The aim of this volume is to investigate the complex relations between language and culture. Language is both a medium of culture and part of culture; discourse is both culturally constituted and constitutive of culture. Languages absorb new elements through contact with other languages and cultures; globalization creates new linguistic landscapes and leads people to develop new language and intercultural competences. These multi-dimensional interactions fascinate researchers from a wide range of backgrounds and theoretical or methodological orientations. It is through the comparison of data and techniques from fields as diverse as lexicography, pragmatics, discourse analysis, media studies, languages for specific purposes and language learning that we can hope to address various aspects of this language-culture interaction in a novel and comprehensive way and thus to answer the need for cognitive pluralism in language and culture studies.
The fifteen papers that make up this volume came out of a European programme organised conjointly by universities in France, Germany, Poland and Turkey. The focus is on methods and applications for language and culture data, in three main domains: Languages and Cultures in Contact, Languages and the Media, Languages and Cultures in Foreign Language Education.