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This article explores the evolution of Cultural Linguistics, its fusion with Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Sociolinguistics, and its application to the study of world Englishes, emphasising the cultural dimension of language and cognition. It investigates key theoretical concepts in Cultural Linguistics such as cultural categories, schemas, conceptualisations, keywords, models and scenarios as essential analytical tools for examining the interplay between thought, language and culture. Using examples from English varieties in sub-Saharan Africa, Great Britain, Ireland, India and Hong Kong, this article demonstrates how these conceptual phenomena interact at increasing levels of conceptual complexity. The discussion also distinguishes conceptual metaphor (and metonymy) from the somewhat problematic concept of ‘cultural metaphor’, previously used in some cultural-linguistic approaches to world Englishes. Finally, the article delves into Conceptual Blending Theory as a possible extension of Cultural Linguistics that synthesises diverse cultural knowledge to interpret culture-specific expressions in contemporary multilingual settings.
This research bibliography lists some of the hallmark works in the field of Cultural Linguistics and has an exclusive thematic focus on cultural-linguistic approaches to world Englishes. Therefore, other important and congenial works that have been published under the umbrella of, for example, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) or deal with langauges other than English are excluded but can be found in the respective references of the individual contributions of this special issue. The research bibliography offers reference works for research strands of the world Englishes framework, such as English language teaching and language use in multicultural and multilingual contexts, as well as language use in the public space. Furthermore, with a collection of publications ranging from the 1980s to most recent state-of-the-art works from the year 2024, the authors identify trends and topical developments in the synthesized research of Cultural Linguistics and world Englishes and offer an outlook on new frontiers in this realm.
Cultural Linguistics
(2024)
Without a doubt, not only through numerous landmark publications (e.g., Sharifian 2003, 2011, 2015, 2017a, b), Farzad Sharifian has shaped the field of Cultural Linguistics like no one has. The success of Cultural Linguistics has been due, to a considerable extent, to the integration of previous theoretical concepts, methods, and terminologies into a unified theoretical approach. However, this process of integration, to our minds, has not been completed. In fact, the first author of this chapter, in a couple of his publications (Wolf et al. 2021; Kühmstedt and Wolf 2022) was about to enter into a terminological debate with Farzad Sharifian, when he left us too early. In this chapter, we would like to take up and systematize this debate. Primarily, as regards theory, we will focus on the relation of Cultural Linguistics to Cognitive Sociolinguistics, and as regards terminology, on the central concept of “cultural conceptualization.” By doing so, it is our hope to solidify the paradigm of Cultural Linguistics even more and to provide a further terminological refinement for “cultural conceptualization.”
The order of destruction
(2024)
This book studies sugarcane monoculture, the dominant form of cultivation in the colonial Caribbean, in the later 1600s and 1700s up to the Haitian Revolution. Researching travel literature, plantation manuals, Georgic poetry, letters, and political proclamations, this book interprets texts by Richard Ligon, Henry Drax, James Grainger, Janet Schaw, and Toussaint Louverture. As the first extended investigation into its topic, this book reads colonial Caribbean monoculture as the conjunction of racial capitalism and agrarian capitalism in the tropics. Its eco-Marxist perspective highlights the dual exploitation of the soil and of enslaved agricultural producers under the plantation regime, thereby extending Marxist analysis to the early colonial Caribbean. By focusing on textual form (in literary and non-literary texts alike), this study discloses the bearing of monoculture on contemporary writers' thoughts. In the process, it emphasizes the significance of a literary tradition that, despite its ideological importance, is frequently neglected in (postcolonial) literary studies and the environmental humanities. Located at a crossroads of disciplines and perspectives, this study will be of interest to literary critics and historians working in the early Americas, to students and scholars of agriculture, colonialism, and (racial) capitalism, to those working in the environmental humanities, and to Marxist academics. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of language and literature, post-colonial studies, cultural studies, diaspora studies, and the Global South studies
Innate or acquired?
(2021)
In this chapter, some of the findings from sociolinguistic interviews with 25 speakers of Indian English and 26 speakers of Nigerian English are presented. Emanating from a larger research project concerned with conceptualizations of gender, the current analysis focuses on conceptualizations of homosexuality and makes use of the analytical tools provided by Cultural Linguistics and Cognitive Sociolinguistics. In particular, the notions of “cultural conceptualizations” (e.g., Sharifian, 2011, 2017) and “cultural model” (e.g., Wolf & Polzenhagen, 2009; also cf. Schneider, 2014) are addressed.
At the time of data collection, discriminatory legislation concerning homosexuality was in force in India and Nigeria. Opinion polls likewise echoed a negative stance towards homosexuality among the population of the two countries. This raised the expectation that similar conceptualizations of homosexuality might be found in Indian and Nigerian English, both in terms of their negative connotation and of how homosexuality would exactly be conceptualized. However, this expectation was not fulfilled. Firstly, the acceptance among the Indian participants to this study was generally greater. Secondly, homosexuality was predominantly conceptualized as an innate condition in the Indian English data, while it was prevalently understood as an acquired condition by the Nigerian informants. Drawing from earlier findings within the context of the same project (Finzel, 2021; fc.), I suggest that these differences can be explained with culture-specific models of gender that lend their logic to conceptualizations of homosexuality.
Most, if not all, of the studies in Cultural Linguistics have (a) taken a synchronic perspective or (b) focused on specific, intracultural conceptualizations. In my chapter, I will look at a cluster of conceptualizations that have been found to exist in different historical periods, in different languages and varieties, and on different continents. The case in point is conceptualizations of magical practices based on menstrual blood. The existence of these conceptualizations across time and space raises the challenging questions of their motivation, and, more generally, the “flow of conceptualizations.” While these questions will be pursued in my chapter, the main focus will be on an elaboration of the conceptual network of conceptualizations pertaining to menstrual blood magic.
In this paper, we take a cognitive-sociolinguistic perspective on texts from the colonial period. The texts stem from various agents in the colonial enterprise and include documents from missionaries, administrators and politicians, as well as legal and scientific texts. What we find and trace in these texts is a recurrent set of dominant systems of conceptualizations that are characteristic of the colonial mindset and the corresponding discourse at large. However, these conceptualizations were spelled out in quite different ways in discourse, depending on the ideological background and objectives of the authors and on the specific colonial setting they deal with. We will focus on two contexts, India and sub-Saharan Africa, and we will highlight conceptualizations related to the framing of the constellation between colonizers and colonial subjects in terms of, inter alia, a parent-child, an adult-child and a teacher-pupil relationship. We will then look into some examples of cultural practices among the colonized that were “disturbing” to the colonizers. The fact that they were betrays value systems as well as preoccupations and fears on the side of the colonizers. These practices triggered efforts at cultural engineering in the colonies which had lasting effects on the local culture in these settings. However, this impact was far from being one-directional. The experience with the “otherness” of the colonial subjects fueled debates on latent societal issues in the culture of the colonizers. We will consider this impact for the case of the discourse on homosexuality. The empire stroke back also in linguistic terms, most notably by a host of loan words that entered the lexicon of English. The way these loan words were “integrated” into the English language provides ample evidence of a cultural appropriation also in this direction, i.e., the process known as “contextualization” in traditional Kachruvian sociolinguistics is bi-directional as well.
This chapter presents an overview of Cognitive Sociolinguistic studies of African English. We discuss early applications of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to the study of English in Cameroon (Wolf 1999, 2001; Wolf and Simo Bobda 2001) as well as the extensive and methodologically diverse body of Cognitive Sociolinguistic research on the cultural model of COMMUNITY expressed in West and East African English (e.g., Wolf 2006, 2008; Wolf and Polzenhagen 2007; Polzenhagen and Wolf 2007; Polzenhagen 2007). Moreover, the chapter illustrates how studies such as Finzel and Wolf (2017), Peters (2021), Finzel (forthcoming) and Peters and Polzenhagen (2021) extend the Cognitive Sociolinguistic approach to further sociocultural issues, such as gender identities and culture-specific strategies of advertising in different anglophone parts of Africa. Finally, we point out possible future applications of the paradigm to socio-pragmatic aspects of African English.
This chapter compares East and West African English as two distinct regional varieties of African English. First, the historical development of English in these two regions is briefly considered. It is argued that British colonial policy contributed significantly to the sociolinguistic and, indirectly, even structural differences these varieties exhibit. Then, the discussion moves on to give a short overview of the national sub-varieties. It is found that, although united by common linguistic features, West African English is far more heterogeneous than East African English, and some explanation is provided for this phenomenon. Focusing specifically on phonetic features, the chapter summarizes and contrasts the main diagnostic and distinctive features of each regional variety, with special reference to the peculiarities of the national varieties of West African English. However, despite their structural differences, West African, East African English and, for that matter, Southern African English are rooted in a shared “African culture.” Recent findings are introduced, in which common conceptual and linguistic patterns pertaining to witchcraft, expressed in the regional varieties in question, are highlighted.
Phobic cosmopolitanism
(2024)