Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) Approach claims that there are some universalities in all languages. Speech acts seem to be present in all languages, but considering this approach, research has not indicated whether request speech act differs from one language to another. Thus, this study intended to investigate whether request strategies are used differently in English and Persian romantic novels and whether Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach can be considered in English and Persian requests. To reach these objectives, the corpus consisting of two English and Persian romantic novels were used. It was analyzed using Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984)’s classification. Results indicated that mood derivable was the most frequent request strategy in both novels. Moreover, a statistically significant difference was not observed between request strategies in English and Persian romantic novels and thus the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach can be considered in English and Persian requests. The conclusion drawn is that considering the applicability of this approach, both American and Iranian native speakers can presumably use imperative structures, with the politeness marker please or without it, as a request strategy, when the interlocutors are close friends or members of the same family.

This article aims at contrasting the conceptualization of space in Persian and English. Using three semantic primes of 'space', namely 'below', 'side' and 'touch' proposed in Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), as one of the cognitive semantics approaches to study language, this cross-linguistic design intends to uncover the similarities and differences of conceptualizations in the two languages. The data came from the Hamshahri corpus of Persian-written data and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).The data were compared to see whether or not the NSM theory is viable to explain the spatial conceptualization. The results indicated that the semantic primes have more than one exponent in Persian and English, with their particular function and conceptual range. Besides, the prime of 'touch' has not spatial correspondence in Persian language. This means that the NSM approach does not provide enough analytical toolkits to satisfactorily explain the similarities and differences in cross-cultural cognitive semantic comparisons and cannot exhaustively explain the conceptualization of ‘space’. Nonetheless, this approach provides us with some insight into the cognitive properties in the minds of the speakers.