Re: Natural Semantic Metalanguage

--- Mr Veoler <veoler@...> wrote:

> Hello!
>
> I'm using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage as an aid in core vocabulary
> creation, but the problem is, I don't know exactly the semantic space of the
> proposed prime concepts. Someone here knows, or can otherwise help?
<snip>

At http://www.une.edu.au/lcl/nsm/nsm.php Goddard states:

---QUOTE---
A mere list is not sufficient, in itself, to identify the intended meanings, if
only because many of these English words are polysemous (i.e. have several
meanings), but only one sense of each is proposed as primitive. While it is
claimed that the simplest sense of the exponent words can be matched across
languages (i.e. that they are "lexical universals"), it is recognised that
their secondary, polysemic meanings may differ widely from language to
language.

A fuller characterisation will indicate, for each proposed prime, a set of
"canonical contexts" in which it can occur; that is, a set of sentences or
sentence fragments exemplifying grammatical (combinatorial) contexts for each
prime.
---END QOUTE---

But on that page he does not give the "canonical contexts" which would
exemplify the region of semantic space occupied by each prime, so it might take
some digging through the published works listed in the bibliography. The only
problem is the prices of those books. Yikes!!!!

--gary

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