An original approach to ethnolinguistics, discussing how abstract concepts such as love and hate are expressed across cultures and ethnicities.

This book provides an overview of approaches to language and culture, and it outlines the broad interdisciplinary field of anthropological linguistics and linguistic anthropology. It identifies current and future directions of research, including language socialization, language reclamation, speech styles and genres, language ideology, verbal taboo, social indexicality, emotion, time, and many more. Furthermore, it offers areal perspectives on the study of language in cultural contexts (namely Africa, the Americas, Australia and Oceania, Mainland Southeast Asia, and Europe), and it lays the foundation for future developments within the field. In this way, the book bridges the disciplines of cultural anthropology and linguistics and paves the way for the new book series Anthropological Linguistics.

the book is concerned with the linguistic worldview broadly understood, but it focuses on one particular variant of the idea, its sources, extensions, its critical assessment, and inspirations for related research. This approach is the ethnolinguistic linguistic worldview (LWV) program pursued in Lublin, Poland, and initiated and headed by Jerzy Bartminski. In its basic design, the volume emerged from the theme of the conference held in Lublin in October 2011: "The linguistic worldview or linguistic views of worlds?" If the latter is the case, then what worlds? Is it a case of one language/one worldview? Are there literary or poetic worldviews? Are there auctorial worldviews? Many of the chapters are based on presentations from that conference, and others have been written especially for the volume. Generally, there are four kinds of contributions: (i) a presentation and exemplification of the "Lublin style" LWV approach; (ii) studies inspired by this approach but not following it in detail; (iii) independent but related and compatible research; and (iv) a critical reappraisal of some specific ideas proposed by Jerzy Bartminski and his collaborators.

The sixth edition of this bestselling text offers a concise history of anthropological theory from antiquity to the twenty-first century, with new and significantly revised sections that reflect the current state of the field.

Cultural keywords are words around which whole discourses are organised. They are culturally revealing, difficult to translate and semantically diverse. They capture how speakers have paid attention to the worlds they live in and embody socially recognised ways of thinking and feeling. The book contributes to a global turn in cultural keyword studies by exploring keywords from discourse communities in Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Melanesia, Mexico and Scandinavia. Providing new case studies, the volume showcases the diversity of ways in which cultural logics form and shape discourse. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach is used as a unifying framework for the studies. This approach offers an attractive methodology for doing explorative discourse analysis on emic and culturally-sensitive grounds. Cultural Keywords in Discourse will be of interest to researchers and students of semantics, pragmatics, cultural discourse studies, linguistic ethnography and intercultural communication.

This edited book explores languages and cultures (or linguacultures) from a translation perspective, resting on the assumption that they find expression as linguacultural worldviews. Specifically, it investigates how these worldviews emerge, how they are constructed, shaped and modified in and through translation, understood both as a process and a product. The book’s content progresses from general to specific: from the notions of worldview and translation, through a consideration of how worldviews are shaped in and through language, to a discussion of worldviews in translation, both in macro-scale and in specific details of language structure and use. The contributors to the volume are linguists, linguistic anthropologists, practising translators, and/or translation studies scholars, and the book will be of interest to scholars and students in any of these fields.

What is cultural semantics? How to define and analyze it in the lexicon of modern Chinese? This book outlines the development and research results of cultural semantic theory, and then proposes the distinction between two types of cultural semantics at the synchronic level: conceptual gap items and items with a cultural meaning. It provides criteria for identifying these items by using detailed examples from theory and application. Finally, the two types of cultural semantics are applied to the case of modern Chinese. The criteria proposed for determining the Chinese cultural semantics apply not only to this, but also to other languages. Therefore, this book offers an operational basis for further studies of cultural semantics in academia.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture presents the first comprehensive survey of research on the relationship between language and culture. It provides readers with a clear and accessible introduction to both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies of language and culture, and addresses key issues of language and culturally based linguistic research from a variety of perspectives and theoretical frameworks. This Handbook features thirty-three newly commissioned chapters which cover key areas such as cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, cognitive anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and sociolinguistics offer insights into the historical development, contemporary theory, research, and practice of each topic, and explore the potential future directions of the field show readers how language and culture research can be of practical benefit to applied areas of research and practice, such as intercultural communication and second language teaching and learning. Written by a group of prominent scholars from around the globe, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture provides a vital resource for scholars and students working in this area.

This book explores the concept of linguistic worldview, which is underpinned by the underlying idea that languages, in their lexicogrammatical structures and patterns of usage, encode interpretations of reality that symbolize, shape, and construct speakers’ cultural experience. The volume traces the development of the linguistic worldview conception from its origins in ancient Greece to 20th-century linguistic relativity, Western ethnosemantics, parallel movements in eastern Europe, and contemporary inquiry into languacultures. It outlines the important theoretical issues, surveys the major approaches, and identifies areas of both convergence and discrepancy between them. By proposing three sample analyses, the book highlights the relevant questions addressed in different but compatible models, as well as identifies possible avenues of their further development. Finally, it considers several domains of potential interest to the linguistic worldview agenda. Because inquiry into linguistic worldviews concerns the sphere of the symbolic and the cultural, it touches upon the very essence of human lives. This book will be of interest to scholars working in cultural linguistics, ethnolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, comparative semantics, and translation studies.

Did you know that, to get a job in Australia, it is important to use the right balance of informal and formal language during the interview? Did you know that student advising in Wu Chinese (spoken around Shanghai) is not a face-threatening activity, contrary to general perceptions about the nature of advice giving? Did you know that the use of minimal eye contact and flat intonation by Japanese speakers is interpreted by native English speakers as a lack of interest and willingness to communicate? Did you know that French and Australian English speakers show a surprising number of similarities in the way they use conversational humour in social visits? Think you know how to address your Italian lecturer or tutor? Think again! These are some of the findings arrived at in this exciting new collection of papers from an array of international scholars who represent different theoretical perspectives, but who all study communicative behaviour across languages and cultures, including English, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian and Wu Chinese. Adopting a comparative or cross-cultural approach, the majority of the contributions draw on authentic examples from a wide range of corpora, including social visits among friends, advising sessions involving recent high school graduates and/or their parents, simulated employment interviews and interactions involving second language learners. Contributions of a pedagogical approach offer practical assistance to the cross-cultural learner through a range of classroom activities. These include: a cross-linguistic comparison of conceptual metaphors; an applied ethnolinguistics framework; and ethnographic critical cultural awareness and reflexivity exercises. All of these activities are designed to equip the learner to study the communicative behaviours and cultural values of the target language. This edited volume is an important contribution to the growing body of work dedicated to better understanding the linguistic and pragmatic aspects of cross-cultural competence required for successful communication across cultural boundaries. It will appeal to readers interested in linguistics, interactional styles and communicative behaviour, cross-cultural pragmatics and intercultural communication.