Search results for "Quotation"
showing 10 items of 18815 documents
On the relation of irony, understatement, and litotes
2016
The aim of this paper is to clarify the distinctive and the shared features of the three phenomena: irony, understatement, and litotes. These rhetorical figures have been defined as synonymous, distinct or overlapping in various accounts. This indicates an interrelation but also a need for clearer definitions. Here, each of these rhetorical figures is defined via two jointly necessary conditions. This approach sharpens the categories, enables clear-cut distinctions and helps to explain cases of overlap. German corpus data and examples from the literature as a basis, allow differentiating between cases of understatement as a means of irony, and cases of litotes as a means of understatement. …
Aspects of a theory of bullshit
2016
This paper addresses the question whetherbullshitis a reasonable pragmatic category. In the first part of the paper, drawing on the insights of Harry Frankfurt’s seminal essay, bullshit is defined as an act of insincere asserting where the speaker shows (a) a loose concern for the truth, and (b) does not want the addressee to become aware of condition (a). The author adds to this definition the condition (c) requiring that the bullshitter expresses morecertaintythan is adequate with respect to condition (a). In the second part of the paper, it is discussed whether the above definition can cope with special types of bullshit considered to be a challenge to Frankfurt’s definition. These areev…
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…
La saisie esthétique, transformation non narrative de la subjectivité
2017
Abstract Post-Greimassian semiotics has worked toward a return to phenomenology, with the aim of studying the sensorial dimension and the body. Most of this research, however, has all but forgotten Greimas’s last book, De imperfection (1987), in which he proposes an original version of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy with the notion of the aesthetic grasp. I propose to reconsider this almost abandoned notion, both from a theoretical point of view (a new version of the catharsis of philosophical aesthetics) and from the vantage of textual descriptions (the short story “The Naked Bosom” by Italo Calvino and the movie Ratatouille).
Metaphors in the mirror: The influence of teaching metaphors in a medical education programme
2016
Medical students often face problems in using and understanding metaphors when communicating with a patient or reading a scientific paper. These figures of speech constitute an interpretative problem and students need key strategies to facilitate metaphor comprehension and disambiguation of meaning. This article examines how medical students' strategies of metaphor comprehension could be improved by specific teaching on metaphors using a Cognitive Linguistics approach. Medical students' ability to comprehend mirror neuron metaphors was assessed comparing the performance of students who did not receive any instruction about metaphoric extension strategies after a lesson on mirror neurons wit…
Sandwich EPP hypothesis: Evidence from child Finnish
2010
It is well-known that grammatical movement is somehow linked to functional heads. There is less agreement on the excact nature of this correlation. According to one view, phrases are moved to the specifier positions of functional heads because functional heads attract them. According to another view, movement is not triggered by functional heads alone, but depends on the larger grammatical context. For instance, one such proposal says that T (tense) becomes attractive only when selected by finite C (complementizer), while V becomes attractive when selected byv* (transitivizer). What attracts phrases are therefore the C–T system and thev*–V system as a whole, not the individual functional he…
Violent women in Spanish TV ads: Stereotype reversal or the same old same old?
2016
Why did different agencies, promoting diverse products, create three ads featuring violence perpetrated by women on their rather immature and submissive male partners in order to sell their products? I posit that the female viewers connect subconsciously with the image of the proactive female protagonists through the psychological mechanism in which we identify with ‘our like’ on the screen. This, in turn, allows for the projection of ‘common ground’, a positive politeness strategy, to favourably dispose the female audience towards the protagonists and, by extension, the products advertised. The success of these ads depends on women viewers identifying with the apparently dominant female pr…
History in Lexicography and Lexicography in History: A Reappraisal
2018
This paper aims to provide an overview of anglophone literature on historical lexicography. It begins by defining history and lexicography in order to explore possible relationships between them. What follows is a critical discussion of two analytical perspectives: “history in lexicography” and “lexicography in history.” The former seeks to explain what historical information is, how history has permeated dictionaries, particularly those compiled on historical principles, and why the historical dictionary needs to be re-interpreted along new lines. The latter, by contrast, attempts to identify the main elements involved in the writing of a history of lexicography. Since no historical accoun…
Visual accounts of Finnish and Greek teenagers’ perceptions of their multilingual language and literacy practices
2017
AbstractThis paper uses visual methods to explore how teenagers in two different European countries (Finland and Greece) personally relate to their first language and to English, which is widely used in the everyday lives of young people in both countries. Our data comprise sets of self-made visualizations in which 14- to 16-year-old teenagers depict their personal relationship to their first language (Finnish/Greek) and to English. Theoretically and methodologically, we subscribe to socio-culturally oriented research on (foreign language) literacy and language learning and recent studies on multilingualism. Overall, by offering a detailed account of the variety of representation forms and …
Between ideologies and realities: Multilingual competence in a languagised world
2016
AbstractRecent developments in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics have put emphasis on the contrast between ideologies of distinct ‘languages’ and the multifaceted reality of linguistic practices. This article argues that recent usage-based reconceptualisations of the notions of competence and repertoire can help paint a more complex picture of the relationship between monolingual ‘ideologies’ and diverse linguistic ‘realities’. Drawing on data from interviews with highly proficient adult speakers of Finnish as a second language, I explore some aspects of how speakers’ competence can be understood as shaped by language use, and what role linguistic ideologies, social expectations and …