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Chapter 5 Analysis sections
This chapter provides an introduction to the individual primitives, citing their importance in linguistic description and recounting their history. It then describes the organization of the individual sections
devoted to each of the 37 primitives. The individual sections themselves immediately follow, presenting the HCE corpus evidence for each primitive and all of their syntactic valences.
5.1 The primitives
The following is the list of primitives to be covered:
PRIMITIVES COVERED IN THIS STUDY
Substantives I
YOU SOMEONE
SOMETHING PEOPLE
Mental Predicates THINK
KNOW WANT
FEEL SAY
Determiners THIS
THE SAME OTHER
Quantifiers ONE
TWO MANY
ALL Actions, Events
DO HAPPEN
Evaluators GOOD
BAD Descriptors
BIG SMALL
Time WHEN
AFTER BEFORE
Space WHERE
UNDER ABOVE
Taxonomy, Partonomy KIND OF
PART OF Metapredicates
NOT CAN
VERY Interclausal Linkers
IF BECAUSE
LIKE They will be studied in the order listed.
5.2 Importance of primitives
It is not possible fully justify, in our limited space, why every primitive in this set is needed. Nevertheless, I would like the reader to consider the number of linguistic domains where these
primitives play a major descriptive role cf. Goddard 1997: Lexical: Moral concepts GOOD, BAD, PEOPLE, DO, HAPPEN, Speech acts SAY, Location WHERE,
ABOVE, BELOW, Emotions FEEL, Prototypes LIKE, Lifeforms KIND OF, and Hu- man artifacts PEOPLE, SOMETHING, DO
Syntactic phenomena: Intonation I, Coordination THE SAME, Negation NOT, Modality CAN, and Topicalization THINK of
Syntactic categories: Gender SOMEONE, SOMETHING, PEOPLE, Animacy SOMEONE, SOMETHING, Pronominals I, YOU, SOMEONE, Evidentials THINK, KNOW, SAY, Factives KNOW,
Imperatives I, WANT, YOU, Experiencer constructions FEEL, Demonstratives THIS, Reflexives THE SAME, HAPPEN, TIME, Reciprocals THE SAME, HAPPEN, OTHER, TIME, Obviatives OTHER,
Number ONE, TWO, MANY, Benefactives GOOD, Adversatives BAD, Augmentatives BIG, Diminutives SMALL, Tense WHEN, BEFORE, AFTER, Classifiers KIND OF, Conditionals IF,
Interrogatives NOT, KNOW, WANT, Superlatives VERY, Causatives BECAUSE, Semblatives LIKE, Inalienable possession PART OF, and Masscount noun classes KIND OF, PART OF, SOMETHING
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5.3 History and status of primitives
This chapter summarizes the history and status of all of the 37 primitives. W’s earliest work follows closely Leibniz’s “axe-like” W 1980:3 application of Ockham’s razor. Any
word, any grammatical category which was not absolutely necessary for expression of some meaning was mercilessly discarded, regardless of the cost in grammatical correctness or elegance. As one would
expect, W’s early lists W 1972 and W 1980 seem quite lean. These two lists are identical, except the latter omits the primitive FEEL. The following is taken from W 1972:
1972 Primitives
I YOU
SOMEONE SOMETHING
WANT THIS
THINK OF FEEL
SAY PART OF
DON’T WANT IMAGINE
WORLD BECOME
A few of these primitives have remained unchanged throughout the history of NSM. These primitives are I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING, WANT, and THIS. They were strongly confirmed in the Goddard
and W’s 1994 cross-linguistic study and may be considered the best established primitives of the entire NSM set.
1
Four of these primitives still remain in the current NSM set, but have been the subject of controversy.
THINK clause was originally explicated as a combination of the primitive THINK OF and SAY clause. As the inadequacies of this analysis became apparent, the THINK clause valency was added. In more
recent work, the form THINK ABOUT is often used in preference to THINK OF. The syntax of THINK may not be a completely settled matter.
SAY has undergone some minor modifications. In particular, as of W 1996, two valency options have been added to its syntax.
FEEL has been characterized a kind of problem child for NSM. W observed in W 1980:29 that FEEL seems to be used exclusively in expressions involving emotions. This was suspicious since, primitives,
being few in number, must each bear a heavy functional load. Furthermore, at that time, W 1980:123 was able to offer an explication for this word:
79 I FEEL GUILTY
a. wanting to say something
b. because of what happens in me when I think about it c. I would say: I am GUILTY
Thus, FEEL remained unneeded and rejected as late as 1989 W 1989:115. The growing body of crosslinguistic evidence Goddard and W 1994 convinced W to acknowledge the inadequacy of the
1
This is not to say that these primitives are not contested outside of NSM. For example, I or YOU are hardly accepted universally by linguists or philosophers as primitive. W has devoted an entire article W 1976 to this
question. Very briefly, alternative accounts usually attempt to define I and YOU as the speaker and the addressee, respectively. Such accounts fail because, first of all, I simply doesn’t mean the same thing as the speaker. The
sentence I am the speaker does not mean the same thing as the sentence The speaker is the speaker. We make use the same argument for you and the addressee. Secondly, such accounts fail because I and YOU may be used without
reference to speech or for that matter, experiencing, as Russell attempts to argue.
40 above explication and welcome FEEL back into the NSM family once more. There is currently an
unsettled question about whether the syntax of FEEL should be formulated as FEEL SOMETHING BADGOOD or FEEL GOODBAD.
The primitive PART OF was also included in W’s first list, and is still in the current list of NSM primitives, but it has hardly been a smooth ride. PART was singled out Goddard and W 1994:497 as the
most problematic of the 37 primitives surveyed in the Semantics and Lexical Universals volume. There remains the question about whether the syntax should be framed as X IS A PART OF Y, or X HAS Y
PARTS, or X PARTS OF Y, or a combination of the above.
The four primitives DON’T WANT, IMAGINE, WORLD, and BECOME were the most controversial of W’s earliest proposals. All of these have either been dropped or transmogrified beyond recognition.
The first relaxing of NSM’s exclusive membership policy appears as a footnote W 1980:37 suggesting KNOW and PLACE as possible primitives. In W 1988:10, KNOW, TIME, and PLACE made their
official debut as full-fledged primitives. Explications had been once proposed for each of these: 80 X KNOWS SOMETHING ABOUT Y W 1980:156
a. X can say something about Y
81 TIME W 1972:120
a. the world thought of as worlds one of which becomes the others
82 PLACE W 1972:95
a. part of the world that something can be thought of as being a part of The explication KNOW is problematic since knowing is applicable to animals, but saying is not. TIME
and all temporal notions were decomposed rather awkwardly in terms of the primitives WORLD and BECOME. Although hailed in McCawley 1983 as a brilliant non-temporal analysis of the domain, W was
quite willing to abandon her earlier hypothesis. Likewise, it was conceded that the explications for PLACE were, in fact, “bizarre and unintelligible” W 1989:114. These three primitives have since been
subjected to large-scale cross-linguistic investigations and have become solidly established as universal primitives.
What began as a trickle, soon became a flood of new primitives. 1989 became an important transitional year for NSM.
Leibniz’s program, with its obsession with reductionism and callous disregard for grammatical correctness and elegance, often resulted in too great a loss in intelligibility. Following this period,
reductive analysis became more tempered with linguistic sensitivity. Hence, many previous word explications came under question as the tools for NSM became more sophisticatedly linguistically.
Consider the following list of previous attempts to explicate primitives: 83 X1 IS BIG W 1972:74
a. X1 is bigger than an X you would think of wanting to imagine X1
84 X1 IS SMALL W 1972:74
a. X1 is smaller than an X you would think of wanting to imagine X1
85 X IS GOOD W 1972:84
a. One can say about X what we could want to be able to say about any X
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86 X IS VERY Y W 1972:86
a. X is Y b. I would say more than Y
87 MANY X’s W 1972:74
a. There are more X’s than you would think of wanting to imagine X’s
88 ALL dogs are faithful W 1980:186
a. one cannot say thinking of a dog:
b. this dog is unfaithful
89 X played BEFORE Y W 1972:113
a. The world-of-which-the-playing-X-was-a-part was a world that the world-of-which-the-playing-Y-
was-a-part was becoming
90 X played AFTER Y W 1972:113
a. The world-of-which-the-playing-X-was-a-part was a world that was becoming the world-of-
which-the-playing-Y-was-a-part
91 UNDER W 1972:101
a. closer to the Earth
92 John is LIKE his father W 1972:223
a. I’m thinking of John
b. I say: this could be John’s father c. one could imagine this being John’s father
93 S1 is P1 BECAUSE S2 is P2 W 1972:199
a. I’m thinking of S1 being P1
b. I say: if S2 were not P2, then S1 would not be P1
94 IF S1 is P1 then S2 is P2 W 1972:192
a. I’m thinking of S1, S2
b. I say: I don’t want to say: S1 is P1, S2 is not P2
95 X CAN do Y W 1972:154
a. If X wants to do Y, X will do Y
2
2
This is actually a good definition for the can of “ability”. The primitive CAN is the can of “possibility”: bad things can happen to good people
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96 X DID something W 1980:177
a. something became sayable about something
b. because something became sayable about X c. because X wanted it
97 something HAPPENED to X W 1980:177
a. something became sayable about X
b. because something became sayable about something else
Presumably, BAD and ABOVE would have been explicated like their antithetical counterparts, GOOD and UNDER:
98 X IS BAD
a. One can say about X what we wouldn’t want to be able to say about any X
99 ABOVE W 1972:101
a. further from the Earth Although I cannot go into all of the reasons, all of these words are now regarded as primitive.
The second major facet of this transition was the realization that primitives needed to prove themselves cross-linguistically.
The one-time primitives, BECOME, IMAGINE, and WORLD were dropped because of the lack of plausible equivalents in some languages. The primitives HAPPEN and DO took the place of BECOME;
IMAGINE was eventually replaced by IF; WORLD was eliminated altogether. All of the above primitives plus the primitives PEOPLE, OTHER, ONE, TWO, and KIND OF were
subjected to Goddard and W 1994’s large-scale cross-linguistic study of 17 languages. They are now regarded as well-established.
All of the primitives in Goddard and W 1994 remain in the current NSM inventory, with one possible exception. The one-time primitive DON’T WANT survived Goddard and W 1994 in the form of NO. The
rationale behind this primitive has always been to account for negation, since it was believed that the notion of rejection was more elementary than negation. Consider an early proposed explication of NOT:
100 S1 IS NOT P1 W 1972:191
a. I’m thinking of S1,
b. I say: I don’t want to say: it is P1 In W 1996:65, W finally assented to the more mainstream clausal NOT after a consideration of the
evidence from child language acquisition.
5.4 Organization of following sections