Anna Wierzbicka

Who is Anna Wierzbicka?

Anna Wierzbicka is a Polish linguist currently working at the Australian National University in Canberra. Brought up in Poland she graduated from Warsaw University and finally emigrated to Australia in 1972, where she has lived until now. With over twenty published books, many of which were translated into foreign languages, she is regarded as a prolific writer. Wierzbicka is famous for her work in semantics, pragmatics, and cross-cultural linguistics. She is especially known for Natural Semantic Metalanguage, particularly the concept of semantic primes. This is a research agenda resembling Leibniz's original "alphabet of human thought", which Wierzbicka credits her colleague, linguist Andrzej Bogusławski, with reviving in the late 1960s.