Term
Semantic Primes
used in 34 texts across the archive
“Wierzbicka has discovered a set of what she calls “Natural Semantic Primes”—that is, words, exact translations of which exist in every language. Another way of defining and testing the primes is to say they are words that can’t be paraphrased by other words, without those other words ultimately having to be paraphrased using the primes themselves.”
In use
“The “speech words” among the semantic primes are “say,” “words,” “true” (not even “false”).”
“The Natural Semantic Primes are on the one hand the simplest, most commonplace words and the most mysterious—how is it, exactly, that we “think,” “say,” “know,” “do” and so on?”
“The idioms I’ve been creating out of a reduction of scenic thinking to Anna Weirzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes is, then, intended to become the language of a team, or teams of teams, operating directly on the field of probability.”