The basic conviction behind the NSM approach - bolstered by scores of empirical studies - is that meaning is the key to insightful and explanatory descriptions of most linguistic phenomena, phonetics and phonology excepted. Meaning is also the bridge between language and cognition, and between language and culture. Compartmentalizing language (or linguistic analysis) into syntax, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics therefore makes little sense. In linguistics, meaning is everybody's business. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is a decompositional system of meaning representation based on empirically established universal semantic primes, i.e., simple indefinable meanings which appear to be present as word-meanings in all languages (Wierzbicka 1996a; Goddard 1998; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2002; Peeters 2006; Goddard 2008). Originating with Wierzbicka (1972), the system has been developed and refined over some 35 years. There is a large body of descriptive-analytical work in the framework, not only about English but Russian, Polish, French, Spanish,Malay, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Ewe, East Cree, and other languages.

In this thesis I describe aspects of referring expressions and referential practice in an English-lexified creole language spoken in the Ngukurr Aboriginal community, in the Northern Territory of Australia. Kriol has substrate influences from seven traditional Aboriginal languages. Dialects of Kriol are spoken in Aboriginal communities across the Top End of Australia; with estimates suggesting more than 20,000 people speak it as a first language. The language has a low status and in many contexts, such as health, medical and legal contexts, it frequently goes unrecognised as a legitimate language requiring interpreters. There is no comprehensive grammar of Kriol and as yet, there have been few in-depth studies into its structure and use. I investigate referential expressions in Kriol from various perspectives, using tools from a range of theoretical frameworks and research traditions, including descriptive linguistics, discourse analysis, information structure, and ethnopragmatics. The thesis provides an integrated description of how referential expressions are structured and how they are used in spontaneous talk to meet communicative needs. A further goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that there is significant continuity of referring strategies from Kriol's Aboriginal substrate languages. The data used in this study consists of a corpus of spontaneous discourse between two or more speakers, elicited material, and consultation with Elders on cultural issues relevant to language use. ... Each chapter contributes original description of the Kriol language. By combining a number of theoretical perspectives, the thesis offers an integrated description of the structure and function of referring expressions.

In her classic paper "Oats and Wheat: Mass Nouns, Iconicity and Human Categorization," Anna Wierzbicka (1988) argued the case for the existence of numerous, subtly different, subclasses of mass nouns and postulated detailed explanatory links between underlying conceptualizations and grammatical behaviors. She also stressed the partly language-specific character of these subclasses and suggested that differences between languages are often related to culture (e.g., connected with different eating and food preparation practices). In this study, I aim to extend and improve on Wierzbicka's arguments and analyses, concentrating on concrete mass nouns in English. The two overriding points of the entire study are that the formal linguistic properties of mass nouns are systematically correlated with their conceptual content, and that this conceptual content can be identified with rigor and precision using appropriate methods of linguistic semantics. The analytical framework is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) system of lexical semantic representation (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2002; Wierzbicka 1996).

Two important themes form the grounding for the discussion in this chapter. First, there is great value in conducting semantic analysis, as far as possible, in such a way as to reflect the cognitive reality of ordinary speakers. This makes it easier to model the intuitions of native speakers and to simulate their inferencing processes, and it facilitates human-computer interactions via querying processes, and the like. Second, there is concern over to what extent it will be possible to.achieve comparability, and, more ambitiously, interoperability, between different systems of semantic description. For both reasons, it is highly desirable if semantic analyses can be conducted in terms of intuitive representations, be it in simple ordinary language or by way of other intuitively accessible representations.

The primary aim of this dissertation is to explore a number of religious concepts in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. These concepts are English angels, the devil, God, heaven, hell, martyr, sin, and grace, as well as their Arabic and Hebrew near equivalents. These concepts are investigated from a linguistic point of view. Linguistic evidence is based mainly on usage data from corpora of everyday language. The corpora are the Corpus of Contemporary American English (410+ million words), Collins Wordbanks Online: English (500+ million words), ArabiCorpus (68 million words), and HebrewCorpus (150 million words). The description of the results is done by relying on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory, developed by Anna Wierzbicka, Cliff Goddard, and colleagues. To lay the groundwork, the dissertation establishes Arabic and Hebrew versions of NSM. In other words, it identifies the exponents of the 64 Natural Semantic Metalanguage semantic primes and maps out their basic combinatorial properties. Semantic explications of the target religious concepts are then developed in terms which are both comprehensible to ordinary people and translatable between the three languages in question. This enables a clear delineation of the similarities and differences among the folk religious concepts. The dissertation is primarily a contribution to linguistic semantics. It is the first detailed study of folk religious concepts from a linguistic vantage point, and it is the first detailed study of the Arabic and Hebrew versions of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. In addition, the results of this dissertation contribute to the fields of lexicography, corpus analysis, interfaith dialogue, cross-cultural communication, and religious education.

In a global perspective, the language of mental state concepts displays a great deal of variation - much greater than imagined by most cognitive scientists. Almost all the words in the English lexicon of emotion and cognition are language and culture specific, i.e., they do not have exact meaning equivalents in many, perhaps most, other languages. This includes words for emotional and attitudinal states, such as sad, angry surprised, anxiety, and grief, words for epistemic states and cognitive processes, such as believe, doubt, and remember, and words for ethnopsychological constructs, such as mind, heart, psyche, and memory (Russell, 1991; Wierzbicka, 1999; Harkins & Wierzbicka, 2001; Palmer, Goddard, & Lee, 2003; Shweder, 2004; Amberber, 2007; Schalley & Khlentzos, 2007). Most cognitive scientists underestimate not only the scale of semantic variation across languages, but also the theoretical and methodological challenges it poses. In theorizing and discussing emotional states, they tend to take English for granted, effectively absolutizing the English lexicon of emotion and cognition (for example, assuming that words such as sadness, anger, and surprise represent natural psychological categories), while denying the same privilege to the lexical categories of other languages. At the methodological level, many researchers seem to regard the "problem of translation" as a mere nuisance that can easily be overcome by tagging indigenous concepts with English glosses. In the process, many cross-cultural studies are seriously flawed by inaccurate translations and concomitant "terminological ethnocentrism."

This thesis investigates the lexical semantics of nice and a set of other superficially "simple" sociality concepts (rude, polite and manners) in Australian English. When appropriately analysed, these words reveal much about the socially accepted and approved ways of behaving in Australian society. As expected of heavily culture-laden words, nice and rude lack precise translation equivalents in many languages and can be regarded as cultural key words (Levisen & Waters, Forthcoming; Wierzbicka 1997, 2010). The comparative reference to French (for example, nice vs. gentil lit. 'kind', rude vs. mal élevé lit. 'badly brought up') highlights differences in ways of behaving and construals of sociality.

Cultural scripts provide a powerful new technique for articulating cultural norms, values and practices using simple cross-translatable phrasing. The technique is based on many decades of research into cross-cultural semantics by Anna Wierzbicka and colleagues in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. This paper illustrates the cultural scripts approach with three examples of pragmatics of Anglo English: request strategies, personal remarks, and phatic complimenting in American English. It argues that the cultural scripts approach can be readily adapted for use in teaching intercultural pragmatics and intercultural communication.

The main aim of this book, whose first edition appeared in 1998, is to give students and teachers a resource for developing their own practical skills in semantic analysis. It also aims to help students develop the knowledge and perspective to critically evaluate semantic analysis and argumentation in linguistics at large. As described shortly, the book has been thoroughly revised since the first edition. Any introductory text must be selective. It must try to balance consistency and diversity of approach, breadth and depth of coverage. In this book, the main method used for describing and analysing meanings is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach. Originated by Anna Wierzbicka, this is a rigorous but commonsense approach based on reductive paraphrase in natural language. Other significant figures that students will meet in the following pages, along with their distinctive treatments of particular semantic problems, include Ray Jackendoff, Ronald Langacker, Charles Fillmore, Leonard Talmy, Beth Levin, John Searle, Brent Berlin, Steven Levinson, George Lakoff, and William Labov. A key theme throughout the book is the relationship between semantics, conceptualization, and culture. Aside from English, languages drawn on for illustrative purposes include Arrernte, Chinese, Danish, Ewe, Jacaltec, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Spanish, and Yankunytjatjara.

First and foremost, this thesis is an exploration of the lexical semantics of selected English social category words, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). It will explicate two sets of social category words, identify commonalities between the explications, and in turn identify sub-classes based upon the shared semantic structures. A subsidiary goal is to explore the syntactic and phraseological properties of each subclass, using online corpora and journals and newspapers from a variety of sources. The three corpora are the British National Corpus–Brigham Young University, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2004-, and Davies, 2008-, respectively), and Collins Wordbanks Online. The question of interest is the extent to which the syntactic and phraseological properties of human social category words can be accounted for by their semantic properties. The thesis makes no attempt to focus on any one particular dialect of English. It generally draws on written English from Australian, British and American sources; however, if it becomes apparent that there are strong differences between these dialects, these differences will be mentioned.