Ethnopragmatics

Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context

Cliff Goddard

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9783110188745
• eBook ISBN: 9783110911114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The studies in this volume show how speech practices can be understood from a culture-internal perspective, in terms of values, norms and beliefs of the speech communities concerned. Focusing on examples from many different cultural locations, the contributing authors ask not only: 'What is distinctive about these particular ways of speaking?', but also: 'Why - from their own point of view - do the people concerned speak in these particular ways? What sense does it make to them?'.

The ethnopragmatic approach stands in opposition to the culture-external universalist pragmatics represented by neo-Gricean pragmatics and politeness theory. Using "cultural scripts" and semantic explications - techniques developed over 20 years work in cross-cultural semantics by Anna Wierzbicka and colleagues - the authors examine a wide range of phenomena, including: speech acts, terms of address, phraseological patterns, jocular irony, facial expressions, interactional routines, discourse particles, expressive derivation, and emotionality. The authors and languages are: Anna Wierzbicka (English), Cliff Goddard (Australian English), Jock Wong (Singapore English), Zhengdao Ye (Chinese), Catherine Travis (Colombian Spanish), Rie Hasada (Japanese) and Felix Ameka (Ewe). Taken together, these studies demonstrate both the profound "cultural shaping" of speech practices, and the power and subtlety of new methods and techniques of a semantically grounded ethnopragmatics.

The book will appeal not only to linguists and anthropologists, but to all scholars and students with an interest in language, communication and culture.

Table of contents

• List of contributors
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Ethnopragmatics: a new paradigm
• 2. Anglo scripts against “putting pressure” on other people and their linguistic manifestations
• 3. “Lift your game Martina!”: deadpan jocular irony and the ethnopragmatics of Australian English
• 4. Social hierarchy in the “speech culture” of Singapore
• 5. Why the “inscrutable” Chinese face? Emotionality and facial expression in Chinese
• 6. Cultural scripts: glimpses into the Japanese emotion world
• 7. The communicative realisation of confianza and calor humano in Colombian Spanish
• 8. “When I die, don’t cry”: the ethnopragmatics of “gratitude” in West African languages
• Author index
• General index