Semantic primes

Semantic primes or semantic primitives are semantic concepts that are innately understood, but cannot be expressed in simpler terms. They represent words or phrases that are learned through practice, but cannot be defined concretely. For example, although the meaning of "touching" is readily understood, a dictionary might define "touch" as "to make contact" and "contact" as "touching", providing no information if neither of these words are understood. The concept of innate semantic primes was largely introduced by Anna Wierzbicka's book, Semantics: Primes and Universals.

Table adapted from Goddard, 2002.

Semantic primes represent universally meaningful concepts, but to have meaningful messages, or statements, such concepts must combine in a way that they themselves convey meaning. Such meaningful combinations, in their simplest form as sentences, constitute the syntax of the language. Wierzbicka provides evidence that just as all languages use the same set of semantic primes, they also use the same, or very similar syntax. She states: "I am also positing certain innate and universal rules of syntax-not in the sense of some intuitively unverifiable formal syntax a la Chomsky, but in the sense of intuitively verifiable patterns determining possible combinations of primitive concepts (Wierzbicka, 1996)." She gives one example comparing the English sentence, "I want to do this", with its equivalent in Russian. Although she notes certain formal differences between the two sentence structures, their semantic equivalence emerges from the "....equivalence of the primitives themselves and of the rules for their combination."

This work [of Wierzbicka and colleagues] has led to a set of a highly concrete proposals about a hypothesised irreducible core of all human languages. This universal core is believed to have a fully ‘language-like’ character in the sense that it consists of a lexicon of semantic primitives together with a syntax governing how the primitives can be combined (Goddard, 1998).

It may not be surprising that all humans today possess a common language core of semantic primes and a more or less universal syntax, since there is substantial evidence that all humans today descended from a common speech-enabled male and female Homo sapiens ancestor. Linguist Johanna Nichols traces Homo sapiens language origin as far back as 130,000 years ago, perhaps only 65,000 years after the earliest Homo sapiens fossil finds (Adler, 2000). Philosopher G. J. Whitrow expresses it:

....despite the great diversity of existing languages and dialect, the capacity for language appears to be identical in all races. Consequently, we can conclude that man's linguistic ability existed before racial diversification occurred (Whitrow, 1988).

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