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”

http://geert-hofstede.com/countries.html

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.