Semantic primes can form a minimal universal set of semantic primitives capable of defining any action.
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Retrieved linguistic literature discusses semantic primitives and lexical indefinables that form a universal common core across languages, but the specific claim that they constitute a minimal universal set capable of defining any action is only partially covered.
Abstract
The set of primitives presented and discussed in this chapter has evolved in the course of nearly three decades of research by myself and colleaguesand it is still evolving. Some of the primitives proposed here are better established than others. Of the fourteen primitives posited in my Semantic Primitives(1972) ten have survived nearly a quarter of a century of critical assaults (by myself and others), and (with one exception: PART) the position of these original members of the set can be regarded as particularly strong. This old guard includes the “substantives” I, YOU, SOMEONE, and SOMETHING, the “mental predicates” THINK, WANT, FEEL, and SAY, and the demonstrative THIS.
Abstract
Most grammatical patterns in any language are language-specific, but there may also be some patterns which are universal. In fact, if cross-cultural understanding is possible at all, despite the colossal variation in language structures, there must be a common core of “human understanding” relying not only on some shared or matching lexical items but also on some shared or matching grammatical patterns in which shared lexical items can be used. Arguably, this common core defines a set of “basic sentences” which can be said in any language, and which can be matched across language boundaries, and the grammar of these basic sentences consists in the possible distribution patterns of the “atomic elements” (that is, the lexical indefinables). To discover those patterns we have to look at the lexical indefinables themselves, to see what their possibilities of co-occurrence are. Therefore, in searching for universal grammatical patterns, we should not be looking for universals of form, but rather for universals of combinability. This chapter is a tentative and preliminary attempt to do just that.
Abstract
It has often been said that the meaning of a word “depends” on the meaning of the other words in the lexicon (see e.g. Trier 1931). Strictly speaking, I do not believe that this is the case: since the meaning of a word is, as I have been arguing all along, a configuration of semantic primitives for each word, its meaning can (and must) be defined positively, regardless of the meanings of any “neighbouring” words in the lexicon. The meanings of different words can overlap (as Abe overlaps with bed),but both the similarities and the differences can be stated only after the meaning of each word has been identified.
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