Cognitive Representation of Animals in Arabic and English Children’s Stories: An Ecolinguistic Study

Abstract

The study adopts a qualitative approach to shed light on the cognitive representation of animals in light of ecolinguistics. Ecolinguistics, as a new interdisciplinary approach, calls for emphasizing the connection between nature and language. Language affects how people think and react towards the environment. So, language can encourage people to either protect or destroy the environment, through the embedded messages between the lines of any text directed to the readers. Ecolinguistics revolves around raising people’s awareness about the destructive behaviors, and encouraging people to resist them, and adopt beneficial attitudes towards the environments and all its elements. Thus, ecolinguistics calls for sustainability and harmony between all living beings. Language with its linguistic tools can help in delivering this message effectively. In the present study, the linguistic tools that are used are frame semantics, along with FrameNet, and conceptual metaphor theory. Frame semantics, as introduced by Fillmore (1982), explores the background information, provided by the semantic frame evoked by any word and its frame elements, which immensely helps in getting a full picture about the meaning of each word. FrameNet is based on the principles of frame semantics. It is a lexicographic database that gives information about the frame, frame elements and the frame-frame relations of any lexical unit, along with some annotated examples of each lexical unit. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) introduced the theory of Conceptual Metaphors to account for the conceptualization of the abstract concepts in terms of concrete ones. They have proved that conceptual metaphors are not just part of language, but also part of the cognition. People do not just speak using conceptual metaphors, they think and act employing conceptual metaphors to the extent that metaphors have become part of their lives and are used unconsciously. The data of the study is comprised of 24 animal-centered children’s stories: 12 Arabic stories and 12 English stories. The stories are analyzed following a number of steps. First, the stories share a number of themes. These themes are divided and supported by annotated example sentences that are labeled by the frame elements, which are evoked by animal-related lexical units such as verbs and adjectives. Thus, the frames and frame elements contribute to the representation of animals from an ecolinguistic point of view; either animals are seen as living beings that are worthy to be included in the ecosystem or as predators who should not be seen as deserving of equality or inclusion. Then, the hierarchy of the frames is highlighted to show how the texts are coherent, and all the frames go back to certain parent frames that include child frames that are either associated with positive or negative connotations.