Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction

Anna Wierzbicka

Published by De Gruyter Mouton 2003

Cross-Cultural Pragmatics

The Semantics of Human Interaction

Anna Wierzbicka

In the series Mouton Textbook

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110220964

Overview
Contents

About this book

This book, which can be seen as both a research monograph and a text book, challenges the approaches to human interaction based on supposedly universal "maxims of conversation" and "principles of politeness", which fly in the face of reality as experienced by millions of people - refugees, immigrants, crosscultural families, and so on. By contrast to such approaches, which can be of no use in crosscultural communication and education, this book is both theoretical and practical: it shows that in different societies, norms of human interaction are different and reflect different cultural attitudes and values; and it offers a framework within which different cultural norms and different ways of speaking can be effectively explored, explained, and taught.

The book discusses data from a wide range of languages, including English, Italian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Walmatjari (an Australian Aboriginal language), and it shows that the meanings expressed in human interaction and the different "cultural scripts" prevailing in different speech communities can be described and compared in a way that is clear, simple, rigorous, and free of ethnocentric bias by using a "natural semantic metalanguage", based on empirically established universal human concepts. As the book shows, this metalanguage can be used as a basis for teaching successful cross-cultural communication and education, including the teaching of languages in a cultural context.

Author / Editor information

Anna Wierzbicka is Professor at Australian National University, Canberra.

Reviews

"The book can be regarded as a recapitulation of results obtained in all former scholarly projects carried by its author. [It] is one if the best manuals of widely understood pragmatics and ethnolinguistics of human speech, the more so as the traditoinal grammars and handbooks of linguistics usually leave the ethnography of speech in the background of linguistics analyses."
Tomasz Wicherkiewicz in: Linguistics and Oriental Studies from Poznan

Topics

Frontmatter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	I
Contents Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	XXXI
Chapter 1. Introduction: semantics and praglllatics Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 2. Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
Chapter 3. Cross-cultural pragmatics and different cultural values Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	67
Chapter 4. Describing conversational routines Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
Chapter 5. Speech acts and speech genres across languages and cultures Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
Chapter 6. The semantics of illocutionary forces Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Chapter 7. Italian reduplication: its meaning and its cultural significance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	255
Chapter 8. Interjections across cultures Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
Chapter 9. Particles and illocutionary meanings Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	341
Chapter 10. Boys will be boys: even 'truisllls' are culture-specific Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	391
Chapter 11. Conclusion: selDantics as a key to cross-cultural pragmatics Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	453
Backmatter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	457

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Edition: 2nd ed. [with a new preface] 2003
Pages
- Front matter: 37
- Main content: 502
Keywords: Pragmatik; Semantik; Kulturvergleich; Illokutiver Akt

eBook

Published: September 4, 2009
ISBN: 9783110220964