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Universal semantic primes surface in human languages: French and English perspectives| old_uid | 10345 |
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| title | Universal semantic primes surface in human languages: French and English perspectives |
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| start_date | 2011/11/07 |
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| schedule | 15h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | The search for conceptual primes in language began in the 17th century with Leibniz. He posited the existence of an alphabetum cogitationum humanarum, an alphabet of human thoughts, which he believed could be discovered by experimental semantic analysis, i.e. by attempting a large number of definitions of ordinary words in order to discover which meanings can be defined without circularity and which cannot. It was a conception closely akin to Descartes’s, Pascal’s and Arnauld’s pursuit of “clear ideas” and indefinable words.
After Leibniz’s death the project fell of the linguistic and philosophical agenda, until the second half of the 20th century, when it was taken up again by the Polish semanticist Andrzej Boguslawski. It was subsequently turned into a large-scale research program in the work of linguists in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage paradigm program, initiated in my l972 book Semantic Primitives and later developed jointly with my Australian colleague Cliff Goddard.
Leibniz never proposed anything like a complete list of the elements making up the presumed “alphabet of human thoughts”. As of 2010, however, NSM researchers have advanced a complete and testable set of fundamental human concepts that surface in all languages.
Thus, this talk will report on the culmination of a long search: the discovery of a set of sixty four elementary meanings common to all languages and presumably innate.
Two versions of this set, English and French will be presented in my talk. The potential of this set as a precise tool for investigating meanings and as a common measure for comparing meanings and ideas across languages and cultures will be illustrated with French and English examples.
In particular, I will focus on the French words douleur and bonheur and their putative English equivalents pain and happiness. I will also talk about the English cultural keyword empirical and I will show how it differs in meaning from the French word empirique. More broadly, I will discuss the cultural underpinnings of such differences in the meaning of words and the new vistas that the discovery of universal conceptual primes opens for lexicography, language teaching and the scientific investigations of languages, cognition and culture. |
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| responsibles | Knittel, Servas |
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