Update May 5, 2020
Learning objectives:
Reading material "9 Language, culture, and politeness":
Source: Mills, S. (2015). Language, culture, and politeness. In F. Sharifian (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and culture (pp. 129-140). London: Routledge.
9 Language, culture, and politeness
Sara Mills
1 Introduction
The terms ‘language’ and ‘culture’ are often used in politeness research as if they were synonyms. In this chapter I tease these two terms apart and chart their complex relation with politeness. I firstly discuss traditional models of politeness and impoliteness which analyse politeness in purely formally linguistic terms. I foreground the problems of such an analysis and then I examine the discursive approach to politeness which tries to develop a more context-based approach. This approach is more able to chart the complex relations between the terms language, culture and politeness. I then focus on the way that different cultures have been described in relation to politeness norms, where certain cultures have been labelled as collectivist or individualist cultures, positive or negative politeness cultures, and discernment and volition-based cultures. I question the validity of classifying whole cultures as tending towards certain styles of politeness or impoliteness.
2 Politeness and impoliteness
2.1 Traditional approach to the analysis of politeness
Brown and Levinson’s early work on politeness has had a major impact on the research field (1978/1987). They were the first to propose a systematic model of politeness and while there has been much criticism of their work, many theorists still adhere to a great deal of their terminology and concepts, even though some elements of the approach used by Brown and Levinson have since been modified. More specifically, Brown and Levinson proposed that politeness is largely strategic, a calculation that speakers make when interacting with others about the social distance from the other person, the power relation between them and the ‘cost’ of the imposition on the other (if, say, for example, the speaker is requesting something from the hearer). From this calculation, speakers work out what they need to ‘pay’ the other person. For Brown and Levinson, individuals need to defend their ‘face’, that is, the self-image of themselves which they, in interaction with others, agree to maintain. If others maintain your face, you, in turn, will maintain their face. Face threatening acts (FTAs) are classified as any actions which potentially disturb the balance of face maintenance among interactants. For example, requests can be categorized as face threatening as they may put the interlocutor into a difficult position, if they wish to refuse the request. Politeness, for Brown and Levinson, is seen as the mitigation of potential threats to face.
Brown and Levinson characterize politeness as consisting of two elements: negative and positive politeness. Negative politeness is largely concerned with not imposing on the other person, and indicating deference and respect towards them. Thus, apologizing would be categorized as negative politeness, as it is seen to be recognizing the needs and wishes of the other person, putting that other person first and stating that the other person will not be imposed upon. Positive politeness is concerned with stressing the closeness between the speaker and the hearer and indicating that the needs of the hearer and the speaker are very similar. Paying someone a compliment or telling them a joke is characterized as positive politeness, as both of these are seen to be concerned with stressing the closeness of the relationship between interactants.
2.2 Problems with the traditional approach to the analysis of politeness
There are a number of issues which have exercised theorists of politeness since Brown and Levinson’s work was first published. These critiques have led theorists to either refine Brown and Levinson’s model or attempt to produce new models of analysis. I will deal with several of these criticisms here: universalism; the relation between indirectness and politeness and context
Universalism: Brown and Levinson claimed that their model was a universal description of politeness, that is, that it could describe politeness in all languages. They argued that individual language groups differed in the extent to which they used positive or negative politeness, but that in essence, all languages subscribed to the same system of politeness. In recent years, however, this traditional approach has come under scrutiny, largely because, although this model seems to be adequate to describe English politeness, it certainly is not an effective model for analysing, for example, East Asian languages (Kadar and Mills, 2011; Matsumoto, 1989). In languages such as Japanese or Chinese, the concern with strategy and fulfilling one’s own individual needs is not viewed as the primary driver of politeness. Instead, in these cultures, there tends to be a focus on marking one’s awareness of one’s position in the group and one’s position in relation to others. Ide (1989) put forward a distinction between discernment and volition to describe these two opposing concerns. Discernment (wakimae) is the concern with marking the awareness of one’s social position and one’s relationship with the interlocutor. Many East Asian languages seem to exhibit a tendency to mark discernment in politeness usage more frequently than Western European languages, or at least this marking of position seems to be more backgrounded and part of expected or appropriate behaviour, than it is in Western European languages. Volition, on the other hand, is characterized by Ide as the type of politeness where speakers decide on the shape and form of the utterance, and tailor it themselves to what they see as the demands of the context and interlocutor. This is often seen as the type of politeness which characterizes Western European languages largely, being concerned with the individual needs of the speaker – and it is the type of strategic politeness described by Brown and Levinson. Ide (1989) describes these two styles of politeness as being related to Eastern and Western cultures; Mills and Kadar (2011, 2013) have described these two styles as tendencies only, arguing that East Asian languages are not wholly characterized by discernment, nor are Western European languages largely characterized by volition. Instead, these are tendencies which can be found in all languages. Mills and Kadar (2013) have also questioned whether there is such a clear distinction to be made between these two terms, and have argued that in fact discernment can best be opposed to certain types of ritualistic or conventionalized utterances rather than to individualistic volitional statements.
2.2.1 The relation between indirectness and politeness
Brown and Levinson argued that there is a scale of politeness, ranging from indirectness and avoidance of speaking to the directness of bald-on record utterances; indirectness for them is seen to be the most polite form. For them, when someone is indirect, for example when requesting something, the person gives the interlocutor the option of not recognizing or acknowledging the request, and therefore indirect forms allow the hearer some freedom of action. For example, if a speaker says: ‘I wonder if you could possibly lend me that book?’ using an indirect form rather than the relatively direct form: ‘Can I borrow that book?’ or the more direct form ‘I want to read that book’, the hearer is offered more options in terms of being able to refuse the request. In a sense, the indirect form already has the potential of refusal embedded within it. This is a highly elaborated form which signals to the interlocutor that the speaker recognizes that they are making a request which might be refused and signalling also to the hearer that the person has the option to refuse: ‘I wonder’ --- thinking rather than demanding; ‘if you’ --- the use of the conditional rather than a statement; ‘could’ – use of the past tense rather than the present; ‘possibly’ – again signalling that there is the option for refusal. All of these elements are highly conventionalized in English and therefore it is difficult to describe the intention or the impact of this type of indirectness in particular interactions. However, overall, using indirectness in English seems to signal an acknowledgement that making such a request involves potentially face threatening behaviour, and because this difficulty has been indicated to the hearer, refusal does not threaten the speaker’s or the hearer’s face. This type of indirectness is characterized by Brown and Levinson (1978/1987) as universal; others have seen it as stereotypically English (Wierzbicka, 1999). However, others have even argued that this type of indirectness is associated with stereotypically elite forms of politeness in English only.
However, many theorists have drawn attention to the fact that while for elite English, indirectness is seen to be the most polite form, in other languages, indirectness may in fact be considered impolite. Kerkam (forthcoming) has shown that in Arabic, indirectness is rarely used for the purposes of being polite, as directness is the seen as the more expected or appropriate form for requests and excuses. Indirectness used in these contexts would indicate a social or affective distance between the interlocutors, and therefore could give rise to an interpretation of impoliteness. Kerkam also shows that when indirectness is strategically used by interlocutors, it tends to be used for face-threatening acts. She has shown that criticizing and blaming are often achieved through indirect means, where speakers and hearers both recognize that an abstracted, generalized indirect utterance, such as ‘British children’s clothes are not very nice, are they?’ is in fact a particularized criticism of someone’s taste in clothes, and perhaps also their orientation to foreign cultures.
Indirectness is not an agreed upon term in all languages; thus, what counts as indirect in English (for example, conventional indirectness, such as ‘Could you open the window?’) might not be seen as indirect at all in some languages (Wierzbicka, 1999). The supposed widespread use of indirectness for refusals in East Asian languages should be viewed as conventionalized, and is often interpreted by native speakers of these languages as fairly straightforward and not indicating politeness.
Thus, indirectness should be seen to have a complex relationship with politeness, and it is clear that particular languages do not necessarily view or use indirectness in the same way as it is interpreted in English.
2.2.2 Context
Brown and Levinson, while arguing for the importance of context, largely focused on single sentence utterances as indicating politeness or impoliteness. It is quite clear that politeness tends to be an accumulated process, whereby politeness and impoliteness build up over a number of utterances and are contributed to by all participants. Thus we might argue that politeness and impoliteness are co-constructed rather than the product of an individual speaker’s intention. Bousfield (2008) has argued that it is important to focus on the way that impoliteness builds up over a long stretch of conversation, rather than assuming that it is somehow ‘contained’ within one utterance. What is important to analyse is the potentiality of politeness and impoliteness – the way that at certain points in the conversation, an interactant manages to repair potential hints of impoliteness, or manages to steer the conversation away from possible impoliteness (Watts, 2003), as I show in the next section. Mills (2003) has focused on the way that, drawing on a Community of Practice (CoP) approach, within a particular context, groups of people classify certain elements as appropriate or inappropriate (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1998). Within each CoP, there may be slightly different assessments of what counts as polite or impolite. A focus on context leads also to a focus on judgement, because politeness and impoliteness are seen as less inherent in particular speech acts or types of utterance, but more as judgements made by interactants about the appropriateness of utterances, in relation to what they consider to be the CoP norms of behaviour.
2.3 Discursive approach to the analysis of politeness
The discursive approach to the analysis of politeness developed because of a dissatisfaction with many aspects of Brown and Levinson’s theorizing and analysis. Following on from Eelen’s (2001) thoroughgoing critique of the work of Brown and Levinson and other politeness theorists, the discursive approach has attempted to develop a form of analysis which either modifies their work or dispenses with their work altogether.
Instead of making universal statements about politeness use, and developing a global model for the analysis of politeness, the discursive approach focuses on the way that context, resources and social forces /ideologies determine the possible meanings and interpretations of politeness. These are the elements which in fact determine whether an utterance is considered to be polite or impolite. Politeness and impoliteness are only that which is judged by interactants to be so, but interactants do not make these judgements in a vacuum. Thus the discursive approach focuses on language use in detail, in much the same way that traditional approaches have, but interpretation, judgement and context are considered crucial (Mills, 2011). For example, a discursive approach to the analysis of politeness would analyse an utterance in a particular context and analyse the way that the utterance seems to be functioning, and seems to be judged by the interactants as polite or impolite. Rather than focusing on second order judgements about the utterance (i.e. the analyst’s assessment), discursive approaches tend to focus on first order evaluations (i.e. the judgements that the interactants can be seen to be making) (Watts, 2003; Eelen, 2001).
Locher and Watts (2008) argue that politeness and impoliteness are not inherent in utterances; the analyst can only recognize that politeness is a possible interpretation, and thus they describe politeness as a potential within utterances. It is the hearer who decides whether they will choose to categorize the utterance as polite or impolite (or in fact a different form of relational work). Mills (2003) also shows the way that within family interactions, for example, interactants may decide not to ‘take up’ potential impoliteness moves; they may decide that in fact they value keeping the peace, rather than recognizing explicitly that someone has been impolite – impoliteness within this type of interaction stays at the ‘potential’ level. That is not to say, however, that its potential is not recognized by interactants. Parents, for example, have the option of acting as though they did not hear the ‘impolite’ utterance. Bousfield (2008), in an analysis of impoliteness in a documentary about traffic wardens, examines the way that a traffic warden has the option of classifying an utterance by an irate member of the public as impolite. However, generally the traffic wardens do not classify offensive or aggressive utterances as impolite, despite the fact that they involve swearing and shouting, because their institutional position allows them to accept that the offensive language is directed to the institution rather than to them personally. Culpeper (2011) also considers the question of whether in army training, the language used by sergeants towards their trainees is impolite, since none of the trainees displays in their responses to the sergeants any indication that they consider the language inappropriate or offensive. Thus, discursive approaches to the analysis of politeness and impoliteness focus more on the evaluation of acts as polite within particular contexts, rather than retaining any sense that language items are intrinsically polite or impolite (see Linguistic Politeness Research Group, 2011).
<……omitted……>
6 Conclusions
I have argued that traditional politeness theorists have tended to characterize cultures and languages as homogeneous and this results in them assuming that the politeness norms of the elite are taken as the norms of the culture or language as a whole. A discursive approach helps us to question this view of politeness and culture and enables us to strive to describe the variety of politeness norms which exist within each culture. For discursive theorists, it is important to distinguish between culture and language. Language is influenced by the cultural values of the elite group, and this is particularly visible in the case of politeness and impoliteness, which is clearly about appropriate behaviour, but we need to recognize that an individual’s linguistic repertoire is infinitely more varied than the elite politeness norms of that language. Politeness theorists need to move away from focusing on the politeness norms of the elite and to analyse the relational work which different classes and groups within a society use.
Reading material "5 Advances in Cultural Linguistics"
Source:
Approaches to Language, Culture, and Cognition --- The Intersection of Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic Anthropology, Edited by Masataka Yamaguchi, Dennis Tay, and Benjamin Blount
5 Advances in Cultural Linguistics
Farzad Sharifian
5.1 Introduction
This chapter provides an account of the development of Cultural Linguistics as a multidisciplinary area exploring the relationship between language, culture, and conceptualisation. Cultural Linguistics grew out of an interest in integrating cognitive linguistics with the three traditions within linguistic anthropology of Boasian linguistics, ethnosemantics, and the ethnography of speaking. In the last decade, Cultural Linguistics has also found strong common ground with cognitive anthropology, since both explore cultural models that characterise cultural groups. For Cultural Linguistics, many features of human languages are entrenched in cultural conceptualisations, including cultural models. In recent years, Cultural Linguistics has drawn on several disciplines and sub-disciplines, such as complexity science and distributed cognition, to enrich its theoretical understanding of the notion of cultural cognition. Applications of Cultural Linguistics have enabled fruitful investigations of the cultural grounding of language in several applied domains such as World Englishes, intercultural communication, and political discourse analysis. This chapter elaborates on these observations and provides illustrative examples of linguistic research from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics.
5.2 What is Cultural Linguistics?
Cultural Linguistics is a sub-discipline of linguistics with a multidisciplinary origin which explores the interface between language, culture, and conceptualisation (Palmer, 1996, this volume; Sharifian, 2011). While ‘cultural linguistics’ (without capitalisation) may be used to refer to a broad, general area of interest in the relationship between language and culture, Cultural Linguistics explores, in explicit terms, conceptualisations that have a cultural basis and are encoded in and communicated through features of human languages. The pivotal focus on conceptualisation in Cultural Linguistics owes its centrality to cognitive linguistics, a discipline that Cultural Linguistics drew on at its inception.
The term ‘cultural linguistics’ was perhaps first used by a pioneer of cognitive linguistics, Ronald Langacker, in an argument emphasising the relationship between cultural knowledge and grammar. He maintained that ‘the advent of cognitive linguistics can be heralded as a return to cultural linguistics. Cognitive linguistic theories recognise cultural knowledge as the foundation not just of lexicon, but central facets of grammar as well’ (Langacker, 1994, p. 31, original emphasis). Langacker maintains that ‘while meaning is identified as conceptualisation, cognition at all levels is both embodied and culturally embedded’. In practice, however, the role of culture in shaping language and the influence of culture on all levels of language was not adequately and explicitly dealt with until the publication of Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics (1996) by Gary B. Palmer, a linguistic anthropologist from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In this book, Palmer argued that cognitive linguistics can be directly applied to the study of language and culture. Central to Palmer’s proposal is the idea that ‘language is the play of verbal symbols that are based in imagery’ (Palmer, 1996, p. 3, emphasis added), and that this imagery is culturally constructed. Palmer argued that culturally defined imagery governs narrative, figurative language, semantics, grammar, discourse, and even phonology.
Palmer’s notion of imagery is not limited to visual imagery. As he puts it, ‘[i]magery is what we see in our mind’s eye, but it is also the taste of mango, the feel of walking in a tropical downpour, the music of Mississippi Masala’ (Palmer, 1996, p. 3). He adds, ‘phonemes are heard as verbal images arranged in complex categories; words acquire meanings that are relative to image schemas, scenes, and scenarios; clauses are image-based constructions; discourse emerges as a process governed by reflexive imagery of itself; and world view subsumes it all’ (Palmer, 1996, p. 4). Since for Palmer the notion of imagery captures conceptual units such as cognitive categories and schemas, my terminological preference is the term conceptualisation rather than imagery. I elaborate on my use of this term later in this chapter.
Palmer’s proposal called for close links between three traditions in anthropological linguistics and cognitive linguistics, as follows:
Cognitive linguistics can be tied into three traditional approaches that are central to anthropological linguistics: Boasian linguistics, ethnosemantics (ethno science), and the ethnography of speaking. To the synthesis that results I have given the name cultural linguistics. (Palmer, 1996, p. 5, original emphasis)
Palmer’s proposal can be diagrammatically represented in Figure 5.1 below:
Figure 5.1 A diagrammatic representation of Palmer’s (1996) proposal for cultural linguistics
Boasian linguistics, named after the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, saw language as reflecting people’s mental life and culture. Boas observed that languages classify experiences differently and that these linguistic categories tend to influence the thought patterns of their speakers (Blount, 1995[1974]; Lucy, 1992). The latter theme formed the basis of later work by scholars such as Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. The views of the relationship between language and culture that have been attributed to this school of thought range from the theoretical position that language and culture shape human thought to one that regards human thought as influenced by language and culture. It is worth noting that although the former is often attributed to scholars such as Sapir and Whorf, in recent decades others have presented much more sophisticated accounts of the views held by these scholars.
A related subfield is that of ethnosemantics, which ‘is the study of the ways in which different cultures organise and categorise domains of knowledge, such as those of plants, animals, and kin’ (Palmer, 1996, p. 19). For example, several ethnosemanticists have extensively studied kinship classifications in Aboriginal languages of Australia and noted their complexity, relative to the kinship system classifications in varieties of English such as American English or Australian English (for example, Tonkinson, 1998). An important field of inquiry that is closely related to ethnosemantics is ethnobiology, which is the study of how plants and animals are categorised and used across different cultures (Berlin, 1992).
The ethnography of speaking, or the ethnography of communication, largely associated with the work of Dell Hymes (for example, 1974) and John Gumperz (for example, Gumperz and Hymes, 1972) explores culturally distinctive means and modes of speaking or communication in general. Hymes emphasised the role of socio- cultural context in the ways in which speakers perform communicatively. He argued that the competence that is required for the conduct of social life includes more than just the type of linguistic competence Chomskyan linguists studied. He proposed that a discussion of these factors be placed under the notion of communicative competence, which includes competence in ‘appropriate’ norms of language use in various Socio-cultural contexts. Generally the three linguistic-anthropological traditions discussed so far ‘share an interest in the native’s point of view’ (Palmer, 1996, p. 26), and an interest in the socio-cultural grounding of language, although a number of anthropological linguists have simply focused on documenting lesser known languages (see Duranti, 2003 for a historical review).
Cognitive linguistics utilises several analytical tools from within the broad field of cognitive science, notably the notion of ‘schema’. The concept of ‘schema’ has been very widely used in several disciplines and under different rubrics, and this has led to different understandings and definitions of the term. For cognitive linguists such as Langacker, schemas are abstract representations. For example, for him, a noun instantiates the schema of [[THING]/[X]], whereas a verb instantiates the schema of [[PROCESS]/[X]]. In classical paradigms of cognitive psychology, however, schemas are considered more broadly as building blocks of cognition used for storing, organising, and interpreting information (for example, Bartlett, 1932; Bobrow and Norman, 1975; Minsky, 1975; Rumelhart, 1980). Image schemas, on the other hand, are regarded as recurring cognitive structures which establish patterns of understanding and reasoning, often elaborated by extension from our knowledge of our bodies as well as our experience of social interactions (for example, Johnson, 1987). An example of this would be to understand the body or parts of the body as ‘containers’. Such an understanding is reflected in expressions like: ‘with a heart full of happiness’. Another analytical tool used in cognitive linguistics is the ‘conceptual metaphor’, which is closely associated with the work of Lakoff, and to a lesser extent Johnson (for example, Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Conceptual metaphors are defined as cognitive structures that allow us to conceptualise and understand one conceptual domain in terms of another. For instance, the English metaphorical expressions: ‘heavy- hearted and light- hearted’, reflect the conceptual metaphor of HEART AS THE SEAT OF EMOTION. In proposing the framework of cultural linguistics, Palmer persuasively argued that it is likely that all these conceptual structures have a cultural basis. His own work has been based on the analysis of cases from such diverse languages as Tagalog, Coeur d’Alene, and Shona (for example, Palmer 1996, 2003).
Although Palmer believed that the link with cognitive linguistics could provide Cultural Linguistics with a solid cognitive perspective ‘cognitive linguistics has received criticism for not having a strong cognitive base, in the areas of cognitive representations, structure, and processes (for example, Peeters, 2001). The ambiguity here lies in different interpretations of the term ‘cognitive’. What makes studies associated with mainstream cognitive linguistics ‘cognitive’ is their emphasis on cognitive conceptualisation, whereas studies of cognitive processing in the subfield of psycholinguistics are more likely to emphasise non- conceptual phenomena, such as response time and strength of response.
In recent years, Cultural Linguistics has drawn on several other disciplines and sub- disciplines towards developing a theoretical framework that would offer an integrated understanding of the notions of ‘cognition’ and ‘culture’, as they relate to language. This framework that may be referred to as cultural cognition and language (Sharifian, 2008b, 2009b, 2011) proposes a view of cognition that has life at the level of culture, under the concept of cultural cognition.
Cultural cognition draws on a multidisciplinary understanding of the collective cognition that characterises a cultural group. Several cognitive scientists have moved beyond the level of the individual, working on cognition as a collective entity (for example, Clark and Chalmers, 1998; Sutton, 2005, 2006; Wilson, 2005). Other scholars, working in the area of complex science often under the rubric of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), have been seeking to explain how relationships between parts, or agents, give rise to the collective behaviours of a system or group (for example, Holland, 1995; Waldrop, 1992). A number of scholars, notably Hutchins (1994), have explored the notion of ‘distributed cognition’, including factors external to the human organism, such as technology and the environment, in their definition of cognition (see also Borofsky, 1994 and Palmer, 2006 for the notion of distributed knowledge in relation to language). Drawing on all this work, Sharifian (2008b, 2009b, 2011) offers a model of cultural cognition that establishes criteria for distinguishing between what is cognitive and what is cultural and the relationship between the two in the domain of Cultural Linguistics.
Cultural cognition embraces the cultural knowledge that emerges from the interactions between members of a cultural group across time and space. Apart from the ordinary sense of ‘emergence’ here, cultural cognition is emergent in the technical sense of the term (for example, Goldstein, 1999). In other words, cultural cognition is the cognition that results from the interactions between parts of the system (the members of a group) which is more than the sum of its parts (more than the sum of the cognitions of the individual members). Like all emergent systems, cultural cognition is dynamic in that it is constantly being negotiated and renegotiated within and across the generations of the relevant cultural group, as well as through the contact that members of that group have with other cultures.
Language is a central aspect of cultural cognition as it serves, to use the term used by wa Thiong’o (1986), as a ‘collective memory bank’ of the cultural cognition of a group. Many aspects of language are shaped by the cultural cognition that prevailed at earlier stages in the history of a speech community. Historical cultural practices leave traces in current linguistic practice, some of which are in fossilised forms that may no longer be analysable. In this sense language can be viewed as storing and communicating cultural cognition. In other words language acts both as a memory bank and a fluid vehicle for the (re-)transmission of cultural cognition and its component parts or cultural conceptualisations, a term elaborated upon in the following section.
<……omitted>
Reading material "1 Cultural Linguistics: The State of the Art"
Source:
Advances in Cultural Linguistics-Springer Singapore(2017), Farzad Sharifian (ed.)
1 Cultural Linguistics: The State of the Art
Farzad Sharifian
1.1 Introduction
While the term ‘cultural linguistics’ (or the more frequently used term ‘ethnolinguistics’) may be used to refer to the general area of research on the relationship between language and culture (see, e.g., Peeters 2016, reprinted in this volume), I use ‘Cultural Linguistics’ to refer to a recently developed discipline with multidisciplinary origins that explores the relationship between language and cultural conceptualisations (Sharifian 2011, 2017). In particular, Cultural Linguistics explores the features of human languages that encode culturally constructed conceptualisations of the whole range of human experience. It offers both a theoretical framework and an analytical framework for investigating the cultural conceptualisations that underlie the use of human languages. Cultural Linguistics has drawn on several other disciplines and sub-disciplines to develop its theoretical basis. These include cognitive psychology, complexity science, distributed cognition, and anthropology. Cultural Linguistics has also been applied to and has benefited from several areas of applied linguistics, including intercultural communication, intercultural pragmatics, World Englishes, Teaching English as an International Language, and political discourse analysis (Sharifian 2011; Sharifian and Palmer 2007).
1.2 The Theoretical Framework of Cultural Linguistics
At the heart of the theoretical framework of Cultural Linguistics is the concept of cultural cognition, which affords an integrated understanding of the notions of ‘cognition’ and ‘culture’ as they relate to language (e.g. Sharifian 2009, 2011). This concept offers a multidisciplinary understanding of cognition that moves beyond the level of the individual mind (e.g. Clark and Chalmers 1998; Sutton 2005, 2006; Wilson 2005). As Frank (2015, p. 494) puts it, cultural cognition is “a form of cognition that ... is not represented simply as some sort of abstract disembodied ‘between the ears’ entity”. Furthermore, cultural cognition is a form of enactive cognition (Stewart et al. 2011) that comes about as a result of social and linguistic interactions between individuals across time and space (see also Cowley and Vallée-Tourangeau 2013). Crucially, the elements of a speech community’s cultural cognition are not equally shared by speakers across that community, so much so that, in fact, cultural cognition is a form of (heterogeneously) distributed cognition (Hutchins 1994). Speakers show variation and differences in their access to and internalisation of their community’s cultural cognition. Also, cultural cognition is dynamic in that it is constantly being negotiated and renegotiated across generations and through contact between speech communities.
The study of cultural cognition has parallels in several subfields and subparadigms of the cognitive sciences (see also Frank 2015). For example, scholars working in the area of complexity science, often under the rubric of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), have been seeking to explain how relationships between parts, or agents, give rise to the collective behaviours of a system or group (e.g. Holland 1995; Waldrop 1992). Similarly, Cultural Linguistics explores cultural cognition as a complex adaptive system that emerges from the interactions between members of a speech community across time and space. Frank (2015, p. 497) observes that “the adoption [by Cultural Linguistics] of a CAS approach as well as other analytical tools, such as ‘distributed cognition’, opens up the possibility of productive dialogue between scholars in the humanities and investigators operating in subfields of cognitive science”.
As a central aspect of cultural cognition, language serves [to use the term used by wa Thiong’o (1986)], as a ‘collective memory bank’ of the cultural cognition of a speech community. Many aspects of language are shaped by elements of cultural cognition that have prevailed at different stages in the history of a speech community. In other words, these elements can leave traces in subsequent linguistic practice. In this sense, language can be viewed as a primary mechanism for ‘storing’ and communicating cultural cognition, acting both as a memory bank and a fluid vehicle for the (re-)transmission of cultural cognition.
The theoretical framework of Cultural Linguistics, as a whole, may be diagrammatically represented as in Fig. 1.1, which shows that this is a framework that also provides a basis for understanding cultural conceptualisations and their realisation in language. Language plays a dual role in relation to cultural conceptualisations. On the one hand, linguistic interactions are crucial to the development of cultural conceptualisations, as they provide a space for speakers to construct and co-construct meanings about their experiences. On the other hand, many aspects of both language structure and language use draw on and reflect cultural conceptualisations. Hence, the study of language itself is of key significance to our understanding of cultural conceptualisations and, ultimately, of the broader cultural cognitions associated with languages and language varieties.
Fig. 1.1 The theoretical framework of Cultural Linguistics
Apart from language, cultural conceptualisations may also be instantiated in various other aspects of people’s lives, including cultural arts, literature, ritual, cultural events, emotion, etc., as represented in Fig 1.2. Exploring cultural conceptualisations is thus not only relevant to language (and linguistics), for these conceptualisations are reflected in many aspects of human life. Consequently, research into cultural conceptualisations can be undertaken by scholars across a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, literature, sociology, theology, and fine arts.
1.3 The Analytical Framework of Cultural Linguistics
The analytical framework of Cultural Linguistics provides tools for analysing the relationship between language and cultural conceptualisations. They include the notions of ‘cultural schema’, ‘cultural category’, and ‘cultural metaphor/metonymy’
Fig. 1.2 The relevance of cultural conceptualisations to various disciplines / domains
(cross- or intra-domain conceptualisation). Many features of human languages are entrenched in cultural conceptualisations. As such, notions such as cultural schema, cultural category and cultural metaphor provide fruitful analytical tools for examining features of language that instantiate culturally constructed conceptualisations of experience.
Cultural schemas capture beliefs, norms, rules, and expectations of behaviour as well as values relating to various aspects and components of experience. Cultural categories are those culturally constructed conceptual categories that are primarily reflected in the lexicon of human languages. Examples of cultural categories are ‘colour categories’, ‘age categories’, ‘emotion categories’, ‘food categories’, ‘event categories’, and ‘kinship categories’. Cultural metaphors are cross-domain conceptualisations that have their conceptual basis grounded in cultural traditions such as folk medicine, worldview, or a spiritual belief system. The analytical framework of Cultural Linguistics can be diagrammatically represented as in Fig. 1.3.
Fig. 1.3 Analysis framework of Cultural Linguistics
In summary, the theoretical and the analytical frameworks of Cultural Linguistics can be presented as in Fig. 1.4, which reflects the fact that various features and levels of language, from morpho-syntactic features to pragmatic/semantic meaning and discourse, may be entrenched in cultural conceptualisations taking the form of cultural schemas, cultural categories, and cultural metaphors.
Apart from the above, an important aspect of our conceptual life is what can be referred to as the reconceptualisation of cultural conceptualisations. This phenomenon is gaining momentum as the processes of globalisation bring about increased contacts between different speech communities and, consequently, different systems of cultural conceptualisations. An example of reconceptualisation is provided by the way in which the cultural conceptualisations of Christmas are adapted in non-Christian, non-Western societies, as is the case in the author’s place of birth, Iran. Local adaptations of the CHRISTMAS schema may involve modifying the cultural categories of CHRISTMAS PARTY, including the subcategories of CHRISTMAS GIFT, CHRISTMAS FOOD, and CHRISTMAS DRINK. The whole event category of CHRISTMAS may be conceptualised as a Western celebration, rather than a religious occasion, providing the host of such a party with a chance to project a (Western) “modern” identity. It is well known that, even in the Western world, historically,
Fig. 1.4 The theoretical and the analytical frameworks of Cultural Linguistics
Christmas has been reconceptualised first from a pagan celebration, then to a Christian cultural event, and more recently in many cases from a religious event to a more commercial one or simply a family gathering. Other examples of reconceptualisation are provided by event categories such as VALENTINE’S DAY, THANKSGIVING DAY, and HALLOWEEN. In some parts of the world, including China, people may celebrate Thanksgiving Day to thank teachers and parents, rather than conforming to the original, earlier idea of thanking God for the blessings of the year, including harvest, as continues to be done in the United States. Thus, in general, reconceptualisation may take various forms, such as blending elements of conceptual systems drawn from different speech communities and cultural traditions, a phenomenon that may be referred to as cross-cultural reconceptualisation. A noteworthy case would be where a conceptual/spiritual system, such as a religion, is amalgamated into a local system of conceptualisations, as in the case of the Christianisation of events such as Yule (which became Christmas) and Valentine’s Day (which grew out of the ancient Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia). Processes such as transnational trade, colonisation, and (increasingly) globalisation often lead to such cases of reconceptualisation.
<……omitted……>
