Cultural Conceptualisations in West African English

Download or read book Cultural Conceptualisations in West African English written by Frank Polzenhagen and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 2007 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an application of the cognitive-linguistic framework to the study of the New Englishes, specifically West African English. Its theoretical part provides an outline of the analytical tools, in particular conceptual metaphor/metonymy and cultural-model theory. Using corpus-linguistic methods and incorporating research from neighbouring social sciences, the empirical part explores culture-specific conceptualisations and their linguistic expression in the variety under analysis. The findings attest to the «cultural contextualisation» of the English language in the West African setting. The last part of the book critically discusses the current debate on the role and spread of English as a global language, from a cognitive-linguistic and discourse-analytical perspective.