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Ethnopragmatics
The term ‘ethnopragmatics’ designates an approach to language in use that sees culture as playing a central explanatory role. It is a reconceptualization of the approach to ‘cross‑cultural pragmatics’ inaugurated by Anna Wierzbicka’s (2003 [1991]) ground‑breaking volume of this name. Ethnopragmatics involves a threefold alignment of objectives, methodological tools, and evidence base (Goddard 2006). The objective of ethnopragmatics is to articulate culture‑internal perspectives on the “how and why” of speech practices in the diverse languages of the world. It is the quest to describe and explain people’s ways of speaking in terms which make sense to the people concerned, i.e., in terms of local cultural categories, values, beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and so on. Its methodological tools are based on using simple, cross‑translatable words to elucidate cultural notions and to capture cultural norms. These methodologies rest on semantic research in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) program; in particular, on its findings about semantic primes and molecules (Goddard 2021; Goddard, Wierzbicka and Ye 2023). The evidence base of ethnopragmatics is broad. It pays particular attention to linguistic evidence, e.g., cultural keywords, phraseology, collocational patterns in corpora, interactional routines, and lexicogrammatical constructions, but it also draws on commentaries by anthropologists, sociologists, and others, and on the “soft data” of anecdotal accounts, life writing, and other literature of bilingual experience.
