Studying characterization in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-336
Author(s):  
Shirin Sheikh-Farshi ◽  
Mahmoud Reza Ghorban-Sabbagh ◽  
Shahla Sharifi

Abstract Apart from the stylistic and cognitive studies which have already been done separately on Miller’s The Crucible, this paper provides a new insight into the play and its system of characterization by integrating these approaches. To this end, the paper draws on Jonathan Culpeper’s cognitive stylistic theory of top-down and bottom-up processes in literary text comprehension and characterization. Based on this holistic framework, the paper takes advantage of such stylistic tools as speech acts, the Cooperative Principle and politeness theory to examine features of the language used by the characters Proctor and Danforth. In this regard, the article assimilates those linguistic elements with the embedded schemata within the play. Consequently, the study reveals that Proctor’s complex characterization does not coincide with the readers’ schema and thus they form their impression of his character based on piecemeal integration. On the other hand, Danforth’s character reinforces the readers’ schema about a representative of the church discourse and thus they comprehend his character on the basis of confirmatory categorization. The paper concludes that while Proctor and Danforth have a passive existence in the text or in people’s minds, it is only in the interaction between their language and the readers’ minds that they come into existence.

Author(s):  
Helle Hermann

This presentation is based on and continues a previous study dealing with linguistic politeness in business correspondence (Danish/French). On the basis of J.R. Searle’s theory of speech acts, H.P. Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, French complimentary closes are analyzed. The paper presents a pilot study which looks at recommendations given by textbooks as well as closes in authen-tic business correspondence. The study has three aims. One aim is to establish the degree to which textbook recommendations differ, the second is to present an outline of any divergences between recommendations and linguistic behaviour as evidenced in a corpus of authentic French business correspondence. The third aim of the study is to provide the Danish correspondent with some guidelines, based on the theory of face and politeness strategies, which will hopefully permit him or her to choose complimentary closes in agreement with the conventions which seem to apply to French business cor-respondence.


2009 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurel Bozin ◽  
Vuk Milatovic

With the aim of gaining insight into literary text comprehension and the linkage between that comprehension and scholastic achievement during the first years of schooling, a research was conducted on the sample of 152 third and fourth grade pupils from one urban and one rural school. After having read silently a selected atypical excerpt from one literary text, interviewed pupils filled out the questionnaire constructed for the purposes of this research starting from the 11 categories of text comprehension singled out based on the theory of comprehension and interpretation of literary text and the current curriculum. In the first part of the research we applied the Children's orientation scale by Malka Margalit, and school marks were used as a measurement of scholastic achievement. Research results point out that, among other things, inferring on the basis of what has been read poses the greatest difficulty for third and fourth graders, that is, that almost three quarters of them are not capable of determining the meaning of some representative sentences from that text. In the positive sense, it was established that almost three quarters of them perceive beautiful poetic expressions and about 80% of them can at least to a certain extent recognize character descriptions, emotional situations and moods, that is, discover significant facts. Answers to the questions regarding the majority of categories of text comprehension are significantly correlated with scholastic achievement. As expected, the highest correlations between the measures on text comprehension categories are with the marks in native (Serbian) language. Partial correlations between the measures on certain categories of text comprehension and measurements of scholastic achievement (excluding the influence of feeling of coherence) are not significantly different from bivariate. Based on the obtained data, authors conclude that the utilized system of categories can be a useful tool for analyzing literary text comprehension at younger primary school age, that is, that separate observation of comprehension of (atypical) literary text can contribute to gaining a better insight into determinates of development of scholastic achievement.


Homiletic ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aimee C. Moiso

In an era of social and political polarization, the question of how to preach amid divided communities looms large. The field of conflict transformation, which emerged as a corrective to earlier conflict resolution and management models, offers new insight into how conflict might serve as a constructive catalyst for change. Conflict transformation provides perspectives and orientations to conflict that are useful to homiletics—but which also challenge assumptions about conflict that are present in the church and in the larger society. This essay introduces secular and Christian approaches to conflict transformation and analyzes some of their implications for preaching, including the claims that conflict is not sinful and could be a way in which God is acting in the world, that conflict transformation requires broad participation and not top-down solutions, and that restoration of right relationships can be more important to conflict transformation than coming to agreement.


2018 ◽  
pp. 306-312
Author(s):  
Veniamin F. Zima ◽  

The reviewed work is devoted to a significant, and yet little-studied in both national and foreign scholarship, issue of the clergy interactions with German occupational authorities on the territory of the USSR in the days of the Great Patriotic War. It introduces into scientific use historically significant complex of documents (1941-1945) from the archive of the Office of the Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky) of Vilnius and Lithuania, patriarchal exarch in Latvia and Estonia, and also records from the investigatory records on charges against clergy and employees concerned in the activities of the Pskov Orthodox Mission (1944-1990). Documents included in the publication are stored in the archives of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Estonia, Lithuania, Leningrad, Novgorod, and Pskov regions. They allow some insight into nature, forms, and methods of the Nazi occupational regime policies in the conquered territories (including policies towards the Church). The documents capture religious policies of the Nazis and inner life of the exarchate, describe actual situation of population and clergy, management activities and counterinsurgency on the occupied territories. The documents bring to light connections between the exarchate and German counterintelligence and reveal the nature of political police work with informants. They capture the political mood of population and prisoners of war. There is information on participants of partisan movement and underground resistance, on communication net between the patriarchal exarchate in the Baltic states and the German counterintelligence. Reports and dispatches of the clergy in the pay of the Nazis addressed to the Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky) contain detailed activity reports. Investigatory records contain important biographical information and personal data on the collaborators. Most of the documents, being classified, have never been published before.


Author(s):  
Roger W. Shuy

Much is written about how criminal suspects, defendants, and undercover targets use ambiguous language in their interactions with police, prosecutors, and undercover agents. This book examines the other side of the coin, describing fifteen criminal investigations demonstrating how police, prosecutors, undercover agents, and complainants use deceptive ambiguity with their subjects, which leads to misrepresentations of the speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, lexicon, and grammar. These misrepresentations affect the perceptions of judges and juries about the subjects’ motives, predispositions, intentions, and voluntariness. Deception is commonly considered intentional while ambiguity is often excused as unintentional performance errors. Although perhaps overreliance on Grice’s maxim of sincerity leads some to believe this, interactions of suspects, defendants, and targets with representatives of law are adversarial, non-cooperative events that enable participants to ignore or violate the cooperative principle. One effective way the government does this is to use ambiguity deceptively. Later listeners to the recordings of such conversations may not recognize this ambiguity and react in ways that the subjects may not have intended. Deceptive ambiguity is clearly intentional in undercover operations and the case examples illustrate that the practice also is alive and well in police interviews and prosecutorial questioning. The book concludes with a summary of how the deceptive ambiguity used by representatives of the government affected the perception of the subjects’ predisposition, intentionality and voluntariness, followed by a comparison of the relative frequency of deceptive ambiguity used by the government in its representations of speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, lexicon, and grammar.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136216882098693
Author(s):  
Eva Jakupčević ◽  
Mihajla Ćavar Portolan

Pragmatic competence is an essential element of communicative competence, which makes it relevant for speakers of all ages, including young language learners (YLLs). Despite the recognized importance of pragmatics, research of textbooks for adult second language (L2) learners to date has found them lacking in their approach to this key aspect of language. However, there is very little research of pragmatics in textbooks for YLLs, which would provide insight into the extent to which these materials can support teachers in including elements of pragmatic competence into their language classes. The present study aims to fill this gap by determining how much pragmatic content is included in 18 textbooks used in Croatian primary schools with learners aged 9–12 years. The textbooks are compared in regard to the percentage of pages with pragmatic content as well as the different speech acts that receive explicit attention in them. The main finding of the study is the great amount of inconsistency when it comes to the scope and treatment of pragmatic content, with some textbooks proving extremely lacking. The results present a concerning picture as all of the students using these diverse textbooks should be following the same curriculum which emphasizes the development of communicative competence.


1998 ◽  
Vol 112 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 104-126
Author(s):  
Frank Van Der Ploeg

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between the Brussels painter Jan 11 van Coninxloo (ca. 1489-1561 or later) and the Benedictine convent of Groot-Bijgaarden. In earlier publications by J. Maquet-Tombu the link between certain members of the Van Coninxloo family and the Vorst convent have already been pointed out. A new chapter can now be added. In the archive of Groot-Bijgaarden convent are two books in which payments made by the prioresses Françoise and Catherine van Straten for the dccoration of the convent and the church are recorded. The books list a separate item for painting and polychrome work. Here, for the first time, the name Jan van Coninxloo crops up in connection with a sum paid for painting the side panels of the main altar. Van Coninxloo was also paid for painting organ doors, a vaulted ceiling and for 'rough painting'. Four triptychs by Van Coninxloo have also been preserved; they were commissions from women of noble birth who had taken the veil. The names of three of these nuns are known: Anthonine de Locquenghien, Berbel van dcr Noot and Marie Brant. The fourth was called Barbara (Berbel). In view of all this material it may be concluded that Van Coninxloo played a significant part in the decorative appearance of the convent church. He was responsible for triptychs on altars dedicated to St. Anne, St. John and St. Benedict. He also painted the smaller triptych with the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin, the panels of the high altar, doors for an organ and (part of) the ceiling decorations. The article offers a new insight into the context of a group of paintings and adds a number of works to Jan 11 van Coninxloo's oeuvre.


This is the first occasion on which I have had the great honour of addressing the Royal Society on this anniversary of its foundation. According to custom, I begin with brief mention of those whom death has taken from our Fellowship during the past year, and whose memories we honour. Alfred Young (1873-1940), distinguished for his contributions to pure mathematics, was half brother to another of our Fellows, Sydney Young, a chemist of eminence. Alfred Young had an insight into the symbolic structure and manipulation of algebra, which gave him a special place among his mathematical contemporaries. After a successful career at Cambridge he entered the Church, and passed his later years in the country rectory of Birdbrook, Essex. His devotion to mathematics continued, however, throughout his life, and he published a steady stream of work in the branch of algebra which he had invented, and named ‘quantitative substitutional analysis’. He lived to see his methods adopted by Weyl in his quantum mechanics and spectroscopy. He was elected to our Fellowship in 1934. With the death of Miles Walker (1868-1941) the Society loses a pioneer in large-scale electrical engineering. Walker was a man of wide interests. He was trained first for the law, and even followed its practice for a period. Later he studied electrical engineering under Sylvanus Thompson at the Finsbury Technical College and became his assistant for several years. Thereafter, encouraged by Thompson, he entered St John’s College, Cambridge, with a scholarship, and graduated with 1st Class Honours in both the Natural Sciences and the Engineering Tripos. Having entered the service of the British Westinghouse Company, he was sent by them to the United States of America to study electrical engineering with the parent company in Pittsburgh. On his return to England he became their leading designer of high-speed electrical generators


2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-141
Author(s):  
Helene Fisher ◽  
Elizabeth Lane Miller ◽  
Christof Sauer

Abstract Emerging understanding of gender-specific religious persecution in some of the world’s most difficult countries for Christians offers timely insight into complex dynamics in which the church and missions have too often been unwittingly complicit due to limited visibility of the components contributing to these wounds. Fresh research into these deeply wounding global phenomena stands as both a warning and a pointer towards an avenue for effective ministrations by churches and Christian ministries that are working in the most severely affected areas of the world. Drawing on the latest trends identified by World Watch Research, outcomes of the Consultation for Christian Women under Pressure for their Faith, a contemporary case study from Central African Republic, and a biblical narrative, we will explore practical opportunities for a holistic approach to bring preparedness, healing, and restoration for communities under severe pressure for their Christian faith.


Author(s):  
Hana Navratilova

A newly excavated ostracon from Abydos bearing the concluding chapter of “The Instruction (a.k.a. Teaching) of King Amenemhat” opens up an interesting enquiry. An ostracon found in the immediate vicinity of a New Kingdom royal memorial temple and carrying an excerpt from a major literary text is an important find, as it develops our insight into New Kingdom educational practices and intellectual quests. The range of ostraca types and text genres appearing in the area of the temple of Ramesses II points to a fully functional temple organization with a building phase and an operational phase, with supplies and literate personnel on site, potentially in different administrative roles. Studies in educational and intellectual pursuits, in turn, are key to expanding our comprehension of the functions—and enjoyment—of Egyptian culture.


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