Implications Of The Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach For Cross-cultural Lexical Teaching And Learning

Words are used for expressing and conveying meanings. Word forms are arbitrary. Word meaning is an important part of the knowledge about a word which should be dealt with in lexical teaching and learning. Not all meanings conveyed through words are universal. Every language reflects the culture and thinking of its speakers and word meaning may vary from language to language and from culture to culture. Therefore, meaning variation across languages and cultures should not be ignored in cross-cultural lexical teaching and learning.Anna Wierzbicka's "natural semantic metalanguage (NSM)" approach is a newly developed theory of cross-cultural semantic analysis, which can lay claim to being one of the most well-developed and practical approaches to cross-cultural semantics. The basic idea of the NSM approach is reductive paraphrase ?we should try to describe complex meanings in terms of simpler ones. NSM researchers believe that semantic primes ?the common core of meaning in all languages ?can be used as a tool for linguistic and cultural analysis: to explicate complex and culture-specific words and other linguistic expressions. This thesis reviews the principle of the NSM approach, the current model of the NSM, the identification of semantic primes, the NSM syntax, and the application of NSM to semantic explication of culture-specific words. The purpose of this thesis is to find out the implications of the NSM approach for cross-cultural lexical teaching and learning.Empirical studies by NSM researchers prove that semantic primes are universal. This thesis tests the simplicity of the English exponents of the semantic primes via corpus-based analyses. The result suggests that the English exponents of the semantic primes are frequently used lexical units by native English speakers and are easy for foreign languages to learn. Therefore, this thesis suggests proposing the semantic primes as the core vocabulary of English, which should form part of the early EFL (i.e. English as a foreign language) lexical syllabus and should be used to write definitionsfor EFL learners.This thesis applies the NSM approach to a case study of a cultural key word in English ?freedom and the related phrase freedom from something. In the case study, this thesis analyzes the concept encoded in the culture-specific word, compares the difference in meaning between English and Chinese, finds faults with dictionary definitions, and carries out an experiment to find out if NSM explications can help cross-cultural language learners understand culture-specific words in the target language. This thesis demonstrates how the NSM approach can facilitate cross-cultural understanding of culture-specific words and proposes a meaning-oriented cross-cultural lexical teaching and learning.