Table of Contents

PART I: Every language draws a circle ...
Chapter 1. Introduction: Recognising the contingency of one's own language
Chapter 2. Naming the world or construing the world?
Chapter 3. The givens of human life
Chapter 4. Universal words, semantic atoms and semantic molecules
Chapter 5. Human bodies and human minds: what is visible and what is invisible

PART II: Emotions and values
Chapter 6. Anglo values vs. Human values: Talking about values in a global world
Chapter 7. Human emotions and English words: Are anger and disgust universal?

PART III: 'Politeness' and 'cooperation'
Chapter 8. Talking to other people: 'Politeness' and cultural scripts
Chapter 9. Doing things with other people: 'cooperation', 'interaction' and 'ob%s?enie'

PART IV: Entering other minds
Chapter 10. Grammar and social cognition: the Hawaiians, the Dalabons, and the Anglos
Chapter 11. Endangered languages, endangered meanings
Chapter 12. Thinking about 'things' in Yucatec and in English
Chapter 13. Chimpanzees and the evolution of human cognition

PART V: Breaking down the walls of the prison
Chapter 14. From ordinary (Anglo) English to Minimal English
PART VI: kindred thinking across disciplines
Preliminary remarks
Chapter 15. Anthropology, Psychology, Psychiatry
Chapter 16. Philosophy, Theology, Politics
Chapter 17. Linguistics: Cognitive and cultural approaches
Chapter 18. Bilingualism, Life writing, Translation
Final remarks

References
Index

About the Author

Professor of Linguistics, Australian National University, and author of Semantics, Culture, and Cognition (1992); Semantics: Primes and Universals (1996): Understanding Cultures Through their Keywords (1997); What did Jesus Mean? (2001), and English: Meaning and Culture (2006)

Reviews

"Imprisoned in English is an heroic attempt to truly understand 'others' as subjects rather than objects without assimilating their understandings to one's own. The book summarizes the author's influential and monumental plan for a great escape from ethnocentrism and conceptual parochialism in the humanities and social sciences." --Richard A. Shweder, Harold Higgins Swift Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago
"This book is the latest outstanding product of Anna Wierzbicka's research, driven by her cross-cultural approach and theory of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). Wierzbicka is excellent in showing how much we are imprisoned in culture-specific English concepts. The book is powerful, and recommended for everyone who is interested in languages." --Istvan Kecskes, founding editor of the journal Intercultural Pragmatics
"Nevertheless, Imprisoned in English is engaging, provocative and wide-ranging in its subject matter. Not only are semantic primes discussed and justified, but they are applied to the fields of linguistic anthropology and endangered languages, politeness research and human emotions, and used to posit a theory of cognitive evolution from the last common ancestors 6 million years ago to the hypothesized emergence of language some 60,000 years ago. And
the book's message -- that English, like all languages, is 'culturally shaped, and this has profound consequences for today's globalizing and English-dominated world' -- is an urgent one." --The Times Literary
Supplement