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Article published In:
International Journal of Language and Culture
Vol. 11:1 (2024) ► pp.95–122

Women have no honour of their own

Conceptualizations of honor in Indian English and Pakistani English

| Develop Diverse
| University of Copenhagen

This article presents a corpus-based Cultural-Linguistic study of the usage of the word honour in Pakistani and Indian Englishes, addressing underlying cultural conceptualizations of the notion of honor. Honor emerges as a complex cultural model which involves several cultural schemas, cultural categories and other cultural conceptualizations, in which women are cast as responsible protectors and upholders of the honor of men, families, and communities, their bodies being the very locus of men’s honor. The study is based on a relatively simple qualitative and quantitative analysis of two specialized corpora representing discourse on honor and related phenomena in Pakistani and Indian Englishes.

Keywords: concretizing conceptualizations, corpus linguistics, Cultural Linguistics, gender, kinship models, semantic preferences, World Englishes
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Honor as a cultural phenomenon
  • 3.Theoretical background
    • 3.1World Englishes and linguistic glocalization
    • 3.2Culture as a complex adaptive system of conceptualizations
      • 3.2.1Cultural schema
      • 3.2.2Cultural category
      • 3.2.3Cultural metaphor
      • 3.2.4Cultural model
  • 4.Data and method
    • 4.1Description of data
    • 4.2Concordance analysis
    • 4.3Collocational analysis
  • 5.Honor
    • 5.1The cultural model of honor in IE and PE
    • 5.2The complex kinship system in the cultural model of honor
    • 5.3Concretizations of honor
    • 5.4Towards a cultural model of honor
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Declaration of interest statement
  • References
Published online: 7 March 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00057.ebe
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