Viewpoint and metaphor in culture

Abstract

The paper presents an in-depth analysis of the language of death in Chinese and discusses the relation between language and occupation as a social factor in analyzing the language of death. In this paper, I address in what specific ways Cognitive Linguistics may serve as a useful analytical framework in studying Chinese idioms used in funerals, in an attempt to uncover cultural elements and viewpoint structure in communicating death. The study introduces basic constructs in Cognitive Linguistics which could be used for such an analysis, and applies this CL machinery to analysing three selected groups of four-character eulogistic idioms used at Chinese funerals. The analysis shows that, in addition to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which has been considered the classic CL tool for studying abstract concepts like death, the subjectivity/objectivity distinction in Cognitive Grammar may also be employed as a complementary and useful theoretical construct in studying the language of death, as it helps identify the special characteristics of the eulogistic idioms for teachers as a special profession in the Chinese culture.

Cultural metaphors in Singlish

“…The view of conceptual metaphors in Cultural Linguistics generally corresponds with that of Cognitive Linguistics, with particular attention paid to cultural metaphors -culture-specific metaphors that represent culturally-influenced ways of viewing and understanding one concept in terms of another concept. The past two decades have witnessed an advent in research on cultural metaphors in a significant number of languages and societies all over the world, spanning many types of domains, including LIFE and DEATH in Taiwanese Mandarin (Lu, 2017(Lu, , 2020, NATION and POLITICS in English, Hungarian, Greek and Turkish (Musolff, 2021), KINSHIP and COMMUNITY in South Korean (Ahn, 2017), RIVERS and LOVE in Hungarian (Kóczy, 2017), as well as AGEING in Australian English (Benczes et al, 2017) (Lu, 2017, p. 53). What these Cultural-Linguistic studies have in common is that they prioritize the identification of particular culture-specific combinations of source and target domains, which represent culture-specific choices of conceptual lenses through which particular topics can be viewed.…”