Perspective in signed discourse: the privileged status of the signer’s locus and gaze

In gesture studies character viewpoint and observer viewpoint (McNeill 1992) characterize co-speech gestures depending on whether the gesturer’s hand and body imitate a referent’s hand and body or the hand represents a referent in its entirety. In sign languages, handling handshapes and entity handshapes are used in depicting predicates. Narratives in Danish Sign Language (DTS) elicited to make signers describe an event from either the agent’s or the patient’s perspective demonstrate that discourse perspective is expressed by which referent, the agent or the patient, the signers represent at their own locus. This is reflected in the orientation and movement direction of the manual articulator, not by the type of representation in the articulator. Signers may also imitate the gaze direction of the referent represented at their locus or have eye contact with the addressees. When they represent a referent by their own locus and simultaneously have eye contact with the addressee, the construction mixes referent perspective and narrator perspective. This description accords with an understanding of linguistic perspective as grounded in bodily perspective within a physical scene (Sweetser 2012) and relates the deictic and attitudinal means for expressing perspective in sign languages to the way perspective is expressed in spoken languages

Udviklingsbistanden og udenrigspolitikken

Lars Engberg-Pedersens om Danmarks brug af udviklingsbistanden i udenrigspolitikken

Paulus retro?

The article discusses claims made in a recent Danish bookentitled Paul Plus – Four Prisms on Paul: Paul & Paul, & the Jews, &Luther, & Nietzsche (ed. Anna Vind; Copenhagen: Publications of theFaculty of Theology 30, 2012). Against the contributors, who are basicallypresenting a traditional, Lutheran understanding of Paul in oppositionto the ‘New Perspective on Paul’, it is fi rst argued that not only wasPaul a Jew: he also continued to see himself as a Jew and took the newChrist faith to be an eminently Jewish phenomenon; and secondly thata number of further features of a ‘New Perspective’ on Paul (he speaksethnically about Jews and Gentiles, not about human beings vis-à-visGod; and he envisages an actual fulfi llment of the Mosaic Law amongChrist believers, not a continued state of being simultaneously ‘justifi edand a sinner’) follow directly from the fi rst basic feature

Paulus og neurobiologien

This review discussion of Colleen Shantz, Paul in Ecstasy etc. describes the main argument of the book, criticizes various details of its argumentation and concludes with a general assessment, which basically applauds the focus on ‘religious experience’ and the attempt to bring in both contemporary neuroscience and social anthropology to elucidate Paul and Pauline Christianity, but also queries whether these modern disciplines are at present sufficiently precise for it to be possible to draw any firm conclusions regarding the historical material

Om de dødes (eller i det mindste åndens) nærvær før, under og efter Jesu død ifølge Johannesevangeliet: Replik til Jesper Tang Nielsen

Replik til Jesper Tang Nielse