OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 4/11/2013, SPi Words and Meanings OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 4/11/2013, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 7/11/2013, SPi Words and Meanings Lexical Semantics across Domains, Languages, and Cultures CLIFF GODDARD AND ANNA WIERZBICKA 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 4/11/2013, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka 2014 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2013945603 ISBN 978–0–19–966843–4 As printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 4/11/2013, SPi Contents Authorship note vi Acknowledgements vii Tables and figures viii 1 Words, meaning, and methodology 1 2 Men, women, and children: the semantics of basic social categories 22 3 Sweet, hot, hard, heavy, rough, sharp: physical-quality words in cross-linguistic perspective 55 4 From “colour words” to visual semantics: English, Russian, Warlpiri 80 5 Happiness and human values in cross-cultural and historical perspective 102 6 Pain: is it a human universal? The perspective from cross-linguistic semantics 127 7 Suggesting, apologizing, complimenting: English speech-act verbs 156 8 A stitch in time and the way of the rice plant: the semantics of proverbs in English and Malay 184 9 The meaning of “abstract nouns”: Locke, Bentham, and contemporary semantics 205 10 Broader horizons: beyond lexical semantics 238 References 262 Index 291 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 4/11/2013, SPi Authorship note This book presents results of our collaborative work in lexical semantics over the past five or six years. For consistency, we have employed a joint authorial voice through- out. It may be useful to state, however, that Chapters 4, 5, and 6 were principally authored by Anna Wierzbicka, and Chapters 7 and 8 by Cliff Goddard, in each case with substantial input from the other. Chapters 1, 2, 3, 9, and 10 were jointly authored. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 4/11/2013, SPi Acknowledgements This book owes a great deal to our ongoing interactions with colleagues in the NSM research community, both in Australia and overseas. In particular, we have been sustained (as well as challenged) by NSM workshops held twice yearly at the Australian National University. We are also greatly indebted to several cohorts of students who have participated in semantic seminars at the ANU and at the Univer- sity of New England. They have kept us on our toes, contributed insights, and enhanced the joys of our search for semantic understanding. Warm thanks to them all. We would like to thank Carol Priestley for her careful and insightful help in preparing the final manuscript. We are grateful to Helen Bromhead, Anna Gladkova, Carsten Levisen, and Zhengdao Ye for helpful comments on various chapters. Other acknowledgements are given below. Part of the research reported in this book was supported by the Australian Research Council. Chapter 3 is a revised version of an article by Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka (2007), titled ‘NSM analyses of the semantics of physical qualities: sweet, hot, hard, heavy, rough, sharp in cross-linguistic perspective’, Studies in Language 31(4), 765–800. Chapter 4 is an expanded and revised version of an article by Anna Wierzbicka (2008), titled ‘Why there are no “colour universals” in language and thought’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14(2), 407–425. Chapter 5 builds on Anna Wierzbicka’s earlier publications on ‘happiness’ includ- ing: ‘“Happiness” in a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective’, Daedalus (2004) 133(2), 34–43; ‘What’s wrong with “happiness studies”: the cultural semantics of happiness, bonheur, Glück and sčast’e’, in Leonid Iomdin et al. (eds), Word and Language [in Russian Slovo i Jazyk], Moscow: Jazyki Russkoy Kultury, 2011, 155–171; and ‘The “history of emotions” and the future of emotion research’, Emotion Review (2010) 2(3), 269–273. Chapter 6 is an expanded and revised version of an article by Anna Wierzbicka (2012), titled ‘Is pain a human universal? A cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective on pain’, Emotion Review 4(3), 307–317. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 4/11/2013, SPi Tables and figures Tables 1.1 Semantic primes (English exponents), grouped into related categories 12 1.2 Valency frame arrays for three semantic primes happen, do, and think 14 2.1 Google “hits” for four English collocations (rounded) 41 7.1 Seven syntactic frames for semantic prime say 159 Figures 2.1 Standard feature analysis of man, woman, boy, girl 23 8.1 Structure of semantic template for proverb meanings 190 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 4/11/2013, SPi 1 Words, meaning, and methodology 1.1 Why words matter Mainstream linguistics in the 20th century devoted startlingly little attention to words. Yet words matter a great deal. They matter in human relations (which are often shaped by names, titles, terms of address and kin terms), in the edifice of human knowledge (to mention only number words, the names of biological species, and the role of terminology in science), and in systems of religion, belief, and values. “The human spirit thinks with words,” wrote the 18th-century German thinker Johann Gottfried Herder, and although Herder’s words have often been disputed, they reflect a deep-seated human intuition that words matter. In Isaiah Berlin’s elegant paraphrase of Herder’s German: Words, by connecting passions with things, the present with the past, and by making possible memory and imagination, create family, society, literature, history. [ ...]tospeak and think in words is to ‘swim in an inherited stream of images and words; we must accept these media on trust: we cannot create them’. (Berlin 1976: 168) Before Herder there was Vico, another great visionary and believer in the funda- mental importance of words, of whom Berlin, in his book Vico and Herder, wrote: “he was, so far as I know, the first to grasp the seminal and revolutionary truth that linguistic forms are one of the keys to the minds of those who use words, and indeed to the entire mental, social and cultural life of societies” (Berlin 1976: 51). For Vico, these “linguistic forms” which can provide the keys to the mental, social and cultural life of societies, present and past, are, above all, words. His sensitiveness to words and the philosophical significance of their use can be very modern. So, for example, he notes what has only in our day been analysed and classified as the ‘performative functions of words’, namely the fact that words themselves need not merely describe or attract attention to something outside themselves, but may themselves be acts or intrinsic elements in action, as, for example, in the part that they play in legal transfers, or religious ceremonial. That words are not invariably used to describe, or command, or threaten or ejaculate or convey images or emotions, but can themselves be a form of action, is certainly a new and important idea. (Berlin 1976: 50) OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 4/11/2013, SPi 2 Words and Meanings People speak with words, they think with words, they “do things” with words; to a significant extent, words shape people’s lives. Arguably, they also contribute signifi- cantly to shaping world affairs. In his book Available Light, Clifford Geertz (2000), who was more acutely aware of the importance of words than most linguists, psychologists, historians, or political theorists tend to be, reflected, in particular, on the importance of the words country, nation, state, society, and people in the world’s politics, calling them “the elementary building blocks of global world order” (p. 231). Having discussed at length the meanings of these words as documented (in a historical perspective) in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), he wrote: I bring all this up, not because I think words in themselves make the world go round (though, in fact, they have a lot to do with its works and workings), or because I think you can read political history off from dictionary definitions in dictionaries (though in fact they are among the most sensitive, and underused detectors we have for registering its subsurface tremors). (Geertz 2000: 234) The authors of this book do not claim either that words by themselves make the world go round, but we too believe that they have a lot to do with its works and workings. We also share Geertz’s belief that while you can’t read political history off from dictionary definitions, word meanings are in fact among the most sensitive and underused detectors for registering what is going on in the world—political, social, and mental.