Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language - Hardcover

Wierzbicka, Anna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199321493 ISBN 13: 9780199321490

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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)

Review

"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

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0199321493
• ISBN 13: 9780199321490
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304