Publications

Publication details [#59599]

[no author]. 2015. The Trinidadian ‘Theory of Mind’. Personhood and postcolonial semantics. International Journal of Language and Culture 2 (2) : 169–193.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/ijolc

Annotation

This paper studies the cultural semantics of the personhood construct mind in Trinidadian creole. It analyzes the lexical semantics of the word and explores the wider cultural meanings of the concept in contrastive comparison with the Anglo concept. this analysis demonstrates that the Anglo concept is a cognitively oriented construct with a semantic configuration based on ‘thinking’ and ‘knowing’, whereas the Trinidadian mind is a moral concept configured around perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The paper further explores the Trinidadian moral discourse of bad mind and good mind, and articulates a set of cultural scripts for the cultural values linked with personhood in the Trinidadian context. Taking a postcolonial approach to the semantics of personhood, it critically engages with Anglo-international discourses of the mind, exposing the conceptual stranglehold of the colonial language (i.e., English) and its distorting semantic grip on global discourse. It is argued that creole categories of values and personhood — such as the Trinidadian concept of mind — provide a new venue for critical mind studies as well as for new studies in creole semantics and cultural diversity.