In this book, Anna Wierzbicka builds on her previous work on universal human concepts and the relationships between meaning and culture. She has organized the book into four parts. In Part 1, “Introduction,” she discusses the cultural and historical baggage of English through the legacy of British Empiricism, and illustrates this with an analysis of the English word empirical and the French empirique, through which she shows that these words have different meanings, historically and currently, in the two languages. She also introduces natural semantic metalanguage (NSM)—a small set of simple words that have semantic equivalents in all languages—as a methodology for analysing the meanings of words and differences in the meanings across cultures. In this chapter, as throughout the book, Wierzbicka draws on large corpora, such as COBUILD's Bank of English, for examples of uses of her target words. She also uses Google searches to provide examples of word uses and to provide quantitative data on phraseological patterns of use. She analyses the corpus examples using NSM and she discusses examples of apparent cognates from other languages, which she argues are in fact not cognates.

In Part 2, Wierzbicka presents a detailed NSM analysis and discussion of meanings of the words experience and evidence through numerous examples from corpora. She argues that these two words represent concepts that are central to and unique to English culture, historically and currently, through the legacy of British Empiricism. Part 3 focuses on the word sense. Wierzbicka presents NSM analyses of corpus examples of uses of phrases such as a sense of, a sense that, a sense of humor, a sense of self, a strong sense, a deep sense, moral sense, common sense, having sense, and making sense. She also presents quantitative data from Google searches that indicate meaning differences through differences in phraseology. Again, she argues that the uses and meanings of sense can be traced back to British Empiricism and are unique to English culture.

Part 4 is only twelve pages long. In it Wierzbicka discusses the value of online searches—for example, Google searches—in providing quantitative data regarding phraseological meaning, which large corpora such as COBUILD's Bank of English are still not large enough to provide. This is an interesting and useful discussion, but I found it an odd way for the book to conclude. What is missing from the book is a concluding section that overviews and pulls together the findings and insights from the dense and detailed analyses presented in the lengthy Parts 2 and 3.