The studies in this volume show how speech practices can be understood from a culture-internal perspective, in terms of values, norms and beliefs of the speech communities concerned. Focusing on examples from many different cultural locations, the contributing authors ask not ‘What is distinctive about these particular ways of speaking?’, but ‘Why – from their own point of view – do the people concerned speak in these particular ways? What sense does it make to them?’. The ethnopragmatic approach stands in opposition to the culture-external universalist pragmatics represented by neo-Gricean pragmatics and politeness theory. Using and “cultural scripts and ” and semantic explications – techniques developed over 20 years work in cross-cultural semantics by Anna Wierzbicka and colleagues – the authors examine a wide range of phenomena, speech acts, terms of address, phraseological patterns, jocular irony, facial expressions, interactional routines, discourse particles, expressive derivation, and emotionality. The authors and languages Anna Wierzbicka (English), Cliff Goddard (Australian English), Jock Wong (Singapore English), Zhengdao Ye (Chinese), Catherine Travis (Colombian Spanish), Rie Hasada (Japanese) and Felix Ameka (Ewe). Taken together, these studies demonstrate both the profound and “cultural shaping and ” of speech practices, and the power and subtlety of new methods and techniques of a semantically grounded ethnopragmatics. The book will appeal not only to linguists and anthropologists, but to all scholars and students with an interest in language, communication and culture.

Ethnopragmatics: Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context (Applications of Cognitive Linguistics [ACL], 3) PDF

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