Wierzbicka, Anna (2016). Two levels of verbal communication, universal and culture-specific. In Andrea Rocci, & Louis de Saussure (Eds.), Verbal communication (pp. 447-482). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110255478-024
Abstract:
Models of the human person embedded in everyday language differ a great deal across languages, cultures and epochs, and often lead us to the heart of the shared cultural values of the speech communities where they are found. Even within European languages, there is considerable diversity. Remarkably, though, all human cultures appear to agree that human beings have a body, which is visible, and ‘something else’, which is not. Models of the human person differ with respect to the construal of that ‘something else’. For speakers of modern English, it is usually interpreted as the ‘mind’; and in the era of global English, the model of a human being as composed of a body and a mind is often taken for granted by Anglophone humanities and social sciences (and even by cognitive and evolutionary science).
Yet the ‘mind’ is a conceptual artefact of modern English – an ethno-construct no more grounded in reality than the French esprit, the Danish sind, the Russian душа duša, the Latin anima, or the Yolngu birrimbirr. The reification of the English ‘mind’ and its elevation to the status of a ‘scientific’ prism through which all other languages, cultures, indigenous psychologies, and even stages in the evolution of primates can be legitimately interpreted is a striking illustration of the blind spot in contemporary social science that results from the ‘invisibility’ of English as a more and more globalized way of speaking and thinking.
This paper demonstrates that the meanings hidden in such language-specific cultural constructs can be revealed and compared, in a precise and illuminating way, through the use of NSM. It also shows how the understanding of such culturally central concepts can lead to better communication across languages and cultures.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
