Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) on semanttisen analyysin menetelmä, jossa tarkasteltavat merkitykset palautetaan rajattuun joukkoon universaaleja semanttisia primitiivejä. Menetelmällä on analysoitu mm. kulttuurisidonnaisia käsitteitä, arvoja ja asenteita sekä kieliopillisia konstruktioita. NSM:n on pannut alulle Anna Wierzbicka, joka myöhemmin on kehittänyt sitä yhteistyössä Cliff Goddardin kanssa.
Nyt on harvinainen tilaisuus päästä oppimaan jotain uutta NSM:stä, kun toinen menetelmän kehittäjistä, professori Cliff Goddard (Griffith University, Australia) pitää vierailuluennon Helsingin yliopistossa torstaina 4.9.2014 kello 16–18 Metsätalossa (Unioninkatu 40), luentosalissa 14. Tilaisuus on samalla yleisen kielitieteen tutkijaseminaarin syyskauden avaus.
Jos olet kiinnostunut jatkamaan keskustelua Goddardin kanssa luennon jälkeen epävirallisen illanvieton merkeissä, ilmoittaudu osoitteeseen ulla.vanhatalo@helsinki.fi mielellään 29.8. mennessä.
Luennon abstrakti:
Lexical semantics, grammatical semantics, and semantic typology – NSM style. A case study of “alienable possession”.
This talk presents recent NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) work on the lexicon and grammar of alienable possession. The key theoretical proposal is that “personal property” concepts are anchored in a semantic prime BE SOMEONE’S, which, evidence suggests, is expressible in all or most languages in canonical contexts such as “It’s mine” and “It’s someone else’s”, i.e. in a predicative or predicate-complement construction whose subject denotes a thing. After this proposal is explained and discussed, it will be shown how lexical units such as “give” and “steal”, which are semantically complex but possibly universal or near-universal, can be explicated in fine-grained detail using BE SOMEONE’S in combination with other elements of the NSM metalanguage. This opens the way for an improved approach to the lexical typology of personal property concepts. After this, the talk will turn to the grammatical semantics of possessive markers, a topic of long-standing interest in grammatical typology. Overall, the presentation will show how a suite of NSM concepts and techniques work in practice, including the concepts of reductive paraphrase, semantic primes, semantic molecules, semantic templates, and metalanguage syntax. The basic research behind the presentation was conducted jointly with Anna Wierzbicka.
Select references
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. and Dixon, R.M.W. (Eds.). 2012. Possession and Ownership: A Cross-Linguistic Typology. OUP.
Goddard, Cliff. 2011. Semantic Analysis. [Revised 2nd edition]. OUP.
Goddard, Cliff and Wierzbicka, Anna. 2014. Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics across Domains, Languages, and Cultures. OUP.
Goddard, Cliff and Wierzbicka, Anna. 2014. Semantic fieldwork and lexical universals. Studies in Language 38(1), 80–127.
McGregor, William (Ed.). 2009. The Expression of Possession. Berlin: Mouton.
http://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-languages-linguistics/staff/cliff-goddard
http://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-languages-linguistics/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage