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- Volume 5, Issue, 2018
International Journal of Language and Culture - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2018
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“Insanity is from home”
Author(s): Nana Aba Appiah Amfo, Ekua Essumanma Houphouet, Eugene K. Dordoye and Rachel Thompsonpp.: 1–28 (28)More LessThis paper examines selected expressions relating to the articulation of mental health challenges in three Akan speaking communities in Ghana, in the context of considering that language is reflective of human thought, and that human cultural practices and behavior emanate from people’s underlying appreciation of particular issues. Expressions of mental health challenges were extracted from a total of 37 one-on-one interviews and 12 focus group discussions. We note that the expressions used fall into 3 categories: idioms and proverbs, non-figurative language and code mixed utterances. Overall, indirection permeates all the categories. Furthermore, our observation is that the expressions provide an indication of the manifestations and perceived causes of the illnesses, which are familial, spiritual or biomedical. There is a strong tendency towards an expectation of communal support for the mentally ill. An appreciation of the languages and cultures of local communities provides the basis for appropriate diagnosis, effective management of mental illness and efficient public health education.
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Cultural grammar and the cultural linguistics heritage from the pre-Millennials
Author(s): Gary B. Palmerpp.: 29–65 (37)More LessWhile the newly arriving Millennial generation of cultural linguists was maturing, Boomers and Generation Xer’s were developing a theory of cognitive linguistics in an environment hostile to both induction and science. Two decades of mechanical deductive models from the intellectual (not political) right were followed by two more decades of linguistic subversion of science from the postmodernist left. In spite of these astringent intellectual currents, inductive linguistic science thrived in the last two decades of the 20th Century and attracted attention from other disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and ESL. The branch that we call cognitive linguistics did so largely by investigating imagery, usage, symbolic networks, and systems of metaphor. Some researchers from the social and linguistic sciences found it useful to shift the focus away from the universal imagistic attentional processes employed by cognitive linguists and over to culturally defined sources of imagery. This resulted in the retooling of linguistic relativism under the rubric of cultural linguistics just as the first Millennials were entering grad schools at the advent of the 21st century. In addition to motivating cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies of metaphors and cultural models, the shift has been productive in revealing links between culture, ideology, and grammar. It is argued that the single most pregnant and distinguishing concept in cultural linguistics is that of the scenario, and it is hoped that the Millennial generation will continue to develop and employ it in cross-linguistic studies. In this paper we demonstrate its application to cultural grammar.
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The representation of Aboriginal cultural conceptualisations in an adopted English
Author(s): Ian G. Malcolmpp.: 66–93 (28)More LessThe Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia encountered varieties of English as a language of colonisation from 1788. Through processes of nativization, Aboriginal people have made English a valid form of expression of their culture and worldview. For this to happen it was necessary for the input varieties of the language received to be changed in form. This, it is claimed, was achieved through processes of Retention, Elimination, Modification and Extension. According to Cultural Linguistics, these processes would have a cultural/conceptual as well as a linguistic dimension. An attempt is made here to trace the processes and to identify the major conceptual imperatives that drove them. It is argued that these were orientations to Relationship, Experience and Integration, as well as the recognition of the practicalities of communicating as a marginal group with other Australians who used English differently.
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Cultural conceptualisations of language and country in Australian Indigenous languages
Author(s): Dima Rushopp.: 94–111 (18)More LessThis article presents a Cultural Linguistics perspective on the enduring and multifaceted relationship between people, language and country in Indigenous Australia. It builds on a substantial body of work in Cultural Linguistics that has examined the cultural conceptualisations present in Aboriginal English, but shifts the focus to exploring how such conceptualisations are also encoded in ancestral Indigenous languages. The article provides linguistic and ethnographic data from a number of Indigenous language groups to explicate the notions of language as a ‘cultural schema’ and country as a ‘cultural category’ in Indigenous languages. It also posits a number of conceptual metaphors that relate to country and language, namely country is a sentient being, country is a rational being, and country is a linguistically competent being.
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The pragmalinguistic dimensions of cultural borrowing
Author(s): José A. Sánchez Fajardopp.: 112–129 (18)More LessThe concept of ‘cultural borrowing’ has been associated with the concept of interlinguistic borrowing, and not necessarily cultural diffusion, which might reveal typological disparities and conceptual incongruence. This article is thus aimed at examining the concept of cultural borrowing, in which its referential component is essential to determine the degree of cultural impact. To have a better understanding of this concept, a multidimensional categorization has been established to describe the leading features and components of the process of cultural assimilation. These dimensions, namely ‘unknown referent’, ‘semantic novelty’, ‘semantic plasticity’ and ‘pragmatic plasticity’, have been used to depict the cultural anglicization of Cuban lexis. Also, based on a dictionary-based compilation, a ‘cultural index’ has been established to shed more light on the multifaceted nature of cultural borrowing and ‘cultural density’, suggesting that such an index is not proportionally related to lexical productivity and frequency, but to the importation of unknown-referent-based cultural loans.
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Fairies, banshees, and the church
Author(s): Arne Peters
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