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- Volume 6, Issue 2, 2019
International Journal of Language and Culture - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2019
Volume 6, Issue 2, 2019
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The biblical roots of English ‘love’
Author(s): Anna Wierzbickapp.: 225–254 (30)More LessAbstractSeen from a broad cross-linguistic perspective, the English verb (to) love is quite unusual because it has very broad scope: it can apply to a mother’s love, a husband’s love, a sister’s love, etc. without any restrictions whatsoever; and the same applies to its counterparts in many other European languages. Trying to locate the origins of this phenomenon, I have looked to the Bible. Within the Bible, I have found both continuity and innovation. In the Hebrew Bible, the verb ’āhēb, rendered in the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint with the verb agapao, implies a “preferential love”, e.g. it is used for a favourite wife of a favourite son. In the New Testament, the concept of ‘love’ loses the “preferential” components and thus becomes applicable across the board: between anybody and anybody else.
The paper argues that the very broad meaning of verbs like love in English, aimer in French, lieben in German, etc. reflects a shared conceptual heritage of many European languages, with its roots in the New Testament; and it shows that by taking a semantic perspective on these historical developments, and exploring them through the rigorous framework of NSM and Minimal English, we can arrive at clear and verifiable hypotheses about a theme which is of great general interest, regardless of one’s own religious and philosophical views and commitments.
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Conceptualizing Brexit
Author(s): Nelly Tinchevapp.: 255–278 (24)More LessAbstractBrexit, i.e. the withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU), is a major event not only in European but also in global politics. Its effect is still to be witnessed and its future impact is debated from a variety of angles – social, economic, cultural, ethnic, religious, etc. The present paper offers a cognitive linguistic perspective on the phenomenon. It aims to investigate the conceptual metaphorization of Brexit on the first days after the 2016 referendum. That period seems of special importance as, arguably, it was then that for many UK citizens, Brexit suddenly became part of reality and not just a hypothetical possibility.
The paper presents data on the dynamics of employing different source domains on each of the first 4 days after the referendum. The main objective is to isolate regularities and tendencies in how the selected culturally-significant source domains help structure the concept. The analysis of the dataset of English-language EU online media texts appearing on the first 4 post-referendum days reveals that the most prominent source domains in the metaphoric conceptualization of brexit are divorce, a natural disaster and part of a journey.
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Does expressing emotions in the local language help migrants acculturate?
Author(s): Alessandra Panicaccipp.: 279–304 (26)More LessAbstractPrevious research has shown that emotional patterns are modified by linguistic and cultural influence. The present paper adopts a different perspective on the topic, investigating whether expressing emotions in the local language (LX) could predict migrants’ acculturation attitudes towards the heritage (L1) and the host (LX) cultures. Quantitative results from 468 migrants, supported by insights from 5 interviews, indicated that a frequent use of the LX for expressing anger, love and for swearing was linked to higher levels of acculturation to the LX culture. Specifically, the LX use for expressing anger and love explained 9.1% of the variance on migrants’ LX culture acculturation, where the LX use for expressing anger was by far the best predictor. Conversely, participants’ attachment to L1 cultural practices proved unrelated to their linguistic preferences for expressing emotions. Findings provide evidence that a language can be a strong emotional bond, able to orient migrants’ acculturation attitudes.
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Ethnodiachrony, Buddhism, and ethnicity
Author(s): Frederic Painpp.: 305–350 (46)More LessAbstractThe paper focuses on how ethnicity is constructed and negotiated as well as on how it surfaces through language convergence. The paper aims to demonstrate that, in the very specific Khmer case, dialect convergences cannot be explained through an exclusive internal analysis of the linguistic system that would dismiss the comprehension of the anthropological environment. It is shown that external anthropological factors bound to ethnicity are to be taken into account in the understanding of dialect convergences.
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Idea-based and image-based linguacultures
Author(s): Per Durst-Andersen and Daniel Barrattpp.: 351–387 (37)More LessAbstractIn order to investigate whether or not cultural cognitive differences between Western and East Asian countries should be taken seriously we compared the empirical results from studies of perception and cognition involving primarily American and Chinese people to linguistic data from exactly the same areas in American English and Mandarin Chinese. What we found were systematic language parallels to the perceptual and cognitive differences found in empirical studies. Our linguistic analysis did not only reveal that the differences should be taken seriously, but also that it seems to be possible to trace them back to different perspectives involved: The Anglo-American culture has an idea-based perspective, while the Mandarin Chinese culture has an image-based perspective to what appears to be a common basis for both Americans and Chinese in all other respects. The difference in perspective is, for instance, reflected in the two very different writing systems.
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