Anna Wierzbicka, language, culture and communication

Abstract

The Introductory article to the second part of the Special Issue dedicated to Anna Wierzbicka’s anniversary focuses on her research in the domain of language and culture interchange. It overviews the fundamental concepts of Wierzbicka’s research program, those of cultural keywords and cultural scripts within the cultural semantics and ethnopragmatics paradigm. As is the case with other Wierzbicka’s linguistic studies, the analysis involves representation of meaning in terms of universal human concepts of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). The article also discusses the concept of Minimal Language as a recent development in the NSM programme and associated research into various fields.