On the Natural Semantic Meta-Language Theory and the Issue of Translatability

Abstract

The Natural Semantic Meta-language Theory (NSM) presented by A. Wierzbicka introduces a list of universal semantic primes and the syntactic rules which create other complex concepts out of these universal basic semantic components. After introducing the NSM theoretical framework, the present paper puts forward the idea of the existence of the innate and universal translatable semantic components across languages.