Abstract
In diasporic narratives, challenges faced by women negotiating life between cultures are often depicted, yet the linguistic analysis of these experiences remains understudied. In the selected short stories of Noelle Q. de Jesus’ The Secret, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard’s Killing Time, and Evelina Galang’s Her Wild American Self, this paper aimed to examine how lexical semantics, in term of connotation, reveal the diasporic ambivalence of the Filipino-American women in the story and how this ambivalence influences their identities. Through thematic and lexical-semantic analyses, the study shows how words associated with silence, nostalgia, hybridity, and cultural tension reflect the dynamic identites of these women. Findings show that through connotation, the diasporic ambivalence of these women includes cultural hybridization, emotional ambiguity, and the pressures of assimilation and heritage. Through these connotations, their identites are revealed as a fluid process shaped by ambivalence and continuous negotiation within the hostland, resulting in identites that are Sustained Negotiated, Hybrid Communitative, Resistant and Self-Translating, Memory-Mediated, and Transconnotative Feminine. Lexical semantics, particularly connotation, functions as an essential analytical framework in revealing the diasporic ambivalence and identity formation of Filipino-American women in diasporic narratives.
Keywords: Cultural Identity, Diasporic Ambivalence, Lexical Semantics, Short Stories, Filipino-American
https://doi.org/10.65494/pinagpalapublishing.251
