The Natural Semantic Metalanguage

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is a theory of language which Anna Wierzbicka began to develop already in the sixties. Some basic assumptions of this theory are:

• We cannot escape from natural language(s) to describe meaning in natural language. Formalized systems used to describe natural languages need themselves natural language to be understood and interpreted (by humans). That is, natural language is its own metalanguage;
• To define the meaning of words, we must use other words which are simpler than the one we want to define, otherwise we define nothing. Defining a word using simpler words is called reductive paraphrasis;
• There is a basic set of concepts, called semantic primes, whose meaning is undefinable; that is, there are no simpler words with which to paraphrase their meaning;
• These semantic primes are expressable in every language. A single language can express a concept using a word or an affix or a syntactic construction; a word which expresses a semantic prime can also have other meanings in a language (for example, the Spanish word querer expresses the semantic prime WANT, but it also means love);
• These semantic primes can be combined in some basic ways, which the theory tries to discover. These combinations are again available in every language, though the syntactic and morphological realization of these combinations differ from language to language;
• Thus, according to the NSM theory, each language has a basic set of words and a basic set of combinatorial possibilities of these words. With them, each language can construct sentences and texts which are perfectly translatable in every other language. The analysis of these basic sentences gives the grammar core of the language.