 The basic idea of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach (henceforth, NSM; Wierzbicka 1972, 1996; Goddard &amp; Wierzbicka 2002) is that word meaning is best described through the combination of a small set of elementary conceptual particles, known as semantic primes. Semantic primes are primitive (i.e., not decomposable into further conceptual parts), innate (i.e., not learned), and universal (i.e., explicitly lexicalized in all natural languages, whether in the form of a word, a morpheme, a phraseme, and so forth). According to NSM, the meaning of any word in any natural language can be defined by appropriately combining these fundamental conceptual particles. Wierzbicka (1996) proposed a catalogue of about 60 semantic primes, designed to analyze word meanings within so-called reductive paraphrases. For example, the reductive paraphrase for ‘top’ is a part of something; this part is above all the other parts of this something. NSM has produced interesting applications in comparative linguistics (Peeters 2006), language teaching (Goddard &amp; Wierzbicka 2007), and lexical typology (Goddard 2012). However, the approach has been criticized on various grounds. First, it has been argued that the method followed by NSM in the identification of semantic primes is insufficiently clear (e.g., Matthewson 2003). Second, some have observed that reductive paraphrases are too vague to be considered adequate representations of word meanings, since they fail to account for fine-grained differences between semantically neighboring words. For example, the reductive paraphrase provided by Wierzbicka for ‘sad’ (i.e., x feels something; sometimes a person thinks something like this: something bad happened; if i didn’t know that it happened i would say: i don’t want it to happen; i don’t say this now because i know: i can’t do anything; because of this, this person feels something bad; x feels something like this) seems to apply equally well to ‘unhappy’, ‘distressed’, ‘frustrated’, ‘upset’, and ‘annoyed’ (e.g., Aitchison 2012). Third, there is no consensus on what items should ultimately feature in the list of semantic primes available to reductive paraphrases: the content of the list is debated and varies considerably between versions of NSM. Fourth, some purported semantic primes appear to fail to comply with the universality requirement and are not explicitly lexicalized in all known languages (Bohnemeyer 2003; Von Fintel &amp; Matthewson 2008). See Goddard (1998) for some replies and Riemer (2006) for further objections.