Goddard Cliff C., Wierzbicka Anna A. Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics Across Domains, Languages, and Cultures

Oxford University Press. 2014. — 352 pages. — ISBN: 0199668434In a series of cross-cultural investigations of word meaning, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka examine key expressions from different domains of the lexicon - concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social.They focus on complex and culturally important words in a range of languages that includes English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri and Malay. Some are basic like men, women, and children or abstract nouns like trauma and violence; others describe qualities such as hot, hard, and rough, emotions like happiness and sadness, or feelings like pain. This fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words. They ground their discussions in real examples from different cultures and draw on work ranging from Leibniz, Locke, and Bentham, to popular works such as autobiographies and memoirs, and the Dalai Lama on happiness.The book opens with a review of the neglected status of lexical semantics in linguistics. The authors consider a range of analytical issues including lexical polysemy, semantic change, the relationship between lexical and grammatical semantics, and the concepts of semantic molecules and templates. Their fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words.Words, meaning, and methodology
Men, women, and children: the semantics of basic social categories
Sweet, hot, hard, heavy, rough, sharp: physical-quality words in cross-linguistic perspective
Fromcolour wordsto visual semantics: English, Russian, Warlpiri
Happinessand human values in cross-cultural and historical perspective
Pain: is it a human universal? The perspective from cross-linguistic semantics
Suggesting, apologizing, complimenting: English speech-act verbs
A stitch in timeandthe way of the rice plant: the semantics of proverbs in English and Malay
The meaning ofabstract nouns: Locke, Bentham, and contemporary semantics
Broader horizons: beyond lexical semantics