Abstract
This paper aims at investigating the conceptual and connotative meanings of the black and white colours as used in the Jordanian society in order to find out the role played by culture in shaping the meaning of lexical items. The results show that all the participants of the study interpret the target expressions according to their connotative meanings rather than lexical ones. The major finding of the study is white colour suggests positive meaning whereas black colour suggests negative meaning; however, few expressions do not follow this pattern such as, ‘his eye is white’, ‘white death’ and ‘black horse’.
Highlights
Learning any language doesn’t mean to master only the phonology, syntax, lexis and morphology and to be well-informed with the basic discourse rules such as connotations, greetings, compliments, etc. (El-Hassan, 1991)
This paper aims at investigating the conceptual and connotative meanings of the black and white colours as used in the Jordanian society in order to find out the role played by culture in shaping the meaning of lexical items
The results show that all the participants of the study interpret the target expressions according to their connotative meanings rather than lexical ones
Summary
Learning any language doesn’t mean to master only the phonology, syntax, lexis and morphology and to be well-informed with the basic discourse rules such as connotations, greetings, compliments, etc. (El-Hassan, 1991). According to Sinclair (2004), denotative meaning is classificatory and defines the place of the word in relation to other words and contexts He states that many words have additional meanings that carry negative of positive orientations or opinions. Evans (2006) points to this relationship and uses of the expressions ‘culture-specific lexical concepts’ to refer to words and expressions which cannot be understood by language learners of other culture. He states that culture is shared and maintained through the use of language. According to Xing (2008) and Tao (1994), among all the colour terms in all world languages, white and black have the longest history, and this is true in Arabic culture, because they are the most contrastive and identified colours such as white-hearted vs. black-hearted or a white future vs. a black future
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