Discourse particles are strewn throughout natural spoken discourse, revealing the speakers' attitude towards what they are saying and guiding the interlocutors' interpretation of that utterance. The majority of works in the area of the French discourse particles 'quoi' and 'ben' provide detailed analyses and place their primary focus on usage. Problems arise, however, when word usage is discussed without a systematic approach to semantics. The present study applies the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method of description to these particles, proposing definitive explications that can be substituted into naturally occurring examples of quoi and ben without causing any semantic loss. Explications, framed in the culture-neutral terms of the NSM, capture the subtleties of meaning conveyed by each discourse particle. They are presented in parallel English and French versions and are tested against a corpus of spoken French.

Over recent years, linguists have given an increasing amount of attention to impoliteness studies (Bousfield, 2008, Culpeper et al., 2003, Kienpointner, 1997, Meier, 1995a, Meier, 1995b and Mills, 2009). Oddly however, little attention has yet been paid to the semantics of the English word rude. Lacking precise translation equivalents in many languages, rude is a keyword revealing much about socially accepted ways of behaving in Anglo society (Wierzbicka, 1997; cf. Fox, 2004). In Australian English, as in English generally, it is the primary ethno-descriptor in the domain of "impoliteness". This paper provides a detailed lexical semantic analysis of rude in the productive formula It's rude to VP, and also in the fixed expression rude word. The semantic explications are framed in the simple universal primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) (Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2002, Peeters, 2006 and Wierzbicka, 1996). The argumentation is supported by data on Australian English collected from Google searches.