Some Final Comments
Language, Culture, and Knowledge in Context - A Functional-Cognitive Approach - Brian Nolan
Brian Nolan [+ ]
Technological University Dublin (retired)
Description
Chapter 11, Some final comments, provides a summarising discussion to this study. The chapter reviews the aim of progressing the discussion on the sets of relationships between language, culture, knowledge, and context, and how they might influence and inform language in interaction. Our overall objective was to bring a new focus and a fresh perspective to these relationships across language, culture and knowledge, through studying language in the linguistic landscape, the language found on artefacts and in art (as a special kind of artefact), knowledge and context, and the pragmatics of language in interaction. In this, we adopted a broad functional-cognitive approach within the study, that language is not an autonomous system and that its interactions with the domain areas of interest are actually deeper, more wide-ranging and multifaceted than had perhaps been previously considered. The functional-cognitive approach taken enables a rounded perspective on the rich and complex set of relationships that are to be found to exist within and across culture and its constituent dimensions of artefact, worldview, linguistic landscape, knowledge, common ground, and language in interaction. What is important is the essential interrelatedness between all of these dimensions.