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L’étude compare les idéologies autour du français et du roumain, dès lors que ceux-ci deviennent langues nationales et sont investis d’une valeur symbolique. À partir de l’analyse des discours esthétiques, scolaires, législatifs et scientifiques concernant la langue nationale, l’article sépare les contenus des idéologies – essentiellement le purisme prospectif et rétrospectif et le « génie » de la langue – des politiques linguistiques que ces contenus ont pu marquer, et identifie les nombreux points communs entre la situation du français et celle du roumain.
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The paper focuses on critical writings by the Catholic theologian Hans Küng, following the intertwining of the discourse strands “birth control” and “authority of the magisterium”. In doing so the present paper employs a combination of interpretation methods inspired by Critical Discourse Analysis, aiming to show how discursive strategies are used to construct an opposition between the supposedly backward teachings of the Church and the own critical and progressive stance. Based on the microanalysis of the sample texts, the paper argues that Küng`s approach is not free of populist rhetorical devices and topoi such as the opposition between the few and the many, the ad hominem argument, the use of collective symbols or the idea of crisis and rebirth.
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Affected by many political and thus social events, the Romanian society inthe middle of the XIXth centurywent through many pressures, this being a particularly important period in terms of its changes and evolution both nationally and culturally. It is a period in which the intellectuals of the time try to get involved, to find solutions for the freedom and emancipation of Romanians. Moreover, many writings from the three Romanian countries reflect and denounce the events, abuses and aspirations of freedom and union.Subsequently, out of the desire to leave to future generations notes, sometimes detailed, and explanations on a wide range of issues, many writers considered it necessary to publish their memoirs. G. Sion is one of them andhe manages to offer us remarkable pages, in which the rendering of observations, but also of thoughts, feelings and personal experiences are intertwined with an admirable sensitivity and modesty of their author.
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From the current image of a European literary scene influenced more or less by the classical canons to the influence that realism has today in the daily literary space, the current study aims to present how realism is recepted in marginal zones of Europe. From the major works of the French epicentre to the adaptations of Eça de Queirós and Duiliu Zamfirescu of the same literary current, the national identity of a whole nation is built with and through literature. The comparison between Portuguese and Romanian creations is not only meant to represent the natural veracity of the literary expression and description that characterizes the nineteenth century, but also the need to render the effect of reality as a structural analysis, especially concerned withidentifying and systematizing major joints of the narrative.
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The researcher who intends to study magical realism and its hypostases in literature finds with astonishment that, over time, this concept has had many interpretations that have often proven to be contradictory. Most statements refer to the notion of magical realism as a literature of borders, overcoming them, capturing new images and presenting reality from various points of view. In this situation, reality is perceived as a game between real and imaginary, as a harmonious fusion between individual and collective consciousness, being an oscillation between believing and not believing what is presented. Undoubtedly, these inconsistencies between the interpretations of magical realism occur mainly due to the oxymoronic nature of the concept that dares to join magic with realism. Magic is perceived as something that happens beyond reality, while realism excludes magic, and the resulting sphere may have various meanings aimed at the sphere of "representation and narrative", but also specific meanings of culture, history and identity, characteristic of what is natural or, on the contrary, supernatural. It is precisely this association of the real with the unreal that has also generated the consideration of magical realism as a branch of other literary genres and, therefore, in this article, we intend to distinguish magical realism from the concepts that it has often been associated with: fantastic, realism, surrealism.
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Although it is less known, there is mutual admiration between Romania and Brazil, that has offered the opportunity for affectionate testimonies and impressive cultural results. Elena Teodorini, Haricleea Darclée, Florica Cristoforeanu and Mihail Plopschi in music, Samson Flexor, Ștefan Eleutheriades and Emeric Marcier in painting, Ghorghe Leonida, Dumitru Dornescu and Ion Mureșanu in sculpture, enjoyed a well-deserved artistic recognition in Brazil. At the same time, Canta Brasil group and samba music, Rodolfo Amoedo, Antônio Poteiro, Josélia Costandrade’s paintings and NeusaMoraes’s sculpture reverberated in the soul of the Romanian people, who has always showed an insatiable appreciation of “the country of Carnival”. In the second subchapter, we will approach the literary dialogue established by means of translations, recalling the decisive contribution made by the Romanian literary vanguard in setting the basis for the whole Brazilian modernism and finding that, as expected, Brazilian literature is better represented in Romania than vice versa. In the third and last chapter, we set out to articulate, through the prism of a poetic mirror that places in dialogue the poems of George Topîrceanu, Daniela Luminița Teleoacă, Ático Vilas-Boas da Mota and Luciano Maia, the Romanian vision on the Brazilian spirit and the image of Romania in the Brazilian imaginary. We will find, after analyzing several poems, that, while Romanian poetry appreciates the exoticism associated with Brazil and highlights everything that is foreign to our culture, Brazilian poetry tends, on the contrary, to assume a common identity, built on the foundation of a shared and specific Latinity. All these will give us a global image, but also an in-depth analysis of the Romanian-Brazilian dynamics, able to clarify not only the intercultural mechanisms, but also the identity of each culture.
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This paper aims to analyse the different representations of culture emerging from the European Capitals of Culture (ECoC) corpus. A second aim is to see the multiple ways in which culture is represented by the Romanian proponents of the ECoC bids. The theory we resorted to is cognitive linguistics as fostered by Lakoff and Johnson, and the method we applied is corpus-based. Our analysis relies on the ECoC corpus; more specifically, we quantitatively and qualitatively analysed the collocations pertaining to culture and the conceptual metaphors retrieved from the corpus. In our analysis, the metaphorical and non-metaphorical representations of culture emerging from the ECoC corpus reveal how the proponents of the bids perceive culture.
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This paper analyses selected pieces of talk-in-interaction, focusing on the gender-related variability of language used by candidates to the presidency of the USA in the debates of 2016 and 2020. The participation framework of the two successive events, namely a female-male interaction starring Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, followed by a male-male interaction between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, enabled an insight into the functionings of different- vs. same-gender talk, within the genre of the presidential debate, in concrete speech events. Looking into ‘the gender thing’, the questions to be answered by this analysis point at the relation between gender and language, the differences, if any, between the way men and women use language and especially between the way language is used in female-male as opposed to male-male interactions. The analysis also considers the speakers’ selection of vocabulary and grammar used to refer to the opponent, as well as speech acts that contribute to ‘performing gender’, namely what it is that makes the protagonists ‘talk like a female’ or ‘talk like a male’. The genre of the presidential debate is by definition about conflict and has a highly adversarial, antagonistic nature, frequently characterised by specious reasoning. Each of the candidates is engaged in a permanent effort of disqualifying the opponent, while serving a strategic purpose of making a politically favourable impact on the audience, as the stake of the election is enormous and the outcome also depends on which narrative imposes itself and determines the general perception upon a candidate. Thus the construction of a reliable self is a main concern of candidates to presidency and the process requires them to make sophisticated use of the most powerful weapons they can own in these battles, words. The approach to gender that this analysis relies on is based on the theoretical framework of the difference model, as initiated by O’Barr& Atkins (1980), on the grounds set by Robin Lakoff (1975), and furtherly built on by Cameron (2005) and Weatherall (2002). These (rather) recent theories of gender and language use sustain that gender in itself does not account for differences in language use at an individual level but that it is the social status and the power within society that determine the way one communicates. Still, gender-related variability in language use is an interesting topic to look into at a contextual level, where gender significantly produces and reticulates one’s communication patterns.
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This work seeks to find and describe the suffixes that create collective names in the Castilian and Romanian languages from 16th and 17th centuries, aiming to mark the Latin inheritance and to justify the analogy between both Romance languages. In Latin there are numerous and specific feminine lexical groups, like plants, objects, abstract nouns, ‘pluralia tantum’, fruits that, in the late and medieval periods of Latin, suffered a transformational process from neutral plural in -a to feminine singular, naturally preserving the collective meaning. Subsequently, the collective derivatives are classified in two main categories: firstly from adjective themes and secondly from nouns. The relevant suffixes from both sections could be distinguished as: -etum/ -eta, -aria, -alia with their variants -ilia, -ulia and -mentum/ -menta, -amen, -imen, -umen, -atura. Furthermore, in Castilian, on one side we found ourselves before the Latin inheritance and we pursued the modality in which the following collective suffixes have been transferred and persevered in the spoken and written language: -men, -menta,-amen/ -ambre, -imen/ -imbre, -umen/ -umbre, -edo/ -eda, -dura/ -adura, -ero/ -era, -ería/ -ería, -al/ -alla. On the other side, the collective characteristic is adopted in the new Castilian forms, phenomenon that is driven by the Iberian Peninsula speakers who tend to perceive the derivate methods inthe process of words’ formation and to experiment the versatility of the language. Therefore, this fact exposes us the path of collective meaning of the subsequent suffixes received from Latin or other languages: -ar, -ario/ -aria, -ajo/ -aja, -ía/ -ío, -aje, -ado/ -ada, -zón, -eno.In Romanian, the series of Latin suffixes (-ame/ -amă/ -ami,-ărime, -ime/ -âme/ -imi, -ét/ -ăt, -ură/ -tură, -ătate, -mânt/ -minte, -ar, -ăreț, -eață, -it, -ărit, -ină, -ie, -ărie) exceedthe suffixes from different origins (-enie, -iș, -iște), while the collective derivatives are more locally created rather than inherited from Latin. Afterwards, the description of the suffix types becomes more explicit during the study of the corpus,which is a representation of the religious and literary characters of the 16th and 17th centuries.
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The aim of this article is to suggest activities which could be organised in French classes through the interpretation of the literary writing of Marcel Aymé. I also intend to provide a list of characters who act in the world created by the French author’s stories. The world created by Marcel Aymé in his Contes du chat perché (The magic pictures) is peopled by humans and animals acting in life scenes of the countryside, with natural acts and gestures in perfect harmony with the space and the epoch evoked. As the main characters are two sisters of school age, the universe of school could not be absent in the multiple frameworks evoked as toile de fond of the actions and scenery of human relationships. The world described by Marcel Aymé is composed of a series of frames in which fiction and reality blend in harmony and the characters created by the author accomplish actions characterised by magic and reality at the same time. My intention is to underline the reality of the school universe through enumerating lexical aspects characteristic to objects, attitudes and characters finding their place in the world of Marcel Aymé’s stories. For the analysis proper, the chosen text is the story entitled "Le problème". This text evokes a situation connected to homeworks. The gestures, actions and attitudes connected to the school environment, involving characters and attitudes, allow me to arrive to specific lexical fields. Other stories in which school is present will be named, occasion to underline the importance of this environment in complete accordance with the age of the characters in the human universe described by Marcel Aymé. I also propose activities which could take place during classes of French as a foreign language, with stress on students’ age and level of language, in accordance with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.
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The aim of this paper is to propose a different approach to communication, focusing on the Braille system, its history and the rules behind this system in relation to foreign languages such as Japanese. Although any letter in the alphabet can be easily converted to Braille, this is not the case with Japanese language. This is mainly due to the fact that it features three forms of writing, namely Hiragana, Katakana (collectively called Kana) and Kanji (Chinese ideograms), the latter exceeding 2000 characters. There are simple algorithms, obtained through repeated human experience, verified by more or less scientific experiments, which could transform a message from Braille or mimetic-gestural language into a verbal one. This leads to an inter-semiotic process, as a translator from the current language and visual writing, to tactile and vice versa.Translating a text from Braille into alphanumeric characters can be easier than translating a text written from one language into another, because in Braille there are clear rules according to which this translation takes place, while the process of rendering a message from a language in the other requires additional effort to adapt the message, which sometimes requires a careful and long study of the culture and civilization. However, the Braille system only covers the alphanumeric elements. Thus, in a book, if there were any images, in most situations, in the Braille version, they are omitted, turning the poly-semiotic content into a mono-semiotic one. Furthermore, one must take into account the fact that the Japanese language rendered through the Braille system undergoes certain transformations, namely the visual form of Kana or Kanji is transposed into the phonetic one, later being transcribed in various combinations of dots. No official solution has been adapted to find the algorithm needed to integrate Kanji into a 6-dot system such as Braille. Nevertheless, this has not prevented the emergence of proposals for combinations within the system to address this issue.This shows that the Japanese appeal for Kanji is intimately linked to the shared experience of mastering a complex body of knowledge that defines the sense of belonging. Whether or not they facilitate communication is a secondary consideration. What really matters, as Braille for Kanji is clearly shown,as it is the sociolinguistic function of the Ideographic Myth, namely to sanctify the status quo.
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Japanese-born British Kazuo Ishiguro is a fiction writer rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, whose polymorph opera is appreciated for the literary quality of books. The memory, the identity, the nostalgia, the self-illusion and the capacity of individual to overpass own limits are topics constituting Ishiguro personal brand. The literary approach was often an anticipation of ontological realities, a view of the future. Never Let Me Go (2005) is a novel about the ethics matters arisen by the problem of cloning bioengineering in formulas of artistic anthropology. The novel was catalogued differently: as dystopic story with fantastic elements about an alternative universe created by the genetic engineering and as a love story disguised in alternative story. Inscribing in the bloodline of Huxley, the innovation of Ishiguro consisted in the fact that he has represented “the cloning kitchen” from a totally different perspective than that of previous novelists – the one of cloned beings, whose true mission is to become living donors of organs for transplantation. There is however in this tensioned atmosphere human elements: the pupils practice arts and fell in love, proving a sensitive capacity of the soul. The artistic conflict consist in the confrontation between humanists and representatives of medical industry, the last taking the control. Ishiguro’s novels do not give solutions, “the clones’ nation” does not try to protest or to escape. The global matters the novel arises inscribes in treating the science as a continuation of the metaphysics, as updating of the spirit by transforming experimentally the living, as delegation of the moral.
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Of the various voices that contribute to the polyphony of a literary work, that of the author and his reader are the most important, despite them being often less manifest than those of the characters. The modalities of the engagement of this dialogue between the author and the reader are highly diverse and are subjected to a pragmatic protocol that is being negotiated – implicitly or explicitly – in accordance to each author’s writing project, but also to the horizon of the readers’ expectations. As such, certain authors choose to attenuate the distinction between the different levels of narrative instances, while others, on the contrary, complexify the enunciative architecture by multiplicating the differences between them. To illustrate such a strategy, we will focus on the novel Jacques le Fataliste et son maître by Diderot, which uncontestably remains one of the most striking examples of a writer exploiting and ironically playing with the hiatus between the different narrative instances. But this ludic stance doesn’t mean that Diderot is not pursuing a very serious aim, namely crafting a model reader whose reading grid is no longer dependent on the referential fallacy.
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The paper argues that rituals and symbolic cultural artifacts are external models of the world. The key idea is that human agents do not have direct or unmediated access to the external world. Humans can sense and act upon intermediary processes such as cultural artifacts and rituals and construct a model of the target external world. In biological terms a Markov blanket mediates sense-making exchanges between the agent organism and the environment. In the cultural niche, humans, via rituals, model themselves modeling the world. In this structure of several nested Markov blankets the individual is included in a larger blanket. Hence, cultural practice offers a model of the world and a model of the self in the world. The cultural practice allows the creation of a cultural body/self for the agent. Rituals mediate the relationship between the organism and the world. They also simulate the “incorporation” of the world and the self via the dynamic process of control. By action and sensory perception, the agent includes the external states in its area of control of the blanket. The agent and the cultural practice are coupled in a bi-directional control cycle. The agent controls the ritual and the ritual, once included in the field of control of a new encompassing blanket, changes the structure of the agent which becomes a new entity/self. Rituals targeting the individual designate the personal transformation (e.g. birth, transition from child to adult, marriage, and death) and rituals of collective transformation (spring festivals that mark the passage from one year to another) target the evolution of the world in time. Rituals formulate (in a descriptive manner) hidden realities and, at the same time (in a performative manner), bring them into existence as external realities that can be described and controlled via what is commonly labeled as magical thinking. Rituals, conceived as explanatory models, simultaneously provide evidence for a self nested in a cultural niche and for a conceptualized external environment.
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The present paper calls into question the withered metaphor, as one of the most suggestive and long-lived metaphors of the metaphor, intensely and enthusiastically used among aestheticians and stylisticians. Interpreting its meaning in the light of the consecrated theories, as well as based on the imaginary schema of plants which gives its substance, it is believed that its successful invention and function were made possible only within a narrow framework of understanding the metaphorical phenomenon, strictly from an aesthetic point of view. Conversely, a significantly wider framework in approaching the metaphor, which would take into consideration theories of cognitivist origin, could show how this concept, going itself through a withering process, can do injustice to a large category of metaphors, and, for this reason, it should be reconsidered. If metaphorization as a phenomenon is no longer viewed as being specific to the poetic thinking, but it is seen rather as a fundamental cognitive process, able to generally explain both the functioning mechanisms of the human thought and the principles of linguistic creativity, then metaphors such as the foot of the mountain, the mouth of the valley, etc., could get the chance to a new life, without carrying the stigma of degradation. If such metaphors were no longer judged as aged forms, lacking their assumed original beauty and brightness, but as fundamental conceptual metaphors, their revaluation could gain a well-deserved place among metaphors: that of the most eloquent and transparent proof of how the human brain makes different metaphorical transfers from the source-domain to the target-domain, so as to create new words or idioms, and, consequently, new concepts.
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Among the writers of his generation, Alecsandri is the most comprehensive one, expressing not only the patriotic aspirations and desires, but also the discoveries from the universe of the private life and trying to make himself noticed in almost all the main literary genres and species. By different circumstances, Alecsandri gets to travel through Moldavia, Wallachia, Bucovina and Transylvania, to the European part of Turkey, to Italy, Austria, Germany, France, Spain, Great Britain, North of Africa, either for personal pleasure, to accompany Elena Negri, who was trying to find a more favourable climate for her fragile health, or for official business. All these travels and each of them separately are part of the development of his creation, leaving marks in his fiction and poetry and “it is printed on the screen of the human experience which defines his public and private personality”. In one of these travels, Alecsandri will discover the folk poetry, discovery which will profoundly mark his destiny as a writer and it will also have immeasurable consequences on the entire development of the Romanian literature from the last century, but also from the years to follow. As a result of the translations into French, German and English of the folk poems or of some of his original poems, Alecsandri becomes one of our first modern writers who became famous also abroad, being accessible to the foreign world.
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The effect of semantic links leads to the modification / non-modification of the lexical meanings of the components following the semantic influence. It has been proved that when a component retains its meaning, it (this meaning) can serve as a motivation for the signifier - the perception of the meaning of the stable polylexical unit (SPU). In these denominative SPUs the image is missing, and the motivated components can be both the modal verb and the noun. Moreover, these elements also include in their semic structure the semes of certain lexical and grammatical values. This gives denominative SPUs the ability to designate those realities in the surrounding world, which cannot be named monolexical correlations of SPUs. Preservation of lexical meanings in the components of stable polylexical units depends on several factors of a semasiological, etymological, and grammatical nature and which is manifested by keeping the meanings of one or more components of the SPU. When we speak of retaining the meanings of all SPU elements, we refer to the denominative polylexical units, which are manifested in Romanian by some set expressions, and when we mention the preservation of the meaning of only one or several components of stable polylexical units, we refer to phraseological expressions, which are connotative. In this case we can speak of the motivation of either total or partial stable denominative or connotative polylexical units.
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This article is devoted to the functions of idioms in a sentence. In the work the word ídiom is used to define phraseological units. Idioms or phraseological units are properly studied from the point of view of their semantic and structural peculiarities, but their functions in a sentence are not given due attention to. Different transformations can take place in idioms. Very often they are the result of the application of specific transformations in the interests of a witty economy of expression. In other words, the application of the transformation is linked with the achievement of a specific stylistic effect. An idiom can become an institutionalised expression when it is approved by the usage of the language. The usage of an idiom or of a word-group in the sentence creates big problem from linguistic point of view and still there is no unanimity of ideas regarding this point.The origin of an idiom can help the translator to know why and where this or that idiom appeared. It may help to find a right idiomatic set-expression in the target language. The knowledge of the functions of idioms in a sentence can help learners to analyze and translate sentences better. An idiom in the text is investigated as a single lexical unit notwithstanding its structure. The author considers that an idiom can be a subject, a predicative, an object, attribute and adverbial modifier in a sentence.
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As we know, there are currently two opposing trends in the choice of educational standards: on the one hand, the search for individualization and, on the other hand, the standardization of the educational service in the sense of standardization of the most common model. The purpose of this paper is to present some linguistic and pedagogical reflections on the cross-cutting approaches that can be adopted, on the one hand, for the development and consolidation of students' language skills in using the French language and, on the other hand, for the teaching of non-linguistic disciplines in French within international programs in the context of globalization. These reflections emerge from our knowledge of the field, both theoretical and practical, in the implementation of teaching focused on general French, French for specific purposes and, lately, French for academic purposes within the Filière Francophone of the Academy of Economic Studies of Moldova. The work sheds light on the new role of the language teacher who has to overcome in his approach a certain number of linguistic and sociolinguistic difficulties faced by learners, and help them succeed in the transition to the standard of teaching à la française, thus ensuring that they take ownership of this new standard. This implies regular links between the teachers of French language and the teachers of specialized subjects in order to set up a common system to help students understand the university courses by creating pairs of language teachers and specialized teachers.
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