Experience, Evidence, and Sense The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English

by Wierzbicka, Anna

• ISBN13: 9780195368017
• ISBN10: 0195368010
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-06-24
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book is based on two ideas: first, that any language-English no less than any other-represents a universe of meaning, shaped by the history and experience of the men and women who have created it, and second, that in any language certain culture-specific words act as linchpins for whole networks of meanings, and that penetrating the meanings of those key words can therefore open our eyes to an entire cultural universe. In this book Anna Wierzbicka demonstrates that three uniquely English words-evidence, experience, and sense-are exactly such linchpins. Using a rigorous plain language approach to meaning analysis, she unpackages the dense cultural meanings of these key words, disentangles their multiple meanings, and traces their origins back to the tradition of British empiricism. In so doing she reveals much about cultural attitudes embedded not only in British and American English, but other global varieties of English. An interdisciplinary work, Experience, Evidence, and Sense is accessible to both scholars and students in linguistics and English, as well as historians of ideas, sociologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, and scholars of communication.

Author Biography

Anna Wierzbicka is Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University. She has an international reputation for her work on language and cultural studies. Her many books include English meaning and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2006), What Did Jesus Mean? (Oxford University Press, 2001), and Semantics, Culture and Cognition (Oxford University Press, 1992).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Making the Familiar Look Foreign	p. 3
Mere Words or Keys to a Cultural World?	p. 3
The Cultural and Historical Baggage of English	p. 4
The Legacy of "British Empiricism,"	p. 6
The English Word Empirical and the French Word Empirique: A Closer Look	p. 11
'Theory', 'Common Sense', and the Reliability of the Sense	p. 13
Natural Semantic Metalanguage as an Effective Methodology for Cultural Semantics	p. 16
Experience and Evidence
Experience: An English Keyword and a Key Cultural Theme	p. 25
The Uniqueness of the English Concept of 'Experience'	p. 25
Experience as the Mother of Wisdom: Shakespeare's Sapiential Perspective	p. 34
"A Frightening Experience": From a Retrospective to an Introspective Perspective	p. 38
Sensory Experience as a Basis for Empirical Knowledge: A Lockean Perspective	p. 44
The Verb to Experience: Evidence for the Semantic Shift	p. 54
Experiences in Anglophone Philosophy: John Searle's Perspective	p. 58
Experience in Religion: William James's Perspective	p. 65
"Bearing Witness": Shared Experience in Anglophone Art and History	p. 74
I Know from Experience ...	p. 78
English Experience Compared with German Erfahrung and Erlebnis	p. 83
Concluding Remarks: The History of Ideas and the Meaning of Words	p. 90
Evidence: Words, Ideas, and Cultural Practices	p. 94
Evidence as a Key Cultural Concept in Modern English	p. 94
An Outline of the Semantic History of Evidence	p. 100
Linguistic Evidence	p. 119
The New Discourse of Evidence	p. 122
Sources of the Modern Concepts of Evidence in Law, Theology, Philosophy, and Science	p. 131
Concluding Remarks: Semantics, Culture, and Society	p. 144
Sense
The Discourse of Sense and the Legacy of "British Empiricism,"	p. 151
Sense, Senses, and Modern English Speechways	p. 151
The Five Senses	p. 155
The Verb to Sense	p. 159
A Sense of What Is Happening	p. 162
To Have a Sense That ...	p. 169
There is a Sense that ...	p. 176
Give us a Sense of ...	p. 178
A Sense of Humor, a Sense of Self, and Similar Expressions	p. 184
A Sense of Humor	p. 184
A Sense of Self	p. 192
A Sense of Freedom (Confidence, Achievement, Competence)	p. 198
A Sense of Obligation (Duty, Responsibility, Urgency)	p. 202
A Sense of History, a Sense of Time and Place, a Sense of Reality	p. 204
A Sense of Joy	p. 209
A Strong Sense, a Deep Sense, and Similar Expressions	p. 212
A Strong Sense (of Something)	p. 212
A Deep Sense (of Something)	p. 231
A Sharp Sense (of Something)	p. 242
A Good Sense (of Something)	p. 250
A Great Sense (of Something)	p. 262
A Real Sense (of Something)	p. 269
A False Sense (of Something)	p. 277
A Keen Sense (of Something)	p. 279
A Clear Sense (of Something)	p. 292
An Acute Sense (of Something)	p. 302
Moral Sense	p. 313
Moral Sense: A Human Universal or an Artifact of English?	p. 313
A Brief History of the Concept of "Moral Sense,"	p. 317
Moral Sense in the Eighteenth Century and Now: A Comparison	p. 322
A Sense of Right and Wrong in Present-Day English	p. 324
Conclusion	p. 326
Common Sense	p. 328
The Importance of Common Sense in Anglo Culture	p. 328
Common Sense in Law	p. 333
The Uniqueness of English Common Sense (Common Sense vs. Bon Sens)	p. 337
The Meaning of Common Sense in Contemporary English	p. 346
Thomas Reid and the Origin of English Common Sense	p. 354
Common Sense and the British Enlightenment	p. 359
From having Sense to Making Sense	p. 368
Being Sensible	p. 368
Having Sense	p. 372
Making Sense	p. 377
Phraseology, Semantics, and Corpus Linguistics
Investigating English Phraseology with Two Tools: NSM and Google	p. 395
An Overview	p. 395
Clear and Stable Contrasts	p. 396
Stable and Overwhelmingly Sharp Contrasts	p. 397
Figures, Proportions, and Patterns	p. 398
Anomalies: How Significant Are They?	p. 400
Monitoring the Proportions of Strong Sense to Deep Sense	p. 402
Limitations of Google as a Tool for Exploring English Phraseology	p. 403
Comparing the Results of Google and Yahoo Searches	p. 404
Concluding Remarks	p. 405
Notes	p. 407
References	p. 417
Appendix	p. 431
Index	p. 441
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