Gengo Seikatsuþ: The study of language life in Japan, 1945–1995

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 95-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Heinrich

SUMMARY The indigenous concept of language life developed out of dialectology and attempts to establish a modern standard language. At first, language life existed above all merely as a label for the joint study of Japanese and its speakers and it only became an essential component of Japanese linguistics after 1945. Within the post-war studies a distinction can be drawn between an empirical approach at the National Japanese Language Research Institute and a theoretical approach by Motoki Tokieda (1900–1967). A first wave of language life studies subsided in the 1960s, the empirical approach was, however, revived and further developed in the seventies finding support in sociolinguistics. Language life was finally displaced by sociolinguistics in the mid-eighties.RÉSUMÉ Le concept autochtone de la vie du langage remonte à la dialectologie et aux efforts pour établir une norme du japonais moderne. Au début, la vie du langage designait principalement les recherches portant sur la langue japonaise ainsi que ses locuteurs. C’est seulement après 1945 que la vie du langage est devenue une partie essentielle de la linguistique japonaise. Après la guerre on peut distinguer une approche empirique développée par l’Institut National de Recherche sur la Langue Japonaise et une approche théorique développée par Motoki Tokieda (1900–1967). La première vague de l’étude de la vie du langage s’estompera dans les années soixante, cependant dans les années soixante-dix l’approche empirique effectuera un retour et sera développée davantage, s’inspirant partiellement de la sociolinguistique. La vie du langage sera finalement remplacée dans les années quatre-vingt par la sociolinguistique.ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Die indigene Konzeption des Sprachlebens geht neben der Dialektologie auf Bemühungen zur Etablierung einer modernen Standardsprache zurück. Sprachleben existierte anfangs weitestgehend nur als Etikett für eine Erforschung des Japanischen in Verbindung mit seinen Sprechern, wurde allerdings nach 1945 wesentlicher Bestandteil der japanischen Linguistik. In der Nachkriegszeit lässt sich zwischen einem empirischen Ansatz am Staatlichen Forschungsinstitut für die Landessprache und einem theoretischen Ansatz durch Motoki Tokieda (1900–1967) unterscheiden. Eine erste Welle der Sprachleben-Forschung verebbte Anfang der sechziger Jahre, jedoch erfuhr der empirische Ansatz in den siebziger Jahren in Anlehnung an die Soziolinguistik eine Wiederbelebung und Weiterentwicklung. Sprachleben wurde Mitte der achtziger Jahre endgültig von der Soziolinguistik verdrängt.

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 95-119
Author(s):  
Patrick Heinrich

Summary The indigenous concept of language life developed out of dialectology and attempts to establish a modern standard language. At first, language life existed above all merely as a label for the joint study of Japanese and its speakers and it only became an essential component of Japanese linguistics after 1945. Within the post-war studies a distinction can be drawn between an empirical approach at the National Japanese Language Research Institute and a theoretical approach by Motoki Tokieda (1900–1967). A first wave of language life studies subsided in the 1960s, the empirical approach was, however, revived and further developed in the seventies finding support in sociolinguistics. Language life was finally displaced by sociolinguistics in the mid-eighties.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Fuhg

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain.


Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson

The first book-length study in English of a national corpus of state-sponsored informational film, this book traces how Danish shorts on topics including social welfare, industry, art and architecture were commissioned, funded, produced and reviewed from the inter-war period to the 1960s. For three decades, state-sponsored short filmmaking educated Danish citizens, promoted Denmark to the world, and shaped the careers of renowned directors like Carl Th. Dreyer. Examining the life cycle of a representative selection of films, and discussing their preservation and mediation in the digital age, this book presents a detailed case study of how informational cinema is shaped by, and indeed shapes, its cultural, political and technological contexts.The book combines close textual analysis of a broad range of films with detailed accounts of their commissioning, production, distribution and reception in Denmark and abroad, drawing on Actor-Network Theory to emphasise the role of a wide range of entities in these processes. It considers a broad range of genres and sub-genres, including industrial process films, public information films, art films, the city symphony, the essay film, and many more. It also maps international networks of informational and documentary films in the post-war period, and explores the role of informational film in Danish cultural and political history.


Author(s):  
Timur Gimadeev

The article deals with the history of celebrating the Liberation Day in Czechoslovakia organised by the state. Various aspects of the history of the holiday have been considered with the extensive use of audiovisual documents (materials from Czechoslovak newsreels and TV archives), which allowed for a detailed analysis of the propaganda representation of the holiday. As a result, it has been possible to identify the main stages of the historical evolution of the celebrations of Liberation Day, to discover the close interdependence between these stages and the country’s political development. The establishment of the holiday itself — its concept and the military parade as the main ritual — took place in the first post-war years, simultaneously with the consolidation of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Later, until the end of the 1960s, the celebrations gradually evolved along the political regime, acquiring new ritual forms (ceremonial meetings, and “guards of memory”). In 1968, at the same time as there was an attempt to rethink the entire socialist regime and the historical experience connected with it, an attempt was made to reconstruct Liberation Day. However, political “normalisation” led to the normalisation of the celebration itself, which played an important role in legitimising the Soviet presence in the country. At this stage, the role of ceremonial meetings and “guards of memory” increased, while inventions released in time for 9 May appeared and “May TV” was specially produced. The fall of the Communist regime in 1989 led to the fall of the concept of Liberation Day on 9 May, resulting in changes of the title, date and paradigm of the holiday, which became Victory Day and has been since celebrated on 8 May.


Author(s):  
Aled Davies

The aim of this book has been to evaluate the relationship between Britain’s financial sector, based in the City of London, and the social democratic economic strategy of post-war Britain. The central argument presented in the book was that changes to the City during the 1960s and 1970s undermined a number of the key post-war social democratic techniques designed to sustain and develop a modern industrial economy. Financial institutionalization weakened the state’s ability to influence investment, and the labour movement was unable successfully to integrate the institutionalized funds within a renewed social democratic economic agenda. The post-war settlement in banking came under strain in the 1960s as new banking and credit institutions developed that the state struggled to manage. This was exacerbated by the decision to introduce competition among the clearing banks in 1971, which further weakened the state’s capacity to control the provision and allocation of credit to the real economy. The resurrection of an unregulated global capital market, centred on London, overwhelmed the capacity of the state to pursue domestic-focused macroeconomic policies—a problem worsened by the concurrent collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system. Against this background, the fundamental social democratic assumption that national prosperity could be achieved only through industry-led growth and modernization was undermined by an effective campaign to reconceptualize Britain as a fundamentally financial and commercial nation with the City of London at its heart....


Author(s):  
Aled Davies

This chapter concerns the politics of managing the domestic banking system in post-war Britain. It examines the pressures brought to bear on the post-war settlement in banking during the 1960s and 1970s—in particular, the growth of new credit creating institutions and the political demand for more competition between banks. This undermined the social democratic model for managing credit established since the war. The chapter focuses in particular on how the Labour Party attempted in the 1970s to produce a banking system that was competitive, efficient, and able to channel credit to the struggling industrial economy.


Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson

The book proposes that the Cold War period saw a key debate about the future as singular or plural. Forms of Cold War science depicted the future as a closed sphere defined by delimited probabilities, but were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm with limits set only by human creativity. The Cold War was a struggle for temporality between the two different future visions of the two blocs, each armed with its set of predictive technologies, but these were rivaled, from the 1960s on, by future visions emerging from decolonization and the emergence of a set of alternative world futures. Futures research has reflected and enacted this debate. In so doing, it offers a window to the post-war history of the social sciences and of contemporary political ideologies of liberalism and neoliberalism, Marxism and revisionist Marxism, critical-systems thinking, ecologism, and postcolonialism.


Author(s):  
Steven N. Dworkin

This book describes the linguistic structures that constitute Medieval or Old Spanish as preserved in texts written prior to the beginning of the sixteenth century. It emphasizes those structures that contrast with the modern standard language. Chapter 1 presents methodological issues raised by the study of a language preserved only in written sources. Chapter 2 examines questions involved in reconstructing the sound system of Old Spanish before discussing relevant phonetic and phonological details. The chapter ends with an overview of Old Spanish spelling practices. Chapter 3 presents in some detail the nominal, verbal, and pronominal morphology of the language, with attention to regional variants. Chapter 4 describes selected syntactic structures, with emphasis on the noun phrase, verb phrase, object pronoun placement, subject-verb-object word order, verb tense, aspect, and mood. Chapter 5 begins with an extensive list of Old Spanish nouns, adjectives, verbs, and function words that have not survived into the modern standard language. It then presents examples of coexisting variants (doublets) and changes of meaning, and finishes with an overview of the creation of neologisms in the medieval language through derivational morphology (prefixation, suffixation, compounding). The book concludes with an anthology composed of three extracts from Spanish prose texts, one each from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. The extracts contain footnotes that highlight relevant morphological, syntactic, and lexical features, with cross references to the relevant sections in the body of the book.


Modern Italy ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Gundle

SummaryThe problem of the legitimacy or otherwise of the Resistance tradition in post-war Italy has been addressed in recent years mainly in terms of the role of the partisan struggle and its political legacy. This article aims to assess the tradition in terms of commemorative practices, rituals, artistic representations and monuments. It seeks to evaluate whether the Resistance gave rise to a civic religion that may be compared to those which existed in the Liberal period, based on the heroic struggles and figures of the Risorgimento, and the Fascist period, which drew on the feelings of loss and injustice that followed the First World War. It is argued that, although the Resistance lacked, prior to the 1960s, a high degree of official sponsorship, it did acquire some of the features of a civic religion. Its appeal was mainly limited to the regions administered by the Left which had seen a significant degree of Resistance activity in 1943-5. Even here, however, it was difficult to sustain the tradition as a key feature of community life during and after the economic boom: the eclipse of public culture, the decline of public mourning and the development of commercial leisure and mass culture all served to deprive it of meaning. Although intellectuals, politicians and ex-partisans reacted to this situation, the visual and rhetorical languages associated with the commemoration of the Resistance became increasingly divorced from everyday life and dominant social values.


Author(s):  
Valerii P. Trykov ◽  

The article examines the conceptual foundations and scientific, sociocultural and philosophical prerequisites of imagology, the field of interdisciplinary research in humanitaristics, the subject of which is the image of the “Other” (foreign country, people, culture, etc.). It is shown that the imagology appeared as a response to the crisis of comparatives of the mid-20th century, with a special role in the formation of its methodology played by the German comparatist scientist H. Dyserinck and his Aachen School. The article analyzes the influence on the formation of the imagology of post-structuralist and constructivist ideological-thematic complex (auto-reference of language, discursive history, construction of social reality, etc.), linguistic and cultural turn in the West in the 1960s. Shown is that, extrapolated to national issues, this set of ideas and approaches has led to a transition from the essentialist concept of the nation to the concept of a nation as an “imaginary community” or an intellectual construct. A fundamental difference in approaches to the study of an image of the “Other” in traditional comparativism and imagology, which arises from a different understanding of the nation, has been distinguished. It is concluded that the imagology studies the image of the “Other” primarily in its manipulative, socio-ideological function, i.e., as an important tool for the formation and transformation of national and cultural identity. The article identifies ideological, socio-political factors that prepared the birth of the imagology and ensured its development in western Humanities (fear of possible recurrences of extreme nationalism and fascism in post-war Europe, the EU project, which set the task of forming a pan-European identity). It is concluded that the imagology, on the one hand, has actualized an important field of scientific research — the study of the image of the “Other”, but, on the other hand, in the broader cultural and historical perspective, marked a departure not only from the traditions of comparativism and historical poetics, but also from the humanist tradition of the European culture, becoming part of a manipulative dominant strategy in the West. To the culture of “incorporation” into a “foreign word” in order to understand it, preserve it and to ensure a genuine dialogue of cultures, the imagology has contrasted the social engineering and the technology of active “designing” a new identity.


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