Phraseology and Culture

The proposition that there is a correlation between language and culture or culture-specific ways of thinking can be traced back to the views of Herder and von Humboldt in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was most explicitly formulated, however, by the German-American linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir in various publications from 1929 onward (re- published posthumously in 1949 under the title Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality), and in the writings of his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf (republished posthumously in 1956 as Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, as it came to be called, expresses the notion that different languages lead their speakers to different conceptualizations of the same extralinguistic reality, which seems to be most evident in the way that reality is segmented by the lexicon. Even though few linguists would fully agree with a strict reading of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis today, it is generally accepted that a language, especially its lexicon, influences its speakers’ cultural patterns of thought and perception in various ways, for example through a culture-specific segmentation of the extralinguistic reality, the frequency of occurrence of particular lexical items, or the existence of keywords or key word combinations revealing core cultural values. Nevertheless, the exact workings of the link between language and culture are still poorly understood. The few specific theoretical frameworks that do exist are often felt to be inadequate, and the research methodology is only insufficiently developed. The aim of this advanced seminar, then, will be to explore the cultural dimension of a wide range of pre-constructed or semi-pre-constructed word combinations in English. These will include highly opaque multiword units of the kick-the- bucket type, collocations, irreversible binominals, phrasal verbs, compounds, metaphorical expressions, similes, proverbs, familiar quotations, catchphrases, clichés, slogans, expletives, and discourse markers such as politeness formulae (all of which have been subsumed under phraseology, or under idiom in the Anglo-American linguistic tradition), types of word combinations (e.g. proverbs and similes), use- related varieties (such as the language of tourism or answering-machine messages), and user-related varieties (such as Aboriginal English or African English). A reader will be available from Copyshop Stork (Körnerstraße 3) from October 4th, 2016. Please check Stud.IP for updates and additional information as the semester approaches. Further secondary literature will be made available on my reserve shelf in the FBL. Gasthörendenstudium LingA1, FAL 2 Size restriction – 25 Prerequisites – LingF1-LingF4 (FüBA) Further information – rainer.schulze@engsem.uni-hannover.de Universität Hannover WiSe 2016/17 Englisch, Master LbS Prof. Dr. phil. Schulze Rainer phil