A Functional Syntactic Approach to Cultural Stereotypes

Cultural stereotypes are widely studied in cross-cultural communication and their relation to prejudice and discrimination makes them an enduring object of study. The present paper aims to apply functional linguistic analysis to stereotypical statements and their license in cross-cultural comparative discourse. The concepts of nominalization, appraisal, and transitivity system especially the relational and mental processes are analyzed in the hope of shedding more light on the understanding of the syntactic features of cultural stereotypes.