A Semantic Menagerie: The Conceptual Semantics of Ethnozoological Categories

i. -- when people in many countries [m] think about these animals [m], how people think they often think about Australia [m] at the same time about them

Needless to say, there are many facts about kangaroos which are not mentioned in this explication; for example, the use of the tail in pushing forward while grazing and hopping, the fact that kangaroos have claws, that there is a notable size differences between male and female, that Aboriginal people hunt kangaroos for meat and many other purposes. I have tried to stick to aspects which are well supported by linguistic evidence.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

The present study has sought to revisit Wierzbicka's (1985) ground-breaking explorations into the semantics of words for natural kinds, and to update and augment her many insights from the perspective of the NSM approach in its current stage of development, more than three decades later.

The most striking claim remains that it is indeed possible to explicate the conceptual content of natural kind terms, given detailed attention to linguistic evidence, but that such explications are astonishingly complex - both in their sheer length (typically 3040 lines of semantic text) and in the number of semantic molecules involved (more than 50 unique molecules in this study alone). Many of the semantic molecules required for ethnozoological concepts are not specific to this domain, e.g. words for body-parts, physical qualities, environmental words, some action and activity verbs, but others are: specifically, the higher-level categories such as `creatures', `animals', `birds', and `fish'.

The present study has focused on the English language, while acknowledging that the near-equivalents of most of the words explicated, including those designating higher- level categories, vary across languages.

Clearly, semantic templates play an indispensable role in disciplining the vast semantic complexity of ethnozoological concepts. The templates, shared by numerous words from the same domain, provide a stable frame (like a questionnaire or checklist, Wierzbicka 1985: 192) which can be filled out and elaborated over childhood as one acquires more and more knowledge and integrates it into the updated cognitive model. The template concept helps us understand how one's model of an unfamiliar species may have "placeholder" sections which are very sketchy or even blank, and - evidently - there can be variation between speech communities, and, presumably, even between individual speakers of a single language. The idea of "concept maximum" and "concept minimum" are useful constructs to help support discussion of such variation.

It must be remembered that the extent to which a speech community or individual approaches the concept maximum for a given species does not depend only, or even mainly, on their personal contact with the species in question. In many cases, the great majority of one's semantic knowledge is linguistically mediated, i.e. acquired from discourse. Yet the volume, detail and character of discourse about animals differs according to physical, environmental and cultural setting. In Australia, for example, kangaroos feature in discourse to a much greater extent than say, badgers or beavers, though the opposite would be the case in England or Canada, respectively. As Wierzbicka (1985: 223) put it: "having said all this I feel it should be admitted that folk names of biological genera ... do seem to be more subject to interpersonal variation than nearly all other kinds of concepts encoded in natural language".

Appendix A: Semantic primes

Semantic primes (English exponents) grouped into related categories

Notes: - Exponents of primes can be polysemous, i.e. they can have other meanings in addition to the semantically primitive meaning - Exponents of primes may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes - They can be formally complex - They can have language-specific combinatorial variants or "allolexes" (indicated with ~) - Each prime has well-specified syntactic (combinatorial) properties.

Appendix B: Explications for semantic molecules:

'eggs', 'wings', 'feathers'

eggs

things of one kind

when people see one of these things, they can know that some time before it was inside the body of a creature [m] of one kind people can know that there can be a small creature [m] of the same kind inside it at the same time they know that there can be something else inside it, they can know that people can eat [m] this something else (this other stuff) things of this kind are small, someone can hold [m] one of them in one hand [m] they are smooth [m] people know that when someone's hands [m] touch one of these things on all sides, this someone can think: "this is like something round [m]" people know that if something hard [m] touches one of these things quickly [m], something can happen to it in one moment because of this they can know that if this happens, after this, this thing can be not one thing anymore

¦ Note: There is another egg meaning, basically, `chicken egg'. wings

two parts of the bodies of some creatures [m]

they are on two sides of the bodies of these creatures [m]

they can move as this creature [m] wants

because their bodies have these parts, these creatures [m] can move as they want in places above the ground [m]

feathers

things of one kind

when things of this kind are part of the body of a creature [m], this small part is inside this creature/s [m] skin [m]

References

1. Apresjan, Ju D. (1969). O yazyke dlya opisaniya znachenii slov. Izvestiya Akademii Nauk SSSR, Seriya Literatury i Yazyka, 28, 415--28.

2. Apresjan, Ju D. (1992[1914]). Lexical Semantics: User's Guide to Contemporary Russian Vocabulary. Ann Arbor: Karoma. [Orig. published in 1914 as Leksicheskaya semantika - sinonimicheskie sredstva yazyka (In Russ.), Moskva: Nauka].

3. Apresjan, Ju D. (2000). Systematic lexicography. (Windle, K. Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4. Atran, S. (1990). Cognitive foundations of natural history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5. Berlin, B. (1992). Ethnobiological classification: Principles of categorization ofplants and animals in traditional society. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

6. Bromhead, H. (2011). The bush in Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 31, 445--471.

7. Brown, C. (1979). Folk zoological life forms: Their universality and growth. American Anthropologist, 81, 791--817.

8. Goddard, C. (ed.). (2008). Cross-linguistic semantics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

9. Goddard, C. (2009). Cultural scripts. In Senft, G., Ostman, J-O, & Verschueren, J. (eds.), Culture and language use. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 68--80.

10. Goddard, C. (2011). Semantic analysis. A practical introduction. Revised 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

11. Goddard, C. (2012). Semantic primes, semantic molecules, semantic templates: Key concepts in the NSM approach to lexical typology. Linguistics, 50(3), 711--743.

12. Goddard, C. (2016). Semantic molecules and their role in NSM lexical definitions. Cahiers de lexicologie 2016-2, No 109, 13--36.

13. Goddard, C. (2017). Furniture, vegetables, weapons: Functional collective superordinates in the English lexicon. In Ye, Z. (ed.) The semantics of nouns. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 246--281.

14. Goddard, C. (2018). Minimal English: The science behind it. In Goddard, C. (ed.) Minimal English for a global world: Improved communication using fewer words. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 29--70.

15. Goddard, C. & Wierzbicka, A. (eds.) (2002). Meaning and universal grammar: Theory and empirical findings, 2 vols. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

16. Goddard, C. & Wierzbicka, A. (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

17. Haviland, J. B. (1974). A last look at Cook's Guugu-Yimidhirr wordlist. Oceania, 44 (3), 216--232. [http://pages.ucsd.edu/~jhaviland/Publications/HavilandOceania.pdf]

18. Kripke, S. (1977). Naming and necessity. In Davidson, D. & G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of natural language. Dordrecht: Reidel, 253--355.

19. Hare, B., Brown, M., Williamson, K. & Tomasello, M. (2002). The domestication of social cognition in dogs. Science 298, 1634--1636.

20. Rosch, E. (1977). Human categorization. In Warren, N. (ed.), Advances in cross-cultural psychology. Vol. 1. London: Academic Press, 1--49.

21. Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In Rosch, E. & B. Lloyd (eds.), Cognition and categorization. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 27--48.

22. Wierzbicka, A. (1985). Lexicography and conceptual analysis. Ann Arbor: Karoma.

23. Wierzbicka, A. (1996). Semantics: Primes and universals. New York: Oxford University Press.

24. Wierzbicka, A. (2007). Bodies and their parts: An NSM approach to semantic typology. Language Sciences, 29(1), 14--65.

25. Wierzbicka, A. (2009). The theory of the mental lexicon. In Kempgen, S., P. Kosta, B. Tilman & K. Gutschmidt (eds.), The Slavic languages: An international handbook of their structure, their history and their investigation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 848--863.

26. Wierzbicka, A. (2013). Polish zwierz^ta `animals' andjablka `apples': an ethnosemantic inquiry. In Glaz, A., Danaher, D.S. & Lozowski, P. (eds.), The linguistic worldview: Ethnolinguistics, cognition, and culture. London: Versita, 137--159.

27. Wierzbicka, A. (2014). Imprisoned in English: The hazards of English as a default language. New York: Oxford University Press.

28. Wierzbicka, A. (2015). Language and cultural scripts. In Sharifian, F. (ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and culture. Routledge, 339--56.

29. Ye, Z. (ed.). (2017). The semantics of nouns. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Размещено на Allbest.ru