The entropy of intoxicated speech - lexical creativity and heavy tongues

Spontaneous speech produced in sober and intoxicated conditions has been compared in information theoretic terms on the phoneme and word level to examine phonological and lexical aspects of intoxication. Word level entropy has been calculated to capture roughly the effect of alcohol on cognitive lexical creativity. Phoneme level entropy is intended to reflect heavy tongue influences on phoneme combinations. Moreover, mispronunciations have been investigated by relating canonical to realised pronunciation by means of mutual information and the Levenshtein distance. To account for the gradual nature of intoxication, examinations have been carried out regarding the offsets and slopes of linear functions mapping the blood alcohol concentration to the information theoretic variables. It turned out that male speakers compensate less for the alcohol-induced degradations with regard to lexical creativity and articulatory precision than female speakers. Furthermore, the pronunciation of male speakers generally deviates more from canonical forms

Cultures and Traditions of Wordplay and Wordplay Research

This volume focuses on realisations of wordplay in different cultures and social and historical contexts, and brings together various research traditions of approaching wordplay. Together with the volume DWP 7, it assembles selected papers presented at the interdisciplinary conference The Dynamics of Wordplay / La dynamique du jeu de mots (Trier, 2016) and stresses the inherent dynamicity of wordplay and wordplay research

Cultures and Traditions of Wordplay and Wordplay Research

This volume focuses on realisations of wordplay in different cultures and social and historical contexts, and brings together various research traditions of approaching wordplay. Together with the volume DWP 7, it assembles selected papers presented at the interdisciplinary conference The Dynamics of Wordplay / La dynamique du jeu de mots (Trier, 2016) and stresses the inherent dynamicity of wordplay and wordplay research

Social work with airports passengers

Social work at the airport is in to offer to passengers social services. The main methodological position is that people are under stress, which characterized by a particular set of characteristics in appearance and behavior. In such circumstances passenger attracts in his actions some attention. Only person whom he trusts can help him with the documents or psychologically

A Companion to Andrei Platonov's "The Foundation Pit"

Written at the height of Stalin's first "five-year plan" for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "production" novel, which is widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973

A Companion to Andrei Platonov's "The Foundation Pit"

Written at the height of Stalin's first "five-year plan" for the industrialization of Soviet Russia and the parallel campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit registers a dissonant mixture of utopian longings and despair. Furthermore, it provides essential background to Platonov's parody of the mainstream Soviet "production" novel, which is widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian prose. In addition to an overview of the work's key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov's oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work's ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work's first publication in the West in 1973

Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach to the Mega-Novel

Reading Cruft offers a new critical model in which to examine a genre vital to modern literature, the mega-novel. Building on theoretical work in both cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics, it argues that the mega-novel is primarily characterized by its inclusion of a substantial amount of pointless text ( cruft ), which it uses to challenge its readers\u27 abilities to modulate their attention and rapidly shift their modes of text processing. Structured into five chapters respectively devoted to subgenres in which mega-novels have been grouped--the dictionary novel, the encyclopedic novel, the Menippean satire, the picaresque and frame-tale, and the epic and allegory--it demonstrates how these books make substantial use of their generic elements but also include text that fails to either fulfill or subvert their most crucial elements, rendering much of their text into excess that cannot be deeply processed. However, mega-novels also contain text that, though appearing to be cruft, is actually quite important, forcing readers to subtly distinguish between the text that does require deep attention and that which does not. This requires readers to develop more sophisticated procedures of attentional modulation in text processing. Reading Cruft argues that the education of attention this process prompts can aid readers in learning to manage the information overload that increasingly characterizes every aspect of contemporary life