‘Family-culture’ and Chinese politeness

An emancipatory pragmatic account

Author(s): Xinren Chen / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2019

While researchers have questioned the suitability of classic Western models for accommodating Chinese linguistic politeness phenomena, inadequate attention has been devoted to the role of ideologies in understanding Chinese language use. This study examines the key ideological notion of jia wenhua 家文化 ‘family culture’, and uses it to model some typical discursive practices of (im)politeness in contemporary China. As an ideology, ‘family culture’ has its roots in ancient Chinese philosophy, and it continues to prevail to the present day. Adopting this ideological notion as an analytic construct, this study seeks to formulate a set of new maxims to account for some discursive practices of Chinese politeness, which neither previous Western nor Chinese models have captured. In so doing, it contributes to emancipatory pragmatics by demonstrating the necessity of deploying culturally-grounded ideologies as analytic constructs, such as ‘family culture’ in this study, to rationalize some types of Chinese sociopragmatic behaviour.

‘Infernal’ subtexts in Brodsky’s poem "The fifth anniversary"

Author(s): Maija Könönen / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2002

This essay explores the intertextual relationships of Joseph Brodsky’s poem Пятая годовщина — an occasional verse dedicated to the fifth anniversary of the poet’s enforced emigration from the Soviet Union. As is common in Brodsky’s poetics, the text is imbued with allusions to other texts, not only from Russian, but from Western belles lettres, as well. Through reminiscences of La Divina Commedia the lost homeland together with the beloved native city of Leningrad is paralleled with Dante’s “lost and accursed” Florence as well as with the lost St.Petersburg of Mandelshtam and Akhmatova, among others. The Dantean undertones are exposed not only on the semantical level of the examined text but in the metrical and structural aspects of the poem, as well.

‘ЧЕРТ’ В СЕМИОСФЕРЕ ФРАЗЕОЛОГИИ (КОМПАРАТИВНЫЙ РАКУРС: ЧЕШСКИЙ VS. БЕЛАРУССКИЙ ЯЗЫКИ)

Author(s): Inna Kalita / Language(s): Russian / Issue: 22/2016

The article is dealing with analysis of phrasemes with component 'devil'. It is comparing the image of devil and his perception in two Slavic traditions Czech and Belarusian. Czech verbal idioms with conjunction jako are identifying a person with the devil and also offer two types of evaluation – negative prevails, but there are even positive. Beside the evaluating function, in Belarusian language the idioms with word 'devil' fulfill function of addressing somebody and interjection. In comparison of thematic phrasemes in two Slavic languages we can find very low number of equivalents. Folklore and etnographic sources are creating national “phraseological view of the world” and they are also the proof of different perceptions of the image of the devil: in contemporary Belarusian culture prevails negative evaluation of this mythical creature, in Czech environment the view of the devil is lenient, in Czech fairytales we can find even positive perception of the devil.

“Alguse” ja “lõpu” kui linna kirjeldamise vahendite kuulumisest linna juurde

Author(s): Tiit Remm / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 6/2009

The beginning or the end are concepts often associated with a city in common understanding, arts as well as in research. Although the beginning is something that has already occurred but the end has not, there still exists certain logical symmetry between them. For Lotman (and Uspensky) the beginning and the end of a city (St. Petersburg) are strongly connected with the textualizing function of a frame. Description through categories of the beginning and the end gives a narrative dimension to a city and links it with its (self)validating activities — aspect clearly visible for example in various descriptions of Sillamäe. Concepts the beginning and the end connect the realms of time, space and moral. The presence of those three aspects does not allow reducing the beginning and the end of a city to a simple linear historical-predictive narrative but needs semiotical mechanisms to deal with them — to mark or eliminate their presence. Aside from artistic texts or common understanding, the concepts of the beginning and the end are also important in theoretical research. It appears that the beginning and the end are doubly modelling devices: the modelling devices of a modelling of a city as culture and thus doubly ideological and without independent existence. The beginning and the end as a descriptive device does not only indicate to the nature of a city but also to the nature of culture described through city.

“ARCHITECTURAL EMBELLISHMENTS”: SPACE FORMS IN THE ASSIGNATION AND THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

Author(s): Adela Livia Cătană / Language(s): English / Issue: 12/2017

This article is based on two well-known short stories written by American author Edgar Allan Poe− The Assignation (1834) and The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)− and aims to offer a close analysis of the relation character/observer and chamber/ house.

“Czech Theory”, Czech semiotics

Author(s): Ekaterina Velmezova / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2016

Review of: Vít Gvoždiak " Czech theory: Tendencies of Modern Czech Semiotics" Olomouc: Palacký University in Olomouc, 2016. 370 pp. by: Ekaterina Velmezova

“How Do Signs Come To Mean?” Reflections on the Goodwinian Interactional Approach to Empirical Investigations of the Human Semiotic Ecology

Author(s): Johanne S. Philipsen,Lasse Vöge Jensen / Language(s): English / Issue: 19/2018

If we are to point to the most central and sustained feature of Chuck Goodwin’s impressive work, it is his persistent resistance to simplify the richness of human meaning-making in face-to-face interaction. Through a unique methodological combination of semiotics, linguistics, cognition, and phenomenology, he has continuously sharpened our understanding of the semiosis in co-action without compromising the empirical complexity of it.

“It Goes Without Saying”

Author(s): Timothy Koschmann / Language(s): English / Issue: 19/2018

The one and only time I had an opportunity to sit down and chat with Harold Garfinkel, he talked at length about a comment once made by Stanley Fish. Fish (1967) had noted that though Christ’s name is never mentioned in Paradise Lost, his presence is sensed in every line written by Milton. His name, it would seem, is present by virtue of not being stated. As Harold put it, “it goes without saying.” How things come to mean was an obsession for Garfinkel, as it is for Fish, though they tend to work the topic from different angles. It has been an obsession throughout his career for Chuck Goodwin as well.

“Ma ei saa kunagi aru, miks ma pean Tartust ära sõitma, kui ma seal olen”: Mati Hindiga eesti keelest, semiootikast ja Tartust

Author(s): Kalevi Kull,Ekaterina Velmezova / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 14/2017

Tartu Ülikooli semiootika osakonna sotsiosemiootikute rühm korraldas Anti Randviiru ja Tiit Remmi eestvedamisel 2017. aasta 19. ja 20. mail Elvas seminari “Juri Lotman and sociosemiotics”. Külalisesinejaks olnud Patrick Sériot rääkis teemal “Language and nations: two models”. See oli üks põhjusi, mis tõi seminarile osalema ja ka sõna võtma keeleteadlase Mati Hindi.

“Nagu pärlid kees”: mõtteid ajast, mis ei kulge

Author(s): Silver Rattasepp / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 6/2009

Inquiry into the manner in which the relationship between time and the phenomena analysed using temporal categories is conceived, resulted in two widespread, yet contradictory explanations: time is either conceived as an abstract, eternal axis, in or on which discrete events take place, or it is conceived as an intrinsic property of things that only exists as long as things themselves actually change and endure. Time is thought of as either reversible, discrete and external, or as creative, cumulative and internal. The paper considers the various ways in which phenomena studied inquiry is manifested if one or the other view is adopted — how change and stability, linearity and cyclicality, diachrony and synchrony would be interpreted. It is concluded that by analysing culture and history under the abstract, chronological gaze, as is done in structuralist account, life in a society will appear as the life of a separate social entity, and change and development will be perceived as an alternation of stable states with intermittent rapid transformations into a new stable state. Behind all this there is the “platonic backhand”, a conceptual inversion that establishes the simplified description, acquired during the inquiry, as the originary source of life’s diversity, thereby turning a description into a cause, a model into an agent.

“Piiririigi” ruumiline aeg

Author(s): Maris Saar / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 4/2007

When Emil Tode’s novel “Border State” was published in 1993, it immediately received extensive attention from the critics. Positive and negative reviews, short and in-depth research have been written. This article seeks to analyse a dimension in the novel’s composition that has largely been overlooked – the chronological organisation of the text and its relations to the spatial structure of the narrated world, deriving specifically from retrospective first-person narrative. The narration in the “Border State” forms from the letters that the narrator writes, thus the text consists of isolated memories. The chronological and causal order of the events is not explicit, as the memory-time does not follow the rules of “real” time. The transfer from one scene to another is triggered by spatial elements rather than causality. This diffusiveness allows the time of the novel to be viewed as postmodern or mythical – both these characteristics reveal the time as giving preference to other dimensions of the text in organising the structure of it. Gaston Bachelard’s view of the personal space in “The Poetics of Space” corresponds to the poetics of the “Border State” in many ways. The space – rooms, houses, windows, cities, streets, landscapes – has a distinctive role in the narration. The ways of being, musing and dreaming created by the rooms the protagonist inhabits are all distinct in their influence to the character. The sense of centrality, if found, evokes a feeling of safety and isolation from the world. Thus the textual universe of the “Border State” is created through a projection of individual perception from the spatial organisation rather than the chronological.

“YAŞLI ŞEF MSHLANGA” ADLI HİKAYENİN GREIMAS’ÇI GÖSTERGEBİLİME GÖRE İNCELENMESİ

Author(s): Sevcan Işık / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 33/2017

This paper aims to analyze the short story The Old Chief Mshlanga (1951) by Dorris Lessing according to Greimas’s actantial model. It covers the period from the childhood of unnamed protagonist to her adolescence. In the story, the opposition between black culture and white culture is of great importance in giving the meaning of the text. As a child, the girl whose nickname Nkosikaas (S1) has an instilled white perspective towards the natives. She takes for granted them through the fairy tales she has read and through the white culture imposed on her by her parents. This is her inverted reality until she encounters the old Chief Mshlanga (S2). After that S1 changes her attitude towards the natives, offers and takes greetings with them and by doing this she tries to justify her position as a white settler in the lands of S2, which brings no gain to the blacks neither in the sense of the unequal treatment of them or the usurpation of their lands. The meaning of the story will be searched from surface level to the abstract or deep one, that is, narrative, discursive and logical-semantic respectively. In the former, the story will be segmented into three main segments which will include a many sub-segments. In these segments, the actions and actants that can be an individual or an abstract thing will be displayed in accordance with their places in time and space. Besides, there will be a focus on the figurative natures of the actants. Lastly, when the logical-semantic level is concerned the oppositions that compose the main theme of the narrative will be shown in semiotic squares.

“Сколько стоятъ въ Лондонѣ галоши”: Quasi-trochees in Nabokov’s prose

Author(s): Grigori Utgof / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2012

Summing up the ideas expressed in the most influential articles on the semantic halo of the Russian trochaic pentameter, scholars tend to avoid one particularly tricky question: how many units – and what kind of units – are needed to detect extra layers of meaning in a particular text? While the article of Kiril Taranovsky “О взаимоотношении стихотворного ритма и тематики” had implied that the source of these meanings (e.g. the dynamic theme of the journey) should be sought in a line starting from the 3- to 4-syllable structure, incorporating a verb of motion and an anapestic anacrusis (Выхожу [verb of motion, last syllable stressed] один я на дорогу), later research objected to this principle as an oversimplification. At the same time two later contributions on the subject (Kirill Vishnevsky’s “Экспрессивный ореол пятистопного хорея” and Mikhail Gasparov’s “The semantic halo of the Russian trochaic pentameter: Thirty years of the problem”) proposed the idea of operating with whole texts as potential sources of meanings, thus calling into question a micro-level approach to the origin of the phenomenon. In my article I propose an empirical model that makes it possible to evaluate some limitations of both practices: I concentrate on some quasi-trochaic pentameters culled from the prose text of Подвиг (Glory) by Vladimir Nabokov (Sirin), and examine these quasi-verse incidents in the framework of both approaches.

„Czerwony Kapturek był śliczną dziewczynką, a Kopciuszek wyszedł za księcia…”- rozbieżności między rodzajem gramatycznym a naturalnym ...

Author(s): Aleksandra Szczurek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 1/2011

The article presents the problem of the differences between grammatical and natural gender of the names of main female protagonists in the tales of Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood. It shows the examples of usage of different gender categories in the text telling about the protagonists. It is possible to mix the gender identity of the protagonists in the texts. It stresses the most logical solution – using the natural gender which, in this situations, should be more important than the grammatical one.

„Drovių ir basų eilėraščių“ pavadinimai: apie Jano Tvardovskio neaiškius sinekdochinius biblionimus

Author(s): Serhiy Yermolenko / Language(s): English / Issue: 72/2015

The author focuses on some titles of poems by the Polish author priest Jan Twardowski (1915-2006) which he calls synecdochical (since they repeat a part of the text they name), in particular, those of them which seem to be uninformative, randomly and arbitrarily chosen as well as vaguely, if at all, motivated by the poem’s content. He explains their specific nature as determined by semiotic features of motivation proper to them as poetic text names, on the one hand, and by their role as an integral part of poetic text, on the other: taken out of their context and put in the prominent position of the title, such text fragments not only formally designate the text according to the ‘pars pro toto’ principle, but also get reinterpreted, acquiring new meaning as well as imparting an additional sense to the poem. The seeming vagueness of such titles acts as a means of making the reader seek the information they add to the text. Because of their vagueness and utter stylistic modesty, these titles represent those features of J. Twardowski’s poetics that reflect the Christian virtues of poverty and the belief in the incredible.

„Dwa szybkie żubry”. Masowa kultura wizualna i koncepcja animal symbolicum Ernsta Cassirera

Author(s): Andrzej Kisielewski / Language(s): Polish / Issue: XXVIII/2016

This paper focuses on a contemporary phenomenon of visual mass culture consisting of signs and pictures expressing technical information and marketing communications. Such signs and pictures shape the environment of the modern man. One can notice them on highways, streets, in the city space, malls, stores, bars, airports and train stations. These signs and pictures are also mass produced items and can be considered as architecture represented by designs of easily recognizable buildings like McDonald's bars and IKEA department stores. Signs and pictures which are a subject matter of this paper have a technical and at the same time artistic character. This text is an attempt to see them in the context of the theory of culture by Ernst Cassirer and his concept of animal symbolicum.

„Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”. Semantyka intralingwistyczna i jej filozoficzne oraz kognitywistyczne konsekwencje

Author(s): Bartosz Żukowski / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 0

The aim of this paper is to present and metatheoretically analyse the model of intralinguistic semantics as set forth by Umberto Eco in his Theory of Semiotics. The distinctive feature of this system is the rejection of the realistic category of reference, understood as a correspondence of meaningful units with the extralinguistic domain of interpretation, i.e., with a class of extralinguistic semantic correlates. As a result, the main idea of Eco’s theory is to replace the traditional extralinguistic semantics with the new one, in which the meaning of each unit is determined solely by its relations with the other elements of the system. Language formed in this way is semantically autonomous, intralinguistically closed and self-explaining. Analysis of Eco’s theory by means of the appropriate conceptual apparatus reveals the far-reaching philosophical and cognitive implications of his approach in studies on language, meaning and truth.

„Jam duch jest, który ciągle przeczy” — żywioł negacji jako zasada świata w Dzieciach szatana Stanisława Przybyszewskiego

Author(s): Dorota Samborska-Kukuć / Language(s): Polish / Publication Year: 0

ЈЕЗИЧКИ КРАЈОЛИК СРБИЈЕ (ДРУГИ ДЕО): ЖАНРОВСКА ДИГРАФИЈА И СЕМИОТИЗАЦИЈА ПИСAМА

Author(s): Dejan Ivković / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 3/2015

This paper presents the second part of the study of the linguistic landscape (LL) of Serbia and digraphia as its main characteristic. In the first part, the study is concerned with perceptions and awareness of alphabet presence in the public sphere among residents of Serbia, that is, the 'subjective' dimension of Serbia's LL. This paper explores its 'objective' dimension, by documenting, analyzing and explaining the processes underlying the use of the two scripts across a range of contexts and situations that sets Serbia's speech community apart from those in other polities in Europe and beyond. The workings of digraphia processes are here described as genre digraphia. More specifically, genre digraphia is defined as a tendency of use of one or the other alphabet in a particular domain/subdomain of language use, or genre: context, content, agency, activity, as well as within a particular spatial and temporal frame. Accordingly, one or the other alphabet would more likely be associated with a particular religious denomenation, political party and/or its ideological proponent(s), setting or type of everyday activity, locale, and historical event or period. Given a range of contexs in which the genre-driven alphabet split is enacted, a multimethodical approach is used (Wodak, 2006), which relies on both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The results of the analysis indicate a high degree of agreement between the perceptions of alphabet presence in selected domains and subdomains of language use and actual presence, thus confirming the main thesis of the study that genre digraphia is the defining feature of the LL of Serbia. In addition, the linkage with the particular domain of language use gives rise to script semiotization: alphabet becomes an index – a type of semiotic sign which points to the location, relation, etc. of signifieds. Alphabet indexicality is thus instantiated in a specific context, both the immediate context of situation and the broader context of culture. In this regard, an alphabet becomes an index of religion, identity and nationhood, commodification, presss tabloidization, and internetization, to name a few.

კულტურათა და ლიტერატურათა ურთიერთობის თეორიისათვის (სემიოტიკური ასპექტი)

Author(s): Yiuri Lotman / Language(s): Georgian / Issue: 18/2017

იური ლოტმანი კულტურათა და ლიტერატურათა ურთიერთობის თეორიისათვის (სემიოტიკური ასპექტი) (ეძღვნება კანტის დაბადებიდან ორას წლისთავს) (ქართულად)