Search results for "Political Science"

Peace Mediations: Recourse to the Arbitration in the kingdom of Valencia (XIV-XV Centuries)

2017

Arbitration, as a means of conciliation, had an extraordinary diffusion in the Medieval West. It had the advantage of being more quick and, generally, less expensive that the causes resolved by the ordinary courts. Moreover, it tried to reconcile the interests of the warring parties. This paper seeks to define the main features of the arbitration in the kingdom of Valencia during the Middle Ages focusing the observation on the small rural community of Vilafranca.

One confession, multiple chronotopes: The interdiscursive authentication of an apology in an international criminal trial

2020

Pragmalinguistic Categories in Discourse Analysis of Science Journalism

2016

AbstractDrawing on selected approaches from pragmatics, functional linguistics, discourse space theories and evaluation theories, this article proposes a methodological framework for the study of science journalism. It presents the institutional context of science journalism, which is considered a hybrid discourse, as it combines features of science communication and of market-driven journalism, particularly the need for the coverage to meet the criteria of newsworthiness. To enable the study of how science journalists tend to engage the readers linguistically without foregoing the appearances of credibility, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of such pragmalinguistic categorie…

The Latvian referendum on Russian as a second state language, February 2012

2016

On 18 February 2012 Latvian citizens participated in a referendum on making Russian a second official (“state”) language. The proposal was rejected by three-quarters of voters. There is a complex background to language policy in Latvia, where since regaining independence in 1991 the country has promoted Latvian as the only state language, though Russian and other languages are widely used at a societal level. The language law and associated citizenship law in Latvia (as in Estonia) have received considerable commentary, with recent significant writings disagreeing strongly regarding their interpretation. These laws have also very often been criticized by both European institutions and by Ru…

Shaping subjects of globalisation: at the intersection of voluntourism and the new economy

2016

Volunteer tourism is one of the latest branches of the ever expanding globalised tourism. The initiative Workaway, an expression of this trend, was established in the late 90s with the aim of promoting “cultural understanding between different peoples and lands throughout the world”. The figure of the workawayer as a new cosmopolitan subjectivity started to take shape. With the growth of the tourism industry, the Workaway scheme has started to be of interest also to tourism entrepreneurs, especially in the global peripheries such as northern Lapland, home to the indigenous minority language community of the Sámi. By signing up as a volunteer in a heritage tourism resort, the workawayer, the…

Software as ideology

2016

Software has become ubiquitous in higher education, especially often taken-for-granted Microsoft Word. Educational writing involves more than horizontal lines of text, but also multimodal representations. When students write in Word, the affordances of the program constrain what multimodal representations of knowledge they can and cannot make. Software such as Word is not neutral tool-kits, but also historical and semiotic constructs loaded with social values and ideologies. By taking a social semiotic approach to Word and SmartArt, this article shows how this software is pre-loaded with values and styles from office management. These values are then infused into education, in the case this…

Beware of the dog! Private linguistic landscapes in two ‘Hungarian’ villages in South-West Slovakia

2015

This study demonstrates how a single type of sign can be connected to language policy on a larger scale. Focusing on the relationship between language policy and language ideologies, I investigate the private Linguistic Landscape (LL) of Hungarians living in two villages in Slovakia. Through an examination of ‘beware of the dog’ signs, it is shown how such signs can be indicative of different language policies. In Slovakia, the Hungarian public LL is often referred to as a threat to the state language and public order. This ideology is reflected on the LL so that there are mostly Slovak-only public signs in bilingual and Hungarian dominant villages. The private realm is the only significant…

Discourse analysis as immanent critique: Possibilities and limits of normative critique in empirical discourse studies

2016

Although discourse analysts often conceive of their work as critical, there is little theoretical discussion regarding the possibility of normative critique in the scientific community of discourse analysis. Rarely are the normative grounds and normative scope of such a critique clear. Thus, this article attempts to find theoretically robust and practical answers to the following question: ‘How is a normative critique possible?’ In seeking my answer, I first provide a short overview of the possibilities of normative critique in critical discourse analysis. Second, I offer an argument in favour of immanent critique while explaining both its advantages and its theoretical and practical probl…

Tongan-English language contact and kinship terminology

2016

‘[D]o all humans mean the same things by words that can be used successfully to point to the same thing?’ (Leavitt 2015: 51). This study shows that the same words used in different English varieties might not have the same meaning. The typological comparison of standardised English and Tongan kinship terminology reveals that the categorisation is based on different underlying features. While standardised English focuses on the concept of ‘core family’, Tongan merges ‘same-sex siblings’ and emphasises the concept of ‘extended family’. The emerging contact phenomenon in Tongan English is the use of English terminology according to Tongan categorisation, that is, a case of semantic transfer.

University language policies : How does Finnish constitutional bilingualism meet the needs for internationalisation in English?

2018

In this article, we discuss the position of Finnish constitutional bilingualism in higher education in the context of internationalisation in English, by focusing on two universities: one dominantly monolingual (Finnish), one dominantly bilingual (Finnish–Swedish); in addition, both teach in English. This article investigates how discourses around language choices (language policy documents, selected staff and student interviews) construe these universities as monolingual, bilingual or trilingual, and what these discourses say about the universities as organisations themselves. Results suggest that, although lack of clarity remains regarding language choices in many practical situations, Fi…