Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna (1997). Discourse and culture. In Teun A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as Social Interaction (pp. 231-257). London: Sage.
As in all cross-cultural research, the overriding methodological problem is ethnocentric bias, that is, the danger that our understanding of the discourse practices of other cultures will be distorted if we view them through the prism of our own culture-specific practices and concepts. There is a need to find a universal, language-independent perspective on discourse structure and on cultural values.
In this chapter we first survey a variety of different approaches to culture and discourse studies, then take a close look at cultural aspects of discourse in five unrelated cultures (Japanese, Malay, Polish, Yankunytjatjara, Ewe). In this way, we can draw out some of the main dimensions of cross-cultural variation in discourse.
