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Minimal English: The Science Behind It

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Minimal English for a Global World

Abstract

This chapter explains in an accessible way the linguistic research that underpins the specifics of Minimal English, that is, research by linguists working in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach into which words and grammatical patterns match across the languages of the world.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The only other linguists who clearly acknowledge the importance of semantic metalanguage, and have done so since the mid-1960s, are the Moscow Semantic School ’s leading figures Jurij Apresjan and Igor Mel’čuk. In his book Systematic Lexicography, Apresjan (2000: 224) explains: ‘[T]he metalanguage of lexicography is a sub-language of the object language, comprising a relatively small and unified vocabulary and syntax. The basis of this metalanguage is semantic primitives. With the aid of the metalanguage, complex semantic units of the object language (grammatical as well as lexical) are reduced to a fixed structure of semantic primitives by a process of hierarchical breakdown’.

  2. 2.

    In some ways, the NSM approach can be seen as following the tradition of lexicography, but, by taking a much more systematic approach, striving to avoid the many pitfalls of conventional lexicography (Wierzbicka 1996: Ch 9; Goddard in press/2017). Aside from circularity and the ‘pseudo-defining’ of relatively simple words in terms of more complex ones, perhaps the most common fault of conventional dictionary-making is not distinguishing invariant meaning from contextual enrichment, leading to the postulation of unlikely dozens of ‘senses’. Another common flaw is reliance on open-ended terms such as usu. (usually) or esp. (especially) and the so-called lexicographer’s crutch, the all-purpose ‘etc.’

  3. 3.

    Written mainly in Latin, they were compiled by his editor, after Leibniz’s death, as his ‘Table de definitions’ (see Leibniz 1903: 437–510).

  4. 4.

    If one had to nominate a single benchmark in the intervening period, that distinction would fall to Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), one of the founding figures of modern comparative linguistics and anthropological linguistics. Humboldt tended to be more interested in culture-unique words than in universal words, on account of his interest in folk (ethno-national) cultures. ‘[E]ach language draws a circle around the people to whom it adheres which it is possible for the individual to escape only by step** into a different one’. Even so, he also wrote: ‘To be sure, a midpoint, around which all languages revolve, can be sought and really found, and this midpoint should always be kept in mind in the comparative study of languages, both in the grammar and lexicon’.

  5. 5.

    Established NSM researchers, roughly arranged into chronological waves, include (i) Bert Peeters, Felix Ameka, Jean Harkins, Cliff Goddard; (ii) Zhengdao Ye, Jock Wong, Anna Gladkova, Rie Hasada, Deborah Hill, Kyung-Joo Yoon, Marie-Odile Junker; (iii) Carsten Levisen, Maria Auxiliadora Barrios Rodriguez, Sandy Habib, Ulla Vanhatalo, Yuko Asano-Cavanagh, Carol Priestley, Zuzanna Bułat-Silva; and (iv) Helen Bromhead, Adrian Tien, Radoslava Trnavac. Recently completed PhDs include Lien Huong Vo, Helen Leung, and Gian Marco Farese.

  6. 6.

    To be precise, one would first have to expand ‘A happened after B’ to ‘B happened at some time, A happened after’. Then, it could be claimed that the latter is equivalent to ‘A happened at some time, B happened before’.

  7. 7.

    When the exponent of a prime is polysemous, the intended primitive meaning can always be made perfectly clear by reference to key grammatical frames (see section 3.3) in which it occurs, but from which the other meanings are excluded.

  8. 8.

    To give an example which will be less familiar to many readers, there are plenty of languages in which the prime SOMETHING has two or more exponents. A typical pattern is for one exponent to be used across a wide range of contexts, while another occurs only when SOMETHING is the complement of a particular verb, such as DO or SAY. Persian (Farsi) is one such language. The main exponent of SOMETHING IS čiz(i), but as the complement of DO, the allolex kār (lit. ‘work’) is used (Arab 2016).

  9. 9.

    This formulation, using ‘now’, is an over-simplification, as the real implicit reference point is the time of speaking, that is, ‘when I say this now’.

  10. 10.

    Equally it is interesting to note that there is much variation in how many molecules (if any) are required in explications . Many explications require no molecules at all and others require only one or two. Explications for common verbs of ‘doing and happening’ (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2009, 2016b) usually require a handful. Explications for concrete nouns, on the other hand, require significantly more. Wierzbicka’s (2015) explications for English spoon and Chinese tangchí, for example, use about 15 molecules per explication.

  11. 11.

    Some might wonder: what about ‘animal’? Actually, this word is much more English specific than ‘creature’ and much less cross-translatable. Even in languages as close to English as Danish and German, the normal translation equivalents for animal (Danish dyr, German Tier) are closer to ‘creature’, insofar as they are used freely about spiders, fish, and so on.

  12. 12.

    In English and many languages, this meaning exists as a distinct sense of the exponent of KNOW, but it is well known that many other languages have a distinct verb for ‘know (someone)’, for example, German kennen and French connaître. NSM researchers once believed that the two verbs in French and German, for example, were allolexes but it has become clear that ‘know (someone)’ can be explicated, as shown (Wierzbicka in press).

    I know this someone:

    I know some things about this someone

    because I was with him/her for some time before

    because of this, I can think like this: “he/she is like this”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Cliff Goddard

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  1. Cliff Goddard
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Cliff Goddard

Appendix A: Semantic Primes, English Exponents (After Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014)

Appendix A: Semantic Primes, English Exponents (After Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014)

I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING~THING, PEOPLE, BODY

Substantives

KINDS, PART~HAVE PARTS

Relational substantives

THIS, THE SAME, OTHER~ELSE

Determiners

ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MUCH~MANY, LITTLE~FEW

Quantifiers

GOOD, BAD

Evaluators

BIG, SMALL

Descriptors

KNOW, THINK, WANT, DON’T WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR

Mental predicates

SAY, WORDS, TRUE

Speech

DO, HAPPEN, MOVE

Actions, events, movement

BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE IS, BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING)

Location, existence, Specification

(IS) MINE

Possession

LIVE, DIE

Life and death

TIME~WHEN, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME, MOMENT

Time

PLACE~WHERE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR, SIDE, INSIDE, TOUCH

Place

NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF

Logical concepts

VERY, MORE

Augmentor, intensifier

LIKE

Similarity

  1. Notes: • Exponents of primes can be polysemous, that is, they can have other, additional meanings. • Exponents of primes may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes. • They can be formally complex. • They can have language-specific combinatorial variants (allolexes, indicated with ~). • Each prime has well-specified syntactic (combinatorial) properties.

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Goddard, C. (2018). Minimal English: The Science Behind It. In: Goddard, C. (eds) Minimal English for a Global World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62512-6_3

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