continents

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Friday, February 22, 2002 1:25 pm -0500 Laurence Horn
<laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:

> At 5:53 PM +0000 2/22/02, Lynne Murphy wrote:
>> In the US, if we say someone's "Asian" we usu. mean 'East Asian'
>> (Chinese, Japanese, Korean).  For people from India & Pakistan, we'd say
>> "South Asian" or just "Indian/Pakistani/etc."  In the UK and South
>> Africa, if one says that someone's "Asian" they mean 'South Asian'.  If
>> they mean "East Asian" they're more likely to use a specific country
>> name (in SA, it's often generic use of "Chinese") or "Oriental" or some
>> such.
>>
> I'm not sure which of this is really determined by lexical meaning
> (for a given speaker) and which by implicature or just preponderance
> of contexts of use.


Doesn't this depend on how you define 'lexical meaning'?  If you think that
lexical meaning is mentally represented as prototypes (abstract ideal
exemplars), then it's possible that the actual meanings might be different
in the US and UK.  In both countries, people from any Asian nation are
('technically') Asian (i.e., the outer boundaries of the meaning are the
same), but what how the meaning is organised within those boundaries would
differ between UK and US.

Not that I actually want to argue that that's the case, but just to point
out that the difference between meaning and implicature gets fuzzier on
some definitions of meaning.

Lynne

Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
Acting Director, MA in Applied Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320