Vilma-Irén Mihály, Levente Pap, Judit Pieldner, Zsuzsa Tapodi, eds.: Homo viator. Studies on Literature, Linguistics and Culture
Bucharest, Sfântu Gheorghe, Cluj-Napoca: RHT, Transylvanian Museum Society, 2015.
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Bucharest, Sfântu Gheorghe, Cluj-Napoca: RHT, Transylvanian Museum Society, 2015.
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Does knowledge of Romanian, more exactly of Romanian passive voice, help learning the English passive construction? Or is it the other way round: knowledge of English helps students learning Romanian? Perhaps L2 and L3 mutually influence each other in the case of Hungarian students from Miercurea Ciuc?In previous studies addressing the problems encountered by L1 speakers of Hungarian in the acquisition of the English passive voice (Tankó 2011, 2014), I presumed that possessing Romanian to various degrees represented a facilitating factor in the acquisition of the passive given that Romanian, like English, has a well-developed, explicitly-taught passive construction. Of course, speakers of Hungarian living in Romania might be influenced to some extent by their knowledge of Romanian when learning the English passive voice – yet, the question is to what extent. Thus, an important element of this study represents identifying students’ level of Romanian and their production of Romanian BE-passive and SE-passive.
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Transylvania has always been a space of multiculturalism, which is reflected in the fact that the Hungarian regional standard contains more Romanian and German elements than the central standard. And that is not only peculiar to the present state of the language, but it is a historical phenomenon. During the process of editing the Historical Dictionary of the Hungarian Language in Transylvania, Attila Szabó T. and his co-workers realized that the language material gathered from Transylvanian archives contains a number of Hungarian words of Romanian origin that the literature has no knowledge of. Thus came the idea of a smaller dictionary which would present the Romanian loan words of Hungarian spoken in Transylvania in the period of the 16th–19th centuries. By the mid-1980s, the editorial work was finalized; however, it has never been published – the material is kept at the Department of Hungarian and General Linguistics, Babeș–Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. In my paper, I will attempt to present the words of Romanian origin listed in the Historical Dictionary of the Hungarian Language in Transylvania which the general literature of loan words has no knowledge of in the context of crossing borders, in the sense that neighbouring languages always have a huge impact on each other even if they are completely different genetically.
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The paper examines the complex phenomenon of intermediality, “multimedial transgression”, “culturally agitating hybridity” resonating and flashing over ages and cultures. It reviews concrete poetry, which may be considered as a real multimedial text with linguistic and pictorial coded aesthetic message, the poetic intention evolving from the mixture of verb and picture. Examining from the aesthetic of reception, code-switching of concrete poetry becomes into focus of the research. We may feel that for a recipient knowing both languages (for the recipient of concrete poetry), it is more advantageous for the speaker combining the expressions of the two languages since one with a mixed language always relates what he would like to say in the language he can express his thoughts more properly. In fact, this is such a code-switching that the recipient may perceive it as a single code on the basis of simultaneity of text and picture. The study highlights reading alternatives that concrete poetry offers us as well as the travel it takes us to. By analysing the mode of interpretation, we can observe how visual poems overbalance the conventional linearity of writing, how figurativity becomes equivalent to the text in the course of creating meaning, while reading is guided by the sight of picture, which confirms the sight as well. Thus, language and picture are practically trapped by the calligram. Text (concrete poetry) understanding is described as integrative by the paper, coming into existence as a result of the constant correction and supplement of situational and ephemeral understandings. It considers the hermeneutical circle/spiral of understanding as a travel, which is always unique and not to be repeated.
More...A Two-Year Edmodo Project
Individual learning is a pre-requisite of formal ME credit allocation in higher education (HE), albeit this may be hard to document and quantify. Edmodo-enhanced self-access learning can be customized to accommodate different learning styles, form basic learning skills and field-specific subskills, extend and expand the students’ medical language use, while also meeting the desiderata of independent curriculum-stipulated learning that can thus be exploited and demonstrated. The paper will reflect on the design of ME multimedia assignments as well as the quantitative and qualitative results, motivation and attitude of a group of medical students working on Edmodo self-access ME learning as part of a class research project for two years.
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The article argues that lexical borrowing is not only motivated by cultural factors linked to prestige or economical aspects but also by the speakers’ need for new lexical-semantic categories and for highly expressive metaphorical terms to operate with, which makes them borrow words. The semantic changes of the lexical borrowings point to the creation of new items in the semantic fields of the receiving language. The integration of borrowings into Hungarian and Romanian exemplifies these processes.
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The article presents a study on the role of journalistic translation (press translation) in translation teaching using a questionnaire in November-December 2016 on a sample of 52 translation teachers. The aim of the survey was to find out the role of journalistic translation in translation teaching in Hungary and three neighbouring countries: Croatia, Romania and Slovakia. The importance of the survey lies in the fact that no research has been published so far on this topic in Hungary, and only minor research has been done on the topic of journalistic translation itself (primarily limited to the field of text linguistics).Despite these facts, the study has revealed the importance of journalistic translation in the teaching of translation: more than 85% of the teachers surveyed use press texts in teaching due to different motivations, and nearly 50% of respondents use them during the entire period of translation education. The inclusion of journalistic translation in the teaching of translation is also confirmed and justified by the fact that more than 80% of those surveyed consider the subject to be relevant for the students’ future work as a translator due to the wide range of application areas of journalistic translation.
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La Femme sans sépulture is one of Djebar’s recent publications which carries on with the author’s self-proclaimed project of recreating an Arabo-Berber past in a French text. The recreation process is achieved through writing in French, which is invaded by Algerian women’s oral voices. In this article, I will argue that French and Algerian oral languages – Arabic and Berber – mutually influence each other, allowing the emergence of new linguistic structures. This is evidenced in the text by the use of free indirect discourse which allows the oral to modify French while being modified by it. Relying on Suresh Canagarajah’s studies on cross-language relations, the mutual relations between Algerian orality and French are interpreted as translingual practices aimed to promote transcultural communication.
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One of the major functions newspapers have is that of (re)presenting reality for their readers and thus explain events and promote specific values; newspapers are multimodal texts, which resort both to language and images to convey their message. The paper analyses a British and a North American newspaper article and has two aims. Firstly, to investigate the strategies used by journalists to represent immigrants in a positive way and, secondly, to draw a comparative analysis between the articles in terms of these strategies. The theoretical part defines the concept of racism and the ways in which it is nowadays expressed and lists some of the strategies that are frequently used to present immigrants (such as topic, referential strategies, intensifying, extensivization, victimization, personalization, voices heard, argumentation, etc.), use of pictures. The second part identifies strategies used in these two articles. The conclusions present a comparison between them in terms of similarities (values upheld, type of argumentation) and differences (intensification and nomination strategies, quotation patterns).
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When researchers write academic journal abstracts, they need to meet the requirements of the publisher, which may very well mean that they need to be aware of “the meaning and functions of borders” within which their work is presented in this type of academic text. This paper reports on an investigation of the use of vague language (VL) and IMRaD moves (Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion) showing the degree of informativeness of academic journal abstracts published in the “Bulletin of Transilvania University” of Brașov between 2010 and 2017. The areas of research these articles focus on range from linguistics and literature to business studies, medicine, and engineering. The analysis of the data, based on Cutting’s (2012) analytical framework, revealed that abstract authors use vague language (e.g.: “universal general nouns” and “research general nouns”) and that their abstracts mostly consist of introduction, method, and discussion moves. Results of similar research into the writing of article abstracts may be informative for both novice academic text writers and expert writers guiding their work.
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The purpose of the present paper is to explore the dynamics of trilingual Internet use and its relation to minority language identity and acculturation among young Swedish speakers in Finland (N = 201) and Hungarian speakers in Transylvania (N = 388). Typically, a feature of linguistic minorities, trilingualism, provides speakers with the competence to move outside their original cultural realm, a feature that is rewarding at an individual level but may form a threat to the minority language culture. The results indicate in both contexts an extensive use of English alongside the minority language and a restricted amount of use of the majority language on the Internet. Majority language and English-language Internet use are strongly related to acculturation towards majority language speakers and English speakers in both contexts. Majority-language Internet use is significantly and negatively associated with minority language identity among participants in Transylvania but not among participants in Finland. Most interestingly, however, English-language Internet use is significantly and negatively related to minority language identity in both contexts. The findings and their theoretical implications are discussed.
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The paper initially presents the Serbian legislative framework relevant to the use of minority languages. The ethnolinguistic vitality of the Hungarian-speaking population in Serbia is then analysed, particularly in the Serbian province of Vojvodina. The paper then focuses upon the sociolinguistic survey of Hungarian language use in Belgrade. The emphasis is placed upon the survey responses related to the awareness of language rights among the Hungarian speakers.
More...The Democratic Legitimacy of Language Regime Choices
In the European Union language regime debate, theorists of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism have framed their arguments in reference to different theories of justice and democracy. Philippe Van Parijs advocates the diffusion of a lingua franca, namely English, as means of changing the scale of the justificatory community to the European level and allowing the creation of a transnational demos. Paradoxically, one key dimension of democracy has hardly been addressed in this discussion: the question of the democratic legitimacy of language regime choices and citizens’ preferences on the different language regime scenarios. Addressing the question of the congruence of language policy choices operated by national and European elites and ordinary citizens’ preferences, this paper argues first that the dimension of democratic legitimacy is crucial and needs to be taken into account in discussions around linguistic justice. Criticizing the assumption of a direct correspondence between individuals’ language learning choices and citizens’ language regime preferences made by different authors, the analysis shows the ambivalence of citizens’ preferences measured by survey data. The article secondly raises the question of the boundaries of the political community at which the expression of citizens’ preferences should be measured and demonstrates that the outcome and the fairness of territorial linguistic regimes may vary significantly according to the level at which this democratic legitimacy is taken into account.
More...A Democratic-Deliberative Answer
Should English be promoted as a worldwide lingua franca for justice-related reasons? Philippe Van Parijs answers affirmatively in order to promote global distributive justice. In contrast, I argue that a rapid expansion of English could lead to one undesirable consequence that ought to be prevented: the globalization of an Anglo-American life-world that impoverishes democratic-deliberative debates. Inspired by John Stuart Mill, I will defend the idea that the more dominant the Anglo-American life-world is, the less diversity of life-worlds and, therefore, the less diversity of substantial voices in the global democratic-deliberative process there will be. It might be that more voices could be heard (because of the lingua franca), but with less substantial diversity of opinions. In that sense, the life-worlds (and language as an access key to them) have an instrumental value that enables plurality and better deliberative discussion. For that reason, I contend that there is a pro tanto reason to prevent the expansion of English as a lingua franca.
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This contribution will engage with Van Parijs’s approach to linguistic justice and his working principles for the reduction of unfairness in the language domain (in particular, the need for intervention and his territorial principle), reflecting on a range of cases of multilingual practice and linguistic coexistence – respectively, in the multilingual capital of the world which is London today; in Fryslân, the minority language area in the northern Netherlands; and in Europe, through its European Charter of Regional Minority Languages.Overall, my argument, on a theoretical level, is for the further exploration of the relationship between linguistic diversity and human rights in civil society; and, on a practical level, for the development of a World Language Atlas as envisaged by UNESCO, containing vital information on all the world’s languages – an urgently needed basic resource for policy-making, to ensure, especially for the world’s many endangered languages, the linguistic justice and fairness advocated by Van Parijs.
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Philippe van Parijs explains in Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World the concept of maxi-min language use as a process of language choice. He suggests that the language chosen as a common language should maximize the minimal competence of a community. Within a multilingual group of people, the chosen language is the language known best by a participant who knows it least. For obvious reasons, only English would qualify for having that status. This article argues that maxi-min is rather a normative concept, not only because the process itself remains empirically unfounded. Moreover, language choice is the result of complex social and psychological structures. As a descriptive process, the maxi-min choice happens in the reality fairly seldom, whereas the max-mini use of languages seen as a normative process could be a very effective tool to measure linguistic justice.
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In this note, we outline various possible long-run effects of an English-only acquisition policy in the European Union. The point of departure is how individual behaviour adapts to constraints in the environment. This leads to changes in collective behaviour, which becomes part of the environment, again influencing individual behaviour. Possible equilibria of this feedback mechanism are discussed. It is argued that domain loss and diglossia may result. The process is further characterized by external effects. Looking at language knowledge as a merit good, path dependencies and multiple stable equilibria can be explained.
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In advocating the use of a global auxiliary language, Van Parijs forms part of a tradition that stretches back to the seventeenth century. However, he differs from this tradition in promoting the use of English rather than an artificial language of some sort. This paper examines the theoretical situation that van Parijs proposes as the most fair, in which English functions world-wide as the preferred auxiliary language and in which certain measures have been taken to counterbalance injustices of three types. I draw attention to injustices of each of these types done to speakers of English in that situation. This leads to the conclusion that proposals to use an artificial language as a global lingua franca that were made in the seventeenth and later centuries have a stronger case than van Parijs has argued.
More...The Case of Hungarians in Transylvania
The article is a brief evaluation of the regulatory environment of language use in Transylvania, Romania based on Van Parijs’ conceptual toolkit presented in his 2011 book Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World. This linguistic regime is a coercive hybrid regulation containing elements stemming from both the categorical regime (personality principle) and territoriality. In municipalities or counties where the official use of minority languages is permitted, it is typically present in a conjunctive manner, but its enforcement is weak and inconsistent. The principle of territorially coercive linguistic subdivision – proposed by Van Parijs as an optimal solution for a greater linguistic justice – is not accommodated in any of the fields of official communication and under present political circumstances it has no further plausibility. A hypothetical alternative for the territorially coercive regime would be the introduction of English as a lingua franca in interethnic communication. We argued that this latter option would be fair only if English could entirely replace the official languages currently in use or it would receive a fully equivalent status at least in those regions where a considerable number of linguistic minorities live.
More...A Review of the Volume Ferenc Vörös (ed.): From Linguistic Geography to Name Geography
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