Cultural conceptualizations in stories of Maori-English bilinguals: the cultural schema of marae

This paper is informed by ideas that have developed in the field of Cultural Linguistics and have recently been applied to the study of World Englishes. In particular, it adopts the analytical framework of cultural conceptualizations to investigate a set of stories narrated by Māori-English bilingual speakers in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand. In view of the close relation between language contact phenomena and cultural conceptualizations, the paper focuses on the analysis of marae. The meaning of the Māori word marae can be rendered as ‘meeting ground’ and a marae represents the center of Māori tribal life and activities. The term has also entered New Zealand English as a borrowing, which is why its investigation bears important cultural implications for New Zealand as a whole. The study illustrates the richness of marae as a cultural concept that expresses tribal identity and sheds light on crucial aspects of its cultural conceptualization. Findings show that the analyzed stories contain revealing instantiations of the cultural schema of marae. In addition, the results demonstrate that marae is closely connected to a range of other cultural categories (e.g. iwi, ‘tribe’; tikanga, ‘correct procedure, custom, habit’) and cultural schemas (e.g. tangihanga, ‘funeral ceremony’), which contribute to build up the superordinate cultural schema of MARAE.