"Cultural Scripts": a New Medium for Ethnopragmatic Instruction

This paper is concerned with the potential applications of one stream of cognitive linguistics - the cross-linguistic semantics of Anna Wierzbicka and colleagues - to the teaching of ethnopragmatics (cultural pragmatics). To begin with, therefore, some remarks on conventional approaches to linguistic pragmatics are in order. Pragmatic differences between languages have been addressed within several frameworks, including the ethnography of communication, contrastive pragmatics, and linguistic anthropology. In general, work within these different frameworks assumes that in any speech community there will be certain shared understandings (variously termed "rules of speaking", "norms of interaction", "preferred discourse strategies", etc.) about how it is appropriate to speak in particular, culturally construed situations.