How words do things with people

Abstract

‘Cultural Keywords in Discourse’ studies culturally-specific words around which whole discourses are organised. The book utilises insights from recent work in cultural semantics and ethnopragmatics, and applies these to the study of cultural discourses. The volume presents original, empirical case studies in cultural keywords across speech communities in seven different geographical areas: Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Melanesia, Mexico and Scandinavia. The introduction outlines our approach and its basic principles. The analytical concepts and lenses offered by our approach are explained and exemplified. The final chapter of the book provides practical guidance for future keyword research and summarises the findings and new directions resulting from the new case studies. We have called our introductory chapter How Words Do Things with People. This, of course, is a play on How People Do Things with Words, the signature phrase of modern speech act theory. The subversion signals both our perspective as well as our disenchantment with the universalist-but-Anglophone tradition in pragmatics. In the Anglo pragmatics paradigm, invented by Austin, Grice, Searle and their followers,1 speakers were rational individuals who used English words, spoke coherently and lived in a world of “brevity”, “truth”, “politeness”, “cooperation”, “relevance” and similar Anglo values. Semantic diversity and cultural differences were not considered to be important, partly because words were subjugated to the purpose of what the speaker “did with them”, and partly because the assumption was that there was a fixed set of universal speech acts which could be “done” by any speaker in any place at any time.