We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
The French Verb Tense System in the Psychomechanics of Language. This article presents Gustave Guillaume's theory of tense, mode and aspect, applied to the French verb tense system.
More...
The Specific Features of the Evolution of the French Language in the Context of a Comparative Typology of the Romance Languages. The article studies the ways in which words are constructed in French: they become increasingly compact and frequently end up as monosyllables. The written word behaves as a compacted unit and its oral counterpart tends to become morphologically unanalysable. The verb loses progressively its personal endings, which tends to make the link between its expression and its content more abstract. The relation in endocentric languages between verbs and nouns is shifted in French, which has become a typologically exocentric language, towards an opposition between a constructed alleviated lexicon and a more developed syntax, submitted to more strict and logical rules.
More...
A Few Wild Words: The Intellectual and Poetic Turning Point of Fondane. This article analyses the intellectual and poetic turning point of Benjamin Fondane, starting from A Few Wild Words, the introduction he wrote for his volume Landscapes. Setting side by side A Few Wild Words by Fondane and Der Meridian by Paul Celan, this study traces, by means of a comparative analysis of these texts, the close poetic interconnection between the two authors coming from Moldova and Bucovina, both historical regions of Romania destroyed by the horror of two world wars. Furthermore, this study examines the profound ennui and the kind of melancholy cruelty, typically Moldavian, which Fondane and Celan share in their specific way of writing poetry.
More...
Evil: The Disarray of Human Nature... A Reading of “O Amor em Lobito Bay” by Lídia Jorge. Lídia Jorge is a writer whose work questions and probes into the Portuguese society when it comes both to some aspects of its history, the dictatorship of the New State, the colonial war or the Carnation Revolution of 1974 as specific components of the Portuguese culture and society (the profound social change the revolution has entailed, the national identity), and to others that are common to any contemporary Western society: the female condition, discrimination against the other, violence and so on. In this study I intend to analyse her collection of short stories O Amor em Lobito Bay (Love in Lobito Bay) (2016). In the nine short texts that make up the book we are told about stories happening around the world like nine mirrors reflecting different facets of the violent contemporary society. In them, the author reveals the different forms evil can take so as to show us the pernicious stages that could lead us to accept it as inevitable or justified. To the anxiety caused by all these stories due to the difficulty of explaining the origin of evil, an answer is offered (by means of another question) which does not belong to the order of reason, but rather to that of action: what is there to do against evil? The first step is to admit one’s guilt, and it is one of the reasons why the locutory mode chosen for the narrative is crucial in the process leading to the characters’ awareness – their admission of guilt – the same as literary communication can be to the author and her readers. “Writing is a way of resisting”, Lídia Jorge said at her book launch. This study will try to analyse this issue in four of the short stories, taking into account the notions of evil (according to the theories propounded by Ricoeur, Kant and Arendt), of the contemporary (Agamben) and of the in-between (Sibony).
More...
The Italian So-Called Inclusive Gender. A Short History of a Myth. This paper aims to broadly outline the history of the so-called inclusive gender. This practice concerns linguistic representation and semiotic interpretation and is extremely frequent within communicative contexts characterized by the presence of both male and female individuals. The absence of critical reactions from contemporary Italian people to such an ancient modality of linguistic gender use and the sense of distress instinctively expressed by people – regardless of their gender – often shown towards those who try to explain the implications of an inclusive reference represent more than a clue to the existence of something beyond language, something involving the typical structure of a well-known but never explicated Myth. For this reason, it could be useful to investigate the non-visible roots of such a category and its development across the linguistic history of the Latin diasystem, as well as the Italian one.
More...
Two Non-languages: The Wooden Language and the Silken Language. The wooden language and the silken language are both opposed to an «authentic» language, which is at the same time simple in its form, varied in its vocabulary, precise in its content and sincere in its intention. This paper aims at presenting the mechanisms of these two languages, the contexts in which they operate and the relationships established between these two content-free «languages» ("non-languages") and creativity.
More...
Reflections on the Concept of Linguistic Imaginary. Our reflections on the concept of linguistic imaginary (LIM) have been triggered by the question whether or not the metalinguistic perspective initially granted to LIM – according to which LIM matches the speaking subject’s representations on the language ‒ may represent a rather restrictive comprehension formula, thus limiting the operational potential of a concept otherwise capable of covering a larger area of research. Therefore, in addition to presenting the ‘classical’ perspective on LIM, quite well-known and exploited in certain linguistic circles in Romania, we will provide a further latent perspective, as suggested by ethnolinguistics and cognitive linguistics. Our present approach aims to exploit the potentiality of such a generous and prolific concept, able to include, from our point of view, the speakers’ world-representations (which obviously include the language-representations as well), encoded in and by the language facts. From such a perspective, the language would be both the object of representation and its essential vector, LIM being part of the cultural imaginary which is expressed in concrete linguistic data at various language levels, mostly at lexical level. As a result, the concept of LIM would significantly expand and become more flexible, thus generating some new, dynamic interdisciplinary research fields.
More...
The Prefacial Discourse of the Bilingual French-Romanian/ Romanian-French 19th Century Dictionaries. We systematically return to our 19th century bilingual lexicography, and this time we turn towards textual sequences preceding the respective lexicographic body; these are interesting for those seeking to understand how the practice of dictionary compilation has evolved; these textual sequences, be they the preface or the inscription, show the way the configuration discourse of a lexicographical work comes, little by little, to confirm the presence of the model, to claim the method and to subordinate the undertaking of the interest of one or several categories of addressees.
More...
Fire as the ‘Logo’ of Artistic Worlds. The aim of the present paper is to analyse the image of fire created by two representatives, one of the Acmeist and the other of the Romantic school of poetry, N. Gumilev and S.T. Coleridge, revealing similarities and differences between their approaches. The obvious parallelism of the poets’ works is demonstrated, with particular attention paid to the fact that specific fire-related images were emphasised by Gumilev in his translation of Coleridge’s works. The attributes of the artistic universes of the Russian and of the English poet are shown: the continuity and constant interaction of their elements, the identity of the properties of the whole and of its various parts in each case.
More...
The Counterfactual: Between Intended Message, Sentence Projection and Incidence. Within the framework of the cognitive principles which lie at the centre of the French system of the conditional, the aim here is to attempt to explain the function of the conjunction si by identifying some of the features it has in common with the Italian se. The expression of the counterfactual by means of the double imperfetto in the main and subordinate clause, or by means of the single imperfetto in the subordinate clause, is not simply due to the decline of the congiuntivo, but also to the morpheme that introduces a conditional idea which has been simplified and renewed by a process of levelling. From a psychomechanical perspective, we have explored the idea of hypothesis that the speech act presents from the start (Guillaume 1973; Joly and Roulland 1980; Hirtle 1994) in terms of «visée de discours» (the intended message) and «visée phrastique» (that is sentence projection), in view of the fact that the enunciation situation conditions the elaboration of the sentence upon the level of incidence (Lorian 1964; Moignet 1974; Skrélina 1980). Moreover, the study of a number of counterfactual clauses in Italian, taken from a contemporary literary genre which makes a legitimate use of these (Ammaniti 2001, 2006) has made it possible to verify the importance of the sociolinguistic dimension of substandard Italian by means of the process of semantic(-syntactic) revelation brought about by translation into French.
More...
The Charade of the Exiled. A Reading of Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne”. This study offers a reading of the most commented poem of the Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire, and suggests a possible explanation of the succession of apparently random images contained in Le Cygne. According to some authors, the poem would have opened «the way for wandering which announces the strolls of surrealists in search of “objective chances”»; its lines might hide a kind of charade in honour of the dedicatee, Victor Hugo, who loved this kind of games to such an extent as to be considered the inventor of the charade à tiroirs.
More...
The Dada Movement: Origins, Literary History; The Pioneer of Surrealism. The Mysterious Figure of Romanian poetry, Tristan Tzara. Globally, the Dada movement can be considered a precursor of the crisis of European consciousness insofar as, coming as a reaction against the First World War, it rejects systems, ideologies, frontiers and rational categories.
More...
Che Guevara, the Christ Figure of the Guerrilla Fighters. In this article, we analyze the iconographic itinerary of the photograph of the dead body of Ernesto «Che» Guevara, as well as «Che» Guevara’s impact on various forms of the imaginary, from his early reception in the Andean popular worldview to his transformation into a capitalist advertising icon. Such a process would not have been possible without the religious analogies of the original image and the iconographic dialogue between the figures of Jesus Christ and the "Che" Guevara.
More...
The Carnation Revolution. Image and Mythology. Eduardo Gageiro’s photograph showing a soldier about to take the portrait of dictator Salazar off the wall at the political police headquarters the day after the Portuguese Revolution of April 25, 1974 evokes a major and symbolic turn in the overthrow of the regime and works as an allegory of change. Yet after all these years, the outcome of that revolutionary dream spurred on by utopian desire remains complex, and its realisation in the form of democracy conceals the loss of lustre of the initial dream. In the light of this apparent contradiction, it is worth revisiting the circumstances that galvanized the revolution and the benefits obtained in terms of rights and freedom, as illustrated by Literature. Fiction, in particular, amplifies History by its storytelling of myths in a space where human desire takes on a role of reconstructing invisible realities. It is in this context that the book entitled Les mémorables (The Outstanding) finds its place.
More...
A Palimpsest Image of December 1989. The present essay focuses on a special photo (credited to the American journalist Peter Turnley), taken during the so-called Romanian Revolution, in December 1989. My paper analyses the way in which the Romanian turmoil can be condensed and caught into a photo that seems very simple at first glance, but which, in fact, proves quite complex and complicated.
More...
Romanian as a Foreign Language: the Teaching of Listening Comprehension and Oral Expression. This paper focuses on two important theoretical aspects of teaching Romanian as a foreign language: oral expression and comprehension, the teaching of which should always be attuned to the students’ needs and the imperatives of assessment and self-assessment. Such a reflexive approach has multiple practical consequences not only on the teaching methods but also on the syllabus and materials design within the framework of communicative teaching and learning. Where assessment is concerned, it is crucial that it should not be relegated to the status of a mere administrative task. Indeed, student performance sheds light on teacher performance and represents extremely useful feedback which makes it possible to improve teaching methods and practices.
More...
Understanding the factors that have influenced the gradual increase in the number of students wishing to be granted a BA in Norwegian language and literature. This study has intended to identify the reasons which have led to an increased interest in the study of Norwegian at The Faculty of Letters of Babeș-Bolyai University over the past years. According to the data gathered from the 86 respondents, students are enrolling for reasons that account for both intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors. The fact that the only BA programme in Norwegian language and literature can be found in Cluj-Napoca might be one of the main reasons for the growing number of students. Good job opportunities (abroad and in Romania), and the reputation on the Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literature (internationalization and exchange mobilities, teaching methods, extracurricular activities, junior summer schools, etc.) also contribute to the increase in the number of students.
More...
The paper presents training programmes for teachers of Bulgarian language and literature and foreign languages aimed at acquiring Professional Qualification Levels (PQL). The specifics of each Professional Qualification Level is dealt with in detail with a specific focus on the system of continuous professional development courses for language teachers delivered at the Department of Information and In-service Teacher Training (Sofia University „St. Kliment Oridski“). The content of the training courses aimed at the Fifth and the Fourth PQL is outlined. Two learning modules – part of the general post-graduate course for pedagogic specialists are discussed in relation to the requirements for the professional pedagogic specialisation aimed at acquiring the Third PQL. Training programmes aimed at the highest degrees – the Second and the First PQL, which are of a diagnostic and innovative character are also analysed.
More...
The aim of this article is to explore the universality and playful character of the fairytale with respect to its diverse perception. Its structure is split into two parts, united by the interest in the specific ways of both children’s and primitive man’s thinking. The first part illustrates the fairytale as an intrinsic part of children literature, and attention is given to the development of the genre and the characteristics of the folklore mind. The cognitive aspect of these types of texts is being discussed as well as its communicative function and its educational effect on children. Regarding the content and semantics of the texts it is being underlined that they positively affect the reader / listener, which is a consequence of the characteristics of the folklore mind and the stereotypes it brings about. The wide use of parody as a method, which tones down the horror elements of the fairytale is being pointed out regarding the psychological interpretation of fairytales. The second part attempts to explain the model of fairytales viewed through the concept of play proving its playful nature. The focus of attention is on Johan Huizinga’s concept of homo ludens, according to which the understanding of play is a key element of every culture. Based on the intrinsic connection between the fairytale and the myths and rituals, the article makes an attempt to search for mechanisms of play in the folkore fairytale model – regarding the repetition, variability, dynamics, improvisation. The function of play is being explored in the very structure of the fairytale - plot, heroes, formulas.
More...
The poem “Cyril and Methodius”, more commonly known as “Varvi, Narode Vazrodeni…” was written in 1892 by Stoyan Mihaylovsky in Ruse. Before starting work as an Associate Professor of Literature at Sofia University “St. Clement of Ohrid”, he used to teach at the high school in Ruse, which is exactly where, on 15 April he wrote the fourteen verses and sent them to Dr. Krastev. The latter then published them in book no. 9–10 of the “Misal” magazine. The text of the hymn may seem pretty familiar to us, and maybe exactly because of this, we do not pay enough attention to the cultural connotation of the images of St. Cyril and St. Methodius in it. And the connotation is rich and intentional. The current research aims at trying to decode it and find out why exactly the images of the two first teachers are always a support in Bulgarian mentality.
More...
