Search results for "Philo"
showing 10 items of 8386 documents
“Good translating is very hard work”
2021
Abstract Upon immigrating to New Zealand in 1937, Austrian-born philosopher of science Karl Raimund Popper lived and worked in the English-speaking world, where he published his major works in English. Life events forced him to engage in various forms of self-translation around the same time that he began earnestly working on translating Presocratic philosophical fragments into English. While he rejected language wholesale as an object of philosophical reflection, translation became an exception, a privileged occasion for philosophical reflection on language. This article reads Popper’s thoughts on translation in the context of previously unpublished correspondence between Popper and potent…
How Hand Gestures Contribute to Action Ascription
2019
ABSTRACTThis article investigates the embodied achievement of intersubjectivity by analyzing depictive gestures that are produced during the final components of the ongoing verbal TCU and extended ...
Książę Niccola Machiavellego jako przykład zastosowania toposu zakulisowości
2019
Aby wyjaśnić fenomen popularności Księcia Niccola Machiavellego, należy wskazać na osobliwy sposób komunikowania się autora tego dzieła z czytelnikiem. Autor przedstawia siebie jako fachowca z dziedziny sztuki politycznej, za swoich czytelników zaś chce mieć jedynie tych, którzy, jak on, znają się na rzeczy. Charakterystyczny zimny i, z pozoru przynajmniej, nieozdobny styl, jakim posługuje się autor Księcia, podkreśla dodatkowo profesjonalny i nieosobisty stosunek pisarza do przedmiotu jego rozważań. W kategoriach teorii retorycznej taki sposób komunikowania się daje się opisać jako poszukiwanie okrężnych dróg do tego, co Kenneth Burke określał mianem konsubstancjacji retorycznej. Mówca sta…
2020
Abstract In classroom settings, laughter and smiles are resources for action that are available to both teachers and students. Recent interactional studies have documented how students use these resources to deal with trouble of various kind, but less is known about the sequential and activity contexts of teachers’ laughter-relevant practices, as well as their pedagogical functions. We use multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to investigate the interactional unfolding and pedagogical orientations of teacher smiles during instructional IRE (initiation-response-evaluation) sequences in a corpus of 37 bilingual lessons collected in schools in Finland and Spain. In analysing the focal smiles, …
Some reflections on semantic–pragmatic cycles
2020
Abstract This paper explores novel ways to consider semantic–pragmatic cycles using a dual strategy: an inwards strategy, whereby the distinctive traits of a pragmatic cycle are established, and an outwards strategy, whereby the categories that delimit semantic–pragmatic cycles are described. The result of this exploration is the distinction between “pragmatic cycle”, “replication”, “concomitance” and “paradigmatic increase” as four different yet related processes. In addition, this study integrates Construction Grammar into the description of each process and shows that the study of semantic–pragmatic cycles can benefit from a constructional approach, adopting Traugott and Trousdale’s (201…
What is an indirect speech act?
2019
Abstract The notion of an indirect speech act is at the very heart of cognitive pragmatics, yet, after nearly 50 years of orthodox (Searlean) speech act theory, it remains largely unclear how this notion can be explicated in a proper way. In recent years, two debates about indirect speech acts have stood out. First, a debate about the Searlean idea that indirect speech acts constitute a simultaneous realization of a secondary and a primary act. Second, a debate about the reasons for the use of indirect speech acts, in particular about whether this reason is to be seen in strategic advantages and/or observation of politeness demands. In these debates, the original pragmatic conception of sen…
Confronting blackface
2019
Abstract Recently, the Netherlands witnessed an agitated discussion over Black Pete, a blackface character associated with the Saint Nicholas festival. This paper analyzes a televised panel interview discussing a possible court ban of public Nicholas festivities, and demonstrates that participants not only disagree over the racist nature of the blackface character but also over the terms of the debate itself. Drawing on recent sociolinguistic work on stancetaking, it traces how panelists ‘laminate’ the interview’s participation framework by embedding their assessments of Black Pete in contrasting dialogical fields. Their stancetaking evokes opposing trajectories of earlier interactions and …
Figure–Ground Spatial Relationships in Finnish Sign Language Discourse
2020
AbstractThis study is about expressing spatial relationships between Figure and Ground in Finnish Sign Language discourse and shows that the variation in this expression is primarily discourse dependent. The main findings are, first, that Ground mainly precedes Figure whether the Figure is new or a known referent within the discourse; the reverse order is possible only when the Figure is known. Second, the lexical signolla(‘have’) appears more frequently in expressing spatial relationships with a new Figure and less frequently with a known Figure but never in a construction with Figure preceding Ground; the formoli(‘had’), referring to the past, appears only in Figure preceding Ground const…
Prosodic modulation as a mark to express pragmatic values: The case of mitigation in Spanish
2021
Abstract One of the functions of prosody in discourse is to convey pragmatic values that add up to the core semantic meaning of spoken units or segments. Regarding mitigation, Caffi (1999: 890) specifically discusses “the very important prosodic and kinesic means of mitigation, such as changes in pitch prominence, rhythm, speech rate, as well as eye-contact, gaze, gaze aversion, smile, particular postures, etc.” In this paper, I focus on some prosodic factors such as pitch, intensity, duration and speech rate that can be used in European Spanish, in combination with pragmatic meanings. The first aim is to establish a theoretical deliberation on prosody as a clear marker to convey pragmatic …
On the participatory agency of texts: Using institutional forms in performance appraisal interviews
2020
Abstract Drawing on studies of the performative effects and agency of texts in organizations, the paper investigates how the agency of texts figures through their participatory status in interaction. The empirical data for the study consist of video-recorded performance appraisal interviews in a Finnish public organization in which the interaction relies heavily on an appraisal form. The data are analyzed through a sequential analysis that draws on multimodal conversation analysis and ethnographic knowledge. The analysis shows that the human participants orient to three different acts that are inscribed in the textual document: 1) presenting demands for the participants; 2) offering topics …