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The meaning of English words across cultures, with a focus on cameroon and Hong Kong

  • The meaning of English words across cultures, with a focus on cameroon and Hong Kong
  • Routledge
  • 2009
    • Hong Kong
    • 1997.7 onwards
    • Unknown or Unspecified
  • 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.
    [Copyright of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01434630802147882]
    • English
  • Journal Articles
    • 01434632
  • https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/bibs/72dafebc
  • 2010-11-28

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