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

The term cultural scripts refers to a powerful new technique for articulating cultural norms, values, and practices in terms which are clear, precise, 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 developed 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 versatility of the cultural scripts approach with case studies from five di¤erent parts of world—China, Colombia, Korea, Singapore, and West Africa— describing a widely di¤ering selection of culture-specific speech practices and interactional norms. One recurrent theme is that the di¤erent ways of speaking of di¤erent societies are linked with and make sense in terms of di¤erent local cultural values, or at least, di¤erent cultural priorities as far as values are concerned. Cultural scripts exist at di¤erent levels of generality, and may relate to di¤erent 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 description 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 ‘Di¤erent cultures, di¤erent languages, di¤erent speech acts: English vs. Polish’, to understand speech practices from the perspective of the speakers themselves. For this purpose, the techniques of cross-cultural semantics are also essential because to understand speech practices in terms which make sense to the people concerned, we must be able to understand the meanings of the relevant culturally important words—words for local values, social categories, speech-acts, and so on. Important words and phrases of this kind