Cliff Goddard

An introduction to the study of meaning in language, and to the language-culture connection. This work covers essential background on traditional and contemporary issues and approaches, and then takes the reader through a series of case studies in descriptive semantics.

"Using cultural scripts and semantic explications, the authors show how speech practices can be contextualised and understood in terms of the values, norms and beliefs of speakers themselves. These studies cover a gamut of culturally shaped ways of speaking from settings around the world - Australia, China, Colombia, Ghana, Japan, and Singapore. The book also serves as an introduction to powerful new techniques for pragmatic analysis which have emerged from 20 years of cross-linguistic semantic research."--Jacket.

"Cross-linguistic semantics - investigating how languages package and express meanings differently - is central to the linguistic quest to understand the nature of human language. This set of studies explores and demonstrates cross-linguistic semantics as practised in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework, originated by Anna Wierzbicka. This book will be valuable for linguists working on language description, lexical semantics, or the semantics of grammar, for advanced students of linguistics, and for others interested in language universals and language diversity."--Jacket.

"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