Australian cultural scripts—bloody revisited § Anna Wierzbicka * Department of Linguistics, Australian National University, Baldessin Precinct Bldg 110, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Received 5 August 2000; received in revised form 16 January 2001 Abstract This paper focusses on ‘‘the great Australian adjective’’ bloody and it shows that far from being meaningless, the humble bloody is packed with meaning; and that by unpacking this meaning we can throw a good deal of light on traditional Australian attitudes and values. It argues that the use of bloody furnishes an important clue to both the changes and continuity in Australian culture, society, and speech and also offers us a vantage point from which to investi- gate a whole network of Australian attitudes and values. Furthermore, the paper shows that the Australian use of bloody also illuminates some important theoretical issues, it demonstrates that frequently used and apparently ‘‘bleached’’ discourse markers do in fact have their own precise meaning, and that this meaning can be revealed by means of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), based on empirically established universal human concepts. It also shows that once the precise meaning of such discourse markers is accurately portrayed, it can provide important clues to the values, attitudes, and modes of interaction characteristic of a given society or speech community. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Discourse markers; Cultural scripts; ‘‘NSM’’ semantic theory; Australian culture; Australian English; Swearing 1. Introduction: ‘‘cognitive ethnopragmatics’’ 1,2 The way we speak reflects the way we think. Not necessarily at the individual level—a skilled speaker can conceal his or her way of thinking behind carefully Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 1167–1209 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma 0378-2166/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(01)00023-6 § An earlier draft of this paper was read by Nick Enfield and Cliff Goddard. I would like to thank them both for their detailed and extremely helpful comments. I would also like to thank my family, Clare, Mary and John Besemeres for many judicious comments on the subject-matter. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +61-2-6125-3353; fax: +61-2-6125-8214. E-mail address: anna.wierzbicka@anu.edu.au (A. Wierzbicka). 1 For an earlier analysis of bloody and related concepts see Wierzbicka (1997). 2 For the term ‘‘ethnopragmatics’’ and the idea of ‘‘ethnopragmatics’’ as a field of study, see Goddard (Forthcoming a).