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- Volume 3, Issue, 2016
International Journal of Language and Culture - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2016
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2016
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Vietnamese cultural conceptualizations of bụng (belly) and lòng (abdomen)
Author(s): Thuy N. Dinh and Van Kieu Thi Lepp.: 161–188 (28)More LessThis paper employs the analytical tools of Cultural Linguistics to investigate the Vietnamese cultural conceptualizations of bụng (belly) and lòng (abdomen), both of which are considered to be the location of thoughts and feelings. Based on our corpus of Vietnamese idioms and proverbs, The Tale of Kieu, and several selected modern poems, we found that, while they share many cultural conceptualizations in common, lòng is used more in figurative contexts than bụng. bụng and lòng are the seat and container of thoughts and emotions. lòng is viewed as a vast sea, vast cloth, piece of land/soil, stone, and a changeable living entity. lòng, besides having size and quality, is believed to metaphorically have weight and color. An ethnographic survey reveals the Vietnamese sociocultural historical context, ethnomedicine, and philosophical beliefs that motivate the centralization on the abdominal area to metaphorically host people’s thoughts and emotions. Our investigation again reveals that language is a “memory bank” (Sharifian 2011, p. 5), this time for cultural conceptualizations that have prevailed at different stages in Vietnamese history.
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Fixed expressions and culture
Author(s): Astrid Fiedlerpp.: 189–215 (27)More LessThis case study examines variation in idiomatic fixed expressions (FEs) in British and West African varieties of English. Using a corpus of newspapers containing FEs with the source domain monkey, I contrast those expressions shared by both varieties — the Common Core — with those found only in the African sources. In so doing, I seek to illuminate to what extent uniquely African cultural influences have affected idiomatic language use in these ‘New Englishes’ beyond the mere adoption of British expressions. The corpus contains 24 FEs, of which 8 belong to the Common Core and 16 classify as potentially new African ones. The analysis of the FEs reveals that West African speakers make use of a much broader spectrum of main meaning foci (Kövecses 2010) when instantiating the human behavior is monkey behavior metaphor than do their British counterparts. This wider system of associated commonplaces (Black 1954) can be linked to the African natural environment on the one hand and to broader cultural influences on the other, including power and corruption issues as well as African models of community and kinship (Wolf & Polzenhagen 2009). On a more global level, this paper lends evidence to the importance of cultural conceptualizations (Sharifian 2011) as a further dimension of variation in the study of World Englishes.
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ANGER metaphors in American English and Kabyle
Author(s): Sadia Belkhirpp.: 216–252 (37)More LessThe position standardly held in cognitive linguistics is that anger is an emotion concept that communicates about human thinking and which is instantiated in language in ways that are often metaphorically, systematically, and conceptually structured. The container metaphor is claimed to be near-universal (Kövecses 2000), but also subject to variation (Kövecses 2005). Variation in metaphor frequencies across languages has also been investigated (Boers & Demecheleer 1997; Boers 1999; Deignan 2003; Kövecses et al. 2015). This article reports a corpus-based contrastive investigation of anger metaphors in American English and Kabyle — a Tamazight language variety spoken in the northern part of Algeria. Its main objective is to contrast these metaphors and try to find out the most used ones in these languages through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the token frequency of linguistic expressions belonging to each of the conceptual metaphors, the type frequency of their linguistic realizations, and the number of their mappings. Aspects of the anger scenario are also studied and contrasted. The findings indicate similarities and differences in the use of anger metaphors in the two languages. The three most frequently used metaphors in American English involve the container, possessed object and opponent source domains while the most frequently used ones in Kabyle involve the fire, container and possessed object source domains. These results confirm the near-universality of the container metaphor. However, the most frequently used metaphorical source domain concept is different in the two languages due to sociocultural influences. In addition, the findings relating to aspects of the anger scenario (intensity and control) support Lakoff and Kövecses’ (1987) prototype model of anger, although it is found to be influenced by sociocultural specificities in American English and Kabyle.
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Bilingual bonds
Author(s): Kate Hammerpp.: 253–279 (27)More LessThis paper investigates the perception of ‘being yourself’ when speaking in the second language (L2) in the context of mobility-migration. Participants consist of 149 highly educated sequential Polish-English bilinguals who relocated to the UK at the average age of 23, and underwent processes of acculturation. The independent variables in this study include acculturation level, social network profile, language of attachment in adulthood, language dominance, length of residence, predicted future domicile, gender, and age of L2 acquisition (AoA). The study employs both emic and etic approaches. The findings reveal strong links between the perception of being yourself in L2 and acculturation level, social network profile, language dominance, predicted future domicile, and language of attachment. The results show that sociocultural and psychological integration into the new society and culture are strongly linked to the perception of being yourself in L2. This study adds acculturation and attachment perspectives to current research on the perception of feeling different when using languages learnt later in life.
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Generic analysis of bakery service encounters in Malaysia
Author(s): Yih-Long Lau and Su-Hie Tingpp.: 280–311 (32)More LessThe study aimed to describe the staging of service encounters in a bakery in Sarawak, Malaysia. The specific aspects studied were categories of transactions, staging of transactions, and nonverbal enactment of stages of transactions. A total of 100 interactions between Chinese vendors and Chinese, Malay, and Indigenous customers at a bakery operated by Chinese vendors in Sibu, Sarawak were observed and recorded. The analysis revealed five categories: Instant Buying, where customers bought the cakes on the spot; transactions where customers waited for the cakes to be baked; transactions where customers placed an order for the cakes; transactions where the customers picked up the cakes they had ordered; and unsuccessful sales. The four obligatory stages were Sale Request, Sale Compliance, Purchase, and Goods Handover. While all four stages could be realized nonverbally, the Purchase and Goods Handover stages in the service encounters were always performed nonverbally. The results suggest no difference in the role of nonverbal communication in service encounters with Chinese and non-Chinese customers but there are cultural differences in the staging. The Chinese vendors were more likely to omit the opening (Sale Initiation and Greeting) and closing (Purchase Closure) in their interactions with non-Chinese customers than with Chinese customers. The results suggest that service encounters in high-context cultures involving customers from other ethnic groups are more likely to be instrumental exchanges with an omission of the politeness rituals that characterize interpersonal relationships.
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Fairies, banshees, and the church
Author(s): Arne Peters
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