Wierzbicka, A: Cross-Cultural Pragmatics -

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Résumé :
This book, which can be seen as both a research monograph and a text book, challenges the approaches to human interaction based on supposedly universal maxims of conversation and principles of politeness, which fly in the face of reality as experienced by millions of people - refugees, immigrants, crosscultural families, and so on. By contrast to such approaches, which can be of no use in crosscultural communication and education, this book is both theoretical and practical: it shows that in different societies, norms of human interaction are different and reflect different cultural attitudes and values; and it offers a framework within which different cultural norms and different ways of speaking can be effectively explored, explained, and taught. The book discusses data from a wide range of languages, including English, Italian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Walmatjari (an Australian Aboriginal language), and it shows that the meanings expressed in human interaction and the different cultural scripts prevailing in different speech communities can be described and compared in a way that is clear, simple, rigorous, and free of ethnocentric bias by using a natural semantic metalanguage, based on empirically established universal human concepts. As the book shows, this metalanguage can be used as a basis for teaching successful cross-cultural communication and education, including the teaching of languages in a cultural context.

Sommaire:
Chapter 1 Introduction: semantics and pragmatics 1. Language as a tool of human interaction2. Different cultures and different modes of interaction3. Pragmatics - the study of human interaction4. The natural semantic metalanguage5. The need for a universal perspective on meaning6. The uniqueness of every linguistic system7. The problem of polysemy8. Semantic equivalence vs. pragmatic equivalence9. Universal grammatical patterns10. Semantics vs. pragmatics: different approaches11. Description of contents Chapter 2 Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts 1. Preliminary examples and discussion2. Interpretative hypothesis3. Case studies4. Cultural values reflected in speech acts5. Theoretical implications6. Practical implications Chapter 3 Cross-cultural pragmatics and different cultural values 1. 'Self-Assertion'2. 'Directness'3. Further illustrations: same labels, different values4. Different attitudes to emotions5. Conclusion Chapter 4 Describing conversational routines 1. Conversational analysis: linguistic or non-linguistic pragmatics?2. 'Compliment response' routines3. 'Compliment responses' in different cultures Chapter 5 Speech acts and speech genres across languages and cultures 1. A framework for analysing a culture's 'forms of talk'2. Some Australian speech-act verbs3. Some examples of complex speech genres4. Conclusion Chapter 6 The semantics of illocutionary forces 1. Are illocutionary forces indeterminate?2. More whimperative constructions3. Additional remarks on the explication of illocutionary forces4. Selected conversational strategies5. Tag questions6. Personal abuse or praise: You X!7. Illocutionary forces of grammatical and other categories8. Comparing illocutionary forces across languages9. Conclusion Chapter 7 Italian reduplications: its meaning and its cultural significance 1. Italian reduplication: preliminary discussion2. Discourse and illocutionary grammar3. The illocutionary force of clausal repetition4. The illocutionary force of Italian reduplication5. Clausal repetition as a means of 'intensification'6. The absolute superlative in Italian and in English7. Illocutionary grammar and cultural style8. Conclusion Chapter 8 Interjections across cultures 1. Preliminary discussion2. Volitive interjections3. Emotive interjections4. Cognitive interjections5. Conclusion Chapter 9 Particles and illocutionary meanings 1. English quantitative particles2. English temporal particles3. Polish temporal particles4. Polish quantitative particles5. Conclusion Chapter 10 Boys will be boys: even 'truisms' are culture-specific 1. The meaning of tautologies2. English nominal tautologies: semantic representations3. Some comparisons from Chinese and Japanese4. Verbal tautologies5. Is there a semantic invariant?6. The deceptive form of English tautological constructions7. The culture-specific content of tautological patterns8. Conclusion Chapter 11 Conclusion: semantics as a key to cross-cultural pragmatics