Semantic primes

See also Linguistic universals

Suppose you, as a bright child, have an excellent dictionary of the English language — The New Oxford American Dictionary or The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, say — and you try to use it to learn the meaning of all the words therein, because you lack confidence that you use all the words you ordinarily use in a meaningful way, and because you want to learn the meanings of all the words your elders speak. You will find every entry-word in the dictionary defined in terms of other words, of course. In your determination to learn the meaning (or meanings) of every word in the dictionary, you find you need look up the definitions of the words used in the definitions of every word. But sooner or later you will find that you cannot complete your task — learning the meaning of every word in the dictionary — because every word’s description of meaning employs other entry-words whose meaning you wish to firmly establish in your mind. You have embarked on a circular task because the dictionary contains only a closed set of words, finite in number, that enable descriptions of the meanings of each other. If you do not already have in your mind a set of basic words whose meanings you happen to have somehow come to know independently of words at all — even though you came to know the meanings of that set of basic words by listening to your elders speaking them — you will remain forever in a continuous circular loop in your dictionary, and fail to achieve your goal.

If you read linguist Anna Wierzbicka’s book, Semantic: Primes and Universals (Wierzbicka, 1996), you will find an argument, grounded in biologically plausible theory and experimental observation, that in fact we all do have as part of our inherited human faculties a basic set of innate ‘concepts’, or perhaps more precisely, a non-conscious propensity and eagerness to acquire those concepts and encode them in words. The words that they become encoded in Wierzbicka calls semantic primes, or alternatively, semantic primitives — ‘semantic’ because linguists use that word in relationship to the meaning of words (=linguistic symbols), and concepts imply meaning.

Moreover, as we shall learn later, as modern human beings who share the same set of types of inherited determinants (i.e., genome), all our natural languages, despite the diversity of language families, share the same basic set of innate concepts, or share the same propensity and eagerness to encode the same set of concepts in words. Our common grandmother and grandfather many generations removed may have encoded those concepts in a specific vocabulary, and therefore had an original set of semantic primes. The dispersal of their descendants from our African homeland throughout the world enabled the evolution of many different languages, each with a unique set of sound-forms for their words. Nevertheless the same set of semantic primes remained within each language, though with differing sound-forms. Thus, as Wierzbicka argues, all modern humans have the same set of semantic primes, though not the same set of sound-forms expressing them, rendering semantic primes cross-culturally universal.

In this article we will elaborate on Wierzbicka’s theory (Wierzbicka, 1996; Goddard and Wierzbicka (eds.), 1994); exemplify the list of semantic primes; show how they underlie the meaning of the non-primes in our language; give some of the experimental observations that support the claim of semantic primes as universal among human languages; discuss the contributions and comments of other linguists and scholars from other disciplines; and indicate how far back we can trace the history the idea of semantic primes by any other name.

References cited

• Wierzbicka A. (1996) Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198700024. Publisher’s website’s description of book Professor Wierzbicka’s faculty webpage Excepts from Chapters 1 and 2
• Goddard C, Wierzbicka A. (eds.) (1994) Semantic and Lexical Universals: Theory and Empirical Findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Publisher’s website’s description of book, with Table of Contents

External links

• Goddard C, Wierzbicka A (2006) Semantic Primes and Cultural Scripts in Language: Learning and Intercultural Communication. PDF
• Goddard, Cliff. 2002. The search for the shared semantic core of all languages. In Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka (eds). Meaning and Universal Grammar - Theory and Empirical Findings. Volume I. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 5-40.
• The Natural Semantics Metalanguage HomePage