Naturalness NSM as an approach to semantic analysis

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Chapter 2 An overview of Natural Semantic Metalanguage

Natural Semantic Metalanguage Theory NSM can be divided into two parts: a set of principles for semantic analysis developed by Wierzbicka and her associates, and a specification of the universal set of semantic primitives and principles of combination which has come out of their research. In this chapter, I will present a logical progression beginning with the former and leading up to the latter.

2.1 NSM as an approach to semantic analysis

Semantic analysis through reductive natural language paraphrase is the very heart of NSM theory. This simple, direct, and intuitively appealing approach to semantics has attracted surprising few serious followers. A notable exception to this rule was Leibniz. Kretzmann 1967:381 notes: Leibniz observed that natural languages were in certain respects real characteristics [i.e., a suitable universal metalanguage for philosophical purposes]. It was on the basis of that observation that he became the first major philosopher after Epicurus to suggest an appeal to ordinary language as a philosophical technique. His general attitude is expressed in the Nouveaux Essais: “... I truly think that languages are the best mirror of the human mind and that an exact analysis of the signification of words would make known the operations of the understanding better than would anything else” 3.7.6. In recent times, a handful of modern scholars, notably Andrez Boguslawski and Anna Wierzbicka, armed with the tools of modern linguistics, have launched large-scale systematic semantic investigations following Leibniz’s paradigm. 1 W and her associates, in particular, have developed Natural Semantic Metalanguage Theory, a coherent method of semantic analysis using reductive natural language paraphrase. The notion reductive natural-language paraphrase may be broken up into three separate constraints on definitions: naturalness, substitutability and directionality. Naturalness is the requirement that definitions be specified in natural language, not in artificial or abstract features. Substitutability means that one must be able to substitute a definition in place of its definiens in natural text. Finally, directionality is the restriction that all elements in a definition be semantically simpler than the definiens. In the following sections, I will discuss each of these constraints individually.

2.1.1 Naturalness

Formal semantic representations are definitions given in natural language. NSM theory is unique in its insistence that natural language is the medium best suited to represent the semantics of natural language. Artificial features or markers, abstract predicates, and the like are regarded as problematic descriptive devices at best, since they themselves carry no intrinsic meaning and require explanation in natural language. We always have direct access to the meaning of natural language explication but we never have direct access to the meaning of an artificial feature. 1 The school of thought known as Ordinary Language philosophy Chappell 1964 also sought to analyze the meaning of words through ordinary language. This school came out of the post-1930 works of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Their premise was that philosophical problems were the result of the philosopher’s misuse and misconstrual of language and that the understanding of philosophical discourse in terms of ordinary language would reveal these errors. Its focus was philosophical and its members were not linguists, although a few, most notably, Austin, Geach, Grice, Lewis, Fodor, Vendler, and Wittgenstein himself, have made their mark in linguistics. 6 To say that natural language is its own best descriptor is not to say that all parts of natural language are equally well-suited for the task. Not all words are equally useful in clarifying or simplifying meanings. NSM uses a subset of natural language, a maximally simple one, containing lexemes and combinations of lexemes common to all natural languages. Since NSM works are generally published in English, NSM is generally specified in English. NSM is not however based on any particular language 2 , but is abstracted from a variety of languages. To this limited extent then, NSM may be regarded as artificial. The elimination of polysemy, ambiguity, and language-specific features is, of course, a desirable trait for a metalanguage. Nevertheless, it is surprising how far NSM has been able to push the paradigm of natural language representation.

2.1.2 Substitutability