| Cultural keywords refer to the words that are closely related to our social and cultural life.These words are abundant in social and cultural information,which can reflect the attitudes and prejudices of related discourse communities and changes in the forms of social culture.Therefore,to study cultural keywords is an important means to study the coding of ideological information.At present,research on cultural keywords in mainland China is still rare,and research on English textbooks across the Taiwan Straits does not relate itself to “cultural keywords”.The present study collects data respectively from the textbooks of mainland PEP edition and Taiwan Kangxuan edition so as to build the Corpus of English Textbooks for Cross-straits Junior High Schools,based on which we employ corpus-based discourse analysis as the methodology and Sinclair ’s Extended Meaning Unit model as the framework of analysis to compare the cultural keywords in terms of discourse meaning and social-cultural meaning.The Extended Meaning Unit model is based on the Co-selection Theory,which is manifested in the co-selection of words,syntax,semantics,and pragmatic functions.The analysis of cultural keywords in this study is carried out from the following three dimensions: collocation,semantic preference and semantic prosody.The present study specifically answers the following two questions:(1)What are the cultural keywords contained in the English textbooks for junior high schools across the Taiwan Straits?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the social-cultural meaning contained in these cultural keywords? It is found that:(1)The top 15 highly-frequent cultural keywords in the English textbooks for junior high schools across the Taiwan Straits can be grouped into three major semantic sets: FAMILY,LIFE and WORK.(2)There are similarities as well as differences in the social-cultural meanings of cultural keywords in the English textbooks for junior high schools across the Taiwan Straits.Since Taiwan and the mainland share the same cultural tradition,they both focus on the connection with the external society in terms of family outlook.The family,as a subset of society,is heavily connected with various social factors.However,the mainland English textbooks seem to highlight the close connection within the family additionally,which has not yet been reflected in the Taiwan English textbooks.(3)The semantic set of LIFE has a strong positive semantic prosody in the English textbooks for the junior high schools across the Taiwan Straits.(4)As for the semantic set of WORK,both emphasize on the spirit of cooperation and hard work.The difference lies in the fact that the Kangxuan edition textbooks also mention the relationship between technological innovation and work structure.(5)On the whole,the semantic prosodies of the cultural keywords of both English textbooks tend to be positive,but the semantic sets involved in the PEP edition textbooks are more abundant.Based on the research findings,this study has the following implications:(1)The PEP edition English textbooks have more tokens on total,but the Kangxuan edition English textbooks contain more types.Therefore,textbook writers can use a variety of vocabulary,parts of speech,and word forms to perform synonymous conversion,which is conducive to students flexible use of language.(2)Cross-strait junior high school English textbooks involve less cultural topics,and the authors can appropriately increase cultural topics when writing textbooks.The social-cultural value of the selection of teaching materials is a “hidden course”.The elegant and insightful teaching materials allow students to not only pay attention to the language knowledge,but also use language to complete tasks or learn other knowledge via language. |
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