Semantic Primes and Universal Grammar

This volume is part of a research program which started with the publication, in 1972, of Anna Wierzbicka’s groundbreaking work on Semantic Primitives . The first within the program to focus on a number of typologically similar languages, it proposes a French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian version of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) elaborated over the years by Wierzbicka and colleagues. Repetition is avoided through teamwork: a number of authors working on the languages under examinati