English : Meaning and Culture - DINUS

[Pages:363]English: Meaning and Culture

ANNA WIERZBICKA

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

English

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English

Meaning and Culture

Anna Wierzbicka

1

2006

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wierzbicka, Anna. English : meaning and culture/Anna Wierzbicka. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 978-0-19-517474-8; 978-0-19-517475-5 (pbk.) ISBN 0-19-517474-7; 0-19-517475-5 (pbk.) 1. English language--Semantics. 2. Great Britain--Civilization. 3. English-speaking countries--Civilization. 4. English language--Foreign countries. 5. Language and languages--Philosophy. I. Title. PE1585.W53 2006 420.1'43--dc22 2005047789

Cover Art: Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews. Courtesy of National Art Gallery, London. Bought with contributions from the Pilgrim Trust, the National Art Collections Fund, Associated Television Ltd, and Mr and Mrs W.W. Spooner, 1960.

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Printed in the United States of America on Acid-free paper

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude, and acknowledge my debt, to Cliff Goddard, who read successive drafts of all the chapters and provided invaluable feedback. Many semantic analyses presented in the book incorporate his ideas. His help was indispensable.

The Australian Research Council funded the research assistance without which I would not have been able to complete this project. I am very grateful both to the ARC and to several research assistants, who provided (at different times) not only invaluable practical and technical help, but also extremely helpful ideas, comments, and suggestions. They were: Anna Brotherson, Laura Daniliuc, Anna Gladkova, Brigid Maher, Elisabeth Mayer, Donna Toulmin, Jock Wong, and Kyung Joo Yoon. In the last phase of the work on the project, I also had the benefit of wide-ranging research support and many discussions with my research associate, Ian Langford. Anna Gladkova undertook the onerous task of preparing the index.

I had the opportunity to discuss many of the analyses presented in this book at my Seminar on Semantics at the Australian National University. I want to thank the participants for their ideas and also for their enthusiasm, which was for me a great source of encouragement and joy.

Two persons particularly closely involved in the thinking behind this project were my daughters, Mary Besemeres and Clare Besemeres, who over the years spent hundreds of hours discussing with me, and arguing about, the meaning of quintessentially English words like right and wrong, reasonable and unreasonable, or fair and unfair (without equivalents in my native Polish) and of Anglo values and assumptions associated with them. My husband John read the whole manuscript and suggested innumerable rephrasings aimed at making my English prose sound a little more `Anglo' (`reasonable' and `dispassionate') than it otherwise might have done.

For helpful discussions on particular topics, I would like to thank James Franklin, James Grieve, Douglas Porpora, Arie Verhagen, and Zhengdao Ye.

I am particularly indebted to my editor at Oxford University Press, Peter Ohlin, whose suggestions and advice on this, as on earlier projects, have been invaluable.

vi Acknowledgments

Two chapters of the book (2 and 6) are partially based on papers published earlier. They are "Right and wrong: From philosophy to everyday discourse" (Discourse Studies 4(2): 225?252) and "English causative constructions in an ethnosyntactic perspective: Focusing on LET" (In Nick Enfield, ed., Ethnosyntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 162?203).

Contents

Part I. Meaning, History and Culture

1. English as a Cultural Universe

3

1.1. English--the most widely used language in the world

3

1.2. English and Englishes

5

1.3. An illustration: Words, scripts, and human lives

7

1.4. "Anglo English" as a historical formation

9

1.5. The tendency to mistake "Anglo English" for the human norm

11

1.6. The cultural underpinnings of (Anglo) English

13

1.7. A framework for studying and describing meaning

16

2. Anglo Cultural Scripts Seen through

Middle Eastern Eyes

20

2.1. Linguistics and intercultural cCommunication

20

2.2. The theory of cultural scripts

22

2.3. The Anglo ideal of "accuracy" and the practice

of "understatement"

25

2.4. "To the best of my knowledge . . ."

35

2.5. Anglo respect for "facts"

41

2.6. "Cool reason": to think vs. to feel

46

2.7. To compel or not to compel? The value of autonomy

50

2.8. Conclusion

56

Part II. English Words: From Philosophy to Everyday Discourse

3. The Story of RIGHT and WRONG and Its Cultural Implications

61

3.1. Introduction

61

3.2. "Right" and "wrong": A basis for ethics?

64

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