Experience, evidence, & sense: The hidden cultural legacy of English (review)

In this book Anna Wierzbicka develops the argument introduced in her English: Meaning and culture (2006) that '"verbal cues" (and especially certain keywords) define the conceptual world inhabited by speakers' of what she calls 'Anglo English' (1). These speakers are said to be 'ordinary people', although they inhabit an intellectual world in which their usage and that of philosophers is assumed to be 'closely related' (104). As in Williams 1985, the focus is on public intellectual uses of keywords, but whereas Williams is concerned primarily with problems of multiple meanings, W is concerned with what speakers have internalized. For the most part, these speakers appear to be passive inheritors and conduits of changes brought about by philosophers like John Locke and by language itself rather than active innovators involved in social practices (Eckert 2000).

To help readers dissect the cultural baggage associated with keywords, W seeks to make the familiar look foreign by describing it in terms of the NATURAL SEMANTIC METALANGUAGE (NSM) she has developed over several decades, recently in collaboration with Cliff Goddard (e.g. Goddard & Wierzbicka 2002). NSM is described as a methodology for explicating meaning 'based on a small set of simple, intelligible, and universally available words' (16). These words are hypothesized to represent conceptual primes, concepts that cannot be further analyzed. Being simple, they are said to be testable against native speakers' intuitions (17).

Central to W's research is her contention that many concepts that are thought to be universal 'scientific truisms' are not, and that most speakers, including philosophers and anthropologists as well as some contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), are unaware of this fact. In order to 'break through the barriers of culture-bound thinking' (1) it is necessary to investigate the multi-functionality of keywords—how they are used in context (for example, using the COBUILD corpus), how they have evolved over time (as evidenced mainly by citations in the OED and works of philosophers), whether they are translatable into other languages, and how they can be explicated in terms of basic propositions of the type used in NSM.

A keyword used to exemplify the approach in Ch. 1, 'Making the familiar look foreign', is empiricism, a term borrowed from French and originally used with contextually negative semantic prosody, as the collocates dangerous Empiricism (1659), debased with empiricism (1756) suggest (8). While it continues to be used with negative prosody in French, in English it came to be used positively by the nineteenth century, as evidenced by empirical validity/tests/research and frequent contrast with in theory (13). W attributes this change to the different stances taken by British and Continental philosophers. She associates British empiricism with methods based in personal sensory experience (seeing and touching) (20).

The keywords that are the topic of this book—experience, evidence, and sense—are explicated at increasingly granular levels of analysis. Of these, only experience (along with empirical) appears in Williams 1985, which may explain why there is only one entry in the index for his work. All three keywords are hypothesized to be strongly associated in Present Day English (PDE) with bodily experience and empirical reality. Therefore the analysis is itself an exercise in 'Anglophone empiricism'.

Experience is argued not to be a universal category since it is not equivalent to German Erlebnis or Erfahrung, and there is no single potential equivalent in Russian. Investigation of use of experience in texts such as Shakespeare's plays and Dr. Johnson's Dictionary leads to the hypothesis, already developed in Wierzbicka 2006, that there was an ideological shift in the eighteenth century, largely attributable to Locke, 'from certainty to doubt' and 'from truth to empirical facts' (145). One wonders whether any one philosopher could have had such a radical influence on language. It seems more likely that he crystallized ideological changes that were already ongoing, as shown by Bromhead (2009). According to W, earlier conceptualizations of experience involve long-term, retrospective, and objectively...