Cultural Schemas, Evaluation, and the Socio-moral Order

In this chapter, we explore the relationship between pragmatics and culture from the perspective of the socio-moral order, considering Sharifian’s notions of cultural schema and pragmatic schema in relation to recent work on pragmatic judgments from the perspective of socio-moral values (Spencer-Oatey and Kádár, Intercultural politeness: managing relations across cultures. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021). While Cultural Linguistics tends to emphasize the relationship between underlying cultural schemas and the performance of pragmatic acts, this chapter discusses ways that schemas function as socio-moral values that shape how speakers interpret others as social and moral beings based on their linguistic and interactional choices.