Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication: Ethnopragmatics and Semantic Analysis [1st ed. 2020] 978-981-32-9982-5, 978-981-32-9983-2

Citation preview

Kerry Mullan · Bert Peeters · Lauren Sadow   Editors

Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication Ethnopragmatics and Semantic Analysis

Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication

Kerry Mullan Bert Peeters Lauren Sadow •

•

Editors

Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication Ethnopragmatics and Semantic Analysis

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Editors Kerry Mullan RMIT University Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Bert Peeters Australian National University Canberra, ACT, Australia

Lauren Sadow Australian National University Canberra, ACT, Australia

ISBN 978-981-32-9982-5 ISBN 978-981-32-9983-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2

(eBook)

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Dedicated to our good friend and colleague Cliff Goddard

Contents

1

Lift Your Game, Cliff! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bert Peeters

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A Brief Introduction to the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lauren Sadow and Kerry Mullan

Part I 3

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Ethnopragmatics

Condolences in Cantonese and English: What People Say and Why . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John C. Wakefield, Winnie Chor and Nikko Lai The Ethnopragmatics of English Understatement and Italian Exaggeration: Clashing Cultural Scripts for the Expression of Personal Opinions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gian Marco Farese

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Ethnopragmatics of Hāzer Javābi, a Valued Speech Practice in Persian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reza Arab

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“The Great Australian Pastime”: Pragmatic and Semantic Perspectives on Taking the Piss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael Haugh and Lara Weinglass

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Thứ-Bậc (‘Hierarchy’) in the Cultural Logic of Vietnamese Interaction: An Ethnopragmatic Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Lien-Huong Vo

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Pile of Dead Leaves Free to a Good Home: Humour and Belonging in a Facebook Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Kerry Mullan

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Contents

Part II 9

Semantic Analysis

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Three Potential Slurring Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Keith Allan

10 Positive Appraisal in Online News Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Radoslava Trnavac and Maite Taboada 11 The Conceptual Semantics of Alienable Possession in Amharic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Mengistu Amberber 12 The Meanings of List Constructions: Explicating Interactional Polysemy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 Susanna Karlsson Part III

Cliff Goddard: List of Publications

Cliff Goddard: List of Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Compiled by Bert Peeters

Chapter 1

Lift Your Game, Cliff! A Fun Tribute to Cliff Goddard Bert Peeters

It must be around twenty years ago now, but the words “Lift your game, Cliff!” still resonate loud and clear around the world-famous Armidale tennis courts that, every month of January, host the New England Open tennis tournament. The event attracts the world’s best players to country New South Wales, where they come to face local talent such as Cliff Goddard, now retired—from tennis at least. That year, Goddard was playing an early round match; he was in superb form and heading for an easy win. Nevertheless, during a change of ends, a spectator called out the infamous words that would inspire the champion, who also knows a thing or two about linguistics, to pen one of his well-known papers (published as Chap. 3 of Goddard 2006) misleadingly titled “Lift your game, Martina!”. Being the non-assuming bloke we all know he is, Goddard cleverly extracted himself from the account of what had occurred and made it look as though it had happened at the Australian Open in Melbourne, to another champion known by the name of Martina Hingis. We know better, don’t we? Since the paper was written, many Australians have informally endorsed the spectator’s comment as “a classic”, and as “so Australian”. In the absence of an obvious, salient lexical label for the Australian English speech practice it illustrates, Goddard called it “deadpan jocular irony”, which is quite a mouthful. So, what was that spectator getting at when he admonished Cliff to “lift his game”? One possibility that should be immediately rejected is that he was levelling some sort of

B. Peeters (&) Australian National University, Canberra, Australia e-mail: [email protected] Universiteit Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Mullan et al. (eds.), Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_1

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“indirect criticism” at his idol. The spectator’s attitude was not critical in the least. Instead, he was expressing something like admiration. The fan’s comment was intended to be amusing and at the same time to express high praise. Which is exactly what this “fun tribute”, which celebrates Goddard’s more than forty years in academia, intends to be and to do as well. Granted, it has not displayed the highest possible academic standards so far, plagiarizing as it does two publications that are part of Goddard’s prolific output. The first is the above-mentioned Chap. 3 of Goddard (2006); the second, a more recent paper titled “Ethnopragmatic perspectives on conversational humour, with special reference to Australian English” (Goddard 2017). Give or take a few minor (and not so minor) adjustments, entire chunks of the first two paragraphs are lifted (that verb again!) out of these two publications. Not that Goddard never played tennis. He did, he really did. He must, however, have grown tired of it, because he eventually gave up the sport and turned to squash and badminton instead. Goddard was always too slight to play rougher sports like rugby, and besides, he is a self-acknowledged “no contact” kind of person whose favourite martial art is Tai Chi. According to reliable sources, even a hug makes him uncomfortable. Many might, therefore, be surprised to learn of his once sporting prowess. His preferred weapon while at the University of New England was the racquet, and over his years in Armidale Goddard organized tennis games and played matches with his colleagues in linguistics, matches that later morphed into squash tournaments and, later again, into badminton competitions. Although he cultivated the professorial look that some might call “unthreatening”, behind that façade Goddard was surprisingly athletic—nimble and light on his feet, combining a fine serve with a mean volley, an uncanny ability to dominate the centre of a squash court, and the deft touch that turns a badminton smash into a float-n-drop over the net. And while these competitions were fierce, they were also the source of much hilarity among the participants and will be remembered fondly. Anecdotes, according to Tridgell (2006: 286), “can be suggestive in indicating the existence of particular cultural phenomena, and Cliff Goddard opens his linguistic analysis of Australian irony with an anecdote”. The analysis she refers to is Chap. 3 of Goddard (2006), which she had somehow laid her hands on before it was available in print. Anecdotes can also be suggestive in indicating the existence of a phenomenon tout court, and Cliff Goddard is one such phenomenon. Let us be honest about it: there is absolutely no way Goddard could possibly “lift his game”—even if he tried. Baby Cliff was a bit of a latecomer, a fact of life that as a grown-up he has consistently and valiantly tried to overcome by (mostly successfully) trying never to run late. Goddard’s parents had tied the knot in the early 1940s and had decided that, because of the war, this was not the right time to start a family. Horresco referens: if they had not restrained themselves, Goddard would by now be almost eighty. We all hope, of course, he will eventually get there and still be the bright young man he is today, but that’s a different story. Back to Bill and Norma Goddard, they waited for a whopping eleven years, before conceiving their first child, early in the Australian autumn of 1953. Exactly nine months later, on a

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Saturday, probably around 6 pm, it was delivery time. Baby Cliff came into the world. It was 5 December 1953, and it would be another 23 months before Goddard’s only sibling—a boy by the name of Alan—would join the family. Goddard’s birthdate had not been planned to coincide with that of dancer Elisabeth Clarke in Camden, New Jersey, nor with that of singer and voice actress Sachiko Kobayashi in Niigata, Japan, or of journalist, publisher and activist Gwen Lister in East London, South Africa. They would all shoot to fame—with Cliff Goddard in hot pursuit. They would all be immortalized on the Take Me Back To website (https://takemeback.to/05-December-1953)—with Cliff Goddard missing out “by that much” (Maxwell Smart, personal communication). Goddard had one insurmountable handicap: whereas the others were all born in places that, in December 1953, had a six-figure population, Goddard’s birthplace was nothing short of a small backwater. Sure, Canberra was Australia’s national capital, but it had little else going for it. Population-wise, according to a short article on page 2 of the Canberra Times of 31 December 1953, it was believed to have about 29,200 residents. Which only goes to show that, to adopt a way of saying things that Goddard’s parents’ gifted son would in due course help popularize, “good things happen in big places; at the same time, good things can happen in small places if people want them to happen there”. By the time Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, arrived in Canberra on a Royal Australian Air Force plane that landed at Fairbairn airfield on 13 February 1954 at 3 p.m. for their first visit ever to the Australian capital, young Cliff was exactly ten weeks old. How did Mr. and Mrs. Goddard get it so right? At ten weeks, he was just ready to follow his parents as they ventured out of their Canberra suburb of Reid to welcome the Queen and her Royal Consort. We cannot be sure that they were in the crowd of adoring Australians lining the streets of Canberra. However, since there were more people (around 40,000) welcoming the royal couple than there were residents in the national capital at the time, there is a reasonable chance they were. As one would expect, the royal visit was accompanied by a lot more fanfare than baby Cliff’s birth ten weeks earlier. Not that he cared very much: he probably slept his way through all the kerfuffle. The Queen and the Duke only stayed for five days; he stayed a lot longer. Canberra was home for Goddard until his early twenties. It is where he attended preschool in Reid and later primary school at Our Lady of Mercy in Braddon and Daramalan College in Dickson. The nuns at Our Lady of Mercy were relentless in their efforts to stamp out Australia’s favourite b-word, which came naturally to most young Australians, including the Goddard brothers. At age 7, Cliff was overheard by his mother as he advised brother Alan, who was about to start school at age 5, not to use the word bloody in the classroom (or in the schoolyard for that matter). “Why, Cliffie?” asked trusting little brother. Cliff’s answer was an utterly sincere “Because the bloody nuns don’t bloody like it!” At Daramalan College, the nuns made way for teachers of a different kind, and Goddard became one of the top students, not only in the remainder of primary school, but also later on—with a few dips here and there. He stayed at Daramalan throughout high school and college

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and, while there, was reportedly bullied for being “brainy”. However, putting his own spin on the school’s motto, “Fortes in fide” [“Strong in faith”], he proved over and over again that he, at least, had a lot of faith in himself and was able to deal with the taunts of the not-so-brainy who had nothing better to do than to have a go at him. By the time Goddard reached the age of 18, university beckoned. It had not all been smooth sailing, though. For a moment, it looked as though Goddard was about to throw it all away, even before passing his High School Certificate. To his credit, he did not. Now living in Watson, a different suburb, closer to Daramalan but further away from the university campus, he gained early entrance to what was at the time Canberra’s only university, appropriately called the Australian National University. He already knew that the so-called hard sciences were not his thing (even though he had been awarded a medal for winning a science competition while a student at Daramalan College). A few years before entering university, he had managed to get his first summer job at the ANU. Asked to transport some large flasks of liquid nitrogen, he had attempted to wheel them up a slope by himself. Not only was he reprimanded quite quickly, but he also lost his job, which is almost certain to have put him off the sciences. So, what would he be studying? While at the university as an undergraduate student, Goddard soon discovered that mathematics and psychology, which formed part of his degree, were not for him either. The real love of his life, which he pursued with much more dedication than the frantic social life he had engaged in earlier and the few girls he had started to date and fallen in and out of love with, was linguistics—or so he thought, because he had not set eyes on wife-to-be Mee Wun just yet. Linguistics, led by R. M.W. (aka Bob) Dixon, was booming at ANU: 48 EFTSUs (Effective Full Time Student Units) in 1973, 70 in 1974, 97 in 1975 (Dixon 2011: 112). Goddard took classes with most of the staff in the department, but one of them would mark him for life. Her name was Anna Wierzbicka, a Polish-born semanticist who had migrated from the US to Australia in the early seventies. The author of a book called Semantic primitives, published in (1972), she had already made a name for herself but could not have known at the time that, in due course, Goddard and she would develop into the most formidable tandem in Australian linguistics. Not that university was all work and no play. Taking some time off between semesters, Goddard went overseas with a friend. The idea was to see Europe and Morocco, perhaps other places as well. They went for one year but the trip ended after six months, when they ran out of money. Had Goddard not bought that acoustic guitar while travelling through Spain, he might have been able to stay a little longer. But the acoustic guitar, no doubt bought on a whim, has proven to be an invaluable purchase: he still has it and, decades later, continues to turn to it when he wants to take his mind off academia. Goddard would no doubt have made a talented musician, but he realized he was no match for either Uncle Cliff, the musician in the family after whom he had been named, or another Cliff, who had already shot to stardom with a name uncomfortably close to Goddard’s. We have all heard of Cliff RichAAArd, haven’t we—and he is not Goddard’s uncle. Goddard might also have made a good salesman, according to some, as he can sell ideas very

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well. Aren’t we lucky he preferred linguistics to linguini sticks, though, which he would no doubt have successfully flogged to the most suspicious home cooks, together with some ideas as to how to use these things in their recipes? After graduating from ANU as a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours, Goddard left Canberra. The year was 1976. He moved to Adelaide, where he spent some time working for a community radio station. He also tried his hand at script writing, producing a politically sensitive film script for which he dreamt up the title “The gap between”. The setting was Alice Springs and surroundings, Australia’s gateway into the Red Centre, the country’s interior desert region. The script had a strong female protagonist. Why this is important I do not know, but it was put to me in no uncertain terms that I might as well add this bit of information, because Goddard would appreciate it. Unfortunately, the script was shelved after Goddard fell out with the film director; the film itself never saw the light of day. Instead, Goddard went on to bigger and better things, at least from a linguist’s point of view. Answering the call to help document Aboriginal languages, which were disappearing at an alarming rate, he returned to academia in 1980 and embarked on extensive research into one of the dialects of the Western Desert Language, a cluster of mutually intelligible dialects spoken in vast areas of Western Australia, South Australia, and the Northern Territory. Goddard’s fieldwork in the northwest of South Australia culminated in a 1983 ANU Ph.D., published two years later as A grammar of Yankunytjatjara. From 1985 to 1987, Goddard lived in Alice Springs, the town of his doomed film script. He was a National Research Fellow at the Institute for Aboriginal Development (IAD), an independent Aboriginal community-controlled language resource and adult education centre serving the Aboriginal community of Central Australia. While at the IAD, and for about ten years after that, he continued his work on Yankunytjatjara and on the neighbouring dialect Pitjantjatjara, producing several language resources for both communities, including wordlists and dictionaries, mostly published by the IAD Press. But Aboriginal linguistics was not the only thing on Goddard’s radar. As mentioned earlier, one name was destined never to drop off it. Anna Wierzbicka’s belief in the descriptive power of “semantic primitives” had left a lasting impression on our Yankunytjatjara/Pitjantjatjara specialist. In 1986, together with David Wilkins, Goddard organized a workshop on semantic primitives during the Australian Linguistics Society’s annual conference held that year at the University of Adelaide. Not content with merely publicizing the approach, he contributed a paper provocatively titled “Wild ideas about the natural semantic metalanguage”. As far as is known, this is where the term natural semantic metalanguage, later abbreviated as NSM and often capitalized as Natural Semantic Metalanguage, was born. The paper was published three years later (Goddard 1989), and its title somewhat toned down. Wierzbicka knew that Goddard was on to something; it did not take long for her to acknowledge that “the Workshop […] proved to be in some ways a turning point in the search for the universal semantic primitives and in the development of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage” (Wierzbicka 1992: 223).

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What would eventually become known as the “Natural Semantic Metalanguage (or NSM) approach” effectively saw the light of day in the latter half of the 1980s. In 1987, Goddard left the IAD to become a Senior Linguist for the South Australian Education Department, which he served in an official capacity for the next three years. At the beginning of 1990, he joined the linguistics team at the University of New England as a lecturer and was soon to develop a reputation as one of the most inspiring and engaging academic teachers on campus. There are many ways of explaining to a LING100 class that the word tree does not always correspond to the object “tree”; however, it takes something special to do so in a way that gets your students hooked on semantics instead of distracted by a huge huntsman spider crawling on the wall behind the lecturer. 1990 was the year the Department of Linguistics at UNE became an entity in its own right. A full degree program in the discipline had only just been established thanks to the unrelenting efforts of the late Steve Johnson, who had been appointed to the University in 1986. Johnson’s tragic death in August 1990 was a devastating blow for the team, from which it managed to recover only thanks to the moral support of colleagues from around the country. A special issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics, in remembrance of Steve Johnson and co-edited by Goddard and Nick Evans, was published in 1992. In the following decade, a gradual shift occurred in Goddard’s research activity. He initially remained faithful to his early focus on the dialects of the Western Desert Language, but increasingly started to turn his attention away from Australia, towards another language on the semantics and cultural pragmatics (later called ethnopragmatics) of which he would soon produce a variety of studies. That language was Malay, otherwise known as Bahasa Melayu. The fact that wife Mee Wun, a native speaker of Cantonese born in Malaysia, had something to do with this sudden interest is of course entirely fortuitous. The two had met in Alice Springs, where they were introduced to one another by a mutual friend. They married in Armidale on 7 January 1994, only weeks after Goddard had been promoted to senior lecturer. Kwan, their only son, was born in Malaysia in 1996 and, once back in country New South Wales, would for a short time become an object of scientific observation. Goddard—noblesse oblige—wrote a paper for which, together with Mee Wun, he followed Kwan around the family home, trying to ascertain which semantic primes the toddler would produce as he learned to talk, when he would produce them, and in which order. It is not entirely impossible that Kwan’s dislike for linguistics using simple words goes back to that very period. The paper was published in (2001). Mee Wun has a vivid recollection of a conference at the University of New South Wales, where her husband was one of the presenters. She was sitting in the back row, holding two-year-old Kwan, and as soon as he started his talk, Kwan called out: “Papa!” Everyone looked up and took notice, an unforgettable moment. Equally unforgettable, from Kwan’s point of view, were the many times he was asked by Papa whether he was a little fool or a big fool, to which he would invariably respond “I’m a big fool”. Kwan obviously had some difficulties with Papa’s sophisticated sense of humour. Aged 5, Kwan was well on his way to

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become the competent native speaker of English he is today, but he had not yet discovered what “deadpan jocular irony” was all about. One day, according to Chap. 3 of Goddard (2006), a colleague dropped by to give father and son a lift into town. As they got into the colleague’s car, it was clear that the vehicle was in an advanced state of untidiness. “Just cleaned the car, have you Nick?” Goddard asked matter-of-factly, without any audible sarcasm. Nick just smiled, but Kwan was nonplussed. “Papa”, he said later, “that car was a big mess”. Meanwhile, Goddard had once again risen through the ranks, becoming an associate professor in 1999. DOIs were introduced the year after, and they ensured Goddard was able to reach for unseen heights. How he does it is still under investigation, but the fact of the matter is that, whenever DOIs are distributed, Goddard is standing in the front row. An impressive number of his Digital Object Identifiers end in the first three letters of his surname. Now, let us be honest about it: how much fun is it to be referred to as “God”, time after time, when reference is made to one of your publications? Especially when others, like the present author, keep on being pushed towards the back row, where they end up with DOIs ending in “pee”. And, while we are on that topic, I might as well mention that there is another set of DOIs Goddard has been cunning enough to avoid. They are the ones that adorn the numerous publications that he has co-authored with Anna Wierzbicka. It’s always (or just about always) Goddard first and Wierzbicka second: if you can choose between DOIs that end in “god” and DOIs that end in “wie”, once again, you do not think twice, do you? The noughties saw Goddard’s attention increasingly turn to his own native language, Australian English. Unfortunately, Wierzbicka beat him at writing that paper about bloody (Wierzbicka 2002) in which he, if he had authored it, could and no doubt would have referred to the bloody nuns episode of his childhood. In 2003, a year after receiving a UNE Vice-Chancellors Award for Research Excellence, Goddard made it to full professor, effectively reviving UNE’s Chair of Linguistics, which had been established in 1995 (upon the appointment of Anne Pauwels) but had become vacant again in June 1998. It would not be until 4 October 2004, though, that Goddard, in true university tradition, delivered his inaugural professorial lecture. No university venue was good enough for that solemn occasion, which took place at the Armidale Town Hall. Meanwhile, Goddard had also been elected as a Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities of Australia. He would eventually (for three years, starting in November 2015) act as head of its Linguistics Section. While a professor at the University of New England, Goddard added semantic molecules and semantic templates (both of which have historical precedents that lacked adequate theoretical underpinnings) to the NSM toolkit and further consolidated the approach he and others refer to as ethnopragmatics, a take on pragmatics inspired by NSM principles. Ethnopragmatics was the answer to the “Seven Deadly Sins of Universalist Pragmatics” (Goddard 2006), a reference that ruffled several feathers, including—it seems—those of a certain Roger. Being a bird (the feathers were for real), Roger didn’t have a name, but it was clear why Goddard had decided to call the winged monster Roger: he had feathers, in German Feder, and as

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a former tennis player Goddard still had nightmares of being at the receiving end of Roger Feder-er’s unrelenting attacks. All of a sudden, the nightmares were becoming a reality, albeit that Goddard’s nemesis had turned into a magpie which, for quite some time, made a point of terrorizing the professor (and at times some of his Ph.D. students as well) with its swooping behaviour and other intimidating tactics whenever he (and they) approached the university campus on their bicycle(s). Goddard liked cycling and for many years cycled to his office at the university. Bike helmets with spikes proved no match for the vindictive bird, who eventually disappeared as unexpectedly as he had surfaced. After traumatizing the local NSM community, he had perhaps found something better to do. 2010 was a watershed year for Goddard. It was the year when, as he would have it, luck came knocking on his door. Armidale was not a bad place to be, not even during the Roger years, but it was not entirely challenge-free. Goddard found himself in the grip of that nagging feeling that many academics experience sooner or later when they come to the realization that there are other opportunities to be had. The classic case, in other words, of grass that tends to look greener on the other side. Goddard certainly thought he had seen some very green and lush lawns some distance away from country New South Wales, and consequently had applied for a professorial position at Griffith University, Brisbane. He was shortlisted and interviewed, only to find out that the position was eventually offered to the other shortlisted candidate. Weird luck, some would say… But hang on, the story does not end there. A short time later, out of the blue, Goddard received a phone call from a highly placed individual at Griffith University, who told him that the selection panel had been so impressed with both candidates that the initial decision to appoint one candidate only (as would happen just about everywhere else) was revised in favour of a double appointment. Goddard, too, was offered the chance to move to Brisbane. Faced with the prospect that a paper dream was suddenly a lot closer to becoming reality, he thought it over long and hard, discussed the pros and cons with wife Mee Wun and son Kwan, and finally decided that leaving Armidale was the right thing to do. One of the main motivations was that husband and wife both suspected Kwan would prefer to pursue university studies away from Armidale. Moving the family to Brisbane would provide Kwan with a number of possibilities without the obligation to leave home. For the record, Kwan has in the meantime finished his undergraduate studies in physics and is working towards a Ph.D. Goddard did not renounce his links with the University of New England, where until today he remains an adjunct professor. Physically, though, he and his family did leave land-locked Armidale and moved to Brisbane, which, for those not in the know, is situated in South East Queensland. Yes: Queen’s Land. Goddard had missed out on his private audience with the Queen in Canberra at the tender age of ten weeks and would finally get a chance of actually meeting Her Majesty—or so he thought. Unfortunately, the latest news from Buckingham Palace, Balmoral Castle, and other such unpretentious hide-outs is that the Queen, now in her nineties, is no longer prepared to travel all the way down under.

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Fortunately, there is something to take Goddard’s mind off royal encounters— apart from linguistics, wife Mee Wun and son Kwan (not necessarily in that order). Goddard loves nature, and he is lucky that Mee Wun and Kwan do too. There was plenty of it around Armidale, as far as the eye would reach, and the family often spent time away from the daily humdrum by undertaking bushwalks in the surrounding national parks, pitching their tent where they pleased and staying away from civilization sometimes for days on end. The outings continue in and around Brisbane, where nature has a different kind of appeal. There is no doubt, though, that it provides as much of a distraction as it did back in country New South Wales. Goddard has been Professor of Linguistics at Griffith University since 2011, where he continues to rally his troops around the NSM canon—not the piece of artillery, mind you, which is where troops are usually found; it is canon with one “n” in the middle, not two. One of Goddard’s favourite hangouts at Griffith is Café Rossa, on the Nathan campus, where some of his current Ph.D. students take time off linguistics by playing a game called “Finding Cliff”. The rules are simple: the first one to spot Goddard at a Café Rossa table wins, and if no one is successful, players rub their eyes and wonder whether they are walking past the right café… Café Rossa coffee seems to do miracles in terms of Goddard’s productivity and intellectual insight. It is available in mugs as well, but ever since the publication of Meaning and Universal Grammar (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2002), MUG for short, Goddard has formed the view that only cups will do for coffee. MUG is for reading; cups are for drinking. It’s at Café Rossa that Goddard tends to meet with students and colleagues alike; it is where the long blacks, Goddard’s preferred style of coffee, always served in a cup, are even better than they were in Armidale, where they were not bad at all. It’s not just his love of coffee that keeps Goddard going. One thing he made sure not to leave behind in Armidale was his bike. He may have bought one or two new ones since the big move, but let’s not be too fussy about details. Now no longer plagued by Roger, Goddard is occasionally seen cycling to work. He cycles even when he is abroad. In Aarhus (Denmark), Goddard has been known, not only for giving lectures where local students sit on the window sills, just to get a chance to hear him talk, but for cycling the streets on a luminescent yellow bike. It is rumoured that, on a sunny spring day, while buying himself an ice cream in downtown Aarhus to cool down after several kilometres on the bike, the ice cream vendor recognized him and roared in an almost biblical voice: “Oh my God, you are the world-famous semanticist Cliff Goddard!!!” World-famous, Goddard most certainly is. His fame extends well beyond Canada and Scandinavia, the two regions for which, in recent years, he has developed a special affinity and where some of his closest research associates are to be found. His network of research associates includes colleagues and former students within but also outside of NSM circles. Many of them, upon being asked, immediately and enthusiastically agreed to contribute to the celebratory volume that Kerry Mullan and Lauren Sadow, eventually joined by the present author, took it upon themselves to publish in Goddard’s honour, to mark his 65th birthday. Such was the response rate that one volume became two and that two became three.

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A handful of potential contributors, unfortunately, could not be reached. Others had to reluctantly decline or bow out because of other commitments. If they had all said yes, three might have become four… Of those who declined, many did kindly agree, together with others, to undertake double-blind peer reviews of the work submitted by their colleagues or to contribute savvy stories worked into this tribute. As a general rule, all contributions were peer-reviewed by one NSM scholar and by one other relevant expert. Non-NSM papers were peer-reviewed by non-NSM scholars. The papers were divided into five broad themes. Like the title of this tribute, all five hint at selected titles of Goddard’s published work. Together, they reflect most if not all of Goddard’s research interests, which straddle language, culture, and meaning.1 Volume 1 is titled Ethnopragmatics and Semantic Analysis; its main editor is Kerry Mullan. Apart from the present tribute and a brief introduction to the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach by Lauren Sadow and Kerry Mullan, this volume includes two parts. Part I, Ethnopragmatics (cf. Goddard 2006), comprises work by Reza Arab, Gian Marco Farese, Michael Haugh and Lara Weinglass, Kerry Mullan, Lien-Huong Vo, and John Wakefield, Winnie Chor and Nikko Lai. Part II, Semantic Analysis (cf. Goddard 1998/2011), comprises work by Keith Allan, Mengistu Amberber, Susanna Karlsson, and Radoslava Trnavac and Maite Taboada. Volume 2, titled Meaning and Culture, also includes two parts; its main editor is Bert Peeters. Part I, Words as Carriers of Cultural Meaning (cf. Goddard 2015), comprises work by Yuko Asano-Cavanagh and Gian Marco Farese, Stella Butter and Zuzanna Bułat Silva, Sandy Habib, Jan Hein, Bert Peeters and Margo Lecompte-Van Poucke, Roslyn Rowen, and Rachel Thompson. Part II, Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context (cf. the subtitle of Goddard 2006), comprises work by Helen Leung and Carsten Levisen. Volume 3, titled Minimal English (and Beyond), includes the fifth part; its main editor is Lauren Sadow. The title of this volume refers to Goddard's edited collection Minimal English for a global world (Goddard 2018) and comprises work by María Auxiliadora Barrios Rodríguez, Deborah Hill, Susana S. Fernández, Alex Forbes, Anna Gladkova, Lauren Sadow, Jiashu Tao, Ulla Vanhatalo and Camilla Lindholm, Anna Wierzbicka, and Jock Wong. The editors and contributors wish Cliff Goddard many more years of research engagement and are delighted to offer him herewith a token of their appreciation for what he has meant and continues to mean for them. An exhaustive list of Goddard’s

1

Adrian Tien sadly passed away on 30 April 2018, when planning was well underway. Did he have a premonition he himself “was headed for the West, riding a crane” when he wrote about this and other phrases used in Chinese in the wake of someone’s passing (Tien 2017)? We will never know. The editors are convinced, though, that they could have counted on him as well, had he lived.

1 Lift Your Game, Cliff!

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publications, many of which are referred to throughout these volumes, is included at the end of each of the three volumes—and DOIs have been added where available. Just a matter of reminding everyone that there is a front row whenever DOIs are being allocated and that Goddard knows where that front row is. Acknowledgements This tribute could not have been written without the complicity of Mee Wun Lee, Goddard’s wife; Kwan Goddard Lee, their son; and some of Goddard’s past and current colleagues and Ph.D. students, including (in alphabetical order) Jan Hein, Vicki Knox, Carsten Levisen, Nick Reid, Andrea Schalley, Jeff Siegel, and Sophia Waters. Special thanks to Vicki and Nick, whose prose about Goddard’s prowess in tennis, squash, and badminton could not be bettered and has been reproduced in this tribute almost verbatim.

References Dixon, R. M. W. (2011). I am a linguist. Leiden: Brill. Goddard, C. (1989). Issues in natural semantic metalanguage. Quaderni di semantica, 10(1), 51–64. Goddard, C. (1998/2011). Semantic analysis: A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goddard, C. (2001). Conceptual primes in early language development. In M. Pütz & S. Niemeier (Eds.), Applied cognitive linguistics: Theory and language acquisition (Vol. 1, pp. 193–227). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110866247.193. Goddard, C. (Ed.). (2006). Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110911114. Goddard, C. (2015). Words as carriers of cultural meaning. In J. R. Taylor (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the word (pp. 380–398). Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10. 1093/oxfordhb/9780199641604.013.027. Goddard, C. (2017). Ethnopragmatic perspectives on conversational humour, with special reference to Australian English. Language & Communication, 55, 55–68. https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.langcom.2016.09.008. Goddard, C. (Ed.). (2018). Minimal English for a global world: Improved communication using fewer words. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62512-6. Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (Eds.). (2002). Meaning and universal grammar: Theory and empirical findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.60 (Vol. 1), https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.61 (Vol. 2). Tien, A. (2017). To be headed for the West, riding a crane: Chinese pragmemes in the wake of someone’s passing. In V. Parvaresh, & A. Capone (Eds.), The programme of accommodation: The case of interaction around the event of death (pp. 183–202). Berlin: Springer. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-55759-5_11. Tridgell, S. (2006). Communicative clashes in Australian culture and autobiography. Auto/ Biography, 14, 285–301. Wierzbicka, A. (1972). Semantic primitives. Frankfurt: Athenäum.

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Wierzbicka, A. (1992). The search for universal semantic primitives. In M. Pütz (Ed.), Thirty years of linguistic evolution (pp. 215–242). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/z. 61.20wie. Wierzbicka, A. (2002). Australian cultural scripts—Bloody revisited. Journal of Pragmatics, 34 (9), 1167–1209. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(01)00023-6.

Bert Peeters is an Honorary Associate Professor at the Australian National University and a Gastprofessor at the University of Antwerp. His main research interests are in French linguistics, intercultural communication, and language and cultural values. His publications include Les primitifs sémantiques (ed., 1993), The lexicon-encyclopedia interface (ed., 2000), Semantic primes and universal grammar (ed., 2006), Tu ou vous: l’embarras du choix (ed. with N. Ramière, 2009), Cross-culturally speaking, speaking cross-culturally (ed. with K. Mullan and C. Béal, 2013), and Heart- and soul-like constructs across languages, cultures, and epochs (ed., 2019).

Chapter 2

A Brief Introduction to the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach Lauren Sadow and Kerry Mullan

Abstract This introductory chapter to the first of three volumes celebrating the career of Griffith University academic Cliff Goddard recaps the fundamentals of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, ethnopragmatics and cultural scripts, and Minimal English (Sect. 2.1 to 2.7), then contextualizes and introduces the individual papers (Sect. 2.8).














Keywords Meaning Culture Cultural Keywords Discourse Natural Semantic Metalanguage Ethnopragmatics Cultural Scripts Minimal English

2.1







Introduction

In 1972 the Polish-born linguist Anna Wierzbicka published a book—the first of many she would go on to write in English—in which she introduced the idea of a set of universal semantic primes (or primitives, as they were called at the time) that could be used to paraphrase the meaning of more complex concepts. By the end of the decade, in 1979, Cliff Goddard published his first ringing endorsement of it, together with a set of paraphrases of his own. In 1986, the idea had caught on sufficiently for Goddard to make the first use in print of the term ‘natural semantic metalanguage’ (NSM) as a convenient label for the primitives and also to describe the growing methodology and field of study relying on them. This volume is the first of three to celebrate that naming and the extensive contribution Cliff Goddard has made to the NSM approach and NSM itself in the last 40 years.

L. Sadow (&) The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia e-mail: [email protected] K. Mullan RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Mullan et al. (eds.), Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_2

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Volume 1, Ethnopragmatics and Semantic Analysis, presents a series of chapters almost all of which use the NSM approach to describe pragmatic and semantic meanings across a variety of languages. The chapters in Volume 2, Meaning and Culture, focus on semantics rather than (ethno)pragmatics (although the latter is never far away) and especially on (mostly lexical) meanings in a variety of cultural settings. The final volume, Minimal English, takes the NSM approach, and the NSM principles, and applies them not only to linguistic analyses, but to real-world problems. Together, these three volumes collect papers ranging across the ever-growing domains of research in which NSM is currently applied; from cultural keywords to pragmatics, and beyond into applications well outside of linguistics. Today’s NSM research is far-reaching both in terms of languages studied and in terms of disciplines in which it is applied. As such, it may be of use to the reader to begin this set with an introduction to the principles and practices of NSM research (cf. also Peeters’ introductory chapter in Volume 2).

2.2

A Metalanguage for Comparing and Defining

Drawing on the philosophical ideas of such intellectual greats as Leibniz, Arnauld and Locke, the natural semantic metalanguage approach has demonstrated like no other theoretical framework before that human thought is in some way comparable across languages (Goddard 2018a). Leibniz referred in this context to the ‘alphabet of human thought’, and while Wierzbicka’s implementation of that ‘alphabet’ was lexical rather than pictorial, the same concepts of reduction and paraphrase do apply. When examining other approaches to lexical definition, it is apparent that there are some challenges that ought to be addressed in order to reach maximally accurate definitions (Goddard 2011). First, the problem of circularity, observed whenever words are defined in terms of one another, so much so that the search for a definition presents the end-user with new words that, when defined in turn, lead right back to the start; second, the problem of obscurity, which surfaces when a word is defined in terms more complex than it is itself, thus further obscuring the meaning rather than elucidating it; third, the problem of inaccuracy, which arises when a definition does not accurately predict a word’s usage. It was with these challenges in mind that Wierzbicka proposed semantic primes as a means to negotiate the pitfalls of defining (Wierzbicka 1985). They are indefinable in the sense that there are no simpler terms that can be used to define them. Relying on indefinable words, and using nothing but indefinable words, resolves the issues of circularity and obscurity. Including folk knowledge about words takes care of the issue of inaccuracy. Furthermore, by using semantic primes that exist across all languages, we can describe culturally specific words and beliefs without imposing the values of another languaculture on the languaculture being described.

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The term ‘natural semantic metalanguage’ (printed in lower case) was first used by Cliff Goddard in his (1986) article ‘The natural semantics of too’. It reflects two of the unique features of what eventually became known as ‘the natural semantic metalanguage approach’. First, it is a highly constrained metalanguage. Not a fully-fledged language similar to the thousands that are in use today, but a specialized language specifically designed to talk about other languages in a clear and intelligible manner, i.e. without becoming recursive. This requires the use of words that represent basic concepts, which cannot be reduced any further (as has already been discussed). The second key idea is ‘natural’. ‘Natural’ in this sense means that the terms employed to talk about the languages we speak and the concepts we use are in fact existing words and existing concepts, directly derived from the languages we speak. They are anything but abstract representations requiring in-depth knowledge to be understood. As Goddard (2011: 65) states, ‘no technical terms, “fancy words”, logical symbols, or abbreviations are allowed in explications, which should contain only simple expressions from ordinary natural language’. ‘Explications’ are the paraphrases the NSM approach uses in its definitions; for more information, see Sect. 2.4.

2.3

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach

As a way of ‘doing’ lexical semantics, the natural semantic metalanguage approach has been steadily growing in popularity. As a method for deep semantic analysis, it is unparalleled with respect to the breadth and depth of topics it can and has been applied to. The NSM approach is an analytical framework that makes it possible to produce semantic analyses using language that is cross-translatable, thereby ensuring that it does not project the cultural and semantic implications of other languages onto the resulting semantic descriptions of a particular language. Ethnocentrism, and in particular Anglocentrism, has long been a challenge for researchers across the world. English words have a tendency to be applied as universal concepts that distort the conceptual complexity of the languages they seek to describe (Wierzbicka 2014). Using complex English words to describe other languages and/or concepts used in these languages, linguists (and other researchers) have unintentionally used semantically and culturally complex terms in an attempt to come up with faithful descriptions of infinitely different cultural realities. Unwittingly, they have promoted the use of English as a ‘neutral’ language, ignoring the fact that it has a cultural heritage of its own, which inevitably distorts what is being described as it is approached through a culturally incompatible prism. The NSM approach actively avoids this hazard by using only cross-translatable language when describing concepts (and cultural norms, on which more later). It thus produces explications that represent the cultural models of the target language, regardless of the language of the explications.

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2.3.1

Semantic Primes and Their Syntax

At its core, the NSM approach uses a limited set of concepts that are universal across all languages and languacultures to describe the culturally specific semantic and pragmatic content found in these languages and languacultures. The use of this semantic core of all languages in our explications means that the explications can then be compared and understood across cultural borders. At present, NSM is made up of 65 universal concepts—known as ‘semantic primes’ (formerly ‘semantic primitives’; cf. Sect. 2.1). To represent the primes, we use words, usually English words. These words are known as the ‘exponents’ of the primes. However, the same set of semantic primes can be identified as easily in French or Pitjantjatjara. Semantic primes can be considered building blocks of complex concepts in all languages. The ‘exponents’ of the primes are often presented in tabular form. Table 2.1 lists the 65 semantic primes into categories based on the kind of meanings they represent. Table 2.1 Semantic primes (English exponents) grouped into related categories (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014) I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING

*

THING, PEOPLE, BODY

KIND, PART THIS, THE SAME, OTHER

*

ELSE

ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MUCH

*

MANY, LITTLE

*

FEW

GOOD, BAD BIG, SMALL KNOW, THINK, WANT, DON’T WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR SAY, WORDS, TRUE DO, HAPPEN, MOVE BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE IS, BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING)

(IS)

MINE

LIVE, DIE WHEN

*

TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME, FOR

Substantives Relational substantives Determiners Quantifiers Evaluators Descriptors Mental predicates Speech Actions, events, Movement Location, existence, specification Possession Life and death Time

SOME TIME, MOMENT

*

Place Logical concepts VERY, MORE Intensifier, Augmentor LIKE * AS Similarity Notes • Exponents of primes can be polysemous, i.e. they can have other, additional meanings. • Exponents of primes may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes. • They can be formally, i.e. morphologically, complex. • They can have combinatorial variants or allolexes (indicated with*). • Each prime has well-specified syntactic (combinatorial) properties WHERE

PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR, SIDE, INSIDE, TOUCH

NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF

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Figure 2.1 presents an alternative visualization, grouping the primes into sets based on the conceptual connections that hold them together. In addition to their basic exponents, primes may have additional exponents depending on their context of use (e.g. ‘SOMETHING’ and ‘THING’—indicated by ‘*’ in Table 2.1 and Fig. 2.1). This phenomenon is known as ‘allolexy’, and the exponents of a single prime are its ‘allolexes’. Some languages have more than two allolexes for a single prime: French, for instance, has three allolexes for WHEN (QUAND * MOMENT * FOIS; Peeters 2006), where English only has two. In some cases, primes can be combined into portmanteau expressions. For example, the combination ‘at many times’ is usually rendered as ‘often’ in the English version of the NSM. Similar portmanteaus may not exist in all languages, but the meaning of a portmanteau is equal to the meaning of the combination of primes it stands for. This makes it possible for portmanteaus to be used in explications (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2016a). The use of portmanteaus results in explications that sound more idiomatic. Not less importantly, the NSM approach proclaims (based on decades of empirical research) that, alongside the universal semantic core, there is a syntactic core that governs the syntax of the primes. The use of this syntax ensures explications are maximally cross-translatable. NSM syntax is expressed through ‘valency options’ such as the following (for the prime HAPPEN):

Fig. 2.1 Semantic primes organized by conceptual category

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something happens something happens to someone something happens to something something happens somewhere (in a place) something happens in something (Goddard 2011: 69).

While the grammatical words in the above valency options (i.e. to, in, a) are not universal primes, they are nonetheless allowed: they are part of the English version of the universal syntax and may have counterparts in other versions of the metalanguage. The basic idea is that all five valency options are expressible in all languages of the world, using similar semantically simple concepts (‘primes’), held together, as the case may be, by language-specific ‘glue’.

2.3.2

Semantic Molecules

Some concepts in need of explication are too complex to be described using only semantic primes. They require the use of intermediary terms that help to build layers of complexity. For example, the concept behind the English word women contains the concept of ‘children’; and the word fun contains the concepts of ‘children’ and ‘laugh’ as an inherent part of its meaning (Goddard 2018c). Concepts like ‘children’ and ‘laugh’ are not semantic primes, but they can be explicated by means of them. NSM terms these concepts semantic molecules—complex concepts that are expressible in semantic primes but are also building blocks for even more complex meanings. Once a semantic molecule is explicated in primes, it can then be used in further explications of more complex concepts—with the symbol [m] being deployed to identify where a molecule has been used. The procedure is illustrated in explications [A] and [B] below, taken from Goddard (2018c: 139, 141; emphasis added): [A] children people of one kind all people are people of this kind for some time when someone is someone of this kind, it is like this: this someone’s body is small this someone can do some things, this someone can’t do many other things because of this, if other people don’t often do good things for this someone, bad things can happen to this someone

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[B] women people of one kind people of this kind are not children [m] people of this kind have bodies of one kind the bodies of people of this kind are like this: inside the body of someone of this kind, there can be for some time a living body of a child [m]

NSM research undertaken to date suggests that some semantic molecules could be universal (e.g. man, woman, child, laugh) or near-universal (e.g. sleep, write, hands, quickly). Other molecules are area-specific (e.g. God, money, tree) or language and culture-specific (e.g. island, snow, plastic). Culture-specific molecules are essential for defining terms in one particular culture but may not exist in other languages.

2.4

Explications

The NSM approach uses semantic primes, and sometimes semantic molecules, as well as NSM syntax, to create reductive paraphrases or ‘explications’ of concepts. Because these explications rely on the conceptual building blocks of NSM, they are cross-translatable and culture-neutral. Explications are instances of deep semantic analysis and can be elaborated for almost any concept in any language, from words for everyday objects to technical or even abstract terms (the primes themselves, however, cannot be defined for reasons explained above). Often NSM is used to define, or ‘explicate’, cultural keywords—words in a languaculture that capture a significant concept pertaining to the everyday life of that culture and are connected to or representative of a number of values, attitudes and beliefs about the world (Levisen and Waters 2017). By fully understanding these cultural keywords, whole worlds of cognition in a languaculture are opened; or, as Wierzbicka (1997: 17) once said: ‘A key word […] is like one loose end which we have managed to find in a tangled ball of wool: by pulling it, we may be able to unravel a whole tangled “ball” of attitudes, values and expectations’. Explications of keywords provide a particularly striking illustration of the strength of the NSM approach when it comes to analysing culture-specific meaning, because the explications describe the exact meaning as well as the attitudes of cultural insiders built into the words and concepts. Happiness is a cultural keyword of English; it is explicated in [C] (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014: 118).

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[C] happiness it can be like this: someone thinks like this: ‘some good things are happening to me now as I want I can do many things now as I want this is good’ because of this, this someone feels something good like people feel at many times when they think like this it is good for this someone if it is like this

This example of a cultural keyword in English is part of a body of research spanning many years during which NSM researchers have investigated the semantics of emotion terms across a range of cultures (see, e.g., Goddard and Ye 2016; Harkins and Wierzbicka 2001; Hasada 2008; Hārābor 2012; Levisen 2012; Wierzbicka 1992, 1999, 2004; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014; Ye 2006) to compare cultural attitudes to emotions and to challenge the previously perceived universality of emotion. That body of research illustrates the need to use cross-translatable terms when defining concepts for non-native speakers. If even terms previously thought to be universal such as happy and sad are not truly cross-translatable, then surely more complex terms such as frustration must be even further from cross-translatability. As NSM research has shown, emotion terms reflect culture-specific cognitive scenarios that are key to understanding the priorities and reactions of native speakers of a language. Of course, cultural keywords and emotion terms barely scratch the surface of the concepts that can be explicated. Extensive research over a number of decades has resulted in explications being proposed across a wide spread of languages. NSM researchers have explored a wide range of nouns (e.g. Wierzbicka 1985; Ye 2017; Bromhead 2018), including kinship terms (e.g. Wierzbicka 2013, 2017; Xue 2016), address forms (e.g. Farese 2018) and ethnopsychological personhood constructs (e.g. Peeters 2019). Emotion terminology and cultural keywords have drawn a lot of attention from within the NSM community (see above), as have speech act verbs (e.g. Wierzbicka 1987; Kim 2008) and evaluational adjectives (e.g. Goddard et al. 2019). NSM researchers have also explored the semantics of grammar (Wierzbicka 1988) and various areas of syntactic variation (e.g. Goddard and Wierzbicka 2009, 2016a). The list is of course incomplete. As of 2018, there were over a thousand publications using the approach (for a continually updated database of bibliographical notices, which also allows to trace explications, scripts, and tables of primes and molecules in the NSM literature, see https://www.nsm-approach.net).

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2.5

21

Semantic Templates

Not every explication needs to be written from scratch. Many words are connected via shared conceptual bases: they belong to the same word class, the same semantic domain, or have otherwise overlapping meanings. Where they have the same semantic structure, they can be said to share a semantic template (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014). Semantic templates can then be articulated within the NSM approach and used to structure explications, providing the bones or the shape of the meaning, to be filled with semantic content. Semantic templates can include many different components depending on the words being explicated, but often include Lexicosyntactic Frames, which provide the general morphosyntactic context for verbs; Prototypical Scenarios, which describe a typical way in which something happens; Manner or Effect, which describes how something is achieved; and Potential Outcome, or what is expected (including someone’s intentions). These four elements, in particular, describe the semantic template for verbs of doing and happening (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2016a), an example of which is given in [D] (ibid.: 218). [D] Someone X is crawling (at this time) someone X is doing something somewhere for some time (at this time) LEXICOSYNTACTIC FRAME because of this, this someone is moving in this place during this time as this someone wants PROTOTYPICAL SCENARIO often when someone does this in a place, it is like this: − this someone thinks like this: ‘I want to be somewhere else in this place after some time’ − this someone can’t move the legs [m] as people often do when they want to be in another place not far from the place where they are at this time

when someone does this, something like this happens many times: MANNER + EFFECT − this someone moves the legs [m] for a short time, at the same time this someone moves some other parts of the body − because of this, many parts of this someone’s body touch the ground [m] in many places during this time − because of this, after this, this someone’s body is not in the place where it was before, it is somewhere near this place if someone does this for some time, after this, this someone can be somewhere not near the place where he/she was before

2.6

POTENTIAL OUTCOME

NSM Versus the NSM Approach

In many NSM publications, there are two different things being referred to with the term ‘NSM’. On one hand, ‘NSM’ refers to the metalanguage itself: a specific set of words and grammar, which has been empirically tested for cross-translatability, and

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which is used to create reductive paraphrases or explications. On the other hand, ‘NSM’ also refers to the NSM approach, i.e. the goals and the principles shared by those who use NSM (the metalanguage) in their research. In this second sense, NSM (the metalanguage) is a tool of researchers working within NSM (the approach), but it is of course not their only tool. NSM researchers use a combination of methods and methodologies to conduct their semantic and pragmatic research, including corpus studies, ethnopragmatic research, as well as a whole host of other elicitation and data collection methods. Throughout the three volumes in this set, the term ‘NSM’ will be used to refer to the metalanguage itself, and we will talk about the NSM ‘approach’ when referring to the principles and ideas that underpin the metalanguage, wherever and however they may be applied.

2.7

Offshoots and Spinoffs

NSM has been fine-tuned over the decades, which has allowed its use in an ever-increasing range of different settings. Wherever the principles of the approach can be applied, researchers are currently working on producing NSM-based tools fit for purpose. Some examples include narrative medicine (Peeters and Marini 2018), language teaching (see volume 3), lexicography (Bullock 2011; Barrios Rodriguez and Sadow in volume 3) and machine learning. Of particular importance in terms of Cliff Goddard’s contribution to NSM are ‘ethnopragmatics’ and Minimal English; they are commented on in this section, and figure prominently in these three volumes.

2.7.1

Ethnopragmatics and Cultural Scripts

As a label, ‘ethnopragmatics’ is nowadays mostly associated with work by Cliff Goddard (see, e.g., Goddard 2006a, 2017; Goddard and Ye 2015; Goddard and Cramer 2017). Ethnopragmatics is arguably the most prominent of the more specialized fields that have originated from within the NSM approach. Goddard (2006a) has defined it in clear contrast to what he describes as the ‘universalist paradigm’ (ibid.: 1) within linguistic pragmatics, exemplified for instance by Grice’s maxims of communication, Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, and Brown and Levinson’s politeness framework. Goddard (ibid.: 18) maintained that the universalist approach underestimates the cultural shaping of speech practices and that its analyses are conducted in terms of alien to the speakers who engage in these practices. To put it differently, while universalist approaches take a so-called etic perspective, thereby failing to account for the unique understandings of cultural insiders, ethnopragmatics adopts an ‘emic’ point of view: the idea is to ‘describe and explain people’s ways of speaking in terms which make sense to the people concerned, i.e. in terms of indigenous values, beliefs and attitudes, social categories, emotions, and so on’ (Goddard and Ye 2015: 66).

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The most important tool within ethnopragmatics is the ‘cultural script’ (see, e.g., Goddard and Wierzbicka 2004, 2007). Cultural scripts had been introduced into the NSM approach in the 1990s (see, for instance, Wierzbicka 1994), well before Goddard introduced the term ‘ethnopragmatics’; he would eventually define cultural scripts as ‘the main mode of representation in the theory of ethnopragmatics, which is the pragmatic sister theory of the NSM approach to semantics’ (Goddard 2008: 18). Cultural scripts use NSM in a way that focuses on capturing the values, attitudes, and behavioural norms shared by the members of a languaculture. In other words, the focus is pragmatic rather than semantic. They provide valuable insights into different cultural communities worldwide. They are able to project language learners and cultural outsiders in general even further into the world of native speakers in that they examine the latter’s internal processing of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and the motivation behind phrase choice. That is, they permit researchers and language learners to examine not only what is said and how it is said, but also why it was said, and why speakers might choose those particular words to convey their intended meaning (Wierzbicka 2006). They also operate on a generalizable level to describe the values of speakers of a languaculture more broadly; however, they do not describe hard and fast rules of interacting or immutable values that are held. Rather, they describe information that members of a languaculture share, whether those members agree and act on that knowledge or not. As Goddard (2013: 252) noted a few years ago, ‘the content which can be captured in cultural scripts forms a kind of interpretive backdrop to everyday interaction and is an essential part of social cognition in the society being described’. Cultural scripts can be used to illustrate the highest level of cultural values—in which case they are often referred to as master scripts (Ye 2004). Such master scripts influence innumerable aspects of the languaculture and represent the shared implicit assumptions or knowledge of social cognition. In Australian English (and other Anglo Englishes), an example of a master script (Goddard 2010: 109) is the core value of ‘personal autonomy’—which can be explicated as follows: [E] An Anglo master script for the core value of ‘personal autonomy’ many people in Australia think like this: when someone wants to do something, it is good if this someone can think like this: ‘I am doing it because I want to do it’

This script guides how speakers of Australian English expect to interact with one another. As a master script, it has a broad range of applications and it influences many—if not all—types of interactions. For example, the script influences the language and expressions used to give an invitation to lunch, or the kinds of phrases and conventions used while arguing, but without wanting to give offence. One of the benefits of cultural scripts is that they can illustrate multiple levels of values and attitudes, right down to the fine-grained interactional details—captured in interaction-level scripts (Sadow 2018). These types of cultural scripts are less

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likely to be shared as individual modes of interaction. However, they exist in social cognition as they are used to express consistent attitudes and are interpreted in the same way across speakers. An example appears in [F]. [F] An Australian interactional script for softening disagreement with partial agreement [in Australia, many people think like this:] when I want to say to another person about something: ‘I know what you think about it, I don’t think the same’ it is good to say something like this at the same time: ‘I know what you think about it, I think the same about some of these things I don’t think the same about all these things’

In between, master-level scripts and interaction-level scripts are mid-level scripts, which have varying degrees of importance and spheres of influence. Cultural scripts are often framed in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as in ‘it is good to think like this’; or ‘can’ and ‘can’t’ as in ‘I can/can’t say…’. Interaction-level and situation-level scripts are often framed in terms of ‘when’ or ‘if’ as in ‘when/if someone says this’. In most cases, cultural scripts are preceded by elements that capture the interpretive backdrop of the contained information, such as ‘many people think like this’, reiterating that the cultural script is representative of shared knowledge rather than an exceptionless rule for behaviour.

2.7.2

Minimal English

Recently (starting with Wierzbicka 2014), NSM researchers have recognized the need for a cross-translatable metalanguage that is more suitable for use by non-experts. This by-product of NSM is known as Minimal English. The goal of Minimal English is to provide non-experts with a framework that assists in clear expression and clear thinking, leading to communication that is truly cross-translatable. This is particularly relevant for international organizations, for anyone working with migrants, and indeed in many other fields. Minimal English adheres to the same principles as NSM when it comes to explicating, i.e. the use of simpler terms and cross-translatable language to express ideas. One of the key differences between the two is that Minimal English makes a more generous use of semantic molecules. Most commonly these are the universal and near-universal molecules, but content-specific molecules that assist readers in the overall comprehension of a text (or even a shorter explication) written in Minimal English can also be used (see Fig. 2.2). For further discussion of Minimal English, see Goddard (2018b) and the introduction to volume 3 in this set.

2 A Brief Introduction to the NSM Approach … hungry, brain, heart river, mountain, desert, sea, island, jungle/forest rain, wind, snow, ice, air flood, storm, drought, earthquake east, west, north, south bird, fish, tree, seeds, grass, mosquitoes, flies, snake dog, cat, horse, cow, pig (camel, buffalo, moose, etc.) family

25 Body Environmental

Biological Biosocial

month, week, clock, hour, second

Times

house, village, city, school, hospital

Places

teacher, doctor, nurse, soldier country, government, capital, border, flag, passport, vote science, the law, health, education, sport meat, rice, wheat, corn (yams, etc.), flour, salt, sugar, sweet knife, key, gun, bomb, medicines paper, iron, metal, glass, leather, wool, cloth Thread, gold, rubber, plastic, oil, coal, petrol car, bicycle, plane, boat, train, road, wheel, wire, engine

Professions ‘Country’ ‘Fields’ Food ‘Tools’ ‘Materials’ Transport

pipe, telephone, television, radio, phone

Technology

read, write, book, photo, newspaper, film

Literacy and media

money, God, war, poison, music

Other: nouns

go/went, eat, drink, take (someone somewhere), burn, buy/pay, learn

Other: verbs Other: adjectives

clean

Fig. 2.2 Examples of non-universal but useful words in Minimal English (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2018: 17)

2.8

Introduction to Volume 1

As previously indicated, Ethnopragmatics and semantic analysis is the first of three volumes collectively called Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication published to celebrate Cliff Goddard’s career and mark his contribution to the NSM approach. Apart from the present introductory chapter, volume 1 consists of two parts that give the volume its name. Part I, called Ethnopragmatics, consists of six chapters; Part II, Semantic analysis, contains another four. Understandably, given the main thrust of Goddard’s work,

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ethnopragmatics (Goddard 2006a) is also an important component of volume 2, while volume 3 focuses on Minimal English (Goddard 2018b). All volumes contain a list of Goddard’s publications to date.

2.8.1

Part I: Ethnopragmatics

In accordance with the principles underlying ethnopragmatics as defined by Goddard, the six chapters in this section all approach interactional practices from an emic perspective. Some are contrastive studies (Wakefield et al. on Cantonese vs. English, Chap. 3; Farese on Italian and English, Chap. 4), while others describe a single languaculture: Persian (Farsi) (Arab, Chap. 5); Australian English (Haugh and Weinglass, Chap. 6; Mullan, Chap. 8); and Vietnamese (Vo, Chap. 7). Two studies incorporate additional or alternative methodologies for analysis, namely interactional pragmatics (Haugh and Weinglass, Chap. 6) and computer-mediated discourse analysis (Mullan), showing how these can also be compatible with an ethnopragmatics approach. One of the chapters (Mullan, Chap. 8) does not employ NSM, but is still thoroughly aware of the usefulness of an ethnopragmatic approach. Part I opens with Chap. 3 by John Wakefield, Winnie Chor and Nikko Lai, who compare the sociopragmatic knowledge that guides Cantonese and Anglo-English speakers when offering death-related condolences to a good friend who has lost someone close. Basing their analysis on responses to a discourse-completion task (DCT), cultural key phrases, and their native-speaker intuitions and experiences, the authors propose contrasting cultural scripts for Cantonese versus English condolence routines. A great amount of overlap was found between the two. However, a key difference was identified in the purpose and focus of the two routines: for Cantonese speakers, the focus is on expressing concern for the health and well-being of the bereaved, while in English the focus is on expressing sorrow for the bereaved’s loss. As Wakefield et al. point out, knowledge of this contrast would help people to respond appropriately to speakers of these two languacultures in this sensitive situation. Chapter 4 is also a contrastive study with a practical application. Here, Gian Marco Farese presents a cultural semantic analysis of the differences in the ways that personal opinions tend to be expressed in English and Italian, namely through understatement and exaggeration, respectively. Following a presentation of these two highly valued concepts as practised in both cultures, Gian Marco Farese uses cultural scripts to highlight these differences, arguing that such clashing communicative styles can lead to cases of miscommunication in cross-cultural interactions. While keen to point out that these cultural scripts do not prescribe ways of speaking, Farese shows how they are useful tools for cross-cultural training for language learners, as well as in preparation for cross-cultural encounters between people with different languacultural backgrounds. Reza Arab examines the highly valued speech practice of hāzer javābi (literally, ‘ready response’) in Persian (Farsi) in Chap. 5. His is one of the few studies to

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apply an ethnopragmatic approach to Persian. Arab illustrates the practice using a number of classical and contemporary examples, showing how it is similar to—yet sufficiently different from—a number of speech practices in other languages, including English. The author presents a historical and cultural contextualization of hāzer javābi, thereby explaining the concept and its cultural significance. Arab then provides a cultural script for the practice, detailing the required three elements of the ‘ready response’: (i) it must have been produced in a much smaller time span than the average person would take to produce the same content; (ii) it should be seen as the best possible response that could be produced in this context; (iii) others must be in a position to appreciate the previous two points and feel good because of it. All of these elements illustrate the importance of being hāzer javāb as well as the ways in this speech practice is perceived. In Chap. 6, Michael Haugh and Lara Weinglass combine semantic and pragmatic approaches to help us understand how ‘taking the piss’ is accomplished in everyday social interaction, and what accomplishing it might mean to (Anglo-) Australians. They demonstrate that not only can semantic explications and cultural scripts address the tendency in pragmatics to label phenomena without sufficient consideration of what such terms actually mean, but they also provide tools for analysing what is going on from the perspective of participants. In addition, the authors propose that pragmatics can inform the formulation of cultural scripts by providing a strong empirical foundation for interactional practices not always accessible through a semantic analysis alone. They suggest that paying attention to metapragmatic uses of expressions like taking the piss in interaction could help reveal what is meant by the expression and what it is doing in that particular situated interaction. The following contribution (Chap. 7) applies ethnopragmatics to the Vietnamese concept of thứ-bậc (‘hierarchy’) in interaction, a valuable contribution since Vietnamese suffers from a lack of such research. Lien-Huong Vo shows how thứbậc is different from its counterparts in other cultures, since it is commonly conceived of in terms of relative age difference (divided into three levels). The author uses proverbs and folk sayings as linguistic evidence for the normative values and communicative virtues underpinning the cultural logic of interactions. She provides cultural scripts for thứ-bậc, its culturally important constituent of politeness lễ-phép (‘respectfulness’), and the norms and skills through which the latter is realized, namely đúng-mực (‘propriety’), khiêm-nhường (‘humility’) and khôn-khéo (‘tact’). Vo points out that, although the concepts presented in the study are not necessarily exclusive to Vietnamese culture, the way Vietnamese people conceive of and enact them in speech practice is specifically Vietnamese. While Chap. 8 does not include cultural scripts or examine particular cultural keywords, the ethnopragmatics approach is evidenced through the analysis of discourse in a cultural context (Goddard 2006a). Here, Kerry Mullan examines the humour in a somewhat subversive and irreverent episode of online joint fictionalization in a local community Facebook group, highlighting many features and practices of humour previously identified as highly valued in (Anglo)Australian culture: co-construction and escalation of absurd ‘fantasy’ humour, banter, mock

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impoliteness, irreverence (cf. also Haugh & Weinglass, this volume), deadpan delivery and jocular mockery (Goddard 2006b). While primarily resembling conversational humour, the online environment offers alternative opportunities for creating humour. A small-scale survey administered to the participants of the thread confirmed the importance of spontaneous humour for them, and how it actively contributes to their sense of belonging in this online community.

2.8.2

Part II: Semantic Analysis

The four chapters in the second part of this volume all deal with ‘semantic analysis’ (Goddard 2011); all but one (Allan, Chap. 9) use the natural semantic metalanguage approach. The authors engage with a varied range of datasets across three languages: three English potential slurring terms (Allan, Chap. 9); ten positive evaluative adjectives in English (Trnavac and Taboada, Chap. 10); a number of verbs of alienable possession in Amharic (Amberber, Chap. 11); and lists in Swedish conversation between friends (Karlsson, Chap. 12). Part II opens with Chap. 9 by Keith Allan, a primarily lexical-semantic analysis (‘with interlaced pragmatic elements’) of three controversial and potential slurring terms: bitch, cunt and nigger. Allan argues that, while the salient senses of these terms are dysphemistic, they can all be used without being intended—or interpreted —as a slur, since, like many similar slurs, they are sometimes adopted by people who are potentially targeted in the insult and subverted to become markers of ingroup solidarity. Therefore, according to Allan, the representation of the terms bitch, cunt and nigger in a lexicon needs to be able to predict the probable intended sense from among the potentially diverse interpretations according to the context of use. Like the author of the preceding chapter, Allan chooses not to employ NSM, but extends an invitation to Cliff Goddard to convert his model lexicon entries for these three terms into NSM explications. Chapter 10 by Radoslava Trnavac and Maite Taboada builds on their previous work with Goddard (Taboada et al. 2017) which looked at the use of rhetorical figures in the expression of negative evaluation. In contrast, this latest study describes a preliminary typology of linguistic devices used for positive evaluation in online news opinion articles and associated comments. Using corpus-assisted analysis, the authors classify some of the resources that play a role in the expression of positive evaluation into phenomena in the lexicogrammar and phenomena that belong in discourse semantics, and compare those resources to the ones deployed for negative evaluation, concluding that positive evaluations do not employ rhetorical figures to the same extent as negative evaluations. Trnavac and Taboada then use NSM to explicate ten evaluative adjectives that carry positive meaning, which fit into the classification of adjectives previously described in Goddard et al. (2019).

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In Chap. 11, Mengistu Amberber examines the semantics of alienable possession in Amharic, responding to a recent proposal by Goddard and Wierzbicka (2016b) that the primitive HAVE cannot capture the meaning of ‘true possession’ (‘ownership’) and that ‘true possession’ or ‘ownership’ is instead expressed by the use of the semantic prime (IT) IS MINE. Amberber compares the (former) semantic prime allə ‘have’ with English HAVE and with Amharic jəne nəw ‘it is mine’. He shows how allə is more multifunctional than (IT) IS MINE, and how it cannot reliably distinguish between true possession and other types of possessive relations, compared with jəne nəw, which is consistently associated with true possession. The chapter also examines the semantics of two sets of verbs that implicate alienable possession: təbəddərə ‘borrow’/abəddərə ‘lend’, and wərrəsə ‘inherit’/awərrəsə ‘bequeath’. The volume closes with Susanna Karlsson’s contribution (Chap. 12): a semantic explication of three structurally different lists found in a corpus of naturally occurring Swedish telephone conversations between friends. Karlsson combines NSM and interactional linguistics to describe the different types of lists in Swedish conversation. These differences are found in the position of the conjunction (one precedes the listed item and one follows it), and in the prosody (one indicates a closed set and one indicates an open set), resulting in three basic types. Karlsson’s NSM explications illustrate how the list formats display the relationship between the listed items differently, and how the speaker draws on these different formats to display an interpersonal stance towards what the interlocutor can know or understand about the list. It is fitting to end the volume with a chapter that demonstrates how natural semantic metalanguage can in fact extend further than semantic analysis: the author shows its clear applicability to interactional variation in syntax and prosody.

2.9

Final Words

The editors would like to thank all the authors for their rich contributions to these three volumes, all of which engage with various aspects of Cliff Goddard’s work (of which there have been many over the years). Together, they advance scholarship through their innovative engagement with natural semantic metalanguage and ethnopragmatics, many incorporating additional methodologies and analytical tools. The editors would also like to thank the authors for their discretion throughout the duration of the project; we very much enjoyed working with them all and with each other. Together we offer this collection of volumes to our good friend and colleague, Cliff, in recognition of everything he has brought to the field, and to all of us professionally and personally.

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Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2009). Contrastive semantics of physical activity verbs: ‘Cutting’ and ‘chopping’ in English, Polish, and Japanese. Language Sciences, 31(1), 60–96. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.langsci.2007.10.002. Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/ 9780199668434.001.0001. Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2016a). Explicating the English lexicon of “doing and happening”. Functions of Language, 23(2), 214–256. https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.23.2.03god. Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2016b). ‘It’s mine!’: Rethinking the conceptual semantics of “possession” through NSM. Language Sciences, 56, 93–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci. 2016.03.002. Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2018). Minimal English and how it can add to Global English. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Minimal English for a global world: Improved communication using fewer words (pp. 5–27). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-625126_2. Goddard, C., & Ye, Z. (2015). Ethnopragmatics. In F. Sharifian (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and culture (pp. 66–84). New York: Routledge. Goddard, C., & Ye, Z. (Eds.). (2016). “Happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.84. Hārābor, A. (2012). An enquiry into Romanian anger-like and happiness-like emotions. Master’s thesis, Australian National University. Harkins, J., & Wierzbicka, A. (Eds.). (2001). Emotions in crosslinguistic perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110880168. Hasada, R. (2008). Two virtuous emotions in Japanese: Nasake/joo and jihi. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Cross-linguistic semantics (pp. 331–347). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10. 1075/slcs.102.20has. Kim, H. (2008). The semantic and pragmatic analysis of South Korean and Australian English apologetic speech acts. Journal of Pragmatics, 40(2), 257–278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. pragma.2007.11.003. Levisen, C. (2012). Cultural semantics and social cognition: A case study on the Danish universe of meaning. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110294651. Levisen, C., & Waters, S. (Eds.). (2017). Cultural keywords in discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.277. Peeters, B. (Ed.). (2006). Semantic primes and universal grammar: Empirical evidence from the Romance languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.81. Peeters, B. (Ed.). (2019). Heart- and soul-like constructs across languages, cultures, and epochs. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315180670. Peeters, B., & Marini, M. G. (2018). Narrative Medicine across languages and cultures: Using Minimal English for increased comparability of patients’ narratives. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Minimal English for a global world: Improved communication using fewer words (pp. 259– 286). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62512-6_11. Sadow, L. (2018). Can cultural scripts be used for teaching interactional norms? Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 41(1), 91–116. https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.17030.sad. Taboada, M., Trnavac, R., & Goddard, C. (2017). On being negative. Corpus Pragmatics, 1(1), 57–76. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-017-0006-y. Wierzbicka, A. (1972). Semantic primitives. Frankfurt: Athenäum. Wierzbicka, A. (1985). Lexicography and conceptual analysis. Ann Arbor: Karoma. Wierzbicka, A. (1987). English speech act verbs. Sydney: Academic Press. Wierzbicka, A. (1988). The semantics of grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/ 10.1075/slcs.18. Wierzbicka, A. (1992). Semantics, culture, and cognition: Universal human concepts in culture-specific configurations. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Wierzbicka, A. (1994). ‘Cultural scripts’: A new approach to the study of cross-cultural communication. In M. Pütz (Ed.), Language contact and language conflict (pp. 69–87). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.71.04wei. Wierzbicka, A. (1997). Understanding cultures through their key words: English, Russian, Polish, German, Japanese. New York: Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (1999). Emotions across languages and cultures: Diversity and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (2004). ‘Happiness’ in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. Daedalus, 133(2), 34–43. https://doi.org/10.1162/001152604323049370. Wierzbicka, A. (2006). English: Meaning and culture. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195174748.001.0001. Wierzbicka, A. (2013). Translatability and the scripting of other peoples’ souls. Australian Journal of Anthropology, 24(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.12018. Wierzbicka, A. (2014). Imprisoned in English: The hazards of English as a default language. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199321490.001.0001. Wierzbicka, A. (2017). The meaning of kinship terms: A developmental and cross-linguistic perspective. In Z. Ye (Ed.), The semantics of nouns (pp. 19–62). Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198736721.003.0002. Xue, W. (2016). The semantics of ‘uncle’-type kinship terms in Cantonese (Guangzhou) and Teochew (Jieyang). Master’s thesis, Australian National University. Ye, Z. (2004). Chinese categorization of interpersonal relationships and the cultural logic of Chinese social interaction: An indigenous perspective. Intercultural Pragmatics, 1(2), 211– 230. https://doi.org/10.1515/iprg.2004.1.2.211. Ye, Z. (2006). Why are there two ‘joy-like’ ‘basic’ emotions in Chinese? Semantic theory and empirical findings. In P. Santangelo & D. Guida (Eds.), Love, hatred and other passions: Questions and themes on emotions in Chinese civilisation (pp. 59–80). Leiden: Brill. Ye, Z. (Ed.). (2017). The semantics of nouns. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10. 1093/oso/9780198736721.001.0001.

Lauren Sadow is a sessional academic at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her main research interests are teaching culture, interactional norms, cultural lexicography and cross-cultural communication. Her Ph.D. thesis created an NSM-based dictionary titled The Australian Dictionary of Invisible Culture for Teachers. Kerry Mullan is Associate Professor and Convenor of Languages in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University. She teaches French language and culture, and sociolinguistics. Her main research interests are cross-cultural communication and the differing interactional styles of French and Australian English speakers. She also researches in the areas of intercultural pragmatics, discourse analysis, language teaching and in humour in social interactions. Her publications include Expressing opinions in French and Australian English discourse: A semantic and interactional analysis (2010) and Cross-culturally speaking, speaking cross-culturally (ed. with B. Peeters and C. Béal, 2013).

Part I

Ethnopragmatics

Chapter 3

Condolences in Cantonese and English: What People Say and Why John C. Wakefield, Winnie Chor and Nikko Lai

Abstract This study used the ethnopragmatics approach to examine the cultural-based knowledge that guides Cantonese and Anglo-English speakers when offering death-related condolences, or what we refer to here as ‘condolence routines’. The data came from discourse completion tasks, the existence of cultural key phrases, and the authors’ native-speaker intuitions. We examined condolences that are offered to a good friend who has recently lost someone close to him or her. We present cultural scripts that are proposed to account for the linguistic contrasts in Cantonese versus English condolence routines. The Cantonese script is entirely new while the English script is revised from a previous study. Based on our analysis, we conclude that the primary contrast is that Anglo-English condolences typically focus on expressing that the condoler feels sad because of the bereaved’s loss, while Cantonese condolences typically focus on telling the bereaved not to be sad and to take care of his-or herself. Knowledge of this contrast in sociopragmatics is not only a meaningful contribution to the study of pragmatics; it is also of practical help to people in regular contact with Cantonese and/or Anglo-English speakers. It can help one to understand how to avoid saying something during a condolence routine that may sound inappropriate, or even insensitive, to speakers of these two languages.




Keywords Ethnopragmatics Condolences culture Cultural scripts Sociopragmatics








Condolence routines
Cantonese

J. C. Wakefield (&) Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic e-mail: john.wakefi[email protected] W. Chor Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] N. Lai The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Mullan et al. (eds.), Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_3

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3.1

J. C. Wakefield et al.

Introduction

The study reported in this chapter examined the sociopragmatic knowledge that guides and influences the offering of death-related condolences in Cantonese and Anglo-English. To do this we adopted the cultural scripts method (Wierzbicka 2003), or what is now referred to as the ethnopragmatics approach (Goddard 2006; Goddard with Ye 2015). Our study produced a cultural script written from the perspective of cultural insiders belonging to the Cantonese languaculture. This was then contrasted with an Anglo-English counterpart that is a revised version of the English script from Wakefield and Itakura (2017), who contrasted English and Japanese condolences. The revisions to the English script are based on our further analysis and on suggestions from the anonymous reviewers. Death-related events are an inevitable part of life. At one time or another, we all face the unfortunate experience of talking to someone whose friend or relative has recently died. If both speaker and hearer belong to the same languaculture, the language used in this situation is guided by a relatively fixed speech routine that has developed over time within the speech community for the purpose of this specific interaction. From here on, a ‘death-related condolence routine’ will be referred to as a ‘condolence routine’. The right words and actions do not come easily when carrying out the sensitive speech act of condoling (Zunin and Zunin 1992; Elwood 2004; Williams 2006), but this does not mean there are no cultural norms involved. People possess cultural knowledge that informs what they should and should not say during a condolence routine. With this in mind, our study is based on the following premises: • There are (un)acceptable things to say when participating in a condolence routine, and there are some things one ought to say; • Different languacultures have different norms and beliefs regarding what is (un) acceptable to say, and what one ought to say; • These culture-specific differences can be captured and articulated in a way that is speaker-oriented, and in terms that are culturally neutral. Condolence routines differ from one speech community to the next. These differences stem from differing beliefs about death, about how people cope with the death of another, and about the perceived role and responsibility of a condoler. As a result, people who mourn someone’s death will expect and appreciate hearing different things depending on their own cultural background and personal beliefs. Therefore, when we are faced with the task of offering condolences to a bereaved from a different languaculture, we cannot assume that an appropriate condolence routine from our own languaculture will necessarily sound appropriate to the bereaved. If we get it wrong, it will at best sound odd, and at worst insensitive or even offensive. The number of studies examining condolence routines is small compared to what has been written about other more commonly occurring speech acts such as complimenting, requesting, refusing, etc. Many authors have looked at cross-cultural contrasts in these speech acts in order to help language learners and cross-cultural communicators perform them appropriately. The relative lack of studies on

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condolences is understandable for several reasons, one of which is that it is comparatively difficult to collect linguistic data. Condolence routines are rare and, because of their sensitive nature, naturally occurring data is difficult to record. In some cultures, even discussing the topic may be taboo (Parkes 2015: 169), which can make it difficult to collect data through interviews. In recent years, however, the internet and social media have made it easier to collect written data, and the use of such data to study condolences is growing. Del Campo Martínez (2012) looked at online corpus data, Kongo and Gyasi (2015) analysed online portal posts, Murad (2013) looked at emails, and Kuang (2015) studied SMS messages. As far as we know, despite the increasing number of relevant studies, no study prior to this one has examined condolences in Cantonese, and none besides Wakefield and Itakura (2017) have examined condolences using the ethnopragmatics approach. Since condoling is encountered less frequently than most other types of speech acts, it may seem less important for language learners and cross-cultural communicators to learn. But its low frequency in real life means that it is harder to learn through natural observation. Its delicate nature also means that it is riskier to learn through trial and error; getting it wrong could have more serious consequences than those related to other types of speech acts. Studies of condolence routines in different cultures are therefore worthwhile, not only for what they can tell us about cultural differences, but also for their practical application. The discussion proceeds as follows. The next section reviews previous studies on offering condolences. Section 3.3 explains our methodology. Section 3.4 presents the data and discusses the key verbal elements included in Cantonese and Anglo-English condolence routines. The cultural values and beliefs that we conclude to be behind this verbal behaviour are then articulated in the form of cultural scripts. Finally, Sect. 3.5 offers a summary and conclusion about the key contrasts between Anglo-English and Cantonese condolence routines.

3.2

Problems with Previous Studies

In our review of the literature on condolences, we noticed two recurring problems. The first is that the ultimate goal of many studies was to describe condolence routines in terms of a list of speech acts or strategies, or in terms of a list of grammatical structures; while such list-like descriptions are helpful and informative, we believe they are inadequate on their own for fully understanding the cultural beliefs and values involved. The second problem we observed is that most authors talk about culture-specific concepts, relationships, and/or scenarios as if they were universal.

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3.2.1

Condolence Routines as a List of Speech Acts or Strategies

Condolences are typically described in terms of the frequency and order of speech act types or strategies, often including a discussion of their functions. Williams (2006), for example, divided the data she collected into three strategies that were used by those who offered condolences to her: acknowledgement of sympathy (e.g. ‘I’m sorry’); question of concern (e.g. ‘Are you okay?’); and inquiry for information (e.g. ‘Was it unexpected?’). Similarly, Elwood (2004) contrasted English and Japanese condolences by listing and calculating the frequency of six different speech acts: acknowledgement of the death; expression of sympathy; offer of assistance; future-oriented remark; expression of concern; other. Lotfollahi and Eslami-Rasekh (2011) later adopted Elwood’s method to analyse the differences between English and Persian condolences. Kongo and Gyasi (2015) referred to their unit of analysis as ‘moves’ rather than ‘speech acts’, but these were very similar to the types of speech acts used by others, e.g. ‘acknowledging of [sic] the news’, ‘expression of sympathy’, etc. Del Campo Martínez (2012) argued that the various speech acts used for condolences can be accounted for by a ‘cognitive model of condolences’, which she proposed as follows: (ibid.: 15): • • • • •

It is manifest to A that B is involved in a negative situation. A is unable to change the situation to B’s benefit. A feels sympathy about B’s misfortune. A makes this feeling manifest to B. B may accept A’s expression of sympathy.

Del Campo Martínez (2012) then discussed the pairing of linguistic constructions (declarative, imperative, and interrogative) with expressions of this model’s elements. We think that discussing condolences in terms of linguistic constructions like this abstracts away from the culture-based values and beliefs that determine what a condoler can and should say. Morady Moghaddam (2013) abstracted away even further by collecting and analysing the use of interjections and intensifiers in condolence routines, based on which she then contrasted English and Persian condolences. It is hard for us to see how knowing the types and frequency of these types of grammatical elements could help cultural outsiders understand condolences from the perspective of cultural insiders. We think an analysis of speech acts is more informative than an analysis of grammatical structures, but regardless, the ultimate object of study should be the culture-specific beliefs that are the underlying reason for the linguistic facts. The speech acts used in condolence routines can be thought of as pragmemes in the sense of Capone (2010: 5), who said that pragmemes are ‘speech acts in context’ and are ‘utterance(s) associated with a goal’. We agree with Capone’s assertion that pragmemes are ‘sensitive to social embedding’ (ibid.), and therefore assume that the functions of speech acts are determined not only by the social

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context of a give speech routine, but also by the languaculture at large within which the routine is embedded. Analysing speech acts should therefore not be seen as a research goal in its own right, but rather as a means of understanding the culture-specific values and beliefs that lie behind the observed verbal behaviour. Samavarchi and Allami’s (2012) stated goal of creating a taxonomy of the forms used for offering condolences is therefore not, in our view, the correct approach. Taxonomies provide examples of what to say, but they do not adequately (if at all) explain why people say what they say, nor do they explain what sorts of things would be inappropriate to say. Accurately describing the cultural values that guide condolers’ verbal behaviour is the only way that cultural outsiders can truly understand why condolers say what they do and is the only way that cross-cultural comparisons can be meaningfully done. An important element of this approach is the need to recognize which aspects of a given framework and analysis are culture-specific, and then avoid treating them as if they are universal.

3.2.2

Mistaken Assumptions About Universality

Some authors examined condolence routines using theoretical frameworks that are assumed by their creators and proponents to be universal in nature. Williams (2006) and Meiners (2013, 2017), for example, adopted the theoretical framework of linguistic politeness, which includes an independence-solidarity scale, and looks at the variables of power- and social-distance between speakers and hearers. This theory also considers whether statements support or threaten positive and negative face, and the degrees of risk involved in performing specific speech acts in specific contexts. We do not think this theory works for making valid cross-cultural comparisons because concepts such as independence-solidarity, power distance, and social distance are not possible to discuss and analyse in ways that are universal. Politeness theory is proposed to be a universal theory, but Goddard with Ye (2015: 81, note 1) explained that incorporating the concepts of positive and negative face are problematic for contrastive studies: “Ironically ‘face’ started its career as a loan translation from Chinese… but in Politeness Theory the concept of ‘negative face’ has morphed into a classically Anglo meme, ‘the desire to be free from imposition’”. In addition, it cannot be assumed that the degree (and type) of risk involved with using a particular kind of utterance in a particular situation is the same across cultures. The fact that Williams’ (2006) study involved a case of suicide also adds another potential cross-cultural difference in what might be said to a bereaved by a condoler. The power- and-social distance variables that Williams (2006) looked at do of course affect the verbal behaviour used in a condolence routine, but such variables are hard to contrast cross-culturally because it is extremely difficult to manipulate them in the same way across cultures. The parent–child and employer–employee relationships, for example, are very different within different languacultures. We did our best to control for this by using a similar relationship between the speaker and

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hearer in both of our scenarios: ‘a good friend’ in English, and一個好朋友 (‘a good friend’) in Cantonese. We recognize and readily admit that the concept of friendship is different between these two cultures. However, this is true of all relationships, so even with a speech routine like condoling, which exists in all cultures, it is probably impossible to design a cross-cultural contrast with social variables that are identical between two cultures. All that researchers can do is try to make the social variables as similar as possible. While we tried to control for any cross-cultural differences in the relationships between the speaker/condoler and the hearer/bereaved, we did use different relationships between the bereaved and the deceased in an attempt to see how this will affect what a condoler says. One scenario relates to the death of the bereaved’s mother, and the other to the death of an uncle. One could talk about these different relationships in terms of power- and social-distance, but that fails to account for the unique ways in which Anglo-English and Cantonese culture view these relationships. In addition, the Cantonese kinship term 叔叔 (‘uncle’ [lit.: father’s younger brother]) was used, which is one of several different types of relations that have been lexicalized in Cantonese to distinguish where an uncle lies with the family social hierarchy, based on whether they are on the paternal or maternal side of the family, and based on their age in relation to the parent. In addition, the scenario of the mother states that the condoler knew her, while in the scenario of the uncle, he is unknown to the condoler. Rather than seeing these as power- and social-distance variables that can be contrasted between these two cultures, we see our study as a test of if (and if so how) an Anglo-English condolence routine changes if the deceased is a ‘known mother of the bereaved’ versus an ‘unknown uncle’. Likewise, it was a test of if (and if so how) a Cantonese condolence routine changes if the deceased is a ‘known mother of the bereaved’ versus an ‘unknown father’s younger brother’.1 We do not assume that these relationships are seen in the same way by members of both languacultures, and we do not see them in terms of the abstract concept of ‘distance’, which we do not believe can be defined and controlled for in a way that could be meaningfully contrasted cross-culturally. Nevertheless, we do feel that there is something along the lines of psychological closeness that is universal, and that a contrast in closeness exists in both cultures between people and their mothers vs. their uncles. The cognitive model shown above that was proposed by Del Campo Martínez (2012: 22) was admittedly ‘preliminary’ and ‘incomplete’, but it appeared to be an attempt at working towards a universal explanation for condolences, including those that are not death-related. If that is indeed the case, we would argue that this is an unachievable goal. Condolences can be given for a wide variety of Even though there are five different lexical terms in Cantonese representing different types of uncles, the second and third author do not believe that a different type of uncle would inherently influence how the bereaved feels about an uncle’s death. They feel it is the psychological relationship that matters, and they would predict that under normal circumstances a Hong Kong Cantonese condoler’s speech would not be influenced by which type of the condoler’s uncles has died.

1

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culture-specific reasons. Different types of ‘negative situations’ will be viewed differently cross-culturally, and different cultures may or may not feel it is appropriate to express sympathy the same way for two different types of ‘negative situations’. Meiners (2013, 2017), for example, found that her Spanish-speaking and English-speaking participants offered similar forms of condolences about the death of an uncle, but offered different types in relation to the hearer having a headache. Another non-universal aspect of Del Campo Martínez’s (2012) cognitive model is the phrase ‘expression of sympathy’, because the term sympathy is not culturally neutral (Gladkova 2010), nor are the ways of expressing something along the lines of sympathy. We therefore assume that cultural factors would influence the second-to-last line of her model, i.e. the way in which someone from a given culture ‘makes this feeling manifest to’ the hearer. For example, Nakajima (2002) found that her Japanese-speaking participants’ use of silence when expressing what she referred to as empathy/sympathy was judged by her English-speaking participants to be problematic and a source of misunderstanding. She also found that the English speakers showed a positive correlation between the number of words used and the seriousness of the situation, while there was a negative correlation for the Japanese speakers. To understand the expression of condolences within a given speech community, we believe that carefully subdividing this speech routine into situation-based types can work towards isolating the effects of different variables. Thus, condoling someone who has lost a job will no doubt be different in all cultures from condoling someone whose child has just died, but there may be fewer differences in some cultures than in others. Even among death-related routines, there will be cultural contrasts in how a condolence routine should be carried out for differing causes of death, differing relationships, etc. We therefore argue that cross-cultural contrasts in condoling should, to the extent possible, examine comparable types of death events and interpersonal relationships among the deceased, the bereaved, and the condoler. Morady Moghaddam (2013) collected condolence routines from 50 movies, half English and half Persian. She said that using movies made ‘the comparison easier and more similar’ (ibid.: 115). We agree that, because of the nature of condolence routines, this way of collecting data is easier than collecting naturally occurring data. However, we do not see this as producing data that is more similar across cultures than data collected by other, more controlled means; there is no limit to the types of contexts and situations that are created for movies. According to Morady Moghaddam (2013: 109), the following four elements affect what speakers and hearers say during a condolence routine: 1. 2. 3. 4.

The bereaved’s relationship to the deceased; The speaker’s relationship with the bereaved; The speaker’s relationship to the deceased; What emotions the bereaved is experiencing.

While these elements do indeed affect what is said, the effect that each has on a condolence routine will vary from culture to culture. In our own study, we include

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elements one and three together (i.e. element one is mother vs uncle; element three is known vs unknown), and our data shows that varying these relationships changes how a condolence routine proceeds in both Cantonese and Anglo-English. We tried to control for element two by stating a similar relationship (i.e. ‘a good friend’) between the speaker and the bereaved for both of our scenarios in both English and in Cantonese. We believe element four would be better worded as ‘emotions that the bereaved is [perceived to be] experiencing’; again, there are innumerable culturally based factors that will influence how a condoler perceives the experience of a bereaved.

3.3 3.3.1

Methodology The Ethnopragmatics Approach

Although Elwood’s (2004) focus was on exemplifying what is said rather than why, she did speculate briefly on the cultural beliefs that may lie behind some of the differences she found between English and Japanese condolence routines. In contrast, our study’s primary focus is on the cultural values and beliefs, and this is why we adopted the ethnopragmatics approach (Goddard 2006; Goddard with Ye 2015), which examines linguistic evidence in order to discover the culture-specific values and beliefs of a given speech community, or languaculture. These values and beliefs are then articulated in the form of speaker-oriented cultural scripts that are proposed to be the cause of the speech community’s unique forms of verbal and non-verbal behaviour—in our case, the verbal behaviour used in condolence routines. All types of linguistic data relating to whichever culture-specific values one wishes to examine can be used as a form of evidence for developing cultural scripts. For the present study, we collected data from a discourse completion task (DCT), examined cultural key phrases, and drew upon the native-speaker intuitions, and experiences of the authors. Related to this final point, Goddard with Ye (2015: 66) said the ethnopragmatics approach ‘also takes heed of the ‘soft data’ of anecdotal accounts, life writing, etc. of cultural insiders themselves’. It is worth noting that while linguistic data are used as evidence for developing cultural scripts, the resulting scripts are then proposed to explain the existence of the data used to create them. Any mismatch between data and scripts is dealt with by modifying the scripts, which may be required after re-evaluation of the linguistic data and/or collection of additional material. The scripts presented in this chapter represent the current version of our proposal regarding the cultural values under discussion. Other linguists and/or native speakers of English or Cantonese are encouraged to propose amendments (additions, modifications) of the scripts. Non-specialist native speakers are qualified to comment on the scripts because they are written in simple terms, from the perspective of cultural insiders, using maximally universal, culturally neutral semantic primes. The semantic primes and their

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combinatorial grammar are referred to as the natural semantic metalanguage (for details, see Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard 2008, 2011).

3.3.2

Data and Analysis

The Cantonese DCT was distributed to 34 native-Cantonese speaking respondents (20 male; 14 female) aged between 18 and 23. All were university students in Hong Kong. As far as we know, this study is the first to collect data relating to Cantonese condolences. The English data, taken from Wakefield and Itakura (2017), are from a group of 22 native speakers of Anglo-English. The English-speaking participants were all university students (10 male; 12 female) who spoke some variety of standard Anglo-English as their first language. Their ages ranged between 19 and 25. They were from Hong Kong (9); USA (6); UK (4); Australia (1); and New Zealand (1). All had attended English-medium schools and used English as their main language of communication among friends at least from primary school onward. In Hong Kong, the university-aged native-English-speaking community includes speakers of different varieties of Anglo-English, with American, British, and Australian being the most common. It is worth noting that the results of the English data collected by Wakefield and Itakura were very similar to the American English data described in Elwood (2004) in relation to the death of a grandmother, indicating that Anglo-English culture is quite similar worldwide regarding the pragmatic knowledge that guides what people say when performing condolence routines. The two DCT scenarios used for this study were taken from Wakefield and Itakura (2017) and translated as directly as possible from English into Cantonese. They are as follows: Situation 1:—個好朋友同你講佢嘅叔叔兩日前死咗。你從未見過你朋友嘅叔 叔,而你朋友之前從來冇跟你提及過呢位叔叔。你會如何回應呢?請以廣東話 (粵語)回答。 ‘A good friend tells you that his/her uncle died two days ago. You have never met your friend’s uncle, and your friend has never said anything to you about this uncle before. You then say: …’ Situation 2: 你見到一個幾日冇見嘅好朋友。你問起佢最近點,佢話:「唔係幾 好。我媽媽啱啱過咗身。」你同佢媽媽有傾過幾次計,佢亦對你好有善。你 會如何回應呢?請以廣東話(粵語)回答。 You see a good friend who you haven’t seen for a few days. You ask how he/she is doing and he/she says, ‘Not very well. My mother just passed away.’ You had seen and spoken to your friend’s mother a few times and she was very nice to you. You say: The contrasting variables between the two scenarios were explained in Sect. 3.2.2.

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3.4

Cultural Scripts for Death-Related Condolence Routines

In this section, we first describe the data in terms of the use and frequency of a number of speech acts, or pragmemes in the sense of Capone (2010: 5). The types of pragmemes we chose for labelling the data come from Elwood (2004) and Williams (2006), plus a new type that we call ‘speaking for the deceased’. A cultural script related to Cantonese condolences is then proposed in Sect. 3.4.1, based on our conclusions about the data and guided by the native-speaker intuitions of the second and third author. Following that, Sect. 3.4.2 presents a revised version of Wakefield and Itakura’s (2017) script related to Anglo-English condolence routines. Table 3.1 lists the seven types of pragmemes that were used for categorizing the data. The four columns in the middle show the percentage of English and Cantonese participants who used a given pragmeme in their condolence routines for both the uncle scenario (U) and the mother scenario (M). The far-left column lists the pragmemes in italics and provides English examples from the data in parentheses. The far-right column gives examples from the Cantonese data, with English translations in parentheses. The most obvious contrasts are seen in the much greater use of expressions of sympathy by English speakers and in the exclusive use of future-oriented remarks and speaking for the deceased by Cantonese speakers. While these quantitative results are interesting and informative, a qualitative discussion and analysis of each pragmeme are essential for a correct understanding of the values and beliefs that underpin these differences; the native-speaker intuition of the authors contributes to this qualitative analysis, which immediately follows the table. • Pragmeme 1: Interjection of negative emotion It is beyond the scope of this study to describe every interjection found in the data. Something worth noting about them in general, however, is the similarity of their use in both languages. Every time an interjection of negative emotion was used, it initiated the act of condoling. We conclude that its function is to express the condoler’s sense of surprise and of feeling bad about the news, as well as to set the mood for expressing what the condoler says next. In line with this, Wierzbicka (2003: 243) said that interjections: typically combine with other utterances into larger wholes, and since their illocutionary force must be compatible with that of the co-utterance, they often serve as important clues identifying the illocutionary force of the combined utterance as a whole.

Wierzbicka also said interjections have ‘their own illocutionary force, which can be described in terms of components such as “I feel X”…’ (ibid.). As such, the interjections in the data are assumed to be meaningful expressions of emotion that are uttered immediately after hearing about the death of the bereaved’s loved one.

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Table 3.1 Percentage of participants who used a given type of pragmeme in their condolences Speech act/pragmeme (English examples)

English

Cantonese

U (%)

M (%)

U (%)

M (%)

Cantonese examples

Interjections of negative emotion (‘Oh no.’; ‘Oh my God.’; ‘Wow.’)

50

27

26

35

“哎啊!” (‘Oh no!’); “唉。” (‘Aw.’); “吓?” (‘Huh?’)

Expression of sympathy (‘I’m so sorry.’; ‘I’m very sorry to hear about your loss.’)

95

86

3

12

“我都替你感到傷心。” (‘I feel sad for you.’); “佢走咗我都傷心。” (‘I’m also sad that she passed.’)

Offer of assistance (‘Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help.’; ‘You know where I am if you need to talk.’)

32

82

6

29

“你想可以同我傾下架!” (‘If you want to, you can talk to me!’); “有咩可以搵 我幫手。” (‘If there’s anything, you can come to me for help.’)

Expression/question of concern (‘Are you okay?’; ‘How are you feeling?’; ‘I hope you’re doing okay.’)

56

27

26

3

“你依家覺得點?” (‘How do you feel now?’); “依家心情點?” (‘How is your mood?’)

Related question (‘Were you close with your uncle?’; ‘Were you close to him?’)

18

5

18

21

“發生咩事?” (‘What happened?’); “去 得安唔安落?” (‘Did he pass peacefully?’); “啲身後事攪成點?” (‘How are the post-death arrangements going?’)

Future-oriented remark (no examples)

0

0

65

44

“ 哀順變。” (fixed expression: ‘restrain your grief; accept the change’); “唔好唔開心啦。” (‘Don’t be sad.’)

Speaking for the deceased (no examples)

0

0

9

12

“你叔叔都唔想你因為佢唔開心。” (‘Your uncle doesn’t want you to be sad because of him.’); “你啊媽都唔想 你咁唔開心。” (‘Your mom doesn’t want you to be so sad.’)

U uncle; M mother

Goddard (2014: 58) defined one of the interjections found in the Cantonese data as in [A]: [A] 哎啊!(Ai1jaa3!) I I I I

think like this: ‘something is happening’ didn’t think before that it will be like this don’t want it to be like this feel something bad because of this

If we take the ‘something is happening’ to refer to the act of the bereaved saying someone has died, then the meaning expressed by this interjection is an appropriate response to hearing the news of someone’s death. We believe this meaning is related to what is expressed by English’s ‘Oh no!’, which was an interjection of negative emotion found in our English data. Another pair of counterparts seen in the data were English’s ‘What?!’ and the similarly meaning “吓!” of Cantonese. These each express both a sense of surprise and a sense that this information is bad.

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It is not the interjections themselves that show a distinction between English and Cantonese condolences, but rather what follows them: in English, an interjection of negative emotion is usually followed by an expression of sympathy (e.g. ‘I’m (so) sorry’); in stark contrast, only one of the Cantonese participants followed an interjection with an expression of sympathy. The most frequent type of pragmeme to follow an interjection in Cantonese was future-oriented remarks, which are discussed below. We conclude that this contrast between the expressions of sympathy versus future-oriented remarks is the key difference between English and Cantonese condolence routines. • Pragmeme 2: Expression of sympathy Few of the Cantonese participants used an expression of sympathy. This contrasts with English condolences that virtually always included some version of ‘I’m (so/very) sorry’, which expresses the older sense of the word sorry meaning ‘sorrowful’, rather than using it to apologize. Interestingly, Cantonese responses to situation two included two tokens of “唔好意思啊” ‘I’m sorry’ and one of “對唔住 啊” ‘I’m sorry’, both of which translate into English as the apologetic version of ‘I’m sorry’. Two of these were followed by statements indicating that the speaker was sorry for bringing up a sad topic, presumably because situation two states that the speaker started the conversation by asking how the bereaved is doing. Apparently, these three participants felt that this question caused the bereaved to talk about his/her mother’s death and therefore warranted an apology. These apologies did not seem very natural to the second and third author, and we therefore did not judge such apologies to be a core component of Cantonese condolence routines, and as such do not account for them in our cultural script.2 • Pragmeme 3: Offer of assistance For both languages, there were more offers of assistance in the scenario related to the deceased mother than the one related to the deceased uncle. We were not surprised by this. Presumably, a condoler will assume that a bereaved person feels a greater sense of loss and sadness when losing a mother than when losing an uncle (under normal circumstances) and the bereaved will therefore be more likely to need help. This is related to how close the bereaved is assumed to have been with the deceased (see Sect. 3.4.1 for a discussion of closeness). Although this contrast between the mother and uncle scenarios was seen in both the English and Cantonese data, the overall number of offers of assistance was greater for English than for Cantonese. Whether or not this is a meaningful contrast is left for future research.

2

There has been a great deal of contact with English in Hong Kong. It is therefore possible that these uses of ‘I’m sorry’ found in the Cantonese data are an influence from English condolences based on a misinterpretation of it as an apology rather than an expression of sorrow.

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• Pragmeme 4: Expression/question of concern In the Cantonese data, all of these were questions, but in the English data they were a mix of both questions and expressions (e.g. both ‘Are you okay?’ and ‘I hope you’re doing okay’). Here again, the Cantonese data is somewhat comparable to the English data. In both cases the expressions/questions of concern appeared more often in the scenario related to the death of the uncle. At first, this may seem odd, but it makes sense that a person’s relationship to an uncle will normally be less clear, and this would therefore elicit an assessment of how the bereaved is doing. This is presumably done to determine how the condolence routine should proceed. • Pragmeme 5: Related question A related question refers to any question about the deceased, about the death event, or about funeral proceedings. We interpreted the asking of a related question as having the function of eliciting information that is relevant to determining how the condolence routine ought to proceed. One weakness of using a DCT to collect data is that these questions are not answered and there is therefore no data to verify how the answers to these questions influence how a condoler proceeds with the rest of the routine. Nevertheless, the types of questions asked can be seen as an indicator of what types of information are considered culturally important. In the English data related to the death of the uncle (i.e. situation one), each token of a related question related to whether the bereaved was close to the uncle. No English participant asked this question about the mother; presumably this is because a high degree of closeness can be assumed. The one token of a related question in the English data in relation to the death of the mother asked what happened. These questions seem to indicate that if the bereaved was closer to the deceased, or if the death was unexpected, then the degree of one’s expression of sorrow ought to increase. In the Cantonese data, four of the seven questions about the death of the uncle asked something along the lines of how close the bereaved was to him, indicating that closeness is also important information for Cantonese condolence routines, but we believe this is so that the speaker will know how strongly to offer future-oriented remarks, rather than for knowing how strongly to express one’s sorrow. As in the English data, and assumedly for the same reason, nobody asked about the bereaved’s closeness to the mother. A fully representative sampling of the questions about the uncle and mother that were not about closeness is as follows: “幾時嘅事?” ‘When did this happen?’, “點解咁突然嘅?” ‘Why so sudden?’, “發生咗咩事?” ‘What happened?’, “去得安 唔安樂?” ‘Did he go peacefully?’, and “啲身後事攪成點?” ‘How are the funeral [lit.: post-life] arrangements coming along?’. This indicates that the nature of the death is important in Cantonese culture, as is knowing whether the often very elaborate Cantonese funeral arrangements are going smoothly (see Sect. 3.4.2). A violent or unexpected death, or problems in making sure the deceased passes smoothly on to the next phase of existence would likely cause the bereaved to be

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especially sad and troubled and would indicate that more emphatic future-oriented remarks would be appropriate in the offering of condolences. • Pragmeme 6: Future-oriented remark There is a stark contrast here between English and Cantonese, with none of the English speakers using a future-oriented remark for either situation. A future-oriented remark is typically an imperative that tells the bereaved not to be sad, or to take care of him-or herself. This is referred to as a future-oriented remark because it expresses a desired change of state from how the bereaved is now to how the bereaved should become in the future (i.e. after now). One participant wrote: “你唔好咁傷心。最緊要你要好好生活 。” ‘Don’t be so heartbroken. The most important thing is for you to be [lit.: live] well’. It is worth noting here also that none of Elwood’s (2004) 25 American English-speaking university student participants included any future-oriented remarks. In contrast, 44% of her 25 Japanese participants did include this pragmeme, causing Elwood to conclude that this is one of the key differences between English and Japanese condolences. She said (ibid.: 68) that it ‘is likely that Americans feel that [it] is callous to ask a bereaved person to put aside their sorrow while Japanese may feel that it’s kind to encourage those who are grieving to look ahead’. We conclude something similar about the contrast between English and Cantonese condolences. • Pragmeme 7: Speaking for the deceased In each case where the pragmeme speaking for the deceased appeared, it was used as an indirect way of expressing a future-oriented remark. We therefore conclude that this pragmeme has the same function as a future-oriented remark. As such, it is not surprising that this pragmeme also did not appear in the English data. More is said about speaking for the deceased in Sect. 3.4.2.

3.4.1

A Close Person

Based on the data, we concluded that the bereaved’s degree of closeness to the deceased influences condolence routines in both English and Cantonese. To represent this concept, we adopt the term close and use the explication in [B] of close person, some of which is adapted from a portion of Wierzbicka’s (1996: 50–52) explication of friend and some of which was suggested by an anonymous reviewer. See Goddard (2016) for details of the semantic molecule know included in the explication. [B] close person I know [m] this someone well this someone knows [m] me well when I am with this someone, I feel something good when I think about this someone, I feel something good I think this someone feels the same

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We tentatively propose that ‘close person’ is a concept that works for both Cantonese and English speakers. The Cantonese adjective 親 ‘close’ is used to describe the relationship between two people and has a meaning that is closely related the meaning of the English word close. We think that the Cantonese phrase 同一個人親 ‘to be close with someone’ entails the meaning of ‘close person’ as defined above. Traditionally 親 only referred to kin relations and was always considered to be an integral part of the relationship, regardless of how the two kin felt about each other. However, its meaning appears to have changed for most Hong Kong Cantonese speakers, and a sentence like this seems to be acceptable for most people: 佢雖然係我大佬, 但係其實大家都唔係好親嘅啫 ‘Even though he’s my (older) brother, we actually aren’t very close (親)’. In the data, one participant asked the question同你親唔親? ‘Was (your uncle) close (親) with you?’. Again, this implies an understanding that it is possible to be (or not to be) 親 with an uncle. In addition to this, 親is starting to be used to describe non-kin relations. The four Cantonese questions that asked about the bereaved’s relationship with the uncle included the following: 好感情 ‘good feelings’ towards each other; 好關 係 ‘good relationship’ with each other; 親 ‘close’ with each other; and a borrowing of the English word close. These either entail the meaning of ‘close’ or they refer to the good feelings that are part of the definition given for close person above. We think that 親 is the most direct counterpart to close and therefore use close and 親 as semantic molecules in our cultural scripts in the following two sections. We do not mean to imply that they are equivalents, but rather that they have an overlapping semantic component as explicated for ‘close’ above, and that this component is what is referred to in condolence routines. The concept ‘close’/親 can be modified as ‘very close’/好親 by changing well and good to very well and very good in the first four lines of the explication of close person above.

3.4.2

Cantonese

The fixed Chinese expression 哀順變 ‘restrain your grief; accept the change’ is a cultural key phrase used in Cantonese condolence routines (as well as other Chinese dialects). If a Cantonese speaker is asked what one should say when offering death-related condolences, this expression would always be considered appropriate, and the most readily recommended. It is important to note that it is not an expression of sympathy. In essence, it tells the bereaved not to be too sad and to accept the death of the loved one. Other common future-oriented remarks are in the form of imperatives that tell the bereaved: “唔好唔開心啦!” ‘Don’t be sad!’; “你唔 好咁傷心” ‘Don’t be so broken-hearted’. These types of suggestions are sometimes indirectly conveyed to the bereaved on behalf of the deceased: “你阿媽都唔想你 咁唔開心” ‘Your mom doesn’t want you to be so sad’. The implication of this is

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that the primary role of a condoler is to encourage the bereaved not to be so overwhelmed by grief that he or she cannot function or take care of his-or herself. In Cantonese culture, telling the bereaved not to be sad is interpreted as an expression of concern. In Anglo-English culture, in contrast, it would likely seem insensitive to imply that one should (and could) so quickly work towards not feeling grieved about the death. However, when people grieve too much for too long a period of time, it would be considered acceptable in Anglo-English culture for very close friends or relatives to tell mourners that they should now work to get over their grief and take care of themselves, and it would be common to speak on behalf of the dead in such cases, though this would normally be done in the conditional: e.g. ‘Your mom would want you to get on with your life’. It appears that a key contrast is that in Cantonese culture, it is assumed that mourners will immediately be overwhelmed with grief to the point that condolers believe they should use these kinds of future-oriented remarks directly after the death event. The contrast discussed in this chapter is therefore one that relates only to what is said a very short time after the death event has occurred. At this time, future-oriented remarks are appropriate in Cantonese, but not in English. Evidence for the assumption that mourners are overwhelmed with grief comes from the traditional methods of mourning in Cantonese culture. The first and third authors have attended several traditional funerals where the surviving family members participate in professionally conducted, elaborate funeral rites that last three days and two nights, during which they eat limited amounts of food, get limited amounts of sleep, and cry and wail repeatedly (cf. Watson 2004). Most funerals are not this rigorous today, and even what we have described here is less so than funerals of the past. Nevertheless, it is understandable based on this background that Cantonese culture assumes the health of surviving family members will inevitably suffer tremendously, and that one should, therefore, exhort a bereaved person not to be so sad and to take care of one’s self. We believe this historical background is the source of the future-oriented remarks. Speaking for the deceased is often used as a means of making these future-oriented remarks. These remarks are worded in a way that implies the deceased is still alive—something that is understandable in Cantonese culture. Tien (2017: 187) proposed the cultural script in [C] to express what he referred to as a Chinese folk attitude of people continuing to live after they die: [C] People go on living when they pass away many people think like this when someone dies it can be like this: this someone is alive this someone is not in this place

Related to this, Tseng (2017: 260) referred to the Chinese saying 往生, which is said to refer to someone having died, but it literally means ‘to head towards rebirth’.

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Tseng said that ‘[a]lthough death is universally regarded as the end of a life journey, it is conceptualized in Chinese culture as the beginning of a new journey as well’ (ibid.), and thus Chinese believe, or are culturally guided to speak as if, the deceased is still living. Based on the data and our analysis, we conclude that a typical Cantonese speaker will be guided by the following beliefs when offering condolences: 1. A condoler should assume that the bereaved is overwhelmed with grief and that this can be bad for his or her wellbeing and health. 2. Because of 1, a condoler ought to tell the bereaved not to be sad and to accept what has happened. These things are said to a greater or lesser degree in relation to the amount of grief. 3. The amount of grief is assumed to be positively correlated with: the bereaved’s degree of closeness to the deceased; the degree to which the death was unexpected or unnatural; the degree to which funeral proceedings are not proceeding smoothly. A condoler can, therefore, ask questions about these things (as necessary and as appropriate) to assess the degree of grief. 4. If the condoler knew the deceased, it is good to say something nice about them. 5. If the condoler is close with the bereaved, and if the bereaved is assumed to be especially sad, it is good to offer to help the bereaved, to accompany the bereaved, or to speak with the bereaved. The script in [D] is our proposal for a cultural script, written from the perspective of a condoler, that guides the offering of death-related condolences in Cantonese. We did not discuss item 4 as a pragmeme above, but examples of complimenting the deceased were seen in both Cantonese and English. Tien (2017: 184) quoted the Chinese saying 死者為大 ‘The deceased are held in high esteem’, and said it implies that deceased relatives in Chinese culture have an elevated status in the family social hierarchy. This, in addition to having known them in life, can make a condoler feel they should say good things about the deceased. The well-known English expression Don’t speak ill of the dead also likely represents a cultural artefact that combines with a condoler having known the deceased and causes them to make complimentary remarks. Because we saw compliments directed towards the deceased in both sets of data, and because we believe this is a natural and common component of condolence routines based on our own experiences, we include this as a component of both scripts. The portions not shown in italics are common between the Cantonese script and its English counterpart shown in [E] in Sect. 3.4.3; the portions shown in italics are unique to each script, illustrating how the two languacultures contrast.

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[D] Cantonese script on offering condolences:

Most of this script overlaps with the script for English condolences in [E]. This may seem like a strong claim, but it should not be too surprising that similar beliefs and speech acts exist in relation to the universal experience of death, even for unrelated languages. The unique part of the Cantonese script is seen in (b) and in the last portion of (c). (b) expresses a Cantonese speaker’s focus on the health and wellbeing of the bereaved, and on what the condoler feels he or she ought to say accordingly. (c) represents the types of things that may increase the degree of grief, and that would therefore cause a condoler to emphasize the key element of the condolence routine, which in the case of Cantonese culture would be an increased expression of concern for the bereaved, i.e. (b). Factors that may increase the degree of grief are: closeness to the deceased; the degree to which the death was expected; and how the funeral arrangements are proceeding. English speakers consider the first two of these to correlate with the degree of grief, but under normal

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circumstances do not typically express concern for how funeral arrangements are proceeding. This is therefore not included in component (c) of script [E] below. We believe it should be included as part of component (c) in [D] because, in traditional Cantonese culture, proper, smooth, and complete post-death arrangements are seen as essential to helping deceased people move on to the next stage of their existence. If these things are not done properly, it can result in an unhappy and angry spirit that can potentially cause serious problems for the surviving family members. Watson (2004: 326) said the following about this: During the funeral there is a preoccupation with complex ritual forms, with performing the rites properly so that the spirit of the recently dead will not become a threat to the living. Everyone dies and every death produces a potentially dangerous spirit. Funeral rites are concerned with converting this volatile spirit into a tamed and domesticated ancestor.

Many Hong Kong Cantonese no longer hold these beliefs strongly, if at all, but the offering of condolences within the speech community at large still appears to include an implicit expression of a concern for how the ‘funeral rites’ are proceeding, even among those who do not believe this can potentially cause great harm to the surviving family members. The contrasting script for English is now shown in the following section.

3.4.3

English

An English speaker will be guided by the following beliefs when offering condolences (see Wakefield and Itakura (2017) for a detailed explanation of this list): 1. A condoler must make the bereaved know that he or she (the condoler) feels bad —it is bad if the bereaved does not believe that the condoler truly feels bad. 2. The degree of sorrow that ought to be expressed increases with the amount of grief felt by the bereaved. The amount of grief is assumed to be positively correlated with: the bereaved’s degree of closeness to the deceased, and the degree to which the death was unexpected. The condoler can, therefore, ask questions about these things to assess the degree of grief. 3. If the condoler knew the deceased, it is good if he or she says something good about the deceased. The closer the condoler was to the deceased, or the more he or she knew about the deceased, the more he or she will feel that he or she should say something good about the deceased. 4. It is good if a condoler offers to help the bereaved, especially if the degree of grief is great. The script in [E] is our proposal for a cultural script, written from the perspective of a condoler that guides the offering of death-related condolences in English.

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[E] Anglo-English script on offering condolences

The two scripts are discussed and contrasted in the following section.

3.5

Summary and Conclusions

Based on the data and on our native-speaker intuitions, we conclude that the key difference between condolence routines in Cantonese versus English is a contrast in the purpose and focus of the routine. For Cantonese, the focus is on expressing concern for the health and wellbeing of the bereaved (see component (b) in script [D]), while in English, the focus is on expressing sorrow for the bereaved’s loss (see component (b) in script [E]). In both languacultures, it is acceptable to ask about the things that are considered to have an influence on the bereaved’s degree of grief. The degree of the bereaved’s closeness to the deceased and the degree of unexpectedness of the death are considered to positively correlate with the degree of grief in both English and Cantonese. The Cantonese script includes in its component (c) an additional element related to the funeral arrangements. Although difficulty with post-death arrangements would presumably affect the degree of grief in both languacultures, this is a much more typical concern among Cantonese speakers because of the traditional complications involved with ensuring that all the funeral arrangements are done properly, and the

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potential for negative consequences (at least historically) if they are not. Our conclusion is that the only differences between the two culture’s scripts on condolence routines are in component (b) of scripts [D] and [E], and in the last portion of component (c) of script [D].3 Perhaps the strongest claim is that there is so much in common between two scripts that represent such different languacultures. Evidence for this comes from the similarities in the data. It appears that the things that were written in the DCTs in relation to those portions of the scripts that overlap (i.e. the portions not shown in italics) could virtually be exchanged for each other. The similarity of the data related to ‘close’ and its Cantonese counterpart 親was illustrated above. Two examples of Cantonese data relating to the expectedness of the death were “發生咩事?” ‘What happened? and “你叔叔因咩嘢事過身呀?” ‘Why did your Uncle pass away?’. The translation of the first question was included in the English data and the translation of the second would be appropriate to ask. Moving on to compliments, represented in both scripts by component (d), Cantonese participants wrote “伯母咁好人都” ‘Your mom (lit.: Auntie) was such a good person’ and “阿姨佢咁好人, 點解係佢離開架? 真係太唔公平啦” ‘Your mom (lit.: Auntie), she was such a good person. Why did she go? That’s so unfair’. The translations of these would be appropriate to say in English, and the English data included ‘She was a wonderful woman’ and ‘I loved your mom, she was so nice’. While certain aspects of the compliments do not readily translate, such as referring to one’s mother as ‘Auntie’ or saying ‘I loved your mom’, the script says ‘it is good if I say something good about him/her’; the ‘something good’ that is said will of course include culture-specific elements. Related to the offering of assistance, represented in both scripts by component (e), Cantonese participants wrote “你有咩需要幫手,即管出聲” ‘If you need anything, don’t hesitate to say so’ and “有冇啲咩可以幫到你?” ‘Is there anything I can help you with?’. Again, the translations of these would be perfectly acceptable things to say in English, and these examples from the English data would be perfectly acceptable if translated directly into Cantonese: ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ and ‘Let me know if there’s anything you need’. The final similarity relates to component (f) in both scripts, and again the data is interchangeable between the two languages. The Cantonese data included “要人陪你就搵我啦” ‘Come find me if you need someone to be with’ and 如果你想分享多啲,我願意聽 你嘅 ‘If you want to share, I’m willing to listen’, and these are very similar to this typical example from the English data: ‘Let me know if you ever need to talk or if you want some company’. Unlike all these similarities, the Cantonese data related to component (b) and the third part of component (c) in script [D] does not have counterparts in the English data. This is what one would predict since these are the portions of the Cantonese script that are not shared with English script. The portion of the English script that 3

We recognize that our scripts do not represent a comprehensive contrast: cultural scripts that addressed all possible contexts and socio-cultural variables would no doubt include much more than what we show in [D] and [E], but we do believe that these scripts capture what are arguably the most prominent cultural differences.

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is different from the Cantonese is in component (b). In this case, there is some Cantonese data that relates to it. For example, one participant wrote “聽到呢個消 息我都好難過” ‘I am very sad to hear this news’. The difference in this case is not that it is inappropriate for the condoler to express that he or she feels something bad, rather it is that in the case of Anglo-English culture, it is important to the point of virtually being essential. This is why the script says the condoler ‘cannot not say I feel something (very) bad’, and this is why Table 3.1 shows a large discrepancy between the percentage of expressions of sympathy between the English and Cantonese sets of data. Our hypothesized scripts indicate that a large number of death-related beliefs and values are shared between these two very different cultures. At the same time, however, the role of the condoler is quite different, causing condolers to say significantly different things. The script in [D] can help English speakers understand why saying ‘Don’t be sad’ is an appropriate offering of condolences in Cantonese, even though it would likely sound inappropriate in English. This relates to Samavarchi and Allami (2012: 74), who collected condolence data from Persian EFL learners and said that a ‘non-native English teacher’s response was “It’s life. Today is her turn, tomorrow mine, and after that yours.”…’ They said ‘native-English speakers [concluded that] these responses were quite insensitive’ (ibid.). This illustrates the practical need for understanding the cultural values that lie behind condolence routines, and perhaps if the native-English-speaking participants of that study had first read a Persian cultural script related to condolences, they would not have considered this kind of response to be insensitive. While sociopragmatic knowledge does not determine precisely what must be said in every context, it works as a guideline for knowing what kinds of things are (in)appropriate to say. Rather than reciting memorized examples of things people often say when condoling another, which may or may not come across as natural,4 understanding the values and beliefs behind offering condolences can allow cultural outsiders to be more authentic and to use their own ways of expressing condolences in a way that does not conflict with the host culture’s practices and values. In the words of Morady Moghaddam (2013: 108), ‘by understanding the cultural background and the belief system of the bereaved, one can express condolences in an appropriate way’. Acknowledgements We thank Angie Wakefield for distributing the English DCTs, as well as all the participants who filled out the DCTs. We appreciate the helpful comments from Mona Law and Maurice Kong on the Cantonese word 親 ‘close’. We are very grateful for comments from the anonymous reviewers. Any faults that remain are our own. This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund Sinophone Borderlands—Interaction at the Edges CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000791.

4

Elwood (2004: 55), for example, said that some of her English-speaking Japanese informants used a response that was inappropriately formal for a verbal offering of condolences: ‘Please accept my condolences’. She speculated that it is a phrase they had learned from the classroom or a textbook.

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Tien, A. (2017). To be headed for the West, riding a crane: Chinese pragmemes in the wake of someone’s passing. In V. Parvaresh & A. Capone (Eds.), The pragmeme of accommodation: The case of interaction around the event of death (pp. 183–202). Cham: Springer. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-55759-5_11. Tseng, M.-Y. (2017). Toward a pragmatic study of funeral discourses in Taiwan: Voice, shared situation knowledge, and metaphor. In V. Parvaresh & A. Capone (Eds.), The pragmeme of accommodation: The case of interaction around the event of death (pp. 259–276). Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55759-5_14. Wakefield, J. C., & Itakura, H. (2017). English verus Japanese condolences: What people say and why. In V. Parvaresh & A. Capone (Eds.), The pragmeme of accommodation: The case of interaction around the event of death (pp. 203–231). Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-3-319-55759-5_12. Watson, J. L. (2004a). Of flesh and bones: The management of death pollution in Cantonese Society. In J. L. Watson & R. S. Watson (Eds.), Village life in Hong Kong: Politics, gender, and ritual in the new territories (pp. 355–389). Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Watson, R. S. (2004b). Remembering the dead: Graves and politics in Southeastern China. In J. L. Watson & R. S. Watson (Eds.), Village life in Hong Kong: Politics, gender, and ritual in the new territories (pp. 325–354). Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (1996). Semantics: Primes and universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction (2nd ed.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110220964. Williams, T. R. (2006). Linguistic politeness in expressing condolences: A case study. RASK, 23, 45–62. Zunin, L. M., & Zunin, H. S. (1992). The art of condolence: What to write, what to say, what to do at a time of loss. New York: Harper Perennial.

John C. Wakefield is an Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and a Key Researcher at Palacký University, Olomouc. His main areas of research are in Cantonese linguistics, discourse particles, intonation, and cultural values. His publications include Cantonese as a second language: Issues, experiences and suggestions for teaching and learning (ed., Routledge, 2019), Intonational morphology (Springer, forthcoming), and Loanwords in Cantonese: How their meanings have changed (HKU Press, forthcoming). Winnie Chor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, the Hong Kong Baptist University. She received her Ph.D. (in Linguistics) on two research scholarships from the University of Sydney, Australia. Winnie’s research interests include cognitive semantics, discourse analysis, stance-marking, language change (from the grammaticalization perspective), and Cantonese linguistics (with a focus on particles). She is the author of Directional particles in Cantonese: Form, function, and grammaticalization (John Benjamins, 2018). She has published articles in journals such as Journal of Historical Pragmatics, Language and Linguistics, and Journal of Pragmatics. Nikko Lai is a Lecturer in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. (in Linguistics) from City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Cantonese Linguistics, (Mandarin) Chinese Linguistics and Semantics.

Chapter 4

The Ethnopragmatics of English Understatement and Italian Exaggeration: Clashing Cultural Scripts for the Expression of Personal Opinions Gian Marco Farese

Abstract This chapter presents a cultural semantic analysis of the differences in the expression of personal opinions between English and Italian. In English, personal opinions are generally understated, whereas speakers of Italian tend to purposely exaggerate when making a statement. As one might expect, opposite communicative styles can lead to cases of miscommunication in cross-cultural interactions. Such cases can be avoided if language learners are provided with efficient tools, which can help them improve their cross-cultural awareness and competence. Adopting the approach of ethnopragmatics (Goddard (Ed.) in Ethnopragmatics. Understanding discourse in cultural context. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2006; Goddard and Ye in The Routledge handbook of language and culture. Routledge, London, pp. 66–83, 2015), this chapter proposes the theory of cultural scripts as the optimal pedagogical tool to pinpoint the differences in the expression of personal opinions between English and Italian and show how scripts can be used effectively for cross-cultural training.




Keywords Understatement Exaggeration scripts Intercultural pragmatics




4.1


Expressing opinions
Cultural

Introduction

Numerous comparative studies on speech acts have shown that cross-linguistic differences in speech act performance are due to different cultural values which inform people’s linguistic behaviour (notably Gass and Neu 1996; Capone and Mey 2015; Martìnez-Flor and Usò-Juan 2010; Wierzbicka 1985, 2003). Among others, Meier (2010: 76) pointed out that:

G. M. Farese (&) Chapman University, Orange, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Mullan et al. (eds.), Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_4

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G. M. Farese Differences in choices regarding speech act performance cannot be analysed without an awareness of the role of culture in informing these choices […] The goal is to understand what is meant by what is said, and an awareness of how underlying cultural values and beliefs may affect speech act performance is critical in facilitating this understanding.

In line with these scholars and with the principles of ethnopragmatics (next section), the view endorsed in this chapter is that linguistic practices are both meaning-oriented and culturally shaped, i.e. aimed at the expression of certain meanings which are encouraged by the cultural values of a community of practice. Different societies have different cultural values; therefore, the meanings expressed by speakers of different languages are different too. This chapter discusses an example of striking difference in speech act performance, the way in which personal opinions are expressed in English and in Italian. More specifically, the chapter highlights the differences in stance between these two languages, “the way speakers present themselves and convey their judgements, opinions and commitments” (Hyland 2005: 176). In Hyland’s view, “personal judgements are only convincing, or even meaningful, when they contribute to and connect with a communal ideology or value system” (2005: 174). This chapter draws on this view and shows that the expression of personal opinions in English and in Italian is informed by different cultural values, which encourage opposite communicative styles: understatement in English and exaggeration in Italian. Other contrastive studies between English and Italian have highlighted significant differences in speech act performance between these two languages (Lipson 1994; Maher 2002, Wierzbicka 2003; Farese 2018, in press), but so far, no study has focused specifically on the differences in the expression of personal opinions. The practices of understatement in English and of exaggeration in Italian are captured in two different cultural scripts. In the first section, ethnopragmatics and the theory of cultural scripts are introduced; in the following two sections, understatement in English and then exaggeration in Italian are discussed separately. The final section discusses how the proposed scripts can be used effectively for cross-cultural training.

4.2

Ethnopragmatics and the Theory of Cultural Scripts

The discipline of ethnopragmatics (Goddard 2006; Goddard and Ye 2015) investigates the connections between speech practices and cultural values in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. Starting from the assumption that “people speak differently because they think differently, feel differently and relate differently to other people” (Goddard 2006: 3), this approach aims at pinpointing the different cultural values of different societies in order to make sense of the cross-linguistic differences in speech practices. The connections are captured in semantic representations called cultural scripts (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2004, 2007). As Goddard and Ye (2015: 66) have written, “a key goal of ethnopragmatics is to access ‘insider perspectives’, i.e. to formulate descriptions of speech practices

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phrased in terms which are recognizable as indigenous by the speakers of the language(s) being investigated. This is possible for two reasons: (i) because cultural scripts are formulated in the simple and cross-translatable terms of the natural semantic metalanguage; (ii) because cultural scripts are strictly based on linguistic evidence such as frequent collocations, language-specific constructions, proverbs and idiomatic expressions, and “linguistic usage functions as an index of routine ways of thinking, and, appropriately analysed, allows us to stay close to an insider perspective” (Goddard and Ye ibid.). Cultural scripts have a precise structure; they all begin with a component ‘in country X, many people think like this’, which presents the value or speech practice as widely shared or at least recognized as salient in a specific linguaculture. The following components capture the shared way of thinking, and the phrasing is typically that of moral evaluation (‘it is good/bad if someone does/says this’) or of (im)possibility of doing something (‘when it is like this, people can/can not do this’). Scripts are distinguished in two different levels of generality: ‘high-level’ or ‘master’ scripts capture the main value or way of thinking of a society, whereas ‘low-level’ scripts capture the implications of that value on how people speak. The two scripts proposed in this chapter are both ‘low-level’ scripts, as they are both about ways of speaking; each script derives from a ‘master’ script which encourages (Italian culture) or discourages (Anglo cultures) the expression of feelings in discourse. Cultural scripts are not intended as prescriptions of linguistic behaviour, but as attempts at capturing tacit rules of linguistic practices, which, to a certain extent, are ritualised and encouraged in a community of practice. The idea is that “even those who do not personally identify with the content of a script are familiar with it, i.e. that it forms part of the interpretive backdrop to discourse and social behaviour in a particular cultural context” (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2004:157). In line with this view, the scripts presented in this chapter are not proposed as “rules for speaking”, but as semantic representations of culturally salient ways of speaking which could be effectively used for cross-cultural training. There are four main reasons why cultural scripts are particularly helpful for cross-cultural training. The first is that scripts do not just describe speech practices, but also capture the reasons why people speak in a particular way, which can help understand the practice itself. The second is that scripts are phrased in NSM terms, and therefore they can be directly translated and phrased in the learner’s language; undoubtedly, the possibility of acquiring information in one’s language is a considerable advantage for language learners, because they can access the information from an insider’s perspective. The third is that the scripts for two different languages are easily comparable because contrastive information is easily identifiable in single semantic components. The fourth is that when reading a script for a foreign language learners become more aware of their own cultural scripts; they can understand the differences and appreciate the similarities between the cultural world that they are studying and their own.

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4.3

Anglo Understatement

The speech practice of understatement consists in saying less than what is meant by attenuating, minimizing or belittling a statement. From a pragmatic point of view, understatement can be considered as a prototypical example of conversational implicature because an understated statement has two key properties: (i) because it is not explicitly asserted, it is more easily deniable; (ii) because it is not explicitly asserted, it makes the interlocutor reflect on the statement to grasp the intended meaning, and therefore it is a way of securing conversational engagement from the interlocutor. Understatement has been defined by English anthropologist Kate Fox (2004: 66) as a quintessentially English linguistic practice: The English are rightly renowned for their use if understatement, not because we invented it or because we do it better than anyone else, but because we do it so much. […] The reasons for our prolific understating are not hard to discover: our strict prohibitions on earnestness, gushing, emoting, and boasting require almost constant use of understatement.

The same comment was made by Hübler (1983: 1), who wrote that “anyone progressing beyond the rudiments of learning English, certainly in Germany, soon finds that understatements are typically English”. Indeed, understatement is a unique English word with no exact equivalents in other languages (there is no equivalent, for example, in Italian), and the untranslatability of a word is the unmistakeable sign that it is a cultural keyword (Wierzbicka 1997; Levisen and Waters 2017; Tien 2015; Farese in press). There are various linguistic realizations of understatement in English discourse. Prototypically, speakers understate by negating the converse of a statement to imply the opposite1: (1) Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel in his heart, by any means waggish then. (Charles Dickens, A Christmas carol, 1843) (2) I imagined him doing well enough to begin with and then, almost imperceptibly, not so well. (Barnes, The sense of an ending, 2011) (3) “What do you think of that girl?” “She’s not bad at all.” (Wordbanks, brspoken) (4) “Did you enjoy the show last night?” “Yeah, it wasn’t too bad” (Wordbanks, brspoken) (5) “What can we do for you?” “Well I’m just erm ringing into say that erm I collect I Spy books.” “Do you?” “Well that’s not quite right because” “Mm.” “erm I have twenty-nine books now but… in nineteen-fifty-six when I was thirteen that gives my age away… (Wordbanks, brspoken).

1

Corpus examples identified as Wordbanks are from Collins Wordbanks Online (http://wordbanks. harpercollins.co.uk/auth/?), accessed March 2019.

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In all these cases, the speaker means the opposite of what he or she says: not bad at all should be read as ‘I like her’; it wasn’t too bad should be read as ‘it was good, I liked it, but could have been better’; not quite right should be read as ‘that’s actually not right’ or ‘not exactly right’. In English discourse, understatement is also realized through a series of adverbs and complex adverb phrases performing the function of hedges, diminishers and downtoners, such as a bit, just, quite, rather and sort of/kind of: (6) a. ‘A bit of a hypocrite?’ Mr. Banks suggested, looking, too, at Mr. Ramsay’s back… b. Minta, Andrew observed, was rather a good walker. (Virginia Woolf, To the lighthouse, 1927) (7) Now that’s what I would call a rather brave, if not foolhardy, decision. (Wordbanks, ukpress) (8) “His English is quite good for a foreigner,” he admitted. (wordbanks, brspoken) (9) In pure rugby terms, it was a slightly sloppy performance and we functioned at only 70%. (Wordbanks, ukpress)

In these examples, the hedges are specifically used by speakers not to say more than what they mean when in fact they do mean more than what they say (e.g. quite good = ‘surprisingly/remarkably good’). It is the speaker, who needs to interpret the understatement correctly in order to grasp the implied meaning. The same applies to examples (10)–(13), where the speakers’ statements are expressed with words, which say less than they really mean: (10) That’s something that everyone needs to know. (read: ‘everyone must know’) (11) There’s an immense amount of reading, and lectures take up quite a lot of your time. (read: ‘an immense amount of studying’). (12) Please, call us at your earliest convenience. (read: ‘now’) (13) “Shall we have an ice-cream?” “Yeah, I don’t mind ice-cream.” (read: ‘I love it, great idea’).

Some excellent examples of Anglo understatement realized through hedges and by negating the converse are given by Fox (2004: 66–67): The understatement rule means that a debilitating and painful chronic illness must be described as ‘a bit of a nuisance’; a truly horrific experience is ‘well, not exactly what I would have chosen’; a sight of breathtaking beauty is ‘quite pretty’; an outstanding performance or achievement is ‘not bad’; and act of abominable cruelty is ‘not very friendly’, and an unforgivably stupid judgement is ‘not very clever’; the Antarctic is ‘rather cold’ and the Sahara is ‘a bit too hot for my taste’; and any exceptionally delightful object, person or event, which in other cultures would warrant streams of superlatives, is pretty much covered by ‘nice’, or, if we wish to express more ardent approval, ‘very nice’.

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Understatement can also be realized through a euphemism, which attenuates the seriousness of a situation or a statement: (14)

BENVOLIO:

What, art thou hurt?

MERCUTIO: Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch. Marry,’tis enough. (William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet) (15) “Have you ever let her choose?” she flashed out. “I’m afraid that’s rude,” she added, trying to calm herself. “Let us rather say unhappily expressed,” said Philip, who always adopted a dry satirical manner when he was puzzled. (E.M. Forster, Where angels fear to tread, 1905)

Expressions of epistemic caution, too, can be considered as ways of not saying more than what one means. In English discourse, various speech act verbs and adverbs are used to present a statement as a possible case, and not as a fact. The list compiled by Wierzbicka (2006: Chap. 7) includes I suppose, I assume, I guess, I gather, I presume, I believe, and above all I think. Some of the adverbs expressing epistemic caution are presumably, conceivably, supposedly, allegedly and possibly. These speech act verbs and adverbs are used to express the meaning ‘I think like this, I don’t want to say: ‘it is like this, I know it’. The use of nice in evaluations is another culturally salient way of understating in English discourse. Nice is used to evaluate virtually everything; its collocational range includes words for things one sees (view, dress, film), personal experiences (day, time, holiday), people (girl, guy, bloke), feelings (meal, drink, sensation), and to a lesser extent things one hears (sound, music). This broad collocational range is reflected in its very high frequency in Wordbanks: there are about 50,000 hits for nice and 4,000 for very nice, whereas for its closest competitor, beautiful, there are only about 35,000 hits and only about 800 for very beautiful. The reason for this difference in frequency between nice and beautiful is semantic. As argued by Waters (2017), the meaning of nice is based on the semantic primes I, GOOD, THINK and FEEL expressed in two semantic components: ‘I think about it like this: this is good’ and ‘when I think about it, I feel something good’. By contrast, Gladkova and Romero-Trillo (2014) have argued that the meaning of beautiful is based on I, VERY GOOD, THINK and FEEL expressed in the components ‘I think about it like this: this is very good’ and ‘when I think about it, I feel something very good’. The higher frequency of nice compared to that of beautiful suggests that when evaluating something speakers of English prefer to say that something is ‘good’ rather than ‘very good’. This suggests, in turn, that there is a cultural assumption in English whereby ‘it is not good to say more’ (than ‘good’, in this case) than what one wants to say. This is not to say, however, that the idea ‘very good’ is never expressed in English when speakers make evaluations. In the language of reviews and

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commercials, which are aimed at convincing people to buy something or go to a show, adjectives like outstanding, brilliant, extraordinary, marvellous and wonderful, as well as adverbs like absolutely, utterly and incredibly abound, as the following posters illustrate:

Likewise, speakers of English seem to have no problems using ‘big words’ when commenting on publicly known or objective facts: (16) Air-faced cheek by Ryanair, Nick Bramhill 05 December 2001 Staff forced to buy uniforms RYANAIR was blasted last night for making its new cabin crew members fork out £450 for uniforms. Labour TD Liz McManus said it was “exceptionally mean-spirited” of the budget airline to make staff pay the hefty charge. “This is completely outrageous,” she stormed. “It’s just incredible that Ryanair asks cabin crew members, who would be on fairly low salaries, to splash out such a huge amount of money. (Wordbanks, sunnow) (17) Well Naples was really cold Mm. when we went there for New Year I was surprised it was absolutely freezing. Had a ghastly trip round Pompei absolutely dying of hypothermia the whole time. (Wordbanks, brspok)

However, cases like (16) and (17) are different from personal opinions; when it comes to expressing what I think, the examples previously adduced suggest that personal opinions are typically understated in English discourse. To be used effectively for cross-cultural training, cultural scripts need to be maximally informative and easily intelligible, apart from being cross-translatable. For English understatement, I propose the script in [A]:

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[A] An Anglo cultural script encouraging understatement in the expression of personal opinions [many people think like this:] at many times, when I want to say something like this to someone about something: “I think about it like this: ‘this is good’” it is good if I say something like this to this someone: “I think about it like this: ‘this is not bad’” it is good if I don’t say more I know that if I say this, this someone can think like this about me because of this: “I know what this someone wants to say to me at this moment this someone wants to say: “I think about it like this: ‘this is good’” I want this it is good if people can say things to other people in this way when they want to say about something: “I think about it like this: ‘…’”

The practice of understatement is set in the prototypical scenario of someone who wants to express a personal opinion. The script is phrased in the first person to capture the idea that understatement is applied to personal opinions, less commonly to publicly known, objective facts. Secondly, the script states that in this situation, it is good to present an opinion in an understated way and that it is good not to say more. By specifying that it is good to say ‘this is not bad’ instead of ‘this is good’, the script also gives precise indications on the linguistic means of understating. Obviously, this is only one of the ways in which understatement is realized in English; similar phrasings could be proposed for other linguistic realizations of understatement. The most important part of the script is the mention of the interlocutor’s interpretation of understatement; it is essential to mention that the interlocutor will know what the speaker actually wants to say. The last component of the script captures the cultural assumption that in English it is good to speak in this way when expressing a personal opinion.

4.4

Italian Exaggeration

When Italian speakers say to someone what they think about something in different contexts, they tend to purposely exaggerate their statements by expressing the meanings ‘I want to say more, much more’ and ‘I think about it like this: this is something very good/very bad/very big/very small’. The variety of linguistic resources available in Italian to express these meanings and the high frequency with which these meanings are expressed in discourse by speakers suggest that in the Italian linguaculture exaggeration is salient and strongly encouraged in specific contexts of interaction. The wide use of exaggeration, in turn, is related to the more general cultural assumption that it is good to express one’s feelings in discourse freely and unrestrainedly (Farese in press).

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Contrary to understatement, exaggeration consists in saying more than what is meant, either by amplifying or reducing a statement to make it, paradoxically, more credible. Just like understatement, the correct interpretation of a hyperbolic statement is based on implicature and on the interlocutor’s ability to arrive at the implied meaning. In Italian discourse, exaggeration is used in everyday discourse and is expressed both morphologically and lexically. The morphological realizations of exaggeration are two: the absolute superlative -issimo of gradable adjectives and adverbs, and the derivational morphemes expressing the meanings ‘big’ and ‘very big’. Examples of absolute superlatives include bellissima (‘very pretty/beautiful’), grandissima (‘very big’), the opening salutations Carissimo/a (‘Dearest’) and Gentilissimo/a (‘Kindest’) used in letters and e-mails (Farese 2018), and the adverbs pianissimo, fortissimo, prestissimo used as musical terms. Apart from adjectives and adverbs, some nouns which include in their meaning a salient gradable property can be used in the -issimo form, too, for example, offertissima (‘super discount’), amicissimi (‘super friends’). From the pragmatic point of view, exaggeration expressed with the absolute superlative can perform two functions: (i) to purposely emphasize a statement and the speaker’s feelings; (ii) to confirm or correct a previous statement by making it more precise and/or more emphatic. Both functions are illustrated in examples (18) and (19): (18) “È contenta?” “Altro che! Contentissima!” “Is she happy?” “I’ll say! Happy as a lark!” (Morante, La Storia, 1974, Morante 1977 translated by William Weaver) (19) “Io sono pronto. Tu sei pronto?” “Prontissimo”. “I’m ready, are you?’ “Biting at the bit.” (example taken from Dressler and Barbaresi 1994: 504)

It should be noted that the expression Altro che! in (18) is itself a way of ‘saying more’; in the context of (18), Altro che! means ‘not just happy, but more, very happy’, and the meaning expressed can be explicated in NSM terms as follows: [B] (È contenta?)—Altro che! Contentissima! you say something to me now about someone I say to you about this someone: “I can say ‘contenta’ I want to say more, much more” when I say this, I feel something

From the semantic point of view, the Italian absolute superlative expresses not only the meanings ‘very’ and ‘nothing else is like this’, but also the speaker’s feelings accompanying the statement. As pointed out by Wierzbicka (2003: 275), “the

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Italian absolute superlative constitutes a grammatical device which enables the speakers of Italian to perform a kind of expressive overstatement any time”. When using the superlativo assoluto, Italian speakers deliberately exaggerate their feelings by presenting them not only as very intense, but also as unrestrainable. This is reflected in explication [C]: [C] Sei bellissima! I want to say something to you about you now I want to sayit with the word ‘bella’ at the same time, I want to say more, much more I want to say something like this: “no-one else is like you when I think about you, I can’t not feel something very good I can’t not say it to you”

The derivational morphemes expressing the meanings ‘big’ or ‘very big’ include the prefixes stra-, maxi-, mega-, iper-, super- and the previously discussed suffix -one. These morphemes can be attached to adjectives, nouns and sometimes to verbs: (20) Casoria. Scoppia maxirissa tra parenti: nove arrestati per l’eredità. Casoria. A maxi-fight among relatives: nine arrested for the inheritance. (Il Mattino newspaper, 17 August 2016) (21) Fa discutere la stravittoria di Tony Blair. The stra-victory of Tony Blair is a source of debate. (example taken from Napoli 2017: 99) (22) Parla e straparla di sé, di quello che vuole e non vuole, come se il carcere intorno fosse un’illusione. He talks and talks about himself, of what he wants and doesn’t want, as if the prison around him were an illusion. (CORIS-CODIS corpus, narrativa)2

Napoli (2017: 95) shows that, in certain contexts, the prefix stra- can compete with the suffix -issimo, as the following minimal pair illustrates: (23) a. Il cinema Capranica è pienissimo. The Capranica cinema is very full of people. b. Il cinema Raffaello martedì sera era strapieno. On Tuesday night the Raffaello cinema was very full of people.

Napoli takes for granted that the two competing forms in this pair are semantically equivalent, but in fact, this is not the case. If the two forms were identical in meaning, one or the other could be used interchangeably in the same contexts. However, there are cases in which stra- cannot be used, whereas -issimo can. For 2

The CORIS-CODIS corpus of written Italian (http://corpora.dslo.unibo.it/coris_ita.html) was accessed in March 2019.

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example, while it is possible to say gentilissimo, bellissimo and amicissimi, it is imposible to say *stra-gentile, *stra-bello and *stra-amici. Moroever, in the pairs pulitissimo-strapulito (‘super clean’), facilissimo-strafacile (‘super easy’) and prestissimo-strapresto (‘super early’), stra- expresses a higher degree of ‘excess’ than -issimo. This difference can be captured positing a component ‘nothing else can be like this’ for the meaning of stra-, as opposed to ‘nothing else is like this’ posited for the meaning of -issimo. There is another semantic difference between stra- and -issimo: there is no expression of feelings in the meaning of stra-. This hypothesis is based on the fact that stra- is only attached to words which denote objectively verifiable facts, not to evaluative adjectives like bello which also include an expression of feelings in their meanings. It is possible to form derived words like strapotere (‘very big power’), stravittora (‘very big victory’), la stragrande maggioranza (‘the very big majority’) and strafamoso (‘super-famous’) because the fact someone has a ‘very big power’ or is ‘super-famous’ is objectively verifiable, whereas *stra-bello expresses the feelings and ways of thinking of individual speakers. It is true that in Italian it is possible to say stramaledetto (literally ‘bloody damned’), which does include in its meaning a component ‘when I think about it, I feel something very bad’. However, considering the collocational range of stra- it seems justified to hypothesize that the bad feelings derive from the meaning of the adjective maledetto and from the angry tone in which the word is uttered, not from stra-. Thus, strapieno in (23b) is a mere acknowledgement of the objectively verifiable fact that the cinema was full to the limit, whereas pienissimo in (23a) also expresses the speaker’s feelings of surprise or amazement at seeing the cinema so full. The meaning of the prefix stra-, as used in the example sentence Il cinema era strapieno ‘The cinema was full to the limit’, can be explicated as in [D]: [D] Il cinema era strapieno I want to say something about it [the cinema] with the word pieno at the same time, I want to say more, much more I want to say something like this: “this is like something very big, nothing else can be like this”

Among the lexical ways of expressing exaggeration in Italian, there is a series of adjectives such as orrendo (‘horrendous’), schifoso (‘loathsome’) and stupendo (‘marvellous’) which already express the idea ‘very’ or ‘very very’ without the semantic contribution of derivational morphemes. There is also a series of intensifying adverbs expressing exaggeration, e.g. molto (‘very’), assolutamente (‘absolutely’), decisamente (‘definitely’), eccessivamente (‘excessively’), estremamente (‘extremely’), incredibilmente (‘incredibly’) and completamente/del tutto (‘completely’). Another lexical expression of exaggeration is the use of a symbolic number to indicate a very large or very small quantity, for example, dire un milione di volte (‘say a million times’ = ‘repeat something many times’), fare due chiacchiere/ quattro passi (‘have two chats/walk four steps’ = ‘have a short chat/walk’), aspettare un secondo (‘wait a second’), volerci tre ore (‘it takes three hours’ = ‘it

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takes an awfully big amount of time’), costare una vita (‘cost a life’ = ‘it costs very much’), è una vita che ti aspetto (‘I’ve been waiting for you for a lifetime’). There are also fixed expressions used to indicate very large quantities, for example c’era un casino di gente, (‘there was a chaos of people’ = ‘there were very many people’), pagare una cifra (‘to pay an amount’ = ‘to pay a lot’), un sacco di soldi (‘a lot of money’). All these expressions mean, in slightly different ways, ‘very very’ and are uttered with an emphatic tone which expresses both the speaker’s feelings and the idea ‘I can’t not say it’. Metaphors are also used a lot to exaggerate. Expressions like è una tragedia (‘it’s a tragedy’) or è la fine del mondo (‘it’s the end of the world’ = ‘it’s so good’/ ‘it’s very bad’) is very common in Italian. Many of the metaphoric hyperboles are directly borrowed from Dante’s Commedia, which perhaps more than any other literary work has contributed to the development of current Italian language. Two of the most frequent hyperbolic metaphors created by Dante are salire alle stelle (‘to ascend to the stars’ = ‘to be very high’, said of prices) and essere al settimo cielo (‘to be in seventh heaven’ of Paradise, the closest circle to God where men can get the highest level of beatitude = ‘to be extremely happy’). A very common metaphoric hyperbole in Italian is based on the idea of ‘death’. It is not hard to understand why death is used in exaggerations; there is nothing more “extreme” than death, the end of all things, the irreversible state, therefore the idea of death lends itself very well to expressive exaggeration in discourse. Expressions like da morire (literally to die for, but different in use and in meaning from the English expression) as in ti amo da morire (‘I love you to die for’ = ‘I love you very very much’) and morire di/da as in oggi si muore di freddo/caldo (‘today one could die from cold/heat’ = ‘it’s freezing/so hot today’), sto morendo di fame/sete (‘I’m dying from anger/thirst’ = ‘I’m so hungry/thirsty’) and morire dal ridere (‘to die from laughing’ = ‘to be extremely hilarious’) are used very frequently in Italian discourse. So is the phrase essere stanco morto (‘to be dead tired’ = ‘to be worn out’). All the exaggeration devices, both morphological and lexical, used in Italian discourse indicate that the expression of the meanings ‘very much’, ‘very big’, ‘very very’, ‘nothing else is like this’ and ‘nothing else can be like this’ are strongly encouraged when it comes to expressing feelings and personal opinions. All these linguistic resources indicate that in Italy there is a specific cultural assumption whereby ‘it is good to say more’ or ‘much more’ than what is meant as a specific strategy to improve the credibility of a statement and to express feelings in discourse. This assumption is captured in the cultural script in [E]:

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[E] An Italian cultural script encouraging the use of exaggeration in discourse [in Italy, many people think like this:] at many times, when I want to say something like this to someone about something: “I think about it like this: ‘this is something big’” it is good if I say much more it is good if I say something like this to this someone: “I think about it like this: this is something very big, nothing else is like this” I know that if I say this, this someone can think about it like this: “this is not true, it is not something very big, I know this” at the same time, this someone can know that when I say this I feel something this is good, I want this it is good if people can say things to other people in this way

4.5

Conclusion: Using Cultural Scripts in Cross-Cultural Training

Evidently, the script of exaggeration in Italian discourse clashes with the script for understatement in English discourse; the two scripts encourage opposite speech practices and are informed by opposite cultural assumptions. In cross-cultural interactions, such striking differences can easily pave the way for miscommunication, which can be avoided if learners are taught what kind of linguistic behaviour is encouraged in the linguaculture that they are studying and what cultural values underlie that behaviour. Foreign learners of English and of Italian who read scripts [A] and [B] receive both linguistic information on how to speak in a precise context and cultural information on why it is good to speak in this way in that context. Obviously, the scripts do not account for diversity in language use across varieties of English and in Italian, as well as for idiosyncratic variation. However, they are ideal starting points for foreign learners to become aware of how to speak in a culturally appropriate way in English and in Italian when expressing personal opinions. There are three main ways in which the two cultural scripts presented here can be used effectively for cross-cultural training. First, the scripts could be translated into the various languages of the students enroled in an English or Italian class, so that they can receive information on how native speakers talk in their own language and compare it directly with their own linguaculture. Second, some additional lines could be added to scripts [A] and [B] in which contrastive information about specific languages is provided. Third, the language in which the scripts are

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formulated could be slightly adjusted to make it sound more idiomatic in a given language; for example, in the case of English ‘this someone’ could be changed with ‘he’ or ‘she’. Much could be said about the possible implications for cross-cultural communication of clashing cultural scripts. However, the scope of the present chapter was to present a case of evident clash between different ways of speaking and propose cultural scripts as the ideal tools for cross-cultural training. Potentially, cultural scripts can be seen ‘in action’ not only in foreign language teaching contexts, but in all the contexts which involve cross-cultural communication and encounters between people with different linguacultural backgrounds.

References Barnes, J. (2011). The sense of an ending. London: Vintage. Capone, A., & Mey, J. (Eds.). (2015). Interdisciplinary studies in pragmatics, culture and society. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12616-6. Dressler, W., & Barbaresi, L. M. (1994). Morphopragmatics: Diminutives and intensifiers in Italian, German and other languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Farese, G. M. (2018). The cultural semantics of address practices: A contrastive study between English and Italian. Lanham: Lexington. Farese, G. M. (2019, in press). Italian discourse. A cultural semantic analysis. Lanham: Lexington. Fox, K. (2004). Watching the English: The hidden rules of English behaviour. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Gass, S., & Neu, J. (Eds.). (1996). Speech acts across cultures: Challenges to communication in a second language. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Gladkova, A., & Romero-Trillo, J. (2014). Ain’t it beautiful? The conceptualization of beauty from an ethnopragmatic perspective. Journal of Pragmatics, 60, 140–159. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. pragma.2013.11.005. Goddard, C. (Ed.). (2006). Ethnopragmatics. Understanding discourse in cultural context. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110911114. Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2004). Cultural scripts: What are they and what are they good for? Intercultural Pragmatics, 1(2), 153–166. https://doi.org/10.1515/iprg.2004.1.2.153. Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2007). Semantic primes and cultural scripts in language learning and intercultural communication. In F. Sharifian, & G.B. Palmer (Eds.), Applied Cultural Linguistics: Implications for second language learning and intercultural communication (pp. 105–124). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/celcr.7.08god. Goddard, C., & Ye, Z. (2015). Ethnopragmatics. In F. Sharifian (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and culture (pp. 66–83). London: Routledge. Hübler, A. (1983). Understatements and hedges in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https:// doi.org/10.1075/pb.iv.6. Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse Studies, 7(2), 173–191. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605050365. Levisen, C., & Waters, S. (Eds.). (2017). Cultural keywords in discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.277. Lipson, M. (1994). Apologizing in Italian and English. IRAL, 32(1), 19–40. https://doi.org/10. 1515/iral.1994.32.1.19. Maher, B. (2002). Natural semantic metalanguage theory and some Italian speech act verbs. Studies in Pragmatics, 4, 33–48.

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Martìnez-Flor, A., & Usò-Juan, E. (Eds.). (2010). Speech act performance: Theoretical, empirical and methodological issues. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/lllt.26. Meier, A.J. (2010). Culture and its effect on speech act performance. In A. Martìnez-Flor, & E. Usò-Juan (Eds.), Speech act performance: Theoretical, empirical and methodological issues (pp. 75–90). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/lllt.26.05mei. Morante, E. (1974). La storia. Torino: Einaudi. Morante, E. (1977). History: A novel. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Alfred Knopf. Napoli, M. (2017). Nomi in stra- in italiano. Intensificazione tra semantica e pragmatica. In A. Lemaréchal, P. Koch, & P. Swiggers (Eds.), Actes du XXVIIe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes: Section 1. Linguistique générale/linguistique romane (pp. 95–105). Nancy: ATILF. Tien, A. (2015). The semantics of Chinese music. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Waters, S. (2017). Nice as a cultural keyword: The semantics behind Australian discourses on sociality. In C. Levisen, & S. Waters (Eds.), Cultural keywords in discourse (pp. 25–54). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.277.02wat. Wierzbicka, A. (1985). Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts: Polish vs English. Journal of Pragmatics, 9(2/3), 145–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(85) 90023-2. Wierzbicka, A. (1997). Understanding cultures through their key words: English, Russian, Polish, German, Japanese. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction (2nd ed.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110220964. Wierzbicka, A. (2006). English: Meaning and culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gian Marco Farese is Research Associate in Linguistics at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and Honorary Lecturer in Linguistics at the ANU. Researcher and Honorary Lecturer in linguistics at the Australian National University. His research interests include the relationship between language and culture, cultural semantics, cross-linguistic semantics, cognitive semantics, translation studies, cross-cultural communication and the relationship between language and music. He is Author of The cultural semantics of address practices (2018), Italian discourse. A cultural semantic analysis (2019, in press) and of the first translation and semantic analysis of the Fundamental Principles of the Italian Constitution in English.

Chapter 5

Ethnopragmatics of Hāzer Javābi, a Valued Speech Practice in Persian Reza Arab

Abstract This study examines the speech practice designated as hāzer javābi (literally, ‘ready response’ in Persian (Farsi) using an ethnopragmatic approach; that is, it attempts to capture the ‘insider’ understandings of the practice by making use of semantic explications and cultural scripts. It is one of only a few papers about the Persian language that employ the ethnopragmatic approach. Section 5.1 introduces the practice, offers some classical and contemporary examples, and draws attention to differences in similar-but-different speech practices in English and some other languages. Section 5.2 describes the analytical framework, i.e. ethnopragmatics. Section 5.3 provides historical and cultural contextualization, aiming both to scaffold a more precise understanding of the concept and to explain its cultural prominence. Section 5.4 presents a script for hāzer javābi. Section 5.5 discusses broader issues and provides concluding remarks. Keywords Hāzer javābi

5.1


Ethnopragmatics
Persian
Farsi
Speech practices

Hāzer Javābi: A First Look

This paper examines hāzer javābi, a valued speech practice in Persian (Farsi), primarily with reference to Iran, although the practice exists in other varieties of the language. The term hāzer javābi is a meta-pragmatic label for situations in which a person responds to the previous utterance—or sometimes the previous incident— quickly (as perceived by others present) and with the best possible words in the context at hand (as it seems to observers). Unlike similar labels in English (such as retort or repartee), hāzer javābi is not necessarily, or even usually, a quick comeback to an insult; rather it can happen (and be valued) in response to any form of utterance. Furthermore, the definitions of

R. Arab (&) Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia e-mail: reza.arab@griffithuni.edu.au © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Mullan et al. (eds.), Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_5

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quick and best possible words distinguish hāzer javābi from any other kinds of response. This will be explored in more detail in Sect. 5.1.2. The lexeme hāzer.javābi consists of two lexical units: hāzer, which can be glossed as ‘present’, and javāb ‘response’, with a bound morpheme -i, which is a nominaliser affix, added to the latter. Overall, it can be glossed as ‘ready response’. The common related forms are hāzer.javābi (noun), hāzer.javāb (adjective), hāzer.javābi-kardan (verb, only in the form of a ‘light verb construction’ with kardan ‘do’ as the light verb). It is important to note that cognate forms are used in other neighbouring languages in a similar sense. They include Urdu (which uses the exact same phrase: hāzer.javābi), Hindi (where there is a small phonological difference: hājer.javābi), and Turkish (which displays Turkish morphological features: hazırcevaplık). Hāzer javābi is usually translated by means of a wide range of English equivalents, such as back talk, wisecrack, repartee, waggery, and wordplay.1 Other translations could include a wide range of English expressions from responding without thinking, answering quickly, riposting, and improvising, to adroitness and cleverness in reply, witticism, and ready wit. The concept of hāzer javābi, which governs the pragmatics of the practice, contains some elements of each of the above English concepts, but it is accurate to claim it is not an equivalent of any single one. In Sect. 5.1.1, I will present some examples from classical literature and two contemporary conversations to make the conceptualization of the practice as clear as possible. Section 5.1.2 discerns the differences with similar concepts and practices in other languages.

5.1.1

Classical and Contemporary Examples

A search for hāzer javābi on the Internet allows us to identify different aspects of the meaning of being hāzer javāb. Translations of some of these examples are given in (1): (1) a. A counselling centre in our town has held a hāzer javābi training course.2 b. You can succeed in the critical moments of life by learning the skill of hāzer javābi.3 c. Apart from the benefits of hāzer javābi in daily life, this art is a part of rhetoric.4

1

Based on a search on http://www.vajehyab.com/. Original source URL: http://www.cloob.com/timeline/answer_124707_1421948. 3 Original source URL: http://gizmiz.com/‫ﻫﺎ‬-‫ﺟﻮﺍﺑﻲ‬-‫ﺣﺎﺿﺮ‬-‫ﺍﺯ‬-‫ﺷﻤﺎ‬-‫ﺧﺎﻃﺮﺍﺕ‬/. 4 Original source URL: http://daneshgahezendegi.com/‫ﺑﺮﺍﯼ‬-‫ﺧﺎﺹ‬-‫ﺳﺨﻨﺮﺍﻧﯽ‬-‫ﻓﻦ‬-‫ﯾﮏ‬-‫؛‬-‫ﺑﻮﺩﻥ‬-‫ﺟﻮﺍﺏ‬-‫ﺣﺎﺿﺮ‬/. 2

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d. There is a thin line between being hāzer javāb and being impolite.5 e. Some children do hāzer javābi to attract more of their parents’ attention.6

To find the above examples, I used the WebBootCat function on the original interface of Sketch Engine.7 Based on the seeds (hāzer javābi in different spelling forms) fed into the system, a search was conducted in the Persian content of the Internet. While I did not intend to carry out an extended corpus study, this minimal use of Sketch Engine provided wider and more neutral results compared to the algorithm-driven results offered by Google, Facebook, and other platforms. Example (a) shows that hāzer javābi, as a practice, is so highly valued among speakers that training courses are run for the public. Examples (b) and (c) point to the benefits of hāzer javābi in social life, as well as to its aesthetic significance. Examples (d) and (e), on the other hand, show the delicacy required of this practice in social interactions. For example, children being hāzer javāb is a generally amusing event for members of the community, and videos of such incidents are popular on social media. As a ‘rule of thumb’, a person who can pass such effortless and witty remarks in response to others is considered a more pleasing speaker of the language. This status seems partly due to characters in folk literature who are famed for their quick and funny responses. The tales of such figures, as known by the people, are filled with stories of hāzer javābi and in-time responses. Like many classical genres in literature, there is often a didactic aspect. The folk figure Nasreddin (more widely known as Molla Nasreddin in Persian and Nasreddin Hodja in Turkish) is familiar to peoples of the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia. Nasreddin is involved in similar stories in different cultures, but the character might refer to more than one personality in the [hi]story (cf. Javadi 2009; Marzolph and Baldauf 1990). The stories related to Nasreddin are “generally humorous, but in the subtle humour there is always a lesson to be learned” (Javadi 2009). In European terms, Nasreddin was a practitioner of Socratic irony. The stories in which he features are recited by people in situations that remind them of the theme of these stories or of Nasreddin’s situational humour. It is often difficult for readers to ascertain if Nasreddin is stupid or clever in such situations, but what he does or says makes points about the nature of human life and social interactions. In one example (Hariyanto 1995: 11–12), among tens of such, Nasreddin takes a few baskets of grapes on his donkey to the local market. He sees a few other farmers, also with baskets of grapes for the market, sleeping by the road. He starts to take grapes from their baskets and puts them into his. One of the farmers wakes up and the following dialogue ensues:

Original source URL: http://telegram-channels.blog.ir/1396/08/04/‫ﺟﻮﺍﺑﯽ‬-‫ﺣﺎﺿﺮ‬-‫ﮐﺎﻧﺎﻝ‬. Original source URL: http://sahebkhabar.ir/news/26308515/‫ﮐﻨﯿﻢ‬-‫ﻣﻘﺎﺑﻠﻪ‬-‫ﻣﺎﻥ‬-‫ﮐﻮﺩﮎ‬-‫ﺣﺎﺿﺮﺟﻮﺍﺑﯽ‬-‫ﺑﺎ‬-‫ﭼﮕﻮﻧﻪ‬. 7 https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/. 5 6

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Man: What are you doing? Nasreddin: Oh, I’m half mad. Sometimes I do strange things and do not know what I am doing. Man: Really? Then why don’t you sometimes take grapes from your baskets and put them into our baskets? Nasreddin: You don’t understand me, I said I am half mad, not totally mad. This story provides a good example of the difficulty one may have in deciding if Nasreddin is acting cleverly or stupidly. Regardless, he reacts with hāzer javābi; that is, he finds the contextually best possible response in a short time. This talent is the cornerstone of his wit and presents a genealogy of his praised humour. In the above example, his quick reply in that situation, where he is under pressure and in danger, makes the anecdote humorous and memorable. In more recent times, numerous stories have emerged of the first cross-cultural communications and visits of Iranians to the West, or of Westerners to Iran, containing different understanding and practices of humour.8 Gail (2011) discusses various versions of the events surrounding an Iranian envoy’s visit to the UK in the nineteenth century. She recounts the encounter of Mirza Hasan (a member of the delegation) with the British host who seemingly lionized him for his wit, a type of wit (called ‘bons mots’ in the source) that could have occurred in this cross-cultural encounter (Gail 2011: 67): Mirza Hasan was asked in London if it is true that Iranians worship the sun. He replied, “Oh yes, Madame, and so would you in England too, if you ever saw him!”

What is described in these stories of bons mots and jokes was also observed by other Westerners who studied Persian literature and culture. Kuka (1923: xiv) was among the first scholars to suggest that in Persian, “we may not come across good specimens of sustained irony like that of Swift”, but in “Repartees and Epigrams, and in the display of fine Fancy, the Persians can stand comparison with any nation”. It was probably difficult for him to contrast the differences between the Persian form of quick responses and repartee, but this paper will do so in Sect. 5.1.2. Apart from the numerous examples from the written literature, I present two recent examples of conversations to show the characteristics of the practice. Both examples were identified as cases of hāzer javābi; at the time, they were posted on the Internet and have been widely viewed. They indicate that a response should have three elements to qualify for hāzer javābi. First, it must be quick, but this does not mean it must be produced in less than 200 ms, and the gap between turns in most languages (see Sect. 5.1). Rather, the response must be produced in a smaller time span than a person would normally take to produce the same content. Second, it is phrased in ‘good words’, in the sense that it is the best response (or at least one

8

The most notable and influential one was J. J. Morier’s The adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824).

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of the best) that could be produced in this context. Third, other people acknowledge and appreciate the previous two points and feel good because of it. The first example9 is taken from a televised interview where a little girl answers questions. The interviewer asks, “What are your favourite dishes?” She quickly names her favourite dishes: “Ooh, I mean like tuna can, I mean like chicken, kebab, I mean like chicken kebab, pickle kebab.” The interviewer interrupts her and asks, “What is a pickle kebab?” The girl’s face shows that she understands she has made a mistake, but quickly (roughly less than 200 ms) replies with “Oh, well, I mean any food that is better if it has pickles with it” (for the Persian transcript, see Appendix 1). This video has been uploaded with the title “hāzer javāb girl” on a popular content website. The second example is a short conversation extracted from the talk show Dorehami (literally, a ‘get-together’), which is hosted by a comedian (Mehran Modiri). The show was aired from March 2016 to April 2018. An audience of around 300 sits in front of the show host, who might interact with them or ask them to walk up onto the set and respond to questions. In one episode of this television show,10 Modiri invites two members of the audience on stage in order to ask them some humorous questions. While Modiri’s questions are probably prepared, the participants’ responses are not. The on-the-spot and quick responses of one of the participants present two examples of hāzer javābi (printed in bold). The translation below shows an extract of the exchange (for the Persian transcript, see Appendix 2). The host (M in the transcript) asks for the meanings of some idioms in Persian. One of the two participants (P in the transcript) quickly answers the questions while referring to how (poorly) the host is dressed. M: Somebody is šambe-yešambe,11 what does it mean? P: It means they were wearing different pieces of outfit, one on top of the other, then one item of clothing is showing underneath the other; for example, an outfit that is not matching—like this (he goes towards M and points at and touches his clothes). This is šambe (Saturday); this is yešambe (Sunday) [Audience are laughing loudly] [P puts his hands on his chest (to show respect)] [M looks at the audience bewildered and surprised] [The audience applauds] M [surprised]: He used me as an example?

https://www.aparat.com/v/IbB9F/‫ﺩﺧﺘﺮ_ﺣﺎﺿﺮ_ﺟﻮﺍﺏ‬. http://nodud.com/entertainment/joke/1502605141.408156. 11 Literally Saturday–Sunday; means ‘dishevelled, not matching’. 9

10

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[Everybody laughs] M [pointing at his clothes]: So this is šambe? This is yešambe? P: Exactly. Yes. M: OK. I’ll talk to you later. Someone šiš mizane12: what does this mean? P: šiš mizane? It means he can’t match his clothes. M: Hmm. P: For example, he wears cotton trousers with a T-shirt [referring to M’s outfit again] Everyone laughing] No offence to you. Both of these examples qualify as hāzer javābi, and both have been labelled as such by Internet users. The example of the girl more fully satisfies the first and the third elements (i.e. quickness and positive perception), while the latter examples from the TV show satisfy the second and third elements (i.e. good words and positive perception). It is necessary to emphasize that in neither case is the speed (quickness) a pre-determined gap between the two parties’ exchanges, but a perception of quickness in relation to the linguistic content produced.

5.1.2

Distinguishing Hāzer Javābi from Similar Concepts in Other Languages

Prior to looking at hāzer javābi in more detail, it is helpful to distinguish hāzer javābi from similar-but-different concepts in other languages and cultures. Quick replies are common in many languages, whether they are specifically valued in them or not; however, in most cases, they are. Several languages and cultures appreciate speakers who quickly and effortlessly use a verbal response in a communicative setting. Some examples below show that this quickness does not essentially mean a response right after someone says something or even right after something happens, but it is often perceived as ‘a response in time’. A satisfactory definition of the concept ‘in time’ depends on a perceptual consensus among speakers that hinges on the dynamics of how people interact (see Sect. 5.1). Hence, some of the most important similar concepts of hāzer javābi are enumerated in this section, and their differences clarified. The main challenge here is an inadequacy of definitions offered for such concepts. The definitions are mostly vague, based on etymology, and fall into the trap of semantic circularity. There seems to be a rhetorical inclination to readiness and quickness in responding that can be traced back, at least in the Western world, to one of the earliest intellectual groups who attempted to articulate the art of speaking: the Sophists. As orators, the Sophists used rhetoric more than any other art and so are

Literally hitting six; means ‘being nuts’.

12

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deemed to be the “master rhetoricians” (Paul 2014: 44) in history. In order to be the masters of rhetoric, they needed to be interested in “the problem of time in relation to speaking” and in “the temporal dimension of the situation [that speech] addresses” (Poulakos 1983: 38–39). The Sophists, more specifically Gorgias and Protagoras, discussed the power of the opportune moment because “if what is said is timely, its timeliness renders it more sensible, more rightful, and ultimately more persuasive” (ibid.: 40). Speaking, for a rhetor, is a temporal choice, and “unless they [the ideas spoken, R.A.] are voiced at the precise moment they are called upon, they miss their chance to satisfy situationally shared voids within a particular audience” (ibid.: 39). The Sophists insisted on the importance of the temporal dimension of speaking, that is, the notion of kairos. Kairos is defined as “the opportune moment” (Poulakos 1983: 36), “the uniquely timely, the spontaneous, the radically particular” (Miller 2002: xiii), and “the right or opportune time to do something, or right measure in doing something” (Kinneavy 1986: 80).13 Kairos, in short, governs the correct time at which the speech could be most effective. In addition to this concept, a few other concepts and tropes in Western literature refer to quick comebacks and responses, such as retort, repartee, quip, riposte, bons mots, and so on. It is interesting that different cultures share the fact that the anecdotal examples of such tropes and techniques are told with admiration (cf. Grothe 2005). Consultation of dictionaries and previous literature establishes that retort, repartee, bons mots, and riposte evolved from Latin into English, while rejoinder is a French legal term. Retort is defined as “turn back, twist back, throwback, say, or utter sharply and aggressively in reply” (Etymonline 2018), and it usually refers to an aggressive, short reply. Bon mot denotes “witticism, clever or witty saying”; it originates from French and literally means ‘good word’; mot itself is a borrowing of Vulgar Latin muttum, from Latin muttire ‘to mutter, mumble, murmur’ (ibid.). Riposte means “a quick thrust after parrying a lunge”; it is a fencing term from the French riposte and originates in the Latin respondere (ibid.). Rejoinder originates from the Middle French noun use of rejoindre, “to answer to a legal charge” (ibid.). As for repartee, which comes from the French repartie and is mostly defined as ‘quick remark’, it refers to a rapid and witty response in conversation, “especially one that turns an insult back on its originator; […] The term may also be applied to a person’s talent for making witty replies” (Baldick 2008). Many times, a repartee fails, or a speaker cannot find the appropriate response in time. The French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–1784) coined a phrase for the latter situation, l’esprit de l’escalier, which literally translates in English as ‘staircase wit’. It is used to refer to the fact that “a witty remark or retort often comes to mind after the opportunity to make it has passed […] i.e., a witty remark coming to mind on the stairs leading away from a gathering” (Knowles 2005).

13

For other senses of kairos, see Paul (2014), and also Sipiora and Baumlin (2002).

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The above-mentioned concepts are helpful in showing that quick replies are not unique to one or two languages. Nonetheless, the definitions are inadequate and similar as they all seem to be quick responses designed to turn an insult back to the speaker. Bon mot, a rare concept in use (see below), is the only term that probably has unambiguously positive connotations in English. The other concept that appears to be used more in conversational English and has been under the scrutiny of some linguists is quip. Haugh and Weinglass (2018: 534) explored quips in two varieties of English (American and Australian) and maintained that “quips can be broadly defined as witty, one-liners”. They further defined jocular quips as playful or light-hearted comments on, or responses to, another speaker’s just-prior serious talk, which are designed to initiate a non-serious side sequence (ibid.; after Jefferson 1972). Norrick (1984: 199) also defined a quip as a reaction to “a situation, but not directly to any other utterance”. “Quips are short, sometimes witty, and often ironic comments about the on-going action, or the topic under discussion” (Holmes and Marra 2002: 75), and they often involve exaggeration (ibid.). These definitions seem unsatisfactory. Defining concepts of this kind is a challenging semantic task because of their high cultural significance and the rare appearances of the term itself in natural discourse. Unlike hāzer javābi in Persian, the above terms are seldom used in daily conversations in English. As an example, the British National Corpus (BNC) displays 191 hits if the lemma is quip (2 per million); with only one exception, they are all found in printed books and periodicals. The frequency of bon mot in BNC is 0.01 per million (19 times in the whole dataset; all from written sources). Repartee (0.01 per million) shows only 39 hits, all from books, and there are 788 hits for retort (7 per million), all in written materials except for five, four of which were used in a documentary (probably based on a written script) and one educational radio program (again, probably written).14 Other less common concepts, practices, or meta-pragmatic labels are in use in English, such as comebacks, afterwit, sally, and so on; I will not review them here. To sum up this section, I have initially examined hāzer javābi and have tried to define it in a conventional, dictionary-style way. I have also offered classical examples from literature, as well as two modern conversational examples. In the last section, I have enumerated three distinguishing elements of hāzer javābi and compared it with other similar concepts in other languages. Hence, I will argue that, to avoid the semantic challenges that I have mentioned, the ethnopragmatic approach to speech practices provides us with more precise definitions and a clear picture of distributed conceptualizations. I will explain this approach in the following section.

14

All corpus examples from BNC have been accessed using https://sketchengine.co.uk from May to June 2018.

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5.2

83

The Ethnopragmatic Approach

As defined by Goddard and colleagues, ethnopragmatics (Goddard 2006; Goddard and Mullan 2019; Goddard and Ye 2015; Levisen and Waters 2017) explores indigenous cultural categories and qualities that are salient in a given language. It does so from a so-called insider or emic perspective.15 Goddard (2006: 2) enumerated a few questions that one could ask to begin an ethnopragmatic study, such as “what is distinctive about these particular ways of speaking?”, “why—from their own point of view—do the people concerned speak in these particular ways?”, and “what sense does it make to them?”. Goddard maintains that the strength of ethnopragmatics resides in its endeavour to overcome ethnocentrism, in general, and Anglocentrism (Wierzbicka 2014) in particular. In the last few decades, English has been elevated to play the role of impartial language of science, but what has been generally overlooked is that, like every language, English, too, has its own cultural baggage. At a recent international conference on ethno-epistemology, for instance, Goddard (forthcoming) pointed out that “contemporary Anglo culture […] has a folk epistemology of its own, and it seems indisputable […] that Anglo English folk notions have left their imprint on theoretical thinking in epistemology”. It follows that projects lacking epistemological sensitivity result in some “inadequacies, exclusions, and marginalization”, and while they present attempts at “producing knowledge of non-European experiences”, they impose their own epistemological categories (Savransky 2017: 12). This is a clear example of ethnological ethnocentrism. With reference to similar attempts, Course (2010: 248) referred to an increasing awareness that “even the foundational assumptions of Western epistemology are neither as transparent nor as self-evident as was previously assumed, but rather pertain to a highly specific naturalist ontology” (cf. Descola 1996; Keane 2007). Goddard does not create an independent case for ethnopragmatics but, to justify the robustness of ethnopragmatic analysis, prefer to return to its foundational base, i.e. the NSM approach. Commenting on the latter, Goddard (2007: 145) writes: The methodological attractions of this approach can be itemised as follows: (i) Any system of semantic representation has to be interpreted in terms of some previously known system and since the only such system shared by all language users is natural language itself, it makes sense to keep the system of semantic representation as close as possible to natural language. (ii) Clear and accessible semantic representations enhance the predictiveness and testability of hypotheses. Most other systems of semantic analysis are hampered by the obscurity and artificiality of the terms of description. (iii) To the extent that the system is

15

To the best of my knowledge, the label ethnopragmatics was used by Alessandro Duranti as early as the 1990s as an approach to blend ethnography of communication and pragmatics (cf. Duranti 1993, 1994, 2015). Peeters (2016) lists different approaches with an ethno-perspective and the ‘ethno-prefix’ at the beginning of their names (such as ethnolinguistics, ethnolexicology, ethnosyntax). He defines ethnopragmatics as “the study of culturally salient communicative behaviours [that] relies on linguistic as well as non-linguistic evidence, with a view to discovering whether any cultural values, previously known or newly discovered, underpin these behaviours” (Peeters 2016: 151).

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What Goddard explains in (i) is the distinctive strength of NSM in general and ethnopragmatics in particular. Points (ii) and (iii) are contested claims to pinpoint how far an NSM analysis is accessible, understandable and preferable by language users themselves. The answer, it appears, depends on what other methods and approaches it is compared against. In the context of pragmatics, and in comparison with the so-called ‘universalist paradigm’ (Goddard 2006: 1) within it, all three are advantages of the NSM approach, which allows to explicate indigenous categories and qualities by means of reductive paraphrases relying on semantic primes and molecules (see, e.g., Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014; Wierzbicka 2014). The paraphrases are called ‘semantic explications’ and aim to present “an attempt to say in other, simpler words (the metalanguage of semantic primes and molecules) what a speaker is saying when he or she utters the expression being explicated” (Goddard 2013: 250). Explications offer the insiders’ understanding of an expression, while being based on universal concepts shared among all languages. According to Goddard (2013: 250–251), a good explication will satisfy at least three conditions: (1) it should make intuitive sense to the native speakers; (2) it has to be framed entirely in semantic primes (and molecules); and (3) it has to make sense as a whole. I will present the explication for the Persian speech practice known as hāzer javābi in Sect. 5.4. One requirement for an ethnopragmatic study of a speech practice is to put it into its cultural and linguistic context. This entails providing linguistic and non-linguistic evidence. Section 5.3 aims at providing a context for the prominence of hāzer javābi in Persian and, by extension, in some neighbouring languages.16

5.3

Historical and Cultural Context

Hāzer javābi has a long history in Persian classical literature, manifested in a variety of genres. The author of a notable paper on hāzer javābi in Persian goes as far as claiming that “we see very often, in the history of Persian literature and poetry, that an in-time word and hāzer javābi by a poet has changed the destiny of a nation or ethnicity, it has saved them from enormous bloodshed and plunder, and it has turned darkness into light” (Bagherzadeh 1973: 951; my translation). Reference is made here to the many examples of hāzer javābi before a king (or other persons in authority) by a courageous individual. Mostly told as anecdotes,

16

The online resource https://nsm-approach.net/ shows that Persian has been previously studied using ethnopragmatic techniques. See, e.g., Sahragard (2000), Karimnia (2012), and Hashemi (2013).

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the hāzer javāb speaker is the protagonist and the eloquent hero in such narratives. The courage needed to be hāzer javāb and to say something after the king has spoken commands admiration for ‘standing up to’ authority. However, kings are often softened by the charm of ‘the right answer’ and the intelligence of such wit at ‘the right time’. Bagherzadeh (1973) offers some examples of these incidents, such as Rudaki (858–941 AD) speaking before a Samanid army general, which resulted in the general withdrawing his army, or Hafez (1315–1390) speaking before Tamerlane, an incident that saved the poet’s life. Ontologies of Persian literature contain other anecdotal evidence of hāzer javāb people finding a quick response. Kuka (1923) presented several in a collection on Persian humour. One of the short stories features Khusro Parwiz, king of the Sasanian Empire, who reigned from 590 to 628, sitting in audience with Sheereen (his wife) (Kuka 1923: 225–226): Khusro Parwiz once ordered 8000 direms to be paid to a fisherman, as a reward for bringing to him a very large fish. When the fisherman rose to depart, one of the direms fell from his hand and rolled on the ground; and he stooped to pick it up. Sheereen, who was with the king, whispered to him, “Look at the meanness of the fellow! How [he] does not let go even a single direm.” Khusro accordingly recalled the fisherman, and said to him, “Were not those 8000 direms sufficient for you, that you stooped low to pick up even a single direm, that had rolled away from your hands?” “The reward of your Majesty has made me rich,” replied the fisherman, “but I was afraid that if the coin remained on the ground, the auspicious name of your Majesty on the coin might get trampled upon.” Khusrow was surprised at this ready wit and ordered that 4000 direms more should be given to the fisherman.

Kuka, who collected these stories in the early twentieth century, probably preferred to use a phrase such as ready wit instead of the original hāzer javābi, which is justifiable in translation. Regardless of the authenticity of this seventh-century story, this is one of the examples of the long tradition and significance of being ‘ready to respond’ in Persian. The punchline of such stories is the unexpected response that one character (mostly the inferior) finds, often in front of a superior person. Beeman (1981) reported in his fieldwork in central Iran in the 1970s on some folk improvisatory performances he witnessed, where a clown figure performs in front of his boss, a traditional merchant. The performances were based on improvisation of actors, and most of the humour comes from the quick responses of the clown figure to the superior person, the merchant. Another setting where hāzer javābi seems to play an important role in Persian is poetry. Monāzere, a genre of verbal battle (cf. Abdullaeva 2014), is a longstanding poetic form in Persian. The prototype of this poetic form is as follows: He1 said. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .: ðSÞhe2 said. . .. . .. . .. . .. . . He1 said. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .: ðSÞhe2 said. . .. . .. . .. . .. . . This is the simplest form possible, and more complicated versions are seen in serious works of poetry. It is based on sequences of ‘the right response’ with the correct prosody and rhymes between two parties in a debate. Abdullaeva (2014: 254) argues that “evidence from antiquity in almost all languages of the Near and Middle East (Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Aramaic, Syriac, Middle Persian or Pahlavi, and Arabic) represent the debate between two sides” (cf. Reinink and

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Vanstiphout 1991). He points out the ancient origin of this literary genre, which is reflected “for example in the Sanskrit Animal Fables, [and] continued in the Arabo-Persian Kalīla and Dimna” (Abdullaeva 2014: 254). Abdullaeva (2014: 255) describes the role of verbal battles prior to real battles between two armies: their weaponry was their skill in eloquence, their audience was their soldiers, and the result of their verbal combat could be treated not simply as a rehearsal, inspiring soldiers and their generals to victory, but might itself have half decided the outcome of the battle for both armies.

One additional cultural phenomenon that probably adds to the value of hāzer javābi is mošā’ere. The word refers to a poetry game known as bait bāzi in Hindi and Urdu. Bait bāzi is a game that “starts with the first player reciting a stanza of a poem off the top of their head, and the next player must recite another stanza of any poem which starts with the last letter of the verse used by the previous player” (Wikipedia 2018). Mošā’ere is Arabic for the same game in Persian. Contestants have played the game in television shows, where the person who cannot find a stanza with the correct first letter within a certain time loses the game. The winners of this game are known as hāzer javāb people. The frequency and significance of reciting poetry in various conversational settings in the Persian-speaking community is a possible topic for further study. To conclude, I have tried in this section to illustrate the historical context in which hāzer javābi as a speech practice has developed. It would not be possible to fully understand the practice without knowing the culture. It is now time in the following section to explicate the pragmatics of hāzer javābi, as well as the shared understanding of the concept in Persian.

5.4

Hāzer Javābi: The Conceptualization

This section presents the script for the conceptualization of the practice of hāzer javābi in Persian, following the ethnopragmatic approach in the study of speech practices and categories. This type of explication was called ethnopragmatic script by Goddard (2004: 1215). “Ethnopragmatic scripts are a specialized kind of cultural script—specialized in that they concern culture-specific ‘ways with words’ rather than other aspects of speaking or thinking” (Goddard 2004: 1216). The script below represents the insiders’ understanding and depicts the shared conceptualization of a valued speech practice; in addition, it functions as an explication for the meta-pragmatic label as used by native speakers. Scripts such as this are useful to show the social cognition of culture-specific concepts, practices, and values (cf. Goddard and Wierzbicka 2004). This one, in particular, shows that hāzer javābi is conceptualized around three core components: first, a state of readiness (as though a person has prepared) to respond whenever possible; second, a notion of quickness, which is more of a surprising quality; and third, a positive evaluation in relation to the second component; that is, it is surprising and unexpected that a person can find such appropriate words in a short span of time. The proposed explication runs as follows:

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[A] Ethnopragmatic script for hāzer javābi a. b.

c. d. e. f.

often when someone is with other people, it is good if this someone thinks like this: “when someone here says something at one moment, it is good if I can say something to this someone a moment after, not like people say at many times it is good if I say it with very good words if I say it well, people here can think about me like this: ‘this someone can think quickly [m], this someone says things well with words’ at the same time, they can feel something good because of it as people often feel when they want to laugh [m] I want this”

Each of the six constituents, (a) to (f), represents one aspect of the semantic dynamics of the concept and the pragmatics of the valued practice. Line (a) illustrates the setting in which this speech practice occurs and accounts for the mental state of readiness. The second line reveals the culturally distributed mental state. It hinges on the readiness for coming up with a response unlike other responses. The distinguishing elements of a good response are that it is well articulated, or it contains high-quality tropes or unexpected inferences; in addition, this quality response has to be produced in a relatively short time. Other people would need much more time to come up with such pithy words, such appropriate tropes, or such unexpected inferences. Lines (c) and (d) try to illustrate the perception of this speech practice, in terms of admiration for the speaker’s mental ability or cleverness in conversation. Line (d), moreover, represents the quality of being hāzer javāb among speakers of Persian. Line (e) points to the social implication and perlocutionary effect of the speech practice that leads to the last line, (f), the attitude of speakers towards hāzer javābi in general (discussed with examples in Sects. 5.1 and 5.3). Appendix 3 presents the same script as a window to the collective conceptualization of hāzer javābi using Persian primes.17 It is an attempt to show that there is a form of conceptualization distributed heterogeneously (cf. Sharifian 2011) among speakers of Persian that is valued if a person responds well and quickly. The diachronic evidence and contemporary conversations show that there is an inclination to be ready to respond quick and well. Both concepts of ‘quick’ and ‘well’ are relative and have been discussed earlier.

5.5

Broader Issues and Concluding Remarks

The final part of this chapter consists of two subsections. The first aims at wedding this study with other linguistic studies on responses in different languages. The second makes some concluding remarks.

17

In addition, Appendix 4 offers the list of Persian exponents of semantic primes.

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5.5.1

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Broader Issues

It seems to be a convention of human knowledge that a response to an utterance needs to be produced in a certain span of time. If speaker B, in a communicative context, fails to produce a response to speaker A’s previous utterance in time t, both parties, and even other observers, feel unsettled. Experiments on turn taking have shown that the “language production system has latencies of around 600 ms and up for encoding a new word but the gaps between turns average around 200 ms” (Levinson and Torreira 2015: 1–2). Some studies show that “the most frequent turn transitions occur with only a slight gap or overlap, regardless of the language” (Bögels and Torreira 2015: 46). This has at least two implications: first, people start planning their response before the other speaker has finished, and second, the gaps between turns by two parties of a conversation are relatively very small. Studies in conversation analysis have supported the general intuition that answers are the most common form of response (cf. Lee 2013: 416). Moreover, some studies show that the question–response sequence is “a universal unit of conversational organization and a pervasive type of sequence in all communities” (Stivers et al. 2010: 2616). These findings support my initial claim that there is an expectation to receive a response and this expectation seems to be a part of the perlocutionary aspect of the speech act. Particularly in the case of the question–response sequence, if we take it as a universal unit, the addressee expects to respond and the speaker expects to be responded to. This expectation might be satisfied with the semiotic of a smile in other cases; nonetheless, it is expected and performed on a daily basis in every language. The focus of this study, more specifically, went beyond the expectation of giving/getting a response in a certain time span. It tried to investigate ‘two sides of the same coin’ in the case of the speech practice hāzer javābi in Persian; one ‘side’ being a perception and the other a tendency. There is a perception in a conversational setting that a speaker has satisfied the expectation of providing a response in a shorter span of time, as opposed to the expected time t. In most cases, however, the turn-taking gaps in these cases are as usual (see the example of the child in Sect. 5.1.2), but the verbal content that has been produced in time t is deemed to be of a higher quality than the one that other, ‘normal’ speakers produce in time t, which in turn indicates the mental ability of the speaker. The other ‘side of the coin’ is a shared tendency among speakers of Persian to come up with a response to an utterance or an event more quickly. Researchers aware of the state of the art in conversation studies stand a lot to gain from investigating this further, especially given the fact that studies of language production show that pre-articulation processes run three or four times faster than actual articulation (Levinson and Torreira 2015; after Wheeldon and Levelt 1995) and also because of the suggestion that production begins as soon as possible, that is, as soon as the speech act content of the incoming turn is clear (Bögels and Torreira 2015). This salient tendency in speakers might be studied from a diachronic and also an ontogenetic perspective. The diachronic perspective would confirm the numerous examples of such a tendency in the history of a language, in its literature, and its art

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of rhetoric. Grothe (2005: 1) began his survey of repartee in English by noting that the stories of (humorous) comebacks and quick replies are almost always told with a tone of admiration in folk literature, mostly to “pay homage to great wit, especially when that wit is exhibited under pressure”. The ontogenetic perspective, on the other hand, would show how and why someone develops this tendency to master quick comebacks over time. In practical terms of human talk, it is impossible to have a repartee of confabulations.18 However, a good speaker, in this case, is perceived as someone who is good at contingencies of human interactions and who has good words to say at the right time, that is, in quicker than the usual time t.

5.5.2

Concluding Remarks

This paper applied an ethnopragmatic approach to study a Persian speech practice. A number of examples and contextualizations were leveraged to clearly show the conceptualization of the practice. They demonstrated that a response should have three elements to qualify for hāzer javābi; first, it must be quick; that is, it must have been produced in a much smaller time span than the average person would take to produce the same content. Second, it must be formed in good words; that is, it can be seen as the best possible response that could be produced in a given context. Third, others must be in a position to appreciate the previous two points and feel good because of it. The explication in Sect. 5.4 covered all these components and elements in a cross-translatable metalanguage. It tried to depict the tendency to be hāzer javāb as well as the ways being hāzer javāb is perceived. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Australian Linguistic Society (ASL) conference in December 2017 at University of Sydney. Part of the examples and arguments presented in this paper was used in another presentation at the Australasian Humour Studies Network (AHSN) conference at CQ University in February 2018. I am indebted to Cliff Goddard for encouraging me to write this paper and also for his helpful comments on the first draft. I also appreciate insightful notes and enlightening comments by Parvin Delshad, Jan Hein, Kerry Mullan, Michael Haugh, Jessica Milner Davis, and Gizem Milonas. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their critic and the editors of the Festschrift for the opportunity. Any inadequacy and errors in the current version of this paper are entirely my own.

18

The expression repartee of confabulations has been used by Lie (2012) while discussing Hegel’s idea “Philosophy is always late”, i.e. every thought is an after-thought.

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‫‪Appendix 1—Persian Transcript of the Interview‬‬ ‫‪with the Little Girl‬‬

‫ﺷﻤﺎ ﭼﮫ ﻏﺬاھﺎﯾﯽ دوﺳﺖ داری؟‬ ‫اووو‪ ،‬ﯾﻌﻨﯽ ﻣﺜﻞ ﺗﻦ ﻣﺎھﯿﯿﯿﯽ‪ ،‬ﯾﻌﻨﯽ ﻣﺜﻞ ﺟﻮﺟﮫ‪ ،‬ﮐﺒﺎااااب‪ ،‬ﯾﻌﻨﯽ ﻣﺜﻞ ﺟﻮﺟﮫ ﮐﺒﺎب‪ ،‬ﺗﺮﺷﯽ ﮐﺒﺎب‬ ‫ﺗﺮﺷﯽ ﮐﺒﺎب دﯾﮕﮫ ﭼﯿﮫ؟‬ ‫ﺧﻮب ﯾﻌﻨﯽ ﻏﺬاﯾﯽ ﮐﮫ ﺗﻮش ﺑﮭﺘﺮه ﺑﺎ ﺗﺮﺷﯽ ﺑﯿﺎرن ﺑﺨﻮرن‬

‫‪Appendix 2—Persian Transcript of the Dorehami‬‬ ‫‪Television Show‬‬ ‫ﻣﺪﯾﺮی– ﻣﯿﮕﻦ ﻓﻼﻧﯽ ﺷﻨﺒﮫ ﯾﺸﻨﺒﮫ ﺳﺖ ﯾﻌﻨﯽ ﭼﯽ؟‬ ‫ش‪ -‬ﯾﻌﻨﯽ ﻟﺒﺎﺳﺶ ﭼﻦ ﺗﯿﮑﮫ ﺑﻮده‪ ،‬ﺑﻌﺪ ﺗﯿﮑﮫ ھﺎش زده ﺑﯿﺮون از زﯾﺮ‪ ،‬ﻣﺜﻼ ﯾﮫ ﻟﺒﺎﺳﯽ ﮐﮫ ﻧﺎﻓﺮﻣﮫ ﻣﺜﻼ اﯾﻨﺠﻮری )ﺑﮫ ﺳﻤﺖ‬ ‫ﻣﺪﯾﺮی ﻣﯽ رود و ﺑﮫ ﻟﺒﺎﺳﺶ اﺷﺎره و دﺳﺖ ﻣﯽ زﻧﺪ( ﮐﮫ اﯾﻦ ﺷﻨﺒﮫ و اﯾﻦ ﯾﮑﺸﻨﺒﮫ‬ ‫)ھﻤﮫ ﻣﯽ ﺧﻨﺪﻧﺪ(‬ ‫ش‪) -‬دﺳﺖ روی ﺳﯿﻨﮫ اش ﻣﯽ ﮔﺬارد(‬ ‫م‪) -‬ﻣﺪﯾﺮی ﺑﺎ ﺗﻌﺠﺐ و ﻏﺎﻓﻠﮕﯿﺮی ﺑﮫ ﺣﻀﺎر ﻧﮕﺎه ﻣﯽ ﮐﻨﺪ(‬ ‫)ﺣﻀﺎر دﺳﺖ ﻣﯽ زﻧﻨﺪ(‬ ‫م‪) -‬ﺑﺎ ﺗﻌﺠﺐ( ﻣﻨﻮ ﻣﺜﺎل زد؟‬ ‫)ﺧﻨﺪه(‬ ‫م – اﯾﻦ ﺷﻨﺒﮫ اﺳﺖ اﯾﻦ ﯾﺸﻨﺒﮫ ﺳﺖ؟‬ ‫ش‪ -‬دﻗﯿﻘﺎْ‪ .‬ﺑﻠﮫ‬ ‫ﺣﺎﻻ ﺑﺖ ﻣﯿﮕﻢ ﻣﯿﮕﻦ ﻓﻼﻧﯽ ﺷﯿﺶ ﻣﯿﺰﻧﮫ‬ ‫م – ﺧﻮب‬ ‫ﯾﻌﻨﯽ ﺗﻮ اﻧﺘﺨﺎب ﻟﺒﺎﺳﮭﺎش ﺑﺎ ھﻤﺪﯾﮕﮫ ﻣﺜﻼ اﺻﻦ ﺗﻨﺎﺳﺐ ﻧﺪاره‬ ‫ش‪ -‬ﺷﯿﺶ ﻣﯿﺰﻧﮫ؟‬ ‫م – اھﮭﻢ‬ ‫ش‪ -‬ﻣﺜﻼ ﺷﻠﻮار ﭘﺎرﭼﮫ ای رو ﺑﺎ ﺗﯽ ﺷﺮت ﻣﺜﻼ آﺳﺘﯿﻦ ﮐﻮﺗﺎه )ﺧﻨﺪه( ﻣﯽ ﭘﻮﺷﮫ ﺑﻼﻧﺴﺒﺖ ﺷﻤﺎ‬

‫‪Appendix 3—Ethnopragmatic Script for Hāzer Javābi‬‬ ‫)‪(Persian Version‬‬ ‫ﺣﺎﺿﺮﺟﻮاﺑﯽ‬ ‫اﻟﻒ‪ .‬اﻏﻠﺐ وﻗﺘﯽ ﮐﮫ ﻓﺮدی ﺑﺎ دﯾﮕﺮان اﺳﺖ‪ ،‬ﺧﻮب اﺳﺖ ﮐﮫ اﯾﻦ ﻓﺮد ﭼﻨﯿﻦ ﻓﮑﺮ ﮐﻨﺪ‪:‬‬ ‫ب‪» .‬وﻗﺘﯽ ﻓﺮدی در ﯾﮏ ﻟﺤﻈﮫ ﭼﯿﺰی ﻣﯽ ﮔﻮﯾﺪ‪،‬‬ ‫ﺧﻮب اﺳﺖ اﮔﺮ ﻣﻦ ﺑﺘﻮاﻧﻢ ﻟﺤﻈﮫ ای ﺑﻌﺪ ﭼﯿﺰی ﺑﮫ اﯾﻦ ﻓﺮد ﺑﮕﻮﯾﻢ‬ ‫ﻧﮫ ﻣﺜﻞ ﭼﯿﺰھﺎی ﮐﮫ ﻣﺮدم در ﺑﯿﺸﺘﺮ ﻣﻮاﻗﻊ ﻣﯽ ﮔﻮﯾﻨﺪ‬ ‫ﺧﻮب اﺳﺖ اﮔﺮ ﻣﻦ ﻟﺤﻈﮫ ای ﺑﻌﺪ ﺣﺮف ﺧﯿﻠﯽ ﺧﻮﺑﯽ ﺑﮕﻮﯾﻢ‬ ‫ج‪ .‬اﮔﺮ اﯾﻦ را ﺑﺨﻮﺑﯽ ﺑﮕﻮﯾﻢ‪ ،‬دﯾﮕﺮان در ﻣﻮرد ﻣﻦ اﯾﻦ طﻮر ﻓﮑﺮ ﺧﻮاھﻨﺪ ﮐﺮد‪:‬‬ ‫د‪» .‬اﯾﻦ ﻓﺮد ﻣﯽ ﺗﻮاﻧﺪ ﺳﺮﯾﻊ ]م[ ﻓﮑﺮ ﮐﻨﺪ‪ ،‬اﯾﻦ ﻓﺮد ﺧﻮب ﺣﺮف ﻣﯽ زﻧﺪ«‬ ‫ه‪ .‬در ھﻤﺎن ﻣﻮﻗﻊ‪ ،‬آﻧﮭﺎ ﺣﺲ ﺧﻮﺑﯽ ﺑﮫ اﯾﻦ ﺧﺎطﺮ ﺧﻮاھﻨﺪ داﺷﺖ‬ ‫ﻣﺜﻞ ﻣﻮﻗﻌﯽ ﮐﮫ ﻣﯽ ﺧﻮاھﻨﺪ ﺑﺨﻨﺪﻧﺪ ]م[‬ ‫ی‪ .‬ﻣﻦ اﯾﻦ را ﻣﯽ ﺧﻮاھﻢ«‬

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91

Appendix 4—Persian (Farsi) Exponents of Semantic Primes ‫ﻣﻦ‬, ‫ﺗﻮ‬, (‫ﻓﺮد)ی(~ﮐﺲ)ی‬, (‫ﭼﯿﺰ)ی‬, ‫آدم)ھﺎ(~اﻓﺮاد‬, ‫ﺑﺪن‬ MAN, TO, KAS(I)~FARD(I), ČIZ(I), AFRĀD~ĀDAM(HĀ), BADAN I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING~THING, PEOPLE, BODY ‫ﻧﻮﻉ‬, ‫ﺑﺨﺶ‬ NO', BAXŠ KIND, PART ‫اﯾﻦ‬, ‫ھﻤﺎن‬, (‫دﯾﮕﺮ)ی‬ IN, HAMĀN, DIGAR(I) THIS, THE SAME, OTHER~ELSE ‫ﯾﮏ‬, ‫دو‬, ‫زﯾﺎد‬/‫ﺧﯿﻠﯽ‬, ‫ﮐﻢ‬, ‫ﻣﻘﺪاری‬/‫ﺑﻌﻀﯽ‬, ‫ھﻤﮫ‬ YEK, DO, XEYLI~ZIYĀD, KAM, BA’ZI~MEQDĀRI, HAME ONE, TWO, MUCH~MANY, LITTLE~FEW, SOME, ALL ‫ﺧﻮب‬, ‫ﺑﺪ‬ XUB, BAD GOOD, BAD ‫ﺑﺰرگ‬, ‫ﮐﻮﭼﮏ‬ BOZORG, KUČAK BIG, SMALL ‫ﻓﮑﺮ ﮐﺮدن‬, ‫داﻧﺴﺘﻦ‬, ‫ﺧﻮاﺳﺘﻦ‬, ‫ﻧﺨﻮاﺳﺘﻦ‬, ‫اﺣﺴﺎﺱ ﮐﺮدن‬/‫ﺣﺲ‬, ‫دﯾﺪن‬, ‫ﺷﻨﯿﺪن‬ FEKR-KARDAN, DĀNESTAN, XĀSTAN, NAXĀSTAN, HES/EHSĀSKARDAN, DIDAN, ŠENIDAN KNOW, THINK, WANT, DON’T WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR ‫ﮔﻔﺘﻦ‬, ‫ﺣﺮف~ﮐﻠﻤﺎت‬, ‫درﺳﺖ‬ GOFTAN, KALAMĀT~HARF, DOROST SAY, WORDS, TRUE ‫اﻧﺠﺎم دادن‬/‫)ﮐﺎری( ﮐﺮدن‬, ‫اﺗﻔﺎﻕ اﻓﺘﺎدن‬, ‫ﺣﺮﮐﺖ ﮐﺮدن‬ (KĀRI) KARDAN~ANJĀM-DĀDAN, ETTEFAQ-OFTĀDAN, HARKAT-

Substantives Relational substantives Determiners Quantifiers Evaluators Descriptors Mental predicates

Speech Actions, events, movement

KARDAN DO, HAPPEN, MOVE

‫)در ﺟﺎﯾﯽ( ﺑﻮدن‬, ‫وﺟﻮد دارد‬, ‫ﭼﯿﺰی( ﺑﻮدن‬/‫)ﮐﺴﯽ‬ (DAR JA’I) BUDAN, VOJUD-DĀRAD, (KASI/ČIZI) BUDAN BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE IS, BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING) (‫ﻣﺎل ﻣﻦ )ﺑﻮدن‬ MĀL-E MAN (BUDAN) (IS) MINE ‫زﻧﺪﮔﯽ ﮐﺮدن‬, ‫ُﻣﺮدن‬ ZENDEGI-KARDAN, MORDAN LIVE, DIE ‫ ﮐﯽ~)ﭼﮫ( وﻗﺘﯽ‬, ‫اﻻن‬, ‫ﻗﺒﻞ‬, ‫ﺑﻌﺪ‬, ‫ﻣﺪت زﯾﺎدی‬, ‫ﻣﺪت ﮐﻮﺗﺎھﯽ‬, ‫ﺑﺮای ﻣﺪﺗﯽ‬, ‫ﻟﺤﻈﮫ‬ (ČE) VAQTI~KEY, AL'ĀN, QABL, BA’D, MODDAT-E ZIĀDI, MODDAT-E KUTĀHI, BARĀY-E MODDATI, LAHZE WHEN~TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME, MOMENT

Location, existence, specification Possession Life and death

Time

92

R. Arab

‫ﺟﺎﻳﯽ ﮐﻪ‬, ‫ﺍﻳﻨﺠﺎ‬, ‫ﺑﺎﻻ‬, ‫ﺯﻳﺮ‬, ‫ﺩﻭﺭ‬, ‫ﻧﺰﺩﻳﮏ‬, ‫ﺳﻤﺖ‬, ‫ﺩﺍﺧﻞ‬, ‫ﻟﻤﺲ ﮐﺮﺩﻥ‬ Place JA'I KE, INJĀ, BĀLĀ, ZIR, DUR, NAZDIK, SAMT, DĀXEL, LAMS-KARDAN WHERE~PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR, SIDE, INSIDE, TOUCH

‫~ﻧﻪ‬-‫ ﻥ‬, ‫ﺷﺎﻳﺪ‬, (‫ﺗﻮﺍﻥ)ﺳﺘﻦ‬, ‫ﺑﺨﺎﻁﺮ ﺍﻳﻦ~ﭼﻮﻥ‬, ‫ﺍﮔﺮ‬ NA, ŠĀYAD, TAVĀN(ESTAN),ČON~BE XĀTER(E), AGAR NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF ‫ﺧﻴﻠﯽ‬, ‫)ﺑﻴﺶ(ﺗﺮ‬ XEYLI, (BIŠ)TAR VERY, MORE ‫ِﻣﺜﻞ‬

Logical concepts Intensifier, augmentor Similarity

MESL LIKE~AS

Notes: • Exponents of primes can be polysemous; i.e., they can have other, additional meanings. • Exponents of primes may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes. • They can be formally, i.e. morphologically, complex. • They can have combinatorial variants or allolexes (indicated with ~). • Each prime has well-specified syntactic (combinatorial) properties

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Levinson, S. C., & Torreira, F. (2015). Timing in turn-taking and its implications for processing models of language. Frontiers in Psychology, 6(731). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015. 00731. Levisen, C., & Waters, S. (Eds.). (2017). Cultural keywords in discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.277. Lie, J. (2012). The structure of afterthought. Identities, 19(4), 544–555. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1070289X.2012.710549. Marzolph, U., & Baldauf, I. (1990). Nasreddin Hodscha. In Enzyklopädie des Märchens, Bd. 6., Lief. 4/5, 1127–1151. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Miller, C. R. (2002). Foreword. In P. Sippiora & J. S. Baumlin (Eds.), Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in history, theory, and praxis (pp. xi–xiii). Albany: State University of New York Press. Norrick, N. (1984). Stock conversational witticisms. Journal of Pragmatics, 8(2), 195–209. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(84)90049-3. Paul, J. (2014). The use of Kairos in Renaissance political philosophy. Renaissance Quarterly, 67 (1), 43–78. https://doi.org/10.1086/676152. Peeters, B. (2016). Applied ethnolinguisticS is cultural linguistics, but is it cultural linguistics? International Journal of Language and Culture, 3(2), 137–160. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.3. 2.01pee. Poulakos, J. (1983). Toward a sophistic definition of rhetoric. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 16(1), 35– 48. Savransky, M. (2017). A decolonial imagination: Sociology, anthropology and the politics of reality. Sociology, 51(1), 11–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038516656983. Reinink, G. J., & Vanstiphout, H. L. J. (1991). Dispute poems and dialogues in the ancient and medieval Near East: Forms and types of literary debates in Semitic and related literatures. Leuven: Departement Oriëntalistiek. Sahragard, R. (2000). Politeness in Persian: A cultural pragmatic analysis (Ph.D. thesis). University of Leicester Sharifian, F. (2011). Cultural conceptualisations and language: Theoretical framework and applications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/clscc.1. Sipiora, P., & Baumlin, J. S. (2002). Rhetoric and kairos: Essays in history, theory, and praxis. New York: SUNY Press. Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., & Levinson, S. C. (2010). Question-response sequences in conversation across ten Languages: An introduction. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(10), 2615–2619. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.04.001. Wheeldon, L. R., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1995). Monitoring the time-course of phonological encoding. Journal of Memory and Language, 34(3), 311–334. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla. 1995.1014. Wierzbicka, A. (2014). Imprisoned in English: The hazards of English as a default language. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199321490.001.0001. Wikipedia. (2018). Bait Bazi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_bazi. Accessed July 1, 2018.

Reza Arab is Ph.D. candidate in linguistics at Griffith University in Brisbane. He is writing his thesis on some Persian valued speech practices under Cliff Goddard’s supervision. His main research interest is philosophical linguistics with special attention to speech practices and acts, perception and intentions.

Chapter 6

“The Great Australian Pastime”: Pragmatic and Semantic Perspectives on Taking the Piss Michael Haugh and Lara Weinglass

Abstract The claim that Australians place considerable value on not taking oneself too seriously lies at the heart of discourses on Anglo-Australian identity. While laughter and playful talk are ubiquitous across languages and cultures, Australians are claimed to pride themselves on being able to joke and laugh at themselves (and others) in almost any context, no matter how dire or serious the circumstances appear to be. One of the key practices that has often been noted is that of ‘taking the piss’, where the pretensions of others are (gleefully) punctured through cutting, mocking remarks. Yet despite its apparent importance for Australians, there has been surprisingly little empirical study of actual instances of it. This lacuna is arguably a consequence of the complexity of studying a phenomenon that is simultaneously semantic and pragmatic in character. Ethnopragmatics is one of the few extant approaches that is specifically designed to directly tackle this problem. In this approach, ‘semantic explications’, which address what a word or phrase means, provide the basis for proposing ‘cultural scripts’, which address what members of a culture are held to (normatively) do in social interaction and the cultural value placed on doing things in that way. In this chapter, we analyse data drawn from spoken corpora to address the question of whether “taking the piss” might be best approached as a kind of ‘semantic explication’ or as a ‘cultural script’, and what the consequences of framing it as one or other might be for research on the role of ‘humour’ more generally in social interaction amongst Australian speakers of English.




Keywords Teasing Joking Interactional pragmatics


Australian English
Ethnopragmatics


M. Haugh (&) The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia e-mail: [email protected] L. Weinglass The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Mullan et al. (eds.), Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_6

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6.1

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Introduction

The claim that Australians place considerable value on not taking themselves too seriously lies at the heart of discourses on Anglo-Australian identity. While laughter and various forms of ‘non-serious’ or ‘playful’ talk are pervasive across languages and cultures, Australians pride themselves on being able to joke and laugh at others and themselves in almost any context, no matter how dire or serious the circumstances appear to be (Davis 2009; Goddard 2006b, 2009). Australians are claimed, for instance, to delight in baiting others (Davis 2009: 38), puncturing pretensions (Goddard 2009: 31; Olivieri 2003: 66), or knocking authority and mocking pomposity (Bellanta 2012: xii), or what is colloquially known as taking the piss (or taking the mickey in more polite circles). The seeming ubiquity of taking the piss is frequently cited as a prime example of this predilection for irreverence in both public life and private life in Australia (Davis 2009: 38; see also Bellanta 2012: xii, 2013: 1; Davis and Foyle 2017: 2; Davis and Crofts 1988: 24; De Groen and Kirkpatrick 2009: xxiiii; Goddard 2009: 47; Goddard and Cramer 2016: 98; Morton 2008: 219; Ryan 2000: 88). While it is acknowledged that taking the piss occurs in other Anglo varieties of English, including amongst British (Davis 2009: 38) and New Zealand (De Groen and Kirkpatrick 2017: xxiii; Plester and Sayers 2007: 158; Plester 2016: 42) speakers of English, it is claimed that not only does Australian culture license its equal application to “friends or strangers, equals or superiors” (Davis 2007: 24), but that amongst Australians “hidden rules decree that when the victim rejects the baiting or ‘doesn’t get it’, by definition the joke has succeeded” and so “the only effective response is to accept, appreciate, and reply in kind” (Davis 2009: 38). Yet despite its apparent importance in Australian life, there have been surprisingly few empirical studies of actual occurrences of it. This lacuna is arguably a consequence of the complexity of studying what is simultaneously semantic in character (being a common idiomatic phrase that is used by speakers with a particular meaning in interaction), and pragmatic in character (being a form of ‘mockery’ or ‘teasing’ that is used by speakers to accomplish particular actions in interaction). The ethnopragmatics paradigm (Goddard 2006a) is one of the few extant approaches that is specifically designed to directly tackle this problem. In this approach, ‘semantic explications’, which address what a word or phrase means through explanatory paraphrases (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014), provide the basis for proposing ‘cultural scripts’, which address shared understandings and expectations, including cultural norms, attitudes, and assumptions about what members of a culture are normatively held to do in social interaction, and the cultural value placed on doing things in that way (Goddard 2006a: 5; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2004: 153; Wierzbicka 2002: 401). While ethnopragmatics has traditionally relied heavily on corpora or data sourced from the media or online to evidence such claims (e.g. Goddard 2006b, 2009), more recently such work has begun to draw from conversational data as well (e.g. Goddard 2017, 2018). It therefore seems timely to consider what semantic and pragmatic perspectives might together bring to understanding how ‘taking the piss’ is

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accomplished in everyday social interaction, and what accomplishing it is taken to mean by (Anglo-)Australians. We begin this chapter by first discussing broadly semantic perspectives on taking the piss that focus on what the phrase is taken to mean. After briefly reviewing extant definitions, we consider the question of whether taking the piss might be best approached in terms of it being a ‘semantic explication’ or a ‘cultural script’, and what the consequences of either or both moves might be for studying instances of it in social interaction. We then consider, in Sect. 6.3, what an (interactional) pragmatics approach to taking the piss might bring to the table. We analyse candidate instances of taking the piss taken from conversational interactions to examine what is being accomplished through it. We compare our analysis of these interactions with the preceding discussion of potentially relevant semantic explications and cultural scripts and discuss the analytical problems that framing taking the piss as a speech practice potentially engender. We conclude by drawing attention to the way in which the expression taking the piss can be treated as both a reflexive object of talk as well as a discursive resource in interaction, and the implications of this for research on the role of ‘humour’ more generally.

6.2

Semantic Perspectives on Taking the Piss

While taking the piss—and the related expression taking the mickey—is frequently referenced in both every day and academic discussions of Australian identity, and the importance placed on irreverence, anti-authoritarianism and levelling humour therein (Bellanta 2012; Davis 2009; Davis and Crofts 1988; Goddard 2006b; Goddard and Cramer 2016), there is considerable variation in how it is defined in English.1 For instance, in the Oxford English Dictionary Online (Simpson 2018 [2006]), taking the piss is defined as “to make fun (of), to mock, deride, satirise”. Consulting dictionaries of idioms or slang throws up further variation in its definition. In the eighth edition of Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of slang and unconventional English (ed. P. Beale), taking the piss is defined as “to pull someone’s leg” or “to jeer at, deride” (Beale 1984: 1199), while in Dalzell and Victor’s Concise new Partridge dictionary of slang and unconventional English it is defined as “to make a fool of someone; to pull someone’s leg” (Dalzell and Victor 2013: 765). Green’s Dictionary of slang online offers perhaps the most nuanced set of definitions in proposing four (presumably interrelated) senses of taking the piss: (1) “to tease, especially aggressively”, (2) “to attack verbally, to sneer or jeer at”, (3) “to make The expressions taking the mickey and related taking the mick are generally defined as ‘politer’ versions of taking the piss. As we shall see, analysis of contemporary usage across Australian and British English suggests the former is used more frequently, especially in the case of Australian English. The earliest attested printed examples of both take the piss and take the mickey are post-World War Two according to the Oxford English Dictionary Online (Simpson 2018 [2006]). Folk etymologies suggest these two expressions were used earlier than this in speech (e.g. Ritchie 2014), but which emerged first has not yet been definitively established.

1

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something up, to say something ludicrous, to make grand claims, to joke”, and (4) “(of a person) to act absurdly, to play the fool” (Green 2011). Yet another sense of taking the piss is referenced in the Cambridge international dictionary of idioms, where it is proposed that it means “to treat someone badly in order to get what you want”, as well as “to make a joke about someone or to make someone look silly” (McCarthy 1998: 301). In the Australian Oxford Dictionary, taking the piss is defined as to “ridicule” or to “humble, puncture the pretensions of” (Moore 2004: 984), with the second sense also being attested in The Dinkum Dictionary, where it is defined not only as to “make a fool of, tease (someone)” but also to “humble, degrade, belittle (someone)” (Johansen 1988: 412). The closely related expression piss-take adds yet further senses to what we might understand by taking the piss. According to the Oxford English Dictionary Online (Simpson 2018 [2006]), the former is “a parody, a send-up; an instance of mockery”, a definition that is also attested in Macquarie Dictionary Online (Yallop et al. 2004) as “a satire or parody” and broadened to include “a tease, a hoax, a practical joke” in Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online (Green 2011). Notably, definitions of the phrase taking the mickey do not attribute any other senses to it that are distinct from those attributed to taking the piss. The former is generally identified as a ‘politer’ version of the latter, if at all. There is no way to settle on what taking the piss (or taking the mickey) means from such definitions, and one might be inclined to dispute their aptness in some cases (Goddard 2009: 31), but loosely grouping them certainly gives one a sense of the considerable variation therein2: • ridiculing (variously construed as teasing, mocking, making fun of, deriding, jeering at) • humbling (variously construed as puncturing pretensions, making a fool of, making someone look silly, degrading, belittling, debunking) • kidding3 (variously construed as making something up, making grand claims, playing the fool, pulling someone’s leg; cf. hoax, practical joke) • satirizing (variously construed as sending up, parody) • exploiting (variously construed as taking advantage of, being taken advantage of). In short, taking the piss can apparently be taken to mean a lot of different things. NSM scholars have, of course, repeatedly drawn attention to the problem of circularity and lack of clarity in dictionary definitions (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014). One could not hope to have a clearer exemplification of this problem than what we have just seen. 2

There are arguably many different ways in which one might attempt to categorize such expressions. Olivieri (2003: 16–17), for instance, divides ‘teasing-related’ expressions into four evaluative categories: antagonistic, anti-pretentious, aggressive, and artful. Our categorization of senses attested in dictionary definitions is only for rhetorical purposes. 3 The term kidding is not used in any of the definitions of taking the piss that we have examined, but it would appear what broadly underlies these various expressions is the notion of ‘kidding’ as recently defined by Goddard (2018).

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This raises an interesting puzzle. Given taking the piss figures so prominently in accounts of Anglo-Australian identity why do definitions of it vary so widely? One obvious possibility is that what taking the piss is taken to mean depends on the target. When used with reference to television shows or films, for instance, taking the piss may well be readily understood as ‘sending up’ or ‘satirizing’ (the Australian comedy, Kath & Kim, is a well-known example of this), but this sense of taking the piss may be less applicable when the target is a co-present participant in interaction. Another possibility is that the expression may well have a different meaning (or sets of meanings) in different varieties of English, given we see its use attested, including not only in Australian English, but in British English and New Zealand English as well. For example, while the etymology of taking the piss is often traced to the earlier expression to be piss-proud (Grose 1788), which lends itself to construals of it as ‘ridiculing’ or ‘humbling’, Ritchie (2014) claims that its etymology can also be traced to use on barges in London where taking the piss or taking the Mickey Bliss was taken to mean “getting one over authority” (ibid.: 33), hence the sense of it as “being exploited” or “taken advantage of” (ibid.: 35). The latter usages have been attested in British English, but it is unclear whether they have currency amongst speakers of Australian (or New Zealand) English. If we take a view of meaning as residing in use (Wittgenstein 1953), one way in which to begin to address such questions is to analyse attested examples of the expression in question in large corpora, such as the Oxford English Corpus (OEC). The OEC contains approximately two billion tokens of a range of different national varieties of English (including from the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, Canada, India, Singapore, and South Africa) sampled across different genres of contemporary written discourse on the Internet (including academic and scientific publications, novels and short stories, news and magazines, blogs, discussion boards, as well as corporate and personal websites) from 2000 to 2012.4 We began our analysis by first examining the relative frequency of the expressions taking the piss, takes the piss, and take the piss across the Australian (89.3 million words), British (502.2 million words), and American (804.5 million words) components of the OEC.5 The results of this search are reported in

4

One of the reviewers suggested that the meaning of taking the piss may have evolved over time. This is certainly a distinct possibility that is well worth further investigation. Our focus here, however, is on contemporary usage of the phrase. 5 We have elected to focus solely on the phrase taking the piss in this section, as it is the one that is arguably more relevant to speakers of contemporary Australian English, and also the phrase that has garnered attention in NSM. Just for the record, however, we found only 16 occurrences of taking the mickey/mick and 11 occurrences of take(s) the mickey/mick in the Australian component of the OEC (0.18 and 0.12 normalized frequencies, respectively; cf. Table 6.1). Notably, the expressions taking the mickey/mick (166 occurrences) and take(s) the mickey/mick (134 occurrences) are found more frequently in British English (0.33 and 0.27 normalized frequencies, respectively; cf. Table 6.1). These differences are well worth investigating in future research.

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Table 6.1 Raw and normalized (per million words) frequency of take(s)/taking the piss in the American, Australian, and British components of the Oxford English Corpus (OEC) taking the piss take(s) the piss

OEC-AUS

OEC-UK

OEC-US

65 (0.73) 67 (0.75)

562 (1.12) 354 (0.70)

43 (0.05) 32 (0.04)

Table 6.1.6 The raw frequency is reported along with the normalized frequency (per million word) in brackets. We assessed whether differences in the attested frequency were statistically significant using the Likelihood-ratio test (Rayson 2008). Cursory analysis indicates that taking/take(s) the piss is used, perhaps not surprisingly, very infrequently in American English compared to both Australian and British English (the log-likelihood ratios are 352.79 and 1294.97, respectively, a difference that is statistically significant at p < 0.05). However, while the frequency of occurrence of take(s) the piss is similar across Australian and British English (log-likelihood ratio = 0.21, not significant at p < 0.05), taking the piss was used more frequently in British English, a difference that was found to be statistically significant (log-likelihood ratio = 12.09, significant at p < 0.05). Notably, if we adopt the multiplier factor of four proposed by Goddard (2009: 47), these results confirm Goddard’s (2009: 46) earlier examination of their frequency of occurrence attested through Google searches of usage on Webpages in the Australian and British Web domains, respectively.7 At a gross level, then, there is little evidence to suggest that taking the piss is somehow specific to Australian English. This seems a somewhat counter-intuitive result in light of claims that taking the piss is a specific feature of public life and private life in Australia (see references in Sect. 6.1). What, then, might be specific to the expression taking the piss in Australian English? Goddard (2009) suggests that what marks take(s)/taking the piss out as different in the Australian context is that it takes a reflexive object (i.e. yourself, himself, themselves) more frequently in Australian as opposed to British English (as attested on the Web). Given this is central to his claim that “taking the piss out of yourself [is] more frequently spoken about in Australia than in the UK” (Goddard 2009: 47, emphasis added), we first coded the number of instances where the expression took a (syntactic) object through various combinations of out of, out, of, 6

One slight complication with using raw frequencies was that we found a (relatively small) number of concordances were repeated through searches. These repetitions were discarded through manual inspection to avoid distortion of our results arising through the practice of re-posting and the like on the Web, as our interest was primarily in the range of contexts in which this expression appears. 7 We note that it is no longer possible to repeat Google searches and obtain reliable frequencies, as Google now uses search algorithms that are tailored to the search history of individual users (and likely unspecified communities of users). There remains, of course, the possibility of using or building Web-based corpora. One of the largest English-language Web corpora for use by researchers is the enTenTen15 Corpus (approximately 15.7 billion words) made available through Sketch Engine (see Haugh 2019), although this corpus does not yet allow for English variety-specific searches.

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Table 6.2 Raw and normalized (per million words) frequency of take(s)/taking the piss with syntactic objects in the Australian and British components of the OECa OEC-AUS

OEC-UK

take(s) the piss [out of] 53 (0.59) 198 (0.34) taking the piss [out of] 34 (0.38) 186 (0.37) a We have combined the counts for take the piss [out of] and takes the piss [out of] as the latter yielded very low frequencies (6 and 25, respectively)

outta, and from following the expression in question across the 132 tokens returned from the Australian component of the OEC and the 916 tokens returned from the British component of the OEC. The results are reported in Table 6.2. An interesting difference emerged from this analysis. While the relative frequency of occurrences of take(s) the piss [out of] is higher in Australian English than British English, a difference that was found to be statistically significant (log-likelihood ratio = 6.44, p < 0.05), in the case of taking the piss [out of], no statistically significant difference emerged (log-likelihood ratio = 0.02, not significant at p < 0.05). Given identifying occurrences of take(s)/taking the piss out of did not clarify the target of the piss-taking, we also coded for whether it targeted: (1) self, (2) other, (3) some other kind of ‘person’ category (e.g. ‘people’), (4) some kind of ‘non-person’ category (e.g. ‘Aussie culture’), or (5) the target was not specified. To give a flavour of these targets, we have reproduced examples from each of the categories we coded across the Australian and British datasets. (1) Self as target a. As Australian sportsmen we don’t mind taking the piss out of ourselves [OEC-AUS: doc#758] b. Not to mention his ability to deftly turn a flat audience reaction into gales of laughter by taking the piss out of himself for telling an unfunny joke. [OEC-UK: doc#330] (2) Other as target a. I had trouble working out who was who’s relatives, because everyone was so comfortable and taking the piss out of each other. [OEC-Aus: doc#925] b. “We spent the best part of six months just taking the piss out of Jenna, so she would feel at home,” 2D laughs—as if to underline the sharp and dry humour that continually flows. [OEC-UK: doc#304] (3) Person category as target a. Ali G has been taking the piss out of some yanks—and they couldn’t tell. Ali G, the fake hip hop artist and interviewer, is set to storm the US [OEC- AUS: doc#794] b. So is that the scouser in you taking the piss out of poshies? [OEC-UK: doc#193]

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The results of our coding are reported in Table 6.3. It appears that in Australian English, take(s)/taking the piss are more likely to involve targeting either ‘other’ or ‘something’ (including abstract categories and events), while in British English the target more often remains unspecified. The difference in overall distribution across the five categories was found to be statistically significant on a two-tailed chi-square test (v2: 31.52, p < 0.05). We also coded the expressions take(s) the piss and taking the piss separately with respect to whether the target was specified or remained unspecified in the Australian and British components of the OEC. These results are reported in Table 6.4. Table 6.3 Frequency (and percentage) of different targets of take(s)/taking the piss in the Australian and British components of the OEC Self Other Person category Non-person Not specified Total

OEC-AUS

OEC-UK

9 (6.8%) 39 (29.5%) 8 (6.1%) 30 (22.7%) 46 (34.8%) 132

31 (3.4%) 172 (18.8%) 54 (5.9%) 114 (12.4%) 545 (59.5%) 916

Table 6.4 Frequency (and percentage) of specified or unspecified targets of take(s)/taking the piss in the Australian and British components of the OEC taking the piss take(s) the piss

Specified target Unspecified target Specified target Unspecified target

OEC-AUS

OEC-UK

35 30 51 16

177 385 194 160

(53.9%) (46.1%) (76.1%) (23.9%)

(31.5%) (68.5%) (54.8%) (45.2%)

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In both the case of taking the piss and take(s) the piss, the target is specified significantly more frequently in Australian English compared to British English (v2: 30.81, p < 0.05). In sum, it does not appear to be the case that Australian English speakers talk more about taking the piss than British English speakers. However, targets of piss-taking are specified more frequently in Australian English. This is an interesting finding that is suggestive of potential differences in the use of this expression in these two varieties of English, given it remains an open question whether the semantics of taking the piss remain the same in cases where targets are specified or unspecified. Our preliminary analysis of tokens of the expression taking the piss (alongside take[s] the piss) in the OEC has indicated that what it is taken to mean may be influenced both by the target in question and the variety of English in question. However, while examining data from corpora offers some arguably useful insights, untangling the various different possible meanings of taking the piss found in dictionaries, and systematically examining possible sources of this variation in meaning(s), clearly requires much more nuanced tools for lexical analysis. NSM arguably offers those tools. The focus in NSM-based work thus far has been on accounting for taking the piss in one particular sense, namely deflating or puncturing the pretensions of others when they take themselves too seriously (Goddard 2009: 32; Olivieri 2003: 32; Sinkeviciute 2014: 124; cf. Plester and Sayers 2007: 158). Olivieri (2003: 67), for instance, defines taking the piss as in [A]: [A] X took the piss out of Y X did something X knew Y could feel something bad because of this X didn’t not do it because of this X did it because X thought like this: “people can think like this about Y: ‘Y thinks like this: I am not like other people, I am someone very good it is not good if Y thinks like this’ if someone else can know this, I will feel something good” when X did this, it was as if X was saying, not with words, but at the same time: “Y thinks like this: ‘I am not like other people, I am someone very good’ everyone knows: it is not good if a person thinks like this” people think: it can be good to do this to people sometimes

This explication advances a number of specific claims. First, taking the piss involves “deflating someone (or something) which is full of something that does not have any worth or purpose” (Olivieri 2003: 68). Second, one can take the piss out of someone through not only saying something but also doing something as well. Third, while the target may well be “upset by what is said” the piss-taker will be “unconcerned” if this happens because of the belief that “people will not and should

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not mind much when someone takes the piss out of them—that they should take it in ‘good humour’ (Olivieri 2003: 68; see also Sinkeviciute 2017a). Olivieri (2003: 71) also notes in passing that one can “take the piss out of oneself” alongside others, although does not propose an additional script to account for this possibility. Sinkeviciute (2014: 124), building on Olivieri’s (2003) earlier work, reformulates the explication in [A] as a cultural script for taking the piss (out of someone). Her cultural script is reproduced in [B]: [B] people think like this: a.

b.

c.

sometimes someone says some (bad) things about another person to this other person not because they want the other person to feel something bad but because they want the other person to know something when someone does this, they say something like this at the same time, not with words: “I think that it is bad that now you think/feel that you are not like other people I know that I can say things like this to you because I want you to be someone like me I want to feel something good towards you now” it is not bad when someone says something like that people can know why someone says things like this, feel something good and laugh [m] when they hear things like this

While Sinkeviciute (2014) also considers ‘deflating’ or ‘puncturing pretensions’ to lie at the core of taking the piss, there are nevertheless some important differences between the two scripts. First, Sinkeviciute (2014) restricts her definition of taking the piss to instances in which the target is present in social interaction, thereby implicitly treating it as a speech practice (Goddard 2009: 31). Second, she emphasizes that what is conveyed by taking the piss arises in part through what is ‘implied’ by what has been said (i.e., ‘they say something like this at the same time, not with words’), not just what has been said. Third, she emphasizes that taking the piss is prototypically regarded as “funny” (cf. Goddard 2017: 59); that is, it can make people ‘feel something good and laugh [m]’. In so doing, she links it more closely with the study of conversational humour.8 Given such fine-grained differences are brought to the fore through comparing these two cultural scripts, they clearly exemplify the “semantic resolution and precision” (Goddard 2017: 56) that the use of semantic primes can bring to the analysis of the meaning of taking the piss. However, they also give rise to two interrelated questions with respect to their empirical grounding. First, how do we know that the meaning of taking the piss is limited to just that sense which is being advanced in those scripts? Second, on what basis would we favour one or the other formulation of taking the piss being advanced in each of the scripts? One principled

8

In subsequent work, however, Sinkeviciute (2017b: 54) has characterized taking the piss as arising when “jocularly making the target believe something that is untrue or, more frequently, by sending somebody up, i.e. making the target look silly”.

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way in which to address such questions would be consider the extent to which the formulation adheres to the principles of NSM, including appropriate use of its semantic primes and basic syntax, and also their degree of precision and clarity. A second would be to examine more closely the empirical evidence that is offered to warrant the claims that are being advanced in these two scripts. Olivieri’s (2003) script appears to be based on examination of attested usage of the expression taking the piss on the Internet, while Sinkeviciute (2014) appears to be basing her script on close examination of examples of taking the piss in social interaction (specifically, in the television reality show Big Brother). These are, however, very different kinds of evidence. On the one hand, systematic examination of attested tokens of an expression seems to us to provide strong grounds for proposing semantic explications that helps us differentiate between different potential senses of that expression. Whether analysing tokens of an expression offer sufficient grounds on their own for proposing a cultural script is less clear. After all, it is now well established that what people say they do is not necessarily aligned with what they are actually doing in interaction. In addition, any attempt to develop a semantic explication (or cultural script) with respect to the meaning(s) of taking the piss would need to first untangle what is meant by the various expressions we see invoked in attempts to define it, including frequently used terms such as funny, amusing, humour, joking, kidding, teasing, and serious (Goddard 2009, 2017, 2018). A semantic explication for taking the piss thus needs to build on semantic explications of these expressions (and likely more besides). It also needs to systematically examine all attested instances of its occurrence (or at least a randomly selected sample of them) to avoid the charge that examples are being selected to favour one sense of taking the piss (e.g. deflating or puncturing pretensions; Plester and Sayers 2007: 158) over others (e.g. baiting someone; Davis 2009: 38). This is particularly important given it is not yet self-evident that it has a single meaning in light of the attested variability in dictionary definitions. On the other hand, close examination of (presumed) examples of what the expression is taken to refer to in interaction, as illustrated in Sinkeviciute’s (2014) work, appears to provide grounds for proposing a cultural script that captures “shared understandings and expectations” (Goddard 2017: 56, emphasis added) about taking the piss as a speech practice. However, analysis of such interaction does not on its own provide grounds for furthering our understanding of what is meant by the expression taking the piss itself. One issue is that such work opens up the possibility that the analyst is imposing his or her own understanding of taking the piss on to the participants through an analysis of particular episodes of interaction as instances of taking the piss (as opposed to something else). In other words, there is an inherent circularity in proposing a cultural script on the basis of one’s analysis of examples of that speech practice in interaction and then attesting to the validity of one’s cultural script through making reference to those examples. We return to consider this issue in more detail in the following section, but note here that this is not a problem that is easily solved without recourse to precise semantic explications of the metalanguage being used by the analyst, particularly when

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making reference to the object of one’s research (e.g. taking the piss as opposed to rubbishing one’s mates). In short, NSM offers a potentially fruitful way forward in furthering our understanding of taking the piss from a semantic perspective. Systematic examination of attested tokens of the expression from large corpora, such as the Oxford English Corpus, combined with the semantic resolution and precision of NSM, may also help us start to unravel a number of interrelated questions about its meaning: does taking the piss have multiple senses, do different senses reflect the different possible targets of piss-taking, and are different senses favoured in different national varieties of English (or regional varieties therein)?

6.3

Taking the Piss in Conversational Interaction

What then does an interactional perspective on taking the piss offer? For the most part, studies of teasing or mocking in (Australian) English have only addressed this issue in passing. In some cases, it is noted en passant that an instance of teasing, particularly those where the tease has been occasioned by the target ‘overdoing’ something, such as extolling the virtues of someone or complaining about someone, can be colloquially termed taking the piss (Haugh 2010: 2113–2114; Haugh and Bousfield 2012: 1106). However, in signalling that this is a colloquial term what is specifically avoided is a claim that this constitutes a practice. Sinkeviciute (2014) makes reference to a ‘prank’ that occurred in an episode of the Australian edition of the reality show Big Brother, but for the most part her work has focused on evaluations of such incidents by either the participants themselves or third-party observers rather than analysing the incidents themselves (Sinkeviciute 2017a, b, c). Finally, while Plester and Sayers (2007) and Plester (2016) make reference to taking the piss in their studies of interaction in New Zealand workplaces, their work is primarily ethnographic in nature and so does not provide analyses of actual examples in interaction either. It appears, then, that despite frequent talk about taking the piss in Australian (and British and New Zealand) English, studies examining instances of taking the piss in conversational interaction are more or less non-existent. This raises the question as to why such studies of taking the piss as a speech practice are vanishingly rare in pragmatics. In order to address this issue, we need to first briefly outline what we mean by a ‘speech practice’. A practice in interactional pragmatics, following ethnomethodological conversation analysis, refers to the “methodical, procedural, or ‘practice-d’ grounds” of the production of that talk/conduct that provides for its recognizability as implementing a particular action (or set of actions) (Schegloff 1996: 173). The focus is on analysing features of the composition of talk/conduct (including not only linguistic forms, but paralinguistic and non-verbal aspects of conduct) and its sequential position in order to identify recurrent interactional patterns across collections of candidate examples of a possible action or practice. For instance, Haugh (2016a) proposes that ‘jocular pretence’ [cf. ‘jocular deception’ (Goddard 2017:

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65–66)] can be differentiated from ‘jocular mockery’ on the grounds that in the former case, claiming non-serious intent (by means of phrases such as just kidding, just joking) is constitutive of the tease, as laughter is invariably delayed until that claim is made. It is worth noting that what defines jocular mockery or jocular pretence as practices is not the definitional gloss provided by the researcher, but rather recurrent features of its compositional and sequential design. Ultimately, then, it is definition by example, hence the emphasis on collection-building (Schegloff 1968) in conversation analysis, and by extension, interactional pragmatics. However, it is fair to say that this point is not always well understood in pragmatics where terminological drift or even outright confusion can arise, especially when working across different linguistic or cultural contexts (Goddard 2018). The use of semantic explications and accompanying cultural scripts clearly has the potential to decrease such problems. The question arises, then, as to why researchers do not make recourse to such methods more often? One possible reason for this goes to the very heart of why we have not seen extended studies of taking the piss as a speech practice to date. The essential challenge is that when attempting to describe social actions, there are invariably multiple ways in which it can be described (O’Keefe 1987; Schegloff 1988; Sidnell 2017). The way in which the same ‘humorous’ episode in interaction can be labelled in various different ways is nicely illustrated in a recent paper by Sinkeviciute (2017b). In her case study, third parties were shown an excerpt from an episode of Big Brother in which George laughingly tells Bradley that the upshot of there being a slightly lower number of housemates who voted for the latter to be evicted is that there is “one less person who hates you”. He then goes on to laughingly say “I hate you” after Layla tells Bradley that “no no one hates you” (ibid.: 56). Our interest here is not in the details of this particular interaction, however, but in the various ways in which it was described by the sample of Australian and British observers who were shown the interaction in question and then asked what they thought about it. What we think is of particular note is that the observers of this interaction did not label it in the same way. It was variously described by different people as taking the piss (ibid.: 58, 64), banter (ibid.: 58, 61, 63), and riffing off (ibid.: 61), as well as a putdown (ibid.: 62).9 This poses somewhat of a dilemma for the analyst. Specific explications of these various different terms do not really solve the underlying problem that when being used to refer to something, users and observers do not necessarily agree on whether or not something counts as taking the piss. This sort of problem is often glossed over by analysts, either by claiming that they are using ‘operational definitions’ (Janicki 2017) or by making recourse to a

9

Notably, the negatively valenced descriptor put down was only used by a small number of the British interviewees, and not at all by any of the Australian interviewees (ibid.: 65).

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particular theory that constrains the range of descriptive options available (Weber 1949). However, if one’s aim is to ground one’s analysis in the understandings of participants—a methodological commitment that arguably lies in common to both NSM and interactional pragmatics—how phenomena are described by the analyst is a substantive issue that warrants serious consideration. At this stage, then, we are not yet sure that taking the piss constitutes a reliable category for pragmatic analysis, given variation in the way which ordinary users appear to label possible instances of it, which reflects, in turn, considerable variation in the ways in which it appears to be defined. Even if we restrict ourselves to instances of taking the piss out of someone that arise in interactions in more everyday interpersonal settings (as opposed to enactments of it in broadcast media and other forms of mass communication), the way in which the same interactional episode can be labelled in multiple different ways makes it difficult to assemble a candidate collection through which recurrent features of the compositional and sequential design of taking the piss as a practice—if it is indeed one—can be identified. This raises, in turn, challenges for researchers wishing to analyse possible power or gender effects on initiators and targets of taking the piss, and what responses to it are treated as legitimate. Taking the piss is often associated with male–male speech (Ryan 2000). However, we need to first establish what counts as taking the piss before we can hope to examine what putative power or gender effects may be coming into play. What then can a pragmatic analysis of taking the piss offer? In the remainder of this section, we propose that it can potentially offer two things. First, it leads us to consider the possibility that taking the piss may not always surface in the conversational record. Second, it enables us to explore other understandings of taking the piss beyond the claim that it involves puncturing pretensions or over-seriousness (Olivieri 2003; Goddard 2009; Sinkeviciute 2014). Both of these possibilities have implications for how we might formulate semantic explications and/or cultural scripts with respect to taking the piss. A key focus in pragmatics is not only what users are doing through what they say, but also what they are doing through what they don’t say, that is, through what they ‘imply’, ‘hint at’, ‘allude to’, and so on. One question that naturally arises when approaching taking the piss from the perspective of pragmatics is the question of whether participants, and thus we as analysts, can always be sure someone is taking the piss out of someone else. It is well known that participants sometimes leave things “off record” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 211) or “pragmatically ambivalent” (Thomas 1985) as to what is meant by the speaker in question. In the case of taking the piss, this can involve the piss-taker doing so deliberately in order to keep the target unaware, or at least uncertain, as to whether the piss is being taken out of them. Consider the following excerpt from an initial interaction in which Norma and David, two Australians in their mid-thirties, are getting acquainted. Prior to this excerpt, Norma and David have been talking about David’s t-shirt. The excerpt

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begins when Norma goes on to ask about the necklace that David is wearing (lines 1–2).10 (6) CAAT: AusAus05: 3:26

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 19 20 21 22

N: D: N: D: N: D: N: D:

N: D: N: D: N: D:

that’s related to the Celtic (0.3) [necklace as well?] [I wouldn’t have a] clue, okay= I got it from a fr- good friend of mi:ne (.) abou:t (.) fifteen years ago for Christmas. ↑oh wo:w= =she was working in a jewellery store? [a guy] was [yeah ] hocking them off? (0.4) and she’s thought ↑me (0.3) #and I’ve had it ever since#=and it’s been an awesome conversation starter .hhh there you ↑go. |((squints eyes)) |((nods)) |((smiles)) MHm. ((deep nod and smile)) ((smiling)) £just as well you wore it to↑day.£ (I) wear it all the time. ((shrugs)) [ha ha] [the on]ly time I couldn’t wear it was when the kids were y- really young

After explaining that he was given the necklace by a friend (lines 5–10), David arguably orients to Norma’s prior noticing of the necklace (lines 1–2) in claiming that the necklace has since proven to be “an awesome conversation starter” (lines 11–12). Norma responds with an explicit expression of accord (line 13) along with a smile and head nod (line 14), thereby endorsing David’s assertion that he is doing the right thing by wearing the necklace. David subsequently affiliates with this affiliative stance on Norma’s part through an agreement token (line 15) and emphatic nodding accompanied by smiling (line 16). Norma subsequently observes that “just as well you wore it today” (line 17), which in this context could be taken as implying that he needs to rely on such ‘props’ to hold a conversation and thus that he is not a good conversationalist. However, Norma indexes through smiling (Ford and Fox 2010), along with a hearable “smile voice” (Jefferson 2004b) that her comment is meant “non-seriously” (cf. Goddard 2009: 35); that is, she is “joking”

10

This excerpt and the one following have been transcribed using standard CA transcription conventions (Jefferson 2004a; see also the appendix to Susanna Karlsson’s chapter in this volume) in order to allow readers access to specific details of timing, prosody, and non-verbal aspects of these interactions.

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(Goddard 2018).11 This provides a warrant for David to go beyond what she has just said and consider what else she might have meant by her comment, namely that she may be taking the piss—in the broad sense proposed by Olivieri (2003: 67) and Sinkeviciute (2014: 124)—of his apparent (over-)enthusiasm for the necklace as a “conversation starter.” David, however, responds seriously in asserting that he wears it all the time (line 19), thereby rejecting the suggestion that it was good fortune that he happens to be wearing it that day. In doing so, he attends only what she has (literally) said and disattends any possible implications of her prior comment. Whether Norma has indeed taken the piss out of David here remains pragmatically ambivalent and thus off record. As Levinson (2013: 115–116) points out, “researching the unsaid is not an easy task: one needs to show that both participants are oriented to something not occurring and deliberately kept off-stage as it were”. In this case, our warrant for proposing that Norma may be (gently) taking the piss out of David is premised on the way in which the comment itself is delivered (i.e. with smile voice, visible smiling), and the laughter subsequently produced in line 20 in response to David’s serious rejection of her comment. However, this inference is clearly defeasible, as are many so-called particularized implicatures (Haugh 2015). In order to more convincingly demonstrate this interpretive possibility, we would therefore need to assemble a collection that includes instances where participants ‘call out’ the other by asking whether they are taking the piss. While space precludes us doing so here, our point is simply that whether someone is indeed taking the piss may be left (deliberately) ambivalent (Haugh and Weinglass 2019). The upshot is that in formulating a cultural script, if not a semantic explication, for taking the piss, one needs to take into account the possibility that it may arise through “saying something not with words” (Sinkeviciute 2014: 124), and so it may not be clear to all participants that the piss is being taken. In other words, we need to account for instances in which taking the piss is done in such a way as to leave the target unaware or unsure as to whether someone is taking the piss out of them. A second line of analysis offered by a pragmatic perspective on taking the piss is that it may enable us to broaden our understanding of what it might involve. In the previous section, we discussed in some detail work that has suggested that taking the piss out of someone involves somehow puncturing pretensions, more specifically, “mak[ing] someone aware of the fact that someone thinks about some aspect of himself, or something he does, a little too seriously” (Olivieri 2003: 70; see also Goddard 2009: 31–32; Sinkeviciute 2014: 124). One question this raises, however, is whether this account is exhaustive of what taking the piss can be taken to be doing in interaction. Consider the following excerpt from a phone call in which Tim his calling his mother who is out at a barbecue with other family and friends.12

Following Goddard (2009: 35), this might be formulated as “I said it like people say something when they say it because they want someone to laugh [m].” 12 We would like to thank Roslyn Rowen for kindly sharing this data excerpt with us. 11

6 “The Great Australian Pastime”: Pragmatic …

(7) New dog (Part I)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

T: J: T: J: T: J: T: J: T: J: T: J: T: J: J: T: J: T: J: T: J: T: J: T: T: J: J: T:

We:ll hh I’ve got some ne:ws for you. (0.8) Hmm?= =◦Tsk◦ Yea::h. (0.5) um: you >sitting down? (1.3) .hh Oh: ↓ Go:d! hh (0.4) Is it ↑good or ba:d. (0.4) ↑I: think it’s ↑good (0.9) Yea::h? (0.7) Rachel and I are going to be £↑ parents £ (1.7) OH :: my ↑ GO :::↓d! (1.2) ◦Mm.◦ (1.0) Holy ↑shit! Yeah? (1.7) ↑Ho-! (0.3) We bought a [dog we -] we bought a ↑dog [↑ ri:ght] (0.8) Oh f:u(hh)ck [you:!] [.hhh ] >HAhaha[hahahahahahaihop], the Scania Gastronomical Society that had something together

4

B:

5

A:

6

B:

7

A:

[ yeah

]

de va< väldit trevlit .hh[hh]. it was very nice [hjaa] yeah så de va en som hade doktorerat om LÖ:k then there was someone who had written a thesis on onions

8

som berättade om lökens eh::who told us of the onions’ eh

9

gul lök åh, onions and

10

hur nyttit de: va åh, how nutritious that was and

11

så vidare? so on

12

The Meanings of List Constructions: Explicating … 12

B:

°hja° yeah

13

A:

/å så¿ åh, and such and

231

14

vicka ämnen man fick i sej åh,= what substances you ingest and

15

=motverka cancer åh,= prevent cancer and

16

=allt va de nu va för nånting åh mnh., (.) all kinds of stuff and

17

å sådär vidare å så, >.heller nej< ::: / \ # " ! . , ? ¿ ja JA °° ## .ja h .h

pause measured by 1/10 of a second pause under 0.2 s overlap starts overlap ends lines latch onto one another without hearable pause slower than the surrounding talk faster than the surrounding talk elongated sound break-off or stuttering speech pitch upstep pitch down-step falling pitch rising pitch continuation tone falling final tone tone falls slightly towards the end tone clearly rises towards the end tone rises slightly towards the end emphasized syllable louder than the surrounding speech sotto voce creaky voice said on inhalation exhalation inhalation

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Susanna Karlsson is an Associate Professor at Gothenburg University. Her main research interests are in Swedish linguistics, conversation analysis and the grammatical specificities of interaction. She also studies attitude to linguistic variation and the practices of language planning.

Part III

Cliff Goddard: List of Publications

Cliff Goddard: List of Publications Compiled by Bert Peeters

1976 (Book review) The Speculative Grammar by C. S. Peirce. International Review of Slavic Linguistics, 1(2/3), 427–440. (Book review) The Tractatus Syncategorematum of Peter of Spain by J. Mullally. Reviewed with reference to modern linguistic theory. International Review of Slavic Linguistics, 1(2/3), 441–458. 1979 Particles and illocutionary semantics. Papers in Linguistics, 12(1/2), 185–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351817909370468. 1982 Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara picture vocabulary. Illustrations by J. Carter. Alice Springs: IAD [Institute for Aboriginal Development] Press. 113 pp. Case systems and case marking in Australian languages: A new interpretation. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2(2), 167–196. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 07268608208599290. 1984 Cohesion and switch-reference in Yankunytjatjara. Language in Central Australia, 1, 35–42. When to use that apostrophe? Language in Central Australia, 3, 11–13.

B. Peeters (&) Australian National University, Canberra, Australia e-mail: [email protected] Universiteit Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Mullan et al. (eds.), Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_13

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1985 A grammar of Yankunytjatjara. Alice Springs: IAD [Institute for Aboriginal Development] Press. 207 pp. (Co-edited; second editor: A. Kalotas) Punu: Yankunytjatjara plant use. Traditional methods of preparing foods, medicines, utensils and weapons from native plants. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. 166 pp. Reprinted 1995 (Alice Springs: IAD [Institute for Aboriginal Development] Press), 2002 (Alice Springs: Jukurrpa Books). 1986 The natural semantics of too. Journal of Pragmatics, 10(5), 635–643. https://doi. org/10.1016/0378-2166(86)90018-4. 1987 A basic Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatara to English dictionary. Alice Springs: IAD [Institute for Aboriginal Development] Press. vi + 195 pp. See also 1992, 1996. 1988 Verb serialisation and the circumstantial construction in Yankunytjatjara. In P. Austin (Ed.), Complex sentence constructions in Australian languages (pp. 177–192). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.15.08god. (Book review) K. Liberman, Understanding interaction in Central Australia: An ethnomethodological study of Australian Aboriginal people. Language in Society, 17(1), 113–118. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500012641. (Book review) Z. Kövecses, Metaphors of anger, pride and love: A lexical approach to the structure of concepts. Lingua, 77(1), 90–98. https://doi.org/10. 1016/0024-3841(89)90041-7. 1989 Issues in Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Quaderni di semantica, 10(1), 51–64. The goals and limits of semantic representation. Quaderni di semantica, 10(2), 297–308. 1990 Emergent genres of reportage and advocacy in the Pitjantjatjara print media. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1990(2), 27–47. The lexical semantics of “good feelings” in Yankunytjatjara. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 10(2), 257–292. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268609008599444. 1991 Testing the translatability of semantic primitives into an Australian Aboriginal Language. Anthropological Linguistics, 33(1): 31–56. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 30028013. Anger in the Western Desert: A case study in the cross-cultural semantics of emotion. Man, (N.S.) 26(2), 265–279.

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(Book review) C. Lutz, Unnatural emotions: Everyday sentiments on a Micronesian atoll and their challenge to Western theory. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 11(1), 120–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268609108599454. 1992 Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatara to English dictionary. 2nd ed. Alice Springs: IAD [Institute for Aboriginal Development] Press. 260 pp. See also 1987, 1996. (Co-edited; first editor: N. Evans) Aboriginal linguistics. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 12(1) (special issue dedicated to the memory of Steve Johnson). Traditional Yankunytjatjara ways of speaking—A semantic perspective. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 12(1), 93–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268609208599472. 1993 A learner’s guide to Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara. Alice Springs: IAD [Institute for Aboriginal Development] Press. 48 pp. (Book review) J. Green (comp.), Alyawarr to English dictionary. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 13(2), 265–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/0726860930 8599497. 1994 (Co-edited; second editor: A. Wierzbicka) Semantic and lexical universals: Theory and empirical findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. vii + 510 pp. https://doi.org/ 10.1075/slcs.25. Semantic theory and semantic universals. In C. Goddard, & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Semantic and lexical universals: Theory and empirical findings (pp. 7–29). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.25.04god. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Introducing lexical primitives. In C. Goddard, & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Semantic and lexical universals: Theory and empirical findings (pp. 31–54). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10. 1075/slcs.25.05god. Lexical primitives in Yankunytjatjara. In C. Goddard, & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Semantic and lexical universals: Theory and empirical findings (pp. 229–262). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.25.13god. The meaning of lah: Understanding “emphasis” in Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Oceanic Linguistics, 33(1): 145–165. https://doi.org/10.2307/3623004. The Pitjantjatjara story-writing contest, 1988. In D. Hartman, & J. Henderson (Eds.), Aboriginal languages in education (pp. 316–323). Alice Springs: IAD [Institute for Aboriginal Development] Press. Semantics. In V.S. Ramachandran (Ed.), Encyclopedia of human behavior: Vol. 4 (pp. 109–120). New York: Academic Press. 1995 Conceptual and cultural issues in emotion research. Culture & Psychology, 1(2), 289–298. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067X9512009.

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Who are we? The natural semantics of pronouns. Language Sciences, 17(1), 99– 121. https://doi.org/10.1016/0388-0001(95)00011-J. ‘Cognitive mapping’ or ‘verbal explication’? Understanding love on the Malay Archipelago. Semiotica, 106(3/4): 323–354. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1995.106. 3-4.301. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Key words, culture and cognition. Philosophica, 55(1), 37–67. Componential analysis. In J. Verschueren, J.-O. Östman, & J. Blommaert (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics: Manual (pp. 147–153). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. See also 2005, 2009.https://doi.org/10.1075/hop.m. (Book review) J.A. Lucy, Grammatical categories and cognition: A case study of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. American Ethnologist, 22(3), 617–621. https:// doi.org/10.1525/ae.1995.22.3.02a00160. (Book review) B. Levin, & S. Pinker (Eds.), Lexical and conceptual analysis. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 15(1), 95–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 07268609508599518. 1996 Aboriginal bird names of the Yankunytjatjara people of Central Australia. Alice Springs: IAD [Institute for Aboriginal Development] Press. v + 41 pp. Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatara to English dictionary. Revised 2nd ed. Alice Springs: IAD [Institute for Aboriginal Development] Press. 306 pp. See also 1987, 1992. The “social emotions” of Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Ethos, 24(3), 426–464. https:// doi.org/10.1525/eth.1996.24.3.02a00020. Can linguists help judges know what they mean? Linguistic semantics in the court-room. Forensic Linguistics, 3(2), 250–272. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.v3i2. 250. Cross-linguistic research on metaphor. Language & Communication, 16(2), 145– 151. https://doi.org/10.1016/0271-5309(96)00003-1. 1997 (Edited; consultant editors: E. Ellis, & L. Cook) Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara pocket dictionary. Alice Springs: IAD [Institute for Aboriginal Development] Press. 269 pp. (Edited) Studies in the syntax of universal semantic primitives. Language Sciences, 19(3) (special issue). The universal syntax of semantic primitives. Language Sciences, 19(3), 197–207. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0388-0001(96)00059-9. (Co-authored; first author: M. Tong, second author: M. Yell) Semantic primitives of time and space in Hong Kong Cantonese. Language Sciences, 19(3), 245–261. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0388-0001(96)00063-0. (Co-authored; first author: D. Hill). Spatial terms, polysemy and possession in Longgu (Solomon Islands). Language Sciences, 19(3), 263–275. https://doi.org/10. 1016/S0388-0001(96)00064-2.

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Semantic primes and grammatical categories. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 17 (1), 1–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268609708599543. Contrastive semantics and cultural psychology: ‘Surprise’ in Malay and English. Culture & Psychology, 3(2), 153–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067X97 00300204. Cultural values and ‘cultural scripts’ of Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Journal of Pragmatics, 27(2), 183–201. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(96)00032-X. The semantics of coming and going. Pragmatics, 7(2), 147–162. https://doi.org/10. 1075/prag.7.2.02god. (Co-authored; second author: N. Thieberger) Lexicographic research on Australian Aboriginal languages 1968–1993. In D. Tryon, & M. Walsh (Eds.), Boundary rider: Essays in honour of Geoffrey O’Grady (pp. 175–208). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Discourse and culture. In T.A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as social interaction (pp. 231–257). London: Sage. (Book review) U. Eco, The search for the perfect language. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 17(2), 245–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268609708599553. 1998 Semantic analysis: A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. xv + 411 pp. See also 2011. Universal semantic primes of space—A lost cause? LAUD Series A: General & theoretical papers, 434. Reprinted in 2007 with divergent page numbering. Bad arguments against semantic primitives. Theoretical Linguistics, 24(2/3), 129– 156. https://doi.org/10.1515/thli.1998.24.2-3.129. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Language, culture and meaning: Cross-cultural semantics. In R. Dirven, & M. Verspoor (Eds.), Cognitive exploration of language and linguistics (pp. 137–159). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. See also 2004. 1999 Building a universal semantic metalanguage: The semantic theory of Anna Wierzbicka. RASK, 9/10, 3–35. (Book review) D.L. Shaul, & N.L. Furbee, Language and culture. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3(4), 570–573. (Book review) C.L. Hardin, & L. Maffi (Eds.), Color categories in thought and language. Linguistic Typology, 3(2), 259–269. https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.1999.3. 2.259. 2000 “Cultural scripts” and communicative style in Malay (Bahasa Melayu). Anthropological Linguistics, 42(1), 81–106. Polysemy: A problem of definition. In Y. Ravin, & C. Leacock (Eds.), Polysemy: Theoretical and computational approaches (pp. 129–151). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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2001 Sabar, ikhlas, setia—patient, sincere, loyal? Contrastive semantics of some ‘virtues’ in Malay and English. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(5), 653–681. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/S0378-2166(00)00028-X. Lexico-semantic universals: A critical overview. Linguistic Typology, 5(1), 1–65. https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.5.1.1. The polyfunctional Malay focus particle pun. Multilingua, 20(1), 27–59. https://doi. org/10.1515/multi.2001.002. Conceptual primes in early language development. In M. Pütz, & S. Niemeier (Eds.), Applied Cognitive Linguistics: Vol. 1. Theory and language acquisition (pp. 193–227). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/ 9783110866247.193. Hati: A key word in the Malay vocabulary of emotion. In J. Harkins, & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Emotions in crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 167–195). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110880168.167. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Language and society: Cultural concerns. In Neil J. Smelser, & P.B. Baltes (Eds.), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences: Vol. 12 (pp. 8315–8320). Oxford: Pergamon. Universal units in the lexicon. In M. Haspelmath, E. König, W. Oesterreicher, & W. Raible (Eds.), Language typology and language universals. An international handbook: Vol. 2 (pp. 1190–1203). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10. 1515/9783110171549.2.11.1190. Cultural semantics and intercultural communication. In D. Killick, M. Perry, & A. Phipps (Eds.), Poetics and praxis of languages and intercultural communication: Vol. 2 (pp. 33–44). Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications. (Book review) R. Jackendoff, P. Bloom, & K. Wynn (Eds.), Language, logic and concepts: Essays in memory of John Macnamara. Journal of Linguistics, 37(1), 205–210. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226701268765. 2002 (Co-edited; second editor: A. Wierzbicka) Meaning and universal grammar. Theory and empirical findings: Vol. 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. xvi + 334 pp. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.60. (Co-edited; second editor: A. Wierzbicka) Meaning and universal grammar. Theory and empirical findings: Vol. 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. xv + 334 pp. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.61. The search for the shared semantic core of all languages. In C. Goddard, & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Meaning and universal grammar. Theory and empirical findings: Vol. 1 (pp. 5–41). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs. 60.07god. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Semantic primes and universal grammar. In C. Goddard, & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Meaning and universal grammar. Theory and empirical findings: Vol. 1 (pp. 41–85). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.60.08god.

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Semantic primes and universal grammar in Malay (Bahasa Melayu). In C. Goddard, & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Meaning and universal grammar. Theory and empirical findings: Vol. 1 (pp. 87–172). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10. 1075/slcs.60.10god. The on-going development of the NSM research program. In C. Goddard, & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Meaning and universal grammar. Theory and empirical findings: Vol. 2 (pp. 301–321). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/ slcs.61.11god. Directive speech acts in Malay (Bahasa Melayu): An ethnopragmatic perspective. Cahiers de praxématique, 38, 113–143. https://doi.org/10.4000/praxematique.582. On and on: Verbal explications for a polysemic network. Cognitive Linguistics, 13(3), 277–294. https://doi.org/10.1515/cogl.2002.019. Overcoming terminological ethnocentrism. IIAS Newsletter 27: 28. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Semantics and cognition. In L. Nadel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of cognitive science (pp. 1096–1102). New York: John Wiley. Ethnosyntax, ethnopragmatics, sign-functions, and culture. In N.J. Enfield (Ed.), Ethnosyntax: Explorations in grammar and culture (pp. 52–73). Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199266500.003.0003. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka). Lexical decomposition II: Conceptual axiology. In D.A. Cruse, F. Hundsnurscher, M. Job, & P.R. Lutzeier (Eds.), Lexicology. An international handbook on the nature and structure of words and vocabularies: Vol. 1 (pp. 256–268). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. (Co-authored; second author: J. Harkins) Posture, location, existence, and states of being in two Central Australian languages. In J. Newman (Ed.), The linguistics of sitting, standing and lying (pp. 213–238). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi. org/10.1075/tsl.51.10god. Explicating emotions across languages and cultures: A semantic approach. In S.R. Fussell (Ed.), The verbal communication of emotions: Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 19–53). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 2003 (Co-edited; second editor: G. Palmer; third editor: P. Lee) Talking about “thinking”. Cognitive Linguistics, 14(2/3) (special issue). Thinking across languages and cultures: Six dimensions of variation. Cognitive Linguistics, 14(2/3), 109–140. https://doi.org/10.1515/cogl.2003.005. Whorf meets Wierzbicka: Variation and universals in language and thinking. Language Sciences, 25(4), 393–432. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0388-0001(03) 00002-0. Dynamic ter- in Malay (Bahasa Melayu): A study in grammatical polysemy. Studies in Language, 27(2), 287–322. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.27.2.04god. Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Latest perspectives. Theoretical Linguistics, 29(3), 227–236. https://doi.org/10.1515/thli.29.3.227.

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Semantic primes within and across languages. In D. Willems, B. Defrancq, T. Colleman, & D. Noël (Eds.), Contrastive analysis in language: Identifying linguistic units of comparison (pp. 13–43). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https:// doi.org/10.1057/9780230524637_2. Yes or no? The complex semantics of a simple question. In P. Collins, & M. Amberber (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2002 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/als2002/Goddard.pdf. 2004 (Co-edited; second editor: A. Wierzbicka) Cultural scripts. Intercultural Pragmatics, 1(2) (special issue). (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Cultural scripts: What are they and what are they good for? Intercultural Pragmatics, 1(2), 153–166. https://doi.org/10. 1515/iprg.2004.1.2.153. The atoms of meaning. IIAS Newsletter, 33, 17. The ethnopragmatics and semantics of ‘active metaphors’. Journal of Pragmatics, 36(7), 1211–1230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2003.10.011. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Language, culture and meaning: Cross-cultural semantics. In R. Dirven, & M. Verspoor (Eds.), Cognitive exploration of language and linguistics. Second revised edition (pp. 127–148). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. See also 1998. “Cultural scripts”: A new medium for ethnopragmatic instruction. In M. Achard, & S. Niemeier (Eds.), Cognitive Linguistics, second language acquisition, and foreign language teaching (pp. 143–163). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10. 1515/9783110199857.143. (Co-authored; second author: S. Karlsson) Re-thinking THINK: Contrastive semantics of Swedish and English. In C. Moskovsky (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/ als2003/goddard.pdf. See also 2008. Speech-acts, values and cultural scripts: A study in Malay ethnopragmatics. In R. Cribb (Ed.), Asia examined: Proceedings of the 15th biennial conference of the ASAA. http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/124461/20110211-1446/coombs.anu.edu.au/ SpecialProj/ASAA/biennial-conference/2004/Goddard-C-ASAA2004.pdf. 2005 The languages of East and Southeast Asia: An introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. xvi + 315 pp. The quest for meaning… Communication, culture and cognition. Armidale: University of New England (inaugural public lecture). 20 pp. The lexical semantics of culture. Language Sciences, 27(1), 51–73. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.langsci.2004.05.001. Componential analysis. In J.-O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics: 2003–2005 installment. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. See also 1995, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1075/hop.m.comm1.

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2006 (Edited) Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. vii + 278 pp. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110911114. Ethnopragmatics: A new paradigm. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context (pp. 1–30). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110911114.1. “Lift your game Martina!”: Deadpan jocular irony and the ethnopragmatics of Australian English. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context (pp. 65–97). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. See also 2007. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110911114.65. Verbal explication and the place of NSM semantics in Cognitive Linguistics. In J. Luchjenbroers (Ed.), Cognitive Linguistics investigations: Across languages, fields and philosophical boundaries (pp. 189–218). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.15.14god. Natural Semantic Metalanguage. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, 2nd edition (pp. 544–551). Oxford: Elsevier. Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, 2nd edition (pp. 609–612). Oxford: Elsevier. Cultural scripts. In J.-O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics: Vol. 10. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. See also 2009. doi: https://doi.org/ 10.1075/hop.10.cul2. (Co-authored; second author: B. Peeters) The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach: An overview with reference to the most important Romance languages. In B. Peeters (Ed.), Semantic primes and universal grammar: Empirical evidence from the Romance languages (pp. 13–38). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.81.07god. (Book review) M. Stubbs, Words and phrases: Corpus studies of lexical semantics. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 16(1), 143–144. 2007 (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) NSM analyses of the semantics of physical qualities: sweet, hot, hard, heavy, rough, sharp in cross-linguistic perspective. Studies in Language, 31(4), 765–800. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.31.4. 03god. A “lexicographic portrait” of forgetting. In M. Amberber (Ed.), The language of memory in a crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 119–137). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.21.08god. A culture-neutral metalanguage for mental state concepts. In A.C. Schalley, & D. Khlentzos (Eds.), Mental states: Vol. 2. Language and cognitive structure (pp. 11– 35). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.93.04god. Semantic primes and conceptual ontology. In A.C. Schalley, & D. Zaefferer (Eds.), Ontolinguistics: How ontological status shapes the linguistic coding of concepts (pp. 145–173). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/ 9783110197792.2.145.

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Semantic molecules. In I. Mushin, & M. Laughren (Eds.), Selected papers from the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society. https://espace.library.uq. edu.au/view/UQ:12798/. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Semantic primes and cultural scripts in language learning and intercultural communication. In F. Sharifian, & G.B. Palmer (Eds.), Applied Cultural Linguistics: Implications for second language learning and intercultural communication (pp. 105–124). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/celcr.7.08god. «Игpaй лyчшe, Mapтинa!» (иpoния «c кaмeнным лицoм» и этнoпpaгмaтикa aвcтpaлийcкoгo вapиaнтa aнглийcкoгo языкa). Жaнpы peчи [Zhanry rechi/ Speech genres], 5, 159–183. Russian translation of “Lift your game Martina!”: Deadpan jocular irony and the ethnopragmatics of Australian English (2006). (Book review) R. Pustet, Copulas: Universals in the categorization of the lexicon. Language, 83(2), 446–449. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2007.0070. A response to N.J. Enfield’s review of Ethnopragmatics (Goddard, Ed., 2006). Intercultural Pragmatics, 4(4), 531–538. https://doi.org/10.1515/IP.2007.027. 2008 (Edited) Cross-linguistic semantics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. xvi + 356 pp. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.102. Natural Semantic Metalanguage: The state of the art. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Crosslinguistic semantics (pp. 1–34). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10. 1075/slcs.102.05god. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) New semantic primes and new syntactic frames: “Specificational BE” and “abstract THIS/IT”. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Cross-linguistic semantics (pp. 35–57). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi. org/10.1075/slcs.102.06god. Towards a systematic table of semantic elements. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Crosslinguistic semantics (pp. 59–81). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10. 1075/slcs.102.07god. (Co-authored; second author: S. Karlsson) Re-thinking THINK in contrastive perspective: Swedish vs. English. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Cross-linguistic semantics (pp. 225–240). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.102. 14god. Contrastive semantics and cultural psychology: English heart vs. Malay hati. In F. Sharifian, R. Dirven, N. Yu, & S. Niemeier (Eds.), Culture, body, and language: Conceptualizations of internal body organs across cultures and languages (pp. 75– 102). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110199109.2.75. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Universal human concepts as a basis for contrastive linguistic semantics. In M.Á. Gómez González, J.L. Mackenzie, & E.M. González Álvarez (Eds.), Current trends in contrastive linguistics: Functional and cognitive perspectives (pp. 205–226). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi. org/10.1075/sfsl.60.13god.

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(Book review) H. Wiese, Numbers, language and the human mind. Language, 84(3), 672–675. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.0.0051. 2009 The ‘communication concept’ and the ‘language concept’ in everyday English. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 29(1), 11–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 07268600802516350. The conceptual semantics of numbers and counting: An NSM analysis. Functions of Language, 16(2), 193–224. https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.16.2.02god. Not taking yourself too seriously in Australian English: Semantic explications, cultural scripts, corpus evidence. Intercultural Pragmatics, 6(1), 29–53. https://doi. org/10.1515/IPRG.2009.002. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Contrastive semantics of physical activity verbs: ‘Cutting’ and ‘chopping’ in English, Polish, and Japanese. Language Sciences, 31, 60–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2007.10.002. “Like a crab teaching its young to walk straight”: Proverbiality, semantics, and indexicality in English and Malay. In G. Senft, & E.B. Basso (Eds.), Ritual communication (pp. 103–125). New York: Berg. Componential analysis. In G. Senft, J.-O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Culture and language use (pp. 58–67). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. See also 1995, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1075/hoph.2.06god. Cultural scripts. In G. Senft, J.-O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Culture and language use (pp. 68–80). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. See also 2006. https://doi. org/10.1075/hoph.2.07god. “Cлeдyй пyтeм pиcoвoгo пoля”: ceмaнтикa пocлoвиц в aнглийcкoм и мaлaйcкoм языкax [“Follow the way of the rice plant”: The semantics of proverbs in English and Malay (Bahasa Melayu)]. Жaнpы peчи [Speech genres], 6, 184– 207. Russian translation of a paper presented at the Wenner-Gren Foundation Symposium on Ritual Communication, Portugal, 17-23 March 2007. Updated and published in English as chapter 8 of Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures (2014). Culture. In L. Cummings (Ed.), The Routledge pragmatics encyclopedia (pp. 121– 122). London: Routledge. 2010 Semantic molecules and semantic complexity (with special reference to “environmental” molecules). Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 8(1), 123–155. https://doi.org/ 10.1075/ml.8.1.05god. Cultural scripts: Applications to language teaching and intercultural communication. Studies in Pragmatics (Journal of the China Pragmatics Association), 3, 105– 119. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) ‘Want’ is a lexical and conceptual universal: Reply to Khanina. Studies in Language, 34(1): 108–123. https://doi.org/ 10.1075/sl.34.1.04god. A piece of cheese, a grain of sand: The semantics of mass nouns and unitizers. In F. J. Pelletier (Ed.), Kinds, things and stuff: Mass terms and generics (pp. 132–165).

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New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/ 9780195382891.003.0008. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. In B. Heine, & H. Narrog (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis (pp. 459–484). Oxford: Oxford University Press. See also 2015. Universals and variation in the lexicon of mental state concepts. In B.C. Malt, & P. Wolff (Eds.), Words and the mind: How words capture human experience (pp. 72–92). Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/ 9780195311129.003.0005. (Co-authored; second author: A.C. Schalley) Semantic analysis. In N. Indurkhya, & F.J. Damerau (Eds.), Handbook of natural language processing: Second edition (pp. 93–120). Boca Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC. 2011 Semantic analysis: A practical introduction. Revised and expanded second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. xix + 490 pp. See also 1998. The lexical semantics of language (with special reference to words). Language Sciences, 33(1), 40–57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2010.03.003. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Semantics and cognition. Wiley interdisciplinary reviews: Cognitive science, 2(2): 125–135. https://doi.org/10. 1002/wcs.101. Semantic primitives (primes). In P.C. Hogan (Ed.), The Cambridge encyclopedia of the language sciences (pp. 740–742). New York: Cambridge University Press. 2012 ‘Early interactions’ in Australian English, American English, and English English: Cultural differences and cultural scripts. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 1038–1050. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.04.010. Semantic primes, semantic molecules, semantic templates: Key concepts in the NSM approach to lexical typology. Linguistics, 50(3): 711–743. https://doi.org/10. 1515/ling-2012-0022. Cultural scripts and communication style differences in three Anglo Englishes (English English, American English and Australian English). In B. Kryk-Kastovsky (Ed.), Intercultural miscommunication past and present (pp. 101–120). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-01353-5. 2013 (Edited) Semantics and/in social cognition. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(3) (special issue). The semantic roots and cultural grounding of ‘social cognition’. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(3): 245–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2013.846454. On the river, on an island, on the street: The semantics of English on-constructions involving “laterality”. International Journal of Cognitive Linguistics [China], 3(2), 153–167.

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(Co-authored; first author: M.A. Barrios Rodríguez) ‘Degrad verbs’ in Spanish and English: Collocations, lexical functions and contrastive NSM semantic analysis. Functions of Language, 20(2), 219–249. https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.20.2.04bar. Comparatives without scales: An NSM analysis of English comparative constructions. In J. Henderson, M.-È. Ritz, & C. Rodríguez Louro (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. https://sites.google.com/ site/als2012uwa/proceedings/Goddard_Comparatives.pdf. English valency patterns. In I. Hartmann, M. Haspelmath, & B. Taylor (Eds.), Valency patterns Leipzig. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://valpal.info/languages/english. 2014 (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. viii + 314 pp. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199668434.001.0001. (Co-edited; second editor: Z. Ye) “Happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures. International Journal of Language and Culture, 1(2) (special issue). See also 2016. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.1.2. (Co-authored; second author: Z. Ye) Exploring “happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures. International Journal of Language and Culture, 1(2), 131– 148. See also 2016. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.1.2.01god. Interjections and emotion (with special reference to “surprise” and “disgust”). Emotion Review, 6(1): 53–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073913491843. Author reply [to respondents of the previous entry]. Emotion Review, 6(1), 66–67. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka, third author: H. Fabréga Jr) Evolutionary semantics: Using NSM to model stages in human cognitive evolution. Language Sciences, 42, 60–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2013.11.003. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Semantic fieldwork and lexical universals. Studies in Language, 38(1): 80–126. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.38.1.03god. On “disgust”. In F. Baider, & G. Cislaru (Eds.), Linguistic approaches to emotions in context (pp. 73–97). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns. 241.06god. Have to, have got to, and must: NSM analyses of English modal verbs of ‘necessity’. In M. Taboada, & R. Trnavac (Eds.), Nonveridicality and evaluation: Theoretical, computational and corpus approaches (pp. 50–75). Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004258174_004. Jesus! vs. Christ! in Australian English: Semantics, secondary interjections and corpus analysis. In J. Romero-Trillo (Ed.), Yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics 2014: New empirical and theoretical paradigms (pp. 55–77). Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06007-1_4. 2015 “Swear words” and “curse words” in Australian (and American) English: At the crossroads of pragmatics, semantics and sociolinguistics. Intercultural Pragmatics, 12(2), 189–218. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2015-0010.

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The complex, language-specific semantics of “surprise”. Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 13(2), 291–313. See also 2017. https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.13.2.02god. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) What does Jukurrpa (‘Dreamtime’, ‘the Dreaming’) mean? A semantic and conceptual journey of discovery. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2015(1): 43–65. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. In B. Heine, & H. Narrog (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis, 2nd edition (pp. 817–841). Oxford: Oxford University Press. See also 2010. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/ 9780199677078.013.0018. Words as carriers of cultural meaning. In J.R. Taylor (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the word (pp. 380–398). Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199641604.013.027. Verb classes and valency alternations (NSM approach), with special reference to English physical activity verbs. In A. Malchukov, & B. Comrie (Eds.), Valency classes in the world’s languages: Vol. 2 (pp. 1671–1701). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110429343-020. (Co-authored; contributor: Z. Ye) Ethnopragmatics. In F. Sharifian (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and culture (pp. 66–83). London: Routledge. 2016 (Co-edited; second editor: Z. Ye) “Happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. vi + 145 pp. See also 2014..https://doi.org/ 10.1075/bct.84. (Co-authored; second author: Z. Ye) Exploring “happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures. In C. Goddard, & Z. Ye (Eds.), “Happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures (pp. 1–18). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. See also 2014. https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.84.01god. (Co-authored; second author: M. Taboada, third author: R. Trnavac) Semantic descriptions of 24 evaluational adjectives, for application in sentiment analysis (Technical report SFU-CMPT TR 2016-42-1). Vancouver: Simon Fraser University, School of Computing Science. Semantic molecules and their role in NSM lexical definitions. Cahiers de lexicologie, 109, 13–34. https://doi.org/10.15122/isbn.978-2-406-06861-7.p.0013. (Co-authored; first author: A. Gladkova, second author: U. Vanhatalo) The semantics of interjections: An experimental study with natural semantic metalanguage. Applied Psycholinguistics 37(4): 841–865. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0142716415000260. (Co-authored; second author: Anna Wierzbicka) Explicating the English lexicon of ‘doing and happening’. Functions of Language, 23(2), 214–256. https://doi.org/10. 1075/fol.23.2.03god. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) ‘It’s mine!’ Re-thinking the conceptual semantics of “possession” through NSM. Language Sciences, 56, 93–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2016.03.002. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka, third author: J. Wong) “Walking” and “running” in English and German: The conceptual semantics of verbs of human

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locomotion. Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 14(2): 303–336. https://doi.org/10. 1075/rcl.14.2.03god. (Co-authored; second author: R. Cramer) “Laid back” and “irreverent”: An ethnopragmatic analysis of two cultural themes in Australian English communication. In D. Carbaugh (Ed.), The handbook of communication in cross-cultural perspective (pp. 89–103). New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9781315709321.ch8. Comment: Lakoff on metaphor—More heat than light. Emotion Review, 8(3), 277– 278. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073915595099. 2017 Ethnopragmatic perspectives on conversational humour, with special reference to Australian English. Language & Communication, 55, 55–68. https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.langcom.2016.09.008. (Co-authored; first author: M. Taboada, second author: R. Trnavac) On being negative. Corpus Pragmatics, 1(1): 57–76. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-0170006-y. The complex, language-specific semantics of “surprise”. In A. Celle, & L. Lansari (Eds.), Expressing and describing surprise (pp. 27–49). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. See also 2015. https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.92.02god. Natural Semantic Metalanguage and lexicography. In P. Hanks, & G.-M. de Schryver (Eds.), International handbook of modern lexis and lexicography. Berlin: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45369-4_14-1. Furniture, vegetables, weapons: Functional collective superordinates in the English lexicon. In Z. Ye (Ed.), The semantics of nouns (pp. 246–281). Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198736721.003.0010. 2018 Ten lectures on Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Exploring language, thought and culture using simple, translatable words. Leiden: Brill. xi + 356 pp. https://doi.org/ 10.1163/9789004357723. (Edited) Minimal English for a global world: Improved communication using fewer words. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. xiii + 292 pp. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3319-62512-6. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Minimal English and how it can add to Global English. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Minimal English for a global world: Improved communication using fewer words (pp. 5–27). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62512-6_2. Minimal English: The science behind it. In C. Goddard (Ed.), Minimal English for a global world: Improved communication using fewer words (pp. 29–70). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62512-6_3. “Joking, kidding, teasing”: Slippery categories for cross-cultural comparison but key words for understanding Anglo conversational humor. Intercultural Pragmatics, 15(4), 487–514. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2018-0017.

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A semantic menagerie: The conceptual semantics of ethnozoological categories. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 22(3), 539-559. https://doi.org/10.22363/23129182-2018-22-3-539-559. (Co-authored; first author: A. Wierzbicka) Talking about our bodies and their parts in Warlpiri. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 38(1), 31–62. https://doi.org/10. 1080/07268602.2018.1393862. 2019 (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Direct and indirect speech revisited: Semantic universals and semantic diversity. In A. Capone, M. García-Carpintero, & A. Falzone (Eds.), Indirect reports and pragmatics in the world languages (pp. 173–199). Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78771-8_9. (Co-authored; second author: A. Wierzbicka) Reported speech as a pivotal human phenomenon: Response to Spronck and Nikitina. Linguistic Typology, 23(1), 167– 175. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2019-0006. In Press and Forthcoming (Co-edited; first editor: M. Mizumoto, second editor: J. Ganeri) Ethno-epistemology: Global perspectives on the study of knowledge. Overcoming the linguistic challenges for ethno-epistemology: NSM perspectives. In M. Mizumoto, J. Ganeri, & C. Goddard (Eds.), Ethno-epistemology: Global perspectives on the study of knowledge. ‘Country’, ‘land’, ‘nation’: Key Anglo English words for talking and thinking about people in places. Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics, 1(2). (Co-authored; second author: M. Taboada, third author: R. Trnavac) The semantics of evaluational adjectives: Perspectives from Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Appraisal. Functions of Language, 26(3). (Co-authored; second author: K. Mullan) Explicating verbs for “laughing with other people” in French and English (and why it matters for humour studies). Humor, 33(1). Vocabulary of emotions and its development in English, German and other languages. In G.L. Schiewer, J. Altarriba, & B.C. Ng (Eds.), Handbook of language and emotion. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Cognitive Linguistics. In J. Stanlaw (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of linguistic anthropology. New York: Wiley Blackwell.