The term ethnosemantics has been revived in the school of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). NSM comes out of the work of the linguist Anna Wierzbicka (e.g., 1996), who has considered many and varied languages in an attempt tofind universal basic elements of meaning, ‘semantic primitives’. Wierzbicka and her followers feel that they have identified such primitives (currently there are sixty-two). Unlike other universal schemes, this one is empirically based, deriving its basic elements from what is actually there in all the languages so far examined. The theory itself insists on the enormous diversity of semantic systems, but holds that all are con- structed from the same building blocks. This is generally shown by being able to paraphrase any statement in any language as a series of semantic primitives.
NSM derives explicitly from the work of the Polish linguist Andrzej Bogusławski and, before him, from Leibniz’s proposal for a universal alphabet of human thought. But it also recalls Max Müller’s proposal (1887: 59–63) that the roots of Indo-European form a universal set of primes from which all language and thought can be derived.
The problem with an assertion of semantic primes, whether deductively or inductively derived, is precisely that meaning is systemic, and we simply do not know how far a given semantic context will contribute to defining a given concept. And paraphrasing remains a kind of translation from one system into another, however reduced.
At the same time, the much broader Boasian ethnosemantics has been revived in recent work in a number offields.
In cognitive psychology there has been an explosion of experimental work on such topics as time, space, colour, and gender that suggests a much more direct relationship between language and conceptualization than has been recognized for some time (seeChapter 2this volume).
In more classical linguistic–anthropological mode, there is a return to work on the relation- ship between language specifics and cultural patterns (e.g., O’Neill, 2008). At the same time, linguistics in a broader sense is once again recognizing the vast diversity of language and its likely connection with cultural conceptualizations (Sharifian, 2011). Sustained discussion of such grammatical categories as evidentiality (e.g., Aikhenvald, 2004) cannot avoid engaging with the actual role of such pervasive categories as data-source marking in patterns of meaning. What has been called a‘Neo-Whorfian Renaissance’ may be upon us, with its concomitant paradigm hop.
Related topics
ethnopragmatics; language, culture, and prototypes; culture and kinship language; language and cultural scripts.
Further reading
Becker, A. L. (1995) Beyond Translation: Essays toward a Modern Philology, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Collection of essays that seeks to uncover the actual functioning of meaning in a number of Southeast Asian languages.
D’Andrade, Roy (1995) The Development of Cognitive Anthropology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. History of the development and transformation of cognitive anthropology, including‘classical’ ethnosemantics.
Pike, Kenneth L. (1967) Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, 2nd edn, The Hague: Mouton. Classic discussion of the implications of linguistic description for other areas of human activity. Introduces the emi–etic distinction.
Tyler, Stephen A. (ed.) (1969) Cognitive Anthropology, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Standard collection of important documents in‘classical ethnosemantics’.
Ullmann, Stephen (1962) Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning, Oxford: Blackwell. Excellent for the period, and because it is of its period gives excellent coverage to semanticfield theory and other approaches.
Notes
1 See Quine’s famous example (1960:ch. 2): a linguist encounters speakers of a language unknown to him. A rabbit runs by, and one of the speakers says‘Gavagai’. Quine discusses the difficulty of knowing that‘Gavagai’ means more or less ‘rabbit’. It’s an illustration of what he calls the inscrutability or indeterminacy of reference.
2 Weisgerber’s major papers from the 1920s and early 1930s are reprinted in Weisgerber (1964).
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