Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction (Trends in Linguistics : Studies and Monographs 53) - Hardcover

Wierzbicka, Anna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3110125382 ISBN 13: 9783110125382

Publisher: Mouton De Gruyter, 1991

Synopsis

This book challenges the approaches to human interaction based on supposedly universal 'maxims of conversation' and 'principles of politeness,' which fly in the face of reality as experienced by millions of people crossing language boundaries (refugees, immigrants, etc.) and which cannot help in the practical tasks of cross-cultural communication and education. In contrast to such approaches, 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 and 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 and it shows that the meanings expressed in human interaction and the different 'cultural scripts' prevailing in different speech communities can be clearly and intelligibly described and compared by using a 'natural semantic metalanguage,' based on empirically established universal human concepts. As the book shows, this metalanguage can be used as a basis for teaching successful cross-cultural communication, including the teaching of languages in a cultural context.

About this title

About the Author:

Anna Wierzbicka is Professor at Australian National University, Canberra.

Review:

"The book can be regarded as a recapitulation of results obtained in all former scholarly projects carried by its author. [It] is one if the best manuals of widely understood pragmatics and ethnolinguistics of human speech, the more so as the traditoinal grammars and handbooks of linguistics usually leave the ethnography of speech in the background of linguistics analyses."Tomasz Wicherkiewicz in: Linguistics and Oriental Studies from Poznan

"The book can be regarded as a recapitulation of results obtained in all former scholarly projects carried by its author. [It] is one if the best manuals of widely understood pragmatics and ethnolinguistics of human speech, the more so as the traditoinal grammars and handbooks of linguistics usually leave the ethnography of speech in the background of linguistics analyses."
Tomasz Wicherkiewicz in: Linguistics and Oriental Studies from Poznan

About this edition

• Publisher: Mouton De Gruyter
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 3110125382
• ISBN 13: 9783110125382
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 502