This section describes the two main methodological tools of ethnopragmatics, namely: semantic explications and cultural scripts. It also introduces the notion of cultural key words.
4.1 Semantic explications for lexical–semantic analysis
A semantic explication is a reductive paraphrase of the meaning of a word, phrase, or lexico- grammatical construction. That is, it is an attempt to say in other, simpler words (the metalanguage Table 5.2 Fifty Anglo English cultural keywords (Wierzbicka 2014)
behaviour, business, challenge, commitment, common sense, communication, competition, control, culture, deadline, depression, efficiency, emotion, empirical, enjoy, entitled, evidence, experience, facts, fair, freedom, friend, frustration, fulfilment, fun, happy, humour, information, kindness, mind, opportunity, options, personal, privacy, rational, reality, reasonable, relationship, rights, rude, rule, science, security, self, sense, sex, story, suggestion, tolerance, work.
of semantic primes and molecules) what a speaker is saying when he or she utters the expression being explicated.
Explications range in length from a few lines of semantic text to a dozen lines or more. A good explication satisfies three conditions. The first is substitutability in a broad sense: explica- tions have to make intuitive sense to native speakers when substituted into their contexts of use, and to generate the appropriate entailments and implications. The second condition is well formedness: they have to be framed entirely in semantic primes or molecules, and conform to the syntax of the natural semantic metalanguage. The third, more difficult to evaluate, concerns coherence and logical structure; minimally, an explication has to make sense as a whole, with appropriate chains of anaphora, co-reference, causal links, etc. Often, the textual structure of explications turns out to include parallelism and counterpoint.
Most words are culture specific and culture related to some extent (Goddard, in press), but experience has shown that certain areas of the lexicon are particularly important for ethno- pragmatics. By definition, this applies to cultural key words. This concept is explained below, followed by some other priority targets for lexical–semantics analysis.
(1) Cultural key words. This term refers to culture-rich and translation-resistant words that occupy focal points in cultural ways of thinking, acting, feeling, and speaking. Typical examples include words for values and ideals, social categories, emotions, sociality concepts, personhood constructs, and ethnophilosophical concepts. Key words and concepts do not, of course, operate in isolation. One usuallyfinds a cluster of related key words, each with its own range of derivatives, fixed phrases and common collocations. (2) Proverbs and common sayings. These often tap into the same layer of ‘cultural common sense’ as key words. (3) Words for social and biosocial categories involved in social cognition in the culture concerned, e.g.‘friend’, kinship terms. (4) Words for speech acts and genres. These represent a cultural catalogue of interaction types. (5) Terms of address, such as various pronouns, titles, quasi-kin terms, designations by profession or role, terms of endearment or familiarity, etc. (6) Interactional routines; such as greetings and partings, appropriate things to say (if anything) when good things happen, when bad things happen, when someone does something good for one, etc. (7) Derivational morphology expressive of social meanings; such as diminutives for expressing interpersonal ‘warmth’, honorifics for expressing ‘respect’, etc. (8) Specialized lexicogrammatical constructions, which may be fine-tuned to express meanings connected with, for example, emotional spontaneity, social reciprocity, or the dynamics of interpersonal causation. (9) Discourse particles and interjections; devices to express a speaker’s feelings, intentions, and attitudes in the act of speaking or to express reactions to one’s interlocutors.
4.2 Cultural scripts for capturing cultural norms, attitudes, and beliefs
Although they are written in the metalanguage of semantic primes, cultural scripts are not paraphrases of word meanings: they are‘representations of cultural norms which are widely held in a given society and are reflected in the language’ (Wierzbicka, 2007: 56; see alsoChapter 23
this volume). Cultural scripts exist at different levels of generality and may relate to different aspects of speaking, thinking, feeling, and acting. Some scripts capture cultural beliefs that are relevant to ways of speaking (Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2004; Goddard 2009).
High-level scripts are typically hinged around evaluational components such as ‘it is good if… ’ and ‘it is bad if … ’, or variants such as ‘it can be good if … .’ and ‘it can be bad if … ’. Another kind of framing component concerns people’s perceptions of what they can and can’t do, e.g.‘I can/can’t say (think, do, etc.) … ’. Belief scripts often begin with the framing com- ponent:‘it is like this: … ’. High-level scripts, sometimes termed ‘master scripts’, are analogous
to what are known in the ethnography of communication tradition as norms of interpretation. They explain‘why’. They often share components with cultural key words.
Lower-level scripts are more specific. They are often introduced by ‘when’-components and ‘if’-components, representing relevant aspects of social context. Scripts of this kind can be quite procedural. They are analogous to norms of interaction. They may be connected with broad communicative styles, with patterns of‘turn taking’ and other conversational management strategies (e.g. preferences for non-interruption, for overlap, for incomplete or elliptical expressions), with specific speech practices (e.g. joking, teasing, self-promotion), with rhetorical modes of expression (e.g. active metaphorizing, hyperbole, sarcasm), with conversational routines and formulas, or go right down to matters of individual word usage.
Importantly, cultural scripts are not about actual behaviours but about participants’ shared understandings and expectations, i.e. about social cognition (cf. Goddard 2013). Obviously, not everyone in a given speech community necessarily agrees with or conforms to such shared understandings. Indeed, speakers are not necessarily consciously aware of them in normal interaction. Nevertheless, the claim is that the content which can be captured cultural scripts forms a kind of interpretive backdrop to everyday interaction.
The number of scripts at play in any culture is not known, but it is safe to say that the number must be large. Cultural scripts can be interconnected in various ways, sometimes cross- cutting, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes competing, with each other. Individual scripts are not necessarily unique to a particular language; see Ameka and Breeveld (2004) and Ameka (2009) on areal cultural scripts in West Africa.