ETHNOPRAGMATICS

Cliff Goddard, with Zhengdao Ye

1 Introduction

The term‘ethnopragmatics’designates an approach to language in use that sees culture as playing a central explanatory role, and at the same time opens the way for links to be drawn between language and other cultural phenomena. This approach involves a threefold alignment of objectives, methodological tools, and evidence base (Goddard, 2006).

– The objective of ethnopragmatics is to articulate culture-internal perspectives on the ‘how and why’of speech practices in the diverse languages of the world. It is the quest to describe and explain people’s ways of speaking in terms which make sense to the people con- cerned, i.e., in terms of indigenous values, beliefs and attitudes, social categories, emotions, and so on.

– Its methodological tools are based on decomposing cultural notions and capturing cultural norms in terms of simple meanings that appear to be shared between all languages. The methodology rests on a decades-long programme of semantic research by linguists in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) programme (see Chapter 23 this volume); see Goddard (2011), Wierzbicka (1996a). Using the NSM metalanguage wards off implicit Anglocentrism and standardizes the terms of description.

– Ethnopragmatics pays particular attention tolinguistic evidence, e.g. usage patterns discoverable using corpus techniques, interactional routines, language-specific lexicogrammatical con- structions, and the like. Linguistic usage functions as an index of routine ways of thinking, and, appropriately analysed, allows us to stay close to an insider perspective. Ethnopragmatics also takes heed of the ‘soft data’of anecdotal accounts, life writing, etc. of cultural insiders themselves.

Ethnopragmatics is a reconceptualization of the approach to‘cross-cultural pragmatics’inaugu- rated by Anna Wierzbicka’s (2003[1991]) ground-breaking volume of this name. Ethnopragmatics is a more appropriate designation because it highlights the claim that there is an explanatory link between indigenous values and social models, on the one hand, and indigenous speech practices, on the other.

A key goal of ethnopragmatics is to access‘insider perspectives’of the participants. This means working through and with local categories and local ways of speaking–not in terms of sophisticated

academic English and technical concepts, but in terms that are recognizable and accessible to the people concerned. This might sound paradoxical. How can one model the perspectives of cultural insiders and at the same time make oneself understood by cultural outsiders? This objective can (and can only) be achieved by framing the description in words and phrases whose meanings are shared between the languages concerned, such as universal semantic primes and molecules. Describing cultural concepts and cultural norms in this way brings other important benefits as well: it eliminates the danger of definitional circularity and allows for a very fine-grained resolution of meaning.

Table 5.1 lists the inventory of sixty-five semantic primes, using English exponents. Com- parable tables have been drawn up for over thirty languages. NSM also makes use of a small set of non-primitive lexical meanings (termed ‘semantic molecules’) that function as building blocks, alongside semantic primes, in explications for many concepts. Some semantic molecules, such as‘man’,‘woman’,‘child’,‘be born’,‘mother’,‘father’,‘hands’,‘mouth’,‘long’, and‘sharp’ appear to be universal or near universal, once language-specific polysemic extensions are taken into account. To the extent that the ethnopragmatic researcher can formulate analyses in terms of this small‘intersection of all languages’, the resulting analyses will be equally well expressible Table 5.1 Semantic primes (English exponents)

I~ME, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING~THING, PEOPLE, BODY

Substantives

KIND, PARTS Relational substantives

THIS, THE SAME, OTHER~ELSE Determiners

ONE, TWO, MUCH~MANY, LITTLE~FEW, SOME, ALL

Quantifiers

GOOD, BAD Evaluators

BIG, SMALL Descriptors

THINK, KNOW, WANT, DON’T WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR

Mental predicates

SAY, WORDS, TRUE Speech

DO, HAPPEN, MOVE, TOUCH Actions, events, movement, contact

BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE IS, BE (SOMEONE/

SOMETHING), BE (SOMEONES’)

Location, existence, specification, possession

LIVE, DIE Life and death

WHEN~TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME, MOMENT

Time

WHERE~PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR, SIDE, INSIDE

Space

NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF Logical concepts

VERY, MORE Augmentor, intensifier

LIKE Similarity

Note: Primes exist as the meanings of lexical units (not at the level of lexemes); exponents of primes may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes. They can be formally, i.e., morphologically, complex, and can have combinatorial variants or allolexes (indicated with ~). Each prime has well-specified syntactic (combinatorial) properties.

Ethnopragmatics

in any language. Even when the English version of the metalanguage is used, the analysis is not tied to English, lexically or conceptually.

2 Historical perspectives

Before the rise of generative linguistics in the 1960s, the study of languages was integrally connected with the humanistic tradition and with cultural and historical studies. Linguistics (as we see it now) was part of philology and anthropology. Under the influence of Chomsky, however, mainstream linguistics, especially in North America, disavowed its links with culture studies and sought to define itselffirst as a part of cognitive psychology and later as a branch of biology (biolinguistics). Interest in cultural aspects of language survived in anthropological linguistics and in the newerfield of ethnography of communication, but it would be fair to characterize late twentieth-century linguistics as largely culture-blind.

This was the context into which ethnopragmatics emerged, in the late 1980s, in a series of studies by Anna Wierzbicka. These were later brought together and augmented in her landmark volumeCross-Cultural Pragmatics (first published 1991, reissued 2003). Wierzbicka argued, with unprecedented attention to matters of linguistic detail, that the then-prevailing universalist approaches to pragmatics, especially Grice’s account of conversational implicature (Grice, 1975), Brown and Levinson’s (1978) Politeness Theory, and aspects of speech-act theory (Searle, 1975), were both descriptively inadequate and profoundly Anglocentric. She called for a new approach, one that would ground conversational practices in cultural values: ‘interpersonal interaction is governed, to a large extent, by norms which are culture-specific and which reflect cultural values cherished by a particular society’(Wierzbicka, 2003: v). She further insisted that cultural values should be accessed via semantic analysis of actual words in the language of the people concerned.

From the beginning, one of the cultures which Wierzbicka set out to problematize and describe was Anglo culture. Having migrated to Australia in the early 1970s from Poland, she was able to bring to this task the perspective of a bilingual, bicultural observer. In the 1980s, such a perspective was far from the norm. For many years she was almost a lone voice in her attempts to denaturalize Anglo culture and to criticize the leading anglophone writers in prag- matics. Gradually other voices began to make themselves heard, with perspectives from Korea, Japan, and other East Asian countries, e.g. Ide (1989), Matsumoto (1989), Sohn (1983), and from adjacent fields such as anthropology and cultural psychology. Nonetheless, anglophone pragmatics, especially in the Gricean line of descent, continued to be remarkably culture-blind.

The 32-chapterHandbook of Pragmatics(Horn and Ward, 2006) did not include so much as an index entry for‘culture’.

A major advance in the development of ethnopragmatics occurred in the mid 1990s, when Wierzbicka articulated what became known as the theory of cultural scripts (Wierzbicka, 1994, 1996b; Goddard and Wierzbicka, 1997). These papers drew on contrastive examples from English, Japanese, Polish, Malay, and Russian. Others followed on a variety of other languages, by a growing community of researchers. The year 2004 saw the publication of the edited collection Cultural Scripts(Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2004), followed byEthnopragmatics(Goddard, 2006), andSemantics in/and Social Cognition(Goddard, 2013).

With the decline of Chomskyan hegemony, culture and cultural issues are now back on the agenda of many linguists. Notable trends include cultural discourse analysis (Carbaugh, 2005), bilingualism studies (Pavlenko, 2006; Kecskes and Albertazzi, 2007), intercultural and contrastive pragmatics (e.g. Pütz and Neff-van Aertselaer, 2008), interactional pragmatics (Haugh and Culpeper, 2014), and the more ‘culture-aware’forms of cognitive linguistics (e.g. Sharifian and

Palmer, 2007; Sharifian, 2011). To this day, however, many heavyweight scholars in linguistics still have a blind spot about Anglocentrism.

3 Critical issues

In this section, I identify three critical issues that pertain not only to ethnopragmatics but to studies of language and culture broadly. Thefirstand most important is the continuing need to combat Anglocentrism in its various modes (Wierzbicka, 2014); and perhaps most urgently, the

‘crypto-Anglocentrism’that is inherent when supposedly universal models are constructed from English-specific materials. It is important to be clear that this problem is not a matter of the conscious intentions of the researchers concerned (no one sets out deliberately to construct an Anglocentric model). It is about researchers taking for granted the interpretive resources of the English language (concepts such as‘imposition’,‘politeness’,‘tact’,‘directness’,‘face’,‘relevance’,

‘interaction’) and about how these assumed concepts influence the content of the models. One of the most exciting things about Brown and Levinson (1978), for example, was its cross-linguistic ambitiousness, and in particular, its use of Tamil as an extended counterpoint to English. And yet, by basing the dimensions of the model on concepts such as ‘imposition’and on individualistic

‘face needs’,¹it presupposed an Anglo code of communication. Defenders of Politeness Theory may dismiss the idea that everyday English concepts like politeness and imposition played any significant role in shaping the theory, but it is hard to believe that the outcome would have been the same if the starting point had been Japanesewakimae‘discernment’(Ide, 1989) or Chinesehé

‘harmony, non-conflict’ (see section 5.1). More recently, Enfield and Levinson (2006: 9;

emphasis added) have attempted to define a newfield as follows:‘a multidisciplinary approach to human interaction. The project asserts the centrality of social interaction in the organization of human societies’. Harmless enough, one might think, but on taking a cross-cultural perspective it becomes clear that the English‘interactionconcept’evokes free-standing individuals doing things with one another but remaining separate, much like the ideal of the ‘free market’of rational economic actors. From a Russian point of view, one might consider founding a theory of human society in terms of the key Russian conceptobšcˇenie(roughly,‘communion of selves’). This would invoke very different cultural assumptions.²

It might be objected that Anglocentrism can be avoided by giving an English folk term a technical definition, but in practice this seldom works out. Sperber and Wilson, for example, employed the English word relevance to reconceptualize Grice (1975) but their attempts to clarify the meaning of‘relevance’have only led to definitions such as:‘an input is relevant to an individual when its processing in the context of available assumptions leads to a positive cognitive effect. A positive cognitive effect is a worthwhile difference to the individual’s representation of the world–a true conclusion, for example’(Sperber and Wilson, 2004). This is inadequate for two reasons. First, it is so vague and abstract that both the producers and consumers of Relevance Theory are, in my opinion, still trading on their intuitive access to the meaning of the English word relevance. Second, key words in the definition, such as‘cognitive’, ‘representation’, and

‘processing’, remain locked into Anglo English conceptual models.

A second critical issue is the need to denaturalize Anglo English concepts and pragmatic norms. We review aspects of Anglo ethnopragmatics insection 5.1. For the moment, consider the list offifty Anglo English cultural key words presented inTable 5.2. According to Wierzbicka (forthcoming), none of these words has exact equivalents even in most other European languages, let alone in most other languages of the world. The listing was not devised with a view to ethnopragmatics, but it includes many terms that are directly relevant to Anglo ways of speaking, including social categories such asfriend, social descriptors such asreasonable andrude,

Ethnopragmatics

value-related terms such as freedom, rights, entitled, personal, and privacy, speech-act and genre words such as suggestion, story, and humour. Abstract Anglo key words such as communication, information, andrationalhavefigured prominently in anglophone pragmatic theorizing.

To see how Anglo cultural key words can find their way into models of communicative behaviour in general, consider the following superbly Anglo English quotation from Spencer- Oatey’s (2008) introduction to intercultural pragmatics (italics highlight words that appear in Table 5.2).

[O]rders and requests can easily threaten rapport, because they can affect our autonomy, freedomof choice andfreedomfromimposition, and thus can threaten oursenseof equity rights(ourentitlementto considerate treatment). They need to be worded, therefore, in such a way that we feel that ourrightstofairtreatment have been adequately addressed.

(19; italics added) Just to be clear, I am not disputing the relevance of the italicized words/concepts to Anglo ethnopragmatics. My objection is to extending them to human beings generally.

Athirdcritical issue is the need to break down the compartmentalization of pragmatics, and language-and-culture studies generally. Within linguistics, there is a need to integrate pragmatics with lexical and grammatical semantics. Despite ongoing talk about the semantics–pragmatics interface, and the like, few practitioners in eitherfield are interested in showing how meaning is constructed by real people in real communication, subjectively in a seamless fashion. The NSM approach uses a common metalanguage for semantics and for pragmatics, thereby opening the way for an easier integration of meaning from both sources, but even the NSM research com- munity has yet to produce well-worked accounts of meaning construction in real time, in real interactions. Equally, there is a need to integrate linguistic pragmatics with other scholarly dis- courses and traditions. Considering that pragmatics is supposed to be about meaning in context, it is paradoxical that most approaches to pragmatics exist in specialized academic niches and have minimal engagement with adjacent fields and disciplines such as ethnolinguistics, cultural anthropology, hermeneutics, literary studies, translation studies, philosophy, cognitive, social, and cultural psychology.

4 Main methodological tools: semantic explications, cultural scripts 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. Thefirst 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

Ethnopragmatics

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.

5 Two ethnopragmatic sketches: Anglo English and Chinese

This section illustrates current research by providing ethnopragmatic sketches of two cultures, based on recent work. Each sketch is highly selective, combining summary accounts of cultural key words with outlines of some cultural scripts associated with distinctive ways of speaking.

Some other language varieties and cultures whose ethnopragmatics have been described include the following (the references are non-exhaustive): Ewe (Ameka and Breeveld, 2004; Ameka, 2009); French (Peeters, 2000, 2013), Danish (Levisen, 2012), Spanish (Travis, 2006), Malay (Goddard, 2000, 2004), Russian (Gladkova, 2010, 2013; Wierzbicka, 2007, 2012;Chapter 23 this volume), Singapore English (Wong, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2014), and Australian English (Wierzbicka, 1997:ch. 2, 2002; Goddard 2006, 2009, 2012).

5.1 An ethnopragmatic sketch of Chinese

In this sketch we pursue three themes: the core cultural value ofhé‘harmony, non-conflict’, the importance ofhánya˘ng‘self restraint’in emotional matters, and the social dichotomies ofshe-ngrénvs.

shúrén(‘stranger’vs.‘familiar person/old acquaintance’) andwàirénvs.zìj˘rénı (‘insider’vs.‘outsider’).

A core value and presiding concern in Chinese interpersonal relations is the Confucian idealhé

‘harmony, non-conflict’(Gao, Ting-Toomey, and Gudykunst 1996). The common sayingHé wéi guì ‘Hé is of utmost importance’has its origin in the Analects. Importantly,hé does not simply entail uniformity; on the contrary, the concept anticipates the existence of profound individual differences, cf. the set phraseHé ér bù tóng‘Hébut not the same’, i.e.‘in harmony without being the same’. Different individual needs and interests always have the potential to lead to conflict.

Conflict is destructive for everyone, whereas harmonious relations are in everyone’s common interest. The overwhelming emphasis in Chinese social and interpersonal relations is therefore notto make one’s needs and wants explicit in any situation where conflict could arise.