Conceptualization of goat in West African Englishes

Abstract

This chapter takes a Cultural Linguistics approach to research on World Englishes and is primarily concerned with the use and variation of animal metaphors in West African Englishes, namely Nigerian and Ghanaian English. In order to provide a sound basis for the aspects of variation, other varieties of English such as British English, Tanzanian English, and Kenyan English will be included as points of reference. In this way, this research intends to reveal the role of different cultural settings on the usage of figurative language in general and variation of animal metaphors in particular, taking the conceptualization of goat as the immediate case in point. The current dataset includes the components of the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE) and the International Corpus of English (ICE) pertaining to the aforementioned varieties of English. Therefore, the main methodological approach follows corpus linguistic analyses of the data. The results show both similarities and differences in the ways that goats are conceptualized in these varieties. Close examinations of figurative usages of goat expressions further contribute to the study of metaphor variation in Englishes spoken around the world.