A cross-linguistic study of value-judgement terms

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to try to establish the extent to which the words good, bad, true and right can be considered lexical universals. These words have been chosen because they are value-judgment terms which, individually, have been discussed at length by philosophers. It seems to be assumed by philosohers and semanticists that these words reflect concepts which are shared by speakers of all languages. By testing whether these words are candidates for lexical universals we can then see the extent to which this assumption is t rue. On the basis of information from native speakers from 15 diverse languages, we can say that good and bad reflect language independent concepts. However, in many languages, including English, the range of meaning of bad 1s narrower than the range of meaning of good. By looking at five of these fifteen languages we can see that the words right and true reflect concepts which are not language independent. Thus by taking a cross-linguistic approach, we can shed some light on the work done by language philosophers in the area of value-judgment terms.