Language, culture, and cognition: From Cultural Anthropology to Cultural Linguistics

Abstract

This article aims at sketching the development of the different lines of research that have focused on the relationship between language, culture and cognition in the course of almost three decades. I will start with the 18th century when a more concise interest in the interaction of language and thought arose to which the third element, culture, had been added little by little with the transition from idealism to romanticism. Finally, in the beginning of the 20th century, the first empirical studies had been initiated at the interface of anthropology and linguistics on North American grounds. Almost two decades after the arrival of cognitive linguistics, in the mid-nineties, cultural linguistics was born as a line of research striving for bringing together central issues of cognitive and anthropological linguistics. After having presented the central concepts and premises of this new strand, I will draw my attention towards the current focus of cultural linguistics that includes topics such as English as a lingua franca, intercultural communication, talk in multimodal interaction, World Englishes, as well as pluricentric languages from a corpus-linguistic perspective.