Semantic universals
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C3P61
2025-12-02
70
Semantic universals
The predominant formal approach to semantic universals assumes semantic primesor primitives and is known as the semantic decompositionor componential analysis approach. Unlike the Universal Grammar hypothesis, which is associated with generative theories, this approach, or collection of approaches, is not associated with a particular type of theoretical framework. Indeed, semantic decomposition has been advocated, in various guises, by both formal and non-formal theorists, including Jackendoff (1983), Pinker (1994), Li and Gleitman (2002) and Wierzbicka (1996). The intuition behind the semantic decomposition approach is that there is a universal set of primitive semantic concepts, innately given, for which any particular language provides a language-specific label. This idea is expressed by Li and Gleitman in the following way:
Language has means for making reference to the objects, relations, properties and events that populate our everyday world. It is possible to suppose that these linguistic categories and structures are more or less straightforward mappings from a preexisting conceptual space, programmed into our biological nature. Humans invent words that label their concepts. (Li and Gleitman 2002: 266)
Some linguists who adopt this type of approach argue that words rarely label individual semantic primitives, but combinations or ‘bundles’ of primitives that combine to create the rather complex concepts that words denote. For instance, Ray Jackendoff, in his pioneering 1983 book Semantics and Cognition, argues that conceptual structure consists of a range of ontological categories, some of which are primitives. A primitive, in this sense, is an entity that cannot be reduced further, and can be combined with other primitives in order to produce more complex categories. Some of the primitives Jackendoff pro poses are [THING], [PLACE], [DIRECTION], [ACTION], [EVENT], [MANNER] and [AMOUNT]. Indeed, these ontological categories can be encoded in language. For instance, each of these corresponds to a wh-question word, such as what, who, when and so on. This is illustrated by the question-and-answer sequences below (drawn or adapted from Jackendoff 1983: 53):
The THEME of the sentence (what the sentence is about) is a particular [THING], lexicalised by the expression the statue. Moreover, the statue is located with respect to a particular [LOCATION], lexicalised by the expression in the park, which consists of the preposition, in, and a reference object, the park. Given that a [LOCATION] is typically occupied by a [THING], there is a relationship holding between [PLACE] and [THING] in which [THING] is a function of [PLACE]. Jackendoff calls this thematic relation [PLACE-FUNCTION].
Jackendoff argues that semantic primitives of this kind derive from the domain of spatial experience and are ‘hard wired’ or innate. In addition, he posits rules that enable the creation of new combinations as new concepts are acquired. The ontological categories and relations can also be deployed by more abstract concepts. For instance, abstract states can also be structured in terms of the [PLACE-FUNCTION] relation, even though abstract states such as TROUBLE or LOVE cannot be construed as locations:
According to Jackendoff’s theory, the reason that the [PLACE-FUNCTION] relation can be applied to abstract states such as TROUBLE and LOVE is because these more abstract concepts are being structured in terms of more primitive onto logical categories.
The semantic decomposition approach faces a number of challenges, as has often been observed by linguists of various theoretical persuasions. In particular, it is difficult to establish empirically what the ‘right’ semantic primitives might be, or how many there are. Furthermore, ‘classical’ componential theories, which assume a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, face the problem of accounting for how an entity can still count as an instance of a category in the absence of one or more of these components (for example, a three-legged cat is still described as cat).
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