A Wierzbicka
Biographic Data
| ID | 9318 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Wierzbicka |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Wierzbicka |
| SIGNATURE | WIERZBICKA A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6074-7865 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 157 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1132 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 158 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1967 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
The Nicene Creed in Minimal English
Anchoring Anthropological Categories in Simple, Translatable Words
“Art” and “religion” are classic categories of anthropological discourse. Both words can be seen as designating distinctive and profound categories of human action and experience and hold special significance not only for anthropology but also for sociology, history, archeology, and adjacent disciplines. Problematically, however, both words are untranslatable into many languages, and even within European languages, they have been subject to endle…
I and Thou
This paper argues that “YOU” and “I” (“I” and “THOU”) are fundamental elements of human thought, present as distinct words (or signs) in all human languages. I first developed this thesis in my 1976 article “In defense of YOU and ME” (and before that, introduced it in my 1972 book Semantic Primitives; cf. also my 2021 article “‘Semantic Primitives’, fifty years later”). Since then, it has been confirmed by wide-ranging cross-linguistic investigat…
The conceptual semantics of “money” and “money verbs”
The central purpose of this study is to apply the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) method of semantic-conceptual analysis to the word money and to related economic transaction verbs, such as buy, sell and pay, as used in everyday English. It proposes semantic explications for these words on the basis of conceptual analysis and a range of linguistic evidence and taking account of lexical polysemy. Even in its basic meaning (in a sentence like t…
Semantics in the time of coronavirus
This study proposes Natural Semantic Metalanguage semantic explications for the English words virus (in two senses), bacteria, germs, and for the related words sick, ill, and disease. We concentrate on their nave or folk meanings (Apresjan 1992) in everyday English, as opposed to scientific or semi-scientific meanings. In this way, the paper makes a start on uncovering the folk epidemiology embedded in the English lexicon. The semantics of words …
“Semantic Primitives”, fifty years later
Are there any concepts that all human beings share? Three hundred years ago Leibniz was convinced that there are indeed such concepts and that they can be identified by trial and error. He called this hypothetical set the alphabet of human thoughts. Gradually, however, the idea faded from philosophical discourse and eventually it was largely forgotten. It was revived in the early 1960s by the Polish linguist Andrzej Bogusławski. A few years later…
We
Addressing God in European languages
All European languages have a word for God, and this word means exactly the same in all of them. However, speakers of different European languages tend to relate to God in different ways. Each group has its own characteristic ways of addressing God, encoded in certain words, phrases and grammatical forms, which both reflect and shape the speakers’ habitual ways of thinking about God and relating to God. Often, they also reflect some other aspects…
Seven essential messages for the time of the coronavirus
Słowa klucze. Różne języki – różne kultury
Prezentowana książka to pierwszy pełny przekład polski Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words. English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese, wydanej przez Oxford University Press w 1997 roku, będącej próbą przekrojowego spojrzenia na kulturę
The biblical roots of English ‘love’
Seen from a broad cross-linguistic perspective, the English verb (to) love is quite unusual because it has very broad scope: it can apply to a mother’s love, a husband’s love, a sister’s love, etc. without any restrictions whatsoever; and the same applies to its counterparts in many other European languages. Trying to locate the origins of this phenomenon, I have looked to the Bible. Within the Bible, I have found both continuity and innovation. …
Talking about our Bodies and their Parts in Warlpiri
Linguists generally assume that all languages have some words for parts of the human body such as ‘head’, ‘hands’, ‘mouth’ and ‘legs’, but it is not so widely agreed that speakers of all languages can speak—or even consciously think—of the designata of such words as ‘parts of the body’. In particular, it has been claimed that the Australian language Warlpiri lacks any suitable lexical equivalent of ‘part(s)’. Using data from the Warlpiri English …
Kinship Terminologies
“Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective
This chapter builds on findings of the author’s 1999 book Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals, which tentatively identified eleven universals pertaining to human emotions. The chapter probes some of those “emotional universals” further, especially in relation to “laughing”, “crying”, and “pain”. At the same time, the author continues her campaign against pseudo-universals, focussing in particular on the anthropologica…
Explicating the English lexicon of ‘doing and happening’
This study proposes NSM semantic explications for a cross-section of the English verbal lexicon of ‘doing and happening’. The twenty-five verbs are drawn from about a dozen verb classes, including verbs for non-typical locomotion ( crawl , swim , fly ), other intransitive activities ( play , sing ), manipulation ( hold ), activities that affect material integrity ( cut , grind , dig ), creation/production ( make , build , carve ), actions that af…
Terms of Address in European Languages
It's mine!’. Re-thinking the conceptual semantics of “possession” through NSM
Making sense of terms of address in European languages through the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)
Building on the author’s earlier work on address practices and focusing on the French words monsieur and madame , this paper seeks to demonstrate that generic titles used daily across Europe have relatively stable meanings, different in different languages, and that their semantic analysis can provide keys to the speakers’ cultural assumptions and attitudes. But to use these keys effectively, we need some basic locksmith skills. The NSM approach,…
Overcoming the Eurocentrism in Psychological Anthropology with Lexical Universals
Back to ‘Mother’ and ‘Father
This paper addresses one of the most controversial issues in cultural anthropology: the conceptual foundations of kinship and the apparent inevitability of ethnocentrism in kinship studies. The field of kinship studies has been in turmoil over the past few decades, repeatedly pronounced dead and then again rising from the ashes and being declared central to human affairs. As this paper argues, the conceptual confusion surrounding ‘kinship’ is to …
Language and Society
A whole cloud of culture condensed into a drop of semantics
This paper investigates the meaning and use of the German word Herr as a form of address, in a historical and cross-linguistic perspective. The paper argues that despite their apparent insignificance, generic titles used daily across Europe, and in all the parts of the world to which European languages have travelled, can reveal complex and intricate webs of cultural assumptions, attitudes, and values, as well as how these assumptions, attitudes,…
The idea of a 'spoon
Can There Be Common Knowledge Without a Common Language
This essay argues that, since Kant wrote in German and since German has no word for "right" corresponding in meaning to the English word, it is a case of conceptual anglocentrism to say, as many anglophone philosophers do, that Kant reformulated the foundations of ethics by formulating them in terms of the "right" rather than the "good." Further, the essay shows how the German word Pflicht, central to Kant's ethics, does not correspond in meaning…
Meanings and Prototypes (RLE Linguistics B
Peer-reviewed
Cross-Cultural Pragmatics
This book, which can be seen as both a research monograph and a text book, challenges the approaches to human interaction based on supposedly universal "maxims of conversation" and "principles of politeness", which fly in the face of reality as experienced by millions of people - refugees, immigrants, crosscultural families, and so on. By contrast to such approaches, which can be of no use in crosscultural communication and education, this book i…
Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts
Semantics
Conceptual primitives and semantic universals are the cornerstones of a semantic theory which Anna Wierzbicka has been developing for many years. Semantics: Primes and Universals is a major synthesis of her work, presenting a full and systematic exposition of that theory in a non-technical and readable way. It delineates a full set of universal concepts, as they have emerged from large-scale investigations across a wide range of languages underta…
Human Emotions
The search for "fundamental human emotions" has been seriously impeded by the absence of a culture-independent semantic metalanguage. The author proposes a metalanguage based on a postulated set of universal semantic primitives, and shows how language-specific meanings of emotion terms can be captured and how rigorous cross-cultural comparisons of emotion terms can be achieved
The Semantics of Grammar
The semantics of grammar" presents a radically semantic approach to syntax and morphology. It offers a methodology which makes it possible to demonstrate, on an empirical basis, that syntax is neither "autonomous" nor "arbitrary", but that it follows from "semantics". It is shown that every grammatical construction encodes a certain semantic structure, which can be revealed and rigorously stated, so that the meanings encoded in grammar can be com…
Cultural scripts
The term cultural scripts refers to a powerful new technique for articu- lating cultural norms, values, and practices in terms which are clear, pre- cise, and accessible to cultural insiders and to cultural outsiders alike. This result is only possible because cultural scripts are formulated in a tightly constrained, yet expressively flexible, metalanguage consisting of simple words and grammatical patterns which have equivalents in all languages…
Australian cultural scripts-bloody revisited
Why there are no 'colour universals' in language and thought
Do all people live in a world full of colours? Perceptually, yes (unless they are visually impaired), but conceptually, no: there are many languages which have no word for 'colour' and in which the question 'what colour is it?' cannot be asked and presumably does not arise. Yet the powerful and still immensely influential theory of Berlin and Kay assumes otherwise. While building on my earlier work on colour semantics, this article brings new evi…
A semantic metalanguage for a crosscultural comparison of speech acts and speech genres
This paper discusses a number of speech acts and speech genres from English, Polish, and Japanese, approaching them through the words which name them. It is claimed that folk names of speech acts and speech genres are culture-specific and provide an important source of insight into communicative routines most characteristic of a given society; and that to fully exploit this source one must carry Out a rigorous semantic analysis of such names and …
Talking about emotions
The author argues that the so-called "basic emotions", such as happiness, fear or anger, are in fact cultural artifacts of the English language, just as the Ilongot concept of liget, or the Ifaluk concept of song, are the cultural artifacts of Ilongot and Ifaluk. It is therefore as inappropriate to talk about human emotions in general in terms of happiness, fear, or anger as it would be to talk about them in terms of liget or song. However, this …
The semantics of interjection
The meaning of color terms
This paper argues that color concepts are anchored in certain “universals of human experience”, and that these universals can be identified, roughly speaking, as day and night, fire, the sun, vegetation, the sky, and the ground. Although our color sensations occur in our brains, not in the world outside, and their nature is probably determined to a large extent by our human biology ( which links us, in some measure, with other primates), to be ab…
Soul and Mind
The author shows that the Russian word duša 'soul' has a much wider scope of use than the English word soul and that it embodies a different folk psychology (fully congruent with what has been described as the Russian "national character"). She also shows that the English word mind stands for an Anglo-Saxon folk category, which has been reified as an objective category of thought. She links the decline and fall of the concept soul and the ascenda…
"Apples Are Not a "Kind of Fruit
This paper examines the semantic structure of English classificatory terms in the area of concrete lexicon, linking differences in semantic structure with differences in grammatical characteristics of different classes of nouns. I argue that in recent literature on human categorization the strictly taxonomic categories (i.e., categories based on hierarchies of kinds) have not been distinguished from other types of categories. I discuss four types…
Case marking and human nature
Japanese Cultural Scripts
Peer-reviewed
A Conceptual Basis for Cultural Psychology
It simply will not do to reject the theoertical centrality of meaning for psychology on the grounds that it is "vague." Its vagueness was in the eye of yesterday's formalistics logician. We are beyond that now. [Bruner 1990: 65
Boys Will Be Boys
Colloquial ‘tautologies’ such as War is war or A promise is a promise have often been adduced in support of a ‘Gricean’ account of language use. The present article shows, however, that ‘tautological constructions’ are partly conventional and language-specific, and that each such construction has a specific meaning which cannot be fully predicted in terms of any universal pragmatic maxims. It is argued that the attitudinal meanings conveyed by va…
Russian Cultural Scripts
Cultural scripts" as understood in this article are representations of cultural norms that are widely held in a given society and that are reflected in language (in culture-specific "keywords," phrases, conversational routines, and so on). A key methodological principle in the theory underlying this article is that the proposed cultural scripts must be formulated in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, that is, in terms of empirically established u…
Japanese key words and core cultural values
Every language has its own key words, which reflect the core values of the culture. Consequently, cultures can be revealingly studied, compared, and explained to outsiders through their key words. But to be able to study, compare, and explain cultures in terms of their key words, we need a culture-independent analytical framework. A framework of this kind is provided by the natural semantic metalanguage developed by the author and colleagues over…
Does language reflect culture? Evidence from Australian English
This paper attempts to demonstrate direct links between Australian language and other aspects of Australian culture. The existence of such links - intuitively obvious and yet notoriously hard to prove - is often rejected in the name of scientific rigor ("if they can't be proved then it is better either to assume that they don't exist or at least not to talk about them"). Nonetheless, the problem continues to exercise fascination over scholars, as…
Semantic fieldwork and lexical universals
The main goal of paper is to show how NSM findings about lexical universals (semantic primes) can be applied to semantic analysis in little-described languages. It is argued that using lexical universals as a vocabulary for semantic analysis allows one to formulate meaning descriptions that are rigorous, cognitively authentic, maximally translatable, and free from Anglocentrism. A second goal is to shed light on methodological issues in semantic …
Emotion and Culture
Martha Nussbaum's account of human emotions, given in her influential 2001 book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions is, in many ways, a balanced and insightful one. Her discussion steers prudently and carefully between, on the one hand, the excesses of cultural relativism and social constructivism, and on the other, the crude universalism of biological and cognitivist accounts of emotion. And yet I do not find Nussbaum's overall ac…
German `Cultural Scripts
This paper is based on the following set of assumptions: (1) Ways of speaking characteristic of a given speech-community constitute a manifestation of a tacit system of `cultural rules', or, as the author calls them, `cultural scripts'; (2) to understand a society's ways of speaking, we have to identify and articulate its implicit `cultural scripts'; (3) to be able to do this without ethnocentric bias we need a universal, language-independent per…
Russian Emotional Expression
This article examines Russian "emotional ideology" as reflected in the Russian language, and especially in the Russian collocational system. Colloquial collocations involving the human body, seen as an organ of emotional expression, are the focus for comparing folk models of the body and emotion in Russian and Anglo cultures. A theory of "cultural scripts" forms the basis of generalizations from the linguistic evidence
On the Semantics of the Verbal Aspect in Polish
The semantics of direct and indirect discourse
(1974). The semantics of direct and indirect discourse. Paper in Linguistics: Vol. 7, No. 3-4, pp. 267-307
Topic, focus, and deep structure
Syntax vs. Semantics
In this paper the author outlines a semantic theory which she has developed in a number of books and articles (see especially Semantic Primitives Athenäum Frankfun 1972). A universal set of thirteen semantic primitives is postulated which correspond to indefinable expressions to be found in every natural language (Leibniz’s “alphabet of human thought”). It is argued that an autonomous syntax which postulates unobservable underlying structures is …
Ethno-Syntax and the Philosophy of Grammar
Peer-reviewed
Are grammatical categories vague or polysemous? (The Japanese ‘adversative’ passive in a typological context)
(1979). Are grammatical categories vague or polysemous? (The Japanese ‘adversative’ passive in a typological context) Paper in Linguistics: Vol. 12, No. 1-2, pp. 111-162
Case marking and human nature
Case marking and the nature of discussion
Peer-reviewed
The Case for Surface Case
Why Can You Have a Drink When You Can't *Have an Eat
This paper argues that sentences in the have a V frame are not a jungle of idiosyncrasies, but exhibit orderly and systematic behavior, governed by strict semantic rules. These rules can be stated in precise formulae with full predictive power. Ten subtypes are singled out: each has a slightly different semantic formula, but all have a common core, which is a semantic invariant of the have a V frame. These semantic formulae, which account for dif…
The Semantics of Case Marking
Preview this article: The Semantics of Case Marking, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/sl.7.2.04wie-1.gif
Cups and mugs
Peer-reviewed
"Apples Are Not a "Kind of Fruit
This paper examines the semantic structure of English classificatory terms in the area of concrete lexicon, linking differences in semantic structure with differences in grammatical characteristics of different classes of nouns. I argue that in recent literature on human categorization the strictly taxonomic categories (i.e., categories based on hierarchies of kinds) have not been distinguished from other types of categories. I discuss four types…
“Oats” and “Wheat”
Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts
A semantic metalanguage for a crosscultural comparison of speech acts and speech genres
This paper discusses a number of speech acts and speech genres from English, Polish, and Japanese, approaching them through the words which name them. It is claimed that folk names of speech acts and speech genres are culture-specific and provide an important source of insight into communicative routines most characteristic of a given society; and that to fully exploit this source one must carry Out a rigorous semantic analysis of such names and …
What's in a Noun? (Or
Peer-reviewed
Tolkovo-Kombinatornyj slovar' sovremennogo russkogo jazyka
Elena Viktorovna Padučeva, Vyskazyvanie i ego sootnesennost' s dejstvitel'-nos'ju. Moscow
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Metaphors linguists live by
Critique de l'ouvrage de Lakoff G. et Johnson M. Metaphors we live by . Le systeme conceptuel structure metaphoriquement. La metaphore et la lexicographie
Italien reduplication
The article examines the use and the function of ‘syntactic reduplication in Italian and compares it with some other ‘intensification’ devices, in Italian and in English, such as the ‘absolute superlative’. It is argued that subtle ‘pragmatic’ meanings such as those conveyed in Italian reduplication can be identified and distinguished from other, related meanings if ad hoc impressionistic comments are replaced with rigorous semantic representatio…
Precision in vagueness
A semantic metalanguage for the description and comparison of illocutionary meanings
Does language reflect culture? Evidence from Australian English
This paper attempts to demonstrate direct links between Australian language and other aspects of Australian culture. The existence of such links - intuitively obvious and yet notoriously hard to prove - is often rejected in the name of scientific rigor ("if they can't be proved then it is better either to assume that they don't exist or at least not to talk about them"). Nonetheless, the problem continues to exercise fascination over scholars, as…
Semantics and the Interpretation of Cultures
This article examines the semantic and cultural significance of alternate generation devices in Australian Aboriginal languages. These devices, which involve distinct kinship terms for alternating generations, reflect a complex system of social organization and cultural understanding. Wierzbicka argues that a proper understanding of these terms requires going beyond mere structural analysis and delving into the underlying cultural values and worl…
Philosophy (127 works) · Linguistics (125 works) · Computer Science (108 works) · Psychology (73 works) · Sociology (70 works) · Epistemology (63 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (61 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (56 works) · History (33 works) · Philosophy (33 works)