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If Levi-Strauss met Langacker: Constructional foundations of cultural patterns
Dominik Lukeš@techczech http://metaphorhacker.net
Preliminaries
Can culture be taught the same way that language can?
Culture is more like language than we assume in that language is more like culture than we assume.
Jakobsonvoiced / unvoiced
cooked / rawLévi-Strauss
“I saw a guy at a party wearing a leather jacket and I thought, ‘That is cool.’ But then I saw another guy wearing a leather vest and I thought, ‘That is not cool’. Then I figured it out: ‘Cool’ is all about leather sleeves.”
– Demetri Martin
Langackerconstruction inventory
??????Levi-Strauss
Caveat
We need more than just using terms from one field to label phenomena in another without providing a benefit.
(Radical) Constructional view of language
Language
=Constructions (meaning/form pairs)
+Integration (blending)
Language is a structured inventory of symbolic units Units are best described as constructions linking form and meaningFormal and semantic compositionality is the process of conceptual integration
Everything we know as words and rules are just constructions.
Knowledge of linguistic units is the same kind of knowledge as other kinds of knowledge (encyclopedic) and exhibits the same kinds of organizational, cognitive and social properties (incl. basic-level hierarchies, prototype category effects, underspecification, redundancy, conventionalization, culture/language-specificity, explication, negotiation)
Knowledge is structured by frames (cognitive models).
(See talk on Frames.)
conceptual integration is constrained, underspecified, opportunistic, dynamic, conventionalized
Meaning of constructions can be very rich (encyclopedic/lexical – ‘horse’) or very schematic (grammatical ‘N’, ‘N+pl’)
meaning___________
form
/ dog /___________
[ d ɔ g ]
/ dog /___________
[ d ɔ g ]
/ plural s/z/ɪz /___________
[ z ]
/ dogs /___________
[ d ɔ g z ]
/ sail /___________
[ s aɪ l ]
Constructions are of different degrees of schematicity (e.g. style is a construction) and their working is available for introspection to various degrees (cf. Talmy)
because construction meaning:
profile logical cause in the discourse space; activate logical prosody of causation
form: [because] clause-initial (stressed) position + collocational patterns
English causal cohesive harmony constructionmeaning: profile necessary (logical) causal
coherence links through connectives plus direction and/or semantic prosody of logical inference
form: zero, for, because, so, therefore, thus, which is why, then plus English elegant variation
introduction construction meaning:
identify genre; activate conceptual spaces for blending; hypostasize entrenched blends and activate gaps; establish credibility of author
form: local grammars of introduction: opening statement, definition, anecdote (it is said, when I), analogy (just like), name-drop (it is Lakoff’s claim), statement of generality (language is one of the most complex systems), statement of agreement (the concensus is)
Construction inventory (Croft and Cruse 2004)
Constructions are organized in a patterned inventory that is subject to both collective convergence and individual divergence.
The inventory is collectively negotiated both implicitly through imitation and explicitly.
Culture as inventory of constructions
Behaviours, beliefs, social hierarchies, forms of speech = patterned inventory of form / meaning pairs
Culture cannot be summarized by general principles. There are regularities and patterns of motivation but no determination.
Examples of cultural constructions
The universal smile?
Russian shopkeepers should be more friendly
Americans are insincere
SMILE___________
Person you knowExpress happinessConfirm emotional relationship
SMILE___________
Person you meetExpress general connection/acknowledgement
IMAGES OF SMILE / SAYINGS ABOUT SMILING / …___________
Smiling means friendlinessSmiling is better when sincereMore people should smile
…
Collectivist / Individualist cultures
(Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences, 1983)
http://geert-hofstede.com/dimensions.html
Individualist“a loosely-knit social framework in which individuals are expected to take care of themselves and their immediate families only”
Collectivist“a tightly-knit framework in society in which individuals can expect their relatives or members of a particular in-group to look after them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty”
United StatesChamber of CommerceTeams, organizations, etc.“No ‘I’ in team”“Friends”
China / RussiaLocal government individualisticIndividuals in teamsFamily is the individual“Friends”
Wierzbicka1997
“I hate the prostitution of the word friendship to
signify modish and worldly alliances.” (Emerson cited by
Wierzbicka, p. 48)
“By contrast, the modern expression close friend is not
meant to have the same range of referents as the word friend;
it is indeed intended to stand for a different category of people,
linked to the target person by a different kind of relationship.”
Wierzbicka, p. 49
FRIEND (forms)_______________
FRIEND (meanings)
“I'll be there for youWhen the rain starts to pourI'll be there for youLike I've been there beforeI'll be there for you'Cuz you're there for me too...”“V nouzi poznáš přítele.”
_______________
Friendship is important
Czech friend, American friend
“How much money do you make now?”_______________
Knowledge of earnings of a person
Czech friend, American spouse, Albanian acquaintance
Ladislav Holý 1996
“ [Czechs] see themselves as petty-minded, intellectually limited, and mediocre, and
yet consider the Czech nation highly cultured and well
educated. The coexistence of the two images poses
constant dilemmas.” (p. 77)
Little England
“Little Englander is also, colloquially speaking, an epithet
applied in criticisms of English people who are regarded
asxenophobic and/or overly nationalistic and are often accused of being "ignorant" and "boorish".”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Englander
Conclusion
Non-reductionist view of culture is possible. Research needs to focus on form/meaning pairings of different generality not the identification of general principles.