Transcultural : semantics, pragmatics, axiology

As soon as a speaker abandons a language - or a culture - for another one, an interlanguage appears and starts developing. It will take some time before such a speaker is able to avoid the majority of misunderstandings that are typical of exolingual situations and that are often the result of non-adherence to foreign communicative norms and cultural values. The study of these norms and values is an important part of cross-cultural study in general, and can benefit from a study of culturally revealing keywords. There are thus three distinct approaches to the study of cross-cultural phenomena: transcultural pragmatics deals with norms, transcultural axiology with values, and transcultural semantics with keywords.15 page(s