Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Anna Wierzbicka (Professor of Linguistics, Professor of Linguistics, Australian National University)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:   Width: 23.90cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 16.30cm
Weight:   0.641kg
ISBN:  

9780199321490

ISBN 10:   0199321493
Pages:   304
Publication Date:   12 December 2013
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

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 'ob%s?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

Reviews

Imprisoned in English is an heroic attempt to truly understand 'others' as subjects rather than objects without assimilating their understandings to one's own. The book summarizes the author's influential and monumental plan for a great escape from ethnocentrism and conceptual parochialism in the humanities and social sciences. --Richard A. Shweder, Harold Higgins Swift Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago This book is the latest outstanding product of Anna Wierzbicka's research, driven by her cross-cultural approach and theory of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). Wierzbicka is excellent in showing how much we are imprisoned in culture-specific English concepts. The book is powerful, and recommended for everyone who is interested in languages. --Istvan Kecskes, founding editor of the journal Intercultural Pragmatics

"""Imprisoned in English is an heroic attempt to truly understand 'others' as subjects rather than objects without assimilating their understandings to one's own. The book summarizes the author's influential and monumental plan for a great escape from ethnocentrism and conceptual parochialism in the humanities and social sciences."" --Richard A. Shweder, Harold Higgins Swift Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago ""This book is the latest outstanding product of Anna Wierzbicka's research, driven by her cross-cultural approach and theory of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). Wierzbicka is excellent in showing how much we are imprisoned in culture-specific English concepts. The book is powerful, and recommended for everyone who is interested in languages."" --Istvan Kecskes, founding editor of the journal Intercultural Pragmatics ""Nevertheless, Imprisoned in English is engaging, provocative and wide-ranging in its subject matter. Not only are semantic primes discussed and justified, but they are applied to the fields of linguistic anthropology and endangered languages, politeness research and human emotions, and used to posit a theory of cognitive evolution from the last common ancestors 6 million years ago to the hypothesized emergence of language some 60,000 years ago. And the book's message -- that English, like all languages, is 'culturally shaped, and this has profound consequences for today's globalizing and English-dominated world' -- is an urgent one."" --The Times Literary Supplement"

Author Information

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)

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