Natural Semantic Metalanguage - Scienze della Formazione

NSM in prospettiva interculturale
The metalanguage of semantic primes can be used not only for
lexical and grammatical semantics, but also as a notation for
writing cultural scripts, that is, hypotheses about culturally
shared assumptions, norms, and expectations that help regulate
interaction in different cultural settings. By using simple crosstranslatable
expressions, this approach to cultural pragmatics (or
ethno-pragmatics) avoids the implicit terminological
ethnocentrism of conventional approaches that rely on complex
technical and/or English-specific descriptors. Cultural scripts
written in semantic primes aim to present an insider perspective
on cultural norms in terms that are accessible to outsiders. The
NSM metalanguage can also be used to spell out the meanings
conveyed by nonverbal signals, such as facial expressions,
gestures, and body postures (C. Goddard, “Natural Semantic
Metalanguage”, in K. Brown [ed.] 2006, Encyclopedia of
Language and Linguistics)