Tag: (S) freedom of expression

(1994) Japanese, English (incl. Black) – Cultural scripts

Wierzbicka, Anna (1994). “Cultural scripts”: A semantic approach to cultural analysis and cross-cultural communication. Pragmatics and Language Learning [Monograph Series], 5, 1-24. PDF (open access)

This paper argues that the ways of speaking characteristic of a given speech community cannot be satisfactorily described (let alone explained) in purely behavioral terms. They constitute a behavioral manifestation of a tacit system of “cultural rules” or “cultural scripts”. To understand a society’s ways of speaking, we have to identify and articulate its implicit “cultural scripts”. Furthermore, it is argued that to be able to do this without ethnocentric bias we need a universal, language-independent perspective; this can be attained if the”rules” in question are stated in terms of lexical universals, that is, universal human concepts lexicalized in all languages of the world.

To illustrate these general propositions, the author shows how cultural scripts can be stated and how they can be justified. This is done with particular reference to Japanese, (White) Anglo-American, and Black American cultural norms.

The cultural scripts advanced in this paper are formulated in a highly constrained Natural Semantic Metalanguage, based on a small set of lexical universals (or near-universals) and a small set of universal (or near-universal) syntactic patterns. It is argued that the use of this metalanguage allows us to portray and compare culture-specific attitudes, assumptions, and norms from a neutral, culture-independent point of view and to do so in terms of simple formulae that are intuitively self-explanatory while at the same time being rigorous and empirically verifiable.


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(2002) Russian – Cultural scripts

Wierzbicka, Anna (2002). Russian cultural scripts: The theory of cultural scripts and its applications. Ethos, 30(4), 401-432.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.2002.30.4.401

Abstract:

Cultural scripts reflect shared cultural understandings. They are representations of cultural norms that are widely held in a given society and that are reflected in language (in culture-specific key words, phrases, conversational routines, and so on). A key methodological principle in the theory underlying this article (a study in ethnopragmatics avant la lettre) is that the proposed cultural scripts must be formulated in NSM. The author argues that cultural scripts formulated in universal human concepts allow us to understand cultural norms and attitudes from within, that is, from the perspective of cultural insiders, while at the same time making them intelligible to outsiders as well.

In this article, the theory of cultural scripts is applied to Russian culture and, in particular, the Russian cultural scripts concerning speech, truth, and interpersonal communication (“obščenie”).

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(2002) English – Cultural key words: RIGHT, WRONG

Wierzbicka, Anna (2002). Right and wrong: From philosophy to everyday discourse. Discourse Studies, 4(2), 225-252. DOI: 10.1177/14614456020040020601

A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 3 (pp. 61-102) of:

Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). English: Meaning and culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

One of the most interesting phenomena in the history of the English language is the remarkable rise of the word right, in its many interrelated senses and uses. This article tries to trace the changes in the meaning and use of this word, as well as the rise of new conversational routines based on right, and raises questions about the cultural underpinnings of these semantic and pragmatic developments. It explores the hypothesis that the “discourse of truth” declined in English over the centuries; that the use of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ as parallel concepts (and opposites) increased; and it notes that the use of right as an adjective increased enormously in relation to the use of true.

Originally, right meant ‘straight’, as in a right line (straight line). Figuratively, perhaps, this right in the sense ‘straight’ was also used in an evaluative sense: ‘good’, with an additional component building on the geometrical image: ‘clearly good’. Spoken of somebody else’s words, right was linked (implicitly or explicitly) with ‘true’. However, in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, right appears to have begun to be used more and more with reference to thinking rather than speaking. The association of right with thinking seems to have spread in parallel with a contrastive use of right and wrong – a trend apparently encouraged by the influence of the Reformation, especially within its Calvinist wing. Another interesting development is that, over the last two centuries or so, the discourse of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ appears to have found a competitor in a discourse of ‘cooperation’ and mutual concessions. Judging by both the frequency and range of its use, the word right flourished in this atmosphere, whereas wrong was increasingly left behind.

This article traces the transition from the Shakespearean response “Right.”, described by the OED as ‘you are right; you speak well’, to the present-day “Right.” of non-committal acknowledgement and it links the developments in semantics and discourse patterns with historical phenomena such as Puritanism, British empiricism, the Enlightenment and the growth of democracy.


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(2015) Ethnopragmatics

Goddard, Cliff, with Zhengdao Ye (2015). Ethnopragmatics. In Farzad Sharifian (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and culture (pp. 66-83). London: Routledge.

Abstract:

Ethnopragmatics pursues emic (or culture-internal) perspectives on speech practices across languages and cultures. As such, it studies the links between language in use, on the one hand, and culture, on the other. The approach is based on the premise that there is an explanatory link between the cultural values/norms and the speech practices specific to a speech community. Ethnopragmatics relies on NSM to decompose cultural norms and notions in terms of simple meanings that are thought to be shared by all languages. Since it relies on linguistic evidence and ethnographic data from insiders to the culture, one of its central objectives is to explore ‘cultural key words’, or words that capture culturally constructed concepts that are pivotal to the ways of thinking, feeling, behaving, and speaking of a speech community.

To illustrate the approach, the chapter includes two ethnographic sketches from Anglo English and Chinese culture, respectively.

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