Anna Wierzbicka

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Anna Wierzbicka b. Smoleńska (born March 10, 1938 in Warsaw ) is a Polish linguist who has been teaching in Australia since 1973 .

Life

Wierzbicka studied from 1954 Polish philology at the University of Warsaw and received his doctorate in 1964 at the Academy of Sciences on Polish Renaissance literature . This was followed by study visits to the Academy of Sciences in Moscow , the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford . 1969 habilitation they are in Warsaw on semantic primitives .

After the divorce from her first husband, the journalist Piotr Wierzbicki (* 1935), she married the Australian translator John Besemeres, whom she had met in Oxford, in 1970. In 1972 they emigrated to Australia. From 1973 Wierzbicka taught at the Australian National University in Canberra , from 1989 as a professor.

Since 1999 she has been a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences . The Polish Academy of scholarship in Krakow it belongs to is also an external member.

research

Wierzbicka is mainly known for her work on semantics . In doing so, it is based on language philosophers such as Leibniz (conceptual theory) and Descartes . In the Natural Semantic Metalanguage she developed , she postulates around 60 basic terms or concepts that should appear in all languages ​​of the world. With these terms all further concepts could then be explained. To derive them, she has developed small scripts that gradually convert the term to be analyzed into the basic terms. She and her students have shown that this is actually possible for some languages.

Fonts

  • Semantic primitives. Athenäum-Verlag, Frankfurt, 1972, ISBN 3-7610-4822-X .
  • The Case for Surface Case. Karoma Publishers, 1980, ISBN 0-89720-027-6 .
  • Lingua Mentalis: The Semantics of Natural Language. Brill Academic Publishers, 1981, ISBN 0-12-750050-2 .
  • Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis. Karoma Publishers, 1984, ISBN 0-89720-069-1 .
  • English Speech Act Verbs: A Semantic Dictionary. Academic Press, 1987, ISBN 0-12-312810-2 .
  • The Semantics of Grammar. John Benjamin Publ., Amsterdam / Philadelphia, 1988, ISBN 90-272-3019-6 .
  • Semantics, Culture and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations. Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York, 1992, ISBN 0-19-507326-6 .
  • Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York, 1996, ISBN 0-19-870003-2 .
  • Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, Japanese. Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York, 1997, ISBN 0-19-508836-0 .
  • Emotions Across Languages ​​and Cultures: Diversity and Universals. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1999, ISBN 0-521-59971-7 .
  • What Did Jesus Mean? Explaining the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables in Simple and Universal Human Concepts. Oxford University Press, New York NY, 2001, ISBN 0-19-513733-7 .
  • Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction. 2nd Edition. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin / New York, 2003, ISBN 3-11-017769-2 .
  • English: Meaning and Culture. Oxford University Press, New York NY, 2006, ISBN 0-19-517475-5 .
  • Experience, Evidence, and Sense: The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English. Oxford University Press, New York NY, 2010, ISBN 978-0-19-536801-7 .
  • Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language. Oxford University Press, New York NY, 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-932149-0 .
  • with Cliff Goddard: Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics Across Domains, Languages, and Cultures. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-966843-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Anna Wierzbicka. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed August 9, 2015 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Wierzbicka, Anna
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish linguist
DATE OF BIRTH March 10, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw