In this thesis I describe aspects of referring expressions and referential practice in an English-lexified creole language spoken in the Ngukurr Aboriginal community, in the Northern Territory of Australia. Kriol has substrate influences from seven traditional Aboriginal languages. Dialects of Kriol are spoken in Aboriginal communities across the Top End of Australia; with estimates suggesting more than 20,000 people speak it as a first language. The language has a low status and in many contexts, such as health, medical and legal contexts, it frequently goes unrecognised as a legitimate language requiring interpreters. There is no comprehensive grammar of Kriol and as yet, there have been few in-depth studies into its structure and use. I investigate referential expressions in Kriol from various perspectives, using tools from a range of theoretical frameworks and research traditions, including descriptive linguistics, discourse analysis, information structure, and ethnopragmatics. The thesis provides an integrated description of how referential expressions are structured and how they are used in spontaneous talk to meet communicative needs. A further goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that there is significant continuity of referring strategies from Kriol's Aboriginal substrate languages. The data used in this study consists of a corpus of spontaneous discourse between two or more speakers, elicited material, and consultation with Elders on cultural issues relevant to language use. ... Each chapter contributes original description of the Kriol language. By combining a number of theoretical perspectives, the thesis offers an integrated description of the structure and function of referring expressions.

Broadly speaking one can identify two approaches to the study of speech acts in cultural context: a mainstream approach known as 'contrastive pragmatics' and an alternative approach which I call 'ethnopragmatics'. Contrastive pragmatics (Blum-Kulka, Danet and Gherson 1985; Blum-Kulka et al 1989; Blum-Kulka and Kaspar 1993; among other works) assumes that certain speech-acts or speech-act types such as request, apology, and compliment - are found in all or most cultures, although they are "realised" differently from culture to culture. For example, requests may be realised with different degrees of directness or politeness, with an emphasis on positive or negative politeness, using different formal means of expression, e.g. imperatives, questions, modalised sentences, and so On. Many valuable studies have been produced in the contrastive pragmatics framework, but there are also some serious difficulties with its assumptions and methodology.

Cultural scripts provide a powerful new technique for articulating cultural norms, values and practices using simple cross-translatable phrasing. The technique is based on many decades of research into cross-cultural semantics by Anna Wierzbicka and colleagues in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. This paper illustrates the cultural scripts approach with three examples of pragmatics of Anglo English: request strategies, personal remarks, and phatic complimenting in American English. It argues that the cultural scripts approach can be readily adapted for use in teaching intercultural pragmatics and intercultural communication.

As Gerd Bauman (1996: 9) observes in his book Contesting Culture, '[n] o idea is as fundamental to an anthropological understanding of social life as the concept of culture'. Given that people's ways of speaking are often, if not always, culturally shaped, it would seem that the same must apply to linguistic pragmatics. Certainly cultural factors play a central part in the ethnography of communication (in anthropology) and in cross-cultural pragmatics (in linguistics). As suggested by Bauman's title, however, the 'culture concept' has lately been subject to sustained scrutiny and criticism for, among other things, its alleged essentialism, over-simplification, failure to accommodate variability and change, and under-estimation of human agency. Ironically though, as Bauman observes, '[a]t the same time, no anthropological term has spread into public parlance and political discourse as this word has done over the past twenty years'.

In the mainstream speech culture of Australia (as in the UK, though perhaps more so in Australia), taking yourself too seriously is culturally proscribed. This study applies the techniques of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) semantics and ethnopragmatics (Goddard 2006b, 2008; Wierzbicka 1996, 2003, 2006a) to this aspect of Australian English speech culture. It first develops a semantic explication for the language-specific expression taking yourself too seriously, thus helping to give access to an "insider perspective" on the practice. Next, it seeks to identify some of the broader communicative norms and social attitudes that are involved, using the method of cultural scripts (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2004). Finally, it investigates the extent to which predictions generated from the analysis can be supported or disconfirmed by contrastive analysis of Australian English corpora as against other English corpora, and by the use of the Google search engine to explore different subdomains of the World Wide Web.