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Semantic Primes
Semantic primes or semantic primitives are a set of semantic concepts that are argued to be innately understood by all people but impossible to express in simpler terms. They represent words or phrases that are learned through practice but cannot be defined concretely. For example, although the meaning of "touching" is readily understood, a dictionary might define "touch" as "to make contact" and "contact" as "touching", providing no information if neither of these words is understood. The concept of universal semantic primes was largely introduced by Anna Wierzbicka's book, ''Semantics: Primes and Universals''. List of semantic primes Table adapted from Levisen and Waters 2017 and Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014. A universal ''syntax'' of meaning Semantic primes represent universally meaningful ''concepts'', but to have meaningful ''messages'', or ''statements'', such concepts must combine in a way that they themselves convey meaning. Such meaningful combinations, in their simple ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anna Wierzbicka
Anna Wierzbicka (born 10 March 1938 in Warsaw) is a Poles, Polish linguistics, linguist who is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Canberra. Brought up in Poland, she graduated from Warsaw University and emigrated to Australia in 1972, where she has lived since. With over twenty published books, many of which have been translated into foreign languages, she is a prolific writer. Wierzbicka is known for her work in semantics, pragmatics and anthropological linguistics, cross-cultural linguistics, especially for the natural semantic metalanguage and the concept of semantic primes. Her research agenda resembles Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's original "alphabet of human thought". Wierzbicka credits her colleague, linguist Andrzej Bogusławski, with reviving it in the late 1960s. Biography Wierzbicka was born in 1938, just before the outbreak of World War II. She received her PhD from the Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences in 1964 and sub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intensifier
In linguistics, an intensifier (abbreviated ) is a lexical category (but ''not'' a traditional part of speech) for a modifier that makes no contribution to the propositional meaning of a clause but serves to enhance and give additional emotional context to the word it modifies. Intensifiers are grammatical expletives, specifically ''expletive attributives'' (or, equivalently, ''attributive expletives'' or ''attributive-only expletives''; they also qualify as ''expressive attributives''), because they function as semantically vacuous filler. Characteristically, English draws intensifiers from a class of words called ''degree modifiers'', words that quantify the idea they modify. More specifically, they derive from a group of words called ''adverbs of degree'', also known as ''degree adverbs''. When used grammatically as intensifiers, these words cease to be degree adverbs, because they no longer quantify the idea they modify; instead, they emphasize it emotionally. By contrast, the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Swadesh List
The Swadesh list ("Swadesh" is pronounced ) is a classic compilation of tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatedness of those languages. The Swadesh list is named after linguist Morris Swadesh. It is used in lexicostatistics (the quantitative assessment of the genealogical relatedness of languages) and glottochronology (the dating of language divergence). Because there are several different lists, some authors also refer to "Swadesh lists". Versions and authors Morris Swadesh himself created several versions of his list. He started with a list of 215 meanings (falsely introduced as a list of 225 meanings in the paper due to a spelling error), which he reduced to 165 words for the Salish-Spokane-Kalispel language. In 1952, he published a list of 215 meanings,Swadesh 1952: 456–PDF/ref> of which he suggested the removal of 16 for being unclear or not ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Natural Semantic Metalanguage
The natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) is a linguistic theory that reduces lexicons down to a set of semantic primitives. It is based on the conception of Polish professor Andrzej Bogusławski. The theory was formally developed by Anna Wierzbicka at Warsaw University and later at the Australian National University in the early 1970s, and Cliff Goddard at Australia's Griffith University. Approach The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory attempts to reduce the semantics of all lexicons down to a restricted set of semantic primitives, or primes. Primes are universal in that they have the same translation in every language, and they are primitive in that they cannot be defined using other words. Primes are ordered together to form explications, which are descriptions of semantic representations consisting solely of primes. Research in the NSM approach deals extensively with language and cognition, and language and culture. Key areas of research include lexical semantics, gra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linguistic Universal
A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, ''All languages have nouns and verbs'', or ''If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels.'' Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology, and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition, perception, or other abilities of the mind. The field originates from discussions influenced by Noam Chomsky's proposal of a Universal Grammar, but was largely pioneered by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, who derived a set of forty-five basic universals, mostly dealing with syntax, from a study of some thirty languages. Though there has been significant research into linguistic universals, in more recent time some linguists, including Nicolas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson, have argued against the existence of absolute linguistic universals that are shared across all languages. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Core Ontology
In philosophy, a core ontology is a basic and minimal ontology consisting only of the minimal concepts required to understand the other concepts. It must be based on a core glossary in some human language so humans can comprehend the concepts and distinctions made. Each natural language tends to rely on its own conceptual metaphor structure, and so tends to have its own core ontology (according to W. V. Quine). It could be said also to represent the moral core of a human linguistics, linguistic culture, and to self-correct so as to better represent core cultural ideas. Such a core ontology is a key pre-requisite to a more complete foundation ontology, or a more general philosophical sense of ontology. Most applicable to education, teaching, e.g. the Longmans defining dictionary of the simplest meanings of 2,000 English words is used to define the 4,000 most basic English idioms—this is a core glossary of the English language, which permits access to the core ontology (the idiom ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Natural Semantic Metalanguage
The natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) is a linguistic theory that reduces lexicons down to a set of semantic primitives. It is based on the conception of Polish professor Andrzej Bogusławski. The theory was formally developed by Anna Wierzbicka at Warsaw University and later at the Australian National University in the early 1970s, and Cliff Goddard at Australia's Griffith University. Approach The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory attempts to reduce the semantics of all lexicons down to a restricted set of semantic primitives, or primes. Primes are universal in that they have the same translation in every language, and they are primitive in that they cannot be defined using other words. Primes are ordered together to form explications, which are descriptions of semantic representations consisting solely of primes. Research in the NSM approach deals extensively with language and cognition, and language and culture. Key areas of research include lexical semantics, gra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johanna Nichols
Johanna Nichols (born 1945, Iowa City, Iowa) is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 with a dissertation titled, "The Balto-Slavic predicate instrumental: a problem in diachronic syntax." Her research interests include the Slavic languages, the linguistic prehistory of northern Eurasia, language typology, ancient linguistic prehistory, and languages of the Caucasus, chiefly Chechen and Ingush. She has made fundamental contributions to these fields. A festschrift in her honor, ''Language Typology and Historical Contingency: In honor of Johanna Nichols'', was published in 2013. Nichols's best known work, ''Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time'', won the Linguistic Society of America's Leonard Bloomfield Book Award for 1994. Books * ''Predicate Nominals: A Partial Surface Syntax of Russian.' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mitochondrial Eve
In human genetics, the Mitochondrial Eve (also ''mt-Eve, mt-MRCA'') is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all living humans. In other words, she is defined as the most recent woman from whom all living humans descend in an unbroken line purely through their mothers and through the mothers of those mothers, back until all lines converge on one woman. In terms of mitochondrial haplogroups, the mt-MRCA is situated at the divergence of macro-haplogroup L into L0 and L1–6. As of 2013, estimates on the age of this split ranged at around 155,000 years ago, consistent with a date later than the speciation of ''Homo sapiens'' but earlier than the recent out-of-Africa dispersal. The male analog to the "Mitochondrial Eve" is the "Y-chromosomal Adam" (or Y-MRCA), the individual from whom all living humans are patrilineally descended. As the identity of both matrilineal and patrilineal MRCAs is dependent on genealogical history (pedigree collapse), they need not ha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Y-chromosomal Adam
In human genetics, the Y-chromosomal most recent common ancestor (Y-MRCA, informally known as Y-chromosomal Adam) is the patrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) from whom all currently living humans are descended. He is the most recent male from whom all living humans are descended through an unbroken line of their male ancestors. The term Y-MRCA reflects the fact that the Y chromosomes of all currently living human males are directly derived from the Y chromosome of this remote ancestor. The analogous concept of the matrilineal most recent common ancestor is known as "Mitochondrial Eve" (mt-MRCA, named for the matrilineal transmission of mtDNA), the most recent woman from whom all living humans are descended matrilineally. As with "Mitochondrial Eve", the title of "Y-chromosomal Adam" is not permanently fixed to a single individual, but can advance over the course of human history as paternal lineages become extinct. Estimates of the time when Y-MRCA lived have also shifte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ownership
Ownership is the state or fact of legal possession and control over property, which may be any asset, tangible or intangible. Ownership can involve multiple rights, collectively referred to as title, which may be separated and held by different parties. The process and mechanics of ownership are fairly complex: one can gain, transfer, and lose ownership of property in a number of ways. To acquire property one can purchase it with money, trade it for other property, win it in a bet, receive it as a gift, inherit it, find it, receive it as damages, earn it by doing work or performing services, make it, or homestead it. One can transfer or lose ownership of property by selling it for money, exchanging it for other property, giving it as a gift, misplacing it, or having it stripped from one's ownership through legal means such as eviction, foreclosure, seizure, or taking. Ownership is self-propagating in that the owner of any property will also own the economic benefits of that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Noun Substantive
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, dead or imaginary): ''mushrooms, dogs, Afro-Caribbeans, rosebushes, Nelson Mandela, bacteria, Klingons'', etc. * Physical objects: ''hammers, pencils, Earth, guitars, atoms, stones, boots, shadows'', etc. * Places: ''closets, temples, rivers, Antarctica, houses, Grand Canyon, utopia'', etc. * Actions: ''swimming, exercises, diffusions, explosions, flight, electrification, embezzlement'', etc. * Qualities: ''colors, lengths, deafness, weights, roundness, symmetry, warp speed,'' etc. * Mental or physical states of existence: ''jealousy, sleep, heat, joy, stomachache, confusion, mind meld,'' etc. Lexical categories (parts of speech) are defined in terms of the ways in which their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntact ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
