Language, culture and society: Modality, face and societal logic

Abstract

It is common to distinguish between individualistic cultures typically associated with Western countries and collectivistic cultures normally linked to Asian countries. Some countries are not easily characterized, because they are placed right in the middle of the continuum. This concerns, for instance, Russia. In this paper, I will attempt to demonstrate on the basis of the theory of communicative supertypes that the notion of individualism is intimately connected to the notion of alethic modality – concerned with laws of nature, i.e. what is possible, impossible, necessary and unnecessary – whereas the notion of collectivism is tied up with the notion of deontic modality having to do with laws of society, i.e. permission, prohibition, obligation and non-obligation. Specifically, the British-English speaking speech community is based on the alethic notion of possibility and guided by the hearer's face, i.e. second person, in contrast to the Mandarin-Chinese-speaking community which is based on the deontic notion of obligation and guided by the speaker’s face, i.e. first person. Compared to this, the Russian-speaking community stands out as a third unnoticed variant that seems to differentiate nature and society by making a sharp distinction within their aspectually defined modality system, between alethic and deontic logic expressed by the perfective and the imperfective aspect, respectively. That Russian culture must be a third variant is confirmed by their understanding of face as being defined in relation to the situation itself, i.e. third person.