Universality and cultural variation in the conceptualisation of love via metaphors, metonymies and cultural scripts: The case of Montenegrin

This paper studies the conceptualisation of love by the Montenegrin student population, via conceptual metaphors, metonymies and related concepts, as well as through the lenses of cultural scripts. The corpus with the conceptual instantiations was collected using a sentence-completion elicitation questionnaire, which was administered to Montenegrin university students. The aim was to identify the cognitive model of love of the targeted population, and to determine the level of universality and cultural variation of the conceptualisations identified. The results suggest that the level of universality and culture-specificity depends on how generally we define the conceptualisation – the superordinate-level, i.e. more general and abstract metaphors displayed more universality, whereas more cultural specificity was likely to be found in the basic-level metaphors, i.e. narrower metaphors.

Culture-generality and culture-specificity of face

In theorizing face as relational and interactional, Arundale (2010) argues that face encompasses a dialectic of relational connection and separation, which is culture-general, but can be voiced differently in different cultures. This paper examines how Arundale’s Face Constituting Theory (FCT) relates to the culture-specific emic understanding of face in Persian culture in talk in dissertation defense sessions. The data are two argumentative excerpts of natural interaction from a corpus of 12 PhD defense sessions in Iran. It is first argued that relational connection and separation is voiced as bonding and differentiation. Second, it is shown how the Persian emic concept of aberu can be accommodated in FCT. The analyses, grounded in CA and FCT, show how the dialectic of bonding and differentiation is interactionally achieved in the practices of aberu.

Examining the Effects of Task Instructions to Induce Implicit Theories of Intelligence on a Rational Thinking Task

In two experiments with Norwegian undergraduates and one experiment with US undergraduates, we examined the potential effects of brief task instructions aligned with incremental and entity views of intelligence on students’ performance on a rational thinking task. The research demonstrated that even brief one-shot task instructions that deliver a mindset about intelligence intervention can be powerful enough to affect students’ performance on such a task. This was only true for Norwegian male students, however. Moreover, it was the task instruction aligned with an entity theory of intelligence that positively affected Norwegian male students’ performance on the rational thinking task, with this unanticipated finding speaking to the context- and culture-specificity of implicit theories of intelligence interventions.