Decolonizing Listening: Towards an Equitable Approach to Speech Training for the Actor.

This article confirms and deepens an understanding of the negative impact of teaching culturally embedded speech standards to actors who are “othered” by a dominant “somatic norm” within the performing arts. The author analyzes evidence from a three-year longitudinal study of actors within a UK conservatory in relation to the critical frame of the somatic norm and colonized listening practices in the performing arts. The author identifies conscious and unconscious bias within traditional training methods and proposes a decolonizing approach to listening within foundational speech training. The ideological shift outlined follows the “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences and moves away from the culturally embedded listening at the core of “effective” speech methods, which focus solely on clarity and intelligibility. The outcome of this research is a radical performance pedagogy, which values the intersectional identities and linguistic capital of students from pluralistic backgrounds. The revised curriculum offers an approach to affective speaking and listening that assumes an equality of understanding from the outset, and requires actors, actor trainers, and, ultimately, audiences to de-colonize their listening ears

Stance detection on social media: State of the art and trends

Stance detection on social media is an emerging opinion mining paradigm for various social and political applications in which sentiment analysis may be sub-optimal. There has been a growing research interest for developing effective methods for stance detection methods varying among multiple communities including natural language processing, web science, and social computing. This paper surveys the work on stance detection within those communities and situates its usage within current opinion mining techniques in social media. It presents an exhaustive review of stance detection techniques on social media, including the task definition, different types of targets in stance detection, features set used, and various machine learning approaches applied. The survey reports state-of-the-art results on the existing benchmark datasets on stance detection, and discusses the most effective approaches. In addition, this study explores the emerging trends and different applications of stance detection on social media. The study concludes by discussing the gaps in the current existing research and highlights the possible future directions for stance detection on social media.Comment: We request withdrawal of this article sincerely. We will re-edit this paper. Please withdraw this article before we finish the new versio

Sociolinguistics of Style and Social Class in Contemporary Athens

This ethnographic study deals with the ways people in Athens, Greece, use style to construct their social class identities. Including a rich dataset comprising ethnographic interviews with actual people who live in the stereotypically seen as leafy and posh northern suburbs and in the stereotypically treated as working class western suburbs of Athens coupled with data from popular literary novels, TV series and Greek hip hop music, it argues that the relationship between style and social class identity is mediated by complex social meanings encompassing features from and discourses relevant to both areas, which are structured across different orders of indexicality depending on the genre of speech in which they are created. As such, it will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, sociology, Modern Greek studies, and to everyone who is interested in how social class is constructed via language.Greek State Scholarships Foundation, Onassis Public Benefit Fund, Foundation for Education and European Cultur

Evaluating stance-annotated sentences from political blogs regarding the Brexit:a quantitative analysis

This paper offers a formally driven quantitative analysis of stance-annotated sentences in the Brexit Blog Corpus (BBC). Our goal is to identify features that determine the formal profiles of six stance categories (contrariety, hypotheticality, necessity, prediction, source of knowledge and uncertainty) in a subset of the BBC. The study has two parts: firstly, it examines a large number of formal linguistic features, such as punctuation, words and grammatical categories that occur in the sentences in order to describe the specific characteristics of each category, and secondly, it compares characteristics in the entire data set in order to determine stance similarities in the data set. We show that among the six stance categories in the corpus, contrariety and necessity are the most discriminative ones, with the former using longer sentences, more conjunctions, more repetitions and shorter forms than the sentences expressing other stances. necessity has longer lexical forms but shorter sentences, which are syntactically more complex. We show that stance in our data set is expressed in sentences with around 21 words per sentence. The sentences consist mainly of alphabetical characters forming a varied vocabulary without special forms, such as digits or special characters

Functions of code switching in Egypt (evidence from monologues in the 1990s)

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DN055723 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Language ideology and policy in a colonial and postcolonial context: The case of Egypt

This chapter explores language ideologies in the colonial context of Arabic in Egypt. After achieving independence in the second half of the twentieth century, Egypt, like all Arab countries, followed a policy of Arabization. In order to understand the implications of such policies for colonial linguistics, it is essential to explore the ideology of Egypt as one community, an ideology that was propagated negatively first by the colonizers and then by Egyptians. The nation-state as an imagined community, built on ideologies and perceptions that are emergent in discourse and dependent on it, is in the focus of the chapter, which describes the role of Standard Arabic vis-vis Egyptian local varieties in constructing ideas about Egyptians as an imagined community

Arabic sociolinguistics

xvii, 311 p. : ill. ; 23 cm

Diglossic switching and the phenomenon of ʻblendingʼ: evidence from Egypt

This paper argues on the basis of empirical data that the definition of diglossia given by Ferguson (1964) does not take account of the overlap between the Η (high) and L (low) varieties in the Arabic language. My data consists of spoken contemporary Egyptian monologues. These monologues are taken from different walks of life. I analyse four monologues. Two are political speeches, which contrary to Ferguson's expectations are a mixture of Η and L, and two are monologues by two cultured Egyptians on television. From this overlap between Η and L, springs a phenomenon I call 'blending'. Blending is different from diglossic switching and code-switching, in that it does not have a discourse function, and does not seem to be as rational an act as code-switching (cf. Myers- Scotton 1998b, Gumperz 1982). I will give five examples of blended features from H and L. This phenomenon resists interpretation within the framework of 'diglossia' and challenges ideas about code-switching. Thus, it is interesting on its own right, as a phenomenon that can explain more about both diglossia and code-switching. If one applies the idea of Myers-Scotton (1997, 1998a), of a Matrix language, then one would indeed find problems with the existence of blending, since a lot of blended forms are system morphemes. Yet, one can ap­ply Myers-Scotton's recent idea of a composite matrix language (1998a) to the Egyptian community. However, this kind of diglossic-switching may be stable and the appearance of blending does not necessarily imply language change or death. To try to explain what goes on in the Egyptian community, I will define those features which characterise blending. I propose that there are two kinds of blending, ʻidiosyncraticʼ blending and ʻintrinsicʼ blending

Redefining Identity through Code Choice in "Al-Ḥubb fī ’l-manfā" by Bahāʾ Ṭāhir

This study examines the use of language and code choice in a modern Egyptian novel, al-Ḥubb fī ’l-manfā (Love in Exile) by Bahāʾ Ṭāhir (b. 1935). The study concentrates on the diglossic situation that prevails in the entire Arabic-speaking world, i.e. a situation in which there are two language varieties: a ‘High’ variety (standard Arabic) and a ‘Low’ one (vernacular dialects), each with a different function. The study will concentrate on the language varieties, or ‘codes’, used by the writer to depict dialogues between the different protagonists in the novel. The question posed is whether the dialogues in this, as well as in other novels published in Egypt and the Arab world, reflect realistic linguistic choices on the part of the protagonists, or whether this literature projects a different reality with different rules and language choices. If the latter case is true then language may be viewed as a tool to redefine reality and project different identities. It is argued that the choice of standard or vernacular has a discourse function, well as a creative one. This case study furthers our understanding of code choice in dialogue in the Arabic literature of Egypt, and of the Arab world in general