scholarly journals The Relevance of Language as a Predictor of the Will for Independence in Catalonia in 1996 and 2020

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 426-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordi Argelaguet
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Reform Process ◽  
Place Of Birth ◽  
Powerful Predictor ◽  
Exogenous Variables ◽  
The Will ◽  
Logistic Regressions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Secessionist Movement

The Catalan secessionist parties, if added together, have won all the elections to the Parliament of Catalonia from 2010 to 2021. Their voters have been increasingly mobilized since the start of the controversial reform process of the Statute of Autonomy (2004–2010). The aim of this article is twofold. First, it intends to test whether language is the strongest predictor in preferring independence in two separate and distinct moments, 1996 and 2020. And second, to assess whether its strength has changed—and how—between both years. Only the most exogenous variables to the dependent variable are used in each of two logistic regressions to avoid problems of endogeneity: sex, age, size of town of residence, place of birth of the individual and of their parents, first language (L1), and educational level. Among them, L1 was—and still is—the most powerful predictor, although it is not entirely determinative. The secessionist movement not only gathers a plurality of Catalan native speakers, but it receives a not insignificant level of support among those who have Spanish as their L1. Conversely, the unionist group, despite being composed primarily by people who have Spanish as their L1 and have their family origins outside Catalonia, has a native Catalan-speaking minority inside. This imperfect division, which is based on ethnolinguistic alignments—and whose relevance cannot be neglected—alleviates the likelihood of an ethnic-based conflict.

Salvaging the Mother Tongue in Exile

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 187-204
Author(s):  
Tomás Espino Barrera
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
First Language ◽  
Language Attrition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Progressive Loss ◽  
First Language Attrition ◽  
Lost In Translation ◽  
Deliberate Effort ◽  
Deep Sense

The dramatic increase in the number of exiles and refugees in the past 100 years has generated a substantial amount of literature written in a second language as well as a heightened sensibility towards the progressive loss of fluency in the mother tongue. Confronted by what modern linguistics has termed ‘first-language attrition’, the writings of numerous exilic translingual authors exhibit a deep sense of trauma which is often expressed through metaphors of illness and death. At the same time, most of these writers make a deliberate effort to preserve what is left from the mother tongue by attempting to increase their exposure to poems, dictionaries or native speakers of the ‘dying’ language. The present paper examines a range of attitudes towards translingualism and first language attrition through the testimonies of several exilic authors and thinkers from different countries (Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Hannah Arendt's interviews, Jorge Semprún's Quel beau dimanche! and Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez, and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, among others). Special attention will be paid to the historical frameworks that encourage most of their salvaging operations by infusing the mother tongue with categories of affect and kinship.

Ibn Khaldun’s Theory of Social Change

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fida Mohammad
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Ibn Khaldun ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Compare And Contrast

In this article I shall compare and contrast Ibn Khaldun’s ideas aboutsociohistorical change with those of Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim. I willdiscuss and elaborate Ibn Khaldun’s major ideas about historical andsocial change and compare them with three important figures of modemWestern sociology and philosophy.On reading Ibn Khaldun one should remember that he was living in thefourteenth century and did not have the privilege of witnessing the socialdislocation created by the industrial revolution. It is also very difficult tocategorize Ibn Khaldun within a single philosophical tradition. He is arationalist as well as an empiricist, a historicist as well as a believer inhuman agency in the historical process. One can see many “modem”themes in his thinking, although he lived a hundred years beforeMachiavelli.Lauer, who considers Ibn Khaldun the pioneer of modem sociologicalthought, has summarized the main points of his philosophy.’ In his interpretationof Ibn Khaldun, he notes that historical processes follow a regularpattern. However, whereas this pattern shows sufficient regularity, itis not as rigid as it is in the natural world. In this regard the position ofIbn Khaldun is radically different from those philosophies of history thatposit an immutable course of history determined by the will of divineprovidence or other forces. Ibn Khaldun believes that the individual isneither a completely passive recipient nor a full agent of the historicalprocess. Social laws can be discovered through observation and datagathering, and this empirical grounding of social knowledge represents adeparture from traditional rational and metaphysical thinking ...

Schopenhauer and the Unconscious

2020 ◽  
pp. 496-516
Author(s):  
Stephan Atzert
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Arthur Schopenhauer ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Sabina Spielrein

This chapter explores the gradual emergence of the notion of the unconscious as it pertains to the tradition that runs from Arthur Schopenhauer via Eduard von Hartmann and Philipp Mainländer to Sabina Spielrein, C. G. Jung, and Sigmund Freud. A particular focus is put on the popularization of the term “unconscious” by von Hartmann and on the history of the death drive, which has Schopenhauer’s essay “Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual” as one of its precursors. In this essay, Schopenhauer develops speculatively the notion of a universal, intelligent, supraindividual unconscious—an unconscious with a purpose related to death. But the death drive also owes its origins to Schopenhauer’s “relative nothingness,” which Mainländer adopts into his philosophy as “absolute nothingness” resulting from the “will to death.” His philosophy emphasizes death as the goal of the world and its inhabitants. This central idea had a distinctive influence on the formation of the idea of the death drive, which features in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

The Relation of Language Context and Religiosity to Trilemma Judgments

2021 ◽  
pp. 002202212110339
Author(s):  
Elyas Barabadi ◽  
Mohsen Rahmani Tabar ◽  
James R. Booth
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Second Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Standard Measure ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Language Context

Utilitarian judgments maximize benefit for the most people, whereas deontological judgments are based on moral norms. Previous work shows that people tend to make more utilitarian judgments in their second compared to their native language, whereas higher religiosity is associated with more deontological judgments. However, it is not known whether the effect of language context is moderated by the religiosity of the individual. We hypothesized that more religious participants from all three languages would favor deontological choices irrespective of language context. In order to investigate this, we studied native speakers of Persian who either had Arabic or English as their second language, and all participants were given a standard measure of religiosity. Decision making was measured by the classic trolley trilemma in which a participant could “push” a person to save the lives of more people which is considered a utilitarian judgment. Alternatively, they could “switch” a track to save the lives of more people (“indirect”), or do nothing (“inaction”), both of which are considered deontological. Consistent with the literature showing more utilitarian judgments in the second language, English participants preferred the push option, whereas Persian participants favored the inaction option. L2 Arabic participants more often chose the indirect option. However, participants’ religiosity moderated this effect of language context. Although L2 Arabic participants’ choices were not influenced by religiosity, higher religiosity in the L2 English and L1 Persian groups was associated with more deontological choices.

Free Agent or ‘Conscious Automaton’? Contrasting Interpretations of the Individual in Spencer's Writing on Social and Moral Life

2003 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Offer
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social Evolution ◽  
Care Needs ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
Policy Sociology ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Individual

Herbert Spencer remains an important and intriguing figure in thinking about political, social and moral matters. At present his writings in relation to idealist thought, social policy, sociology and ethics are undergoing reassessment. This article is concerned with some recent interpretations of Spencer on individuals in social life. It looks in some detail at Spencer's work on psychology and sociology as well as on ethics, seeking to establish how Spencer understood people as social individuals. In particular the neglect of Spencer's denial of freedom of the will is identified as a problem in some recent interpretations. One of his contemporary critics, J.E. Cairnes, charged that Spencer's own theory of social evolution left even Spencer himself the status of only a ‘conscious automaton’. This article, drawing on a range of past and present interpretative discussions of Spencer, seeks to show that Spencerian individuals are psychically and socially so constituted as to be only indirectly responsive to moral suasion, even to that of his own Principles of Ethics as he himself acknowledged. Whilst overtly reconstructionist projects to develop a liberal utilitarianism out of Spencer to enliven political and philosophical debate for today are worthwhile – dead theorists have uses – care needs to be taken that the original context and its concerns with the processes associated with innovation (and decay) in social life are not thereby eclipsed, the more so since in some important respects they have recently received little systematic attention even though the issues have contemporary relevance in sociology.

The processing of case in near-native Spanish

2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Jegerski
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Differential Object Marking ◽  
L2 Processing ◽  
Case Marker ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
Case Markers ◽  
Ditransitive Constructions

This article reports a study that sought to determine whether non-native sentence comprehension can show sensitivity to two different types of Spanish case marking. Sensitivity to case violations was generally more robust with indirect objects in ditransitive constructions than with differential object marking of animate direct objects, even among native speakers of Spanish, which probably reflects linguistic differences in the two types of case. In addition, the overall outcome of two experiments shows that second language (L2) processing can integrate case information, but that, unlike with native processing, attention to a case marker may depend on the presence of a preverbal clitic as an additional cue to the types of postverbal arguments that might occur in a stimulus. Specifically, L2 readers showed no sensitivity to differential object marking with a in the absence of clitics in the first experiment, with stimuli such as Verónica visita al/el presidente todos los meses ‘Veronica visits the[ACC/NOM]president every month’, but the L2 readers in the second experiment showed native-like sensitivity to the same marker when the object it marked was doubled by the clitic lo, as in Verónica lo visita al/el presidente todos los meses. With indirect objects, on the other hand, sensitivity to case markers was native-like in both experiments, although indirect objects were also always doubled by the preverbal clitic le. The apparent first language / second language contrast suggests differences in processing strategy, whereby non-native processing of morphosyntax may rely more on the predictability of forms than does native processing.

Examining individual variation in learner production data: A few programmatic pointers for corpus-based analyses using the example of adverbial clause ordering

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Stefan Th. Gries ◽  
Stefanie Wulff
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Subordinate Clause ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Chinese Learners ◽  
Adverbial Clauses ◽  
Adverbial Clause ◽  
Temporal Adverbial

ABSTRACT This study examines the variable positioning of a finite adverbial subordinate clause and its main clause with the subordinate clause either preceding or following the main clause in native versus nonnative English. Specifically, we contrast causal, concessive, conditional, and temporal adverbial clauses produced by German and Chinese learners of English with those produced by native speakers. We examined 2,362 attestations from the Chinese and German subsections of the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger, Dagneaux, Meunier, & Paquot, 2009) and from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (Granger, 1998). All instances were annotated for the ordering, the subordinate clause type, the lengths of the main and subordinate clauses, the first language of the speakers, the conjunction used, and the file it originated from (as a proxy for the speaker producing the sentence so as to be able to study individual and lexical variation). The results of a two-step regression modeling protocol suggest that learners behave most nativelike with causal clauses and struggle most with conditional and concessive clauses; in addition, learners make more non-nativelike choices when the main and subordinate clause are of about equal length.

Volkswille: Reale Substanz oder notwendige Fiktion?

Der Staat ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-396
Author(s):  
Shu-Perng Hwang
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
The Real ◽  
The People ◽  
The Will ◽  
Right Wing Populism ◽  
The Individual

Angesichts des markanten Aufstiegs des Rechtspopulismus in den vergangenen Jahren drängt sich die Frage immer wieder auf, ob oder inwiefern das Parlament den eigentlichen Volkswillen (noch) vertreten kann, und wie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung und Digitalisierung der eigentliche Volkswille überhaupt festzustellen und effektiv durchzusetzen ist. In dieser Hinsicht steht das Vertrauen in die Fähigkeit des Parlaments, den wahren Volkswillen herauszubilden und zu artikulieren, erneut vor großen Herausforderungen. Durch eine vergleichende Analyse zwischen den Demokratietheorien Böckenfördes und Kelsens zeigt der vorliegende Beitrag, weshalb und inwiefern das weitverbreitete Verständnis des Volkswillens und dessen Rolle in der parlamentarischen Demokratie gerade vor dem heutigen Hintergrund eine kritische Besinnung verdient. Es wird argumentiert, dass gerade in demokratischer Hinsicht nicht die Suche nach dem „wahren Volkswillen“, sondern nach wie vor die Gewährleistung der Menschen- bzw. Grundrechte der Einzelnen und insbesondere der Minderheiten von zentraler Bedeutung sein soll. In view of the spread of right-wing populism in recent years, the question as to how the will of the people is to be ascertained and expressed has attracted much attention in constitutional scholarship. In particular, the issue of whether or to what extent the parliament is (still) capable of representing and demonstrating the will of the people has been repeatedly discussed and debated. Through a comparative analysis of Böckenförde’s und Kelsen’s democratic theories, this article critically examines the problems of the widespread understanding of the will of the people as a real-empirical existence and its significance for the realization of democracy. Accordingly, it points out why and in what sense the reference to the so-called real will of the people would undermine rather than promote democracy. This article concludes by arguing that, precisely for the sake of democracy, what is crucial is not to determine what the “real will of the people” is, but rather to guarantee the freedom of the individual and especially of the minorities.

First language effects on the identification and evaluation of second language speech

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-194
Author(s):  
Anne-France Pinget
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Language Aptitude ◽  
Content Type ◽  
It Impacts ◽  
Language Effects

Abstract In Belgium, Dutch as spoken by Francophone learners is relatively frequent in political, commercial or educational contexts. While the characteristics of this second language (L2) variety have been studied extensively, there is to date no systematic report of how it is evaluated by either native speakers of Dutch or non-natives. Previous studies conducted in other language contexts have found that non-natives tend to be very critical towards L2 accents similar to their own. The main goal of the present study is to investigate the extent to which the listener’s first language (L1) impacts ratings of the fluency, accentedness and comprehensibility of L2 Dutch as spoken by Francophone learners and how it impacts the identification of the speakers’ L1. Specifically, we compared ratings by three groups of listeners: Francophone learners of Dutch, native speakers of Belgian Dutch and native speakers of Netherlandic Dutch. Moreover, the extent to which three additional cognitive and environmental factors influence L2 ratings is examined: listeners’ familiarity with the L2 variety, their language aptitude and language proficiency. The results show that the majority of native and non-native listeners recognized the speakers’ L1 (French). Non-native listeners perceived L2 speech as less fluent, less comprehensible and more accented than natives did, which corroborates the previously reported critical attitudes towards a shared L2 accent. Moreover, subtle differences in accent and fluency ratings were found between the Netherlandic Dutch and the Belgian Dutch listeners. No clear effects of other cognitive and environmental factors appeared in the ratings.

Translation and sociolinguistics

Babel ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
María T. Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
First Language ◽  
Specific Situation ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Original Language ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Speaker

Language varies depending not only on the individual speaker but also on the specific situation in which speakers find themselves. This means that the language used in a given social envi­ronment may be perfectly translatable into a different language, but the society to which this other language belongs may not recognise the situation described by the first language. This ­article presents some examples of cultural values which cannot be translated literally (or which, if translated literally, will convey a message not intended in the original language/culture) and reaches the conclusion that, as a result of all this, there cannot be a simple answer to whether language can translate society. In some cases, it will be perfectly possible; in others, the translator will have to adopt a technique which reflects the society he or she is translating for, rather than the society described in the original text.

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