Publications

Publication details [#17311]

Durst, Uwe. 1999. BAD as a semantic primitive: Evidence from Biblical Hebrew. Pragmatics & Cognition 7 (2) : 375–403.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/pc

Annotation

In an article entitled “Is BAD a semantic primitive?” (1996), John Myhill suggested that the concept bad’ should be removed from the list of semantic primitives put forward by Anna Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard. Myhill argued (1) that bad’ is semantically decomposable, (2) that there is no word in Biblical Hebrew that corresponds to the English word bad and, thus, no linguistic form that represents the primitive BAD in this language, and (3) that bad’ is dispensable in the semantic analysis and can be replaced with other components without any loss or change of meaning. Discussing and illustrating some fundamental questions in the search for universal semantic primitives, the present author reconsiders these findings and finds a different answer to John Myhill’s question.