Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
and Language
Farzad Sharifian
Monash University
Chapter 1 - On cultural conceptualisations
1.1 Conceptualization
1.2 Cultural conceptualizations: A distributed model
1.3 Examples of cultural conceptualizations
1.3.1 Event schemas
1.3.2 Role schemas
1.3.3 Proposition schemas
1.3.4 Emotion schemas
1.4 Instantiation of cultural conceptualizations
1.5 Identifying cultural conceptualisations
On Cultural Conceptualization
• Conceptualization: fundamental cognitive processes such as
schematization and categorization
• Schematization: a process that involves the systematic selection of
certain aspects of a referent scene to present the whole, disregarding
the remaining aspects (Talmy, 1983: 225)
• Categorization: a process by which distinct entities are treated as
somehow equivalent (Rosch, 1978)
Cultural Conceptualizations
• Conceptualizations can be initiated in individuals’ cognition, but they may well
emerge as cultural cognitions.
• (Aboriginal Australians heavily rely on oral narrative for the maintenance of their
cultural conceptualizations.)
Examples of cultural conceptualisations:
• Event Schemas
• Role Schemas
• Image Schemas
• Proposition-schemas
• Emotion Schemas
Event Schemas
• Event schemas: our experience of certain events (Mandler, 1984; Schank & Abelson,
1977).
• There are also cultural differences in schemas and categories that are associated with
every event.
(The items that might be considered as appropriate gifts for a wedding might differ across
cultures.)
Event Schemas
• The Aboriginal schema of Funeral: A significant obligation for
Aboriginal people and also necessitates a relatively high degree of
mobility on their part.
• ‘Father’, ‘mother’, ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ may even include people whom an
Anglo Australian might categorize as ‘second cousins’.
Identifying Cultural Conceptualizations:
Family
• Many Aboriginal groups have a special ‘avoidance’ style of speaking.
This avoidance may be associated with the presence of a relative with
whom one can only use the formal style of speech, with no joking,
according to laws of the kinship system.
• A man and his mother-in-law, or a woman and her son-in-law may not
be allowed to look directly at one another, and have to use an
avoidance speech style when in the other’s presence.
Conclusion
• Cultural conceptualizations are viewed to be representations that are
distributed across the minds of members of a cultural group.
• Cultural cognition is usually the basis for many aspects of our actions
and behavior in two senses:
• Our behavior: our linguistic performance, largely derives from our cultural
cognition
• Other interactants’ behavior draw on the same cultural cognition
Emergent Cultural Cognition and Language
• The way and the degree to which the conceptualizations have been
encoded in human languages differ from one language to another
(Palmer, 1996).
• Murrinh-Patha:
• Second person pronouns: family members
• ‘nhi’: ‘you singular’
• ‘nanku’: ‘you two brothers and sisters’
• ‘nanku ngintha’: ‘you two who are not brothers or sisters and one both are female’
Emergent Cultural Cognition and Language
• Aboriginal English speakers do not appear to rely very much on
chronological sequencing of the events in their discourse production.
Rather, in Aboriginal English discourse, events may be ordered
according to their salience and significance in the cultural
conceptualizations that the speaker is drawing on.
Conclusion
• The importance of viewing cognition as a property of cultural groups and not just
individuals.