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.

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.

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.

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.

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.