Abstract
This study examines whether the semantic primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) are attested in Denesųłiné (Athabaskan, Northern Canada). The NSM claims that the semantic primes are basic and universal meanings expressible as lexical units or morphemes in all languages. This study finds, however, that certain claimed semantic primes are problematic to posit in Dene, including be (somewhere), bad, moment, feel, kind, and part . Dene seems not to express partonymy and typonymy via abstract lexical items. This article suggests improvements in the NSM in light of the Dene data and reflects on how semantic decomposition approaches like NSM can improve the documentation and analysis of this language.
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