Colloquium: New Philologies (E-Journal)
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Wissenstransfer in den Geistes-, Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften: Zum Inhalt, über die Autor_innen, Inhaltsverzeichnis
No full textPrispevek bilateralnega avstrijsko-slovenskega znanstvenega sodelovanja k raziskavam rokopisnih in tiskanih besedil starejšega slovenskega slovstva
Get PDFThis article discusses the research cooperation between the University of Klagenfurt’s Institute of Slavic Studies and the ZRZ SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies in Ljubljana funded by the Austrian Exchange Service (OeAD) and the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS) as part of bilateral academic and technical cooperation. It presents the history and current research focus of both institutes, the course of the project, and the central content-related, technical, and conceptual intersections in the research of both project teams
Analysis of The Correlation Between Populist Discourse and Tweet Popularity
Get PDFThis paper analyses linguistic features present in populist discourse on Twitter, together with the relationship that these may have with the popularity obtained by the tweets. The preliminary part of this study was conducted on tweets collected from the official accounts of four European populist leaders, namely Luigi Di Maio, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage. This phase suggested that particular discursive elements often related to populism, such as emotionalization, simplistic rhetoric and intensified evaluations, are present on social media as well. However, the main focus was on the possible correlation between these aspects and the number of “like” and “retweet” that a single tweet receives. Therefore, tweets were firstly classified by a popularity value, and then divided in two groups, creating a corpus of most and least popular tweets for each subject. Secondly, tweets were annotated using the Appraisal framework (Martin and White 2005), in order to observe the existence of a peculiar linguistic behaviour by populist leaders. The same operation was conducted on a control group formed by three establishment politicians, namely Matteo Renzi, François Hollande and David Cameron. Finally, the annotations of the most and the least popular tweets were compared to highlight features that were particularly frequent in popular tweets. This process showed how specific “populist” features as emotions, negative judgments or intensified evaluations are related with the attention received by users on social media. Findings indicate that these features are positively correlated with the tweet popularity, both when considering populist and non-populist politicians. As a matter of fact, reference subjects were the ones who showed a stronger presence of populist-related features in popular tweets. This leads to believe that the stylistic distance between establishment and populist parties is reducing, and that also non-populist leaders are taking advantage of particular discursive elements that better catch the attention of the social media audience
Die Digitalisierung der Bestände des Tiroler Dialektarchivs: Ein Werkstattbericht zum vorläufigen Projektende
Get PDFThis paper presents the the output of the research project “Tiroler Ortsdialekte online” (TiDiOn) that aimed to digitize at least part of the archive collections of the Tyrolean Dialect Archive (University of Innsbruck) for making it accessible to the public via an interactive online linguistic atlas.
In doing so we encountered several challenges that had to be dealt with: a) structuring the data with regard to creating a database exactly adapted for our needs as well as with regard to presenting it in a way that made the generated cartographic material intelligible to the layperson, b) abstracting the material for the the sake of public intelligibility by simplifying the original records written in the phonetic alphabet “Teuthonista” and by commenting the maps in an easily understandable way, c) transferring the Teuthonista-records into a unicode-based font that can deal with the complexity of characters and combinations (some of which occurring only in a few cases). The paper presents our approaches and strategies to cope with these challenges.
Although the preparation of the material was oriented on non-expert public users the data and its presentation is of course also relevant for linguists. We exemplified that by demonstrating its relevance for questions dealing with language change or for the visualization of language geographic pattern
Evgenij Zamjatin, We and Tatjana Tolstaja, Kys’: A Century of Envisaging a Dystopian Future
Get PDFAfter World War I, the new Soviet government propagated one principal option to replace nationalism and its emotional appeal: Socialist rationalism was to inform all aspects of individual and social life.
One of the first dystopian novels of the Soviet period, Evgenij Zamjatin’s We (1920), takes this idea to the extreme, thus warning the young state against the consequences of exclusive rationalism. After the end of the Soviet Union, another negative utopia, Tatjana Tolstaja’s Kys’ (2000), deals with the return of emotional nationalism at the cost of rationality. Both novels use the genre of dystopia as laboratory: With a starting point in their respective present, they outline a possible future development of individual man and mankind. The latter´s reduction to either reason or emotion results in the individual´s social de-contextualization and a loss of cultural competence, and both turn out to be hotbeds of violent upheaval and devastating insanity
Dependency Structures and Beyond: Assembling Drawings of Sentence Construction
Get PDFThis paper purports to propose a concise system of symbols to illustrate the sentence construction through assembling drawings, in which chunks are attached step by step according to their semantic dependency relations into a partial structure, which ultimately develops into the complete structure. The assembling drawings, purporting as a supplementary yet more linearized notation of dependency structures, use semantic streams to represent the semantic dependency relations, which indicate the objective movement within a sentence; while the attachment of chunks represents the word order, indicating the subjective movement. The sentence construction is accomplished at the point when all the chunks can be integrated, and the semantic streams merge together. The performance of the assembling drawings is investigated and exemplified with a diversity of Mandarin Chinese and English sentences
Prednost izračunavanja razgovornih implikatura pred njihovim poništavanjem: argumentacijski pristup
Get PDFAccording to H. P. Grice, the two main features of conversational implicatures are their calculability and their cancellability. Here I present the idea that these two features are in conflict with each other. In the paper I link the calculability of implicatures with argumentation theory and rationality and distinguish between formal cancellability and communicational deniability. Then, in order to solve the conflict between calculability and deniability, I argue for the priority of calculability over cancellability. I defend this position by presenting the calculation of implicatures as the reconstruction of arguments. Consequently, the priority of their calculability over their cancellability, or more correctly, their deniability, should lead to new insights related to the communicational responsibility of the speaker for the content that competent hearers read from his or her utterance
Conceptual Blending in Social Issue Advertisements
Get PDFThe aim of the paper is to examine the extent to which conceptual integration theory can be applied to the analysis of social issue advertisements. Taking into consideration that we live in a visually-dominated culture, visual resources such as advertisements, cartoons, and memes have been used in crafting short, eye-catching messages, seeking the biggest impact with a limited amount of space. In recent years, there has been an enormous interest in the way conceptual integration theory can be used to explain how the mentioned resources are formed and what message they convey. More precisely, CIT will be used to show a glimpse of the intricate mental processes that are involved in the creation and understanding of social-issues advertisements.
ContentTheoretical outlineConceptual integration theory, commonly known as blending, has emerged as an offspring of Fauconnier\u27s mental spaces theory. In one of his works, Fauconnier (1994: xxvii) states that meaning construction or conceptualization is inseparable from the context since sentences serve as cues for the construction of mental spaces. Mental spaces are said to be "structured, incrementable sets, that is, sets with elements (...) and relations holding between them (...) such that new elements can be added to them and new relations established between their elements (ibid:16). In other words, mental spaces are temporary containers of information created for the purpose of better comprehension of a spoken or a written discourse.
Mental spaces get integrated in a conceptual integration network as a model of how meaning is mentally constructed. The network encompasses minimally four mental spaces that are structured by many different domains, namely two input spaces connected by counterpart matching or cross-mappings that is indicated by solid lines in the diagram, a generic space, and a blended space. The link between the generic space and input spaces is bidirectional. The generic space inherits elements from the inputs creating a less detailed structure than the one found in the input spaces, which is in turn mapped onto its counterparts in the inputs. There is a partial projection from the inputs into the blended space marked by the broken lines in the diagram. What emerges in the blend is a novel structure that remains connected to the inputs, as the blend "contains generic structure captured in the generic space but also contains more specific structure, and it can contain structure that is impossible for the inputs (...)" (Fauconnier and Turner 2002:47).
MethodologyIt has been suggested that the creation of meaning in an advertisement can be explained by applying conceptual integration theory (Lundmark 2003, Ruiz 2006, Joy et al. 2008, Delibegovic Dzanic and Berberovic 2012). The paper tries to prove that social-issue advertisements are no exception. The three social-issue advertisements that were analyzed in the paper were randomly selected from “the most powerful social-issue advertisements that make you stop and think” (Digital Synopsis 2016). The first social - issue advertisement was part of the 2010 campaign by the French LICRA (Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitism) against racism and anti-Semitism. The campaign slogan "Your skin color. Shouldn’t dictate your future" had cognitive and emotional appeal and served as a call for action. The second social- issue advertisement was taken from the 2014 "Liking is not helping. Be a volunteer. Change a life" campaign developed by Publicis Singapore for Crisis Relief Singapore. Finally, the third UN social- issue advertisement tried to bring attention to the issues of discrimination, gender inequality, and women\u27s rights. On their website, UN women (2013) stated that the intent of the campaign was to "expose negative sentiments ranging from stereotyping as well as outright denial of women’s rights".
Social-issue advertisement 1 Source: http://www.ufunk.net/en/publicite/contre-le-racisme-et-lantisemitisme/
Social-issue advertisement 2 Source: https://digitalsynopsis.com/inspiration/60-public-service-announcements-social-\\issue-ads/
Social-issue advertisement 3 Source: http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2013/10/women-should-ads
In all three examples, conceptual integration network is established by opening mental spaces on the basis of verbal and/or linguistic element, cobbling them together and creating the blend. The blended space contains a structure that represents an incongruity that needs to be solved. What ensues is the unpacking of the blend and reconstructing the input spaces by relying once again on visual and verbal components that serve as cues for the viewers to arrive at the intended meaning. Following the reconstruction, the backward projection to the input spaces highlights the contrast between the emergent structure in the blend and the elements in the inputs and, as Delibegovic Dzanic and Berberovic (2010:210) notice, “reinforce[s] construals in input spaces in accordance with the new structure created in the blend “. In this way, viewers are able to grasp the main idea behind the advertisement.
Tentative ResultsThe paper presents an analysis of social-issue advertisements within the framework of conceptual integration theory. The main goal of the paper was shedding light on the meaning construction in social issue advertisements, as well as the comprehension of central ideas behind them. It needs to be pointed out that texts, images and social context play a vital role in the understanding of social-issue advertisements.Thus, in the first advertisement, the image of babies in cribs opens a mental space that comprises a newborn nursery. Furthermore, the advertising slogan, as well as the social context in which the advertisement was created, evokes the concept of racial segregation in the French society.
Selective projections from the two input spaces give rise to the blend in which black babies in a nursery wear uniforms that symbolize lower-paid and lower-status jobs, as opposed to white babies whose future has not been predetermined.
In that sense, we are able to understand the central message behind the advertisement, that is, the provision of tougher support against racial discrimination.
In the second advertisement, verbal and visual components prompt the opening of mental spaces comprising the domain of war and Facebook, respectively. In the blend, a dying boy is gently held in his mother’s arms, as the Facebook users are giving the thumbs up. Since the blend itself represents an incongruity that needs to be accounted for, the unpacking of the blend enables the backward projection and reconstruction of the input spaces. It is suggested that posting a courageous status/photo and getting thousands of virtual likes will be rendered ineffective unless users take prompt action. The blend ridicules the social setting in which virtuality is being treated as a substitute of reality, rather than its supplement.
In the third example, input space one contains women around the world that differ in race, nation, and ethnicity, and the concept of women\u27s rights. The second input space utilizes a Google search engine and a list of the most denigrating searched phrases on women suggested by the Google autocomplete search function. Lastly, input space three comprises the notion of restraint that is metonymically symbolized by duct tape. Projections to the blended space result in the blend containing four women with the duct tape over their mouth which has been merged with the Google queries. Backward projections point out that women are unable to voice their opinion but have sexist attitudes imposed on them. The advertisement puts the spotlight on the fact that the notion of women\u27s rights is still met with resistance around the world, contravening the entitlement to equality with men.
Taking everything into account, it can be concluded that conceptual integration theory can be applied to the analysis of social- issue advertisements. The paper confirmed the hypothesis by showing that visual and verbal resources are exploited in an advertisement in order to grab attention, aid the creation of meaning, and incite people to act. It can be suggested that, to a certain extent, conceptual integration theory explains how human beings think
(Un)doing nationalism through familial metaphors: a case of Taiwan
Get PDFCombining corpus-assisted method and discourse analysis, this paper aims to study familial metaphors such as mother, wife, and parents and analyze how ideals of gender roles are intersected with socio-political transitions in testing times.
ContentIdeals of femininities and masculinities (to a lesser extent) are often used to mobilize citizens in testing socio-political times. Familial roles such as mothers and wives are prime targets for politicians crafting ideals of nationalism. In this presentation, I use political speeches delivered by female politicians in Chinese/Taiwanese modern history, namely, Mme. Chiang Kai Shek, and Annette Lu, to argue that ideal familial roles always intersected with cultural and political transitions. Moreover, these ideals parallel changes in a society through feudalistic, modern, and authoritarian to democracy. Combining both corpus assisted method and discourse analysis and studying the argumentative strategies and familial metaphors such as mothers, wives and parents, I offer a comprehensive view on how gender, nation, and family values have been articulated in times of transitions on the island in the 20th century.
Taiwan situated in the strategic center in the Pacific Ocean can offer an interesting case study as it has experienced brief colonization by the Dutch and the Spanish in the 16th century and was included as one of the prefatory to Fujian, one of the provinces in China during the Qing dynasty (the last Chinese dynasty). At the beginning of the 20th century, Taiwan became the first colony of Japan (1894–1945) as a result of the first Sino-Japanese War, experienced a 50 year authoritarian rule as the then ruling party KMT (Kuomintang) to the island as it lost the civil war to the Chinese communists in the late 1940s. In the late 1980s, the island started to democratize rapidly with much opposition demanding changes and direct elections. In 1996, the island held the first presidential election in Chinese history, in 2000 the then opposition party, DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) won the election and ended the 50 year monopoly of KMT. Since the turn of the 21st century, the island has experienced three party successions.
Following Brownell and Wasserstrom (2002), Chang (2002) and Li (2011), I see gender and politics as mutually intertwined and I am interested in the following questions: 1) Do political transitions from feudal society to modern state and from authoritarianism to democracy change the way we view gender roles and expectations? 2) If gender and politics are mutually embedded, do shifts in political ideology change the way candidates and voters view issues? 3) Does Confucian stress on women’s subordination and subservience still pervade 21st-century Taiwan? Our results show that Mme. Chiang Kai Shek in the period of modern China saw women’s subordinate status and illiteracy as one of the major culprits for China’s malaise. Ways to advance women’s status and the emphasis on women’s education were incorporated into Chinese nationalism and patriotism where women were shown to lead in all spheres in society and their potentials were boundless. Women were discursively constructed as strong and rebellious and their defiance to Chinese patriarchy was allowed so long as it was an act of patriotism. Gender socialization was emphasized, and their well-bounded familial roles paralleled China’s transition from a feudal society to a modern state and emphasized the importance of Chinese nationalism which had reigned in Taiwan from the 1940s to the 1980s.
Annette Lu was one of the most forceful feminists and human rights advocators in Taiwan. Her belief that gender equality is a fundamental human right served as one of the driving forces for her political convictions. By embedding her gender ideals with democratic appeals, her rhetoric constantly tested the limitations of tolerance when Taiwan was under martial law. Her stress on being human and then learning how to become men or women echoed much of the mistreatment of women in Taiwan in the 1950s, a society where Chinese patriarchal beliefs saw the dependence and obedience of women to men as the holy grail dictating gender relations. Lu’s stress on the agency and independence of gender roles resonated well in the Taiwanese society when being submissive to Chinese patriarchy and Chinese nationalism was rampant.
By studying the rhetoric of these prominent politicians in time, we should get a better understanding of how changing ideas and ideals for gender, nation, and family can serve as resources for testing theories on gender, politics and language