Universal and culture-specific properties of greetings

Six criteria for what counts as a greeting, and a community whose greetings carry real information --- which makes the corridor handshake one implementation, not the shape of greeting itself.

Duranti, A. (1997). Universal and culture-specific properties of greetings. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 7(1), 63–97.

Type

Journal article

Find it

doi.org/10.1525/jlin.1997.7.1.63

Checked

Against the abstract, 16 September 2026

Why it is on the list

The greetings literature kept asserting things about greetings without agreeing what one is, so Duranti proposes six criteria for identifying a greeting exchange across languages and speech communities. Applied to a speech community in Western Samoa, the criteria pick out four types of greeting exchange — and those exchanges contradict a standard claim, because they are not devoid of propositional content and need not be “expressive” acts in the speech-act sense. Samoans use greetings to do social work, including searching for new information and sanctioning behaviour. Week 1 uses this twice: as the model for specifying anything precisely enough to argue about, and as the reason the course calls “the reply is a token, not an answer” a property of this protocol rather than of greeting as such.