Ethnopragmatics: a new paradigm

For many years the dominant paradigm in linguistic pragmatics was strongly universalist: human communication was seen as largely governed by a rich and substantive inventory of universal principles. Variation between cultures was described in terms of local adjustments to and local construals of the presumed pan-human universals of communication. Different versions of this universalist paradigm are represented in works such as Grice (1975), Brown and Levinson (1978), Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989), Sperber and Wilson (1995), among others. Universalist pragmatics necessarily imposes an "external" perspective on the description of the speech practices of any particular local culture, since the basic descriptive parameters have been decided in advance without reference to that local culture. Furthermore, these descriptive parameters - such as positive and negative politeness, the maxims of quality and quantity, "relevance", collectivism and individualism, etc. - are of such an abstract and technical nature they would be unrecognisable to the people of the culture being described. At the same time, universalist pragmatics carries with it the assumption that local variations are somehow minor when compared with the grand groundplan of "human" communication.