Concerns with cultural variation and epistemic perspectives have played major roles in experimental semantics. They dominate Li's book (2023). Li's own experimental work provides two promising ...explanations of the cultural variation: Chinese, but not Americans, tend to agree with a character's false statement because they think it is not her fault that she is wrong or because they are socially conforming. So, the notice argues, the cultural variation is a red herring to the theory of reference. Li preferred explanation is that Chinese and Americans take different epistemic perspectives. The notice argues that this is misguided and another red herring.
This article investigates the culturally constructed conceptualisations of schizophrenia in Cameroonian languages. Twenty languages from the four Cameroonian cultural areas were investigated using ...focus group discussions and individual interviews. A thematic analysis was used, and the results of these investigations indicate that the meaning attached to schizophrenia is culture specific. The sociocultural conceptualisation mainly reflects guilt in its spiritual dimension, impurity, punishment from the deity of justice, spirit possession, bewitchment, etc. Two main conceptualisations of schizophrenia or mental illnesses were discussed: the guilty type where schizophrenics are mostly considered to be under a spell as a result of their negative acts in the society; and the non-guilty types. It is assumed that the various choices made for treatment could be influenced by the culturally constructed conceptualisations revealed by the linguistic features analysed in this work. While some patients believe that their sickness is spiritual and the treatment for it should be spiritual, others go to hospital to seek medical care.
This study aimed to find out the percentage, the balance proportion and the presentation of local and target language culture in English textbooks EOS 2 and WERAB VIII. The design was content ...analysis research with 2959 sentences and 887 pictures as the study data. The procedure of analyzing the data started by classifying the data into local or target language culture, then it coded under Byram & Morgan’s checklist (1994), while the pictures simply classified into local or target language culture. To see the balance proportion, Mann Whitney U-test was conducted. The presentation was made by drawing inferences. The result showed that the percentage for the analysis of sentences of local language culture was 11.78% and 12.24% for target language culture in EOS 2. Then, local language culture was 33.06% and 7.57% for target language culture in WERAB VIII. Under picture analysis, 19.5% was local language culture and 16.4% was target language culture in EOS 2, while, 43.2% was local language culture and 10.17% under target language culture in WERAB VIII. The results of Mann-Whiney U-test indicated EOS 2 has balance proportion and WERAB VIII did not have balance proportion. Under picture analysis, EOS 2 also has balance proportion than WERAB VIII. The presentation of culture in EOS 2 dominated under category #8 national cultural heritage (NCH) both local and target language culture, while local language culture in WERAB VIII focused on category #3 belief and behavior (BB) and category #8 national cultural heritage (NCH) for target language culture.
Aquest treball pretén, en primer lloc, fer una petita presentació del terme cromàtic bai en la història xinesa per a destacar la importància d'aquest color tant en la cultura com en la llengua del ...país; en segon lloc, pretén comparar els aspectes lingüístics i culturals entre bai en xinès i blanco en castellà per tal de comprovar que el terme cromàtic bai, respecte al terme blanco en espanyol, presenta trets universals i particulars. Per altra banda, tindrà com a corpus paraules formades amb bai aparegudes en Hong-lou-meng i les seves traduccions a l'espanyol a Sueño de las mansiones rojasamb la finalitat de demostrar l'existència de les diverses connotacionsde bai diferents a blanco en castellà, produïdes per raons tradicionals, socials i culturals.
Ce numéro 15 offre a ses lecteurs, non seulement en Chine mais également dans l'ensemble du vaste réseau GERFLINT, une brillante sélection d'articles pensés et écrits sur des thématiques différentes ...mais complémentaires dans la mesure ou elles sont toutes en relation implicite avec le probleme mondial abondamment initié aujourd'hui par le préfixe pluri sous les multiples acceptions qu'il peut prendre en combinaison avec les substantifs langue et culture.
Network technology influences and transforms the language use, environment, and cultural practices of ethnic minorities. This paper designs a text classification model for minority languages and ...cultures, utilizing BERT for word vector modeling, and introduces LSTM and attention mechanisms to capture distant semantic information, solve the gradient vanishing problem, and learn contextual details. The BiLSTM multi-head attention mechanism is then used to filter important semantic features of the input sequence, and finally, all extracted features are linked to complete the text classification and output the categories of minority language and culture texts. The model is applied to text datasets from ethnic minority forums and their news video datasets. It is found that the proportion of traditional ethnic minority vocabulary in forums decreased from 14.6% in 2004 to 10.7% in 2024. Conversely, the ratios of vocabulary related to consumption, marriage, employment, and education increased, with the ratio of marriage-related vocabulary rising from 0.33 to 0.94. This suggests that, despite the influence of Internet technology, traditional cultural concepts of marriage among ethnic minorities remain widely observed. This study provides a feasible solution for categorizing texts in minority languages and offers a unique reflection on the influence of the Internet on the cultural changes of minority languages.
This research article delves into the metaphorical extensions within agricultural lexemes in the Tamil language, unraveling a rich tapestry of linguistic evolution and cultural interplay. The study ...explores how metaphors, rooted in the foundational activity of agriculture, serve as powerful conduits for expressing diverse facets of human experience. The metaphorical journey spans lexical items such as talaiyetu, kalaiyetu, allakkai, mataimarru, and vatikal, revealing the dynamic interplay between language, culture, and agricultural practices. This analysis highlights the complexity of language evolution, where metaphors rooted in specific cultural practices offer a unique lens through which individuals express and conceptualize abstract ideas. The metaphorical extension of agricultural lexemes serves as a testament to the dynamic interplay between language, culture, and human experiences. Keywords: Agriculture - Metaphor - talaiyetu, kalaiyetu, allakkai, mataimarru, vatikal
This paper explores linguistic and cultural complexity within immigration legal advice communication. Drawing from a linguistic ethnographic study, ethnographic and interactional data from two linked ...advice meetings about UK refugee family reunion processes are subject to deductive analysis using Risager’s model of the language-culture nexus, within which the intersection of language(s) and culture(s) in a communicative event is conceptualised as a nexus of linguistic, languacultural, discursive, and other (non-linguistic) cultural resources and practices. The paper operationalises this intercultural communication theory in a new and exploratory way to investigate how cultural complexity is manifest, and interactionally managed, at different levels of meaning.
The substantive analysis shows how a range of divergent resources, brought in by the different participants, are drawn upon and externalised as communicative practices in both legal advice meetings. Understanding is negotiated interculturally at different levels of meaning – the linguistic, the languacultural, and the discursive – in contrasting ways in each meeting. Methodologically, the paper argues that a strength of Risager’s framework is that it supports a methodical and structured analysis of communicative events characterised by linguistic and cultural complexity, which can be linked to other discourse analytical approaches. The model’s complexity, and its foregrounding of verbal over other semiotic modes, are highlighted as challenges for the analyst.
We reviewed articles on computer-assisted language learning, focusing on intercultural education studies published in the last five years. We investigated the following aspects: (1) the theoretical ...foundation that the studies were based on, e.g., theory, hypothesis, model, or framework, (2) the technologies used by the participants, (3) the languages and cultures that the studies focused on, (4) the methodology of the reviewed studies, and (5) the findings reported by researchers. Our results showed that Byram's intercultural communicative competence model, sociocultural theory, and social constructivism were the most frequently used theoretical foundations. The participants frequently used discussion forums, Facebook, email, and Skype. English was the most popular language, and American culture received more attention than any other culture. In terms of the methodology, most studies were conducted for four to 18 weeks, and undergraduate students with advanced language skills were the most frequent participants. The participants interacted with their partners, e.g., introduced cultural backgrounds, created collaborative products, and reflected on learning experiences. Researchers in most studies used questionnaires and interviews to collect the data, and their results demonstrated that intercultural telecollaboration in foreign language education promotes language and culture learning. Benefits such as students having positive attitudes toward technology-supported learning activities and learning activities contributing to developing language abilities and intercultural skills were reported by the researchers. However, according to the results, high cost and learning burdens were the most frequently reported drawbacks of CALL for intercultural education. Several implications were drawn from the results of this review study. The significance of this study is that it provides up-to-date information on CALL-based intercultural education, keeps track of changes in technologies and their applications to language and culture learning, and focuses on aspects that are important to the field but were neglected in earlier review studies.
Friend is a familiar notion, existing probably in any language and culture. Yet it is far from clear what it exactly means, especially in human life. The many aspects it is related to offer many ways ...how to approach the topic. Out of these, by a random choice, one might select, as a starting point, old Roman There is no life without friendship, opening the scene of friends and friendship which seems so rich, and yet, knowing from our own personal experience and life, is in fact far from being rich. This contribution is mapping various aspects of friend-friendship relationship in various languages.
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