International Journal of Language and Culture - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2020

The aim of this paper is to ask how exchange students retrospectively co-construct their first ‘culture shock’ experiences on a verbal, vocal, and visual plane. The results show that the different co-occurring levels of communication in the talk of the students offer various insights into cognitive processes: (1) Metaphorical and metonymical gestures are frequently used to represent or compress cultural dimensions in moments of high involvement and emphatic speech style. (2) Such gestures are also often historically and culturally embedded and may additionally serve to gain laughter from the co-participants in order to exaggerate the effect of cultural confrontation, underpinned by the use of prosodic cues. (3) Other prosodic means such as creaky voice may be used as a metaphorical marker for distance and represent therefore another type of cultural shock marker. (4) A dynamic understanding of blending theory might be a tool for laying cognitive processes of intercultural experiences open for the researcher.

This paper combines central ideas from Intercultural Pragmatics and Cultural Linguistics to rethink an issue that has been amply discussed in various branches of linguistics: idioms, ‘phrasemes,’ and other forms of fixed-form figurative language, when used in intercultural communication (ICC). It argues that an interaction-oriented approach needs to think beyond the description and mapping of idioms in different languages and cultures, and apply both pragmatic and cognitive linguistic approaches to explain if and how idiomatic language works (or does not work) in ICC. Methodologically, this paper relies on a combination of empirical approaches. A data-inductive analysis of authentic intercultural discourse involving native speakers of German, Afrikaans, and Zulu, who use English as a lingua franca in a project management setting provides interesting real-life examples of the pragmatic aspects of idiomatic language in authentic ICC. The results of this pragmalinguistic analysis have inspired and are accompanied by a deductive-experimental study, using questionnaires for speakers of various native languages (Arabic, German, Russian, Spanish, Turkish), testing the cross-linguistic communicability of English idioms in a ‘laboratory setting.’ These experiments show that an appreciation of both the embodied and empractic-interactional dimensions of idioms promises insights into how figurative language and fixed-form expressions are used successfully or unsuccessfully in ICC and why.

Following up on recent calls for studies dealing with first-order understandings of face (Arundale 2013; Haugh 2013), this paper presents arguments in favor of an empirical investigation of cultural conceptualizations (Sharifian 2011) underlying these first-order (or emic) models. The arguments are based on the findings of a study on business communication in international contexts (Mendes de Oliveira 2020). The study comprises the analysis of (a) interviews with business people from different sectors and (b) a compilation of e-mails exchanged by Brazilian and German employees of a healthcare company. I focus specifically on conceptualizations of ‘respect in business negotiations’ (Mendes de Oliveira 2017) as well as on their pragmatic instantiations in e-mails. For instance, the recurrent image schema vertical splitting in the Brazilian interview excerpts on the topic of respect in business negotiations is shown to be pragmatically instantiated in terms of how participants acknowledge ‘hierarchy’ in their construals of face in e-mail interactions. The image schema horizontal splitting is shown to be related to how German participants construe ‘face’ as a transactional phenomenon in the e-mail exchanges. I conclude that cultural conceptualizations play an important role in the Brazilian and German emic models of face. Future studies can take the reflections presented in this paper into consideration in order to strengthen the arguments that favor the inclusion of culturally-based views on face into an overarching theoretical model of face (Arundale 2013).

The argumentative and variable nature of (im)politeness evaluations and perceptions has long been discussed by scholars working in the field. The variability found in the perception of (im)politeness norms is arguably one of the most important and fundamental components of (im)politeness research. By using a three-stage analysis and drawing on several authentic examples from Persian, the present study uses the notion of ‘heterogeneous distribution of cultural conceptualizations’ to account for instances where differences arise in the conceptualization of (im)politeness in Persian interactions. It will be argued that evaluations of (im)polite behavior vary according to people’s level of internalization of the cultural conceptualizations. Furthermore, this study will also address some of the most significant social and cultural factors that cause variability in people’s evaluations of what is impolite and why it is so.

Drawing on insights borrowed from Mey’s pragmatic act theory (2001) and Sharifian’s framework of Cultural Linguistics (2011, 2017a), this study attempts to explore the pragmemes associated with the speech act of responding to dard-e-del (lit. pain of the heart) in Persian and the cultural pragmatic schemas underlying them. Dard-e-del can be described as the verbal communication of suffering, sadness, or hardships to others, mainly for the purpose of discharging negative emotions, finding relief, and strengthening social bonds. This study argues that the language used by speakers of Persian to respond to dard-e-del can be categorized into three groups of pragmemes. Pragmemes, according to Mey (2010: 2884), are defined as “general situational prototypes of [pragmatic] acts that are capable of being executed in a particular situation or cluster of situations.” Besides, it is illustrated that the identified pragmemes cannot be correctly used and interpreted unless the interlocutors are aware of the cultural pragmatic schemas informing them. A cultural pragmatic schema is described as the (assumed) shared knowledge by members of a cultural group, which is reflected in different features of their language (Sharifian 2017a, 2017b). Data for the present study was collected from a number of online forums, where speakers of Persian communicate their dard-e-del to other users. As a cultural insider, the author has also drawn on personal observation and insights from some Persian literary works. Qualitative analysis of the data revealed that interlocutors mainly employ three pragmemes to respond to dard-e-del. These pragmemes include wishing to suffer instead of the sufferer, cursing the cause of suffering, and inviting the sufferer to submit to god’s will. Each pragmeme has the potential to be expressed in a variety of ways (practs), depending on the context. The speech act of responding to dard-e-del in Persian and the associated pragmemes and practs draw on the three cultural pragmatic schemas of ghorbâni, tavakkol, and nefrin, which have their roots in religion.

The paper argues in favor of including cultural aspects in the description of communicative interaction. According to Eco (1976), a linguistic sign is a cultural unit. In order to use it properly, a speaker relies on communicative experience with this unit within a culture (Wittgenstein 1960; Feilke 1996, 1998; Everett 2012). We expand the notion of ‘cultural unit’ by including internet memes found in social media (Shifman 2013, 2014; Diedrichsen 2013a, 2013b, 2019a, 2019b). The term builds on Richard Dawkins’ 1976 definition of a ‘meme’ as a unit that is the cultural equivalent of a biological gene. The paper proposes three knowledge sources for the production and comprehension of these units. The first is semiotic knowledge, the second is common ground knowledge (Clark 1996), and the third knowledge source involves culturally shared cognitive conceptualizations on which word meanings and other linguistic conventions are founded (Sharifian 2003, 2011, 2015, 2017). These three knowledge sources are established through daily interactions and learning processes within a culture (Kecskés and Zhang 2009). The paper characterizes the application of these three knowledge sources for a variety of sign uses. We will also show that a cultural view on pragmatics, as suggested by Sharifian (2017), serves to describe speech acts by identifying their culturally based source. The paper therefore demonstrates that the inclusion of cultural knowledge enables a perspective on communication that goes beyond the analysis of spoken and written words within communities of speakers, as it includes emerging means of communicative interaction in the digital age.