Fresh fish are here for sale: From cultural cognition to the language use in English and Vietnamese shop signs

Abstract

The article presents the general theories of cultural cognition and cultural conceptualization from Sharifian's perspectives as a theoretical framework to justify some cases of the language use in English and Vietnamese shop signs. Accordingly, cultural cognition is understood as the whole perception, feeling, assessment that are enactive, unevenly distributed and dynamic among members of a speech community; it is approached and schematized with cultural conceptualizations that are generalized and encoded in human languages. The article clarifies these relationships by analyzing cultural cognition as well as cultural conceptualizations related to ‘the opposites’, ‘the current location’, and ‘the display’ reflected in English and Vietnamese at the systematic level and practical application in some shop signs.