Cli ¤ Goddard, ed. 2006. Review of Ethnopragmatics: Understanding dis- course in cultural context. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Reviewed by N. J. Enfield Language and Cognition Group, Max Planck

With this book, Cli ¤ Goddard has overseen the production of a new mile-stone in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to mean-ing (cf. Goddard & Wierzbicka 1994, 2002; Wierzbicka 1972, 1980, 1996). Here we are given seven original studies of culture-specific norms of interaction in a range of languages and cultures: Anna Wierzbicka on Anglo norms against ‘‘putting pressure’ ’ on others, Cli ¤ Goddard on Australian English irony, Jock Onn Wong on Singapore English values of hierarchy in social structure, Zhengdao Ye on Chinese norms and seman-tics of emotion and facial expression, Rie Hasada on Japanese norms for the display of emotions, Catherine Travis on Colombian Spanish values of ‘‘trust’ ’ and ‘‘human warmth,’ ’ and Felix Ameka on West African norms for the expression of gratitude. The empirical chapters follow a unitary format, making this volume not a mere collection of papers but a multi-authored report on a major collaborative project. The contribu-tions are theoretically and methodologically uncompromising in their ad-herence to NSM tradition. Each chapter o¤ers an analysis of a cultural pragmatic principle in a given language-culture, supported with evidence from popular culture, literature, and other sources. Alongside the descrip-tive notes, each chapter proposes formal statements of these culture-specific pragmatic norms, phrased as NSM explications called cultural scripts (see Goddard’s introduction for background; for use of the notion of scripts elsewhere, see for example Fiske & Taylor 1991; Halpern 1994, 1997; Schank & Abelson 1977). The approach is unique in research on pragmatics and culture—nowhere else do we find these kinds of explicit statements of cultural values in a descriptive metalanguage whose degre