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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
I have attempted to avoid redundant treatment of syntactic valences. For example, the syntactic frame SOMEONE SAID SOMETHING could be considered part of the syntax of SOMEONE or part of the syntax
of SAY. I have chosen to cover it as a part of the syntax of SOMEONE because SOMEONE may also serve as a mental subject to an entire family of predicates. On the other hand, I am treating the valence
43 SOMEONE SAID SOMETHING TO SOMEONE as part of the syntax of SAY and not SOMEONE
because the addressee slot is peculiar to the predicate SAY. In other words, I will assign a valence to a lexeme if the overall result is a more general syntax.
1. Each section is subdivided in the following manner:
a Information to disambiguate the primitive sense, if needed b A detailed listing of the primitive’s syntactic valences
c A discussion of all potential HCE candidates d Example sentences from the corpus of all syntactic combinations found for each plausible HCE
candidate e A conclusion
HCE forms are selected as potential candidates if they may serve as rough translation equivalents for the SE exponents of NSM primitives. An HCE candidate is deemed plausible if it is not possible to specify
a semantic difference between the NSM primitive and itself. This process involves formulating hypothetical differences and evaluating these hypotheses against the corpus data and my own linguistic
intuitions until either a valid hypothesis surfaces or all plausible hypotheses have been exhausted.
Illustrative examples are listed for each valence found for each plausible HCE candidate primitive. I have divided examples into three classifications:
Type 1. In a ‘canonical’ example,
3
there is a primitive HCE exponent for each member of the syntactic pair. This type of example provides the strongest possible evidence for a particular NSM primitive
syntactic configuration.
Type 2. In a ‘near-canonical’ example, there is a primitive HCE exponent for the primary primitive under
investigation. There is a non-primitive HCE term corresponding to the second member of the NSM syntactic pair, which is decomposable in terms of the appropriate NSM primitive. This type of
example provides good evidence for a particular NSM primitive syntactic configuration.
Type 3. A ‘non-canonical’ example contains only an HCE exponent of the NSM primitive under inves-
tigation. This kind of example only serves to exemplify the sense of a primitive. It can be used as evidence for the existence of an NSM primitive in HCE, but cannot be used to argue in favor of any
syntactic configuration.
The conclusion identifies the most compelling HCE candidate if there is one, summarizes the results of the search for primitive syntactic configurations, evaluates the strength of the evidence, and
analyzes the significance of missing syntactic combinations. A missing syntactic combination will not necessarily lead to the conclusion that it does not exist in HCE. A missing combination which is part of
an overall pattern is more significant than an incidental missing combination. Again, the introspective evidence is the final arbitrator.
3
“Canonical example” should not be confused with the standard NSM term “canonical sentence”. An NSM “canonical sentence” is a sentence containing only primitives and, in some cases, near-primitives. In a “canonical
example” however, one only considers the context relevant to the particular syntactic valence under investigation. For practical reasons, I investigate combinations of two lexical primitives at one time. This pair is usually all the
context that is relevant.
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5.5 I 5.5.1 Primitive Syntax
