Despite the fact that ethnosyntax was established as a new direction of research in linguistics more than thirty years ago, it remains an area that has received limited attention. While detailed studies of grammatical phenomena are common, only few studies attempt to establish connections between grammar and culture. This calls for the following directions in future research.
Broader investigations of language and culture are required. Ethnosyntax studies are closely linked with and will benefit from other investigations of lexicon and grammar that aim to establish connections between language and cultural values.
Language-specific studies of grammatical structures at different levels in relation to culture are needed.
Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies of grammatical structures will shed further light on the issues of cultural specificity.
Methodological aspects of ethnosyntax studies need to be developed and universal metalanguage needs to be employed in such studies to avoid ethnocentrism.
Studies in ethnosyntax in a historical perspective can contribute to the research on the issues of grammatical variation and change in relation to cultural values.
The results of ethnosyntax studies have enormous potential for language pedagogy and cross-cultural training as they can make language-specific structures more clear and accessible to language and culture learners.
Related topics
the linguistic relativity hypothesis revisited; ethnosemantics; ethnopragmatics; language, culture, and politeness; cultural semiotics; language and cultural scripts
Further reading
Enfield, N. J. (ed.) (2002) Ethnosyntax: Explorations in Grammar and Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Includes several studies on ethnosyntax on a broad variety of languages employing diverse methodologies as well as a good theoretical explanation of the approach.)
Goddard, C. (ed.) (2006) Ethnopragmatics: Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. (A collection of studies that represent ethnosyntax in a broad sense.)
NSM homepage, www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-languages-linguistics/research/natural- semantic-metalanguage-homepage (Online resource on the NSM approach with a basic explanation of it, an exhaustive list of publications, and several downloadable papers.)
Whorf, B. (1956) Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. J. Carroll, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (A must-read classics on the relationship between language and thought.) Wierzbicka, A. (1988) The Semantics of Grammar, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (A pioneering study in
ethnosyntax with illustrations from different languages.)
Note
1 In more recent NSM scripts, scripts of this kind are usually formulated as‘many people think like this’ (seeChapters 5and23this volume).
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