Evaluation in late modern English history writing

Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Identifikation und der Klassifikation von evaluativer Lexis in den Werken von britischen Geschichtsschreibern der Spätneuzeit. Im Fokus stehen die von den Historikern im Verlauf von 200 Jahren (ca. 1700-1914) verwendeten sprachlichen Mittel, welche zur Bewertung von historischen Ereignissen und Akteuren eingesetzt werden, und die durch die Mittel realisierten Funktionen. Zentral ist die Betrachtung von Evaluation als linguistischem Mittel der Signifikanzherstellung in neuzeitlicher englischer Geschichtsschreibung. Die Arbeit stützt sich in ihren theoretische Ansätzen u.a. auf das Appraisal Framework (Martin & White 2005) und erweitert dieses, um es unter Einsatz von sowohl korpuslinguistisch-quantitativer als auch qualitativer Methoden auf ein großes Korpus historischer Primärwerke aus dem 18.-19. Jahrhundert anzuwenden. Sie verortet sich sowohl in der historischen/diachronen Diskursforschung als auch in der korpusunterstützten Diskursanalyse (Partington et al. 2013) und liefert eine erste linguistische Beschreibung des historiographischen Registers in der wichtigen Periode seiner allmählichen Verwissenschaftlichung und Institutionalisierung. Indem sie eine interdisziplinäre Perspektive einnimmt, vermittelt diese Arbeit zwischen historischer Theoriebildung und linguistischer Theorie und Methodik.This paper is concerned with the identification and classification of evaluative lexis in the works of British historians of the Late Modern period. The focus is on the linguistic resources used by historians over the course of 200 years (c. 1700-1914) to evaluate historical events and actors, and the functions realised through these resources. Central to the study is the consideration of evaluation as a linguistic means of signaling historical significance in Late Modern English historiography. The work draws on the Appraisal Framework (Martin & White 2005) and extends it in order to apply it to a large corpus of primary historical works from the 18th-19th centuries using both corpus-linguistic-quantitative and qualitative methods. Situating itself in both historical/diachronic discourse research and corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Partington et al. 2013), it provides the first linguistic account of the historiographical register in the pivotal period of its gradual scientification and institutionalisation. By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, this work mediates between historiographic theorising and linguistic theory and methodology

Planning non existent dictionaries

In 2013, a conference entitled Planning non-existent dictionaries was held at the University of Lisbon. Scholars and lexicographers were invited to present and submit for discussion their research and practices, focusing on aspects that are traditionally perceived as shortcomings by dictionary makers and dictionary users. This book contains a collection of papers divided in three sections. The first section is devoted to heritage dictionaries, referring to lexicographic projects that aim to register all the documented words in a language, particularly those that can be described as early linguistic evidence. The second section is devoted to dictionaries for special purposes and it gathers papers that describe innovative lexicographic projects. The last section in this volume provides an overview of contemporary e- lexicography projects.publishe

Prediction and integration of semantics during L2 and L1 listening

Using the visual world paradigm, we tested whether Dutch-English bilinguals predict upcoming semantic information in auditory sentence comprehension to the same extent in their native (L1) and second language (L2). Participants listened to sentences in L1 and L2 while their eye-movements were measured. A display containing a picture of either a target word or a semantic competitor, and three unrelated objects was shown before the onset of the auditory target word in the sentence. There were more fixations on the target and competitor pictures relative to the unrelated pictures in both languages, before hearing the target word could affect fixations. Also, semantically stronger related competitors attracted more fixations. This relatedness effect was stronger, and it started earlier in the L1 than in the L2. These results suggest that bilinguals predict semantics in the L2, but the spread of semantic activation during prediction is slower and weaker than in the L1

Language and ethnic national identity in Europe: the importance of Gaelic and Sorbian to the maintenance of associated cultures and ethno cultural identities

As many other ethno-cultural identities in Europe, the collective self perceptions of Scotland's Gaels and the Sorbs of Lusatia are undergoing considerable changes. Proceeding from the post-structuralist premise that discourse plays a crucial part in the generation of knowledge, power and social behaviour (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard), the study addresses the ways in which the Gaelic and Sorbian elites incorporate the language aspect into narratives on cultural continuity and considers the implications of accelerated language shift towards English/German and the survivalist promotion of the ancestral medium for the maintenance of group boundaries. Its primary empirical data corpus comprises more than 100 interviews and a questionnaire survey (n=201) conducted during the late 1990s in peripheral parts of the Ghidhealtachd and bilingual territories of Lusatia, publications by Gaelic and Sorbian organisations, and relevant items from the local and national media. A brief exploration of the ways in which the two communities came to think of themselves as distinct reveals that a substantial legacy of cultural nationalism and pan-Slavism allowed the Sorbian intelligentsia to sustain a strong sense of ethnic difference throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, whereas Scotland's Gaels have never overtly embraced this paradigm in political terms. Their elite was confronted with its premises during their reinvention as Scotland's Celts and combined linguistic patriotism with calls for socioeconomic improvements during the 1880s, but it has been rather reluctant to portray contemporary and future users of the ancestral language as a distinct nation or ethnic group. To the present day, Gaels are inclined to perceive themselves to be a key component, and arguably the kernel, of the Scottish nation. The most significant overlap between Gaelic- and Sorbian-related revival discourses has been the notion that a complete decline of the traditional medium would seal the fate of the associated culture, though the underlying rationales indicate a gradual shift from an essentialising agenda of preservation and exclusion to a more liberal and pluricentric approach. A desire to withstand the homogenising forces of capitalist globalisation fuels purist attitudes with regard to specific cultural forms, many of which are thought to depend on the traditional medium and put native speakers with heartland links into positions of authority. At the same time, the Gaelic and Sorbian heritage are treated as sources of alternative values and wisdom, in which context Gaelic/Sorbian language ability is primarily valued as an access tool. Tensions between essentialist and dynamic perspectives also occur over the development of the languages themselves. They are enhanced by the assumption that the 'survival' of Gaelic and Sorbian depends in part on individuals who acquire and transmit them outside the bilingual districts, where an ability in the minority medium is more likely to generate subcultural, regional and political identities than a radical ethno-cultural reorientation. According to this study's findings, the linguocentric agendas of many Gaelic and Sorbian organisations can neither be attributed to a naive belief in linguistic determinism nor be dismissed as an entirely symbolic ingredient for the restoration of justice and pride where historic circumstances inflicted marginalisation and oppression. They are based on a justified concern that the complete demise of a linguistic boundary would make it impossible to generate separate discursive spaces, to which Gaelic and Sorbian culture have in most locations become reduced and for which a separate literature and separate electronic media are indispensable

Affective language processing in a native and non-native mind: A neuropragmatic perspective

Wydział AnglistykiCelem pracy jest zbadanie elektrofizjologicznych oraz behawioralnych podstaw przetwarzania języka afektywnego w kontekście, w języku ojczystym oraz obcym u Polaków mieszkających w Wielkiej Brytanii. Dwa eksperymenty badają reakcje uczestników na przymiotniki afektywne prezentowane poza kontekstem (eksp. 1) oraz w kontekście zdaniowym (eksp. 2), oferując perspektywę pragmatyczną. Założono, że czytanie przymiotników afektywnych osadzonych poza kontekstem zdaniowym nie wywoła mierzalnych różnic w danych behawioralnych oraz elektrofizjologicznych w języku pierwszym oraz drugim. W eksperymencie 2, natomiast, przewidziano różnicę w modulacji potencjałów wywołanych walencją emocjonalną w języku pierwszym oraz drugim ze względu na zwiększenie informacji kontekstowej. Obie hipotezy zostały potwierdzone. W eksp. 1, zaobserwowano porównywalne reakcje elektrofizjologiczne w języku pierwszym oraz drugim, co sugeruje, że przetwarzanie słów afektywnych wydaje się być zautomatyzowane w obu językach. W eksp. 2, natomiast, reakcje elektrofizjologiczne na te same bodźce osadzone w kontekście różniły się pomiędzy językami, ukazując zredukowany dostęp semantyczny do zdań negatywnych w języku drugim we wczesnym etapie ich przetwarzania. Wyniki niniejszego badania oferują pierwszą neurokognitywną interpretację wyników wcześniejszych badań, oraz niosą ważne implikacje w kontekście terapii oraz edukacji z osobami dwujęzycznymi.The study examines electrophysiological and behavioural correlates of affective language processing in context in the native and non-native language of immersed Polish-English bilinguals using an electroencephalograph. Two experiments test bilinguals’ responses to affective adjectives embedded in a single-word (experiment 1) and sentence (experiment 2) context, introducing a “pragmatic twist” in the experimental design. It was hypothesized that reading affective adjectives in single-word context will not produce measurable differences between L1 and L2. In experiment 2, by contrast, I predicted a differential modulation of electrophysiological responses by affective valence in L1 and L2 as a factor of build-up of contextual information. Both hypotheses were confirmed. In experiment 1, comparable electrophysiological responses were elicited in L1 and L2, showing that processing of single affective words seems to be automatized in L1 and L2. In experiment 2, however, electrophysiological responses to the same set of affective words embedded in context differed as a function of language, whereby semantic access to negative sentences in L2 was reduced in the early stages of processing. This result offers a neurocognitive interpretation for findings reported in previous research and may have important implications for bilingual therapy and education

Style and creativity: towards a theory of creative stylistics

The purpose of this thesis is to present a new theory of creative stylistics as an antithesis to traditional description-oriented stylistics. For this purpose it undertakes: (1) a selective historical survey of stylistics with special attention to its academic formation in the context of the theoretical dissociation between linguistics and literary criticism (Chapter 1), (2) a theoretical survey of stylistics with special attention to the way it has been defined and subcategorized (Chapter 2), (3) a rearrangement of various stylistic theories according to the criterion of purpose, and a cognitively oriented demonstration of redefined linguistic, literary, and pedagogical stylistics (Chapter 3), (4) a theorization of creative stylistics as a prescriptively oriented discipline complementing the descriptivism of traditional stylistics, in terms of the cognitive processes of textual creation (Chapter 4), and (5) a demonstration of creative stylistics through an examination of my own literary writing, together with a discussion of further pedagogical and cross-cultural issues arising from this (Chapter 5). Through these chapters I make it clear. (a) that the theoretical proliferation, the variety of nomenclature, and the arbitrary subcategorization of stylistics has made this discipline seem more complicated than it really is; (b) that stylistics has so far only followed the course laid down by descriptive linguistics and literary criticism, and has not yet fully explored or exploited the dynamic interaction between language and literature, since it has hardly paid attention to the issue of the creativity of style and language; (c) that, in order to establish stylistics as a truly interdisciplinary field of study between linguistic and literary studies, we need to take up the classical idea of rhetoric with its prescriptive function as well as the new idea of 'creative language awareness' in order to open up the domain of stylistic study for the purpose of textual creation; (d) that, as the descriptive analyses of traditional stylistics should be retrievable, so the processes of creative stylistics should be replicable for any creatively-motivated writer, irrespective of the kind of text he or she is trying to create; (e) that, by being replicable, the theory of creative stylistics would be extraordinarily useful in pedagogical contexts in helping language learners both to improve their skills in writing and to sensitize themselves to language and literature; and (f) that creative stylistics is designed to explore and exploit the possibilities of breaking down the native/non-native opposition in English studies and of bridging native/non-native cultural gaps in aesthetic creation

A Neurocognitive Approach

One of the most important hallmarks of human language is the use of symbolic signs in that words just “symbolically” represent the objects they refer to. That is, neither the written word ‘tree’ nor the spoken sequence of sounds /triː/ has any inherent similarity or analogy to a real tree. This is a core assumption of classic linguistics, which states that words are paired with objects, mental images, or concepts in an arbitrary fashion. Thus, the sound of a word per se has no inherent semantic content, nor does it play any contributing role in shaping the meaning of words. The goal of this dissertation is to contemplate, to rethink, and to examine the aforementioned statement, which has dominated language research throughout the last century. Indeed, there are a vast number of counterexamples showing how meaningful single phonemes, or their combination—as in nonwords—can be. Consider the standalone role of sound in poetry, or the use of single syllables or phonemes in various sacred rituals, or the prevalence of onomatopoetic words, i.e., words that sound similar to what they mean (e.g., click, zigzag), across all of the languages in the world, or the tendency of language users toward using harsh-sounding words as swear words, or cross-linguistic phenomena such as a preference to match the nonword BOUBA with a curvy round shape and KIKI with a spiky angular shape: These all constitute excellent examples that could potentially falsify the radical assumption of the sound of words being per se meaningless. The present dissertation now wants to shed new empirical light on this old debate, which dates back to Greek antiquity, yet faces a number of unanswered questions regarding the cognitive and neuropsychological mechanisms underlying the potential effect of sound on the processes of meaning making. More specifically, my focus is on the existence of sound-meaning relationships in the affective domain, termed affective iconicity, and on the investigation of different aspects of this phenomenon in both everyday language and poetry. By taking an interdisciplinary approach, the present work combines a variety of methods and techniques, such as behavioral and neuroimaging experiments, phonological and acoustic analysis of a large-scale lexicon, computational modelling, and corpus analysis, in order to provide comprehensive answers for this multi-faceted phenomenon. The theoretical part of the dissertation explores and integrates linguistic perspectives on the iconic mappings, explaining how a linguistic sign can acquire meaning based on similarities between its form and the object it refers to. A surprising neglect of the role of emotion in empirical models of language in general, and in previous investigations of iconicity in particular, is discussed. Specific hypotheses are formulated via the predictions made by the recently proposed Neurocognitive Poetics Model (NCPM), and through reviewing the previous works on the topic. Accordingly, three main questions are formulated that the present dissertation aims to address: i) Does the sound of words evoke affective responses observable at the behavioral and neural level? ii) Does the sound of words influence the processes of meaning making in the affective domain? iii) Does the sound of words in a poem contribute to its global affective meaning as perceived by readers? Six empirical studies attempt to address these questions which are subdivided into six more precise research questions. Results of the empirical part provide a comprehensive picture of the interplay between sound and meaning at different levels of processing (i.e., rating, semantic decision, and passive listening) for different presentation modalities (i.e., visual, and auditory) and for different textual levels (i.e., single word, and entire text). In short, results of Study 1 and Study 2 indicated a high similarity between the affective potential of the sound of words and other types of affective sounds (e.g., nonverbal emotional vocalization and affective prosody) at both the level of psychological perception (Study 1) and the level of neural correlates and substrates (Study 2). Furthermore, when giving their affective judgments (valence and arousal) about the meaning of words, participants, as shown in Study 1, were implicitly influenced by the sound of words even when words were presented visually and read silently. These results were extended in Study 3 in which iconic words, as operationalized by congruence between affective sound and affective meaning, were evaluated more quickly and more accurately than their non-iconic counterparts, suggesting that a similarity between the form and meaning of a word may help language users to more readily access its meaning through direct form-meaning mappings. Study 4 investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the facilitative effect observed in Study 3. Results showed an enhanced fMRI signal in the left amygdala, known for its role in multimodal emotion integration, for both a comparison between iconic and non-iconic words, as well as functional connectivity between two seed regions representing the sound (superior temporal gyrus) and meaning (inferior frontal gyrus) of words modulated by iconic condition. Lastly, results of Study 5 and Study 6 emphasize the role of foregrounded phonological units in the affective and aesthetic processes of literary reading. This clearly supports the initial hypotheses that iconicity is a feasible indicator of the affective qualities of a literary text as evoked by particular phonemic structures. The presented method for measuring the basic affective tone of the poems investigated could account for a considerable part of the variance in the ratings of their general affective meaning. In summary, this dissertation provides strong psychological and neuroimaging evidence for a device that has long been deployed in poetry and the arts, i.e., evoking affective (and aesthetic) responses by the use of certain words with specific sound patterns. The results were used to upgrade the standard models of visual word processing by conceiving corresponding modules responsible for the evaluation of affective sound and its interaction with the evaluation of the affective meaning of words. Lastly, at the more complex level of the whole text, the findings of this dissertation confirm the central assumption of the NCPM regarding the role of foregrounded elements in enhancing affective perception, although the Panksepp-Jakopson hypothesis might need to be extended to human-specific brain regions which originally evolved for other, more simple, tasks. Also, the literary model of reading may need to be updated by adding feedback loops from resulting reading behavior (e.g., fluent reading) to the perceived emotions (e.g., lust and play) based on the findings concerning the facilitative role of iconicity in language processing

Cappadocian kinship

Cappadocian kinship systems are very interesting from a sociolinguistic and anthropological perspective because of the mixture of inherited Greek and borrowed Turkish kinship terms. Precisely because the number of Turkish kinship terms differs from one variety to another, it is necessary to talk about Cappadocian kinship systems in the plural rather than about the Cappadocian kinship system in the singular. Although reference will be made to other Cappadocian varieties, this paper will focus on the kinship systems of Mišotika and Aksenitika, the two Central Cappadocian dialects still spoken today in several communities in Greece. Particular attention will be given to the use of borrowed Turkish kinship terms, which sometimes seem to co-exist together with their inherited Greek counterparts, e.g. mána vs. néne ‘mother’, ailfó/aelfó vs. γardáš ‘brother’ etc. In the final part of the paper some kinship terms with obscure or hitherto unknown etymology will be discussed, e.g. káka ‘grandmother’, ižá ‘aunt’, lúva ‘uncle (father’s brother)’ etc

Style and creativity: towards a theory of creative stylistics

The purpose of this thesis is to present a new theory of creative stylistics as an antithesis to traditional description-oriented stylistics. For this purpose it undertakes: (1) a selective historical survey of stylistics with special attention to its academic formation in the context of the theoretical dissociation between linguistics and literary criticism (Chapter 1), (2) a theoretical survey of stylistics with special attention to the way it has been defined and subcategorized (Chapter 2), (3) a rearrangement of various stylistic theories according to the criterion of purpose, and a cognitively oriented demonstration of redefined linguistic, literary, and pedagogical stylistics (Chapter 3), (4) a theorization of creative stylistics as a prescriptively oriented discipline complementing the descriptivism of traditional stylistics, in terms of the cognitive processes of textual creation (Chapter 4), and (5) a demonstration of creative stylistics through an examination of my own literary writing, together with a discussion of further pedagogical and cross-cultural issues arising from this (Chapter 5). Through these chapters I make it clear. (a) that the theoretical proliferation, the variety of nomenclature, and the arbitrary subcategorization of stylistics has made this discipline seem more complicated than it really is; (b) that stylistics has so far only followed the course laid down by descriptive linguistics and literary criticism, and has not yet fully explored or exploited the dynamic interaction between language and literature, since it has hardly paid attention to the issue of the creativity of style and language; (c) that, in order to establish stylistics as a truly interdisciplinary field of study between linguistic and literary studies, we need to take up the classical idea of rhetoric with its prescriptive function as well as the new idea of 'creative language awareness' in order to open up the domain of stylistic study for the purpose of textual creation; (d) that, as the descriptive analyses of traditional stylistics should be retrievable, so the processes of creative stylistics should be replicable for any creatively-motivated writer, irrespective of the kind of text he or she is trying to create; (e) that, by being replicable, the theory of creative stylistics would be extraordinarily useful in pedagogical contexts in helping language learners both to improve their skills in writing and to sensitize themselves to language and literature; and (f) that creative stylistics is designed to explore and exploit the possibilities of breaking down the native/non-native opposition in English studies and of bridging native/non-native cultural gaps in aesthetic creation