The Meaning Of English Words Across Cultures, With A Focus On Cameroon And Hong Kong  

Oleh:

Bobda, Augustin Simo

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development vol. 30 no. 5 (Sep. 2009), page 375-389.
Topik: English; meaning; culture; Cameroon; Hong Kong
Fulltext: The Meaning Of English Words Across Cultures, With A Focus On Cameroon And Hong Kong.pdf (121.29KB)

Isi artikel

A word, even when considered monosemic, generally has a cluster of meanings, depending on the mental representation of the referent by the speaker/writer or listener/reader. The variation is even more noticeable across cultures. This paper investigates the different ways in which cultural knowledge helps in the interpretation of English lexical items. After a brief review of the traditional World Englishes structural perspective, the paper analyses the various ways in which the schema helps in the construction of lexical meaning: it helps to decode the denotative meaning of some words with possible multiple interpretations; to perceive the referential boundaries; to understand the connotative meaning; to modulate meaning, demoting some features and promoting others; to understand the physical elements which contribute to the mental representation of some words; to perceive the bodily movements and other paralinguistic elements which contribute to the construction of the meaning of some words; to perceive the salience of a word within a cultural community; to perceive and predict collocates; to perceive cultural assumptions; to perceive political politeness and taboos; to distinguish transactional language from interactional language, and so on. The study is shown to have implications for lexicography and for English Language teaching.

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