Tag: (E) laid back

(2015) English (Australia), German – ‘Laid-back’, ‘serious’

Cramer, Rahel K. (2015). Why Australians seem “laid-back” and Germans rather “serious”: A contrastive semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis of Australian English and German, with implications for second language pedagogy. MA thesis, Hamburg University. PDF (open access)

This study aims to explore manifestations of cultural characteristics in spoken conversational Australian English and German to reveal the relation between cultural values and ways of speaking and to facilitate their understanding, in particular for second language learners. It is a two-part contrastive analysis. Part One gives a cultural overview by identifying macro-concepts of the two speech communities (‘Ordnung’ and ‘Angst’ for the German culture; the ‘no worries’ attitude, ‘friendliness’ and ‘good humour’ for the Australian culture). Part Two provides a detailed semantic and pragmatic analysis of micro-concepts, which includes a section on social descriptor terms (laid back, relaxed and easy going in Australian English; locker and sympathisch in German) and a section on conversational ideals (anregend and ernsthaft in German; friendly and not too serious in Australian English). The methodological approach is a combination of corpus linguistics and the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). The findings from this analysis are considered in relation to their applicability to and usefulness for second language pedagogy.


Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2016) English (Australia) – Ethnopragmatics

Goddard, Cliff & Cramer, Rahel (2016). “Laid back” and “irreverent”: An ethnopragmatic analysis of two cultural themes in Australian English communication. In Donal Carbaugh (Ed.), The handbook of communication in cross-cultural perspective (pp. 89-103). New York: Routledge.

Abstract:

What cultural logic is at play whereby Australians can be friendly and humorous, and yet at the same time derisive, disdainful, and scornful? One of the goals of this study is to explain this paradox by providing a detailed insider perspectives on certain canonical Anglo-Australian (“Aussie”) cultural values and orientations to communication, both at the interpersonal level and in the public sphere. Words and expressions are treated as entry points through which to access cultural meaning.

The focus is on two clusters of words. In the first cluster are the words laid back and easy going, which are high-frequency descriptors of the preferred Australian interactional style and an indisputable part of the national self-stereotype. The second cluster consists of the twin expressions not taking yourself/anything too seriously and the word irreverence. These expressions, it is argued, are Australian cultural key words and, consequently, deeply implicated in canonical Anglo-Australian conceptions of personhood, social interaction, and humour.

Though the paper includes occasional contrastive remarks about other cultural orientations, its focus is not on cross-cultural communication but on Australian cultural conceptualizations of communication and how these play out in communicational practices.

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Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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