The book discusses data from a wide range of languages and it shows that the meanings expressed in human interaction and the different "cultural scripts" prevailing in different speech communities can be clearly and intelligibly described and compared by using a "natural semantic metalanguage", based on empirically established universal human concepts. As the book shows, this metalanguage can be used as a basis for teaching successful cross-cultural communication, including the teaching of languages in a cultural context.

About the Author

Anna Wierzbicka is Professor at Australian National University, Canberra.

Reviews

"The book can be regarded as a recapitulation of results obtained in all former scholarly projects carried by its author. [It] is one if the best manuals of widely understood pragmatics and ethnolinguistics of human speech, the more so as the traditoinal grammars and handbooks of linguistics usually leave the ethnography of speech in the background of linguistics analyses."Tomasz Wicherkiewicz in: Linguistics and Oriental Studies from Poznan