Cultural Model of fairy in Scottish English

The chapter approaches Scottish English (henceforth SE) from a cultural-linguistic perspective, specifically focusing on the Scottish cultural concept fairy. We aim to unveil which cultural keywords (Wierzbicka, 1997), cultural keyword chains (Peters, 2017), cultural conceptualizations, schemas, and categories combine to form the cultural model (see Sharifian, 2017; Wolf & Polzenhagen, 2024) of fairy expressed in SE. The cultural-linguistic analysis of folk tales, songs, and ethnographic research as well as corpora reveals the cultural salience of the lemma fairy and its collocations in SE (cf. Leech & Fallon, 1992; Wierzbicka, 1997; Wolf & Polzenhagen, 2009), such as, for instance, fairy hill, fairy landscape, fairy rings, and fairy captivity. The analysis yielded conceptualizations of fairy in terms of its nature, for example, fairies are spirits of dead ancestors or fairies are possessors of evil magical powers. The chapter also discusses schemas of protection from fairy featuring objects or (body) liquids, such as the sprinkling urine or sticking a metal object into a surface schema. We also discuss conceptualizations of the relationship between fairies, the Scottish landscape, and the supernatural world, such as fairies are inhabitants of the scottish landscape and fairies are part of the real and the supernatural world. The identified conceptualizations build a complex, highly interrelated conceptual network we venture to call the Scottish cultural model of fairy. The chapter thus illustrates how the cultural linguistic paradigm can be applied to SE, suggesting a new research perspective on this variety of English.