Imprisoned in English
The Hazards of English as a Default Language
1st Edition
Published on 7. November 2013
288 pages
978-0-19-932151-3 (ISBN)
Description
In Imprisoned in English, Anna Wierzbicka argues that in the present English-dominated world, millions of people - including academics, lawyers, diplomats, and writers - can become "prisoners of English", unable to think outside English. In particular, social sciences and the humanities are now increasingly locked in a conceptual framework grounded in English. To most scholars in these fields, treating English as a default language seems a natural thing to do.
The book's approach is interdisciplinary, and its themes range over areas of central interest to anthropology, psychology, and sociology, among others. The linguistic material is drawn from languages of America, Australia, the Pacific, South-East Asia and Europe. Wierzbicka argues that it is time for human sciences to take advantage of English as a global lingua franca while at the same time transcending the limitations of the historically-shaped conceptual vocabulary of English. And she shows how this can be done.
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Person
Professor of Linguistics, Australian National University, and author of Semantics, Culture, and Cognition (1992); Semantics: Primes and Universals (1996): Understanding Cultures Through their Keywords (1997); What did Jesus Mean? (2001), and English: Meaning and Culture (2006)
Content
PART I: Every language draws a circle ...
Chapter 1. Introduction: Recognising the contingency of one's own language
Chapter 2. Naming the world or construing the world?
Chapter 3. The givens of human life
Chapter 4. Universal words, semantic atoms and semantic molecules
Chapter 5. Human bodies and human minds: what is visible and what is invisible
PART II: Emotions and values
Chapter 6. Anglo values vs. Human values: Talking about values in a global world
Chapter 7. Human emotions and English words: Are anger and disgust universal?
PART III: 'Politeness' and 'cooperation'
Chapter 8. Talking to other people: 'Politeness' and cultural scripts
Chapter 9. Doing things with other people: 'cooperation', 'interaction' and 'obS?enie'
PART IV: Entering other minds
Chapter 10. Grammar and social cognition: the Hawaiians, the Dalabons, and the Anglos
Chapter 11. Endangered languages, endangered meanings
Chapter 12. Thinking about 'things' in Yucatec and in English
Chapter 13. Chimpanzees and the evolution of human cognition
PART V: Breaking down the walls of the prison
Chapter 14. From ordinary (Anglo) English to Minimal English
PART VI: kindred thinking across disciplines
Preliminary remarks
Chapter 15. Anthropology, Psychology, Psychiatry
Chapter 16. Philosophy, Theology, Politics
Chapter 17. Linguistics: Cognitive and cultural approaches
Chapter 18. Bilingualism, Life writing, Translation
Final remarks
References
Index
