Christmas Trees, Pigs and Catwalks: A Brief Look at Oil and Gas Metaphors

Author(s): Stefania Alina Cherata / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

Metaphor is generally defined as a form of transfer that suggests a relation of similarity between two entities. Specialist literature features a complex debate whose focus lies on the question as to whether metaphors reproduce similarities or generate them. A number of metaphor theorists have argued against the assumption that metaphors express already existing similarities between ‘objects’. They have shown that metaphors do not need to refer to real-world entities in order to be interpretable. There are situations when a metaphor can be meaningful even if the similarity underlying it does not have a correspondent in immediate reality. Based on this, Weinrich (1968) argues that the similarities expressed in metaphors are not simply present in the natural world, but are created by the metaphors themselves. However, he adds that such similarities cannot be regarded as completely subjective constructs, but that they represent perspectives which people bring in their interaction with their environment. The present paper demonstrates the validity of this hypothesis by carrying out a comparative analysis of selected metaphors from the field of oil and gas in English and Romanian. The variety of metaphors which express the same semantic content cross-linguistically and sometimes within the same language illustrates precisely this phenomenon.

Žánrová preference v narativech dětí mladšího školního věku

Author(s): Silvie Cinková,Anežka Náhlíková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3/2019

In this paper, we present an analysis of hypothesized sex-specific genre preferences in spontaneous narratives in a corpus of 286 transcribed recordings of younger school children (aged 6–11). We draw upon Nicolopoulou’s conception of narratives as a symbolic activity with sex-specific tendencies: girls prefer the “family” genre and boys prefer the “heroic-agonistic” one. We operationalized Nikolopoulou’s genre classification into 10 thematic narrative features and annotated their respective presence or absence in each narrative. The application of a combination of statistical methods to our sample revealed that the sex-correlated narrative preferences are so weak that they have no implications, e.g. for school practice. The most prominent result, in fact, even counters the a priori assumption of sex-based narrative preferences: no matter what sex or age, children show a strong preference for “mutual aid and cooperation”

Opčinjenost stilovima i znakovima

Author(s): Ivan Šunjić / Language(s): Bosnian,Croatian Issue: 75-76/2019

Zahvaljujući Stilistici – od čijeg će prvog izdanja uskoro biti puna dva desetljeća – Marina Katnić‑Bakaršić, jedna od najznačajnijih regionalnih stilističarki, (p)ostala je autorica čiji su naslovi uobičajena referentna točka ovdašnjih znanstvenih i studentskihProučavanja jezika i književnosti, jedna od onih iz kojih se uči. Podsjetimo se reizdane Stilistike dramskog diskursa, ali i poglavlja o ruskom formalizmu, Bahtinovom dijalogizmu i karnevalizaciji u Suvremenim tumačenjima književnosti1 te priloga o jeziku i (de) konstrukciji roda u također koautorskim Izazovima feminizma2. stalan je interes i za neke ranije studije, stoga ne čudi da je Gradacija, jedna od prvih monografija na ovim prostorima posvećenih pojedinačnoj stilskoj figuri, nedavno objavljena u elektroničkom ruhu.3 Pretposljednja autoričina knjiga Između diskursa moći i moći diskursa zbog distribucijskih neprilika mnogim zainteresiranim još uvijek je nedostupna.

K možnostem stylistického hodnocení jazykových prostředků v mluvených projevech učitelů základních škol

Author(s): Václav Jindráček / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2020

In the present study, the author seeks to explore features peculiar to spoken language in Czech schools. For this purpose, the system of stylistic classification of linguistic items proposed by J. Homoláč and K. Mrázková is used. This system is based on an understanding of the Czech language situation as consisting of two basic sets of communicative situations: (1) everyday communication and (2) the realization of higher communicative aims. Data for the present study comprised 31 audio-recordings of classes in grades 6–9 conducted in Czech schools: the participants were 4 teachers and their pupils (aged 11–15). This material was described using the following criteria: (1) everyday communication or institutional communication, (2) the position of the linguistic item on the axis of high, medium and low style, (3) expressiveness of the linguistic item, (4) typically Bohemian or Moravian use. The analysis shows that the stylistic classification of linguistic items in these spoken texts should reflect criteria derived from the description of communication situations rather than their link to structural varieties of Czech (Standard Czech or Common Czech).

Esej o subžánri športového filmu

Author(s): Jozef Mergeš / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 41-42/2020

The article defines and characterizes the subgenre of sports film with aim to remind cultural tendencies leading to the depiction of sports events and sports performances in a fictitious form, and to clarify the possible relationship between sports movies and the relationship to mediasport as a whole. It appears mediasport is not similar to a sports film to the extent that it might seem at first glance. The common denominator of both phenomena is certainly the consistency of their thematic and, from the sports narrative perspective, also compositional elements, but in both cases the topic becomes functional and communicatively relevant for substantially different reasons.

Grammatical means and their potential to violate the news reporting information quality

Author(s): Božena Bednaříková / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2018

The paper deals with the inflectional means of Czech and their potential to serve as a tool for violating the rules of information quality of news reporting in media. It briefly introduces the underlying theory and the process of data acquisition and processing and summarizes the results of the analysis. The conclusions show that by morphological means, eg by using variant word forms, it is possible to implicitly suggest either evaluation or preconceived emotional attitudes to the recipient, or their perception may be disturbed. In a broader context, research shows that, despite the fact that the inflectional means are a less open strategy than lexical units or intonation, they may have an implicit but strong potential to implement a function other than the intended informative function in news reporting.

BINÔMES ET POLYNÔMES DANS LA CHANÇUN D’WILLAME

Author(s): Cristiana Papahagi / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2021

Binomials and Polynomials in the Chançun d’Willame. The paper explores binomial constructions (a common stylistic feature of all European medieval literatures) in the Old French epic poem Chançun d’Willame (c. 1200). It analyses the frequency, position, internal structure, and degree of variation of this figure in the poem’s two parts, and compares them to binomial constructions in the Song of Roland, and in romances from the same period. The paper shows that, at a micro-level, this stylistic figure is yet another feature distinguishing the two parts of the William poem. In the more archaïc part, binomials are rigid and formulaic, while in the more recent, romance-like part, they are flexible and creative. At the macro-level, binomial constructions are similarly used (often to achieve assonance) in this poem and in Roland, but differently in the romances. Binomials thus belong to the complex system of formal clues that characterise a medieval “genre”.

Tehnica variantelor la Tacit (Annales I-VI)

Author(s): Florica Bechet / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2020

In the present paper we highlight some of the modalities which pertain to style, to the manner of writing, by which Tacitus succeeds in imposing on his readers (in the first six books of the Annales) a certain point of view, in a way which is not at all evident. I have proposed, as the foremost method of accomplishing this goal, a so-called technique of variants. After inventoring these variants, I have tried to group them and to emphasize the effects obtained through each category.

Vocabulele candorii în latină și în limbile romanice

Author(s): Maria Subi / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2020

In Latin language, the terms candor,-ōris and candǐdus (3) are used to express the concept of "shining white", but also the idea of "purity, innocence, blamelessness". This dual connotation – chromatic as well as moral – can be identified in their Romance language reflexes: candoare and candid (Romanian); candeur and candide (French); candore and candido (Italian); candor and cándido (Spanish) etc. The literary works of the Romance space offer numerous such examples, the words for candor being well represented in the artistic vocabulary, which exploits stylistically the oscillation between the concrete, physical sense and its figurative counterpart.

„Nu-i condei să poată scrie”: egestas linguae – concept și mărturisire în poezia lui Traian Dorz

Author(s): Florina Băcilă / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2020

The aim of our paper is to analyse the concept of egestas linguae, as it is reflected in some of the lyrical confessive creations of Traian Dorz – a Romanian contemporary author whose work represents the fruit of some spiritual experiences that decisively sealed his existence. Nonetheless, the soul’s relationship with God (in the frame of Earth, but also in the perspective of eternity) remains a constant topic of this work dedicated to His uniqueness, to the amazing feeling of divine love, within which everything is, not once, wordless. As a result, we will have in view the fact that such unmediated confessions, about the weakness of language in the act of artistic creation, materialize to an expressive extent, in several ways, especially through the means of sentences (main or subordinate clauses) with verbs in the negative form (like to be or can), underlining the limits of the usual discourse in the act of trying to portray the exceptional characteristics of Divinity, impossible to convey through trivial words; nevertheless – easier to depict through that emblematic absence of a written or said word, equivalent to the uplifting quietness while praying, following the mystics of forever.

Metafora și instituirea sensului poetic. O privire dinspre și înspre Blaga

Author(s): Oana Boc / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2020

Literary text interpretation from a poetic and stylistic perspective presupposes a functional approach aimed at identifying and interpreting the linguistic categories (as pre-textual units, already rendered within and through the idiomatic tradition) and the textual ways of establishing meaning, as well as the discovery of semantic functions beyond textual expression, which are geared towards a type of finality that is specific to literary textuality: the creation of poetic worlds. World-conceiving is, in fact, as Eugeniu Coşeriu reveals, the essential and intrinsic finality of poetry, the poetic finality. We are setting ourselves, in the present paper, with the task of presenting certain aspects to help disclose the essential role of the metaphor in instituting poetic meaning, not only at a syntagmatic level, as a literary device, but especially at a macro-textual level, as a global semantic strategy, as foreshadowed by the anthropological poetics, starting from Blaga’s metaphorical functions. The poetic act creates its own referent during (and simultaneously to) the process of creation of meaning with poetic finality, by interrupting the primary organisation of the world rendered by language and by an individual and free reconfiguration of the world order, in an independent universe of discourse. And this is an essential metaphorical process wich is guided by the poetic principle of the transgression of the “ordinary system of meanings” into a different “ontological horizon”, in Lucian Blaga’s terms. Moreover, investigating the uniqueness presented by the discursive and textual techniques, that is to say, of the discursive form – which, in L. Blaga’s vision, is in itself metaphorical – discloses the uniqueness of the poetic meaning and, implicitly, of the instituted poetic world, as we shall demonstrate in our paper.

Visul celtic și visul românesc: thanatofilia eroică

Author(s): Mirela-Ioana Borchin-Dorcescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2020

This paper aims to show some obvious, but subtle correspondences and interferences between the everlasting dreams of chivalry, which have crossed the European cultures. This type of dream, involving strength, love, faith, devotion and readiness to die for a noble cause, proves to be essential for Eugen Dorcescu’s poiesis. Both his poetry and prose are based upon the Celtic dream that provides prolific perspectives as a pattern of distinguished manhood. In broad lines, this is the matrix of Eugen Dorcescu’s work. All dreams of elation developed in poems or in fairy-tales lead back in time, reinforcing the Celtic dream. For instance, the strong and painful feeling of exile experienced by the writer in his own homeland makes him dig deep in the layers of oblivion in order to find where his roots are. Arch-remembrance helps him go beyond the usual limits. Darkness, mist, labyrinth, depths etc. bring to light his own ancestral avatar: the Knight. ”Heading westwards”, he reaches the Celtic symbols of love, power and sacrifice in the person of Lancelot. The novel about The Knights of the Round Table supports the resurrection of the Celtic dream and the parallel development of the Romanian dream of chivalry, which equally mean nobility and ultimate sacrifice in the name of love. The Knight’s life is worth to be given either for his Lady (see The Arch-remembrance) or for his Lord/for God Himself (see The Saint John’s Knight). In Eugen Dorcescu’s fantastic prose, some Romanian knights, among whom Barbă-Cot is the writer’s alter-ego, are simply Lancelot’s partners. They are always ready to die for him, since they are united in the same dream, although separated in history. The utmost devotion takes the form of the heroic thanatophilia. The calling of nobility, in life and death, is a sign of dignity and value.

Paradoxul semantic în discursul cioranian

Author(s): Simona Constantinovici / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2020

We try to show, in this paper, that when it comes to a writer like Emil Cioran, the insertion, in a philosophic, essayistic or aphoristic discourse, of terms with different stylistic functionality, becomes clear proof of the mastery of the potentials and nuances of the Romanian language. By association with the determinant endearing, the terms fury and hysteria, for example, leave the area of the usual language, installing themselves in a semantic of the paradox, cultivated by the philosopher on wide areas. Cioran often associates the word "hysteria" with determinants from other semantic spheres, makes it more domestic, more gentle, in other words, fades the initial terminological mark, removes it, at first reading, from the scientific, medical style. Endearing, laic, messianic, metaphysical are just a few of these paradoxical determinants, catalysts of intense experiences, but also a semantic source of perplexity, of absurdity, of sarcasm. There is a predilection in Cioran's youth discourse for the use of terms that come from different semantic spheres, which are used in association or in syntagmatic partnership. The proximity of them, within the collocations they structure, leads to obtaining unusual, oxymoronic predications. Thus, it is produced a relativization of the semantic homogeneity of the two terms and, in a paradoxical way, a fusion of them, in the discursive actuality, by the recovery of the etymological meaning. The association with antonymous or contrastive terms, forces a semantic reorientation of the entire cioranian speech.

Interferencias y contrastes entre el lenguaje común y el lenguaje coloquial

Author(s): Roxana Maria Crețu / Language(s): Spanish Issue: 1/2020

Language is the instrument through which humans communicate. Depending on each situation, we use a specific language that adapts to what we want to say. For our everyday conversations with family and friends we use colloquial language. We believe that colloquial language is the part of the language that is in continuous development, since it is a language that changes with each generation, that is constantly updating to stay alive. Sometimes, the words used take new meanings, other times new words are formed by derivation, parasynthesis or composition, enriching the language by it. And, that is way, in this article we want to discuss the differences in meaning that the words used in colloquial language present and classify them according to their means of creation. In this article we will talk about the terminology used in the colloquial language, see what are the new meanings that a series of words in a colloquial context receives, and if it comes close or not to its original meaning.

METAFORA ÎN TOPONIMIE

Author(s): Iustina Nica Burci / Language(s): Romanian Issue: XIII/2012

Metaphor – the figure of speech found in all the fields of human life – has raised, since the Antiquity, many discussions. Especially, its mechanism of formation and functioning, and its classifications have been the object of numerous studies in rhetoric, philosophy, hermeneutics, poetics, linguistics, semiotics, stylistics, cognitive psychology, etc., and, more recently, in scientific language, because here, the metaphor appears now to compensate the lack of specialized terms. The metaphor also supplies the gap of specialized terms in toponymy; the great variety of forms of geographical space made it necessary the borrowing of nonspecific appellations from the vocabulary of other sciences and from the common language. The analogy is, usually, made with in/animated things (and/or with theirs features), which are part of the micro universe in which men live and work, but also with himself, when the human a person borrows to the surrounding physical world names indicating parts of human body. In this paper we will follow the typology of these terms borrowed to the two levels: a) The level of popular geographic terminology, where various irregularities of the soil are associated with real objects, by virtue of the similarity between them; b) The level of topic names (a part of them also came from popular geographic terms, which became, by toponymy, official denominations of some places).

Rugăciunea. Structură și univers de discurs

Author(s): Nadia Obrocea / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 59/2021

The prayer is a particular type of text, with a particular structure and a specific purpose. This paper aims to address the prayer from the perspective of text linguistics developed by Eugeniu Coșeriu, analyzing the textual structure of the prayer and, in particular, one of the specific mechanisms that contribute to the articulation of its meaning, i.e. the relative clause. The starting point of our approach – and its fundamental theoretical landmark – is the study of Eugeniu Coșeriu Orationis fundamenta. The Prayer as a Text, in which Eugeniu Coșeriu analyzes the prayer Our Father from the viewpoint of text linguistics as hermeneutics of the meaning (Coșeriu 2010). This paper indicates that relative clauses have a special status within the textual structure of the prayer. In terms of semantics, it can be emphasized that relative clauses have a significant role in articulating textual meaning, therefore in the intrinsic functionality of the text. The concept of the “universe of discourse”, which represents a system of meaning that grants validity and meaning (Coșeriu 2013, 69), also becomes a relevant landmark to our research.

Stylistyczny odcisk palca

Author(s): Maciej Eder,Ewelina Kaczmarczyk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 805/2022

Мовностилістичні особливості публіцистики Святомира Фостуна в журналі „Сурмач”

Author(s): Ruslana SAVCHUK / Language(s): Ukrainian Issue: 01/2022

The article deals with the journalistic texts of Svyatomyr Fostun, published in the London military journal “Surmach” (Trumpeter). It analyzes the specifics of the grammatical and stylistic design of these texts. It was found that the author’s journalism reflects the phonetic, orthographic, lexical, and morphological features codified in the Ukrainian spelling of 1929. The journalist’s creative self-expression in the analyzed journalistic texts includes tropes and stylistic figures, which expand the semantic framework of the text, and reveal its essential features. The conclusion is that the author uses stylistic devices in journalistic language for emotional and expressive reinforcement, axiological characteristics (positive and negative evaluation), communicative and pragmatic guidelines. Intertextual elements contribute to the structural and semantic integrity of the publicist’s texts, and coordinate the addressee’s perception and interpretation of the message in the right direction.

Funkcje kolokwializmów we współczesnym nabożeństwie drogi krzyżowej na tle innych leksemów nacechowanych stylistycznie

Author(s): Agnieszka Sieradzka-Mruk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2022

The study is based on material of about 100 texts of the service published since 1977 until 2020. Despite the primarily written and elaborated character of analyzed texts there are many informal words in them, and their number increases with time. Traditionally colloquialisms are considered inappropriate in religious discourse, however, they are numerous. The number of colloquialisms depends on the addressee and on the author’s individual style. It is interesting that informal and formal words can coexist in religious discourse and putting them together in immediate vicinity has specific functions.

Štýlové variácie v predpovedi počasia

Author(s): Iveta Bónová,Lucia Jasinská / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 51/2022

Based on the analysis and interpretation of medial communication in a commercial TV, the presented paper points to subjectively conditioned selection and composition of the means of expression in an information news genre of weather forecast. Starting from style and stylistic attributes of the text F. Miko´s concept of expressional categories, we used the programme The Best Weather broadcast by the commercial TV JOJ to verify lowering of conceptuality and at the same time strengthening of experiences in the field of iconicity and weakening (though not annulment) of sociativeness at the expense of subjectivity in the field of operativeness. It turned out that a monological form is prevalent in the evening news block on TV. Latently, it also includes a fictional dialogue with viewers where its protagonist selects and combines lexical, syntactic and acoustic stylemes (along with a constant informative part) to keep up-to-datedness on the level of variant rendition. The final form of weather forecast also highly depends on an individual style of the forecaster.