15 W and her colleagues have recently added an additional requirement to Leibniz’s program: a
primitive must prove itself cross-linguistically. That is, these primitives must have exact lexical equivalents in a wide variety of unrelated languages. The potential primitives world and imagine were
dropped from NSM because they were not found in a number of languages.
2.4 About the forms of primitives
An important part of establishing primitives cross-linguistically is learning how to recognize them. The first step in this process is understanding the ways in which a primitive’s form may differ across
languages. The following list addresses a number of common misconceptions:
1. A primitive may appear to be formally complex. Something and someone appear to consist formally of some + thing and some + one. Likewise, Japanese nanika and dareka appear to
contain a formative -ka. Semantically, however, some + one does not equal someone. Someone is a simple and irreducible concept.
2. A primitive may be composed of several possibly noncontiguous wordsmorphemes. The primitives THERE IS, IS SOMEWHERE, IF ... WOULD, and KIND OF are realized in SE as several
words. 3. A primitive form may be polysemous, with both a primitive and a non-primitive sense. Know is
polysemous between a non-primitive sense as in we know John and the primitive sense as in we know John is a good boy. In Yunkuntjara Goddard 1994, the form for the primitive WANT can
also mean stomach. 4. A primitive may have contextual variants allolexes such as I and me in English.
5. A primitive need not be realized as a free form, it may be realized as a bound-morpheme. One exponent for WANT in Japanese is the verbal suffix -tai.
6. A primitive in one language need not be in the same syntactic category as its English counterpart.The other exponent for WANT in Japanese is the adjectival hoshii. Neither -tai nor
hoshii are verbs like English want. From NSM’s point of view, the primitive’s formal syntactic category is not as important as its semantic combinability. It does not matter whether NSM
substantives such as I or THIS are realized as nouns or verbal inflections or whether NSM predicates such as WANT are realized as verbs or adjectives. What does matter is that there is a
mechanism by which they may be combined to form a canonical sentence meaning I WANT THIS. Combinatorial operations are left unspecified in NSM and they may be accomplished
through any means, whether syntactic or morphological.
7. Under the current strong lexicalization hypothesis, a primitive must have some kind of segmental content. It cannot be realized as an intonation or as a grammatical process such as
reduplication. This constraint may seem too strong to some, but for the time being, it is retained because it is the strongest and therefore the most interesting hypothesis.
2.5 Cross-linguistic equivalence
The second key step in establishing a primitive cross-linguistically is to verify that the cross-linguistic forms are in fact exact semantic equivalents.
13
They are exact semantic equivalents if no semantic
13
There is a sense in which there are probably no exact equivalents across languages. Consider once again, the example of know and savoir. English know is ambiguous between knowing something and
knowing someone. Although French savoir is probably an exact semantic equivalent to knowing that, there is no analogous sense of savoir which means to know someone. A French speaker, therefore does not have the same mental association
between knowing something and knowing someone. In Yunkuntjara, the word for WANT is polysemous with the word for stomach. An English speaker would therefore not have the same kind of association between wanting and stomach.
16 difference between the two can be found. Establishing semantic equivalence involves a deliberate
attempt to find differences. One repeats the process of proposing differences and testing whether the differences actually exist. After exhausting all reasonable possibilities, two forms can be provisionally
accepted as equivalent.
Probably the most helpful tools for isolating the relevant primitive senses of a word are canonical sentences. A canonical sentence contains a primitive in an elementary syntactic configuration. Often
there is sufficient disambiguating context to eliminate incompatible non-primitive senses in polysemous words.
Consider the following canonical sentences: I saw someone there.
If I do this, people will say bad things about me. I think this is bad, but I don’t know.
When that happened, I felt something good. I want you to do it.
There are many kinds of things. These two people lived at the same time.
Some people can do this – some people can’t. Don’t say anything more about it
Good people do not do things like this. I live near here.
This thing is above this other thing. John is now on this side of me.
There is something inside this. I don’t know, maybe John knows.
This thing can move. A very short time after that I heard something.
This thing has two parts. He thought that someone like me could do it.
These sentences are composed entirely of primitives or near primitives and exemplify the elementary syntax of their respective primitive. They should have exact counterparts in all languages.
This use of canonical sentences reflects a new view of primitives in NSM. A primitive is no longer just an isolated lexeme, but a lexeme and its primitive combinatorial syntactic properties. Thus, it is
just as legitimate to view canonical sentences as the true primitives of the system, since they exemplify the valid combinations of primitives. At the primitive level, the distinction between lexicon and syntax is
blurred and one cannot be separated from the other.
2.6 The NSM specification
