This thesis investigates the lexical semantics of nice and a set of other superficially "simple" sociality concepts (rude, polite and manners) in Australian English. When appropriately analysed, these words reveal much about the socially accepted and approved ways of behaving in Australian society. As expected of heavily culture-laden words, nice and rude lack precise translation equivalents in many languages and can be regarded as cultural key words (Levisen & Waters, Forthcoming; Wierzbicka 1997, 2010). The comparative reference to French (for example, nice vs. gentil lit. 'kind', rude vs. mal élevé lit. 'badly brought up') highlights differences in ways of behaving and construals of sociality.

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'.

How are proverbs connected to notions of ritual, ritual communication, and ritualized communication? Along with greetings and partings, apology formulas, and the like, proverbs fall squarely under the rubric of "smaller" ritual, in the sense of formulaic communicative practices of everyday life: utterance forms with a quality of ready-madeness, fixity, and iteration, drawn from (and understood to be drawn from) a limited corpus. To be sure, they are not situation-specific in the same way greetings and partings are. Rather, proverbs are typically used to impose particular construals upon situations. Like scriptural allusions and quotations, proverbs epitomize "double-voicing," in Bakhtin's terms, standing aside from the ongoing flow of discourse even while being integrated into it. They necessarily bring a complex interdiscursivity into the speech situation. As Hasan-Rokem (1992: 129) put it: "The application of a proverb imbues the specific situation with cultural meaning by linking it to a chain of situations all of which may be interpreted by the same proverb." Proverbs can also be seen as falling under the rubric of ritual communication - or better, "ritualized" communication - in that they recapitulate and reproduce established cultural values. They are communicative vehicles that both enact traditional authority and are partially constitutive of it.