The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture

Farzad Sharifian, Farzad Sharifian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317743170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture presents the first comprehensive survey of research on the relationship between language and culture. It provides readers with a clear and accessible introduction to both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies of language and culture, and addresses key issues of language and culturally based linguistic research from a variety of perspectives and theoretical frameworks.

This Handbook features thirty-three newly commissioned chapters which

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• cover key areas such as cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, cognitive anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and sociolinguistics
• offer insights into the historical development, contemporary theory, research, and practice of each topic, and explore the potential future directions of the field
• show readers how language and culture research can be of practical benefit to applied areas of research and practice, such as intercultural communication and second language teaching and learning.

Written by a group of prominent scholars from around the globe, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture provides a vital resource for scholars and students working in this area.

PART I

Overview and historical background

1

LANGUAGE AND CULTURE: OVERVIEW

Farzad Sharifian

Interest in studying the relationship between language and culture can be traced back at least to the eighteenth century. Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835), Franz Boas (1858–1942), Edward Sapir (1884–1939), and Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) are prominent scholars who all emphasized the relationship between language, thought, and culture. However, a unified subdiscipline focusing on the relationship between language and culture has never been fully developed. Taking the US alone, Duranti (2003) distinguishes between three different paradigms in the history of the study of language as culture, which is summarized in Table 1.1.

Although Duranti associates the development of each paradigm with a certain period in history, he maintains that all three paradigms persist today. As for the labels, Duranti (2009: 33) notes that the term ‘ethnolinguistics’ has been a popular term in Europe for studies of language and culture (see Underhill, 2012). No matter which label or which theoretical orientation is adopted to study the relationship between language and culture, the difficulty in defining both terms has partly contributed to the immature development of a unified sub-discipline for the study of language and culture. Views of language have in the past century ranged from language as a cognitive system/faculty of the mind, to language as action, language as social practice, language as a complex adaptive system, etc. Culture has similarly been viewed differently by different schools of thought. It has been seen, for example, as a cognitive system, as a symbolic system, as social practice, or as a construct (see Foley, 1997; and Chapters 10 and 28 this volume). Furthermore, the relations between language, culture, and thought provoke different questions in different disciplines and are treated variously by the scholars within each field.

The challenge that has faced studies of language and culture, due to the complexity of the two notions, has been reflected in the absence of a handbook dedicated to language and culture.¹ While numerous handbooks have been published on areas such as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics, no handbook has ever been dedicated to studies of language and culture. The aim of this Handbook is, therefore, to bring together a comprehensive and historical survey of studies of language and culture.

The chapters in this Handbook represent various approaches, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary theoretical orientations, analytical frameworks, analytical tools, and constructs associated with studies of language and culture. This introductory chapter provides an overview of how each chapter contributes to the general theme of language and culture from a particular focus or sub-theme/sub-discipline. There is no doubt the reader will notice a certain degree of overlap between some chapters. It is both inevitable and in most cases beneficial to discussions of how certain constructs, such as ‘Community of Practice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991), have been helpful for scholars interested in studying language and culture in various disciplines/sub-disciplines.

Table 1.1 Three different paradigms in the history of the study of language as culture (Duranti, 2003)

Focus	View of language	Associated labels
Documentation, description, and classification of indigenous languages	Language as lexicon and grammar	Anthropological linguistics
Language use in context	Language as a culturally organized and culturally organizing domain	Linguistic anthropology, ethnography of speaking
Identity formation, narrative, and ideology	Language as an interactional achievement filled with indexical values	Social constructivism

Overall, the Handbook, with its many diverse contributory chapters, set out to achieve the following aims:

to provide readers with a clear and accessible introduction to the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scope of studies of language and culture, offering insights into their historical development, contemporary theory, research, and practice, and potential future directions;

to familiarize readers with various approaches to language and culturally based linguistic research, and key issues from a variety of perspectives/disciplines/sub-disciplines;

to help readers develop a critical awareness of the strengths and limitations of different or competing theories and approaches to language and culture research;

to raise readers’ awareness of the contested nature of culture and language and the complex connections between the two;

to show readers how language and culture research can be of practical benefit to applied areas of research and practice, including intercultural communication and second-language teaching/learning;

to draw attention to the potential for new, deeper understandings of language and culture through increased dialogue and collaboration between scholars/theorists from various disciplines and sub-disciplines, including cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, cognitive anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and sociolinguistics.

In terms of structure, Part I presents an overview of the Handbook and a historical account of research on the relationship between language and culture, in particular on the thesis of ‘linguistic relativity’. The next set of chapters (Part II) explores research in those areas of language and culture that are united by their use of the prefix ‘ethno’ plus an aspect of language (e.g. ethnosyntax). In Part III, the chapters survey research on language and culture with a more specialized focus, such as gender or kinship. Part IV includes chapters that present research on various aspects of the relationship between language, culture, and cognition. The chapters in Part V review research on language and culture according to particular sub-disciplines, such as sociolinguistics. Part VI includes chapters that survey research on language and culture in applied domains such as in intercultural communication and second-language learning. Part VII is dedicated to chapters that engage with the field of Cultural Linguistics, including future research on language and culture. What follows summarizes each chapter in some detail.

In Chapter 2 Leavitt engages with the history of research on language and culture, in particular the historical development of the thesis of linguistic relativity, the most influential theoretical framework in studies of language and culture. Due to its significant impact, many scholars simply equate studies of language and culture with linguistic relativity, as well as controversies surrounding its correct interpretation. Leavitt traces the roots of studies of language and culture back to the sixteenth century and discusses the philosophical views that each subsequent school of thought held in relation to language and culture. He then focuses on common misrepresentations of the views held by Boas, Sapir, and Whorf, collectively referred to as ‘linguistic relativity’ and the causes of such misrepresentations. He argues that the view of language as determining and limiting speakers’ world-view was never held by scholars such as Boas, Sapir, and Whorf. Rather, they emphasized that particular language patterns tend to guide habitual patterns of conceptualization. For Boas, different languages categorize and carve up experience differently, and words of human languages reflect cultural interests. Different languages may require different aspects of experience to be attended to. Whorf made a distinction between habitual thought, which tends to follow the ready-made paths made available to it by language, and the limitless potentialities of thought. Leavitt notes that the 1990s witnessed a shift in research on linguistic relativity. For example, empirical research, particularly in cognitive science, has been focusing on, and revealing, the influence of language specifics on patterns of conceptualization, sometimes termed ‘Whorf effects’. He argues that ‘[g]iven that human beings are using specific languages, with all of the peculiarities of each, as tools to help think and communicate about the world and themselves thousands of times a day, this [Whorf effect] is hardly surprising – it is simply a case of the tools used having some influence on the final product’.

In Chapter 3, Gladkova provides an account of research on ethnosyntax, the study of how syntax, including morphology, encodes culture. Maintaining that the theoretical foundations of ethnosyntax were laid by Sapir and Whorf, Gladkova makes a distinction between a narrow and a broad sense of ethnosyntax. Ethnosyntax in the narrow sense explores cultural meanings of particular grammatical structures whereas ethnosyntax in the broad sense examines how pragmatic and cultural norms influence the choice of grammatical structures. Gladkova provides several examples for each approach. As an example of morpho-syntax encoding cultural meaning, she presents the case of Russian, where an attitude of endearment and intimacy is encoded by a diminutive. As an example of the second broader sense, she compares request speech acts in Russian and English, and examines how these languages employ different grammatical structures to perform the same speech act and how this usage is compatible with broader cultural norms.

In Chapter 4, Leavitt presents a history of research on ethnosemantics, the study of meaning across cultures, observing that ‘[t]he key question in putting an ethno- before semantics is whether meanings are universal, either innate in the mind or given by the world, or whether they vary from language to language, society to society’. He presents an account of the three traditions of Boasian cultural semantics, Neohumboldtian comparative semantics, and ‘classical’ ethnosemantics. He notes that the ethnosemantics practised by Boas and his students sought to identify semantic differences at all levels of language beyond the phoneme. The Neohumboldtian school of ethnosemantics maintained that ‘each language could be studied as a coherent system, and that the meanings carried in the language, its “contents”, formed a whole that could be identified with the world-orientation or world-view of its speakers’. That is, each language formed a coherent system that ‘determined the range of people’s thought’. Leavitt observes that ‘classical’ ethnosemantics, also known as ethnographic semantics or, often, cognitive anthropology, explored culture as knowledge and sought to identify how cultural knowledge was organized. This tradition focused on studies of vocabulary related to domains such as kinship, plants, animals, or disease. Here vocabulary is viewed hierarchically as a window onto the organization of particular knowledge domains in the minds of speakers in a given speech community. Leavitt notes that ethnosemantics fell into disfavour during the 1970s as universalistic theories of language began to emerge in linguistics. Finally, he notes that it has recently been revived in the work of the school of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) (see Chapters 3, 5, and 23 this volume) and in other research that examines the relationship between language and cultural conceptualizations (Sharifian, 2011).

In Chapter 5, Goddard focuses on ethnopragmatics, one approach to the study of the links between language in use and culture. Ethnopragmatics explores emic (or culture-internal) perspectives upon the use of various speech practices across different languages of the world. This approach is based on the premise that there is an explanatory link between the cultural values/norms and the speech practices specific to a speech community. Goddard maintains that the NSM serves as a rigorous tool for ethnopragmatics to decompose cultural norms and notions in terms of simple meanings that appear to be shared by all languages. Since ethnopragmatics relies on linguistic evidence and ethnographic data from insiders to the culture, one of its central objectives is to explore ‘cultural key words’, or words that capture culturally constructed concepts which are pivotal to the ways of thinking, feeling, behaving, and speaking of a speech community. As examples of ethnopragmatic research, the chapter presents two ethnographic sketches from Anglo English and Chinese culture (the latter contributed by Zhengdao Ye).

In Chapter 6, Risager focuses on the notion of ‘linguaculture’ (or languaculture) and traces its roots in the works of American scholars, in particular Paul Friedrich and Michael Agar. For Friedrich, language and culture constitute a single domain (linguaculture) where verbal aspects of culture merge with semantic meanings. Agar uses the term ‘languaculture’ and regards culture as residing in language, and language as being loaded with culture. Risager (2006) introduces a new transnational and global perspective onto the notion of linguaculture. According to this perspective the use of language (linguistic practice) is viewed as flows in social networks of people and speech communities. These networks develop further when people migrate or learn additional languages. For Risager, linguistic practice is the external locus of language, which exists alongside an internal one; that is, linguistic resources in the individual. She also identifies a third locus, that is, the language system, which has a more deliberately constructed or ‘artificial’ nature, representing a reification of the language conceived as a coherent whole, or maybe an object, or even an organism or a person. For Risager, people carry their linguistic resources with them from one cultural context to the next as they move around the world. Overall, Risager reveals how the concept of ‘linguaculture’ can be productively used in a whole range of areas of study of language and culture, particularly if it is interpreted in a dynamic sense that is sensitive to transnational and global flows of people and languages.

In Chapter 7, Tanaka focuses on research on language, gender, and culture. She notes that the relationship between language and gender has been of interest to scholars from several fields of inquiry, including psychology, linguistics, and anthropology and that many of these scholars view gender as a construct that, among other things, maintains inequalities in society. Language is one of the tools used to construct gendered identities and characteristics associated with men and women, a function that is observed in cultures as diverse as Arabic, Japanese, American, or Thai. In her historical survey of the research on language and gender across different languages, Tanaka focuses on three specific approaches. The first approach relies on a textual analysis of linguistic resources that reflect gender stereotypes, for example, those portraying female speakers as emotional. The second approach explores features of human languages that ‘have designated semantic, pragmatic or lexical elements for the exclusive use of female and male speakers’. This approach has shown, among other things, that in some languages different registers are used by men and women. The third approach analyses spoken discourse to find gendered differences in discourse strategies. For example, when it comes to turn taking, some studies have shown that male speakers have a tendency to dominate the interaction by more frequent interruption and other strategies. The differences between the use of language by male and female speakers has led some scholars to view gender as a ‘culture’ on its own and some others to argue that language is used to create differences and control less powerful groups. Tanaka also discusses the emergence of what she refers to as ‘third wave’ theory of the relationship between language, gender, and culture. This theory subscribes to the notion of a Community of Practice (see Chapters 25 and 26 this volume) and focuses on how language is understood in every community of practice. This theory rejects a binary construct of gender and includes less studied LGBT perspectives.

In Chapter 8, Kecskes explores the relationship between language, culture, and context. Adopting a socio-cognitive perspective, he views culture as a set of shared knowledge structures that capture the norms, values, and customs to which the members of a society have access. For Kecskes, both language and context ‘are rooted in culture, and they both are “carriers” of culture and both reflect culture but in a different way. A part of culture is encoded in the language. What is encoded in language is past experience with different contexts while the actual situational context represents actual, present experience.’ Thus, Kecskes regards context as a dynamic construct that captures both prior contexts of experience and the actual situational context. Prior context is in the mind of the speaker while the actual situational context exists in the external world as a field of action. Within the framework of the socio-cognitive approach, meaning is the result of the interplay between these two forms of context. Kecskes elaborates on this framework and provides several examples which reveal how the interpretation of formulaic language draws on both forms of context. The examples provided demonstrate a strong link between language, culture, and context.

In Chapter 9, Mills argues that although language and culture are often used synonymously in politeness research, a distinction should be ...