An Analysis Of Australian Aboriginal English Vocabulary From The Perspective Of Frame Semantics

Australian Aboriginal English is a general term used to refer to all the stable English varieties resulting from the contact between Aboriginal English and English.Even though there has been over 200 years of integration with English,Aboriginal English is immensely influenced by the Aboriginal culture and "Dreaming" worldviews in terms of its linguistic forms and semantics.There are many words in Australian Aboriginal English which share the same linguistic forms but with different or even opposite meanings from Standard Australian English.Since vocabulary best reflects the embedded meaning of any language,comprehending and distinguishing the meaning of Aboriginal English words accurately enable us to avoid the confusion caused by the homonym phenomenon.In the 1970s,Frame Semantics was put forward by the American cognitive linguist Fillmore,which provides people with a new method of understanding and describing meanings of words and sentence patterns.It is regarded as an important path to study the meaning of words in the field of Cognitive Linguistics.This thesis is based on the Frame Semantics theory and several concepts of the theory including frame,frame elements,prototype,scene,and perspective are adopted.The Aboriginal vocabulary data are from an Aboriginal English dictionary entitled Aboriginal English:Cultural Study,Australian Aboriginal literary works Carpentaria and Benang from the heart,and two Aboriginal children’s narratives Rockhole to Rockhole and Medina Mob Yarnin.Four identified frames,namely,"Dreaming" worldviews,including the Creation myth frame,the religious rituals frame,the religious beliefs frame and the kinsfolk system frame and other related cognitive frames including the colonization history frame,the Aboriginal narrative styles frame and the racial discrimination frame,provide prototype scenes which enable us to comprehend and distinguish the meaning of 60 Aboriginal English words of 16 entries accurately.The unique Australian Aboriginal English carrying the unique culture,especially"Dreaming" worldviews of Aborigines,is an important symbol of Australian Aboriginal people’s sense of national identity.The result of the analysis has proved that Frame Semantics provides a theoretical foundation for distinguishing the meaning of Aboriginal English words accurately.The connotation and extension of Australian Aboriginal English vocabulary can be defined accurately through the four cognitive frames mentioned above so that we can understand the deep cultural connotation and appreciate the Aboriginal literature and other narratives.