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JSF - Chapter 5 - Ethnopragmatics PDF

Ethnopragmatics is an approach to language that views culture as having an explanatory role in how people speak based on their indigenous beliefs, values, and social categories. It aims to understand speech practices from an insider cultural perspective rather than imposing external frameworks. Ethnopragmatics analyzes linguistic usage patterns, interactional routines, and constructions to understand cultural thinking and stay close to indigenous viewpoints. A key goal is describing cultural concepts using terms meaningful within each language to avoid Anglocentrism and gain fine-grained understanding of cultural influences on language.

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206 views2 pages

JSF - Chapter 5 - Ethnopragmatics PDF

Ethnopragmatics is an approach to language that views culture as having an explanatory role in how people speak based on their indigenous beliefs, values, and social categories. It aims to understand speech practices from an insider cultural perspective rather than imposing external frameworks. Ethnopragmatics analyzes linguistic usage patterns, interactional routines, and constructions to understand cultural thinking and stay close to indigenous viewpoints. A key goal is describing cultural concepts using terms meaningful within each language to avoid Anglocentrism and gain fine-grained understanding of cultural influences on language.

Uploaded by

Judith Fetalver
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© © All Rights Reserved
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BATANGAS STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES


Pablo Borbon Main I, Batangas City

CHAPTER REFLECTION:
Chapter 5 : Ethnopragmatics

Ethnopragmatics is an approach to language that is utilized in a society that sees


culture as having a central explanatory role and at the same time make way for the linkage
that is drawn between language and the society’s cultural beliefs and occurrences. Also,
this approach explained a threefold alignment of its objectives, methodological tools and
evidences. The threefold alignment was expounded by Goddard in 2006.
The objectives of ethnopragmatics is that it gives way to the knowledge of culture-
internal perspectives on the ‘how and why’ of speech practices in the diverse languages of
the world. It deals with the explanation and description of the way how of how people
speaks in terms that it make sense to the people concerned including their indigenous
beliefs, values, attitudes, social categories and emotions. When it comes to the
methodological tools, it is based on decomposing cultural notions and learning the cultural
norms in terms of its meanings that seem to be shared and common between all the
languages used in the world. As for the linguistic evidences, ethnopragmatics focuses on
usage patterns, interactional routines, and language constructions. Linguistic usage
functions as the index of routine ways of thinking and, appropriately analyzed, allows us
to stay close to an insider perspective. Ethnopragmatics also takes heed of the ‘soft data’
of anecdotal accounts, life writing in terms of cultural insiders themselves. This also means
that ethnopragmatics deals with the life-written reports of people and the experiences they
shared and have inside their culture.
Aside from the definitions above, ethnopragmatics is the reconceptualization of the
approach to ‘cross-cultural pragmatics’ as stated by Wierzbicka’s (2003). Ethnopragmatics
is a more appropriate designation because it highlights the claim that there is an explanatory
link between indigenous values and social models, on the one hand, and indigenous speech
practices, on the other. A key goal of ethnopragmatics is to access ‘insider perspectives’ of
the participants. This means working through and with local categories and local ways of
speaking – not in terms of sophisticated academic English and technical concepts, but in
terms that are recognizable and accessible to the people concerned. This objective will and
will only be achieved by enclosing the description in words and phrases whose meanings
are shared between the languages concerned, such as universal semantic primes and
molecules. Describing cultural concepts and cultural norms in this way brings other
important benefits as well because this eliminates the danger of definitional circularity and
allows for a very fine-grained resolution of meaning. This equate to the theory that the
culture of a person greatly affects the language that he or she should be learning. That is
visible to the society he or she belongs to.
There are three critical issues that should be faced when analyzing and studying
about ethnosemantics. The first one is that it need to continuously combatting against the
Anglocentrism or the practice of viewing the world from English or Anglo-American
perspective, with an implied belief, either consciously or subconsciously, in the
preeminence of English or Anglo-American culture. This is present when universal models
are made from English-specific materials. It is important to be clear that this problem is
not a matter of the conscious intentions of the researchers concerned but it is about
researchers taking for granted the interpretive resources of the English language and about
how these assumed concepts influence the content of the models.
The second critical issue is that Anglo English concepts as well as pragmatic norms
should be denaturalize. Based from several studies done, there are words in the Anglo
English language that do not have equivalents in any other languages such as European
languages. Some words are not made based from the ethnopragmatics view but instead, it
is made directly relevant to Anglo ways of speaking, including social categories and social
descriptors. Lastly, the third Critical issue is the need to itemize and conceptualized the
compartmentalization of pragmatics, and language-and-culture studies generally. Within
linguistics, there is a need to integrate pragmatics with lexical and grammatical semantics.
Despite ongoing talk about the semantics–pragmatics interface, few practitioners in either
field are interested in showing how meaning is constructed by real people in real
communication, subjectively in a seamless fashion.
As a conclusion, there are still a lot of things that should be done in studying and
exploring ethnopragmatics. Some of which are documenting and exploring more and more
languages, experimenting with new formats of cultural scripts and explications,
discovering more about the intertextuality between cultural scripts, accommodating
situational and interpersonal factors in greater detail. Most importantly, practical
application using ethnopragmatics should also be a focus in this. Societal and cultural
scripts and experiences data are expressed in a non-technical ordinary language, they have
the potential to be readily applied to real-world needs in many situations. As an example,
real-life scenarios like having to assist with cultural induction of immigrants and refugees,
to develop the intercultural competence component of language courses, to assist
governmental and international agencies to communicate more effectively with cultural
minorities, to help bridge cultural gaps in international negotiations. Ethnopragmatics also
has an important contribution to make at this time of language endangerment, by providing
techniques for capturing indigenous concepts and describing indigenous speech practices
in an authentic fashion that do not use Anglocentrism. This should be visible to the
continuous progress in ethnopragmatics and its great contribution to the society.

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