Languages, Cultures, Media

International audienceThe aim of this volume is to investigate the complex relations between language and culture. Language is both a medium of culture and part of culture ; discourse is both culturally constituted and constitutive of culture. Languages absorb new elements through contact with other languages and cultures ; globalization creates new linguistic landscapes and leads people to develop new language and intercultural competences. These multi-dimensional interactions fascinate researchers from a wide range of backgrounds and theoretical or methodological orientations. It is through the comparison of data and techniques from fields as diverse as lexicography, pragmatics, discourse analysis, media studies, languages for specific purposes and language learning that we can hope to address various aspects of this language-culture interaction in a novel and comprehensive way and thus to answer the need for cognitive pluralism in language and culture studies. - TABLE OF CONTENTS : -*- Introduction / B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, M. Kopytowska, J. Osborne, J. Schmied, K. Yumlu - ‎I- LANGUAGES AND CULTURES IN CONTACT -1- Dialect Continua and Language Contact in Ireland : historical and terminological considerations / Piotr Stalmaszczyk‎ [ Abstract : The paper discusses the terminological issues connected with the languages and dialects involved in language/dialect contact in Ireland. It concentrates on the Irish variety of English and reviews the use of various names for this variety, and the linguistic and non-linguistic (political and cultural) implications of choosing the relevant term (Anglo-Irish, Hiberno-English, Irish English), and the status of this, and related varieties of English and Scots used in Ireland. The paper also discusses the most important developments in the history of English in Ireland, and introduces the concept of language/dialect continua.] -2- Linguistic and cultural response to globalisation - English lexical influences in the Polish press 1972-2005 / Jerzy Tomaszczyk‎ [ Abstract : The political change that took place in Poland in June 1989 and the subsequent transition from communist-style command economy to market economy, opened the country up to a variety of outside influences, including cultural and linguistic ones. These are visible both in the ways in which industry, business organisations, government and non-government agencies, schools and medical services, etc, are organized and how they function, and in the development of a large number of lifestyles, movements, interest and hobby groups, etc, most of which represent direct Western influence. Linguistically, a vast majority of these influences are related to English. The purpose of the work reported here was to identify the range of the English lexical influences in Polish in the years immediately after 1989. The study shows that while English lexical influence was definitely on the rise, the widely perceived threat to the integrity of Polish language must be seen as unfounded, at least with respect to the period under study.] -3- Culture, brands and the concept of brand culture / Deniz Maden‎ [ Abstract : It is necessary to evaluate brands from the cultural point of view since, along with being economic concepts, brands also exist as cultural concepts. A cultural perspective on brands is necessary in understanding the brand construct as a whole. The cultural dimension of a brand indicates its core essence that includes its values, signs and reflections through products. The relation of culture and brands is two-fold, that is, culture has important effects on brands and at the same time brands are carriers of culture. When enhancing the research on brands and culture, the concept of brand culture takes attention in order to include all the complex cultural dimensions of brands. Within this chapter, the relation of culture and brands is discussed through a braoad theoretical literature, evaluating their two-sided relationship and the concept of brand culture.]-4- Legal paremias and legal culture / Malgorzata Krol‎ [ Abstract : The basic agenda behind this paper is, firstly, to manifest an integrational stance in the interface of legal theory and language sciences in all their complexity. The bond between law and language is particularly strong and significant. Language provides as natural habitat for law, being a means of communication between the legislator and people subjected to the law. Researching law in terms of linguistic phenomena has been widely accepted and methodologically established as one of the basic scientific paradigms in legal science. Secondly, in this paper I would like to emphasise the pragmatic role of legal (Latin) paremias as demonstrated in legal discourse oriented towards setting and applying law as well as in legal science, where legal paremias exhibit astonishing richness of meaning accompanied with gnomic, succinct form.] -II-LANGUAGES AND THE MEDIA -5- Culture in newspaper writing? Comparing journalistic text-types in Englishes around the world / Suzanne Wagner and Josef Schmied‎ [ Abstract : The internet today provides large amounts of data form every corner of the earth. English newspapers are published in almost every country, so they can be used as a convenient comparative database, since they make available large amounts of data relatively easily. However, newspaper corpus compilers and users have to be aware of some technical as well as linguistic issues. When these are considered and overcome they provide a good window into foreign cultures and can be used for language and culture teaching. This contribution uses examples form Tanzanian newspapers to illustrate the usefulness and the challenges. To improve comparisons in future research, better ways of making available comparative databases are necessary.] -6- Dialect authenticity in film text : the case of "Sweet Home Alabama" / Matthias Hofmann‎ [ Abstract : This article takes account of the growing interest of our students to analyze films linguistically and outlines a perceptual approach to rating authenticity of the variety spoken in the movie "Sweet Home Alabama" (Tennant 2002). It emphasizes the complex interaction between three academic disciplines : film studies, cultural studies, and (socio)linguistics. Perceptual dialectology offers excellent methods and contemplations for having U.S. American respondents rate speech form probably their most salient dialect region - the South. When gathering perceptions, it is crucial to design questionnaire items either as statements repondents can rat on a, e.g., 5-point scale or as closed questions, e.g. multiple choice. A fine-grained analysis of the responses shows that the regional origin of the respondents is the strongest indicator of rating authenticity accurately. The results are, however, not generalizable, because of the small and unstratified sample of participants.] -7- Political news frames as a reflection of political culture in Turkey / Konca Yumlu‎ [ Abstract : The media in Turkey is highly concentrated, politicized and under government pressure. In an authoritarian political environment, the media develops into a partisan media with content supportive of government ideologies and politics. Coverage of the media during election campaigns is particularly important to analyze because this time is a typical period for political polarization. The media both transfer political frames of the political actors and at the same time construct new ones related to social, political and cultural events in the society. The constructed frames in the news, the making of frames and the effects of framing are important research paradigms of political communication. The aim of this article is to trace the political frames used in the general elections of June 12, 2011. Their relation to the cultural background of the country is presented using content analysis method. Four national daily newspapers have been examined for a period of two weeks before the general elections. The political issues on the first page and middle page of the dailies are analyzed using coverage of political parties and political actors, positive or negative coverage and political frames.] -8- Data from the internet for language and culture studies : a corpus-linguistic appraisal / Josef Schmied‎ [ Abstract : The internet today offers new opportunities of communication and information, it creates new text-types and text collections - and it makes available new data for language and culture studies. The entire Web can be used like a corpus and provides evidence for the usage of even rare lexemes and collocations. Facebook and Twitter allow data collection in new registers and networks, while Wikipedia records the negotiation of meanings in collective writing. However, the actual authors of Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia texts are not clear, so that sociolinguistic variation analyses may be difficult. All these opportunities and challenges deserve a new appraisal from a corpus - and sociolinguistic perspective. This paper provides a general discussion and presents findings of small research projects to illustrate how old research questions may be answered by new research data from the internet.] -9- English and Polish self-projection in the internet comments on sports events : communal and confrontational practices / Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk‎ [ Abstract : The paper discusses internet users' discourse behavior and self-projection as observed in two online English and Polish discussions of two sports events. The dynamics of the encounters and the interactional effects they produce by the use of "language" - and "culture-specific" strategies are discussed and interpreted. Results of the analysis present a picture of different discourse strategies and preferences of the English and Polish groups of the commentators in this respect and the implications for the dimensions of "individualism" and "collectivism" as originally proposed by Geert Hofstede (1980).]-10- Online questionnaires and online corpora as research tools : the case of "themself" / Cornelia Neubert [ Abstract : Questionnaires and the web-as-corpus are widely employed methods for linguistic data collection online. This contribution investigates the usefulness of an online questionnaire and the corpus "Google Books : American English" for electronic data elicitation. It describes their advantages but alsos explains shortcomings of these methods. The subject of research is the use of the non-standard reflexive pronoun "themself" among educated native and non-native speakers of English. The questionnaire was employed firstly to examine "themself" as an anaphor to grammatically different antecedents and secondly to investigate the general acceptance of several reflexive pronouns including "themself" in one defined setting. Theses findings are compared with the occurrence of "themself" in the corpus "Google Books : American English". The survey shows that the online questionnaire was an appropriate tool to obtain exploitable data whereas the corpus did not produce utilisable results] -11- Formulaic sentiment markers in online political discourse / Mikolaj Deckert, Piotr Pezik and Lukasz Drozdz‎ [ Abstract : In the chapter we argue for what is termed "formulaic sentiment markers", i.e. multiword patterns of language that carry evaluation. With the use of corpus techniques we extract such conventionalised lexical sequences from Polish and English user-generated Internet data such as comments to online articles and analyse them qualitatively to investigate their cross-linguistic/cultural dynamics and to look into some of the functions of linguistic automaticity - as evidenced in online political discourse - and interactants ' attitudinal positioning.] -III- LANGUAGES AND CULTURES IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION -12- Language proficiency and the comparative fallacy : fluency and precision in speech / John Osborne‎ [ Abstract : Comparisons between the productions of learners and native speakers are frequent in learner corpus research and in error analysis and interlanguage studies. Such comparisons are sometimes criticised for giving undue importance to native speaker performance as a yardstick for learner ' proficiency, for imposing an arbitrary norm on those who are not native speakers of the language, or for failing to consider the learner's interlanguage in its own right. However, these objections can be avoided if comparisons are based on purely objective measures and do not presuppose any given norms of language production. The present study uses measures of this kind to investigate the characteristics of two features - fluency and precision - in the oral production of both learners and native speakers of Englih and of French.] -13- Managing rater cultural bias in intercultural contexts / Przemyslaw Krakowian‎ [ Abstract : The following article investigates undesired rater behaviour patterns often exhibited in rating samples of oral performance that are more likely to appear in contexts that are intercultural in nature than in ordinary uniform testing contexts. The lenient, the severe, the safe and the careless marker can all be investigated using Multi Facet Rasch Analysis (MFRA or RA for short). In order to identify markers exhibiting such bias, a pre-selected data set, identified using a simple Chi-Square procedure, is analysed using Ratergrinder, a computer program implementing a two facet model of interaction between examiners and samples of spoken production.] -14- The interface of language and culture in the legal context - some teaching implications / Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka‎ [ Abstract : This paper looks at language and culture in selected contexts where linguistic communication comes into contact with the law. It comments on the dynamicity of meaning when language is defined, interpreted or applied in the perspective of the legal system and points to related constraints on language learning and selected relevant implications for second language teaching at the academic level. The text does not suggest a particular curriculum for a course focused on legal language, but indicates areas worth consideration in the context of such courses. Language in the context of the law is an illustrative example of how cultural and social-linguistic values influence and define meaning of linguistic forms. On the basis of English language corpus examples, the paper shows how superficially equivalent forms may receive different interpretations under the influence of the legal culture, which in 'real life' may lead to serious consequences, but is also communicatively crucial in contexts where there is no direct and real intervention of the legal system. The interface of language and law is interesting both on the intralinguistic and interlinguistic levels. For instance, superficially common words and phrases may receive different interpretation inside and outside the system. In the law, "non-botanically speaking", tomatoes can be a type of vegetable, while carrot is a kind of fruit, and (as has been accepted in the European Union for a number of years now), snails can be "legally" known as inland fish. More interestingly common phrases associated with politeness strategies, such as "Would you like to ...?" or "May I ...?" have been shown to be interpreted as requests or orders depending on the institutional authority of the speaker, which opens way for manipulation in the domain of language and the law, as has been documented in the United States. Such phenomena serve to show that linguistic meaning is highly dependent on contextual-cultural information, which further has implications for teaching contexts. It is evident that teaching curricula should include information on pragmatic factors which exert influence on meaning of certain linguistic expressions and that teaching materials should contain explicit examples of situated language uses. It also seems necessary to show that problems of equivalence transcend simple interlinguistic contexts. The differences in perception and management of the semantics located in the interface of language and law are relative to cultural (and intercultural) differences, as well as to social needs pursued by speaker. Differences between intralingual groups of different cultural background may often appear to be more salient than interlingual differences between two legal cultures or two lay cultures.] -15- Media creation and sharing for intercultural competence development : implementation of M-learning with linguistic landscape / Jacek Walinski [ Abstract : New media shape the intensity of intercultural contacts, which results in a greater than ever before heterogeneity o modern societies not only through content consumption, but also through content creation with modern mobile technologies. This enables citizens to participate in the exchange of content in the Web 2.0 paradigm (audiences as both media consumers and media creators), which is prevalent in modern online services. This study demonstrates an application of the linguistic landscape approach to exploration of cultural diversity with m-learning in a foreign environment, i.e. a location unfamiliar to learners in a foreign country. The application is shown from the pedagogical perspective of authentic, informal, and situated learning activities conducted with the use of mobile devices. The study shows that learning activities of this kind offer the potential to change students' perception of the cultural diversity, which is a sound staring point for the change of cultural attitudes and further intercultural competence development.