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Contextualizing aunty in Singaporean English
Author(s) -
WONG JOCK
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
world englishes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.6
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-971X
pISSN - 0883-2919
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-971x.2006.00481.x
Subject(s) - pejorative , meaning (existential) , linguistics , paraphrase , feeling , mainstream , possessive , sociology , deference , natural (archaeology) , psychology , social psychology , history , theology , archaeology , psychotherapist , philosophy
ABSTRACT: Presumably, in any culture, people who are perceived to be different from some ‘mainstream’ majority are categorized in some way and assigned a label. Such ‘cultural’ categories can be complimentary or, usually, pejorative and are therefore good indicators of cultural attitudes and values. We can learn a lot about a culture through the semantic study of its cultural categories. In Singapore English, the social honorifics aunty and uncle are used by extension as cultural categories to refer, somewhat unflatteringly, to a distinct kind of people. Yet, ironically, the use of these terms also reflects deference for age and thus indicates the speakers' mixed feelings towards the objects of their reference. In this paper, the meaning of the word aunty is described in the form of a reductive paraphrase using natural semantic metalanguage. On the basis of meaning, the contrastive cultural attitudes reflected by the use of the word are explored.