THE ETHNO CULTURAL CONCEPT OF SMILE IN MALAYSIAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

The ongoing paper aims to investigate the concept of a smile in Malaysian literature in English. The concept is a linguistic phenomenon that emerges from the combination of logical models that identify the knowledge in organizing a group of some ethnos, and demonstrate the solidity of language patterns in associative, synonymous and other relations (Abdikalyka and Abitzhanova,2016). People transfer their feelings metaphorically to depict abstract concepts with other ordinary concepts. Metaphor is an important tool for communication and cognition, it provides us with an unfamiliar way of visualizing familiar things, and a familiar way of visualizing unfamiliar things (Lakoof and Johnson,1980)  The concept considers as one of the basic units of cognitive linguistics. This branch of linguistics studies the language which concentrates on presumption, that language reflects thinking patterns (Green and Evan,2005:5). However, the present study analyses the way smile is contextualized in Malaysian culture through Malaysian novels in English: The Rice Mother', "Evening Is The Whole Day", "Green Is The Color", and "The Garden Of Evening Mist".