English: Meaning and Culture.

English: Meaning and Culture. English: Meaning and Culture. By Anna Wierzbicka Anna Wierzbicka (b. 1938) was born in Poland and is a linguist at the Australian National University.She is primarily known for her work in semantics, pragmatics, and cross-cultural linguistics and especially for the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. . Oxford and NewYork New York, state, United StatesNew York,Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of : Oxford University Press. 2006. ix + 352 pp. 17.99 [poundssterling]. ISBN ISBNabbr.International Standard Book NumberISBNInternational Standard Book NumberISBNn abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m: 978-0-19-517475-5. Anna Wierzbicka's new book is a thoughtful, thought-provoking,and often illuminating work on the distinctive cultural patterning ofmeaning and grammar within English. If the central ideas of a culturalscript within language have previously been productively explored forlanguages such as Japanese, this is a territory which, as Wierzbickaobserves, has often been marginalized in modern linguistic analysis of'Anglo' English. Yet, as she firmly states, 'English isnot a cultural tabula rasa'; to use English, as she makes clear, istherefore also to engage with a specific and distinctive culturalbaggage The term cultural baggage refers to the tendency for one's culture to pervade thinking, speech, and behavior without one being aware of this pervasion. Cultural baggage becomes a factor when a person from one culture encounters a person from another, and unconscious that exists at the heart of discourse. To examine the institution and deployment of what appear asquintessentially 'English' assumptions about fair play, reason(and reasonableness), precision, or the equally 'English'predilection for the use of hedges, for understatement, or for'whimperatives' rather than direct commands, might, of course,seem to take us 'simply' into the realms of folklinguisticsand a form of popular social-cultural stereotyping on national lines.Wierzbicka rightly stresses the value of 'a coherent theoreticalframework' and 'hard linguistic evidence'; in thiscontext, her previous work on natural semantic metalanguage The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is an approach to semantic analysis based on reductive paraphrase (that is, breaking concepts/words down into combinations of simpler concepts/words, see Oligosynthetic language) using a small collection of semantic primes. (NSM (Network and System Management) Running and controlling the networks and computer systems in an enterprise. See network management. )provides the core principles of the former and the evidential ev��i��den��tial?adj. LawOf, providing, or constituting evidence: evidential material.ev basis forthe latter. By these means, she argues, it is possible to document notonly a shared set of universal conceptual primes that operate within andbetween all languages, but also the cultural scripts that are specificto, and highly characteristic of, particular languages and theirspeakers. Such ideas of a form of 'cultural landscape' areintriguing, and are often compellingly argued. 'Fairness' and'fair play', for instance, can, as Wierzbicka notes, operateso centrally within an Anglo world view that 'for native speakersof English [...] (including many scholars), it is simply unimaginablethat "fairness" should not be a universal human concern'.Yet, in reality, such notions, and their critical absence from thewell-documented set of universal conceptual primes, strikingly confirmthe ways in which the constituent features of a native language cancombine to shape culturally-specific ways of thinking about the world.'Fairness', in this sense, becomes a salient and distinctiveelement of a cultural script of Anglo English which may baffle thosewhose language, and culture, is inscribed in��scribe?tr.v. in��scribed, in��scrib��ing, in��scribes1. a. To write, print, carve, or engrave (words or letters) on or in a surface.b. To mark or engrave (a surface) with words or letters. in different ways, and whichmay, in turn, lead to cultural translations or assumptions that arefundamentally misplaced mis��place?tr.v. mis��placed, mis��plac��ing, mis��plac��es1. a. To put into a wrong place: misplace punctuation in a sentence.b. (as in the examples that Wierzbicka gives ofEnglish biblical translation biblical translationArt and practice of translating the Bible. The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, with scattered passages of Aramaic. It was first translated in its entirety into Aramaic and then, in the 3rd century AD, into Greek (the Septuagint). for children, or in her own eminently faircritique of notions of fairness as a biologically determined and henceuniversal property). The English 'whimperatives' ('couldyou/would you do X?' or 'she suggested that he do Y')likewise lack parallels in other languages, again providing a linguisticpatterning of thought, culture, and verbal behaviour that enacts aparticular 'take' on the world (one in which theacknowledgment acknowledgment,in law, formal declaration or admission by a person who executed an instrument (e.g., a will or a deed) that the instrument is his. The acknowledgment is made before a court, a notary public, or any other authorized person. of the addressee's personal autonomy remains animportant cultural premise). The wealth of evidence that Wierzbicka presents in every casefirmly anchors her research but in no way combines to render her textless than interesting arguments without compromising the clarity of herexpositions, or rendering it less than highly readable. The style islucid, clear, and logically presented, and while Wierzbicka can and doeschallenge conventional readings (her conclusions will no doubt becontroversial in certain circles), the book reveals, and sustains, alevel of insight and sheer interest that is immensely engaging. Lynda Mugglestone University of Oxford