Linguistic expressions as cultural units

The paper argues in favor of including cultural aspects in the description of communicative interaction. According to Eco (1976)Eco, U. (1976). A theory of semiotics. Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press. , a linguistic sign is a cultural unit. In order to use it properly, a speaker relies on communicative experience with this unit within a culture (Wittgenstein 1960Wittgenstein, L. (1960). Philosophische Untersuchungen. In: L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (= Schriften 1), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. English translation by G. E. M. Anscombe, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.; Feilke 1996Feilke, H. (1996). Sprache als soziale Gestalt. Ausdruck, Prägung und die Ordnung der sprachlichen Typik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp., 1998Feilke, H. (1998). Idiomatische Prägung. In I. Barz & G. Öhlschläger (Eds.), Zwischen Grammatik und Lexikon (pp. 69–80). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. ; Everett 2012Everett, D. (2012). Language, the cultural tool. London: Profile Books.). We expand the notion of ‘cultural unit’ by including internet memes found in social media (Shifman 2013Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in a digital world: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 18(3), 362–377. , 2014Shifman, L. (2014). Memes in digital culture. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.; Diedrichsen 2013aDiedrichsen, E. (2013a). Constructions as memes – Interactional function as cultural convention beyond the words. In F. Liedtke & C. Schulze (Eds.), Beyond words (pp. 283–305). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. , 2013bDiedrichsen, E. (2013b). From idioms to sentence structures and beyond: The theoretical scope of the concept “construction”. In B. Nolan & E. Diedrichsen (Eds.), Linking constructions into functional linguistics – The role of constructions in grammars (pp. 295–330). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. , 2019aDiedrichsen, E. (2019a). On the semiotic potential of internet memes. In A. Benedek. & K. Nyíri (Eds.): Vision fulfilled – The victory of the pictorial turn (pp. 201–213). Budapest: HAS–BUTE Open Content Development Research Group, 2018, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Budapest University of Technology and Economics., 2019bDiedrichsen, E. (2019b). On the interaction of core and emergent common ground in internet memes. Internet Pragmatics [online first]:   ). The term builds on Richard Dawkins’ 1976 definition of a ‘meme’ as a unit that is the cultural equivalent of a biological gene. The paper proposes three knowledge sources for the production and comprehension of these units. The first is semiotic knowledge, the second is common ground knowledge (Clark 1996Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ), and the third knowledge source involves culturally shared cognitive conceptualizations on which word meanings and other linguistic conventions are founded (Sharifian 2003Sharifian, F. (2003). On cultural conceptualisations. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 3(3), 187–207. , 2011Sharifian, F. (2011). Cultural conceptualisations and language: Theoretical framework and applications. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. , 2015Sharifian, F. (2015). Language and culture: Overview. In F. Sharifian (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language and culture (pp. 3–17). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge., 2017Sharifian, F. (2017). Cultural linguistics. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ). These three knowledge sources are established through daily interactions and learning processes within a culture (Kecskés and Zhang 2009Kecskés, I., & Zhang, F. (2009). Activating, seeking and creating common ground: A socio-cognitive approach. Pragmatics & Cognition, 17(2), 331–355. ). The paper characterizes the application of these three knowledge sources for a variety of sign uses. We will also show that a cultural view on pragmatics, as suggested by Sharifian (2017)Sharifian, F. (2017). Cultural linguistics. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. , serves to describe speech acts by identifying their culturally based source. The paper therefore demonstrates that the inclusion of cultural knowledge enables a perspective on communication that goes beyond the analysis of spoken and written words within communities of speakers, as it includes emerging means of communicative interaction in the digital age.