International Communication

Cultural Scripts: What are they and what are they good for?

Cultural and cultural scripts are critical cornerstones when we try to master the
international communication skills. By studying the literature “Cultural scripts: What are
they and what are they good for?”, I understood what is cultural scripts and how they
work to support the cross-culture spreading.

Simply, Cultural Scripts is a semantic approach to cultural. We recognized that different

speech communities have different "ways of speaking", not just in the narrowly linguistic
sense but also in the norms or conventions of linguistic interaction. "Cultural scripts" is a
way of spelling out different "local" conventions of discourse using the metalanguage of
universal semantic primes. Using this method, cultural norms can be spelt out with
much greater precision because they are phrased in simple and translatable terms, the
danger of ethnocentric bias creeping into the very terms of the description is minimized.

 Cultural Keywords: They are words around which whole discourses are
organized. They are culturally revealing, difficult to translate and semantically
diverse. They capture how speakers have paid attention to the world they live in
and embody socially recognized ways of thinking and feeling.
 Other kinds of Linguistic evidence: Such as common sayings, proverbs which
reflected to the specific local culture connotation and historical background.

The above tow parts of linguistic evidences formed evidence-based cultural scripts.

Semantic primes refer to a relatively small set of words that specify concepts whose
meanings cannot be described in terms of other, simpler, non-semantic-prime words.
They can be safely used as a common code for writing explications of word meanings
and for writing cultural scripts, free from the danger of “terminological ethnocentrism”,
with maximum clarity and resolution of details, and in the knowledge that they can be
readily transposed across languages. They offer a mechanism by which meaning can
be free from the grip of any single language.

The frame of the culture scripts makes most of people accept the scripts even they are
not familiar with them. At the same time, culture scripts differ in their level of generality
 International Communication

and can be interrelated in a variety of ways. However, the scripts heavily rely on
evaluative components. Lastly, mere possession of a common language does not mean
that people who use this language share all their culture scripts and associated
ethnopragmatic behavior.

To summarize, culture scripts provide a convenient tool to support the languages

transformation among the difference cultures and to avoid the interference of
ethnocentrism, although the disadvantage of “contrastive pragmatic” is obvious and
there are many criticisms and suspicions to the factors of culture scripts.

Questions:

1. What is “terminological ethnocentrism”?

2. Why culture scripts can avoid the ethnocentrism?
3. How to separate the culture keywords from the non-keywords?
4. How does cultural script pursue the understanding of discourse customs from the
cultural perspective of the speaker himself?
5. What kind of language is a culture-neutral language?