- Home
- e-Journals
- International Journal of Language and Culture
- Previous Issues
- Volume 11, Issue 1, 2024
International Journal of Language and Culture - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2024
Volume 11, Issue 1, 2024
-
The moral grammar of marriage rules
Author(s): Doug Jonespp.: 1–30 (30)More LessAbstractAccording to theories of “moral grammar,” judgments of what is wrong or right – like judgments of what is ungrammatical or grammatical – are guided by implicit, often unconscious rules. An ideal test case for exploring the parallels between moral rules and language rules is the moral regulation of mating in relation to kinship. Here I argue that combinatorial variation in both kin terminologies and marriage rules results from the operation of a grammar faculty, which juggles tradeoffs between conflicting constraints according to the principles of “Optimality Theory.” This works to produce kinship grammars, input-output systems that map some kin types onto others via mergers and reductions. This in turn can yield marriage rules. If a kin type maps onto a close consanguine, this corresponds to a marriage proscription. If a kin type maps onto a close affine, this corresponds to a marriage prescription/preference. I analyze both elementary structures of kinship (where cross kin are prescribed spouses, and parallel kin are proscribed; e.g. Dravidian southern India) and complex structures (where kin are divided into an unmarriageable core and a marriageable periphery, and affines are sometimes tabooed because they are equated with close consanguines; e.g. Jane Austen’s England). Rather than treating social organization as the source of mental categories, this analysis starts with the machinery of categorization and shows how it spontaneously generates marriage rules. The result is an updating of structuralism in light of cognitive science: moral codes vary within limits set by fundamental structures of the human mind.
-
The heart became hot
Author(s): Jonathan Tanihu and Samuel Alhassan Issahpp.: 31–57 (27)More LessAbstractThis paper provides a comparative study of the conceptualization of ANGER in Dagbani and Dangme, classified as Mabia and Kwa languages respectively. We employ the Conceptual Metaphor Theory as an analytical tool for explaining the empirical facts on the conceptualization of anger in these languages. We show that the mental concepts of the Dangme and the Dagbani people reflect in their conceptualizations of ANGER. We demonstrate that although the two languages deploy varied body organs (especially the heart and stomach), to express anger, Dagbani tends to focus more on the use of the heart, the lungs and the chest to express anger, whereas Dangme uses the heart, stomach and the body or self. The two languages share a common conceptual metaphor of anger as ‘heat’ with other schematic nodes, such as ‘fire’, ‘fluid’ and ‘container’. We finally establish that although most of the expressions of anger in these two languages fit into cross-linguistic patterns, there are also salient cultural specifics that demonstrate how their physiological and experiential realities tend to play an important role in their conception of anger. Data for this study were collected from native speakers of these languages through spontaneous conversations as well as from literary works produced in the two languages under investigation.
-
Bold colors, sweeping melodies, offensive smells
Author(s): Ádám Galacpp.: 58–94 (37)More LessAbstractThis paper presents a corpus-based exploratory study of the figurative conceptualizations of visual, auditory, and olfactory stimuli in English and Hungarian. Through a manual semantic analysis of altogether 6,800 occurrences of 18 sensory nouns (three per sensory modality in each language) in the TenTen corpora, the following conceptualization types of perceptual stimuli have been examined: reification, agentification, animization, and personification. The paper presents the relative frequencies of these conceptualizations along with their subtypes and concrete linguistic manifestations in English and Hungarian. Among a number of interesting observations that call for further investigations, the following findings merit special attention: (1) visual stimuli have the lowest values in every category; (2) in both languages, agentification is the most typical in the case of olfaction; (3) with the exception of representations of olfactory stimuli as living beings, every conceptualization type is more frequent in the Hungarian data.
-
Women have no honour of their own
Author(s): Ansa Mahmood and Kim Ebensgaard Jensenpp.: 95–122 (28)More LessAbstractThis article presents a corpus-based Cultural-Linguistic study of the usage of the word honour in Pakistani and Indian Englishes, addressing underlying cultural conceptualizations of the notion of honor. Honor emerges as a complex cultural model which involves several cultural schemas, cultural categories and other cultural conceptualizations, in which women are cast as responsible protectors and upholders of the honor of men, families, and communities, their bodies being the very locus of men’s honor. The study is based on a relatively simple qualitative and quantitative analysis of two specialized corpora representing discourse on honor and related phenomena in Pakistani and Indian Englishes.
-
Metaphtonymy and semio-cognitive de-legitimation of Donald Trump in the meme discourse of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (January 2016–December 2019)
Author(s): Nashwa Elyamany and Maha SalahEldien Mohamed Hamedpp.: 123–152 (30)More LessAbstractThe current research endeavor extends scholarship on political satire and digital memes proposing a more nuanced semio-cognitive analytical framework for the innovative political image macro memes pertinent to The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (January 2016–December 2019). Premised on Martynyuk and Melescchenko’s (2021) conceptualization of metaphtonymy and van Leeuwen’s (2007) (de)-legitimation strategies, a corpus of 159 image macro meme instances from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah’s (January 2016 to December 2019) has been examined to show how the semio-cognitive de-legitimation of Donald Trump and his administration is materialized through creative meme-inherent metaphtonymies. Key findings include the dominance of four meme-specific metaphtonymic patterns. In tandem, the overlapping semio-discursive de-legitimation strategies of authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoeisis are metaphtonymically encoded in the image macro memes of the show’s monologue to: (a) function as highly medium-specific expressions that respond to challenging events based on thematic and structural templates, and (b) provide a timely (and even reactionary) response to political debates, creating a negative view of Donald Trump to reduce his legitimacy as the US president.
Most Read This Month

-
-
Fairies, banshees, and the church
Author(s): Arne Peters
-
- More Less