Cultural Conceptualizations of Filiality in Singapore, Malaysian, Philippine, and Hong Kong Englishes

This study comprises a corpus-based exploration of the cultural conceptualizations of filiality in Singapore, Malaysian, Philippine, and Hong Kong Englishes as represented in the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). A comparison of these four East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) varieties and the core varieties (US, Canadian, British, Irish, Australian, and New Zealand) found eight “NOUN + filial” clusters that are particularly salient in the ESEA component. Further analyses of the contexts of these clusters revealed significant differences in collocational and lexico-grammatical patterning between the two components of GloWbE. It is argued that these differences reflect cultural variation in the conceptualizations of filiality, manifested in cultural categories, cultural schemas, and cultural metaphors that are rooted in traditional Chinese Confucian values. The fact that Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong have sizeable Chinese-descended communities that have continued to identify culturally and ethnically as Chinese may have contributed to some of the Confucian worldviews reflected in their varieties of English. This study provides further evidence for the merit of Farzad Sharifian’s model of cultural conceptualizations for exploring and interpreting variation in World Englishes.