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Semantic Primitives
Linguists of the NSM school rely on semantic primitives (or semantic primes)
for analysis. Semantic primes means the suggestion that we have as part of our
inherited human faculties a basic set of innate 'concepts', or perhaps more
precisely, a non-conscious propensity and eagerness to acquire those concepts and
encode them in sound-forms (words). The words that those concepts become
encoded in what is called semantic primes, or alternatively, semantic primitives —
'semantic' becauselinguists have assigned that word in reference to the meaning of
words (=linguistic symbols). Words that qualify as semantic primes need no
definition in terms of other words. In that sense, they remain undefinable. We know
their meaning without having to define them. They allow us to construct other
words defined by them.
When Wierzbicka and colleagues claim that DO, BECAUSE, and GOOD, for
example, are semantic primes, the claim is that the meanings of these words are
essential for explicating the meanings of numerous other words and grammatical
constructions, and that they cannot themselves be explicated in a non-circular
fashion. The same applies to other examples of semantic primes such as: I, YOU,
SOMEONE, SOMETHING, THIS, HAPPEN, MOVE, KNOW, THINK, WANT, SAY, WHERE,
WHEN, NOT, MAYBE, LIKE, KIND OF, PART OF. Notice that all these terms identify
simple and intuitively intelligible meanings which are grounded in ordinary linguistic
experience (Goddard, 2002).
All people know all words below because they heard the words spoken a long time:
Table adapted from Goddard, 2002.
Given the universal nature of the list of semantic primes among languages,
and of the grammar, every language has essentially the same natural semantic
metalanguage, though each semantic prime sounds different among languages and
the appearance of the syntax may differ. Wierzbicka and colleagues refer to all the
natural semantic metalanguages as 'isomorphic' with each other. Conceivably, if the
dictionary of meaning descriptions of each language was reductively paraphrased in
the text of its natural semantic metalanguage, and that natural semantic
metalangugage was translated to a common natural semantic metalanguage for all
natural languages, it would greatly reduce language barriers.