CULTURAL METAPHORS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE SHOP SIGNS

Abstract

Shop signs play an important role in the time of global trade and tourism. Previous studies have reached general conclusions about the characteristics, expressions, and functions of shop sign language. This study aims to explore the cultural, pragmatic, and social concepts encoded in shop sign language through cultural metaphors. The data was collected and observed from American and Vietnamese contexts respectively. The cultural conceptualizations embedded in the linguistic expressions are discovered by metadiscourse analysis and then generalized in the form of cognitive (metonymy) models that underpin the understanding of the cultural metaphors. The results show significant differences between the two speech communities in cultural metaphors related to customers, business scale, business identity, product origin, relationship, and quality. The study contributes specific theoretical and practical insights into English and Vietnamese shop signs from the perspective of cultural cognition, thus providing a base for analyzing coding phenomena at the level of cultural conceptualization contact and intercultural pragmatics.