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This paper investigates the use of address forms among the academic staff of the Faculty of Arts and Islamic Studies at the Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria. The aim is to find out whether there is variation in the use of the terms between the members of academic staff of the Faculty which has six Departments (Arabic, English, History, Islamic Studies and Sharia, Nigerian Languages, Linguistics and Foreign Languages). An Ethnography research method and the Variationist Sociolinguistics Theory are used to collect and analyze the data. Following the findings, three address forms are presented in more detail, namely titles, nicknames, and kinship terms. Special attention is put to the title Malam, which originally referred to a teacher or a person versed in Islamic knowledge, but nowadays is used more commonly than any other type of address forms. The research shows that age, gender, social status, degree of intimacy, and context of communication determine the use of the address forms among academic staff. The findings reveal that the staff members of The Faculty favor traditional address terms which are used in Hausa society rather than the terms Corresponding to their professional rank. In addition, these address forms are culture specific and the dominant culture is Hausa.
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In their 2018 paper “On the Metaphoric Use of (Fictional) Proper Names”, Corazza & Genovesi explored what speakers do when they utter a fictional name in a metaphorical way to refer to actual individuals. The example given was “Odysseus returned home” referring to their friend Bill, who had returned after a long and hectic journey. With such an example in mind, Corazza & Genovesi claimed that speakers produce a metaphorical utterance where properties of Odysseus are mapped onto the referent that the speaker intends so that they refer to that person. That is to say, the name “Odysseus” somewhat ceases to be a proper name, and instead becomes something akin to a Donnellan’s referential use of descriptions, i.e. a description that successfully picks out an object of discourse even if the latter does not satisfy the descriptive content conveyed by the description. In our example Bill does not satisfy the property of being called “Odysseus”. In this paper, we connect the previous work by Corazza & Genovesi’s with anaphora, in particular with the use of anaphoric definite descriptions linked to a metaphorical use of a proper name. With fictional proper names in mind, we are interested in cases where speakers anaphorically refer to the actual referent. For example, we are interested in utterances of the sort “Odysseus returned home, he1 is hungry” or “Odysseus1 returned home, the/that brave soldier1 is hungry”, where “Odysseus” is metaphorically used to refer to the actual person, Bill, the individual the speaker has in mind. Such sentences leave us wondering how the anaphoric pronoun or description simultaneously carries the content from the fictional subject, and refers to Bill. On a cursory analysis, anaphora forces the properties attributed to the actual referent (e.g., Bill) into the background, like pragmatic presupposition. In the cases of anaphoric complex demonstratives and definite descriptions, the speaker emphasizes, or makes salient the further implications shared between the fictional character (e.g., Odysseus) and the actual referent (e.g., Bill; and that Bill, like Odysseus, had a harrowing journey).
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The article continues the analysis of the problem previously raised by the author, which deals with the nature of the headlines of modern new media. This article presents a pragmatic perspective on the study of headings aimed at attracting the attention of readers from the point of view of their correspondence to the postulates of communication of J. Grice. The article shows that the attention of the reader is often attracted by the violation of such cooperative principles as the postulate of quantity (maxim of quantity). The author focuses on the speed of dissemination of information under a certain heading and notes the transformation of headlines on various news sites. This makes it possible to assess the place of a news site in the media space and to determine how correctly the news resource uses the information received from another resource. The article attempts to establish a correlation between the “viral” headlines and the nature of modern culture that affects the reasons for their creation and transformation. Following the concept of media education of the English theorist of culture and media education L. Masterman, the author outlines possible ways of developing critical thinking on the basis of such headings, which are an integral part of the “new media”.
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The article presents formal, semantic, and pragmatic features of Slovenian subject impersonal reflexive constructions, e. g. Nekoč se je veliko delalo ‘Back in the day, one used to work a lot’. Constructions with unexpressed arbitrary agents should be distinguished from sentences in which the nominative agent has been omitted, but can be determined from the context. Subject impersonal reflexive constructions use the reflexive forms of non-reflexive verbs. In such constructions, the morpheme se is a grammaticalized element that does not express a reflexive action. The constructions under discussion can express habitual or iterative actions performed by a non-expressed human agent and can also have a deontic meaning. Reflexive constructions with arbitrary agents mainly involve verbs denoting conscious human actions and activities, which sets them apart from weather impersonals or subjectless constructions describing physiological states. Subject impersonals, characteristic of South Slavic and West Slavic languages, are parallel to those in which the arbitrary agent is expressed lexically (Nekoč so ljudje veliko delali ‘Back in the day, people used to work a lot’). We compare subject impersonals with other impersonal and passive constructions in Slovenian and, at the same time, contrast their features with similar constructions in other South Slavic languages and Russian.
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This paper concerns the topic of slur reclamation. I start with presenting two seemingly opposing accounts of slur reclamation, Jeshion’s (2020) Polysemy view and Bianchi’s (2014) Echoic view. Then, using the data provided by linguists, I discuss the histories of the reclamation of the slur ‘queer’ and of the n-word, which brings me to presenting a view of reclamation that combines the Polysemy view and Echoic view. The Combined view of slur reclamation proposed in this paper postulates meaning change while fleshing out the pragmatic mechanisms necessary for it to occur.
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Address Forms in a Multisystemic Approach: A New Theoretical Model of Analysis. The aim of this paper is to propose a new theoretical model for the analysis of address forms. In the first part of the paper, I do a critical evaluation of existing theoretical models, showing, on the one hand, that the divergent approaches reflect the complexity of address research, and, on the other hand, that there is a need for a unified model to englobe morphosyntactic, semantic, pragmatic, discursive, and diachronic approaches. In the second part of the paper, I present the multisystemic theory developed by the Brazilian linguist Ataliba de Castilho and demonstrate that it can be successfully used for the analysis of address forms. In the last part of the paper, I show that lexicalization, semanticization, discursivization, and grammaticalization (linguistic processes identified by Ataliba de Castilho in his theory) can explain linguistic phenomena of the address systems in Portuguese and Romanian.
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This paper focuses on a subgroup of Macedonian light verb constructions (LVCs) with дава (give) which can be interpreted as a transfer of a verbal message from the first to the second human participant, as one of the possible metaphorical extensions of (give) is in the field of verbal communication. The second participant is oftentimes not overtly expressed on the surface of the text, but can be reconstructed from the context. These LVCs are mainly based on verbs of speaking and some verbs of cognition, and unlike the LVCs based on deontic verbs of communication, in these constructions the first participant does not try to alter the behavior of the second human participant. Although it may seem at first sight that LVCs (with their verbo-nominal structure) are simply stretched versions of already existing full verbs (FVs), yet there is no absolute synonymity and interchangeability between them. The rationale behind the use of a LVC as opposed to its full verb (FV) counterpart lies in the information structuring potential of LVCs (evident in the possibility for reduction of arguments), as well as the advantages offered by presence of a nominal component in the LVC, such as quantification and premodification by adjectives.
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The subject of analysis in this paper is the speech act of apology. The comparative analysis was conducted in relation to the form of the speech act and the strategies used to express it. The analysed data were obtained through an online discourse completion task among American and Macedonian university students. The DCT includes three situations that differ in accordance to the social distance and the social status of the participants, and the severity of the offence. The aim of the research is to define the pragmatic structure of apologies, by determining the possible similarities and differences in both languages. Herein, speakers in both languages can avoid future miscommunication and become aware of different communication styles and cultural features of the languages.
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This paper investigates whether, and if so, in what way, argumentation can be profitably described in speech-act theoretical terms. I suggest that the two theories of argumentation that are supposed to provide the most elaborate analysis of it in speech-act theoretical terms (namely van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst’s Pragma-Dialectics and Lilian BermejoLuque’s linguistic normative model of argumentation) both suffer from the same two flaws: firstly, their “illocutionary act pluralism” assumption and secondly, a lack of interest in where arguing belongs in the classification of illocutionary acts. I argue that these flaws derive from the authors’ reliance on an intention-based speech-theoretical framework. Finally, I adopt a deontic framework for speech acts in order to propose an alternative way of accounting for argumentation which seems to overcome the two limitations outlined above. According to this framework, argumentation may be conceived as a speech act sequence, characterized by the conventional effects brought about by the communicative moves (as illocutionary acts) of which it is composed.
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Based on the data from Japanese personal blogs the paper addresses grammar and pragmatics of the Japanese constructions with the quotative marker to. The aim is twofold: (a) to describe the actual use of quotatives in informal electronic discourse; and (b) to put the Japanese data in the context of the current discussion about the nature of the direct/indirect speech opposition. Japanese is shown to be an intriguing case when it comes to distinguishing direct and indirect reports. First, it lacks standard indexicals typical for languages known as “standard average European”, e.g. there is no personal agreement, first and second personal pronouns are extremely rare, hence, one can rely only on optional indexicals, like benefactives, honorifics or the so called final pragmatic particles. Furthermore, even these optional indexicals may operate controversially within one and the same utterance — some being oriented towards the external narrator (which is typical for pragmatically indirect reports) and other being oriented towards the internal speaker (which is typical for pragmatically direct reports). Second, whatever type of indexicals is used, if at all, the report is marked by the quotative marker (complementizer) to. This also distinguishes Japanese from standard average European languages where complementizers normally introduce only pragmatically indirect reports which constitute an embedded clause. Third, the quotation marks (kagi) are optional for pragmatically direct reports, especially in informal electronic discourse. The kind of data we present supports the approach to reported speech that doesn’t favor either/or decisions, but rather is based on multifactorial analysis that considers the whole range of possible parameters and isolates their observed language-specific clusters.
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Linguistic, socio-cultural, communicative, and cognitive characteristics of the folklore discourse were studied based on the folk lullaby texts in order to identify the nationally driven informative “stimulus” of the cultural and historical context that determines the unified communicative and pragmatic space of lullabies. Through descriptive, comparative, and stylistic analysis, the texts of lullabies were considered as a cultural and historical “code” translating the most important attitudes, which are essential for the successful socialization of a child. It was shown that the folk conceptual framework is based on four semantic units. It was proved that lullabies have aesthetic, emotional, and pedagogical influences on children’s consciousness through both verbal and non-verbal communicative tools. As a result of the analysis of the textual and non-textual characteristics of lullabies, it was concluded that this genre is a universal source of the age-old knowledge and experience for children, which guides them to the world of adults.
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Explicit Import Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of Explicatures [Głównym celem niniejszego artykułu jest przedstawienie argumentów za tym, że modelowanie treści przekazywanych wprost w komunikacji werbalnej w najważniejszych teoriach pragmatycznych jest obarczone wadami. Przyjmuje się w nich, że odbiór treści komunikowanych eksplicytnie polega na pragmatycznym wzbogaceniu odkodowanej formy logicznej wypowiedzi do uzyskania pełnej formy propozycjonalnej, o określonych warunkach prawdziwości. Ten rodzaj wzmocnienia, związany z dodawaniem materiału pojęciowego do niedookreślonej formy logicznej zdania, nie odzwierciedla adekwatnie praktyki komunikacyjnej i prowadzi do wielu komplikacji na poziomie teorii. Czerpiąc z wcześniejszej krytyki pojęcia eksplikatury, ukazanej w pracach Borg (2016) i Jary’ego (2016), artykuł przedstawia dodatkowe argumenty przeciwko modelowaniu treści przekazywanych wprost w sposób, w jaki robią to czołowe koncepcje pragmatyczne. Podkreśla się, że wiarygodna poznawczo teoria komunikacji werbalnej powinna właściwie oddawać naturę procesów przekazywania i odbioru znaczeń, a proponowane instrumentarium teoretyczne nie może ich zniekształcać.]
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Obwohl die perzipierte Sprechflüssigkeit eine subjektive Einschätzung der Äußerungsflüssigkeit eines Sprechers ist, zeigen Forschungen, dass es eine Korrelation zwischen der Wahrnehmung des Zuhörers und den objektiven Parametern der Äußerungsflüssigkeit gibt. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wurde eine Untersuchung durchgeführt, bei der die Bewerter (drei Deutschlektorinnen und drei Studenten) die Sprache der Probanden nach der ersten und wiederholten Ausführung derselben Aufgabe bewerteten. 22 Studenten des ersten Semesters des Germanistikstudiums nahmen im Studienjahr 2020/2021 an der Untersuchung teil. Die Ergebnisse der Analyse anhand des Fragebogens zeigen, dass die wiederholte Ausführung relativ niedrig, aber immer noch höher im Vergleich zur ersten Ausführung bewertet wurde. Interessant ist, dass beide Ausführungen der Probanden von den Studenten und Lektorinnen ähnlich bewertet wurden. Ein Einblick in die retrospektiven Kommentare zeigt, dass die Studenten angeben, dass die Probanden in der wiederholten Ausführung flüssiger sind und die Wiederholung der Aufgabe als nützliche Aktivität betrachten. Die Lektorinnen (Bewerterinnen) geben an, dass die Probanden in der zweiten Ausführung selbstbewusster sind, Sätze leichter bilden, schneller sprechen und versuchen, weniger Füllwörter zu verwenden. Die Untersuchung zeigt eine positive Wirkung der Aufgabenwiederholung auf die Sprechleistung, vor allem auf die Sprechgeschwindigkeit.
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The mechanisms of metaphorical evaluation have to date been little explored in the study of evaluative language and the study of metaphor, despite some earlier attempts to place them more firmly on the linguistic science agenda. The founders of Conceptual Metaphor Theory have argued that metaphor structures thought by influencing not only our understanding of concepts, but also our ability of criticising, evaluating and stance taking (Lൺඈൿൿ, Johnson 1999: 2), which is sporadically mentioned in approaches to linguistic evaluation, but with no theoretical or practical interaction with existing analyses of metaphor in discourse. The present paper explores the nature of metaphorical evaluation, drawing on the example of metaphorical representations of language in newspaper discourse. The analysis of the discourse on language is used to discuss metaphorical evaluation, to empirically examine its prominence in the discourse, and its contribution to the construction of meaning, as well as to discuss the broader theoretical and methodological implications. The findings point to the importance of metaphor in the evaluative subsystem of graduation, seen in the interaction of metaphorical and hyperbolic meanings. More broadly, it is argued that bringing together conceptual metaphor analysis and Appraisal Theory analysis offers a rich theoretical apparatus for socio-cognitive discourse analysis.
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In this essay, we attempt an interpretation of the postmodernist literary discourse from the perspective of image, imaginary and character. As hyposthases of a self-generative type of fiction in Mircea Cartarescu’s postmodernist discourse, the body as text and the text as body are reccuring themes. The text is a written simulation of the materiality of the body, throught the lines of which the image of the author allows itself to be seen programaticaly. Approached from the point of view of the fascination exercised by the transformation of the body into letter upon the postmodernist writer, the theme of corporality unveils spectacular depths. This is the reading we propose for Mircea Cartarescu’s shortstory.
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he assertion from which we start our study is that in the last decades the anaphor has been defined relatively homogeneously from one researcher to another, from two perspectives: a. The syntactical-semantic perspective; and b. The rhetorical perspective - in the linguistics of the text, cultivated in pragmatics, in cognitive sciences, etc. We approach the anaphor in our research, from a syntactical-semantic perspective, as a semantic relation between two linguistic elements, in which the element with subsequent occurrence in the speech does not have a stand-alone meaning, being interpreted by reference to the antecedent. The objective of the research is to analyze the anaphora in the medical discourse. The descriptive-linguistic, analytical and contrastive methods are used in the research. One of the main conclusions is that in the medical discourse, the typology, the ways of accomplishing the anaphora, according to the criterion of referential continuity, are particularly complex.
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We focused in this paper on a special relation that functions at the pragmatic, discoursive level unlike all the other relations in the Romanian language: the parenthetical relation. The variety of its elements (simple or complex parts of speech, sentences or even phrases), its marks and the possibility to have a syntactic role inside their structure bring different difficulties or controversies with it. We explain some of these difficulties or errors: the difference between the disjunctive connector ori and the pragmatic connector or; the parenthetical feature of an explanatory structure or the lack of this feature; the difference between the adverbial predicate and the modality object etc.
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The cycle and practice of showing a second or unknown dialect – is principally a part of applied semantics, yet can be an interdisciplinary field. There are four principle learning classifications for language instruction: open capabilities, proficiencies, multifaceted encounters, and numerous skill levels.
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No other phenomenon has affected the natural course of life of the entire planet since World War II until the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to implementing the rules generated by the state of emergency or by the state of alert, the citizens are seeking parallel solutions, that function as a refuge, where they can withdraw from fear. Being out of control, this feeling can irreparably paralyse rational thinking. Natively endowed with a very well-developed sense of humour, our compatriots found an opportunity to turn it to account by using their ingenuity. They created a rich inventory of comic texts, which would sweeten the fear of the unfriendly profile of this coronavirus. In this paper we refer to a special type of urban folk literature, generated, as previously stated, by physical isolation at home, but which occurred simultaneously with the exit from latency of a spirit which is thirsty for figment. To be more specific, we analyzed some of the jokes that have circulated on various communication channels (especially electronic ones) and whose invariant theme is the human existence during the epidemic, captured in all its fundamental aspects. A condition for the successful communication of a joke is placing the interlocutors in a familiar context of immediate conceptions, interests and aspirations, which means that both the speaker and the recipient benefit from a common background. On the one hand, we tried to identify the semantic meaning of the texts we took into consideration, and on the other hand, we studied how we are led, “activated” to the pragmatic meaning of the statement through latent, implicit content.
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