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Study

High school students

Learn about the support available to help you get ready for university.

Postgraduate coursework

Take your career to the next level, or in a new direction.

How to apply

Application information you need for your circumstances and chosen degree.

Non school leavers

Explore the different ways you can get in to Griffith.

Higher degrees by research

Discover the benefits of studying a research degree at Griffith.

Scholarships

Explore our wide range of scholarships, find out what you?re eligible for and apply.

Information about

  • Business and government
  • Criminology and law
  • Education
  • Engineering and IT
  • Environment, planning and architecture
  • Medicine, dentistry and health
  • Humanities and languages
  • Music
  • Science and environment
  • Sport
  • Student entrepreneurship
  • Visual and creative arts

International

Life in Australia

Explore the Australian lifestyle and environment, accommodation, and cost of study.

Life in Australia

Find out more - Life in Australia

Study at Griffith

We offer hundreds of study options across a wide range of areas.

Know your options

Discover your pathway options based on your current qualifications and English levels.

English language programs

Study English language courses to improve your English level to qualify for a Griffith degree, travel or work.

Apply now

Follow our simple process to apply to study at Griffith.

Scholarships and finance

Find out about financing study through your home country's loan program, sponsored student support and scholarships.

Student support

Learn about the wide range of support services available for international students.

Study abroad and exchange

Complete one or two trimesters of study in Australia and earn credit towards your home degree.

Information for

  • Griffith English Language Institute
  • International Business Development Unit
  • International Relations
  • Tourism Confucius Institute
  • Find an international agent
  • Contact us

Research

Research excellence

  • Asian politics, security and development
  • Climate change adaptation
  • Criminology and crime prevention
  • Drug discovery and infectious diseases
  • Education
  • Environmental sciences
  • Health and chronic diseases
  • Music, the arts and the Asia Pacific
  • Nursing
  • Physical sciences
  • Sustainable tourism
  • Water science

Griffith research

Explore the strengths of one of Australia?s leading universities.

Research with impact

Delve into our discoveries and see how our research is making a difference.

Centres and institutes

We have an extensive network of research centres and institutes.

Griffith Graduate Research School

Services, support and resources for candidates and supervisors.

Research services

Grants, development, ethics and integrity, policy and performance.

Griffith Enterprise

Commercialisation and technology transfer office of Griffith University.

PhDs and Research degrees

Collaborative research opportunities at Griffith open doors to greater innovation and discovery for higher degree researchers, who are ready to think globally and discover new world solutions.

PhDs and research degrees

Find out more - PhDs and Research degrees

Industry

Industry partnerships

We foster mutually beneficial partnerships with industry, government and the community that power innovation and drive success.

Industry mega nav image

Find out more - Industry partnerships

Collaborate with us

Collaborating with us can open a world of options.

Research commercialisation

Access our research capabilities and see how our impact across industries.

Professional development

Access our educational resources to upskill in a wide range of areas.

Engage our talent

Engage our students, tap into our alumni network and see our success stories.

Success stories

Explore our partnerships and discover the ways we can make a difference.

Contact us

Develop a collaborative partnership with Griffith.

Information about

  • Access to commercial research
  • Griffith Enterprise
  • Griffith Experts
  • Professional training
  • Professional development (music)
  • Creative short courses
  • International business development
  • Recruitment services
  • Work placements

Advancement

Annual appeal

Please make a gift to the Students’ Future Fund to support students facing financial hardship. Thank you.

Annual Appeal

Find out more - Annual appeal

Alumni

Griffith alumni are making an outstanding impact in their local and global communities.

Events and opportunities

Every year we host alumni events in Australia and overseas. Come and join us.

Stay connected

Stay in touch with Griffith University and fellow alumni. Simply register or update your details.

Giving to Griffith

Giving changes lives. Contribute to a better future for all through education and research.

Donate now

Every gift makes a difference. And it?s so easy.

Gifts in wills

The ultimate act of philanthropy, creating a lasting footprint for the future.

Information for

  • Notable alumni
  • Alumni news
  • Annual awards
  • Staff giving
  • Governance
  • Contact us

About Griffith

First Peoples

We recognise Australia?s First Peoples? place in history and culture, and acknowledge them as the traditional custodians of the land.

Walk and Talk event

Find out more - First Peoples

About the University

Discover more about our history, our vision and what sets us apart from other tertiary institutions.

Our campuses and facilities

Explore our five campuses between Brisbane and the Gold Coast.

Life at Griffith

Find out all Griffith has to offer aside from study.

Our values

Learn about our mission, values and commitments.

Academic groups

View all the schools and centres that fall within our academic groups.

Jobs at Griffith

Investigate employment opportunities available across our five campuses.

Information about

  • Architecture, construction and planning
  • Business and government
  • Criminology and law
  • Education
  • Engineering, IT and aviation
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Staff

Annual appeal

Please make a gift to the Students’ Future Fund to support students facing financial hardship. Thank you.

Annual Appeal

Find out more - Annual appeal

Email

Access your Microsoft account for email, calendar and teams.

Staff services and resources

View a list of commonly accessed services and resources.

Staff Portal

Login to Griffith's intranet services.

Library

Access library resources, catalogues, databases, workshops and training.

Learning@Griffith

Interact with students and peers and access or upload learning and teaching materials.

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Find your way around our campuses with detailed building and parking location maps.

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Investigate employment opportunities available across our five campuses.

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Home > Griffith Intranet > Schools and departments > Natural Semantic Metalanguage > Publications

Publications

  • Natural Semantic Metalanguage
  • In brief
  • What is NSM
  • Semantic explications
  • Cultural scripts
  • Publications
  • Downloads
  • Minimal English

NSM Authors

Cliff Goddard

  • View Cliff Goddard's Griffith Experts profile: Research Publications and Outputs

Anna Wierzbicka

  • Anna Wierzbicka publications

Bert Peeters

  • View Bert Peeters' Griffith Experts profile: Research Publications and Outputs
  • External website NSM Approach - full publications

Other NSM Authors

  • NSM Authors

Recent Books

Minimal English for a Global World

Edited by Cliff Goddard

This book introduces a new tool for improving communication and promoting clearer thinking in a world where the use of Global English can create numerous comprehension and communication issues. Based on research findings from cross-linguistic semantics, it contains essays and studies by leading experts exploring the value and application of ‘Minimal English’ in various fields, including ethics, health, human rights discourse, education and international relations. In doing so, it provides informed guidelines and practical advice on how to communicate in clear and cross-translatable ways in Minimal English. This innovative edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of applied linguistics, language education and translation studies.

Find out more: Minimal English for a Global World


The Semantics of Nouns

Edited by Zhengdao Ye

This volume brings together latest research on the semantics of nouns in a range of languages, including English, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, the Papuan language Koromu, the Dravidian language Solega, and Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara from Australia. Chapters offer detailed analyses of scores of individual nouns across a range of conceptual domains, including 'people', 'places', and 'living things', with each analysis fully grounded in a unified methodological framework. The studies show how in-depth meaning analysis can shed light on many subtle grammatical phenomena and lead to unexpected insights into ways in which speakers of different languages conceptualize, categorize, and order the world around them. The authors engage with research in multiple disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, and philosophy.

Find out more: The Semantics of Nouns


semantics-of-chinese-music

The Semantics of Chinese Music: Analysing selected Chinese musical concepts

Dr Adrian Tien

Music is a widely enjoyed human experience. It is, therefore, natural that we have wanted to describe, document, analyse and, somehow, grasp it in language. This book surveys a representative selection of musical concepts in Chinese language, i.e. words that describe, or refer to, aspects of Chinese music. Important as these musical concepts are in the language, they have been in wide circulation since ancient times without being subjected to any serious semantic analysis. The current study is the first known attempt at analysing these Chinese musical concepts linguistically, adopting the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to formulate semantically and cognitively rigorous explications.

Find out more... 


language-culture

"Happiness" and "Pain" across Languages and Cultures - Special Issue of International Journal of Language and Culture 1(2)

Edited by Cliff Goddard and Ye Zhengdao

This volume presents studies of “happiness-like” and “pain-like” expressions across a range of languages (including Chinese, Danish, English, French, Japanese, Koromu, and Spanish), undertaken using the NSM method of semantic and cultural analysis. At the same time as probing the precise linguistic meanings of the expressions in question, the authors provide extensive cultural contextualization, showing in some detail how the meanings they are analyzing are truly “cultural meanings.


Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics Across Domains, Languages, and Cultures

By Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka

In a series of cross-cultural investigations of word meaning, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka examine key expressions from different domains of the lexicon - concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social.

They focus on complex and culturally important words in a range of languages that includes English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri and Malay. Some are basic like men, women, and children or abstract nouns like trauma and violence; others describe qualities such as hot, hard, and rough, emotions like happiness and sadness, or feelings like pain.

This fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words. They ground their discussions in real examples from different cultures and draw on work ranging from Leibniz, Locke, and Bentham, to popular works such as autobiographies and memoirs, and the Dalai Lama on happiness.

Find out more...


Imprisoned in English. The Hazards of English as a Default Language

By Anna Wierzbicka

Imprisoned in English argues that in the present English-dominated world, social sciences and the humanities are locked in a conceptual framework grounded in English and that most scholars in these fields are not aware of the need to break away from this framework to reach a more universal, culture-independent perspective on things human. Indeed they are typically not aware that any problem exists, and resistant to its being pointed out.

The book engages with current debates across a range of disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, sociology, evolutionary science, psychology, and cognitive science, as well as linguistics.

Find out more... 


J-Wong-Singaporean-English

The Culture of Singapore English

By Jock Wong

This book provides a fresh approach to Singapore English, by focusing on its cultural connotations. The author, a native Singaporean, explores a range of aspects of this rich variety of English - including address forms, cultural categories, particles and interjections – and links particular words to particular cultural norms. By using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, which is free from technical terminology, he explains the relationship between meaning and culture with maximal clarity, and an added strength of this study lies in its use of authentic examples and pictures, which offer a fascinating glimpse of Singaporean life.

Through comparisons with Anglo English, it also explores some difficulties associated with Standard English and cultural misunderstanding. Lending a unique local perspective and written with an incisiveness that makes it ideal for both academic and non-academic readers, this book will appeal to all those interested in Singapore English and its cultural values.

Find out more... 


Semantics and/in Social Cognition - Special Issue of Australian Journal of Linguistics 33(3)

Edited by Cliff Goddard

Seven papers showing how NSM techniques (semantic explications, cultural scripts) can tap into social cognition of people from diverse cultures, while avoiding conceptual and terminological Anglocentrism. Languages include: Chinese, Russian, Danish, Koromu, Kayardild, Pitjantjatjara, Roper Kriol.

Find out more...


Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition. A case study on the Danish Universe of Meaning

By Carsten Levisen

Presenting original, detailed studies of keywords of Danish, this book breaks new ground for the study of language and cultural values. Based on evidence from the semantic categories of everyday language, such as the Danish concept of hygge (roughly meaning, ‘pleasant togetherness’), the book provides an integrative socio-cognitive framework for studying and understanding language-particular universes.

Find out more...


Semantic Analysis: A Practical Introduction

By Cliff Goddard

This lively textbook introduces students and scholars to practical and precise methods for articulating the meanings of words and sentences, and for revealing connections between language and culture.

Topics range over emotions, speech acts, words for animals and artefacts, motion, activity verbs, causatives, discourse particles, and nonverbal communication. Alongside English, it features a wide range of other languages, including Malay, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, and Australian Aboriginal languages. Undergraduates, graduate students and professional linguists alike will benefit from Goddard's wide-ranging summaries, clear explanations and analytical depth. Meaning is fundamental to language and linguistics.

This book shows that the study of meaning can be rigorous, insightful and exciting.

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