Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna (1998). Language, culture and meaning: Cross-cultural semantics. In René Dirven, & Marjolijn Verspoor (Eds.), Cognitive exploration of language and linguistics (pp. 137-159). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2nd ed.:
Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna (2004). Language, culture and meaning: Cross-cultural semantics. In René Dirven, & Marjolijn Verspoor (Eds.), Cognitive exploration of language and linguistics. Second revised edition (pp. 127-148). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
This chapter looks into cross-linguistic semantic differences in a systematic way. We present a method for pinpointing semantic distinctions and for exploring their cultural relevance. A key question is whether differences in linguistic conceptualization play a central role in language and thought or whether they are rather marginal. Both positions have been advocated. The first is known as linguistic relativity, in its extreme form as linguistic determinism. The second is known as universalism and holds that all people all over the world basically think in the same way. This chapter proposes a compromise between the extremes: Most linguistic concepts are indeed language-specific, but there is also a small number of universal linguistic concepts which occur in all languages. These universal concepts can be used as a “neutral” basis for paraphrasing the huge variety of language-specific and culture-specific concepts in the languages of the world. This is illustrated firstly for lexical concepts, then for grammatical concepts, and finally for the cultural norms of behaviour which underlie people’s behaviour in different cultures.
