scholarly journals Linguistic Prescriptivism

Linguistics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Straaijer
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
English Language ◽  
Single Instance ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Prescriptive Grammar ◽  
English Speaking World

The term prescriptivism refers to the ideology and practices in which the correct and incorrect uses of a language or specific linguistic items are laid down by explicit rules that are externally imposed on the users of that language. This ideology and its practices are now usually ascribed to nonlinguists or nonacademic linguists, whereas modern academic linguists, following Saussurean tenets, restrict themselves to the study and description of the structure of language and its natural use. Next to the term prescriptivism, the terms prescriptivist, prescriptive, and prescription occur in the literature on the subject. It is useful to briefly mention how these terms are used, and how they relate to each other. The term prescriptivist is used both as a noun and as an adjective. The noun is used to refer to those individuals practicing prescriptivism, whereas the adjective refers more generally to the adherence (of a person or work) to prescriptive concepts or ideals, often as an opposite to descriptivist, though this stark dichotomy is now seen by linguists as somewhat reductive. The adjective prescriptive is also used with this meaning, though more often in the phrase prescriptive grammar—works that are contrasted with academic, descriptive grammars. The noun prescription usually refers to a single instance of prescriptivism, or to put it more simply, a prescriptive rule. Technically, a prescription only tells one what should be done, whereas a proscription tells one what should not be done, but the two are often subsumed under the former term, almost exclusively so by nonlinguists. The present article focuses mainly on English prescriptivism, that is, studies on prescriptivism as practiced in the English-speaking world and pertaining to the English language.

The Leninist Theory of Perception

Dialogue ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Goldstick
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Present Article ◽  
English Language ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Standard English ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
The Past ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Alternative Reading

In the standard English-language reference work, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards (New York and London, 1967), we find the following blunt statement on the subject of “orthodox Marxism's” theory of knowledge:Its epistemology is naive representationism.The use of the word “naive” will alert the reader to the unsurprising fact that the reference here is a definitely unfriendly one. More interesting is the way in which this characterization, based on an interpretation of Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, has become generally accepted in English-speaking philosophical circles over the past forty years. The purpose of the present article is to explain the representationalist interpretation, challenge it in favour of an alternative reading of Lenin's text, and make some substantive comments on issues arising from the philosophical debate between the representationalist and anti-representationalist positions outlined.

When was Melaka founded and was it known earlier by another name? Exploring the debate between Gabriel Ferrand and Gerret Pieter Rouffaer, 1918−21, and its long echo in historiography

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 175-196
Author(s):  
Peter Borschberg
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Early History ◽  
Port City ◽  
Place Names ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The City

A century ago, research on the Malay world was experiencing major breakthroughs on several fronts, but the greatest achievement at the time was without doubt George Coedès’ ‘rediscovery’, based on Asian sources, of a forgotten kingdom named Srivijaya. His book, published in 1918, saw a wave of publications follow in its wake. Sources were trawled in the hope of finding answers to unresolved issues and unidentified place names. Attention invariably also fell on Melaka. In a long article published by the French academic and diplomat Gabriel Ferrand in the same year, the question of Melaka's founding date came under the spotlight. What do the different surviving sources tell us? What about Gaspar Correia's claim that Melaka was a thriving port city for centuries before the arrival of the Portuguese? Was the city — just as in the case of Temasek (Singapore) — known by a different name in earlier times? Ferrand's publication provoked a response from the Dutch academic Gerret Pieter Rouffaer, director of the KITLV. What he planned to be a 20-odd page response to Ferrand swelled into a multifaceted argument running into hundreds of pages. The debate between Ferrand and Rouffaer that touched on Melaka and Temasek-Singapura's early history probably eluded most of their academic contemporaries who were not proficient in both Dutch and French, especially in the English-speaking world. The present article reconstructs the main points of this debate together with their echo in historiography. It makes a contribution to the ongoing discourses, especially in Malaysia, concerning the founding date of Melaka.

scholarly journals Multilingual access: Language hegemony and the need for discoverability in multiple languages

2018 ◽  
Vol 79 (11) ◽  
pp. 617
Author(s):  
Kelly McElroy ◽  
Laurie M. Bridges
Keyword(s):  
English Language Learners ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
English Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

It is widely accepted that English is the current lingua franca, especially in the scientific community. With approximately 527 million native speakers globally, English ranks as the third most-spoken language (after Chinese and Hindu-Urdu), but there are also an estimated 1.5 billion English-language learners in the world.The preeminence of English reflects the political power of the English-speaking world, carrying privileges for those who can speak, write, and read in English, and disadvantages to those who cannot. This is also the case in scholarly communication. Linguist Nicholas Subtirelu identifies three privileges for native English speakers: 1) easier access to social, political, and educational institutions; 2) access to additional forms of capital; and 3) avoiding negative opinions of one’s speech.For example, we were both born into families that speak American English at home, we were surrounded by English books and media growing up, and our entire education was in English. Even defining who counts as a “native” speaker can be refracted through other social identities. As college-educated white Americans, our English is never questioned, but the same is not true for many equally fluent people around the world. 

Kim Ki-duk

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hye Seung Chung ◽  
So-hee Kim
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Korean Language ◽  
Korean Society ◽  
National Division ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Socially Relevant ◽  
English Speaking World

This study investigates the controversial motion pictures written and directed by the independent filmmaker Kim Ki-duk, one of the most acclaimed Korean auteurs in the English-speaking world. Propelled by underdog protagonists who can only communicate through shared corporeal pain and extreme violence, Kim's graphic films have been classified by Western audiences as belonging to sensationalist East Asian “extreme” cinema, and Kim has been labeled a “psychopath” and “misogynist” in South Korea. Drawing upon both Korean-language and English-language sources, the book challenges these misunderstandings, recuperating Kim's oeuvre as a therapeutic, yet brutal cinema of Nietzschean ressentiment (political anger and resentment deriving from subordination and oppression). The book argues that the power of Kim's cinema lies precisely in its ability to capture, channel, and convey the raw emotions of protagonists who live on the bottom rungs of Korean society. It provides historical and postcolonial readings of victimization and violence in Kim's cinema, which tackles such socially relevant topics as national division in Wild Animals and The Coast Guard and U.S. military occupation in Address Unknown. The book also explores the religious and spiritual themes in Kim's most recent works, which suggest possibilities of reconciliation and transcendence.

Statistics and the Conversion of the Roman Aristocracy

1995 ◽  
Vol 85 ◽  
pp. 135-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. D. Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Religious Change ◽  
Major Advance ◽  
Important Distinction ◽  
Imperial Rome ◽  
The Public ◽  
Famous Paper ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
English Speaking World

In a justly famous paper published in 1961, Peter Brown set out a model for understanding the historical process whereby the formerly pagan aristocracy of imperial Rome became overwhelmingly Christian during the course of the fourth and fifth centuries. Brown's paper has deeply influenced all who have subsequently studied this historical phenomenon, at least in the English-speaking world. Since this article argues that the Roman aristocracy became Christian significantly earlier than Brown and most recent writers have assumed, it must begin by drawing an important distinction. Brown's paper marked a major advance in modern understanding because it redirected the focus of scholarly research away from conflict and confrontation, away from the political manifestations of paganism culminating in the ‘last great pagan revival in the West’ between 392 and 394, away from episodes which pitted pagan aristocrats of Rome against Christian emperors, away from ‘the public crises in relations between Roman paganism and a Christian court’, towards the less sensational but more fundamental processes of cultural and religious change which gradually transformed the landowning aristocracy of Italy after the conversion of Constantine. This change of emphasis was extremely salutary in 1961, it has permanently changed our perception of the period, and it entails a method of approaching the subject which remains completely valid. Unfortunately, however, Brown also adopted prevailing assumptions about the chronology of these changes which are mistaken, on the basis of which he asserted that the ‘drift into a respectable Christianity’ began no earlier than the reign of Constantius. The evidence and arguments set out here indicate that the process began much earlier and proceeded more rapidly than Brown assumed, but they in no way challenge the validity of his approach to understanding the nature of the process.

Administrative Law and the Constitution

1929 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-46
Author(s):  
Marvin B. Rosenberry
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Great Work ◽  
The People ◽  
Explicit Statement ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Government ◽  
English Speaking World

In the constitution of Massachusetts is found the following: “In the government of this commonwealth the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers or either of them; the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers or either of them; the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers or either of them; to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.” This is probably the most explicit statement of the doctrine of separation of powers to be found in the constitution of any of the states of this Union. While the doctrine has been set forth in other constitutions in other language, the constitutions of all the states as construed and interpreted have come to have substantially the same meaning. For more than a century, lawyers, courts, political scientists, publicists, and the people generally regarded the separation of the government into coördinate departments as one of the corner-stones of our liberties.Montesquieu, who had no doubt derived his ideas upon the subject from the writings of Locke and a study of English law, in 1748 published his great work, The Spirit of Laws. In this treatise he gave a new exposition of the doctrine of separation of powers and the reasons for it, in a form which gave it wide currency in the English-speaking world; but this exposition was intended by Montesquieu to be a statement of political theory, and was so accepted by political writers of the time.

scholarly journals "Give 'Em a Few Bars of the Hymn of Hate": The German and English-Language Reception of Ernst Lissauer's "Haßgesang gegen England"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Roger Smith
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
English Language ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
The First World War ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Almost All ◽  
First World

<p>Ernst Lissauer’s “Haßgesang gegen England” is an Anglophobic German poem, written in the early weeks of the First World War. This thesis examines the poem’s reception in the German and English-speaking worlds, the imitations it inspired, the opposition it provoked, and the enduring discourse it instigated. The study begins by outlining Lissauer’s biography, and places his “Haßgesang” within the context of contemporary German poetry of hate. It discusses the changing reception of the poem in the German-speaking world over time, and the many and varied German works it inspired. The “Haßgesang” is shown to have captured the Zeitgeist of Germany at the beginning of the First World War, but to have been later rejected by the German public and renounced by its author, while the war still raged. The poem also established a discourse on hatred and hatefulness as motivating factors in war, sparking debate on both sides. In the English-speaking world, the “Haßgesang” was viewed by some as a useful insight into the national psyche of the Germans, while for others it merely confirmed existing stereotypes of Germans as a hateful people. As an example of propaganda in reverse the poem can hardly be bettered, inspiring parodies, cartoons, soldiers’ slang and music hall numbers, almost all engineered to subvert the poem’s hateful message. The New Zealand reception provides a useful case study of the reception of the poem in the English-speaking world, linking reportage of overseas responses with new, locally produced ones. New Zealand emerges as a geographically distant but remarkably well-informed corner of the British Empire. Regardless of the poem’s literary quality, its role as a vehicle for propaganda, satire and irony singles it out as a powerful document of its time: one which cut across all strata of society from the ruling elite to the men in the trenches, and which became an easily recognised symbol around the globe.</p>

Fairy-Tale Films

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pauline Greenhill
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
English Language ◽  
Movie Theaters ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Times ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Digital Formats ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Vladimir Propp

Films incorporating fairy-tale narratives, characters, titles, images, plots, motifs, and themes date from the earliest history of the cinema, beginning with director Georges Méliès’s Le manoir du diable made in 1896, the year after Auguste and Louis Lumière’s first public showing of their “cinematograph” in Paris in 1895. Fairy tales can be oral (told by people in different geographical locations and at various historical times up to the present) and/or literary (created by known authors) in origin, but they manifest in numerous media, including film. While the Disney formula of innocent persecuted heroines, handsome princes, and happy-ever-afters has dominated popular understandings of such narratives (at least in the English-speaking world), fairy tales need not contain these elements. They concern the fantastic, the magical, the dark, the dreamy, the wishful, and the wonderful. Short and feature length, animated and live action, produced in film stock, video, and digital formats, fairy-tale films have appeared in movie theaters and more recently on television and computer screens. Using Kevin Paul Smith’s classification for literary fairy tales, fairy-tale filmic intertexts can include explicit reference in the title—for example, Duane Journey’s Hansel & Gretel Get Baked (2013); implicit reference in the title—for example, Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s Mirror Mirror (2012); explicit incorporation into the text—as when Micheline Lanctôt’s Le piège d’Issoudun (2003) includes a play of “The Juniper Tree”; implicit incorporation into the text—as when Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) has the mechanical child David’s human mother abandon him in the woods, as do Hansel and Gretel’s parents; discussing fairy tales, as in the “Once Upon a Crime” episode of the American television show Castle (2009–2016), when the writer and police talk about what fairy tales really mean; and invoking fairy-tale chronotopes (settings and/or environments)—as in the portions of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) set in the heroine Ofelia’s father’s magical kingdom. Alternatively, filmmakers may re-vision a story, sometimes with new spin, as when Matthew Bright’s Freeway 2 (1999) relocates “Hansel and Gretel” to 1990s America, with two delinquent teen girls fleeing to Mexico, or may create an entirely new tale—like Pan’s Labyrinth, not based on any specific previous literary or traditional fairy tale. This article focuses on the cinema—movies made for theatrical and/or video release—but draws on television and Internet films when they offer telling illustrations. Most examples are from English-language media. Although classic works like director Jean Cocteau’s La belle et la bête (1946) have received considerable attention from cinema studies and the fairy-tale structural analysis of Vladimir Propp (1968) has greatly influenced film analysis, only since the beginning of the 21st century has fairy-tale scholarship merged with film scholarship. Scholars of fairy-tale film often consider adaptation and intermediality in cinematic versions of tales. This article uses the example of director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s The Fall (2007), which draws on and references fairy-tale magic to collapse, expand, and generally fictionalize time and space to invoke the postmodern and postcolonial as well as the transnational and transcultural.

Feral and "Wild" Children

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Newton
Keyword(s):  
Common Denominator ◽  
Human Society ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Feral Children ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Political Realm

The term feral children has been taken as applying to those who have endured three very different kinds of childhood experience. In one case, the term covers “children of nature,” that is, those who have lived in a solitary state in the countryside. Closely related to such individuals are those children who have been reared for a while by animals, most notably wolves or bears, though there are also tales of children suckled by gazelle, pigs, sheep, cows, and so on. Yet, the phrase has also been applied to children who have been confined to long periods of isolation within human society, locked up in rooms or dungeons. The common denominator in these tales is the experience of an absolute solitude, the absence of caring human parents, and, very often, the deprivation of language that results from that solitude. As such, for centuries these children have been an object of fascination to philosophers interested in human development, the inception of the political realm, and the origin of language. In more recent times, they have been the subject of study by linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists. Whether “wild children” have truly existed is a matter of some interest; more important here is what they stand for, the ideas and philosophies they evoke, and the fantasies that their supposed existence nurtures. Outside the English-speaking world, the idea of feral children is especially important in French- and German-language texts. However, this bibliography limits itself to sources in English, including translations of Arabic, Latin, French, and German works. Feral children have been central to a number of literary works, from William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610–1611) to Thomas Day’s The History of Little Jack (1788), and from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1895–1896) to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1914). Authors have in several instances turned true stories of feral children into fiction, as with Jakob Wassermann’s Caspar Hauser (1908), Catherine Mary Tennant’s Peter the Wild Boy (1939), and Jill Dawson’s novel based on the Wild Boy of Aveyron, Wild Boy (2003). Similarly, several excellent films have been produced on the subject, such as François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (1970), Werner Herzog’s Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (1974), and a number of other successful works, such as Michael Apted’s Nell (1994) or even the Disney-animated classic, The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman 1967). It is beyond the scope of this bibliography to make full mention of these works; however, it is clear that they demonstrate that a fascination with feral children goes beyond the limits of academic discourse.

Prescott's History Of The Conquest And Calderon de la Barca's Life In Mexico: Mexican Reaction, 1843-1844

1991 ◽  
Vol 47 (03) ◽  
pp. 337-348
Author(s):  
Michael P. Costeloe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Mexican History ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Conquest Of Mexico

In 1843, two friends, one Scottish and one American, published books about Mexico which were to become essential reading for students of Mexican history. Much the better known of the two is William Hickling Prescott whose History of the Conquest of Mexico became an instant best-seller and remains to this day one of the classics of Mexican historiography. Less well-known but equally valuable to historians of nineteenth-century Mexico is Frances Calderón de la Barca's vivid account of Life in Mexico based on her experiences during the two years from 1840-1841 when she lived in the country as the wife of the first Spanish ambassador. By coincidence, Prescott and Sra. Calderón were close personal friends and regular correspondents and they gave each other much assistance in preparing their respective books for publication. Both their works were greeted with critical and public acclaim in the English-speaking world of Europe and North America but reactions in Mexico were markedly different. While Prescott's book was received with qualified enthusiasm, Life in Mexico was the subject of hostile reviews and its author much vitriolic, personal abuse.

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