scholarly journals From connectors to extension particles, the meaning of sipa ki in Mauritian Creole

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 9-25
Author(s):  
Shimeen-Khan Chady

The extension particles are not considered as discourse markers by all researchers mainly considering the grammatical function the connectors which they are based on can present. However, as for discourse markers which “desemantisation” has been revoked, other researchers argue that extension particles maintain part of their original meaning while endorsing an intersubjective value. I try to study this question in this article for the Mauritian Creole extension particle sipa ki which is formed on the connector sipa. A fine-grained conversational and pragmatics analysis of 6 hours of ordinary conversations, collected in 2014 shows how sipa ki plays a part in conversational relation co-construction. While helping the enunciator to construct their own discourse and showing their attitude towards it, sipa ki provides information on the way the sentence has to be interpreted by soliciting (assumed) shared experience by interlocutors for message reconstruction. I argue that speech effects provided by extension particle sipa ki partly rely on the meaning of connector sipa on which it is constructed and which also holds an intersubjective value.

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-147
Author(s):  
S. K. Tabatabaee

It is historically established that the readers of the Qur'an read certain Qur'anic phrases or words in various ways. Some of these different readings affect the pronunciation of certain words without changing their meanings, e.g. ‘kufuwan aḥad’ where two readings exist: ‘kufuwan aḥad’ with fā' madmūma and wāw maftūha without hamza and ‘kufu'an aḥad’ with hamz and fā' maḍmūma. Other readings, however, may affect the function of a word in a sentence in terms of the syntactical structure of the sentence and the grammatical function of the word, and the way it is to be parsed. This can be observed in ‘mālik yawn al-dīn’ (Q.1:4) where three readings exist: ‘māliki yawmi'l-dīn’, ‘maliki yawmi'l-dīn’ and ‘malaka yawma'l-dīn’, turning mālik into a past tense verb and rendering the word yawm in the nasb mood. Another example can be found in the Qur'anic phrase ‘bi-mā kānū yakdhibūn’ (Q.2:10) where two readings exist: ‘yakdhibūn’ with yā' maftūḥa and single dhāl, and ‘yukadhdhibūn’ with yā' maḍmūma and doubled dhal. This article will focus on the obligations to be undertaken by the translators of the Qur'an in relation to the latter type of Qur'anic readings.


2016 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 561-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Hunter ◽  
Masaya Yoshida
Keyword(s):  

This squib presents a restriction on the phenomenon descriptively known as ‘‘vehicle change’’ that has not, to our knowledge, previously been noted. With vehicle change construed as a kind of ‘‘tolerable mismatch’’ between an ellipsis site and its antecedent, the data we present suggest that exactly the same mismatches cannot be tolerated between the members of a movement chain. While in principle one might consider the possibility that ellipsis and movement could be reduced to the same operation ( Chomsky 1995:252–253 )—that the deletion usually described as ellipsis might be the same operation as the deletion or ‘‘chopping’’ (in the sense of Ross 1967) that applies to the unpronounced (usually lower) copy in a movement chain—the differences in the kinds of mismatches that can be tolerated will pose a difficulty for this unification. We present the crucial data that suggest that such a unification is not tenable in section 1 and then outline an explanation of these facts in section 2 . We state this explanation in terms of the way movement, ellipsis, and vehicle change interact, while remaining largely agnostic about the exact mechanisms that implement these somewhat pretheoretic notions. In section 3 , we consider the consequences for these more fine-grained questions about the nature of ellipsis and movement, and in section 4 , we consider some further implications that depend on how vehicle change is understood. Section 5 addresses a challenge for our proposed explanation that turns out to be only illusory, and section 6 briefly concludes.


2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (0) ◽  
pp. 119-0
Author(s):  
Andrea Rosa

This paper aims to recount a shared experience of some psychology students – an intellectual adventure of exploring one’s own approach towards human relations and nature on the way to becoming a psychotherapist. To become practitioners, the students need to choose a certain psychotherapeutic training based on one of the main psychotherapeutic theoretical approaches. The following are mentioned in this paper: psychoanalysis, cognitivebehavioral therapy, humanistic/existential and the postmodern narrative approach. Exploring the assumptions underlying different modalities and practices is also considered here to be an ethical challenge. It is reckoned that the choice of a specific psychotherapeutical practice bound to a theory shapes the identity of the therapist and the patients, forms the language and behaviour through which the future therapist will express his own Self and influence the Other. Referring to postmodern inspirations, the author speaks in favour of making an endless effort of recognizing the assumptions underlying different practices – as the only way for not taking a potentially violent and impervious attitude in the relationship between the therapist and the patient.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-244
Author(s):  
Nancy Hawker

Abstract‘Arabrew’ denotes a mixture of the languages that index two nations known for their seemingly intractable conflict. It is supposedly spoken by Palestinians and other Arabs who are citizens of Israel. Evidence from the field gathered in 2015 shows some codeswitching, especially inter-sentential, and borrowing, mostly of nouns for specialist terminology, and of a few discourse markers. This does not support the claim that a new variety has emerged, yet the debate around it channels concerns about nonlinguistic issues relating to the political economy of Israel and to anxieties about Israeli-Palestinian relations. This debate invokes ideologies, including language ideologies, of nationalism, colonialism, liberalism, and more, that are identifiably linked to the historical and material contexts. The study uses critical discourse analysis and contact linguistics to outline the articulation between distinctions of national identity, socioeconomic class, the way people speak, and the way this speech is ideologically received. (Arabic, Hebrew, codeswitching, ideology)*


2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-192
Author(s):  
Emad Mohamed

Abstract Discourse markers are lexical items that play the role of conveying the speaker’s attitude towards the topic of conversation. Although discourse markers have this function, they have little semantic content, yet their importance for understanding (oral) discourse can hardly be overestimated. As such, they have been widely studied in English. While the Qurʾān has a number of these discourse markers, none of them seem to have been properly noticed, let alone studied, by Arabic linguists and Qurʾān commentators. This article introduces what I believe to be the most frequent of these in the Qurʾān: araʾaytum (literally: “have you seen?”) in its various morphological manifestations. This article uses concepts from historical linguistics, pragmatics, and corpus linguistics – and in particular lexical co-occurrences – to examine the development of this form from a sense verb that simply means “to see” to a pragmatic attitudinal marker that is semantically vacuous and whose main function is to express the speaker’s dissatisfaction with, resentment at, or disapproval of the topic of conversation. While the analysis provided in this article is mainly linguistic, the findings will affect the way we read the Arabic-Islamic heritage, especially as regards the authenticity of what are known as the Satanic Verses, also known as the episode of the High-Flying Cranes (Qiṣṣat al-ġarānīq). This article also provides suggestions for the translation of this discourse marker.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludivine Crible

Abstract While discourse markers (DMs) and (dis)fluency have been extensively studied in the past as separate phenomena, corpus-based research combining large-scale yet fine-grained annotations of both categories has, however, never been carried out before. Integrating these two levels of analysis, while methodologically challenging, is not only innovative but also highly relevant to the investigation of spoken discourse in general and form-meaning patterns in particular. The aim of this paper is to provide corpus-based evidence of the register-sensitivity of DMs and other disfluencies (e.g. pauses, repetitions) and of their tendency to combine in recurrent clusters. These claims are supported by quantitative findings on the variation and combination of DMs with other (dis)fluency devices in DisFrEn, a richly annotated and comparable English-French corpus representative of eight different interaction settings. The analysis uncovers the prominent place of DMs within (dis)fluency and meaningful association patterns between forms and functions, in a usage-based approach to meaning-in-context.


2018 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 71-87
Author(s):  
Julia Lukassek ◽  
Alexandra Anna Spalek

This paper investigates the meaning adaptability of change of state (CoS) verbs. Itargues that both coercion and underspecification are necessary mechanisms in order to properlyaccount for the semantic adaptability observable for CoS verbs in combination with theircomplements. This type of meaning adaptability has received little formal attention to date,although some recent work has already led the way on this topic (Spalek, 2014; Lukassek andSpalek, 2016; Asher et al., 2017). Our paper is part of a cross-linguistic case study of Germaneinfrieren and Spanish congelar (‘freeze’). We model the meaning adaptability of this test casewithin Type Composition Logic (TCL) (Asher, 2011). We build on Asher’s coercion mechanismand introduce an additional mechanism for underspecification that exploits the fine-grained typesystem in TCL.Keywords: lexical semantics, change of state verbs, coercion, underspecification, Type CompositionLogic.


2001 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 85-101
Author(s):  
Donka F. Farkas

This paper is concerned with semantic noun phrase typology, focusing on the question of how to draw fine-grained distinctions necessary for an accurate account of natural language phenomena. In the extensive literature on this topic, the most commonly encountered parameters of classification concern the semantic type of the denotation of the noun phrase, the familiarity or novelty of its referent, the quantificational/nonquantificational distinction (connected to the weak/strong dichotomy), as well as, more recently, the question of whether the noun phrase is choice-functional or not (see Reinhart 1997, Winter 1997, Kratzer 1998, Matthewson 1999). In the discussion that follows I will attempt to make the following general points: (i) phenomena involving the behavior of noun phrases both within and across languages point to the need of establishing further distinctions that are too fine-grained to be caught in the net of these typologies; (ii) some of the relevant distinctions can be captured in terms of conditions on assignment functions; (iii) distribution and scopal peculiarities of noun phrases may result from constraints they impose on the way variables they introduce are to be assigned values. Section 2 reviews the typology of definite noun phrases introduced in Farkas 2000 and the way it provides support for the general points above. Section 3 examines some of the problems raised by recognizing the rich variety of 'indefinite' noun phrases found in natural language and by attempting to capture their distribution and interpretation. Common to the typologies discussed in the two sections is the issue of marking different types of variation in the interpretation of a noun phrase. In the light of this discussion, specificity turns out to be an epiphenomenon connected to a family of distinctions that are marked differently in different languages.  


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-101
Author(s):  
Jukka Jouhki

Online poker, like gambling in general, is predominantly a male activity. Thus, poker ads most often depict men as their protagonists. According to Jean Baudrillard, advertising can be seen as a ‘plebiscite whereby mass consumer society wages a perpetual campaign of self- endorsement.’ Ads often use stereotypical imagery for establishing a shared experience of identification with the consumer, and since their role is to sell rather than to portray the realities of life, they often have an exaggerated and monolithic – or, hyperreal – way of representing gender. This article offers an analysis of the ways in which men are portrayed in the ads of Poker Magazine Finland in the volume of 2009 (all six issues), at the peak of the so-called online poker boom.Theoretically, the article draws on postmodern theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and particularly on his concept of hyperreality (exaggerated and media-saturated reality) to analyze the way males are portrayed in the ads in question. 


2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-446
Author(s):  
Piotr Lamparski

The Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) method potentially offers many possibilities for fast and reliable lithostratigraphic sediment models to be developed. From a cognitive point of view, this represents a major simplification and shortening of procedures with which information about sediments can be obtained. And from the point of view of the economy of operations, there can be a significant reduction in costs and time of research in shallow geology and the stratigraphy of areas where unconsolidated clastic sediments are of superficial occurrence. Also noteworthy is the possibility for the results of GPR surveys to be deployed in support of geological mapping, as well as in the shallow exploration of resources and hydrogeological studies.The most major advantage of the GPR method related to the possibility of the structure of forms being observed in full shape. In the absence of large outcrops, geophysical prospection of geomorphological forms is helpful, insofar as we are able to translate the results of geophysical surveys into the actual lithostratigraphic system of sediments building a specific form.Against that background, the research presented in this article forms part of the work to develop radar stratigraphy, as an important support for direct geological research (Huggenberger et al., 1994; Van Overmeeren, 1998; Beres et al., 1999, Overgaard and Jakobsen, 2001; Jakobsen and Overgaard, 2002; Neal, 2004; Lejzerowicz et al., 2014; Żuk and Sambrook Smith, 2015; Lejzerowicz et al., 2018). It also points to the research potential of the GPR method in determining the genesis of form. The discussion on the way kames form has been going on in the literature for years (Niewiarowski, 1959; 1961; Karczewski, 1971; Klajnert, 1978; Jaksa, 2003; Terpiłowski, 2008). The studies presented here do not suffice to allow the matter to be determined comprehensively, even though they do provide for verification of the opinions of previous researchers.The area forming the subject of this article is defined by Niewiarowski (1959) as the dead ice zone because of the characteristic set of forms (dead ice moraines, kames and eskers). Like modern researchers (Terpiłowski, 2008), Niewiarowski points to the importance of sub-Quaternary surface elevations in the formation of cracks in the ice sheet, with this leading on to the formation of kame hills above such elevations. This would also seem to have been one of the reasons for the formation in the mass of ice of lakes whose filling with sediment and melting ice walls took the form of kames.The great advantage of the GPR method lies in its ability to recognise macrostructural sediment patterns in glacilimic forms. This diagnosis allows for the high-probability assessment of the genesis of form, especially in the context of its position being determined in the marginal zone of the ice sheet. Also looking extremely promising is the capacity for the thickness of fine clastic sediments lying on till to be determined using GPR. It allows for the determination of the way in which a given form is rooted.Described as they are in brief only, test results for selected sites serve to confirm the great usefulness of the GPR method in the recognition of shallow lithostratigraphy of clastic sediments. Nevertheless, this should not be the only method used to recognise the geological structure of forms and sediments. Significant interpretation ambiguities mean that the GPR method should act in support of direct lithostratigraphic research, not merely serving as an alternative to it. GPR surveys offer a depiction particularly close to the real one – of sediment present in homogeneous sediments in relation to electrical parameters. Sediments ideal for GPR surveys would for example be fine dry sands or silts – and it is precisely these sediments that built most of the investigated kame forms.


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