Anna Wierzbicka

Linguist Anna Wierzbicka casts new light on the words of Jesus by taking her theory of universal human concepts and bringing it to bear on Jesus' parables and the Sermon on the Mount. Her approach results in strikingly novel interpretations.

"In 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."--Publishers website

This book is based on two ideas: first, that any language-English no less than any other-represents a universe of meaning, shaped by the history and experience of the men and women who have created it; second, that in any language certain culture-specific words act as linchpins for whole networks of meanings, and that penetrating the meanings of those key words can therefore open our eyes to an entire cultural universe. In this book Anna Wierzbicka demonstrates that three uniquely English words-experience, evidence, and sense-are exactly such linchpins. Using a rigorous plain language approach to meaning analysis, she unpacks the dense cultural meanings of these key words, disentangles their multiple meanings, and traces their origins back to the tradition of British empiricism. In so doing she reveals much about cultural attitudes embedded not only in British and American English, but also other global varieties of English. An interdisciplinary work, Experience, Evidence, and Sense is accessible to both scholars and students in linguistics and English, as well as historians of ideas, sociologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, and scholars of communication.

Although Australia prides itself on being multicultural, many Australians have little awareness of what it means to live in two cultures at once, and of how much there is to learn about other cultural perspectives.

"Not everything that can be said in one language can be said in another. The lexicons of different languages seem to suggest different conceptual universes. Investigating cultures from a universal, language-independent perspective, this book rejects analytical tools derived from the English language and Anglo-culture and proposes instead a "natural semantic metalanguage" formulated in English words but based on lexical universals. The outcome of two and a half decades of research, the metalanguage is made of universal semantic primitives in terms of which all meanings, including the most culture-specific ones, can be described and compared in a precise and illuminating way. Integrating insights from linguistics, cultural anthropology, and cognitive psychology, and written in simple, non-technical language Semantics, culture, and cognition isaccessible not only to scholars and students, but also to the general reader interested in semantics and the relationship between language and culture."--Cover page 4.