"Astérix et Obélix" – un univers pragmatique

Author(s): Alexandra Cărămizaru / Language(s): French / Issue: 2/2013

The article uses notions and concepts borrowed from Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis (i.e. speech act and ethos), combined with the actantial model developed by Greimas (1966). The author focuses on the essentially pragmatic dimension of the textual world created by Uderzo & Goscinny: the actions performed by Asterix and Obelix, the heroes of the famous comics bearing the same title, are based on their knowledge and understanding of the world they live in (dictionary and encyclopaedia), on their will to act (intention), but also on the fact that they can act (they have a mandate from their leader). This pragmatic dimension is inherent to the discourse allowing certain relationships to be established between individuals acting in specific contexts. By identifying the dominant speech acts, the author draws up the ethical profiles of the selected characters and the corresponding relations, more or les asymmetric (at the social and/or discursive level), generated by them.

"La Langue de Bois" et "Le Politiquement Correct" dans le Discours Public Roumain

Author(s): Sorina Şerbănescu / Language(s): French / Issue: 16/2017

Le discours public roumain d’après la Révolution de '89 a gardé des anciennes habitudes langagières communistes dont "la langue de bois". D’autre côté, il a emprunté, comme une conséquence de la synchronisation trop rapide à la modernité, des clichés langagiers qui continuent les tendances agressives et autoritaires héritées du totalitarisme communiste. Notre analyse imbrique la sémantique du discours, la sémiotique, la pragmatique linguistique et la psycholinguistique, se concentrant sur des corpus tirés des discours publics des dernières dix années.

"Œdipe Roi" – De l’enquête policière à la quête identitaire : noms propres et descriptions définies

Author(s): Mădălina Raşoga / Language(s): French / Issue: 4/2015

Sophocle’s tragedy, Oedipus the King, may be considered the first detective novel whose plot is built around the defining question of this literary genre: “Who is the murderer (x)?”. The existence of a murderer is thus presupposed since the beginning, which leads us to the first interpretation of the play, namely the referential investigation, aiming at the identification of the murderer to whom we assign the variable x. However, the real subject of the play is not the identity of the alleged murderer, but that of the eponymous character. The accent shifts from the referential investigation to Oedipus’s beliefs about his own origin (“Who am IŒdipe?”). Therefore, we propose a second reading level that leads us to the analysis of the play as the story of the quest for identity. We will sustain our hypothesis with the help of the notions of reference – seen from a double perspective: (i) logical vs (ii) pragmatic – and the universe of belief.

#ForgiveUsForWeHaveSinned:

Conceptual integration theory and political Internet humour

Author(s): Nihada Delibegović Džanić,Sanja Berberović / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2017

The aim of the paper is to uncover the extent to which different forms of political Internet humour can criticise current political affairs in a developing democracy such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. Specifically, applying a cognitive linguistic theory of meaning construction, namely conceptual integration theory, the paper analyses the construction of meaning of humorous Internet forms, such as memes, demotivational posters, hashtag posts, and memetic photographs, representing innovative ways of providing political commentaries on current political affairs. The meaning of political humour is constructed in conceptual blending as a basic cognitive mechanism. As it is claimed (Coulson & Pascual 2006, Coulson & Oakley 2006, Coulson 2006, Oakley & Coulson 2008) that blending can be used as a rhetorical tool influencing the audience to change the reality and even act upon it, the analysis of the construction of meaning of political humour as products of conceptual integration can reveal hidden ideologies in political discourse.

(De)Constructing Leadership through Ritualised Discourse

Author(s): Gabriela Scripnic / Language(s): English / Issue: 9/2019

This study deals with the notion of leadership, envisaged broadly as the quality of a head of state to lead his people towards a common goal while conveying the image of a role-model by both his actions and statements. During his presidential term, a head of state is confronted with many institutionalised contexts where he is expected to issue an official speech. From the numerous official speeches that a president is likely to deliver, I have chosen to dwell on one of the most ritualised discursive sequences, namely the presidential greetings on New Year’s Eve, in order to highlight how the presidential ethos is built through discursive and extra-discursive elements. In this context, I have taken into account the greetings of the Romanian ex-President, Traian Băsescu, from the period 2004-2013 (he was elected twice) with a view to analysing both the purely discursive devices (speech acts, appellatives, semantic content emphasized) and the extra-linguistic elements (place where the discourse is delivered, communication channel). The analysis aims at answering the following questions: Can we consider the presidential greetings and the choices made within and outside the discourse itself as indirect evidence of the diminution of the public support that the president had benefited from? Do the greetings emphasize the president’s effort to adapt to his audience while maintaining the tradition of a well-established ritual?

(Ne)episteminis modalumas: anglų kalbos must, have to ir have got to bei jų vertimo atitikmenys lietuvių kalboje

Author(s): Audronė Šolienė / Language(s): Lithuanian / Issue: 69/2016

This paper deals with the three types of modality – epistemic, deontic and dynamic. It examines the relation between the synchronic uses of the modal auxiliary must and the semi-modals have to and have got to as well as their Lithuanian translation correspondences (TCs) found in a bidirectional translation corpus. The study exploits quantitative and qualitative methods of research. The purpose is to find out which type of modality is most common in the use of must, have to and have got to; to establish their equivalents in Lithuanian in terms of congruent or non-congruent correspondence (Johansson 2007); and to determine how Lithuanian TCs (verbs or adverbials) correlate with different types of modality expressed. The analysis has shown that must is mostly used to convey epistemic nuances, while have to and have got to feature in non-epistemic environments. The findings show that must can boast of a great diversity of TCs. Some of them may serve as epistemic markers; others appear in deontic domains only. Have (got) to, on the other hand, is usually rendered by the modal verbs reikėti ‘need’ and turėti ‘must/have to’, which usually encode deontic modality.

(Nie)honoryfikatywne sposoby określania znanych publicznie osób w polskim dyskursie medialnym na Litwie

Author(s): Irena Masojć / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 44/2020

This article focuses on the ways of referring to public figures which involve the use of honorifics when talking about high-ranking representatives of society. In the Polish cultural tradition this function is performed by official and professional titles and the honorific pan/pani ‘mister/misses’. The study analyses designations used by participants of the discussion programme “Szósty dzień tygodnia” [The Sixth Day of the Week], which is broadcast on the Polish Radio “Znad Wilii” [By the Wilia River] in Lithuania. The research material includes 10 radio broadcasts aired in 2015 and 2016, featuring a total of 24 people (the host and 23 guests). The aim of the study is to identify the most frequently applied constructions that consist of personal names and official/professional titles, and to determine different functions of the honorific pan/pani in these constructions. The quantitative analysis makes it possible to identify the frequency of particular constructions and the tendencies prevailing in the media discourse. The qualitative analysis of the collected material reveals a variety of functions performed by the honorific pan/pani. Depending on the formal or pragmatic context, this item may endow a construction with a shade of respect or, conversely, make it derogatory. The female honorific pani firstly has a grammatical function: it is used with the titles and surnames which are masculine in form as the only indicator of female gender (e.g. pani prezydent, pani premier Szydło).

(Nie)poprawność językowa w oświeceniowych gramatykach języka polskiego

Author(s): Wanda Decyk-Zięba,Monika Kresa / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 02/2017

The object of the analysis is forms considered incorrect, non-standard, yet included and discussed in Enlightenment grammar books of Polish by: Walenty zylarski (1770), Michał Dudziński (1776), and Onufry Kopczyński (1778––1781, 1817), and in a book on the Polish language by Stanisław Kleczewski (1767). The issues of proper language use touched upon by the authors in the above mentioned works refer to various problems: spelling, pronunciation, inflection, word structures and appropriateness, syntactic connectivity, and utterance/statement clarity. The object of the evaluation is (general Polish and regional – borderland) forms which, in the authors’ opinion, violated the norms of general familiarity, semantic expressiveness, and stylistic dignity. The grammarians approve of the borrowings which entered the Polish language long ago. Each of the discussed works is another link in the debate on the Polish language, linguistic habit, and norms of language use.

(Un)translatability revisited:

transmetic and intertextual puns in Viktor Pelevin’s Generation “P” and its translations

Author(s): Roman Ivashkiv / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2019

Babylen Tatarsky, the protagonist in Russian writer Viktor Pelevin’s novel Generation “P”(translated into English by Andrew Bromfield as Homo Zapiens), works to adapt Americanadvertisements for the Russian market and witnesses how the reality of Russia’s tumultuous1990s is replaced by a consumer-driven television simulation. Puns in the advertising slogansthat Tatarsky translates, interspersed throughout the novel, are central to its plot. Some of thesepuns exhibit greater sophistication than others: in addition to utilizing homonymy, homophony,homography, paronymy, and polysemy, they involve transmesis, multilingualism, andintertextuality. This article compares how Pelevin’s translators (English, German, Polish,Spanish, and French) approached these difficult puns. The objective of this comparative analysisis to demonstrate how the intertext(s) evoked through wordplay may, on the one hand, impedetranslation, but, on the other, open avenues for creative solutions, by producing new traces andechoes of meaning that make the act of translation possible. The issues raised by the varioustranslations point to a need to re-examine the roles and tasks of the translator and underscorethe importance of keeping the (un)translatability debate open. Ultimately, this article aims tocontribute to the ongoing reconceptualization of what literary translation is and, especially,what it does: with texts, readers, literatures, and, above all, with language.

19. Yüzyil Türkistan Şair Ve Tarihçilerinden Mûnis Harezmî (1778-1829) Ve Eseri: Firdevsü’l-İkbâl

Author(s): Hayrullah Kahya / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 77/2014

Knowledge about the 19th century Central Asia Turkish language is quite insufficient. Moreover, an entire list of the artists of this period are not available as related information and documents for this period existed for many years under the domination of the Soviet Russia, a case which made it impossible to reach these documents for many years. However, knowledge about this period has increased thanks to new researches and publications. Certainly Munis Khwarazmi is one of the most important Turkestan artists in 19th century. In this paper, Mûnis Khwarazmi who earned reputation for not only being historian but also poet has been researched together with his important work Firdaws al-iqbal in which he wrote the official history of Khanate of Khiva. Initially, a short information is given about the khanates period of Turkestan (Khiva, Bukhara, Kokand Khanates) and then the life of Mûnis and his works are discussed. Following this, the most important work of Mûnis, Firdaws al-iqbal, has been examined. Phonetic and morphological properties of the work, written by Munis himself, have been examined in respect to its differing properties from Classical Chagatai Turkish until the fifth part of the work. Language style of Mûnis has been studied to be determined with the sample texts taken from the Firdaws al-iqbal.

21-oji tarptautinė specialiosios kalbos konferencija „Tarpdalykinių žinių kūrimas: specialiosios kalbos tyrimų iššūkiai“

Author(s): Asta Mitkevičienė / Language(s): Lithuanian / Issue: 24/2017

7. Sınıf İngilizce Ders Kitaplarında Cinsiyet Kavramı

Author(s): Hatice Çubukçu,Pınar Sivaslıgil / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 137/2007

This study aims to investigate ELT textbooks from the perspective of gender ideology underlying the representations of female and male figures, considering that coursebooks play an important role in children’s development of ‘gender’. The 7th grade English coursebook published by the Turkish Ministry of Education has been selected as the object of investigation, mainly because they are used by a large population at state schools. Both verbal and non verbal features of the textbooks have been analyzed through the content analysis, and discourse analysis has been applied to the verbal components to depict any possible power assymmetries reflected through language between two genders.

A comparison of heritage learners and L2 learners of Spanish: A study on compliment sequences in the classroom

Author(s): Jeremy W. Bachelor,María Jesús Barros García / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2019

The present study sought to evaluate the pragmatic competence of heritage learners of Spanish in regard to compliment sequences and the impact that pragmatic lessons would have on these students. To this end, pre and post tests to assess pragmatic recognition in regard to Spanish compliments were designed by the researchers and completed by the participants before and after a series of pragmatic interventions. Control and experimental groups were established in order to evaluate other potential variables involved. Additionally, the same lessons were implemented in two beginner L2 Spanish groups (one control and one experimental) as to determine whether or not the lessons were more suited for this demographic of students. Preliminary data suggest that the heritage groups of students already have high pragmatic competence in regard to compliments and that lessons do not have an impact on this type of learner. On the other hand, the beginner L2 Spanish students greatly benefited from the interventions and experienced statistically significant growth in the experimental group. The effect size was also calculated and found that the interventions had little to no impact on the heritage experimental group and a very large impact on the L2 experimental group. The conclusions of the study suggest that it may not be necessary to teach pragmatic norms to heritage language learners. Design, lessons, pedagogical interventions, and recommendations for future study are included.

A Corpus Linguistics Investigation into Phrasal Verbs in British Academic Spoken English

Author(s): Fatma Kübra Durna,Okan Güneş / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2020

This current study aims to shed a new light into the usage of phrasal verbs, which are one of the most avoided multi-word constructions for English learners but widely used by native speakers of English in BASE (British Academic Spoken English). The purpose of this study is to identify which phrasal verbs are used more frequently in BASE and how the findings might be utilized in educational settings. To do this, three lexical verbs (go, come and take) combining phrasal verbs with nine adverbial particles and forming 27 phrasal verbs were analysed using 1.742.886 running words in BASE. BNC (British National Corpus) was used as the core data for selecting lexical verbs and adverbial particles by benefiting from the research of Gardner and Davies (2007). The results reveal some similarities between BNC and BASE in terms of phrasal verb usage and the paper exemplifies some ways to teach phrasal verbs in the light of the analyses.

A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of modality in social transformation campaigns in Nigeria

Author(s): Mohammed Ayodeji Ademilokun / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2019

This article examines modal resources in the mediatised discourse of social transformation in Nigeria with a view to showing how they are strategically used to code interpersonal meanings for enhanced and impactful delivery of messages of social transformation in the nation. Data for the study comprises texts on aspects of social transformation campaigns in Nigeria in the context of democracy, anti-corruption crusade, insecurity and domestic violence compiled as small corpora. The data comprises texts produced by government and non-governmental actors consisting of speeches, radio commentaries, jingles, printed texts, interviews, tweets and online newspaper comments and covers the period from March 2013 to March 2018. The five-year span was informed by the wide gamut of negative realities in the nation during the time frame which led to increased mediatisation of social transformation messages. Corpus-assisted critical discourse approach was employed for data analysis, using Fairclough’s (1989, revised 2015) dialectical relational approach, the corpus linguistic tool of Antconc, chi-square test on R-Studio and normalised relative frequencies. Data analysis revealed that the different participants in the discourse characteristically used different modal resources to reflect their power on the one hand and resistance on the other and to capture the intensity of their views and feelings on the actions required for Nigeria to experience genuine social transformation. The study concludes that even though the discourse is largely ideational, modal resources are deployed for emphasising the urgency and seriousness of the issues in the ideational contents of the discourse.

A corpus-driven analysis of structural types of lexical bundles in court judgments in English and their translation into Lithuanian

Author(s): Donata Berūkštienė / Language(s): English / Issue: 70/2017

Formulaicity is one of the characteristic features of legal discourse, which manifests itself not only at the level of wording, “but also in the content, structure and layout” of legal texts (Ruusila & Londroos 2016, 123). Formulaic language, which includes phrasal and prepositional verbs, idioms, collocations, lexico-grammatical associations, lexical bundles, etc., are building blocks of legal discourse shaping legal text meanings. However, up to now, far too little attention has been paid to the nature of frequently occurring “sequences of three or more words that show a statistical tendency to co-occur” (Biber & Conrad 1999, 183), i.e. lexical bundles, in different genres of legal texts. Most studies in the field of lexical bundles in legal texts have only been based on one language (e.g. Jablonkai 2009; Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011; Breeze 2013), whereas translation-oriented contrastive studies on lexical bundles are lacking. In respect of the aforementioned gaps, the aim of this pilot study is to analyse structural types of lexical bundles in court judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union in English and to examine the way these structures are rendered into Lithuanian. To gain insights into the frequency and structure of lexical bundles, the present study uses the methodological guidelines of corpus linguistics. The classification of lexical bundles into structural types is based on the framework suggested by Biber et al. (1999, 2004). For the purpose of this study, a parallel corpus of court judgments was compiled comprising approximately 1 million words of original court judgments in the English language and about 8 hundred thousand words of court judgments translated into Lithuanian. Lexical bundles in this research were identified using the corpus analysis toolkit AntConc 3.4.4 (Anthony 2015). A concordance program AntPConc 1.2.0 (Anthony 2017) was employed to find Lithuanian equivalents of the most frequent lexical bundles identified in the English court judgments. The evidence from this study suggests that different structural types of lexical bundles have more or less regular equivalents in Lithuanian; however, in most cases, these equivalents tend to be shorter.

A Corpus-Driven Study on the Turkish Focus Particle Sırf

Author(s): Muhammet Fatih Adıgüzel / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2019

This is a corpus-driven study based on the TNCv3.0 to determine the co-occurrence patterns of the focus particle sırf (only/just) in its scopes. The study revealed that sırf’s syntactic associates are largely phrases or clauses of purpose or reason. Over half of the 430 concordance lines analysed had various purpose or reason expressions as sırf’s focused constitutes. The most frequent colligates in the exclusive operator’s scopes are reason and purpose markers diye or için, ranking the first two in its collocation list. This very strong lexical priming suggests a pragmatic motivation. By choosing sırf rather than any other particles like sadece or yalnızca, the speaker not only marks the single reason or purpose for which something is done but also often reflects a negative attitude to reasons or purposes as being unjustifiable. The most unfavourable prosody was detected in the collostruction sırf +noun+ olsun diye, in which almost all the nouns in the ‘noun’ slot are abstract, most of which have negative connotations.

A critical note on the evolution of social theoretical and linguistic underpinnings of contemporary discourse studies

Author(s): Piotr Cap / Language(s): English,Croatian / Issue: 2/2019

This paper gives a critical overview of analytical approaches dominating the field of discourse studies in the last three decades, from the perspective of their philosophical and formative bases: social constructionism and linguistics. It explores different conceptions of the theoretical nexus between these two bases leading to the emergence of three distinct yet complementary strands of thought (i–iii). The paper starts with poststructuralist views of discourse salient in (i) Laclau and Mouffe’s Discourse Theory. Laclau and Mouffe’s assumption that no discourse is a closed entity but rather transformed through contact with other discourses is taken as the introductory premise to present a large family of (ii) critical discourse studies, characterized as text-analytical practices explaining how discourse partakes in the production and negotiations of ideological meanings. Finally, the paper discusses (iii) three recent discourse analytical models: Discourse Space Theory, Critical Metaphor Analysis, and Legitimization-Proximization Model. These new theories make a further (and thus far final) step toward consolidation of the social-theoretical and linguistic bases in contemporary discourse studies. The empirical benefits of this consolidation are discussed in the last part of the paper, which includes a case study where the new models are used in the analysis of Polish anti-immigration discourse.

A diminished propensity to compute scalar implicatures is linked to autistic traits

Author(s): Greta Mazzaggio,Luca Surian / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2018

We investigated whether there is an association between autistic traits in the broader phenotype and the ability to compute scalar implicatures. Previous studies found that the frequency of autistic traits is higher in students of science than of humanities. Here we recorded the frequency of rejection of underinformative scalar items in students enrolled either in a science or in a humanities curriculum and assessed their autistic traits using the Autism-Spectrum Quotient questionnaire. We found that rejections were less frequent in science curricula students than in humanities curricula students. Moreover, rejections were associated negatively with autistic traits and positively with performance on Theory-of-Mind tasks. These findings suggest that autism cognitive phenotype is negatively associated with a propensity to spontaneously derive scalar implicatures

A direct application of medical corpora to academic writing: A specialized concordance search interface and Moodle-based courseware

Author(s): Shozo Yokoyama,Chizuko Suzuki,Seisuke Yasunami,Naoko Kawakita,Ryo Ohba / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Despite a relatively large number of research papers discussing corpus-based discourse analysis for medicine, few attempts have been made to uncover the rhetorical distinctiveness of subdisciplines such as Genome Bio-Science, Nursing, Public Health, and Clinical Surgery. The aim of this study is to apply the frequencies of verbs (including modal verbs) found in medical research articles (RAs) among these four subdisciplines to materials development by incorporating a specialized concordance search interface and Moodle-based courseware for medical students.