A Semiotic Approach to Language Ideologies: Modelling the Changing Icelandic Languagescape

Author(s): Stephen Pax Leonard / Language(s): English Issue: 2-4/2020

Attempts have been made to examine how speakers frame linguistic varieties by employing social semiotic models. Using ethnographic data collected over many years, this article applies such a model to Iceland, once described as the ‘e-coli of linguistics’ – its size, historical isolation and relative linguistic homogeneity create conditions akin to a sociolinguistic laboratory. This semiotic model of language ideologies problematizes the prevailing discourse of linguistic purism at a time of sociolinguistic upheaval. The analysis shows how an essentializing scheme at the heart of Icelandic language policy ensured that linguistic “anomalies” such as “dative disease” and “genitive phobia” indexed essential differences. “Impure” language was indicative of un-Icelandicness. Once monolingual (indeed monodialectal), the Icelandic speech community is increasingly characterized by innovative linguistic transgressions which thus far have not been instrumentalized by language policy makers. It is shown how a semiotic model can help us analyse the function of language ideologies more generally.

A Socio-Cultural Aspect of Anti-language

Author(s): Monika Piechota / Language(s): English Issue: 8/2019

The article has been devoted to the phenomenon of anti-language and the focal point of the paper refers to the analysis of socio-cultural processes involved in the formation and reception of anti-language. The analysis has been aimed at defining the circumstances of the occurrence of anti-language as well as determining its role and functions at both individual and collective levels. My general approach to the study of anti-language outlines the social functions which govern the emergence of anti-languages with the explicit reference to language, context and text. Kenneth Burke (1966) defines man as a symbol-using animal. In his “Definition of Man”, Burke draws attention to the concept of negativity when he argues that negatives do not occur in nature and they are solely a product of human symbol systems. According to Burke, “(...) language and the negative ‘invented’ man (...)” (Burke 1966: 9). The study has begun with the premise that anti-language permanently depicts an antagonistic attitude towards the official language, whereas the negative attitude towards anti-language translates directly into stigmatisation of its users. The negativity of the affix anti—in anti-language has been culturally and socially structured as antithetical to language. Nevertheless, language and anti-language do not necessarily forge a typical antithesis in a polar sense. Victor Turner (/1969/ 1975) employs the affix anti—for his term anti-structure and explains that the affix has been used strategically and does not imply radical negation. This paper seeks to revise the one-dimensional attitude towards anti-language and fortify its social significance with a new quality. The basis for the study of anti-language has been its multi-functionality and multifaceted character. A small corpus of anti-languages has been analysed in order to illustrate a complex and polysemic nature of this phenomenon.

A sociolinguistic investigation of Arabic ‘professional reputation’

Author(s): Ahmad Khalaf Sakarna / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2013

The current work attempts to investigate the vital role of linguistics in saving and defending ‘reputation’ as an important social and cultural phenomenon that is widely known in Jordan as al-isim ‘the name’ or al-sum‘a ‘the reputation’. A good example that illustrates the common application of this social phenomenon in the Arabic culture is an ordinary job known as samsara, i.e., the act of marketing a property, which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been studied in the linguistic literature. The study attempts to shed lights on the different linguistic features associated with the struggle to save ‘reputation’ within the field of samsara. It argues that it is a big challenge for alsimsār, ‘the dealer’, to resist losing ‘reputation’, as maintaining it requires mastering the skill of using certain linguistic strategies and structures, which I call linguistic power, to maintain al-isim or al-sum‘a as an important social and cultural value. It is an interesting case where three different fields (business, linguistics, and sociology) interact in which business appeals to using linguistic and social tools to survive socially and professionally.

A Sociolinguistic View on the Romanian Young Adults' Language

Author(s): Bettina Ene / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

The present study explores the linguistic changes that have ocurred in contemporary Romanian in the last few years and illustrates the major impact of Anglicisms and Americanisms in the Romanian young adults’ everyday speech. We wish to offer a brief insight into the actual social contexts in which these language patterns occur and discuss briefly the theoretical framework that supports our investigation. The aim of the present study was to explore in more detail the discourse patterns frequently used by our target group, namely a homogeneous group of young adults (predominantly students, teenagers or young employees), and gather tangible data that supports our initially stated hypothesis.

A statistical analysis of satirical Amazon.com product reviews

Author(s): Stephen Skalicky,Scott Crossley / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2014

A corpus of 750 product reviews extracted from Amazon.com was analyzed for specific lexical, grammatical, and semantic features to identify differences between satirical and non-satirical Amazon.com product reviews through a statistical analysis. The corpus contained 375 reviews identified as satirical and 375 as non-satirical (750 total). Fourteen different linguistic indices were used to measure features related to lexical sophistication, grammatical functions, and the semantic properties of words. A one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) found a significant difference between review types. The MANOVA was followed by a discriminant function analysis (DFA), which used seven variables to correctly classify 71.7 per cent of the reviews as satirical or non-satirical. Those seven variables suggest that, linguistically, satirical texts are more specific, less lexically sophisticated, and contain more words associated with negative emotions and certainty than non-satirical texts. These results demonstrate that satire shares some, but not all, of the previously identified semantic features of sarcasm (Campbell & Katz 2012), supporting Simpson’s (2003) claim that satire should be considered separately from other forms of irony. Ultimately, this study puts forth an argument that a statistical analysis of lexical, semantic, and grammatical properties of satirical texts can shed some descriptive light on this relatively understudied linguistic phenomenon, while also providing suggestions for future analysis.

A Strategic Analysis of Translation Problems in a Polish Detective Novel:

Seans w Domu Egipskim

Author(s): Maria Piotrowska / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

The study explores the translator’s decision-making process and implementation of strategies and techniques in the English rendition of the contemporary Polish detective novel entitled Seans w Domu Egipskim. The main objective of the study is to analyse various translation problems, such as culturemes and idioms, and consider pragmatic gaps that may occur in their rendition from a language of limited diffusion, like Polish, to a dominating language, like English. Dynamic and contextualised strategic analysis conducted within the ARTS methodological framework and based on Pym’s minimalist competence model (2003) leads to observations on the nature of cultural knowledge, awareness of cultural meanings encoded in culturemes and pragmatic assumptions in intercultural communication. Conclusions from the conducted case study emphasize the mediating role of the translator in “playing the strategic translation game” and overcoming communicative barriers imposed by the cultural distance.

A Structural Analysis of Newspaper Articles

Author(s): Madalina Cerban / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2015

This article analyses the structure of newspaper articles as text organization, taking into account the three elements of structure which represent the minimal unit of interaction in written texts. The term ‘exchange’ is used as referring to its structure that is made up of three parts: initiation, response and follow-up. The second part of the article focuses on text analysis, explaining that the triad consists of three turns or elements, namely, Lead, Follow, and Valuate, serving distinctive functions of initiation, follow-up, and evaluation. The last part of the article refers to triad combinations that form the text itself.

A study of appropriacy of cultural conceptualizations of taboo topics in EFL classes

Author(s): Elaheh Rahimi / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2019

The cultural practices related to local uses of certain topics are a socially communicative minefield for English learners. The purposes of this study were twofold. First, the cultural linguistics framework was employed to investigate the appropriateness of cultural conceptualizations (CCs) of taboo topics in Iranian EFL classes. A revealing result was that students do not feel embarrassed or uneasy about using CCs of taboo topics. Second, the study attempted to explore teachers’ and students’ perceptions about the effects of employing taboo topics in EFL classes by means of interviews. The results indicate that teachers need to be cognizant of the forbidden nature of these topics and approach them critically via CCs to avoid insulting students. They also provide a basis for pedagogical implications for instructors in Iran teaching English as a foreign language.

A Study of Assyrians’ Language Use in Istanbul

Author(s): Arda Arikan,Ozan Varli,Eyüp Yaşar Kürüm / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2017

Being one of the oldest Christian communities in the Middle East, Assyrians have continued to live in various parts of Turkey for thousands of years. Today, the estimates related to the number of Assyrians living in Turkey vary between 4,000–25,000 while they cannot benefit from the rights put forward by the Lausanne Treaty among which schooling is the most important. Assyrian community can be said to be deteriorating in number. This decline in the number of Assyrians living in Turkey raises the question of whether they could maintain their ethnic identity while maintaining their language (Syriac). No studies so far have been carried out to find out the linguistic practices of Assyrian community living in Turkey, as well as their attitudes toward the languages they use. This study aims at shedding light on the present situation of Syriac used among the Assyrian community living in Turkey. The participants are limited to those living in Istanbul due to practical reasons. In this study, language attitudes and language use practices of Assyrian community living in Istanbul are found out through a language attitudes questionnaire. It is hoped that the results of the study will provide the current situation of the Syriac language in terms of its ethnolinguistic vitality as spoken among the community. It is also hoped that the results of the study will provide useful data for those who would like to help protect the ethnolinguistic identities of Assyrian minority in Turkey, as well as all those dispersed around the world, which seems to have become increasingly important for such a country at the gates of the European Union as Turkey.

A Study of Gender-Conditioned Use of Inflectional and Periphrastic Forms in English Adjective Comparison

Author(s): Jelena Grofulović,Vladimir Ž. Jovanović / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

First introduced to the study of language by Robin Lakoff in her 1975 book Language and Woman's Place, gender has gained a status of a significant variable when it comes to language realization (Frank, 1978). As such, gender is an object of many sociolinguistic studies (Jespersen, 1922; Kramer, 1974; Edelsky, 1976; Thorne et al, 1983; Crawford, 1995) and is assumed not only to play a role in the pragmatics of language usage, but also to influence the frequency and nature of different lexical and structural realizations, resulting in what Kramer termed “a genderlect” (Kramer, 1974). The aim of this paper is to present the results of a case-study of periphrastic and inflectional instances of the grammatical category of comparison in English, attempting at answering the question whether gender causes a preference for periphrasis in language usage, which, in the broadest sense, presents a multi-unit alternative to a single-unit meaning, be the meaning lexical or grammatical, and the unit a word or a bound morpheme. We analyzed a sex-wise and quantity-wise symmetrical corpus, comprised of different registers and genres – fiction, scientific non-fiction, and on-line magazine articles, encompassing a million words approximately per sex, and looked for the frequency of periphrastic instances of the two categories. Our assumption is that gender on its own, with all other social and textual variables excluded (discourse, register, author’s age and social groups, personal language background) is not a sufficient factor to unambiguously and conspicuously determine an author’s/speaker’s preference for the periphrastic form of the studied grammatical values.

A Study of Spanish Language Growth

Author(s): Frances Kvietok Dueñas / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

Spanish is a piece of the Ibero-Romance gathering of dialects of the Indo-European language family, which developed from a few vernaculars of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the breakdown of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. The most established Latin writings with hints of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the ninth century, and the main deliberate composed utilization of the language occurred in Toledo, a conspicuous city of the Kingdom of Castile, in the thirteenth century. Current Spanish was then taken to the viceroyalties of the Spanish Empire starting in 1492, most prominently to the Americas, just as domains in Africa and the Philippines.

A szintó cigányok társadalmi és nyelvi azonosítása írott forrásokban és a közösségek gyakorlatában

Author(s): András Márton Baló,Mátyás Rosenberg / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2021

The Sinti are a minority of the Gypsy population in Hungary, but their cultural, linguistic and social characteristics make them a well-identifiable group among other Romani-speaking Gypsy groups, different from the majority. In the first part of this paper, we present the sources dealing with the Sinti from a scientific-historical perspective, mainly from a linguistic point of view, from the 16th century to the present day, describing the different names of the Sinti and the historical and etymological dilemmas related to them. Then, drawing on our fieldwork data, we analyse the external and internal ethnonyms, surnames and related strategies that are important tools for the social and linguistic (self-)identification of the Hungarian Sinti.

A szlovák nyelv és a szlovák–magyar kétnyelvűség, A beszélt szlovák nyelv szociolingvisztikai vizsgálata a Nagykürtösi (Veľký Krtíš) járásban

Author(s): Ladislav György / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2019

The contribution takes a comparative stance; it provides general characterization of the Slovak-Hungarian bilingualism in the ethnically mixed territory of Slovakia. Within the studied diglossia and bilingual processes, the problems of describing the language users (monolingual and bilingual speakers), their [speakers’] classification according to particular types of bilingualism, and the categorization into the specific groups of bilingual families etc. are specified. The work deals with the systemic and structural analysis of the monolingual and bilingual speakers’ spoken communication and explains the question of diglossia and bilingual communication in detail from the point of view of the description of various transference phenomena. It also offers opinions including general characteristic of the spoken Slovak in district Veľký Krtíš.

A szlovákiai magyar középiskolai anyanyelvtankönyvek állapotáról

Author(s): Veronika Jakab / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2019

The subject of this study are the mother tongue textbooks of secondary grammar schools and vocational schools with Hungarian as the language of instruction, in particular the study-aid for the second grade. In order to map the pedagogues´ opinion regarding the content, structure and methodological solutions of the examined textbooks, I conducted a survey in January 2019, and this study is intended to present the collected data.

A TALE OF “THE LORD OF THE SEA” IN QATARI FOLKLORE AND TRADITION

Author(s): Katarzyna Pechcin / Language(s): English Issue: 17/2017

The following paper is dedicated to a mysterious creature found in the tales of the Persian Gulf, so called Bū Daryā – ‘The Lord of the Sea’. This legendary character was believed to be an evil and maleficent jinnee, appearing in the middle of the darkest of nights to kill and devour pearl divers of the Gulf. Various versions of the folktale appear in Qatar, Bahrain and United Arab Emirates, however it is always the story about a bravery of divers struggling against the tremendous and mighty malicious water jinnee. The research is based on available literature and my own fieldwork in Doha, Qatar. It contains a brief introduction presenting the importance of pearl diving in Qatari culture. The main part of the article provides a detailed description of the tale with reference to its numerous links in Qatari folklore and traditions. The characteristics of the legendary creature as well as all citations used in the article are based on an original folktale of Bū Daryā registered during my fieldwork in Qatar. All cultural references are supported by sources in Qatari traditional and modern literature.

A token-based investigation of verbal plurality in Lithuanian dialects

Author(s): Kirill Kozhanov,Björn Wiemer / Language(s): English Issue: 72/2019

This paper examines the use of the verbal suffixes -(d)inė- and dav in Lithuanian dialects. Both suffixes express pluractionality, although of different types, and their distribution in Lithuanian dialects differs as well. Using corpus data, we find that in South Aukštaitian dav is rarer and -(d)inė is more frequent than in East Aukštaitian; in Lithuanian dialects of Belarus -dav- is almost absent. We argue against the assumption that -(d)inėforms have extended into the domain of the past habitual at the expense of dav forms; a slightly higher token frequency of -(d)inė in South Aukštaitian seems to apply irrespective of any particular tense. We also argue that only token-based analyses can substantiate claims concerning areal distribution of certain grammatical forms and constructions.

A typology of contact phenomena in medieval personal names (A historical onomastic survey based on medieval documents from Hungary)

Author(s): Mariann Slíz / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

Medieval Hungary was a multicultural country: beside the Hungarian majority it also had Turkic, German, Slavic, Walloon, Italian, etc. inhabitants. Although the majority of medieval documents were written in Latin, there are a number of charters written in other languages, such as German. This cultural and linguistic diversity provides an opportunity to investigate contact phenomena among different languages based on personal name phrases. The paper outlines the methodological adaptability and the limits of using given names, bynames or family names and name phrases in the investigation of contact phenomena. It introduces language and discourse contact phenomena on the level of spelling and orthography and the morphology and syntax of name phrases, based upon examples from charters written in Latin and German.

A vajdasági magyar ötödik és nyolcadik osztályos tanulók pozitív nyelvjárási attitűdje

Author(s): Eleonóra Kovács Rácz / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2015

The paper summarizes the results of a study carried out among 300 (fifth and eighth grade) Hungarian elementary school students studying in their native language in eight towns in Vojvodina. The results show that the respondents consider their own dialect appealing, they like it, they are used to it, and in their towns they gladly and often speak it in informal situations. In addition to all this, a dialect is also an expression of local awareness of identity.

A warum You nicht ballare?! Makaronizam, jezični mimetizam i ludizam u hrvatskoj popularnoj glazbi

Author(s): Ivo Žanić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 1-2/2015

Lyrics in popular music are an important site of language contacts, of hybridization and of symbolic and ludic use of linguistic material. They are a source and a vehicle of linguistic innovations. However, the study of lyrics mostly focuses on their relation with the global expansion of English, although various historically existing language practices in the receiving societies can shed additional light to the topic: in the case of Croatia, this would concern the contact points with Italian and German. The paper analyses examples from various music genres, and shows analogies with early modern and post-modern macaronic poetry and the linguistic witticism of popular and élite cultures, including the use of phonetic analogies and other selected features to create linguistic metonymy. On that basis, the paper argues that popular music should be both synchronically and diachronically integrated into culture, and proposes a typology of linguistic interpolations and interferences.

Academic event report

25th annual conference of Australasian Humour Studies Network, 6–8 February 2019, Melbourne, Australia

Author(s): Kerry Mullan / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019