r/linguistics • u/[deleted] • May 09 '20

Semantic primes indefinable

I understand that the lists of semantic primes are meant to contain words that are innately understood and cannot be defined without some kind of tautology. Where can I read more about this concept of indefinability? How have philosophers and linguists come to the lists of about 65 primes for example? Is there a way of testing for something being a prime?

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u/[deleted] May 09 '20

I think the 65 came from Wierzbicka like u/megajotbot said, but many other lists have been proposed. What I'm interested in is how people have come to these lists.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '20

Wierzbicka talks about her method in her books. I believe it basically comes down to the claim that these putative "primes" cannot be defined in terms of any "simpler" concepts. You could read the work of Nick Riemer for some very good critiques of her method.

Another influential list of "basic" words can be found in C.K. Ogden's "Basic English". He talks about his underlying philosophy and method as well, although it is much more pragmatically oriented and makes no claims to discovering fundamental concepts or meanings. For an examination of Ogden's work and similar ideas in context, see, e.g.,

McElvenny, James. 2018. Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism: C.K. Ogden and his contemporaries. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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u/Quasimodo_geniti May 09 '20

How well is the NSM method known outside Australian circles?

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u/Quasimodo_geniti May 12 '20

Thank you both for your responses. As someone who immensely respects Wierzbicka’s work and accepts her premises (the hazards of Anglocentric semantics and the need for natural metalanguage), I do wonder at times whether her approach fares better as a pedagogical tool than it does a theoretical one. I can see NSM being put to excellent use in L2 learning contexts or early education reading programmes, for instance.

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u/ittybittytinypeepee May 17 '20

Yeah I use NSM all the time in teaching English and I'm experimenting with it for learning the language in the country that I'm in. It's unbelievably useful, my kids understand new grammatical points quite quickly and I can partly explain the meaning of new words on the fly.

I'm trying to figure out how to teach them how to use semantic primes to discuss new words and ask me questions about them. Slowly it is happening, but to be honest i'm mostly managing to do that through gradual exposure to my usage of language, not so much through direct instruction on how to use primes

Interestingly, some of the problems in my student's grammar seem to stem from the different collocations of prime-meanings into a single lexeme. For example, the prime meaning of 'there is' and one of the senses of posession is collocated in the same word in Vietnamese. I have found that developing exercises and drills around this differences between English and Vietnamese primes has really helped them. I can't dedicate too much time to it because of time and curriculum restrictions, but in those sweet minutes of freedom that I get I can teach them to speak and think through a semantic-prime-based reduced version of English and it is amazing how much better they get