Cultural scripts: What are they and what are they good for?

Abstract

The term cultural scripts refers to a powerful new technique for articu- lating cultural norms, values, and practices in terms which are clear, pre- cise, and accessible to cultural insiders and to cultural outsiders alike. This result is only possible because cultural scripts are formulated in a tightly constrained, yet expressively flexible, metalanguage consisting of simple words and grammatical patterns which have equivalents in all languages. This is of course the metalanguage of semantic primes devel- oped over the past 25 years of cross-linguistic research by the editors and colleagues in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach. The present collection of studies demonstrates the productivity and versa- tility of the cultural scripts approach with case studies from five dierent parts of world—China, Colombia, Korea, Singapore, and West Africa— describing a widely diering selection of culture-specific speech practices and interactional norms. One recurrent theme is that the dierent ways of speaking of dierent societies are linked with and make sense in terms of dierent local cultural values, or at least, dierent cultural priorities as far as values are concerned. Cultural scripts exist at dierent levels of generality, and may relate to dierent aspects of thinking, speaking, and behaviour. The present set of studies is mainly concerned with norms and practices of social interaction. The cultural scripts technique is one of the main modes of descrip- tion of the broad project which can be termed ethnopragmatics (cf. Goddard ed, in press a). This refers to the quest, inaugurated in linguistics by Anna Wierzbicka (1985) in her article 'Dierent cultures, dierent languages, dierent speech acts: English vs. Polish', to understand speech practices from the perspective of the speakers themselves. For this pur- pose, the techniques of cross-cultural semantics are also essential be- cause to understand speech practices in terms which make sense to the people concerned, we must be able to understand the meanings of the rel- evant culturally important words—words for local values, social catego- ries, speech-acts, and so on. Important words and phrases of this kind