GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURES IN CROSSCULTURAL COMPARISONS Anna Gladkova School of Humanities University of Brighton Falmer Brighton BN1 9PH UK The article discusses how cultural information is embedded at the level of grammar and it treats grammar as inseparable from semantics and pragmatics. <...> The article provides examples of cultural meaning embedded at the level of syntax relying on examples from Russian and English. <...> In particular, it demonstrates variation in impersonal constructions in Russian and causative constructions in English. <...> It then discusses variation in the use of grammatical structures due to the influence of cultural factors on the basis of ways of wording ‘requests’ in English and Russian. <...> The linguistic examples in the discussion are sources from the Russian National Corpus for Russian and Collins Wordbanks Online for English. <...> The article argues for the importance of culture-sensitive linguistic studies in language teaching. <...> Key words: ethnosyntax, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), Russian, English, requests, impersonal constructions, causative constructions. 1. <...> INTRODUCTION The article demonstrates how cultural information can be embedded at the level of grammar and it treats grammar as inseparable from semantics and pragmatics. <...> Ethnosyntax is an approach to studying grammar as a vehicle of culture. <...> The term ‘ethnosyntax’ was introduced by Wierzbicka (1979) to reflect a new perspective on grammatical studies with a particular focus on cultural meaning. <...> She advocated the view that grammatical constructions are not semantically arbitrary and their meanings are related to broader cultural understandings. <...> Two senses of ethnosyntax can be distinguished — a ‘narrow’ and a ‘broad’ one (Enfield 2002; Goddard 2002). <...> Ethnosyntax in a ‘narrow’ sense aims to locate and articulate cultural understandings that are embedded in the meanings of particular grammatical structures. <...> Ethnosyntax in this sense overlaps with some studies in the area of pragmatics, such as ethnopragmatics (Goddard 2002, 2006) and ethnography of speaking (e.g., Gumperz & Hymes 1972). <...> The accumulated experience of studies into Ethnosyntax allowed researchers to formulate methodological requirements to this kind of linguistic investigations. <...> There is a degree of unanimity among scholars that research into cultural element of grammatical constructions involves the analysis of their meaning (e.g., Wierzbicka 1979, 1988, 2002; Enfield 2002; Goddard 2002; Simpson 2002). <...> As emphasised by Wierzbicka (1979), a key to decoding cultural meanings embedded <...>