European structuralism

European structuralism is a paradigm for the study of language developed by prominent European linguists during the inter-war period and the first decades after World War II that radically rejected the prevailing atomism of 19th century (particularly neo-grammarian) linguistics and language psychology

Active current, reactive current, Kirchhoff's laws and Tellegen's theorem

The relations between the basic laws of circuit theory (Kirchhoff's laws and the conservation of generalized power) are discussed with respect to the active and reactive current components. It is shown that the active and reactive currents do not satisfy Kirchoff's current law. It is proved that this is not in contradiction with the property that the active and reactive powers satisfy the conservation property

Componential analysis

Componential analysis is a method of semantic analysis based on the assumption that the meaning of words can be adequately described by a set of primitive semantic features

Immediate Constituent Analysis (IC analysis)

Immediate Constituent Analysis is a structural method for analysing the hierarchical relations among the constituents of complex linguistic constructions, proceeding consecutively from the higher to the next lower level until no further breakdown into smaller units is possible

Georg von der Gabelentz and 'das lautsymbolische Gefühl': a chapter in the history of iconicity research

In any future history of iconicity research, a chapter will have to be reserved to a singular figure in the history of linguistics: Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893). Only few scholars have paid attention to Gabelentz’ views on iconicity. Coseriu (1967: 97) mentions Gabelentz’ “interesting and fertile ideas” on sound symbolism, without further discussion, like Schuchardt (1897: 205) had done before him. The most comprehensive reference to date is a two-page summary of Gabelentz’ views on sound symbolism in Jakobson & Waugh (1987: 181-183). For the rest, it seems that Gabelentz’ observations have gone largely unnoticed in modern scholarship. In this article I therefore discuss some of his observations on sound symbolism as they can be found in his magnum opus 'Die Sprachwissenschaft' ([1891] 1901). Although reflections on the expressive values of sounds have a long tradition in Western thinking, Gabelentz is among the first scholars who turned the previously mostly intuitive and unsystematic presentations of this aspect of language into a more systematic approach based on a number of insightful conceptual distinctions. After Gabelentz, the role of sound symbolism has been increasingly discussed by scholars, e.g. Paul ([1880] 1909), Wundt (1900), Leskien (1902/1903), Rubinyi (1913), among others. However, it seems that the importance and the proper place of Gabelentz in this historical development has not been duly appreciated

Film/NotFilm

Although Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) showed a genuine interest in audio-visual media in his fascinating and innovative radio plays and television works, and in 1936 even wrote a letter to Sergei Eisenstein to be accepted to the famous Soviet film school VGIK, the 22-minute Film (1965) was his only venture into cinema. Beckett conceived the film, wrote the screenplay, supervised the production and, as one of the film’s crew members recalled and as the director Alan Schneider himself acknowledged, ‘Beckett directed the director’. Because the practice of filmmaking didn’t exactly turn out as the unexperienced Beckett had imagined, he considered the film to be a failure. The recent 4K restoration of Film by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, in cooperation with the British Film Institute, and the documentary/film essay NotFilm by UCLA restorer Ross Lipman, however, aim to bring Beckett’s Film back into the spotlight and stimulate a reappraisal of its remarkable qualities

From movies to games: how film policy is changing

While the expansion of film industry activities film to other media has a long history, media convergence has intensified this trend in recent years. Flanders, the northern, Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, offers an interesting European case-study of how film policy is responding