On Monday this week French President Emmanuel Macron was greeting some high school students at a ceremony in western Paris to commemorate General Charles De Gaulle’s call for resistance in the second world war. It became an unlikely lesson in French manners. Greeting a group of boys, Macron said to them, “Ça va?”, a phrase you’d use with your friends or people you know well to mean “How are you?”. A boy, who’d tried to catch the president’s attention by singing the Socialist anthem, The Internationale, then shouted “Ça va, Manu?”. “Manu” is the shortened form of “Emmanuel”. He certainly got Macron’s attention. The president responded: No, no, no, I’m not your mate, no. You’re here at an official ceremony, you behave comme il faut [as befits the situation]. You can carry on like an idiot, but today’s about The Marseillaise and the Song of the Partisans. You call me “Mr President of the Republic” or “Sir”, OK?

Discourse particles are strewn throughout natural spoken discourse, revealing the speakers' attitude towards what they are saying and guiding the interlocutors' interpretation of that utterance. The majority of works in the area of the French discourse particles 'quoi' and 'ben' provide detailed analyses and place their primary focus on usage. Problems arise, however, when word usage is discussed without a systematic approach to semantics. The present study applies the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method of description to these particles, proposing definitive explications that can be substituted into naturally occurring examples of quoi and ben without causing any semantic loss. Explications, framed in the culture-neutral terms of the NSM, capture the subtleties of meaning conveyed by each discourse particle. They are presented in parallel English and French versions and are tested against a corpus of spoken French.

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.

‘Cultural Keywords in Discourse’ studies culturally-specific words around which whole discourses are organised. The book utilises insights from recent work in cultural semantics and ethnopragmatics, and applies these to the study of cultural discourses. The volume presents original, empirical case studies in cultural keywords across speech communities in seven different geographical areas: Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Melanesia, Mexico and Scandinavia. The introduction outlines our approach and its basic principles. The analytical concepts and lenses offered by our approach are explained and exemplified. The final chapter of the book provides practical guidance for future keyword research and summarises the findings and new directions resulting from the new case studies. We have called our introductory chapter How Words Do Things with People. This, of course, is a play on How People Do Things with Words, the signature phrase of modern speech act theory. The subversion signals both our perspective as well as our disenchantment with the universalist-but-Anglophone tradition in pragmatics. In the Anglo pragmatics paradigm, invented by Austin, Grice, Searle and their followers,1 speakers were rational individuals who used English words, spoke coherently and lived in a world of “brevity”, “truth”, “politeness”, “cooperation”, “relevance” and similar Anglo values. Semantic diversity and cultural differences were not considered to be important, partly because words were subjugated to the purpose of what the speaker “did with them”, and partly because the assumption was that there was a fixed set of universal speech acts which could be “done” by any speaker in any place at any time.

Over recent years, linguists have given an increasing amount of attention to impoliteness studies (Bousfield, 2008, Culpeper et al., 2003, Kienpointner, 1997, Meier, 1995a, Meier, 1995b and Mills, 2009). Oddly however, little attention has yet been paid to the semantics of the English word rude. Lacking precise translation equivalents in many languages, rude is a keyword revealing much about socially accepted ways of behaving in Anglo society (Wierzbicka, 1997; cf. Fox, 2004). In Australian English, as in English generally, it is the primary ethno-descriptor in the domain of "impoliteness". This paper provides a detailed lexical semantic analysis of rude in the productive formula It's rude to VP, and also in the fixed expression rude word. The semantic explications are framed in the simple universal primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) (Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2002, Peeters, 2006 and Wierzbicka, 1996). The argumentation is supported by data on Australian English collected from Google searches.

The Danish word lige [ˈliːə] is a highly culture-specific discourse particle. English translations sometimes render it as “please,” but this kind of functional translation is motivated solely by the expectation that, in English, one has to ‘say please’. In the Danish universe of meaning, there is in fact no direct equivalent of anything like English please, German bitte, or similar constructs in other European languages. Consequently, Danish speakers cannot ‘say please’, and Danish children cannot ‘say the magic word’. However, lige is in its own way a magic word, performing a different kind of pragmatic magic that has almost been left unstudied because it does not correlate well with any of the major Anglo-international research questions such as “how to express politeness” or “how to make a request.” This paper analyzes the semantics of lige in order to shed light on the peculiarities of Danish ethnopragmatics. It is demonstrated not only that Danish lige does a different semantic job than English please, but also that please-based and lige-based interactions are bound to different interpretations of social life and interpersonal relations, and reflect differing cultural values.

This book took shape at the International Pragmatics Conference in New Delhi, 2013. The contributors of the book were panellists at the ‘Cultural Keywords in Discourse’ panel organised by the editors. Our panel consisted of Australia- and Scandinavia-based researchers and research students of different cultural backgrounds, and we presented to an audience of mainly Indian researchers. The scene was set for an extraordinarily fruitful and lucid discussion. The day before the conference, fate would have it that half of the book’s authors were hired as extras in a Bollywood movie. All were given roles as Russian diplomats and the scenes were shot at the Imperial Hotel. Becoming Russians in India added to our sense of curiosity and to the mystery of meaning-making that forms our fascination with language and culture.

Throughout the book our contributors have demonstrated how “words do things with people” in different discourse communities. Each study in the volume has presented an original case study, and an in-depth analysis of a particular keyword in discourse. Utilising the natural semantic metalanguage as a shared tool for keyword analysis, all contributors have explored discursive logics and values that are guided and governed by such keywords. In this final chapter, we would like to extend an invitation to cultural keyword studies, which provides some guidance for researchers and research students who want to take up the explorative keyword-driven discourse study as showcased in this book. The invitation will at same time reflect on the findings, insights and experience that were gained during the process of analysis and writing.