Words and Meanings

Cliff Goddard is Professor of Linguistics at Griffith University, Brisbane. His books include Semantic Analysis (OUP 1998, 2nd edn 2011), Cross-Linguistic Semantics (ed., 2008, John Benjamins), and The Languages of East and Southeast Asia: An Introduction (2005, OUP). Anna Wierzbicka is Professor of Linguistics at Australian National University. Her many books include Semantics: Primes and Universals (OUP 1996), Emotions across Languages and Cultures (CUP 1999), and Experience, Evidence & Sense: The hidden cultural legacy of English (OUP 2010).

• 1: Words, meaning, and methodology 2: Men, women, and children: the semantics of basic social categories 3: Sweet, hot, hard, heavy, rough, sharp: physical quality words in cross-linguistic perspective 4: From "colour words" to visual semantics: English, Russian, Warlpiri 5: Happiness and human values in cross-cultural and historical perspective 6: Pain is it a human universal? The perspective from cross-linguistic semantics 7: Suggesting, apologizing, complimenting: English speech-act verbs 8: A stitch in time and the way of the rice plant: the semantics of proverbs in English and Malay 9: The meaning of "abstract nouns": Locke, Bentham and contemporary semantics 10: Broader Perspectives: Beyond lexical semantics References Index

the great pleasure the reader will experience while reading Words & Meanings as it revivifies the rich philosophical background you can keep in mind when discussing the main topics: the authors demonstrate that beyond linguistic schools of thought, there is still a lot to learn from Jeremy Bentham, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, John Locke and John Stuart Mill to put things in perspective. They guide the reader from the general to the particular, from the generic to the specific, from the concrete to the abstract, from the simple to the complex ... As a result, the reader's linguistic landscape cannot fail to be enriched because it becomes more diversified