Cultural Pragmatic Schemas, Pragmemes, and Practs: A Cultural Linguistics Perspective

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between cultural pragmatic schemas, pragmemes, and practs, from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics (Sharifian, Cultural conceptualisations and language: theoretical framework and applications. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2011; Cultural linguistics. In: F. Sharifian (ed) The Routledge handbook of language and culture. Routledge, London, pp. 473–492, 2015). The analytical tools that Cultural Linguistics draws on include cultural schemas, cultural categories, and cultural metaphors. Cultural pragmatics schemas comprise a particular class of cultural schemas that serve as a basis for communicating pragmatic meaning. This chapter argues that in certain cases, cultural pragmatic schemas, pragmemes, and practs reflect a hierarchical relationship where a particular pract instantiates a pragmeme, which in turn instantiates a particular cultural pragmatic schema. In other words, a three-tier hierarchy (cultural pragmatic schema > pragmeme > practs) is at work, such that correctly interpreting the practs requires knowledge of the underlying cultural pragmatic schemas and pragmemes in which they are entrenched. Social context, which as Mey (2007, p. 172) argues “is, by its very origin, cultural” is also an integral part of the process. The chapter elaborates on the framework by presenting and analyzing further examples from Persian.