Search results for "RELATION"
showing 10 items of 10542 documents
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…
Sharing cultural knowledge at work: a study of chat interactions of an internationally dispersed team
2015
Tässä artikkelissa tarkastellaan etnometodologisen jäsenkategorisoinnin analyysin avulla, kuinka kansainvälisesti hajautetun tiimin jäsenet jakavat kulttuurista tietoa Skype™ -keskusteluissaan. Tarkemmin katsotaan sitä, miten osallistujat luokittelevat itsensä ja muut tiimin jäsenet ’kulttuurisiksi tietäjiksi’ ja ’ei tietäjiksi’. Analyysissa havaittiin neljä tapaa, joilla tiimin jäsenet jakoivat tietoa samalla kun he hallinnoivat tehtävien jakelua ja suorittamista sekä rakensivat yhteisymmärrystä vuorovaikutuksessa. Tutkimuksen tulokset osoittavat, että kulttuurinen tieto on dynaamisesti muuttuvaa, kontekstisidonnaista ja vuorovaikutuksessa rakentuvaa. Sen sijaan että kulttuurisuus haittais…
Asymmetries of Knowledge and Epistemic Change in Social Gaming Interaction
2014
While a growing number of studies investigate the role of knowledge and interactional management of knowledge asymmetries in conversation analysis, the epistemic organization of multilingual and second language interactions is still largely unexplored. This article addresses this issue by investigating how knowledge asymmetries and changing positions with regard to knowledge impact social interaction in multilingual gaming activities. Drawing on a collection of video recordings of social gaming sessions collected over a two year period and involving the same two participants, we examine how the participants orient to knowledge and deal with knowledge asymmetries while solving game-related p…
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. …
Spracherwerb und Kinderliteratur
2011
This paper argues for a close relationship of research into language acquisition and research into children’s literature. Because children’s literature is a specific input for many children, and because children’s literature basically is literature accommodated to the child’s needs and cognitive abilities, an interdisciplinary field of research emerges. The paper sketches several aspects of this field and points to already existing results as well as to future research.
Teaching English as a Non-Imperial Language in an Underprivileged Public School in Spain
2018
This article summarizes the processes and findings of a 2-year collaborative action research (CAR) project that analyzed and aimed to counteract some of the most negative educational effects of English linguistic imperialism in the field of English language teaching (ELT) and, more concretely, in the context of English as a foreign language education in Spain. The CAR investigated the ramifications of this phenomenon in a primary school located in one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city of València. The pedagogical alternative it embraced in order to reverse the underlying tenets of ELT under present-day neoliberal imperialism consisted in combining art and multimodality thr…
Detransitivisation as a support strategy for causativebring
2016
This article presents diachronic corpus analyses of causativebring(bringcaus) which provide new insights into a fairly novel research paradigm in language change: the role of ‘Moderate Transitivity Contexts’ (MTCs) as a refuge for waning verbs and as a breeding ground for waxing verbs (see Mondorf 2010, 2011, 2016; Rohdenburg 2014b; Schneider & Mondorf 2015). It argues that the modulation of transitivity serves as a support strategy for a formerly well-established verb that is leaving the language.The potential of semantic transitivity for the development of explanatory principles in language change has been hinted at by Hopper & Thompson (1980: 279). Empirically investigating the d…
Readability and the Web
2012
Readability indices measure how easy or difficult it is to read and comprehend a text. In this paper we look at the relation between readability indices and web documents from two different perspectives. On the one hand we analyse how to reliably measure the readability of web documents by applying content extraction techniques and incorporating a bias correction. On the other hand we investigate how web based corpus statistics can be used to measure readability in a novel and language independent way.
Nordic language policies for higher education and their multi-layered motivations
2016
Language policies have been drafted in Nordic higher education with the obvious, but unproblematised and unchallenged motivation caused by internationalisation. In this article, we analyse the various motivations for drafting language policies in Nordic higher education and the ideological implications of those motivations. We do this by approaching the question from multiple (macro, meso and micro) viewpoints, in order to make visible some of the undercurrents in higher education language policy. We are particularly interested in the explicit motivations for language policy change, and the explicit and implicit actors and action represented in our data. We will first discuss the background…
(Im)politeness in Service Encounters
2017
This chapter examines sociopragmatic research on commercial service encounters. It offers a precis of the studies that have utilised service encounters as a vehicle to examine (Im)politeness manifestations. It addresses the methodological advantages of the service encounter as a relatively formalised interactional site in which sociability and efficiency are managed, hence as a locus for the emergence of (Im)politeness orientations. The chapter traces the evolution of (Im)politeness research and discusses the complexities of capturing (Im)politeness practices in transformation: from face-to-face and telephone-mediated encounters to newer communicative arenas resulting from technological adv…