ABSTRACT
My wife and I aren’t communicating across cultures (except in the trivial sense that no one ever fully shares the culture even of those they know most closely), so it’s not surprising that our exchange appeals to cultural knowledge:
(1) BRANKA: When will you be back PETER: I should be back by eight but you know what trains are like
I assert, correctly, that Branka does indeed ‘know what trains are like’. And while the formula you know what x is like typically implies a negative evaluation, I probably wouldn’t have used this formula if I’d been talking to someone who didn’t share the same cultural knowledge of trains as myself. This is because in a different culture, ‘you know what trains are like’ might imply any number of different negative evaluations: that they’re dirty, slow, inconvenient, cold, hot, crowded, dangerous, populated by thieves, etc. So that even if the formula you know what x is like implies a negative evaluation universally, i.e. in every language (which, by the way, I’m not claiming), the nature of the relevant negative evaluation would still be culturally conditioned.
