Cultural Conceptualisations of Collective Self-representation Among Chinese Immigrants

Abstract

This chapter explores cultural conceptualisations of collective self-representation as phrases and expressions in Chinese that indicate collective self positioning emerge in social interaction. Twenty-five university-educated Chinese immigrants in Australia participated in focus group interviews. The linguistic constructions manifesting their collective self-representation contain several types of spatial metaphors which reveal the underlying conceptual structure pertaining to Chinese. Drawing on the perspective of Cultural Linguistics, it was found that meaningful representations of these conceptual structures encode cultural schemas in which cultural cognition plays a fundamental role. Two cultural schemas were identified: the Sino-centric worldview and the cultural exemplar role. The discussion, therefore, centres upon interpreting how the cultural image schema of the Sino-centric worldview and the cultural role schema of the cultural exemplar shape the participants’ conceptualisation of their identities as immigrant Chinese in the Australian-Chinese cross-cultural context. Findings drawn from the naturally occurring data on the representation and negotiation of the collective sense of self among Mandarin Chinese speakers serve as an empirical ground to support the view that the self is conceptualised in culturally specific ways and they contribute to the body of research that sits in the area of Cultural Linguistics.