A Future Agenda for Research on Language and Culture

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the future of Cultural Linguistics (see Chapter 32 this volume) as a tool for exploring a variety of linguistic phenomena along with their intra-group and inter-group cultural instantiations. As a subfield of linguistics, Cultural Linguistics has the potential to bring forth a model that successfully melds together complementary approaches, e.g., viewing language as ‘a complex adaptive system’ and bringing to bear upon it concepts drawn from cognitive science such as ‘distributed cognition’ and ‘multi-agent dynamic systems theory’. This will allow us to move away from essentialist models of the entity we call ‘language’ (Frank, 2008) and hence to adopt and build on theoretical approaches, e.g. ‘enactive cognitivism’, already being exploited by researchers working in related areas more characteristic of the cognitive sciences, that is, by those who no longer subscribe to the tenets of ‘classic cognitivism’. The paradigm emerging from research in Cultural Linguistics draws on a highly nuanced multidisciplinarily informed approach that allows for a greater appreciation for individual choices and the motivations behind these choices as they coalesce into and around ‘cultural conceptualizations’ (Sharifian, 2003, 2009a; see also Chapter 32 this volume). The approach also allows for the role of synchronic and diachronic sociocultural context to be foregrounded. As will be shown, it is a framework that is particularly sensitive not only to the role of culture in linguistic choices and perceptions, but also to the role of language in maintaining and transmitting the cultural conceptualizations that these linguistic choices have produced over time under the influence of pre-existing cultural and linguistically entrenched schemas. In addition, it opens up an avenue for an in-depth exploration of the relationship between two conceptual entities, the term ‘culture’ on the one hand, and ‘language’ on the other, whose definitions, although often assumed in practice to be givens, have shifted radically over the past decades (Strauss and Quinn, 1997). More significantly, even though until now a unified sub-discipline focusing on the relationship between language and culture has never been fully developed, the theoretical framework for such an enterprise is well underway, a topic that will be taken up in the first part of this chapter. In short, this is a framework that could create a flexible transdisciplinary umbrella for future work on language and culture.