Search results for "meaning"
showing 10 items of 756 documents
Four Potential Meanings of Double Negation
2016
The figurative use of double negations (not uninteresting, not unhappy) has been described by linguists and rhetoricians with regards to the rhetorical figure litotes. Both mitigation and strengthening have been proposed as aims of litotes (Horn, 1989; Krifka, 2007; van der Wouden, 1996). An analysis of the construction nicht un-adjective (not un-adj.) on the basis of German corpora leads to a coherent system of pragmatic functions for this sort of double negations. The construction can function as denial, potential presumption denial, mitigation or understatement. Nevertheless, litotes exemplifies the “indeterminate nature of figurative meaning” as suggested by Colston/Gibbs (2012: 259) in…
Boris “Ich bin drin” Becker (‘Boris I am in Becker’). Syntax, semantics and pragmatics of a special naming construction
2016
Constructions such as Germ. Boris “Ich bin drin” Becker (‘Boris I am in Becker’) follow a startling pattern. A quotation (“Ich bin drin”) is inserted in between two constituents of a complex personal-name construction (Boris Becker). The quotation relates to the person bearing this name. Therefore, the whole construction cannot be understood without massive contextual knowledge, i.e. knowing when, where, and why Boris Becker said so, and how this is relevant in the interpretation of the construction. In general, N “CP” N constructions such as Boris “Ich bin drin” Becker not only differ from canonical personal-name constructions such as Boris Becker in requiring the import of background know…
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.
Indexing epistemic incongruence: uy as a formal sign of disagreement in agreement sequences in Spanish
2018
Abstract This study explores epistemic incongruence in Spanish by focusing on the particle uy in Iberian Spanish. It is claimed that this interjection has a basic change-of-state meaning and that it is commonly used to stress disagreement. Despite its general association to disagreement, the particle can be used in agreeing responses, where it also treats the previous turn as problematic. In this sequential environment, however, it is not the content of the previous turn but rather the underlying assumptions (the basic epistemic configuration of an assertion-answer adjacency pair) that are challenged by the second speaker. The evidence for this analysis comes from the sequential context. Ty…
Teaching in the age of accountability: restrained by school culture?
2015
AbstractIn this paper, we explore how ‘teaching communication’ in the classroom is connected to school culture. In the age of accountability, the outcome focus force to the forefront, a ‘blame game’ which either blames students’ achievements on the teachers and teacher education, or the students and their socio-economic background. We argue that to succeed with teaching and learning is dependent on the school culture more than the single teacher or the students’ backgrounds. School culture is understood as attitudes, communication, student focus and engagement. Teaching communication in this paper is studied as teachers’ and students’ talk about subject matter in whole-class teaching. We ex…
“Sealfie”, “Phoque you” and “Animism”: The Canadian Inuit Answer to the United-States Anti-sealing Activism
2018
A corpus made by online Canadian newspaper articles, coming from the archives of CBC News, Vice Canada and Huffington Post Canada, and related multimedia contents such us audio interviews, videos and especially links to images and comments shared on Twitter, allows us to reconstruct the debate on the seal hunt that involved Canadian media in 2014. In specific, we propose an interpretation of the pro-sealing discourse by Canadian Inuit and Newfoundlanders as an ironic and incisive answer to the serious United States animal rights activists discourse, explaining how these two different points of view on animals come from a different experience of the environment and a different conception of …
Digging up the frequency of phrasal verbs in English for the Police: the case of up
2016
The present study focuses on the frequency of phrasal verbs with the particle up in the context of crime and police investigative work. This research emerges from the need to enlarge McCarthy and O’Dell’s (2004) scope from purely criminal behavior to police investigative actions. To do so, we relied on a corpus of 504,124 running words made up of spoken dialogues extracted from the script of the American TV series Castle shown on ABC since 2009. Based on Rudzka-Ostyn’s (2003) cognitive motivations for the particle up, we have identified five different meaning extensions for our phrasal verbs. Drawing from these findings, we have designed pedagogical activities for those L2 learners that stu…
‘What’s the Moment Thingy?’– On the Emergence of Subject-Specific Knowledge in CLIL Classroom Interaction
2017
Situated in the European CLIL context where mainstream schools may opt for teaching content subjects through the medium of a foreign or second language, this paper explores secondary school physics classrooms, taught through English in Finland. The focus is on the role of classroom interaction in the emergence of subject-specific knowledge during six consecutive lessons, with particular attention to how one key concept in physics, ‘moment’, is handled. This micro-longitudinal approach shows that while the students are struggling between the everyday and the academic meanings of the word ‘moment’ throughout, there are also clear signs of progression. These signs show, for example, in student…
Benchmarking the sustainable manufacturing paradigm via automatic analysis and clustering of scientific literature: A perspective from Italian techno…
2019
Abstract The number of scientific papers in the field of Sustainable Manufacturing (SM) shows a strong growth of interest in this topic in the last 20 years. Despite this huge number of publications, a clear statement of the profound meaning of Sustainable Manufacturing, or at least a strong theoretical support, is still missing. The 6R framework seems to be a first attempt to rationalize this issue, as it is an axiomatic identification of its true nature. Recognizing the pursuing of one or more of the Reduce-Recycle-Reuse-Recover-Redesign-Remanufacture principles allows users to identify if any manufacturing action is in the right direction of sustainability. In the paper, the authors spec…
Lo civil en el Código napoleónico y la libertad de los modernos
2020
RESUMEN:El propósito de este artículo es explicar el cambio de significado que lo civil sufre en el Código napoleónico. Me centro, a tal efecto, en el discurso preliminar pronunciado por Portalis en la presentación del proyecto de 1801, y comparo su concepción con la de Montesquieu. Para este último, las leyes civiles son aquellas que regulan las relaciones de los ciudadanos entre sí, a fin de garantizar el mantenimiento y la unidad de la comunidad política. Portalis pretende, en cambio, que esta misma función de cemento cívico la desempeñe un Código civil que se ocupa únicamente de esa esfera privada en la que los individuos disfrutan de su propiedad. Como muestro en la conclusión, Benjami…