Sunday, March 7, 2010

Loading of the floor


When I saw this sign, I was confused as to what the sign meant.

Firstly, "Floor Loading" is here used ungrammatically, but then I realised that it was meant to be read as a noun. In this case, it is informing people of the maximum load when undergoing the process of "floor loading". But upon further thought, I realise that the term "gun loading" is used commonly in the military force, especially when it comes to ammunition loading of a gun. Perhaps it is because "floor loading" is not common to my lexicon, thus it is confusing.

Secondly, "Design imposed load" here first gave me the impression that you are supposed to design the imposed load that is meant to be placed here. It was very confusing to me.
The use of the word "loading" is actually meant to be a verb, but in this context, it is used to denote a noun. And also, the use of two verbs here side by side also makes it very ambiguous. Is the load one that has a design imposed on it, or are we to design the load that is to be imposed. The choice of word use here really is confusing. Syntagmatically, I attempted to come up with new phrases, such as "draw exposed chicken" and "write implicit content". What I realise is that the collocation of the words used can affect the interpretation given, because it is probably used in rather high frequency, thus it has come to seem as normal for us.

I guess that as this week's reading on the Lexical analysis of Singaporean English will show, it is truely a lexical stock that varies from culture to culture, and the collacations of word use can indicate the differences. =)

No comments:

Post a Comment