Approaches to Language, Culture, and Cognition

The Intersection of Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic Anthropology

M. Yamaguchi, D. Tay, B. Blount, M. Yamaguchi, D. Tay, B. Blount

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137274823
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Approaches to Language, Culture and Cognition aims to bring cognitive linguistics and linguistic anthropology closer together, calling for further investigations of language and culture from cognitively-informed perspectives against the backdrop of the current trend of linguistic anthropology.

1

Introduction: Approaches to Language, Culture, and Cognition

Masataka Yamaguchi, Dennis Tay, and Benjamin Blount

1.1 Why language, culture, and cognition now?

By recognizing that the study of language, culture, and cognition has been fragmented into separate disciplines and paradigms (see Beller, Bender, and Medin, 2012; Kronenfeld, Bennardo, de Munck, and Fischer, 2011), we aim to re-establish dialogue between cognitive linguistics and linguistic anthropology in order to advance our understanding of the relationship among language, culture, and cognition (see Blount, 1995[1974]; Blount and Sanches, 1977; Casson, 1981; Dougherty, 1985; Giglioli, 1972; Gumperz and Hymes, 1972; Sanches and Blount, 1975 for earlier attempts). This volume particularly highlights the ways in which cognitive linguistics can contribute to a better understanding of cultural and social phenomena. In so doing, it aims to provide insights into the theory and practice of linguistic anthropology, which has been mainly concerned with ‘the cultural contextualization and social uses of language, and … the acquisition of communicative competence’ (Keesing, 1992: 604; also see Duranti, 2001, 2009).

In linguistic anthropology, however, ‘[t]here is much work to be done on exploring languages as conceptual systems’, as Roger M. Keesing (1992: 605) points out. We take this suggestion seriously, even after more than two decades has passed since 1992 (and we will come back to this point at the end of this chapter). At the same time we also draw explicit attention to the reciprocal contributions that cognitive linguistics and linguistic anthropology can make toward each other in both conceptual and empirical terms, which we hope will provoke further thought and discussions. For these purposes, the volume collects empirical papers that demonstrate ways of integrating language, culture, and cognition through actual analyses of discourse, as well as showcasing the ways in which cognitive linguistic approaches to grammar, semantics, and metaphor are useful for investigating sociocultural and historical issues (see Section 1.3).

As noted, this collection draws on cognitive linguistics and other cognitive theories, including cognitive anthropology (e.g., Brown, 2006; D’Andrade, 1995; Shore, 1996; Strauss and Quinn, 1997) while covering diverse topics. The eleven chapters that follow are arranged in terms of theoretical orientations: Part I (Cognitive Linguistic Approaches) consists of three chapters that represent foundational cognitive linguistic approaches (Langacker; Geeraerts; Pang); Part II (Cultural Linguistic Approaches)contains three chapters that introduce what Cultural Linguistics is (Sharifian) and illustrate the field by two case studies (Occhi and Palmer et al.); Part III (Intersections of Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic Anthropology)collects four chapters (Kataoka; Yamaguchi; Wee; Tay) that are located at the intersections of cognitive linguistics and linguistic anthropology. All of the authors in Part III show commitment to empirical analyses of discourse data. The volume concludes with a historical overview, current trends, and future directions for integrating language, culture and cognition (Blount).

For the rest of this introductory chapter, we list existing significant collections as precursors, which point to both uniqueness and continuity of this collection (see Section 1.2). We then present an overview of this volume and the connections and cross-readings of the chapters. Finally we conclude with a call for further investigations of language, culture, and cognition against the backdrop of the current trend in linguistic anthropology (see Section 1.3).

1.2 Language, culture, and cognition: precursors

Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to review the vast amount of the literature on this topic, which necessarily makes our selection highly selective, we should recognize several collections as significant contributions in the history of the field of language, culture, and cognition. We only list edited collections that are directly relevant to this volume. First of all, Language, Culture, and Society: A Book of Readings, edited by Ben G. Blount (1995), should be noted as a synthetic volume that has implications for framing the study of cognition in the history of linguistic anthropology. It is an expanded version of his earlier collection (1974), which divides the study of language, culture, and society into three historical periods (cf. Duranti, 2003): the 1910–1940s as the formative period, in which Boas, Sapir, and Whorf played a major role; the 1950s–1970s as the period of paradigm development; and 1980s–1990s as the period of new directions (Blount, 1995). Among the ten selected articles published between the 1950s and 1970s, three papers fall within the category of cognitive anthropology and linguistics (Charles O. Frake’s ‘The Ethnographic Study of Cognitive Systems’ in 1962, and his ‘How to Enter a Yakan House’ in 1975[1964], and Brent Berlin’s ‘Speculations on the Growth of Ethnobotanical Nomenclature’ in 1972). A foundational linguistic/semiotic anthropological paper, ‘Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description’ (Silverstein, 1976), occupies a prominent place by synthesizing the cognitive papers with the other sociocultural and sociolinguistic articles (see Blount, 1995: 106–107, for an explication).

Blount’s collection is also notable in that he selects cognitive anthropological/linguistic papers, which were published after 1980s (Eugene Hunn’s ‘Ethnoecology: The Relevance of Cognitive Anthropology for Human Ecology’ in 1989, and Paul Kay, Brent Berlin, and William Merrifield’s ‘Biocultural Implications of Systems of Color Naming’ in 1991), as well as a linguistic anthropological paper ‘Whorf’s View of the Linguistic Mediation of Thought’ by John A. Lucy in 1985. If we follow Duranti’s (2003) vision of the three paradigms, the period of paradigm development between 1950s and 1970s should have no ‘classic’ cognitive papers. However, cognitive lines of inquiry in linguistic anthropology were alive and well throughout the 1970s, into the 1980s–1990s (Berlin, 1992), and at present (Beller and Bender, 2011; Hunn, 2006; Kronenfeld, 2008; Strauss, 2006; cf. Silverstein, 2004, 2007). Thus, we might question the statement ‘language was no longer a window on the human mind … Rather it was primarily a social phenomenon, to be studied … in the midst of speech events or speech activities’ in 1970s and 1980s (Duranti, 2003: 329, italics in the original). We agree, of course, that language is fundamentally social, but to say that it is not a ‘window on the human mind’ seems unnecessarily restrictive. Social activity cannot occur in the absence of a coordinated nervous system, even among eusocial animals. Among humans, language has to be cognitively based and, moreover, is a major avenue of inquiry into how social and cultural phenomena are processed and integrated in the brain. Marginalization of cognition within linguistic anthropology, however, has been an unfortunate trend for several decades.

Cognition in linguistics has not been subject to the same marginalization. In linguistic anthropology, views about its marginal status are related to developments in the 1970s (see Blount, 2011; Quinn, 2011). Decomposition of lexical items within domains, e.g., kinship, was pursued from the late 1960s as a way of searching for underlying features of organization. The arrangement of underlying features, or components, was originally thought to have psychological validity. The components upon which classification was based were considered to be units upon which cognition operated, but by the late 1970s that view was known to be inadequate, requiring modification. As in linguistics (Fillmore, 1975; Taylor, 2003[1989]), feature analyses gave way to prototype perspectives (Rosch, 1973), producing new directions in cognitive anthropology. An early success was in color term research (Berlin and Kay, 1969), but other successes followed, in particular the concept of cultural models.

Marginalization of cognition in linguistic anthropology came about, in part, through an erroneous equation of lexical classificational analyses (componential analysis) to cognition in language in general. Cognitive approaches in linguistic anthropology have been portrayed, incorrectly, as a continuation of the formal lexical analyses, thereby rendering them as deficient and marginal. That point of view unfortunately became widespread. The incorrect reading of cognition and language within linguistic anthropology has been previously noted and discussed in a number of publications. Strauss and Quinn (1997), for example, addressed the problem in detail and serves as a good source for historical contextualization of the issue. We return to this topic at the end of this chapter.

Among the most widely known topics in the study of language, culture, and cognition is the linguistic relativity hypothesis also known as the ‘Whorfian Hypothesis’. Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, edited by John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson (1996), is an authoritative and comprehensive collection of publications since the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which the idea of linguistic relativity was ignored at best and dismissed at worst. Known as the ‘neo-Whorfian movement’ (Lucy, 1992; Silverstein, 1979), the theory and methods for investigating the issue of linguistic relativity is refined by taking typological universals into account. The Gumperz and Levinson volume points to the necessity to study language, culture, and cognition from a broadly ethnographic perspective of observing and recording ordinary usages (‘fashions of speaking’) in cultural context, combined with psychological experiments for testing the relativity hypothesis. Some of the findings from the neo-Whorfian approach to spatial cognition (Levinson, 1996, 2006a) are utilized by Kataoka (Chapter 8), who combines them with multimodal discourse analysis in this volume.

Naomi Quinn’s discourse-oriented approach to cultural models is entitled Finding Culture in Talk: A Collection of Methods (2005), a volume mainly written for graduate students in cultural anthropology. Technical details in linguistics are not explored in depth, although the linguistically sophisticated analyses made by Jane Hill (2005a) and by Claudia Strauss (2005) are informative even for seasoned cognitive linguists. In relation to this current volume, Yamaguchi and Blount are particularly inspired by the cognitive anthropological notion of ‘culture’ as ‘shared knowledge’ among a socio-culturally defined group of people, which was proposed by Goodenough (1957). In Chapter 4, Sharifian also describes the recent conceptual developments of Cultural Linguistics, which are partly influenced by cognitive anthropology. Furthermore, in Chapter 12, Blount refines the meaning of ‘sharing’ from a cognitive anthropological perspective (see Section 1.3).

Another volume that makes strong contributions to linguistic relativity is Language, Culture, and Society: Key Topics in Linguistic Anthropology, edited by Christine Jourdan and Kevin Tuite (2006). The publication is from the Cambridge University Press series of ‘Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language’, and it contains four chapters written by notable experts (John Leavitt, Regna Darnell, Penny Brown, and Paul Kay). This volume also features eminent linguistic anthropologists such as Monica Heller, Elinor Ochs, Bambi Schieffelin, and Paul Friedrich. The editors, however, did not intend to integrate the contributions in either conceptual or empirical terms. They did not, in other words, make an effort to bring cognitive consideration into play. One of the chapters in the current volume, however, shows how important an integration can be in those terms. In Chapter 6, Occhi draws on Friedrich’s conceptualization of ‘ethnopoetics’ in her cognitive linguistic analysis of metaphors in lyrics (cf. Lakoff, 1993). By this combination, she confronts and manages ‘the dilemma of poetic nuance versus universals, the role of tropes or figures, [and] the harmonization of verbal art and scientific approaches’ (Friedrich, 2006: 207).

In linguistic anthropology, Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition, and Interaction, edited by N. J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson (2006), needs to be acknowledged. It covers the diverse topics of ‘Properties of Human Interaction’, ‘Psychological Foundations’, ‘Culture and Sociality’, ‘Cognition in Interaction’, and ‘Evolutionary Perspectives’ in a well-balanced and synthetic manner. The collection shows not only depth and breadth but the continuity of the study of cognition in linguistic anthropology and related disciplines, including psychology. With reference to this present collection, Kataoka develops some of the conceptual tools for analyzing interaction, proposed by such contributors as Schegloff, C. Goodwin, Hutchins, and Enfield, in Enfield and Levinson (2006). Also, in Chapter 12, Blount places his proposal for ‘neurocultural cognitive models’ within an evolutionary framework (see Sperber, 2006).

Calls for greater attention on culture and interaction have also resounded across cognitive linguistics, with many upholding the position that these variables should, or have always occupied a central place in cognitive linguistic theorization (e.g., Geeraerts and Grondelaers, 1995; Kövecses, 2005; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). An early collection, Discourse and Perspective in Cognitive Linguistics (1997), edited by Wolf-Andreas Liebert, Gisela Redeker, and Linda Waugh, examined how interactional phenomena such as modal expressions, focus particles, and tag questions are both sites of application and enrichment for cognitive linguistic constructs including metaphor and Cognitive Grammar. Sociocultural and interactional perspectives are also prominent within what are traditionally regarded as independent branches of cognitive linguistics. Langacker (2001), for instance, demonstrated that the seemingly abstract analytic units of Cognitive Grammar are able to provide a coherent framework for contextually driven discourse analysis. Within the province of conceptual metaphor theory, the study of how context, culture, and interaction shape the characteris...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Approaches to Language, Culture, and Cognition
• Part I Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Language and Culture
• Part II Cultural Linguistic Approaches to Language and Culture
• Part III Intersection of Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic Anthropology
• Part IV Summary and Future Directions
• Glossary
• Index