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Wierzbicka, Anna (1991). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Reissued, with a new preface, as:

Wierzbicka, Anna (2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

DOI (2003): https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110220964

Abstract:

This book challenges approaches to human interaction that are 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, cross-cultural families, and so on. By contrast to such approaches, which are of no use in cross-cultural 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. 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. It shows that the meanings expressed in human interaction and the different cultural rules (called ‘cultural scripts’ in more recent work) prevailing in different speech communities can be described and compared in a way that is clear, simple, rigorous, and free of ethnocentric bias. It relies on NSM to do so, and argues that the latter can be used as a basis for teaching successful cross-cultural communication and education, including the teaching of languages in a cultural context.

Table of contents:

1. Introduction: Semantics and pragmatics
2. Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts
3. Cross-cultural pragmatics and different cultural values
4. Describing conversational routines
5. Speech acts and speech genres across languages and cultures
6. The semantics of illocutionary forces
7. Italian reduplication: Its meaning and its cultural significance
8. Interjections across cultures
9. Particles and illocutionary meanings
10. Boys will be boys: Even truisms are culture-specific
11. Conclusion: Semantics as a key to cross-cultural pragmatics

More information:

Chapter 2 builds on: Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts: Polish vs. English (1985)

Chapter 5 builds on: A semantic metalanguage for a crosscultural comparison of speech acts and speech genres (1985); a more recent publication building on this chapter is chapter 5 (pp. 198-234) of Wierzbicka, Anna (1997), Understanding cultures through their key words: English, Russian, Polish, German, Japanese. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 6 builds on: A semantic metalanguage for the description and comparison of illocutionary meanings (1986)

Chapter 7 builds on: Italian reduplication: Cross-cultural pragmatics and illocutionary semantics (1986)

Chapter 8 builds on: The semantics of interjections (1992)

Chapter 9 builds on: Precision in vagueness: The semantics of English ‘approximatives’ (1986); The semantics of quantitative particles in Polish and in English (1986)

Chapter 10 builds on: Boys will be boys: ‘Radical semantics’ vs. ‘radical pragmatics’ (1987)

Rating:

Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

Tags listed below are in addition to those listed at the end of the entries for the earlier work on which this book builds.