A Semantic Study of the Connotative Meaning of Lexical Items in English and Moroccan Arabic: A Contrastive Approach
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Description
Linguists, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists have debated the concept of meaning in language studies for many centuries. The complexity and ambiguity of linguistic expressions have brought a new sense of emergency to understanding how meaning is structured and conceived in universal languages. In his famous book Semantics, Geoffrey Leech (1974) classified the concept of meaning into seven types, namely conceptual, connotative, stylistic, affective, reflected, collocative, and thematic meaning. Of course, each of these types has a different function and purpose in the realm of speaker and hearer. To determine the extent to which linguistic expressions differ across cultures (and languages), the present manuscript looks into the differences and/or similarities between some selected words across English and Moroccan Arabic (Darija). In so doing, this paper uses the componential analysis (distinctive features) to represent the conceptual and connotative meaning associated with each linguistic item. The ultimate goal is to provide suggestions and recommendations for teaching/learning connotative words in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and Moroccan Arabic (Darija) classrooms.