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Ethnolinguistic 28 Lublin 2017

I. Research articles
DOI: 10.17951/et.2016.28.31

Farzad S h a r i f i a n
(Monash University, Australia)

Cultural Linguistics∗

Cultural Linguistics is a multidisciplinary area of research that explores

the relationship between language, culture, and conceptualisation. Originally,
this area grew out of an interest in integrating cognitive linguistics with the
three traditions present in linguistic anthropology, namely, Boasian linguistics,
ethnosemantics, and the ethnography of speaking. In the last decade, Cultural
Linguistics has also found strong common ground with cognitive anthropology,
since both explore cultural models, which are associated with the use of
language. For Cultural Linguistics, many features of human languages are
entrenched in cultural conceptualisations, including cultural models. In recent
years, Cultural Linguistics has drawn on several disciplines and sub-disciplines,
such as complexity science and distributed cognition, to enrich its theoretical
understanding of the notion of cultural cognition. Applications of Cultural
Linguistics have enabled fruitful investigations of the cultural grounding of
language in several applied domains such as world Englishes, intercultural
communication, and political discourse analysis. This contribution elaborates
on these observations and provides illustrative examples of linguistic research
from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics.

Key words: Cultural Linguistics, linguistic anthropology, cultural

conceptualisations, cultural models, cultural cognition

∗
First published in The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture, ed. Farzad
Sharifian, London and New York: Routledge, 2015, pp. 473–492. c Farzad Sharifian. It is
included here, with minor editorial changes, with the author’s permission. The author
thanks Gary Palmer and Roslyn M. Frank for their helppful comments on an earlier draft
of this paper. It was produced with financial support ftom Australian Research Council
(ARC DP and Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship [project number DP0343282], ARC
DP [project number DP0877310], and ARC DP [project number DP140100353]). It also
appeared in Polish as “Lingwistyka kulturowa” in Etnolingwistyka 28, pp. 31–57.
34 Farzad Sharifian

1. What is Cultural Linguistics?

As a sub-discipline of linguistics with a multidisciplinary origin, Cultural

Linguistics explores the interface between language, culture, and conceptual-
isation (Palmer 1996; Sharifian 2011, 2017). Cultural Linguistics explores, in
explicit terms, conceptualisations that have a cultural basis and are encoded
in and communicated through features of human languages. The pivotal
focus on meaning as conceptualisation in Cultural Linguistics owes its cen-
trality to cognitive linguistics, a discipline that Cultural Linguistics drew on
at its inception.
The term Cultural Linguistics was perhaps first used by one of the
founders of the field of cognitive linguistics, Ronald Langacker, in a statement
he made emphasising the relationship between cultural knowledge and
grammar. He maintained that “the advent of cognitive linguistics can be
heralded as a return to cultural linguistics. Cognitive linguistic theories
recognise cultural knowledge as the foundation not just of lexicon, but central
facets of grammar as well” (Langacker 1994: 31, original emphasis). Langacker
further maintains that “while meaning is identified as conceptualisation,
cognition at all levels is both embodied and culturally embedded” (2014:
33). In practice, however, the role of culture in shaping the conceptual level
of language and the influence of culture as a system of conceptualisation
on all levels of language was not adequately and explicitly dealt with until
the publication of Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics (1996) by Gary
B. Palmer, a linguistic anthropologist from the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas. In this book, Palmer argued that cognitive linguistics can be directly
applied to the study of language and culture.
Central to Palmer’s proposal was/is the idea that “language is the play
of verbal symbols that are based in imagery” (1996: 3, emphasis added), and
that this imagery is culturally constructed. Palmer argued that culturally
defined imagery governs narrative, figurative language, semantics, grammar,
discourse, and even phonology.
Palmer’s notion of imagery is not limited to visual imagery. As he puts it,
“[i]magery is what we see in our mind’s eye, but it is also the taste of mango,
the feel of walking in a tropical downpour, the music of Mississippi Masala”
(1996: 3). He adds, “phonemes are heard as verbal images arranged in complex
categories; words acquire meanings that are relative to image-schemas, scenes,
and scenarios; clauses are image-based constructions; discourse emerges as a
process governed by reflexive imagery of itself; and world view subsumes it
all” (p. 4). Since for Palmer the notion of imagery captures conceptual units
such as cognitive categories and schemas, my terminological preference is
 Cultural Linguistics 35

the term conceptualisation rather than imagery. I elaborate on my use of

this term later in this paper.
Palmer’s proposal called for bringing three traditional approaches found
in anthropological linguistic to bear on research carried out in the field of
cognitive linguistics, as follows:
Cognitive linguistics can be tied into three traditional approaches that are central
to anthropological linguistics: Boasian linguistics, ethnosemantics (ethno science), and
the ethnography of speaking. To the synthesis that results I have given the name cultural
linguistics. (Palmer 1996: 5, original emphasis)

Palmer’s proposal is diagrammatically represented in Figure 1. Boasian

linguistics, named after the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas,
saw language as reflecting people’s mental life and culture. Boas observed that
languages classify experiences differently and that these linguistic categories
tend to influence the thought patterns of their speakers (Blount 1995[1974],
2011; Lucy 1992).

Figure 1. A diagrammatic representation of Palmer’s (1996) proposal for Cultural Lin-

guistics

The latter theme formed the basis of later work by scholars such as
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. The views of the relationship between
language and culture that have been attributed to this school of thought
range from the theoretical position that language and culture shape human
thought to one that regards human thought as influenced by language and
culture. It is worth noting that although the former is often attributed to
scholars such as Sapir and Whorf, in recent decades others have presented
much more sophisticated and much more nuanced accounts of the views held
by these two researchers (see Lee 1996).
A related subfield is that of ethnosemantics, which is “the study of the
ways in which different cultures organise and categorise domains of knowledge,
36 Farzad Sharifian

such as those of plants, animals, and kin” (Palmer 1996: 19). For example,
several ethnosemanticists have extensively studied kinship classifications in
the Aboriginal languages of Australia and noted their complexity relative to
the kinship system classifications in varieties of English such as American
English or Australian English (Tonkinson 1998). An important field of
inquiry, closely related to ethnosemantics, is ethnobiology which is the study
of how plants and animals are categorised and used across different cultures
(Berlin 1992).
The ethnography of speaking, or the ethnography of communication,
largely associated with the work of Dell Hymes (for example, 1974) and
John Gumperz (for example, Gumperz and Hymes 1972), explores culturally
distinctive means and modes of speaking, and communication in general.
Hymes emphasised the role of sociocultural context in the ways in which
speakers perform communicatively. He argued that the competence that is
required for the conduct of social life includes more than just the type of
linguistic competence Chomskian linguists had studied. He proposed that a
discussion of these factors be placed under the rubric of communicative com-
petence, which includes competence in “appropriate” norms of language use in
various sociocultural contexts. Generally, the three linguistic-anthropological
traditions discussed so far “share an interest in the native’s point of view”
(Palmer 1996: 26) as well as an interest in the sociocultural grounding of
language, although a number of anthropological linguists have simply focused
on documenting, describing, and classifying lesser known languages (see
Duranti 2003 for a historical review).
Cognitive linguistics itself utilises several analytical tools drawn from
the broad field of cognitive science, notably the notion of schema. The
concept of schema has been very widely used in several disciplines and under
different rubrics, and this has led to different understandings and definitions
of the term. For cognitive linguists such as Langacker, schemas are abstract
representations. For example, for him, a noun instantiates the schema of
[[thing]/[X]], whereas a verb instantiates the schema of [[process]/[X]]. In
classical paradigms of cognitive psychology, however, schemas are considered
more broadly as building blocks of cognition used for storing, organizing, and
interpreting information (for example, Bartlett 1932; Bobrow and Nonnan
1975; Minsky 1975; Rumelhart 1980). Image schemas, on the other hand,
are regarded as recurring cognitive structures which establish patterns of
understanding and reasoning, often elaborated by extension from knowledge
of our bodies as well as our experience of social interactions (for example,
Johnson 1987). An example of this would be to understand the body or parts
of the body as “containers”. Such an understanding is reflected in expressions
 Cultural Linguistics 37

like with a heart full of happiness. Another analytical tool used in cognitive
linguistics is the conceptual metaphor, which is closely associated with the
work of Lakoff, and to a lesser extent Johnson (for example, Lakoff and
Johnson 1980). Conceptual metaphors are defined as cognitive structures
that allow us to conceptualise and understand one conceptual domain in
terms of another. For instance, the English metaphorical expressions heavy-
hearted and light-hearted reflect the conceptual metaphor of heart as the
seat of emotion. In proposing the framework of Cultural Linguistics,
Palmer persuasively argued that it is very likely that all these conceptual
structures have a cultural basis.1 His own work is based on the analysis of
cases from such diverse languages as Tagalog, Coeur d’Alene, and Shona
(for example, Palmer 1996, 2003).
Although Palmer believed that the link with cognitive linguistics could
provide Cultural Linguistics with a solid cognitive perspective, his proposal
received criticism for not having a strong cognitive base, specifically, in the
areas of cognitive representations, structure, and processes (for example,
Peeters 2001). The criticism, however, appears to be related to the fact that
there are different interpretations of the term cognitive. What makes studies
associated with mainstream cognitive linguistics “cognitive” is their emphasis
on cognitive conceptualisation, whereas studies of cognitive processing in
the subfield of psycholinguistics mostly focus on non-conceptual phenomena,
such as response time and strength of response.
In recent years, Cultural Linguistics has drawn on several other disciplines
and sub-disciplines in the process of developing a theoretical framework that
affords an integrated understanding of the notions of cognition and culture,
as they relate to language. This framework is one that may be best described
as cultural cognition and language (Sharifian 2008b, 2009b, 2011, 2017) in
that it proposes a view of cognition that has life at the level of culture, under
the concept of cultural cognition.
Cultural cognition draws on a multidisciplinary understanding of the
collective cognition that characterises a cultural group. Several cognitive sci-
entists have moved beyond the level of the individual, working on cognition as
a collective entity (for example, Clark and Chalmers 1998; Sutton 2005, 2006;
Wilson 2005). Other scholars, working in the area of complex science often
under the rubric of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), have been seeking to
explain how relationships between parts, or agents, give rise to the collective
1
The reader is also referred to a discussion of the cultural basis of metaphors (see
Quinn 1991), where the cognitive anthropological perspective (i.e. metaphors reflect
cultural models) challenges the traditional cognitive linguistic perspective (i.e. metaphors
constitute cultural models).
38 Farzad Sharifian

behaviours of a system or group (for example, Holland 1995; Waldrop 1992).

A number of scholars, notably Hutchins (1994), have explored the notion
of distributed cognition, including factors external to the human organism,
such as technology and the environment, in their definition of cognition (see
also Borofsky 1994 and Palmer 2006 for the notion of distributed knowledge
in relation to language). Drawing on all this work, Sharifian (2008b, 2009b,
2011) offers a model of cultural cognition that establishes criteria for distin-
guishing between what is cognitive and what is cultural and the relationship
between the two in the domain of Cultural Linguistics.
Cultural cognition embraces the cultural knowledge that emerges from
the interactions between members of a cultural group across time and space.
Apart from the ordinary sense of emergence here, cultural cognition is emer-
gent in the technical sense of the term (for example, Goldstein 1999). In other
words, cultural cognition is the cognition that results from the interactions
between parts of the system (the members of a group) which is more than
the sum of its parts (more than the sum of the cognitive systems of the in-
dividual members). Like all emergent systems, cultural cognition is dynamic
in that it is constantly being negotiated and renegotiated within and across
the generations of the relevant cultural group, as well as in response to the
contact that members of that group have with other languages and cultures.
Language is a central aspect of cultural cognition as it serves, to use
the term used by wa Thiong’o (1986), as a “collective memory bank” of
the cultural cognition of a group. Many aspects of language are shaped
by the cultural cognition that prevailed at earlier stages in the histoty of
a speech community. Historical cultural practices leave traces in current
linguistic practice, some of which are in fossilised forms that may no longer
be analysable. In this sense language can be viewed as storing and commu-
nicating cultural cognition. In other words, language acts both as a memory
bank and a fluid vehicle for the (re-)transmission of cultural cognition and
its component parts or cultural conceptualisations, a term elaborated upon
later in this chapter.

2. Why Cultural Linguistics?

A question might be asked in relation to the need for the development

of Cultural Linguistics. Scholars who have been interested in exploring
the interrelationship between language and culture have faced at least
two significant challenges in regards to the notion of culture: one is its
abstractness and the other, the essentialist and reductionists implications
 Cultural Linguistics 39

often associated with it. These challenges have led to the avoidance of the
term by many scholars. For example, as Atkinson puts it, “[i]n the very
field which innovated the concept in fact – anthropology – culture has been
‘half-abandoned’ ” (2015: 424).2 Many scholars have found the notion of
culture to be too abstract to be useful in explicating the relationships that
link beliefs and behaviour to language use. Although linguists have had
rigorous analytical tools at their disposal, what has not been available to
them is an analytical framework for breaking down cultures and examining
their components, so that features of human languages could be explored in
terms of the relationship between language and culture. Cultural Linguistics,
and in particular the theoretical framework of cultural cognition and cultural
conceptualisations, is an attempt to provide such an analytical framework.
First of all, this framework avoids the abstractness of the notion of culture
and instead focuses on exploring culturally constructed conceptualisations.
As this chapter has shown, the framework draws on several disciplines, such
as cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, for its analytical tools, such as
cultural schemas, cultural categories, and cultural metaphors. These analytical
tools allow cultural conceptualisations to be examined systematically and
rigorously. Furthermore, they enable the analysis of features of human
languages in relation to the cultural conceptualisations in which they are
entrenched.
As for the essentialist and reductionist tendencies associated with the
notion of culture, the theoretical model of cultural cognition and cultural
conceptualisations avoids these by, first of all, examining cultural concep-
tualisations rather than examining speakers and then ascribing cultures
to people, or people to cultures. It also views cultural conceptualisations
as heterogeneously distributed across the members of a group, rather than
equally shared by the speakers. Both language and culture demonstrate
a similar pattern of distribution across speech communities, and neither
of them is homogenously held by speakers. These themes will be further
expanded in the remainder of this chapter.

3. Cultural conceptualisations

Among the analytical tools that have proved particularly useful in ex-
amining aspects of cultural cognition and its instantiation in language are
cultural schema, cultural category (including cultural prototype), and cultural
metaphor. I refer to these collectively as cultural conceptualisations (Sharifian
2
Following Mazzarella (2004: 345). [editor’s note]
40 Farzad Sharifian

2011, 2017). Consistent with the view of cultural cognition discussed earlier
in this chapter, these analytical tools are seen as existing at the collective or
macro level of cultural cognition, as well as that of the individual or micro
level (Frank and Gontier 2011). Cultural conceptualisations and their en-
trenchment in language are intrinsic to cultural cognition. This formulation
of the model of cultural cognition, cultural conceptualisations, and language
are summarised diagrammatically in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Model of cultural cognition, cultural conceptualisations, and language

The figure captures the close relationship between language, cultural

conceptualisations, and cultural cognition. As reflected, various features
and levels of language, from morpho-syntactic features to pragmatic and
semantic meanings may be embedded in cultural conceptualisations in the
form of cultural schemas, cultural categories, and cultural metaphors. The
following section elaborates on the interrelationship between language and
each of these types of cultural conceptualisations.

3.1. Cultural schemas and language

The notions of schema and conceptual metaphor were discussed earlier
in this chapter. The following section elaborates on the notion of cultural
schema and discusses how it relates to language. Cultural schemas are a
culturally constructed sub-class of schemas; that is, they are abstracted from
the collective cognitions associated with a cultural group, and therefore to
some extent based on shared experiences, common to the group, as opposed
to being abstracted from an individual’s idiosyncratic experiences. They
enable individuals to communicate cultural meanings. In terms of their
 Cultural Linguistics 41

development and their representation, at the macro level, cultural schemas

emerge from interactions between the members of a cultural group, while
they are constantly negotiated and renegotiated across time and space. At
the micro level, over time each individual acquires and internalises these
macro-level schemas, albeit in a heterogeneously distributed fashion. That
is, individuals who belong to the same cultural group may share some, but
not all, components of a cultural schema. In other words, each person’s
internalisation of a macro-level cultural schema is to some extent collective
and to some extent idiosyncratic. This pattern is diagrammatically presented
in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Diagrammatic representation of a cultural schema (adapted from Sharifian 2011)

The figure shows how a cultural schema may be represented in a heteroge-

neously distributed fashion across the minds of individuals. It schematically
represents how members may have internalised some, but not all, components
of a macro-level cultural schema. It also shows how individuals may share
some, but not all the elements of a cultural schema with each other. It is to
be noted that the individuals who internalise aspects of a cultural schema
may not only be those who are viewed as the insiders by the cultural group.
“Outsiders” who have somehow had contact and interaction with the group
can also internalise aspects of their cultural schemas.
Besides its pivotal use in Cultural Linguistics, the notion of cultural
schema has also been adopted as a key analytical tool in cognitive anthro-
pology (for example, D’Andrade 1995; Shore 1996; Strauss and Quinn 1997).
For cognitive anthropologists culture is a cognitive system, and thus the
notion of cultural schema provides a useful tool to explore cognitive schemas
that are culturally constructed and maintained across different societies
42 Farzad Sharifian

and cultural groups. A term that closely overlaps with cultural schema and
has again received major attention in cognitive anthropology is that of the
cultural model (for example, D’Andrade 1995; D’Andrade and Strauss 1992;
Holland and Quinn 1987). This term, which was initially intended to displace
the term folk models (Keesing 1987), has also been employed in the sense
of “a cognitive schema that is inter-subjectively shared by a social group”
(D’Andrade 1987: 112). D’Andrade constantly refers to the notion of schema
in his explication of the term cultural model (ibid.) and he regards models as
complex cognitive schemas. Strauss and Quinn (1997: 49) also maintain that
“another term for cultural schemas (especially of the more complex sort) is
cultural model”. Polzenhagen and Wolf (2007), however, have used the notion
of cultural model to represent more general, overarching conceptualisations
encompassing metaphors and schemas which are minimally complex.
An example of the use of cultural models in cognitive anthropology is
the exploration of the cultural model of American marriage. For example,
Quinn (1987) observes that the American cultural model of marriage is
based on metaphors such as marriage is an ongoing journey, reflected
in statements such as this marriage is at a dead end.
From the outset, the notion of cultural schema proved to be pivotal to
Cultural Linguistics. In Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics, Palmer
(1996: 63) maintained that “[i]t is likely that all native knowledge of language
and culture belongs to cultural schemas and the living of culture and the
speaking of language consist of schemas in action”. Cultural schemas capture
encyclopaedic meaning that is culturally constructed for many lexical items
of human languages. Take an example of the word privacy in a variety of
English such as American English. The pool of knowledge that forms a web
of concepts that define privacy in relation to various contexts and factors is
best described as the cultural schema of “privacy”. The cultural construction
of this schema is partly reflected in complaints that some speakers make
about members of some other cultural groups, such as “they don’t understand
the meaning of privacy”.3
Cultural schemas may also provide a basis for pragmatic meanings, in
the sense that, knowledge which underlies the enactment and uptake of
speech acts and that is assumed to be culturally shared is largely captured
in cultural schemas. In some languages, for example, the speech act of
“greeting” is closely associated with cultural schemas of “eating” and “food”,
whereas in some other languages it is associated with cultural schemas that
relate to the health of the interlocutors and their family members. The

3
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/privacy
 Cultural Linguistics 43

available literature in the area of pragmatics makes very frequent references

to “inference” and “shared assumptions” as the basis for the communication
of pragmatic meanings. It goes without saying that inferences about the
knowledge of listeners are technically based on the general assumption that
shared cultural schemas are necessary for making sense of speech acts. In
short, cultural schemas capture pools of knowledge that provide a basis for a
significant portion of semantic and pragmatic meanings in human languages.

3.2. Cultural categories and language

Another class of cultural conceptualisation is that of the cultural category.
Categorisation is one of the most fundamental human cognitive activities.
It begins, albeit in an idiosyncratic way, early in life. Many studies have
investigated how children engage in categorizing objects and events early in
life (Mareschal, Powell, and Volein 2003). Children usually begin by setting
up their own categories but as they grow up, as part of their cognitive
development, they explore and discover how their language and culture
categorise events, objects, and experiences. As Glushko et al. put it:
Categorization research focuses on the acquisition and use of categories shared by a
culture and associated with language – what we will call “cultural categorization”. Cultural
categories exist for objects, events, settings, mental states, properties, relations and other
components of experience (e.g. birds, weddings, parks, serenity, blue and above). Typically,
these categories are acquired through nonnal exposure to caregivers and culture with
little explicit instruction. (Glushko et al. 2008: 129)

The categorisation of many objects, events and experiences, such as

“food”, “vegetables”, “fruit”, and so on, and their prototype instances, are
culturally constructed. It is to be noted that the reference to wedding as
a category in the above quotation is distinct from the use of this word in
relation to cultural schemas. The “wedding” as a cultural category refers
to the type of event that is opposed to “engagement” or “dining out”, for
example. “Wedding” as a cultural schema includes all the other aspects of
the event, such as the procedures that need to be followed, the sequence of
events, the roles played by various participants and expectations associated
with those roles.
As for the relationship between cultural categories and language, many
lexical items of human languages act as labels for the categories and their
instances. As mentioned above, in English the word food refers to a category,
and a word such as steak is an instance of that category. Usually categories
form networks and hierarchies, in that instances of a category can themselves
serve as categories with their own instances. For example, pasta is an instance
of the category of “food” with its own instances, such as penne or rigatoni.
44 Farzad Sharifian

Apart from lexical items, in some languages cultural categories are

marked by noun classifiers. For example, Murrinh-patha, an Australian
Aboriginal language, uses ten noun classes which are reflective of Murrinh-
patha cultural categorisation (Walsh 1993; Street 1987). These categories
are identified through noun class markers that appear before the noun. The
following list from Walsh (1993: 110) includes the class markers and the
definition of each category:
Kardu: Aboriginal people and human spirits
Ku: non-Aboriginal people and all other animates and their products
Kura: potable fluid (i.e., “fresh water”) and collective terms for fresh water (i.e., “rain”,
“river”)
mi: flowers and fruits of plants and any vegetable foods; also faeces
thamul : spears
thu: offensive weapons (defensive weapons belong to nantht), thunder and lightning,
playing cards
thungku: fire and things associated with fire
da: place and season (i.e. dry grass time)
murrinh: speech and language and associated concepts such as song and news
nanthi: a residual category including whatever does not fit into the other nine categories

The above categorisation also allows for multiple membership in the

sense that depending on its function, a noun may be categorised into one
class at one time and another class at another. For instance, a boomerang
may be categorised as nanthi when it is used as a back-scratcher and thu
when it is used as an offensive weapon (Walsh 1993). Also, in the Dreamtime
Creation stories, when the Ancestor beings turn into animals while engaged
in their journey of creating the natural world this change is signalled by a
switch from one noun class into another. This system of noun classification is
entrenched in Murrinh-patha cultural categorisation, which in turn is based
on the Murrinh-patha world-view. For instance, as Walsh argues, the fact
that fresh water, fire, and language are classified separately indicates that
each holds a prominent place in the culture of the Murrinh-patha.
Apart from noun classifiers, there are pronouns in many Aboriginal
languages that reflect cultural categories, through marking moiety, generation
level, and relationship. In Arabana, as an example, the pronoun amanthara,
which may be glossed into English as ‘kinship-we’, captures the following
complex category:
Amanthara = we, who belong to the same matrilineal moiety, adjacent generation
levels, and who are in the basic relationship of mother, or mothers’ brother and child.
(Hercus 1994: 117)

In Arabana, this cultural categorisation of kin groups is also marked on

the second plural kinship pronoun aranthara and the third person plural
 Cultural Linguistics 45

kinship pronoun karananthara. These examples clearly reveal how some

cultural categories are encoded in the grammatical system of a language
(see also Lakoff 1987).

3.3. Cultural metaphors and language

As mentioned earlier, conceptual metaphor refers to the cognitive con-
ceptualisation of one domain in terms of another (for example, Lakoff and
Johnson 1980). Extensive research in cognitive linguistics has shown how
even our basic understanding of ourselves and our surroundings is mediated
by conceptual metaphors. For example, in clock-and-calendar industrial
cultures time is commonly understood in terms of a commodity, money, a
limited resource, and so on. This is reflected in expressions such as buying
time, saving time, and the like. More importantly our understanding of
ourselves is achieved through conceptual metaphors. For example we can
conceptualise our thoughts, feelings, personality traits, and so on in terms
of our body parts.
Research in Cultural Linguistics is interested in exploring conceptual
metaphors that are culturally constructed (for example, Palmer 1996; Shar-
ifian 2011, 2017), which I refer to as cultural metaphors. Several studies
have explored cultural schemas and models that give rise to conceptual
metaphors, for example through ethnomedical or other cultural traditions
(Sharifian et al. 2008; Yu 2009a, 2009b). For example, in Indonesian it is hati
‘the liver’ that is associated with love, rather than the heart (Siahaan 2008).
Siahaan traces back such conceptualisations to the ritual of animal sacrifice,
especially the interpretation of liver organ known as “liver divination”, which
was practised in ancient Indonesia. In some languages, such as Tok Pisin
(Muhlhausler, Dutton and Romaine 2003), the belly is the seat of emotions.
Yu (2009b) observes that many linguistic expressions in Chinese reflect the
conceptualisation of the heart is the ruler of the body. He main-
tains that the “target-domain concept here is an important one because the
heart organ is regarded as the central faculty of cognition and the site of
both affective and cognitive activities in ancient Chinese philosophy” (Yu
2007: 27). Studies of such cultural conceptualisations are currently gathering
further momentum (for example, Idstrom and Piirainen 2012).
It should be noted here that the cognitive processing of conceptual
metaphor is a rather complex issue to explore. While the use of the term
metaphor here highlights the involvement of two distinct domains of expe-
rience (that is: source and target) it does not follow that every use of an
expression that is associated with a conceptual metaphor involves the online
46 Farzad Sharifian

cognitive process of mapping from one domain to another. Some cases of

conceptual metaphors are simply “fossilised” conceptualisations that repre-
sented active insight at some stage in the history of the cultural cognition
of a group. Such metaphors do not imply current speakers of the language
have any conscious awareness of the cultural roots of the expressions, or are
engaged in any conceptual mapping when they use them. In such cases, the
conceptual metaphors may serve rather as cultural schemas which guides
thinking about and helps with understanding certain domains of experience.
In some other cases, the expressions that are associated with such cultural
conceptualisations may be considered simply as figures of speech.
As for the relationship between cultural conceptual metaphors and
language, it is clear from the above discussion that many aspects of human
languages are closely linked with cultural metaphors. In fact, Cultural
Linguistics and cognitive linguistics heavily rely on linguistic data for the
exploration of conceptual metaphor. As mentioned above, the language
of emotion (for example, you broke my heart) largely reflects culturally
mediated conceptualisations of emotions and feelings in terms of body parts.
In short, Cultural Linguistics explores human languages and language
varieties to examine features that draw on cultural conceptualisations such
as cultural schemas, cultural categories, and cultural conceptual metaphors,
from the perspective of the theoretical framework of cultural cognition.

4. Applied Cultural Linguistics

While the ultimate aim of Cultural Linguistics is to examine the relation-

ship between language, culture, and conceptualisations, thus far a Cultural
Linguistics perspective has been used in several areas of applied linguistics.
The following sections present brief summaries of how a Cultural Linguistics
framework has been applied to world Englishes, intercultural communication,
and political discourse analysis.

4.1. Cultural Linguistics and research into varieties of English

Cultural Linguistics has offered a ground breaking approach to the explo-
ration of varieties of English, based on the premise that varieties of English
may be distinct from each other when their respective cultural conceptual-
isations are taken into consideration (Sharifian 2005, 2006). Malcolm and
Rochecouste (2000) identified a number of distinctive cultural schemas in
the discourse produced by a number of speakers of Australian Aboriginal
English. These schemas included: travel, hunting, observing, scary things,
 Cultural Linguistics 47

gathering, problem solving, social relationships, and smash (an Aboriginal

English word for a fight). The first four schemas were found to occur most
frequently in the data.
Other researchers (Polzenhagen and Wolf 2007; Wolf 2008; Wolf and
Polzenhagen 2009) have explored conceptualisations of the African cultural
model of community in African varieties of English. Wolf (2008: 368) main-
tains that this “cultural model involves a cosmology and relates to such
notions as the continuation of the community, the members of the com-
munity, witchcraft, the acquisition of wealth, and corruption, which find
expression in African English”. For example, by examining a number of ex-
pressions in Cameroon English, e.g., they took bribes from their less fortunate
brother, Wolf observes that the central conceptual metaphors in that variety
of English are kinship is community and community is kinship (Wolf
2008: 370).
Sharifian (2005, 2008a) examined cultural conceptualisations in the
English spoken by a group of Aboriginal students who, because they sounded
like speakers of Australian English, were not identified by their teachers as
Aboriginal English speakers. Through a study of word association, however,
he found that English words such as family, home, and shame evoked
cultural conceptualisations in these students that were predominantly those
associated with Aboriginal English rather than Australian English. For
example, for Aboriginal students the word family appeared to be associated
with categories in Aboriginal English that extend far beyond the “nuclear”
family, which is the central notion in Anglo-Australian culture. Consider
Table 1, showing data from Sharifian (2005).
The responses given by Aboriginal participants instantiate the Aboriginal
cultural schema of Family as they refer to members of their extended
family, such as aunts and uncles. The responses from the Anglo-Australian
participants suggest that the word family is, in most cases, restricted to the
nuclear family, while sometimes house pets are also included.
Responses such as they’re there for you, when you need ’m they look after
you by Aboriginal participants reflect the responsibilities of care that are
very alive between the members of an extended Aboriginal family. Uncles and
aunties often play a large role in an individual’s upbringing. The closeness
of an Aboriginal person to a range of people in his or her extended family
members is also reflected in the patterns of responses where the primary
responses refer to uncles and aunties or nana and pop instead of father and
mother. Responses such as my million sixty-one thousand family and I’ve
got lots of people in my family reflect the extended coverage of the concept
of “family” in the Aboriginal conceptualisation. Moreover, for them the word
48 Farzad Sharifian

Table 1. A comparison of Aboriginal and Anglo-Australian meanings for family

Aboriginal Anglo-Australian
Stimulus word: family Stimulus word: family
– Love your pop, love your nan, love our – You got brothers and sisters in your
mums, love our dads. family and your mum and dad, and you
– Brothers, sisters, aunnie, uncles, nan, have fun with your family, have dinner
pops, father, nephew and nieces. with your family, you go out with your
– They’re there for you, when you need family.
‘m they look after you, you call ‘m aunie – Dad, mum, brother, dog.
and uncle an cousins. – Mum, and dad, brother and sister.
– People, mums, dads, brother, group of – Fathers, sisters, parents, caring.
families, like aunties and uncles nanas – People, your mum and dad, and your
and pops. sister and brother.
– I’ve got lots of people in my family, got – All my family, my brothers and sisters,
a big family, got lots of family. my mum and my dad.
– My family, you know how many family – Kids, mums, dads, sisters, brothers.
I got? One thousand millions, hundred – Mother, sister, brother, life.
ninety-nine million thousand thousand – Mum, dad, my brother.
nine nine sixty-one . . . million million, – I think of all the people in my family.
uncle, Joe, Stacy . . . cousins, uncles, [F: Who are they? I: My mum, my dad,
sisters, brothers, girlfriends and my mil- and my sister]
lion sixty-one thousand family. – They have a house, they have a car,
– I like my family, all of my family, my they have their kitchen, their room,
aunties an’ uncles and cousins, and I their toilet, their backyard, their car-
like Dryandra. port, they have a dog and a cat.
– Just having family that is Nyungar [an
Aboriginal cultural group] and meeting
each other.

home appeared to be mainly associated with family relationships rather

than “an attitude to a building” used as a dwelling by a nuclear family.
Cultural Linguistics has also been recently used in compiling a dictionary
of Hong Kong English. In a very innovative project, Cummings and Wolf
(2011) have identified and included underlying cultural conceptualisations for
many of the words included in the dictionary. The following is an example
of an entry in the dictionary:
Spirit money (also paper money, hell money, hell bank notes)
Fixed expressions, n.
Definition. Fake money burned in a ritual offering to the dead
Text example: “An offering of oranges may be peeled and placed on the grave, together
with paper money. Finally, crackers are let off.”
Underlying conceptualisations: a supernatural being is a human being, a paper
model is a real object in the supernatural world [target domain > super-
natural being, paper model] [source domain > human being object in the
supernatural world] (ibid.: 163–164)
 Cultural Linguistics 49

This is a groundbreaking approach to the way dictionary entries are

compiled for it allows readers to become familiar with the cultural con-
ceptualisations underlying certain expressions in the given language or the
language variety. But, of course, in many cases the underlying conceptual-
isations themselves have their roots in older cultural traditions, including
religious and spiritual ones.

4.2. Cultural Linguistics and intercultural communication

In the past, intercultural communication has been investigated primarily
from the perspective of linguistic anthropology. For instance, some thirty
years ago Gumperz (for example, 1982, 1991) introduced the notion of con-
textualisation cues as an analytical tool for exploring intercultural communi-
cation/miscommunication. He defined these cues as “verbal and non-verbal
metalinguistic signs that serve to retrieve the context-bound presuppositions
in terms of which component messages are interpreted” (Gumperz 1996:
379). Central to this notion is the importance of the indirect inferences
speakers make during intercultural communication as they rely on linguistic
and non-linguistic cues.
From the perspective of Cultural Linguistics, making indirect inferences
during intercultural communication is largely facilitated by the cultural
conceptualisations shared by the interlocutors. Cultural conceptualisations
provide a basis for constructing, interpreting, and negotiating intercultural
meanings. These conceptualisations may be the ones that are associated
with their L1, or they may be others that the individuals have had access
to as a result of living in a particular cultural environment, or even new
ones that they have developed from interacting with speakers from other
cultures.
In recent years several studies have shown that in certain contexts,
intercultural communication, and in particular miscommunication, reflect
differences in the ways in which various groups of speakers conceptualise their
experiences. In doing so they draw on their own cultural schemas, categories,
and metaphors. Wolf and Polzenhagen (2009) observe that “cross-cultural
variation at the conceptual level calls for a strongly meaning-oriented and
interpretive approach to the study of intercultural communication” and that
is what Cultural Linguistics has to offer.
As an example of studies of intercultural communication carried out
from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics, Sharifian (2010) analysed
examples of miscommunication between speakers of Aboriginal English and
non-Aboriginal English that mainly arose from non-Aboriginal speakers’
50 Farzad Sharifian

unfamiliarity with Aboriginal cultural conceptualisations relating to the

spiritual world. Many lexical items and linguistic expressions in Aboriginal
English are associated with spiritual conceptualisations that characterise the
Aboriginal world-view. These include words such as sing and smoke. Take
the following example from a conversation between a speaker of Aboriginal
English and a non-Aboriginal English speaker:

A: My sister said, “when you go to that country, you [are] not allowed to let ‘em take
your photo, they can sing you”.

According to the Aboriginal cultural schema of “singing”, “to sing some-

one” is the ritual used to cast a charm on someone with potentially fatal
consequences. For example, if a man falls in love with a girl he might try to
obtain strands of her hair, her photo, or some such thing in order to “sing”
her. This would make the girl turn to him or, in the case of her refusal to
do so, the “singing” could result in her falling sick with a serious or even
fatal illness (Luealla Eggington, p.c.). It is clear that unfamiliarity with the
Aboriginal cultural conceptualisations intimately associated with the use of
words such as singing could well lead to miscommunication.
Another Aboriginal cultural schema associated with an English word in
Aboriginal English is “medicine” in the sense of ‘spiritual power’ (Arthur
1996: 46). The following is an example of the use of the medicine in this sense,
from a conversation between the author of this chapter and an Aboriginal
English speaker:

That when . . . my mum was real crook and she . . . she said, “I woke up an’ it was
still in my mouth . . . the taste of all the medicine cause they come an’ give me some
medicine last night” an’ she always tells us that you can’t move . . . an’ you wanna sing
out an’ say just . . . sorta try an’ relax. That happened to me lotta times I was about
twelve.

In this narration the speaker is remembering that once her mother was ill
and that she mentioned the next morning that “they” went to her and gave
her some “medicine” that she could still taste. She also describes her mother’s
reaction to the medicine as wanting to shout and then forcing oneself to
relax. Without having the requisite schema, the audience of the above
anecdote would be likely to think that they refers to medical professionals
who visited the mother after hours and gave her syrup or a tablet. However,
further discussion with the speaker revealed that her mother was referring
to ancestor beings using their healing power to treat her illness. It is clear
from these examples how unfamiliarity with Aboriginal cultural schemas
informing Aboriginal English can lead to miscommunication.
 Cultural Linguistics 51

Another example of cultural schemas that are functioning cognitively

in the background in such instances of intercultural communication comes
from Sharifian and Jamarani (2011). The study examined how the cultural
schema, called sharmandegi ‘being ashamed’, can lead to miscommunication
between Persian and non-Persian speakers. This cultural schema is commonly
instantiated in Persian through expressions such as sharmand-am (short for
sharmandeh-am ‘ashamed-be.lSG’) meaning ‘I am ashamed’, or sharmandeh-
am mikonin ‘ashamed-1SG do.2SG’, meaning ‘you make me ashamed’. Such
expressions are usually used in association with several speech acts, such as
expressions of gratitude, offering goods and services, requesting goods and
services, apologizing, accepting offers and making refusals. The following
is an example of such usage, from a conversation between a student and a
lecturer where the student is expressing gratitude to the lecturer for writing
a letter of recommendation for her:
Speaker A (the lecturer):
in ham nâme-yi ke mikhâstin
This too letter-ART that requested.2PL4
Here is the letter that you asked for.

Speaker B (the student): sharmandeh-am, vâghean mamnoon

Ashamed-BE.1SG really grateful
I am ashamed, I am really thankful.

Here the use of sharmandegi is intended as an expression of awareness

that the other person has spent some time/energy in providing the speaker
with goods and services they were under no obligation to supply. The
speaker acknowledges this by uttering a “shame” statement, as if guilty
because of this awareness. Although the cultural schema of sharmandegi is
very widespread and commonly drawn upon among speakers of Persian, it
can lead to miscommunication during intercultural communication between
speakers of Persian and non-Persian speakers. Consider the following example
from Sharifian and Jamarani (2011):
Tara’s (Iranian) neighbour Lara (Australian) offered to pick up some groceries for
her, when she was doing her own shopping. Tara happily accepted the offer and told Lara
what she needed. When Lara brought the groceries back, Tara wanted to pay her straight
away:
Lara: It is okay, you can pay me later.
Tara: No, you have made me enough ashamed already.
Lara: But why do you say so?! I’d offered to do the shopping myself, and I had to do
my own shopping anyway.

4
The use of the plural in this example marks politeness/social distance.
52 Farzad Sharifian

It is evident here that Lara is surprised to hear the expression, or

accusation, of “shame” on the part of Tara, as she had willingly offered
to do the shopping for her. However, from the perspective of the Persian
cultural schema of sharmandegi Tara’s response is entirely appropriate,
simply reflecting Tara’s gratefulness to Lara. Examples such as this reveal
how the process of intercultural communication involves a “meeting place”
for cultural conceptualisations, where successful intercultural communication
requires a sensitivity to and an awareness of cultural differences and hence
the need to recognise and negotiate meaning.

4.3. Cultural Linguistics and political discourse analysis

A number of recent studies in political discourse analysis have adopted
the approaches of cognitive linguistics and Cultural Linguistics. In general,
these studies are in agreement with the longstanding belief that political
discourse relies heavily on conceptual metaphor and that political metaphors
are often rooted in certain underlying ideologies and cultural models (Dirven,
Frank, and Ilie 2001; Dirven, Frank and Pütz 2003). These conceptual devices
are by no means incidental to political discourse but rather serve to establish
or legitimise a given perspective (Sharifian and Jamarani 2013).
George W. Bush, for example, repeatedly used either novel or conven-
tional metaphors in his speeches about the Iranian government’s nuclear
technology. In one of his press conferences, Bush used the metaphorical
expression of house cleaning in relation to Iran’s nuclear programme and
stated that these people need to keep their house clean. In this metaphor,
nuclear technology is conceptualised as dirt, which needs to be removed from
the house, the house here being the country. It is difficult to disagree with
the statement that one’s house needs to be kept clean and the use of the
clean house metaphor appears to present the US president in the legitimate
position of exhorting others to perform a socially desirable act. In other
words, Bush’s statement positions Iran in a very negative light, as associated
with dirt [dirty house], while positioning himself, or the US government, very
positively, as speaking from the moral high ground and putting pressure on
the Iranian government to clean Iran’s house. However, Iran construed its
nuclear programme not in the negative sense of dirt but as “technology” and
“energy”, both of which have positive connotations.
From the perspective of Cultural Linguistics, political discourse is not
free from cultural influence and is in fact heavily entrenched in cultural con-
ceptualisations (Sharifian 2007, 2009a). For example, when people attempt
to translate from one language into another, such as for the purpose of in-
ternational negotiation (see also Baker 2006; Cohen 1997; Hatim and Mason
 Cultural Linguistics 53

1990), they are very likely to need to convey cultural conceptualisation found
in one language by means of cultural conceptualisations found in another. In
other words, the process of translation or cross-cultural rendering of cultural
conceptualisations can be difficult since languages encode the culturally
differentiated and hence historically entrenched ways in which speakers have
conceptualised their world in the past and continue to do so in the present.
As a result, finding sets of words that successfully capture equivalent cultural
conceptualisations in another language can become complicated, depending
on the degree to which the two cultures have been in contact and, as a result,
have similar although perhaps not identical cultural conceptualisations (see
Avruch and Wang 2005).
Sharifian (2007) analyses the cases of words such as concession and
compromise, which are pivotal to international political discourse, and argues
that the meanings of these words lend themselves to certain culturally
constructed conceptualisations. For example, the positive connotations of
compromise, that is, arriving at a settlement by making concessions, hearken
back to the secular foundations of Western democracies and, in turn, link
to beliefs promulgated by nineteenth-century classical liberalism, a view
that elevated the status of the individual and promoted the notion of
contractual relations between “free agents” in commerce, and so on. This
conceptualisation is far from a universal one, and some languages do not even
have a word for this concept. Also, a historical analysis of the dictionary
entries for this concept reveals a tendency towards attributing positive
meanings to it rather than negative ones. In general, the approach of Cultural
Linguistics can help unpack aspects of political discourse that largely draw on
cultural conceptualisations. Given the importance of political discourse, and
the possible consequences when misunderstandings arise, the contribution
of Cultural Linguistics to this area of inquiry is undoubtedly very valuable.

5. Future directions

Research on Cultural Linguistics and its applications is still in its infancy.

Many features of human languages can be examined for their embeddedness
in cultural conceptualisations, from morphosyntactic features to semantic
and pragmatic meanings and discourse structure. As discussed and exempli-
fied above, many features of human languages can be used to index cultural
conceptualisations such as schemas, categories and metaphors. The results of
such analyses of language and culture will be of benefit to scholars in several
disciplines, including linguistics and anthropology. Cultural Linguistics will
54 Farzad Sharifian

also hopefully generate significant interest among applied linguists whose

research also focuses on language and culture. As shown in this chapter, areas
of applied linguistics such as world Englishes, intercultural communication,
and political discourse analysis can benefit from the approach of Cultural Lin-
guistics in that it provides them with a robust framework and sharply honed
analytical tools. Cultural Linguistics has also been applied to the study of sec-
ond dialect learning, in particular on the part of Aboriginal English speaking
children in Australia. Also, application of Cultural Linguistics to the area of
Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL) has shown significant
promise. Drawing on Cultural Linguistics, Sharifian (2013) offers the notion
of metacultural competence as a target for learners, in order to succeed in
the use of English as a language of international communication. This com-
petence enables interlocutors to communicate and negotiate their cultural
conceptualisations during the process of intercultural communication.
As has been demonstrated in this article, Cultural Linguistics has drawn
on research that has been carried out in several areas of applied linguistics
while, at the same time, it has already proved its ability to provide new
insights into the complex relationships holding between language and culture,
especially in intercultural settings. In general, it is expected that any area
of inquiry that involves the interaction between culture and language will
significantly benefit from adopting the framework of Cultural Linguistics.

6. Concluding remarks

One of the most important and at the same time challenging questions
facing anthropological linguists has been the relationship between language,
culture, and thought. Theoretical stances regarding this theme have ranged
from a view that language shapes human thought and world-view to one
that considers the three to be separate systems. Cultural Linguistics, with
its multidisciplinary origin, engages with this theme by exploring features of
human languages that encode culturally constructed conceptualisations of
human experience. One of the basic premises in this line of inquiry is that
language is a repository of cultural conceptualisations that have coalesced
at different stages in the history of the speech community and these can
leave traces in current linguistic practice. Similarly, interactions at the
macro and micro levels of the speech community continuously can act to
reshape pre-existing cultural conceptualisations and bring new ones into
being. Also, while placing emphasis on the culturally constructed nature of
conceptualisations, Cultural Linguistics shares with cognitive linguistics the
 Cultural Linguistics 55

view that meaning is conceptualisation. Overall, due to the multidisciplinary

nature of the analytical tools and theoretical frameworks that Cultural
Linguistics draws upon, it has significant potential to continue to shed
substantial light on the nature of the relationship between language, culture,
and conceptualisation.

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From the Editors∗

(a note on Sharifian’s Cultural Linguisitcs)

Farzad Sharifian’s article published here presents to the Polish reader

the key notions and tenets of what functions under the label of Cultural
Linguistics (capitalised).
Farzad Sharifian is professor at Monash University, the biggest higher
education institution in Australia, as well as the editor-in-chief of Interna-
tional Journal of Language and Culture (IJoLC ),1 launched in 2014. He has
published important works in cultural and applied linguistics, the language of
politics, and intercultural communication (Sharifian 2005, 2010, 2014, 2015).
He has co-edited, together with Gary B. Palmer, the volume Applied Cultural
Linguistics (2007), and authored the monograph Cultural Conceptualisations
and Language (2011).
∗
This note appeared in Polish as “Od redakcji” in Etnolingwistyka 28, pp. 55–57. The
present English translation has been financed by the Ministry of Science and Higher
Education, project titled “English edition of the journal Etnolingwistyka. Problemy języka
i kultury in electronic form” (no. 3bH 15 0204 83).
1
https://benjamins.com/catalog/ijolc
60 Farzad Sharifian

The list of authors publishing in IJoLC includes Anna Wierzbicka, Gary

B. Palmer, Bert Peeters, or Carsten Levisen. In one of the special issues,
guest-edited by Bert Peeters (Language and Cultural Values. Adventures in
Applied Ethnolinguistics, 2-2, 2015), the authors encroach on the territory
of applied ethnolinguistics. The latter term is rather unpopular in Western
literature, being associated with minority languages or dialects, as well as,
rather negatively, with ethnic violence, unrest, or downright ethnic cleansing.
In IJoLC, in contrast, the authors use ethnolinguistics in a broader, neutral
sense that embraces national languages, an approach parallel to that of
Lublin ethnolinguistics.
Lublin ethnolinguistics, deriving from the Russian tradition (the works
of Vladimir Toporov, Yuri Apresjan, Nikita Tolstoy, or Svetlana Tolstaya),
seeks common ground for dialogue also with Western scholarship. This in
fact has been going on for some time. The journal Etnolingwistyka has
welcomed contributions, usually in Polish translation, from such authors
as Anna Wierzbicka, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Teun van Dijk, or
James Underhill. Volume 27 of the journal contains articles by the Gary
B. Palmer from the USA (Palmer 2015) and Bert Peeters from Australia
(Peeters 2015), scholars whose work is referenced in Sharifian’s article. The
former proposes to incorporate into linguistic analysis the findings from
extralinguistic inquiries, such as ethnography or paleontology. The latter
presents an intriguing attempt to extend Anna Wierzbicka’s NSM frame-
work onto the realms of ethnolexicology, ethnorhetoric, ethnophraseology,
ethnosyntax, ethnopragmatics, and ethnoaxiology. Sharifian’s contribution
to the present volume is a modification and extension of Gary B. Palmer’s
proposal laid out in his book Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics (1996),
where the author draws a framework that combines the achievements of
cognitive linguistics and linguistic anthropology.
Sharifian presents the key tenets and descriptive constructs of what he
calls Cultural Linguistics. It contains above all the notion of cultural concep-
tualisations, which, in Sharifian’s model, has replaced imagery, inherited by
Palmer from Langacker.2 Other notions include cultural schemas, cultural
categories, and cultural metaphors, as well as cultural models and cultural
cognition. The latter embraces the cultural macro- (i.e. collective, social) and
micro- (individual) levels. How do these notions relate to the major constructs
of Lublin-based ethnolinguistics, with its linguistic worldview conception,
stereotypes or cultural concepts, cognitive definition, or profiling? We would
like to engage in a discussion of these issues by investigating to what extent

2
Langacker himself has for some time now preferred the term construal.
 Cultural Linguistics 61

the two parallel, albeit differently named frameworks, designed to basically

achieve the same goals, may be mutually inspiring or enriching. The discus-
sion will hopefully be commenced in subsequent volumes of this journal.
translated by Adam Głaz

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