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Book review: Books as Events in Europe and the Ottoman Empire (17th c. -19th c.). Editors: Nadezhda Alexandrova, Raya Zaimova, Anna Aleksieva. Sofia, Bulgarian Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, 2020.] http://bulgc18.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Dalgiat-osemnadeseti-vek-3.pdf
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The article examines the processes of the development of the Bulgarian magazine, published in the Czech Republic, 'Roden glas' ('Native voice'), and its half-century history. The purpose of an article is to analyze the factors that led to the need of a migrant community to publish its own media and to reason the significance of this type of media products as main contributors to the cultural identity of the Bulgarian diaspora and the preservation of its history.
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The article focuses on Methodology and Literature education of pedagogy students - the most expected future primary school teachers, as a prerequisite for the effective formation of the reading comprehension skills of primary school students. The necessity of deep knowledge of contemporary child literature as well as the classic works for children is underlined
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Different theoretical backgrounds for the study of literature leads to different objects of investigation. This article is concerned with the distinctions of two types of theoretical backgrounds (semiotic and semantic) and some consequences in the study of a particular field of investigation of literature: fictional texts and fictive worlds. It is commonly considered that fictional texts are non-referential. This consideration fits in the study of literature with a semiotic theoretical background. In a study of literature with a semantic background fits another presupposition: fictional texts are in a particular sense deemed referential. This article is concerned with the contrast of these positions and some implications for investigations of fictive worlds as part of the study of literature.
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In this study, we propose the analysis of a series of biblical quotations in the last Cervantine novel in order to identify the role that these could play in highlighting the meanings of the book and in the narrative strategy of the author.
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Serving as introduction to this Special Issue, this article presents a thematic review of topics involved in studies on humour and belonging. It briefly elaborates on the intricacies of concepts such as humour, sense of humour and belonging and their relationships. It then provides a selective review of some major relevant studies. Finally, the themes and contents of the Special Issue are introduced.
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This paper combines perspectives from evolutionary biology and linguistics to discuss the earlyevolution of laughter and the possible role of laughter-like vocalisation as a bonding mechanismin hominins and early human species. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, we hereemphasise several things: the role of exaptation, the typically very slow pace of evolutionarychange, and the danger of projecting backwards from the current utilities of laughter to inferits earlier function, hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years ago. From the perspectiveof linguistics, we examine both the semantics of the word ‘laugh’ and the vocal mechanics ofhuman laughter production, arguing that greater terminological care is needed in talking aboutthe precursors of laughter in the ancient evolutionary past. Finally, we turn to hypotheses abouthow laughter-like vocalisations may have arisen, long before articulate language as we know ittoday. We focus in particular on Robin Dunbar’s hypothesis that laughter-like vocalisation,which stimulated endorphin production, might have functioned as a bonding mechanism (a kindof “vocal grooming”) among hominins and early human species.The paper contributes to the special issue theme (Humour and Belonging) by casting a longlook backwards in time to laughter-like vocalisation as a distant evolutionary precursor ofhumour, and to bonding as an evolutionary precursor to cognitively and socially modern formsof “belonging”. At the same time, it cautions against casual theorising about the evolutionaryorigins of laughter.
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Drawing on a range of American, Australian, British and Scandinavian research into laughter,the current paper will use the form of pragmatic analysis typically found in qualitative researchand apply it to data produced by the quantitative methodology common in the author’s owndiscipline of psychology. Laughter will be examined as an indexical that serves both a discoursedeictic function, designating the utterance in which it occurs as non-serious, and a social deicticfunction, marking the laughing person’s preference for social proximity with fellowinterlocutors. The paper will then analyse examples and data pertaining to three types oflaughter bout derived from taking laughter as an indexical. First, solitary listener laughter willbe argued to signify a deferential acknowledgement of continued solidarity with the speaker.Second, solitary speaker laughter will be suggested to mark a simple preference for solidarity.Third, joint laughter will be accepted as a signifier of actual solidarity that may also be used tomark status depending on which party typically initiates the joint laughter. Joint laughter thusacts in a manner closely analogous to the exchange of another set of indexicals, the T and Vversions of second person pronouns in European languages. Finally, the paper will concludeby examining the problematic case of laughing at another interlocutor, before brieflyconsidering the implications of this pragmatic perspective for traditional accounts of laughteras well as for future research.
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This study examines the use of online humour in a subversive local community Facebook group set up in 2017 by disgruntled members banned from a similar group “in opposition to [the original group’s] arbitrarily-applied rules, [its] enforced happiness, and [its] suppression of any post that isn't about giving away lemons or asking to borrow small appliances”. The dissatisfaction with the guidelines and the administration of the original Facebook group provides rich material for humorous posts in the new group, many with varying degrees of aggression directed at the founder and certain members of the “Dark Side”, as the original group is frequently referred to. This article will demonstrate how the use of humour in this new rival Facebook group is used for the purposes of inclusion and exclusion, and how it contributes to a sense of belonging in this online community of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991) created by a small group of selfdeclared dissidents. It will be shown how the humour shapes the identity of the group through the members’ shared ideologies and beliefs (Tanskanen 2018), and how the humorous messages intended to denigrate and belittle the “Dark Side” reinforce unity among the group members, since the feeling of superiority over those being ridiculed coexists with a feeling of belonging (Billig 2005). Fifteen single comments or multi-post threads were chosen for analysis. These appeared during the first twenty months of this rival group’s existence, and included primarily affiliative and/or aggressive humour (Meyer 2015) directed at the original group. The analysis was carried out using elements of computer-mediated discourse analysis (Herring 2004), and an insider participant-observer online ethnographic approach. The examples chosen illustrate how the humour is used to unite the members of this subversive group by dividing them from the original one, to create the joking culture (Fine and de Soucey 2005) of the new group, and in so doing, creates and sustains the members’ shared identity as irreverent breakaway troublemakers.
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Our study examines the impacts on workers when organisational humour is repeated,sustained, dominating, and potentially harmful, and thus can be considered to be bullying. Inan ethnographic study of an idiosyncratic New Zealand IT company, we observed humour thatwas sexualised, dominating, and perpetrated by the most powerful organizational members.We argue that the compelling need for belonging in this extreme organizational cultureinfluenced workers to accept bullying humour as just a joke and therefore acceptable andharmless even when it contravened societal workplace norms. Our contribution is inidentifying and extending the significant theoretical relationship between workplace humourand bullying that, to date, is not well-explored in organizational research.
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Successfully joining a new workplace community is demanding, especially when this involvescrossing national boundaries in addition to team boundaries. For outsiders, humour is anarea that arguably presents a challenge to full participation, particularly when localunderstandings are not shared, nor even recognized as distinctive. Newcomers face thechallenge of navigating the trajectory from legitimate peripheral member towards core status(adopting the terms of the Community of Practice model). This involves cooperating withothers in interaction, including engaging with humour and laughter as a way of indicatingbelonging. Here belonging is operationalized using the two dimensions proposed by Antonsich(2010), namely (1) a sense of belonging and (2) the politics of belonging as evidenced throughnegotiation with others. Applying an Interactional Sociolinguistic approach, I offer analysis ofnaturally occurring workplace interactions and reflections from skilled migrant interns in NewZealand workplaces. I discuss the place of laughter in attempts to demonstrate teammembership, arguing that these attempts at belonging require the cooperation andendorsement of insiders. The findings indicate that, however benevolently intentioned, thelocal colleagues’ use of humour, and their reactions to the humour and laughter produced bythe skilled migrant interns, often results in a sense of othering and exclusion. This is keenlyfelt by the interns who note the difficulties that taken for granted practices create in theiracceptance and progress. In many cases the result is laughing along, as an outward signal offit, rather than laughing with which suggests a deeper sense of belonging.
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Defended PhD theses in Bulgaria in the field of linguistics, literature, history, folklore, ethnography and art studies.
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Data about scientific events in the field of the humanities in Bulgaria in 2022.
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The article presents a study concerning the development and testing of innovative educational approaches for developing language competences of engineering students. The study was carried out among 1st and 2nd year students of the specialty „Technical Mechanics“ at the University of Chemical Technology and Metallurgy (UCTM) – Sofia, Bulgaria. An original bilingual educational tool was developed for this purpose. It was designed to support and improve the learning process in specialized foreign language classes.
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