The lexical semantics of personality words: On ‘shy’ and ‘outgoing’

This study addresses linguistic and cross-disciplinary issues connected with the study of personality trait words, e.g., shy, selfish, outgoing. Although the personality lexicon has long been seen as a primary concern for the field of psychology, it is argued here that the study of personality words belongs primarily within the domain of linguistics and can be performed by methods of lexical semantics and corpus analysis. To demonstrate this, two English personality adjectives representative of the personality dimension Extraversion (namely, shy and outgoing) are analysed using a corpus-assisted Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach. The results highlight the status of the English words as folk concepts. The risks of excessive reliance on such folk concepts in personality research are demonstrated by the brief comparison with Russian, and alternative ways forward are outlined.