scholarly journals Language Contact in Social Context: Kinship Terms and Kinship Relations of the Mrkovići in Southern Montenegro

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria S. Morozova

The purpose of this article is to study the linguistic evidence of Slavic-Albanian language contact in the kinship terminology of the Mrkovići, a Muslim Slavic-speaking group in southern Montenegro, and to demonstrate how it refers to the social context and the kind of contact situation. The material for this study was collected during fieldwork conducted from 2012 to 2015 in the villages of the Mrkovići area. Kinship terminology of the Mrkovići dialect is compared with that of bcms, Albanian, and the other Balkan languages and dialects. Particular attention is given to the items borrowed from Albanian and Ottoman Turkish, and to the structural borrowing from Albanian. Information presented in the article will be of interest to linguists and anthropologists who investigate kinship terminologies in the world’s languages or do their research in the field of Balkan studies with particular attention to Slavic-Albanian contact and bilingualism.

Author(s):  
Judith Huber

Chapter 6 begins with an overview of the language contact situation with (Anglo-) French and Latin, resulting in large-scale borrowing in the Middle English period. The analysis of 465 Middle English verbs used to express intransitive motion shows that there are far more French/Latin loans in the path verbs than in the other motion verbs. The range of (new) manner of motion verbs testifies to the manner salience of Middle English: caused motion verbs are also found in intransitive motion meanings, as are French loans which do not have motion uses in continental French. Their motion uses in Anglo-Norman are discussed in terms of contact influence of Middle English. The analysis of motion expression in different texts yields a picture similar to the situation in Old English, with path typically expressed in satellites, and neutral as well as manner of motion verbs being most frequent, depending on text type.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-118
Author(s):  
Milan Orlić

Post-Yugoslav literature and culture came out of the stylistic formations of Yugoslav modernism and postmodernism, in the context of European cultural discourse. Yugoslav literature, which spans the existence of “two” Yugoslavias, the “first” Yugoslavia (1928–1941) and the “second” socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1990), is the foundation of various national literary and cultural paradigms, which shared the same or similar historical, philosophical and aesthetic roots. These were fed, on the one hand, by a phenomenological understanding of the world, language, style and culture, and on the other, by an acceptance of or resistance to the socialist realist aesthetics and ideological values of socialist Yugoslav society. In selected examples of contemporary Serbian prose, the author explores the social context, which has shaped contemporary Serbian literature, focusing on its roots in Serbian and Yugoslav 20th century (post)modernism.


Author(s):  
Touré Bassamanan

This paper highlights the different layers of meaning that characterize the notion of manhood in Gaines’ fiction. The quest for manhood represents an imperative for the frustrated men in the framework of the social context wherein they are emasculated. Here, manhood should be grasped through a binary paradigm. On the one hand, the expression of manhood equates with male domination and violence. On the other hand, due to social expectations, manhood refers to the struggle for freedom. It undermines the white racial superiority and it claims blacks’ humanity. Manhood fosters humanistic principles. Thus, it takes on a universal dimension.


1983 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter F. Edwards

ABSTRACTCreolists have been showing that the use of codes in Creole societies is linguistically motivated, but these scholars have neglected the social principles informing the use of language varieties in these societies. This paper takes the position that the use of Creole and English varieties in Guyana is socially motivated. The typical Guyanese speaker uses linguistic items which are socially appropriate or mandated in the social context or cultural milieu he finds himself in, and uses items from both English and Creole. The speaker's use of linguistic forms seems to be related more to his conscious or subconscious social intentions than to linguistic principles which inhere in the basilect to acrolect continuum model with which many creolists work. The linguistic behavior of nine groups of individuals from three communities in Guyana is examined within a theoretical framework proposed by R. B. LePage (1972, 1973, 1977). This framework allows us to see these groups, and individuals within them, as exploiting the codal resources of their society to their social advantage. (Sociolinguistics, Creole linguistics, language contact)


2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Johnson ◽  
Suzanne Clisby

Cosmopolitans are frequently characterized as living and perceiving the world and their environment from a distance. Drawing on ethnographic work among a small group of Western migrants in Costa Rica, we complicate this portrayal in a number of ways. First, we demonstrate that these people think in similar kinds of ways as social theorists: they too are worried about living at a distance from place and are seeking what is, in their way of reckoning, a more engaged relationship with their surroundings. Second, however, we explore the social context and corollaries of these migrants' attempts to bring together a putatively "modern/cosmopolitan" way of relating to place and a "traditional/place-based" way of relating to surroundings. Specifically, we demonstrate how migrant claims to transcend the differences between "tradition" and "modernity" create new forms of social exclusion as they, both literally and figuratively, come to claim the place of "the other."


1994 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Halvor Moxnes

Apparently, the social situation in which Luke's community lived was that of an urban setting in the Eastern Mediterranean. This situation was shaped by the honor and patronage culture of the Hellenistic city. At the heart of the Lukan community's ethos lay its common meals. The purpose of these meals was dual: On the one hand, they forged a common identity for a socially and ethnically diverse group of Christians; on the other hand, they functioned as a criticism of urban culture.


Barnboken ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen King

“How could she ever put those terrible pictures into words?” (Naidoo, Truth 51). This question is at the heart of Beverley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth (2000), which narrates the trauma of Nigerian asylum seeker children Sade and Femi as they flee to Britain. Speech and silence are ambivalent within the text, fluctuating in meaning dependant on the social context in which they are enacted. Showing this text to be primarily a narrative of activism, I explore how Naidoo’s representations of trauma inform her critique of the British immigration system. This text invites a reading that draws on recent postcolonial theories of trauma. Using both textual and paratextual analysis of the novel and Naidoo’s archive, held by Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books in Britain, I draw on Forter’s model of psychosocial trauma to demonstrate that the trauma the protagonists face is a result of their encounter with a racist society and bureaucracy. Reflecting Kertzer’s claim that social justice should be central in trauma narratives for children, Naidoo shows healing from trauma to be the locus of political awakening for both characters and implied reader. The aim of this article is to integrate contemporary models of postcolonial trauma with an understanding of the activist nature of Naidoo’s work, showing that in this sort of children’s trauma narrative, the site of healing from trauma is simultaneously the site of social change. Since the trauma that the child protagonists face is a social phenomenon, the speech that allows the children to begin to heal is similarly socially situated, and their healing is synonymous with social justice.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-252
Author(s):  
Luisa Seguin

Abstract When communicating speakers map meaning onto form. It would thus seem obvious for languages to show a one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form, but this is often not the case. This perfect mapping, i.e. transparency, is indeed continuously violated in natural languages, giving rise to zero-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one opaque correspondences between meaning and form. However, transparency is a mutating feature, which can be influenced by language contact. In this scenario languages tend to evolve and lose some of their opaque features, becoming more transparent. This study investigates transparency in a very specific contact situation, namely that of a creole, Haitian Creole, and its sub- and superstrate languages, Fongbe and French, within the Functional Discourse Grammar framework. We predict Haitian Creole to be more transparent than French and Fongbe and investigate twenty opacity features, divided into four categories, namely Redundancy (one-to-many), Fusion (many-to-one), Discontinuity (one meaning is split in two or more forms,) and Form-based Form (forms with no semantic counterpart: zero-to-one). The results indeed prove our prediction to be borne out: Haitian Creole only presents five opacity features out of twenty, while French presents nineteen and Fongbe nine. Furthermore, the opacity features of Haitian Creole are also present in the other two languages.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arianna Schiano Lomoriello ◽  
Mattia Doro ◽  
Paola Sessa ◽  
Ivana Konvalinka

Previous studies have shown that sharing an experience, without communicating, affects people’s subjective perception of the experience, often by intensifying it. However, the effect of shared experience on the underlying neural processing of information is not well understood. In this study, we aimed to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying shared attention by implementing a dual- EEG study where participants were required to attend to and judge the intensity of neutral, angry and happy faces, simultaneously or independently. In order to study whether the presence of another individual modulates an individual's perception and processing of facial expressions, we implemented three experimental conditions: 1) participants performed the task alone, in the absence of a social context (unshared condition), 2) participants performed the task simultaneously next to each other in pairs, without receiving feedback about the other participant's responses (shared no feedback) and 3) participants performed the task simultaneously while receiving the feedback (shared with feedback). We focused on two face-sensitive ERP components: the N170 and the Early Posterior Negativity (EPN). We found that the amplitude of the N170 was greater in the shared with feedback condition compared to the other conditions, reflecting a top-down effect of shared attention on the structural encoding of faces, irrespective of valence. In addition, the EPN was significantly greater in both shared context conditions compared to the unshared condition, reflecting an enhanced attention allocation in the processing of emotional content of faces, modulated by the social context. Behaviourally, we found a modulation on the perceived intensity of the neutral faces only when participants received the feedback of the other person’s ratings, by amplifying the perceived neutrality of faces. Taken together, these results suggest that shared attention amplifies the neural processing of faces, regardless of the valence of facial expressions.


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