Experience, Evidence, and Sense The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English

"Focusing on a handful of English words whose meaning seems obvious to native speakers, and using a brand of semantic analysis accessible to any intelligent lay person, Anna Wierzbicka reveals the empiricist worldview embedded in the English lexicon and shows how mystify-ingly foreign English can thus be to foreigners. As an exploration in historical semantics, Wierzbicka's new book deserves a place beside Raymond Williams's Keywords."---J. M. Coetzee, University of Adelaide, Nobel Laureate in Literature --