19.The Theory of Cultural Scripts

Anthropological linguists and ethnographers of communication have long recognised 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" are 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 than is possible with technical labels such as "direct", "polite", "formal" and so on. Because they are phrased in simple and translatable terms, the danger of ethnocentric bias creeping into the very terms of the description is minimised.

Cultural scripts are not intended to provide an account of real life social interactions. Rather they are intended as descriptions of commonly held assumptions about how "people think" about social interaction. Because people bring these assumptions with them into everyday interactions, cultural scripts influence the form taken by particular verbal encounters but they do not in any sense determine individual interactions. Individuals can and do vary in their speech behaviour. The claim of the cultural scripts approach is merely that the scripts form a kind of interpretive background against which individuals position their own acts and those of others.