Conceptualization of goat in West African Englishes
This chapter takes a Cultural Linguistics approach to research on
World Englishes and is primarily concerned with the use and variation of
animal metaphors in West African Englishes, namely Nigerian and Ghanaian
English. In order to provide a sound basis for the aspects of variation,
other varieties of English such as British English, Tanzanian English, and
Kenyan English will be included as points of reference. In this way, this
research intends to reveal the role of different cultural settings on the
usage of figurative language in general and variation of animal metaphors in
particular, taking the conceptualization of goat as the immediate
case in point. The current dataset includes the components of the Corpus of
Global Web-based English (GloWbE) and the International Corpus of English
(ICE) pertaining to the aforementioned varieties of English. Therefore, the
main methodological approach follows corpus linguistic analyses of the data.
The results show both similarities and differences in the ways that goats
are conceptualized in these varieties. Close examinations of figurative
usages of goat expressions further contribute to the study of metaphor
variation in Englishes spoken around the world.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The use and variation of metaphor
- 3.Data and methodology
- 4.Analysis of the data: The use of goat metaphors
- 4.1The great chain of being metaphor
- 4.2Gender and sexuality
- 4.3Religion
- 4.4Politics
- 5.Discussion and conclusion
-
References