“Know Your Coffee!” The Cultural Semantics of a Lexico-Syntactic Molecule of English

This paper presents a cultural semantic analysis of the English syntactic construction ‘know your + noun’ made combining the analytical principles and methods of ethnosyntax (Wierzbicka, 1988, 2003, 2006a) with those of corpus-based discourse analysis (Baker, 2006; Partington et al., 2004). Three main points are made in the paper: (i) ‘know your n.’ constitutes an indissoluble lexico-syntactic molecule of English expressing its own specific meaning; (ii) this construction is both genre-specific and subject to intralinguistic variation; (iii) this construction is quintessentially Anglo, because it reflects Anglo cultural assumptions about personal autonomy informing certain speech practices in English discourse (Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2004; Wierzbicka, 2006b) and defies easy translation in other languages. The analysis is based on the findings of a corpus search in GLOWBE across varieties of English complemented by additional data from the web. The results provide a clear picture of the meaning of ‘know your n.’ and of where it situates within the broad range of know-constructions. Ultimately, the paper emphasises the contribution that corpus-based, empirical discourse analysis can make to the semantics and ethnography of syntax as well as to the study of the interface between syntax, semantics and culture.