‘Till Death Do Us Wed’—About Ghost Brides and Ghost Weddings in Hong Kong English

Abstract

The present corpus-based analysis was initiated by the author’s previous research on cultural conceptualisations from the domains of family and money in Hong Kong English (Latic and Wolf 2017). It showed that local cultural practices can be linguistically traced in collocations such as ‘hungry ghost’, ‘hell money’ and ‘worship ancestors’, which are instantiations of the underlying cultural conceptualisation ghosts are humans. In Hong Kong, life and death, the real and the other world coexist in the traditions and language of its inhabitants, which will be fleshed out with marriage-related references within the domain of ghosts in this chapter. It is argued that the domain under investigation is part of a larger conceptual network and that the corresponding (cultural) keywords form chains (cf. Peters 2017), as they do not appear isolated, but rather trigger or—as Wierzbicka (1997: 17) put it—‘lead us to’ related keywords and collocations. ‘Ghost bride’, ‘ghost marriage’ and ‘ghost wedding’ testify to that principle and demonstrate that keyword chains can be used as a measuring unit in an attempt to quantify qualitative studies. The present analysis contributes to the further exploration of the domain of ghosts in Hong Kong English (HKE) and illustrates that the length of the ghost-related keyword chain reflects the preoccupation with this domain on many levels of Hong Kong people’s lives.