Semantic primes

Semantic primes

The NSM model has changed a lot since it was first advanced in the early 1970s. In Anna Wierzbicka's 1972 book Semantic Primitives, only 14 semantic primitives were proposed and in her 1980 book Lingua Mentalis, the inventory was not much bigger. Over the 1980s and 1990s, however, the number of proposed primes was expanded greatly, and has now reached a total of 65. The same period also saw the development of some important new ideas about the syntax of the semantic metalanguage. The current proposed primes can be presented, using their English exponents, in the Table below. Perhaps not surprisingly, the inventory of primes looks like a natural language in miniature. As with any language, the "mini-language" of semantic primes has a grammar, as well as a lexicon. This is described in brief below.

Proposed semantic primes (2014), English exponents (grouped into related categories)

Download the NSM Primes Three Tables (DOC 82k)

Download a chart of NSM semantic primes (PDF 154k) Please note this must be printed on A3 paper, in landscape.

Five important points about identifying semantic primes:

1. A mere list is not sufficient, in itself, to identify the intended meanings, if only because many of these English exponents are polysemous (i.e. have several meanings), but only one sense of each is proposed as primitive. While it is claimed that the simplest sense of the exponent words can be matched across languages (i.e. that they are "lexical universals"), it is recognised that their secondary, polysemic meanings may differ widely from language to language. A fuller characterisation indicates for each proposed prime a set of "canonical contexts" in which it can occur; that is, a set of sentences or sentence fragments exemplifying its allowable grammatical contexts.
2. When we say that a semantic prime ought to be a lexical universal, the term "lexical" is being used in a broad sense. An exponent of a semantic prime may be a phraseme or a bound morpheme, just so long as it expresses the requisite meaning. For example, in English the prime A LONG TIME is expressed by a phraseme, though in many languages the same meaning is conveyed by a single word. In many Australian languages the prime BECAUSE is expressed by a suffix.
3. Even when semantic primes take the form of single words, there is no need for them to be morphologically simple. For example, in English the words SOMEONE and INSIDE are morphologically complex, but their meanings are not composed from the meanings of the morphological "bits" in question. That is, the meaning SOMEONE does not equal "some + one"; the meaning INSIDE does not equal "in + side". In meaning terms, SOMEONE and INSIDE are indivisible.
4. Exponents of semantic primes can have language-specific variant forms (allolexes or allomorphs, indicated by ~ in the table above). For example, in English the word 'else' is an alloex of OTHER; likewise, the word 'thing' functions as an allolex of SOMETHING when it is combined with a determiner or quantifier (i.e. this something = this thing, one something = one thing).
5. Exponents of semantic primes may have different morphosyntactic characteristics, and hence belong to different "parts of speech", in different languages, without this necessarily disturbing their essential combinatorial properties.

All these factors mean that testing the cross-linguistic viability of the semantic primes is no straightforward matter. It requires rich and reliable data, and careful language-internal analysis of polysemy, allolexy, etc. Though cross-linguistic testing of this kind is still in progress, the prospectus seems promising. The existence and lexicalised status of semantic primes has been confirmed for more than 30 languages of widely different linguistic types and from widely different cultural settings. There are a couple of difficult and/or contested cases, but the great balance of evidence favours the hypothesis that semantic primes are both universal and have lexical exponents in all languages.

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