The pragmatics of grammaticalisation

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katalin Nagy C.

This paper aims to identify the role of pragmatics in grammaticalisation and to highlight the particular steps in the process of the conventionalisation of conversational implicatures on the basis of a historical pragmatic study concerning the grammaticalisation of the Catalan anar ‘to go’ + infinitive construction. It also provides some comparative considerations with similar constructions in other Romance languages. The corpus contains occurrences taken from medieval Catalan chronicles. In order to reconstruct the history of anar + infinitive, the paper also considers morphological facts and other Catalan medieval periphrases. The paper concludes that implicatures play a double role in semantic change. On the one hand, they can become part of the semantic meaning attached to a certain construction as a new semantic component. On the other hand, they can promote the salience of a certain semantic component within the semantic structure of a lexical item.

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-99
Author(s):  
Vimbai Moreblessing Matiza

Dramatic and theatrical performances have a long history of being used as tools to enhance development in children and youth. In pre-colonial times there were some forms of drama and theatre used by different communities in the socialisation of children. It is in the same vein that this article, through the Intwasa koBulawayo performances, seeks to evaluate how drama and theatre are used to nurture children and youth into different developmental facets of their lives. The only difference which this article will take into cognisance is that the performances are done in a different environment, which is not the one used in the pre-colonial times. Although these performances were like this, the most important factor is the idea that children and youth are socialised through these performances. It is also against this backdrop that children and youth are growing up in a globalised environment, hence the performances should accommodate people from all walks of life and teach them relevant issues pertaining to life as they live it now. Thus the main task of the article is to spell out the role of drama and theatre in the nurturing of children and youth through socio economic and political development in Intwasa koBulawayo festivals.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-97
Author(s):  
Béla Mester

Abstract The role of the diaries and memoirs in the process of the conscious self-reflection and their contribution to the emergence of modern individual personalities are well-known facts of the intellectual history. The present paper intends to analyze a special form of the creation of modern individual character; it is the self-creation of the writer as a conscious personality, often with a clearly formulated opinion about her/his own social role. There will be offered several examples from the 19th-century history of the Hungarian intelligentsia. This period is more or less identical with the modernization of the “cultural industry” in Hungary, dominated by the periodicals with their deadlines, fixed lengths of the articles, and professional editing houses on the one hand and the cultural nation building on the other. Concerning the possible social and cultural role of the intelligentsia, it is the moment of the birth of a new type, so-called public intellectual. I will focus on three written sources, a diary of a Calvinist student of theology, Péter (Litkei) Tóth, the memoirs of an influential public intellectual, Gusztáv Szontagh, and a belletristic printed diary of a young intellectual, János Asbóth.


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-146
Author(s):  
Andreas Langenohl

Abstract Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology has been written with the intention to offer lessons from the historical trajectory of economic redistribution in societies the world over. Thereby, the book suggests learning from the political-economic history of ‘social-democratic’ policies and societal arrangements. While the data presented speak to the plausibility of looking at social democracy, as understood by Piketty, as an archive for learning about the effects of redistribution mechanisms, I argue that the book, or future interventions might profit from integrating alternative archives. On the one hand, its current line of argumentation tends to underestimate the significance of power relations in the international political economy that continued after formal decolonization, and thus form the flip side of social democracy’s success in Europe and North America. On the other hand, the role of the polity might be imagined in a different and more empowering way, not just-as in Piketty-as an elite-liberal democratic governance institution; for instance, it would be interesting to explore the archive of the French solidaristes movement more deeply than Piketty does, as well as much more recent interventions in economic anthropology that deal with ‘economic citizenship’ in the Global South.


2021 ◽  
pp. 273-275

This chapter assesses Liat Steir-Livny's Remaking Holocaust Memory (2019). This book is the first comprehensive English-language study of the Israeli Third-Generation engagement with the history of the Shoah in documentary films. In analyzing “how Third-Generation documentaries provide new ideas and concepts to commemorate and preserve the memory for future generations,” Steir-Livny contrasts Third-Generation documentary films with the works of second-generation directors and explores an extensive number of films in five key areas. These key areas include the role of gender; the changing attitudes toward Germany; the use and exploration of historical film footage in Third-Generation documentary films; the function of testimonies that feature in Third-Generation documentaries “in more complex ways”; and the representation of perpetrators and bystanders in Third-Generation films. Throughout her study, Steir-Livny discusses the documentaries against the background of documentary film theories, on the one hand, and Israeli/Zionist Holocaust memory, on the other.


Buddhism ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Gutschow

The very existence of a “Women and Buddhism” entry but no “Men in Buddhism” entry implies a set of methodological lacunae in Buddhist studies. On the one hand, Buddhist studies have often proceeded as if the history of men in Buddhism stands in for Buddhist history, with little effort made to mention or recover the significance of women. On the other hand, systematic methodological choices, such as the discounting of feminist analysis and the privileging of text over other sources of knowledge, have exacerbated the tendency to elide the role of women in Buddhism. This elision of women, or their marginalization, in Buddhist analyses where “man” or “male” is assumed to represent “human” has prompted a countersurge of analyses. These latter analyses have found ample evidence for the centrality of gender and women in shaping Buddhist society and soteriology. Although works are now available that cover the role of women and gender in most Buddhist eras or societies, these have only scratched the surface of an extraordinarily rich set of material and questions. It remains to be seen how well Buddhist scholarship can give gender and women their proper place in developing its central concerns.


Author(s):  
Vinh Nguyen

Vietnamese Canadian refugee aesthetics are the diverse expressions of how hundreds of thousands of refugees and their descendants experienced the Vietnam War and its aftermath. They are shaped on the one hand by a history of war in, and forced migration from, Vietnam and on the other by resettlement in multicultural Canada. Significantly, Vietnamese Canadian refugee aesthetics are produced within a distinct context of Canadian “forgetting of complicity” in the Vietnam War. A major shaping force of this aesthetics is the idea that Canada was an innocent bystander or facilitator of peace during the war years, instead of a complicit participant providing arms and supporting a Western bloc victory. This allows, then, for a discourse of Canadian humanitarianism to emerge as Canada resettled refugees in the war’s wake. Vietnamese Canadian refugee aesthetics are produced and received in relation to the enduring narrative of Canadian benevolence. In this way, they celebrate the nation-state and its peoples through gratitude for the gift of refuge. More importantly, however, they illuminate life during and in the wake of war; the personal, political, and historical reasons for migration; the struggles and triumphs of resettlement; and the complexities of diasporic existence. Refugee aesthetics are driven by memory and the desire to commemorate, communicate, and make sense of difficult pasts and the embodied present. They often take the form of literary works such as memoirs, novels, and poetry, but they are also found in community politics and activism, such as commemoration events and protests, and other popular media like public service videos. Produced by refugees as well as the state, these aesthetic “texts” index themes and problematics such as the formation of voice; the interplay between memory, history, and identity; the role of autobiography; and the modes of representing war, violence, and refuge-seeking.


1973 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. A. Hooker

In recent times it has become fashionable to emphasize the role of conceptual change in the (philosopher's) history of science. To judge from recent writers (Feyerabend 5-9, Kuhn 18), every significant theoretical change in science is first and foremost a revolution in scientific concepts—a conceptual revolution. According to this view, every level of experience is affected by each fundamental theoretical change: physical theory, experimental practice and even perceptual experience. The Aristotelian patrician who watched the sun sink beneath the horizon not only had different beliefs (theory) about the phenomenon but actually saw something different from the Newtonian gentleman who saw the horizon rise above his eye-sun line, and the Einsteinian professional who saw the sun's varying geometrical relations to the world light-geodesics on which successive temporal stages of his eye world-line lay. Moreover, such is the completeness of the conceptual-experiential shifts undergone in a fundamental scientific change that it is impossible to meaningfully discuss the one theory within the confines of the other or, indeed, to provide any systematic, cumulative comparison of successive theories.


Author(s):  
Paolo Desideri

This chapter discusses first the general cosmological principles which lie behind Plutarch’s historiographical work, such as can be recovered through significant passages of his Delphic Dialogues. Second, it investigates the reasons why Plutarch wrote biographies, and more specifically parallel biographies, instead of outright histories: in this way, Plutarch aimed to emphasize, on the one hand, the dominant role of individual personalities in the political world of his own time, and, on the other hand, the mutual and exclusive relevance of Greece and Rome in the history of human culture. Third, the chapter seeks to connect the rise-and-fall pattern, typical of biography, with the general rise-and-fall pattern which Plutarch recognizes both in the Greek and in the Roman civilizations; through that connection one can rule out the idea that Plutarch had any providential view of history. Finally, some reflections are offered on Nietzsche’s special interest in Plutarch’s biographies.


2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
pp. 411-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Dixon ◽  
Mark Levine ◽  
Steve Reicher ◽  
Kevin Durrheim

AbstractFor most of the history of prejudice research, negativity has been treated as its emotional and cognitive signature, a conception that continues to dominate work on the topic. By this definition, prejudice occurs when we dislike or derogate members of other groups. Recent research, however, has highlighted the need for a more nuanced and “inclusive” (Eagly 2004) perspective on the role of intergroup emotions and beliefs in sustaining discrimination. On the one hand, several independent lines of research have shown that unequal intergroup relations are often marked by attitudinal complexity, with positive responses such as affection and admiration mingling with negative responses such as contempt and resentment. Simple antipathy is the exception rather than the rule. On the other hand, there is mounting evidence that nurturing bonds of affection between the advantaged and the disadvantaged sometimes entrenches rather than disrupts wider patterns of discrimination. Notably, prejudice reduction interventions may have ironic effects on the political attitudes of the historically disadvantaged, decreasing their perceptions of injustice and willingness to engage in collective action to transform social inequalities.These developments raise a number of important questions. Has the time come to challenge the assumption that negative evaluations are inevitably the cognitive and affective hallmarks of discrimination? Is the orthodox concept of prejudice in danger of side-tracking, if not obstructing, progress towards social justice in a fuller sense? What are the prospects for reconciling a prejudice reduction model of change, designed to get people to like one another more, with a collective action model of change, designed to ignite struggles to achieve intergroup equality?


2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S Landes

In the history of technological development, why didn't other regions keep up with Europe? This is an important question, as one learns almost as much from failure as from success. The one civilization that was in a position to match and even anticipate the European achievement was China. China had two chances: first, to generate a continuing, self-sustaining process of scientific and technological advance on the basis of its indigenous traditions and achievements; and second, to learn from European science and technology once the foreign “barbarians” entered the Chinese domain in the sixteenth century. China failed both times. What explains the first failure? I stress the role of the market: the fact that enterprise was free in Europe while China lacked a free market and institutionalized property rights; that in Europe innovation worked and paid, while the Chinese state was always stepping in to interfere with private enterprise. As for the second failure, China's cultural triumphalism combined with petty downward tyranny made it a singularly bad learner.


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