Cultural Linguistics

Abstract

This ground-breaking book marks a milestone in the history of the newly developed field of Cultural Linguistics, a multidisciplinary area of research that explores the relationship between language and cultural conceptualisations. The most authoritative book in the field to date, it outlines the theoretical and analytical framework of Cultural Linguistics, elaborating on its key theoretical/analytical notions of cultural cognition, cultural schema, cultural category, and cultural metaphor. In addition, it brings to light a wide array of cultural conceptualisations drawn from many different languages and language varieties. The book reveals how the analytical tools of Cultural Linguistics can produce in-depth and insightful investigations into the cultural grounding of language in several domains and subdisciplines, including embodiment, emotion, religion, World Englishes, pragmatics, intercultural communication, Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL), and political discourse analysis. By presenting a comprehensive survey of recent research in Cultural Linguistics, this book demonstrates the relevance of the cultural conceptualisations encoded in language to all aspects of human life, from the very conceptualisations of life and death, to conceptualisations of emotion, body, humour, religion, gender, kinship, ageing, marriage, and politics. This book, in short, is a must-have reference work for scholars and students interested in Cultural Linguistics.

Cultural Linguistics and ELT curriculum: The case of ‘Prospect’ English textbooks in Iran

“…Cultural Linguistics is a recently developed discipline by Sharifian (2011a) that explores the relationship between language and cultural conceptualisations. Cultural Linguistics theoretically centers cultural cognition, which involves the notions of "cognition" and "culture" implicitly relevant to language (Sharifian, 2017a). Cultural cognition is a "group-level collective cognition that […]emerges from the interactions between the members of a cultural group across time and space" (Sharifian, 2011b: 35).…”

“…Cultural Linguistics has been applied to a growing number of research topics including religion (Lu, 2017;Sharifian, 2017b), world Englishes (e.g., Degani, 2017;Malcolm, 2017;Wolf, 2017), political discourse F I G U R E 1 The analytical framework of Cultural Linguistics. Reprinted from Sharifian (2017a: 8) [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] (e.g., Ansah, 2017;Musolff, 2017), cross-cultural pragmatics (e.g., Sharifian, 2005;Wilson & Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 2017), intercultural communication (Sharifian, 2010), culture, body, self, and language (e.g., Bagasheva, 2017;Sharifian, 2011b), teaching English as an international language (Xu, 2017), and English language teaching curriculum (Dinh & Sharifian, 2017) which is in line with the domain of the current study.…”

“…As a central aspect of cultural cognition, language functions as a “ collective memory bank ” (Sharifian, 2011a: 39) for cultural conceptualisations that have prevailed across generations in speech community. In cultural cognition, the process of conceptualisations consists of schematising and categorising, and the collective term of cultural conceptualisations includes the notions of “cultural schema,” “cultural category,” and “cultural metaphor.” “Cultural schemas (and subschemas) capture beliefs, norms, rules, and expectations of behavior as well as values relating to various aspects and components of experience” (Sharifian, 2017a: 7). There are various types of schemas such as event schemas, role schemas, emotion schemas, image schemas, and proposition schemas (Sharifian, 2011a).…”

Associative Experiment in the Study of Sociocultural Stereotype

“…Stereotypes appear as results of categorisation, which is based on a universal human ability to save on cognitive resources. Natural languages not only instantiate but also encode culturally constructed categories encompassing the whole range of human experience (Sharifian, 2017).…”

The Immigrant as "the Other". Towards Differential Cultural Models

“…enterprise as proposed by Farzad Sharifian (most recently, 2017b) and pursued by a number of scholars to various "degrees of separation" in Sharifian (2017a). If the place of cultural models can be more precisely established within the larger set of constructs that embraces cultural categories, cultural schemas, and cultural metaphors, the framework of Cultural Linguistics would gain an extra level of coherence and reliability.…”