Bad Arguments against Semantic Primitives

The material in this communication may be subject to copyright under the Act. Any further reproduction or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Do not remove this notice. Semantic primitives have fallen on hard times. Though their existence was once widely accepted in linguistics, a variety of counter-arguments have since engendered widespread scepticism. This paper examines a selection of anti-primitives arguments with the aim of showing that they fail to apply to the most resilient and well-developed theory of semantic primitives, namely, Anna Wierzbicka's 'natural semantic metalanguage' theory. The most serious of the faulty arguments invalidly link semantic primitives with 'objectivism', or with abstractness and non-verifiability, or with implausible views about language acquisition or language processing. Others rely on misanalyzed linguistic 'facts', or simply fail to come to grips with the most credible pro-primitives position. The anti-primitives arguments are drawn from a broad range of sources, including the philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, language acquisition studies, and cognitive linguistics.