An introduction to the study of meaning in language, and to the language-culture connection, this work covers essential background on traditional and contemporary issues and approaches, and then takes the reader through a series of case studies in descriptive semantics. It includes topics such as emotions, speech acts, colours, concrete objects, motion, causative verbs, and grammatical categories. The author draws on a range of material from a diversity of languages, including Arrernte, Ewe, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Spanish, and Yankunytjatjara. The main method used is reductive paraphrase in natural language, an approach which is rigorous yet accessible, and each chapter has a selection of exercises to involve students in practical semantic analysis.

Product Description: Cross-linguistic semantics – investigating how languages package and express meanings differently – is central to the linguistic quest to understand the nature of human language. This set of studies explores and demonstrates cross-linguistic semantics as practised in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework, originated by Anna Wierzbicka...read more

Product Description: Pitjantjatjara and Yanunytjatjara are two neighbouring dialects of the Western Desert language. They are spoken over a wide area of the Northern Territory and South Australia stretching south from Areyonga to Coober Pedy and beyond, along the Western Australian border and as far as Oodnadatta to the east...read more

'This book introduces the linguistic diversity of East and Southeast Asia. It contains treatments of diverse areas including: word origins, cultural key words, tones and sounds, language families and typology, key syntactic structures, writing systems and communicative style' --Provided by publisher.

This book develops a bold new approach to universal grammar, based on research findings of the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) program. The key idea is that universal grammar is constituted by the inherent grammatical properties of some 60 empirically established semantic primes, which appear to have concrete exponents in all languages. For six typologically divergent languages (Mangaaba-Mbula, Mandarin Chinese, Lao, Malay, Spanish and Polish), contributors identify exponents of the primes and work through a substantial set of hypotheses about their combinatorics, valency properties, complementation options, etc. Each study can also be read as a semantically-based typological profile. Four theoretical chapters by the editors describe the NSM approach and its application to grammatical typology. As a study of empirical universals in grammar, this book is unique for its rigorous semantic orientation, its methodological consistency, and its wealth of cross-linguistic detail. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Punu' is a Yankunytjatjara word which means not only plants of all kinds, but also the things that can be made or derived from them: punu includes everything from trees, vines, grasses and fungi to food, medicine, tools, weapons and ornaments...read more

Product Description: This set of papers represents a unique collection; it is the first attempt ever to empirically test a hypothetical set of semantic and lexical universals across a number of genetically and typologically diverse languages. In fact the word 'collection' is not fully appropriate in this case, since the papers report research undertaken specifically for the present volume, and shaped by the same guidelines...read more