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The European Language Framework as a natural consequence of the communicative approaches places the user and the trainee within the language as two social actors who are to accomplish some tasks according to present circumstances and background. In this context the present paper approaches the question of the French language for specific purposes, and it also stresses the arguments in favour or against the interest in learning teaching.
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We have to start by asking whether Don Juan can be considered a myth. This is the question that Jean Rousset was asking himself at the beginning of his book <<The Myth of Don Juan >>. But the definitions of the myth are numerous and varied and it is not easy to answer .The first authors that spoke about the myth of Don Juan were Ramiro de Maeztu, Victor Said Armesto and Francisco Agustin. There is no doubt that it is the most universal of the Spanish literary myths. Don Juan didn’t need much time to forget about his first author, to travel across the world, speaking all the languages and becoming the main character in many novels, dramas, essays, works, etc., written or composed by famous authors like Byron, Moliere, Goldoni, Pushkin, Balzac, Alejandro Dumas, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Apollinaire, Montherlant, G.B. Shaw, Victor Eftimiu, Stendhal, Albert Camus, Gregorio Marañon, José Ortega y Gasset, Kierkegaard, or Mozart. Francisco Márquez Villanueva emphasized the “semiological unstableness “ of Don Juan and he thought that he was a “ timeless and boundless myth “; every period had its Don Juan and it identified itself with him , or with his victims . Kierkegaard noticed that the first Don Juan is not a seducer and more, in Tirso’s work, Don Juan does not seduce the women, he just deceives and dazzles them promising a brilliant marriage. Maybe Tirso did not want to make his main character look like a seducer, but more like a sinner that gets his punishment (let’s not forget that Tirso was a friar). But the following authors made him the very archetype of the seducer.
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The article presents an attempt to unify defining vocabulary which belongs to the lexical classes of verbs and nouns, and which is used in Słownik języka polskiego edited by M. Szymczak (1998). The analysis has used the electronic version of the dictionary - Komputerowy słownik języka polskiego (1998), where 1069 verb definitions have been excerpted from. It aimed at decreasing the capacity of rare vocabulary and increasing the amount of frequently used one - theme words - by changing lexemes into their hyperonyms according to the principle of defining series formation or by their replacement with synonymous lexemes, as an additional method. The article presents the issue related to statistic linguistics. It reports on the way of frequency of vocabulary usage list formation and the way of division into frequent and rare vocabulary. Then, it describes methods of rare vocabulary reduction and presents figures resulting from unification of the vocabulary. In conclusion, there are initial and final lists of frequent vocabulary.
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The main question examined in this article is whether the vacillation of Ukraine’s political regime is not a regular, permanent condition. Having two main aims – (1) to construct a theory of Ukraine’s post-soviet political transformation, and (2) to disclose the possibilities of democracy consolidation in this country – the article starts with making some “corrections” to the transitologist approach to regime change. Then it proceeds with the proposal of model for analysing post-soviet regime transformations. The model consists of three main explanatory variables: (1) the structure of political elite, (2) the ‘rules of game’ prevalent in the system, and (3) the strategies of political elite aiming at gaining business and/or mass support. Various interrelations of these variables may produce four possible ideal-type outcomes of regime change – (1) democracy, (2) ‘democracy with adjectives’, (3) zero-sum game (a very unstable option when political regime may be temporarily democratic but is at a huge risk of downfall), (4) authoritarianism. The article predicts that due to the structural peculiarities of Ukraine the zero-sum game will remain very intensive in Ukraine in the future as well. Thus, the permanent instability of the state and both – democracy and authoritarianism – in Ukraine (a zero-sum game) may actually be considered to be its consolidated political regime form.
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The purpose of this article is to discuss the principle of responsible governance as a basic principle, upon which the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania has relied in explication of the peculiarities of constitutional status of Member of Parliament. On the basis of analysis of the decision of the Constitutional Court, made on 1 July 2004, this article seeks to reveal the specifics of argumentation of the decisions of Constitutional Court, as well as their impact on legislation. Institutions of constitutional supervision in two post-communist countries (Hungary and Lithuania) are compared with a focus on the causes and reasons of their activism and the legitimacy of such activism.
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The article analyzes the concept of national state and the meaning of national independence. Political independence has proven to be a much greater challenge to the nations of Eastern and Central Europe. The population of the region is not merely aware of the fact that political independence is difficult to gain; they believe that it is far more important to handle the tasks related to moral and cultural justification of independence. The said aspects do not vanish from the horizon of philosophical, moral and political reflections of the nations within the region. Links with the Western culture is one of the topical subjects in Eastern and Central Europe. However, from the vantage point of political independence the Western culture tends to undermine the spirit of the nations within the region rather than uplift it. The ailments of the Western culture, when brought to the region, are perceived as the factors destroying the meaning of independence.
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There are two important differences in the outcomes of postsocialist transformation of the Baltic countries: (1) Due to the inclusive citizenship laws the liberal democracy in Lithuania is more consolidated than in other Baltic countries. (2) However, in the economy Estonia has established reputation of “a shining star from the Baltics”, while Lithuania during first decade of market transition acquired the reputation of a pupil that although made the homework asked by the international institutions, but always a bit too late and never with excellent marks. While the explanation of the first difference is relatively uncontroversial, the opinions clash around the explanation of the differences in the economic performance. The article analyzes how can the reemergence of the difference between Baltic South and North be explained after the levels of socio-economic development between Baltic states had converged during the Soviet time? Did better initial economic conditions, peculiarities in the political process (e.g. exclusion of significant part of non-ethnical Estonian population that could be potential electorate for postcommunist party like the Lithuanian “Labourists”), Protestant cultural legacy, better public relation work – or what? – make Estonia “a shining star from the Baltics”? The paper closes with the discussion of the further difficulties of the culturalist explanation (including the Latvian riddle again) and possible solutions, and presents some proposals of further research relevant for the progress in the testing of conflicting explanations.
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Starting from the premise that The Hieroglyphical History is a cultural sign, the author shall distinguish, on the one hand, the message of the work as sign, with a statute similar to the significant and on the other hand, the code, which functions like a significant.
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The twentieth century was a century of revolutions crisis - because it began with a planetary revolution of founding and ended up with a revolution of planetary destruction of the foundation; between the beginning and the end there was the Holocaust - but extended in the third millennium century. Human being, from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century, took place from the eclipse of reason to the eclipse of the absolute. The author presents two philosophical attempts to overcome the sense lack of the absolute.
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Our analysis has the goal of highlighting the way two biggest thinkers of humanity, one from east, the other from west, pleaded for a united Europe from political, cultural and spiritual point of view, using the scientific and philosophic knowledge in making some political, theological projects confirmed by history, some becoming real.
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The main point of the text is that prejudicative relations, although of a logical nature, can help solving some important philosophical nature, like the relation between subsistence, being, and existence, the problem of universal or the matters pertaining to essence, quiddity or Porphyrius’ five voices.
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This article aims to show the influence of two ancient philosophical doctrines in Dimitrie Cantemir’s main philosophical work, the Divan. Among stoic ideas of the ephemeral world, the power of wisdom, the beauty of the soul and the attitude of the wiseman towards death, there are some other references, like the world considered as a dungeon and the body as the soul’s tomb which clearly are prove of Neoplatonic influence, even if no Neoplatonic authors are ever quoted in the whole work. Obviously poorer than the infuence of the overwhelmingly Christian tradition, the few references to ancient philosophical tradition are significant to the message that sends Cantemir whose ideal seems to be a symbiosis of European spirituality.
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The author sustains the necessity/possibility of a theoretical-methodological complementarity among structuralism, semiotics, and hermeneutics within the effort to conceptualize meaning as existential experience. These analytic perspectives must be also r
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What we intend to illustrate is what kind of human prototype Dimitrie Cantemir builds in his work, having as cultural model the Greek philosopher Plato. From this perspective, consistent advocacy for knowledge, for truth, is the foundation of the whole “moral edifice" which is especially dedicated by Cantemir in the Sentences (Sententii). Cantemir's work is an invitation to self-knowledge, thereby contributing to the education of the Romanian human nature.
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Stravinsky’s aim of coordinating man and time through music is explored in the context of changes in our understanding of time at the turn of the twentieth century. His growing expertise in the construction of temporalities of differing quality and depth to create a vehicle for greater temporal and spiritual awareness is traced through the early works from Petrushka to Le Sacre du Printemps, and the background to their time qualities explored. At a distance of 100 years some thoughts are offered on the effect that the première of Le Sacre du Printemps had upon the audience with respect to a more particular awareness of time.
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This paper discusses contemporary empirical approaches to the topic of music and emotions that are conducted at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and musicology. I show that within this interdisciplinary programme a number of general issues were posed that are not that distant from the questions asked by the classical authors such as Stravinsky and Hanslick. The main purpose of the paper is to show that there are three areas of cognitive and behavioural activity of the listener and the respective types of musical emotions: embodied emotions, cognitive emotions, as well as associative and contextual emotions.
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The most famous sentence in Igor Stravinsky’s autobiography reads: “Music is by its very nature powerless to express anything at all.”241 When it appeared, this sentence surprised his audience. After all, Stravinsky had composed some of the most expressive music of the twentieth century, from the lyrical Petrouchka to the dramatic Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) to the elegaic Symphony of Psalms.242 But ever the polemicist, Stravinsky was in actuality blasting those whom he regarded as his aesthetic opponents, such as the followers of Richard Wagner; such “impurists” were always marshaling music in the service of extramusical ends, from national solidarity to religious freedom. Seeking to repair a perceived imbalance, Stravinsky portrayed the musician as a craftsman whose materials of pitch and rhythm in themselves harbor no more expression than the carpenter’s beams or the jeweler’s stone.
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This paper revisits an old question that neither I nor anyone has been able to answer very well, namely, why is it that nineteenth century composers, who had fairly easy access to nonwestern musics in notation, rarely quoted them? But by the early twentieth century, such quotations became quite common. This article argues that the rise of finance capital, as theorized by Rudolf Hilferding in the early twentieth century, marked the ascendance of exchange value over use value. As a rise of the ideologies accompanying finance capital, composers, and everyone else, began to regard other musics, other sounds— other objects—as something that could be exchanged. This process is exceptionally clear in works by Igor Stravinsky such as Le Sacre du printemps, which, while drawing on nineteenth century nationalistic impulses, also shows a relationship to other musics, appropriated as raw material. The new ideology of exchangeability introduced by the rise of finance capital continued through musique concrète in the 1940s and into the rise of digital sampling in the 1980s and after.
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