scholarly journals Metapragmatics and genre: Connecting the strands

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-104
Author(s):  
Evgeni N. Molodychenko ◽  
Jürgen Spitzmüller

Genre analysis involves at least a foray into the social/contextual dimension framing genre-exemplars. One way to explore this dimension is drawing on the concept of metapragmatics, which is primarily associated with (American) linguistic anthropology. However, with a few exceptions, genre studies have not consistently operationalized metapragmatics, either theoretically or practically. The purpose of this article is, therefore, to explore one possible angle of such operationalization by means of studying discourse fragments reflecting on fragments of (these very or other) discourses (so-called metapragmatic discourses) vis--vis any generic properties of the reflected discourse. Specifically, we analyzed comments sections for a number of YouTube videos exemplifying several lifestyle genres. The results indicate that generic references can range from simply using a generic label to refer to the discourse in question (as a token of a certain type/genre) to actually discussing the generic characteristics of the genre it instantiates, as well as projecting certain (generic) metapragmatic stances. Another observation is that different wordings used by the discourse community to refer to generic models can be, as it were, proper generic labels, but they can also be words and phrases that would hardly qualify as proper names of genres from an analysts point of view. Both these proper and other - genre-like - labels are also often used in conjunction with or are replaced by other ways of metapragmatically referring to what the speaker does or even what they are in/by dint of using the discourse in question. This suggests that any generic labels or cues are just part of a large pool of other possible metapragmatic meanings, knowledge, and ideologies circulating in discourse communities. More broadly, the results may indicate that genre studies should see genre as an even less stabilized entity because what a genre is depends on what people who actually use it make of it, as well as augment their standard toolkits with methods aimed at exploring metapragmatic discourse.

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Besin Gaspar

This research deals with the development of  self concept of Hiroko as the main character in Namaku Hiroko by Nh. Dini and tries to identify how Hiroko is portrayed in the story, how she interacts with other characters and whether she is portrayed as a character dominated by ”I” element or  ”Me”  element seen  from sociological and cultural point of view. As a qualitative research in nature, the source of data in this research is the novel Namaku Hiroko (1967) and the data ara analyzed and presented deductively. The result of this analysis shows that in the novel, Hiroko as a fictional character is  portrayed as a girl whose personality  develops and changes drastically from ”Me”  to ”I”. When she was still in the village  l iving with her parents, she was portrayed as a obedient girl who was loyal to the parents, polite and acted in accordance with the social customs. In short, her personality was dominated by ”Me”  self concept. On the other hand, when she moved to the city (Kyoto), she was portrayed as a wild girl  no longer controlled by the social customs. She was  firm and determined totake decisions of  her won  for her future without considering what other people would say about her. She did not want to be treated as object. To put it in another way, her personality is more dominated by the ”I” self concept.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Sina Saeedy ◽  
Mojtaba Amiri ◽  
Mohammad Mahdi Zolfagharzadeh ◽  
Mohammad Rahim Eyvazi

Quality of life and satisfaction with life as tightly interconnected concepts have become of much importance in the urbanism era. No doubt, it is one of the most important goals of every human society to enhance a citizen’s quality of life and to increase their satisfaction with life. However, there are many signs which demonstrate the low level of life satisfaction of Iranian citizens especially among the youth. Thus, considering the temporal concept of life satisfaction, this research aims to make a futures study in this field. Therefore, using a mixed model and employing research methods from futures studies, life satisfaction among the students of the University of Tehran were measured and their views on this subject investigated. Both quantitative and qualitative data were analysed together in order to test the hypotheses and to address the research questions on the youth discontentment with quality of life. Findings showed that the level of life satisfaction among students is relatively low and their image of the future is not positive and not optimistic. These views were elicited and discussed in the social, economic, political, environmental and technological perspectives. Keywords:  futures studies, quality of life, satisfaction with life, youth


Author(s):  
Oksana Galchuk

The theme of illegitimacy Guy de Maupassant evolved in his works this article perceives as one of the factors of the author’s concept of a person and the plane of intersection of the most typical motifs of his short stories. The study of the author’s concept of a person through the prism of polivariability of the motif of a bastard is relevant in today’s revision of traditional values, transformation of the usual social institutions and search for identities, etc. The purpose of the study is to give a definition to the existence specifics of the bastard motif in the Maupassant’s short stories by using historical and literary, comparative, structural methods of analysis as dominant. To do this, I analyze the content, variability and the role of this motive in the formation of the Maupassant’s concept of a person, the author’s innovations in its interpretation from the point of view of literary diachrony. Maupassant interprets the bastard motif in the social, psychological and metaphorical-symbolic sense. For the short stories with the presentation of this motif, I suggest the typology based on the role of it in the structure of the work and the ideological and thematic content: the short stories with a motif-fragment, the ones with the bastard’s leitmotif and the group where the bastard motif becomes a central theme. The Maupassant’s interpretation of the bastard motif combines the general tendencies of its existence in the world’s literary tradition and individual reading. The latter is the result of the author’s understanding of the relevant for the era issues: the transformation of the family model, the interest in the theory of heredity, the strengthening of atheistic sentiments, the growth of frustration in the system of traditional social and moral values etc. This study sets the ground for a prospective analysis of the evolution the bastard motif in the short-story collections of different years or a comparative study of the motif in short stories and novels by Maupassant.


2019 ◽  
pp. 87-95

The article is devoted to the role of Tourism terminology in linguistics and the issue of general classification, peculiarities in the expression and translation of terms related to tourism in English into Uzbek and Russian, as well as the choice of the most optimal methods for translating terms in accordance with the requirements of this professional sphere. The terminology of the English language tourism is distinguished by its brightness, versatility. Tourism terms are formed under the influence of a generalized lexical layer of language and perform a specific functional function.Tourism terms are formed through the affixation method (prefixation, suffixation, circumphixation) and get rich through the process.The terminology of English Tourism is distinguished by its content and structural features, forming a part of the language vocabulary from the linguistic point of view. Texts in the field of Tourism take into their composition concepts of Tourism and interpret them in their content. They will be mainly in the form of advertising, as well as enlighten information about a particular region or place, create informational precedents and ensure their manifestation in the social cultural presence. The relevance of the study of the problems of translation of terms in the field of tourism has been investigated, mainly due to the development of international relations, expansion of cooperation between local and foreign companies, as well as the increase in this area of communication.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Redacción CEIICH

<p class="p1">The third number of <span class="s1"><strong>INTER</strong></span><span class="s2"><strong>disciplina </strong></span>underscores this generic reference of <em>Bodies </em>as an approach to a key issue in the understanding of social reality from a humanistic perspective, and to understand, from the social point of view, the contributions of the research in philosophy of the body, cultural history of the anatomy, as well as the approximations queer, feminist theories and the psychoanalytical, and literary studies.</p>


Dreyfus argues that there is a basic methodological difference between the natural sciences and the social sciences, a difference that derives from the different goals and practices of each. He goes on to argue that being a realist about natural entities is compatible with pluralism or, as he calls it, “plural realism.” If intelligibility is always grounded in our practices, Dreyfus points out, then there is no point of view from which one can ask about or provide an answer to the one true nature of ultimate reality. But that is consistent with believing that the natural sciences can still reveal the way the world is independent of our theories and practices.


Author(s):  
Mireia López-Bertran

This chapter explores the funerary rites in the Phoenician-Punic world from a comprehensive point of view, and it focuses on the common points arising from a large amount of data. The concern for burying their deceased and the belief in the soul’s afterlife show that the Phoenicians considered death as a transformation rather than as the end of a person’s life. Through our access to archaeological remains and written sources, we can reconstruct the existence of a meaningful burial program that was destined to provide a “good death” and afterlife. Funerary rituals, thus, are the actions or gestures to achieve this goal. The aim of this chapter is to explain the rites that family members undertook once someone died, in order to transform correctly the deceased person into an otherworldly being, the ancestor. The social implications of the data arising from burials are also briefly considered.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 327-327
Author(s):  
Stefan Hopf

Abstract Modern societies can be regarded as service economies, consequently accessing services is an essential part of social and economic participation. Direct and indirect indiscrimination act as barriers to accessing and using services and one way to address these barriers is to implement anti-discrimination legislation and policy. From a sociological point of view, such policies and legal frameworks can be described as elements of the social discourse in these areas. These texts, along with their implicit and explicit interpretations of the problem, represent the official and legitimised stake of the socially available stock of knowledge of what constitutes age discrimination. Hence the shape and contribute to the general understanding of age discrimination. The study aims to investigate the interpretation patterns offered by the “supply” side, that is by those actors who in their work refer to but also (re-) shape and disseminate the problem interpretation contained in the official texts. To address this aim, focus groups with stakeholders and semi-structured interviews with legal and policy experts were conducted in Austria and Ireland. The findings highlight that experts and stakeholders’ definitions of age discrimination usually extend past legal and policy concepts. The expert and stakeholder approaches differ in their starting points for describing the problem, ranging from vulnerability considerations to human rights-based concepts and more structurally orientated needs-based criteria. Finally, the analysis also reveals a central distinguishing feature of age discrimination, namely the “de-temporalization” and “de-historicization” of the person, which is of equal importance as the de-individualization as a consequence of stereotyping


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Kim Harding ◽  
Abby Day

In Great Britain, “religion or belief” is one of nine “protected characteristics” under the Equality Act 2010, which protects citizens from discrimination in the workplace and in wider society. This paper begins with a discussion about a 2020 ruling, “Jordi Casamitjana vs. LACS”, which concluded that ethical vegans are entitled to similar legal protections in British workplaces as those who hold philosophical religious beliefs. While not all vegans hold a philosophical belief to the same extent as Casamitjana, the ruling is significant and will be of interest to scholars investigating non-religious ethical beliefs. To explore this, we have analysed a sample of YouTube videos on the theme of “my vegan story”, showing how vloggers circulate narratives about ethical veganism and the process of their conversion to vegan beliefs and practices. The story format can be understood as what Abby Day has described as a performative “belief narrative”, offering a greater opportunity to understand research participants’ beliefs and related identities than, for example, findings from a closed-question survey. We suggest that through performative acts, YouTubers create “ethical beliefs” through the social, mediatised, transformative, performative and relational practice of their digital content. In doing so, we incorporate a digital perspective to enrich academic discussions of non-religious beliefs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 136 (2) ◽  
pp. 538-566
Author(s):  
Sandra Issel-Dombert

AbstractFrom a theoretical and empirical linguistic point of view, this paper emphasizes the importance of the relationship between populism and the media. The aim of this article is to explore the language use of the Spanish right wing populism party Vox on the basis of its multimodal postings on the social network Instagram. For the analysis of their Instagram account, a suitable multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) provides a variety of methods and allows a theoretical integration into constructivism. A hashtag-analysis reveals that Vox’s ideology consists of a nativist and ethnocentric nationalism on the one hand and conservatism on the other. With a topos analysis, the linguistic realisations of these core elements are illustrated with two case studies.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document