Because meaning is fundamental to language and culture, a practical technique for describing meanings and transposing them across languages has multiple practical applications. This chapter demonstrates several applications of the NSM approach to semantics: as a guide to core vocabulary in the early L2 syllabus, as a means of writing cultural scripts and interpreting cultural key words for language learners, and as the basis for a culture-neutral international auxiliary language. Illustrative material is drawn from English, Russian, and Korean.

This study explores the contrastive lexical semantics of verbs comparable to 'cut' and 'chop' in three languages (English, Polish, and Japanese), using the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) technique of semantic analysis. It proposes a sixpart semantic template, and argues that this template can serve as a basis for a lexical typology of complex physical activity verbs in general. At the same time, it argues that language-specific aspects of the semantics are often culturally motivated. Nine verbs are examined (English 'cut', 'chop', 'slice', Polish 'ciąć' "cut", 'krajać' "cut/slice", 'obcinać' "cut around", 'rąbać' "chop", Japanese 'kiru' "cut", 'kizamu' "chop"), and NSM explications are proposed for each one based on its range of use in natural contexts, thus capturing the semantic similarities and differences in fine-grained detail.

More than six hundred years ago Roger Bacon taught that "Grammatica una et eadem est secundum substantiam in omnibus linguis, licet accidentaliter varietur" ('Grammar is, in its essence, one and the same in all languages, even though it differs in superficial features', Jakobson 1963:209). Why did Bacon believe this? Essentially, because he believed that the fundamentals of grammar arise from fundamentals of human thought, which are shared by all people and by all languages. This is the time-honoured tradition of universal grammar, now largely displaced by Chomsky's structure-based conception of UG in which meaning plays no real part. In historical perspective, then, the NSM program can be seen as a return to the older tradition – but with an important difference, namely, detailed and rigorous analysis of natural languages. As indicated in the previous chapter, the thirty-year program of semantic research inaugurated in Wierzbicka (1972) has reached the point where it has become possible to articulate a detailed and concrete account of exactly what the unity of all grammars consists in; that is, to delineate where the line runs between what is constant and what is variable, what is essential and what is "accidental", what is universal and what is language-specific. The main purpose of this chapter is to describe the proposed model of universal grammar; i.e. the inherent syntactic properties of universal semantic primes. We will also establish some basic metalinguistic terminology, building on the firm conceptual foundation of semantic primes.

OPENING STATEMENT - VOLUME I: This two-volume set of studies takes as its starting point an old idea: the idea that universal grammar is based on meaning. It seeks to give this idea a solid theoretical foundation, and to explore its viability through detailed empirical studies in a set of typologically divergent languages (Lao, Malay, Mandarin Chinese, Mangaaba- Mbula, Polish and Spanish). As the twentieth century recedes, linguists seem increasingly to agree that the "anti-semantic turn" inaugurated by Leonard Bloomfield and continued by Noam Chomsky was a wrong turn. It is now widely believed that the grammatical properties of a word follow, at least in large measure, from its meaning. PREFACE TO VOLUME II: This set of studies is founded on the idea that universal grammar is based on - indeed, inseparable from - meaning. The theoretical framework is the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach originated by Anna Wierzbicka over thirty years ago and developed since then in collaboration with Cliff Goddard and other colleagues. ... The NSM framework is based on evidence supporting the idea that there is a set of simple, indefinable meanings - universal semantic primes - which have concrete linguistic exponents in all world's languages. The NSM system is perhaps best known as the methodology for a large body of descriptive studies in cross-linguistic semantics and pragmatics, but it also has fundamental implications for the theory of universal grammar. The key idea is that universal semantic primes have an inherent grammar (including combinatorics, valency and complementation options) which is the same in all languages.

In this chapter we first propose a new semantic prime: specificational BE, i.e. BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING). We then show how the new prime can be used to analyse some classic problems in the semantics of naming and reference, and make some initial observations about its cross-linguistic realisations. In the second part of the chapter, we explore a newly recognised syntactic option of the prime This, here termed "abstract THIS/IT", which is of particular importance to discourse anaphora. The third and final part of the chapter shows how using these new possibilities together enables improved analyses of certain English grammatical constructions, such as presentational "it-constructions", clefts, and specificational sentences.

This article explains and demonstrates the theory of lexical decomposition originated by Anna Wierzbicka (1972, 1980, 1992, 1996, among other works); cf Goddard and Wierzbicka (1994, In press), Goddard (1998). Wierzbicka and colleagues refer to their approach as the "natural semantic metalanguage" (NSM) theory. It is sometimes referred to as a version of "conceptual axiology". An earlier designation is the "semantic primitives" approach. The foundational assumption of the NSM theory is that the meanings expressible in any language can be adequately described by means of language-internal reductive paraphrase. That is, the theory assumes, first, that any natural language is adequate as its own semantic metalanguage, and, second, that any semantically complex expression can be explicated by means of an exact paraphrase composed on simpler, more intelligible terms. By relying on reductive paraphrase the NSM approach is safeguarded against the twin pitfalls of circularity and obscurity which dog other "definitional" approaches to semantic analysis. No technical terms, neologisms, logical symbols, or abbreviations are allowed in NSW explications - only plain words from ordinary natural language.

The term cultural scripts refers to a powerful new technique for articulating cultural norms, values, and practices in terms which are clear, precise, and accessible to cultural insiders and to cultural outsiders alike. This result is only possible because cultural scripts are formulated in a tightly constrained, yet expressively flexible, metalanguage consisting of simple words and grammatical patterns which have equivalents in all languages. This is of course the metalanguage of semantic primes developed over the past 25 years of cross-linguistic research by the editors and colleagues in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach. The present collection of studies demonstrates the productivity and versatility of the cultural scripts approach with case studies from five different parts of world - china, Columbia, Korea, Singapore, and West Africa - describing a widely differing selection of culture-specific speech practices and interactional norms. one recurrent theme is that the different ways of speaking of different societies are linked with and make sense in terms of different local cultural values, or at least, different cultural priorities as far as values are concerned. Cultural scripts exist at different levels of generality, and may relate to different aspects of thinking, speaking, and behaviour. The present set of studies is mainly concerned with norms and practices of social interaction.

The words and grammar of any language encode a vast array of complex prepackaged concepts, most of them language-specific and culture-related. These concepts are manipulated routinely in almost every waking hour of most people's lives. They are largely acquired in infancy and they are intersubjectively shared among members of the speech community. It is hard to imagine such elaborate and variable representation systems not having a substantial role to play in ordinary cognition, and yet the language-and-thought question continues to be a contested one across the various disciplines and sub-disciplines of cognitive science. This article provides an overview from the vantage point of linguistic semantics.

All languages have words, such as English 'hot' and 'cold', 'hard' and 'soft', 'rough' and 'smooth', and 'heavy' and 'light', which attribute qualities to things. This paper maps out how such descriptors can be analysed in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework, in terms of like and other semantic primes configured into a particular semantic schema: essentially, touching something with a part of the body, feeling something in that part, knowing something about that thing because of it, and thinking about that thing in a certain way because of it. Far from representing objective properties of things "as such", it emerges that physical quality concepts refer to embodied human experiences and embodied human sensations. Comparisons with French, Polish and Korean show that the semantics of such words may differ significantly from language to language.

There are, broadly speaking, two traditions of semantics: the linguistic or conceptual tradition, which sees meaning as a cognitive phenomenon, and the logical or formal tradition, which sees meaning in terms of correspondences (truth-conditions) with an objective reality. This article adopts the linguistic or conceptual perspective. Many aspects of human cognition, such as basic perception, attention, and visual processing, are substantially shared with other primates. Language is primarily relevant to higher-order cognitive processes which are largely, if not entirely, species-unique. Importantly, human cognition not only includes reasoning and information processing about physical reality, it also includes so-called social cognition (Tomasello, 1999), that is, assessing and reasoning about intentions, mental states, and social situations, and it is in this arena that language has some of its clearest cognitive effects. (See Categorial Grammar and Formal Semantics; Social Cognition)