Natural Semantic Metalanguage - Scienze della Formazione

Il Natural Semantic Metalanguage
“The challenge consists not in proposing a list of candidates, but in
justifying it.” (Wierzbicka 1992: 11)
Criteri:
(1) irriducibilità ad altri concetti (v. sopra);
(2) ruolo di un concetto nel definire altri concetti;
(3) criterio “cross-linguistico”:
a) candidates for the status of innate and universal human
concepts should ‘prove themselves’ in extensive descriptive
work involving many different languages of the world
(genetically and culturally distant from one another);
b) the concepts which have ‘proved themselves’ as building
blocks in definitions should also prove themselves as lexical
universals, that is, as concepts which have their own
‘names’ in all the languages of the world (Wierzbicka 1992:
12)