Cultural Linguistics: The State of the Art

Abstract

Cultural Linguistics is a recently developed discipline with multidisciplinary origins that explores the relationship between language and cultural conceptualisations. In particular, Cultural Linguistics explores the features of human languages that encode culturally constructed conceptualisations of the whole range of human experience. It offers a theoretical as well as an analytical framework for investigating the cultural conceptualisations that underlie the use of human languages. Cultural Linguistics has also been applied to and benefited from several areas of applied linguistics including intercultural communication, intercultural pragmatics, World Englishes, Teaching English as an International Language, and political discourse analysis. This chapter presents a brief overview of Cultural Linguistics, followed by a discussion of how each chapter included in this volume adopts the analytical framework of this newly developed field to explore a wide range of topics. The contributions address the language and cultural conceptualisations of life and death, emotion, body, humour, religion, gender, kinship, ageing, marriage, politics, etc. Clearly, the range of studies included in this volume presents robust evidence for the potential that Cultural Linguistics has to contribute to a better understanding of human life.