Publication details
Use of Multiple Parallel Texts (Multi-ParT) as a Method in Cultural Linguistics: Stability and Variation
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
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| Description | In this talk, I introduce use of multiple parallel texts (Multi-ParT henceforth; for details, see Knotková and Lu 2020; Lu et al. 2018; Lu 2019, 2020, Accepted; Lu et al. 2020) as a means of studying cultural conceptualization, especially in terms of its stability and variation across languages. In the first part of my talk, I introduce the notion of cultural conceptualization as defined by Sharifian (2011, 2017), summarizing and evaluating the state-of-the-art in the field. Following from that, I will argue that Multi-ParT is methodologically meaningful at least in two ways. Firstly, the usage-based commitment in Cognitive Linguistics (Barlow and Kemmer eds. 2000), which Cultural Linguistics share much with, calls for a contextualizing need to analyze the verbalization in parallel usage events, which I believe may allow researchers to conduct comparative linguistic research in a methodologically controlled manner. Secondly, I will argue that Multi-ParT meets the call for the social turn in Cognitive Linguistics (Geeraerts 2016), which advocates proper emphasis on variation within the same linguistic community. In the second part, I apply Multi-ParT to the cross-linguistic study of culinary language, using names of the same Chinese dishes collected from menus of Chinese restaurants in Czechia (that are in Chinese and Czech). In this part, I present two findings: firstly, some figurative expressions in Chinese (such as shuang-dong and luóhan zhai) simply cannot get through, or barely gets through, to the Czech language; secondly, some homophony-based figurative dish names (such as pútí rou) cannot get through to the Czech language; thirdly, some figurative expressions are highly abstract and when they do get across to the Czech menus, they keep their highly abstract and figurative nature (such as san-xian, wu-xiang, ba-bao, and quán jia fú); fourthly, in rare cases, culture-specific creativity may get through (or leak) to the target language from the source language (such as the case of shíjin yú), resulting in a highly poetic (though completely inaccurate) construal of the dish. In the third, I apply Multi-ParT to the cross-linguistic dimension of viewpoint research in Cognitive Linguistics (Dancygier 2012; Dancygier et. al ed. 2016). In this part, I first introduce the basics of viewpoint constructions in language and will illustrate how Multi-ParT may help identify viewpoint strategies that are specific to Chinese (in comparison to English and potentially other languages), and how Multi-ParT helps us understand the stability and variation of the encoding of narrative viewpoint within the target language (which is Chinese in this case). With the above findings, I discuss the potential value of Multi-ParT in the context of the socio-cultural turn of Cognitive Linguistics. |