Rappresentazioni mentali, modelli culturali e concetti culturalmente specifici nel quadro della Linguistica Cognitiva: verso un approccio interculturale

Abstract – In a dynamic and ever-evolving society, where people with different cultural backgrounds, social habits and linguistic patterns meet and interact, the intercultural linguistic mediator plays a key role as a ‘facilitator of communication’, providing services across a broad spectrum of socio-cultural differences. In the perspective of intercultural mediation, the approach developed by Cognitive Linguistics (CL) can serve as an important theoretical framework for the training of mediators. CL posits a close relationship between form and meaning, language and cognition, making the semantic-conceptual level the main focus of its interest. Indeed, each language categorizes the world differently, it has its own cultural models, often transmitted by metaphors; in other words, linguistic categories reflect conceptual operations carried out by speakers. It follows that understanding the conceptual mechanisms and mental representations which underlie linguistic expressions is crucial to facilitate the process of interaction between speakers belonging to different linguistic and cultural contexts. Linked to language, gesture and facial expressions are also used to convey meaning and can differ across cultures; thus it is also worth taking these two aspects of non-verbal communication into account. CL also focuses on matters of universality and language specificity. Besides a set of universal concepts or ‘semantic primes’, expressed in all languages and cultures in the world (even with formal variations), there are several culture-specific concepts/words/scripts and grammatical patterns, grounded in the historical and cultural experiences of each linguistic community. The formulation and interpretation of these concepts, related to typical values, norms and practices, can be a source of misunderstanding during interaction; this is why a mediator has to possess solid linguistic and cultural, or better still, intercultural competences of the two universes which come into contact, in order to help dialogue and mutual comprehension and to overcome communication barriers