1. By:
GUSPERA (1110731012)

2. Metalanguage
the language that is used to present, name
and describe terminological information, the
language of a particular field name in an entry,
e,g. "synonym" is the English name of the data
field, that contains synonyms to main entry
terms.
To make it simpler, metalanguage is a
language that can be used to describe
languages.

3. The Natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) is a
linguistic theory and a practical, meaning-based
approach to linguistic analysis.
Natural Semantic Metalnguage is a language which
is used to describe other language. In spite of
that, it may be used to describe not only other
languages in general, but also themselves. It can
be defined as kinds of semantic analysis
approach in finding the simplest meaning of a
word.

4. Wierzbicka in many of her works tries to explain that
apart from the semantic primes, all the other
words in any given language are more complex
ideas and could be explained with the set of
primes only.
For example MOURING can be “you feel this, you
feel sad, after someone you love, someone good,
die(s)” (I avoid changing the primes to fit the rules
of grammar of any certain language). Wierzbicka
wrote many books, especially in English, where
she shows more complicated examples – my
personal favourite was “bread” which took her
approx. one page to define and several
predefined concepts (like “grain” or “bake”).

5. Those aspects are:
1. The difference of social communities
2. The systematical difference
3. The difference of culture
4. The different style of speaking and
communication
Using NSM allows us to formulate analyses which
are clear, precise, cross-translatable, nonAnglocentric, and intelligible to people without
specialist linguistic training.

6. The method has applications in intercultural
communication, lexicography (dictionary making),
language teaching, the study of child language
acquisition, legal semantics, and other areas.
Thus, according to the NSM theory, each language
has a basic set of words and a basic set of
combinatorial possibilities of these words. With
them, each language can construct sentences and
texts which are perfectly translatable in every
other language. The analysis of these basic
sentences gives the grammar core of the
language.
Sources:
http://www.vilnergoy.org/nsm/nsm-intro.html
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Natural_semantic_
metalanguage.html