JAPANESE MENTAL PREDICATE ‘SEE’ IN KANJI??MIRU, ??MIRU, ??MIRU, ??MIRU: A NATURAL SEMANTIC METALANGUAGE APPROACH

Widya Purnawati, Ketut ( Udayana University)

LINGUAL: Journal of Language and Culture
Vol 2, No 3 (2014)

The semantic prime SEE in English is known as MIRU in Japanese, which is written as ?? in Japanese kanji and kana. Miru as a verb, however, is not written only in one way as mentioned above, but may also be written in some different ways by using different kanji followed by kana as okurigana, such as ??miru, ?? miru, and ??miru. In general, these kanji denote semantic prime SEE or MIRU in Japanese. However, actually, each of this kanji has their particular meaning as well. This paper is aimed at defining the differences between those MIRU verbs in Japanese. MIRU as a semantic prime belongs to the group of Japanese Mental Predicate. The approach used in this paper was the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, first proposed by Anna Wierzbicka in 1972 and developed greatly until today