Universal human concepts as a tool for exploring bilingual lives

Abstract

Embodied within every language is a unique universe of meaning. This raises some key questions about the conceptual universes of bilingual persons: What meanings does a bilingual person live with? How does such a person (in contrast with a monolingual person) think and feel? How are their thoughts and emotions related to their two different languages? In order to investigate these questions we need to listen to the subjective experience of bilingual people and, in particular, bilingual writers who have been able to reflect deeply on their personal experience and to articulate their own insights (cf. Besemeres, 2002). We also need to analyze semantic differences between languages and try to link the “soft” subjective experience of bilingual persons with “hard” objective evidence derived from rigorous semantic analysis. Finally, we need to recognize that in order to compare the different meanings that bilingual persons live with, we need a common measure at our disposal. In this paper, I will argue that the “Natural Semantic Metalanguage” based on empirically established lexical and grammatical universals (Goddard & Wierzbicka, 1994, 2002) provides such a common measure, and I will try to show how the use of this metalanguage can help us to explore the conceptual worlds of bilingual people more effectively and more revealingly.