International Journal of Language and Culture - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2017

The present paper approaches Irish English from a cultural linguistic perspective. It illustrates how the study of cultural schemas, cultural categories, cultural conceptualisations, and conceptual metaphors/metonymies can contribute to the understanding of Irish English as a variety of English whose speech community shares a unique cultural cognition, which is instantiated in linguistic patterns that appear to be ‘marked’ for everybody from outside of Ireland. Drawing from two corpora (ICE-Ireland, Corpus of Galway City Spoken English) as well as from ethnographic research ( Wentz 1911 ; National Folklore Collection 1939/2017 ), the paper discusses possible cultural keywords of Irish English, cultural schemas involving banshees and fairies as well as conceptual metonymies such as the church is authority, all of which can be understood to express particular Irish cultural experiences. The paper also illustrates how cultural conceptualisations are constantly being negotiated and renegotiated through time and across generations within the Irish English speech community. The paper illustrates the applicability of the cultural linguistic paradigm to the study of Irish English, offering a new perspective on a well-studied variety of English.

Although a minority of Indigenous Australians still use their heritage languages, English has been largely adopted by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as their medium of communication both within and beyond their communities. In the period since English first reached Australia in 1788, a dialect has emerged, drawing on English, contact language, and Indigenous language sources, to enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander speakers to maintain cultural conceptual continuity while communicating in a dramatically changed environment. In the perspective of Cultural Linguistics it can be shown that many of the modifications in the lexicon, grammar, phonology, and discourse of English as used by Indigenous Australians can be related to cultural/conceptual principles, of which five are illustrated here: interconnectedness, embodiment, group reference, orientation to motion, and orientation to observation. This is demonstrated here with data from varieties of Aboriginal English spoken in diverse Australian locations. 1 The understanding of Aboriginal English this gives has implications for cross-cultural communication and for education.

Our paper readdresses the Kachruvian notion of ‘contextualisation’ from a cultural-linguistic/cognitive-sociolinguistic perspective. We provide an exemplary analysis along these lines, using data from a corpus of Indian-English matrimonial advertisements as our empirical basis. Taking the dimensions of contextualisation distinguished in Kachru’s original framework as a matrix, we show that instances of nativisation detected in the data can be fruitfully spelled out in terms of their underlying cultural conceptualisations and are often interrelated against this background. Furthermore, we suggest that the notion of contextualisation can be profitably applied to entire text types. At a general level, we argue that an analysis that addresses cultural cognition at group level can overcome limitations of descriptive approaches in the study of L2-varieties and provide common ground for a joint endeavour of various research paradigms and disciplines.

Hong Kong culture blends paradoxes: In it, life and death, the real and the other world coexist in the traditions of its inhabitants, which eventually surface in the variety of English spoken in this Special Administrative Region of China. Our corpus-linguistic analysis, on the basis of ICE-HK and the GloWbE ( Davies 2013 ) corpus, 1 demonstrates the centrality of the family concept and its ramifications as well as its relation to the concept of money in Hong Kong English. The conceptualization children are an investment does not only show the conceptual network family and money belong to, but also lucidly shows the dynamics within the parent-child relationship, which is governed by filial piety and elderly care when the investment bears fruit. Collocations such as ‘hungry ghost,’ ‘hell money,’ and ‘worship ancestors’ are combinations of common core English terms that underwent semantic extension under the influence of the local Hong Kong cultural context. Our data shows how tightly language and culture are linked and that culture and cultural changes are the main factors to influence language and its development.

This study of media discourse focuses on how the sociopolitical culture in Hong Kong and Mainland China is conceptualized by the English-speaking press. To this end, the present research studies newspaper articles on the Hong Kong Occupy Central Movement published in Britain, the United States, and Australia. Cultural Linguistics, combined with corpus analytical techniques, is used to examine the construals of hong kong and mainland china. A 303,455-word corpus which contains 402 articles was compiled for data analysis. It is found that the disagreement between the Hong Kong civilians and the Mainland Chinese government is often reported with metonymical conceptualizations (place for inhabitants versus place for the institution). In general, the sociopolitical culture in Hong Kong and Mainland China is imbued with negative emotions, disharmony, and power differences, as is evident from the body, illness, disease, container, and possession conceptualizations. At the end of this paper, issues about researching conceptualizations in newspaper texts, such as the journalistic input, are discussed.

The fact that English has been used as a means of global communication appears to bring about the association of English with multiple cultural conceptualisations regardless of its roles in different contexts. The purpose of the present paper is to explore and argue for the existence of ‘Vietnamese English’, a variety developed by Vietnamese users of English with its own lexical specifics and underlying cultural conceptualisations. The most important areas of the study will include: (1) lexical innovations in Vietnamese English found in the data of the Vietnam Heritage Magazine and locally developed English textbooks in Vietnam; (2) the cultural schemas, categories and metaphors that are entrenched in instances of lexical innovation; and (3) a sample of documenting entries for a yet-to-be-compiled Vietnamese English Dictionary based on the findings.

International business negotiations are prone to several difficulties, one of the most fundamental of which being differences in cultural conceptualizations ( Sharifian 2011 ). In order to explore how Brazilians and Germans conceptualize respect in business negotiations, interviews in English with business negotiators were conducted and cultural conceptualizations analyzed. Following an ‘organic’ ( Quinn 2005 ) and (mainly) qualitative approach to data, this paper presents: (a) the main conceptualizations found for both groups; (b) a cognitive-linguistic analysis of collocations of ‘respect’ found in the interviews; and (c) a preliminary sketch of group-level conceptualizations of respect in business negotiations for both groups. For Brazilians, the source domains location and vertical splitting were salient, which points to the relevance of hierarchy. For Germans, the source domain horizontal splitting and the sphere separation cultural schema were recurrent, which signals appreciation for the public-private sphere separation. These conceptual differences might have practical consequences in international negotiation scenarios.