Presentation delivered at Cognitive Futures of the Humanities http://www.bangor.ac.uk/cognitive-humanities/ on 5 April 2013.

1. If Levi-Strauss met Langacker:
Constructional foundations of
cultural patterns
Dominik Lukeš
@techczech
http://metaphorhacker.net

2. Preliminaries

3. 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.

4. Jakobson
voiced / unvoiced
cooked / raw
Lévi-Strauss

5. “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

6. Langacker
construction inventory
??????
Levi-Strauss

7. Caveat
We need more than just using
terms from one field to label
phenomena in another without
providing a benefit.

8. (Radical)
Constructional view of
language

10. Language
=
Constructions
(meaning/form pairs)
+
Integration (blending)

11. Language is a structured
inventory of symbolic units
Units are best described as
constructions linking form and
meaning
Formal and semantic
compositionality is the process
of conceptual integration

12. Everything we know as words
and rules are just
constructions.

13. 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)

14. Knowledge is structured by
frames (cognitive models).
(See talk on Frames.)

15. conceptual integration is
constrained, underspecified, op
portunistic, dynamic, convention
alized

16. Meaning of constructions can
be very rich
(encyclopedic/lexical – „horse‟)
or very schematic
(grammatical „N‟, „N+pl‟)

17. meaning / dog /
___________ ___________
form [dɔg]

18. / dog / / plural s/z/ɪz /
___________ ___________
[dɔg] [z]

19. / dogs / / sail /
___________ ___________
[dɔgz] [ s aɪ l ]

20. 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)

21. because construction
meaning:
profile logical cause in the discourse
space;
activate logical prosody of causation
form: [because] clause-initial (stressed)
position + collocational patterns

22. English causal cohesive harmony construction
meaning: 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

23. 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)

24. Construction inventory
(Croft and Cruse 2004)

25. Constructions are organized in
a patterned inventory that is
subject to both collective
convergence and individual
divergence.

26. The inventory is collectively
negotiated both implicitly
through imitation and explicitly.

27. Culture as inventory of
constructions

28. Behaviours, beliefs, social
hierarchies, forms of speech =
patterned inventory of form /
meaning pairs

29. Culture cannot be summarized
by general principles. There are
regularities and patterns of
motivation but no determination.

30. Examples of cultural
constructions

32. The universal smile?

33. Russian shopkeepers should be
more friendly

34. Americans are insincere

35. SMILE
___________
Person you know
Express happiness
Confirm emotional relationship

36. SMILE
___________
Person you meet
Express general
connection/acknowledgement

37. IMAGES OF SMILE / SAYINGS
ABOUT SMILING / …
___________
Smiling means friendliness
Smiling is better when sincere
More people should smile
…

38. Collectivist /
Individualist cultures
(Hofstede, Culture‟s
Consequences, 1983)
http://geert-hofstede.com/dimensions.html

39. Individualist
“a loosely-knit social framework
in which individuals are
expected to take care of
themselves and their immediate
families only”

40. 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”

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

42. United States
Chamber of Commerce
Teams, organizations, etc.
“No „I‟ in team”
“Friends”

43. China / Russia
Local government individualistic
Individuals in teams
Family is the individual
“Friends”

44. Wierzbicka
1997

45. “I hate the prostitution of the
word friendship to signify
modish and worldly alliances.”
(Emerson cited by Wierzbicka, p. 48)

46. “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

47. FRIEND (forms)
_______________
FRIEND (meanings)

48. “I'll be there for you
When the rain starts to pour
I'll be there for you
Like I've been there before
I'll be there for you
'Cuz you're there for me too...”
“V nouzi poznáš přítele.”
_______________
Friendship is important
Czech friend, American friend

49. “How much money do you
make now?”
_______________
Knowledge of earnings of a
person
Czech friend, American spouse, Albanian acquaintance

50. Ladislav Holý
1996

52. “ [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)

53. 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

54. Conclusion

55. Non-reductionist view of culture
is possible. Research needs to
focus on form/meaning
pairings of different
generality not the identification
of general principles.