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Lexical universals of kinship and social cognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2010

Anna Wierzbicka
Anna Wierzbicka
Affiliation:
School of Language Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200Australia. anna.wierzbicka@anu.edu.auwww.une.edu.au/bcss/linguistics/nsm/
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Abstract

Jones recognizes the existence of “primitives of conceptual structures,” out of which “local representations of kinship are constructed.” NSM semantics has identified these primitives through a cross-linguistic search for lexical universals (“NSM” stands for Natural Semantic Metalanguage and also for the corresponding linguistic theory). These empirical universals provide, I argue, a better bridge between cognitive anthropology and evolutionary psychology than the abstract constructs of OT, with dubious claim to conceptual reality.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 33 , Issue 5 , October 2010 , pp. 403 - 404
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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