The Handbook of Cultural Linguistics

Book excerpt: Bringing together a wide selection of work on cultural linguistics and pragmatics, this comprehensive handbook offers global, comparative insights into the field. Diversity does not always imply differences, but it also offers insights into surprising similarities and parallels when it comes to expressions. By the same token, this collection shows that when we see that linguistic differences, when they exist, stem from not merely language, but from the cultural and historical context that cultivates and nurtures them. Within that paradigm, then, this handbook locates the importance of philosophy, religion (or even the lack thereof), political affiliations, and so on, in forming expressions. In addition, comparisons with other models of cultural linguistics are undertaken. These trends provide readers with a comprehensive introduction to issues in cultural linguistics, addressing the peculiarities of the field under the rubric of localized studies, and speaking to the possibilities that exist in interpretation of what metaphors are. The book highlights the complexities that are so tightly interwoven into the fabric of every word and a sentence, across cultures and linguistic traditions. A must-have collection for anthropologists, philosophers, linguists, philologists, theoreticians, rhetoricians, and scholars of poetics, this is the one-stop reference in cultural linguistics.