Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2008
Using Wierzbicka's natural semantic metalanguage, this paper sets out to show the pragmatic differences between ‘health enquiries’ and ‘weekend routines’ in French and (Australian) English. In French, except in rare cases, ‘health enquiries’ and ‘weekend routines’ must be introduced by means of a greeting of some sort. In (Australian) English, they may take the place of conventional greeting behaviour. Phaticity in the case of the English phrases is considerably higher than in the case of the French phrases, which, in the context of an intercultural encounter, may result in pragmalinguistic and/or sociopragmatic failure.