The expressions good boy and good girl are widely used in Anglo
parental speech directed at children to praise them for their actions. Used in this
way, these expressions have no equivalents in other European languages. In tracing
the history of these expressions, and their negative counterparts bad boy
and bad girl, this paper seeks to show that they reflect a unique cultural
model of child rearing, which links evaluation of a child’s behaviour with
evaluation of the child him- or herself. It is argued that this model, which might
seem natural and universal, but which is in fact culture-specific, has its roots in
England’s and America’s Puritan past. Using the NSM semantic
methodology, the paper explores the changes and continuities in this cultural model
against the backdrop of broad linguistic usage.
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