Cultural Linguistics and the future agenda of research on language and culture

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the future of Cultural Linguistics (Sharifian, this volume) as a tool for exploring a variety of linguistic phenomena along with their intra-group and inter-group cultural instantiations. As a subfield of linguistics, Cultural Linguistics has the potential to bring forth a model that successfully melds together complementary approaches, e.g., viewing language as ‘a complex adaptive system’ and bringing to bear upon it concepts drawn from cognitive science such as ‘distributed cognition’ and ‘multi-agent dynamic systems theory’. This will allow us to move away from essentialist models of the entity we call ‘language’ (Frank, 2008) and hence to adopt and build on theoretical approaches, e.g. ‘enactive cognitivism’, already being exploited by researchers working in related areas more characteristic of the cognitive sciences, that is, by those who no longer subscribe to the tenets of ‘classic cognitivism’. The paradigm emerging from research in Cultural Linguistics draws on a highly nuanced multi-disciplinarily informed approach that allows for a greater appreciation for individual choices and the motivations behind these choices as they coalesce into and around ‘cultural conceptualizations’ (Sharifian, 2003, 2009a, this volume).