Bert Peeters

Within the field of ethnolinguistics, whose proponents seem to be using it essentially to mean "differences in comunication across languages" (that is, approximately, "the empirical investigation of linguistic relativity, especially on the pragmatic level") Peeters discusses "miscommunication in native/non-native communication" (citing the title of Varonis and Gass's 1983 article), intending to move toward applications in the foreign-language classroom (tho he never really gets there). He draws a distinction between "pragmaticolinguistic" and "sociopragmatic" failures, where the first woud be simple pieces of missing knowledge or lacking habits, like saying "thank you" in a French restaurant and not understanding that you're not gonna get a second cup of coffee, and the latter would be larger things like not understanding that the Russians you're talking to aren't actually mad at you or that Thai smile is a social nicety only. To distinguish between these situations and understand how to negotiate them, Peeters semi-instrumentalizes the French terms savoir-faire and savoir-apprendre, "knowing what to do" and "knowing how to learn" (it's not necessarily clear that he's thought out the difference), and their role in placing yourself in someone else's shoes or relating what seems to be going on with them to reference points within your own linguaculture (call it "push-hermeneutics" and "pull-hermeneutics," perhaps?). There is a weird systematicity-drive to his need to identify reliably objective cultural hierarchies of values, but I well understand by now that that's just always gonna be the golden dream for some (that's what gives you a "social sciences" in the first place, on a strict interpretation).

Peeters isn't really sure what he wants to call his cultural reckoning-markers: "rich points" of cultural supersaturatedness, "keywords," "catalysts" for learning (these all the same thing in different guises, of course). He cites Anna Wierzbicka's "new semantic metalanguage" (which makes me suspicious just by its name), George Lakoff's categories, Jerzy Bartmiński's axiology (which seems to me to fall closest to the point here--linguistic categories are always culturally rooted, going back to before we had "language" or "culture" as such, but we still had beliefs and proclivities in some form), and James Underhill's large writing on Humboldt, notably the difference between Weltanschauung, which is active and personal, and Weltansicht, which is prior to there being a person at all--the perspective imposed by a culture and language.

Overall it's a good accounting, though the many pages of accounting of different terms with "ethno-" in front of them (syntax, phraseology, pragmatics, axiology) seems excessive and occasionally tedio-arrogant. But maybe that's just my Weltanschauung.… (altro)