s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

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Zuzanna Bułat Silva
tions on lexicographical data and a corpus consisting of 100 tango lyrics. But
before proceeding to the analysis of dolor, I would like to take a closer look at
the NSM paradigm which constitutes a theoretical basis for my considerations.
2. The methodology of natural semantic metalanguage
The NSM, i.e., natural semantic metalanguage (Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard
& Wierzbicka 2002; Goddard 2008) is a decompositional approach to lexical
meaning. It is based on a fixed set of symbols, called semantic primes, and
combinatorial rules, which constitute the rules of text formation. The meaning
of a given word is thus explicated by ascribing to it an equivalent expression
composed of semantic primes – a metalinguistic explication. This method is
called reductive paraphrase, because it is assumed that the meaning of a word
can be paraphrased entirely via the combination of semantic primes and molecules.
1
The repertoire of semantic primes consists of 63 lexical units (not lexemes).
A lexical unit is defined as a pairing of a single specifiable meaning with a lexical
form (Goddard 2001: 2). It also must be noted here that the minilanguage is
not based on universals of experience, environment or culture (cf. Swadesh
1972), but on abstract, conceptual universals. It includes among others deictics
I, YOU, NOW and HERE, mental predicates THINK, WANT and FEEL, evaluators
GOOD and BAD and logical concepts such as NOT, IF and BECAUSE (cf. Table 1).
The primes are universal. Hence, we may say that NSM corresponds to the
intersection, the common core of all languages. In other words, every language
– as tested on a representative group of world languages (Goddard & Wierzbicka
1994, 2002; Wierzbicka 2009) – has its own version of NSM. If the
primes exist in every language, they are intuitively intelligible to all people in
the world. Thus the metalinguistic explication aims to be free from ethnocentric
bias and culturally transparent.
What NSM allows us to do is to describe fairly complicated concepts, e.g.
emotion terms, without relying on Anglo categories such as happiness, sadness,
loss and emotion. We are able then, as Wierzbicka (2009: 4) argues, to “explore
human emotions from a universal point of view, independent of any particular
languages and cultures”. And that is what I am going to do here – to describe
the Spanish term dolor and to compare it with its English counterparts pain and
grief, using the NSM primes.
1 Semantic molecules are words that have proven to be useful in the explication of many other
words, e.g., woman, sun, eat, kill (see also: Goddard & Wierzbicka 2002).