A semantic metalanguage for a crosscultural comparison of speech acts and speech genres

Abstract

This paper discusses a number of speech acts and speech genres from English, Polish, and Japanese, approaching them through the words which name them. It is claimed that folk names of speech acts and speech genres are culture-specific and provide an important source of insight into communicative routines most characteristic of a given society; and that to fully exploit this source one must carry Out a rigorous semantic analysis of such names and express the results of this analysis in a culture-independent semantic metalanguage. The author proposes such a metalanguage and illustrates her approach with numerous detailed semantic analyses. She suggests that analyses of speech acts and speech genres carried out in terms of English folk labels are ethnocentric and unsuitable for crosscultural comparison. She tries to show how folk labels of speech acts and speech genres characteristic of a given language reflect salient features of the culture associated with that language, and how the use of the proposed semantic metalanguage, derived from natural language, helps to achieve the desired double goal of insight and rigor in this area of study. (Speech acts, speech genres, semantics, lexicography, language and culture)