This tightly integrated and carefully edited collection follows a single explanatory paradigm, called here “Ethnopragmatics” (EP), developed principally by Anna Wierzbicka. The paradigm’s goal is to specify detailed “cultural scripts” that are analytical reconstructions of the shared understandings characteristic of a “given community of discourse.” While not all members of a given community use language in exactly the same way, they are all generally familiar with the content of the cultural scripts for their community. Followers of EP rigorously avoid English-based metasemantic and metapragmatic labels (such as “request,” “metaphor,” and “indirect” speech) for the language practices and cultural understandings of non-“Anglo-English” communities. EP then requires that even the most contextually delicate and culturally intricate understandings must be framed in terms of about 60 “semantic primes” that, the authors claim, have identical lexical and grammatical meanings in the world’s languages. This set of “natural” semantic primes contains items such as good, bad, die, body, and true – constructs that one might think would be fruitful windows into the rich diversity of speech communities. That culture X has a construct dealing with death that corresponds to culture Y’s construct concerning death (since all humans die) does not imply that the contents of the two linguistic expressions are the same: Buddhists and Christians “die” quite differently!

That three chapters in the volume deal with socially constructed “emotions” suggests that practitioners of EP have high hopes for using semantic analyses to illuminate aspects of human behavior and social interaction relatively distant from articulate awareness. Zhengdao Ye studies Chinese labels (in both verbal and written registers) for facial expressions and finds that the “inscrutability” stereotypically interpreted by the Anglophone West is rather a privileging of “group harmony” over the expression of “true feelings.” Rie Hasada, similarly, finds that Japanese speakers try not to express negative emotions that might be disturbing to others and to express positive emotions in unfamiliar situations. Catherine E. Travis discovers that Colombian Spanish speakers, in contrast, stress the explicit display of emotions, especially using certain key words centering on human trust (confianza) in situations of relative intimacy, and human warmth (calor humano) in social interactions more generally.

Two chapters are explicitly comparative: Anna Wierzbicka’s investigation of various “cultural scripts” for non-overtly asking people to do things or putting pressure on people to do things, and Felix K. Ameka’s careful survey of ways of expressing gratitude in a group of West African speech communities. Both embody most clearly EP’s goal of working from non-ethnocentric yet comparative perspectives. And two chapters deal with non-Anglo varieties of English. Cliff Goddard (who also contributed a clearly worded editor’s introductory essay) characterizes Australian English speakers (“Aussies”) as having a highly developed sense of sarcasm, a deep preference for informality, and refined radar for detecting “bullshit.” Speakers of Singapore English, the subject of Jock Onn Wong’s contribution, value deference to elders and infer from children’s violation of this norm a failure of parental training.