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  • NSM analyses of the semantics of physical qualities: sweet, hot, hard, heavy, rough, sharp in cross-linguistic perspective

    Author(s)
    Goddard, Cliff
    Wierzbicka, Anna
    Griffith University Author(s)
    Goddard, Cliff W.
    Year published
    2007
    Metadata
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    Abstract
    All languages have words, such as English hot and cold, hard and soft, rough and smooth, and heavy and light, which attribute qualities to things. This paper maps out how such descriptors can be analysed in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework, in terms of like and other semantic primes configured into a particular semantic schema: essentially, touching something with a part of the body, feeling something in that part, knowing something about that thing because of it, and thinking about that thing in a certain way because of it. Far from representing objective properties of things "as such", it emerges that ...
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    All languages have words, such as English hot and cold, hard and soft, rough and smooth, and heavy and light, which attribute qualities to things. This paper maps out how such descriptors can be analysed in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework, in terms of like and other semantic primes configured into a particular semantic schema: essentially, touching something with a part of the body, feeling something in that part, knowing something about that thing because of it, and thinking about that thing in a certain way because of it. Far from representing objective properties of things "as such", it emerges that physical quality concepts refer to embodied human experiences and embodied human sensations. Comparisons with French, Polish and Korean show that the semantics of such words may differ significantly from language to language.
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    Journal Title
    Studies in Language
    Volume
    31
    Issue
    4
    DOI
    https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.31.4.03god
    Subject
    Linguistics
    Linguistics not elsewhere classified
    Publication URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/10072/58796
    Collection
    • Journal articles

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