Anna Wierzbicka
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195174748
- eISBN:
- 9780199788514
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195174748.003.0005
- Subject:
- Linguistics, English Language
Fairness is one of the most important values in modern Anglo culture and native speakers of English, including scholars, often assume that “fairness” is a universal human concept. This chapter shows ...
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Fairness is one of the most important values in modern Anglo culture and native speakers of English, including scholars, often assume that “fairness” is a universal human concept. This chapter shows that far from being universal, this concept is an artifact of modern Anglo culture. It argues (with reference to Fukuyama's Trust) that ethical codes binding large groups of people into “moral communities” are conveyed across generations through particular words, and that the English words fair and unfair are prime examples of this. Using the mini-language of universal human concepts (NSM), this chapter shows what exactly these words mean, what culture-specific values they reflect, and how they can be effectively explained to cultural outsiders (including immigrants to English-speaking countries).Less
Fairness is one of the most important values in modern Anglo culture and native speakers of English, including scholars, often assume that “fairness” is a universal human concept. This chapter shows that far from being universal, this concept is an artifact of modern Anglo culture. It argues (with reference to Fukuyama's Trust) that ethical codes binding large groups of people into “moral communities” are conveyed across generations through particular words, and that the English words fair and unfair are prime examples of this. Using the mini-language of universal human concepts (NSM), this chapter shows what exactly these words mean, what culture-specific values they reflect, and how they can be effectively explained to cultural outsiders (including immigrants to English-speaking countries).
Tim William Machan
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199601257
- eISBN:
- 9780191759031
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199601257.003.0005
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, English Language
Like physical and temporal distance, qualitative judgments about varieties and their speakers structure imaginative arguments involving the integrity of English and its varieties. Like dictionaries ...
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Like physical and temporal distance, qualitative judgments about varieties and their speakers structure imaginative arguments involving the integrity of English and its varieties. Like dictionaries and histories of the language, grammars therefore have an ambivalent relation to English, not so much building definitions of English out of linguistic experience as categorizing linguistic experience in accordance with some pre-existing definition. How that definition comes about, in many cases, again hinges on non-linguistic issues like speakers’ ethnicity, a variety’s social uses, or even the circumstances of a conversation. This chapter moves from the earliest moment in English’s grammatical historiography to a much later moment, when the language had become indigenous far from its continual point of reference in southeast England.Less
Like physical and temporal distance, qualitative judgments about varieties and their speakers structure imaginative arguments involving the integrity of English and its varieties. Like dictionaries and histories of the language, grammars therefore have an ambivalent relation to English, not so much building definitions of English out of linguistic experience as categorizing linguistic experience in accordance with some pre-existing definition. How that definition comes about, in many cases, again hinges on non-linguistic issues like speakers’ ethnicity, a variety’s social uses, or even the circumstances of a conversation. This chapter moves from the earliest moment in English’s grammatical historiography to a much later moment, when the language had become indigenous far from its continual point of reference in southeast England.
