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Article published In:
International Journal of Language and Culture
Vol. 6:2 (2019) ► pp.351–387

Idea-based and image-based linguacultures

Evidence from American English and Mandarin Chinese

| CBS, Denmark
| Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

In order to investigate whether or not cultural cognitive differences between Western and East Asian countries should be taken seriously we compared the empirical results from studies of perception and cognition involving primarily American and Chinese people to linguistic data from exactly the same areas in American English and Mandarin Chinese. What we found were systematic language parallels to the perceptual and cognitive differences found in empirical studies. Our linguistic analysis did not only reveal that the differences should be taken seriously, but also that it seems to be possible to trace them back to different perspectives involved: The Anglo-American culture has an idea-based perspective, while the Mandarin Chinese culture has an image-based perspective to what appears to be a common basis for both Americans and Chinese in all other respects. The difference in perspective is, for instance, reflected in the two very different writing systems.

Keywords: The West and the East, perception, cognition, image, idea, perspective, American English and Mandarin Chinese linguacultures
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Basic differences between English and Chinese
    • 2.1Preliminary remarks
    • 2.2The two writing systems
    • 2.3The two grammatical systems
    • 2.4Reading research
  • 3.Categorizing from the point of view of an idea or an image
    • 3.1Making sense of objects
    • 3.2Language parallels – The word as an image-idea pair
    • 3.3Idea-based vs. image-based
    • 3.4Summary
  • 4.Perceiving an entity in an absolute or relative way
    • 4.1Perceptual judgements
    • 4.2Language parallels
    • 4.3Summary
  • 5.Perceiving a complex scene in a local or global way
    • 5.1Introducing perception of visual scenes
      • 5.1.1Verbal description
      • 5.1.2Change detection
      • 5.1.3Eye tracking
      • 5.1.4Aesthetics: Preferred way of framing things
    • 5.2Language parallels
      • 5.2.1Word frequency
      • 5.2.2Word order in text-initial utterances
      • 5.2.3Other pieces of evidence for different perception strategies
        • Introducing yourself in American English and Chinese
        • How to write an address in American English and Chinese
        • How to present time in American English and Chinese
    • 5.3Summary
  • 6.Cognizing in an abstract or concrete way
    • 6.1Cognition and reasoning
      • 6.1.1Logical reasoning
      • 6.1.2Causal reasoning
      • 6.1.3Dialectical reasoning
    • 6.2Language parallels
      • 6.2.1Logical reasoning: Image-based and idea-based thinking
      • 6.2.2Causal and dialectical reasoning
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • References
Published online: 24 January 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.17011.dur
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