MEN, WOMEN and CHILDREN: the CONCEPTUAL SEMANTICS of BASIC SOCIAL CATEGORIES Cliff Goddard, University of New England Anna Wierzbicka, Australian National University
MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN: THE CONCEPTUAL SEMANTICS OF BASIC SOCIAL CATEGORIES Cliff Goddard, University of New England Anna Wierzbicka, Australian National University 1. The canonical example of lexical semantics? The great Danish linguist Louis Hjemslev produced the classic structuralist semantic analysis of men, women, boys, and girls, as part of his Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1961[1943]: 69-75). Hjemslev’s program was to progressively reduce complex semantic entities to combinations of a smaller number of simpler semantic elements. If, for example, a mechanical inventorying at a given stage of the procedure leads to a registration of the entities of content ‘ram’, ‘ewe’, ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘stallion’, ‘mare’, ‘sheep’, ‘human being’, ‘child’, ‘horse’, ‘he’ and ‘she’—then ‘ram’, ‘ewe’, ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘stallion’, and ‘mare’ must be eliminated from the inventory of elements if they can be explained univocally as relational units that include only ‘he’ and ‘she’, on the one hand, and ‘sheep’, ‘human being’, ‘child’, ‘horse’, on the other. (Hjemslev 1961: 70) In other words, man implies ‘he-human being’, ram implies ‘he-sheep’, and stallion implies ‘he-horse’. Similarly, woman implies ‘she-human being’, ewe implies ‘she-sheep’, mare implies ‘she-horse’. The content of boy and girl can be captured by means of the element ‘child’: boy is ‘he-human being, child’ and girl is ‘she-human being, child’. Hjemslev urged that the process of reductive analysis be carried through as far as possible: “until all inventories have been restricted, and restricted as much as possible” (p.71). Subsequent to Hjemslev (1961), a similar style of structuralist analysis came to be known as componential analysis (CA).
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