Journal Review Assignment

Journal Review

Title : LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CULTURAL CONCEPTUALIZATION

Authors : Azam Dayyan, Hanieh Davatgari Asl and Fahime Farjami

Journal : Indian Journal of Fundamental and Applied Life Sciences ISSN: 2231– 6345

Publication : An Open Access, Online International Journal Available at www.cibtech.org/sp.ed/jls/2015/01/jls.htm 2015 Vol.5 (S1), pp. 3632-3638/Dayyan et al.

Abstract : In a cross-cultural comparison of cultural conceptualization in English and Persian, the researcher selected proverbs and idioms to examine various metaphors to see certain degree of conceptual differentiation interpreted differently in the two languages, and also the meanings and applications of them in each language. Findings will make it clear that some concepts are entirely different so that no link can be found between conceptual image in Persian and the corresponding conceptual image in English. In addition, it will reveal that concepts in two languages may make cultural or communicational misunderstandings. Good examples are mentioned to show clear cases of how variable the relation between metaphor and cultural models can be. It was concluded that the differences between concepts in two languages was due to difference in users' cultural and personal experience. 

Keywords: Language, Culture, Cultural Conceptualization, Idioms, Proverbs

Goals :  to reveal that concepts in two languages may make cultural or communicational misunderstandings

Problems : concepts in two languages may make cultural or communicational misunderstandings

Theories : Language and Thought The empirical studies of "Whorfian effects” have largely been couched in terms of the extent to which language influences individual thinking (Levinson, 1996; Lucy, 1992b; Pederson et al., 1998). In other words, the (at least implicit) reference to culture in views ranging from Humboldt, through Boas, to Sapir and Whorf, which refer to language and “world view”, has been downplayed in the narrowing of the problem-field to one of individual psycholinguistic functioning. For Boas, “the purely linguistic inquiry is part and parcel of a thorough investigation of the psychology of the peoples of the world” (Boas, 1966 [1911], cited in Palmer, 1996); and this inquiry was explicitly directed to the exploration of both differences and universals. It is likely that Boas was influenced in this conception by the ideas of Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt, though usually remembered as one of the “founding fathers” of laboratory experimental psychology, accorded equal importance (and devoted most of his prolific writing) to what he called “Völker psychology”, the psychology of the peoples of the world, or (cross-) cultural psychology. In other words, the originating matrix for what later came to be called the “linguistic relativity hypothesis” was one in which anthropology, linguistics and psychology were distinct, but related, moments of an integrated inquiry into the mutual relations of culture, language and thought. Linguistics and anthropology later achieved a partial rapprochement in the componential-analytic style of early, “first-generation” cognitive anthropology (or ethno semantics), which borrowed the “etic-emic” distinction directly from linguistics, and which was predicated upon the hypothesis that cultural difference was to be captured in terms of the taxonomic categorizations of specific cognitive domains (kinship; color; natural kinds), which are shared by individual members of a given culture, but not necessarily by members of other cultures. This approach eventuated in the important and well-known demonstrations by Berlin, Kay and Rosch of the existence of universal cognitive foundations of categorization.

Language and Culture

The most comprehensive recent treatment of the language-world view relationship, specifying it in explicitly cognitive linguistic terms, is Palmer‟s (1996) path-breaking book on cultural linguistics (see also Palmer and Arin, 1999). Palmer defines his research program as follows: “Cultural linguistics is concerned with most of the same domains of language and culture that interest Bosnians, ethno semanticists and [ethnographers of speaking], but it assumes a perspective on those phenomena which is essentially cognitive.” (p. 36): by which he means that it employs cognitive linguistic concepts and analyses, in conjunction with ethnographic-linguistic methods. Palmer‟s innovation consists not simply in the wealth of ethno linguistic data that he reviews and submits to cognitive analysis, but also in his proposal that “Linguistic meaning is subsumed within world view. Linguistic meaning is encyclopedic in the sense that it involves the spreading activation of conceptual networks that are organized chains and hierarchies of cognitive models. Language both expresses and constitutes world view but could only fully determine it in a culture that lacked other means of expression and communication.” (p. 291; our emphasis). Again, we shall emphasize below that “expression” or “embodiment” of cultural knowledge can also involve material culture. Hirschfeld (1996; 1988; 1994) makes similar claims about social categories. He notes that there is good evidence that the development of racial and gender concepts is similar in many groups and may well be largely independent of any explicit teaching about either racial or gender differences. He asserts that “children are prepared to find that humans come in groups, that is,they have social identities” (1994, p. 222). Children‟s understanding of social categories is an essentialist one which assumes that, just as tigers has an essence that makes them tigers no matter how transformed, humans have racial and gender essences.

Language and Cognition

Some early anthropologists and psychologists held the view that different peoples indeed reason differently. Wilhelm Wundt, in proposing a cultural psychology to complement experimental psychology, certainly thought so when he wrote, “All phenomena with which the mental sciences deal are, indeed, creations of the social community” (1916, p. 2). The French sociologist Levy-Bruhl (1910) believed there was a characteristic “primitive” thought that did not understand the world in terms of causal sequences and tended to merge emotion and cognition. Levy-Bruhl did not regard primitive thought as inferior but merely as different – and not different in a fundamental pragmatic sense: “…in their everyday activity, when they are not being influenced (misled) by their collective representations, „they‟ think the same as „we‟ would, drawing the same conclusions from the same kinds of evidence” (Cole, 1996). To summarize, after an initial period of mixed findings, growing new evidence supports the Sapir-Whorf contention that linguistic differences affect thought. Solid evidence has been found for the cognitive effect of linguistic differences in number marking (Lucy, 1992), the coding of spatial location (Levinson, 1996), and even color categorization (Roberson et al., 2000). The work supporting linguistic relativity has profound implications for psychology, and more specifically, for the cultural mediation of thought. A number of studies indicate that East Asians organize the world in rather different ways than do people of European culture. East Asians tend to group objects on the basis of similarities and relationships among the objects whereas Americans tend to group on the basis of categories and rules. In an early study by Chiu (1972), Chinese and American children were shown sets of pictures of three objects, for example, a man, a woman, and a child, and were asked to choose which of two objects were alike or went together. American children tended to choose the objects linked by category membership, and thus chose the man and the woman “because they are both grownups.” Chinese children tended to emphasize relationships and thus chose the woman and the child “because the mother takes care of the child. Ji and Nisbett (Ji, 2000; Ji and Nisbett, 2000) found that adults showed similar tendencies when asked about the association between words. Asked how strong the association was between words in a set, Chinese were more likely to find the association strong if there was a relationship between the words, either functional (e.g., pencil- notebook) or contextual (e.g., sky-sunshine) whereas Americans were more likely to find the association strong if the objects belonged to some category (e.g., notebook-magazine)

Methods : The present study is a qualitative study in that the research questions have been answered through comparing and Contrasting some selected proverbs and in English and Persian in order to collect a body of data to examine the cognitive knowledge structures in one‟s cultural environment and also aims to explore cultural conceptualizations across two languages and cultures and in order to detect whether speakers of different languages view the concepts differently? The following English dictionaries were examined: Idiom Dictionary (Laura, 2009), and McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs (Spears, 2006).Persian dictionaries such as Farhang- eEstelahat-e-Aamiyaneh (Glossary of Colloquial Expressions: Najafi, 2010), Amsal-o-Hekam-e- Dehkhoda (Idioms and Proverbs: Dehkhoda, 1999) were also consulted to Consider culture-specificity

Findings and Conclusion : We should note that culture is not material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the form of things that people have in mind, their model of perceiving and dealing with their circumstances. Culture is the total life way of people, the social legacy the individual acquires from his group (Wilson, 2009). Culture would be transferred through language (Emmitt and Pollock, 1997). As Sapir-Whorf argues, different thoughts are brought about by the use of different forms of language One is limited by the language used to express one's ideas. Different languages will create different limitations, therefore people who share a culture but speak different languages, will have different views of the world. Still, language is rooted in culture and culture is reflected and passed on by language from one generation to the next (Brislin, 1976). From this, one can see that learning a new language involves the learning of a new culture (Byram, 1989). The relationship between culture and language is quite entwined, the latter being an important feature of the former, and each affects the other one. Metaphoric expressions are colorful language used to communicate one's thoughts and feelings, to give life and richness to language by taking the existing words, combining them in a new sense and creating new meanings, just like a work of art (Lenung, 2008). In a cross-cultural comparison of metaphors in English and Persian, selected proverbs are used to compare English and Persian speaker‟s cultural conceptualizations to see the certain degree of differences in the two languages and cultures. Findings made it clear that some images were entirely different in words but meaning links could be found between Persian and the corresponding images in English. The different concepts of idiomatic expressions and proverbs in two languages Contributes to the speaker experiences, social beliefs, and cultural knowledge and attitudes, and he/she transforms them to linguistic manifestations. This manifestation is more culture-oriented rather than universal. The finding used Al- Hosnavie‟s Cognitive Model to represent degrees of cross cultural conceptualization across languages in proverbs. The results of the present study can help ELT policy makers, ELT experts, syllabus designers, curriculum developers, translators and language educators to show appropriate sensitivity to cultural aspects of foreign language teaching to provide a basis for communicating pragmatic meanings as they facilitate intercultural communication which may hinder successful communication.

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