Parliamentary impoliteness and the interpreter’s gender

Pragmatics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 459-484
Author(s):  
Magdalena Bartłomiejczyk
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
Illocutionary Force ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Common Phenomenon ◽  
Widespread Phenomenon ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
Filtering Effect ◽  
Large Corpus

Abstract Impoliteness is a common phenomenon across various democratically elected parliaments. However, in multilingual legislative bodies such as the European Parliament speakers have to rely on interpreters to transfer pragmatic meaning, including face-threatening acts and impoliteness. The existing research in the field of Interpreting Studies offers much evidence of the filtering effect that interpreting may have on impoliteness, through facework strategies introduced by interpreters. The main question here is whether female interpreters tend to mitigate grave, intentional impoliteness to a greater degree than male interpreters. My analysis of a large corpus composed of English-Polish interpretations of speeches by Eurosceptic MEPs shows that mitigation of impoliteness by interpreters is a widespread phenomenon. The illocutionary force of original statements is often modified by means of diverse interpreting strategies. However, the quantitative analysis of interpreter facework does not reveal a statistically significant gender-based difference in the distribution of approaches towards impoliteness.

scholarly journals Twinship as a Resource: Zygosity- and Gender-Based Comparison of Twins’ Attitudes Toward Twinship

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 376-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Hegedűs ◽  
András Pári ◽  
Zsófia Drjenovszky ◽  
Hanna Kónya
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Twin Studies ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Cultural Goods ◽  
Online Data ◽  
Opposite Sex ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Adult Twins

Aiming to perform the first sociological survey of Hungarian twins, our main question was whether being a twin has positive consequences on one's life. Adult twins completed our questionnaire at three Hungarian summer twin festivals, in hospitals during medical twin studies, and on some websites online. Data represent 140 twin pairs (mean age: 38.2 ± 14.6 years). We employed some indices for measuring the resource nature of twinship. Three main types of benefits were distinguished: profit of attraction, as ‘material capital’; the easier obtainability of cultural goods when twins take part in it, as ‘cultural capital’; and positive aspects of an a priori existing dyadic relation, as ‘relational capital’. We were interested in the difference among types of twins regarding advantages. We paid special attention to the five groups of twins derived from gender and zygosity (i.e., monozygotic females, monozygotic males, dizygotic females, dizygotic males, opposite-sex pairs). Our analysis showed that Hungarian twins involved in our research basically enjoy their twinship; during their lives they used and still make use of different benefits given by it. In our twin samples, women had more advantages from being a twin than men. Significant differences could be observed on all indicators between monozygotic and dizygotic twins.

Grammar and Lexicon in Individuals With Autism: A Quantitative Analysis of a Large Italian Corpus

2009 ◽  
Vol 47 (5) ◽  
pp. 373-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arjuna Tuzzi
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Written Production ◽  
Statistical Procedures ◽  
Grammatical Categories ◽  
Distributional Patterns ◽  
Large Corpus

Abstract Statistical and linguistic procedures were implemented to analyze a large corpus of texts written by 37 individuals with autism and 92 facilitators (without disabilities), producing written conversations by means of PCs. Such texts were compared and contrasted to identify the specific traits of the lexis of the group of individuals with autism and assess to what extent it differed from the lexis of the facilitators. The purpose of this research was to identify specific language features using statistical procedures to analyze contingency lexical tables that reported on the frequencies of words and grammatical categories in different subcorpora and among different writers. The results support the existence of lexis and distributional patterns of grammatical categories that are characteristic of the written production of individuals with autism and that are different from those of facilitators.

scholarly journals Twitter jako narzędzie zarządzania wizerunkiem

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 507-533
Author(s):  
Wojciech Maguś
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
National Election ◽  
Management Tool ◽  
Election Campaign ◽  
Image Management ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Image Creation

Twitter as an Image Management Tool Twitter is becoming an increasingly popular tool used for political communication, especially in election campaigns. It is also an important element of image creation. Due to its functionalities, it allows for quick, low-cost reaching of recipients. As part of the article, over 130,000 entries from the period of the 2019 European Parliament election campaign in Poland were subject to quantitative analysis. The activity of 397 people running from six national election committees was analyzed. Every second candidate applying for a mandate as an MEP used this service. The article is an attempt to answer whether and to what extent popularity on Twitter translated into the electoral result.

scholarly journals Agencies’ Reputational Game in an Evolving Environment: Europol and the European Parliament

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 85-95
Author(s):  
Agathe Piquet
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
European Governance ◽  
Communicative Strategies ◽  
The Face ◽  
Over Time

With European Union agencies becoming increasingly significant actors in European governance, further research is needed to understand how they interact with their environment. Applying the ‘reputation’ literature to Europol, this article examines in greater detail how agencies behave with their ‘informal’ audiences in comparison with the formal ones. It demonstrates that agencies are deeply invested in the shaping of their reputation, including towards their informal audiences especially if the latter represent ‘reputational threats.’ Based on a quantitative analysis of activity reports and on a qualitative study of the face-to-face engagements of Europol with the European Parliament over time, this research sheds light on the complementary communicative strategies agencies can use to (re)present themselves depending on the dimension of their reputation at stake.

Generative metrics and Old French octosyllabic verse

2002 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rolf Noyer
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Old French ◽  
Gradual Change ◽  
Constituent Structure ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
Binary Constituent ◽  
Large Corpus

Both Old French meters and their Modern French descendants are usually thought to lack the internal binary constituent structure of, say, English or German iambic verse. In this article, however, an underlying iambic structure for the Old French octosyllable is established through quantitative analysis of a large corpus of texts written from c. 975 to 1180 (42 distinct works, including over 22,000 lines). Because no texts conform absolutely to the grammar of English iambic verse (Halle & Keyser, 1971; Kiparsky, 1977), certain measures are proposed for the degree to which a sample deviates from the iambic pattern; these values are then compared with the (chance) deviation of normal Old French prose. A significant correlation emerges between these measures and date of composition, author, and genre: early texts are almost perfectly iambic, and late 12th-century texts approach, but do not reach, chance levels. It is concluded that the grammar of meter used by Old French authors underwent a gradual change during the 12th century, a change comparable to more familiar phonological and syntactic changes.

scholarly journals Downside: The Perpetrator of Violence in the Representations of Social and Health Professionals

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (19) ◽  
pp. 7061 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fortuna Procentese ◽  
Roberto Fasanelli ◽  
Stefania Carnevale ◽  
Ciro Esposito ◽  
Noemi Pisapia ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Professionals ◽  
Violent Behavior ◽  
Dropout Rate ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Patriarchal Culture ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Motivation For Change ◽  
Widespread Phenomenon ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
Healthy Part

Gender-based violence is a widespread phenomenon and pandemic that affects women’s lives. Many interventions have been activated for perpetrators, but the dropout rate is still high. In order to draw up guidelines for responsibly and sustainably dealing with the phenomenon, this study is aimed at investigating the professionals’ perception of the perpetrator as a useful element in designing innovative intervention policies. Open interviews were carried out with welfare and health professionals and the Grounded Theory Methodology was used to analyze the collected data. These results detect attitudes of social health personnel and their feelings of impotence towards gender-based perpetrators because of the emergence of an inevitable repetitiveness of the violent behavior, as well as the “normality of violence” in a patriarchal culture and its “transversality”. This reflective knowledge allows for the opportunity to develop best transformative attitudes toward the phenomenon. According to the results, it is urgent to establish an active and convinced alliance with the healthy part of the man, through specific prevention paths, in order to activate an authentic motivation for change and its sustainability.

scholarly journals Wishes as bene- and malefactive speech acts. On the basis of discrediting parliamentary speeches in the Polish Lower House

2019 ◽  
pp. 35-42
Author(s):  
Magdalena Jurewicz
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
Illocutionary Force ◽  
The Public ◽  
Precise Knowledge ◽  
Lower House ◽  
Political Speeches

What will be analysed in the paper, from the pragmalinguistic perspective, is the specificity and the positioning of wishes in an MP’s speech as a particular type of text. In my research, I would like to shed some light on the multifunctioning of such speech acts in the public performances, to which parliamentary speeches belong, which stems from the multitude of their addressees. I will be particularly interested in the change of the illocutionary force of wishes which, thanks to the influence of the irony that they contain, may serve the opposition politicians to mock the ruling party’s MPs. This, in turn, can indirectly lead to the disparagement of the latter. In a broader sense it can also be the result of a general persuasive function of all political speeches. The marking of irony is very specific for a given culture or even the idiolect of particular MPs. The precise knowledge of the possible indirect readings of some MPs’ utterances, and the techniques for deciphering ironic expressions would be very valuable for interpreters who have just recently begun their work in e.g. the European Parliament, where the speeches of MPs are interpreted simultaneously.

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