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 set of studies explores and demonstrates cross-linguistic semantics as practised in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework, originated by Anna Wierzbicka. The opening chapters give a state-of-the-art overview of the NSM model, propose several theoretical innovations and advance a number of original analyses in connection with names and naming, clefts and other specificational sentences, and discourse anaphora. Subsequent chapters describe and analyse diverse phenomena in ten languages from multiple families, geographical locations, and cultural settings around the globe. Three substantial studies document how the metalanguage of NSM semantic primes can be realised in languages of widely differing types: Amharic (Ethiopia), Korean and East Cree. Each constitutes a lexicogrammatical portrait in miniature of the language concerned. Other chapters probe topics such as inalienable possession in Kromu (Papua New Guinea), epistemic verbs in Swedish, hyperpolysemy in Bunuba (Australia), the expression of "momentariness" in Berber, ethnogeometry in Makasai (East Timor), value concepts in Russian, and "virtuous emotions" in Japanese.

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.

'Culture' is one of the key words of the English language, in popular as well as scholarly discourse. It is flourishing in popular usage, with proliferation of extended uses (police culture, Barbie culture, argument culture, culture of complaint, etc.), while being endlessly debated in intellectual circles. Though it is sometimes observed that the meaning of the English word culture is highly language-specific, its precise lexical semantics has received surprisingly little attention. The main task undertaken in this paper is to develop and justify semantic explications for the common ordinary meanings of this polysemous word. My analytical framework is the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach originated by Anna Wierzbicka. I will propose a set of semantic explications framed in terms of empirically established universal primes such as PEOPLE, THINK, DO, LIVE, NOT, LIKE, THE SAME, and OTHER.

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.

For some thirty-odd years now, Anna Wierzbicka has been a very prolific, insightful, and inspiring scholar in the field of linguistic semantics. For about twenty of them, she has arguably been among the 'most' prolific, insightful and inspiring scholars in her field. Her books and articles encompass areas as diverse and diversified as lexical semantics, grammatical semantics and pragmatics (not to mention bible exegesis; cf. Wierzbicka 2001). At the theoretical level, she is widely known for the twofold claim that the same limited set of universal semantic primes can be identified in all the languages of the world, where they exist as meanings of specific morphemes, words or phrases; and that this universal set of primes makes up the lexicon of a Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) governed by an equally universal set of combinatorial properties. Following in the footsteps of - but at the same time going beyond = Descartes, Pascal, Arnauld and, above all, Leibniz, Wierzbicka views her primes as semantically simple concepts which, duly combined, give rise to articulate thought. To describe her set of semantic primes, she often uses Leibniz's image of an "alphabet of human thoughts".

The chapter adopts the standpoint of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory, originated by Anna Wierzbicka (1972, 1980, 1988, 1992, 1996). It outlines how semantic primes have been identified within and across languages, over several decades of empirical research, and how they can be used as a tool in lexical and grammatical typology and contrastive linguistics.

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.