1,720,975 research outputs found
Character’s mental functioning during a ‘neuro-transition’: Pragmatic failures in Flowers for Algernon
Get PDFThe representation of fictional minds that work in idiosyncratic ways has received significant attention in the past few decades, particularly regarding characters with some form of developmental delay or pathological disorder. The present paper attempts to investigate the mental functioning of the central character in Daniel Keyes’s widely acclaimed short-story Flowers for Algernon, which presents two versions of the same character: after being introduced as cognitively delayed and with a very low IQ, a futuristic treatment turns him into a neurotypical individual first, and into a genius later. With the unfolding of the plot, however, it soon becomes clear that the character’s mental gains are doomed to deteriorate by the end of the story, when he finds himself as cognitively delayed as he was at the beginning. By building on previous research, this paper is concerned with the effects of drastic changes in mind style in the course of the same story. More particularly, the final aim of this article is to study whether an abrupt shift in mind style may bear consequences on the character’s ability to interact with the other characters. Mental schemata and adherence/flouting of Grice’s maxims are closely investigated in the two versions of the characters, together with analyses of deictical patterns carried out by means of corpus techniques
Characterisation through Language: Perspectives from Stylistics
No full textThis book is about fictional characters. More than ever before, our lives are surrounded and sometimes influenced by them in a plethora of different ways: movies, TV shows, narrative fiction, video games, etc. Sometimes characters ‘migrate’ from one medium to another or become ‘serial’ and central to people’s lives for decades.
Despite all this, crucial theoretical issues are still hotly debated by critics: what is a character? how are characters different from human beings? how shall they be approached, from a critical perspective? By building and expanding on previous research, the volume starts by reflecting on issues related to characters’ ontological status and on analytical theories that have ‘humanised’ and ‘de-humanised’ them’. After that, a series of theoretical frameworks considered crucial for character’s analysis are presented and discussed, along with several examples. What these frameworks have in common is their focus on language, therefore they belong to the tradition of ‘Stylistics’. Particular attention has been devoted to the relation between language and cognition, i.e.to how character’s mental functioning can be conveyed by language. In the third section, the discussions outlined in Part 2 are applied to a case-study
Translating Standard Language Into Easier Varieties in Italy: Mapping Needs and Strategies for Spoken Easy Language
Get PDFThis paper discusses results from an Erasmus+ project called SELSI aimed to identify needs and strategies for linguistic support in Spoken Easy Language. It focuses on data collected in Italy among professionals who work with individuals needing linguistic simplification and on users who need simplified language themselves. More specifically, this study addresses both linguistic and non-linguistic aspects that are crucial for supporting the development of communication through Easy Language, e.g. textual and conversation-enhancing strategies, linguistic strategies, listener-engaging strategies and the use of multimodal materials. The strategies discussed include the use of signpost language as a means to scaffold different textual parts and clarify the logical and semantic relations, the potential of metaphors for simplifying more abstract and potentially challenging concepts, the potential of interpersonal linguistic options and the use of multimodal resources for the creation of multisensory environments that support literacy development. Overall, it will be argued, the data collected from professionals and from users exhibit a strong alignment: with very few exceptions, the strategies frequently employed by professionals coincide with the ones users find highly beneficial or helpful. These findings suggest that professionals employing Easy Language are presently headed in a positive direction, although they do highlight areas for potential future enhancements
‘Tweeting engagement’. Strategies of identity construction and ‘alignment-disalignment’ in Donald Trump’s use of social media
Get PDFThe main aim of this study is to describe the linguistic and discursive strategies of speaker-hearer alignment used by Donald Trump in his tweets about ‘fake news’. As previous work by Miller (2002; 2004) and Quam and Ryshina-Pankova (2016) has shown, Engagement theory (Martin and White 2005) can shed light on particular strategies politicians employ to strengthen their arguments and persuade their audiences to adopt their views. Starting from the assumption that Donald Trump’s use of Twitter played in his favour already in the 2016 Presidential campaign, the present analysis shows that Donald Trump tends to privilege meaning-making choices which ‘fend off’ or ‘shut down’ dialogistic alternatives: typically, his tweets contain either ‘bare assertions’ which take shared assumptions for granted, or ‘contractive heteroglossic’ options that make the dialogic space very constrained. In general, the ‘Engagement moves’ deployed are quite limited and repetitive, consisting mainly of ‘Denials’, ‘Pronouncements’, and ‘Counters’: this might work to Donald Trump’s advantage, as repetitions can give the speaker an air of authority and provoke an unconscious response of support among his followers (Lakoff 2016). This study also shows that the distribution of linguistic and discursive strategies in Donald Trump’s tweets is very similar to the distribution of the same resources in non-Twitter contexts: therefore, his ‘Engagement style’ in Twitter does not seem to be due to the character-limit of the platform, but to a more general ‘cross-media’ tendency that tends to tune down alternative positions
Identities in 'Non-places' : The Geosemiotics of Computer-mediated Learning Environments in Second Life
No full textThe diffusion of virtual computer-mediated settings and the development of Web 2.0 environments have enormously increased the importance of non-material places, that is to say virtual ‘non-spaces’ where social identities are constantly re-semiotized thanks to the multisemiotic potentialities afforded by the electronic settings. The case of Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com) is rather emblematic: it was created in June 2003 and “[a]t the beginning of September, 2008, just over 15 million accounts were registered, although there are no reliable figures for actual long term consistent usage” (Wikipedia, 2008; Rymaszewki et al., 2008). Among a variety of different ‘real-to-life’ environments, Second Life (from now on SL) offers a widespread choice of ‘education places’: from real institutions with a virtual ‘campus’ (see a list in SimTeach, 2008) to entirely virtual schools (see SimTeach, 2008 and Pepper, 2008).
This study discusses some of the potentialities offered by virtual communities and their socio-cultural dynamics in SL learning environments. The analysis will try to complement theoretical frameworks derived from the fields of multimodal analysis and education: in particular, critical socio-semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006; Baldry and Thibault, 2006; Lassen et al. 2006; Caldas-Coulthard and Iedema, 2008) and socio-constructivist theories of learning related to computer-mediated communication (CMC) for educational purposes (Lamy and Hampel, 2007; Pritchard, 2007).
One of the aims of the study is to identify a working procedure to investigate SL learning environments and explore its virtual and potential geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon, 2003) in relation to e-user identities (institutional, learning and teaching) and corresponding virtual communities of practice (Wenger, 1998, 2008; Lave and Wenger, 1991).
More specifically, the paper reports a case-study from our work-in-progress and presents a framework to analyse whether the geosemiotics of a virtual setting and its affordances promote the construal of places (or ‘non-places’ ) conducive to learnin
Neurodivergence, foregrounding, and narrative empathy: A study on readers’ responses to textual manipulation
No full textThis paper empirically investigates how stylistic foregrounding affects narrative empathy toward unconventional characters, focusing on Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon (1959), a short story about a cognitively delayed janitor who, after a futuristic treatment, turns into a genius and then regresses to neurodivergence. Our questionnaire-based study compared readers’ empathic responses to original excerpts—rich in linguistic deviations mirroring the protagonist’s cognitive shifts—with responses to manipulated, stylistically neutral versions. Although we hypothesized that foregrounding would enhance empathy, quantitative data reported higher empathy scores for readers of the manipulated versions, though with no statistically significant differences between conditions. Regression analysis showed that aesthetic appreciation was the strongest predictor of state empathy. Foregrounding, conversely, emerged as a negative predictor, suggesting that salient stylistic features may distract from emotional immersion for some readers. However, collected post-reading reflections suggest that foregrounding fosters stronger emotional connections by creating more challenging emotional reactions, as readers become progressively involved in the narrator’s developments and regressions that materialize in his writing style. We provide multiple interpretations of the observed effects of foregrounding in relation to personal factors and the specific literary specimen, highlighting that foregrounding can both enhance and inhibit empathy depending on reader characteristics such as language proficiency and aesthetic sensitivity. While accessibility may facilitate immediate emotional connection, stylistic complexity appears to support reflective, often more intense responses. This study highlights the multifaceted role of literary style in shaping narrative empathy and suggests the need to account for individual reader differences in future empirical research
Developing Critical Multimodal Literacy in Secondary School Students.
No full textThis chapter discusses the results of a project aimed at enhancing critical
multimodal literacy in Italian secondary school students. The activities described
are part of a larger project called MACHETE (Multiliteracy Advances and
Challenges in Hypermedia English Teaching Environments – see Vasta’s paper,
this volume) and were conducted in a secondary school in the Friuli Venezia
Giulia region under the author’s supervision, after discussing texts and methods
with the other project members. The project is a follow-up to a previous one
conducted with primary school students (Vasta and Trevisan 2017)
‘Pedagogical Stylistics’ through Corpora in the University Classroom: A Case-Study
Get PDFHow can corpus linguistics be used for pedagogical purposes? How can it contribute to the study and appreciation of specific literary aspects? The aim of this paper is to show how students can become researchers, and use authentic language data to discover tendencies and thematic trends through inductive procedures: in other words, how awareness/consciousness can be triggered in a practical way, without being overtly deductive. To start with, some activities that were carried out in the language classroom are described: these include the introduction of crucial corpus methods such as keyness, collocations and concordances, followed by their application to a specific case-study, the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. These activities proved very useful to raise the students’ awareness regarding the use of particular language patterns by the English author. After that, the steps of a specific ‘methodological journey’ carried out by a student in her BA dissertation are presented: here, Austen’s novel has been compared to the rest of her literary production first, and to a reference corpus composed by a sample of English literature (the Imaginative Writing Section of the British National Corpus) later. Overall, the activities described show that corpus methods can prove successful both for testing previously-formed assumptions about specific aspects of literature, and for improving language skills more generally
Systemic functional grammar as a tool for experimental stimulus design: new appliable horizons in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics
Get PDFSince their onset more than 50 years ago, both psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics have
provided crucial breakthroughs for understanding the cognitive bases of language. Despite
their major contributions, however, both fields have been undermined by a tradeoff between
ecological validity (i.e., the degree to which tasks reflect the conditions of everyday
communication) and experimental control (the manipulation of fine-grained variables,
which is typically achieved by matching lists of decontextualized words and sentences).
Specifically, most extant research sacrifices the former requisite in pursuit of the latter, or
vice versa, but both are rarely met in combination. To overcome this problem, we have
relied on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and designed a protocol for constructing
carefully matched but fully naturalistic narratives usable in experimental settings. First, we
describe the limitations of mainstream language experiments and their poor ecological
validity. Second, we introduce an SFL-based protocol that allows constructing naturalistic
stories that differ in one critical target variable while guaranteeing statistical comparability
in multiple other factors. Third, we illustrate how the protocol has been successfully
implemented in two groundbreaking studies exploring the links between biological motor
systems and lexico-semantic processing. Finally, we discuss the potential gains springing
from future collaborations between SFL and experimental language research
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