ANALYZING THE WORD CHOICE IN RELATION TO THE SEMANTIC ADJUSTMENT IN THE ENGLISH-INDONESIAN TRANSLATION OF DISNEY’S DONALD DUCK SERIAL COMIC BOOK.

This paper is a qualitative study of the word choice in relation to the semantic adjustment in the Indonesian translation of a Disney’s Donald Duck serial comic book entitled “Misteri Anggrek Rawa” (Mystery of the Swamp Orchid). It is revealed that there are six semantic features found, namely situational meaning, semantic adjustment, semantic omission, semantic change, semantic shift, and mistranslation. Those features may help the readers in understanding the text, but they may also create confusion on the readers of what the text actually is about, and that the change and/or the mistranslation can make the readers misinterpret the meaning

A preliminary bibliography on focus

[I]n its present form, the bibliography contains approximately 1100 entries. Bibliographical work is never complete, and the present one is still modest in a number of respects. It is not annotated, and it still contains a lot of mistakes and inconsistencies. It has nevertheless reached a stage which justifies considering the possibility of making it available to the public. The first step towards this is its pre-publication in the form of this working paper. […] The bibliography is less complete for earlier years. For works before 1970, the bibliographies of Firbas and Golkova 1975 and Tyl 1970 may be consulted, which have not been included here

Reflections on Hindi and history

textIn this paper, I consider historical periods, linguistic categories, and social theories in relation to Hindi in order to trace out the character and trajectory of the language. From sixteenth-century courtly contexts, to the adoption of the Devanagari script in the twentieth century by nationalists, Hindi has a polyvalent and yet specific history. I discuss these contexts in which social contact led to linguistic change and in which Hindi acquired many of the lexical, syntactical, and phonological characteristics by which it is recognized today. I conclude with a section that considers the motif of language and power, and I suggest that the production of knowledge and power in language use, offers both the means of distinction and expression or, in another sense, of hierarchy and communitas. A thread that runs throughout the paper is attention to the contexts in which language use enables elaboration and in which elaboration is eschewed in order to attain social unity. Pursuing a descriptive historical-linguistic project, I neither affirm nor deny the politics of such language use, but rather I indicate the ways in which actors and agents use Hindi to help articulate their agency.Asian Studie

From ergativus absolutus to topic marking in Kiranti : a typological perspective

In many languages, clauses can be subordinated by means of case markers. For Bodic languages, a branch of Sino-Tibetan, Genetti (1986) has shown that the meaning of case markers on clauses is in most instances a natural extension of their function on nouns. A dative, for example, which marks a referential goal with a noun, signals a situational goal, i.e., a purpose, when used on a clause. Among the case markers recruited for subordination, we not only get relatively concrete cases like datives, comitatives and various types of locatives, but also core argument relators such as ergatives and accusatives. In this paper, I focus on ergative markers in one subgroup of Bodic, viz. in Kiranti languages spoken in Eastern Nepal, especially in Belhare

A functional view on prototypes

The human mind may produce prototypization within virtually any realm of cognition and behavior. A "comparative prototype-typology" might prove to be an interesting field of study – perhaps a new subfield of semiotics. This, however, would presuppose a clear view on the samenesses and differences of prototypization in these various fields. It seems realistic for the time being that the linguist first confine himself to describing prototypization within the realm of language proper. The literature on prototypes has steadily grown in the past ten years or so. I confine myself to mentioning the volume on Noun Classes and Categorization, edited by C. Craig (1986), which contains a wealth of factual information on the subject, along with some theoretical vistas. By and large, however, linguistic prototype research is still basically in a taxonomic stage - which, of course, represents the precondition for moving beyond. The procedure is largely per ostensionem, and by accumulating examples of prototypes. We still lack a comprehensive prototype theory. The following pages are intended, not to provide such, a theory, but to do the first steps in this direction. Section 2 will feature some elements of a functional theory of prototypes. They have been developed by this author within the frame of the UNITYP model of research on language universals and typology. Section 3 will bring a discussion of prototypization with regard to selected phenomena of a wide range of levels of analysis: Phonology, morphosyntax, speech acts, and the lexicon. Prototypization will finally be studied within one of the universal dimensions, that of APPREHENSION - the linguistic representation of the concepts of objects – as proposed by Seiler (1986)

Remarks on deixis

The prevailing conception of deixis is oriented to the idea of 'concrete' physical and perceptual characteristics of the situation of speech. Signs standardly adduced as typical deictics are I, you, here, now, this, that. I and you are defined as meaning "the person producing the utterance in question" and "the person spoken to", here and now as meaning "where the speaker is at utterance time" and "at the moment the utterance is made" (also, "at the place/time of the speech exchange"); similarly, the meanings of this and that are as a rule defined via proximity to speaker's physical location. The elements used in such definitions form the conceptual framework of most of the general characterisations of deixis in the literature. [...] There is much in the literature, of course, that goes far beyond this framework . A great variety of elements, mostly with very abstract meanings, have been found to share deictic characteristics although they do not fit into the personnel-place-time-of-utterance schema. The adequacy of that schema is also called into question by many observations to the effect that the use of such standard deictics as here, now, this, that cannot really be accounted for on its basis, and by the far-reaching possibilities of orienting deictics to reference points in situations other than the situation of speech, to 'deictic centers' other than the speaker. [...] Analyses along the lines of the standard conception regularly acknowledge the existence of deviations from the assumed basic meanings. One traditional solution attributes them to speaker's "subjectivity", or to differences between "physical" and "psychological" space or time; in a similar vein, metaphorical extensions may be said to be at play, or a distinction between prototypical and non-prototypical meanings invoked. Quite apart from the question of the relative merits of these explanatory principles, which I do not wish to discuss here, the problem with all such accounts is that the definitions of the assumed basic meanings themselves are founded on axiom rather than analysis of situated use. The logical alternative, of course, is to set out for more abstract and comprehensive meaning definitions from the start. In fact, a number of recent, discourse-oriented, treatments of the demonstratives proceed this way; they view those elements as processing instructions rather than signs with inherently spatial denotation (Isard 1975, Hawkins 1978, Kirsner 1979, Linde 1979 , Ehlich 1982.

Strong and Weak Interpretations in Translating Chinese Poetry

Are classical Chinese and modern Chinese one language, or two? Is translating classical Chinese poetry the same as or different from translating modern Chinese poetry? I have earlier argued that modern Chinese poetry is in some ways a translation of premodern Chinese poetics through the filter of international poetics—but if this is the case, then should translation of classical and modern poetry into English be more similar than they are? Looking at Lydia Liu’s notion of the “supersign” alongside my experiences translating contemporary poets Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan as well as Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin, I discuss what I call “weak interpretations” and “strong interpretations” and how they play out in the translational alignment of classical and modern Chinese poetry with poetry in English today