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Giugno 11, 2025

Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)

Filed under: Uncategorized — E @ 12:36 pm

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, originated by Anna Wierzbicka, can lay claim to being the most well-developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics on the contemporary scene. It has been applied to over 30 languages from many parts of the world.

The NSM approach is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings, known as semantic primes, which can be expressed by words or other linguistic expressions in all languages. This common core of meaning can be used as a tool for linguistic and cultural analysis: to explain the meanings of complex and culture-specific words and grammatical constructions (using semantic explications), and to articulate culture-specific values and attitudes (using cultural scripts). The theory also provides a semantic foundation for universal grammar and for linguistic typology.

Using NSM allows us to formulate analyses which are clear, precise, cross-translatable, non-Anglocentric, and intelligible to people without specialist linguistic training.

The method has applications in intercultural communication, lexicography (dictionary making), language teaching, the study of child language acquisition, legal semantics, and other areas.

 

For an example of an explication of a meaning which will be unfamiliar to most readers, we can take the Japanese word amae. According to Takeo Doi (1974, 1981), amae is a “peculiarly Japanese emotion” which “runs through all the various activities of Japanese society” and represents “the true essence of Japanese psychology”. So what exactly is amae? Doi explains that it is the noun form of amaeru, an intransitive verb which means ‘to depend and presume upon another’s benevolence’. It indicates ‘helplessness and the desire to be loved’. Amaeru can also be defined as ‘wish to be loved’ and ‘dependency needs’. Various bilingual dictionaries define amae as ‘to lean on a person’s good will’, ‘to depend on another’s affection’, ‘to act lovingly towards (as a much fondled child towards its parents)’, ‘to presume upon’, ‘to take advantage of’; ‘to behave like a spoilt child’, ‘be coquettish’, ‘trespass-on’, ‘take advantage of’, ‘behave in a caressing manner towards a man’; ‘to speak in a coquettish tone’, ‘encroach on (one’s kindness, good nature, etc.)’; ‘presume on another’s love’, ‘coax’, and so on.

The prototype on which the amae concept is based is not difficult to guess. As Doi says “the psychological prototype of amae lies in the psychology of the infant in its relationship to its mother”; not a newborn infant, but an infant who has already realised that its mother exists independently of itself …[A]s its mind develops it gradually realises that itself and its mother are independent existences, and comes to feel the mother as something indispensable to itself, it is the craving for close contact thus developed that constitutes, one might say, amae” (Doi 1981: 74). According to Doi and others, in Japan the kind of relationship based on this prototype provides a model of human relationships in general, especially (though not exclusively) when one person is senior to another.

The following explication is adapted from Wierzbicka (1998):

someone X feels amae (towards Y) at this time:

  • someone X thinks like this at this time (about someone Y):
    • “this someone can do good things for me
    • this someone wants to do good things for me
    • when I am with this someone, nothing bad can happen to me
    • I want to be with this someone”
  • because of this, this someone feels something good at this time
    • like someone can feel when they think like this

The next explication, for the English emotion term ‘happy’ (with the verb ‘to be’), shows how a prototypical cognitive scenario can be incorporated into an explication. The feeling experienced by X is not described directly; rather it is described as LIKE the good feeling experienced by a person who thinks certain prototypical thoughts, cf. Wierzbicka (1999) Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014).

someone X is happy (at this time):

  • someone X thinks like this at this time:
    • “many good things are happening to me as I want
    • I can do many things now as I want
    • this is good”
  • because of this, this someone feels something good at this time
    • like someone can feel when they think like this

This approach to emotion semantics allows a great deal of subtle differentiation between closely related emotions (e.g. ‘happy’, ‘joyful’, ‘pleased’, ‘content’, ‘related’, ‘jubilant’, and so on). To see this, here is a parallel explication for the word ‘contented’. Notice that it follows the same overall structure or “semantic template”:

someone X is contented (at this time):

  • someone X thinks like this at this time:
    • “something good is happening to me now
    • I want this
    • I don’t want anything else now”
  • because of this, this someone feels something good at this time
    • like someone can feel when they think like this

 

Anthropological linguists and ethnographers of communication have long recognised that different speech communities have different “ways of speaking”, not just in the narrowly linguistic sense but also in the norms or conventions of linguistic interaction. “Cultural scripts” are a way of spelling out different “local” conventions of discourse using the metalanguage of universal semantic primes. Using this method, cultural norms can be spelt out with much greater precision than is possible with technical labels such as “direct”, “polite”, “formal” and so on. Because they are phrased in simple and translatable terms, the danger of ethnocentric bias creeping into the very terms of the description is minimised.

Cultural scripts are not intended to provide an account of real life social interactions. Rather they are intended as descriptions of commonly held assumptions about how “people think” about social interaction. Because people bring these assumptions with them into everyday interactions, cultural scripts influence the form taken by particular verbal encounters but they do not in any sense determine individual interactions. Individuals can and do vary in their speech behaviour. The claim of the cultural scripts approach is merely that the scripts form a kind of interpretive background against which individuals position their own acts and those of others.

For example, the script below (cf. Wierzbicka 1994 a) is intended to capture a Japanese cultural norm.

A Japanese cultural script:

  • many people think like this:
  • when something bad happens to someone because I did something,
    • I have to (= can’t not) say something like this to this someone:
      • “I feel something bad because of this”
  • I have to (= can’t not) do something because of this

This represents a hypothesis about a cultural norm which is characteristically (though not exclusively) Japanese. It is linked with the often noted tendency of the Japanese to “apologise” very frequently and in a broad range of situations, but it does so without relying on the culture-bound English speech-act verb apologise. The script is also more accurate and explicit than the English term in not implying any admission that ‘I did something bad to you’, which would be inappropriate for the Japanese ‘apology’. One is expected to perform the speech-act in question whenever one’s action leads someone else to suffer harm or inconvenience, no matter how indirectly. The script is readily translatable into Japanese, and is thus directly accessible to the intuitions of Japanese speakers.

 

(Griffith University)

https://intranet.secure.griffith.edu.au/schools-departments/natural-semantic-metalanguage

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