Words and meanings : lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures /

This book presents, in accessible language, the theory of semantic primitives developed by Wierzbicka and her collaborators over a period of more than 40 years. These primitives are concepts that provide the foundations of vocabularies: kind, part-of, do, happen, and a few others (as explained in chapter 1). These primitives are defined by means of a meta-language made up of simple propositions presented in sequence in capsule form. This approach stands against alternatives such as the old structuralist binary feature approach--still present in textbooks although, as Goddard (Griffith Univ., Brisbane, Australia) and Wierzbicka (Australian National Univ.) point out, nobody believes in their usefulness--Eleanor Rosch's prototype theory, and Ray Jackendoff's conceptual structures. The authors provide a considerable cross-linguistic database. They also include chapters on happiness, pain (and the expression of pain), and proverbs, and even discuss the connection between their approach and Locke's philosophy. --Luis Lopez, University of Illinois at Chicago