Language, culture and values: towards an ethnolinguistics based on abduction and salience

In recent work, I have laid the foundations of a framework which I refer to as applied ethnolinguistics , and which is intended as a tool that can be used in the advanced foreign language classroom to make students aware of the fact that the language they are learning contains numerous cues that can help them gain a better understanding of the cultural values generally upheld by native speakers of their chosen foreign language. The notions of languacul-ture , abductive reasoning , and salience will be integrated into what is hoped to be a coherent procedure for dealing with apparently inexplicable cultural behaviours. Six pathways, ethnolexicology, ethnorhetoric, ethnophraseology, ethnosyntax, ethnopragmatics, and ethnoaxiology, are proposed as speciﬁc directions guiding the process of language and culture teaching in a multicultural classroom.

Speaking a language, even acquired from birth, is not as easy as it sounds; making sense of what is said is arguably even harder.The complexity of the quest for meaning is often underestimated, especially so since the hurdles that confront the hearer are mostly overcome without the latter even taking notice (Peeters 2003).The word mostly needs to be emphasized here, because things do not always go as planned: it is quite conceivable that misunderstandings arise.Some of these are less serious and may be a source of mirth; others may cause confusion or even consternation.
The situation is even more complex if and when an interaction involves individuals who do not share the same languaculture (see §1 below).As-suming the language used is an L1 for one of the speakers, we are dealing with what has been called an unequal encounter (Thomas 1984). 1 Those who have experienced this type of interaction know that misunderstandings, when they eventuate, are not always easy to address.They also know that, in some instances, when the hurdles referred to above are too massive, communication may fail altogether.To prevent this from happening too often, it may be a good idea for those who engage in this sort of interaction to familiarize themselves, at least to a point, with the "values" 2 of their speech partners, or for at least one of them to make an effort towards doing so.It is indeed more than likely that at least some of the misunderstandings that may arise in the kind of interaction envisaged here are caused by unsuspected cultural differences. 3But how does one gain familiarity with something as intangible as a set of values?This is the question we seek to answer in this paper.
1. Languaculture, language and culture Are terms like languaculture (Agar 1994) or linguaculture (Friedrich 1989) -which have equivalents in other languages, such as langue-culture in French or taalcultuur in Dutch -as dangerous as some authors have made out?Presumably neither more nor less than the terms language and culture themselves.It would be impossible to deny that several influential writers have set out to deprive both the concept of "culture" (in its relevant meaning of "French culture", "German culture", "Japanese culture", etc.) and the label used to refer to it of their legitimacy, the point being that the entities that the term and concept are meant to cover not only lack homogeneity, uniformity, coherence, fixed contours, and so on, but change over timesomething which, as poignantly observed by von Münchow (2013: 205), has not necessarily stopped these writers from using them in their own works.The question is whether the alleged slipperiness justifies the conclusion that is being heralded.Following in Wierzbicka's footsteps, I think it is not.Here is what she has to say: The word culture(s) provides the speaker of English with a very convenient way of referring to a complex conceptual construction which reflects some important aspects of their collective experience of the world.First of all, this experience (reflected in the English language tells them that in different places in the world people think differently.Second, it tells them that these different ways of thinking are often associated with different values (i.e.roughly, different sets of assumptions about what is good and what is bad).Third, it tells them that such different ways of thinking (reflected in ways of speaking) are often linked with different ways of living and different ways of "doing things" (different "practices", different social institutions, etc.).(Wierzbicka 2005: 593) It would be futile to even try to deny or ignore the diversity existing within what has been traditionally referred to as cultures, as futile in fact as to try to deny or ignore their potential to evolve.Nonetheless, the claim that any statements made about such entities are nothing short of arbitrary amounts to throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water.Regardless of any diversity or impermanence, there is always a common core, even in so-called multicultural societies -a core anyone who has ever had to settle in a new and therefore foreign environment, where all of a sudden speaking a foreign language is a necessity, will be acutely aware of.That common core is not fixed for ever, but it is relatively stable; any changes to it will not happen overnight (cf.Wierzbicka 2005).
There is no harm in talking about cultures, says similarly Goddard (2000: 85), provided they are not reified and not treated as monolithic or exclusive: It goes without saying that cultures are always to some extent heterogeneous, that they cross-cut and overlap, and that they are constantly changing.The notion of "a culture" is an abstraction, an idealization -not altogether dissimilar, in some respects, to the notion of "a language".But, though languages too are heterogeneous, interconnected, and ever-changing, we can continue profitably to employ the concept of "a language" (for example, "French", or "Russian", or "Malay"), so long as we handle the concept with care.In my view, we can adopt the same attitude to the concept of "culture".

Learning strategies for "foreign" values
What learning strategies, if any, can assist with the acquisition of foreign cultural values?Additional schooling, perhaps?The result will often disappoint.Even after a protracted period of language learning in a classroom setting, the awareness one will achieve of the values of a foreign culture is likely to be superficial at best.Most teachers spend hardly any time on them and most of the language textbooks used in schools and universities contain very little relevant material.
How about the so-called "cultural guides" one can find on the tourism shelves of most bookshops?Unfortunately, they cannot always be relied on.Whatever their aim, whether they seek to educate or to entertain, more often than not they are written by self-proclaimed experts who perceive and seek to interpret a foreign languaculture in terms of their own and their audience's, thereby becoming unwitting victims of ethnocentricity.In the most extreme cases, they lend further credibility to stereotypes which do nothing to promote better understanding and do not transcend the kind of observations made by ill-prepared participants who, having been involved in interactions between speakers from different languacultures, have jumped to hasty conclusions.The latter, once reached, are hard to challenge and are often couched in pejorative terms which, oddly enough, are used by both sides, each relying on their own evidence, each accusing the other of being egocentric, hypocritical, conformist etc. -but for different reasons (see e.g.Béal 2010: 53-54, with reference to appraisals of the French by Australians and vice versa).
A better way to acquire non-native values would seem to immerse oneself in the relevant languaculture.Immersion, day-to-day contact with a less familiar languaculture, may raise more learner awareness of cultural differences than reading cultural guides or taking language classes ever will.The challenge, of course, is to understand what is going on, and this is often a gradual process.Success on day one is not guaranteed, as humorously reported by Colgan: If you've ever learnt another language you'll know that you can be totally confident in a classroom, then turn up in the country and everybody goes «wabbawabbawabbawab-baWAH?» to you at a million miles an hour, and you panic because you can't understand a single bloody word of it.That's certainly what happened to me.(Colgan 2013: xi) Besides, not everyone has the means (financial or otherwise) to afford a period of total immersion in a foreign languaculture.Last but not least, effective immersion, resulting in the acquisition of unfamiliar values, critically relies on observation, assimilation and imitation of non-native behaviours.In most cases, native speakers cannot be counted on as effective teachers, guides or mentors in a conscious learning process.To transmit one's values through teaching, one must first be aware of them -and values are often so entrenched that such awareness, simply, does not exist.That being the case, learners are compelled to display receptiveness, to develop some sort of a disposition or cognitive aptitude to acquaint themselves, to the best of their ability, with new knowledge; they must acculturate independently of any formal learning.Once again, not everyone has what it takes.
Luckily, a strategy that complements all of the above and prepares the ground for subsequent immersion may well exist.It involves what, in computer science, has been referred to as "data mining", but it does not require any highly technical skills that cannot be readily taught to motivated language learners.The hypothesis is that, in the context of foreign language education, intelligent "data mining" involving various resources of the L2, selective analysis of certain communicative behaviours and observation of particular, carefully chosen, facts of society will enable teachers to equip their students with relevant cultural knowledge.

Basic tenets in cross-cultural research
For the present writer, the above hypothesis materialized in the course of reading Wierzbicka's (2003Wierzbicka's ( [1991]]: 69) summary of basic tenets underlying an ever expanding body of research in cross-cultural communication: 1.In different societies, and different communities, people speak differently 2. These differences in ways of speaking are profound and systematic 3. Different ways of speaking reflect different cultural values, or at least different hierarchies of values 4. Different ways of speaking, different communicative styles can be explained and made sense of, in terms of independently established different cultural values and cultural priorities Of these four tenets, the last two are undeniably the most far-reaching4 , and our focus will therefore be on them.They transcend the boundaries of linguistics per se and establish a link between language and culture.
The third tenet links variations in communicative behaviour from one languaculture to another one to underlying variations involving cultural values.But what do we mean by cultural values?The answer obviously depends in the first instance on our definition of the term value.In the French sociological tradition exemplified by the occupant of the first chair of social psychology at the Sorbonne, Jean Stoetzel (1910Stoetzel ( -1987; see for instance Stoetzel 1983), values are defined as models, ideals stored deep in the human psyche that guide individuals to act in certain ways.Unlike opinions and behaviours, which are surface phenomena, they can only be reached through inference based on external observables.People may waver in their values, and values may change over time but they will always be there to inspire our actions and to define who we are.In the oft-quoted formula used by the American philosopher John Dewey, values are "what we hold dear".At a different level, they are general beliefs which determine how we assess real or imagined behaviours (others', not our own), rating some appropriate, desirable or valued and others inappropriate, undesirable or poorly valued.Australian psychologist Norman Feather (1996: 222) adds a few more interesting points: The values that people hold are fewer in number than the much larger set of specific attitudes and beliefs that they express and endorse.Values are not equal in importance but they form a hierarchy of importance for each individual, group, or culture, with some values being more important than others.Values have some stability about them but they may change in relative importance depending on changing circumstances.They are not cold cognitions but are linked to the affective system.People feel happy when their important values are fulfilled; angry when these values are frustrated.(italics added) Now, what about cultural values?In light of what has just been said, they can be defined as values that appear to be widespread within a languaculture, values that underpin the beliefs, convictions, attitudes and communicative habits generally associated with that languaculture.They are not all equally important, hence the idea of a hierarchy.In addition, whereas some values have been documented for quite some time, others have remained in the shadow and are only now being recognized for what they are.Among the former are, with reference to French languaculture, values such as franchise 'frankness', prise de position 'the urge to take a stand' and esprit contestataire 'reluctance to accept what is going on'; among the latter, values such as débrouillardise 'resourcefulness' and méfiance 'wariness'.As argued above, these and other cultural values usually remain hidden not only from those without an intimate knowledge of the relevant languaculture, but also from those who are "in the thick of it" (cf.§2).
Let's move on to the fourth and last tenet: "Different ways of speaking, different communicative styles, can be explained and made sense of, in terms of independently established different cultural values and cultural priorities" (italics added).The adverb independently is crucially important.Cultural values proposed to explain and make sense of particular communicative behaviours are not to be posited lightly, without reference to other data, both linguistic and non-linguistic.To establish a cultural value solely on the basis of one or more instances of a communicative behaviour would open the door to all sorts of unwelcome claims.We need to look further.It is imperative to proceed by so-called abduction and view any cultural value we posit as a conjecture or a hypothesis which has nothing definitive about it.Abduction as a form of scientific reasoning was first introduced more than a century ago by Charles Sanders Peirce, quoted here after Pizzi (2012: 179) (F = fact, H = hypothesis): The surprising fact, F, is observed.But if H were true, F would be a matter of course.Hence, there is reason to suspect that H is true.
A very common form of abduction is the one that, in English, relies on the verb must in an example such as You MUST BE SENSITIVE TO COLD to be wearing so many layers (which is equivalent to saying You're dressed pretty warmly; I guess you're sensitive to cold ).The surprising fact that the addressee is warmly dressed leads the speaker to voice a hypothesis which, if it were true, would render the fact unremarkable.Abduction demands validation, as it is by definition conjectural: it is only when more evidence presents itself (the money spent on his heating bills, his refusal to go on a skiing holiday, etc.) that it will be known whether the conjecture or the hypothesis is legitimate.Similarly, additional investigation is required to establish the reality of a cultural value which allegedly accounts for an unexpected communicative behaviour, i.e. a behaviour different from those one is accustomed to, but that would no longer be unexpected if the alleged cultural value was real; it is the only way to confirm what otherwise is set to remain hypothetical.To be conclusive, this additional investigation must rely on independent linguistic and non-linguistic data -in other words, on data not taken into account during the conjectural phase.Pizzi (2012: 179-180) comments on Peirce's use of the adjective surprising as follows: It is of some interest here to remark that when Peirce defines the notion of abduction he uses the notion of surprise.[. . .] The notion of surprise used by Peirce should be understood and carefully studied in the context of his system of thought.[. . .] Peirce intends that a fact F is surprising when it is unexpected or -more plausibly -unexplained.Being F unexplained, we look for an explanation of it, and the abductive process stops when some hypothesis H provides a natural explanation of F. As a matter of fact, Peirce seems to give to the word "surprising" a sense which refers to an objective lack of an explanation and not to the mental or psychological state of some specific subject.
It is true that unexpectedness is not a prerequisite for abduction to occur.The hypothesis of cruelty in This is the umpteenth time I see you pull a wing off a fly; you must be cruel to do that to these poor creatures is not triggered by unexpectedness but by the apparent lack of an explanation for the addressee's behaviour.However, in the context of foreign communicative behaviours, both labels, unexpected and unexplained, seem to be quite appropriate; abduction, here, does indeed involve making sense of "surprising facts".

Learning catalysts
At the centre of the tenets summarized by Wierzbicka (2003Wierzbicka ( [1991]]: 69) and commented on in the previous section are differences of a very specific kind.According to the third tenet, the said differences between languacultures relate to communicative behaviours and reflect different values -or at least different hierarchies of values.It follows that any attempts to get to these values or hierarchies of values may be inspired by the discovery of unexpected, unusual or otherwise remarkable communicative behaviours, either in situ (i.e. in immersion) or (since immersion has its limits) beforehand, in the language classroom.
But why stop there?Could it not be the case that, apart from communicative behaviours, there are other aspects of language equally conducive to the discovery and eventually the acquisition of foreign cultural values?Taken together, these behaviours and other aspects would provide us with a number of rich points, as defined by American anthropologist Michael Agar (e.g. 1994Agar (e.g. , 1996)),5 and so would some striking "facts of society" the study of which could, in all likelihood, also bear fruit.The hypothesis seems worth pursuing: it is not unreasonable to claim that, when attempts are made to recognize values that are typical of a given languaculture, language as a whole can be put to good use, starting with words and usual word combinations such as common phrases, idioms, slogans, proverbs etc.And then there are metaphors, productive syntactic patterns. . .and entire communicative behaviours.There is one important proviso: we must not jump to the conclusion that the entire lexicon and the total sum of usual word combinations, metaphors, productive syntactic patterns and communicative behaviours can unravel relevant information.Let us be mindful of the fact that, in gold mines, not everything one finds is gold. . .It is therefore important to identify the resources most likely to shed light on the values one must be aware of to be a successful player in a cross-cultural context.Those resources will be like keys opening doors, catalysts enabling easier acquisition of foreign cultural values -as long as they are used wisely, without getting caught in the net of hasty generalizations, as pointed out above, when we highlighted the need to find independent evidence to confirm the reality of values posited solely on the basis of specific communicative behaviours.
Once we feel we might have found a promising lead, we can look at various other resources (databases, reference works, specialist literature etc.) to find out what -if anything -the so-called promising lead can teach us.
Of course, this begs the question of how to isolate, from among all those innumerable words, usual combinations, metaphors, syntactic structures and communicative behaviours, the most solid candidates for the status of catalyst.Easy -or so one would think at first sight: for a "fact of language" to be able to serve as a catalyst, it has to have enough visibility.In other words, it has to be salient.And that is the end of it; or is it?Unfortunately, what is true of so many other concepts and terms in linguistics (and probably other disciplines) is true here as well: there is no commonly accepted definition, and people use the same term to talk about very different things.
The list of linguistic phenomena on which the concept of salience has been brought to bear is long.Inkova (2012: 9) has one that, translated into English, includes "anaphor resolution, focalization, information structure, verb semantics, lexical selection, prototype theory, stylistic effects"; most importantly, it ends with a very meaningful etc. Cultural salience is not mentioned; for someone wishing to find out more about the values of a languaculture different from his or her own, this would have to be the only form of salience that matters, though.The late Swiss linguist Bernard Py spoke of salience for any "phoneme, syllable, morpheme, phrase, clause, etc." (Py 2004: 121) which was "foregrounded in the perception of the learner"6 ; he is one of only a handful of linguists, together with Kecskés (2001Kecskés ( , 2006) ) and more recently Baider (2013), to have dealt with salience in the context of foreign language instruction.The latter do not talk about cultural salience either; Py does however produce an example, even if he does not use the term.He refers to the contrast between the expectations raised by a real-life speech act in a given social context: an act of thanks produced in a situation where it would be inappropriately used in the learner's languaculture (whereas, in that same situation, it is entirely conventionalized in the foreign languaculture) is likely to draw attention and therefore to be salient.This example illustrates that, for a learner, a lack of conventionality contributes (or may contribute) to salience, whereas it would seem that, for a native speaker, conventionality itself (rather than a lack of it) renders a fact of language more salient (cf.Giora 2003).
Hence, what is salient for some is not necessarily so for others.Over the years, several students have drawn this author's attention to possible catalysts they had identified and which, for some reason, had escaped his notice.More generally, the very things a learner perceives as salient may well lack salience from a native or near-native speaker's perspective. 7Not to mention there may be differences from one learner or (near-)native speaker to the next.In other words, the concept of salience is eminently subjective.Even so, underlying that subjectivity there is an undeniably objective base.In Py's (2004: 121) words, and from a learner's perspective: Salience sits at the interface between objectivity and subjectivity, inasmuch as a segment's propensity towards salience stems, on the one hand, from certain objective (and observable) discourse properties and, on the other, from the way in which each learner perceives, selects and exploits these properties.Objective properties work either for or against salience, but it is the learner who selects candidates for salience and who, ultimately, turns one or several of these candidates into salient segments.8 The selection of so-called "candidates for salience", whether cultural or of any other type, involves more or less spontaneous focalization: unbeknownst to themselves, learners and scholars alike make a distinction between what appears relevant and useful, and what either escapes their attention or strikes them as inconsequential (Py 2004: 117).Curiously, in Py's view, a segment is either salient or not.However, salience being an eminently scalar concept (Kecskés 2001, Giora 2003, Baider 2012), it goes without saying there are degrees of salience; in terms of cultural salience, the more (culturally) salient a fact of language, the more likely its status as a candidate catalyst.
"What are the criteria enabling one to establish whether one entity is more salient than another one and to 'measure' its salience?Do all of these criteria for the identification of the most salient entity have the same importance, or are some factors more important than others?"The questions raised by Inkova (2012: 9-10; my translation, B.P.) hold for all forms of salience, including cultural.Without immediately defining a hierarchy of factors contributing to cultural salience, let us start by recalling that, from the point of view of a learner, salience is more likely associated with what one is not familiar with (yet).This invalidates the near-totality of the criteria listed by Giora ( 2003) who adopts a native speaker's stance and defines is more likely to hold true in the early stages of language learning than later on, when learners have already acquired a solid basis of the language, but not necessarily of the culture (i.e. the cultural values): "what is salient for individuals belonging to the target language community will not necessarily be salient for the 'newcomers', the L2 learners".
salience in terms of frequency, familiarity, conventionality and prototypicality.Of all these, only frequency is sure to enter into the picture from a learner's perspective: the more frequently a surprising or perplexing fact of language occurs in the learner's speech environment, the more likely he or she will be to interpret that fact as resulting from a cultural differencewhich is all we need for this fact of language to turn into a potential catalyst for the assimilation of foreign cultural values.
What else can we rely on?How should we proceed in the absence of objective strategies enabling us once and for all to identify the catalysts which will render the greatest services?A fact of language that is spoken about -i.e. that has already been mentioned by others -is by definition more salient than another one that has remained unnoticed.To identify candidate catalysts for the acquisition of foreign cultural values, one can therefore try to determine the extent to which they have featured in "observer's accounts", both internal and external.Internal accounts are provided by members of the community where the languaculture is dominant; external accounts come from observers which, like the advanced language learner, watch the relevant languaculture from the outside.Generally speaking, external accounts are easier to find than internal ones; they surface with some regularity in the travel narratives of tourists and in the "acculturation narratives" of recent settlers.Even novels or other fictional accounts can occasionally provide precious indications.9On the other hand, learners who are already (or have been) in contact with native speakers of the relevant languaculture can be guided by their own impressions (as pointed out above).Finally, apart from witness accounts, one may want to consider what could be called the ubiquity of a fact of language in the languaculture.Ubiquity is a form of frequency measured in terms of occurrences in book titles, newspaper headings, songs, movies, proverbs, slogans etc.

Pathways in applied ethnolinguistics
In light of the above, we can now identify a number of different ethnolinguistic pathways that can be explored in advanced language classes and may potentially contribute to a better understanding of the cultural values commonly associated with a particular languaculture.The pathways may be of interest to independent learners and to scholars as well.They have been devised for possible use by anyone wishing to move beyond the existing strategies for the acquisition of foreign cultural values and, together, provide a framework called applied ethnolinguistics.

Six pathways
At this point in time, six pathways have been envisaged.Only the future will tell whether this is sufficient or whether other pathways should be added.The use of small capitals is meant to emphasize that the pathways are linked up with specific theoretical and methodological stances (one of which is the reliance on the natural semantic metalanguage or NSM developed over the last forty years or so by Anna Wierzbicka, Cliff Goddard and their collaborators).
-Ethnolexicology (for a French example, see Peeters 2013a) is the study of culturally salient lexical items.It relies on linguistic as well as non-linguistic evidence, with a view to discovering whether any cultural values, previously known or newly discovered, underpin these items.This may or may not be the case, but if it is, values which were previously known will be better understood, whereas the reality of newly discovered values will subsequently have to be proven via other means.Defined in this way, ethnolexicology is a successor to what, in earlier work, was called ethnosemantics (e.g.Peeters 2009Peeters , 2010aPeeters , 2012)).
-Ethnorhetoric (for a French example, see Peeters 2015a) is the study of culturally salient metaphors and other stylistic devices.It relies on linguistic as well as non-linguistic evidence, with a view to discovering whether any cultural values, previously known or newly discovered, underpin these devices.This may or may not be the case, but if it is, values which were previously known will be better understood, whereas the reality of newly discovered values will subsequently have to be proven via other means.
-Ethnophraseology (for a French example, see Peeters 2014) is the study of culturally salient phrases and idioms.It relies on linguistic as well as non-linguistic evidence, with a view to discovering whether any cultural values, previously known or newly discovered, underpin these phrases and idioms.This may or may not be the case, but if it is, values which were previously known will be better understood, whereas the reality of newly discovered values will subsequently have to be proven via other means.
-Ethnosyntax (for a French example, see Peeters 2010b) is the study of culturally salient productive syntactic patterns.It relies on linguistic as well as non-linguistic evidence, with a view to discovering whether any cultural values, previously known or newly discovered, underpin these patterns.This may or may not be the case, but if it is, values which were previously known will be better understood, whereas the reality of newly discovered values will subsequently have to be proven via other means.
-Ethnopragmatics (for a French example, see Peeters 2013b) is the study of culturally salient communicative behaviours.It relies on linguistic as well as non-linguistic evidence, with a view to discovering whether any cultural values, previously known or newly discovered, underpin these behaviours.This may or may not be the case, but if it is, values which were previously known will be better understood, whereas the reality of newly discovered values will subsequently have to be proven via other means.Ethnopragmatics as defined here presents numerous affinities with Goddard's work going by the same name (e.g.Goddard 2006).
-Ethnoaxiology (for French examples, see Peeters 2015b, c) is the pathway aimed at confirming the reality of hypothetical cultural values commonly thought of as being defining features of the languaculture they are usually associated with.The corroborative process is predicated on a search for linguistic as well as non-linguistic data in support of a presumed value.An ethnoaxiological examination will often be preceded by one of the other approaches, but may also be carried out in its own right, independently of any preceding investigation.

One overarching framework
The six pathways presented in the previous section form a coherent framework referred to in earlier work by the labels ethnolinguistic pathways model (Peeters 2009) and applied ethnolinguistics (Peeters 2013c).10Reliance on the adjective applied is legitimate since applied ethnolinguistics, unlike Bartmiński's (2009) (cognitive) ethnolinguistics, and ethnolinguistics as defined by authors such as Underhill (2012), is a methodology primarily aimed at advanced language learners.It is resolutely pedagogical and relies on the concepts of abduction and salience.The aim of applied ethnolinguistics is twofold: not only does it seek to illustrate how the detailed study of culturally salient words, metaphors, phrases, productive syntactic patterns and communicative behaviours can lead to the discovery of putative cultural values which are then to become the subject of further investigation leading to either the confirmation or rejection of their assumed status; it also sets out to demonstrate how, through detailed study of non-linguistic data on the one hand, and culturally salient words, metaphors, phrases, productive syntactic patterns and communicative behaviours on the other hand, cultural values typically associated with a particular languaculture can be further corroborated.