Investigating Culture from a Linguistic Perspective: An Exemplification with Hong Kong English

Abstract

The special issue in which our article features bears evidence to the growing concern for a linguistically informed study of culture and, vice versa, a culturally informed study of language. In recent years, Cognitive Sociolinguistics has established itself as a viable approach to analyze and systematize linguistic realizations of conceptually coded cultural patterns (see e.g. Wolf / Polzenhagen 2009). In our article, we give a brief summary of the fundamental tenets of the Cognitive-Sociolinguistic approach as regards culture. Highlighting the field of World Englishes, we demonstrate that certain lexical items and entire lexical fields in non-native varieties of English cannot be properly interpreted without cultural background knowledge and, more specifically, without a systematic account of their underlying cultural conceptualizations. This insight is then applied to the analysis of expressions and collocations from Hong Kong English; under investigation are, in particular, socio-culturally salient conceptualizations from the domain of FAMILY. Our paper closes with a discussion of the applicability of Cognitive Sociolinguistics methods and findings to curriculum reform and design. Emphasized here are the potential for students’ hands-on analytic engagement with texts produced in culturally “alien” varieties of English, and, more globally, intercultural competence as a possible learning outcome