Showing papers on "Connotation published in 1992"

Vocabulary in Action

Abstract: Mother tongue sound-spelling denotation word grammar collocation polysemy frequency connotation register vocabulary within written discourse vocabulary within spoken discourse.

Public Relations as a Science - Implications of Cultural Differences and International Events

Abstract: Is public relations a science? The two terms in the question carry a lot of baggage with them in the popular mind, are culturally bound, and have been defined in mutually exclusive ways by different authorities. In particular, the term public relations carries a powerful, often manipulative, connotation for the naive lay person or scholar, something like: “the powerful businesses and political technique used to control events through lies and half truths.” The term science, on the other hand, carries a powerful positive connotation for the lay person and many scholars, something like: “what highly educated people do in pursuit of truth so as to solve all the problems of the world.” If such popular interpretations of public relations and science were accepted the answer would be obvious, public relations and science would be incompatible. But there are other understandings of public relations and science which make the question more meaningful. This analysis focuses on understanding what must be meant by the terms in order for the question to be meaningful. The question is answered in the context of the discussion and how an ongoing program of research on cultural differences and international events is being used to more fully explore the question is discussed.

Feed-Forward: Future Questions, Future Maps.

Abstract: "Feed-forward" is a technique that encourages families to imagine the pattern of their relationships at some future point in time. Questions about the future, in conjunction with positive connotation, put families in a metaposition to their own dilemmas and thus facilitate change by opening up new solutions for old problems.

A Comparative Case Study of Prior Cultural Knowledge in English-Second-Language Lexical Meaning-Making.

Abstract: The study investigated the role of a second language (L2) learner's prior cultural knowledge in target language lexical meaning-making. Comparison focuses on what important similarities in L2 lexical meaning-making of culturally loaded words appear among learners with the same ethnic background, and what important lexical meaning differences exist across cultures. Subjects were three Chinese learners of English as a Second Language and one Canadian native English speaker. Data were collected through a first-impression talk, open word-association questionnaire, and followup interviews. Information.from three responses (Canadian speaker's response to an English word, Chinese learners' response to the English word in English, and Chinese learners' response to the English word in Chinese) and the word's meanings (conceptual, connotative, synonyms, antonyms, lexical cultural categories, specific knowledge in lexical meanings, and cross-linguistic factors) in both English and Chinese were examined. Findings were that a central meaning of an L2 word exists and is shared by the L2 learners with the same cultural background. Between the L2 learner and the native speaker there exists an overlapping conceptual relationship in the central meaning of a culturally loaded word, with striking individual differences in connotation. Pedagogical implications are seen. (MSE) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** 1-") N 0 O A COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY OF PRIOR CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE IN ENGLISH-SECOND-LANGUAGE LEXICAL MEANING-MAKING

On the borders of semantic invariance: connotation and the dictionary

Abstract: Throughout Its history lexicography has been practised on the assumption ofsemantlc Invariance oflexlcalphenomena withln linguistic areas and historic periods. It has seen its chief task and raison d'être In providing Invariable denotations. Both, premise and alm, are questioned In this paper. It will be argued that connotation posslbfy plays a much larger rôle than denotation In all types of language use, wlth significant consequences. Lexicography will be shown to have been more committed to theories about language than to actual language activity. 1. Some remarks on the concept of denotation in lexicography "Modern lexicographers, who have grown up with the linguistic thinking of the past forty years have been faced with a paradox: disclaiming authority but claiming scientific authoritativeness, praising change but making permanent records, exalting speech but writing books distilled from writing, believing in equality but finding hierarchies, believing in relativism but finding the absolutely persistent concept of ЪеКег and worse/ assuming determinism but hoping to encourage the 'patterns of tendencies that have shown themselves in the drift of the English language.' (Fries 1949,44)" (Baker 1972,139) Subjected to the powerful influence of scientific thinking, lexicography in the present age indeed finds itself in a quandary. Recognition of the dynamism of language seems to conflict with the very essence of dictionaries as stabilizing social instruments. For, to the extent that lexicography aims to provide semantic information, it has alwas considered the meaning of lexemes stable enough to warrant their description in decontextualized alphabetical format claiming general validity. Charles Richardson's contention at the beginning of the 19th century, that 'words have only one meaning, which is immutable," (Sledd 1972, 131) is evidence of a long tradition of speculation that has its roots in classical antiquity and that regarded words as natural properties of the things they designate (Hadas 1961,89f.). The hope giving rise in the late 18th century controversy on the origin of language, of identifying a universal language, was in due course dashed by the rise to triumph of historicism only to be rekindled in the concept of language universals in the 20th century. Looking back to Samuel Johnson, lexicography today seeks a model in the achievement of his dictionary; yet it would be more comfortable with the earlier Johnson of the PLAN OF AN ENGLISH DICTIONARY who considers it his highest aim in the dictionary-to-be-compiled to stabilize the language and save it from corruption. His hopes reduced in the end to "circumscribing" the chaos of human language by 398 EURALEX '92 PROCEEDINGS "limitations", Johnson represents the sort of split mind that has made lexicographers by turn deluded legislators and resigned apologists of general usage (Weinbrot 1972,93). From the notion of linguistic stability and semantic invariance to the adoption of the concept of lexical denotation it was but a small indeed inescapable step with lasting consequences. Denotation still is a concept central to lexicography and its attitude to­ wards semantic function. That semantic function has explicitly or by implication been sought in, and attributed to, the isolated individual word. Even the advent of text linguis­ tics has apparently had little, if any, influence on the principle of word denotation in lexicography, although in other respects the rise of modern linguistics has visibly affected the purpose and structure of dictionaries. While the probem of syntagms and their treat­ ment has, for example, inspired new approaches in general as well as in specialized lexicography in Britain and elsewhere and has stimulated the growth of a whole new field of research, none of that inquiry seems to be directed at the question of denotation itself. In fact it appears not to be seen by lexicographers as a problem at all, which is strange. At the heart of the matter lies the relationship between concepts and words on the one hand, and words and lexemes on the other: it is the question whether lexemes in diction­ aries can be considered fair representations of words. After all, words are instantiations, occurring in the actual process we call language; lexemes, by contrast, are abstractions from a finite number of recorded instances of such real use. Those abstractions, superim­ posed and amalgamated in dictionary glosses and definitions are assumed to yield in­ contestable, universally valid denotations. Indeed they do so, but with an important limitation: that which is denoted is the substance, not of actual words, but of lexemes, which remains invariable until a new text base is chosen on which to establish the same lexemes in a different set of contexts. It would be a fallacy to assume that such synthetic denotation equals words, i.e. specific articulations in pragmatic settings. It is on the contrary to be expected that, the more near-perfect a denotation is in achieving the desired sharp outline of a concept, the less the corresponding lexeme will represent any actual word in the above sense. In order to examine this possibility, we need to consider how words acquire meaning and also the circumstances in which we use them. The "prevailing scientism" (Baker 1972, 140) in recent linguistic thinking would make of language a system operating by fixed and rational laws that make language behavior essentially predictable. Such a view suggests a clear and one-dimensional operation at the verbal level in the human mind, which we know to be a convenient fiction. Semantic denotation in reality is the outside chance, a borderline case of systematicity that is not the normal condition in natural language but occurs only in highly

How Can You Translate If You Can't Express Yourself in Writing?.

Abstract: Good translation requires writing skills in each of its three stages: decoding the original text; transferring its cultural and linguistic element into the context of the target language; and encoding the information in that context. During decoding, the translator must be conscious of speech level, word usage, cultural references, syntactic devices used for stylistic effect, connotation as well as denotation, and writing skills. The second stage of translation requires making cultural and linguistic elements recognizable in both linguistic communities. Often, this requires some research, and may mean inserting footnotes for clarification. In the third stage, encoding text into the new language and context, writing skills are most clearly needed to make both style and context of the target language text faithful to the original. Translation from Spanish to English is seen to involve major structural changes at times, to reconcile differences in grammatical and stylistic patterns of the languages; for example, longer Spanish sentences may have to be broken into more, shorter sentences in English, without losing the relationships between elements in the sentences. It is further suggested that the best possible results occur when the translator has writing skills equal to the original author. A handout for this paper is written in Spanish and English. (Contains 10 references.) (MSE) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ***************************************k******************************* "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY