Imprisoned in English
The Hazards of English as a Default Language
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Price: 1000 Toman
Download: Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language ().
راهنمای سریع دانلود، کلیک کنید .
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.
Review
–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
About the Author