Anna Wierzbicka

Imprisoned in English (eBook, PDF)

The Hazards of English as a Default Language

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

In Imprisoned in English, Anna Wierzbicka argues that in the present English-dominated world, millions of people - including academics, lawyers, diplomats, and writers - can become "prisoners of English", unable to think outside English. In particular, social sciences and the humanities are now increasingly locked in a conceptual framework grounded in English. To most scholars in these fields, treating English as a default language seems a natural thing to do. The book's approach is interdisciplinary, and its themes range over areas of central interest to anthropology, psychology, and sociology, among others. The linguistic material is drawn from languages of America, Australia, the Pacific, South-East Asia and Europe. Wierzbicka argues that it is time for human sciences to take advantage of English as a global lingua franca while at the same time transcending the limitations of the historically-shaped conceptual vocabulary of English. And she shows how this can be done.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 288
• Erscheinungstermin: 7. November 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780199321513
• Artikelnr.: 40043054

Autorenporträt

Professor of Linguistics, Australian National University, and author of Semantics, Culture, and Cognition (1992); Semantics: Primes and Universals (1996): Understanding Cultures Through their Keywords (1997); What did Jesus Mean? (2001), and English: Meaning and Culture (2006)

Inhaltsangabe

* PART I: Every language draws a circle ...
* Chapter 1. Introduction: Recognising the contingency of one's own
language
* Chapter 2. Naming the world or construing the world?
* Chapter 3. The givens of human life
* Chapter 4. Universal words, semantic atoms and semantic molecules
* Chapter 5. Human bodies and human minds: what is visible and what is
invisible
* PART II: Emotions and values
* Chapter 6. Anglo values vs. Human values: Talking about values in a
global world
* Chapter 7. Human emotions and English words: Are anger and disgust
universal?
* PART III: 'Politeness' and 'cooperation'
* Chapter 8. Talking to other people: 'Politeness' and cultural scripts
* Chapter 9. Doing things with other people: 'cooperation',
'interaction' and 'ob?enie'
* PART IV: Entering other minds
* Chapter 10. Grammar and social cognition: the Hawaiians, the
Dalabons, and the Anglos
* Chapter 11. Endangered languages, endangered meanings
* Chapter 12. Thinking about 'things' in Yucatec and in English
* Chapter 13. Chimpanzees and the evolution of human cognition
* PART V: Breaking down the walls of the prison
* Chapter 14. From ordinary (Anglo) English to Minimal English
* PART VI: kindred thinking across disciplines
* Preliminary remarks
* Chapter 15. Anthropology, Psychology, Psychiatry
* Chapter 16. Philosophy, Theology, Politics
* Chapter 17. Linguistics: Cognitive and cultural approaches
* Chapter 18. Bilingualism, Life writing, Translation
* Final remarks
* References
* Index