She is

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Figure 8

Lecture 2

Semantic primes—English (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014)

my mother), but it is very obvious that two meanings are involved, because ‘being somewhere’ (‘being in a place’) is surely a different meaning to ‘being someone’. Some languages have separate words for these two primes, which is very nice. MUCH and MANY. In English we have two words, many and much. Many languages in the world, including French, have just one word, and so do most Asian languages. The situation in English is an instance of allolexy: two words whose meanings are the same, but which are used in different combinational contexts. So you use much when you are talking about a substance, e.g. much water, and many when you are talking about people or things, e.g. many people, many things. I will also mention another example of allolexy: OTHER and else. English has this special word else. Many languages don’t have any such word. Even other European languages like Spanish and German have just one word for OTHER, without any word comparable to else. So this type of table, which presents the main exponents of semantic primes that we use in English, includes examples of allolexy (indicated by a tilde). Another allolexy of English is me: I and me. OK, one can say that me is the “object form” of I, or the form which occurs after the verb (which is probably a better grammatical description), but from a meaning point of view, there is no difference. There is just an automatic grammatical substitution. In a language

Semantic Primes and Their Grammar

Figure 9

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Semantic primes—Finnish (Vanhatalo et al. 2014)

like Chinese, the word for ‘I’ (wŏ) doesn’t change. I love her. She loves me. The fact that I alternates with me is just an accidental property of English. There is only one semantic prime. I hope this is helping you to understand what the table of semantic primes is doing. It can’t be a full explanation of all aspects of the semantic primes, it is an abbreviated display. Now this table (fig. 9) shows the semantic primes in Finnish. Finnish is a language with very complex morphology. It is one of the most famous agglutinative languages. It has 12 to 15 case forms, few prepositions and postpositions, and few complementizing words. Most of the grammatical changes occur by joining endings onto the words, so that’s different from English and very different from Chinese. Even so, we can see from the table that there is still some allolexy in Finnish. These two words are I and YOU, and this is SOMEONE (pointing to the third word in the first row in fig. 9). You can see that there are a couple of different substitute words, allolexes, for SOMEONE. Here are the “BE words” in Finnish (pointing to the seventh row in fig. 9). BE (SOMEWHERE) (pointing to the first word in the row), THERE IS (pointing to the second word in the row), and BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING). They all use the same Finnish word OLLA. (English has its special there is construction,

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Figure 10 Semantic primes—Chinese (Wong and Ye 2016)

and some languages have a special single word for THERE IS, like Spanish hay. Many languages, like Finnish, use the same verb for BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE IS, and BE (SOMEONE).) Overall, there don’t seem to be any serious problems with identifying exponents of semantic primes in Finnish. This is a current list of Chinese semantic primes (fig. 10), composed by Zhengdao Ye and Jack Wong. I’ll just leave it up on the screen for a little while, so you can contemplate on it. Unfortunately for me, I don’t read or speak Chinese so I have to rely on advice from others. The table shows there are some allolexes. There is an allolexy similar to that of English SOMETHING—different versions of SOMETHING and THING. There are different versions of PEOPLE. There are a couple of versions (allolexes) of the SAME, and likewise of OTHER. With WANT, you have one allolex which is monosyllablic (pointing to the second word in the fifth row in fig. 10), and then another version which has an overlap with THINK (pointing to the fourth word in the row). There are some overlaps within words for SEE and HEAR (pointing to the last four words in the fifth row of fig. 10). So, kind of interesting, right …

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Every language has its own particularities, especially the overlaps in form between exponents of primes. This can be puzzling. Why should there be these overlaps? Why should overlaps work in a certain way in one language, and a different way in another language? If we look at 50 languages, would we see similar patterns recurring? Do these patterns of formal variation tell us anything? These are good research questions and the NSM research community is trying to work on these questions. Another thing, I want to make some comments about which I am somewhat out of my depth. Chinese presents a different situation probably to any language in the world, because of Chinese characters. Chinese characters are a special way of representing words, which is a unique product of Chinese civilization. Well-educated Chinese people, such as yourselves, know a lot about characters. You know the composition of the characters and you often know about the history of particular characters. Even exponents of semantic primes often consist of two characters. That meaning is a single meaning, even it is represented with two characters. So, what happens when Chinese people want to think about meanings? It can be difficult not to start thinking about characters, because basically your education and cultural heritage directs you, as it were, to think about characters. I don’t want dispute the value of learning about the history of characters, it is a very important part of Chinese culture. But it is an exclusively Chinese thing. If you translate words from Chinese into another language, everything connected with the characters, the names and history of the characters, is lost. It can’t be conveyed in another language. So, although it is a very important part of the representation system of Chinese, according to the NSM way of looking at it, it is not part of the meaning of words. It is something that has to do with the cultural representations of words. (Even when you see a Chinese word written in pinyin, of course, you lose the character.) What we are saying is that for NSM linguists meaning is paraphrase. That is, meaning is the kind of thing which can be put into words and transferred into other languages. Now I want to go through some formal issues with identifying exponents of semantic primes. We’re looking at morphology and at formal overlap. The first point is that exponents of primes can be formally complex, that is, morphologically, complex. To illustrate using English, SOMEONE and SOMETHING, from the point view of word structure, share a common element, namely, some. Even so, they are semantic primes. That is, although they are morphologically complex they are semantically simple. So you can’t look at the morphology of a word, and assume that the morphology is an accurate guide to the meaning.

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Figure 11 Formal complexity. Exponents of primes in different languages can be formally complex in various ways.

There are many cases where you have morphological complexity, but only a simple meaning. Second, sometimes a semantic prime can be expressed by a whole phrase, rather than a single word. So, in English A LONG TIME and A SHORT TIME are phrases. She stayed there for a long time. A long time ago it was like this. In many languages of the world, there is a single word that expresses the meaning A LONG TIME, but in English for some reason we use these phrases. If you think about it, in the expression a long time, the word long doesn’t mean ‘long’. And the word short, in the expression a short time, does not mean ‘short’. That is, in these phrases the words long and short don’t have the same meanings as they have when they are used to talk about physical objects. Why? It is an open question and an interesting question. We know that many languages use similar expressions. But whatever the reason, the NSM claim is that A LONG TIME is single meaning, even though it is sometimes expressed by a phrase. Third, an exponent of a semantic prime can be a suffix or prefix, in other words, a bound morpheme. Especially in languages with a lot of morphology, agglutinative languages, inflectional languages, some of the semantic primes are expressed by bound morphemes. For example, in Yankunytjatjara (central Australia), there is no separate word for BECAUSE, instead the meaning is expressed by the suffix -nguṟu. If you want to say ‘because of this’, you say “this-nguṟu”. When we say “lexical equivalent”, we don’t mean that it has to be a separate word, we don’t mean that it has to be only a single word, we don’t mean that it has to be an unanalyzable word. All we mean is that it has to be lexical material—something real and concrete in the language. In fact, exponents of primes can even be discontinuous. If you are interested in semantic typology, fig. 12 shows an interesting example from Farsi.

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Figure 12 Exponents of select primes in Farsi (Persian).

I have a doctoral student (Reza Arab) from Iran and his first language is Farsi (Persian). In this language there are a lot of “light verb” constructions. A light verb construction is where a meaning is expressed by two elements. One of them is a verbal element and the other is something else, which can be described differently in different language traditions. It may be described as a noun, or as a particle, or as a “pre-verb,” or something like that. In Farsi, exponents of many verbal primes consist of light verb constructions. For instance, instead of saying THINK with one word, as in English, they literally say something like “do thought”. Instead of saying FEEL as one word, they say literally something like “do feeling”. Instead of saying MOVE as one word, they say something like “do movement”. Likewise, LIVE is expressed as “do life” and TOUCH as “do touching”. The so-called “light verb” in these constructions is identical in form to the verb meaning ‘to do’, but when it’s in the light verb construction, it doesn’t mean ‘do’. It is a sort of grammatical verb, a kind of grammatical prop that the language uses. NSM researchers are quite happy to say that this combination (pointing to the following semantic primes in fig. 12) is the Farsi exponent of THINK, that this is the Farsi exponent of FEEL, that this is the Farsi exponent of MOVE, and so on. Even though there are two elements involved, and even though these elements can be separated by other material, e.g. you can put adverbs in-between. When NSM linguists find out this kind of thing, we don’t think “Oh, gee, that ruins our theory”. What we think is “Aha, we just found out something about languages. We just found out that light verb constructions can express semantic primes”. Presumably, there are dozens or hundreds of other languages that do it like this. OK, the next issue is lexical polysemy. We know that in any language some exponents of semantic primes are going to be polysemous. I will first use the

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Figure 13 Lexical polysemy. Expinents of primes can be polysemous, with different secondary meanings in different languages

example DO. In many languages the word for DO also has a second meaning, which is close to the meaning ‘make’. NSM researchers have studied this across many languages, so we know it to be a common pattern. For a second example, consider FEEL in English, for example, in contexts like ‘She feels something bad’ or ‘I feel something good towards you’. This is the semantically primitive FEEL. But the word feel also has another meaning in English. You can say, for example, She feels his hand or She felt his pulse. So one of these meanings, the first one, is the semantically primitive meaning. It’s a prime. The second meaning, which involves physical contact (TOUCH) is a complex, i.e. non-primitive, meaning. In Malay, the word for FEEL is rasa, but the word rasa has a secondary meaning as well. That meaning is ‘taste’, to taste something; so when you taste food, you rasa the food. My point is that the secondary meanings of exponents of semantic primes can be different in different languages. That doesn’t matter. The important claim is that there is one meaning, the simplest meaning, which matches across languages. An important corollary of this is that when NSM researchers say that words for semantic primes occur in all languages, we don’t mean that they occur with the same range of use in all languages—in every language, the word will likely have some secondary meanings and the secondary meanings are used in different ways. Figure 14 summarizes some of the typical extended meanings of semantic primes. So, it’s very common for the word for BEFORE to also mean ‘first’. And the word for FEEL, as mentioned, often has the secondary meaning ‘taste’. Overlap or polysemy between semantically primitive meanings also occurs frequently with FEEL. In a language like Italian, for example, the word for FEEL and the word for HEAR, as in “hearing with your ears”, can be expressed using the same word. NSM researchers have accumulated quite a lot of knowledge about polysemy and semantic primes. This is a useful resource for people who are interested in descriptive and typological linguistics.

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Figure 14 Certain polysemies are common across languages

I mentioned before that there are languages where DO and SAY are expressed by the same form. This is a good example (fig. 15). In the Samoan language, there is a single form, the verb fai, which can be either SAY or DO. Initially that’s puzzling. How can one word express two semantic primes? When we look carefully at the grammar and morphology of Samoan, however, we discover that the two meanings—fai which means DO and fai which means SAY— have some different grammatical properties, which makes it very easy to argue that they are actually separate words. What are these different grammatical properties? Look at the examples in fig. 15. Notice that Samoan is a language where the subject noun-phrase often comes at the end of a sentence. So the first sentence involves SAY: “Then the woman said again, “Friend …” The sentence starts from the form fai meaning SAY. Then you get ‘the woman’ and what she said (beginning with the word “Friend, …’). I just draw your attention to this phrase le fafine ‘the woman’ here, that’s the subject of SAY. It has a particle in front of it, an absolutive particle (with the interlinear gloss ABS). This is a grammatical marker. Certain verbs require their subjects to occur with an absolutive marker. SAY is one of them. But when you use the same verb to mean DO, it isn’t like this. It is like this (pointing to the sentence example of DO). This phrase here, le tame ‘the youth’, is the subject of DO. Notice: instead of an absolutive particle, there is an ergative particle (with the interlinear gloss ERG).

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Figure 15 Sometimes exponents of two distinct semantic primes share a single form

The basic idea is that in Samoan every verb selects either an absolutive-marked subject or an ergative-marked subject. The marking is done by a particle that occurs before the verb. The simple message is that the DO verb selects an ergative-marked subject and the SAY verb selects an ­absolutive-marked subject. This is a very basic grammatical difference which is telling us that these are two different words. Basically, there are two fai’s: fai that means DO and fai that means SAY. Another fact about Samoan is that the DO verb can occur in an extended form, with a kind of suffix. Instead of fai, the extended form is faia. That extended version is only possible with the DO meaning, you can’t ever use it with the SAY meaning. In short, if you do language-internal analysis, you can separate the two meanings by grammatical and morphological properties. Samoan is therefore not a counterexample to the universality of the SAY/DO distinction. DO and SAY can be expressed by the same form, provided that there some grammatical differences. Next: allolexy. Chinese doesn’t have the same kind of allolexies as English, but it still does have some. English has a certain kind of allolexy, which we can call “case allolexy”. English doesn’t have a great number of cases anymore, as you know, but in the pronoun system there is a little bit of case left in the difference between I and me. We can regard me as an allolex of

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Figure 16 Allolexy. In some languages, there are multiple exponents of a single prime.

‘I’. In a language like Polish, the exponents of the semantic prime ‘I’ have three or four different forms, such as instrumental form, accusative form, and genitive form. If a language has even more cases, there can be even more forms. All those grammatically inflected forms that are needed in the metalanguage, we say they are all allolexes. When you convert, say, a Polish NSM to Chinese NSM, all those five different Polish forms of ‘I’ will be converted into one Chinese word wŏ. This shows that the formal variation is not essential to the meaning, it’s just one of the grammatical properties of a fully inflectional language. Some other examples of allolexy. I’ve already mentioned OTHER and else. English also has NOT and don’t. It’s kind of interesting, like what’s the difference between not and don’t? I mean, technically don’t is an auxiliary verb do with a contracted form of the negative particle attached. But if you say Don’t do it, for example, it is very similar to Not do it. You can get more complex examples. There are languages which have a couple of different words for SOMETHING. What normally happens is that one word is used in several different contexts, and there are also specialized words reserved for use with certain verbs. This is the case in Farsi (Persian). In Farsi there is a general word for SOMETHING and with this word, you can say the Farsi equivalents of ‘She said SOMETHING’, ‘She knows SOMETHING’ and ‘SOMETHING happened’. On the other hand, if you want to say ‘She did SOMETHING’, you can’t use that word. You have to say (the literal equivalent of): ‘She did work’. That is, you have to use the word which looks like it means ‘work’, but in this context it doesn’t mean ‘work’. It’s just the Farsi way of saying the same thing as ‘She did SOMETHING’. So, to say ‘She did SOMETHING good,’ for example, you say the literal equivalent of ‘She did good work’.

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Likewise, for ‘She did SOMETHING bad’, one says the literal equivalent of ‘She did bad work’. It is a specialized allolex for SOMETHING that only appears in combination with the verb DO. Some languages just do that kind of thing, i.e. they have specialized allolexes that are used only in certain combinations, especially with DO and SAY. The last one for the time being: portmanteaus. This term is used in general linguistics for a morpheme or word that combines several other morphological categories. In an inflectional language like Latin, for example, if you have an ending which combines singular and nominative, we call it a “portmanteau morpheme”. In a similar fashion, we can have portmanteau words. For example, it is fairly common for languages to have a single word to express CAN plus NOT, and even English does it a little bit, i.e. CAN’T. In the case of English, you can still see from the form that it is a common combination of CAN and NOT, but there are other languages where it’s not visible. Portmanteaus are particularly common with LIKE. Many languages have a single word that means ‘like this’. German is such a language and the word is so. It is spelt ‘s-o’ but pronounced [zo]. To say ‘She did it like this’, one says ‘She did so’. To say: ‘She said something like this: …’, one says: ‘She said so: …’. Occasionally it happens that in some combinations, a prime might be expressible only by a portmanteau word. You may have been wondering how words like GOOD and BAD can both be semantic primes—because clearly GOOD and BAD are related to one another (see fig. 18). Likewise with ABOVE and BELOW, and NEAR and FAR. But words can be related without it being possible to paraphrase one in terms of the other. What we want to be able to say is that such words are related, but not compositionally. That is, GOOD and BAD are related but one can’t

Figure 17 Portmanteaus. A single word (bound morpheme, phraseme) can express a combination of semantic primes

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Figure 18 Non-compositional relationships between primes

paraphrase GOOD in terms of BAD, and one can’t paraphrase BAD in terms of GOOD. This is because if someone says, for example, ‘This is good’, he or she is saying something different from ‘This is not bad’. Likewise, if you say ‘This is not big’, it doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘this is small’, despite the fact that ‘big’ implies ‘not small’, and ‘small’ implies ‘not big’. Of course we need to acknowledge that fact. We need a term to describe this kind of semantic relationship between words, which is not based on composition, so we use the term “non-­compositional relationship”. The non-compositional relationships between GOOD and BAD, ABOVE and BELOW, etc., are easy to perceive, but there are other non-compositional relationships which are more subtle. Consider DO, HAPPEN and SAY. Actually, they do have something in common. They have certain logical properties in common (which is why they are the basis of event structures, for instance). One of these properties is that they all require times. DO, HAPPEN, SAY, they are all predicates that are required to be anchored in time. You expect to find them associated with some time adjuncts, either visible or implied. In other words, they are time-bound predicates. Also, all three of these different semantic primes potentially have duration: you can DO something ‘for some time’, you can SAY something ‘for some time’,

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something can HAPPEN ‘for some time’. A third shared property, not shown on the slide (fig. 18), is that one can say ‘like this’: ‘it happened like this’, ‘she did it like this’, ‘she said it like this’. This is probably connected with duration: because they have duration, there is time enough for someone to observe and describe the “manner” in which something happens, or in which someone does or says something. In short, these three primes—HAPPEN, DO, SAY—have a kind of affiliation. They seem to constitute a small natural class that shares certain properties. I’ll mention one more example of a non-compositional relationship—IF, CAN and MAYBE. If I say ‘Bad things can happen to good people’, it raises a sort of moral or ethical problem which has puzzled generations of philosophers. How is it that bad things can happen to good people? The word CAN, used in this way, indicates something which is non-real but which is potential. Now consider MAYBE, in a sentence like ‘Maybe she’s at home, maybe she’s not’. We are not talking about a firm reality, we are talking about possibilities. Now consider IF: ‘If it rains, we won’t go’. The word IF introduces a potential “condition”. Again, there seems to be something in common between CAN, MAYBE, and IF, at least to the extent that they are ways of speaking about something other than “reality”. It is perhaps not too surprising to discover that in some languages exponents of these three meanings overlap (as we will see shortly). However, I don’t think it is possible to paraphrase any of these three meanings (CAN, IF, MAYBE) in terms of the others. So the affiliation between them is another instance of non-compositional relationship. The final part of this afternoon’s presentation is about the grammar of semantic primes (fig. 19). The idea is that every semantic prime has its own little grammar. In other words, for every prime we need to say what other primes it can be combined with—because in the end grammar, syntax, is all about combination. We need to describe for every prime, what other primes it can be combined with, and how. It turns out that some primes have “valency options”. This means that they can occur both in a very simple frame, and also in an extended frame. It’s complicated to describe the grammar all of 65 different primes, so lately we have been using this big Chart (fig. 20) as a form of summary presentation. You can’t read the chart well on the slide, but you’ll get the idea. It is also useful to be able to see the primes arranged into groups. The Chart shows groups of primes that are related to one another.

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Figure 19 The grammar of semantic primes

Figure 20 Chart of NSM semantic primes

Let’s take a closer look (fig. 21). In each box, WANT for instance (indicates top left of the slide), you can see some writing underneath that gives the key grammatical contexts for that prime. Likewise for KNOW. (Indicates right hand side, middle row) Here we find the key grammatical contexts for KNOW.

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Figure 21 A closer look at part of the Chart

Likewise for DO, and so on for all 65 primes. This Chart is regularly updated. It’s not stipulated once and for all. If we discover that particular languages don’t allow certain combinations or frames, as we sometimes do, we revise it to accommodate these facts. So in the time available, I need to focus on a couple of primes. I am going to look at DO, SAY, HAPPEN and KNOW, starting with DO and SAY. At this point, you can read this from here (pointing to first two boxes in the second row). These are the basic frames for DO, and these are the basic frames for SAY. You can see straight away that there are more frames available for SAY than there are for DO. That’s an interesting thing. If you glance around the Chart, you can see that there is quite a bit of variation in the number of frames available for different primes. Now let’s look at HAPPEN (fig. 22). The basic frame, the minimal frame, is ‘something HAPPENS’ (at some time). Basically you can just say ‘something HAPPENS’, but you can also say: ‘something HAPPENS somewhere’. That is, we expect that in all languages one can not only say ‘something HAPPENS at some time’, but also ‘something HAPPENS somewhere at some time’, i.e. HAPPENING can be situated, it can have location, a locus.

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Figure 22 Selected grammatical frames for HAPPEN, DO, SAY (English)

We can also say: ‘something HAPPENS to someone’, something good or something bad perhaps. And: ‘something HAPPENS to something’. So these are four grammatical frames for HAPPEN. This is what I mean by extensions. There is a minimal frame and in addition there are the extended possibilities. With DO, the minimal frame is ‘someone DOES something’. By the way, remember that you can add modifiers to SOMETHING or SOMEONE, so it could be ‘someone DOES something’, it could be ‘someone DOES something bad’ or ‘someone DOES something good’. But the absolute minimum is ‘someone DOES something’. You can: ‘do something to someone else’. You can: ‘do something to something’. Most linguists would just say “OK, DO can take a patient and it can be animate or inanimate”. No surprises. You can: ‘do something with something’. This could be an instrument or tool of some kind. Now this last frame (points to fourth row in the middle block, on fig. 22) is an interesting one. You can, apparently in all languages, combine DO with another semantic prime GOOD, and get what we call a “compound valency”, like ‘do something good for someone’. That’s a very important frame for ethics, the thought that you can do something good for someone. With SAY (final block on fig. 22), you can simply ‘say something’ or you can ‘say something to someone’. This is what we call the “addressee” role in general linguistics. You can also ‘say something about something’. It is obvious, of

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course, that the verb SAY will allow these options: say something to someone, say something about someone or about something. Another frame is ‘say something like this: “blah, blah, blah”’, a quotational frame. For example, ‘she said something like this: “I don’t want to go”’. The possibility to put something like a speech quote after SAY is part of the universal grammar of SAY. And finally, one should be able to ‘say something with some words’. SAYING doesn’t have to be done with words, though it usually is. Notice one thing. There is no ‘say that …’ frame. That is, there is no “indirect speech” frame in NSM. This is because we know that there are languages which don’t allow a that-complement (sentential complement) with SAY. English does, of course, have an indirect speech construction, and so do many other languages, but it is not universal so it is not part of the NSM metalanguage. Figure 23 shows the identical frames for Finnish. By now you’re familiar with this kind of display. These are the HAPPEN frames in Finnish. These are the DO frames in Finnish (pointing to the second cluster on figure 23). Here are the SAY frames in Finnish (pointing to the last cluster on the figure 23). You get the idea. Now we move to Chinese. There may be some controversial aspects to this. Four frames for HAPPEN (pointing to top cluster). Some frames for DO, including ‘do something to someone’ (pointing to the first line in second cluster on the slide). Different allolexes can be used. There are frames also for SAY. I can’t discuss these in detail, though I have some notes from my colleague Zhengdao Ye (ANU) about the special allolexes that are used in the frame ‘something happens to something’. And as for Chinese exponents of WORDS, there are two: zi and ji. I’ve picked this example because KNOW is one of the verbs whose NSM syntax has been recently adjusted. We now think that KNOW has the four basic frames shown in figure 25 (Wierzbicka in press, Goddard in press). The first frame is I KNOW. For example, someone says something to you, and you reply I KNOW. It’s a dialogical, first-person use of KNOW, often used in response to somebody else. As far as we can tell, people can say this kind of thing in all languages. It is extremely common in English. The second frame is a third-person frame: ‘someone KNOWS it’. This time we are attributing something like knowledge to someone. We can also say, using the third frame, that ‘someone KNOWS something’. And finally, using the fourth frame, we can say that ‘someone KNOWS something about something’. For example, if we want to talk about people (experts) who know a lot about something. These are the basic four frames for KNOW.

Semantic Primes and Their Grammar

Figure 23 Selected grammatical frames for HAPPEN, DO, SAY (Finnish)

Figure 24 Selected grammatical frames for HAPPEN, DO, SAY (Chinese)

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Figure 25 Basic grammatical frames for KNOW

Now in many languages, the exponent of KNOW can also be used in the context of ‘knowing someone’ (fig. 26). That is a very interesting thing, because ‘know someone’ is not one of the four frames just outlined. ‘Know someone’ is not a semantically primitive use of KNOW, according to our current understanding. I’ve got to admit that there was a time when NSM linguists took the opposite interpretation. At that earlier time, we believed that ‘know something’ and ‘know someone’ were both equally basic and that any difference in the verb used for ‘know’ was just allolexy. The point is, of course, that many languages, including European languages like German and French, have two separate words: to ‘know someone’ uses a different verb to ‘know something’ or ‘to know that …’; for example, German wissen vs. kennen. But in recent years we have reached the conclusion that ‘know someone’ can be explicated, and here is the explication (in fig. 26). If you say ‘I know him’, what you are saying is, first: ‘I know something about him because I was with him sometime before’. That is, it implies some knowledge of him on the basis of having been with him for some time. Then: ‘because of this, I can think like this: “he is like this”’, meaning that you can imagine…. that you have the impression of knowing what someone is like. We could talk for a long time about whether the explication is perfectly satisfactory, but it responds to a lot of observations about this kind of “knowing”. Scholars have often said, for instance, that this kind of “knowing” is experiential—that it concerns knowledge based on experience. But what is this “experience”? The proposed explication says that ‘knowing someone’ is based on the experience of being with someone for some time, and therefore, having the impression that you know what someone is like. I’ve some more points to make about KNOW. I mentioned before that ‘know that …’ is not a basic frame for KNOW. So the question arises: what does it

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Figure 26 ‘know2 (someone)’: A complex lexical meaning

mean to say, for example, ‘I know that John did it’? If this is not a semantically primitive use of KNOW (because KNOW doesn’t allow a “that-complement”), how can such a sentence like ‘I know that John did it’ be explicated? This is how (see fig. 27). We break the sentence into two parts, namely: ‘it is like this: John did it’ and ‘I know it’. Our claim is that when someone says ‘I know that John did it’, that person is saying: ‘it is like this: John did it. I know it’. To describe this using terminology from logic, the content of the proposition is separated out from the mind of the “knower”. This is quite a helpful proposal, because it enables us to deal with the property called “referential opacity”, which people who are familiar with logical semantics will know about. The basic problem is that if you take a sentence like ‘John knows that I did it’, the word ‘I’ is spoken from the point the person who’s saying the sentence; however, the knowledge is being attributed to John, from John’s point of view. There is a kind of paradox. However, if we explicate the sentence ‘John knows that I did it’ as shown on the slide (fig. 27), the paradox is resolved because the content of the knowledge is represented from the point of view of the speaker, even though it is being attributed to the subject of the sentence, the “knower’. I have some other examples (figs. 27 and 28), but for reasons of time it is not possible to deal with them now. I had wanted to talk to you about CAN and MAYBE, and discuss the fact that in some languages, the same word is used as an exponent of both primes, for example, Polish może. But despite the same form being used in both cases, there are grammatical differences that make it extremely clear that there are two different words involved (see fig. 29).

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Figure 27 ‘know that …’: a complex grammatical meaning

Excluding that, we now come to the concluding remarks (fig. 30). The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach has come a long way over the years of its development. The vocabulary of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage now includes 65 meanings (semantic primes), which we believe cannot be paraphrased, and every one of those meanings has its own mini-grammar, which is specified in full detail. The metalanguage provides a wonderful tool for describing meaning wherever we find it. We can use this tool for describing word meanings, we can use it for describing grammatical meanings, we can use it for describing cultural meanings. For people in cognitive linguistics, it is interesting to reflect on what the NSM approach is saying about meaning and syntax. According to the NSM view, syntax is not autonomous. Every semantic prime has its own distinctive syntax because of its meaning. Take SAY, for instance. According to NSM researchers, it is natural and inevitable that one can SAY something to someone, SAY something about something, and SAY something like this: “blah, blah, blah”—these grammatical possibilities are a consequence of the SAY meaning. Sometimes I’ve heard doctoral students here say: “Oh, this is like Word Grammar”, and in a sense, it is true because each semantic prime has its own inherent grammar. NSM gives an integrated account of core syntax and core meaning. Finally, I want to make the following four points. First, the NSM system allows semantic description to become standardized. We use a very small number of words which are controlled—it’s quite constrained in that way. Second, it is a

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Figure 28 CAN vs. MAYBE

Figure 29 More on CAN and MAYBE

comprehensive system. We want to be able to explicate meanings of all kinds: lexical and grammatical. Third, the resulting analyses (explications) should be very clear, because we use only simple words in simple combinations. Fourth, they should be non-ethnocentric, because the NSM metalanguage consists of words and grammar which, as far as we know, can be found in every single language. The metalanguage is not tied to English in any way.

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Figure 30 Concluding remarks

English NSM, Russian NSM, Chinese NSM, Spanish NSM: they are, or should be, ­essentially equivalent to one another. Tomorrow I am going to show you case studies into two tricky areas: the semantics of emotion words and the semantics of evaluational adjectives. Thank you for your attention.

Lecture 3

Explicating Emotion Concepts across Languages and Cultures Lecture 2, yesterday afternoon, was tough, because we went into a lot of detail about the Natural Semantic Metalanguage itself, including complications that can arise in the process of identifying exponents of semantic primes across languages. But actually the main thing about the Natural Semantic Metalanguage is that it gives us a method of semantic description. NSM is a tool for semantic description which is very precise and which can help us access and capture meanings that are beyond the reach of other methods. This morning in Lecture 3, my idea is to take up the case study of emotions.

Figure 1

Plan of this morning’s lecture

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5684140. © Cliff Goddard. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004357723_004

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Here is my plan for this morning’s presentation (fig. 1). The first part is to introduce the general approach. For that I am going to use a couple of similar emotion words from English. This will take about 40 or 50 minutes. I will introduce the general semantic template for emotion concepts. That means a pattern of semantic components that is typical of emotion words. After that, we will do some case studies looking at several different languages (English, Polish, Spanish). We will compare words for, roughly speaking, “longing for home”. Then we are going to look at some words in the domain of “happiness”. I am putting some big scare quotes around the word “happiness”, because I don’t actually think that there is any universal concept of “happiness”. We will look at data from English, Danish and Chinese. As you can see on the slide here (pointing to slide 1), there have been quite a number of books and special issues of journals with NSM studies on emotions. NSM linguists have been studying emotion semantics for a very long time, right back to Wierzbicka (1972). Probably we have studied this area more intensively than any other group of linguists. Of course, emotions are very important to our normal human life. If we are interested in human cognition, we have to be interested in human emotions. Emotions are also interesting from a grammatical point of view, because emotion concepts can be expressed by nouns, or adjectives, or verbs. Emotion words tend to have interesting grammar too, no matter what the language is. But my focus is going to be on the semantic content of emotion words.

Figure 2

Cognitive semantics across languages and cultures

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The general problems we face when approaching emotion vocabulary across languages are the same as we face when approaching any domain across languages. It is a typological enterprise, i.e. we want to compare languages. And when you want to compare any set of things, the fundamental problem is: compare them in terms of what? What are the appropriate terms of comparison that can be applied to Language A, Language B, Language C, and so on? How can we choose those terms of comparison to get an optimal result? There is a traditional expression from Latin, tertium comparationis, that is often used in the philosophical literature about this problem. We want our terms of comparison to be stable, to be as clear as possible, and to be languageneutral (i.e. we don’t want terms of comparison that are borrowed from one language and don’t even exist in other languages). We also want our terms of comparison to be able to represent the conceptualization of native speakers. Especially for Cognitive Linguistics, that is a fundamental goal. We also want the capacity to describe things in fine detail; ideally, with the maximum resolution of detail. Now I want to claim that the NSM system can meet these needs—all of these different criteria (pointing to the second part of fig. 2). And I want to use this case study in emotions to demonstrate this; essentially, to show the flexibility and expressive power of the metalanguage, by showing that it can capture the fine details of emotion concepts across languages.

Figure 3

Key points about semantic explications

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To do that, I am going to present and explain a series of semantic explications. What is a semantic explication? These are the key points about semantic explications (pointing to fig. 3). Semantic explication is the NSM way of representing meanings. A semantic explication is an explanatory paraphrase composed of semantic primes and molecules. It is a paraphrase because it’s trying to say the same thing as the word which is being explained. A good semantic explication has to be, firstly, well-formed. In NSM theory, a well-formed explication means an explication that consists solely of semantic primes and molecules. It is very easy, especially when one first starts out doing explications, to accidently use words which are not part of the NSM metalanguage. But as we revise and refine the explication, we eliminate any such words and replace them with semantic primes and molecules, the correct NSM vocabulary. Equally, the semantic primes and molecules must be used according to the correct NSM grammar. That’s what well-formed means. Second, the explication has to be coherent. A typical explication consists of 4–6 lines, or maybe a text of up to 20 lines, but however many lines of semantic text there are in an explication, it has to all make sense together. When you start from the top and go down, it all has fit together and make sense. That’s what we mean by coherent. It means that relationships of co-reference, and all the causal and temporal relationships in the explication, fit together and make sense. Third, the explication should be “substitutable”. By substitutable, we mean that you can take the explication and put it into contexts where the word is being used, and the explication will make sense. So, when developing an explication we always look at a lot of real examples of the word being used and we take the explication, and we ask “Is this explication correct in that context”? You can’t literally substitute the explication, but you can take the meaning expressed by the explication and check it against the total context in naturallyoccurring examples. Does it satisfy? Does it satisfy native speakers’ intuitions? Now normally, when you do your first explication you spend a long time just trying to get the explication well-formed and coherent. It’s actually quite difficult using such a small vocabulary—trying to find a way to capture your ideas using this small vocabulary and conform to the required NSM grammar, and also to arrange the components in logical order. For newcomers to NSM, this can take days or even weeks. When you get very good at it, of course, you can do it more quickly, but when you first start, it’s usually very difficult. Learning to use NSM is like learning a new language. In the beginning everything is hard, even a single sentence; but as you get more and more used to the language, it starts to come naturally. And eventually you

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can speak without thinking too much. I am speaking out to the people who might want to try using NSM themselves. This is what you will experience. It can be quite difficult at the beginning. It’s good to have a helper or teacher. It is good to work in groups. There aren’t any fixed procedures for explicating a word. Different people can approach the task in different ways. The approach one takes can be dependent on one’s personality somewhat. Some people are very logical and they like to start with fifty examples, and think about all the examples in context. Other people are more intuitive, they take just a few examples, and they have a first go. Personally, I don’t think it matters what the starting point is. What matters is the final result and whether it can be tested. In the history of science, some scientists have got their ideas in a dream. How they got it doesn’t matter, what matters is: once you have your idea, can you test it, can you prove it? In practice, even professional NSM linguists use the method of successive approximations. That just means you start with your first coherent explication, and then you start substituting it into a range of naturally occurring examples. Usually (always, actually) you find that the explication needs revision. So you adjust it, keeping it well-formed and coherent. You keep adjusting and revising, measuring the explication against more and more examples. (You can get the examples from a corpus or from observation, or if you are a native speaker you can make them up. It doesn’t matter.) Eventually you get to the point where … aha, it seems to work. Once the explication seems to fit against a selection of new examples, at that point we provisionally think that we have achieved a reasonably good explication. This whole process of testing against examples of use and revising iteratively usually takes weeks, sometimes a month, sometimes years. However, I must say that even a faulty explication is better than nothing, a lot better than nothing. Because even if something is imperfect, we can still learn from it and it is also a basis for future work. There are many explications that I’ve produced in the past which I now realize were imperfect; but I don’t feel too bad if they were improved later, or if other people can improve them, because this is what is needed to progress the work. Figure 4 summarizes some key things to be remembered about explications. First, they are intelligible to native speakers. And because an explication is intelligible to native speakers, it is reasonable to think that it might be a model of a native speaker’s cognition. Let me just try to persuade you of this point by referring to the opposite situation. Suppose I were to give you a representation of your own cognition, and you couldn’t even understand it. Your own cognition … here it is being

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Figure 4

More key points about semantic explications

Figure 5

Lexical polysemy and the “paraphrase test”

explained to you, and you can’t even understand it. How likely it is that people’s cognition can be faithfully represented using notations, technical terms, and fancy diagrams which people themselves don’t understand and can’t even recognize? In my view, it’s rather implausible. If, on the other hand, we can model someone’s cognition in terms that they can understand, they can actually tell you “I don’t think that’s right”, or “oh, yes, that seems right”. Surely that’s a much better way of doing cognitive semantics. Because explications are phrased in cross-translatable terms, they have this wonderful capacity to help cultural outsiders see things the same way as insiders. They can help, say, Chinese people to understand Spanish concepts, and they can help Spanish people understand Chinese concepts. I am going to demonstrate this by showing you Spanish concepts and Polish concepts, explicated using NSM, and you can see what you think about that. One last thing. In doing lexical semantic analysis, it is very important to be aware of polysemy. Many words are polysemous, i.e. many words have two or more interrelated meanings. Since that is a likelihood, we have to be aware of

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it. If a word has two meanings, it means that it requires two explications: one explication for each meaning. If the two meanings are related, of course the two explications will be related or have some overlap. We have to bear this in our mind when we are working through the process. Many linguists think that it is difficult, or even impossible, to decide about questions of polysemy. Some think that polysemy and homonymy kind of phase into one another. You get a lot of talk about meanings being fuzzy and there being a continuum of meaning. Now I am actually going to say the opposite. I think that we can distinguish clearly between the separate meanings of a word, and that we can also decide whether a word has one general meaning or whether it has two or three separate meanings. How do we do that? We do it by paraphrasing. To be more specific, if a word has one general meaning which can cover all its uses, it means that there should be one paraphrase. So, if someone says that a certain word has one general meaning, I can say: “Show me the paraphrase”. Then I can test the paraphrase against a selection of examples, and if the paraphrase works in all those examples: good, the word has a single meaning. If on the other hand, one can’t find a single paraphrase that is suitable for the full range of use, then one has to try two paraphrases. If someone says, this word is polysemous with two meanings, a person who is sceptical can say: “Show me the paraphrases”. Once you are given the two paraphrases, you can check them against the word’s range of use and see if it is indeed covered by these two meanings, and so on. So, the paraphrase test provides an answer to the so-called problem of lexical polysemy. It makes the problem of lexical polysemy decidable. These are just introductory points about the explication process. Now I am going to talk specifically about emotions. As I mentioned before, Wierzbicka was already doing emotion semantics in 1972, and she took an important cue from literature. What she noticed was that in novels (specifically in Tolstoy’s novels), the novelist would often give an insight into the emotions of a character by using an imaginative scenario, a kind of evocative situation. These are some examples from Anna Karenina: “From after dinner till early evening, Kitty (that’s a male character) felt as a young man does before a battle”. When we read that “he felt as a young man felt before a battle”, it works, right? It enables us to imagine a certain kind of feeling which in fact probably has no label or no perfect label in the language. Another example. “Vronsky catches sight of Anna’s husband.” Vronsky is Anna’s lover and he is wanting to have a love affair with her. He sees her husband and he has “a disagreeable sensation as a man tortured by thirst might

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Figure 6

Lecture 3

Explicating emotion concepts

feel on reaching a spring of water and finding a dog, sheep or a pig in it.” Now this kind of literary device is effective, but it uses a kind of simile or comparison with a real situation. It is tailored to a highly specific, individual situation. Wierzbicka’s insight was that the same logic applies to ordinary emotion words in the language. What ordinary emotion words do is evoke a feeling by linking it with some typical thoughts and typical wants. For instance, before we look at precise details, consider sadness. We can describe sadness, roughly speaking, as a bad feeling linked with thinking that something bad happened. That’s not a complete description, but if you say She felt sad, part of what you are saying is that she felt something bad like people feel when they think “something bad happened”. And for joy: a good feeling linked with thinking “something very good is happening now”. I’ll soon be showing some semantic templates and semantic explications, but I first want to give you a quick briefing about the semantic primes that are going to be needed (fig. 7). It’s interesting that so many primes are needed to explicate even apparently simple emotions words like happy and homesick. We certainly need words like I, SOMEONE, PEOPLE. We need “mental” words like FEEL and THINK, WANT and DON’T WANT, and also KNOW, because sometimes people’s assumptions about what they know come into it. GOOD and BAD are needed because we need to talk about feeling something good or feeling something bad; and also VERY, because we may feel something ‘very good’ or ‘very bad’.

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Figure 7

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Important semantic primes for explicating emotion concepts

Some emotion words involve the body and parts of the body. Not all of them, but some, such as disgust, for instance, which probably involves an analogy with having something bad in your mouth. I suppose pain is not an emotion in the strict sense, but pain obviously involves the body in some way. So, the semantic primes BODY and PARTS (of the body) are needed in some emotion explications. We also need time expressions like FOR SOME TIME and IN ONE MOMENT, because some emotions take time and others can be very quick (like surprise or delight, they happen suddenly). HAPPEN and DO are usually present in most cognitive scenarios, as you will see in a moment. We also need some logical words, such as BECAUSE, CAN, LIKE and NOT, to provide the “glue” for putting explications together. Now still without looking yet at any particular emotion, I want to take you to the general schema or semantic template that we will use. Suppose we want to explicate words like happy, angry and disappointed in English, to begin with we need a minimal sentence frame, something like ‘This person was happy’, ‘This person was angry’, or ‘This person was sad’. Here I am calling the person ‘someone X’. That’s this person [pointing to “someone X” on the slide] was happy, angry or sad at some time. The first part of the template is: ‘this someone X thought like this at this time: “…”’. Then come some thoughts [pointing to the dotted lines in quotation

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Semantic template for English emotion adjectives with verb ‘to be’

marks]. What I am saying is that the semantic structure of an emotion sentence like ‘someone was happy (or angry)’ often starts with a model thought, i.e. ‘this someone X thought like this at this time: “…”’. It doesn’t mean that the person in question thought exactly this, but they thought like this. And then: ‘because of this, he/she felt something good (or bad)’ (it could also be something very good or very bad) … ‘like people often feel when they think like this’. So, there’s a feeling, a resultant feeling, which is understood to be typical. These are just labels [pointing to the squares, call-outs, on the right-hand side of the slide]. The actual content is here (on the left). “Typicality” is ‘like people often feel when they think like this’. If you meditate on this arrangement, I hope you will think “Hmm, I kind of get it”. The template is based on the idea that an emotion is a feeling which is typical of a certain kind of thought. The difference between different emotions, being happy, angry, sad or whatever, depends largely on the content of that model thought. I am going to show you the next slide very quickly, just because there is another common sentence frame for English emotion words. This is when you don’t say that someone was happy, angry, or sad, but you say they felt happy, angry or sad. What’s the difference between saying ‘someone was angry’ versus ‘someone felt angry’? Without going into too much detail, the difference is that in the explication for sentences like ‘someone felt angry’ the feeling part comes first. They feel something good or bad like people often feel when they think like this. It just reverses the order of the components in the template, putting the feeling first and then the thought. I am mostly going to use the first pattern.

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Semantic template for English emotion adjectives with verb ‘feel’

Figure 10 ‘Pleased’ vs. ‘contented’

I am going to show explications for pleased, contented and delighted. Why did I choose these examples? I picked these words mainly because they are close in meaning. They are also not the classic “big emotions” like, you know, English happy, sad and angry, which some people think are basic emotions. These ones (pleased, contented, delighted) are more specialized emotion words. Some of you might not be completely sure of the exact differences between them,

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and even native speakers usually don’t have a conscious knowledge of the differences. In actual usage, some differences are very predictable, and people will agree that in particular sentences contented sounds better than pleased, even though they can’t tell you exactly why. Their knowledge is unconscious. But it’s the job of linguists and the job of semantic analysis to make this knowledge explicit. I want to start with pleased. For example, I am very pleased that you got the scholarship, or She was pleased to discover something. What does it mean to be pleased? The NSM explication for pleased starts as follows: this someone (he) thought like this: “something good happened before, I wanted this”. So, the person who is pleased in a sense recognizes that something good has happened and also that they wanted it. (So if I say I am pleased you got the scholarship, I am saying that I think it’s good that you got the scholarship, and that I wanted this.) And then: ‘because of this, this person feels something good like people often feel when they think like this’. You may be thinking: “Hm, that’s interesting. That’s what it means”. You may be comparing it with some Chinese words that you know and wondering “Do we have one exactly like that?” I don’t know. There are plenty of languages which don’t have a word exactly like pleased, though they have other words that are similar. English also has a number of other words which are similar, for instance, contented. If you look at a typical English dictionary, it’s quite likely you’ll find that the word pleased is actually defined as contented. Then if you look up contented, it may say that it means pleased. This is definitional circularity. (By “circular definition”, we mean a definition that refers to itself and therefore tells you nothing. It’s a bad thing for a definition to be circular; we also use the term “vicious circle”.) As you know, as bilingual people and as language learners, a circular definition tells you nothing. (Well, it tells you that the words are related, which can be helpful, but not very helpful.) Now, let’s move to contented. A common image for contented would be a contented cat, sitting in the sunshine, purring, feeling pretty good. If a person is described as contented, then you imagine them comfortable, not wanting anything else. Look back the explication in fig. 10. He was contented. He thought like this: “Something good is happening to me now, I want this, I don’t want anything else now”. What a nice thought, right? If a person thinks something like this, it makes sense that he or she will have a pretty good feeling. The word

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contented implies this configuration ‘like people often feel when they think like this’. We sometimes call this part here [pointing to the three lines in quotation marks for contented], the “model thought”. Sometimes we call it “prototypical cognitive scenario”. It is prototypical because it includes the word ‘often’ and is not necessarily exactly so in every case. It is cognitive because it involves thinking. Now let’s highlight the differences with pleased. The model thought of pleased involves “something good happened before”, while with contented it is “something good is happening now”. That’s one difference. The other difference is that pleased does not involve ‘me’, whereas contented does. It would sound odd to say I am contented that you got the scholarship. Unless perhaps I was thinking “I worked so hard to get you that scholarship. It was my life work and now you have finally got that scholarship”. In this context, I am thinking that you getting the scholarship was something good for me. Maybe in such a context one can say contented, but it doesn’t normally sound very appropriate. The other thing that is special about the model thought behind contented is that it includes: “I don’t want anything else now”. So contented is, in a sense, more focussed on the present, i.e. the ‘now’. Here is the last one: delighted. He was delighted. One thing about delighted is that it sounds sort of like a nice surprise. Using the same template: this someone thought like this: “Something very good happened a moment before. I didn’t know before that it would happen”, followed by this person ‘feels something good like people often feel when they think like this’. Perhaps the most interesting part is that the model thought concerns something that happened ‘a moment before’. This is the idea of suddenness. And also that what

Figure 11 Semantic explication for English ‘delighted’

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happened is not just (thought of as) ‘something good’, but as ‘something very good’. Something very good happened a moment before. How great! And also: “I didn’t know before that it would happen”. So, the person is delighted. One thing you’ve got to watch out for with all emotion words, but especially delighted, is that sometimes there is a first-person formula, such as I am delighted to meet you, or I am delighted to welcome to the stage …, etc. This I am delighted to … is a politeness formula. It’s a speech formula of English. It doesn’t mean really that I am delighted. The reason we can tell that it’s a fixed formula and that it doesn’t mean that a person is really delighted is that it doesn’t work the same way if you put it into past tense. Suppose I say, for example, I’m delighted to welcome so-and-so to the stage, and that later you want to describe what happened. Could you say Cliff was delighted to welcome so-and-so to the stage? No. I just said that I was delighted. Most of these formulas are first-person, including also for pleased. For example, I’m pleased to meet you. Saying this doesn’t necessarily mean that you are pleased. It is a speech formula used for politeness reasons and it is understood as such. (Another good test for detecting whether something is a formula, aside from changing the tense, is to change the person of the subject.) Leaving speech formulas aside, explications for the general meanings of delighted, pleased and contented are given together in figure 12. Can you imagine a special kind of dictionary of emotion terms—with 50 different emotion words, instead of 3—all following the same template? The template refers to the overall structure of the explication: a model thought, followed by associated feeling which is presented as being typical (‘like people often feel when they think like this’). The template structure itself is a great finding. Once we have identified a suitable template, it makes explicating other similar word much easier. Of course, it could be that some emotion words require a slightly different template, for instance, the ones that involve part of the body, such as disgust. In an explication for disgust, for example, we might want to include a component such as: ‘like someone feels something bad when something bad is in the mouth’. But a great many emotion words can be explicated using the template shown in fig. 12. So, if you want to do an NSM semantic analysis in your own language, it’s a good idea to first consult the NSM literature to see whether or not any template has been proposed for words of the kind you are interested in. You may have to adapt that template a bit to make it suit your own language, or you may want to improve it in some other way, but getting an idea about a satisfactory template is a good initial strategy. That’s the end of the first part of the Lecture.

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Figure 12 Three explications compared (‘pleased’, ‘contented’, ‘delighted’)

Now we start with the second part of presentation. It consists of two case studies and some concluding remarks. In each case study, I am going to present three explications. So that’s six explications altogether, and some of them are going to be long and unfamiliar. This is a challenge. I want to say this at the beginning because I believe I have some good reasons for doing it. My strategy in this lecture is to show you the value of the results, i.e. to show you that explications can successfully convey complex and unfamiliar meanings. What I am not doing is showing the process whereby someone devises an explication, and what kinds of evidence they use to produce the explication. I am going to give you more about that later. At this point what I want to dramatize is that this is a very powerful, expressive, flexible system capable of capturing fine nuances of meaning, and, in some cases, meanings which are very culturally-based. These are the three words I have chosen (figure 14). They have been extensively dealt with in the NSM literature. The English word homesick, the Polish word tęsknić, and the Spanish word morriña. Let’s start with a quick look at an explication for the English adjective homesick. It’s not the only English word in this domain: there is also a verb (to) miss.

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Figure 13 Contrastive case study of “longing for home” words

Figure 14 Semantic explication for English ‘homesick’

You can miss someone. I suppose you can miss your home, but normally you miss someone. We also have explicated the verb miss. It’s somewhat different to homesick. One thing about missing someone is that there may be no possibility of ever being together with that person again. For instance, you can miss your grandma after she’s passed away. In short, miss evokes a different scenario from homesick, first, because it involves a person, and second, because it doesn’t imply that you could ever be with that person again. I am going to show the explication for homesick (fig. 14). If someone is homesick: someone thinks like this about a place: “I am far from the place where I live. When I was in this place before, I felt something good.” (Home is a little bit like the place where I live.) When I was in this place before, I felt something good” (it implies good memories and a sort of nostalgia) … “I want to be in this place now. I know that I can’t be in this place now.” It is so sad that I am far from the place where I live. Then: ‘because of this, this someone feels something bad, like people often feel when they think like this.’

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It is not necessary for every language to have exactly such a word. There can be components that are similar but different. I am going to show you an explication for the Polish word which is normally translated as homesick, and then for the Spanish word which is normally translated as homesick. You can see there are some parts are similar and some parts are different, but it’s always about a place, and about “feeling something bad” on account of being separated from this place. The Polish word tęsknić is a verb. Anna Wierzbicka, who herself is Polish, did a very good study of this in her 1999 book Emotions Across Languages and Cultures. There is also a corresponding noun tęsknota. Both words—tęsknota and tęsknić—can be regarded as key words of Polish culture. There are cognate words in other Slavic languages, such as Russian, but Wierzbicka’s claim is that the Polish word has shifted in its meaning due to the history of Poland. Perhaps not everyone knows much about the history of Poland. Poland is one of those countries which has always been dominated by its more powerful neighbors. It was repeatedly divided—partitioned— between Russia, Prussia (modern-day Germany) and Austria. According to Wierzbicka, this has left a permanent impression on Polish thinking. The Partition of Poland in the late 18th century actually eliminated Poland as a separate country (it only became a country again after World War I). After the Partition, there was an uprising, which was suppressed, and many Polish intellectuals and artists went into exile, including the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz and the pianist and composer Fryderyk Szopen (Chopin). The claim is that the historic experience of living in exile changed the meaning of the words tęsknota and tęsknić, as they were used in the Polish emigre literature

Figure 15 Background on Polish tęsknić

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Figure 16 Semantic explication for Polish tęsknić

and poetry, and elevated the concepts to the status of key emotion concepts of Polish. I am basically presenting Wierzbicka’s 1999 explication, with some small alterations. Because this word is a verb, it’s a bit like to miss (someone). This is the explication (fig. 16). You can actually tęsknić a person as well as a place. For example, if your daughter moves away from home, you can have this feeling for her; or if you move away from your daughter, you can have that kind of feeling. It’s based on separation. I am explicating the feeling about the place. This is the explication: someone who tęskni for a place, first of all: he or she ‘often thinks about this place’. This component is connected with tęsknić being a verb. And when they think about this place: ‘they feel something very bad like someone often feels when they think like this about a place:….’, and then comes the prototypical thought. So overall it’s a very bad feeling that people often have when they think about a place (which could be their home city or home country): “this place is very far from the place where I am now. I can’t be in this place now.” Not that I am not in this place, but that: “I can’t be in this place now”. Then: “when I was in this place before, I felt something good, I want to be in this place now.” So, it’s a kind of blend of sadness and pain, something strong, leading to a very bad feeling. If this explication is correct, there is certainly no word in English with exactly this meaning. From the explication it seems like an intense and painful longing to be somewhere. But we really don’t have such a

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Figure 17 Semantic explication for Polish tęsknić (Polish version)

word in English. Tęsknić is much more intense than homesick, and it’s not the same as missing something either. Because it is composed of semantic primes, the explication can be easily put into Polish. Maybe not too many people speak Polish here, but in any case here is the explication in Polish (fig. 17) (with one missing word, actually, the word for “often” is not in the first line, as it should be). Now I am going to talk about the Spanish morriña. Actually, morriña is a word in northern Spanish. We did the initial work on it for a conference in Santiago de Compostela, which is in a province of Spain called Galicia, close to Portugal. A great many Spanish people immigrated from that area to South America in the late 1800s. Literally millions of Spanish people left Galicia, and other parts of modern Spain, and went to Argentina and Chile; more than 4 million to Argentina and more than 3 million to Chile. Most of them never returned. This sentence here (pointing to the first example sentence) is in Gallego, the language of Galicia. This is from a Spanish dictionary (pointing to the “Real Academia Española”), a kind of Oxford Dictionary of Spain, and it defines the word morrinã as (the English translation): “sadness or melancholy, especially nostalgia for the land of one’s birth”. When you speak to Spanish people from the North of Spain about morriña, they often start to talk about their home village, the little village where they came from. We have just a couple of examples here (on fig. 18). The first one, in Galician: “There is no one in the world who does not feel morriña for his childhood, for his birthplace, for that place where everyone knows us and where we are someone”. It sounds beautiful, isn’t it? But it also reflects the assumption that, of course, morriña is a universal feeling. Everybody always think that their emotion terms are universal human feelings; but actually there is no such word as

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Figure 18 Background on Spanish/Galician morriña

morriña in English. You can also have morriña (these are the last two examples) when you are reminded of home, especially thinking about your childhood. I will just go straight to the explication. Someone X feels morriña (morriña is a noun): ‘someone X feels something bad like people often feel when they think like this about a place: “some people are like a part of this small place, I am one of these people”’. Notice that you are not alone, and that it’s about a ‘small place’. The model thought continues: “I did many things with people there when I was a child.” There’s a kind of memory of childhood. “I often felt many good things when I was there, I want to be in this place now, I know that I can’t be in this place now because it is very far from here.” The explication helps us imagine a certain sort of feeling which our language (well, English at least) may have no specialized word for, but it’s within our human capacity to imagine this kind of feeling. Notice that the word ‘child’ in this explication is marked with [m], indicating that ‘child’ is a semantic molecule. It’s interesting that this morriña emotion involves concept of ‘child’. Also, the mention of a ‘small place’ brings to mind something like a village. Actually people can still have morriña even if they grew up in a big city. I asked about that. It seems that Spanish cities are typically divided into sections (barrios, neighbourhoods) which are like urban villages. That’s what you

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Figure 19 Semantic explication for Spanish morriña

Figure 20 Semantic explication for Spanish morriña (Spanish version)

imagine. You imagine growing up in that section of the city when you were a child and think back on those days, and have this terrible consciousness that ‘I know I can’t be in this place now because it’s very far from here’. Because it is composed of semantic primes, the explication can be put into Spanish. This explication is translated into Spanish by one of my doctoral students (Jan Hein), who is from Argentina. That concludes the second part of the presentation. Now we are going to start the second case study. This one isn’t about bad feelings, I thought we should have some good feelings for the second part. In a sense, it is about happiness, but from a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural point of view. There is a sociological dimension too, because the world seems to be in the grip of “happiness fever” (see fig. 21). It started with the positive psychology movement in the United States, at least 15 years ago, maybe longer. Now we have global surveys, like the World Happiness Survey and the World Values Survey, which attempt to assess and track the relative happiness of people in countries around the world. It’s even been proposed that should there be a

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Figure 21 Background on second case study – “happiness” concepts across languages

Gross National Happiness (GNH) index, which should be used alongside Gross National Product (GNP) to help people understand how their country is going. In some ways that’s a good thing, I suppose. It’s nice to think that people are interested in the good feelings of others. However, the assumption that the English word happiness identifies or designates some sort of universal feeling or universal mental condition, and that every country and culture in the world can have its happiness measured— I don’t believe it, and I believe there needs to be a critique of the dominant happiness discourse. But before we get to this, I’d like to note that historians and philosophers, not just psychologists, are now talking a lot about happiness. For example, historian Darrin McMahon (2006) has contributed a very interesting book on the history of happiness. “Happiness”, he says, “is now is a global concern with roots … in many different cultural and religious traditions”. One philosopher (Bok 2010) says: “Not since antiquity have there been such passionate debates in the world today concerning visions of what makes for human happiness”. You’ll also see happiness discussed in political philosophy, cultural anthropology, economics, and even computer science—there is something called intelligent computing where we try to enable computers to assess human emotions better, including trying to get computers to detect the level of happiness. Before we look at some other languages, I am going to give you a warm-up by looking at the English word happy. The English word happy is a polysemous word and I am dealing here with only one of its meanings. Anna Wierzbicka has written extensively about happiness and she’s also done historical studies, tracing how the meaning of the word happy has changed in English over

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Figure 22 Semantic explication for English ‘happy’

several different periods, going back to early modern English. And it definitely has changed in its meaning, and, according to Wierzbicka, more so than comparable words in other European languages. The English happy seems to express a particularly modern concept. Coming to the proposed explication (fig. 22). If we say He was happy, we are saying ‘he thought like this at this time: “many good things are happening to me now as I want, I can do many things now as I want, this is good”’. The claim is that this sense of English happy involves something almost like freedom, in the thought that: “I can do many things as I want, this is good”. It’s not a reaction necessarily to any particular event. It is more generic, because it implies a view about one’s condition of life. (Perhaps ‘many good things are happening to me now as I want, I can do many things now as I want’ might sound a little bit “American” to you. I think that would actually be right, because the United States Declaration of Independence singled out the “pursuit of happiness” as one of its national ideals, along with “life” and “liberty”. It has since, of course, become a very widespread goal around the world.) The second part of the explication states that someone who has this prototypical thought ‘feels something good like people often feel when they think like this’.

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In the middle of figure 22 is a note to remind you that, according to Wierzbicka, this is a “modern” meaning. If we go back to the 18th century, the word happy in those days was more like joy. It pointed to a more intense, shortlived feeling, a rare feeling, and it was usually linked to very good luck or to some very good fortune which just happened. Even in other contemporary European languages, words such as German glücklich and French heureux are more like the older meaning of English happiness. They indicate feelings that are more intense, more short-lived, and more exceptional than contemporary English happy. We will skip over the next part (fig. 23), which is about the second meaning of English happy, which is basically happy with. In English you can talk about being ‘happy with something’, like I am happy with my job. But being happy with something is not the same thing with being happy in general. To save time I am going to skip this slide, but it is in your booklet. OK, now I want to move to Denmark. As you may know, Denmark is a country to the north of Germany and southwest of Sweden. It’s a small country with 5–6 million people, in many ways an unusual and special sort of place. Denmark is supposed to be “the happiest country in the world”. According to the World Happiness Report, Denmark consistently ranks in the top three happiest nations in surveys of well-being. Happiness researchers, such as BiswasDiener and colleagues, have published papers asking, what can account for the

Figure 23 More on happy with

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Figure 24 The happiest country?

“chronically high happiness” in Denmark? The Danes themselves have used it in tourism campaigns. My presentation today is based on the work of Carsten Levisen (2012, and other works), who is himself a Dane. He is an associate professor at Roskilde University in Denmark. He has published various articles criticizing and deconstructing the origins of this mistaken idea. Because the thing is, Danes were not asked in the survey about their levels of happiness. The surveys were translated from English into Danish, so what the Danes were actually asked about was their level of lykke. (The Danish noun is lykke and the corresponding adjective is lykkelig.) So, what is lykke and does it mean the same as happiness? If “I am (or feel) lykkelig” doesn’t mean the same as ‘I am (or feel) happy’, that would be a major problem. The people who did the World Happiness Survey used the standard methods in preparing the translated version. They had the survey translated into Danish, and then they had a so-called “back translation” done, from Danish back into English. That was the procedure for verifying that the meanings of the translation equivalents were the same. Unfortunately, from a semantic point of view, this is a pretty poor procedure. There is no way that back-translation can guarantee that two meanings are the same. It can only guarantee that the words in question are the closest available single words, in their respective languages.

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According to Levisen, lykke has two meanings. The most important one is what he called the “lykke of everyday well-being”. It has to do with how people think of their daily life and it is an important cultural key word of Danish. Songs are very important in Danish culture. There is a song about the Svante’s lykkelig day, and every Dane knows its chorus: “Lykke is not the worst thing we’ve got / the coffee’ll soon be ready”. Carsten Levisen says: “the vision of lykke depicted in this song is very earth-bound, in which a person is thankful for the small things in life”. So, this is what lykke is really about, according to Levisen. It’s the good feeling you have when you think about the many small things in life and appreciate them for what they are. Figure 25 gives Levisen’s explication for lykke. Because it is a noun, it has a different introductory section but you can still appreciate the content. The model thought of a lykke person is about their life condition. This someone thinks: “I’ve lived for some time, when I think about it now I can say something like this about it:….”. That is, one can assess or judge how it’s been to live: ‘many good things happened to me during this time, not many bad things happened to me during this time. This is good, I know that it can be not like this’. In other words, the person appreciates his or her life condition. It is a sort of reflection on one’s life experience, seeing it as overall ‘good’. And when someone thinks like this: ‘they feel something good like people often feel when they think like this’. Clearly, this is very culture-specific. The word lykke is a Danish national key word, and the closest translation to happiness, according to the global survey.

Figure 25 Semantic explication for Danish lykke (Levisen 2015)

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If you ask Danes (in English) about being the happiest country, few Danes would say so. Actually, Denmark has a rather high suicide rate, historically one of the highest. Few Danes really think that they are “the happiest people in the world”. In fact, the whole idea that they are smiling happy people is very unDanish. On the other hand, the idea of being relatively contented with life in your country—that certainly makes sense to Danes. Denmark is a social democratic country which spends a lot of time and effort trying to arrange things for the good of the citizens. Levisen proposed two further components which help elevate the importance of the lykke concept, namely: ‘it’s good for someone if he/she can think like this’ and ‘it is bad for someone if he/she can’t think like this’. So that does boost the value of lykke concept. Obviously, this Danish concept is very different from English happiness. OK, now the final part is about Chinese xìngfú. Here I am relying on work by Zhengdao Ye from Australian National University. The two of us co-edited a book called “Happiness” and “Pain” Across Languages and Cultures, which appeared last year (2015). This explication comes from Ye’s chapter on the Chinese concept xìngfú. She points out that xìngfú is a key word in Chinese “happiness discourse”, and word used in the calculation of Gross National Happiness Index in official Chinese publications. She also says that it’s a very important concept in the lives of ordinary people. Many TV series, books and other stories have the word xìngfú in their titles. For Chinese people, this is a very plain and ordinary word but

Figure 26 Background on Chinese xìngfú.

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actually it doesn’t have an exact equivalent in English, or in Danish either. I want you to see these notes at the bottom of figure 26. Ye used corpora, also autobiographies, and did the contextual substitution (of the draft explication, that is) into lots of examples. There are very good corpora of Chinese language available. Ye’s study reveals that the meaning of xìngfú is markedly different from that of English happiness. The most important difference, according to her, is that xìngfú is anchored in interpersonal relationships. It is a good feeling which is anchored in a particularly valued kind of human relationship. It depicts a state of mind based on the idea that one is cared for and loved. Let’s look at the explication. After the first part of today’s Lecture, you are familiar with the introductory section already. What we are interested in is what the cognitions are that would lead to this ‘very good feeling’, which is sustained or prolonged ‘for some time’. The first part goes as follows: I know that I can often be with someone I feel something very good when I am with this someone I feel something very good when I think about this someone Roughly speaking, then, there is a special person who you can often be with and with whom you feel something very good. You feel something very good when you think about them:

Figure 27 Semantic explication for Chinese xìngfú (Ye 2015)

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at the same time, I know that it is like this: this someone feels something very good towards me this someone often thinks about me this someone wants to do good things for me That’s a very beautiful set of thoughts and one will feel very comfortable to think that there is such a person, that you can be with them, and naturally you feel something very good when you are with them and when you think about them. Equally, you are conscious of the fact that they feel something very good towards you, often think about you, and want to do good things for you. One can easily imagine that this could be referring to one’s parents (mother and father, for instance) or some other family relatives who are very special to you, or it could be your marriage partner (your husband or wife). ‘I want it to be like this.’ Now there is more. When the experiencing person thinks like this: ‘this someone feels something very good like people often feel when they think like this’. And: ‘it is very good for this someone if it is like this.’ So, it is a very valued state—a high ideal in life—to be able to have these kinds of thoughts. Ye comments: “Xìngfú represents a state of inner security accompanied by the experiencer’s thought that he or she is cared for and loved by the ones they are attached to.” You couldn’t use the term, for instance, in reference to unmarried people, or to Buddhist monks or nuns because they are generally

Figure 28 Some further quotes from Ye (2015)

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Figure 29 Concluding remarks

thought of as detached from the world and as not having such attachments to other people. Ye says that the Chinese xìngfú concept is linked to the Chinese idea of love and the place of relationships, human relationships. The Chinese cultural ethos, she points out, is family-oriented and relational. Unpacking the meaning of xìngfú allows us to see the invisible hand of culture at play. To conclude, it is important for us to understand emotion concepts across cultures. It has immense human interest. It is also important for different fields of academic study in humanities and social science, including the various areas listed on the slide (fig. 29). Academic psychologists have gone seriously wrong by being too dependent on English-specific concepts and the global discourse on happiness is an example of that. The semantics of emotion is also relevant to linguistic semantics, translation studies, lexical typology, and language documentation, all subfields of linguistics. Equally, it is of practical importance for interpreting and translating, and for cross-cultural understanding. It really helps to appreciate other people if you can understand their feelings and understand what’s important to them. Among linguists, we need to reduce Anglocentrism in our discipline, and to get greater clarity and resolution in our semantic analyses. I hope that you can see now that NSM explications can be very useful in meeting these aims. NSM explications can capture small differences in meaning in a very precise way. One final point. For many linguists, meanings are the most intangible thing. “Meaning is so subjective”, they say, “how can we deal with it”? In the NSM view,

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Figure 30 Final points

this problem only exists if we lack the necessary methods to make meanings tangible. Paraphrase makes meanings tangible. The discipline of putting hypotheses about meanings into words, using a controlled vocabulary and strict syntax guidelines—this suddenly makes meaning very concrete, very tangible, and very testable. The fact that you use words and grammar which is understandable by ordinary people increases the attraction. One can get evidence for (or against) explications in a much more straightforward way when the language is clear.

Lecture 4

Wonderful, Terrific, Fabulous: English Evaluational Adjectives My plan over this ten lecture series is that every lecture is doing some different kind of work. Earlier today, in Lecture 3, I wanted to show you that you can use NSM very helpfully to capture differences between different languages. There was not much emphasis on how you do explications, and not much evidence given in support of each explication. I was more emphasizing the power of the metalanguage as an instrument for doing semantics across cultures. Now in Lecture 4 I’ll look at a set of words in just one language (English) which are even trickier than emotions. I’ll present more sentences, more examples, and more evidence. And we will work at it, alright? The next class, Lecture 5 tomorrow morning, is about semantic molecules. I know there is a lot of interest in semantic molecules. But for both lectures today, semantic molecules are not needed much. That’s another interesting observation. You can do a lot of good explications in areas of the lexicon such as emotions, evaluational words, and in many other areas of the lexicon, without using any semantic molecules. I want to begin by acknowledging my collaborators from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada: Professor Maite Taboada and Dr. Radoslava Trnavac. We’ve been working together for a couple of years now on a project about evaluational language (Goddard, Taboada, and Trnavac in press/2019). I’ll explain more about where this project comes from later. This is the plan of the lecture. First, an overview of English evaluational adjectives. I’ll tell you a bit about how we came upon this topic, and why it is taking so long to work our way through it. You all already know the idea of semantic template. It turns out that evaluational adjectives also fall into several semantic templates. Actually, they fall into five or six different templates, corresponding to five or six different subtypes of evaluational adjectives. Now All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5684239.

© Cliff Goddard. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004357723_005

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English evaluational adjectives

this is a surprising result, at least to me and others. I will introduce the groupings and templates. Then we will start working our way through the different groupings, each grouping with its own template. As we’ll see in a moment, we have given the templates identifying letters: A, B, C, and D. Two templates are very similar to one another, so we are calling them templates B1 and B2. And then we finish with concluding remarks. In general, evaluational adjectives, and evaluational language more broadly, is what we can call, using a certain jargon, a “hard problem”. It is a hard problem for several different reasons. One reason is that there are a lot of evaluational adjectives in English. This is just the starting list: awesome, awful, boring, brilliant, clever, compelling, complex, depressing, disappointing, disgusting, dismal, disturbing, dreadful, entertaining, excellent, exciting, fabulous, great, gripping, haunting, impressive, … on and on it goes. That’s not all. There are at least triple that many. My colleagues Taboada and Trnavac, they came to the area of evaluational adjectives because they were studying certain kinds of discourse. They were studying film reviews and product reviews, from the point of view of what’s called sentiment analysis, which is a computational application. Sometimes people call it opinion mining. Basically, the idea is to train a computer to detect how positive or negative people’s evaluations are about something—such as a

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film, a new product on the market, or a political campaign. There is quite an industry providing sentiment analysis both to companies and to political parties. For example, a company wants to know how a new product is being received by the public. A sentiment analysis business harvests a lot of commentary from the internet, and automatically provides a kind of digest or summary. Sentiment analysis is also used by political parties. During election campaigns they may use it on a daily basis. So, it’s a kind of language technology. To develop this technology requires computational linguistics and computer science; and it also requires linguists. Taboada and Trnavac are not directly involved in any commercial operations, but they are interested in the scientific underpinnings. So the question is: How can a computer decide automatically whether a particular text is positive or negative? The first thing to do, obviously, is to look at the adjectives in the text. The computer can search for and identify the evaluational adjectives, using an online dictionary database. For every adjective in that database you can write in how “positive” or how “negative” it is, and you can have some automated calculations (algorithms) that add up the positives and subtract the negatives. Other complicated calculations have to be done. For instance, what if someone uses negation, says about a new film or product It’s not great. Obviously, you have to take account of the not and reverse the positive evaluation inherent in the word great. Overall, there are many different calculations needed to do sentiment analysis successfully. Coming back to evaluational adjectives, it’s important to get the actual analysis of evaluational adjectives correct. My colleagues at Simon Fraser University were interested in finding out whether by using the NSM approach they could get a more fine-grained or more useful analysis of evaluational adjectives. They contacted me, we formed a collaboration and started to study evaluational adjectives as the background. That explains why a lot of my examples today come from film reviews. We used a couple of corpora: one was a special testbed corpus of film reviews, which is held at Simon Fraser University. Another was WordBanks Online, which is a commercially available corpus of English. By the way, all the words on figure 1 appear frequently in film reviews. And there are many many more. You can’t quite see the two movie posters here (on the slide). I’ll just read from them: daring, electrifying, hilarious, devastatingly howlingly funny, wonderful, superb … So, in just two film posters, we have already seen a great number of different evaluational adjectives. Indeed, probably part of the reason that so many evaluational adjectives exist is precisely because there are genres of critical evaluation, such as film and book reviews. The reviewers try to make their reviews sound verbally skillful and original. No one is interested in a review that just says ‘this is great’ or ‘this is terrible’. So,

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reviewers try to deploy a lot of different adjectives and adjectival expressions and this perhaps helps to explain why there are so many. Anyway, it’s a fantastic challenge to linguistic analysis. Here we have dozens and dozens of words which all seem superbly subjective. I mean, the whole point of any evaluational word is to be subjective. Surely, the difference between all these words is not just a number on the scale. It is not like we can just lay down a scale from 1 to 5, and you know, dreadful is –4.5 and appalling is –4.6. There must be more to it than that. But what? How can we capture the meaning content, or at least differentiate the meaning content, in such a subjective area? Now the third point is that the number and also the exact meanings of evaluational adjectives differ a lot between languages. Professor Taboada is Spanish by birth, a Spanish native speaker. Just comparing English and Spanish, you can already find that a lot of the adjectives don’t match, either in terms of number and in terms of their meaning content. So, it’s a supreme challenge for corpus linguistics and for cross-linguistic semantics. In this lecture, as I said earlier, I’m just doing English semantics. This is a little bit more about the background (fig. 2). Most evaluational adjectives are very versatile, i.e. you can use them in many different contexts. Take a word like wonderful, for instance. You can talk about a wonderful film, a wonderful smile, a wonderful person, a wonderful sunset, and so on. The type

Figure 2

Background on our study

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of referent, whether it is a film, a person, a sunset, and so forth, can be very different, very diverse. We are concentrating on examples from movie reviews, as I said, but we have also taken examples from other sources as well. For the moment, it is an open question, whether and to what extent the type of noun changes the interpretation of the adjective. In movie reviews, the sentence types in which such adjectives are typically found include, for instance: It’s a wonderful movie, or It is a fabulous performance, or It is a complex movie (see examples under (a) in fig. 2). Or: In this brilliant film, the performance or direction was dreadful or flawed (see examples under (b) in the figure). Or could be: One of the most appealing, delightful, thoughtful …, etc. (see examples under (c) in the figure). Those are among the typical sentence frames you can find in movie reviews. Overall, our study was corpus-assisted. That’s the term I would like to use: corpus-assisted. You might have heard, there has been some discussion in Corpus Linguistics about corpus-based vs. corpus-assisted. I think it’s quite a useful distinction, actually. We’ve been using corpus as a tool, as a source of evidence, and we interpret that evidence. In no way are we simply summarizing the data in the corpus. On the other hand, if you do corpus-based research, maybe sometimes you are indeed summarizing statistical data, and other data, that’s in the corpus. Our approach was corpus-assisted. In particular, we paid a lot of attention to collocation data. Because like everyone, we agree that “You shall know a word by the company it keeps”—perhaps the most famous quotation in relation to corpus linguistics, from J. R. Firth, a British linguist. UK linguists were interested in the grammar and meanings of words, and in lexicography in general, well before most other people in the English-speaking world. OK, moving on. We started work on about sixty words. And we eventually (so far) have produced satisfactory explications for about forty or so. On the basis of the investigation so far, we have concluded that there are five different groupings of evaluational adjectives. We had no presupposition when we started, as to how many groupings there were. I was personally surprised to discover there were as many as five. Seemingly, we cannot reduce the number of templates. For satisfactory explications, we need five. I hope by the end of this Lecture we will see that there really are clear differences between these five different groups of words and that each demands its own semantic template. To put it into perspective though, consider the situation with verbs. My goodness, it’s even worse. Verbs have been much more intensively studied, of course. Who knows how many different subclasses of verbs are there—at least forty? There is widespread consensus these days that there are a great number

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of verbal subclasses, which means a great number of different semantic templates. The old idea that there are just a few verb classes, such as transitive, intransitive, and ditransitive, is long gone. The same goes for nouns. It’s no longer widely accepted that all nouns fall neatly into a couple of classes, such as common nouns and proper nouns, plus maybe abstract nouns. It is recognized that are many different kinds of nouns, each with a different semantic template: body-part nouns, kinship terms, color nouns, landscape words…. So maybe a similar result for evaluational adjectives is not so strange after all. Some of you may have knowledge about background work on evaluational adjectives (see fig. 3). The main significant work has been done in Systemic Functional Linguistics, and the key work is Martin and White’s (2005) book The Language of Evaluation. They propose something they call the Appraisal Framework (sometimes people just call it Appraisal). It is a widely-used system for describing evaluational language, and it is often used in sentiment analysis. Just to summarize the areas that are relevant to us, Martin and White proposed that there is an Appreciation subsystem (see top right-hand section of the diagram on fig. 3), which has five different subcategories. You can see these words on the slide: arresting, captivating, predictable, beautiful, plain, balanced, elegant, disjointed, complex, original, derivative, worthless. So, it’s true to say that

Figure 3

Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Framework

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the Appraisal Framework has already gone into this terrain and proposed some groupings. Will their groupings will turn out to be the same as the groupings we propose? That’s an interesting question to keep “on hold” for the moment. One aspect of Martin and White’s treatment was that they didn’t provide any clear way of separating the words within each group. So, in that sense, their analysis has not reached the final level. There is an indefinitely a large number of words in this group, and in this one, and in this one (indicating subcategories of Appreciation), and what is difference between them? We can discuss later, if people here are interested in Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL), the great challenge that the lexicon poses for SFL (cf. Martin 2016). Very briefly, the problem arises for SFL because it is very difficult to make ever-increasingly fine divisions and to categorize everything right down to the level of minute detail. NSM of course takes a different approach, since it is based on paraphrase (not on categorization). We propose that there are five groups, each requiring a different template. As I said in the introduction, we just gave them these names (A–D) for convenience. This is an overview of examples (see fig. 5 below). In each group, you can have words which are either positive or negative. ‘Positive’ means that they have the semantic prime GOOD in them; and ‘negative’ means that they have the semantic prime BAD in them. In group A, for example, you have positive ones like great, wonderful, terrific, fabulous, awesome, and negative ones like terrible, awful, and dreadful. No doubt some of you can sense some kind of similarity between all those words. They all sound extreme, and a little bit emotional. Group B includes, on the positive side: interesting, delightful, entertaining, compelling, touching, gripping, exciting, tense, suspenseful, stunning, and on the negative side: boring, predictable, disgusting and sickening (for instance, This movie is sickening, or It is a sickening portrayal of violence). I don’t know if you can feel the tiny difference between the two groups designated as B1 and B2. I’ll keep you in suspense just for the moment. Then we have a third group, group C: powerful, memorable, haunting, inspiring, those are positive, and on the negative: disturbing, depressing. Group D is very diverse: complex, excellent, outstanding, impressive, brilliant, original, clever are examples of positive ones, and disappointing, dismal, woeful are examples of negative ones. For the purpose this Lecture, I decided to only give examples of positive ones, just because we cannot have too many explications. My co-authors and I have an article in press with the journal Functions of Language. It also only uses positive words. We have published separately a small article on the negative words.

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Groupings and templates for English evaluational adjectives

OK, shall we start? I’ll first review the five groups again—not just from the point view of the labels and what kinds of words are involved, but an overview of the templates. The A template, for words like great, wonderful and terrific, we could call them first-person evaluators (which means they have a lot of ‘I’ in them) and they involve thought-plus-feeling. The evaluation consists of a first-person thought-plus-feeling. They are very subjective. Their semantic structures are actually very simple. I’m going to give you three examples (great, wonderful and terrific), and present explications that will show the difference between these three very positive evaluations. Now to the B templates: B1 and B2. We call these “experiential evaluators”: entertaining, delightful, gripping, and exciting. The reason for the term “experiential” is that, as you will see from the template, they kind of comment on how someone can receive or respond to the film or the book, as they watch it or listen to it. What is their experience like? There is a time dimension implied from the point of view of how people could respond. When someone calls something gripping or exciting, they’re kind of saying: someone watching this, could think like this and feel like this. The difference between the B1 template and the B2 template is that the latter includes a potential bodily effect. Some words, such as stunning, exciting, or thrilling, imply some kind

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of potential physical effect. It’s not just a mental feeling. Those are the B groups. Now the C group, including words like powerful and memorable. What makes them different is that they don’t focus on the experience of watching the film or reading the book, but on the after-effect. These words imply a lasting effect. For example, you have to think about it afterwards, and perhaps feel bad. In any case, the idea that they imply an after-effect means that these words can’t be explicated using the same template as the ones we’ve seen before. Finally, the D group. They turn out to be purely cognitive. If you call something complex, for instance, the word complex is not really expressing or entailing any feeling. It’s just a cognitive evaluation. When we come to explicate the meaning of complex, we’ll see that in some contexts it may imply some feeling, but feeling is not actually encoded as part of meaning of the word. The D group are not really “feeling words”. They are more about judgment, purely mental evaluation. There turned out to be quite a lot of Group D subgroups, but these subgroups don’t require any extra templates. They differ according to the kind of judgement being made—in the semantic ingredients, as it were—but all of them seem to fit under the same template. Figure 5 gives an overview of the templates, all on one slide. Now let’s explicate some words belonging to template A. Suppose we look at something like this: It’s a great movie, or It was a wonderful performance, or Someone does a terrific job. This is the general template (see fig. 6) for all three of these.

Figure 5

Overview of the 5 templates (positive words only)

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Template A: “first-person thought + feeling”

The first idea is: ‘I think about this (movie, performance, job) like this: …’. The content of the model thought is different for wonderful, for terrific, and for great. But the first thing to note is the presence of the “I”. ‘I think about it like this’. So, you’ve really gone out there. You’ve put your own subjective authorship on this judgment, it’s explicit. ‘I think about it like this: ….’. Next: ‘when I think about this, I feel something good (or, very good, or even ‘very very good’) because of it’. As a matter of fact, for these adjectives, the feeling always seems to be not just ‘good’, but ‘very good’ (or, if negative, ‘very bad’). They seem to go with extreme positive (or negative) evaluation. There are a few pieces of the linguistic evidence to back up the presence of these components. From an intuitive of point of view, it is pretty obvious that these words express some kind of emotive response, that there’s some kind of feeling quality there. But we can find supporting linguistic evidence as well. One of them is that words like great, wonderful, and terrific can actually occur with the verb feel to describe a person’s feelings. So, you can say: I feel great. I feel wonderful. I feel terrific (whereas you can’t say, for example, *I feel exciting or *I feel delighting /delightful or *I feel complex). Also, you can use these template A words as self-contained utterances: Great!, Wonderful!, Terrific! and this also is a property not shared by all or most other evaluational adjectives. The fact that you can use these adjectives as exclamations is consistent with the proposition that they express feelings, because exclamations are usually feeling-based. So just to summarize template A, it consists of the first-person thought (firstperson meaning ‘I’), then comes the content of the thought or model thought, and then the feeling. So, for Great movie or Great food: ‘I think about this movie

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(or, this food) like this: “This movie, (or, this food) is very very good”. When I think about it like this, I feel something very good’. Pretty simple, really. When you hear people saying Great! Great!, this is what they’re saying: ‘I think it’s very very good. I feel something very good because of it’. The fact that the meaning is so simple is consistent with the fact that great is a high-frequency word in a culture that encourages “positivity”, such as American culture, and Anglophone culture generally. American culture in particular encourages the expression of positive feelings. Of course, the word great is polysemous, with plenty of other meanings. In an expression such as a great king, for example, it means a very important king. If I say a great number of people, it means a very large number of people. So, the word great has several other meanings, but we are just looking at its evaluational meaning. When we compare great to the other example words in this group, i.e. wonderful and terrific, great is the simplest of the three. As I said, it is also the most frequent and, from an intuitive point of view, the plainest word of the three. I mean, if you say The food is great, or Great food, intuitively it’s just a simpler statement than saying Terrific food or Wonderful food. In fact, the meaning expressed by great is so simple that sometimes it may seem a little perfunctory, like, not too interesting. For example, to say The food is wonderful or The food is terrific somehow carries more effect than simply The food is great. Like maybe you’ve thought about it a bit more … you’ve chosen a more complex word. By the way, the combination ‘very very good’ (or ‘very very bad’), we think this is allowable in NSM, the repeat of ‘very’. Some languages may have other ways of expressing the same meaning, e.g. with a portmanteau word like ‘extremely’. One question worth considering is: Does great imply “unexpectedness”? Some people have suggested that if you say that something is great, then you are implying that it is unexpected. If this were true, we could deal with that: we could include components like ‘I didn’t know it before’ in the explication. That would be fine, we can capture “unexpectedness” in the NSM metalanguage. But from an empirical point of view, calling something great is not incompatible with saying that it is expected. You can say something like We expect great food from Heston (a celebrity chef) and tonight is no exception. We can see in the corpus counter-evidence to the idea that unexpectedness is involved. Also, simply calling something ‘very very good’ already implies that it is of an exceptional standard, because most things are not very very good. In short, during the development process we experimented with various alternative components, and sometimes we decided not to include them

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Explicating English ‘great’

because that would make the explication inconsistent with attested uses in the corpus. Now what about wonderful (fig. 8)? First I’ll give you some examples and some commentary. A wonderful performance, a wonderful sunset, or He is a wonderful person. It seems warmer somehow, even though it is not clear at this moment what this “warmer” means. When we look at the WordBanks corpus, we found that wonderful occurs very frequently in combinations like this: a wonderful flavor, wonderful smell, wonderful aroma. They are sensuous: taste, flavor, smell. Also, you often get wonderful used about a person: a wonderful loving man, a wonderful wife, a wonderful caring man. Earlier this year (2016), a very popular British MP called Jo Cox was killed in the street by a madman. Afterwards, a Member of Parliament, in a tribute to her, called her a wonderful woman and a wonderful MP. We also get expressions like wonderful time and wonderful memories. We can have a wonderful atmosphere. Someone can have a wonderful voice; like, a brilliant singer who has a wonderful voice. So, when we look at the range of collocations involving wonderful, we have the intuition of something like warmth and we can deduce that there is potential for the wonderful referent to evoke “good feelings”. The good feelings can be sensuous, they can be aesthetic, they can be emotional. When we call someone or something wonderful, we are partly saying that this person or thing is ‘very very good’, but as well as that: ‘someone can feel something very good because it is like this’. So, if it’s a wonderful flavor: ‘this flavor is very very good’ (and)

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Explicating English ‘wonderful’

‘someone can feel something very good because it is like this’. We are attributing to the referent, to the thing being described, the power to bring about this very good feeling. If you call someone a wonderful wife, it implies that someone (I suppose, her husband) can feel something very good because she is like this. If she is a wonderful MP, the public can feel something very good because she is their representative. The speaker also says, according to the explication: ‘when I think about this, I feel something very good’. But the speaker’s own very good feeling is a different matter from the capacity of the referent to evoke a very good feeling response generally. It’s the latter component that corresponds to warm as an adjective in English, for example, when we talk about a warm person. In this use, warm generally means something to do with good feelings, expressing good feelings. If someone is a warm person, you can sense their good feelings towards you. If She greeted me warmly, it means that when she greeted me, I could tell that she felt something very good towards me. OK, now let’s quickly go to terrific (fig. 9). Terrific is actually quite a popular adjective. At my university, you often hear the managers complimenting us on doing a terrific job, or saying that someone has done terrific work. For me, the word terrific has got a kind of “exciting” feeling to it. This is just an intuition at this point, just a sort of sense, a hint. It seems to have a dynamic feeling, to convey the idea that something is happening. You know, It’s terrific, a terrific result, to praise someone’s performance. On the other hand, we also get terrific used

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Figure 9

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Explicating English ‘terrific’

about things which are apparently unrelated to performance. Terrific food…. well, maybe the chef has done a terrific job, but what about a terrific atmosphere? And you can even have terrific weather; for example: terrific weather for hiking, terrific weather for skiing, terrific weather for sightseeing. After a great deal of puzzling, we formed the idea that terrific implies an “enabling” effect. Specifically, when you describe something as terrific, what you are saying is ‘because of this, something can happen as many people want’. That is, if something is terrific, it enables some kind of desired outcomes to occur. So, if you say Cate Blanchett’s terrific performance (one of the examples on fig. 9), I think you’re saying not only that she acted very well, but that this made a contribution to the whole film. If you have terrific food, it’s contributing to overall dining experience. When people talk about terrific weather, it’s often in the context of outdoor sports, because with weather like this people can do their activities as they want. So, this is the explication. ‘I think about this (performance, food, weather) like this: “it is very very good.” Because of this, something can happen as many people want. When I think about this, I feel something very good because of it.’ Regarding the intuition that terrific implies something “exciting” or “dynamic”, this comes from the component ‘because of this, something can happen as many people want’. Exactly what it is left vague. In terrific weather, it

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looks at first as if terrific means something quite different from what it means in terrific food; but actually we can find a single explication that works in both contexts. The interpretation in context is partly determined by what the noun is, but apparently the word terrific has a stable and invariant meaning, as captured in the explication. Here is an overview of the three explications (fig. 10). This is a great X, a wonderful X, a terrific X. As you can see, they all follow the same template. I have put the “thought content” in bold because it’s the thought content that makes the difference. All of them include the assessment that ‘this X is very very good’, of course, but with wonderful and terrific, there is an additional thought content. (If we were explicating negative words under this template, such as terrible, dreadful, and awful, then the assessment would be ‘this X is very very bad’, plus some other stuff.) We start again, moving to the B, C and D templates. We call the B group “experiential” evaluators: words like entertaining, delightful, exciting, stunning. From a morphological point of view, we notice that such words typically have an -ing suffix, i.e. they are identical in form to the present participle form of the verb. (Even delightful may be semantically the same, because there is no such word as *delighting. So, we may possibly say that, in terms of meaning, delightful means what delighting would mean.) BTW, in a paper on surprise

Figure 10 Three template A explications compared (‘great’, ‘wonderful’, terrific’)

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(Goddard 2015) I have written a section trying to specify what is characteristic of present participle adjectives with -ing. We don’t have time to go into that now. Maybe it’s best if I first show template B (see fig. 11), then try to justify it. It is more complex than template A. This one starts like this: ‘when someone thinks about this X …’ (it depends on the nature of the referent), ‘this someone can think about it like this (at many times): “…” ’. The first thing to note is that the thought is depicted as someone’s potential thought. It is not presented as my thought, but as a thought that ‘someone’ can potentially have (i.e. ‘someone can think like this: ….’). Of course, the judgment is still subjective because it’s coming from one person, the speaker, who is choosing to use this particular word (entertaining, delightful, exciting, etc.). But the speaker or writer is sort of hiding or masking their subjectivity a little bit, insofar as they attribute the potential reaction to anyone who “consumes” or “experiences” the referent designated by the noun. In other words, if you call something entertaining, delightful, or exciting, you are saying that anyone could have this reaction, this response, this potential thought. The rest of the B1 template is not too dissimilar from template A: ‘when this someone thinks like this, he/she can feel something very good (or, very bad) because of it’. So, the overall ground-plan is pretty similar to the first-person “thought-plus-feeling” explications, except that it is a potential third-person “thought-plus-feeling”.

Figure 11 Templates B1 and B2: “experiential evaluation

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Some of these words require an additional component: ‘he/she can’t not feel like this’. If this component is present, the response is depicted as compelling, i.e. you have no choice. Some of these words also have a “potential bodily reaction’ component: ‘at the same time, he/she can feel something in the body because of it.’ If there is a potentially bodily reaction component, we will call that template, template B2. We will call the simpler template, without that component, template B1. So, the B1 and B2 templates are very similar, differing mainly by one component. Now let’s look at the explication for entertaining (fig. 12). This is actually a rather difficult word to explicate. Here are some examples: – Reviews called it “topical, funny and entertaining but far from challenging drama”. – I doubt there has ever been a more spectacular folly than Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, a hugely entertaining and utterly preposterous tilt at Homer’s mythical siege.

Figure 12 Explicating English ‘entertaining’

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The second example is about the movie Troy—in my opinion, a pretty dreadful movie. But the reviewer calls it hugely entertaining, even though utterly preposterous. A lot of sophisticated evaluations here. The proposed explication for something entertaining (let’s say it is a film or a book) starts like this: ‘when someone watches this film (or, reads this book) for some time, he/she can think like this at many times: ….’. So, we have the idea that as you have the experience, i.e. as you watch the film or read the book, at various times you can think something like this: “something is happening now because someone wants people to feel something good like people can feel when they want to laugh [m]. This is good.” Someone who evaluates something as entertaining, according to the explication, understands that some events are occurring because someone (maybe the director, maybe the author, maybe the host) ‘wants people to feel something good’; and not just something good but: ‘something good like people often feel when they want to laugh [m]’. This does not necessarily mean that it is funny as such, but it’s the kind of good feeling that can be associated with laughing. (‘Laugh [m]’ is a semantic molecule, I’ll show you the explication tomorrow.) And this is evaluated overall as: ‘this is good’, i.e. the whole package is considered to be good. Overall, this is a fairly complicated package of evaluation. If you think about the positive evaluation part of this explication it can sound pretty superficial: just saying, in effect, that someone wanted to get good feelings from the audience and that they succeeded in it. Perhaps this explains why simply saying that something is entertaining can seem a bit lightweight, a bit unimpressive. This probably explains why when people are trying to be positive, they often combine entertaining with some more serious-sounding adjectives. For instance (about a TV documentary), She found the programme informative and entertaining. If we just called it entertaining, it wouldn’t sound very worthwhile, but if we add informative, that’s very good. Another tendency is for entertaining to occur modified by an adverb like very, hugely or highly, which again makes it sound more impressive than simply being entertaining. OK, you are used to the template now, so when we look at the explication for delightful (fig. 13), we can just zero in on the content of the potential thought. If it’s, you know, a delightful film or a delightful book: ‘when someone watches this film or reads this book, they can think like this at many times: “something very good happened a moment before, I didn’t know before that this would happen”. Earlier today, in Lecture 3, I presented an explication for the word delighted in the emotional sense, and obviously there must be a relationship between

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Figure 13 Explicating English ‘delightful’

delightful (evaluation) and delighted (emotion). What the explication (in fig. 13) is saying, essentially, is that if you call a film delightful, then we imagine that there are a lot of “delightful moments” in this film. That is, often during the film one can have this kind of thought: “Oh, something very good just happened. I didn’t know before that this would happen.” Here are some typical examples: – It’s a delightful film brimming with information, humor, and visual delights. – Alice in Wonderland JR., a delightful adaptation of the classic Disney film. Thinking about it from another point of view, we can say that the explication depicts the prototypical thought as registering that something very good and unexpected is taking place, with a resulting good feeling. (This links in with the emotion literature on delight, which connects delight with surprise, as I mentioned in Lecture 3.) Let’s try exciting (fig. 14). Exciting, I don’t know if you have such a word in Chinese. I was surprised to discover that there is no such word in Spanish; I mean, no word that is a perfect match with English exciting. It’s actually quite a common word in English, and of course it is not only used about films and books. Many things can be exciting. If you read popular science magazines or websites, you will always be hearing about an exciting discovery, and there are many other possible contexts. Here are some examples:

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Figure 14 Explicating English ‘exciting’

– But he’s also pulled off the bloodiest, most exciting and convincing sword-andscandal saga in cinematic history. – The children ranging from 5 to 15 years of age, for all of whom this voyage was the most exciting adventure of their lives. From an intuitive point of view, exciting sounds kind of eager and enthusiastic. If you look in the WordBanks corpus, you’ll find that the word exciting frequently collocates with the word new. So, we often get new and exciting. And of course, there is the expression: an exciting sale. I’m sure that in all the fashionable shopping places in Beijing, there are lots of exciting sales and exciting new products. According to WordBanks, the next most favorite adjective to collocate with exciting is interesting. If you explicate the word interesting, which I have done (Goddard 2015), you find that interesting also connects, in its semantics, with new. This is my proposed explication for exciting (fig. 14), as used about a film or a book: ‘when someone watches this film (or, reads this book), he or she can think like this at many times: “very few things like this happened before, something very good can happen after a short time because of this”. So, the triggering event, what has just happened, is depicted as rare, as unusual. In the expression an exciting sale, for instance, the word exciting conveys the impression that nothing quite like this has happened before, and that

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something very good can happen because of it, and in a short time. The word exciting creates anticipation. Similarly, if there is an exciting fight in a film, while you are watching you have the idea that maybe the heroes will win and that something very good can happen. The component ‘something very good can happen after short time because of it’ is associated with anticipation. (By the way, many languages have a word like soon that they use as a portmanteau for ‘after a very short time’.) Now I am going to go to stunning (fig. 15). I can’t not mention Donald Trump’s stunning electoral victory. He has already flooded the internet with a huge number of instances of the expression stunning victory. Now, stunning victory is a typical collocation of the word stunning, and not only in politics, of course; it is also very common in sports reporting. Equally, we can have a stunning defeat. One can also give a stunning performance. A lot of collocations involving stunning are visual; for example, someone can wear a stunning dress, or have a stunning girlfriend or stunning boyfriend. So, it’s got to do with “looks” in cases like these. At the moment I want to stay neutral about whether this is a separate meaning, i.e. whether there is a separate meaning “visually stunning”. Let’s leave those stunning boyfriends and girlfriends aside for the time being, and just think about film reviews, and examples like stunning performance, or stunning victory for that matter.

Figure 15 Explicating English ‘stunning’

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It turns out that when you look at the WordBanks corpus, you don’t often see stunning in conjoined expressions, i.e. there are no examples of the form stunning and … And it is also rare to see stunning modified by very, i.e. you don’t get very stunning. Something can be very exciting, but not very stunning. On the other hand, you can get absolutely stunning, simply stunning, and quite stunning. People who are familiar with the literature on intensifying expressions will know that is often (rightly) said that there two different categories of intensifying expressions. Very belongs to the plain type. There is another type, which kind of says ‘this is the right word’. Absolutely, quite and simply, belong to the second type. If I say simply stunning, I am saying the word stunning and at the same time, as it were, certifying that stunning is the right word to use in this context. OK: ‘when someone thinks about this, he/she can think about it like this: “this is something very very good”. So, it’s an extreme type of evaluation. Then: ‘I don’t know how it can be like this’—a component that is also found in words like astonished and amazed (Goddard 2015). And also, the person at least purports to experience a kind of disruption to his or her normal thinking: ‘because of this, I can’t think well at this moment’. (Relatedly, if you are physically stunned punched in the head or whatever, there’s a mental effect too, right?. You might not lose consciousness, but momentarily you can’t think well.) So, that’s the logic here, that’s the package: ‘this is something very very good; I don’t know how it can be like this; because of this, I can’t think well at this moment.’ That is the set of cognitions, and thinking like this one can feel something good because of it. There is even more to stunning, according to our analysis. First, our hypothetical someone ‘can’t not feel like this’. If it is a stunning sunset, stunning performance, or maybe even a stunning girlfriend, it is so dramatic, so overwhelming, that indifference is not an option. Second, there is the possibility of feeling something in the body at the same time. This component is vague and non-specific, it just hints at some kind of physical reaction. (Again, it is linked with the physical meaning of the verb stun.) Overall, it’s a pretty complex bundle of meaning. As mentioned, we have about 40 explications of evaluational adjectives in hand, and it turns out that the number of words in the B group is quite large. There are a lot of them in both B1 and B2 categories, i.e. without any potential bodily reaction, and with potential body reaction. It’s possible there may be a further subcategory of more vivid bodily reactions, expressions like gutwrenching, heart-breaking, stomach churning, which involve a kind of image of an affected body-part. If so, that would be template B3. As interesting as they

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are, I can’t keep talking about these template B words. We need to get to the next two templates. Template C is for words like memorable or powerful (fig. 16). A powerful film, a memorable book, a haunting melody. The basic idea behind this kind of evaluator is that when someone watches the film, reads the book, or whatever, it has an effect on that person: ‘something happens to him or her because of it’. This is different from the adjectives we have seen before. And moreover, this effect carries on: ‘because of this, for some time afterwards, it is like this: ….’. That is with words like memorable or powerful, it’s not so much about the person’s cognitive reaction and their feelings, it’s about the effect on a person and how it carries on afterwards. That’s why we call this grouping the “lasting impact” grouping. The slide (fig. 16) shows the template structure and the labels for each section. The first section indicates an immediate Effect on the viewer or experiencer. The second section is called After Effect. There is also a final component of Social Evaluation, which is usually positive: ‘people can think about it like this: “this is good”’. You’ll see what I mean when I show you the explication for memorable (fig. 17). Here are a couple of examples (memorable ‘flicks’ means memorable films): – Maybe that’s why some of his most memorable flicks-The Godfather, The Godfather PartⅡ, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon—are from and of the simpler … – McGrady had turned another night into something special, something memorable, something legendary.

Figure 16 Template C: “Lasting impact”

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Figure 17 Explicating English ‘memorable’

Here is the proposal. When someone says a memorable film or a memorable book, they mean: ‘when someone watches this film (or, reads this book) for some time, something happens to them during this time. Because of this, for some time afterwards it is like this: …’ Now what is this on-going effect? In the case of memorable, the effect is that this someone thinks about it at some times afterwards. And what do you think about it afterwards? Basically, you have the feeling that you know what it is like and you think that it is good. This is connected with the meaning of the word memory (cf. Wierzbicka 2006), which probably we could discuss for a long time. Normally, memorable is a positive word, e.g. calling something a memorable experience is saying something good about that experience. (Admittedly, one can talk about a bad experience as memorable, but this is a kind of ironic usage.) And finally, there is an evaluational component: ‘people can think about it like this: “this is good”’. There are also some negative words like this, such as traumatic. For example, a traumatic memory is something which you can’t get rid of. You keep coming back to it, keep thinking about it; but it is ‘very bad’. Now here’s another one, powerful (fig. 18). You may wonder what a powerful portrayal is, what a powerful movie is. We have to be careful here, because the word powerful is very polysemous. For example, if we have a powerful man, the meaning of powerful is different from a powerful movie. In the case of a powerful man, a key semantic component might be: ‘when this man says something like this: “I want people

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Figure 18 Explicating English ‘powerful’ (in its evaluational sense)

to do something”, people can’t not do it.’ “Power” is about people having no choice but to do what you say. Likewise, consider: a powerful engine. That is another different meaning of powerful. Likewise with a powerful storm: a third meaning of powerful. So yes, powerful is a polysemous word, with several different, interrelated meanings, and here we just want to look at its use in contexts like a powerful film. But in film reviews, that’s actually a very common usage. It is common to talk about someone’s powerful performance or to praise a powerful story. That’s a powerful family drama. Here are some examples: – Drunkenness, incest and hatred lie just beneath the surface in a powerful portrait of exile and loss. – In a year packed with scintillating storylines and powerful performances, the panel has to make some of its hardest choices ever. What does it mean when you describe someone’s performance as powerful? It has something to do with impact, so it’s sort of like memorable. But what’s the difference? This is the proposal. For a powerful film or powerful book: ‘when someone watches this film (or, reads this book), something happens to this someone during this time. Because of this, for some time afterwards, it’s like this: …’ Specifically, you ‘can’t not think something about it during this time’;

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and as well, you ‘can’t not feel something’ when you think about it. In other words, certain thoughts come into your mind, and certain feelings too, and you can’t resist them. (This looks a little bit similar to a powerful man: when that powerful man says something, people can’t not do it. But it’s quite a different kind of power: it’s the power to make you think about it later and have some feelings later.) That’s what we mean by powerful. As well, if I call something a powerful film, I am evaluating it as good. More precisely, I convey the idea that: ‘people can think about it like this: ‘this is good”. Haunting is another adjective in the “lasting impact” category. In particular, the expression a haunting melody is a very common collocation. Now I am going to go to the last of our five templates, template D. Template D covers a very diverse bunch of words, which all concern “cognitive evaluations”. They all seem to involve a potential thought which is linked with or presupposes some level of knowledge. In contrast to the previous templates, there is no feeling state portrayed in these explications, i.e. no component like ‘this person can feel something good (or, bad) because of it’. They are just cognitive evaluations: how you can think about it based on your knowledge. There are many different “types” of cognitive evaluation, depending on the semantic components that are in the Potential Thought component. I want to show you a couple of interesting ones (fig. 20). First, complex. Complex is a great word. We use it all the time in linguistic discussions, always talking about complex phenomena; and agreeing that the problem is very complex. (Usually it is too.) Here are some other examples. Notice that you tend to get the word complex in fairly sophisticated registers, with sophisticated words in the surrounding context.

Figure 19 Template D: “Cognitive evaluation”

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Figure 20 Explicating English ‘complex’

– He speculated that order is pervasive and exists in increasingly subtle and complex hierarchies. – David’s a complex character. He can be gentle as well as ruthless, and naïve as well as astute … You can have a complex character, a complex story. What we think about complex is that basically it has got to do with PARTS. If something is complex, it has ‘many parts’, and because it has so many different parts, it’s hard to understand. But what does “hard to understand” mean? This explication (fig. 20) is based on the idea that “hard to understand” means hard to ‘know well what this is like.’ It’s hard to get a good knowledge of it because there are so many parts and they are different. If this explication is correct, when we call something complex, we are invoking a kind of “analytical” mindset. Would you call a chair complex? Probably not. But the design of a chair could be complex. What about an engine? Is an engine complex? Probably yes, because we immediately know that an engine has many parts and is hard to understand. OK, what about a complex film, a complex argument, or a complex character? According to the explication, it means: ‘if someone knows what this film

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(argument, character) is like, this someone can think about like this: “this thing has many parts; many of these parts are not like the others”. (It couldn’t be something with all identical parts: that wouldn’t be very complex. There has to be some diversity in the parts.) The explication continues: ‘because of this, if someone doesn’t know many things about these parts, this someone can’t know well what this something is like.’ In other words, for comprehensive knowledge, you need to know about all the parts. Unless you know about all the parts, you can’t overall know well what this thing is like. And: ‘it is good if someone can know well what this something is like’. I can even say: this is a pretty complex explication for complex. Why? Because my explication has many parts which are not like the other parts, and in order to understand (roughly, know well) the whole explication, you have to understand the individual parts. You can see why such a word would be very useful for scientists dealing with some problems which have many different parts. Now I’ll show you a simpler one: excellent (fig. 21). Someone’s excellent performance, or excellent service, or excellent idea. One thing about the word excellent, shared also by words like outstanding, is that it gives the impression that the speaker is a bit of an expert on the topic. If I say This is an excellent film, for example, I give the impression that I know what I’m talking about. If I say That film is great, on the other hand, it could sound a little naïve. If I say excellent, or outstanding, it really sounds like I can assess the difference between different things. Professors can assess students’ work as excellent because they have a lot of knowledge about the field or area. How can we capture this idea, i.e. give the impression that the speaker or the writer knows a lot about the field? I’ll show the explication. Let’s say we are talking about an excellent performance, an excellent proposal, an excellent idea: ‘I can think about this performance (or, proposal, idea) like this: “this is something very very good”’. That’s just a very positive evaluation. Then comes the component: ‘very few things of this kind are good like this’. This is the component that gives the impression that our person knows a lot, because they are able to make this kind of assessment. For example, if I say this excellent film, I give the impression that I think that very few films are as good as this. I must know a lot about films if I can make such a judgment. Likewise, if I am assessing a student’s paper, and I say This is an excellent paper, then I am giving the impression that very few papers are as good as this. That makes me sound good too because I must know enough to make that judgment. I’ll just show you the last couple of explications, for impressive and brilliant (fig. 22).

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Figure 21 Explicating English ‘excellent’

Figure 22 Explicating English ‘impressive’

Impressive is often modified by very, i.e. very impressive. The explication is in same template as excellent, and one key component is the same as in excellent, too, namely: ‘this is something very good, few things of this kind are like this’. Then comes a different part: ‘if people know this, they can’t not feel something good like people can feel sometimes when they see something very big.’ The claim is that if you say that something is impressive, as in an impressive performance, there’s some sort of implicit comparison with ‘something big’. This is very subjective but usually people agree with it. There is even an indirect link with ‘big’, in that an evaluational impressive is often accompanied by the word

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Wow! in English, like when you say: Wow, that’s really impressive. When you do the semantics of the word Wow, which I have done in a published paper (Goddard 2014), it turns out that the semantics of the exclamation wow implies a comparison with ‘something very big’. Of course, for something to be impressive it doesn’t have to be physically big, that’s not intended at all. The idea is something impressive can potentially elicit a feeling ‘like someone can feel like when they see something very big’, (or maybe even ‘very very big’). So the last one: brilliant (fig. 23). Behind brilliant, according to this explication, is an implied ‘someone’. Behind a brilliant film, or a brilliant performance, or brilliant direction, … even though we may be talking about the film when we call it brilliant, we imply that someone did something very good to produce that film. There is an implied construal that “this someone can do some things very well, very few people can do such things”. Only a small minority of people can do such very good things. And: “if people know this, they can’t not feel something very good because of this”. That implies something like admiration. When you call someone brilliant, you are implying that people would admire this person’s high level of ability. We found in the WordBanks corpus that one of the most common collocations is the expression brilliant scientist; and especially brilliant young scientist.

Figure 23 Explicating English ‘brilliant’

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Look at this example: – Brilliant show, brilliant music, brilliant acting, brilliant set, brilliant producer. Well done to everyone involved. So you see, it’s the individuals who get the credit, in a sense. The show, the music, the acting, the set: behind all those things, there are individual people. Well done to everyone involved, because they all can do some things very well. Very few people can do such things and they all deserve our admiration. Now some concluding remarks. I want to go back briefly to comparing NSM explications with the Systemic-Functional Linguistics treatment of evaluational adjectives, using the Appraisal Framework. One difference is that with an NSM explication, it’s “all in one”. There are different sections in an explication, but the explication is a single thing. In the SFL Appraisal Framework, there are several different subsystems: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Another thing you may have noticed is that in the NSM treatment, there are no scales, no numerical evaluations, no “1 to 10”, nothing like that. NSM researchers don’t believe that people think in terms of “1 to 10”, in terms of ratings or scales. Of course, if you ask people in a survey: Rate these adjectives on a scale of 1 to 10, or a scale of 1 to 5—of course, they can do it. And they do it quite reliably, actually. But that doesn’t mean that this is their normal cognition, their normal way of thinking. It just means that’s their response to the task which you have set them. In NSM explications, we can model a similar effect because we have differences between: ‘very very good’, ‘very good’,

Figure 24 NSM explications of evaluational adjectives: summary remarks

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‘good’, neutral (neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’), ‘bad’, ‘very bad’, and ‘very very bad’. So if anything, it’s like a seven-point of scale; but done with qualitatively different evaluations, rather than with numbers. We think that’s more like the way people actually think. Another aspect of subjective effect depends on whether the evaluational word reflects a direct first-person perspective (as with great, terrific, fabulous, the template A words) or whether it adopts a “pseudo objective” perspective (as with interesting, exciting, and the other template B words). Also relevant is whether any potential bodily effect is implied, and also whether the explication says that someone can think or can feel a certain way, or that they can’t not think or can’t not feel in a certain way. In other words, the overall “impact” or perceived “strength” of an evaluational word is determined by many different things. NSM linguists are very much against the idea of describing meanings in terms of ratings on a scale. The more general points (fig. 25) are, first, that the NSM approach is very well-adapted to describing “subjective” meanings, like evaluational meanings, and also emotion meanings, as we saw in Lecture 3. Second, it makes sense to talk about two levels of meaning description: the “micro” level (the details of individual explication) and the “meso” level: i.e. the middle level between the micro and the macro. In the NSM approach, “meso” level description is done by means of semantic templates. In later lectures you are going to hear more about semantic templates. My third and final point is that the NSM approach is not tied to English. Though I have presented explications in English, they are intended to be “portable” across languages. We can translate the explications into other languages, and equally, we can explicate similar meanings in other languages and translate them into English.

Figure 25 Final comments

Lecture 5

Semantic Molecules and Semantic Complexity During the course of the previous lectures, many people must have wondered how 65 semantic primes can possibly be enough, even given that most of those primes have several different grammatical possibilities each. How can we explicate very complex concepts, especially physical concepts, using such a small inventory? And, of course, I explained to you that the solution is that we don’t just use the 65 semantic primes in explications. The 65 semantic primes are the fundamental elements, the minimal elements of the whole system. But using those 65 semantic primes, we can also construct some concepts which are pretty basic and important in our thinking and form part of our everyday cognition. These basic but non-prime concepts, which can appear in explications alongside semantic primes, we call them “semantic molecules”. This is the plan of Lecture 5. I will first expand a little on the concept of semantic molecules and compare them to some compatible concepts in other theories, then start the main presentation on molecules as such. One of the interesting things is that we can have molecules inside molecules inside molecules, thus enabling a great compression of semantic complexity. This has important implications for cognition. Then we will look at explications for some proposed universal semantic molecules. We are not sure that they are completely and utterly universal, but that is the current hypothesis. There are also semantic molecules in any language which are not universal, but which are specific to one culture zone, or even to a single language. Such language-specific molecules are also extremely interesting, so that is our fourth topic today. Then, having reviewed these different kinds of semantic molecules, I want to do a quick review of the lexicon to show why we need these molecules for different areas of the lexicon.

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5684377. © Cliff Goddard. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004357723_006

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What are semantic molecules?

As you know, semantic molecules are certain complex, but relatively simple, meanings which function alongside semantic primes as building blocks of meaning (fig. 1). They are marked in explications with the notation [m]. As I said, some semantic molecules are likely to be found in all or most languages. Examples include words like ‘children’, ‘long’, ‘hands’, ‘mouth’, ‘sun’ and ‘water’. Picking from a couple of different groups, there are biosocial categories like ‘men’, ‘women’ and ‘children’; some physical quality words such as ‘round’, ‘flat’, ‘hard’, ‘sharp’; body-part molecules such as ‘hands’ and ‘mouth’, and others such as ‘head’ and ‘legs’; things to do with the environment such as ‘sky’, ‘moon’, and ‘sun’, and other words like ‘water’ and ‘fire’; and perhaps some others. The idea of semantic molecules implies that we cannot explicate everything immediately into semantic primes. That idea has been in the NSM literature for a very long time. As early as the mid-1980s in the books English Speech Act Verbs: A Semantic Dictionary (1987) and Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis (1985), Anna Wierzbicka did not use a metalanguage consisting solely of semantic primes. She used semantic primes plus one hundred or so extra words. But the choice of the extra words was not very rigorously theorized at that time. They were chosen carefully but they weren’t always explicated themselves, and there wasn’t much discussion about whether and to what extent those extra words were universal or language specific, etc. The Moscow School of Semantics (Zholkovsky 1964; Apresjan 1992, 2000; Mel’čuk 1989, 2012) is a very important approach to semantics (unfortunately,

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Some proposed universal semantic molecules

not terribly well-known in the West). Even back in the 1960s, Moscow School theorists such Apresjan and Zholkovsky had the idea of “intermediate-level concepts”. They believed in semantic primitives, because it is logically necessary, but they also saw the need for intermediate-level concepts. Over-simplifying a bit, the idea is that semantic primitives are at the very bottom, then come concepts at the intermediate level, and then ordinary concepts at the top. Now I’m going to take a quick review of some proposed universal semantic molecules. These are some of the proposed universal ones (fig. 2). At the top, you can see a list of body-part terms: ‘hands’, ‘mouth’, ‘eyes’, ‘head’, ‘ears’, ‘nose’, ‘face’, ‘legs’, ‘teeth’, ‘fingers’, ‘breasts’, ‘skin’, ‘bones’, and ‘blood’. As you can see, it is quite a long list. On the other hand, there are also a lot of English bodypart words which are not on that list. To be a universal semantic molecule, a word has to be both a universal word and its meaning has to appear inside other explications. We are pretty sure that words like ‘shoulders’, ‘knees’, ‘hips’, and ‘chest’, for example, are not universal molecules because they are rather English-specific and because they are apparently not necessary in explications for other words. We don’t think that ‘feet’ is a universal molecule, but it is apparently necessary as a semantic molecule of English. The next category on fig. 2 includes ‘children’, ‘men’, ‘women’. Let me start with them, what we call biosocial categories. As you can imagine, there are a lot of concepts that need to refer to the concept of ‘men’ (or ‘man’), ‘women’

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(or ‘woman’), and also ‘children’. ‘Be born’, you might wonder why ‘be born’ should be proposed as a semantic molecule? Well, I will explain a little more about this later, but the basic idea is that the concept of relative age is important in many words (kinship words, for instance). In many languages, however, there is no such word as English age. What it is important to know is whether someone ‘was born’ before or after me: that is the basic idea of relative age. It is also important for “stage of life” terms, for example, to be able to talk about someone who ‘was born a long time ago’, to give the idea of old age. And of course, when we look into the semantics of words like ‘mother’ and ‘father’, we find that they involve ‘be born’. We think that ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are lexical universals, even though in many of the world’s languages, these words have extended uses. We think that this is polysemy, i.e. that there is a basic or core meaning of ‘mother’, which is, more or less, the woman who gave birth to you. We think that ‘wife’ and ‘husband’ are semantic molecules too, even though they are obviously more complicated in their meanings than ‘mother’ and ‘father’. Physical qualities: some shape-related words like ‘long’ and ‘round’, maybe also ‘flat’, and properties such as ‘hard’, ‘soft’, and ‘sharp’ (that’s quite an important one actually). Also ‘smooth’ and ‘heavy’; and there could be a couple more, but you can see the idea. Materials. When you think of the whole wide world, it’s apparent that there are many materials which are not found everywhere in the world; for instance, ‘metal’ or ‘glass’. Certainly, there are cultures which may never have had any materials of that kind, if you look back in history. However, we think that ‘wood’ and ‘stone’ are probably universal materials, so they could be universal semantic molecules. There are some positional relationships in the physical world. It may be important to talk about something being ‘on’ something else, or something being ‘at the top’ or ‘at the bottom’, or ‘in front’ or ‘around’. All these terms can be explicated, they are molecules, not primes. Environmental terms. These include ‘sky’ and ‘ground’, also ‘sun’, and expressions like ‘during the day’ and ‘at night’. Notice I am saying ‘during the day’ and ‘at night’. These are adverbial expressions, as it were, referring to certain times: ‘day time’ and ‘night time’. Also in this broad grouping are ‘water’ and ‘fire’, as mentioned. We also think that ‘day’, in the meaning like ‘one day before’ or ‘one day after’, may be a semantic molecule. That’s ‘day’ in different sense to “day time”. It is ‘day’ as a period or unit of time. When we look at biological words, there are a lot of these words. In English, ‘animal’ is apparently an important semantic molecule, but the word ‘animal’

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is not a universal molecule because even in European languages, the word which is normally translated as animal usually has a much broader meaning than English animal. For example, in languages like German or Danish, spiders, leeches, and fish are all called Tier or dyr, which are the closest words to English animal; but in English a fish is not really an animal, and certainly not a spider or a leech. We believe, however, that the word ‘creature’ is likely to be a semantic molecule (something living that can feel, and, perhaps, move). We will come back to this later. Let’s look at the idea of “plants”. For this area of the lexicon, it is important to have the idea of ‘growing (in ground)’. This is different from when we speak about a child growing. The meaning we think is likely to be universal is to ‘grow in the ground’: it involves something increasing in size, as well as part of it being inside the ground. Coming to the verbal arena, the idea of ‘knowing someone’ is a likely universal. Remember that the semantic prime KNOW is about ‘I know’ or ‘I don’t know’, or ‘I know it’, or ‘someone knows a lot about something’, etc. The basic syntactic frames for the semantic prime KNOW do not include ‘know someone’, which means that ‘know someone’ is a complex meaning. I’ve already shown you an explication for it in Lecture 2. We think that this meaning, i.e. ‘know someone’, is probably a semantic universal. It is an important part of human sociality to be able to talk and think about ‘knowing other people’. You can distinguish between people you know and people you don’t know, and between people you know well and people you don’t know well. Also important is the idea that something can ‘be called’ something, like ‘this (showing a pen to the audience) is called pen’. The molecule ‘be called’ enables us to link things (or people) with identifying words or labels. Continuing with proposed “universal verbs”, the first one listed here (in the second-last row of fig. 2) is ‘hold’, which of course involves ‘hands’. Tools and instruments are extremely important in human life, and to describe the semantics of many of them involves saying that you ‘hold (it) in your hand’. ‘Sit’, ‘lie’, and ‘stand’, they are some basic posture words. Probably ‘sleep’ or ‘be sleeping’ also deserves to be identified (provisionally) as a universal semantic molecule. Then there are some more complicated words, such as ‘play’, ‘laugh’, and ‘sing’. It is good to think that these human activities could be semantic molecules. We know that in all cultures, children ‘play’, and that people ‘laugh’ and ‘sing’. They also ‘make’ things and they also ‘kill’. That’s a quick overview of the diversity that we expect in the lexicon of universal semantic molecules. So, you can see that they have already expanded the expressive power of metalanguage a great deal. We are now entitled to use

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Figure 3

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Molecules within molecules

all these words in explications, in addition to semantic primes. That is going to really help us in explicating many many complex concepts. Now let’s take a different kind of overview, intended in this case to give you examples of building up concepts using “molecules within molecules” (see fig. 3). The first example is from the domain of body-parts. The idea is that at the bottom (the left-hand column of fig. 3) we have semantic primes. With semantic primes alone, without using any molecules, we can explicate ‘mouth’ and ‘hands’. I am going to show you shortly an explication for ‘mouth’ (not for ‘hands’, but it is available). As far as we know, these are the only two bodypart words which can be explicated purely in terms of semantic primes. This gives them an important status. Once you’ve got ‘mouth’ and ‘hands’, then you can use these words in other explications. You can use ‘mouth’, for example, in the explication of ‘water’. You can use ‘hands’, for instance, in the explication of ‘hold’. Once ‘water’ and ‘hold’ are available, we can use them in other explications. So, for instance, once you have ‘water’, you can use it in the explication of ‘drink’. Once you have ‘mouth’ and ‘hold’, you can use them in the explication of ‘eat’. (You might not immediately see why ‘hold’ is needed in the explication of ‘eat’ but, you know, when people are eating, they have to get the food to their mouths, and whether they use chopsticks, a spoon or a fork, holding something in the ‘hands’ is usually involved.)

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Once you have ‘eat’ and ‘drink’, then you can explicate words like ‘cup’, ‘spoon’ and ‘plate’, because those concepts obviously involve ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ as part of their meanings. So, we have “molecules within molecules”: one, two, three, four (counting up from the bottom of fig. 3), at least four levels of molecules within molecules. We don’t yet know exactly how many levels there can be, probably at least one or two more. This remains to be further explored. To ensure that no circular definitions (no vicious circles) arise, we always have to explicate the lower-level molecules first. It requires discipline. Looking at this from another point of view, from the top down, we can see that these explications are showing us chains of semantic dependency. We can say that the concepts of ‘cup’, ‘spoon’ and ‘plate’ are semantically dependent upon ‘eat’ and ‘drink’, i.e. ‘eating’ and ‘drinking’ are part of the concepts of ‘cup’, ‘spoon’ and ‘plate’. Likewise, the concepts ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ are semantically dependent on ‘water’ (even ‘eat’ is semantically dependent on ‘water’, because if you want to describe the difference between ‘eating’ and ‘drinking’, it has to do with the kind of stuff, whether it is more or less “liquid-like” or not; and if you want to really explain what is “liquid”, you need to say that it is ‘something like water [m]’). So, this is interesting—the idea of chains of dependency. It seems so natural, but strangely enough, it is not a concept that appears in classical (or oldfashioned) componential analysis.

Figure 4

Molecules within molecules, biosocial

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I’ve got another example here from the biosocial world (see fig. 4). I will show you shortly that it is possible to explicate ‘child’ (and ‘children’), purely in terms of semantic primes. And actually, as you will see shortly, the concept of ‘women’ depends on ‘children’. Roughly speaking, ‘women’ are people whose bodies are of the kind that can have children. (This doesn’t mean that every woman can have children, just that women’s bodies are the kind that can have children.) The concept of ‘men’ then depends on a contrast with ‘women’, as I’ll show you later. This is a different result to classical componential analysis, in which the words ‘men’ and ‘women’ differ only on the semantic feature [±MALE]. In classical componential analysis, ‘men’ and ‘women’ are equal in semantic complexity; but there are good reasons to think that the concept of ‘women’ is simpler, and that the concept of ‘men’ depends on the concept of ‘women’. Once we have the ideas of ‘men’, ‘women’, ‘children’ and ‘be born’, then we can start to explicate kinship relationships, family relationships. We can talk about ‘mother’ and ‘father’. Obviously, the concept of ‘mother’ involves ‘being born’: roughly speaking, the woman you are born from is your ‘mother’, and your ‘father’ is the man who did something which helped that happen. We don’t want to include too many details in the explication, because the details are not known to everyone, especially to young children. Once you have ‘mother’ and ‘father’, which are probably universal concepts, you can construct other more complex kinship terms, such as ‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’, which are not universal terms (Wierzbicka 2016, 2017). There are definitely languages that don’t have words for ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ in the exactly same sense as in English. That is because it is quite typical for languages to distinguish, roughly speaking, between the older ones and the ones born after. For instance, in Yankunytjatjara in central Australia, older brothers are called kuṯa, and older sisters are called kangkuṟu, and younger brothers and sisters just have the same word which is maḻany, which means “after-ones”. This means that in Yankunytjatjara, there is no word which means exactly the same as brother in English, and equally there is no word in English like maḻany, because although English has the (not very common) word sibling, it doesn’t include any component about being “born after”. So, at the top level of the kinship relationships (see fig. 4), there is a lot of culture-specificity. Here is the follow-up note to what I said earlier about ‘mother’ and ‘father’ being likely universal semantic molecules, notwithstanding that in many languages these words do have extended uses. I don’t know if you know this, but in what are called “classificatory kin systems”, kinship words can extend to everybody in society. Not just as a nice way of speaking to someone, like when we say

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‘grandfather’ or ‘aunty’ to respected older persons. Not like that. In a “classificatory kin system”, everybody in the entire society is regarded as related to everyone else. Yankunytjatjara is one of those societies. In Yankunytjatjara society, everyone is going to be my ‘older brother’, my ‘older sister’, my ‘junior sibling’, or ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘uncle’, ‘aunty’, ‘grandma’, etc.—everybody, the whole society. According to NSM analysis, this is a system of lexical polysemy. There are rules for figuring out how to extend the kinship words, working outwards from your own family and cousins, and so on. Despite that complication, we think that ‘father’ and ‘mother’ are universal semantic molecules, while ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ are clearly language-specific. If you are interested in kinship semantics, there is a good recent article by Anna Wierzbicka (2016), published in Current Anthropology. It is called ‘Back to mother and father, overcoming the ethnocentrism of kinship studies by using eight lexical universals’. The last general example is shown in figure 5. We will go through it quickly. You already know the claim that with semantic primes alone we can decompose the word ‘hands’. One level up, there are words like ‘long’ and ‘round’. Firstly, it has to be noted that these words are polysemous, so we have to identify what we regard as the “basic sense” of the word. We think that the basic sense of ‘long’ is when you’re talking about something like a stick, or a cucumber, or the tail of a dog. They are concrete objects and they are ‘long’. This meaning of ‘long’ actually involves the semantic prime TOUCH. Basically, if we say that something is ‘long’ we are saying that ‘one part is very far from the other’, and that one can tell this by touching it with the hands, as well as

Figure 5

Semantic compression

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by seeing it. This is quite an “embodied” approach to physical property words, because it involves the human body and physical interaction. Likewise with ‘round’. It’s interesting, when people are talking about the meanings of words like ‘long’ and ‘round’, they often do something like this (gesturing with hands). They make these gestures spontaneously and unconsciously. The primary or basic meanings of ‘round’ and ‘long’ are needed in many explications, even some body-part explications. If you want to define ‘arms’ and ‘legs’, for example, you have to say, roughly speaking, that they are two ‘long’ parts of someone’s body. If you want to explicate ‘head’, we have to say, roughly speaking, that is a part above all the other parts of the body and that it looks like something round. One level above (see fig. 4), there are words for items of clothing, for instance, ‘trousers’, ‘shirt’, ‘dress’, ‘hats’, and so on that refer to parts of the body. There are also many other words that refer to parts of the body. It is no coincidence that body-parts is the largest subcategory of semantic molecules, because we humans interact with the world using parts of our body. To conclude this second overview part, what we have been talking about here is “semantic compression”. I think it is a very good term: semantic compression. Look at a word like trousers or dress, and consider the fact that it includes many semantic molecules, and that many of those molecules have additional molecules inside them. With three, four or five levels of molecules, we are getting a huge compression of semantic detail. Here is a very nice quotation from Wierzbicka (see fig. 5). Semantic molecules enable an incredible compression of semantic complexity, but at the same time this complexity is disguised by its being encapsulated and telescoped into lexical units embedded one in the other, like a set of Russian dolls. Wierzbicka 2009

This finding is also telling us something very significant about human cognition, about the mechanisms of category complexity, about semantic dependencies and semantic compression. These seem to me to be powerful and interesting concepts, but they are not really present in many other semantic theories. In the next part, I am going to start talking about explications for some of the most basic semantic molecules, such as ‘mouth’, ‘sky’ and ‘water’. It seems that these meanings are really very basic in our thinking. We have been using these basic concepts in our thinking from a very young age, probably from before

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we could speak. So, when we try to undertake a conceptual analysis of those terms it can feel strange, because we normally take such concepts so much for granted. Explicating a word like ‘mouth’ or ‘fire’ is a somewhat different kind of psychological process to explicating a word like ‘table’ or ‘aluminium’, where it is obvious from the outset that the concept is complex, and we are happy with that idea, and happy to start taking it apart. When we start to try to take apart a concept like ‘mouth’ or ‘fire’, it requires a lot of logical thought, because, as I said, these words are so experientially basic. This is the explication for mouth (fig. 6). Let’s go through it from the top. First: mouth (someone’s mouth) one part of someone’s body something can be inside this part of someone’s body for a short time if this someone wants after this, this something can be somewhere else in this someone’s body if this someone wants One semantic component of the concept ‘mouth’ is the idea that something can be inside someone’s mouth, if this someone wants it. That “stuff can go into our mouth” is a very basic experience we all have from babyhood. Getting stuff into the mouth includes our mother’s nipples, and milk, and lots of things. Babies love having things in their mouths. Another thing is that it is not just having something in the mouth, but: ‘after this, this something can

Figure 6

Semantic explication for ‘mouth’

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be somewhere else in this someone’s body if this someone wants.’ Basically, the mouth is the “entry point”. Stuff can go into the mouth and then go down somewhere else inside the body Now comes the second part: when people say something to other people, this part of the body moves, other people can see it This component links the mouth with speech, and the final line says that the mouth movements are visible. Anna Wierzbicka and I spent weeks and months trying to figure out the optimal content and arrangement of these components. It’s possible that it could still be improved, I suppose, but the main point I am making, and why I have chosen this as an example, is that it can be done purely in terms of semantic primes. All the words in this explication are semantic primes. The next explication is even more challenging, because it is for the concept of ‘water’. Clearly, ‘water’ is experientially an extremely salient and extremely basic concept (fig. 7). We learn about water from very young age. We have bath time and otherwise. ‘Water’ forms part of many other concepts, for example, words like ‘river’, ‘lake’, ‘sea’, and, of course, ‘rain’. How can we explain the concept of

Figure 7

Semantic explication for ‘water’

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‘water’? From an experiential point of view, it seems so elusive, as well as so basic. In her 1996 book Semantics: Primes and Universals, Wierzbicka pointed out that although water is somehow elementary, it has some properties which we can separate and isolate with our minds. One of them that you can drink it, i.e. it is something that can go into the body. Another is the idea that ‘water’ occurs naturally, so to speak, in various places. In the explication in figure 7, there is also the idea that ‘water’ is useful, i.e. people can do a lot of things with ‘water’. And finally, another aspect of ‘water’, which is very important, is that it is “hard to handle”. You can’t really do much with water if it is not inside something, inside some kind of container. This is the explication for ‘water’ (fig. 7). Let’s start from: ‘something, there is always a lot of it in some places’. This explication starts with natural occurrence, as one of the main properties of water. You may perhaps wonder about deserts. People who live in desert environments, such as the Yankunytjatjara people in central Australia, would they have this component? It is true that in the central deserts of Australia, there is no open water for most of the year, i.e. there are no rivers, no lakes. Only after rain, you may get some water on the ground. However, there is water in some special places in rocky mountain areas, in “rock holes” and underground wells, and underground in creek beds. Yankunytjatjara people are very well aware of all this, because their lives depend on being able to locate this water. So, there is still a consciousness that ‘there is always a lot of water in some places’. The second component is that: ‘people often want there to be a little of it inside their bodies’. And: ‘because of this, they often do something with it with the mouth [m]’. That’s the way you get things inside your body, after all, you first get it inside your mouth. This component is basically getting at the idea of drinking, but we are not using the word ‘drink.’ Why? First, because later we will want to use the word ‘water’ inside the definition of ‘drink’, so we cannot use ‘drink’ in the definition of ‘water’ without creating a vicious circle. And also, ‘drink’ is not a universal word. There are languages, such as Kalam in PNG, which don’t have separate words for eating and drinking (Wierzbicka 2009b). So, we have formulated the component in this way: ‘because of this, people often do something with it with the mouth [m]’. Then finally: ‘people can do many other things with this something. They can’t do these things with it if it is not inside something’. The idea is that ‘water’ has a lot of uses: for washing, for cooking, … We don’t want to be too specific about it. Instead we can just say: ‘people can do many other things with it’, but they can’t do these things ‘if it is not inside something’. A critical thing, from the point of view of the molecule theory, is that we have used the word ‘mouth [m]’ here. In other words, the claim is that inside

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Figure 8

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Semantic explication for ‘children’

the concept of ‘water’, almost invisibly, as it were, is the concept of ‘mouth’. In our normal intuition, I suppose we don’t see this, because normally we think firstly about drinking. I acknowledge that and I agree with that. But on further analysis, it seems to me, it is better to formulate the component using ‘mouth’. Now jumping ahead a bit, obviously ‘water [m]’ is one of the most prolific of all semantic molecules. Not only in the explications of words like ‘drink’ and ‘pour’, but all words for liquids, such as ‘blood’, ‘milk’, ‘tea’, and ‘oil’. And, of course, in all those environmental words like ‘rain’, ‘river’, ‘lake’, and ‘sea’. We will just have a look at ‘women’ and ‘children’ (fig. 8), and then we’ll take a break. I don’t know whether this analysis will strike you as intuitive or as counter-intuitive. It may depend somewhat on whether you’ve already studied conventional semantics. One standard example we teach our students in first-year linguistics, you know, is the Componential Analysis (CA) of men and women, and usually some animal species as well; you know, stallion and mare, bull and cow, and such. In the view of Anna Wierzbicka and myself, the standard CA analysis is terrible for multiple reasons. I think it is very unfortunate for the linguistics curriculum and it has a bad effect on students, because there is something very counter-intuitive about it. The feature [±MALE], it’s never easy to convince female students about this component and if you tell them that it doesn’t matter, that you could just as

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easily say [±FEMALE], that doesn’t please anyone either, because the idea that it doesn’t matter what component one chooses is very unsatisfying for theoretical reasons. And the other thing is adult, you have to say that men and women are [+ADULT], and the feature ADULT is not very satisfactory either. So, we have a problem with the “gender” feature [±MALE], and a problem with the “mature” adult feature [±ADULT], and then there’s the comparison with stallion and mare. Oh my God, can anybody really think that the semantic structure of stallion is so similar to the semantic structure of man that it differs in only one feature? If we start again and re-do the whole thing from the Natural Semantic Metalanguage point of view, it becomes clear pretty early that ‘children’ is the best place to start; first, because there is no gender feature involved with the word ‘children’, so you don’t have to worry about that, and second, because later, rather than using the word ‘adult’ or something similar in the explications for ‘men’ and ‘women’, we can say instead that: ‘they are not children [m] anymore’. So here we go (see fig. 8). ‘Children’: ‘people of one kind, all people are people of this kind for some time’. Everyone is a child at some time, it is the first stage of life. Then: ‘when someone is someone of this kind (i.e. when someone is a child), it is like this: ‘this someone’s body is small’. Before going further, I want to comment that it is incredible that in the traditional structural analysis of ‘children’, the idea of small body size is not mentioned at all. There are such strong psychological connections between ‘child’ and ‘small’; and there are linguistic connections too (e.g. the word for ‘child’ is a common historical source for diminutive morphemes). Next: ‘this someone can do some things, this someone can’t do many other things’, i.e. a child is only partly capable. So: ‘because of this, if other people don’t often do good things for this someone, bad things can happen to this someone’. Children depend on other people often doing good things for them. In many or most cases, those other people would be the mother, father or other kin, but we don’t need to mention any of these specific terms. The idea is simply that children are dependent for their well-being on other people. Notice that in this explication, all the terms are semantic primes: ‘people’, ‘kind’, ‘body’, ‘small’, ‘do’, and so on. Now let’s try ‘women’. As I mentioned before, the traditional CA analysis using [±MALE] says that the concepts of ‘men’ and ‘women’ are exactly parallel to one other. Our analysis is going to say the concept of ‘women’ is semantically simpler than the concept of ‘men’. So, women: ‘people of one kind, people of this kind are not children [m]’. This same component will be in the explication of ‘men’, so it is something like

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Figure 9

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Semantic explication for ‘women’

the old feature +ADULT. ‘People of this kind (i.e. women) have bodies of one kind’. So here we approach the basic difference between ‘men’ and ‘women’: namely, that their physical bodies are different. Now: ‘the bodies of people of this kind (i.e. women’s bodies) are like this: inside the body of someone of this kind there can be for some time a living body of a child [m]’. So, this is sort of limited, it is not trying to tell the full story about the “facts of life”. It is not saying anything specific about birth, for example; but even little kids know (or can know) that “there’s a baby in mummy’s tummy”. The idea that there can be a living body of a child inside a woman’s body is probably the first thing that we know; how it came to be there, how it gets out, that’s extra knowledge that comes later. So, this is the special thing about women bodies: that they can have inside them the living body of the child. This means that ‘child’ is a semantic molecule in the explication of ‘women’. One could potentially discuss this for a long time. In the book Words and Meanings, by myself and Anna Wierzbicka, the entirety of Chapter 2 is basically about ‘men’, ‘women’ and ‘children’, including extended uses of the words, derivatives like childish and manly, and related words like boy, girl, baby, and other similar stage-of-life words. What about ‘men’? According to the NSM analysis, ‘men’ is the most complex of the three concepts (see fig. 10).

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Figure 10 Semantic explication for ‘men’

Figure 11 A foundational environmental molecule: ‘sky’

As you see, in line four of this explication (fig. 10), men’s bodies are characterized in a sense negatively, i.e. their bodies are not like women’s bodies. Then in the final line, it seems some mental attention goes onto the parts: specifically, men’s bodies have ‘some parts (which are) not like parts of women’s bodies’. The key point for the theory of semantic molecules is that the concept of ‘women [m]’ is part of this explication. So, this means that the concept of ‘men’ is semantically dependent upon the concept of ‘women’. Now I want to quickly go through some of the proposed universal “environmental” molecules. According to current thinking, ‘sky’ is one of the most important molecules (fig. 11), and we think that it can be explicated purely in semantic primes. sky a very big place, it is above all the places where people live in all places where people live, people can see this very big place they can see it far above the places where they live

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Figure 12 Semantic explications for ‘during the day’ and ‘at night’

There is a little bit of overlap—I prefer to see it as reinforcement—between the different components. Rather than dwelling on that explication, for reasons of time I’ll just go straight to the next ones, which are for ‘during the day’ and ‘at night’ (see fig. 12). One key idea behind these two explications is that they are about times when we ‘can (or, cannot) see things well’. Here (fig. 12, top) we have the explication for ‘during the day’. The reason for the component ‘at the same time they can see the sky [m] well’ is to give a kind of “big picture”. It is true that during the day you can see the sky well, and referring to this in the explication gives the concept a large environmental scale, so to speak. during the day at a time when it is like this: people can see things well for some time at the same time they can see the sky [m] well There is a symmetrical relationship between ‘day time’ and ‘night time’, so we can give a parallel explication for ‘at night’. at night at a time when it is like this: people can’t see things well for some time at the same time they can’t see the sky [m] well

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It could be that some small adjustments are needed to this pair of explications. At one point, we had some components in ‘day’ reflecting the idea that people are generally more active during the day than at night (e.g. ‘people can do many things when it is like this, not like at other times’). However, there are cultures in which people often do many things at night in certain places, so we thought the safest thing was to keep the explication minimal. The interesting thing from the molecules point of view is the presence of the molecule ‘sky [m]’, slightly unexpected, I guess. Now when we come to the idea of ‘sun’, we could have a long discussion about which comes first, the concept of ‘day time’ or the concept of ‘sun’? We have experimented, i.e. we tried to do it both ways, and in the end, this is our preferred analysis. What is the ‘sun’? It is, to begin with: ‘something, many people in many places can often see this something in the sky [m] during the day [m]’. This component creates an immediate link between ‘sun’ and ‘day’, because the sun is often visible in the sky during the day, which seems intuitively satisfying. Then: ‘when people see it, they can think like this: “it is something round [m]”. Notice that this component is phrased in terms of how people can think on the basis of their visual impression. It doesn’t actually say that the sun is round. This is because the explication of ‘round’, as I mentioned before, involves ‘hands’ and touching; it is set up to apply to physical things, like an orange or a ball, something that you can hold in your hand. Of course, we can (and do) say that the ‘sun’ is round, but we can never handle it, so the idea reflected in the explication is that looks round.

Figure 13 Semantic explication for ‘sun’

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Now: ‘people in a place can sometimes see it above this place for some time, sometimes they can feel something good in their bodies because of it’. The ‘sun’ being overhead has special significance. When you can see the sun above the place where you are, then it tends to be that you can feel warm. OK now, how get the idea that the sun moves across the sky? We do not actually see the sun moving, of course, but we know that at different times of the day it can be seen in different places in the sky. So: ‘at some times during the day, people can see this something in some places on one side of the sky [m], at other times during the day [m], they can see it in some places on the other side of the sky [m]’. This part of the explication will give quite a lot of “hooks” for connecting ‘sun’ to the ideas of sunrise, sunset, and other words involving day. I haven’t brought the explication of ‘moon’ to show you today, mainly because it is still more complicated, largely because one of the most important things about the moon is that it changes its shape. So, sometimes when we see it, we can think it’s round, at other times we can think it’s like part of something round. There are ways of describing the changing shape of the moon, but I didn’t want to spend time here explaining that explication. Instead I choose ‘stars’, because this explication is also very interesting and nice (fig. 14). The first line of the explication says that ‘stars’ are ‘things of one kind’. Then: ‘people can often see these things in the sky [m] during the night [m], they can often see them at times when they can’t see anything else’. Even when it is totally dark at night, you can often see the stars (not always, because there can be clouds). And: ‘people can’t see these things in the sky during the day’. Now, how to describe the vast number of stars in the sky? There seem to be thousands and thousands of them. The explication contains the line: ‘often they (i.e. people) can see many many of them’, and: ‘they are very very small’.

Figure 14 Semantic explication for ‘stars’

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At this point, I want to shift to a separate topic. So far all the examples we’ve been talking about are probably universal semantic molecules. That is, it seems likely that such words have translation equivalents in other languages, and also they are likely to be components in the meanings of other words. It is pretty obvious that there are many semantic molecules which are not universal, so let’s take an overview (fig. 15), starting with ones that are likely to be fairly widespread in the languages of the modern world. Staple foods in any culture—rice, wheat, corn, or, in other parts of the world, yams, plantain, whatever are the most important major foods … the names of such foodstuffs are likely to be semantic molecules inside lots of other words: words to do with food products, the names of dishes, certain types of cooking words. Because they are only found in the certain areas of the globe, they cannot be universal words. In traditional times in central Australia, for instance, no one had any idea what ‘rice’ was, what ‘wheat’ was, and so on. And materials. In the modern world, ‘paper’, ‘iron’, ‘metal’, ‘glass’, and ‘wool’ are all very widespread materials and we often would want to use words for those materials in describing many other things. For example, when explicating the meaning of ‘book’, we may want to say that it has many parts and that they are made of ‘paper’. But there are many cultures in the world which didn’t have these materials, especially in ancient times. (The only one of these words that might possibly be universal after all, is ‘thread’.)

Figure 15 Widespread yet culture-specific molecules

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Time words. Now I don’t know about ‘year’ and ‘month’. There may be an argument that these concepts are universal (especially ‘year’). Yet clearly ‘week’ is not universal. I would also like to draw your attention to ‘clock’, because it is quite amazing how many other concepts are dependent on the idea of ‘clock’: all the words like ‘hour’ and ‘minute’ that are involved in the measuring and recording of time. Of course, hundreds of years ago (and still in many cultures today) there were no clocks and people never “measured” time in this way. So, ‘clock’ is a very important language-specific semantic molecule. Words like ‘village’, ‘city’ and ‘country’ are very important words in the modern world and in many cultures; but there are cultures which have no villages, where people are “nomadic”, as they say. Certainly there are places where people have no such concept as ‘country’; it is quite a modern thing actually, the idea that there are ‘countries’. And the Chinese word for ‘country’ and English word country might not mean exactly the same thing. Some words like ‘house’, ‘school’, and ‘hospital’, kinds of places people can be, are doubtless important semantic molecules in many languages. Also, important professions like ‘doctor’ and ‘teacher’, and maybe even ‘soldier’, since we have to explicate words like ‘army’ and ‘war’. In the animal world, there are important animals like ‘horse’, but the kinds of animals that are important in everyday life differ across the world. In many traditional cultures of Canada, I recently discovered, the important staple sources of meat are ‘caribou’ and (further north) ‘moose’. These words could be semantic molecules in many languages of First Nations peoples in Canada. There must be certain molecules pertaining to the modern world, things like ‘car’, ‘plane’, and ‘boat’, some words like ‘wheel’ and ‘wire’; also ‘engine’, quite important, and ‘computer’. There must be a lot of words these days whose meanings involve ‘computer’ as a semantic molecule. And: ‘read’, ‘write’, ‘book’. And yes, at the bottom of the slide (fig. 15), ‘money’, though, obviously, there are cultures which have no money. Likewise with ‘number’: many cultures don’t have any word like ‘number’, and have no digits and no writing systems. ‘God’ is another widespread yet language-specific molecule. In their respective languages and cultures, these words are just as important as the universal molecules. So, although universal molecules are theoretically more significant, for practical purposes and to understand human cognition in any particular cultural setting, culture-specific semantic molecules are also terribly important. It is interesting to wonder whether some non-universal molecules might have approximate equivalents in all or most languages. I start with the examples of ‘eat’ and ‘drink’. We know that some languages, such as the PNG

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Figure 16 Approximate molecules and highly localised molecules

language Kalam, which has been very well described by excellent linguists, a single word is used for both eating and drinking (cf. Wierzbicka 2009b). So, the distinction between ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ is not universal. On the other hand, something like ‘eat’ and/or ‘drink’—approximately—must be important in all cultural contexts, so perhaps it is approximately universal. So-called “life-form” category words like ‘bird’, ‘fish’ and ‘tree’ are not precisely universal. You will find in the anthropological literature a lot of discussion about “bird”, for instance, whether in particular languages something like an ostrich or an emu (you know, these great big flightless birds) are categorized as “birds”. In the Yankunytjatjara language in central Australia, for example, there is a word kaḻaya which means ‘emu’ (a very large bird-like creature, sort of like an ostrich), but no way is a kaḻaya ‘emu’ regarded as a tjuḻpu, which is the Yankunytjatjara nearest word to English ‘bird’. On the other hand, every language seems to have something approximately like ‘bird’, and ‘fish’, and even ‘tree’. So again, these could be approximate universals. And likewise ‘sea’ and ‘ice’, and ‘rain’ and ‘wind’. You will find it discussed in the translation studies literature, that there can difficulties in translating these words across languages, depending on the language. On the other hand, words with similar, if not precisely identical, meanings are probably important in all languages. Even ‘dog’, … I’m not sure whether the concept of ‘dog’ can be exactly the same in every single language, because people in different cultures have very different attitudes towards the dog. In some cultures, dogs are regarded as very

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unclean and nasty, the last thing you would ever want in your house. In central Australia, on the other hand, dogs are valued because everyone knows that they can sense evil spirits, and they are also used in hunting. Because the cultural associations of dogs vary so much, it seems unlikely that the “dog concept” is the same everywhere in the world. Yet dogs are pretty well universal animals, in the sense of having a place in almost every human society. So, ‘dog’ may be another instance of an approximate universal molecule. Now, following up on the point in the second part of fig. 16, there are language-specific molecules which are highly localized, such as ‘color’ and ‘king’, and ‘brother’ and ‘sister’. These words are important semantic molecules in European languages (and possibly in Chinese, at least ‘color’). There are definitely languages in the world, however, which have no word for ‘color’. The concepts of ‘king’ or ‘emperor’, they may be very important words in the organization of many societies, but many other societies have nothing similar. Even ‘brother’ and ‘sister’: in European kinship systems, if you want to explicate the meaning of words like ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’, it actually makes a lot of sense to do it using the terms ‘brother’ and ‘sister’—yet ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ are not universal molecules (Wierzbicka 2017). They are European molecules. What is interesting here is the idea of the “culture zone”. Although these these words are language-specific, it seems that they are hardly ever restricted to just one language. They seem to range across a broader cultural zone, or even across a civilizational area. The last part of Lecture 5 is an overview of why we need some of these molecules. Some of them are pretty obvious, so I will go over this very quickly. Body-part words are the most populous grouping of semantic molecules, and

Figure 17 Body-part molecules in the lexicon

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among them, ‘hands’ is the most important one. It is needed in explications for all the tactile properties, like ‘rough’, ‘smooth’, and the like, and for words for various tools and things whose meanings involve “handling”, using the ‘hands’. The molecule ‘hands’ probably occurs in hundreds of explications. After that, in terms of importance, comes ‘mouth’ and then maybe ‘legs’, which is needed to explicate words like ‘walk’, ‘run’, and ‘kick’. To explicate verbs like ‘climb’ and ‘swim’, the molecules ‘hands’ and ‘legs’ are both required. To explicate words for items of furniture and clothing, we need to make use of molecules for other parts of the body, including the ‘bottom’ in the explication of ‘chair’, and ‘head’ in the explication of ‘hat’. There are countless other examples. I am very fond of this slide (fig. 18). It is a model of the proportion of the cortex (in the human brain) that is devoted to sensory perception from particular parts of the body. What it shows is that vastly more of the human brain is devoted to the hands, than to any other body-part; and that after the hands, the next most important body-part is the mouth. So, there is really quite an interesting convergence between neuroscience and semantics here, because according to NSM semantics, ‘hands’ and ‘mouth’ are two most important body-part molecules. In a very real sense, then, we are creatures of hands and mouth. Anna Wierzbicka (2007) once remarked: “Human hands mediate, to a large extent, between the world and the human mind”. This is also very much an “embodiment” thing. NSM analysis shows that our concepts of the world are very often mediated through concepts of the human body.

Figure 18 Sensory homunculus. Body parts in proportion to the area of the cortex concerned with sensory pereption

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Figure 19 Biosocial molecules in the lexicon

The next slide (fig. 19) shows the biosocial categories. We already know that we need ‘children’ to explicate the concepts ‘mother’ and ‘father’; but it is also needed in words like ‘toy’ and ‘play’, and ‘school’. Words like ‘men’ and ‘women’ are needed for gender-specific words like ‘beard’ and ‘breasts’, and for items of clothing which are specifically related to women like ‘dress’ and ‘bra’, and for countless other things related to sexuality and gender. The molecule ‘be born’ is needed to explicate various kinship words, and also to explicate words like ‘old’ and ‘young’. Among the biological molecules (fig. 20), we obviously need ‘grow (in a place)’ for all the “botanical” words—including ‘tree’ and ‘flower’, and for things like ‘fruit’ and ‘vegetables’, and for all the names of individual plant species. These words (indicating ‘creature’, ‘fish’, ‘bird’ and ‘tree’), they are macro categories of living things. There are many different kinds of ‘creatures’, many different kinds of ‘fish’, many different kinds of ‘birds’. These important taxonomic words are semantic molecules in numerous more specific words, such as (in case of birds) ‘eagle’, ‘sparrow’, ‘crow’, ‘pigeon’, ‘raven’, and so on. Among environmental molecules (fig. 21), ‘ground’ is important in words like ‘run’ and ‘walk’, and for ‘grow’. The molecule ‘sea’ is important in words like ‘ship’, ‘coast’ and ‘sailor’, also if we want to explicate words like ‘sharks’ or ‘whales’. For English, the color ‘blue’ has two prototypes: one of them is ‘sky’, and the other is ‘sea’. And obviously, we need the molecule ‘water’ in so many words. The molecule ‘fire’ is needed in words like ‘hot’ and ‘warm’, and also for the color ‘red’. Now in relation to places (see fig. 22), the molecule ‘house’ is needed in explications for many household items, and also as part of the meaning of words

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Figure 20 Biological molecules in the lexicon

Figure 21 Environmental molecules in the lexicon

for “domestic animals”, such as ‘dog’. We want to say, basically, that sometimes they ‘live in people’s houses because people want this’. As part of the explication for words like ‘rats’ or ‘mice’, we want to say that they can be in people’s houses and that people don’t want this. So ‘house’ is an interesting semantic molecule with some unexpected or non-obvious applications. The semantic molecule ‘country’ is needed for the names of countries (‘Germany’, ‘Australia’, etc.), and also in the meanings of words like ‘king’, ‘prime

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Figure 22 Place molecules in the lexicon

Figure 23 Time molecules in the lexicon

minister’ and ‘border’. Words like ‘school’, ‘church’, and ‘bank’ are needed in explications for words like ‘principal’ or ‘bank teller’, and also “bank words” like ‘cheque’ and ‘credit’. Time molecules like ‘day’ are needed in words like ‘weekend’, ‘birthday’, ‘holiday’, and the names of the days of the week (see fig. 23). The slide in figure 24 shows some of the lexical fields for which “action and activity” semantic molecules are needed. As mentioned, highly culture-specific molecules can be very important in numerous word meanings (see fig. 25). ‘Money’ is an important molecule in words like ‘buy’, ‘sell’, ‘pay’, and ‘bank’. As for ‘number’, ‘number’ is an amazing word and much more prolific as a molecule than one might first think.

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Figure 24 Action and activity molecules in the lexicon

Figure 25 Culture-specific molecules in the lexicon

There are many words whose meanings involve or imply ‘number’, even words like ‘temperature’, ‘weight’, and ‘age’—pretty well anything that involves “measurement”. ‘God’ is a semantic molecule in various words such as ‘church’, ‘priest’, and ‘angel’, and in speech-act verbs like ‘pray’ and ‘bless’. And ‘ball’. Amazingly, ‘ball’ would seem to be needed in explications for many “sports words”, such as ‘soccer’, ‘tennis’, and ‘cricket’.

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Figure 26 How many molecules per explication?

Now the final part of Lecture 5 is about more general issues, starting with the question: How many semantic molecules can we expect to find in a typical explication? The answer seems to be: it depends (see fig. 26). It depends on the kind of word being explicated. I can’t really prove this to you in the time available, but we have already seen that explications for some words have no semantic molecules at all, or maybe just one or two. A word like ‘play’, for instance, has ‘children [m]’ in it—only one. Some explications require a small number of semantic molecules. We will see when we look at verb meanings in Lectures 7 and 8, that they usually require a handful of molecules, three or four. There may be a couple of body-parts words and some descriptor words like ‘long’, ‘hard’ or ‘sharp’, but typically the number of molecules required is relatively small. Interestingly, however, when you look at explications for concrete nouns, these tend to need large numbers of molecules. For instance, Wierzbicka (2015) examines the meaning of the English word spoon in great detail, and she also compares it to one of the nearest Chinese words: tangchí. Those words require about 15 molecules in each explication. The explications are overall much longer and they also require more molecules. This seems to be an interesting result. It is not specific to artifact words, but also goes for concrete words in the natural world, words like mandarin or apple, for example. This diagram (fig. 27) is a schematic representation of some of the main concepts I have presented so far. Each of these big ovals represents a language: Polish, English and Chinese. The idea is to show in the middle, the intersection of all the languages (obviously this is not to scale). The core of the intersection consists of semantic primes. As well, in this intersection area there may

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Figure 27 Schematic representation of the relationship between semantic primes, universal semantic moleculesm, cutural key words, and the full lexicons of three languages.

be universal semantic molecules, not in the very centre, but still shared by all languages. This afternoon, Lecture 6 is going to be largely about “cultural key words”, so I will just mention this concept now. These are words which are out at the farthest perimeter (in the diagram), furthest away from the shared core. They are the most culture-specific and culture-heavy words—words which may in fact belong to one language only or else to a small group of languages. Words that are so full of cultural content that they completely resist translation. This is the concept of cultural key words. In some ways, cultural key words are sort of opposite to semantic primes. One or two final thoughts. Some people who have followed the NSM theory for many years have said: “Well, you are bringing in danger as soon as you allow the idea of semantic molecules. People might start assuming willy-nilly that words are semantic molecules because it makes the task of analysis easier”. This is a real danger and it must be resisted (see fig. 28). We have to insist that the decision as to whether a given word is or is not a semantic molecule requires careful analysis. It is not always apparent to our immediate intuitions. We have a very good example with the word ‘hit’. It is very tempting to assume that the explication for words like ‘punch’ and ‘kick’ involves ‘hit’ as a semantic molecule. But when you do a careful analysis of these words, it turns out that

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Figure 28 Precautionary points

Figure 29 Concluding points I

they do not require ‘hit’ in their explications, and, furthermore, that to use ‘hit’ would actually introduce inaccuracies and inconsistences into the analysis. I can’t give you the details at this moment, but see Sibly (2010). From the cognitive point of view, and this is my final point, semantic molecules enable the human mind to manipulate huge amounts of semantic .

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information (fig. 29). It is quite marvelous really. Seemingly, once we have the molecules entrenched in our minds, we do not pay great attention to their internal content: we just manipulate them as units. Leibniz made a very relevant analogy with playing the piano. He said that when you know how to play the piano fluently you don’t need to pay attention to what you are doing. You are doing very complex things fluently. This is like how we manipulate concepts, how we manipulate words: once having learnt it, we do it fluently. But, Leibnz said, when you first start learning to play the piano, every single movement is painful and difficult. I think that this is a very useful analogy. As fluent adult users of a language, we have achieved maximum routinization. We have internalized hundreds of primes and molecules and we manipulate them all extremely fluently. In human evolution, the emergence of semantic molecules must have been a great breakthrough in the development of human cognition. The very last point to make is that the theory of semantic molecules is still under development, compared to the primes (see fig. 30). We have had nearly 40 years of studying semantic primes and adjusting the model incrementally. Semantic molecules have been studied for only 15 or so years, and not nearly so intensively. Probably we still have a decade of work ahead to sort through all the issues relating to semantic molecules. It is a very good area, a very open area, for future semantic research.

Figure 30 Concluding points II

Lecture 6

Words as Carriers of Cultural Meaning Thank you very much everybody and very warm welcome to the students and others who are joining this lecture series for the first time. You know this is Lecture Six. So, the other people who are attending the full series, they have already been to five previous lectures. I’ve made some adjustments to my slides to try to give a bit more background, but you might find some parts of the lecture difficult to follow. I am going to talk at the beginning about the importance of words and the importance of meanings. You might think that’s a strange thing to talk about, because the importance of words is surely very obvious. But actually, as I will explain, in linguistics many people don’t think so. And especially they don’t think that cultural words are particularly interesting. They are mainly interested in other kinds of words. I will then spend a little time going over some of the basic ideas of NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage). Then we start to come to the concept of cultural key words. Cultural key words, you see, is the idea that there are certain words which are very very culturally important—words which are difficult or even impossible to translate into other languages, words which carry the heritage and tradition of a whole people. Then, after getting that idea, we shall look at some examples of cultural key words and the challenge of how to unpack the meaning of those words. Even though they are so difficult, so culture-specific, can we open them up and expand their meanings, so that they become accessible to people from other cultures and other languages? The examples I am choosing are: the English word fair, Chinese word xiào 孝, and the German word Ordnung. Each of these three words is a cultural key word for its respective language and culture. As well as that, I want to talk about other culturally important words, i.e. words which are not cultural key words but are still culturally important. There can be culturally important

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5687800. © Cliff Goddard. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004357723_007

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Approaches and attitudes to words and cultural meaning

words in unexpected places, in areas of the vocabulary which seem very plain and ordinary. I will come to that towards the end of the presentation. To begin with, this slide (fig. 1) shows a cover of a book co-authored by myself and Professor Anna Wierzbicka. The book is called Words and Meanings (OUP, 2014). We called it Words and Meanings because we wanted to draw the attention of linguists to the importance of words. Why? People who study literature, history or culture, all know that words are important. But strangely enough, in the 20th and 21st century, most linguists have not been greatly interested in cultural words. I think that these are widespread attitudes among many linguists (pointing to top of fig. 1). Normally, they don’t say such things out loud, but these are some general attitudes that many linguists would have. First, that “cultural meaning” is not part of the main business of linguistics. The main business of linguistics is (I will put these words in inverted commas) “understanding the grammar”. If you are a generative linguist (that’s the dominant form of linguistics, especially in North America) the most important thing in language is syntax: “the grammar”. Words which are very relevant to grammar, well, we might be interested in those words, but cultural words? Not so much. Rather, the attitude is: “Let’s leave that to somebody else: i.e. to some other kind of scholar, maybe an anthropological linguist, or a cultural historian. And we will just get on with the studying “the grammar” ”.

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Meaning in 20th and 21st century linguistics

That’s a very different attitude to most areas of the humanities and social sciences; for instance, anthropology, cultural history, literary studies, translation studies and hermeneutics, ethnography and cognitive anthropology. All these many different fields of social science and humanities, they all recognize the importance of words. In fact, they celebrate words. They look in vain to linguistics for help, even though linguistics is supposed to be the discipline dedicated to language. It’s a terrible paradox. The reasons are pretty simple to understand (fig. 2). In Western linguistics the 20th century was dominated by two main historical figures. The first was Leonard Bloomfield, in the first part of the century. He had a so-called structural approach. He didn’t believe that you could study meaning at all. Then along came Noam Chomsky, in the second part of the 20th century, and his attitude was essentially the same, except that he was mainly interested in syntax. In later times, Chomsky and his followers became interested in a certain very narrow kind of logical meaning. A certain kind of meaning became incorporated into generative grammar, into the so-called “logical form”. But this logical form is only concerned with a very small number of words, and not cultural words, so bad luck for cultural words. The main emphasis was still on form, not on meaning. Luckily, however, interest in the cultural aspects of the vocabulary didn’t go away altogether during the 20th century. It was preserved in some varieties of sociolinguistics, in what’s called the “ethnography of communication”, which is a kind of anthropological linguistics connected with the name of Dell Hymes, and in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, which

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got started in 1972. People working in NSM linguistics have always been deeply interested in cultural words. Now that we are well into the 21st century, there are many signs that linguistics is getting interested in meaning again. There is the Cognitive Linguistics movement, which I’m sure many of you have heard about. The rise of cognitive linguistics has come about largely because people want to bring meaning back into linguistics. Cognitive linguistics is very strong in many parts of the world, including in Europe. Another influential field is discourse analysis, and especially cultural discourse analysis. You might not have heard of that, but it’s a very interesting new type of discourse analysis, and, as you can see, it has the word cultural in it. There are also some very promising trends in Europe under the banner of ethnolinguistics. All these things are on the contemporary scene. Also, since the beginning of the NSM theory, its trajectory has been gradually up, up, up. The NSM approach is still not dominant, that’s for sure, it’s still a minority approach but it is gradually becoming accepted as one standard approach among others. I think that’s another healthy sign. People are getting interested again in meaning. They are trying to find ways of describing meanings and understanding meanings.

Figure 3

The importance of words and meanings

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I want to read this beautiful quotation (fig. 3) from an important scholar called Isaiah Berlin (1976: 168): Words, by connecting passions with things, the present with the past, and by making possible memory and imagination, create family, society, literature, history. […] to speak and think in words is to ‘swim in an inherited stream of images and words’; we must accept these media on trust: we cannot create them. He means that to a large extent, yes, we live and think in a sea of words, but normally we don’t choose these words, they are words that we are given by our language and our culture. Now, when thinking about words, most people naturally think of dictionaries. Unfortunately, most dictionary definitions are not particularly helpful when it comes to explaining the content of words in a clear way. Usually, dictionary definitions get caught up in vague or complex language which is hard to understand. They don’t capture meanings clearly. Furthermore, in a bilingual dictionary, for instance, a English-Chinese or Chinese-English dictionary, you can get another problem, which is where the explanation of a word is composed of words which don’t have any equivalents in the original language. So, for instance, you might get Chinese words described in terms of English words which don’t have any equivalents in Chinese. Think about that … if I describe Chinese words using English words that don’t have Chinese equivalents, how can I claim to be capturing a true Chinese meaning, the meaning as it exists in the minds of Chinese people? I just converted your meanings into English words. How can that be authentic, how can that give us a true picture? In fact, it is a kind of ethnocentrism, a kind of cultural bias. In the same way, if an English word is described in terms of Chinese words which don’t have any equivalents in English, then you are not getting a true, authentic picture of those English words, you are getting a Chinese version. This is a very serious problem. People who are attending my lecture series know this stuff, but I just want to summarize a few basic points (fig. 4). The NSM approach was originated by Professor Anna Wierzbicka. She is the founder of the NSM approach. It goes back to her first major book in 1972. These are some of the recent books on NSM. There are many many books and hundreds of other academic publications.

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Interlude: Main ideas behind NSM approach

The basic idea of NSM is that there are some very simple meanings, a small number of them, which are found as words in all languages. That’s the key idea. Some words are so simple and so basic that (i) they can’t be explained any further, and (ii) they are probably found in all or most languages. NSM linguists believe that by a long process of investigation we have actually discovered these very simple basic words, which are called “semantic primes”. There are believed to be 65 semantic primes. Semantic primes are simple, crosstranslatable words. Now, we can use this small vocabulary of simple, cross-translatable words to describe the meanings of all the other words. That is the main idea behind the NSM approach. As well as those semantic primes, sometimes we use another kind of relatively simple word, called “semantic molecules”, many of which are also found in all or most languages. For instance, words like ‘water’ and ‘fire’, and ‘mother’ and ‘father’. That’s the table of semantic primes given in the English language (fig. 5). The idea is that these are very simple words, which have equivalents in all or most languages. What I am going to try to do in this lecture is to see if we can explain complicated cultural words using only these simple words, and maybe some semantic molecules, such as ‘mother’ and ‘father’, and ‘be born’.

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Semantic primes – English (Goddard and Wierzbica 2014)

Now to the idea of cultural key words (see fig 6). This is a very interesting and powerful concept which was popularized in Anna Wierzbicka’s 1997 book, Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words. Her idea was that every language has certain key words which reflect the core values of the culture. So, when we call something a “key word”, we mean that it is a kind of focal point of a culture. It is a culture-rich word. It is a word which usually resists translation into other languages. And yet, at the same time, to the speakers of the language, it seems very normal and often gets taken for granted. A cultural key word is a kind of focal point for cultural ways of thinking, acting, feeling, and speaking. I must admit that there are many culturally important words in any language, and that sometimes it is hard to draw a strict line between cultural key words and other very important cultural words. I am not even sure that there is an absolutely strict line there. But the concept of “cultural key words” is still a useful concept, a way of directing attention to the fact that some words are tremendously important to a culture. It is good to bear in mind that cultural key words often come in clusters, or groups. So, for instance, in English, the idea of being fair goes together with being reasonable. Being fair and being reasonable are linked, and linked also with the idea of rules. All three words are related to one another. That’s a typical thing.

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Cultural key words

Sometimes a given speech community or cultural group is aware of some of its own cultural key words, usually because they have become famous, internationally, through contrast with another culture. For instance, though you might not have heard of this, in Denmark there is such a word as hygge, and all Danes will tell you, “Yes, hygge is a very important Danish concept”. If you are going to visit Denmark as a tourist and you get the Lonely Planet travel guide, it will include some stuff about hygge. When the current Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, who is originally from Australia, married into the Danish royal family and started to learn Danish, she began to talk about hygge. The particularly Danish meaning of hygge is not found in Swedish or in Norwegian (though Norwegian has the word hygge with a different meaning). I suppose that it was by comparison with those languages and with other European languages, such as German, that the Danes became aware that hygge is one of their key words. In Australia, people talk a lot about the fair go. You will often hear Australian politicians say that it’s really important that everyone should have a fair go. You will find it in a Lonely Planet guide to Australia. I can’t really explain right now the meanings of either hygge or fair go, except to say that they are complicated. Often though, cultural key words are below people’s consciousness, below the horizon of consciousness—invisible to speakers, and yet powerful ways of conditioning our ways of thinking and our ways of feeling.

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Figure 7

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Cultural key words in the lexicon

Here is an overview of some different places where you could expect to find cultural key words (fig. 7). The list starts with some of the obvious places, such as words for values, i.e. value concepts. In this list, I’ve put the English translations in inverted commas (“scare quotes”), because the whole point of cultural key words is that you can’t really translate them easily into other languages. So, just to touch on a couple of examples in each category: value terms like privacy or rude. Social categories, for example, a word like friend. You may think you understand it, but then again perhaps not. In most European languages, the word that usually translates friend does not mean the same thing as the English word for friend. If we look at German, for example they have a couple of different words (Freund and Bekannte, the latter is usually rendered as “aquaintance’, but ein guter Bekannte [a good Bekannte] is ‘a good friend’). In Russian there is a word drug “close friend”, but it’s for a really “close” friendship, compared to English friend. I think that the exact meaning of the English word friend is quite specific to English. Also on fig. 7, we have Chinese zìjĭrén and wàirén—important Chinese social category words which lack equivalents in other languages. Emotion words are often quite important culturally. Happiness, we looked into “happiness” in Lecture 3, and discovered that the English word happiness

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does not mean the same as its normal translation equivalent (xìngfú 幸福) in Chinese. German is famous for its word Angst. It is often translated into English as fear, but it’s not really fear: it’s something like fear, something like anxiety, not quite one or the other. There are some other examples here. Japanese is famous for its word, amae, a kind of interdependency, or trusting, loving, caring, closeness. Words that we call ethnopsychological are basically words for parts of a person: not the physical body, but the inside. In English, we have the word mind, it’s a very English-specific word actually. Russian doesn’t have a word for ‘mind’, not really, but Russian has its word duša, a very famous word something like “soul”. Often you hear about “the Russian soul”, but they are talking really about the Russian duša, which is a much richer concept. Chinese has xīn 心, Japanese kokoro, Korean maum. These words are not equivalent to one another. Yet they are very important parts of people’s ideas about the makeup of a human person. It’s fascinating to think that different cultures can understand human nature in such different ways. Let me expand briefly about English mind and Russian duša. Basically, the essence of the Anglo English concept of mind is that it focuses very much on knowing and thinking. If someone has a good mind, it means they can know things and they can think well. Mind is not much about feelings. In English, feelings belong to the heart, to the psychological heart. Russian duša includes feelings and moral capabilities, as well as thinking. Philosophical concepts. I call them “philosophical” with the word in inverted commas. Like, do you believe in fate or in sud’ba, as many Russians do? In Anglo English culture, many people are rather “empirical” in their thinking, so they talk a lot about evidence and facts, but what is evidence and what are facts? These words have meanings, of course, albeit complex and difficult to pin down, but in modern Anglo thinking, they arguably carry with them a whole worldview, a sort of scientific approach to life. There are many other examples. Now I want to move on to some case studies. We have three case studies, where we will take on some cultural key words and try to take them apart. We start with English. What is the meaning of fair? Someone says: That’s not fair. It’s not actually very obvious what the meaning of fair is (see fig. 8). It’s possible to make a good argument that most European languages don’t have the word fair (though sometimes they have borrowed the word-form from English). Fair is not the same as just, and fairness is not the same thing as justice. Justice might be a concept that’s much more widespread in the world than fairness. Fairness is very Anglo, very English. I am not saying it’s not an interesting

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Figure 8

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Anglo English fair

and popular concept in the world. People kind of like it, I think, and perhaps understandably so, but the original idea of fairness probably came from England. How can I try to persuade you that fair is so special? One thing is that even a child in the playground can say to another child That’s not fair. Anglo children are always saying that kind of thing to each other: That’s not fair! or Unfair!. A little kid will not say That’s not just, however. It would sound ridiculous for a word like just or justice to come from the mouth of a young child. However they can and do say It’s not fair. What about in school? It’s easy for English students, I mean Anglo students, to talk about whether a teacher is fair or not fair…. You may think that children shouldn’t be critical of teachers, but Anglo kids are often critical of teachers, and one of the common criticisms is that the teacher is not fair. But you will not find the children saying that the teacher is unjust. So, the range of use of these words, fair and fairness vs. just and justice, are actually quite different. I just want to focus actually on the expressions, That’s not fair and It’s not fair. Those expressions are found right across the board in English—both from children and adults. They are found in different registers—in informal speech and in formal speech. Politicians, intellectuals, sportspeople, will all use the word fair, and children will also use it. It’s a very broad-ranging word. If you ask the average English person “What does fair mean?”, they will normally start to talk about equal treatment. They are talking about dividing things fairly, which would normally mean the same amount for each person.

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“Fairness” and the expectation of consensus

But actually fairness is not always or necessarily about equality of treatment (see fig. 9). For instance, we have collocations such as fair price. If we talk about whether the price for some product or commodity is a fair price, we are not interested in whether it is equal to anything else. It’s the price that people would think by general consensus to be “reasonable”. That’s it, that most people would agree that a fair price is “not too much for the buyer, not too little for the seller”. What about fair comment? That’s a fair comment, or, that’s a fair criticism. Fair criticism doesn’t mean that the criticism is right. It means that most people think that it would be OK to say such a thing. It’s nothing to do with equality of treatment. So, it’s strange. It seems like the concept of fairness has something to do with popular agreement, with the idea that people can be trusted to agree that some things are OK, while other things “go too far”. But what is this going too far? I am going to try to explain it in a second. So, what Wierzbicka argued in her discussion of fair, is that its meaning rests on the assumption that there’s an expected social consensus about the range of things you can and can’t do when you are dealing with other people. It’s almost as if there was a shared understanding about “the rules of the game”. You’ve got quite a lot of freedom, but some things are too extreme. Those are the things which are not fair. This expectation that there is, or can be, a consensus among people can help to explain why it seems to be considered people’s right to say to somebody

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Figure 10 Semantic explication for ‘That’s not fair’

else “That’s not fair” and “You can’t do something like this”. For example: You can’t charge high prices like that, that’s not fair. You can’t make such a comment, that’s not fair. You can’t give three quarters to one child and only one quarter to the other child, it’s not fair. Let’s try to go down to the level of semantic primes and see if we can unpack the whole thing. If you haven’t been in previous lectures, this will seem pretty strange. Here (fig. 10) we have a semantic explication for the sentence “That’s not fair”. When someone says that’s not fair, what are they saying? According to this explication, what they are saying is: I say: “people can’t do things like this if someone does something like this, this someone does something bad” if other people know about it, they can’t not say the same Why should the speaker have that confidence? Who knows? But if you say That’s not fair, you seem to be expressing the assumption that other people would agree with you. There’s more:

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when people want to do things of some kinds with other people, it is like this: – they can do many things – at the same time they can’t do some things, because if they do things like this, it is very bad for these other people everyone knows this So, in other words, when you have dealings with other people, you are free to do many things but there are some things that you can’t do because they would have very bad consequences for other people—and ‘everyone knows this’. Notice, this doesn’t just refer to you personally doing very bad things to these other people directly. It is intended to rule out you doing anything that would be very bad for those other people, indirectly. This is quite a complicated package. It’s interesting that fairness is a relational concept. It concerns doing things with other people; for instance, playing sports or games, or trading, doing business. It’s also interesting to contemplate whether this particular idea of fairness was connected with democratic politics when it came out of a particular cultural milieu of England in the 18th and 19th centuries. The English are generally very keen on rules and games. Does the “fairness concept” imply that rules and games are the model for the whole society? To pursue these questions in depth would take a long time. Any cultural key word is basically very complicated, not only in its meaning, but also in its origins and its implications. All I have tried to do in the explication in fig. 10 is to capture the literal meaning of the saying ‘That’s not fair’. As for the origins and broader context, Anna Wierzbicka explored these aspects in her book (fig. 11) English: Meaning and Culture (2006). It is a really good book for anyone interested in the culture (and cultural history) of the English language. What Wierzbicka was trying to do in this book is to get people to realize that English is not a “culturally neutral” language. It’s not as if every language in the world has a culture attached to it, except for English. On the contrary, Wierzbicka argues, English is full of what she calls “Anglo culture”. This Anglo culture comes down from history and it shows itself in the language, in many many particular ways. One of these ways is through cultural key words like fair. Now when she was describing and contextualizing fairness and its place in the Anglo cultural tradition, Wierzbicka used some quite intellectual terminology herself. This is what she says about the unconscious Anglo cultural

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Figure 11 Cultural underpinnings and origins of the “fairness” concept

assumptions which are not shared by Polish culture, not shared by Russian culture, not shared by German culture (see fig. 11). The basic idea is that social life is based “on what people as individuals want to do” (not in terms of their family responsibilities or anything of that kind). But at the same time “it needs to be regulated, in everyone’s interest, by certain rules. To state all those rules in advance would be impossible because human life is too complicated and too varied for that … These rules are seen as “the same for everyone (“democratic”) and voluntary”, as in the fairness concept. The approach is “pragmatic and flexible”. It’s not all laid down in advance. What is laid down in advance is the idea that people’s freedom to do things which are ‘very bad for other people’ is limited. That’s ruled out. Aside from that, you can do what you wish. “It allows for the free pursuit of one’s wants – in other words, it is “liberal” – but within limits”. Wierzbicka argues (also fig. 11) that fairness and associated ideals came from the political philosophers of the 17th and 18th century in England, particularly John Locke. Locke had an amazing influence on English life. He is probably the most important English philosopher in that respect. Locke’s books went through many editions (18 editions in his own lifetime), meaning that they were being read by the public. These ideas were developed by the thinkers of the British Enlightenment as they overcame the religious wars. There were many contributing historical factors. Wierzbicka’s claim is that these ideas

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eventually filtered down into public consciousness and became part of their everyday life. “The everyday word fair has crystallized in its meaning political and philosophical ideas which were developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century by the thinkers of the British Enlightenment and which have become entrenched in the modern Anglo consciousness”. I think that’s a pretty good summary how fair came to be a key word of modern Anglo culture. Now I am going to take on the Chinese 孝 xiào (xiàoshùn 孝); see figure 12. After that, we will have a break for questions and then move to the next part of the presentation. I am very interested in this, even though I can’t pronounce Chinese words terribly well. 孝 xiào (xiàoshùn 孝顺) is a very important concept in Chinese culture and I assume that you all agree. When we learn about this in the west, we would learn that 孝 xiào is considered by many people to be the very core of Confucian values. This is just one of the quotations from Confucius which you probably know, right? Băi shàn xiào wéi xiān ‘Of the hundred good deeds, xiào comes first’. But what is xiào? What’s the meaning of it? Of course, in a sense you all know because you grew up with it, but in English there is no such word. From the point of view of translation (and you may learn this if you study English), there is an expression filial piety. If you look up 孝 in a ChineseEnglish dictionary, you will find filial piety, but the problem is that filial piety is an extremely specialized term, mostly used by Chinese scholars. The average English-speaking person would have no idea what it is supposed to mean. Like, my students in my university, most of them have never heard of it. That goes also for the word filial, they have hardly even heard of the word filial. A few

Figure 12 Chinese 孝 xiào “filial piety”

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brave students tried in class, they would have a guess: “Something to do with the family?” Likewise piety, piety is a word mainly used about religious practice. It’s an old fashioned word. If you put the two things together, filial piety—it’s really not doing anything much as far as explaining the meaning. I don’t know if this applies to English in China, but in Singapore English people often use the word filial just by itself, e.g. to say something like ‘He’s so filial’ or ‘I’m not very filial’. Still, that does not help us mainstream speakers of English, because we don’t know what they mean by that. So what does it mean? I will read you out some commentaries (fig. 13), intended to explain using other English words. For instance, Djao (2003) says that xiào implies “love, respect, obedience, solicitude, devotion, care”. That’s a pretty big package but it’s interesting, because it gives us scope. It gives us English speakers a hint that this is a deep and broad concept with a lot of implications. The same author also writes about “the utter sense of duty of the children towards the parents, including the implicit understanding that the children will look after the parents in their old age”. There’s a famous Confucian saying: ‘Give your father and mother no cause for anxiety other than illness’. You probably know the Chinese version. So, unwinding it further, the core of the idea seems to be that everybody has a unique lifelong debt to their parents. You might say: “obviously”, but actually Western people don’t generally think like that. Speaking as an Anglo person myself, I would say that most Anglo people are very grateful to our parents and we love our parents, but we don’t think that we owe them a unique lifelong debt. The Chinese concept

Figure 13 Background on Chinese 孝 xiào

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Figure 14 Semantic explication for Chinese 孝 xiào

makes perfect sense, however, because our parents have given us life and they have raised us, and educated us. They’ve done so many good things for us. Of course, you can extend the xiào concept to grandparents sometimes, and, for a woman, to her woman’s parents-in law, but the core of it seems to be focused on father and mother. I am going to show you an explication, which is the work of Zhengdao Ye (ANU). We drew on her research earlier, in Lecture 3. This is her explication (fig. 14). It’s going to be a little bit strange to you because it begins by spelling out all the assumptions: ‘people can think about some other people like this: “one of these people is my father, one of these people is my mother”. So, we can identify two special people: one is father, one is mother. ‘I live because these people did many good things for me for a long time after I was born’. The words ‘father’, ‘mother’ and ‘born’ are semantic molecules. I haven’t put the marker [m] after them, but let’s not worry about that. ‘I live because these people did many good things for me for a long time after I was born; because of this, when I think about them, I feel something very good.” So, there is the feeling there. It’s not just a debt. There’s something like love or affection. ‘It is good if someone thinks about these people at all times.’ It is an ideal to have your parents in mind at all times; of course, we may not always be able to fulfil that, but this is an ideal. ‘It is good if someone thinks about these people like this:

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I want these people to feel something very good at all times because of this, I want to do many good things for them I can’t not do these things I don’t want these people to feel something bad at any time because of this, I can’t do some things Certain things you just can’t do, because it would cause your parents too much concern or worry; and anyway: ‘I don’t want to do those things’. So, this is the sense of obligation or duty, if you want to put it that way. You want to look after the mental condition of your father and mother, which I know in many Chinese students’ lives will have a lot of important effects, such as not to move too far away, perhaps not to have a certain boyfriend or girlfriend, to study certain subjects in the university and not to study others. Chinese people will do many things on account of xiào, which Anglo Westerners would not do (or at least, would be much less likely to do). In making their life decisions, they often don’t take their parents wishes into account as much as Chinese people. OK, the final part: ‘it is very good if someone does many things because he/ she thinks like this. It is very bad if someone does not do many things because he/she thinks like this’. Xiào is a very rich ethical concept. I suppose it’s obvious to you how it relates to Confucian thinking. What’s so interesting is that this is not a universal concept. It’s a concept which is largely developed and nurtured in China. It has been passed, via Confucian culture, to Korea and Vietnam especially, and probably to some extent to Japan. Ho (1996), who I think is a sociologist, has emphasized that the xiào concept has no real equivalent in non-Confucian cultures. And, she says: “filial piety surpasses all other ethics in historical continuity (i.e., the time period over which this concept has been in existence), in the proportion of humanity under its governance (i.e. one billion plus people), and the encompassing and imperative nature of its precepts”, (i.e. the great and profound implications for an individual person’s life).

Figure 15 The 孝 xiào concept on global perspective

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Figure 16 German Ordnung

OK people, now I want to show you an example of a cultural key word that you have never heard of before, well, not unless you have studied German. This word Ordnung has been called by quite a few people: “the most important word in the German language” (see fig. 16). Hammerich and Lewis (2013), who work in the area of business communication, say: “Working in a German company, one hears this phrase a dozen times a day. Ordnung is roughly translatable into English as ‘order’ or ‘orderliness’’. But these translations can’t really give the impression of how important the concept is. They are talking about the very common German expression: Alles (ist) in Ordnung, something like “everything [is] in order”. I once spent a few months living in Leipzig in Germany and it’s true you can hear people say Alles (ist) in Ordnung probably ten times a day; you know, in the cafeteria, in the office. It’s a very ordinary expression. Another one is: Ordnung muss sein. That muss sein means must be: “there must be Ordnung”. I am reporting the results of a German scholar Rahel Cramer (2015). I can’t describe her study in full, but she used corpus materials from a large corpus of the German language called COSMAS II. In that corpus, she found that one of the most common co-occurrences of Ordnung is with the noun Sicherheit, which means something like ‘safety’ or ‘security’, but also ‘certainty’. Other words strongly associated Ordnung are Recht ‘law, rightness’, Ruhe ‘peace, quiet, and Disziplin ‘discipline’. I mentioned before that cultural key words tend to come in clusters. These are some of the other words in the Ordnung cluster, especially Sicherheit.

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Figure 17 Hofstede (2001) on the culture of Germany

Gert Hofstede is probably the most famous cross-cultural sociologist. He has described Germany as a country whose national culture is characterized by strong “uncertainty avoidance” (see fig. 17). Generally speaking, Germans don’t like things being unpredictable. And that connects with the idea that Sicherheit covers both certainty, on the one hand, and safety and security, on the other. I’m about to show you an explication of Ordnung, and you will see that, basically, Ordnung provides Sicherheit, because Ordnung reduces uncertainty. Hofstede (2001) went so far as to say that Germany’s legal system was influenced by the priority of Sicherheit. German laws are very minutely detailed, and it’s also true that there are a lot of rules and regulations (Ordnungen, Ordnung-plural) in Germany. Hofstede’s idea is that the country has a great need to reduce uncertainty, therefore it has very finely differentiated laws. I’m going to concentrate just on the expression Alles in Ordnung. Here are two everyday examples (fig. 18). Somebody can say something like: ‘I don’t know … It can be little things that give me the feeling that everything is in Ordnung—this cup of tea, for example, that I am drinking right now’. And here is one from a doctor, who is checking a lady who is pregnant. He puts his hand on the lady’s tummy and says: “Everything seems to be in Ordnung.” So, Alles in Ordnung it’s not always about rules and regulations. When someone says Alles (ist) in Ordnung, it implies that there is no need to worry. And there is a good feeling or potential good feeling. This (fig. 19) is an adapted version of Cramer’s (2015) explication for Alles (ist) in Ordnung. It may take you a little while to digest it. It’s all about reducing the uncertainty, so that you know that ‘some things are happening here now, some other things are not happening here now’. And because of that, you ‘can know that

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Figure 18 Background on “Alles in Ordung”

Figure 19 Semantic explication for “Alles (ist) in Ordnung” (Cramer 2015)

some bad things cannot happen here now’. All that, of course, contributes to you feeling something good, a sort of comfortable safe feeling. The whole package is considered to be good, obviously (pointing to final line in fig. 19). There isn’t time for a fuller account of Ordnung. It is a major theme of German culture, and it has echos in other parts of northern Europe also. Now I want to move on to some broader questions. Although we’ve been talking about “cultural key words”, it’s not always true that there is a perfect

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Figure 20 Further brief comments

one-to-one alignment between one culture and a set of key words, for two reasons (see fig. 20). First, sometimes different varieties of the same language have some different key words; for instance, that fair go that I mentioned before is definitely a cultural key word in Australian English; and also the concepts of mate and mateship are a very big deal in Australia, more so even than in the UK. But they are not particularly important in America. Whereas in America, the idea of the dream, having a dream, I think we can see that dream (in the sense of a high ambition) is really a cultural key word of American culture, but not so much in Australia. If you ask Australians “What’s your dream?”, they will look at you with a funny expression, and maybe think “You must be joking”. That’s one reason why we can have differences within the same language, different “national cultures”, so to speak. The other reason is that some key words—or rather, key concepts—are shared across different languages. I think maybe the “filial piety” concept, or a very similar concept, would be majorly important in Vietnamese and in Korean. But my example here (on fig. 20) is a different one: the word ‘love’ in a very vague and generalized sense; for example, in a sentence like ‘Love is the most important thing in life’. A sentence like that is probably, as far as we know, freely translatable into most European languages. But it doesn’t translate readily into many other languages of the world, because you might have to specify what kind of “love” in intended. The point is, this abstract European

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Figure 21 Other ways in which words can be culturally important

“love concept” is a very broad and undifferentiated. Anna Wierzbicka thinks that it descends from the Greek concept agape, which found its way into the Christian Bible, and subsequently into European culture broadly. Yes, let’s bear in mind that some cultural key words are more widespread than others, spanning across several languages, while others can belong to sub-versions of a particular language. Now I want to move to some other ways in which words can be culturally important (fig. 21). I don’t want to give the impression that the only culturally important words are key words. Words can be bearers of cultural meaning in other ways as well. One way is what linguists call “lexical elaboration”. Lexical elaboration, roughly speaking, means when there are a lot of words in a particular domain. So, it’s a relative concept actually, because it means more than we expect, compared to some other languages. Despite this imprecision, when a language has a lot of words in a particular area it often seems to indicate that people are interested in that area. This is a fairly familiar thought, but what is perhaps not so familiar is the idea that there can be lexical elaboration without people knowing it. In this connection I want to put it to you that English has lexical elaboration in the area of speech-act verbs. Speech-act verbs are words like: promise, suggest, ask, apologize, complain, congratulate, praise, guarantee, … I can go on and on. English has more than a hundred speech-act verbs. Most languages

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of the world don’t have such a large number, not even most other European languages, and some languages have only a handful. The minimum number of speech-act verbs you can have in a language is one, namely, say. All languages have SAY, which is a semantic prime. Normally a language will also have a speech-act verb to describe asking a question, maybe another one for giving someone an instruction or order, maybe another one for something like ‘promise’. But languages can get by with half a dozen speech-act verbs. They certainly don’t need several hundreds. This is interesting because speech-act verbs provide a kind of “catalogue” of recognized kinds of verbal interactions. They give you a set of labels, as it were: offer, invite, order, request, … I mean, there are many subtle variations there. Having a big vocabulary of speech-act verbs seems to show that people are interested in verbal interaction, and in particular that they are interested in categorizing verbal interactions according to the apparent attitude of the people involved. For example, if you describe someone saying something using the verb order (like, She ordered him to sit down), you give the impression that the speaker spoke as if he or she thought that the other person had no choice. If you say She told him to sit down, you give the impression that speaker thought that the other person would do it, but not that they had to do it. If you say She asked him to sit down, you give the impression that speaker was thinking something like “I am not quite sure whether you will do it but it will be good if you do”. You also can say She invited her to sit down. There are a number of possibilities. I will be discussing some of these speech-act verbs in Lecture 7. Anna Wierzbicka has argued for a long time that the proliferation of speech-act verbs in English has got to do with Anglo culture, with the idea of “personal autonomy”. Briefly, this refers to the idea that it’s a good thing if people do things because they want to do them, and to the assumption that, normally, people are free to do as they want. In this kind of cultural context, when you want to influence another person to do something, it’s potentially sensitive. You don’t want to give the impression that you are disregarding the other person’s autonomy. It’s useful therefore to have verbs which can describe how we “position” ourselves in relation into another person when we are trying to influence that other person to do something. That’s the short story. I can’t give you full details. But the interesting aspect to it, if it is true, is that maybe you didn’t realize before that English has lexical elaboration in the area of speech-act verbs. We can also find culturally interesting words among semantic molecules (fig. 22). This will make more sense to the people who have been coming to the full lecture series, especially Lecture 5. Basically, semantic molecules are

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Figure 22 Culture-specific semantic molecules

building blocks of meaning which can be culture-specific. If there are culturespecific semantic molecules, they are going to influence a lot of other words in the language. The concept of ‘God’, for instance, is a culture-specific semantic molecule shared by European languages. There are lots of words connected with ‘God’—all the religious vocabulary in the Christian tradition, including simple words like church, priest and Bible, sin, heaven and hell, devil and angel, of course. And speech-act verbs like to bless, pray, and absolve, among others. The ‘God’ concept plays a central role in the meanings of all these words. Another very interesting cultural molecule is ‘number’. European languages all have ‘number’ as a semantic molecule, and it is implicated in the meanings of number words, in concepts connected with counting and measurement, and in many other concepts as well. Of course, Chinese culture has also had the number concepts for thousands of years. But there are plenty of cultures in the world that do not have number systems as we do. They don’t have digits. They don’t have arithmetic. They might have a small number of words (after all, ONE, TWO, MANY, and FEW are semantic primes), but the idea that you can measure and weigh things with numbers, or “tell the time” using numbers (and a ‘clock’, of course) or give someone’s “age” using a number, all these are very culture-specific practices and concepts which depend in an important way on the concept of ‘numbers’. And normally, we don’t even realize it. There can also be culturally important words in places that we didn’t expect (fig. 23). For instance, cognitive verbs: the meaning of the English word believe, for example, is not exactly the same as the Russian word sčitat’, basically because the Russian version is much more committed, much firmer, much

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Figure 23 Cultural semantic in unexpected places

stronger…. You may not think that’s connected with culture but arguably it is, as I will show you in a second. Another area is epistemic adverbs. English has lots of these words, such as probably, certainly, presumably, possibly. There are maybe 20 epistemic adverbs in English, with probably being by far the most important one. Wierzbicka (2006) claims that in the Anglo cultural tradition people have become very concerned with the difference between facts and opinion (two more cultural key words). The English philosopher John Locke was very big on this. The idea was that you shouldn’t present yourself as certain about something if you don’t have evidence to prove it. You should be cautious in how you speak, you should say things like: ‘I think such-and-such’ or ‘in my opinion’, or ‘it seems to me …’. In lots of cultures in the world, people normally don’t talk like that. They just “say out” what their current best thought is. Cross-cultural experience shows that people in many parts of the world, including Chinese people, have a more firm and assertive approach than Anglos, who are always hedging things with I think …, or in my opinion, or probably, and so on. Terms of address can be cultural key words, even words like auntie in Singapore English, or Herr in German (which is not the same as Mr.). Terms of address and titles, they often really help us to see how a given society is regulated. The semantic study of titles and terms of address is often extremely informative about common social assumptions. Even discourse particles can be culturally very revealing. The English word well, for example, is such an important part of English language. It’s a very high

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Figure 24 Example: English believe (that) vs. Russian sčitat’ “firmly believe” (Gladkova 2006)

frequency word. Well, you know, … I can’t stop myself from saying it. The average English person has no conscious idea of the meaning, and yet well it is very important in ordinary English conversation. (So, if you want to imitate English people, try increasing your use of well. For example, when you are asked for your opinion, before you say what you think, say well first. It sounds much better.) Here (fig. 24) is a quick look at the difference between English believe and Russian sčitat’. The English word believe is a polysemous word, with a couple of similar-yet-different meanings. This explication is the believe that goes with I believe that …, so it’s more or less stating a belief. If someone says, for example: I believe that Donald Trump will be a disaster for America, then this is what they are expressing: ‘when I think about it, I think like this: “– –”. This implies, first of all, that I have thought about it a bit, it’s not completely spontaneous. (That’s already different from I think that …). Then follows the content of the belief, e.g. ‘Donald Trump will be a disaster for America’, or whatever. The explication then continues: ‘I know that someone else can think not like this’. In other words, when you say I believe that …, you leave room for the understanding that somebody else might have a different opinion. Furthermore: ‘I can say why I think like this, I can say why it is good if someone thinks like this’. According to this, when I say I believe that …, I am sort of implying, you

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know, that I can be expected to be able to justify my belief and to explain why it is good to have such a belief…. ‘I can say why I think like this’. Sometimes this might be not because you have evidence, as such; it could be on account of your faith in God, for instance. But there has to be some kind of reason. This links with the idea of opinion. Opinion is a classic English word. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, as the saying goes. How democratic can you get? Of course it can be a problem if someone’s opinion is a horrible opinion, like a hateful Nazi racist opinion, for example. So, it’s slightly a contradictory concept, I must agree. But the Anglo ideal is that everyone is entitled to their opinion and that people are expected to be open (another Anglo key word), and flexible and not dogmatic. Being dogmatic is regarded as very bad in Anglo culture. In Russian culture, it’s a somewhat different story. Russians tend to think that Anglo people are kind of weak in their convictions and lack firm views. Why can’t they say what they really believe? What’s with all the hedging and uncertainty? This is according to studies by a Russian NSM linguist Anna Gladkova (2006). This is her explication for the nearest equivalent Russian word, in the same sentence frame, i.e. Ja sčitaju, čto ‘I sčitaju that …’. The first line is the same as for English: ‘when I think about it, I think like this: “——”. But the following components are different: ‘I thought about this for some time before, I thought about other things like this for some time before’. This implies greater and deeper prior thought. The explication continues: ‘I want to think like this, I know why I want to think like this. I don’t want to think about it in any other way. It is good to think about it like this’. In other words, someone who says Ja sčitaju appears to be very firmly convinced and does not want to be swayed. There is no implicit idea that other people might think differently, that doesn’t enter the picture. The picture is more like, this is my firm conviction, I am prepared to defend it and I will resist being swayed away from it. Generally speaking, Russians expect other people to have strong views and are not surprised if they are unyielding in their views. In my experience, it’s great to have arguments with Russians, because they will say just straight out what they think, and if they think that you are wrong, they will tell you so. Then you can have a good hard discussion. While English people, they will say: “Well, you know, I’m not sure I quite see it that way. Have you considered such and such?”—when actually what they mean is: I don’t agree at all. My point is that even words like believe and sčitat, seemingly small items of vocabulary, can be clues to the broader culture. Now I want to look briefly at some words about physical things, starting with words for what anthropologists call “material culture” (fig. 25), i.e. words

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Figure 25 Cultural content in words for items of “material culture”

for concrete objects that are created by people, for instance, books, knives and forks, and all that kind of thing, the cultural objects. We are all familiar with the idea that we can learn a lot about an “exotic” culture by finding out the meanings of their words. So as a finale, I will show you some words from the Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara language of Australia’s central desert. As you know, Australia is a terribly dry country. Almost the entire interior of Australia is arid land, or even desert. When I was a doctoral student, I lived in central Australia and was studying an Aboriginal language called Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara. Actually that’s the name of two different dialects, and it’s long, so people sometimes use the letters P/Y as an abbreviation. These are some of the words you will find in P/Y (fig. 25). Kiṯi is kind of adhesive gum, made from the resin of spinifex or mulga. Spinifex is a tough, sharp desert grass, and mulga is a kind of small hardwood tree. From both these plants, you can get a kind of resin and you can use this resin to plug holes or cracks in your wooden bowls, or to fasten a spearhead to a spear. Piti is a large hemispherical wooden bowl, used to carry water. Tjirpika is a bed of leaves or branches that you make to put meat on, so it won’t get covered in dirt. For instance, if you kill a kangaroo in the desert, and you want to cut it up, which of course you have to do, you can’t put it on a table or bench, or anything like that, so you put down some branches and leaves on the ground, and that’s a tjirpika.

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It’s obvious that we can learn a lot about the lifestyle and culture from the meanings of those words. But what we often don’t realize is that even in familiar languages—even in our own language—there is a lot of cultural content in ordinary everyday words. Often it only comes out when we do detailed semantic description of our own language. I can’t go into much detail about this, but I want to mention “artefact words”, because there are some good research articles published about this topic. “Artefact words” is a technical term for words for things like cup or spoon, things that are made by people. Cup, spoon—they seem so plain and ordinary. It seems like there can’t be much cultural information in such a word; but actually there is quite a lot. Consider the difference between English cup and mug. Maybe you’ve never thought about it but if you do think about it, you will realise that a mug is generally bigger than a cup, and there is usually no saucer. A mug is designed so that you can walk around carrying it. Cups are usually smaller and they often come in sets. There’s often a saucer, which implies that there’s likely to be a table nearby, and sometimes there’s a pot of tea. The design of the object provides clues to its assumed purpose, which is associated with certain assumed “ways of drinking”. Likewise, with spoon. As I mentioned in Lecture 5, Wierzbicka (2016) is a great article about the English word spoon. As you know, the English spoon has a long handle and a somewhat different shape to the Chinese spoon, the kind of spoon with the flat bottom (tāngchí). Wierzbicka has a very interesting discussion of how this reflects the different “food cultures”. The English spoon is adapted to certain kinds of food that people eat in Europe, while the Chinese spoon is adapted to certain soupy kinds of food that people eat in China, and also to the fact that you have small bowls and chopsticks to pick out the solid bits. So even practical common words can have a cultural aspect to them. It’s a fallacy that words like these are merely labels for things. A word like spoon is not just a label for a thing. A word like spoon has its meaning, including a sort of little script about the way it’s used and some information about why it is that way. (Like, why does the Chinese tāngchí have a flat part at the bottom?) Now to landscape words (see fig. 26). People are inclined to think that mountains, hills, rivers and lakes exist. In a sense they do of course. There is a real physical world out there, but how one sees this world and how one describes it, is different in different languages. For example, some languages don’t have any word exactly like lake, because they have two or three such words. If there is a lake in the mountains, in English we still call it lake. But in Spanish or French, a “mountain lake” is a different word. Likewise, we don’t have any special word like French word étang. Normally étang is translated as ‘pond’ but the English

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Figure 26 Cultural content in words for features of the “landscape”

word pond normally suggests it’s made by people. The Russian linguist Jurij Apresjan (1992) uses a very nice expression: “the naïve picture of the world”. Every language, he writes, gives its speakers a certain picture of the world. The meanings of words, how they categorize things, provides us with this picture of the world. Helen Bromhead (2011, 2013) has studied words like river, stream and creek— what she calls “enlongated water places”, which just means that such places are thought of as long. Really, it is quite fascinating to drill down and identify the differences between a river, stream and creek. Australian English has a special meaning of creek, which is well adapted to Australia because in Australia it’s so very arid. We don’t have any big rivers. I mean, nothing like you have in China, or even in America. In Australia, rivers are all rather small by comparison, and in many places there is a little river and at some times of the year it can be dry. There’s no water flowing at all. The Australian English word creek, according to Bromhead’s analysis, actually contains the idea that sometimes there can be no water in it. If that’s true, it shows that Australian English has adapted itself to the new landscape. In England, the word creek does not mean anything like that. I am going to spend a tiny moment on the P/Y word karu. In central Australia, there are no rivers, no water that’s normally flowing. The only time you get

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Figure 27 Cultural context in ordinary “physical activity” words

flowing water is after heavy rain. It flows for a while and then it dries up again. But because water flows often occur in the same places, there are long sandy places which are called karu. That’s where you expect water to be flowing when it does flow. So, karu is like what in English is called a ‘creek bed’. The relationship to water is that sometimes water flows in a karu. You may think “OK, I kind of get that”. What you probably don’t know is that you can get water by digging in some places in a karu, because usually there is underground water in certain places in a karu. People who live in an arid land depend on water for their life. They know where all water can be obtained. So, part of the meaning of the word karu is that in some places in the karu, there is water under the ground. That is just not part of the meaning of the English words creek or creek bed, of course. I’ve got one final example. Even a word like chop, … you might think that “chopping” is just a physical action, so how can chop be a cultural word? But if you compare the English word chop with the Polish word rąbać, and the Japanese word kizamu (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2009), you will see that Japanese kizamu is typically a smallish kind of motion like this (indicating), Polish rąbać is much bigger motion, typically with a big heavy axe, and English chop is somewhere in between. This might be connected with the lifestyle of the respective cultures. In Polish, rąbać is used especially for splitting logs of wood and for smashing the ice in a very cold climate. On the other hand, the smallscale action of Japanese kizamu is especially suited for the Japanese style of food preparation, much of which depends on dividing up the ingredients into delicate portions. So somewhat unexpectedly, even ordinary verbs like these may turn out to be fine-tuned for the culture. But why not? I mean, it’s natural to think that the meanings of our words should be adapted to our lifestyle.

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Figure 28 Concluding remarks

There are many ways in which words can be carriers of cultural meaning. Here are the last points (fig. 28). I am going to come back to the idea that words are important and deserve attention from linguists. Here is a quote from our book Words and Meanings: People speak with words, they think with words, they “do things” with words; to a significant extent, words shape people’s lives. Arguably, they also contribute to shaping world affairs. Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014

As linguists, we can’t understand the true nature of language without understanding words. The idea that we can study syntax autonomously from the lexicon, the idea that we can understand language without being very interested in lexical meanings, I think those ideas are profoundly mistaken. We need advanced theories and high-resolution methods for dealing with lexical meaning. Around the world, furthermore, thousands of languages are becoming extinct. It’s very important as linguists and as humans that we try to document the words and the concepts of endangered languages. They are the human legacy. Each language is a living document of the history and culture of its people. Many field linguists, when they document endangered languages, don’t pay great attention to word meanings. Usually they are more interested in the grammar and the phonology.

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Finally, English is on the brink of becoming a global lingua franca. Should we be worried? Well, in some ways, I think, maybe yes. The advantages are pretty obvious, because it’s good to have a medium of communication that can be used by people internationally. But English words have a lot of Englishspecific meanings built into them. When you buy into English, you may be buying more than you bargained for. There may be a homogenizing effect or an Anglicizing effect. Now it could be that we are OK with that, or it could be that we are not OK with that. But we need to understand it better. That’s for sure. That’s another reason for understanding words and, in particular, trying to better understand English words. Whether there are strategies for retaining English while reducing the danger of Anglocentrism is going to be one of the topics in Lecture 9.

Lecture 7

English Verb Semantics: Verbs of Doing and Saying Hello to students and teachers who are from this university. This is Lecture 7, so the people who have been following this lecture series have already had six lectures which explain the background and the methodology. So it might seem strange and unfamiliar if this is your first time. The basic idea, in just a few sentences, is that we are using a method of meaning analysis called the “natural semantic metalanguage”, or NSM method. What we are trying to do is to explain complex meanings using very simple words. We use only a small number of very simple, cross-translatable words—65 of them (semantic primes). We sometimes also make use of other basic words which are not fundamentally simple, provided that they are cross-translatable. I’ll leave it at that for the time being. I will begin with a general introduction. If you are familiar with this area, you will already know about this. Even so, I am going to start with an introduction to the idea of verb classes, and verb semantics, and another important concept from the NSM theory: semantic templates. Then, for the rest of the lecture we will be looking at a sample of explications for English verbs. There are some verbs of doing, and then later some verbs of saying, or speech-act verbs. When I say “explications”, I mean semantic description done using very simple words. An explication is a definition phrased using very simple words. I will present a set of explications for some physical activity verbs. Verbs of bodily motion: crawl and swim, and also some transitive physical activity verbs: eat, cut, and pour. These verbs and many others are described in a paper by Professor Anna Wierzbicka and myself, titled “Explicating the English lexicon of ‘doing’ and happening’” (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2016). In that paper, we deal with about 25 verbs and today I will present just a selection from these.

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5687839.

© Cliff Goddard. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004357723_008

English Verb Semantics

Figure 1

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Verb classes, verb semantics and semantic templates

In the second part of the lecture, I am going to look at a couple of speechact verbs: order, tell, ask and suggest. If you are interested in speech-act verbs, there is a chapter about them in the book Words and Meanings (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014). These days most linguists see the verbal lexicon as consisting of many different classes and sub-classes, with each sub-class having certain grammatical and semantic properties (see fig. 1). This is very different from the view we may have had 50 years ago, when people thought—well, there are transitive verbs and intransitive verbs, plus a few ditransitive verbs. These days we know that there are many classes and sub-classes of verbs, maybe 40 or 50, or even more. To a large extent, this outcome is due to the work of Beth Levin. Her most influential book is English Verb Classes and Alternations (Levin 1993). Beth Levin, Malka Rappaport Hovav, and other colleagues have been working now for 30 years in this area. More than anybody else, they have convinced us all about the usefulness of the idea of verb classes and sub-classes. But the ironical thing is that Levin herself does not believe that verb classes are particularly important in themselves. What is much more important are verb meanings, the semantic components of the verbs. She says (fig. 1): “the behaviour of a verb, particularly with respect to the expression and interpretation of its arguments is governed by its meaning”. In later work, Levin and Rappaport Hovav write: “it is the elements of meaning that define verb classes that are the most important”. So,

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Semantic templates for verbs

according to these leading scholars, we should be focussing first and foremost on verb meanings, rather than on verb classes. So, it’s kind of sad in a way that many other working linguists have not been completely convinced. Personally, I think the root reason is that Levin and her colleagues don’t have a particularly good method for describing meanings. We can allocate the verbs into verb classes on account of their grammatical behavior; and there are many indications that verbal semantics is the basis of it. But to actually prove this, convincingly, you need to have a good method of describing verb meanings. What I want to demonstrate today is that the NSM method of semantic description is able to do this job. We can describe verb meanings in a much more accurate and helpful way, and in the process explain a lot of things about the grammar of verbs, as well as their meanings. As you already know, one key aspect of the NSM approach is explaining complex meanings in terms of very simple words, but there is another interesting and important idea: the idea of semantic templates (fig. 2). Basically, the idea is that for each sub-class of verbs, the explications of these verbs follow a certain pattern or arrangement of semantic components which is consistent for all the verbs in that sub-class. That is, different groups or sub-classes of verbs have different template structures. For convenience, we

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Figure 3

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Lexicosyntactic frames for two verb subclasses

often label the sections of a template with some technical names. They are not part of explication but they are useful for us as linguists. For physical activity verbs, as I will show you soon, that template has four sections. We call those sections: LEXICOSYNTACTIC FRAME, PROTO­ TYPICAL SCENARIO (which usually includes the intention or the mental state of the actor), MANNER, and POTENTIAL OUTCOME. The sections of template come in that order, so Lexicosyntactic Frame is at the top, it’s the top-most set of components. These components are expressed in a very generic kind of way. They identify the core participants and the inherent aspect of a verb, and other grammatically important things, such as whether the verb is a volitional verb (in other words, is it done deliberately?) and whether it involves a high degree of control. Before we start looking at individual verb explications, I am going to review a number of different Lexicosyntactic Frames, so you can get a feel for what it means (see fig. 3). So let’s go. First, verbs of bodily motion; for instance, running, crawling, swimming, and climbing. There are a lot of such verbs in English. If someone is running, crawling, swimming, or climbing, the Lexicosyntactic Frame is this:

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someone does something somewhere for some time because of this, this someone is moving in this place during this time as he/she wants All the words here are semantic primes: ‘someone’, ‘something’, ‘somewhere’, ‘for some time’, etc. You can see that it is long, compared to saying “localized volitional motion”. But the description above basically says the same thing using words that everyone can understand. We know that there is “action”, because ‘someone does something’. It is “localized” because it happens ‘somewhere’. It has “duration” (‘for some time’). There is “motion”, i.e. our person is ‘moving in this place’, and there is an element of volition or control (‘as he/she wants’). Many different bodily motion verbs fall under this Lexicosyntactic Frame, with the difference between them coming from the next three sections of the template. Now let’s look at the Lexicosyntactic Frame for transitive activity verbs such as eating, drinking, pouring, cutting, where we have a grammatical object, an affected object (see fig. 3, bottom). The Lexicosyntactic Frame begins with: ‘someone does something to something for some time’. Notice the ‘to something’. Then: ‘because of this, something happens to it during this time’. There is an “affected patient”, as we would say in the usual linguistic jargon. Additionally, many transitive activity verbs involve a degree of control over the process. So, for instance, when I am cutting something, as I cut it, I am controlling the effect on the object by controlling the sharp instrument or tool I am using. For verbs like this, which imply ongoing attention and control by the actor, we add the component ‘as he/she wants’. Many transitive verbs also involve an instrument. Not all of them; eating doesn’t, for instance, we just eat with parts of our body. But for verbs like cutting and grinding, and many other transitive verbs that involve an instrument, you add this component to the Lexicosyntactic Frame: ‘this someone does it with something else’. Dozens or hundreds of transitive activity verbs will have the Lexicosyntactic Frame shown in the second part of figure 3. Up till now I’ve been talking about activity verbs. When I say “activity”, what I mean is verbs which designate things that take some time. They have duration. It’s helpful to use a separate word—“action”, for things which we do ‘in one moment’, without any noticeable duration. For instance, hit would be a transitive example of this kind; likewise kill, or break, or throw. These actions don’t necessarily take much time, whereas activities like cutting or grinding, and so on, do take time. So let’s consider hit (see fig. 4). We say its Lexicosyntactic Frame starts: ‘someone does something to someone else at this time’. Incidentally, we think

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Figure 4

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Lexicosyntactic frames for two subclasses of transitive action verbs

that the verb hit is polysemous, and that hitting a person is somewhat different in meaning to hitting a drum, for instance. In any case, the Lexicosyntactic Frame for hit someone starts ‘someone does something to someone else …’. But instead of ‘for some time’, we just say ‘at this time’. So hit does have a location in time, but it doesn’t necessarily have duration. Then: ‘because of this, something happens to this someone else’. Verbs like put and throw, sometimes people call them verbs of “induced motion” or “induced change of location”. If you put something or throw something, the idea is that the ‘something’ gets into another place. So, the Lexicosyntactic Frame can say: ‘someone does something to something at this time’, and ‘because of this, after this, this something is not in the place where it was before’. If we need to specify that the action is really very momentary, we can use the NSM expression ‘it happens in one moment’. (In the NSM metalanguage, we have a durational semantic prime FOR SOME TIME, and we also have a semantic prime for punctual or momentary events: MOMENT; cf. Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014). So far I have been showing you a sample of Lexicosyntactic Frames that correspond to some classes of “verbs of doing”. Of course, there are also a lot of verbs based on HAPPEN, and there are a lot of verbs based on SAY, and also there are a lot of mental verbs. Just give you one example, there are various “verbs of happening” that involve something bad happening to stuff due to

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Figure 5

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Other kinds of Lexicosyntactic Frames

natural processes; for instance, your food can ‘rot’ or milk can ‘go sour’. There is a sub-class of such verbs, sometimes called “verbs of deterioration” (Barrios and Goddard 2013). The final example (fig. 5) is the Lexicosyntactic Frame for many speech-act verbs. Speech-act verbs are based on SAY, naturally: they are verbs of saying. Many speech-act verbs have this as their top-most component: ‘someone says something to someone else’. And often, when someone says something to someone else, they want to get some outcome. That is: ‘this someone wants something to happen because of it’. That concludes this quick overview of Lexicosyntactic Frames. You can see that even though we are just using a very small number of words, like ‘someone’, ‘do’, ‘happen’, ‘say’, ‘want’, ‘because’, and so on, it’s possible to have a lot of variety in these Lexicosyntactic Frames. We can define many different subclasses of verbs just by different combinations of components of that kind. Obviously, every verb has a lot more in its content than just the Lexico­ syntactic Frame. The Lexicosyntactic Frame is just the general stuff at the top. What makes the verbs in any sub-class different from one another is the rest of the explication. To see how this works, we need look at some individual verbs (fig. 6). As I said, we will look at two verbs of bodily motion, crawl and swim, and then at three activity verbs: eat, cut, and pour. What I mean by “activity”, just to remind you, is that these are verbs whose basic meanings involve duration. Approaching the semantics of verbs is complicated in many ways, because they can be used in different tenses and aspects, and because many verbs can

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Figure 6

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Physical activity verbs

be used in several different constructions. In Lecture 8, I am going to look at different constructions; so that’s coming. But before we can get even get started on explicating a verb, we have to decide what is its semantically basic frame. What I mean is, what is the most convenient and helpful starting point to do the explication. In the case of activity verbs, I am going to say that the semantically basic frame is, in English, a Progressive construction. The reason is that these are verbs which inherently involve duration, so it makes sense to start with a grammatical context where the duration is quite obvious. So, I am going to start by explicating someone is crawling, someone is swimming, someone is eating something, someone is pouring something, and so on. Before we do crawling and swimming, let’s take another look at the semantic template for verbs of bodily motion (fig. 7). The first section is the Lexicosyntactic Frame, so for someone X is crawling or someone X is swimming, we will say: ‘someone X is doing something somewhere for some time; because of this, this someone is moving in this place during this time as he/she wants’. After this comes the Prototypical Scenario, introduced by: ‘often when someone does this, it is like this …’ And then, there will be some description, different for every verb. For swimming, for instance, we need to mention that the person is in water, right? For crawling, we need to mention that the person can’t use their legs in the normal way. After the Prototypical Scenario comes the Manner section, introduced by: ‘when someone does this, it happens like this: …’. Then we describe the details. Obviously, swimming is different from crawling, which is different from

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Figure 7

Semantic template for verbs of bodily motion, e.g. run, crawl, swim, fly

running, … they involve different parts of the body and different movements. There is also a component called Effect. I will describe this in a moment. Finally, if someone is running, crawling, or swimming, it doesn’t mean that they necessarily get where they want to go. All such verbs have the idea that someone wants to move to some intended location, but you can run and not quite get there, you can crawl and not quite get there. So, the final section of the template is Potential Outcome: ‘if someone does this for some time, after this, he/she can be somewhere else, as he/she wanted’. To put it another way, if they keep at it for long enough, the activity will have the desired outcome. Ok, now crawling. I am going to give you the specifics of Someone X is crawling and try to persuade you that this explication is good although it is quite complicated (see fig. 8). The reason for the subscript 0 in the word crawl (i.e. crawling0) is that crawl may have several different meanings, and I want to be very specific that I am explicating crawl in the context Someone is crawling0 at a certain time. We already know what the Lexicosyntactic Frame will be (first section of the explication in fig. 8). Now what’s the Prototypical Scenario for crawling? The Prototypical Scenario for crawling0, according to this analysis, is this: often when someone does this, it is like this: this someone thinks like this: “I want to be somewhere else in this place after some time”

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Figure 8

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Semantic explication for English ‘crawling’

That is, the person who crawls often has the idea they want to be ‘somewhere else in this place’. The wording ‘somewhere else in this place’ implies that it is probably somewhere close. There is another part of the Prototypical Scenario as well: ‘this someone can’t move their legs [m] as people often do when they want to be somewhere else in a place’. That is, part of the Prototypical Scenario for crawling is that the person can’t use their legs in the normal way. I mentioned to you just now a couple of examples of crawling. In English (we’ve done research with English language corpora), one of the highest collocates of the verb crawl is baby. You get sentences like: When does a baby start to crawl? or The baby was crawling across the floor. Of course, babies can’t use their legs as people often do when they want to be somewhere else in a place, because they are still babies. Another common context for the verb crawl is injury. For example, somebody has been in an accident, a car crash or something, and they crawl out of the wreckage. Another possibility is, you are a soldier in battle and there are bullets whizzing overhead, so you keep low. The range of situations in which someone ‘can’t move their legs as people often do when they want to be somewhere else’ is quite diverse, but that doesn’t matter, because this component is general enough that it will cover all these different situations. What about the Manner of crawling? How do we describe that? One thing about crawling, and many other bodily activities actually, is that it has a kind of iterative structure. The same thing happens many times. When you crawl,

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there is a certain pattern of body-part movement, involving the legs, which repeats over and over. So, we first have to describe an individual “bit” of crawling, then say that ‘the same thing happens many times’. (Reading from the third section of fig. 8): it happens like this: ‘this someone moves the legs for a short time, at the same time, they move some other parts of the body’ (which other parts depends on their situation). And because of how they move their legs and other parts of the body: ‘many parts of the body touch the ground in many places during this time’. That is, when someone is crawling, usually some other parts of their body are touching the ground. It could be the arms, or it could be the chest or stomach, it’s quite variable. And because they are moving their body-parts in that way, in contact with the ground: ‘after this, the body is not in the place where it was before, it is somewhere near this place’. That is, there is a small bodily displacement. Every one little part of crawling moves the person’s body a little bit. Finally, there is the Potential Outcome: ‘if someone does this in a place for some time, after this, he/she can be somewhere else in this place as they wanted’. Now in support of this explication, I can mention a few relevant facts, even though there isn’t time to fully justify every aspect of it. One fact is that among the other collocates of crawl, a lot are body-part words. That is, words like knees, legs, stomach are very often found collocated with crawl. Typical contexts are that someone is crawling on their hands and knees, or on their tummy. In these expressions, the contact between body-parts and the ground (or floor, etc.) is explicit. Another very frequent collocation type is with a location. Often there is a reference to the ground, or to mud, a swamp, etc. This provides indirect support for the proposal that parts of the body touching the ground is a salient part of the concept of crawling. One final thing to mention, also related to collocations, is that in English the verb crawl is very often used about insects, like ants or spiders, for instance. For example, we can say Ants are crawling all over the table. We think this is the separate and extended meaning of crawl. It’s not crawl0. Of course, the explication I’ve just presented would not be applicable to ants: it is about human actors (‘someone’, ‘people’). According to our analysis, the use of crawl (in English) for insects (and snakes even) is an extended meaning, or to put it another way, crawl is a polysemous word. Now, I will show you an explication for swimming (fig. 9). By the way, the verb ‘swim’ has been studied quite a lot cross-linguistically. A group of Russian linguists have published a book on what they call “aquamotion”, comparing verbs like ‘swim’ and ‘float’ in different languages (Koptjevskaja-Tamm et al. 2010), and they found that the meanings of these verbs are not exactly the same

English Verb Semantics

Figure 9

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Semantic explication for English ‘swimming’

in different languages. So, it could be that English ‘swim’ is somewhat different from Chinese ‘swim’, I don’t know, certainly English ‘swim’ is different from Russian ‘swim’. In English, for instance, just staying afloat does not really qualify as swimming: you have to be moving in a certain direction to be swimming. Let’s now run through the explication for Someone X is swimming. The Lexicosyntactic Frame is basically the same as before, except that we mention water: ‘someone X is doing something for some time in a place where there is much water [m]’. We think that water is so important to the concept of swimming that it should be mentioned right up there in the Lexicosyntactic Frame. That would link swim with words like float and sink, and other “water verbs”. Anyway, because our person is ‘doing something for some time in a place where there is much water’, they are ‘moving in this place during this time as they want’. The Prototypical Scenario starts with the component: ‘many parts of this someone’s body are inside water in this place’. That is, the body is largely submerged. I am not sure about the expression ‘inside water’—whether or not it sounds good in Chinese, or whether you would say ‘in water’, but basically you want to get the idea that the person’s body is largely in the water. And also: ‘this someone’s body is not touching anything else at this time’. We may take this for granted, but it has to be made explicit. I mean, if somebody is in the water but holding onto something … if, for example, someone fell into a river but they are now holding onto the boat, then they are not swimming. So basically, the physical situation is that the person’s body is in the water and is not being supported by anything else.

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Now this someone thinks: ‘I want to be somewhere else in this place after some time’. That is, they have the same kind of intention as with crawling, they want to be somewhere else, normally somewhere fairly close. It’s important to remember at this point that this is only the Prototypical Scenario, i.e. that it is ‘often like this’. It doesn’t mean that you can’t talk about someone swimming across the English Channel or doing long-distance swimming. The idea is rather that the concept of ‘swimming’ is connected with a typical situation in which someone wants to swim not very far: they want to get ‘somewhere else in the place where they are’. But how do they do it? Like crawling, the Manner of swimming has a repetitive structure; that is: ‘when someone does this, the same thing happens many times’. There is a series of repeated sub-episodes. First: ‘this someone moves some parts of the body for a short time’. We don’t want to be too specific about the body-parts, because there are lots of different styles of swimming (you know, the so-called freestyle or crawl, backstroke, butterfly, the dog paddle). Anyway, you move some parts of the body, and: ‘these parts of the body touch the water in many places during this time’. And after a small amount of this: ‘the body is not in the place where it was before, it is somewhere near this place’. As with crawl, there is a small displacement of the body. And: ‘if someone does this in a place for some time, they can be somewhere else in this place as they wanted’. Now, it could be that some details of the Manner section could be improved perhaps, but the general structure seems to be good. We have done explications for quite a lot of bodily motion verbs, and this general pattern seems practical. Before we move on, I just want to highlight this component here (pointing to last component in the third section of fig. 9). This is the Effect component. I mentioned before that this section of the template is called Manner + Effect. Well, scholars who study lexical aspect and event structure have often pointed out that there is a difference between what they call “incremental effect”, which is the small effect that occurs as you do something, and the final or “cumulative effect”. These are important concepts in the study of lexical aspect. For example, when we talk about a “telic” verb, the idea is that the activity is kind of closedoff or completed, once the intended outcome has been achieved. That has to be distinguished from the local, incremental effect of just doing a little bit of the activity as we go. It’s the same with cutting. If you are cutting something, then there is an incremental effect which happens as you do the cutting, whether or not you complete the cutting and achieve the Potential Outcome; for example, cutting a piece of paper into two. So, in the explications we distinguish this part

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(the last component in the third section, which corresponds to the “incremental effect”, from this part (the final section of the explication) which represents the “cumulative effect” or Potential Outcome. I’ve got one last thing to say about swimming. If you look at the collocations of swim in an English language corpus, naturally water is the most frequent collocate; but swim also frequently occurs, notably, with various directional expressions. You know, swimming to the shore or away from the boat, that kind of thing. This is consistent with the proposed explication. However, and this parallels the situation with crawl, there are also quite a lot of uses of swim in connection with fish, dolphins, and other underwater creatures. In English, you can say that fish swim, even though they are underwater, and fish, obviously, are not people. To some extent, this is a peculiarity of the English language. There are plenty of languages in which one would not use the word ‘swim’ about fish: you say instead they “go under the water” or something like that. In other words, when English swim is used about fish, we view this as a case of lexical polysemy, a separate-but-related meaning to that explicated in fig. 9. Now, before we pause for a break, I think we ought to make a start on one of the transitive verbs, because they are more complex than the motion verbs. I will show first the template, or rather one of the templates, for transitive verbs (fig. 10). We know from the term “transitive verb” that such verbs have a grammatical object. In the case of a transitive activity verbs, the object is being affected by the ongoing action of the subject, i.e. what the subject is doing is having an ongoing effect on the object. I will start with eating.

Figure 10 Semantic template for “transitive activity” verbs, e.g. eat, cut, pour

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People who have attended previous lectures will remember that I’ve mentioned a couple of times that not all languages have a verb which is exactly the same as English eat. There are two reasons for that. First, some languages don’t distinguish very clearly between eating and drinking: they have one verb involving taking stuff into the mouth, doing something with the mouth, and it goes down. Second, even when languages do have separate words for eating or drinking, there can still be small differences between their meanings. For example, in a paper titled ‘Eating and Drinking in Shanghainese and Mandarin’, Ye (2015) argues that neither language has words which are exactly, precisely, the same in meaning as English ‘eat’. The relevant Lexicosyntactic Frame for transitive activity verbs, repeating from earlier, is: ‘someone X is doing something to something for some time, (and) because of this, something is happening to it at the same time’. In technical jargon, there is an ongoing activity with a concurrent effect. The Prototypical Scenario is introduced in the same way as before: ‘often when someone does this, it is like this, …’, and we then set out certain features of the typical situation in which someone does such a thing. Then comes Manner plus Effect, introduced by: ‘when someone does it, it happens like this: …’. Then Potential Outcome. This is a general template, suitable for many transitive activity verbs. Let’s suppose that someone X is eating a hamburger. What does it mean (fig. 11)? First: ‘someone X is doing something to something for some time’ (the something is a hamburger) and ‘because of this something happening to it (that is, to the hamburger) at the same time’. As for the Prototypical Situation,

Figure 11 Semantic explication for English ‘eating’.

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there are two components. The first is that the thing being eaten is ‘not something like water’. Why do we say this? Well, we want to give the idea that it is not liquid but solid, but we can’t use words like ‘solid’ or ‘liquid’ in NSM explications, because these words have complex meanings and because comparable words are not found in all languages. The meanings of the words ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ basically go back to whether or not the stuff is ‘something like water’. ‘Water’ is a universal word. So, the thing with eating is that the stuff is ‘something not like water’. (If we were explicating drinking, then the stuff will be described as ‘something like water’.) The second component of the Prototypical Situation is that our person has an intention. They want what they are eating ‘to be somewhere inside their body’. The Manner of eating is heavily affected by the fact that the stuff is not something like water. Eating involves quite a bit happening inside the mouth, unlike as with drinking. So: ‘when someone does this to something, the same thing happens many times’. As a person is eating a hamburger, some kind of subevents are happening over and over: ‘it happens like this: …’ First, this someone does something to the hamburger with their hands. In the case of a hamburger this is obvious, because typically people hold a hamburger in their hands, but even if you are eating something with a knife and fork, or with chopsticks, you still are doing something to the food with the hands. Basically, hands are involved because of the need to get the food to the mouth. Incidentally, when people use mime to indicate ‘eating’, they do this (moving hands repeatedly to the mouth). And: ‘after this, a little of it’ (that is, a little of what they are eating) ‘is inside the mouth for a short time’. We don’t have to describe exactly how it gets in there. And during this time the person: ‘does something to it with some parts of the mouth’ and ‘something happens to it because of this’. This indicates something like ‘chewing’, but we don’t want to use a word like ‘chewing’ because it is complex and not found in every language (and sometimes the action is not always exactly chewing, in any case). Typically, it gets a bit “mushy”. After this, the person eating ‘does something else with the mouth’ (which is swallowing) and ‘because of this, it is not inside the mouth anymore, it is somewhere else inside the body’. That is, it goes down. That’s what’s involved in eating, this kind of repeated micro-process; and if our person keeps doing it for some time: ‘all of it can be somewhere inside his/her body’. That is the Potential Outcome. The explication does not say precisely where in the body, because we don’t want to use any words like ‘stomach’ or ‘tummy’.

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Let’s now have a short question period and then a short physical break. Now we are going to do a couple more transitive activity verbs, namely cutting and pouring, and then I will do a summary with some general comments about doing verbs. After that, we will look at a couple of saying verbs, then have some general concluding comments about the whole thing. This morning’s Lecture 7 bears a closely relationship to Lecture 8 this afternoon. In Lecture 8, we will look at how we can take some of these verbs and put them into past tense sentences, into resultative constructions, and into other, more specialized constructions that are sometimes called “syntactic alternations”. In other words, this morning’s lecture lays the groundwork for the afternoon. Some of you may know that cut, and to a lesser extent chop, have become rather famous among verbs. Cross-linguistic studies into “verbs of cutting” was the topic of a special issue of the journal Language Sciences in 2006, and Anna Wierzbicka and myself later published an article about verbs of cutting and chopping in the same journal, comparing English, Polish, and Japanese (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2009). From a broad point of view, from the point of view of the human species, it’s a very interesting thing that humans are the only species that cuts things. Chimpanzees are very clever creatures and they do ‘pound’ and ‘hammer’ things, to smash nuts open with rocks and things like that. But they don’t cut things using sharp objects. And if you go back into human evolution, the so-called “stone knife” was one of the first stone tools, using a sharp-edged flake of rock. To explicate English cut, we will adopt the Progressive as its semantically basic frame; that is, we will explicate Someone X is cutting something. So, we imagine that someone is cutting some paper or cutting some bread. (Incidentally, even from these examples we can already detect some cross-linguistic differences. In some languages, you don’t use the same verb for ‘cutting’ paper as for ‘cutting’ bread, because normally people cut paper with scissors, and in some languages, using something with two ‘long sharp parts’ calls for a different verb to using a knife. Danish is one such language. But let’s contine with English.) So, we’ve got our person cutting something (some bread or some paper). The top components, in the Lexicosyntactic Frame, are much like before: ‘someone X is doing something to something for some time, because of this, something is happening to it at the same time as this someone wants’. Notice that we have now added ‘as this someone wants’, because the way the effect is achieved is under quite a bit of control by the person who is doing the cutting. There is also an extra component because there is an instrument involved: they are doing

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Figure 12 Semantic explication for English ‘cutting’

it ‘with some something else’, which could be a knife, scissors, a sharp rock, or whatever. The Prototypical Situation is more complex than what’s involved with eating. Why? Because cutting basically requires more “mental attention” than eating. Eating is not exactly automatic, but it’s not very cognitively complicated. With cutting, on the other hand, if you are going to use a sharp instrument, you need to get sort of set up for it. The Prototypical Situation involves a quite complicated intention, formed in the mind of the cutting person. So: ‘a short time before, this someone thought like this, …” (that is, you turn your mind to the thing in front of you, the paper or the bread, and you want to get a certain result) … ‘I don’t want this thing to be one thing anymore, I want it to be two things’. You intend to achieve a certain effect on the object. And: ‘because of this, I want to do something to it for some time’. You are aware that it’s going to take you some time to get this effect. And: ‘when I do it, I want something to happen to it all the time as I want’. The reason for this component is that there are many ways that you can divide something into two parts. You can break it, you can tear it, you can rip it apart. So, those verbs are different and their respective Prototypical Situations will be different. The Prototypical Situation of someone who is cutting something involves them wanting to have control over the process of dividing the thing.

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You may ask: why is the prototypical actor’s intention phrased as: ‘I want it to be two things’? Because obviously, one can cut something into four pieces, or six pieces, or any number of pieces. Even so, we think that the basic scenario for cutting is dividing into two. Even if you cut something into four, normally you will first cut it into two, and then cut each piece again into two. And anyway, the Prototypical Situation is introduced by the word ‘often’. That is, in the imagination at least, the most typical scenario is that someone wants to divide something into two. In the general literature on “verbs of cutting”, there is talk about a “separation event”. The agent wants to bring about “separation”, but we can’t use a word like ‘separation’ in NSM because it is semantically complex and it because doesn’t have equivalents in other languages. And anyway, in people’s minds, is it plausible that anyone would think ‘I want to separate this’? We think that ‘I don’t want it to one thing anymore, I want it to be two things’ is more intuitive and it is certainly much clearer. The Manner section of the explication is also quite complicated. Here we go: ‘when someone does this to something, it happens like this:….’. For cutting, there are no sub-episodes, it’s a continuous action. So we don’t have to say ‘the same thing happens many times’, we just say that: ‘when someone does this to something, it happens like this: this someone holds [m] part of something else with one hand….’ (notice that ‘hold [m]’ is marked with [m] to identify it as a semantic molecule). The reason why we say ‘holds part of something else’ is, well, the other parts are going to be sharp, you don’t want to be holding that or you will hurt your hand. ‘Sharp’ is also a semantic molecule, which has been explicated separately. So, imagine I am holding part of something with one hand, and some other parts are sharp, and I move my hand for some time (demonstrating with a pen in hand). I move my hand for some time, and because of this: ‘the sharp parts touch this thing for some time in some places as I want’. So, it’s all about the hand really, because, you know, we can move the hand with great precision. We can ensure that the sharp part comes into contact with what we are cutting in certain places; and then, we can move it along, with the sharp part in contact with the affected object. The incremental effect is: ‘because of this, something happens to this thing in these places as this someone wants’. That is, the sharp part has its effect in the places where the contact is occurring, as the actor wants. The incremental effect continues: ‘after this, because of this, part of the thing is not like it was before’. Even though when I am cutting something, I may not finish the job (may not end up cutting it into two pieces), even so, the places the sharp edge was in contact with, those parts are not like what they

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were before. This is different from, for instance, stroking something or rubbing something. Doing things like that doesn’t necessary change the object, but if you put something sharp against an object and move it along, it’s usually going to have a lasting effect. And finally, comes the Potential Outcome. If you do it for some time, this thing can be two things as you wanted from the beginning. That’s the brilliance of it. In Lecture 8, I will show you how to do sentences like She cut it into two pieces or into four pieces. We will look at resultative constructions and at past tense sentences, where the Potential Outcome becomes a real outcome. We will also see examples with the verb pour. Pouring is very interesting. It’s another one of those human things, actually. As far as I know, humans are the only species that manipulates liquids using containers. Because we use containers, we can store water, we can carry water. It’s quite important. Probably all languages have some kind of word similar to pour. In English, you can use the verb pour not only about water or tea or milk, but you can also pour flour, or even sand, right? Maybe not in Chinese. There can be some language-specific aspects to the exact meaning (just as there were with cutting, right?) The explication on the slide (fig. 13) is just for English pouring.

Figure 13 Semantic explication for English ‘pouring’

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As usual, we have to decide on the semantically basic frame. We, Anna Wierzbicka and I, believe that the simplest frame to start with is Someone X is pouring something out of something. For example, you are pouring water from a jug, pouring something down the drain—something like that. The top section is the same, as expected: ‘someone X is doing something to something for some time, (and) something is happening to it during this time’. What’s the Prototypical Situation? The first thing to consider is what kind of stuff we are pouring. The explication says: ‘this something can move like water [m] can move’. It is phrased that way in order to be compatible with pouring stuff like flour, powder, or fine sand. It has to be something that can move with a kind of “flowing” motion. Now, this stuff is ‘inside something else’, i.e. the container. Now, I want to pause a second and remind you of what’s involved in the physical mechanics of pouring. Suppose I have some water inside a glass or a jug. I take hold of the glass or the jug, and I move my hand, so that the top part of the glass or jug is lower than it was before. In this way I create the situation where the water inside flows out. It requires quite a bit of concentration and dexterity. So, let’s see, what is the mental attitude or mindset of somebody who gets ready to pour something: ‘short time before, this someone thought like this: “I don’t want this to be inside this thing anymore, I want it to be somewhere else”’. That is, we want the stuff not to be inside the container anymore, we want it to be somewhere else. And: ‘because of this, I want it to move for some time as I want’. And: ‘it can be like this if I do something to this thing with my hands [m]’. I can get the desired result by doing something to the container with my hands. I don’t have to touch the water (or the oil, or whatever it may be), rather I have to do something to the container. This is all part of the taken-for-granted intention of someone who is pouring something. Now to the Manner section: ‘when someone does it, it happens like this: …’. You hold this thing, that is, the container, for some time. At the same time, you move your hands, and ‘because of this, the top [m] of this thing is for a short time below the place where it was before’. ‘Top’ is a semantic molecule. ‘Because of this, the something inside moves like water [m] can move’. So, it starts moving and after this, a little of it is not inside this thing anymore: that’s the micro situation of pouring. It doesn’t mean that you will necessarily pour it all out, but you are pouring. However, if you do this for some time: ‘after this, all of it can be not inside this thing anymore’. That is the Potential Outcome: you pour it all out of the container, and it ends up somewhere else ‘as this someone wanted’. I don’t know how you will receive this explication. What often happens is that when people think through the explication, bit by bit, one component at

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Figure 14 Some brief further comments

a time, they think “Yeah, OK, every part seems all right”, but when they stand back and see the whole thing, the reaction is: ‘But how it can be this complicated?”. That’s a natural reaction, I can understand it. All I can say is that this degree of complexity seems necessary. You can use this technique to explicate dozens and hundreds of verbs in any language, and capture the micro differences between all these verbs. I mean, if we don’t allow for a great deal of semantic detail, then we won’t be able to describe the specifics of each individual verb. Of course, it may be that the phrasing of particular components could be improved, but the main point is the general strategy. Take several related verbs, try to figure out a semantic template (which can take a long time, actually), then start the work of devising satisfactory explications that can differentiate between the different verbs. It takes a long time but you get a good pay off. In a little while, I am going to move to “verbs of saying” and we will come back to “doing verbs” in Lecture 8, but I want to give general comments at this point about physical activity verbs (see fig. 14), particularly about the Manner specifications, which are usually very long and detailed. Why is it that “activity verbs” tend to have such detailed Manner components? Well, I think the reason is quite logical: it’s because the activity verb takes time. That’s what an “activity verb” is: it’s something that you do for some time. And when you do something for some time, a person can observe

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what’s happening during that time. It’s not like that with a punctual verb. If something ‘happens in one moment’, for example, there is really no time to pay attention to how it happens. So, it’s kind of logical that activity verbs are where you tend to get Manner components. Of course, you don’t have to have such detailed Manner components as in English, especially in “bodily motion” verbs. Since Talmy (1985) it has been well known that many languages have fewer “bodily motion” verbs than English, and that the verbs in question have much less detailed specifications of Manner. I would also like to mention that, in the view of NSM linguists, the notion of Manner has not been adequately theorized. It’s one of those taken-for-granted terms, but if you ask linguists “What exactly do you mean by manner?”, you may get a range of different answers. The core idea seems to be that it is how someone does something, but other components are often called ‘manner’ too, for example, things to do with a person’s attitude or emotional state. So, I think in general linguistics we need to give a bit more attention to theorizing exactly what we mean by “manner”, but I can’t pursue it here. Let’s move along to some “verbs of saying”, speech-act verbs (see fig. 15). Some of you may know that there is an area of philosophy called speech-act theory, which overlaps with linguistics. There are famous linguistic philosophers, like John Searle and JL Austin (1962), who founded the study of speech acts. And as well as speech acts, there are speech-act verbs: actual real verbs. In my view, a great deal of speech-act theory is very confusing. Pretty well everybody has that reaction actually. If you have studied speech-act theory,

Figure 15 Speech-act v erbs: SAY

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you will know that it employs a lot of labels, such as ‘directives’, ‘expressives’, ‘declaratives’, and so on, for different kinds of speech-acts. But different speech act theorists tend to categorize differently, identify different numbers of subgroups, and use different or overlapping labels for the categories. That’s one source of confusion. The other problem is that speech act theory generally uses English-specific verbs as examplars all the time, without taking into account that speech-act verbs can be quite different in different languages. That is really a major problem. How can we have a non-Anglocentric approach to speech acts if we use English speech-act verbs to set up the basic categories? Take the standard assumption, for instance, that there is a speech-act of “requesting”. There are numerous studies about “requesting”, as if requesting exists as a natural category. But there are plenty of languages that don’t have any word like request. I can’t pursue this line of argument here, but I want to get on record that the NSM view is that conventional speech act theory is very Anglocentric. Another reason why the study of speech acts and speech-act verbs is normally confusing is that it abounds with vicious circles and obscure definitions. For instance, the English verb promise is typically defined, by Searle for instance, as ‘to undertake an obligation’. Well, really, how helpful is that? Because undertake and obligation are just as complex and obscure as promise, probably more so. So the general procedure is not good. It’s not applying the basic principle of semantics, which is that you should try to explain meanings using simpler terms. If you try to explain meanings using more complex terms, you will inevitably get end up having a lot of debate and discussion about what the complex terms mean. Eventually, your whole discourse will be about the meaning of your own terms (I am exaggerating a little). But the whole discourse becomes one of, “how do we define our terms”? Now, how would we do this using the NSM approach? Well, for starters, we will try to use very simple words to explain the meaning of speech-act verbs. And the simplest word in this area is say. SAY is a semantic prime. According to NSM theory, all languages can be expected to have a verb or a word that means SAY. We can think of speech-act verbs as “verbs of saying”. Other semantic primes which tend to be involved with speech-act verbs are WANT, THINK and KNOW. Speech-act verbs often have to do with what someone wants, what they think and what they know (or, think they know), when they say something. In speech act theory, this corresponds to the idea, going back to Austin, that speech acts “reflect the intentions, assumptions and beliefs” of a speaker. ‘Intentions’ involve WANT, ‘assumptions’ and ‘beliefs’ involve KNOW and THINK.

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From our NSM investigations, we think that there are at least 6 sub-classes of speech-act verbs. This number won’t surprise people familiar with the speechact literature, because it usually distinguishes at least 6 types, sometimes 8, sometimes 12 even. But we are confident that we have identified six different sub-classes (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014: Ch 7). In the present lecture, I can’t overview those six different sub-classes, so I have just picked one, an interesting sub-class normally called “directives”. I am going to look at order, tell, ask and suggest. English has a lot of directive speech-act verbs, so it may seem that Anglo culture is very interested, so to speak, in differentiating between different kinds of directive scenarios. Anna Wierzbicka has argued for a long time that the lexical elaboration in this area is connected with Anglo culture, and in particular with the value that Anglo culture puts on “personal autonomy”. I will deal with this a little more in Lecture Nine, but basic idea is that in the Anglo culture, it’s considered very good if when people do things, they can think: “I am doing this because I want to do it”. Therefore, if you want to influence somebody else to do something (which they may not want to do), you have to go about it quite carefully. Another thing which I want to mention here, though we don’t have time to go into detail, is that different speech-act verbs can have different “microgrammar” (see fig. 16). Verbs of saying haven’t received nearly the same amount

Figure 16 Some micro-grammatical properties of English speech-act verbs

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of attention from linguists as verbs of doing, but the micro-grammar of speech act-verbs is probably just as elaborate as with verbs of physical activity. For instance, some speech-acts verbs can be used as “performatives”. So, you can say, for example, I order you to do it or I promise you I will do it. On the other hand, others you can’t use in that way. You can’t say, for instance, *I complain that or *I insult you. It’s interesting to wonder why some speech-act verbs can be used as performatives, and others can’t. Another thing is that some speech-act verbs put the addressee in a tophrase. For example, in sentences like She suggested to him; she complained to them, the addressee, the person who is getting the message, is introduced with the preposition to. But with other speech-act verbs, the addressee appears as a direct object. For example, She told him, she insulted him, not *she insulted to him; or *she told to him. In my view, we ought to be able to explain all of these grammatical differences using good semantics. Just as Beth Levin said, the grammatical behaviors of verbs can be explained from their meaning components. We can’t take this on in this lecture though. What I am going to do is to describe the meaning content of a small selection of directive speech-act verbs. Here is a semantic template (fig. 17) for this kind of speech-act verb; for example, if someone X tells someone to do something, or orders someone to do something, or asks someone to do something. The template has three parts. The Lexicosyntactic Frame starts with: ‘someone X says something to someone else’. And usually, they have some aim in mind, i.e. they ‘want something to happen because of it’.

Figure 17 Semantic template for directive speech-act verbs

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For this sub-class of speech-act verbs, the next section of the template describes the message content or Dictum. (The term Dictum comes from Latin, it just means the thing said or what is said). Many speech-act verbs have a core message, such as, in the case of directive speech-act verbs, ‘I want you to do something’. The third section of the template is the Apparent Mental State. This is the most curious and distinctive thing about speech-act verbs. These verbs enable us to portray the Apparent Mental State of the person who is speaking. So, if I order you to do something, I seem to be thinking that ‘you have to do it’, and perhaps that you know it as well. If I ask you to do something, I seem to think that I am not sure whether you will do it. We will come back to ask in a second, but I just want to note at this point that it’s a funny thing that, in English, we can use ask as a “directive”, i.e. that you can ask someone to do something. I mean, the verb ask is a also question word, for when you are seeking information (asking a question). Sometimes, in English you will even hear people say something like My boss asked me to do it. Well, actually in this situation you know you have to do it, but if you say He asked me to do it (as opposed to He told me to do it, for example), you are giving the impression that he said it nicely, as if you had a choice. Notice that the third section of the template is called Apparent Mental State. We don’t mean the real mental state, because who knows what someone’s real mental state is? All that we can do is listen to someone’s the tone of voice, the words they use, to infer something about their mental state. The Apparent Mental State section is introduced as follows: ‘this someone said it like someone can say something like this to someone else when they think like this: …’. You will see how this works when we look at some full explications. I will start with order, even though people probably don’t actually order each other very much in English. I’ve put some examples here at the bottom of the slide (fig. 18). – The police said a man entered the store armed with a revolver and ordered the attendant to lie on the floor. This example shows that order does not necessarily imply authority. If somebody is bank robber and has a gun, he can come in and order everyone to lie on the floor. It’s a perfectly a good use of the verb order. – After parking his car, he steamed towards the front door of the building and ordered the cameraman to “get out of my way”.

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Figure 18 Explicating English ‘order’

Probably this sentence is about some kind of celebrity, you know, an arrogant celebrity. He gets out of his car and the cameraman is there, and he says “get out of my way”. And this is described as he ordered. Again, he doesn’t have any real authority, but it would appear that he assumes that the cameraman has to do it. And also, we often get this kind of sentence in English: – What makes you think you can order me around? Here is the explication (fig. 18, top) for Someone X ordered Y to do something. First: ‘someone X said something to someone else Y’. Why? ‘This someone wanted something to happen because of it’. Namely, that the addressee complies, I suppose. And what they said, i.e. the Dictum, was: ‘I want you to do this’. Normally of course, people don’t literally use the words ‘I want you to do it’. They use the imperative grammatical construction, which itself expresses the meaning ‘I want you to do it’. You know, Sit down, Open your books, Pay attention, Get out of my way (all said in harsh tone). I am definitely expressing that ‘I want you to do something’. And I am doing it with a certain mental attitude.

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I’m saying it like someone can say stuff like that, when they think like this, and this is the apparent thought: “I know that because I say this, this someone cannot not do it”. That is, I appear to have in my mind the idea that the addressee, whoever he or she is, ‘cannot not do it’. The expression ‘cannot not’ is more or less equivalent to have to in English. But in Chinese, I think you can say ‘cannot not’ and it will sound quite OK. In any case, the speaker seems to think not only that ‘because I say this, this someone cannot not do it’, but moreover: ‘this someone knows the same’. I know, and they know too that they have no choice, so to speak. We could discuss this for some time, but it will be more productive to move to a similar verb which has slightly different assumptions. This is tell (see fig. 19). The verb to tell (in contexts like tell someone to do something) is much more common than order, and not nearly so “strong”. But even telling someone to do something can be a sensitive matter, depending on the situation. First we should see some examples (at bottom of the slide). – He grabbed Nicole and told her to get out of the house. I think the context is that there was smoke in the house and this is a housemate or something like that. He grabs Nicole and tells her to get out the house. He seems to be assuming that she will do it, I think. Maybe not that she has to do it (as with order), but that she will do it. – I told him [a taxi driver] to take me to Selkirk in Scotland. In English, it would sound OK to say that I told the taxi driver to do something, or even better to say you asked the taxi driver. You would hardly say that you ordered the taxi driver to do something. That would seem quite inappropriate. And this sentence is about a judge. – He told the jury to disregard testimony. Basically, my idea is that the meaning of the word tell implies that the speaker was pretty certain that the other person would do it. Now, it’s interesting here to note that the verb tell is polysemous. You can tell someone to do something, that’s the directive use of tell, but tell has a separate meaning as well, as in Tell me the answer, or Tell me where is the station, or Can you tell me the time? The verb tell has two meanings. One is a kind of giving-information speech-act, and the other one is directive. I am going to show you the explication for directive

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Figure 19 Explicating English ‘tell’ (in its directive sense)

tell. But actually, there is one component of meaning shared between the two which I want you to know about, because it provides a semantic link between the directive sense and the information-giving sense. Here is the directive sense, i.e. for a sentence like Someone X told Y to do something. To begin with: ‘someone X said something to someone else Y, this someone wanted something to happen because of it’. This is my proposed Dictum or message: ‘I want you to do this, I want you to know it’. That is, as the speaker I seem to be not just directly expressing my wish, but also, in a sense informing you of what my wish is. Like, “I want you to do this and I want you to know it”. And along with that, the Apparent Mental Attitude is: ‘I know that after I say this, this someone will do it’. That is, a person who will tells someone else what to do seems to be confident that the other person will do it. Not that they ‘cannot not do it’, but simply that they will do it. What about asking someone to do something? Here are some examples (bottom of fig. 20). – I asked the police to get these kids out of the station.

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Figure 20 Explicating English ‘ask’ (in its directive sense)

I suppose when we are talking to police, we don’t usually tell them what to do. We may ask them. – Most “fancy” restaurants do not advertise takeout but if you ask nicely they will do it. The idea of asking nicely is very good cultural information. You know, when you are trying to get people to do things in Anglo English culture, you have to learn how to ‘ask nicely’. In many different cultures around the world, people don’t ‘ask nicely’; they just say what they need or what they want, and sometimes they say please, or they just say it strongly to give the impression that they really need it. This is not ‘asking nicely’ and can cause a lot of misunderstanding. – “Can I come in?” he asked. Notice that you can ‘ask someone to do something’ using the question-form of a sentence, as in this example: Can I come in? Likewise: Can you do this? Can you open the window? These are actually directives, right? I am expecting that you will probably open the window, I’m not expecting you to say

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“Yes I can”, or anything like it, i.e. to respond as if it was an informationseeking question, not a directive. It’s an interesting thing about English that directives are frequently expressed using questions, rather than by using the imperative. When telling someone to do something or ordering someone to do something, typically you use the imperative but when you ask someone to do something, typically you use a question-form. The verb ask has another meaning which is really about information-seeking, like She asked me where the station was, She asked me the time, She asked me how much it cost. So, like tell, in this respect, ask has two meanings: one is information-seeking, and the other one is directive. So, in a way, you take your intention, which is basically to say ‘I want you to do something’, and instead of coming right out and saying that, you deliver a more complex message that seems to acknowledge the other person’s freedom to do what they want, and even to express a little uncertainty (even if you don’t really have that uncertainty). So it’s quite elaborate positioning. X asked Y to do something. ‘Someone X said something to someone else Y (and) X wanted something to happen because of it’. So, what is the expressed message, the Dictum? Something like this: ‘I want you to do this, it will be good if you do it’. The speaker seems to give the impression that it would almost be a favor if you do it; it’s not just ‘I want you to do it’ but also ‘it will be good if you do it’. And: ‘maybe after this, you will do it. I don’t know, I want to know’. The speaker seems to be expressing a bit of uncertainty. This aspect of the expressed meaning is linked with the use of the question-form. When you ask someone to do something, very often it is presented in the form of question, as if you are saying ‘I don’t know, I want to know’. In reality of course, you may know. If my boss asks me to do something, if my Vice Chancellor says: Cliff, could you join this committee? We really need your expertise, what are my choices? In principle, I can refuse but it is very unlikely, and we both know it. But because of how he has expressed himself, he has asked me, he hasn’t told me to do it. If he says Cliff, join this committee, that’s telling me. So, how do we capture the Apparent Mental State of somebody who asks someone. What about this?—‘this someone says it like someone can say something like this to someone else when they are thinking: “maybe after I say this, this someone will do it. I don’t know.” For the speech-act to be described as asking, the speaker must give the appearance of having such a thought. So, if I am your boss and come in and say (speaking very forcefully) Can you type this letter?, that’s not good enough (not nice enough) to be reported as asking, even though I’ve used the question-form. It’s not good enough because my

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Figure 21 Explicating English ‘suggest’

tone and my voice gives the impression that I am certain that you will comply, right? Now to our final example (see fig. 21). Anna Wierzbicka has gone so far as to say that suggest is the most “perfectly English” of speech-act verb. Suggesting encapsulates so many things. It’s a rather elaborate kind of speech-act, but at the same time so totally important in Anglo speech culture. I really would advise anyone who wants to learn how to interact well with Anglo people to try to learn how to suggest. If in doubt, you can always say I suggest …, preferably sounding a little bit hesitant at the same time. That would usually do the job … however, one can suggest in all sorts of ways. Here are some examples. This is one from literature, from the book The Wind in the Willows. – Well, supposing we go and call on him, suggested the Mole. The form of this suggestion uses the verb suppose (‘Supposing we go and call on him’), and it’s also introduced by well. – “Maybe you should just drop the whole thing and cut your losses”, she suggested.

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As this second example shows, putting a maybe in front (like, Maybe you should do this, or Maybe you could think about that) is a good way of suggesting something. Using a modal verb like should or could is also important. – “How about going to see a doctor?” Harry suggested. A third possibility to use this how about construction. And if you are going to use how about, and sound “authentically English”, it’s important that you should sound a little hesitant when you say it. – Why don’t you think about deferring till next year? he suggested. This fourth example is very elaborate in form: Why don’t you think about … It’s a kind of negative question. So much complicated grammar and phraseology just to do a simple thing. Except that it’s not so simple, because sending a complicated set of messages in a single package is what suggesting is all about. Let’s go through the explication at the top of figure 21. The first component is: ‘someone says something to someone else at that time’. And notice, this time I haven’t included: ‘this someone wanted something to happen because of it’. It’s a subtle point, but it is connected with the fact that the addressee of the verb suggest appears in a to-phrase. It is not a direct object. Now what does someone say when they suggest something? The Dictum of a suggestion is: ‘it can be good if you do this, it can be good if you think about it.’ So, the basic idea is not to say ‘I want you to do it’, but rather: ‘it can be good if you do it, it can be good if you think about it’. Plus, when you say it, you say with the Apparent Mental State of someone who thinks: ‘maybe this someone will do it, I don’t know’. This makes suggesting compatible with the question-form, and as we have seen, suggestions are often made using the question-form. There is also an additional component to the Apparent Mental State: ‘I know that if this someone wants not to do it, this someone can not do it’ (i.e. they don’t have to do it). You really seem to be giving the decision over to the addressee. This is an elaborate package of meaning. What I’ve been trying to show here is that we can get a very fine-grained separation between the meanings of these different speech-act verbs. The NSM metalanguage of the semantic description is very suitable for doing this kind of thing. I want to finish with four brief comments about the whole presentation (fig. 22). Remember that there is Lecture 8, also on verbs and constructions, coming in the afternoon. The first and most obvious point is that verb meanings are very complex. OK, in a way we knew that before, now we know it more.

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Figure 22 Concluding remarks

Second, the main semantic primes to do with verbs are DO, HAPPEN, SAY, and MOVE. These appear in the top-level components of many verb explications, usually in combination: DO often pairs with HAPPEN, or HAPPEN with MOVE. Very often there are mental primes mixed in, because human action is usually intentional. People do and say things because they WANT certain outcomes. People do and say things on the basis of certain beliefs or assumptions, that is, because they THINK in certain ways. Sometimes FEEL is involved too. People often do and say things, especially speech-acts, because they feel something good or bad towards the other person. And also, there are “verbs of thinking”, such as realize, decide, doubt and wonder, but I won’t go into these now. Third, there are many many different sub-classes of verbs, each following its own semantic template. Fourth, the grammar of verbs is largely driven by the semantics. I will take this further in Lecture 8, by looking into verb alternations and verb constructions.

Lecture 8

English Verb Alternations and Constructions Thanks everyone, and welcome to new students who are coming for the first time. This is probably the most complicated of all the lectures in this series. It also depends to some extent on this morning’s Lecture 7. Anyway, I will try my best to be clear. I’m going to start by discussing the topic of verb alternations and constructions. I need to explain the background, why some people call these things alternations and other people call them constructions, and what’s the difference, if any. This is a classic problem area. Linguists have been studying verb alternations and constructions in English for 25 years. Then we will come to the NSM approach and how it can handle these phenomena. To do that, I need to first explain a new concept, which we haven’t yet seen in these lectures, which is the derivational base [d]. This is a way in which complex meanings can appear in explications, but not as semantic molecules. It’s something similar to semantic molecules but it is not the same thing. I’ll talk about how and why we use derivational bases, and about the difference between derivational bases and semantic molecules. Then, still before we get to alternations, there’s one other important thing we have to do. We have to find out how we can take a verb which is, let’s say, a durational verb, and put it into the Simple Past tense. And also the other way around: how do we take a punctual verb like ‘jump’ (it takes only a very short time, maybe just a moment, to jump), and put it into a durational context? For example, when we hear a sentence like He is jumping, we understand that the “jumping” must be happening over and over. This is the topic of aspectual transposition. If verbs come with an inherent lexical aspect (such as, for instance, durational or punctual), how do we convert or transpose them into another aspect? It turns out that the solution to this problem involves this idea of the [d], the derivational base.

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5688340. © Cliff Goddard. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004357723_009

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Finally, after all this groundwork, we will come to alternation phenomena. When a verb like ‘cut’ or ‘pour’ or ‘dig’ occurs in several different constructions, some people call this an alternation, a syntactic alternation. But regardless of what we call it, the big puzzle is how the meanings of the different constructions are related to one another. We will look in some detail at three sets of examples. First, cut. The verb cut occurs in several different specialized constructions in English, and we will look at three of them. Second, pour. It also occurs in several different specialized constructions, but we will just look at ‘pouring a drink’. I’m assuming that the basic meaning of ‘pour’ occurs in contexts like She poured some liquid out of the container, but you can also pour someone a drink, or pour a beer. So, what’s the relationship? Finally, dig. We didn’t explicate dig in Lecture 7, but I have an explication ready, of course. The basic meaning of ‘digging’ involves doing something to the ground in a place, using some kind of tool, but in English one can also dig a well, or dig a trench, meaning to make a well or a trench by digging, sort of. This is a specialized construction or alternation of the verb dig. “Alternation phenomena” is an area of English grammar where meaning and grammar are very closely entwined. It’s complicated and difficult. It poses great problems for linguistic description and for linguistic theory. That’s why people have been studying it for 25 years. In the old days people approached alternation phenomena from the viewpoint of generative grammar (see fig. 1). They had the idea that there was a single deep structure and this deep structure could produce two or three alternate surface structures (in the jargon, the arguments of the verb were “realized” differently). Since then, people have increasingly seen that the

Figure 1

Overview of “alternation phenomena”

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different constructions don’t mean exactly the same thing. So, in the present day, a lot of people prefer to talk about constructions, and they don’t assume that any one of these constructions corresponds to “deep structure”. The idea is simply that we have several different constructions and we want to know what the meaning of each one is, and what their relationship is. To do that, you really have to get involved with semantics, you have to describe the meanings. Unless you have a good method for describing meanings, you won’t be able to make much progress. My general case is that the NSM method is a good method because we can achieve great detail and great clarity when we describe meaning. So therefore, it will help us to make our way through this difficult area. A second reason why this is a complicated and interesting area is that, as many linguists have now realized, these different constructions or alternations involve lexical aspect and lexical polysemy. So, you’ve got constructions, lexical aspect and lexical polysemy, and you need very detailed semantic description—which makes it a hard problem. My coverage in this lecture therefore has to be very selective. I will try to pick interesting examples. In the beginning, I’m going to do something which I normally wouldn’t do. I’m going to give you a quotation from a well-known linguist, David Dowty (2000), even though I don’t expect that you can fully understand this quotation

Figure 2

Dowty (2000) on the “fallacy of argument alternation”

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yet (see fig. 2). But I hope by the end of the lecture, we can appreciate what Dowty is talking about. Dowty is a generative linguist but in this article, from more than 15 years ago, he was taking an unorthodox stand. He didn’t believe that you have one deep structure and from that produce two different constructions with little semantic difference between them. He calls this view the “fallacy of argument realization”. Dowty was talking in particular about the so-called “locative-subject construction”, but his comments relate equally to other specialized constructions: Contrary to the usual view (in generative syntax) …, good reasons can be given to view this kind of specialized construction as a lexical derivation analogous to rules of WORD FORMATION on the one hand, and to processes of LEXICAL SEMANTIC EXTENSION … And METAPHOR on the other. I said before that the linguistic facts in this area are very complex and that to make good progress we need a very good method of semantic description. But there are several other difficulties, which are caused by linguists themselves. First, they use a lot of confusing and inconsistent terminology. There are many technical terms used in describing these phenomena, whose meanings are obscure (see fig. 3). Like “Middle construction”, for instance. Whenever I teach this term to undergraduates, they want to know why it’s called “middle”; and I have to tell them: “for no good reason, it’s a term that has descended from classical grammar. It’s got nothing to do with ‘being in

Figure 3

Problems of terminology

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Figure 4

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Other problems in the study of alternations

the middle’”. Or consider a term like “Quasi-agentive instrumental subject construction”. There’s a lot of obscure terminology used in this area of grammar. Secondly, to make matters worse there’s a lack of standardization. What I mean is that some linguists use almost the same terminology for very different things. For instance, you will find the very same construction called either “Unspecified Object alternation” or the “Understood Omitted Object construction”. Equally, the same or similar labels can be used for different constructions. So, a sentence like this, The garden is swarming with bees, is often called the Locative Subject construction. But a sentence like this, This room sleeps five people, it can be called the Location Subject construction. It’s just confusing. From a typological or cross-linguistic point of view, a third problem is that a great deal of work on verbs and constructions uses English-based terminology, both for names of verb classes and for names of alternations. For example, linguists talk about verb classes such as “Grow verbs”, or “Need verbs”, or even “Meander verbs”. It’s confusing and inappropriate especially if you’re trying to do work in, say, Chinese, where there may not be a verb like ‘meander’. Sometimes even particular alternations are named after English verbs. There’s something called the “Search alternation”, for example; that means the alternation which exists with the verb search. Before you can make sense of that, you

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have to know a lot of English linguistics, know about the alternation for search, and then compare it to something to your own language. Fourth, another annoying problem has been the tendency, until very recently, to rely on a few stock examples, sometimes quite artificial-sounding, which are discussed over and over and over. I mean, how many times do we have to analyze The bees are swarming in the garden? It’s actually a pretty rare type of sentence. If you look for it in a corpus, or put it into Google, the only examples you find come from linguistic studies that use the sentence. A similar problem, even in modern construction grammar, is to pick some interesting but unusual sentences and spend an awful lot of time talking about them. So, people who have studied this area, how many times have you seen this sentence: She sneezed the napkin off the table? Okay, it is a possible sentence, but in my view, it’s a bad strategy to spend so much time on such very unusual sentences. It’s better policy to start with common ordinary sentences and make sure we understand them first, before looking at strange sentences. Luckily, techniques of corpus linguistics are starting to bring an improvement in this situation. Now I turn to the question of alternations. Even the term ‘alternation’, its meaning is not exactly clear, so I will just tell you how I’m going to use this term. I use the word ‘alternation’ to describe the situation in which there are two, three, or more alternative constructions available to the same verb. The alternation is the existence of the alternative constructions. It’s not the name of any single construction. Okay, before we can go on, I have some other groundwork to do, starting with the NSM concept of a derivational base, as on the slide (fig. 5). This might seem “off topic” and it’s going to take us quite a while, but it turns out to be very necessary and a key for us in solving the alternation problem. You’ve already heard in previous lectures that the NSM method doesn’t use just the 65 very simple words called semantic primes. We also allow some other basic words which can be explicated, but which turn up in a lot of other explications, such as ‘water [m]’, ‘sharp [m]’ and ‘hands [m]’. We call these semantic molecules and when we use them, we mark them with [m] to remind ourselves that it’s a semantic molecule. Semantic molecules are one way in which complex meanings can appear in explications. Now there’s another way in which complex meanings can appear in explications. This is when words are used as derivational bases and, for this we use [d] as an abbreviation. I will first give you a very simple example. Suppose you want to explicate the word illness. It is tempting to think, and it actually turns out to be correct to think, that the word illness includes the word ‘ill’—not just morphologically, but also semantically. In other words, the meaning of the

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Figure 5

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The NSM concept of derivational base [d]

word ‘ill’ is included in the meaning of the word ‘illness’. We want to allow this kind of possibility into our theory. However, the word ‘ill’ is not a semantic molecule, because it’s not found in the meanings of many words right across the lexicon: it is only needed in the explication of illness. So, it’s a very localized relationship that exists, in this case, because of a word derivation process, because of derivational morphology. You start with the base word ill, you put on the suffix -ness, and you get illness. So ‘ill’ in this case is functioning like a semantic molecule but it’s very specialized and very localized. That’s why we use [d], because of the term ‘derivation’. Here’s another example. Suppose you talk about knifing someone. What does it mean to knife someone? It can have a metaphorical meaning but it can also have a physical meaning, i.e. to stab somebody with a knife. A knife is the instrument that’s used to perform the deed. So presumably, the meaning of the noun ‘knife’ is part of the meaning of the verb (to) knife. So you can use the noun ‘knife’, marked with [d], in the explication of the verb to knife (someone). Another example is the expression to butter (bread, etc.). The interesting thing is that when you butter something (like bread, or toast, or a cracker) it doesn’t have to be done with butter. It can be done with margarine. So, the

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verb (to) butter doesn’t mean (roughly) “putting butter on bread, etc.”, it means something more like “putting something on bread, etc. like people do when they put butter on bread”. That is in this case, the explication depends on likeness to a common situation involving butter. Even so, we will need the noun ‘butter’ as a [d] component inside the meaning of the verb (to) butter. There are a great many derived words in English, as you probably know. Many English words are interrelated in this way, including by what people call ‘zero derivation’, as in the examples of knife and butter. In other words, the verb to knife is derived from the noun knife, even though there is no separate derivational morpheme added onto it. You just take the noun and convert it into a verb. Same with butter. (I’m not a great fan of the term ‘zero derivation’, it goes back to the days when people thought there was a ‘zero morpheme’ involved.) Now in saying that we need this [d] process to capture the relationship between the base and derived forms, you’ve got to be careful, because a morphological relationship is not necessarily the same as a semantic relationship. For instance, consider fun and funny. It would be easy to assume that funny involves fun, but it doesn’t. If you do semantic analysis of both words, you discover that you can explicate funny without any reference to ‘fun’ (cf. Goddard in press). There’s some similarity between the two meanings, but it’s not like one meaning is included in another. So, we’ve got to be very careful. We can’t assume that because of the morphological relationship, there’s necessarily a semantic relationship. Often there is, but often there isn’t.

Figure 6

More on derivational bases [d]

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Figure 7

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Aspectual transposition

As I was explaining, a [d] element is like a semantic molecule but different in two ways. (i) Semantic molecules are used widely across the whole lexicon. If you look at molecules like ‘water’, ‘hands’, or ‘sharp’, you can find them in hundreds of words. [d] elements, on the other hand, are extremely localized. They are used for very specific purposes in a handful of semantically related words. (ii) In English at least, semantic molecules are usually not visible in the surface morphology (in other some languages, they are more visible). [d] elements, however, are usually visible in the surface morphology. Now here’s the thing. This idea of the [d] element, which was originally devised to deal with derivational morphology, turns out to be helpful with a lot of semantic problems. It can help us solve the problem of aspectual transposition, and it can also help us with syntactic alternations. First I will do the aspectual transposition part. It’s relevant even to the alternations, as you will see shortly. As we saw in Lecture 7, verbs have what linguists call “inherent aspect” or “lexical aspect”, which just means that any verb has some sort of temporal or durational component built into it; or maybe the component doesn’t specify duration as such, it just says something happens at a time; or maybe it says that it happens ‘in one moment’. Most verbs have some kind of time specifications of this kind, as part of their “event structure”, if you like. We are talking about the internal makeup of the event. Okay, if this is the case, how can one take a verb which has one type of inherent aspect and shift it to a different aspect type? For instance, if you have an activity verb like eat or cut (which we explicated in the progressive form, as

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eating and cutting), how can you turn them into a “perfective” category, like the English Simple Past? (I’m using the term Simple Past as a grammatical term for the past tense of English, the one formed with -ed or equivalent allomorphs. That’s as opposed to the Past Progressive or in the other “past” tense categories, such as the Perfect.) What’s the relationship, in other words between He was eating a hamburger and He ate a hamburger? What’s the relationship between She was cutting the apple and She cut the apple? When you are thinking about He was eating a hamburger or She was cutting the apple, we understand very clearly that it’s taking some time: it’s on-going. The durational nature of the activity is prominent when the sentences are in the progressive. But in the Simple Past, e.g. He ate a hamburger or She cut the apple, the durational aspect of meaning is not prominent at all. So how do we shift the verb from one category to the other? Another example. If you take a punctual verb like blink or jump, how come you can say She is jumping or She is blinking, i.e. how can a punctual verb appear in the progressive construction? Of course, we know the answer: it means doing it over and over, right? That is, changing the aspectual frame to progressive forces an iterative interpretation. But we need to see exactly how this works, semantically, and if [d] is part of the solution. Remember from Lecture 7 that the semantically basic frame for physical activity verbs like eating or cutting is activity-in-progress (see fig. 8). Disregarding slight differences between them, they both have top-level components in the

Figure 8

Semantic template for basic “activity-in-progress” meaning of physical activity verbs

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Figure 9

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Semantic template for the Simple Past of physical activities verbs

Lexicosyntactic Frame: ‘someone is doing something for some time’ and ‘something is happening … at the same time’. Along with a Prototypical Scenario that involves wanting and thinking, a description of the Manner (how someone does it), and a Potential Outcome. The Potential Outcome, just to remind you, indicates that if the actor does it for long enough they can achieve their outcome, as they wanted. If they are eating something, they can eat it all; if they are cutting something, they can succeed in dividing it into two pieces, etc. Now let’s just look at Simple Past sentences. What I want to say is that the Simple Past has a different semantic template. Suppose we look at a schematic sentence “someone verb-ed something” (fig. 9); for instance, someone ate it, or cut it, or poured it. That is, we take a verb which is inherently durational and we put it into the Simple Past. What happens, semantically? The idea is very simple. The idea is that when the sentence is in the Simple Past, e.g. He ate the hamburger, you are saying that this person ‘did something to something’ and that ‘it happened like this: he/she was “verbing” [d] it for some time’; e.g. ‘it happened like this: he was eating [d] it for some time’. Essentially what this is saying is that the basic, durational version of the verb becomes part of the Manner in which someone achieves the result. Let’s look more closely at how it works with some specific verbs. The first example (fig. 10) is He ate a hamburger. ‘He did something to something (namely, a hamburger) at this time’. We understand that the time is

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Figure 10 Semantic explications for Simple Past of ‘eat’ and ‘cut’

before now because it’s a past tense sentence. ‘It happened like this: he was eating [d] it for some time; after this, all of it was somewhere inside his body for some time as he wanted’. It’s not strange to say that ‘eating’ is a semantic element of ate a hamburger. It’s just when we say I ate a hamburger, we are not so much interested in the process. We are more or less interested in the result. It’s typical for Simple Past tenses to be result-oriented. Next let’s look at She cut the apple into four pieces. This sentence includes the resultative phrase into four pieces. what does it mean? she did something to the apple at this time it happened like this: she was cutting [d] it for some time because of this, after this, it was not one thing anymore it was four things as she wanted The first three lines come from the verb cut (past tense). This last line is the new part: ‘it was four things as she wanted’. The idea is that when a specific resultative phrase (like, into four pieces) is present in a sentence, we understand that this was an objective or intention of the agent, and that it was achieved. It’s an interesting fact that resultative

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expressions are typically found in past perfective contexts. (It’s true that you can flip it back into the present if you want, and say She was cutting the apple into four pieces. But quite a bit of explanation is needed to make sense of the sentence like that, because one can’t tell, when someone is cutting something, how many pieces they intend to cut it into. You can’t actually see that, right? So you could only say She was cutting the apple into four pieces if you had some reason to believe that this was what she was planning to do.) If you think about it, this analysis is kind of unexpected, because it seems to be saying that the semantic relationship between the present progressive and Simple Past is like a derivational relationship. This is unexpected, because normally linguists make a sharp distinction between inflectional morphology and derivational morphology, right? Some specialist morphologists would say, “Well actually, we are not too sure that there is a strict line between inflection and derivation.” According to the NSM semantic analysis, you can’t have a strict line between the two, because the different tense-aspect forms are related in a kind of derivational way. For any given type of verb, one of its tense-aspect forms is the semantically basic one, and the other tense-aspect forms are related to the basic one in a derivation-like fashion. It’s actually a very ordinary idea. It’s just like saying there’s a paradigm with different word or word-forms: eating, ate, has eaten, etc. It’s obvious that all these words are related in their meanings. But this NSM analysis is telling us exactly how the relationship works. If we look at the Simple Past template and compare it to the progressive one, there are three differences (fig. 11). First, the Simple Past doesn’t have any durational content in its Lexicosyntactic Frame. So, for Someone ate the hamburger or Someone cut the apple, the top-level component is just: ‘this someone did something to something’. Not ‘for some time’—that component is not there. Second, the Manner in which the actor did it is described in terms of the activity-in-progress, which is inserted into the explication as a [d] element. Third, the outcome is a real Outcome, not just a Potential Outcome. If someone cut the apple, it means the apple ended up divided. If someone ate a hamburger, it means the hamburger ended up fully inside the person. These three changes convert the ongoing, incomplete but goal-oriented progressive construction into a temporally-located result-oriented Simple Past construction. This account is quite similar to the classical description of perfective aspect. If you look into the literature on grammatical aspect (cf. Comrie 1993), it says when a verb is in the perfective aspect you are interested in the “totality of the

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Figure 11 From “activity-in-progress” to Simple Past (template to template transposition)

event”, as if you see the event as ‘all one thing’. You are not interested in the “internal temporal constituency”, i.e. with what happens during the event. In a sense, this corresponds closely to what we saw in the explication I just showed you (fig. 10). This is so because the details about what happens as someone eats something or cuts something, even the fact it takes some time, all this is “compressed” into that [d] element. That means that we are not paying much attention to it. From a cognitive point of view, it’s like with molecules. When a semantic molecule appears in an explication; people are not thinking about what’s inside the molecule, as it were, the details of its semantic content. They just take it for granted. Aspectual transposition, and the relationship between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect, is a big story that we can’t go much further into. Briefly though, the same general approach will work to describe what happens when a punctual verb is used in the progressive construction (see fig. 12). If you want to say Someone was blinking or Someone was jumping, basically, you insert the basic sense of the verb blink or jump into a different kind of template. We haven’t actually looked at explications for jump or blink, so you just have take my word for it that they include ‘someone did something in one moment’. Yet, when we say someone is jumping, the progressive construction is telling us that it takes some time. The only way a momentary action like ‘jump’ can take some time is if you do it (i.e. jump) many times. In other words, when you put a punctual verb into the progressive, it forces this interpretation: ‘during this time, the same thing happens many times’. If the verb is jump, it means

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Figure 12 Semantic template for Past Progressive of punctual action verbs

that the person jumps many times. If the verb is blink, it means the person blinks many times. We could spend a long time talking about aspectual transposition, but I’m not going to do that, because we need move on to talk about alternations. All this narrative about the [d], and how the meaning of a word in one sense can be inserted into a different tense-aspect construction, has been laying the groundwork for the topic of specialized constructions. Do you have a hint of where we are going with this? When we use a specialized construction, we take the basic meaning of the verb as a [d], and we insert it into the specialized construction, along with some other elements that come from the construction. That’s what’s coming. Meanwhile I will give you a warm-up about alternations. We come at last to alternation phenomena. Levin (1993) documented that many English verbs can appear in two or three different sentence patterns or constructions. The classic example, which we all learn in introductory linguistic classes, is the so-called Locative Alternation (fig. 13). Here’s one of the classic sentences: Sharon loaded the apples into the cart. Sharon is doing something to the direct object (i.e. the apples) and the location

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Figure 13 Alternations phenomena: specialised constructions

or destination of the apples is the cart; the cart appears in a prepositional phrase, into the cart. Alternatively, you can say Sharon loaded the cart with apples, and this is a different construction. In this second construction, the location or destination where the stuff ends up is the direct object (i.e. the cart) and the stuff moved appears in a prepositional phrase, with apples. Now consider: She poured some water into a glass. That’s showing that the verb pour normally takes the liquid as the direct subject. But there are also specialized constructions like She poured me a drink (a beer, etc.) or She poured me a cup of tea. Here the direct object (a drink, a beer, a cup of tea) looks like a product and there’s also benefactive indirect object (me). So, these are alternations [pointing to the load case and the pour case in fig. 13], because in each case there are two constructions. I want to show you briefly that the verb cut can also appear in several constructions. Compare He cut the apple, with He cut his face while shaving (this sentence must come from the old days, when men used razors not electric shavers). It might seem at first that there is no real difference between these examples, but if you think about it, there is. Because if you cut your face while shaving, first, the face is not separated into two parts; second, it usually happens very quickly, and third, it is not deliberate, it’s accidental. Now consider He cut his foot on a rock. Maybe the situation is that someone is climbing around in a place where there are rocks and the person is bare-footed. If there’s a sharp rock, you could end up saying: He cut his foot on a rock. And what about

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this? The glass cut her hand. Here we have an inanimate object as the subject. Presumably it’s a sharp piece of glass. These are all different cut-constructions and Levin (1993) identified all of them in her treatment of cut. They all involve some kind of accidental damage to a part of the body. Now normally, in other languages, you can’t just take the cut verb and use it that way. Normally, you bring in some derivational morphology or perhaps a reflexive particle, or it may be that you simply can’t use cut at all in these “accidental body-part damage” situations. You may have to say the equivalent of ‘he damaged (or, hurt) his face while shaving’; or ‘he hurt his foot on the rock’. I’m just going to read quickly through this slide (fig. 14) because I think that many of you already know this. You can describe these constructions using grammatical terms like direct object (DO) and prepositional phrase (PP). This is another example of the Locative alternation: The farmer loaded apples into the cart, vs. The farmer loaded the cart with apples. Here’s another one, He sprayed paint onto the wall vs. He sprayed the wall with paint. So very interesting, you can take verbs like load and spray and use them in those two different constructions. But here’s the thing. There are other verbs which don’t allow both constructions: you can only use one or the other. For instance, if the verb is fill, you

Figure 14 Example: the Locative alternation

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can fill the glass with water, but you can’t *fill water into the glass. Obviously, to the English-speaking person, it doesn’t make any sense to *fill the water into the glass. On the other hand, if the verb is pour, you can’t say *she poured the glass with water, but you can say she poured the water into the glass. What’s going on here? It looks like some verbs can appear in two constructions, and other verbs can only appear in one of the constructions. So straightaway, we can divide the verbs into three classes: (i) Those verbs which allow both constructions, e.g. load, spray (ii) those verbs which only allow the ‘thing moved’ = DO construction, e.g. pour (iii) those verbs only allow the ‘location’ = DO construction, e.g. fill. In other words, we can use the possibility of the alternative constructions, i.e. alternation, as an indicator of what type of verb we are dealing with. There are lots of alternations in English—at least 40 of them. At one point in my academic life, only a few years ago in fact, I was in Leipzig, Germany, at one of the Max Planck Institutes. There was a big international linguistic project based there, looking into valency alternations and valency patterns (the same thing, essentially) with linguistic experts from about 30 languages. Their plan was to devise a list of verbs which would be roughly translatable across most languages and look at what kinds of alternative constructions were available to these verbs in different languages. It was a really fantastic project. I took on the task of doing English, which involved making a database of English verb alternations. This and the other databases are now available on the internet. There are some details on the slide (fig. 15). In the remaining part of Lecture 8 we will look at an example of the Product/ creation alternation, focusing just on the verb pour. We will compare She poured some water into the glass and She poured me a drink. How are they similar and how are they different? We are also going to look at three Accidental body-part damage constructions. (We won’t touch the Middle alternation. I just put that on the slide to remind you that there are lots of other specialized constructions.) When Beth Levin did her original work, she used alternations mainly as a way of arranging verbs into verb classes (fig. 16). At that time they were not very interested in the meanings of the different constructions, but they could kind of sense that the meanings were not quite the same. For example, if you load the cart with apples, you seem to be more interested in the effect on the cart, whereas if you load the apples into the cart, you seem to be more interested in the effect on the apples. This was perceived in the early days, but they did not focus on it. They viewed the alternation as a syntactic phenomenon. But now, as I said before, times have changed and we are now more interested in the question: how can we capture the meaning of each construction?

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Figure 15

Figure 16 Other alternations (aka specialised constructions)

Because these meanings involve a very tight interaction between the verb meaning and the grammar, many people now use the term lexicogrammatical construction, and I must say, I like this term. There is also talk of “micro-grammar”, and this term too has its merits. If you think about it, often when we use the word “construction”, we think of something like the Passive construction in English, or the Perfect construction. These are “big constructions”, in the sense that hundreds of verbs, maybe even thousands, can participate in them.

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Figure 17 The key ideas in NSM approach to alternation phenomena

The type of constructions we are talking about here, on the other hand, are relatively specialized. They only apply to small groups of verbs with particular kinds of meaning. That’s why it is handy to have a separate term, such as lexicogrammatical construction. The key NSM idea is that so-called alternations are based on meaning (fig. 17). The phenomenon is not purely syntactic, but is in fact driven by meaning. Remember what Dowty (2000) said? He talked about “specialized constructions” whose meanings were akin to “lexical derivation”. Broadly speaking, that is the approach that will be unfolded here. In particular, we will see that each specialized construction embeds the “basic” meaning of the verb (as a [d] element) into a more specific scenario—and I’m going to give you quite a bit of detail about what I mean by a more specific scenario. So, in order to understand alternation phenomena, we first we have to work out the basic meaning of the verbs, which requires a lot of analytical effort. We have to decide what the simplest grammatical frame is, then figure out the semantic template, and then do detailed analysis. Luckily for us, we did that in Lecture 7, so we already have explications for ‘eating’, ‘cutting’ and ‘pouring’. We have already explicated the basic meanings of these verbs, as they occur in their semantically basic frames. What remains to be done is to figure out how the basic meaning fits into the specific scenarios associated with the specialized constructions. That’s what I’m going to do in the second part of the lecture. We will start with cut, and

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Figure 18 Three “accidental body-part damage” construction for English cut

look at the three different specialized constructions I mentioned earlier. Then we will look at pouring a drink, and if there’s time, I will also talk about digging a well, and digging for treasure. In this part of the lecture, I’m going to start by looking at three different specialized constructions with the verb cut (see fig. 18). For convenience, I’m going to refer to the basic meaning cut, the one that we explicated in Lecture 7, the one that occurs in a sentence like She was cutting it, as cut subscript zero, i.e. cut0. So cut0 is the of meaning that we have in a sentence like She is cutting0 the bread. To summarize it in ordinary words, not in semantic primes, it means a deliberate activity or action which is intended to separate something into two or more parts, using a sharp instrument, such as a knife or scissors, in a controlled fashion. That’s the basic meaning: cut0. But there are plenty of English-specific constructions where the verb cut appears, apparently expressing somewhat different meanings—and that’s our problem. Here are the three constructions that I’m interested in: (i) He cut1 his face (while shaving), I will call it cut1, (ii) He cut2 his foot on a rock, I will call it cut2, (iii) The glass cut3 her hand, I will call it cut3. At the moment, I don’t want you to assume that cut itself has three meanings. We can just say that there are three constructions and call them one, two and three. In other languages, it’s normally not possible to use the verb cut (or rather, its nearest equivalent) in such a way across all these three contexts. As I said,

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Figure 19 More on three cut-constructions

sometimes you use derivational morphology or add a reflexive particle, or you may just use another verb, like He damaged his face while shaving, or something of that sort. Although they are different constructions, these three constructions do have a few things in common. First, the outcomes are not intended, they are accidental. Second, there’s no separation into two parts (if you cut your foot on a rock, your foot is not two parts). Third, the event usually takes place very quickly, maybe even momentarily. And for that reason, you normally can’t put them into the progressive. Because if you put them into the progressive, you are implying that they would take some time, and since it is unpleasant—it hurts—people wouldn’t do it. So, *He was cutting his face while shaving, *He was cutting his foot on the rock, and *The glass was cutting her hand, all sound very unnatural. So, these various aspects—part of the body, unintended event, contact with something sharp, momentary event—they are shared between all these three constructions and, if you think about it, they make sense together. It’s because sharp things have the potential to damage our bodies in ways that we don’t want, right? We can be doing something with a sharp instrument and make a mistake. Or be in a place where there are sharp things on the ground and some damage can come to us. And when it happens, it’s usually going happen

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Figure 20 Semantic explication for English cut in “accidental body-part damage” construction-1

quickly and not because you want it. The existence of these constructions reflects some experiential realities of life. Why do we use cut in this context (in English)? To cut a long story short, it’s a kind of analogy: what happens to you happens like something happens to something when someone is cutting it. For example, if glass cuts your hand, the glass doesn’t DO anything actually, but what happens to your hand is like what happens to something when someone is cutting it. So, the use of the verb cut in this context is not describing an action, it’s actually a kind of Manner component … Let’s have a closer look (fig. 20). He cut1 his face while shaving. She cut1 her hand grating the carrots. He cut1 his hand while slicing bagels. Someone is handling a razor, a grater or a knife, and in each case, accidentally does something that results in some “damage” to the face or hand. What does it mean when we say He cut1 his face while shaving? Let’s think how we would describe this to people from another planet or another country. Well (reading from the slide in fig. 20), ‘he did something to part of his body, not because he wanted to’. I mean, he did do it, but he didn’t intend to do it. And because he did that, there was an effect on his face: ‘part of his face was

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Figure 21 Semantic explication for English cut in “accidental body-part damage” construction-2

not like it was before’, at least for a time. And how did it happen? ‘It happened like this: he was doing something for some time with something sharp [m], (and) during this time, this sharp [m] thing touched part of his face (or hand), not as he wanted’. And: ‘because of this, something happened to this part of his face (or hand). So far—notice—‘cutting’ has not been mentioned, but now comes a key component: ‘it happened like something happens to something when someone is cutting [d] it’. So, the Manner is likened to what happens to something when someone is cutting it. And finally: ‘it happened in one moment’. There is no “metaphor” about the sharp thing being like a person and doing some cutting, nothing like that. The relevance of ‘cutting’ is to describe the manner in which the effect comes about. Okay, so now we go to the second one (fig. 21): He cut2 his foot on a rock, or I cut2 my hand on a piece of broken glass. Notice the use of the preposition on. The choice of this preposition is quite intriguing. It doesn’t really mean on, in the same sense as the glass is on the table, but this is how we say it in English. We will use the example He cut2 his foot on a rock. When I was a little kid in Australia, we liked doing things outdoors. On holidays we would go to the beach and nearby there’d be some rocky places, and we would play on the rocks. We’d have bare feet and sometimes it happened that I cut my foot on a rock. So, you go running to your mum and say Mummy, I cut my foot on a rock.

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So, this can actually be quite an ordinary sentence in places when people are outdoors a lot. So, what does He cut2 his foot on a rock mean? It means (reading from slide in fig. 21) ‘he did something at that time’ (the nature of what he did is kind of vague), ‘because of this, part of his body (foot, in this case) was not like it was before’. It happened like this: ‘he was doing something for some time in a place where there was something sharp [m]’ And: ‘at some time during that time, his foot touched this sharp [m] thing not as he wanted’. There was an unintended contact with a sharp thing. Then: ‘because of this something happened to this part (i.e. the foot) like something happens to something when someone is cutting [d] it’. There was a kind of “cutting effect” on my foot. And ‘it happened in one moment’. Again, we have ‘cutting [d]’ in the ‘How it happened’ section of the explication, and it’s a [d], meaning that we are bringing in a complex meaning we’ve already explicated before and we are embedding it into this construction. All of the other semantic content, the scenario about being in a place where there is something sharp, it’s coming from the construction as a whole. The construction has a personal subject, a possessed body-part, and a prepositional phrase with on. That would be the structural description of the construction. For reasons which we don’t fully understand, that pattern creates or conveys all this meaning. (You can use certain other verbs. You can scratch your hand on a rock, for instance. There are a number of “sharp verbs” which would fit into the same pattern.) Now we have “Accidental Body-Part Damage construction-3”, as in The glass cut her hand (see fig. 22). The structural description of the construction includes an inanimate object (something sharp) as the subject, and the direct object is a “possessed body-part”. Some examples: – As she pushed though the dense bush, the razor-sharp leaves cut her face terribly. – I was clearing the pieces away and one of them cut my hand. So, you’ve broken a glass or a plate in the kitchen, and as you are picking up the pieces, one of them cut my hand. What does it mean when we say this kind of thing? The glass cut her hand. If you think about what’s going on in the situation when you describe it like that, I think there is an idea that the sharp thing moved. How and why is kind of unclear. It could be that you are holding it and it slips. And (reading from the slide in fig. 22): ‘because of that, something

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Figure 22 Semantic explication for English cut in “accidental body-part damage” construction-3

happened to part of her body at that time, it happened in one moment’. And the result was that: ‘after this, this part of her body (hand, face, etc.) was not like it was before’. And: ‘it happened like this: …’. There is an implied scenario: ‘this something sharp [m] (some glass) moved for a very short time’, i.e. suddenly, and ‘when it moved, it touched part of her body’. And: ‘because of this, something happened to this part of her body, like something happens to something when someone is cutting [d] it’. So again, according to this account, the rationale for using the word cut is describe how the effect takes place, by analogy or comparison with what happens to something when someone is cutting [d] it. That mechanism is exactly the same in all three different constructions. What differs between the three constructions is the circumstances that cause this to come about. It can happen because a person is handling something sharp, it can happen because they are in a place where there’s something sharp, or it can happen that something sharp around the place moves and comes into contact with their body. Those are three different sets of circumstances, but in each case, the rationale for the verb cut is this analogy component. In fact, similar constructions exist with other verbs. Just quickly, there are “burning verbs”; for example, you can burn your hands on something hot.

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Basically, there are sharp things, hot things, also very hard things, which have the capacity to hurt our bodies in ways which we don’t want. These “accidental body-part damage” constructions all seem to be focused on scenarios involving such things. If you are handling something hot in the kitchen, for example, you could say I burnt my hand on the saucepan. Or The saucepan burnt my hand. Partly I’m mentioning this because I don’t think this is totally arbitrary. It’s not like grammar is madness, and these grammatical structures exist for no reason. From the point of view of the English language, they exist for a good reason, because they enable us to package up certain scenarios and express these meanings very compactly. With these constructions, we can express quite complicated meanings using a very short sentence structure. They are practical and they are useful. This raises the question: how do other languages deal with the same thing? If you look into that, you will discover that there are actually a lot of ways of dealing with these kinds of scenario, often using verbal derivational morphology. English does not have a lot of verbal derivational morphology, but it does have a huge range of syntactic alternations. Languages which have derivational morphology usually don’t use a lot of syntactic alternations. I will save that for later, for question time. Okay, now to pouring a drink (fig. 23). I’ll first remind you of what the basic meaning of pour0 is, which we did in this morning’s lecture. If someone is pouring0 something, like pouring some water into a glass, the direct object designates a liquid, or at least something that can flow like a liquid. Normally there’s a locational expression as well; for example, you are pouring something into something else, or maybe you are pouring it out. And it involves a person manipulating the container with his or her hands, in such a way that some of the liquid which was inside goes out in a controlled fashion. That’s pour0, as in She poured0 some water into the glass or She poured0 it down the sink. But there is also a specialized “production/creation” construction, and I will give you three examples. He poured1 another drink. The likely context is that there are some people gathered together, they are probably drinking alcohol actually. In this context, pour another drink normally refers to some kind of alcoholic beverage, such as beer, wine, or whisky. Pour1 me a glass of wine (beer, etc.). You can also use expressions like a glass of wine or a cup of tea as a direct object. Very often, there’s an indirect object as well, a benefactive indirect object, indicating somebody who is benefited. If I say pour me a drink, the drink is for me, right? It’s not strictly necessary to have that benefactive object there (you can say things like She taught me how to pour1 the perfect cup of tea), but a benefactive object is very often present, and as we will see, it gives a clue to the meaning of the overall construction.

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Figure 23 Pouring1 someone a drink

It’s interesting that this construction seems very specific to scenarios involving a certain sort of product. It’s basically about getting certain kinds of liquid into a certain kind of container (like, a cup or a glass) that is designed for drinking it. There is quite a lot of cultural framing here. The specialized construction involves producing something by transferring (by ‘pouring’) a small quantity of liquid from some kind of “storage container” (which would be normally a bottle, or a jug, or a tea pot) into some kind of smaller container that is used for drinking from, like a glass or a cup. Okay, so let’s have a look at a full explication (fig. 24). Someone X poured1 a drink. So: ‘someone X did something to something in the place, because she/he wanted something in this place to be not like it was before’. As for the specific situation: ‘when this someone did it, it was like this: there was something like water [m] in this place, it was inside something’. We know that there must be some beer or wine or milk, or something like that, around the place, and it must be inside something. And the actor thought about it like this (thus we arrive at the actor’s intention): ‘it will be good if someone here can drink [m] a little of this something as people often want to do’; in other words, in a normal way. And: ‘it can be like this if a little of it is inside something else’, such as a glass or a cup. And: ‘because of this, this someone was pouring [d] it for some time’. It’s obvious, really, isn’t it? That’s the way ‘pouring’ enters in the situation: it is how you get the liquid into the glass or

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Figure 24 Explication for the pour a drink construction

cup. (Note that actual real ‘pouring’ is involved, unlike as with the specialized ‘cut’ constructions, which only involved an effect similar to that produced by cutting.) ‘Pouring’ is the method whereby someone produces the desired result of having some of the liquid ready for someone to drink it as people often want to do. “Wow”, you might think, “that’s a pretty specialized construction”, and I would agree with you. It is a pretty specialized construction, and it is testimony to the culture of drinking things. Now, I hasten to add, this is parallel to some other constructions (fig. 25). For instance, He baked (me) a cake or She knitted (me) a sweater, … these are patterns that already exist in the English language and they are rather similar, because if you bake someone a cake, you do something because you want someone to have a cake. If you knit a sweater, you do some knitting because you want there to be a sweater. So probably, these other sentence types are a kind of model for the “pour a drink” construction. In saying this, I am agreeing with many construction grammarians that specialized constructions tend to be modeled on particular exemplars. (Just to be clear, though, the “pour a drink” construction is not exactly the same as bake a cake or knit a sweater, because the verbs bake and knit are inherently “production/creation verbs”, whereas pour is not.) We are now going to do some constructions with the verb dig (fig. 26). I want to show you that the same general approach works with lots of different constructions and lots of different verbs. We don’t have to accept the exact details at this point, right? It’s the general idea of it.

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Figure 25 Parallels with “production/creation” verbs

Figure 26 Two constructions with dig

We haven’t actually explicated dig (dig0), as in She was digging0 in the garden, but it is an activity that someone does in a place, and it involves shifting some earth, typically using an instrument such as a shovel or a spade. It’s a durational activity, i.e. it takes some time, and as you do your digging, the same thing happens over and over: a little bit of the earth gets moved, and as you do more digging, more earth gets moved. But there’s also a “production/creation” construction with dig which looks a bit like one with pour (fig. 27). In English, you can say someone dug a hole, or dug a well, or a grave, or a trench. You get my meaning? In this case, there’s a

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Figure 27 Digging a hole (well, tunnel, grave, trench, etc.)

direct object and it designates … well, a feature of the ground in a place: a hole in the ground, a well, a grave, a trench, something like that. We’ll look briefly at this construction, and then turn to a second one, which is digging for, as in they were digging for potatoes, they were digging for gold, or they were digging for water. The strange feature of these constructions is that they can be used to describe people doing something with heavy machinery. That is, in English you can use the verb dig even in expressions like digging a tunnel or digging a subway. In most languages, you can’t use the verb dig (or its nearest equivalent) like that. Okay, so: He dug a hole in the ground, or They dug a tunnel. Obviously, the only nouns that can occur as direct object denote things that can be created by human activity on the ground. What does it mean? Well (reading from slide in fig. 28), ‘this someone did something in this place because they wanted there to be something in this place, not like there was before’, i.e., they wanted to create something. And: ‘when they did it, it was like this: …’. They had formed a certain intention, i.e. some time before they thought: “it will be good if there is something in the ground [m] in this place, not like there was before”. And they know that: ‘it can be like this if someone does something to the ground [m] in this place’. It can’t happen by magic. If you want there to be something in the ground in this place, someone has to do some things to the ground in this place. And because of that, they do some things; and as they do those things, ‘something happens to the ground like something happens when someone is digging [d]’. It’s not saying that they actually are digging, because that would imply a single person, moving parts of their body, causing a very limited displacement of earth. When you dig a well or dig a grave, you may be using machinery or there may be a group of you. But basically, the use of word dig, in this construction, has its justification in what’s happening to the ground, i.e. displacement of the earth. And after they do that activity for a while, with its “digging-like” effect: ‘there

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Figure 28 Explication for the dig a well construction, i.e. dig1

can be something (whatever it might be, a well, tunnel or grave) in this place, as this someone wanted’. Last one (fig. 29). Now we are digging for potatoes, or digging for gold. I don’t know whether you can say such a thing in Chinese, like someone is digging for gold. It’s very productive in English. In your garden, for instance, if you plant potatoes, you know how the top of the potato plant dies off in the cold weather, and then you need to find the potatoes underneath the ground. That’s how come you can be digging for potatoes. Needless to say, ‘digging for something’ sounds like sort of like ‘looking for something’ and that’s no coincidence. The “digging for” construction is very likely modeled on the “looking for” construction. An interesting thing about “digging for” is that the subject, the person who is digging, believes that there might be something useful or valuable under the ground, such as water or gold or potatoes, but actually this person is not necessarily sure, or at least is not very sure where exactly it is. To try to persuade you about this point, consider the following situation. Suppose I’ve got some treasure, and I decide I’d better hide it from my relatives or from the police, so I bury the treasure in my back garden. Obviously, in this situation I know where it is. Now suppose, after the police or the relatives have left, I want to get the treasure again, so I go out and I dig. Now, to describe this situation, you cannot say I was digging for treasure. You would have to say I was digging the treasure up.

English Verb Alternations and Constructions

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Figure 29 The “digging for” construction

What I’m trying to get at is that the “digging for something” construction implies that you are not really sure if it’s down there. You want to find out. And why you want to find out is that you want that stuff, whether it’s water, gold, treasure, potatoes, or whatever. So, in this respect it is like “look for”. The whole point is that you don’t know exactly where it is, but you want to find it and do something with it. Let’s try a full explication (fig. 30). Someone is digging for water. ‘Someone was doing something in a place for some time because this someone wants to do something with something’. Notice, in this case the actor is not out to create something new in this place (like, a hole, a trench, or anything like that). Basically, they want ‘to do something with something’. The explication continues to give the actor’s motivation: ‘some time before, this someone thought like this: “maybe there is something good below the ground [m] here, I want to know”. (So I guess this a similar motivation to searching, right?) And: ‘if there is something like this here, I want it not to be below the ground [m] anymore. I want to do something with it’. So with that in mind, you do something in this place for some time, and while you are doing it: ‘something happens to the ground [m] in this place like happens when someone is digging [d] in a place’. You may be digging for water, or even digging for oil, with machinery or drills. Digging for oil, it’s not like ordinary personal digging, but still in English we can use the word digging. This extension is allowed by English language and that’s why I call it all these English alternations and constructions. A lot a lot of these specialized constructions and usages are very English-specific. We don’t necessarily expect them to appear in other languages. We expect that other languages will have different constructions and other ways of getting this kind of meaning across.

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Figure 30 Explication for the “digging for” construction, i.e. dig2

So, this really is micro-grammar, the micro-grammar of English. That’s why it has kept English grammarians busy for 25 years. Okay, in my concluding remarks (fig. 31), I want to take you back to David Dowty’s (2000) quotation. I hope we can now appreciate better what he was saying. He was saying that a specialized construction can be viewed “as a lexical derivation”. Well, we agree. He says that it’s analogous to “word formation”, that is, when you take a word and derive another word. Yes, it is sort of like that, except that we are doing it using a construction rather than a derivational morpheme. He says that it’s analogous to “processes of lexical semantic extension.” Yes, specialized constructions are exactly like lexical semantic extension: you take the basic meaning and you extend it. (He also says it’s like “metaphor”, but I think it would be more precise to make the comparison to simile or analogy, rather than to metaphor.) The account that I have presented this lecture, I know that it is very complex and potentially confusing, but the phenomenon itself is complex. The account presented here agrees with Dowty’s (2000) view, but as well as that, it shows the mechanics. It shows how it works. We literally see the derivational-like nature of the specialized construction through the involvement of the [d] element, the same kind of derivational mechanism as used for ordinary derivation. Like illness being based on ‘ill [d]’, or to butter, being based on ‘butter [d]’: that’s ordinary derivation which uses [d] element. You take the basic meaning and you embed it in or insert it into a different frame. The same mechanism works for specialized lexicogrammatical constructions. You take the basic meaning and you insert it into a broader scenario of the construction.

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Figure 31 Back to Dowty (2000)

This whole phenomenon of specialized constructions is semantically driven, that’s my larger message. I don’t think we can understand alternation phenomena unless we are prepared to “get down and dirty” with semantics. If you just generalize, talking about induced-motion and the like, you won’t be able to really get the fine details. This is a situation where you really need semantic fine detail. It’s also true that it’s impossible to understand this problem without looking at lexical polysemy, without looking at derivation, without looking at aspect. All of these different areas are intertwined in the area of specialized constructions. That’s why it is such a hard problem. (I don’t know if you are familiar with this jargon expression “hard problem”, but in science when they talk about a “hard problem”, it refers to something that people have been trying to solve for many years without success. It’s kind of slang of scientists.) What I’m saying is that this area of specialized lexicogrammatical constructions or alternations is a classic “hard problem” of English linguistics. My proposition is that it is a hard problem precisely because in order to solve it, we need fine-grained semantic analysis. We need to be able to do semantic analysis right down to the level of semantic primes and molecules. I want to finish by giving credit to Professor Anna Wierzbicka. Already in her 1988 book The Semantics of Grammar, she was onto this. She was already looking at “words in construction”. And back in 1982, there was her famous paper ‘Why you can have a drink but you can’t *have an eat’, published in the journal Language. If you are looking for classic early papers on construction grammar, that would be one of them.

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Figure 32 Concluding remarks

This is a wonderful quotation from her: “There’s no such thing as grammatical meaning or lexical meaning. There are only grammatical and lexical MEANS of expressing meaning—and even here no sharp line can be drawn between them” (Wierzbicka 1988:8). Again, this is very consistent with the general feeling behind construction grammar: that words and grammar work together. That’s the end of my most difficult lecture. Thank you very much.

Lecture 9

Applications of NSM: Minimal English, Cultural Scripts and Language Teaching I’m going to present this morning’s lecture in two self-contained parts, which I’m calling Lecture 9A and Lecture 9B. Lecture 9A is about what we call Minimal English. Minimal English is a practical application that has emerged from the NSM theory and from the crosslinguistic experience of the NSM research community. I’ll start by explaining how Minimal English relates to earlier types of “reduced” English, for instance, Basic English and something called Globish, then I’ll go through some examples of how Minimal English can be useful in different fields and applications. Lecture 9B is more to do with English language teaching and the various ways in which the results of NSM work can be useful in language teaching. One of them—in some ways the easiest one to use in the classroom—involves what we call cultural scripts. This is a way of using the simple, cross-translatable NSM metalanguage to discuss cultural practices and to help learners “get” important cultural ideas. That can be very helpful in language learning. To begin Lecture 9A, I want to talk about Anglocentrism (fig. 1).

Lecture 9A

In 2014 Professor Anna Wierzbicka wrote this book Imprisoned in English, with the subtitle: The Hazards of English as a Default Language (see fig. 1). Now the thing is, it’s a reality that English is rapidly becoming a global lingua franca. It is already a global lingua franca in the natural sciences, and increasingly so in the social sciences, but also in international relations, and even in higher education. There are obviously a lot of advantages to this situation, because it’s

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5688346. © Cliff Goddard. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004357723_010

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Figure 1

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Anglocentrism and its challenges

good if people from different language backgrounds can have a common language to communicate with. However, what Wierzbicka wanted to do in this book is to say uncomfortable things, things which people don’t always want to hear, especially native speakers of English. First, when international discourse is conducted in English, there may be the appearance of full understanding but often there are still cultural misunderstandings going on; so-called “invisible misunderstandings”. Second, if international and intercultural discourse is conducted primarily in one or two languages, we really are getting rid of diversity. Instead of the conceptual resources of many different languages being available in the world, only a very narrow range of languages will be heard, bringing a loss of conceptual and cultural diversity. In social sciences and humanities, Wierzbicka (2014) argues that if you base a theory (in linguistics or psychology, for example) on the English language, by starting with concepts borrowed from English, then that can actually affect your theory. Your theory can end up distorted or skewed by the fact that the starting point was English. This is a depressing thought, because we don’t want scientific results to be locked into one language, we don’t want scientific results to be shaped and determined by one starting point; especially in linguistics, of course, since one of the high ideals of linguistics is to understand languages from a non-biased point of view. There are also practical costs to non-translatability. Many ordinary Anglo English words, even quite plain words, don’t translate well into the other languages in the world, especially when you think about the great diversity of languages in Asia, South America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and

Applications of NSM

Figure 2

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The many “untranslatables” of Global English

elsewhere. The United Nations and other international bodies constantly produce a lot of material which needs to be translated into multiple languages, and every time there are translation problems caused by the fact that the message is phrased in ways which are unnecessarily difficult to translate. This is a cost. It costs money, because it takes longer to do a good translation, and it costs effectiveness; for instance, important health messages might not reach people effectively because the translation is not satisfactory. “Global English is not an unmixed blessing …” The statement at the top of the slide (fig. 2) comes from an edited book called Minimal English for a Global World: Improved Communication Using Fewer Words (Goddard ed., in 2018). To understand how we can get better communication by using fewer words, let’s go back to Global English and start to think about what aspects of Global English are non-translatable. Just roughly, it’s useful to think of two different sources of untranslatable terms in Global English. One is the words of Anglo culture which are so specific to English that they don’t have equivalents even in other European languages. There’s a surprisingly large number of those terms. For instance, “plain words” like fair, mind, fact, friend, rude, and sex. Those are words which don’t have precise equivalents in languages like Russian, German or Spanish. We touched on this in Lecture 6 on cultural key words. Then there

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are more “sophisticated” English-specific words, such as evidence, violence, communication, cooperation, commitment. Often, even European languages don’t have precise equivalents of those words either. Then there are broader European words; for instance, system, function, structure, information, which are absent from many languages. You may be thinking, in Chinese we have words like that. Chinese is a very sophisticated language that has developed over thousands of years and is quite modernized. However, think about the thousands of places in the world where people may not have good formal education and where languages are still adapted mainly to traditional lifestyles and culture. Certainly, if you try to translate a seemingly simple English sentence such as, for example, language is a system of communication, into many languages in the world, you’ll find that it is just impossible. You have to start paraphrasing. What do we mean by system? what do we mean by communication? You won’t find words ready at hand for ‘system’ or for ‘communication’. These two sets of linguistic baggage, the baggage of Anglo English culture, and the baggage of European culture broadly, have both left their imprint on Global English. It means that there are a lot of things one can say in Global English which are untranslatable into the thought patterns of people in many parts of the world. The idea of Minimal English is to develop a kind of “reduced English”, with a reduced vocabulary and a reduced grammar, so as to make it more translatable (fig. 3). We’re not talking in this Lecture about NSM semantics as a linguistic science. We’re talking about a very practical thing: how to help people express what they want to say using simpler, more translatable words. That’s what Minimal English is all about. Minimal English can never replace Global English and it is not intended to. It will always be a sort of supplementary language, an “auxiliary language”. If it catches on, we will retain the advantages of Global English and we will also have Minimal English available as a special tool for when we need to say important things in a clear and translatable way. Minimal English, as you can probably guess, is based on semantic primes and universal semantic molecules, because these words are known to be relatively simple and highly cross-translatable. But it is not a problem to add other words into Minimal English if they are important and there are good reasons to believe that they are largely cross-translatable, or else indispensable. Minimal English is a practical project. It is not dedicated to the idea of precise linguistic analysis. For example, consider a word like government. In many places in the world you need to use the word government to get across messages about community

Applications of NSM

Figure 3

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Minimal English and its relation to global English

development, public health, and international relations. Likewise, a word like plastic could be very important in discussing pollution. There are major problems in many parts of the world with plastic containers getting into the sea and causing environmental damage. The word mosquitoes might seem very inconsequential, but mosquitoes are bearers of some of the worst diseases in the world, so in the health context, Minimal English may need to use the word mosquitoes. That’s OK because Minimal English is not a closed scientific system like NSM, not a rigorous tool of linguistic analysis. I will talk about the vocabulary of Minimal English in more detail shortly, but first I want to make the point that Minimal English is trying to be “minimally English”. That is, we are trying to devise a kind of English which has as few English-specific features as possible. Of course, there is no reason why one could not devise a Minimal Chinese. In fact, we should have Minimal Chinese. It would be quite similar to Minimal English, actually, because the two “minimal languages” are both arranged so as to be maximally cross-translatable. Another global lingua franca is Spanish, so it would be very useful to have Minimal Spanish. Just to repeat a few things (fig. 4). Although it is based on research by linguists in NSM approach, Minimal English is not NSM. It is a flexible adaptation of NSM and the purpose is different. The purpose of Minimal English is to help effective communication among ordinary people. It is intended for

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Uses and benefits of Minimal English

non-specialists and intended to be used in a wide and open-ended set of applications. Another aspect of Minimal English is that trying to express your ideas using a small set of words actually forces you to think more clearly about exactly what you want to say. You can’t hide behind fuzzy words. It is a good discipline for clear thinking. In Minimal English you have to be quite strict with what you say, because every word counts. Now I want to compare Minimal English to some other projects in the past. I will do this quickly (fig. 5). There have been a lot of attempts over the years to produce simplified versions of English. The most famous is CK Ogden’s BASIC or “Basic English”, which I believe had quite a big influence in language teaching programs in China after WWII. In many English-speaking countries there is a movement for what we call Plain English. This is aimed especially at making government documents clearer, so that ordinary people can understand them. Normally there would be some guidelines provided; for instance, in my country, there is something called the Style Council which gives advice about how to write government forms, how to put out public information. Globish, you may not have heard about it, but I will tell you a few things about it shortly. Even Wikipedia has a type of simplified English called Simple English Wikipedia. You can click and it’ll convert a page to simple English. In short, many people have had the idea that it would be a good thing to have an English with a reduced vocabulary that would be easier to understand without a high level of education. But the problem with all previous attempts is that they haven’t taken translatability into account. They just try to simplify English.

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Figure 5

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How is Minimal English different from other versions of “simplified English”?

This (fig. 6, top left) is Charles Kay Ogden. He was really quite a visionary, I suppose. In the 1930s, he and his colleague I.A. Richards got the idea of Basic English and they tried to figure out a small vocabulary that would be suitable for all everyday purposes and they came up with a basic list of 850 words. They called it an “international auxiliary language”. It was widely promoted, especially after WWII, as something which would be useful for world peace. There are good Internet resources on Basic English, if you are interested. Unfortunately, Basic English included many words without equivalents in other languages; for instance: authority, experience, industry, organization and suggestion. These days, Basic English doesn’t really exist as a movement any longer, but its influence lingers on. The Berlitz language school (one of the biggest international language schools) is using it. They start from a version of the 850 words, and so does Simple English Wikipedia. But as I just said, the problem is that the 850 words are a mixture of good choices, words which really are cross-translatable, and bad choices like experience, industry, and authority (and dozens of others) which don’t have equivalents in other people’s languages. In the early 1930s, the famous American linguist Edward Sapir also had the idea of an auxiliary language. He said, and this is a beautiful quotation: “What is needed above all is a language that is as simple, as regular, as logical, as rich, and as creative as possible; which starts with a minimum number of demands on the learning capacity of the normal individual and can do the maximum amount of work” (Sapir 1931). Many decades later (fig. 7), Randolph Quirk, who was the famous linguist behind one of the big modern grammars of the English language, proposed something he called Nuclear English. The same kind of vision: “as culture free as calculus”, not very pretty, not very literary, not very aesthetic—but it would be fast and easy to learn, and you will be able to communicate adequately.

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BASIC or Basic English

Quirk and his colleagues didn’t give many concrete details and I don’t think much happened with this proposed project. One of Quirk’s colleagues offered words like ‘female’ and ‘brother’ as examples of the vocabulary of Nuclear English. Unfortunately though, they are not translatable words, as we have seen in previous lectures. Plenty of languages have no words like female and male that you can use about animals as well as about people. You can even use English female and male about insects or fish, e.g. you can talk about a female spider or a male fish. In many languages you just can’t do that, using the same words you would use about a woman or a man. As for ‘brother’, as you know, many languages have no such word because they have special words for “older brothers”, different from the words for younger siblings. So basically, the idea that you can just guess or trust your intuition about what is translatable just doesn’t work. We need empirical research. The same applies to Jean-Paul Nerrière’s (2004) Globish (see fig. 8). Nerrière is a former French diplomat who has published a book and Internet resources on so-called Globish. His belief, as an experienced citizen of the world, is that when non-native speakers of English speak with one another using English, they tend to use a fairly standardized practical vocabulary of about 1500 words.

Applications of NSM

Figure 7

“Nuclear English”

Figure 8 “Globish”

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“Plain” but untranslatable English

But as with the other systems, the Globish word-list includes hundreds of untranslatable words; such as fair, right, wrong, mind, evidence, and experience. There may be well-educated people around the world who know, or seem to know, those words but if you try that in the village, you will find that in lots of languages, you just cannot find words for experience or evidence, or even mind. There is grammar to be considered too. Basically, the point is that what sounds plain and ordinary to speakers of English may not be very translatable. For example, these are three very plain and ordinary English sentences. (i) Let’s stick to the facts. (ii) That’s not fair. (iii) We have to do something about that. I really don’t know how you would translate sentence (i) into many languages. It’s got the idiom stick to, but also the noun facts, and we are going to have to explain what facts are. Are they things that everyone can know? Are they things that everyone can know and no-one can deny? Are they things that people can find out for themselves? I mean, the meaning of the word fact is quite unclear and difficult to state, yet facts is a basic word of English.

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Re. sentence (ii), we spent 10–15 minutes in Lecture 6 dealing with the complex meaning expressed by That’s not fair, and how the meaning is not the same as ‘that is not just’ or ‘that is bad’. It is a very particular package of meaning. Sentence (iii) sounds like very plain and ordinary English, but the problem points with this sentence are grammatical. Not all languages have an expression like English have to and also they won’t be able to say something like ‘do something about’. That expression does not go into other languages very easily. So, even though it sounds like it has a simple sentence pattern, to get the same meaning across in many languages would call for substantial re-working and grammatical rearrangement. Professor Wierzbicka and I and other NSM linguists, a couple of years ago, realized that we have a lot of research experience into cross-translatability. We had the experience of trying to find semantic primes and molecules in many languages in the world, and we also have a bilingual or multilingual research community of good linguists with lots of experience with cross-translatability. That’s how the idea of Minimal English started. We wanted to provide linguistically informed advice about how to say important things in a clear and translatable way. Now it’s time to talk about the core vocabulary of Minimal English (see fig. 10). The basic vocabulary consists of the words which we know to be either exactly or approximately translatable, i.e. the semantic primes plus all the known universal semantic molecules and approximate semantic molecules too, words like ‘trees’, ‘birds’, and ‘fish’. I have talked about all these in Lecture 5. In terms of numbers, that would take us close towards 200 words. As well as that, there is no problem with taking words which are likely to be found in major world languages, for instance, ‘money’, ‘book’, and ‘sea’. Although certain languages don’t (or, didn’t) have such words, these days most languages, even minority languages, have been contact with world languages and world languages will have those words. They may borrow those words into their local language. Because Minimal English is not about being pure but is about being practical, we may need words like the ones I mentioned before: ‘government’, ‘plastic’, and ‘mosquitoes’, but we also might need words like ‘the law’. In expressions like, you know, ‘the law says we can’t do that’. As for words like photo, computer, phone— why not? if they are important words in politics, community development, or the lifestyle of ordinary people and provided we think they are not going to introduce serious misunderstanding. They are probably not semantic molecules, and they may not have any kind of theoretical importance to linguists, but they may be practically important. There is no problem with using them in Minimal

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Fgiure 10 The vocabulary of Miinimal English

Figure 11 Non-primitive words in the Minimal English lexicon

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English, providing that they are not smuggling in any culture bias. Generally speaking, concrete nouns are less harmful than abstract words. So, something like ‘photo’ or ‘computer’, people may not understand exactly what the word ‘computer’ means, but in most contexts the imprecision is not damaging. It is important to take into account that Minimal English is “expandable” when we go to new areas, for instance, women’s health. See figure 12. Or we may have to expand the vocabulary for items which are relevant to the local environment. For example, in the Pacific … I don’t know if you know the terms ‘kava’ and ‘betelnut’, but they are relevant to widespread cultural practices in Pacific island cultures, where people have a drink made from the plant ‘kava’ and chew ‘betelnut’. There is no harm in adding those words to Minimal English in that part of the world, along with others such as ‘canoe’. If you are in the Arctic, there is no problem with words like ‘seal’ or ‘whale’ in Minimal English. We have to be more careful with abstract words. Abstract words tend to be both less cross-translatable and more loaded up with cultural assumptions. So when we expand Minimal English for practical purposes, we advise people to avoid abstract words. Play it safe, and try to say it in simpler words. John Locke (1690), one of the great philosophers of England in the 17th century, already said this: “if we compare different languages we shall find that though they have words which in translations and dictionaries are supposed to answer one another [i.e. have the same meaning] there is scarce one of ten amongst the names of complex ideas that stands for the same precise idea”.

Figure 12 Minimal English is expandable

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And, he said, this applies particularly to “abstract and compound ideas such as those which make up moral discourses”. There are some grammatical guidelines for Minimal English: a list of do’s and don’t’s (fig. 13). A couple of constructions we have to be particularly careful about are indirect speech, like ‘He/she said that …’, and reported thought, like ‘I thought that….’ In many languages of the world you can’t use such things, you have to say instead ‘he said something like this’ or ‘I thought like this’. We also have to avoid the comparative construction, i.e. words like bigger, better, and so on. There are ways around it, as I will show you in a second. Obviously, it is very convenient in ordinary English to use these expressions, but you can avoid it in Minimal English and when you avoid it, you are making your message more translatable. What I’m saying is that learning Minimal English isn’t just learning about choices of words, it’s also about learning to keep the grammar simple. Now, at the present time Minimal English is just being launched. We have had some symposiums and workshops and it is very encouraging to discover that non-linguists often get very interested, like people who work in international relations, human rights, science education and health communication. Minimal English is good for children, because it helps to explain complex ideas using simpler words. In one country, Finland, a version of Minimal Finnish is taking off. Finland is an unusual country, small but with a very well educated

Figure 13 Grammatical “do’s” and “don’ts” of Minimal English

Applications of NSM

Figure 14 More “do’s” and “don’t’s”

Figure 15 Example from ethics

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population. There is a movement in Finland to use semantic primes so that people can have a better public discussion about public policy. There are chapters about those different things in the book Minimal English for a Global World (Goddard, 2018). I’ll finish with a couple of specific examples come from the Minimal English book. In one chapter, Anna Wierzbicka writes about Global Ethic. This is a movement, supported by the United Nations but taking place also in other organizations and international forums, where people are trying find a common framework for ethics in our complex global world. Is it possible to articulate some principles that most people would agree with, despite their cultural differences? If we want to contribute from a Minimal English point of view, the idea will be not to use any English words that don’t have equivalents in other languages. That would mean not using any words like, for instance, ‘prejudice’ or ‘racism’. You couldn’t say ‘it’s bad if people are prejudiced’ or ‘racism is bad’. Even words like ‘murder’ and ‘rape’ don’t have exact equivalents in other languages. Wierzbicka proposes 25 ethical principles, all written in Minimal English, which she thinks might be acceptable to most people in the world. Here is one: It is very bad if people think like this about some people: “People of this kind are not like other people, they are below other people”. If I wanted to rephrase that in normal English, I’d say something like: it’s very bad if people think that some kinds of people are inferior, or even “subhuman”. This principle could refer to racist beliefs or to a caste system. It is phrased exclusively in semantic primes. Wierzbicka also proposes a number of other ethical principles, which are phrased using other words from Minimal English, in addition to semantic primes (fig. 16). I will briefly comment on three examples that use the nonprime words ‘kill’, ‘men’ and ‘women’. – It is very bad if people want to kill other people. Notice that the principle doesn’t say ‘it is very bad if people kill other people’ because many people regard it as acceptable to kill in some circumstances, e.g. in self-defence. The proposed idea that it is very bad if people want to kill other people. You see the difference? Here is another one. – It is very bad if men want to do very bad things to women.

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Figure 16 Other examples from ethics

This principle doesn’t say what the ‘very bad things’ are, but it seems to imply that men have a special responsibility not to do very bad things to women. In human life, we may know what those very bad things could be. They could be sexual crimes, could be bashing, other possibilities too. It seems like a powerful proposal. And what about this? It is more complicated overall, but each individual part is still expressed using very simple words. – It is very bad if men think like this about women: there are two kinds of people, men are one kind, they are above the other kind, women are the other kind One could of course debate about the content of these principles (here are 25 of them altogether), but my point here is simply that quite sophisticated moral and ethical principles can be summed up using simple crosstranslatable words, without the need for words like ‘discrimination’, ‘racism’, ‘gender bias’, ‘sexism’, or anything like that. Jumping now to a completely different kind of example, science education presents very great challenges, especially in a global context. There are many schools in the world without good resources, and the language of the kids might not be English or Chinese, but minority languages, village languages. Is it possible to introduce scientific ideas and start the process of science

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education using common words? Two chapters in Minimal English For a Global World take up that question. The examples I am going to give you concern science concepts for children. In the West, they often teach about science by telling stories about the history of science. One important narrative is about astronomy, about how long ago people thought that the earth was the center of the universe and that everything rotated around the earth. Now we know differently and, in particular, the figure of Galileo, the great Italian early scientist, is often mentioned. Galileo and his telescope. He made observations of the night sky, and he was able to figure out that the sun is the center of the solar system. This story is interesting for children and it helps them understand. Can we tell that story and other stories about history of science using Minimal English? This is a text written in Minimal English, about Galileo’s telescope (fig. 17). “Galileo looked at the stars not like other people looked at them before. Because of this, he could see them well, not like people could see them before. When he was looking at them, he was holding something of one kind near his eyes. When someone holds something of this kind near the eyes, this someone can look at some places very far from the place where this someone is. A thing

Figure 17 Example from science education

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of this kind is called a “telescope”. When Galileo looked at the sky at night like this, he could see some places very far from the earth well.” You can see, it’s not normal English but at the same time it is kind of cute, and it expresses the main ideas. Notice how we introduce a new special word like ‘telescope’. There is no problem bringing it into the text. You just describe it a little, saying that it’s something you ‘hold near the eyes [m]’ and that when you use it you ‘can see some places very far’ away. Then you can just say: ‘a thing of this kind is called telescope’. Using this mechanism (which of course depends on the fact that ‘is called’ is part of the core Minimal English vocabulary), we can introduce new nouns into Minimal English, giving them a bit of description. Did you notice that this passage uses quite a lot of words, like ‘stars’, ‘look at’, ‘hold’, ‘eyes’, ‘sky’, ‘at night’, and ‘the earth’, which are not semantic primes? Probably most of them, though, are translatable into most languages. One little detail, the passage does not use the comparative construction. We don’t say that Galileo could see the sky better than other people before. That’s because we know that better is not a translatable word. Instead we say: ‘he could see the stars very well, not like people could see them before’. That gets across the essential idea without using the word better. I’ve got a number of final points (fig. 18). First, I don’t think the greatest value Minimal English is to help people to translate existing texts. Probably its greatest value is to help compose texts in translatable language in the first place. There is an amazing amount of information-based material being produced all the time in the world, intended to be translated into other languages: health guidelines, product manuals, safety guidelines, school textbooks, tourist information … In translation studies, people often call this “technical writing”, and they describe the translation process as technical translation (as opposed to literary translation). We think that Minimal English will be very useful to people doing technical writing and technical translation. It will save money, it will make for more efficient work flow, and more accurate and successful transmission of ideas across languages. By the way, as I’ve mentioned before, Minimal English doesn’t have a privileged status for any theoretical reason, it’s just practical because English is shaping up as a global lingua franca. But in particular parts of the world, Minimal Chinese, Minimal Arabic, Minimal Spanish would also be very useful. Second, I want to remind you that Minimal English is not fixed or static. It’s a kind of a project, a process. We are trying to get the idea out there. We think that even if people employ Minimal English only partially and imperfectly, things will still be better than they would be otherwise. That’s already a great thing. It’s a social benefit that can be brought about through linguistic knowledge.

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Figure 18 The future for Minimal English

This is another quote from the book Minimal English for a Global World: “we would like to think that the spirit behind the movement will be practical, open to adaptation, improvisation.” This slide (fig. 19, next page) is a summary of some possible benefits of Minimal English. It can improve international communication, it can improve clarity of thinking, it can help government agencies, NGOs and community groups express their key information in a way which is clearer and easier to translate. It does help safeguard against Anglocentrism, but that’s not the best selling point, I think, because this is not a burning concern for most people. If you are doing linguistic fieldwork with people in a minority culture, it’s very good to use Minimal English to help communicate with your consultants and to help them to communicate with you. There are also potential applications in language technology, including AI (artificial intelligence) and robotics. It’s hugely relevant to language teaching and language learning, because it gives some guidelines about what kind of vocabulary is best to teach early, and for other reasons that we’ll explore in lecture 9B, after some questions and a short break. Thank you!

Lecture 9B

This is the plan of lecture 9B (fig. 20). There are many different applications of NSM in language teaching. Some of you are experienced language teachers and

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Figure 19 Benefits of using Minimal English – e.e. English consisting of simple, cross-translatable words

I’m sure you have already been thinking about various possibilities. One thing about language teaching and language education is that it is intensely practical. You know the old saying in teaching, “What am I doing on Monday?”. You have to have a practical plan, you have to know how to apply ideas in classes and exercises. You people are the experts on that, not me. But if I had to choose one area where I think NSM can be helpful in language teaching, in ways that are not already obvious to you, it is cultural scripts. Most of this lecture is about using cultural scripts in the classroom. Of course, using NSM to help explain word meanings is very important, but you can probably figure out how to do that. Obviously, you may not always want to take an entire explication into the classroom, sometimes it may be better to take just the most important part, or the components that differ between the closest L1 and L2 words (cf. Sadow 2016, Tully 2016). But cultural scripts, I haven’t even talked about cultural scripts yet, although they are actually a very important part of the NSM research program. I am going to start by describing, in a very brief way, what this cultural script business all about. And then, I will explain how cultural scripts can be used to help with the cultural aspects of language education. The cultural script theory is like a “sister theory” of NSM. It’s how to do pragmatics—cultural pragmatics—using an NSM-based approach. After some background and context, I’m going to show you some examples of what we call “high-level” cultural scripts, important cultural scripts: one each from Anglo culture, Russian culture, and Spanish culture. That will give you the general idea, and then we will think about how we can use these cultural scripts in language teaching, including how we can adapt them into what we call

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Figure 20 Plan of lecture 9B

“pedagogical scripts”. This is a kind of script which is specifically designed to help language learners. The cultural script approach in general (fig. 21) is a method for describing cultural norms and cultural values using semantic primes—not to explicate words, but to explicate people’s social norms, assumptions and values in a way that makes sense to the people from that culture. That’s the so-called “insider perspective”. That’s a term from anthropology. When we talk about insider perspective, it means we are trying to describe things from point of view of the people concerned, from the point of view of the cultural insider. To do that, it’s very helpful to use simple non-technical words, words which exist in the language of the people concerned. As I just said, the “cultural scripts approach” (or, method) is like the pragmatic sister theory to NSM semantics. Another term you will find in the literature is “ethnopragmatics”. I mention that because I have edited a collection of studies called Ethnopragmatics (Goddard ed. 2006) and published a number of articles with the word ‘ethnopragmatics’ in their titles. Basically, ethnopragmatics is a label for doing semantics and pragmatics together using NSM methods. When working on cultural scripts, it’s often a good idea to do some lexical semantics, especially looking at the meanings of cultural key words and other special expressions at the same time. When we combine this kind of cultural semantics with cultural scripts, doing the two things together, it can be useful to have a term for that, and the term is ethnopragmatics. There have been many studies in ethnopragmatics and/or using the cultural scripts method. The conventional way of doing cultural pragmatics, for example, to describe the interactional or communication styles of different languages, is to use descriptive words like ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’, ‘formal’ and ‘informal’; or else to talk about cultural rules and practices of ‘politeness’ (see fig. 22). For example,

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Figure 21 Key points about the cultural scripts approach (also known as ethnopragmatics)

Figure 22 Problems with conventional approaches

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people may say that Russians are much more ‘direct’ than Anglos, or that Japanese people prefer more a ‘formal’ style of communication, or they may describe how to be ‘polite’ in Spanish. One problem with this approach is that words like ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’, ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, ‘polite’ and ‘impolite’, are obviously complex technical, or semi-technical terms, belonging to the vocabulary of English-speaking social scientists or linguists. They are not words which normally or necessarily exist in other languages, or if similar words exist in other, non-English languages, the meanings are almost always a bit different to the English meanings. Other terms which are often used in cross-cultural pragmatics and intercultural communication studies come from sociology: especially, ‘collectivist’ vs. ‘individualist’. I’m sure most of you have seen discussions in which such-and-such culture is described as ‘a collectivist culture’ or as ‘an individualist culture’. Western culture generally, and especially American culture, is often said to be very ‘individualist’. These terms are also problematical. For one thing, they are not very precise: probably most cultures in the world are ‘collectivist’. In a similar vein, some of you may have heard about ‘high context communication style’ vs. ‘low context communication style’, or ‘high power distance’ vs. ‘low power distance’. All of these terms are “outsider” terms. That is, they are ways of describing a culture from the outside, using a foreign language and foreign ideas. When you do that, there is an obvious risk of getting a distorted picture of how people themselves actually think; like, what does it all mean to them? Why they are behaving as they do, according to their own logic? The cultural scripts approach tries to say things from the point of view of the actual people concerned, from the insider perspective. This (fig. 23) is a slight indulgence because it is something to do with academic debate. Until quite recently, the most popular approach to crosscultural pragmatics was so-called “universalist pragmatics”, especially Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory and the supposed “maxims of conversation” based on the philosopher Paul Grice (1975). In recent times there has been a lot of criticism of universalist pragmatics, and I am one of the people who are critical. Some years back, I constructed this list of the Seven Deadly Sins of universalist pragmatics. First, universalist pragmatics seriously underestimates the amount of cultural shaping. To put it crudely, the idea behind universalist pragmatics is that at base, it is all pretty similar really, subject to some cultural variations. Well, I think that this vastly underestimates the scale and depth of cultural variation.

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Figure 23 Critique of Universalist Pragmatics

Second, because universalist pragmatics uses terms which are alien to the speakers, it inevitably creates an “outsider perspective”. It can’t reveal an insider perspective. Third, universal pragmatics creates a big gulf between pragmatics and the rest of cultural description. If we believe that language and culture are entwined, then we should be able to say something about connections between speech culture and rest of culture, but you will not find much about that in the Politeness Theory. They describe a model of communication without reference to cultural values or cultural history. Fourth, universalist pragmatics describes, but it can’t explain, and fifth, it is “terminologically slippery”. What I mean is that different authors use its technical descriptions, such as ‘polite’ or ‘formal’, with different meanings. Sixth, it is Anglocentric because it basically takes Anglo norms as a baseline, and any deviations from that baseline are explained by cultural factors. That is obviously Anglocentric. It’s not as if Anglos don’t have culture; of course they do. The English language and English speech practices are deeply culturally shaped, as much as any other language and culture system. And finally, because this kind of pragmatic description is based in the vocabulary of a foreign language, it’s inaccessible to the people themselves. You

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Figure 24 Cultural scripts: an Anglo example

can’t discuss positive and negative politeness with people in the village (unless you want to start by running tutorials about the face theory, and so forth). This has been a quick run-through of the inadequacies of conventional approaches to pragmatics. What’s the alternative? One alternative is to write about cultural norms using simple cross-translatable words. This is an example (fig. 24), first proposed by Anna Wierzbicka many years ago. It is a high-level cultural script, sometimes called a “master script”. It’s for modern mainstream speakers of Anglo English. People think like this: when someone does something, it is good if he or she can think like this: “I am doing this because I want to do it”. This is a widespread, taken-for-granted idea in English-speaking countries: that when someone does something, it is good if that person can think: “I am doing this because I want to do it”. That’s a very general thing and, to Anglos, it is a very obvious thing. It is not obvious, however, to people in every place in the world. When I’ve presented this little script in various non-Anglo countries, I’ve often had the reaction “Oh yes, that is the Western way of thinking”, or similar. Because it’s not presenting things in terms of doing what is good and or right for you as a father or mother, or as a older brother or sister, i.e. out of family responsibilities, or because of tradition, or out of religious duty, or anything else. The Anglo idea is that when you do things, you should be able to think ‘I’m doing this because I want to’.

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There are many different Anglo speech practices which are consequential upon this very high-level script, and I’m going give you an example shortly. But I want to first remind you why this is better than using a term like “personal autonomy”: better than saying, for example, that personal autonomy is a cherished Anglo cultural value. Maybe as an academic, I can find something to like about the term ‘personal autonomy’, but the problem is that it’s a technical expression that the average Anglo person doesn’t even know. If you stop an average Anglo person on the street and say: ‘Do you guys believe in personal autonomy?’, they will look at you strangely. So therefore, it cannot represent the insider perspective, the perspective of ordinary people. And it’s also not translatable across languages. It’s also not particularly useful in the language classroom to say that Anglo people generally value “personal autonomy”. You would have to start by explaining what you mean by personal autonomy. Of course, the script on fig. 24 is a generalization, but I would say, it’s a good generalization. And it’s clear. Now I will give you an example of a high-level Russian cultural script (see fig. 25). Russian speech culture is very different to Anglo speech culture. Normally, Anglo people experience Russians as very firm, quite loud, and insistent. They can be very sweeping in what they say. From an Anglo point of view, they can be intense. These judgements all depend on an implicit Anglo

Figure 25 Cultural scripts: a Russian example

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baseline, and the meanings of terms like ‘firm’, ‘insistent’ and ‘intense’ all stand in need of explication themselves. Leaving that aside, however, one can say that Russians are generally “expressive” compared to English people. But what do we mean by ‘expressive’? Here is one proposed Russian cultural script connected with “expressiveness”. people think like this: when someone is with other people, it is often good if he/she thinks like this: I want these people to know what I think, I want them to know what I feel. Anglos don’t have this script, and especially not the last bit, about wanting people to know how you feel. It is just a single script, of course, and there are many other related scripts, but it does capture a lot in a very succinct fashion. This too is a high-level script, i.e. it is at the top of the hierarchy of values. It is linked with the Russian cultural key word iskrennost’, which is roughly like “sincerity”. Russians value iskrennost’, which implies saying what you really think, what you really feel—not so much “looking after the other person’s feelings”. That’s not an issue. Rather than someone looking after your feelings, you would rather know what they really think. The most important thing is to be truthful, even if it is unpleasant sometimes. This is very different from the Anglo culture, with its “cult of consideration”. The Russian cultural script in fig. 25, linked with the value of iskrennost’, encourages frank and uninhibited expression, even if the message is confrontational or negative or socially unacceptable. There are some concrete examples on the slide, stressing that very frank expressions, and also “emotionally loaded” expressions, are common in Russian speech, or at least more so than in contemporary Anglo English. In modern English, from a Russian point of view, everything is qualified and everything is compromised. From an Anglo point of view, it is taking the other person’s feelings into account. Another language and culture which people often call “expressive” is Spanish, but I don’t think Spanish “expressiveness” is the same as Russian “expressiveness”. Of course, one must be a little careful because Spanish exists in many different versions and there is not just one Spanish-speaking culture. However, if you are speaking with Spanish-speaking people from whatever country, normally there are “feelings” coming through all the time. The script in Figure 26 has been proposed as a high-level Spanish cultural script:

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Figure 26 Cultural scripts: a Spanish example

often when someone says something to someone else, it is good if he/she thinks like this, “I want this someone else to know how I feel when I say this”. The phrasing ‘how I feel when I say this’ refers to one’s on-going feelings. This is not the same as the Russian script, which is more general: to say what you think and to say what you feel. The Spanish script is to show your feelings as you are speaking. What does this mean for a speaker? Well, here are some linguistic indicators in normal Spanish speaking. First and foremost, perhaps, prosody: there’s a lot more vocal dynamics than in English. There are a lot of intensifiers used, superlative constructions, exclamatory constructions, vivid turns of phrase. It can be quite difficult for Anglos, actually, to kind of “rev ourselves up” and speak in a Spanish fashion. We can speak grammatically correctly, but to speak pragmatically correctly, in culturally natural way, goes against some values of Anglo culture. The three scripts we’ve just looked at are high-level scripts, very general (see fig. 27). In any language and culture, there are many many cultural scripts. We don’t know how many, but it is certainly more than 20 or 30. In the tradition of ethnography of communication, which is a kind of anthropology that’s dedicated to studying communication, it is generally recognized that it’s a very complicated matter. I don’t think anyone has claimed to have produced a complete description of any speech culture. But this doesn’t mean we can’t try to make a start. We should make a start by finding the highest-level scripts, using concrete linguistic evidence as far as possible.

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Figure 27 Remarks on lower-level cultural scripts

When you set about mapping lots of scripts, you find that some of them are very situated, some of them depend on the other person (like, do I know the other person well or do I not know them well? do I think that the other person is someone above me or not?) There are a lot of ways in which scripts can be fine-tuned to specific situations, and we can also use cultural scripts to deal with things like sarcasm and exaggeration, which are often very tricky for language learners. And of course, what is “exaggeration” from one cultural point of view might just be normal in another culture. If you speak Russian, Spanish, or Arabic, a lot of the time you will be “exaggerating”, compared to English. Now let’s think about the relevance of cultural scripts to language teaching. Everybody knows that cultural competence is part of language teaching, and we do try to teach it, but there is a shortage of good methods for teaching cultural competence. I mean, it’s not very systematic. In theory, we all know that intercultural competence is a fundamental part of language learning, but we don’t know much about how to teach it, compared to what we know about teaching vocabulary and grammar. Maybe cultural scripts can be helpful. I’ve put some general observations from the language learning literature here (fig. 19). Cultural scripts are attractive as a way of teaching “pragmatic competence” (to use the applied linguistics terminology) or intercultural competence. They can help close the “theory-practice gap” identified by Diaz (2014) in a book-length study which surveyed many countries in the world. Diaz found a big gap between official policies and what the curriculum says, on the one hand, and how it plays out in practice, on the other. Many people working with cultural aspects of language teaching talk about the importance of “metapragmatic awareness”. This just means learners becoming more consciously aware of their own culture and the other culture.

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Figure 28 Teaching pragmatic competence using cultural scripts

It means thinking not in terms of absolutes and stereotypes (for example, “Americans are arrogant and talk about themselves all the time”), but instead connecting with cultural values and recognizing that what you see depends partly on your own point of view. Cultural scripts can help people develop metapragmatic awareness. Exposing learners to cultural scripts can also help them “notice” things that would otherwise escape attention. Noticing things, using selective attention, is a skill actually. And it’s often said in language learning that if you can help people to notice things, specific things, this helps them to learn (the so-called “noticing hypothesis”). The good thing about cultural scripts is that they are easy to understand and easy to translate into any language. This makes them much easier to bring them into the classroom, after some modification. It’s much easier to adapt them into a teaching context than technical pragmatics. The other great advantage of cultural scripts is they don’t just describe how people talk: they can help explain why they talk like that. Understanding the “why” is a really important part of appreciating other cultural practices, especially once you get past a basic level of language. Language learning is not just about production, you know, i.e. it is not just about what learners can say. It’s also about what they can understand, whether they can understand what’s going on around them, in the L2 cultural context.

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If they leave the classroom with ways of understanding that they can apply for themselves, that’s one of the greatest gifts you can give them. Figure 29 gives some quotes on the importance of teaching pragmatic competence. For reasons of time, I will not read them all. A lot of the applied linguistic literature stresses that pragmatic competence is really important—if only we could do a better job of teaching it. Some point out that the primary emphasis in the curriculum is always on vocabulary and grammar, with pragmatic competence relegated to third, fourth, or fifth place, sometimes almost like an afterthought. Warga (2007) suggests that pragmatic competence should be taught from as early as primary school. Clearly, we need to get pragmatic competence into the discussion on curriculum and to find ways of teaching it effectively. Now I want to give a couple more examples of Anglo English cultural scripts, not very high-level this time, sort of medium-level. This is the last part before we get to pedagogical scripts. We saw this high-level script earlier (fig. 30, top of slide), but now I want to ask: What are the consequences for ways of speaking, according to Anglo cultural logic? We touched lightly one of the consequences in Lecture 6, in connection with the proliferation of directive speech-act verbs in English. It’s that when you want to influence somebody else to do something—that’s not a straightforward thing in Anglo culture. You can’t just use your authority or high position, or rely on your role as a parent, for example, to issue a

Figure 29 Some quotes on the importance of “pragmatic competence”

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Figure 30 Anglo English rules against using direct imperatives and in favour of alternative strategies

straightforward imperative sentence (in effect, saying ‘I want to do this’). Because that would not be taking into account this high-level value: that when people do things, it’s good if they can think: “I am doing this because I want to”. So, you have to give the addressee some space, so to speak, or at least give the appearance of that. You often want to convey the message ‘It’s up to you’, as Anglo people say. I don’t want to force you and I’m not simply assuming that you will do it. Relatedly, in Anglo speech culture people often say that one shouldn’t tell people what to do. In many cultures, there is no problem telling people what to do. Not so in Anglo culture: you have to “ask nicely” and you have to suggest. But how do you “ask nicely”? There are many ways (see fig. 31). The pragmatics literature has identified some really amazing features of the English language. There are a great number of sentence patterns which express a directive message (essentially ‘I want you to do something’), … but instead of saying that you embed this message into a question-form. These question-form sentences are sometimes called “interrogative-directives” or “whimperatives”. (I don’t know if you are familiar with the latter term. ‘Whimperative’ comes from ‘wh-imperative’, where wh- indicates an interrogative. It is a play on words because of the slang word wimp, which means, roughly speaking, someone who lacks the courage to stand up for himself.) “Interrogative-directive” is the more literal term, for a sentence which is interrogative in form but directive in function.

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Figure 31 “Interrogative-directive” and “suggestive” formulas in English

So, we use: Would you …?, Could you …?, Would you mind …?, Would you like to …?, Do you want to …?, Why don’t you …?. There are a lot of these interrogative-directive formulas, and they all have slightly different meanings and convey slightly different effects. In Australia, the Would you mind …? formula is a really important one. One study in cross-cultural pragmatics showed that Australian police officers, when they stop someone for speeding, would often say to the driver something like: Would you mind showing me your licence?. Obviously, if a police officer says this to you, you will show your licence, you can’t really refuse—but the form of words used by the police officer gives the impression that the driver may choose not to comply. It is challenge for language learners to start learning these formulas and they need to know why it’s worth it. If they can see that using these interrogative directives is connected with important Anglo cultural values, then they may be more inclined to think “OK, I will try”, and pay more attention to precise details. Another type of Anglo English formula which is very common (also on fig. 31, bottom) is the so-called “suggestive” formula. For example: You might

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like to …, or Perhaps you could consider …, I suggest …, Have you thought of …?. Again, each of those formulas conveys a slightly different nuance of meaning and L2 learners should be warned, or rather, helped, to understand how important it is to use them. This is something which has been emphasized repeatedly by Anna Wierzbicka, who is herself an immigrant to an English-speaking country. In Poland, where she was born and educated, people don’t use “interrogative directive” and “suggestive” formulas nearly so much. Many speech cultures in the world don’t have such a wide range of commonly-used directive formulas as English. (The one exception is the ‘Can you …?’ formula, i.e. ‘Can you do it?’, which does seem to be fairly common, at least in European languages.) What happens if you don’t use these formulas appropriately? As Wierzbicka (2006) points out, there’s a serious risk that you will perceived as rude or pushy, or in more guarded, but still implicitly negative language, as direct, or very direct. According to Wierzbicka, interrogative directives “should be the subject of the first lesson in acculturation taught to every immigrant to an English speaking country”. Another example is Anglo sensitivity to so-called “personal remarks” (fig. 32). The term personal remark is a fairly common expression in ordinary English, even though its meaning is by no means obvious to cultural outsiders. When my son was in primary school, I was surprised to find that there was a school guideline against making “personal remarks” to the other children. Lots of parents were immigrants, who may have had no idea of what a “personal remark” is supposed to be. Well, one kind of personal remark has to do with the other person’s body. Anglo people are quite particular about not saying things about someone else’s body. That includes not only negative things like You’ve put on weight (which could, of course, be positive in the Chinese context) or You’re looking much older these days, but also positive statements, for instance, You’ve lost weight, or You look so young. These are regarded as “personal comments” to be avoided, unless you know someone very well. It is quite particular to Anglo culture, I don’t think such prohibition applies in Spanish, Polish, or Chinese. How to get this kind of thing across, quickly and accessibly, to cultural outsiders? Well, we can say that in Anglo culture there is a cultural script as follows: if I don’t know someone very well, it can be bad if I say something to him/ her about his body often if I say something to someone about his body, he/she can feel something bad because of it

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Figure 32 Anglo English rules against “personal remarks”

The first component gives the warning ‘it can be bad if …’, and second component spells out the possible consequences, i.e. that it can make the other person feel something bad. I think that, as a language learner, as soon as you see a script like that, it will have a great effect: “Ha, OK, I get it, I don’t want to do that”. I am not saying, however, we should always just take cultural scripts straight into the classroom. Sometimes they may seem too complicated, or too unfamiliar, even a bit weird. It seems sensible to think about ways of adapting cultural scripts to pedagogical contexts. This brings us to the topic of “pedagogical scripts” (fig. 33). As teachers, you should feel free to explore ways of adjusting cultural scripts so that they will be more effective in the classroom. Here are a few ideas. Some helpful changes are just matters of wording. For example, you may want to explicitly identify the L2 country. You may want to make the script more strongly directive, you may want to use more natural-sounding phrasing. For example: In Australia (or, in America), when you want someone to do something good for you, you can’t say something like this: “I want you to do something good for me, I know that you will do it”. If you say something like this to someone, he/she can feel something bad.

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Figure 33 Adapting cultural scripts for the classroom

Notice, once we have made these modifications, the script is not directly modelling an “insider perspective” anymore, but it is still based on an insider perspective and this could be very helpful to the language learners. We can even add stuff to the pedagogical scripts to “cancel” or counteract expectations that might come from the home culture (fig. 34). For example, with Chinese learners of English, we could use a pedagogical cultural script to help get across the importance of using interrogative requests and “suggestions”. For example, we could use the following script to get across the importance of using interrogative directives and words like maybe. In Australia (or, in America), when you want someone to do something good for you, it is often good if you say something like this: ‘I want to do something good for me. Maybe after I say this you will do it, maybe you won’t do it, I don’t know.’ But it may still be very difficult for a Chinese person to believe that this script applies equally to ‘people above you’ and to ‘people below you’, i.e. to people in higher or lower social positions, and even to people that you know very well,

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Figure 34 Adding contrastive information to pedagogical scripts

including (often) one’s own family members. It can be hard to believe because in Chinese culture it’s not like that. So, we can consider adding components which are intended to “cancel out” such expectations from the home culture. you say it like this if you know someone well, you say it like this if you don’t know someone well. you say it like this to someone below you, you say it like this to someone above you. Contrastive components like these are not part of the cultural scripts of the Anglo “insiders”, but they may be very effective to drive home the message with particular outsiders. I want to wind up now (fig. 35). I think that cultural scripts are one of the spin-offs of NSM which can be most useful in language teaching. It’s something we can give to teachers and we can trust teachers to find ways to use them. NSM linguists, who are linguistic scientists, are not necessarily the best people to figure out the practical uses of things in the classroom. I want to close on a broader idea: namely, that intercultural learning is not just learning about other people, it is learning about oneself as well. So, if you are a Chinese learner of English or if you are teaching English to Chinese learners, it’s important for the Chinese learners to get a better understanding of Chinese ways of doing things. Similarly, if I am trying to learn Chinese or Spanish, it will really help me if I can better understand my own Anglo English

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Figure 35 Concluding remarks

ways of doing things. It really helps me to appreciate another person’s point of view, if I have a clear understanding of my own point of view, and cultural scripts can help with that. Cultural scripts have many other potential applications, as you can imagine: in professional-client communication, in counselling, and in any area where effective communication is necessary. Thanks for your attention. That’s the end of this Lecture on applications of NSM.

Lecture 10

Retrospect: NSM Compared with Other Approaches to Semantic Analysis So, it seems that it’s the last lecture. I would like to say a big “Thank you” again to Professor Thomas Li, who can’t be here at this time. But you know, he is the organizer and mastermind of this entire amazing series of Cognitive Linguistics lectures. I also want to thank his team, all six or eight of them. The team is very competent and professional, and nothing could happen without them, so I thank you very much, team, especially the team leader Catherine. I also want to thank the regular participants—students, teachers, scholars, who have been following this series. It seems like a long time, but in another way, it’s not such a long time. So, we are coming into the last two hours of the 10 Lecture series. My plan for this final lecture is to give an overview of the NSM methodology and system and to compare it with other prominent linguistic approaches to meaning. So if you are here for the first time, you may still be able follow some things in this lecture. My reason for putting the overview at the end, not the beginning, is that I wanted the people who attended the 10 Lecture series to have received quite a lot information about the NSM approach and to have seen how it’s used across a lot of different areas of semantics and even pragmatics. Now we are going to begin with an overview of the NSM approach, so as to help position NSM against the other theories. For this purpose I want to put the emphasis on the question of metalanguage, because the most distinctive thing about the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach is that it pays a lot of attention to metalanguage. I will talk about why this is so important, then review the distinctive properties of the NSM approach, then start a series of comparisons with other theories and approaches.

All original audio-recordings and other supplementary material, such as any hand-outs and powerpoint presentations for the lecture series, have been made available online and are referenced via unique DOI numbers on the website www.figshare.com. They may be accessed via this QR code and the following dynamic link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5688556. © Cliff Goddard. Reproduced with kind permission from the author by Koninklijke koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004357723_011

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Overview: meaning and metalanguage

First, I will compare NSM with two theories which are in fact not cognitive, namely, formal semantics and so-called “extensionalist” semantics. The latter is the kind of semantics practised by the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics based in Nijmegen. Of course it is not only in Nijmegen, “extensionalist” semantics is a trend. The second set of comparisons is with theories that are explicitly cognitive in different ways: Ray Jackendoff’s Conceptual Semantics, the Generative Lexicon approach of James Pustevjosky and colleagues, and finally FrameNet, associated with the name of Charles Fillmore and his team. This is an overview, so I can’t possibly do justice to those five or six different theories and approaches, but I still hope to make an interesting overview for you. A good way to start thinking about semantics and meaning is to recognize there are actually two long traditions, traditions going back to ancient times, for thinking about meaning (fig. 1). Charles Fillmore (1986) proposed, quite a long time ago, that it all boils down to what you think meaning is about. If you think meaning is about the world, about the relationship between linguistic expressions and world, that’s one stand. That’s the objectivist or realist stand, and it’s associated with truth-conditional semantics. Alternatively, you can take the stand that meaning is about the mind, in which case you are doing … Fillmore called it understanding-semantics. So, it is the semantics of human understanding versus semantics of truth-correspondence to the world. This is the great divide between approaches to meaning in modern linguistics. Fillmore called the two positions T-semantics (truth-semantics) and U-semantics (understanding-semantics). NSM semantics, like Cognitive Linguistics generally, is firmly in the Usemantics tradition. When we do semantics through NSM, we are not interested

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directly in the relationship between linguistic expressions and the world (or any objective reality). We are interested in the relationship between linguistic expressions and what’s in our minds, the human understanding. And actually that expression echoes … you may remember from my very first lecture, when I was reviewing the western history of these ideas, the important 17th century philosophers Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz and John Locke. They both published important works called Essays on Human Understanding. First Locke, and then Leibniz, wrote essays on “human understanding”. I think that’s a nice detail. So, we are going along the path of human understanding, trying to understand what it means in our minds, in our thoughts, if you like. How can we describe what words, concepts or meanings mean to people, to us? The critical issue is that we would appear to have to use words. It’s a kind of paradox: we want to explain the meanings of words (and phrases and sentences built out of words), but we have to use words themselves as our method of identifying those meanings. When you use words or a language to describe another language, this is called metalanguage (figure 2). A metalanguage just means any language or set of terms that you use to describe another language. In the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, along with some other linguistic approaches that I will mention shortly, we think that metalanguage is THE issue, THE critical

Figure 2

The crucial issue of metalanguage

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issue. If you don’t get the metalanguage right, you are doing an unproductive, possibly largely self-defeating, kind of exercise. Patrick Hanks, who is a prominent English lexicographer, edited a huge compendium works on lexicography. Hanks didn’t have any problem saying what is essentially obvious, namely, that: “there is no metalanguage other than words themselves (in one language or another), or at a pinch derivatives of words such as logical symbols—for expressing thoughts about words” (Hanks 2007). Given this apparently obvious logical truth, it means that we have to pay attention to the kind of metalanguage we use to describe people’s concepts. We have to ensure, firstly, that the metalanguage we are using is not undermined by definitional circularity. Definitional circularity refers to a situation where, let’s say, expression “A” is defined in terms of “B”, and then expression “B” is later defined in terms of “A”. This is what, in the Anglophone tradition, is called a vicious circle. It’s where a definition (or pseudo-definition) essentially tells you nothing because all it does is re-cycle itself. Typical dictionaries are full of vicious circles. You look up the meaning of one word. You are sent off to find out about some other words. You look up the meaning of those other words. Sooner or later you come back to the first word. Nothing is learned, other than the fact that the words are all related. But the nature of the relationship and the content of the ideas, is not made clear at all. That’s one problem, one general theoretical problem. It applies to any system of semantic representation. You may use technical language, you may use logical symbols, but I am going to argue that all technical language, all logical symbols, and even diagrams, ultimately have to be understood in terms of ordinary language. They are all “derivatives”, as Hanks puts it, derivatives of words. The other great problem is ethnocentrism. Suppose our metalanguage of semantic description is based on one human language only, such as English. Is that a good idea? What if it’s the case that English packages meanings in an English-specific way, so that the metalanguage based on English words has some implicit culture-specific content? If we use such English-specific words to describe the cognitive meanings of people all around the world, Chinese people, people from Africa, India, anywhere in the world, we will basically be describing their thoughts through English words. Certain dangers present themselves: there may be cultural bias, ethnocentric bias, in our actual words – if we are not careful, if we don’t choose the words carefully. I am not saying that these problems are inevitable. I’m saying that they deserve attention. Unfortunately, however, most linguists are blind to the issue of metalanguage. You can read the works even of professional semanticists in many

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different approaches, and you will see that they never say a word about it. They don’t even use the term ‘metalanguage’. Logicians less so, logicians are a little bit more aware. Therefore in my opinion, even though it might sound shocking, I think that a lot of approaches to linguistic semantics don’t really have a firm and rigorous basis, because they have overlooked these fundamental questions about metalanguage. Many psychologists, linguists, and cognitive scientists generally, seem to think that once they have got a technical metalanguage, a set of technical terms, in hand, then they are off the hook. “No problem”, the thinking goes, “we are using a technical language, we know what we mean, and we can describe ordinary people’s thoughts using our technical language”. That’s semantic analysis. Well, in my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth. You cannot avoid definitional circularity by just spelling something in capital letters, or by using unusual terminology and claiming that you understand what you mean or that only experts can understand it. This is not a way of avoiding circularity and it’s not a way of expressing anything very clearly. It’s also not very likely that you are modeling the cognition of ordinary people, if you are modelling their cognition using terms which they would never even understand. There are so many reasons why our faith, so to speak, in technical language is misplaced. In fact, it all comes back to whether we can explain what we mean in ordinary language (fig. 3). John Lyons, who is one of the most famous English semanticists, back in his foundational 1977 textbook Semantics, said, talking about formalisms for describing meaning, that: “any formalism is parasitic upon the ordinary everyday use of language”, in the sense that it “must be understood intuitively on the basis of ordinary language”. Actually, when we learn technical language that is also the process: we initially learn the meanings of technical terms through ordinary language, and then, as we get more skill and more knowledge, we can do it more or less independently. Another semanticist Keith Allan, who has also written a very comprehensive introduction to semantics, says that formalism is “a degenerate form of natural language”, because in order to understand the formalism you mentally turn it back into ordinary language. And often, when we are reading logical formalism and technical descriptions of linguistics, we do exactly that. We look at the technical description and we think “Um, OK. That means that, this means that … now I get it.” Right? Very good logicians, very good formal semanticists, can be so fluent that they start using the mathematical terms almost as if they were everyday terms, I admit. But nonetheless, in the end it all comes back to ordinary language.

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The inescapability of natural language

And sure, there is no escape from language. If we are going to describe the concepts in people’s minds and link them with linguistic expressions, in the end we have to do it in terms of language, and ultimately in terms of ordinary language, even if we put technical terms between us and the language. There is no escape from the world of symbols (at least not for linguists). We cannot do our work without the use of symbols. While I am mentioning a number of important people, Yorrick Wilks is one of the founders of artificial intelligence studies. He used the term the “Escape Fallacy”, I think it is very nice. The Escape Fallacy is the belief that you can somehow “escape from the world of symbols” into some kind of objective world where significance comes about independently of symbols. Let me just say, I doubt it. Anyway, the NSM approach does not try to escape this human reality, the NSM approach accepts it. I hope it is now clear why we have to think very carefully about metalanguage, we have to think through how our descriptive metalanguage as semanticists can be based on natural language. How we can systematize and discipline, and in some sense “tame”, natural language in order to make it suitable for our purposes? There is another important school of linguistics which also sees the importance of metalanguage (fig. 4). This is the Moscow Semantics School. Unfortunately, this Moscow School is not very well known in the West, even though Igor Mel’čuk, who is one of its leading proponents, has lived in Canada for many years. Some of you may know more about it, because of the historical scholarly connections between China and Russia.

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“Moscow Semantic School” and semantic metalanguage

The Moscow Semantic School is the only other major school of semantics which clearly acknowledges the importance of semantic metalanguage. They were using the term “semantic metalanguage” already in the 1960s, insisting that semantic metalanguage is the fundamental problem in linguistic description. I want to mention two leading Moscow School scholars: Jurij Apresjan and Igor Mel’čuk. Apresjan is one of the world’s foremost lexicographers, perhaps the most amazing lexicographer. Igor Mel’čuk is most famous for Meaning-Text Model and Meaning-Text Grammar, which is a systematic approach to mapping between meaning and form. Apresjan (2000) summarizes their view as follows: “the metalanguage of lexicography is a subset of the object language … comprising a relatively small and unified vocabulary and syntax”. They have the idea of a minimal, very restricted, explaining language. “The basis of this language is semantic primitives”. The term ‘semantic primitives’ refers to meanings which are so simple that they can’t be further explained or defined. They are analogous to chemical elements, which can’t be broken down into any other elements. A semantic primitive, in principle, is a meaning which resists further explanation or decomposition. “With the aid of the metalanguage”, Apresjan writes, “complex semantic units of the object language … are reduced to a fixed structure of semantic primitives by a process of hierarchical breakdown”. As he says: “the fundamental similarity between the theories of Moscow Semantic School and those of Anna Wierzbicka can be seen at a glance”.

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Diagrams as representations of meaning

I am shortly going to return to Professor Anna Wierzbicka, the founder and originator of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory. Once you are not in North America, once you are in Russia, or in Central or Eastern Europe, Anna Wierzbicka and the NSM approach is very well known—unlike as in North America. For some reason, American linguists seem reluctant or resistant to learn about it. But wait. Maybe we don’t need language after all. This is kind of a digression, but I think it’s interesting. Maybe we can do a lot of work with diagrams, how about that? Actually, some varieties of Cognitive Linguistics make quite important use of diagrams of different kinds. I’ll just show you some of the most famous ones (fig. 5). These diagrams (right-hand side of fig. 5) are so-called image schemas [they appear first without any captions]. If you already know what they are supposed to mean, it may be very comforting to see them because you can make sense of them. But if you don’t already what they mean, actually, without captions or prior instructions, you can’t tell. You could take a guess. Actually this one [revealing the captions of the two left-hand diagrams] is supposed to be CYCLE, and this one is supposed to be CENTER-PERIPHERY. These are the names of the image schemas. The diagrams are used to “visualize” the concept of those two particular schemas. Here (at the far right of the slide) we have three more diagrams, and you can see that there is a resemblance between them. There is an arrow. And that arrow (pointing to each right-hand side diagram, starting from the top), it comes from inside of the circle, or it comes from inside of the circle and goes out to the

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Diagrams cannot be semiotically self-contained

dotted line, or else it’s just the arrow. At one end the arrows have LM written on them, and at other end they have TR written on them. If you know this system, you will know that these letters refer to a Landmark and Trajector, respectively, which are terms in Ronald Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. But my point is that the diagrams don’t mean anything if you don’t already know the significance of the graphic conventions. It’s not the case that the diagram has a meaning and the words just come along and help you explain it. It’s the other way around. The diagram is only interpretable through the captions and labels. What I’m trying to say is that the real work, or, at least, the great part of the work, is being done by these verbal descriptions. You can’t escape into a purely diagrammatical world, so that’s why it says (on fig. 5) that: “even apparently simple and transparent visual depictions are not semiotically self-contained. They can’t do their work without verbal support”. To dramatize this point, it’s very interesting to look at graphic depictions of meaning from other, unfamiliar cultures. So for instance (fig. 6), this one here at the top-right (pointing to the diagram labelled (a)), it looks a bit like an arrow, right? Actually, it means kangaroos, because it’s a kangaroo track (footprint). And this one, labelled (b), also looks a bit like an arrow. Well, that’s actually an emu track. If you come

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from central Australia, from the indigenous people of central Australia, there is instant recognition, just like when we see an arrow and think of movement. Why is that? Because we are used to arrows, and the diagram is parasitic on our understanding of an arrow that moves one place to another. We know that the thing at the end (of the arrow) indicates direction, and so on. Now these ones (also at the right of the slide). Would you believe that the circles represent a camp? That is a camp, or it could also be a water hole. And these ones here (the semi-circles at the left and right of the concentric circles) are people, two people sitting by camp. There is an iconic basis for the U-shape. It is based on the fact that when people sit on the sandy ground, there is an impression left in the sand by people’s bottoms. My point is that when we look at a diagram and “see” meaning in it, we always depend on some interpretive conventions. No diagram can be semiotically self-contained, not even simple ones like these. In Cognitive Linguistics, some scholars use very complex diagrams, such as these (indicates (a) and (b) at the left of slide, which first appear without captions). They go back to classic work by Leonard Talmy (1988) on Force Dynamics. I’m quite sure that if you show these diagrams to people who don’t already know what they are, they would have no clue what the diagrams represent. You need to know what the various graphic elements mean; for instance, that these arrow-like things mean ‘force tendency’. This one means ‘tendency to movement’, and this one, where there is a big black dot, means ‘tendency to rest’. You also have to know some other stuff: what the plus-sign means, and that the bottom part is giving you an outcome. What I’m trying to say is that the diagram is like a visual summary of the description, or else it’s a visualization of the description. It is not independent of the description, it depends on the description. So, conclusion: there is actually no escape from reliance on natural language. Natural language has to be its own metalanguage. We have to do what Apresjan and the Moscow School recommended, which is to use a subset of the larger natural language (what they called the object language, the object language being the language described). We have to identify the smallest subset of words and grammatical patterns which will enable us to describe the larger language. This brings us to the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, because that’s exactly what the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach has sought to do. The distinctive properties of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach are by now well-known to the regular participants of this lecture series. In fig. 7, I’m presenting them using a different order.

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Distinctive properties of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach: summary

As I said earlier, the most distinctive thing about the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach it is that sees metalanguage as the Number One fundamental issue in semantic description. If you are not prepared to talk about your metalanguage and to explain what it is and why it is so, then you are not making the grade, and you are also going to get into methodological problems later. The second distinctive thing is that the NSM researchers have been doing empirical research for, let’s say, 45 years, to identify through experimentation, through semantic analysis, what are the basic meaning units of language. The NSM metalanguage is not based on philosophical speculation. People who were here for Lecture 1 know that in the 17th century, many European philosophers believed that there are “simple ideas”, basic ideas which all humans share, but instead of trying to find them out by empirical work they did it by a kind of meditation and pure thought. Only one of those 17th philosophers— Leibniz—believed that you couldn’t rely on pure thought. He believed in what we would now call experimental semantic decomposition: what you had to do was try to explain words in terms of other words, for a long time, always trying to reduce the number of words that you retain in your explanations or definitions. His was an empirical, analytical approach. That’s also been the approach of Anna Wierzbicka and her colleagues since 1972, when the Leibnizian program was revived. Since that time, now about 45 years, the linguists working in this approach believe that they have identified 65 basic indefinable meanings, which we call semantic primes. (The term means the same thing as ‘semantic primitives’ actually; but it seemed

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useful to have a brand name or term which was specific to the NSM theory.) A semantic prime is a word meaning which is regarded as irreducible, in the sense that it can’t be defined in terms of other words. Semantic primes are essentially “concepts”. They are expressible by words, but in the end they are not words. They are meanings of words, or concepts which we indicate by words. We could talk for a long time about these issues. I think I will just mention two points which may make it clearer. First, we believe that infant children, even before they have much language, have quite a lot of concepts. So, they can have concepts before words, and they acquire words later. Second, consider chimpanzees, and other very intelligent primates. Primatologists talk a lot about chimpanzee cognition: it’s very clear that chimpanzees can think. Not exactly as we do, of course, but there are substantially shared elements between human thinking and chimpanzee thinking. Of course, chimpanzees don’t have language as we know it, and especially they don’t have words. Both infant cognition and chimpanzee cognition can be modelled using semantic primes (though the inventory of primes appropriate in each case is not identical to that possessed by adults humans, cf. Wierzbicka (2016), Goddard, Wierzbicka and Fábrega (2015). We cannot go into the details here but since neither very young infants or chimps have words, the general point is that semantic primes can exist as elements of cognition, independently of words. A key feature of the NSM approach is that it tries to be implementable in all languages. The assumption is that if there is a small rock bottom set of indefinable concepts, it is likely that they are going to be the same in all languages and cultures. One can’t be completely sure, of course, but it is a hypothesis, a hypothesis of universality. The implication is that the NSM approach tries to make sure that its metalanguage is not dependent on English in any important way. We ought to be able to identify semantic primes not only using the English language, but also using other languages—in principle, in any language. We should be able to find how those 65 basic concepts are expressible through words or phrases in all languages. NSM linguists are seriously committed against Anglocentrism. Unfortunately, I think that NSM is possibly the only linguistic theory which takes an explicit stand against Anglocentrism at this moment. A lot of practising linguists take a stand in their practical day-to-day work, but on the question of whether it should be a principle that meanings (we are talking about meaning here, not syntax) must be described in a non-Anglocentric way, I think you’ll find that NSM is pretty well the only theory which declares itself to be a non-Anglocentric theory, or at least trying.

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Another interesting thing, as I will explain further later, is that the NSM theory doesn’t comply with the typical dichotomies that are used to organize discussions on these matters. You know, people seem to have a very binary way of thinking, so they often make distinctions between ‘formal’ and ‘natural’, or between ‘empiricists’ and ‘rationalists’, or between ‘universalists’ and ‘relativists’. The NSM approach doesn’t fit neatly into any of these normal dichotomies. It’s both formal and natural. It’s both universalist and relativist. It’s interested in both lexicon and grammar. The NSM approach is very ambitious. Its metalanguage is intended to be comprehensive. It should be able to capture meaning distinctions in any realm of the lexicon or grammar. Anything that is capable being paraphrased, we want to be able to paraphrase it. There are some things, to be sure, that cannot be paraphrased. There are certainly iconic-indexical parts of language which cannot be captured in words—but conceptual content in the normal sense can be, and the NSM theory is extremely comprehensive. Finally, it is humanistic. Humanistic in the sense that it is about people and human understanding. NSM linguists tend to be very interested in making links with other humanities subjects. The theory and its works attract a lot of attention from people in literature, in cultural studies, in cognitive anthropology, and other studies of cultural expression, and of course, in pragmatics. In no sense is it a narrow, technical, isolated form of linguistic description. People who have been attending the previous lectures will recognize Anna Wierzbicka, the originator of the theory (fig. 8). As described on the slide, NSM is a formal system based on a small set of words and meanings shared between all languages. It’s a formal system based on the intersection or common core of all languages. The system was originated by Wierzbicka, whose first major publication was in 1972, and it has been steadily growing since, slowly at first, and recently, at a more rapid pace. It’s a controversial approach. It is in no way the dominant approach. Actually, in semantics, I’m not sure that there is a single, dominant approach. Semantics is of one of the most controversial aspects of linguistics, with many different rival approaches. But if you look at objective evidence, for instance, number of publications, citation figures, and the longevity of publications, you will have to say that the NSM approach is one of the most well-developed approaches. Also, it is probably the approach to semantics with the strongest record of investigating other languages. A great variety of phenomena and a great variety of languages have been studied using the NSM method. For people who haven’t seen it before, this (fig. 9) is a table of semantic primes, i.e. the elements here on the left-hand side. It is of course just a

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Key points about the NSM approach

summary presentation, a vocabulary list of the 65 semantic primes. This list is given in English, but comparable lists have been made in about 30 languages. Lists in 20 languages are available now on the internet at the NSM Homepage, including Chinese, but also in languages like Ewe from West Africa, Farsi or Persian, and Longgu from the Solomon Islands. This is only a small sample of all the languages in the world, that’s true, but it is a diverse sample of genetically, culturally, and geographically unrelated languages. So far so good. It appears that all or most of the primes have a very good chance of having lexical equivalents in different languages. There are some complications that can arise when identifying exponents of semantic primes. Lecture 2 was about these issues, but here I haven’t got time to go into all that again. The second thing I want to point out is that every semantic prime has its own “little grammar”. Overall, of course, NSM is a kind of “mini-language”. It has a mini-vocabulary, and of course it has a mini-grammar, too. That is, it has some principles that enable us to join the primes together to form phrases and sentences. Every single semantic prime should have a well-specified grammar. We normally display it using this Chart of the NSM Semantic Primes (see fig. 10), which is also available on the Internet. It is a graphic display. Each box represents a semantic prime, and inside the box there are examples of what we call its “basic grammatical frames”; in other words, the possible

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Semantic primes – English (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014)

Figure 10 Chart of NSM Semantic Primes

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combinations and grammatical potentials that we expect each semantic prime to have. So, the NSM metalanguage is a lot of more than just 65 primes. You’ve got 65 primes, but usually 3 or 4 different grammatical frames are available to each prime. The metalanguage is surprisingly flexible and surprisingly expressive. Now, we can use this metalanguage of semantic primes as a tool for semantic analysis. In one sense, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage is a research finding: the bold and ambitious claim that we may have discovered the shared core of human cognition embodied in languages around the world. But the Natural Semantic Metalanguage is also very useful as a tool of semantic description, because we can use these 65 words and their associated grammar to describe the meanings of other words. All the thousands upon thousands of words in any language, with all their variations and meanings, all the complex languagespecific grammar…. in principle, all that ought to be describable using this very small metalanguage. When we do that, we are doing what’s called “semantic explication”. A semantic explication is a paraphrase of what someone is saying or what we interpret them to be saying. This paraphrase, the interpretive text, is called an explication. We can also use Natural Semantic Metalanguage to capture cultural norms, and we call those “cultural scripts”. It is a very good thing to have a simple, cross-translatable metalanguage. To the extent that you can use it to describe words and meanings, you are freeing your descriptions of vicious circles and you are detaching your descriptions from the grip of the English language. You can transpose explications across languages, and equally, you can do NSM semantics in other languages; for example; you can do NSM semantics in Chinese, using Chinese exponents of primes. I have to mention that, as people attending the full lecture series already know, the metalanguage does not consist solely of semantic primes. We also allow in a bunch of more complex meanings which we call “semantic molecules”. These are meanings which appear to be very basic to human thinking, and which form part of many other concepts. A fair number of them may even be universal. But they are themselves decomposable into primes. They are words like, for instance, ‘hands’, ‘sky’ and ‘water’. People who attended previous lectures would know, we dealt with these quite a lot in Lecture 5. So, that’s basically my warm-up description of what’s distinctive about the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Before we start comparisons with other theories, I want to explain my claim that NSM does not fit neatly into the standard dichotomies (see fig. 11). NSM is both “universalist” and “relativist”. (So we please no-one, actually.) The NSM claim is that all human cognition that can be modelled in language

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Figure 11 Beyond the standard dichotomies

can be captured in terms of a shared core of 65 semantic primes and a minimal grammar, and a number of semantic molecules. That’s a very strong universalist claim. Now, in linguistics, but more so in the humanities broadly, there are plenty of people who are against universalism in general. Some have even said that “the universal is always Bad News”. But on the other hand, consider that the claimed universal core is so very small. In an average language, there will be at least 10–20,000 words, and most words will have several meanings. So, there are thousands upon thousands of meanings which are potentially variable across cultures, and according to the studies of NSM linguists, word meanings do vary tremendously across languages and cultures. In that sense, NSM appears to be radically relativist, because we are saying that the vast majority of words and grammar of any language is open to cultural variation. As stated in the quotation from Wierzbicka (fig. 11), NSM can be rightly characterized as both “radically universalist” and “radically relativist”. Likewise, NSM is both “formal” and “natural” (fig. 12). There is actually no contradiction between formal and natural, if you really get what “formal” means. Formal doesn’t mean symbols with no meaning, though that is an interpretation which has been popularized in generative linguistics. If you have a minimal language, with all the terms well-specified and the grammar and combinatorial properties well-specified, you have a formal system. That’s actually what a formal system is. It’s a system where everything is well-specified and explicit. Now, consider Nick Enfield’s comment back in 1992. He said that “many linguists are unable to appreciate” (that’s an understatement) “… are unable to

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Figure 12 Beyond “formal” vs. “natural”, beyond “lexical” vs. “grammatical”

appreciate NSM’s unique achievement of unifying formalism and naturalism in a single descriptive and analytical system”. And to a large extent that’s because people who are interested in formal systems are often blinded by the naturalistic aspects of NSM. They see ordinary words, rather than technical symbols, and they think that it’s not formal, but actually that’s mistaken, as Keith Allan comments. I am not saying that NSM is completely formalized, but in Allan’s (1992) words, “it is approaching the standard of a formal metalanguage, because fundamental terms and combinatorial principles are all explicitly defined”. The critical point is that formal doesn’t necessarily mean artificial or invented. It is quite possible to imagine a formal system carved out of natural language, a disciplined and systematized subset of natural language. (When we look later at formal semantics, I will show you a quotation from Tarski, one of 20th century’s most brilliant logicians, that bears on this issue.) Another dichotomy which NSM violates, so the speak, is the distinction between lexical meaning and grammatical meaning. NSM deals with both—and in fact, it doesn’t see a strict dividing line between lexical and grammatical meaning (as regular attendees of this lecture series already know). We believe in constructional meaning, i.e. we think that there are certain specialized constructions which encapsulate highly specific meanings. In such cases, one needs to explicate the whole construction, the sort of Gestalt of it, the whole thing.

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ONE, TWO, SOME, MUCH-MANY

number-marking (incl. duals, paucals)

THE SAME, OTHER

switch-reference, obviation, reflexives, reciprocals

WANT

imperatives, purposives, “uncontrolled” marking

KNOW, SEE, HEAR, SAY

evidential systems

DO, HAPPEN

active marking, passive voice, inchoatives

FEEL, THINK

expressive derivation, experiencer construction

GOOD, BAD BIG, SMALL

benefactives, adversatives diminutives, augmentatives

VERY

superlatives, expressives

NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME FOR SOME TIME, IN ONE MOMENT ABOVE, BELOW, NEAR, FAR, ON (ONE) SIDE PART OF

tense systems (incl. degrees of remoteness) aspect (durative, punctual) elaborate locational deixis body-part syntax (“inalienable possession”)

Figure 13 Semantic primes and associated morphosyntactic systems found in the world’s languages

Now I will show you something new (fig. 13), something that not even the people who have been coming regularly have seen before. If you look at the morphosyntactic systems in the world languages, many of them seem to be associated with certain semantically primitive meanings. The semantic primes ONE, TWO, SOME, and MUCH~MANY: they are the basic elements of number systems. Not all languages have number systems in their nominal morphology, but many do, and these are the kind of semantic elements involved. Some languages, well, all languages I think, have a little bit of this in their pronoun systems. Some pronoun systems have dual pronouns: that’s a grammaticalization of the semantic prime TWO. THE SAME and OTHER, these semantic primes are involved in switchreference systems and in systems of obviation. These are markers, found in some languages, which indicate whether the subject of one sentence is the same as or different from the preceding sentence, or whether somebody that we are talking about is someone other than the person whom we were talking about just recently. The semantic prime WANT is critically involved in the imperative construction, and in purposive constructions. The primes KNOW, SEE, HEAR, and

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SAY, these become grammatically encoded into evidential systems. If a language has evidential marking, it’s very likely to include a so-called “hearsay” evidential, expressing a meaning like ‘I know it because someone says something’. Also common are markers of so-called auditory knowledge (HEAR) and visual knowledge (SEE). As for the primes DO and HAPPEN, and the relationship between DO and HAPPEN, languages that have “passive” construction and “active” constructions are very interested in the relationship between DO and HAPPEN. These constructions enable one, roughly speaking, to take a DO-sentence and turn it around into a HAPPEN-sentence. There’s also the inchoative construction which is heavily based on HAPPEN. THINK and FEEL are primes which are involved in what linguists call “expressive derivation”. The term can be a bit unclear in the literature, but often it is used to designate linguistic constructions which are to do with good (or bad) feelings directed towards someone. Likewise, “experiencer constructions”: in many languages, the grammar of experiencer constructions involves both THINK and FEEL. GOOD and BAD, of course, are involved in benefactive and adversative constructions. Malefactive is another technical term used to describe constructions involving BAD. The prime SMALL gets grammaticalized in some languages in systems of diminutives, and many languages have so-called augmentatives, i.e. special morphology for describing something as bigger than expected, along with, usually, some kind of derogatory effect. VERY is involved in superlative constructions and expressives. The temporal primes like NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, FOR SOME TIME, A LONG TIME and so on, … if you look at tense systems in the world’s languages, you’ll see that these are the semantic ingredients that are needed to deal with tense systems. Obviously BEFORE and AFTER are needed for past and future, but there are also languages which distinguish degrees of remoteness. For example, there may be a “remote past” category: i.e. a past category ‘a long time ago’ or ‘a very long time ago’. The semantics of aspect, both lexical aspect and inherent aspect, is very much concerned with duration (FOR SOME TIME) vs. “punctualness” or suddenness (IN ONE MOMENT). Some languages have elaborate systems of locational deixis, i.e. instead of just having terms like ‘this’ and ‘that’, there might be three, four or five different words, depending on how far away the thing is. The semantics of spatial deixis usually involves semantic primes such as NEAR and FAR. In mountainous areas, spatial deictics sometimes indicate whether a location is ABOVE or BELOW where you are at the moment of speaking. Some languages even have

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spatial deictics for things which are ‘towards the coast’ or ‘in the interior’, and if we analyze the meaning, it has to do with being ON ONE SIDE or other of the sea. The last prime listed in fig. 13 is PART. Many, perhaps most, languages have some specialized “body-part” syntax. Of course, figure 13 is not a complete list of semantic primes, it is just a selection, and not all grammar expresses cognitive meaning, but a lot of it does. My point is that we want to capture the meanings expressed by these kinds of morphosyntactic constructions, and to do so in a cross-linguistic perspective, semantic primes are extremely helpful. So, contrary to what one might think at first, there is no reason to make a strict separation between lexical semantics and grammatical semantics, because many grammatical constructions in different languages encode meanings which can be captured in paraphrases. The next section of the lecture is about comparisons with non-cognitive approaches to semantics. Let’s start with formal semantics (fig. 14). Formal semantics is one of the most important approaches to semantics in linguistics at the moment. It comes out of a tradition of mathematical logic and symbolic logic. It’s not part of the cognitive tradition, the tradition of U-semantics, in Fillmore’s terms. It is a part of T-semantics, the tradition which is concerned with the relationship between linguistic expressions and the world. The basic concern from the beginning was to ensure that our reasoning

Figure 14 NSM compared with formal semantics

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processes are safe; that if we start with true premises and conduct some reasoning, we can be sure to arrive at true conclusions. Truth is very important to formal semantics and logic, and in these disciplines truth is normally construed in terms of the relationship to the world or to some model of the world. That’s very different to NSM and Cognitive Linguistics in general. Formal semantics is not cognitive, it’s truth-functional. A second distinctive thing about formal semantics is that it focuses on a rather narrow range of phenomena. Most work in truth-functional or formal semantics deals with reference and quantification and related topics, including aspect (because one can formalize aspect in a such way that involves quantification). It is really no good for ordinary lexical semantics. It won’t help you capture the difference between miserable and unhappy, or explain the difference between the English word friend and the Russian word друг drug. I am not saying that formal semantics couldn’t be extended in its coverage in some future world. At present, however, it tends to deal with the sort of phenomena which are understood in generative grammar to belong to socalled “logical form”. This is consistent with the idea that formal semantics is really a kind of formal logic. It’s the kind of formal logic which can be grafted onto a generative description, and it covers that little bit of meaning that generative linguists are prepared to let in. Generally speaking, as I mentioned earlier, Chomskyan linguistics is very unfriendly to meaning. It shows no interest, except for logical semantics. But I must say, there are some similarities in spirit between formal semanticists and NSM linguists. In my own life experience, I’ve often had very good discussions with formal semanticists, firstly, because they are usually not dogmatic or single-minded about their formal notations. They are always aware of what they call the “intuition” underneath the formalism. If you look in formal semantics papers, you will constantly find expressions like this: “the basic intuition is that …” or “informally …”. And they can be very good at making minute distinctions of semantic detail. From that point of view, they appreciate one thing about Natural Semantic Metalanguage, namely, that it aspires to be really rigorous. A lot people in linguistics, especially in the culturally-oriented varieties of linguistics, and even in some types of Cognitive Linguistics, actually don’t like the word ‘rigour’. They think it’s, you know, pointless or hopeless to pursue rigour, and some even consider it a bad sign if somebody is interested in rigour. You won’t get that reaction from formal semanticists. As well, they can be quite tolerant, I suppose because the assumptions of the two theories (NSM and formal semantics) are so different that they don’t actually compete with each other.

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Figure 15 A formal system based on natural language

Now I want to go to this quotation (see fig. 15) from Tarski. The root reason formal semanticists don’t want to use natural language as their metalanguage is that they think it’s impossible to systematize it. Natural language is too vague, too subjective, and there’s too much polysemy. Tarski (1935) expressed the view that if you want to pursue the semantics of ordinary language, using natural language, and to do it with what he calls “exact methods”, this would lead to “the thankless task of the reform of this language … to define its structure, to overcome the ambiguity of the terms which occur in it”. Tarski was right, it is a Herculean task. And he also said that: “in the end, it could be doubted whether the language of everyday life, after being rationalized in this way, would still preserve its naturalness or whether in the end it will take on features of the formalized languages”. Now my proposition to you is that, actually, NSM linguists have tried to undertake this task. We don’t think it’s exactly thankless (although a lot of people have not appreciated our efforts, that’s for sure), but we have now arrived at the following conclusion: it is indeed possible to have a tiny vocabulary and to expunge these words of unwanted additional meanings. Partly that is done by only allowing a very narrow range of grammatical patterns. It is also true that the NSM language is not fully natural, depending on what we mean by “natural”. It is not fully natural in the sense that it doesn’t sound like ordinary speech. If you try speaking using only 65 words and a very basic grammar, it’s

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Figure 16 NSM compared with “extensionalist” semantics

not going to sound like ordinary speech. It’s actually going to sound a little bit like a logical language. But at the same time, we don’t think the “naturalness” of NSM is seriously compromised, because it is still understandable through ordinary language, and in fact, ordinary people can learn it rather quickly. (Once people hear that “yes, it does sound a little bit funny because we only use such a small number of words, ignore that”, most people get the idea very quickly.) So we think although Tarski had understandable doubts, there is no inevitable gap between natural language and formal language. It is possible and practical to formalize, or at least largely formalize, natural language. That’s what NSM linguists think we’ve done. Now I want to move onto a completely different type of non-cognitive semantics: “extensionalist” semantics (fig. 16). What I am going to say is a bit controversial because many people who do extensionalist semantics actually say that they are investigating cognition. The leading person would probably be Stephen Levinson, in his capacity as the director of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands. They are very interested in acquiring comparable “data sets” from different languages. Their idea is that

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you base your work around sets of stimuli. You create sets of suitable stimuli that you can take around the world to different field locations. They are quite careful about how they do it, they workshop it in-house, and then they have a “field season” when they send out linguists to different locations around the world and gather in the language data. The stimuli can be pictures, e.g. photographs or line-drawings of certain things, they can be models, they can be video-clips. They can be kits of items and standard tasks; for example, we put a dividing wall between you and your friend, both of you have the same map or model in front of you; you have to move something around on the model and your task is to describe to your friend what’s happening. That forces you to use lots of spatial language, which will differ from language to language, and as well, the task may be approached using different strategies. The MPI linguists are able to harvest a great deal of varying but comparable data from the same standardized set of stimuli. Analyzing this data, Levinson calls “stimulus-based comparative semantics”. The term “extension”, by the way, originated from philosophical logic. It refers to the range of use or the range of reference of a particular word or expression. The idea is that we can capture the extension or the range of use, using the standardized stimuli-sets. Then we can compare data from different languages and in the process we will find out a lot of things. The classic work, the foundational work, in this approach was actually done using a stimulus set called the “Munsell color chips”. The Berlin and Kay (1969) theory of “basic color” meanings all goes back to the fact that there was an array of little color chips which had been scientifically created to represent all possible hues. You take those chips around the world, to people in different languages and cultures, and get people to group them and name them according to the words in their language. In my view, this is not cognitive, but let me explain a bit more about the procedure first. The extension or range of use of different forms is typically presented in the form of a map, or a diagram, as shown at the right-hand side of fig. 16. Each one of these little cells is a picture of a different spatial situation. There are a lot of them, like: a ceiling on top of a house, a table with something long and flat lying on it, or something round on that table. You gather data on how these different spatial configurations are described in languages. This diagram is taken from one of the early publications (Levinson et al. 2003), dealing with spatial adpositions (prepositions or postpositions) in four languages. The research team takes the use of the adpositions and tries to fit them all together onto an arrangement or array of the spatial configurations. If you do that, what you discover is that among these spatial adpositions in the four languages,

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none of them overlap perfectly with the others. Their ranges of use are crosscutting. They don’t have any common core. None of them share any common core of reference or extension. Now that’s very interesting, but it is actually not telling us anything about the speakers’ concepts. It’s telling us about the range of use of the adpositions. One of them was the English preposition on. Now what if on is a polysemous word, with several different meanings? That possibility is not taken into account. All the mapping does is show the entire range of situations that on can be used about. So that’s my second objection. The first objection is that a map showing the range of the use of the word is not telling you about people’s concepts. If you want their concepts, we need some other way of accessing their mental states, we don’t have that. The second thing is that these extensionalist researchers don’t do thorough language-internal analysis, or only rarely, in order to control for polysemy. Range of extension does not equal conceptualization. Consider body-parts. We assume that all humans share basically the same bodies, but it doesn’t mean that everybody thinks about their bodies in a same way. It’s an open question: whether people divide up the body conceptually the same way in all languages, and even when they do, to what extent do they conceptualize their body-parts in the same ways, and to what extent they do not. So, while I think these stimuli kits are useful ways of getting data, they are not a substitute for cognitive or conceptual analysis. I will show another type of diagram, because it’s very pleasing (fig. 17). This is a famous diagram from Bowerman and Choi (2007) about English and Korean. They also conducted studies using pictures that showed different kinds of spatial relationships. Korean-speaking subjects and English-speaking subjects were asked to describe what was going on, in their respective languages. To summarize the results, they figured out an arrangement of the stimuli and they just put a line around stimuli that were described using the same forms. For example, (pointing to slide, left-hand side), this side is English. There is one line around the situations described using English put on (at the top), and one around put in (at the bottom). You can compare this with Korean, where they use not adpositions but certain special verbs whose use is shown on the right-hand side. One of the Korean verbs, for example, means something like “squeeze something in” (a “tight fit”). My point is, the diagram is very good way of summarizing the data, but is that telling us about those people’s concepts? In my opinion: no, not directly. It shows the range of use and that is valuable information, but it’s not showing the speaker’s concepts.

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Figure 17 Extensionalist approaches

Another problem with this extensionalist method is that it is not very good for non-concrete domains. If you want to talk about human feelings, thought processes, or social values, it is pretty difficult to do it using stimulus-sets. And the study still does not take into account language-internal polysemy. I myself have done a couple of studies of the English spatial preposition on (Goddard 2002b, 2003a), and I believe that it demonstrably has several discrete meanings. So, it is quite possible that if we look separately at the different meanings of on, one of them may overlap fully overlap with one of the Korean expressions, such as nohta (in the small circle at the top-right of the diagram). In short, there are multiple problems with making the jump from extension to conceptual semantics. In my view, the extensionalist method is basically a data-gathering exercise. It is a stimulus-response approach to meaning (reminiscent of behavourism, if anything), rather than a cognitive approach. Now I must add that many linguists who work with this methodology bring their own personal knowledge of the languages to bear, including their knowledge about language-internal facts, and, sometimes, subtler aspects of meaning. Depending on how much insight is added by the individual linguist, to allow us to interpret and understand the extensionalist facts, they can produce

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Figure 18 Ray Jackendoff’s “Conceptual Semantics”

a very good analysis; but such additions and interpretations are not part of the extensionalist methodology as such. We have looked at two non-cognitive approaches. Now I want to look at the cognitive approaches, beginning with Ray Jackendoff’s Conceptual Semantics (see fig. 18). Jackendoff is the one of the major theorists, if not the major theorist, of conceptual semantics within the fold of generative grammar. He has been a long-time friend and ally of Noam Chomsky. Jackendoff adopts what he calls a “conceptual approach”. He says straight out that: “word meanings are composed of what ordinary language calls “concepts”, “thoughts” or “ideas””. He also says, like the NSM linguists, that word meanings are built up from a finite set of “conceptual primitives”. But the great difference with NSM is that Jackendoff doesn’t see that conceptual primitives are in any relationship to natural language. He feels free to propose conceptual primitives in very technical abstract terms. In fact, over the period of his work, his system of semantic representation has become more and more abstract. So, if you look at his 1990 book Semantic Structures, the representations are kind of schematic, there are words written in capital letters, and lots of bracketing; but basically, you can still figure out what the paraphrase would be in ordinary language. By the time you get into this century, he is using very abstract terms. For instance, (points to lower left of slide) this is Jackendoff’s representation of what TO X means, as in ‘I went

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to the station’. So, he claims that there are some features of “dimensionality”: there is a DIM feature which has several values (1d = one dimensional), and there is a “boundedness” feature, whether something is bounded, and if so, what it is bounded by (BDBY). My point is … this is a kind of abstract metalanguage. It’s very far from natural language. It seems unsatisfying to me that one can’t understand it at all without a lot of assistance. I doubt that this method can show ordinary people’s cognition. Perhaps, if there were no alternatives, if this was the only way it could be done, we might have to say: “Well, look, people don’t understand themselves”, i.e. ordinary people are incapable of understanding their own thinking. They need technical experts to identify the abstract features which are underneath their ordinary thinking, which they themselves don’t recognize and can’t understand. But actually, there is an alternative approach , i.e. the NSM approach, that’s based on simple meanings which exist in ordinary natural language. So, I think it should be preferred. The other thing, from a theoretical point of view, is that Jackendoff’s system is terribly unconstrained. Jackendoff can just invent any new set of features and functions as he chooses. This is something that displeases formal semanticists tremendously. You won’t find anywhere in Jackendoff’s work a list of all the features and functions, or even any very good definitions of them. So, it’s kind of ad hoc and unconstrained. In this respect, I’m with the generative linguists who would like to have a very constrained approach. I think whenever you’ve got strong constraints on a theory, it forces you to be disciplined. You may decide in the end that the constraints are too strong, and you may want to loosen them. But for the time being, for as long as you can continue working under strict methodological constraints, it’s usually the best policy, rather than “anything goes”. Our next comparison is with Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon (see fig. 19). Pustejovsky is a sort of “fellow traveller” of generative linguistics and he publishes widely with excellent logical linguists; but really he is from the world of computer science, as much as from linguistics. When he invented the system called “Generative Lexicon”, it was an important advance. Part of its attraction was the idea that maybe it would help with automatic translation, i.e. if we could capture ordinary word meanings at a much better level of granularity than usual, it would help with automatic translation. Pustejovsky wants what people call “computer-tractable, machine-tractable representations”. Generative Lexicon (GL) representations contain a lot of detail, much more detail than Jackendovian semantics. Pustejovsky’s representations include Argument Structure, Event Structure and Qualia Structure, and each of these

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Figure 19 Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon (GL)

different departments of meaning has a number of options. If you look at them all together (see the description in fig. 19), a verb’s meaning can include: “specific properties of the participants (like, for instance, whether it is a human being, a fish, or a bird); change of being, state, location or relation; causation and agency; manners and means of an activity; temporal and spatial constraints”. And this one is interesting: ‘intentionality of the actor’. People who were in my Lecture 7 and 8 know that intentionality of the actor plays an important part in NSM explications of verb meanings (the prototypical cognitive scenario). Also: there is information about the instrument, and about the ‘psychological state of the participants’. That looks like a list of component types similar to what you will find in an NSM explication and I think Pustejovsky deserves some credit, because he’s done the work to separate all those things out. But when you actually look at what GL representation looks like, it’s very different to an NSM explication. To make this point, I’m first going to show you a recent NSM explication (fig. 20). People who have seen explications before will be prepared for this unusually detailed and extensive paraphrase. I am going to take the verb ‘to build’, in a sentence context like ‘Someone builds a house’. The reason is that we have available a GL representation of ‘build’, which is frequently cited in the literature. In the NSM approach, if we want to talk about someone ‘building something’, like a house, we start with a very minimal type of sentence. We choose

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Figure 20 Figure 20 Semantic explication for English ‘build’

the tense and aspect, for reasons I explained in Lecture 8, as progressive, the activity-in-progress. ‘Someone is building a house’, for example. What does it mean? How can we paraphrase it? The very top level of this explication is: ‘someone X is doing something in a place for some time, because he/she wants there to be something of one kind in this place’. So, the actor is out to “create something” in a place. Next comes: often when someone does this in a place, it’s like this: some time before, someone thought about this place like this: I want something of one kind to be in this place I want it to be like this: it is like a part of this place, people can be inside it There is a range of different things that one can ‘build’. You can build a house, you can build a hut, you can build a shelter. The above components are an attempt to summarize the common idea. The thing is envisaged to be ‘like a part of this place’, which implies that it is kind of permanent, and ‘people can be inside it’.

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The explication continues, expanding further on the mental state (the intentional state) of the actor. at the same time, this someone thought about some things in this place like this (this refers to available materials): if I do something to these things for some time, after this, there can be something of one kind in this place as I want. For example, if I want to build a shelter and there are some branches and leaves around, if I do something with those branches and leaves, I can get something of this kind as I want. The person who sets out to do the building seems to have this in mind: to use the available materials to produce the designed outcome. Now, how do they do it? This is how the process of building is described, in stages: when someone does this in the place, it happens like this: – this person does something to the ground in this place The idea is that some sort of preparing the ground is needed. It may be just clearing the ground, or maybe digging foundations. But if you want the thing you are building to be ‘like a part of the place’, it makes sense that you prepare by doing some things to the ground. After this, you have do something to the materials, i.e. to ‘some things in this place’; minimally, this involves rearranging them in some way, even if you’ve just got to brace one pole one against another, and place some “covering” material over them. So, they end up ‘not where they were before’. And at the same time, they are ‘not like they were before’, because they are now parts of something. What was previously just a bunch of materials, all become part of something in this place. So, continuing with the text of the explication (fig. 20): − after this, he/she does something to some things in this place for some time − because of this, after this, these things are not in the places where they were before − at the same time they are not like they were before, they are parts of something in this place The final section of the explication states that ‘if someone does this for some time’, it can be effective, i.e. ‘after this, there can be something of one kind in this place as this someone wanted’. Of course, one can start building something, and stop before it is finished, but the concept of ‘building’ is such that if

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you continue the process, in principle you will wind up with what you wanted in this place. Now, this NSM explication is complex, it is based on a lot of assumptions and operating principles (explained in previous lectures). It is going to seem quite outlandish to people who are seeing semantic representations like this for the first time. Sorry about that. The explication also assumes that the English verb build is polysemous. We are assuming that ‘building a house’ is a different meaning, for instance, to ‘building a bomb’. If you look at corpora of English, you will find that ‘build a bomb’ is actually quite an important collocation of the English word build. But it seems to us that in ‘building a bomb’, build has a different meaning, because the “product”, i.e. the bomb, is not something that is anchored in the place and not something that people can potentially be inside. In short, we don’t think it is possible to cover both uses (‘build a house’ and ‘build a bomb’) under a single explication. Also in English, one can talk about ‘a bird building a nest’, believe it or not. We think this is another extended meaning. One argument I can quickly mention in favor of this polysemy comes from the noun building, as in a building. This noun is related to the first meaning of ‘build’, the one explicated in fig. 20. On the other hand, if someone is ‘building a bomb’, the bomb is not a building; and if a bird is ‘building a nest’, the nest is not a building. This is evidence from derivational morphology, one of the tests that lexicographers generally accept as in favor of a polysemy analysis. We could continue to discuss the NSM explication (fig. 20) for build for a long time from different points of view. One thing that’s very obvious, however, is that the NSM explication is a kind of text. It’s written in natural language and it’s like a text. Now let’s look this GL representation of build (fig. 21). Clearly, it’s not very text-like. This is the Event Structure, this is the Argument Structure, and this is the Qualia (pointing to different sections of the slide). I mentioned before that Pustejovsky’s system was more detailed than most, in that it allowed for many different types of semantic components, but now I want to point out that this detail is undermined by the fact that all of those components have to be expressed by features. It’s called a “typed feature representation” and it’s quite strict. The typed feature representation uses terms like ‘material’ and ‘mass’ and ‘PhysObj’. Not only are these technical terms, but they don’t correspond to their expected meanings in ordinary language. Most people would be surprised to hear, for example, that a person is regarded as a ‘PhysObj’. Normally, we don’t think of people as physical objects. What I’m trying to say is that there are many ways in which this GL representation is distant from natural language. And although it is rather detailed,

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Figure 21 GL representation of English ‘build’

it is not nearly as detailed as the NSM analysis. (We could talk a lot about the GL system. Pustejovsky has a very ingenious system of coercions, for example, that is designed to overcome some of the apparent difficulties, but we don’t have time to discuss this here.) Two final points. First, there is a lot of unresolved semantic complexity in this kind of representation. Terms like ‘create’ and ‘artifact’ are not analyzed in the theory, but evidently they are themselves semantically complex. Second, the GL breakdown doesn’t show the logical coherence of the concept of ‘build’. If you go through the NSM explication, the various components (the actor’s intention, how they go about using the materials, and so on), it all makes sense. We can see how and why the different components fit together. There is an internal logic. The GL representation is more like a list of all these different features. It’s not clear why there should be any such relationship between particular Qualia, particular Argument Structures, and particular Event conditions. My last comparison (see fig. 22) is with FrameNet. People familiar with Cognitive Linguistics would all have heard of Charles Fillmore. He is one of the greats. Unfortunately, he passed away a couple of years ago (2014). Fillmore devised many important ideas in linguistics, and in the last couple of decades of his life, he founded an approach to semantic description called Frame Semantics. Inspired by the architecture of Frame Semantics, a project started which is called FrameNet and it is still on-going. Based in Berkeley, it is a documentation of English verbs and their argument structures, published on the

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Figure 22 FrameNet

internet, following a manual of techniques and representations, conducted by people trained in the method. They are particularly interested in verbs and valency patterns. In principle, a Frame is supposed to represent a construal of experience: knowledge, conceptual knowledge. A Frame is not actually a linguistic entity. Frames exists at different levels of generality: there are extremely general frames, like Intentionally Create, and very specific micro-frames. Also, there are frames within frames. The smaller frames can inherit properties from larger frames. It’s all very cleverly worked out. One of the interesting things about it is that the frames are described using natural language, so that is a point of similarity with the NSM approach. The FrameNet linguists try to keep it not too technical. There is a measure of technicality to it, but if you look up the Frame Definitions, you know, you can understand them. So, it is using natural language. Now I must comment that although, in theory, a Frame is supposed to model real-world knowledge, once you get down to looking into the meanings of individual verbs, FrameNet descriptions look like they are modelling linguistic knowledge. That is, it looks like they are doing lexicography and actually their lexicography is very good, in my opinion. The FrameNet linguists are very high quality lexicographers, they really know what they are doing, and have a great deal of experience. So, respect.

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Figure 23 FrameNet BUILDING Frame

This is an example, the FrameNet description of BUILDING (fig. 22). It turns out that BUILDING is actually a frame itself, so let’s just read out the Frame Definition. This Frame describes “assembly or construction actions, where an Agent joins Components together to form a Created entity, which is profiled, and hence the object of the verb”. The slide (fig. 22) also shows the Frame Definition for Intentionally Create, but I am going to skip over that. Now, it should be obvious to you that there are a lot of words in this Frame Definition which are not optimally simple; for instance, words like ‘assembly’, ‘construction’ and ‘components’. They are also not cross-translatable. Although frames are described in terms of natural language, the FrameNet linguists do not pay much attention to metalanguage. They adopt, I would say, a fairly ad hoc approach. It’s not completely ad hoc, because they discuss and deliberate among themselves about the best formulation of the frames. But they don’t try to control the metalanguage of the frames, which means that over the years, lots and lots of complex frames involving complex terms have been developed. It’s quite a maze actually. A maze of complex and connected notions, many which are based on English-specific terminology (for instance, in the BUILDING frame, terms like ‘assembly’ and expressions like

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‘joining components’). So unfortunately, I think the FrameNet linguists are making trouble for themselves by not adopting a systematic approach to the metalanguage. When they try to extend the FrameNet approach to other languages, they find that they run into various problems. Some of these problems are due to the complexity of the other languages, but some of them are because the frames themselves don’t translate. The FrameNet linguists of course don’t want their Frames to be untranslatable, for obvious reasons. Frames are intended to represent knowledge and, obviously, the knowledge content of Spanish people should be representable in Spanish. They shouldn’t have to depend on English to describe their own knowledge. FrameNet linguists have acknowledged that the “applicability of semantic frames as a cross-linguistic metalanguage” remains to be tested, and that “to determine the feasibility of a truly independent metalanguage based on semantic frames for connecting multiple FrameNets [in different languages] … not an easy task” (see fig. 23). I think they should be praised for their honesty but it’s going to be a difficult road ahead, because a great deal of work will be needed to re-engineer the frames into more translatable language. That completes my overview of three different cognitive approaches: Jackendoff’s approach, Pustejovsky’s approach, and Fillmore’s approach. You can measure them against the NSM approach, which I think you now know is supremely cognitive but also very constrained, since it is based on a minimal and cross-translatable metalanguage. So now just some concluding comments (fig. 24). After a decades-long pursuit of semantic minimality and universality, the system of NSM semantic analysis has, I think, matured to the point that really, if you’ll excuse me saying such a thing, it is an unrivalled tool for semantic description. There are many classic “hard problems” of linguistics, such as valency alternations and some problems in quantification, which have been puzzled over for 20 or 30 years. In my opinion, these problems demand semantic solutions, so if you don’t have a very precise method of semantic description, you can’t make much progress. I think that the NSM system in principle can deliver. As aspiring cognitive linguists, I recommend that you familiarize yourself further with this system. Practise some semantic explications yourself. Get the textbook Semantic Analysis (Goddard 2011) and maybe work through it yourself, or assign parts of it to your students. To wind up, I would like to come back to the point that NSM linguists are busy building bridges outside linguistics (see fig. 24). Many varieties of linguistics

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Figure 24 Conclusions and Wider Perspective

these days are quite isolated. Some of them even seem to like it that way, they almost seem proud of the fact that no-one can understand what they are talking about, and that their theory has no apparent application outside their own area. The NSM approach is not like that. People in adjacent disciplines often publish very interesting responses, sometimes not fully understanding the linguistic details, but they are appreciative. NSM linguists want to encourage such linkages. We want to encourage links with cognitive anthropology and cultural anthropology, and also with a discipline called cultural psychology, which is trying to make psychology more culture-sensitive. It is in my opinion a bit of scandal that linguistics has so little to say about translation studies. There is an independent field of translation studies, and I think that as linguists it is our obligation to engage constructively with translation studies. Not to tell them what to do, because translators usually know their craft well, but I think there can be very productive relationship. Literary studies, hermeneutics and religious studies, first language acquisition, language teaching (reading from fig. 24), … we have dealt with some of these in Lecture 9. Finally, evolutionary psychology. It is possible to use the NSM framework to shed some light on the evolution of human cognition. There is

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an article titled ‘Evolutionary semantics’ listed in the bibliography (Goddard, Wierzbicka, Fábrega 2015). So, the NSM theory has multiple out-reaches to very different fields of humanities and social sciences. Now to my final comment. As far as the wider perspective goes, the 20th century was a pretty bad time for the study of meaning; first Bloomfield and the Structuralist Period, then Chomsky and the Generative Period. It was a tough time for meaning. But now that we are in the 21st century, we have seen the rise of Cognitive Linguistics and ethnolinguistics, and discourse analysis has also come back to life. Likewise, cultural anthropology and cognitive anthropology are reinvigorated, so I’m very hopeful that the 21st century will be a much better century for meaning. Thank you!

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About the Series Editor Fuyin (Thomas) Li (1963, Ph.D. 2002) received his Ph.D. in English Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is professor of linguistics at Beihang University, where he organizes China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics since 2004, http://cifcl.buaa.edu .cn/. As the founding editor of the journal Cognitive Semantics, brill.com/cose, the founding editor of International Journal of Cognitive Linguistics, editor of the series Distinguished Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics, brill.com/dlcl, (originally Eminent Linguists’ Lecture Series), editor of Compendium of Cognitive Linguistics Research, and organizer of ICLC-11, he plays an active role in the international expansion of Cognitive Linguistics. His main research interests involve the Talmyan cognitive semantics, overlapping systems model, event grammar, Causality, etc. with a focus on synchronic and diachronic perspective on Chinese data, and a strong commitment to usage-based model and corpus method. His representative publications include the following: Metaphor, Image, and Image Schemas in Second Language Pedagogy (2009), Semantics: A Course Book (1999), An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics (in Chinese, 2008), Semantics: An Introduction (in Chinese, 2007), Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Volume Ⅰ: Concept Structuring Systems (Chinese version, 2017), Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Volume Ⅱ: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring (Chinese version, 2018). His Personal homepage: http://shi.buaa.edu.cn/thomasli E-mail:  [email protected]; [email protected]

Websites for Cognitive Linguistics and CIFCL Speakers All the websites were checked for validity on 30 June 2017



Part 1

Websites for Cognitive Linguistics

1. http://www.cogling.org/ Website for the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, ICLA 2. http://www.cognitivelinguistics.org/en/journal Website for the journal edited by ICLA, Cognitive Linguistics 3. http://cifcl.buaa.edu.cn/ Website for China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics (CIFCL). 4. http://cosebrill.edmgr.com/ Website for the journal Cognitive Semantics (ISSN 2352–6408/ E-ISSN 2352–6416), edited by CIFCL 5. http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/16078?rskey=fw6Q2O&result=1&q=CLR Website for the Cognitive Linguistics Research [CLR] 6. http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/20568?rskey=dddL3r&result=1&q=ACL Website for Application of Cognitive Linguistics [ACL] 7. http://www.benjamins.com/#catalog/books/clscc/main Website for book series in Cognitive Linguistics by Benjamins 8. http://www.brill.com/cn/products/series/distinguished-lectures-cognitive -linguistics Website for Distinguished Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics (DLCL) 9. http://refworks.reference-global.com/ Website for online resources for Cognitive Linguistics Bibliography

Websites for Cognitive Linguistics and CIFCL Speakers

359

10. http://benjamins.com/online/met/ Website for Bibliography of Metaphor and Metonymy 11. http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/research/cognitive/ Website for Cognitive Program in Berkeley 12.

https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/ Website for Framenet

13. http://www.mpi.nl/ Website for the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics



Part 2

Websites for CIFCL Speakers and Their Research

14.

CIFCL Organizer Thomas Li, [email protected]; [email protected] Personal Homepage: http://shi.buaa.edu.cn/thomasli http://shi.buaa.edu.cn/lifuyin/en/index.htm

15.

CIFCL 17, 2017 Jeffrey M. Zacks, [email protected] Lab: dcl.wustl.edu.

16.

CIFCL 16, 2016 Cliff Goddard, [email protected] https://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-humanities -languages-social-science/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage

17.

CIFCL 15, 2016 Nikolas Gisborne, [email protected]

18.

CIFCL 14, 2014 Phillip Wolff, [email protected]

19.

CIFCL 13, 2013 (CIFCL 3, 2006) Ronald W. Langacker, [email protected] http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~rwl/

360

Websites for Cognitive Linguistics and CIFCL Speakers

20. CIFCL 12, 2013 Stefan Th. Gries, [email protected] http://tinyurl.com/stgries 21.

CIFCL 12, 2013 Alan Cienki, [email protected] https://research.vu.nl/en/persons/alan-cienki

22.

CIFCL 11, 2012 Sherman Wilcox, [email protected] http://www.unm.edu/~wilcox

23.

CIFCL 10, 2012 Jürgen Bohnemeyer, [email protected] Personal webpage: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/ The CAL blog: https://causalityacrosslanguages.wordpress.com/ The blog of the UB Semantic Typology Lab: https://ubstlab.wordpress.com/

24. CIFCL 09, 2011 Laura A. Janda, [email protected] http://ansatte.uit.no/laura.janda/ https://uit.no/om/enhet/ansatte/person?p_document_id=41561&p_dimension_ id=210121 25.

CIFCL 09, 2011 Ewa Dabrowska, [email protected]

26. CIFCL 08, 2010 William Croft, [email protected] http://www.unm.edu/~wcroft 27.

CIFCL 08, 2010 Zoltán Kövecses, [email protected]

28. CIFCL 08, 2010 (Melissa Bowerman: 1942–2011)

Websites for Cognitive Linguistics and CIFCL Speakers 29. CIFCL 07, 2009 Dirk Geeraerts, [email protected] http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.be/qlvl/dirkg.htm 30. CIFCL 07, 2009 Mark Turner, [email protected] 31.

CIFCL 06, 2008 Chris Sinha, chris.sinha @ling.lu.se

32.

CIFCL 05, 2008 Gilles Fauconnier, [email protected]

33.

CIFCL 04, 2007 Leonard Talmy, [email protected] https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~talmy/talmy.html

34. CIFCL 03, 2006 (CIFCL 13, 2013) Ronald W. Langacker, [email protected] http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~rwl/ 35.

CIFCL 02, 2005 John Taylor, [email protected] https://independent.academia.edu/JohnRTaylor

36. CIFCL 01, 2004 George Lakoff, [email protected] http://georgelakoff.com/

361