English : Meaning and Culture/Anna Wierzbicka
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English: Meaning and Culture ANNA WIERZBICKA OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS English This page intentionally left blank English Meaning and Culture Anna Wierzbicka 1 2006 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2006 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of Oxford University Press. 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. 987654321 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 hun- dreds 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 asso- ciated with them. My husband John read the whole manuscript and suggested innu- merable 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 ear- lier. They are “Right and wrong: From philosophy to everyday discourse” (Discourse Studies 4(2): 225–252) and “English causative constructions in an ethnosyntactic per- spective: 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 viii Contents 3.3. The link between “right” and “reason” 70 3.4. “That’s right” 74 3.5. An illustration: English vs. Italian 76 3.6. “Right” as a neutral ground between “good” and “true” 78 3.7. Procedural morality 80 3.8. “Right” and “wrong”: Increasingly asymmetrical 82 3.9. The changing frequencies of true, truth, right, and wrong 85 3.10. “Right” as a response in dialogue 87 3.11. “Right” and cultural scripts 92 3.12. Retrospect and conclusion: The Puritans, the Enlightenment, the growth of democracy 95 4. Being REASONABLE: A Key Anglo Value and Its Cultural Roots 103 4.1. Introduction 103 4.2. The pre-Enlightenment uses of “reasonable” 104 4.3. The main themes in the modern meanings of the word reasonable 105 4.4. “A reasonable man” 107 4.5. “It is reasonable to” think (say, do) . 112 4.6. “Reasonable doubt” 117 4.7. “Reasonable force” and “reasonable care” 123 4.8. “A reasonable time,” “A reasonable amount” 125 4.9. “Reasonable” as “reasonably good” 127 4.10. “Reasonable” and “unreasonable” 128 4.11. An internal reconstruction of the semantic history of “reasonable” 133 4.12. “Reasonable” and Anglo cultural scripts 135 4.13. Is the Anglo value of “reasonable” unique? English vs. French 138 5. Being FAIR: Another Key Anglo Value and Its Cultural Underpinnings 141 5.1. The importance of “fairness” in modern Anglo culture 141 5.2. The meaning of fair and not fair 144 5.3. “Fairness” and Anglo political philosophy 152 5.4. “Fairness” vs. “justice” 155 5.5. The illusion of universality 160 5.6. “Fairness” and “fair play”: A historical perspective 163 5.7. “Fairness” and “procedural morality” 165 Part III. Anglo Culture Reflected in English Grammar 6. The English Causatives: Causation and Interpersonal Relations 171 6.1. The cultural elaboration of causation 171 6.2. The English “let”-constructions and the cultural ideal of “noninterference” 183 Contents ix 7. i think: The Rise of Epistemic Phrases in Modern English 204 7.1. Introduction 204 7.2. I think 208 7.3. I suppose 208 7.4. I guess 209 7.5. I gather 210 7.6. I presume 212 7.7. I believe 213 7.8. I find 220 7.9. I expect 226 7.10. I take It 230 7.11. I understand 233 7.12. I imagine 235 7.13. I bet 236 7.14. I suspect 237 7.15. I assume 239 7.16. Conclusion 241 8. probably: English Epistemic Adverbs and Their Cultural Significance 247 8.1. Introduction 247 8.2. Developing a format for the semantic analysis of epistemic adverbs 257 8.3. “Probably” and “likely”: The heart of the category of epistemic adverbs 261 8.4. “Confident” adverbs: Evidently, clearly, obviously 270 8.5. “Nonconfident” adverbs: Possibly and conceivably 276 8.6. Hearsay adverbs: Apparently, supposedly, allegedly, and reportedly 278 8.7. The “uncertain” status of certainly 284 8.8. Epistemic adverbs vs. discourse particles 287 8.9. The history of epistemic adverbs in modern english 291 Part IV. Conclusion 9. The “Cultural Baggage” of English and Its Significance in the World at Large 299 9.1. The legacy of history 299 9.2. Living with concepts 300 9.3. Two illustrations: International law and international aviation 301 9.4. Communication and “vibes” 305 9.5. Intercultural communication and cross-cultural education 308 9.6. English in the world today 310 Notes 315 References 325 Index 341 This page intentionally left blank part i MEANING, HISTORY, AND CULTURE This page intentionally left blank Chapter 1 English as a Cultural Universe 1.1. English—the Most Widely Used Language in the World Few would now disagree with the view expressed in Quirk et al.’s (1985, 2) Compre- hensive Grammar of the English Language that “English is the world’s most impor- tant language.” It is certainly the world’s most widely used language. As David Crystal noted more than a decade ago in his Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Lan- guages (1992, 121), it is spoken “by a large and ever-increasing number of people— 800,000,000 by a conservative estimate, 1,500,000,000 by a liberal estimate.