The Semantic Roots and Cultural Grounding of ‘Social Cognition’

Abstract

Social cognition (roughly, how people think about other people) is profoundly shaped by culture. It cannot be insightfully studied except by methods that are able to tap into the perspectives of cultural insiders, while avoiding the pitfalls of conceptual and terminological Anglocentrism. This paper shows how the analytical concepts and techniques developed by the NSM approach to language description, such as semantic explications and cultural scripts, can meet these requirements. It argues that the metalanguage of semantic primes, the outcome of a decades-long programme of research, is well adapted to modelling local culturally grounded modes of social cognition in fine detail.

Keywords:

• Semantics
• Social Cognition
• Sociality Concepts
• Cultural Scripts
• Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)
• Cultural Key Words

Notes

¹ A substantial bibliography (and some free downloads) can be accessed at the NSM Homepage: www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-languages-linguistics/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage. The works listed there include studies by more than 40 authors, across roughly as many languages.

² NSM researchers have long been trying (with little effect, it would seem) to point out that cultural factors are shaping much contemporary linguistic theorizing about social cognition. This occurs when supposedly universal theories and models are constructed from English-specific concepts, such as communication, interaction, (im)politeness, imposition, relationship, cooperation and relevance. The issue is not just terminological ethnocentrism but also conceptual ethnocentrism (Anglocentrism); cf. Wierzbicka (2006; in press).

³ The NSM metalanguage can validly be seen as a model of the species-specific ‘human semantic potential’. As such, contrastive examination of its character compared with that of the analogous ‘NSMs’ of chimpanzees and other primates has much to tell us about the cognitive underpinnings of social cognition and sociality in Homo sapiens.

⁴ There is a second Moscow School which is more focussed on cultural semantics (Zalizniak et al. 2005) but whose works are as yet available only in Russian. For an attempt to apply Pustejovsky's framework to subtle socially infused meanings, see Morrissey and Schalley (2012).

⁵ Another, but separate problem (for some people) is that some NSM expressions, such as ‘this someone’ and ‘can't not’, are not particularly idiomatic in English, even though their meanings are intuitively very clear.