Dimensions of social meaning in post-classical Greek towards an integrated approach

Especially in the first half of the twentieth century, language was viewed as a vehicle for the transmission of facts and ideas. Later on, scholars working in linguistic frameworks such as Functional and Cognitive Linguistics, (Historical) Sociolinguistics and Functional Sociolinguistics, have emphasized the social relevance of language, focusing, for example, on linguistic concepts such as deixis, modality, or honorific language, or embedding larger linguistic patterns in their social contexts, through notions such as register, sociolect, genre, etc. The main aim of this article is to systematize these observations, through an investigation of how the central, though ill-understood notion of “social meaning” can be captured. The starting point for the discussion is the work that has been done in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. This framework distinguishes “social” (“interpersonal”) meaning from two other types of meaning, and offers a typology of different types of contexts with which these different meanings resonate. In order to achieve a more satisfactory account of social meaning, however, I argue that we need to connect to a theory of how signs convey meaning. The discussion is relevant for Ancient Greek in its entirety, but focuses specifically on Post-classical Greek: as a case study, I discuss five private letters from the so-called Theophanes archive

Creating the Virtual Library

Workshop presentation paper by Jules Winterton (Associate Director and Librarian, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies) providing an understanding of the key issues to be considered in creating and managing collections of electronic resources in libraries and some background to project design, funding and management

Multimodality and superdiversity: evidence for a research agenda

In recent years, social science research in superdiversity has questioned notions such as multiculturalism and pluralism, which hinge on and de facto reproduce ideological constructs such as separate and clearly identifiable national cultures and ethnic identities; research in language and superdiversity, in translanguaging, polylanguaging and metrolingualism have analogously questioned concepts such as multi- and bi-lingualism, which hinge on ideological constructs such as national languages, mother tongue and native speaker proficiency. Research in multimodality has questioned the centrality of language in everyday communication as well as its paradigmatic role to the understanding of communicative practices. While the multimodality of communication is generally acknowledged in work on language and superdiversity, the potential of a social semiotic multimodal approach for understanding communication in superdiversity has not been adequately explored and developed yet – and neither has the concept of superdiversity been addressed in multimodal research. The present paper wants to start to fill this gap. By discussing sign-making practices in the superdiverse context of Leeds Kirkgate Market (UK), it maps the potentials of an ethnographic social semiotics for the study of communication in superdiversity and sketches an agenda for research on multimodality and superdiversity, identifying a series of working hypotheses, research questions, areas of investigations and domains and fields of enquiry

A Kingdom of Priests and Its Earthen Altars in Exodus 19–24

Argues that, reversing the trope of subjects visiting the magnificent, the Elohistic history has Yahweh interested in the simplest, flimsiest altars only, which he will visit when and where he is invited to do so. The implication rules out temple-altars and temples for their royal sponsorship

Review of Ruth Finnegan\u27s Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research Practices

Review of Ruth Finnegan\u27s Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research Practices. (ASA Research Methods in Social Anthropology Series, no. 4.) xviii, 284pp. London and New York: Routledge, 1992

Maniat Laments as Narratives: Forms and Norms of Entextualization

This thesis studies Maniat laments as narratives in folkloristic contexts. It focuses on a manuscript collection of Maniat laments which was compiled around 1930-35 by Ioannis Strilakos (a philologist from Gerolimenas, 1911-1949); it also draws on data from ethnographic fieldwork and published collections. Texts from the collection that refer to killings or abductions (sensational laments) have been compiled in a digital corpus following the latest standards in textual encoding in order to facilitate textual analyses. The study proposes an eclectic language-focused approach to verbal art following recent trends in the study of oral poetics (Bauman and Briggs 1990) and narrative analysis (Labov 1997, Ochs and Capps 2001) brought together by critical perspectives on discourse and culture in sociolinguistics (Blommaert 2005). First of all, the analysis identifies an ethnopoetic-narrative patterning and its variations in relation to prototypical structures of oral experience narratives. The identified prototypical structures are viewed along a set of narrativity dimensions which define their conventionalisation and entextualisabilityt on a continuum that encompasses laments performed in both ritual and non-ritual contexts. Secondly, this study explores the way norms of language have been deployed in practices of recording, selecting, editing, transcribing and publishing laments either emphasising their 'canonical' textual shape or adding new meanings through orthopraxies. The latter are illustrated in the hybrid register in which the texts in the manuscript collection have been recorded, pointing to synergies between orality and literacy norms and revealing the complexity of the natural histories of verbal art