The natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) is a linguistic theory based on the conception of Polish professor Andrzej Bogusławski. The leading proponents of the theory are Anna Wierzbicka at Warsaw University and later at the Australian National University who originated the theory in the early 1970s (Wierzbicka 1972), and Cliff Goddard at Australia's Griffith University (Goddard & Wierzbicka 1994, 2002).
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Approach
Linguists of the NSM school rely on semantic primitives (or semantic primes; those are simple, indefinable, and universally lexicalized concepts) for analysis and reductive paraphrase (that is breaking complex concepts down into simpler concepts).
Research in the NSM approach deals extensively with language and cognition, and language and culture. Key areas of research include lexical semantics, grammatical semantics, phraseology and pragmatics, as well as cross-cultural communication.
Languages studied in the NSM-framework include English, Russian, Polish, French, Spanish, Malay, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Ewe and East Cree, as well as Swedish.
Semantic primitives
The declared NSM primes have stabilized as a list of irreducible meanings, coded here as English words with specific senses. These primes are hypothesized to be language universals, with most of them having been tested across a wide variety of languages without encountering disconfirmation.
It is very important to realize that some of the exponents in the following list have meanings in English that are not shared with other languages, but when used as an exponent in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, we are only concerned with the meanings that are universal.
The English exponents of semantic primitives
Explication
An explication is a breakdown of a non-prime concept into prime ones.
E.g., Someone X killed someone Y:
someone X did something to someone else Y
because of this, something happened to Y at the same time
because of this, something happened to Y's body
because of this, after this Y was not living anymore