This book brings together six published and as many new essays by means of which Wierzbicka has enlarged and made more profound our understanding of the multiplex relations between the forms of language, notably key words such as Russian dusha 'soul', and the underlying cultural and psychological meanings which they must have and to which they inevitably contribute. Wierzbicka's method for reconnoitering and attacking these territories is two-pronged-incorporating, first, sensitive textual and contextual analyses of words, idiomatic phrases, and culturally imbricated syntactic processes, e.g. the rates of use and some of the patterns of formations of the so-called impersonal constructions. This approach entails meticulous attention to patterns of usage, including literary usage, in actual languages such as Russian and her native Polish. This book also bristles with evidence from Australian languages (both English and Aboriginal), Japanese, French, and, to a lesser extent, Ilongot, Samoan, German, Italian, and Eskimo. Wierzbicka's second method is to explain linguistic meaning in terms which, she feels, are universal and which, in her work, take the shape of syllogisms, if-this-then-that propositions, and other schemas from classical logic. We find, then, along with empirical, multilingual richness, a concern that is not only "theoretical" in one linguistic sense (e.g. alluding to contemporary syntax), but that is also genuinely philosophical in the archaic and still lively sense of someone almost as obsessed as Socrates with such "imponderables" as fate and destiny, bravery and cowardice, soul and spirit, courtesy and embarrassment, honor and shame, humility and spiritual survival. We also find, pulled together here into general linguistics, a range of philosophical views that becomes a synecdoche of the history of (Western) philosophy from Aristotle on. Similarly, sociological, social-anthropological, and socialpsychological methods and concepts are dealt with or actively used with a range from ancestral figures such as Radcliffe-Brown to our contemporary Michelle Rosaldo. Clearly, SCC is a bold, almost hubristic attempt to synthesize many strands of social science, philosophy, and literature with linguistic, particularly socio-and ethnolinguistic, theory. The results, while never seamless, are always imaginative in texture and constructive in intent.