MEANING, LIFE AND CULTURE IN CONVERSATION WITH ANNA WIERZBICKA MEANING, LIFE AND CULTURE IN CONVERSATION WITH ANNA WIERZBICKA EDITED BY HELEN BROMHEAD AND ZHENGDAO YE Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au ISBN (print): 9781760463922 ISBN (online): 9781760463939 WorldCat (print): 1225157761 WorldCat (online): 1224950342 DOI: 10.22459/MLC.2020 This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The full licence terms are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover design and layout by ANU Press. Cover artwork: Conversation (c. 1960) by Benode Behari Mukherjee. Photo © Tate. This edition © 2020 ANU Press Contents Acknowledgements . vii List of abbreviations . ix Contributors . xiii Introduction . 1 Zhengdao Ye and Helen Bromhead Part I: Meaning, life and culture: The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach . 11 1 . Prototypes, polysemy and constructional semantics: The lexicogrammar of the English verb climb . 13 Cliff Goddard 2 . The comparative semantics of verbs of ‘opening’: West Africa vs Oceania . 33 Felix K . Ameka and Deborah Hill 3 . Gezellig: A Dutch cultural keyword unpacked . 61 Bert Peeters 4 . Royal semantics: Linguacultural reflections on the Danish address pronoun De . .. 85 Carsten Levisen 5 . The Singlish interjection bojio . 99 Jock Onn Wong 6 . The semantics of bushfire in Australian English . 115 Helen Bromhead 7 . The semantics of migrant in Australian English . 135 Zhengdao Ye 8 . The semantics of verbs of visual aesthetic appreciation in Russian . 155 Anna Gladkova 9 . Christian values embedded in the Italian language: A semantic analysis of carità . 173 Gian Marco Farese 10 . The semantics of two loanwords in Navarrese Spanish . 193 Mónica Aznárez-Mauleón 11 . TIME in Portuguese saudade and other words of longing . .. 211 Zuzanna Bułat Silva 12 . Lost in translation: A semantic analysis of no da in Japanese . 229 Yuko Asano-Cavanagh Part II: Meaning, life and culture: Perspectives . 247 13 . Locating ‘mind’ (and ‘soul’) cross-culturally . 249 Frances Morphy and Howard Morphy 14 . Teknocentric kin terms in Australian languages . 273 Harold Koch 15 . Showing and not telling in a sign language . 291 John Haiman 16 . Games that people play: Capitalism as a game . 303 Annabelle Mooney 17 . Our ordinary lives: Pathways to a more human-oriented linguistics . 319 John Newman 18 . On defining parts of speech with Generative Grammar and NSM . 333 Avery D . Andrews 19 . CUT-verbs of the Oceanic language Teop: A critical study of collecting and analysing data in a language documentation project . 355 Ulrike Mosel 20 . The depiction of sensing events in English and Kalam . 381 Andrew Pawley 21 . Russian language-specific words in the light of parallel corpora . 403 Alexei Shmelev 22 . ‘Sense of privacy’ and ‘sense of elbow’: English vs Russian values and communicative styles . 421 Tatiana Larina 23 . On the semantics of cup . 441 Keith Allan 24 . Where we PART from NSM: Understanding Warlpiri yangka and the Warlpiri expression of part-hood . 461 David Nash and David P . Wilkins Envoi . 491 Anna Wierzbicka’s life . 493 Kevin Windle and Mary Besemeres Index . 501 Acknowledgements We are indebted to all the reviewers, both of the individual chapters and the volume as a whole, for their valuable comments. We want to express our thanks to Beth Battrick for her meticulous and efficient copyediting. We also wish to thank Christine Huber and the rest of the Humanities and Creative Arts Board of ANU Press for their guidance, and Emily Tinker of ANU Press for managing the final production process. The publication of the book is partially supported by an ANU Publication Subsidy grant. The ANU Emeritus Faculty has also partially supported the indexing of the volume with a grant. vii List of abbreviations ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation ABS Australian Bureau of Statistics AIATSIS Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies AND The Australian National Dictionary ANU The Australian National University ASL American Sign Language AWARE Association of Women for Action and Research BSL British Sign Language CAP cumulative average point CBOT Chicago Board of Trade DCT Discourse-Completion Task DS direct speech EA Euro-American ERP event-related potential FOMO fear of missing out IDP internally displaced persons IOM International Organization for Migration IS indirect speech LAAL Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages LFG Lexical Functional Grammar MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology NP noun phrase NSM Natural Semantic Metalanguage ix MeANiNG, LiFe AND Culture NSW New South Wales NUS National University of Singapore OED Oxford English Dictionary OSV object–subject–verb PP prepositional phrase RNC Russian National Corpus SL sign language SOV subject–object–verb SVAdj subject–verb–adjective SV/AVO subject–verb/transitive subject–subject–object SVC serial verb constructions SVO subject–verb–object TAM tense–aspect–mood TESOL Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages TG Transformational Grammar VP verb phrase VS/VOA verb–subject/verb–object–transitive subject Glossing abbreviations 1, 2, 3 First/second/third person 12 First person inclusive 4 Fourth person; used in non-topical object function instead of a third person pronoun when the subject of the clause is the topic and a third person acc Accusative all Allative art Article aux Auxiliary cl:animal Animal classifier cl:man Man classifier comp, compl Complementiser x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS consec Consecutive marker re indicating that the situation denoted by the verb complex directly follows the preceding situation dat Dative def Definite dim Diminutive dl, du Dual ds Different subject from the next verb erg Ergative evoc Evocative ex, excl Exclusive fut Future gen Genitive imp Imperative in, incl Inclusive inf Infinitive io Indirect object ipfv Imperfective aspect marker inflecting for person and number lnk Linker: links prepositional attributes and adverbials to the head of NPs and VCs, respectively loc Locative nomic Nomic nonpast, npst Non-past obj Object objm Object marker pf Perfective (today’s past or present habitual) pl Plural plm Plural marker poss Possessive marker inflecting for person and number and linking possessor pronouns or NPs to the possessed noun in inalienable constructions pred Predicate marker xi MeANiNG, LiFe AND Culture prep Preposition; specifically, the multipurpose preposition te pres, prs Present prior Prior to the next verb prog Present progressive pron Pronoun pst Past q Question particle/marker rdp Reduplicative red Reduplication refl Reflexive rel Relative pronoun, not inflecting, but syntactically holding the position of a topical NP rp Recent past sbj, sub Subject sg Singular sim Simultaneous with the next verb ss Same subject as the next verb tam Tense/aspect/mood marker top Topic trs Transitive xii Contributors Keith Allan (MLitt, PhD (Edinburgh)) FAHA, Emeritus Professor, Monash University and Honorary Associate Professor at University of Queensland. Selected books: Linguistic Meaning (Routledge, 1986; 2014); Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and Weapon (with Kate Burridge, Oxford University Press, 1991); Natural Language Semantics (Blackwell, 2001); Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language (with Kate Burridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006); Concise Encyclopaedia of Semantics (Elsevier, 2009); The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics Second Expanded Edition (Equinox, 2010); Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics (with Kasia Jaszczolt, Cambridge University Press, 2012); Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics (Oxford University Press, 2013); Routledge Handbook of Linguistics (Routledge, 2016) and Oxford Handbook of Taboo Words and Language (Oxford University Press, 2018). Felix K. Ameka (PhD, The Australian National University (ANU) 1991), FGA FAHA, works at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics and was an Associate Researcher, Language and Cognition Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. His interests are language documentation and description, cross-cultural semantics, pragmatics, and the sociocultural and cognitive motivations of grammar, anthropological and contact linguistics. He has conducted field-based research and published on these topics on West African languages like Ewe Akan and Likpe. Avery D. Andrews received his PhD in linguistics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1975, and began working in 1976 as a Lecturer at ANU, writing on topics including case-marking and grammatical relations, relative clauses, complex predicates and, more xiii MeANiNG, LiFe AND Culture recently, the syntax–semantics interface and the possible relations between Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) and Formal Semantics. Although officially retired in 2014, he remains active in the field. Yuko Asano-Cavanagh is a Senior Lecturer at Curtin University, Perth. Her research focuses on the semantics and pragmatics of Japanese. She is the author of several semantic analyses of Japanese cultural keywords using the NSM approach. Her most recent publications include ‘Inochi and tamashii: Incursion into Japanese ethnopsychology’ (2019), and ‘In staunch pursuit: Revealing the semantics of the Japanese terms shūkatsu “job-hunting” and konkatsu “marriage partner hunting”’ (2019). Mónica Aznárez-Mauleón is a Lecturer at the