RT list:

It would be of theoretical interest to study written texts in terms of the
differences from oral texts in different cultures, making a comparison.

Jock Wong has written an interesting paper on contrastive pragmatics from
a cultural point of view for my special issue on Pragmemes to be submitted
to the JP.

My idea is that it is of interest to study corrections by teachers /
supervisors on written assignments.

For example Italian culture demonizes repetition, English is more
tolerant. Written texts show elements of reflective and careful
preparation as well as rherotical orientation.

Italian written texts perfectly adhere to the gricean maxims - showing
perhaps that the maxims derive from some kind of academic literary
training specific to western cultures.

legal texts perhaps are a case in which some maxims prevail over others -
say eliminate all possible ambiguities or make texts as little ambiguous
as possible.

Or:

utilize all possible contextual clues to avoid ambiguity.

Wong argues that relevance theory is not applicable to Singapore culture.
I doubt that, albeit his considerations must be taken into account.

he also argues that politeness principles do not apply to singapore
culture - I doubt that too.

Written texts are more culture-maxim-oriented than oral texts - or perhaps
there is an emphasis on different maxims.

So the theoretical interest is to show how much of pragmatics is
culture-specific and how much is universal.

Suppose you start with the hypothesis that the principle of relevance is
universal - then you could argue that the gricean maxims are
culture-specific (or are sensitive to cultural parameters) and then you
could discuss the relation between culture specific maxims and universal
cognitive principles.

Interesting, isn't it?

Dt Alessandro Capone
D.Phil. University of Oxford
Received on Fri Oct 10 10:36:04 2008