A great deal remains to be done in ethnopragmatics: documenting and exploring more and more languages, experimenting with new formats of cultural scripts and explications, discovering more about the intertextuality between cultural scripts, accommodating situational and interpersonal factors in greater detail.
There are practical applications for ethnopragmatics too. Because cultural scripts and expli- cations are expressed in non-technical ordinary language, they have the potential to be readily applied to real-world needs in many situations; for example, to assist with cultural induction of immigrants and refugees, to develop the intercultural competence component of language courses, to assist governmental and international agencies to communicate more effectively with cultural minorities, to help bridge cultural gaps in international negotiations. To translate this potential into effective applications, however, requires collaboration with experts and practi- tioners across many fields (Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2007). Ethnopragmatics also has an important contribution to make at this time of language endangerment, by providing techniques for capturing indigenous concepts and describing indigenous speech practices in an authentic fashion, free from Anglocentrism (Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2013; Nicholls, 2013; Priestley, 2013; Wierzbicka, 2013).
In time, one may hope, continuing progress in ethnopragmatics will help overturn the hegemony of Anglo concepts in pragmatics and in language-and-culture studies generally.
Related topics
cultural linguistics; ethnosyntax; ethnosemantics; language and cultural scripts; language and culture in cognitive anthropology
Further reading
Goddard, Cliff (ed.) (2013) ‘Semantics and/in Social Cognition’, special issue, Australian Journal of Linguistics 33(3). (These seven studies show how with NSM semantic explications and cultural scripts we can circumvent Anglocentrism and tap into the social cognition of people from diverse cultures: Chinese, Russian, Danish, Koromu, Kayardild, Pitjantjatjara, Roper Kriol.)
Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (2014) Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics across Domains, Languages and Cultures, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Presents systematic empirically based studies of key words from different lexical domains – concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, social – in a range of languages and cultures: English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri, and Malay.)
Notes
1 Ironically‘face’ started its career as a loan translation from Chinese (see expressions such as to lose face, and to save face), but in Politeness Theory the concept of‘negative face’ has morphed into a classically Anglo meme,‘the desire to be free from imposition’ (see Matsumoto, 1988).
2 Obšcˇenie (often misleadingly rendered, in this context, as ‘dialogue’) was crucial to Bakhtin’s influential theory of what it is to be human. The word is directly related to the Russian noun obšcˇestvo ‘society’.
3 The explication shows that hé is different from Japanese wa (‘unity’), a cognate written using the same character (Wierzbicka, 1997). Unlike Japanese wa, hé does not require group members to do the same things, or to think or feel the same way; rather, it is about maintaining good relations in the common interest.
4 This applies particularly to ‘horizontal’ relations. In the vertical order, the paradigm for children’s behaviour is built on the notion of xiào (‘filial duty’), known as ‘filial piety’ among China specialists. This uniquely Confucian concept has no counterpart in English. Though one of the preeminent Chinese values, it cannot be dealt with here (see Goddard, in press).
5 Note that shu- and qı-n are terms that specifically describe relational distance.
6 The word personal evokes modern Anglo ideas about the rights of the individual. The same applies even to the English person, unlike comparable words such as German Mensch or Russian cˇelovek, which simply refer to a single human being.
7 Expressions of opinions frequently include evaluative or modal words, e.g. good, best, worst, should, possible, impossible. The content of an opinion as such cannot be checked or verified, but because it supposedly rests on some knowledge base, the factual basis behind an opinion can be contested.
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