2. Is "remember" a universal human concept? "Memory" and culture

Anna Wierzbicka

Speaking of “elementary notions, common to everyone in the human race, that can be expressed in all languages”, Umberto Eco (2000: 87–88) states: “Most certainly, every man has a notion of what it means to (. . .) to remember”. This paper argues that Eco is mistaken and that ‘remembering’ is not a universal human concept but a cultural construct, shared by some languages but not others. It also shows that culture-specifi c concepts like ‘remember’ and ‘memory’ can be explained and compared through genuinely elementary and universal notions such as know, think and before (that is, through ‘ nsm’). To illustrate these general themes, the paper offers a detailed analysis of the Polish fi eld of ‘memory’, linking Polish semantics with Polish history and culture.

Published online: 14 November 2007
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.21.04wie

Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

Goddard, Cliff & Anna Wierzbicka

2014. Semantic fieldwork and lexical universals. Studies in Language 38:1 ► pp. 80 ff.

Lai, Changsheng

2021. Against epistemic absolutism. Synthese 199:1-2 ► pp. 3945 ff.

Linde, Charlotte

2015. In The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, ► pp. 1 ff.

Monchamp, Anne Marie

2011. The other side of the story. Memory Studies 4:1 ► pp. 53 ff.

Sutton, John

2020. In The Internal Senses in the Aristotelian Tradition [Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, 22], ► pp. 137 ff.

Tivyaeva, Irina & Olga Syomina

2020. English Mnemonic Lexicon: Constituent Structure and Verbalization Potential. English Studies at NBU 6:1 ► pp. 29 ff.

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