BOOK REVIEW: Persian Linguistics in Cultural Contexts

There have been a number of models that probe the interaction of language and culture, including linguistic relativity, linguaculture, and thinking for speaking, to name a few. Despite such a long history of investigating language-culture nexus, there has been a gap regarding the existence of an analytical framework that can assist researchers in systematically analyzing the emerging, complex, and heterogeneous nature of this interaction (Baker, 2015). In order to integrate the aforementioned features into a model that explains language-culture nexus, Sharifian (2017) followed a multidisciplinary approach and expanded Palmer’s (1996) cultural linguistics to propose an analytical framework that investigates the interconnection of language and cultural conceptualizations, the latter of which refers to cultural schema, cultural metaphor, and cultural category collectively. As an attempt to localize such an analysis to a particular context, Persian Linguistics in Cultural Contexts, edited by Alireza Korangy and Farzad Sharifian, attempts to provide an application of Sharifian’s Cultural Linguistics to myriads of linguistic analyses related to translation, academic correspondence, pragmatics, and literature. This edited compendium is a reader-friendly collection of papers that comes across as appropriate both for postgraduate students and Cultural Linguistics researchers. The volume is organized into 11 chapters in addition to a one-page acknowledgement, information on contributors, an introductory chapter, and an index. All the chapters begin with an introductory note and end with concluding remarks, which provide readers with a short summary of the quintessential findings.