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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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The extraordinary development of science and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries led to a changed perspective of the position of man in the world and of the beliefs and values that had shaped the western world. History was taking on a new course and along, a different type of society was emerging, but the direction those changes were leading to, was not clear at all. While religious faith was shaken again after the Enlightenment by the development of scientific reason and rationality, some turned in adulation to science as to a new form of religion. Many scholars, scientists and educators were searching for equilibrium, for a balance between the two apparently irreconcilable enemies, as the only way to have a proper, guided development of scientific discoveries and technological advance checked by a continuous emphasis on the moral principles that should govern society first and foremost. That was the general atmosphere in which a series of prominent figures from the worlds of science and letters were formed and were encouraged to express their views on the future of mankind. Aprestigious example in this respect was Aldous Huxley with his novel Brave New World.
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Many scholars believe that the foundations of the relationship between science and culture can be found in the Victorian friability of the boundaries between scientific knowledge and artistic expression. The awareness of the decisive changes in several areas of science brought a shift in literary perspectives as well: the prevalent themes of the age, the means through which the message is conveyed, and the variation in the frame of reference point to this period’s importance. The present study attempts to investigate the assimilation of the scientific disputes in literature and how literature becomes an attestation of the general discourse of the age. The intellectual current of the age appealed to a wide range of writers: some of them embracing the changes, others opposing the ideas advanced by the scientific development. This article proposes to discuss Lewis Carroll’s children’s literature, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic fiction within the framework of the dominant scientific discourse of the century. The concepts of transformation, religion, natural selection, heredity, species, desynchronized body, atavism, religion, and science are the aspects that link these works. The ideas advanced by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man And Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) influenced not only the general public and the scientific scene but the artistic expression as well. Alice’s journey in Wonderland is not arbitrarily constructed around the ideas of natural selection, evolution, and regression, shrinking and expanding body, nature, species of animals, and religion. Neither the accent upon Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ lineage and heredity, her relation to the sacred, her desynchronized body and atavism, nor Jekyll’s scientific pursuit, Hyde’s savagery, and animal instincts are mere accidents in the Victorian literature. The recurrence of these themes in the Victorian age are adaptations of the public discourse to the literary perception. Without proposing to be extensive, this article acknowledges that the common aspects of the presented works are conscious reflections of the writers regarding the leading thoughts and concepts of scientific life during the Victorian age.
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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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Portugal and the religiosity of the Portuguese people. In this paper, we intend to analyze some cultural aspects that define the Portuguese people, as well as its religion and religiosity. For a better understanding of the contemporary society, we will have a closer look to some historical events that had a major impact on the daily life of the peoples living in Galicia in the 6th and 12th century. We will contextualize these events by taking into account the political situation in which the Iberian Peninsula found itself at that time. Then, we will analyze some important fragments from different versions of the Bible referring to the notion of time (days of the week). The versions were chosen in order to underline the differences between various translations and the manner in which they have been interpreted along the centuries. Finally, we will discuss some relatively more recent aspects characterizing the Portuguese society and its religiosity, such as the myth created around the figure of Dom Sebastião. From the point of view of some historians, this myth is related to the one of Divino Martle (Bendito), a brave man who defended the religion in which he truly believed, against his own emperor, with the price of his life.
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In this article we aim to highlight the way in which the Romanian intellectuals in the interwar period relate to the Jewish problem starting from a brief presentation of the evolution of this aspect, as well as the particularities that make this issue different from the way it was treated in other countries. The Romanian interwar changed the situation of the Jews in Romania by offering them rights after long expectations and exclusions from Romanian politics and social life, while Romanian intellectuals became more and more involved in the Jewish issue.
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This paper analyses the way in which classical Panslavic theories are brought back to life and are reshaped in contemporary times, while trying to debunk the stereotype that Panslavism is a tsarist invention and can only be discussed in connection with Russian imperialism. As a movement, Panslavism originated in the first half of the 19th century among the Western and Southern Slavs, in a climate of crystallization of national sentiment. Until the Crimean War, the Slavs looked mainly to the West for guidance, to liberalism, to democracy, to safeguards for the rights of the individuals and of the nations – hopes that were channelled into Austro-Slavism. The Russian Pan-Slavism became prevalent only after the Crimean War, attempting to unite the Slavs spiritually (through Orthodoxy), linguistically (by establishing Russian as the official language of Slavdom) and politically, with Moscow at the centre of the new empire/federation. After a long Soviet period when Panslavism was (with some exceptions) forbidden and exiled, with the fall of the USSR we are witnessing a re-emergence of the Panslavic ideas. Although a large part of the followers of Panslavism continue to develop unifying Panslavic projects according to a hierarchical, centralized model (with Russia/Moscow at the centre), there are also theorists (like Mikhail Suslov, Boris Naimushin) who bring new perspectives, trying to highlight the positive aspects of pan-Slavism for the new democratic, multiculturalist context and to show the capacity of Panslavic projects to help overcome the tense postcolonial situation in the post-socialist space by reconfiguring the geography of the Slavic world according to decentralized, horizontal, open models that favor the periphery. The solutions for the realization of these imaginative reconfigurations come from two distinct but convergent areas: the religious and the political. Politically, Russia's "big brother" status is overtaken mainly by the sacrifice of Serbia during the 1999 NATO bombings – the event being interpreted as a crucifixion of Serbia for the Panslavic cause – and the Slavic integration initiatives of AleksandrLukashenko, as a result of which Minsk acquired the status of a Panslavic capital. From a religious point of view, the credit goes to Patriarch Kirill, who is trying, through a series of pilgrimages in the post-Soviet space, to establish the borders of "Holy Russia" – an imagined community that has many sacred centres located on the periphery and that includes not only the Eastern Slavic states, but also Moldova and Kazakhstan (just like Solzhenitsyn's model of post-Soviet Russia).
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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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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 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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