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 chapter investigates the English word nice as a cultural keyword, around which sociality discourses revolve. Focusing on its semantic scope in Australian discourse, the keyword nice has an important story to tell about socially accepted and approved ways of thinking, communicating and behaving. Oftentimes nice has been trivialised, or even ridiculed as an “empty word”, but closer scrutiny reveals that nice has all the characteristics of a cultural keyword. It is frequent and foundational in Australian discourse, and it reflects cultural logics, values and orientations. Also, as is common with cultural keywords, nice lacks translational equivalents, even in closely related languages. A comparison with French gentil demonstrates how nice is distinctive in the way it organises and maintains specific discursive orders.

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.

This study investigated perceptions and practices of compliments among twenty male Jordanian-Australians who have lived in Australia for a minimum of five years. Jordanian-Australians refer to Australians of Jordanian ancestry or Jordan-born individuals who live in Australia. The study focused on how compliments are given and received in social intercultural settings in both Arabic and English. The study also examined how languages, cultures and associated metadiscourse practices, which existed in these participants, influenced their perceptions and practices of compliments. Furthermore, the research explored male Jordanian-Australians’ choice and use of compliment topics, syntactic structures, positive semantic carriers in compliments and compliment response strategies. The goal was to understand their intercultural attitudes, knowledge, skills of interpreting and relating, skills of discovery and interaction, and critical cultural awareness.
The study adopted an intercultural approach and targeted male Jordanian-Australians as its units of analysis. The theoretical framework for this study was built around Byram’s (1997) theory of intercultural communicative competence. The theory consists of five elements (intercultural attitudes, knowledge, skills of interpreting and relating, skills of discovery and interaction, and critical cultural awareness), which were applied individually to test the hypotheses and suppositions of this study. Ethnographic methods that included semi-structured interviews and participant observation were used to collect rich sociolinguistic data. The study used thematic techniques of analysis to read and interpret the meanings of the data.
The study revealed that intercultural differences affect individuals’ choice of strategies, topics and language. It also showed that the cultural specificity of complimenting as a social act is influenced by values such as politeness and sincerity. Furthermore, the study discovered the cultural dilemma participants face when complimenting in another language while simultaneously trying to retain their Jordanian cultural identity. Moreover, it highlighted the importance of explicit teaching of discourse functions, complimenting and intercultural awareness in migrant English language classrooms in order to develop intercultural communicative competence of students, migrants and refugees in Australia. In addition, the current study revealed intercultural gaps and opens doors for other research on complimenting, intercultural pragmatics and intercultural communication.

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.

Conventional wisdom says that Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot. While manners have been studied by sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, who have uncovered an array of social processes performed in seemingly trivial daily encounters, this study, with its ethnopragmatic approach to semantics through the natural semantic metalanguage, brings a new perspective. The uniting theme of these “rules” in the Australian context centres on personal autonomy and its concomitant norm of not telling people what to do. The importance of manners in Australian English is evident in its frequency of use and its prominence in Australian child-rearing and etiquette literature.