Cross-Cultural Pragmatics

Abstract

Cross-cultural pragmatics (CCP) is an area of linguistics that studies natural language use in a contrastive perspective accounting for cultural factors. “Natural language” here is interpreted in its relation to culture. By culture, people’s shared ways of living, thinking, feeling, doing things, and speaking are understood. CCP is a relatively recent field in linguistics, and it is not uniform either. It lies at the intersection of pragmatics, contrastive linguistics, and anthropological linguistics or ethnolinguistics, and its different realizations also intersect with cognitive studies and sociolinguistics. The approaches here stem from different areas of linguistic studies and emphasize different aspects of language use—pragmatics, on the one hand, and social, cultural, and anthropological approaches, on the other. At the same time, the possibility of providing a contrastive perspective in the analysis is crucial. Therefore, approaches to studying cross-cultural pragmatics can be broadly divided into two trends—linguo-philosophical and sociocultural or anthropological. The linguo-philosophical trend accepts the main postulates of pragmatics as a field and uses them as grids of comparison. Sociocultural approaches analyze language use in its close relation to culture and society. This article will consider the following approaches within each trend: Politeness Theory and Contrastive Pragmatics as the linguo-philosophical trend, and Ethnopragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Pragmatic Act Theory, Cultural Linguistics, The Moscow School of Semantics and the Lublin School of Linguistic Worldview Studies, and Postcolonial Pragmatics as the sociocultural trend.