Tag: (S) social interaction

(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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(2004) Ewe, Fulfulde – Areal cultural scripts

Ameka, Felix K., & Breedveld, Anneke (2004). Areal cultural scripts for social interaction in West African communities. Intercultural Pragmatics, 1(2), 167-187. DOI: 10.1515/iprg.2004.1.2.167

Taboos reflect the values and the ways of thinking of a society. They are recognized as part of the communicative competence of its speakers and are learned in socialization. Some salient taboos are likely to be named in the language of the relevant society, others may not have a name. Interactional taboos can be specific to a cultural linguistic group or they may be shared across different communities that belong to a speech area, i.e. an area in which contiguous cultural linguistic groups share similar communicative practices.

The authors claim that tacit knowledge about taboos and other interactive norms can be captured using the cultural scripts methodology. The term areal cultural script is introduced to refer to scripts that pertain to an entire speech area. The article describes a number of unnamed norms of communicative conduct that are widespread in West Africa, such as the taboos on the use of the left hand in social interaction and on the use of personal names in adult address, and the widespread preference for the use of intermediaries for serious communication. It also examines a named avoidance (yaage) behaviour specific to the Fulbe, a nomadic cattle-herding group spread from West Africa across the Sahel as far as Sudan.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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