Abstract
John Bodey is an award-winning Aboriginal Australian writer. This paper reports a corpus-based study of Aboriginal Australian cultural conceptualisations as represented in his short story, The Blood Berry Vine. The story is set in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and comprises 8,787 words in running text. A comparison of The Blood Berry Vine and ACE-Lit, a 147,163-word reference corpus of general Australian English literature, found keywords and distinctive transitivity patterns associated with the expression of Aboriginal cultural categories and cultural schemas. The study contributes to our understanding of aspects of Aboriginal worldviews and demonstrates the feasibility of combining a corpus-based approach with transitivity analysis in analysing and identifying variation in cultural conceptualisations.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Cultural Linguistics and World Englishes |
Editors | Marzieh Sadeghpour, Farzad Sharifian |
Place of Publication | Singapore |
Publisher | Springer |
Chapter | 3 |
Pages | 37-63 |
Number of pages | 27 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9789811546969 |
ISBN (Print) | 9789811546952 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2021 |