International Journal of Language and Culture - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2023

The word ‘health’ is highly polysemous, and many attempts have been made to define its meaning in terms of actual use and to create a workable and even universal concept of health (Balog 1978; Boruchovitch & Mednick 2002). However, though the meaning of ‘health’ has been debated extensively, as well as the metaphorical conceptualizations of illness (e.g., Sontag 1978), there has been little treatment of how health is metaphorically conceptualized. This article investigates the meaning of the word ‘health’ in the United States and the United Kingdom, through a search on websites based on an examination of concordances in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). It focuses on the senses emerging from metaphorical cultural conceptualizations. Recent developments in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Kövecses 2005; Yu 2009) and Cultural Linguistics (Palmer 1996; Sharifian 2011) have increased the focus on the interaction between cognition and culture. I present an analysis of the conceptual metaphors, proposition schemas, and image schemas that converge to form a cultural model for health within these speech communities revealing, for example, that one model sees health in terms of a manageable valuable commodity, which may contribute to health behaviors such as self-tracking and observation, as discussed by Lupton (2016).

Since Lakoff and Johnson (1999) proposed ‘Embodiment theory’ in Cognitive Linguistics, the relationship between language and body parts has been a subject of research for many years. This paper examines the conceptualization of body part ‘head’ in 305 Persian figurative expressions and proverbs in two related Iranian dictionaries. Using the ‘Cultural Conceptualization’ model introduced by Sharifian (2011), this article demonstrates how sar, the Persian equivalent to ‘head’, is conceptualized to convey various notions such as mental activity, emotions, personality traits, social behavior and state, time, place, death, measurement, leader, and success. The conceptualization of body parts in a language can be bounded to that language and often rooted in some cultural background; however, this topic has received scant attention among scholars of Persian language. Apparently, no comprehensive studies on the conceptualization of head in Persian figurative expressions have been conducted so far, thus this research is an attempt to fill this gap. The analysis of the afore-mentioned word revealed that it can convey several meanings; these include mental activity, emotions, human traits, social action and status, time, location, death, measurement, leadership and success. The variety of meanings stems from contexts within which the word is presented.

Individuals in multilingual societies are associated with several culturally diverse groups, and so their cultural identity is multifarious and subject to constant change across time and space as a result of increasing intercultural engagements. While cultural norms are essentially embedded in one’s language, the choice of language is understood as a significant tool in projecting the cultural identity of a linguistic community. This paper examines how language choice becomes an agency for Tamil speakers in India to construct their cultural identity. Contextualized among native Tamil speakers in Chennai, the capital city of the southernmost Indian state of Tamil Nadu, this study unravels the narratives by which the speakers’ specific language preference in family, friendship, and institutional domains is used to perform identities and maintain a community consciousness. It also examines the role of language ideologies in contributing to their choices. The study finds that despite the penetration of English into all three domains in varying degrees, Tamil remains the ‘pride’ and the preferred language for all. This affinity is driven by ideological discourses surrounding the cultural history of Tamizhakam, from which arise the need to form a distinct Tamil identity.

This paper is a comparative study of names and naming practices among speakers of Dagbani, Kusaal, Likpakpaanl and Sɩsaalɩ. We discuss in detail the ceremonies that accompany the naming of a newborn among speakers of these languages. By using the framework of ethnopragmatics, the study explores the culture-internal dynamics of personal names by comparing the typology of names in the four languages. It draws attention to the fact that personal names are not given randomly but rather influenced by the special circumstances surrounding the birth of the name bearer and also by the advice of a diviner. This study reveals how culture is crafted through language and transmitted from one generation to the other through personal names. It is also observed that speakers of these languages have a common perception or worldview evident in their traditional cultural practices.

This research investigates request strategies in the Javanese community and the influence of the ± Power (±P), ± social Distance (±D), and ± Rank of imposition (±R) on the use of request strategies. The data were collected through Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) and analyzed according to Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). The results show that in the (+P+D+R) context, requests tend to be expressed indirectly. This is influenced by the (+) which is attached to all the variables. In the (−P−D−R) context, requests tend to be expressed directly. This is influenced by the (−) which is attached to all the variables. In the contexts of (+P+D−R), (+P−D+R), (−P−D+R), and (−P+D+R), there is a tug-of-war between the (+) and (−). However, the influence of the (+) appears to be stronger than the (−). Therefore, in these contexts requests are more likely to be expressed indirectly rather than directly.