  Much work in cross-lingual transfer learning explored how to select better
transfer languages for multilingual tasks, primarily focusing on typological
and genealogical similarities between languages. We hypothesize that these
measures of linguistic proximity are not enough when working with
pragmatically-motivated tasks, such as sentiment analysis. As an alternative,
we introduce three linguistic features that capture cross-cultural similarities
that manifest in linguistic patterns and quantify distinct aspects of language
pragmatics: language context-level, figurative language, and the lexification
of emotion concepts. Our analyses show that the proposed pragmatic features do
capture cross-cultural similarities and align well with existing work in
sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. We further corroborate the
effectiveness of pragmatically-driven transfer in the downstream task of
choosing transfer languages for cross-lingual sentiment analysis.
