Language Arts & Disciplines

What is speech? Where did it come from?
Speech is the exchange of information for mutual social orientation. Its fundamental features are simplicity of structure and universal referential usage.

Gaona traces the evolution of signal calls of anthropoid apes and early hominins to the vocalized utterances of speech. The signal call’s frequency components were deconstructed and rearranged (isomeric reordering), leading to the breakthrough discovery of the syllable as a uniquely creative unit of communication. Determining the source of the vocalic and consonantal elements of the syllable as its integrative framework is essential to understanding the origin of speech.

Vowels are the key element of every syllable, positioned invariably at the peak of an acoustic wave form to which consonantal elements can be added at the beginning or end. Vowels were first isolated during the ritualized practice of group tonal vocalization as the only consistent, effective carriers of referential sound, with proto-consonantal oral noises excluded as interruptive and unsustainable (i.e., t - k - b). At the utterance of a vowel (or vowel equivalent), the syllabic wave emerges. Subsequently, the previously excluded noises would be incorporated with the vowel into the cohering acoustic wave-energy field of the syllable. As an ordered set of phonic elements, the syllable is the fundamental combinatory (tap, pat, apt) and permutational (tap-es-try, pat-tern, ap-ti-tude) structure generative of lexical items: the foundational basis of speech.

Gaona’s study focuses on:

The semiotic and cognitive importance of the ritual display performance (a series of actions that are performed in a specific order and often have cultural or spiritual significance);

How hominins first learned the significance and use of signs by tracking animals, an essential precursor of speech born of the need to track data and communicate the results to the group;

Stepping as a group: the regulated collective pace as the source of sustained rhythmical progression, leading to dance, music and the prosody of speech (the patterns of rhythm and sound); and

The interval: uniformity of the collective step and its patterned subdivisions (i.e., half step or quarter step) as the origin of choreography of movement (dance), scalar melodic composition (music) and the prosodic intermittence of speech (stress and intonation).

This is the first such collection of essays presenting a critical multi-author examination of language and power relations in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The post-Soviet period in Ukraine and Kazakhstan has been characterized not only by changes in the economic marketplace in the transition from communism to capitalism, but also in the linguistic marketplace. During the Soviet period, Russian was the primary language of schooling, media, and government administration in both countries, leading to widespread language shift away from their titular languages, especially among the educated urban elites. Since independence, Ukrainian and Kazakh, which occupied relatively peripheral positions in the Soviet-era marketplace, have been elevated to the status of national languages and institutionalized in government and schools, thus increasing their symbolic power. Nevertheless, the years since independence have also seen contentious debates around language.
Employing various methodological tools ranging from surveys to critical discourse analysis of legislation, literary texts and social media products, the authors in this volume seek to demonstrate and explain how political relations and hegemonic ideologies have been reproduced and negotiated at both the macro-level in legislation on language and state-sponsored media channels and embodiments of political and linguistic ideologies in translations, as well as at the micro-level of everyday language practices, school choice, and discourses on social media platforms. Among the authors are Elise S. Ahn, Igor Danylenko, Bridget Goodman, Lada Kolomiyets, Natalia Kudriavtseva, Svitlana Melnyk, Juldyz Smagulova, Yuliia Soroka, and Maryna Vardanian.

William Strnad traces the formation and development of modern Korean digraphia during the years 1894–1972, including a description and analysis of the historical discourse related to Korean phonetic script and Chinese characters.

Modern Korean digraphia was contextualized and altered amid the global emancipation and speculative metanarratives of modernity, and the national metanarratives of nationalism and modernization. These constructions were shaped by the civilization discourse of the nineteenth century, imperialism, the experience of Japanese occupation, and after liberation, the Cold War politics of Marxist utopianism in North Korea and bourgeois progressivism in South Korea. By 1972, the narrative closure of the global and national metanarratives of modernity in both Koreas provided the socio-political space for the limited reversal of Korean script exclusivity, which had earlier been implemented in the North and South.

Are you studying a subject in the humanities or social sciences? Do you have a long essay, dissertation, or thesis to write? This short guide is for international students, mature students, all students uncertain as to how to proceed.

You won’t have time to read more than you need to, so the student-friendly text is kept to a minimum. Advice is given concerning your title, what you might cover in your introduction; your review of the literature—your analysis of the ‘received opinion’ on the subject; your own counter-argument; your sources and use of evidence; and your conclusion.

A number of short, illustrative passages are included, written by distinguished authors, as well as a summary structure plan, and exemplar essay.

Youth language data provides interesting perspectives on gender dynamics and gendered usage in society. However, the gender perspective has not received the deserved focus in youth language studies in Africa. This is partly due to the general perception that youth languages and classic youth language practices, such as slang and anti-language, are male-oriented.

This collected volume focuses on gender dynamics and gendered usage in African youth languages and youth language practices, against the backdrop of urbanity as well as rurality. With representations from different parts of Africa, the volume examines sundry youth usage in different contexts and domains. While avoiding strict binarizations and potentially flawed dichotomies, the contributing scholars observe some of the motivations for different gender performatives and how these manifest in a variety of language forms and through predominated categories of use. Data samples were obtained through sociolinguistic and anthropological instruments, ranging from questionnaires and structured interviews to street-based observations and corpus analyses.

On the whole, the volume engages the literature and debate on language, youth, and especially on gendering dynamics in African youth language practices.

What is the relationship between writing systems and nationalism? How can different alphabets coexist in the same country? What is the destiny of the Cyrillic alphabet in Europe?

Giustina Selvelli’s original work provides detailed answers to these far-reaching and potentially divisive questions and many more by examining several intriguing debates on topics of alphabets and national identity in a number of countries from the Balkan area over the course of the last 100 years. Following an encompassing perspective on alphabetic diversity, Selvelli, an expert on Southeast European Studies, reconstructs the ideological context of national discourses connected to the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, also taking a look at the Arabic and Glagolitic scripts, and interweaving issues on the symbolism of the alphabet with the complex recent history of the region, marked by the parallel influences of the East and the West. She also sheds light on the impact of a range of alphabet policies on ethnolinguistic minorities, proposing a new definition of “alphabetic rights” with special regard to the multiethnic legacy of the former Ottoman and Habsburg empires.

This comprehensive book makes us discover the privileged role that writing systems played in the region’s delicate post-imperial and post-socialist transitions, leaving us captivated by peculiar stories such as that of the utopian “Yugoslav alphabet”.

By sensing the fundamental ideas of space and place on earth, this collection seeks to negotiate with and react to the underlying semasiological or psycho-geographical principle of geopoetics that cuts across varied and at times conflicting schools. From reading some geopoetical texts to understanding the idea of the earth in Humboldt and Marx-Engels, topolitics in Tintin, reef-thinking and the geography of exile, the volume tries to understand how we poetically exist with the earth. Isn’t literature, taking a cue from Hölderlin, a symptom of the way “man lives poetically on the earth”? How is our psyche an integral part of the earth-thought? How does literature deal with the concepts of space and place? How does literature enable us to comprehend the underlying principle of geopoetics—the principle of finding art in earth? These are some of the pivotal questions which this volume seeks to explore.

Literature exemplifies a geographical consciousness—an “intimate and subjective” experience of the earth. This book is an attempt to conceive this eclectic infusion of art and earth, so that we are able to ensure that the world of the art always remains in touch with the earth of the world. Let us, through this book, un-earth this deep-rooted spatiality in literature. Let us imitate earth through art, as this is the only place where we can live.

Society is characterized by a constant flow of multimodal products, which increasingly blur the lines between screen and reality, and audiovisual translation allows overcoming geographical and linguistic frontiers between small realities across the planet. However, research has long struggled to adapt its methodologies to effectively analyze such phenomena, and even more to scale its results through larger corpus analyses.

Dora Renna proposes a pioneering framework, informed by the latest trends in audiovisual translation and multimodality and fit to achieve the complex task of operatively including multimodality in a rigorous corpus analysis of source and target versions of films characterized by language variation as a key element of character design.

While language is at the core of her analysis, its role in the broader audiovisual context is explored thanks to a solid network of relations that shed light on linguistic and translational choices as well as on their implications. Framework and methodology are explained in detail and thoroughly applied to the case study to show how this perspective contributes to move a step forward in corpus-based audiovisual translation studies. The results obtained are unexpected and urge readers to overcome old attitudes towards audiovisual translation and multimodal corpora.

This book provides a new understanding of fictocriticism—a genre stemming from metafiction, écriture feminine, and postmodernism—via original creative and experimental writing devoted to the issue of the contemporary self, offering a reinvigoration of fictocriticism as a writing strategy.

Cholewa explores questions surrounding what fictocriticism is and what it can do, and the essential paradox between theories surrounding fictocriticism suggesting how ‘freeform’ it is, yet how non-freeform and chameleonic it still seems to be due to its lack of theoretical ‘rules’. Evaluating fictocriticism as both an art form and as a vehicle for higher theory and criticism, he offers and proposes further academic attention across a plethora of sociocultural, artistic, scientific, educational, political, and historical fields.

Propelled by the work(s) of Roland Barthes, the ‘godfather of fictocriticism’, the ultimate goal of this research and text is to provide new and expanded reading tools that both explain the subjectivity and context of fictocritical writings and simultaneously innovate on the form.

What is a cultural error? What causes it? What are the consequences of such an error?

This volume enables the reader to identify cultural errors and to understand how they are produced. Sometimes they come about because of the gap between the source culture and the target culture; on other occasions they are the result of the cultural inadequacies of the translator, or perhaps the ambiguity arises because of errors in the reception of the translated text. The meta-translational problem of the cultural error is explored in great detail in this book. The authors address the fundamental theoretical issues that underpin the term. The essays examine a variety of topics ranging from the deliberate political manipulation of cultural sources in Russia to the colonial translations at the heart of Edward FitzGerald’s famous translation The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Adopting a resolutely transdisciplinary approach, the seventeen contributors to this volume come from a variety of academic backgrounds in music, art, literature, and linguistics. They provide an innovative reading of a key term in translation studies today.

Language policy and usage in the postcommunist region have continually attracted wide political, media, and expert attention since the disintegration of the USSR in 1991. How are these issues politicized in contemporary Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine? This study presents a cross-cultural qualitative and quantitative analysis of publications in leading Russian-language blogs and news websites of these three post-Soviet states during the period of 2004–2017.

The most notable difference observed between Ukraine and the two Baltic countries is that many Russian-writing users in Ukraine’s internet tend to support the position that the state language, i.e. Ukrainian, is discriminated against and needs special protection by the state, whereas the majority of the Russian-speaking commentators on selected Estonian and Latvian news websites advocate for introducing Russian as a second state language. Despite attempts of Ukraine’s government to Ukrainize public space, the position of Ukrainian is still perceived, even by many Russian-writing commentators and bloggers, as being ‘precarious’ and ‘vulnerable.’ This became especially visible in debates after the Revolution of Dignity, when the number of supporters of the introduction of Russian as second state language significantly decreased. In the Russian-language sector of Estonian and Latvian news websites and blogs, in contrast, the majority of online users continually reproduce the image of ‘victims’ of nation-building. They often claim that their political, as well as economic rights, are significantly limited in comparison to ethnic Estonians and Latvians.

The results of Maksimovtsova’s research illustrate that, notwithstanding differences between the Estonian as well as Latvian cases, on the one hand, and Ukraine, on the other, there is an ongoing process of convergence of debates in Ukraine to those held in the other two countries analyzed in terms of an increased degree of ‘discursive decommunization’ and ‘derussification.’

Edited by Stephanie Schwerter and Jennifer K. Dick, Transmissibility and Cultural Transfer: Dimensions of Translation in the Humanities brings together monumental voices in the social sciences—such as Jean-René Ladmiral from Paris and Peter Caws from Washington DC—to begin to address the Humanities' specific issues with and debt to translation. Calling for a re-examination of how translations are read, critiqued, and taught in Philosophy, History, Political Science, and Sociology departments, this book provides tools for reflection, bases for reconsideration of given translations, and historical observations on how thought has been shaped across national borders.

The volume ends with four case studies—examples from auto-translation in postcolonial literature, cultural issues of translation in Chinese-language cinema, negotiating meaning between linguistically and culturally different audiences in the United States and Lebanon, to verbal-visual questions of translation in marketing to German and French clients. All in all, this book is a comprehensive, compact survey of the cultural and linguistic translation and transmission issues in the social sciences today. Transmissibility and Cultural Transfer: Dimensions of Translation in the Humanities is illuminating and informative.

This comprehensive and systematic text book provides teachers and students alike with a profound, yet concise reference for the analysis of narrative texts. It provides appropriate and differentiated terminological and methodological tools to all the questions that arise when analyzing a narrative text. An advantage of this textbook is that the narrative theory models and concepts are presented in understandable and operational analytical categories and parameters and illustrated by tables and matrices to help make the sophisticated analysis easier to understand and memorize. Exemplary model analyses are provided to present and test the performance of this method.This book is valuable not only to literary scholars but is also suitable to teachers and students.

Lehrende und Studierende, die einen Erzähltext analysieren wollen, finden in diesem umfassenden, systematischen, profunden und zugleich übersichtlichen Lehrbuch und Nachschlagewerk ein geeignetes und differenziertes terminologisches und methodisches Instrumentarium, um alle Fragen, die bei der Analyse eines Erzähltextes auftauchen, beantworten zu können. Ein Vorzug des vorliegenden Handbuches besteht darin, dass die erzähltheoretischen Modelle und Konzepte in verständliche und operative analytische Kategorien und Parameter umgesetzt und durch Tabellen, Matrizen und graphische Darstellung veranschaulicht werden, um die anspruchsvollen analytischen Raster besser fass- und memorierbar zu machen. In exemplarischen Musteranalysen wird die Leistungsfähigkeit der vorliegenden Erzähltextanalyse erprobt. Das Buch wendet sich nicht nur an Literaturwissenschaftler, sondern ist auch für Lehrkräfte und Schüler geeignet

This volume provides a collection of new perspectives on linguistic aspects of language criticism. It aims to offer a systematic account of the linguistic dimensions of all complex actions and discourses that can be the subject of critical language theory, which tries to link language and society. In contrast to conventional language criticism, the linguistic branch builds its conditions on the basis of a systemic analysis of its objects of inquiry. Its main goal is the formation of a linguistic awareness regarding the criterion of appropriateness with view of situational, contextual, and cultural factors.

The contributions in this volume reflect the multitude of different factors of and interrelations between linguistic aspects of language criticism. They show the extent to which critical linguistic practices impact societal issues and discourses but also how they function in everyday and institutional contexts such as new media and face-to-face interactions. They also discuss the didactic challenges and opportunities that come with the teaching of language criticism in schools and universities.This book is primarily aimed at linguists as well as lecturers and teachers but also at general readers interested in all aspects of language criticism.

This truly unique collection is the essential guide to archival research on conservatism, the right wing, and the far right, offering a detailed overview of primary sources in all media. It details documents, film, video, sound recordings, microfilm and microfiche, cartoons, sheet music, newspaper art, and more housed in more than 4500 archives across twenty-two countries. Designed as an indispensable reference work for anyone researching in the field of right-wing politics, this astonishingly detailed account includes:

- collections of personal and institutional papers,
- archives of right-wing periodicals in the Japanese, Romanian, and Russian languages,
- collections of pamphlets, ephemera, vertical files, and press cuttings,
- oral histories,
- library-accessible commercial databases,
- digitized collections and exhibitions,
- archived web sites,
- microfilm and microfiche collections with right-wing material.

The description of each archive contains its physical address and other identifying information, a summary of its contents and highlights, lists of publications and web pages citing the archive, and links to online finding aids. This book will be a crucial guide for anyone conducting primary research in the field.

Translation studies have traditionally been known to be interdisciplinary. What better term to sum this up than boundaries? A term that means different things in different fields and can be applied to a multitude of topics. Political, personal, symbolic, or professional boundaries, boundaries of the mind as found in psychology, or boundaries in the sociological sense where they separate different fields of knowledge. From politics to geography, boundaries are everywhere. They need to be identified, drawn, or overcome—depending on circumstances and context. What are the boundaries translators and interpreters have to deal with? How do they relate to translation studies in general?

Boundaries and translation go hand in hand. As the discipline grows and ever more elements of interdisciplinarity come into play, the more the question of what the boundaries of translation are needs to be asked. Some of the research topics presented in this collection may well extend the boundaries of the discipline itself, while others may look at the constraints and limits under which translators and translations operate, or showcase the role translation and interpreting play in overcoming social or political boundaries.

It is with this in mind that the group of young researchers presented in this book has come together. The papers offer insights into the state of the discipline in various nations, often touching on underresearched topics such as the role of translation in the creation of national as well as individual identities or the translation of popular music. They look at the role of culture and, more specifically, sociocultural influences on translation. At the same time, non-linguistic, intra- and extratextual factors are taken into account with particular attention to multimodality. What unites the papers collected is the general tendency to see translation as a means of bringing people together and enabling dialogue, a means of overcoming ideological and social boundaries. By looking both to the past and the future of the discipline, the authors aim to (re)define the boundaries of translation studies.