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Article published In:
Intercultural Pragmatics and Cultural Linguistics
Edited by Ulrike Schröder, Milene Mendes de Oliveira and Hans-Georg Wolf
[International Journal of Language and Culture 7:1] 2020
► pp. 15–37

Talking about intercultural experiences

The cognitive ‘leap’ into another universe

| Federal University of Minas Gerais – UFMG
The aim of this paper is to ask how exchange students retrospectively co-construct their first ‘culture shock’ experiences on a verbal, vocal, and visual plane. The results show that the different co-occurring levels of communication in the talk of the students offer various insights into cognitive processes: (1) Metaphorical and metonymical gestures are frequently used to represent or compress cultural dimensions in moments of high involvement and emphatic speech style. (2) Such gestures are also often historically and culturally embedded and may additionally serve to gain laughter from the co-participants in order to exaggerate the effect of cultural confrontation, underpinned by the use of prosodic cues. (3) Other prosodic means such as creaky voice may be used as a metaphorical marker for distance and represent therefore another type of cultural shock marker. (4) A dynamic understanding of blending theory might be a tool for laying cognitive processes of intercultural experiences open for the researcher.
Keywords: metaphor, metonymy, gesture, alterity, blending theory
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical-methodological framework
  • 3.Analysis
    • 3.1I’m German – you are in France now
    • 3.2For Germans the body is a natural thing
    • 3.3Totally backward
    • 3.4It was awful but it was too very funny
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00025.sch
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