Language and Communication

PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnes E. Meyer

My Sense of gratitude—of indebtedness—has often propelled me into difficult situations but none more difficult than the one in which I find myself tonight. I accepted the invitation of your Executive Secretary, Mr. George Winchester Stone, Jr., to address this formidable assemblage because such knowledge of foreign languages as I possess has been and still is one of the most formative influences on my whole life and my concept of the meaning of life.

Author(s):  
Kapitolina Fedorova ◽  

Multilingualism in urban spaces is mainly studied as an oral practice. Nevertheless, linguistic landscape studies can serve as a good explorative method for studying multilingualism in written practices. Moreover, resent research on linguistic landscapes (Blommaert 2013; Shohamy et. al. 2010; Backhaus 2006) have shed some light on the power relations between different ethnic groups in urban public space. Multilingual practices exist in a certain ideological context, and not only official language policy but speaker linguistic stereotypes and attitudes can influence and modify those practices. Historically, South Korea tended to be oriented towards monolingualism; one nation-one people-one language ideology was domineering public discourse. However, globalization and recent increase in migration resulted in gradual changes in attitudes towards multilingualism (Lo and Kim 2012). The linguistic landscapes of Seoul, on the one hand, reflect these changes, and However, they demonstrates pragmatic inequality of languages other than South Korean in public use. This inequality, though, is represented differently in certain spatial urban contexts. The proposed paper aims at analyzing data on linguistic landscapes of Seoul, South Korea ,with the focus on different contexts of language use and different sets of norms and ideological constructs underlying particular linguistic choices. In my presentation I will examine data from three urban contexts: ‘general’ (typical for most public spaces); ‘foreign-oriented’ (seen in tourist oriented locations such as airport, expensive hotels, or popular historical sites, which dominates the Itaewon district); and ‘ethnic-oriented’ (specific for spaces created by and for ethnic minority groups, such as Mongolian / Central Asian / Russian districts near the Dongdaemun History and Culture Park station). I will show that foreign languages used in public written communication are embedded into different frameworks in these three urban contexts, and that the patterns of their use vary from pragmatically oriented ones to predominately symbolic ones, with English functioning as a substitution for other foreign languages, as an emblem of ‘foreignness.’


2006 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-133
Author(s):  
Karol Bujnowski

Nowadays more often people are asking about the meaning of life. It is a fundamental question that every human being faces. Man is asking whether life is worth living, what to do to make our life meaningful?A human being, among many needs, has the need for discovering the sense of life, the need comes from the very core of human existence as placed in time and connected with the phenomenon of passing away. Discovering the sense of life leads to the experience of happiness, joy, and to inner life lived much more to the full. Showing the meaning of life and helping to find that meaning are very important functions of religion. Due to it, a man is able to live one’s life, ambitions, goals, joyful moments as well as his or her suffering in the light of deeper understanding. Religion is the one that can often bring the richest and deepest answers to the question of the two meanings: the meaning of life and the world.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-252
Author(s):  
Svetlana Alexandrovna Tarasova

The paper discusses the problem of professional competence of penitentiary system employees. The author says that employees of the penal system should be ready for the challenges of the vital and professional way. The author defines existential aspect as part of holistic professional competence. Existential setting is included in the existential aspect of professional competence. Existential setting is defined as readiness of a future specialist for self-development and self-improvement. Existential setting is a spiritual resource of a person. Existential setting helps to maintain interest in the professional activity of penitentiary system employee in difficult situations. Existential setting is formed in the process of reflection development. The paper considers forms of educational work: existential dialogue, essays, solution of situational problems. The author gives a brief description of these forms of work and specific examples. The paper contains indicators of effectiveness: students interest in the spiritual side of life as well as in problems of the meaning of life and professional activities.


2003 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 1210-1229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Søren Ventegodt ◽  
Niels Jørgen Andersen ◽  
Joav Merrick

This paper presents a positive philosophy of life developed to support and inspire patients to take more responsibility for their own lives and to draw more efficiently on their known or hidden resources. The idea is that everybody can become wiser, use themselves better, and thus improve quality of life, subjective health, and the ability to function.To be responsible means to see yourself as the cause of your own existence and state of being. To be the one who forms your own life to your liking, so that others do not shape it in the way they prefer to see you. Seen this way, taking responsibility in practice is one of the most difficult things to do. One of the greatest and most difficult things to do in this context is to be able to love. To be the one who loves, instead of being the one who demands love, care, awareness, respect, and acceptance from somebody else.Since almost all of us have had parents who maybe loved us too little and mostly conditionally, we all harbor a deep yearning to be loved as we are, unconditionally. A lot of our energy is spent trying to find recognition and acceptance, more or less as we did as children from our parents, who created the framework and defined the rules of the game. But today, reality is different. We have grown up and now life is about shaping our own existence. So we must be the ones who love. This is what responsibility is all about. Taking responsibility is, quite literally, moving the barriers in our lives inside ourselves. Taking responsibility for life means that you are willing to see that the real barriers are not all these external ones, but something that can be found within yourself. Of course there is an outside world that cannot be easily shaped according to your dreams. But a responsible point of view is that although it is difficult, the problem is not impossible; it is your real challenge and task. If there is something you really want, you can achieve it, but whether it happens depends on your wholehearted, goal-oriented, and continuous attempts. This paper describes the philosophy about seizing the meaning of life and becoming well again, even when there is little time left.


2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 568-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danijela Prosic-Santovac

When teaching foreign languages to very young learners, motivation is an issue that needs to be taken into account even more than in the case of any other age group. Teaching materials and students’ textbooks used in schools and preschools, however carefully crafted, often fail to cater for the genuine interests of children and to invoke intrinsic motivation for learning. This article aims to examine whether centring teaching around authentic media material, such as popular cartoons, and the accompanying branded toys, affects the level of second language (L2) knowledge and motivation for learning. The ‘one environment – one language’ approach was developed for this case study, which focuses on the learning progression of one four-year-old during the period of 18 months. The results speak in favour of using this approach both in kindergarten settings, exploiting role play with playschool character toys, as well as in home settings, where family characters can be used to connect home and preschool environments.


2017 ◽  
pp. 111-120
Author(s):  
Ivan Zabyaka

The article deals with Vasyl Gorlenko, one of the most prominent Ukrainian culturologists of the late nineteenth century – beginning of the XX century. Whose name on the one hand did not belong to the forgotten names: it is fixed in all professional encyclopedias, many articles have been written about it, it is mentioned in the memoirs of contemporaries, there are even three monographs, on the other hand all this is very small, going out from what was done by Vasily Petrovich. There are a lot of problems raised in the writings of V. Gorlenko. There are some that are extremely important. It was established that studying at the famous Sorbonne, he passed the beautiful school of the French theoretician of literature and art critic Ivan T., French classical literature and art, thus receiving a high level of education, education of the best spiritual traits of behavior, possessed at least 5 foreign languages. It was discovered that when V.Gorlenko returned to his homeland, he first met in St. Petersburg with many prominent figures who came from his native land. One of these places of acquaintances is "Tuesdays" by M. Kostomarov. It was on them that V. Gorlenko was a true school of Ukrainian studies. And when Ukraine appeared periodicals that were in line with its patriotic interests, V. Gorlenko began to work with them. In the newspaper Trud, after twenty years of actual silence about T. Shevchenko, the first in Ukraine is a fragment of Russian tales of Taras Shevchenko "A walk with pleasure and not without morality" and the story "The Musician" with some reproach to everyone else who hadn’t done it already. It was found out that the Ukrainian elite rallied around the magazine "Kievan old woman" (1882-1906): V. Antonovich, D. Bagaliy, M. Belyashivsky, P. Golubovsky, V. Domanytsky, P. Efimenko, P. Zhitetsky, O. Lazarevsky, O. Levitsky, M. Sumtsov, V. Tarnovsky and many others. Here were M. Drahomanov, M. Kostomarov, V. Vynnychenko, Panas Mirnyi, I. Franko, M. Staritsky and dozens of other Ukrainian scholars and writers. Among them Vasyl Horlenko. Currently, 114-th of his publications, contained in this publication, are known. Articles, reviews, reviews of publications, information, folk records - each of these publications is an example of scientific conscientiousness and responsibility of the author. It was here that his multifaceted talent of journalist, literary critic and historian, ethnographer and folklorist, art historian, expert in Ukrainian antiquity was revealed. Quite often, V.n Gorlenko was the first, who write about the works of P. Mirny, I. Franko, I. Karpenko-Karyi, M. Kropivnitsky, I. Manzhuro and many others. Invaluable source in the study of both the personality of V. Gorlenko and his environment is his correspondence. Currently, there are about 40 recipients and more than 700 letters to him and partly to him. He corresponded with many Ukrainian and foreign writers, scholars, and cultural figures. He loved Ukraine most of all and was afraid of those revolutions that were devastated, death, spiritual impoverishment, barbarism; advocated the steadfast development of society, feeling as an integral part of its people, small and great Nature. Therefore, it remained for us a bright star of the unimpeded space of culture.


Etyka ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 127-132
Author(s):  
Leonid Archangielski

In Soviet ethical literature, the study of the language of morals is denoted as “the study of ethical categories”. These categories include the concepts of good and evil, duty, conscience, dignity, happiness and meaning of life. The set of categories is open but these traditional categories will always constitute the core of the system of ethical concepts. Remarkable difficulties in interpreting the nature of ethical categories result from the fact that they develop on the borderland between two forms of social consciousness – morality and ethics conceived of as the science of morals. Thus, on the one hand, they are scientific notions, but, on the other, they retain the specific qualities of morality: prescriptivity, evaluativeness and evocativeness. While professing his allegiance to the programme of Marxist ethics as a science intended to develop a system of ethical categories the author points out the danger of overrating the role of the economic factor as this may lead to misapprehending the specific qualities of ethics.


Kalbotyra ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 268-285
Author(s):  
Elena Vladimirska ◽  
Jelena Gridina ◽  
Daina Turlā-Pastare

In this paper, we discuss the question of discourse markers (DM) – a category conceived differently by theoretical and applied linguistic approaches. Unlike in applied approaches, in which DMs are considered desemantized/grammaticalized lexical units devoid of their own semantics and therefore of status in the language, we consider DMs to constitute a full-fledged category of language, having its own semantics and distribution, both of which play a crucial role in the construction of discourse (Paillard 2011, 2012; Franckel 2008, 2019). This hypothesis has been developed in theoretical linguistics and has seen little evidence from a perspective of the acquisition and didactics of foreign languages. Based on cross-analysis of linguistic theories (Benveniste 1974; Ducrot 1980; Hopper & Traugott 1993; Culioli 1990,1999; Franckel & Paillard 2008) and on distributional analysis of data of the spoken corpora, we show that the absence of specific linguistic status for DMs has repercussions at the didactic and acquisition levels: DMs are generally approached in an ad hoc manner, all functions combined, which leads on the one hand to gaps in the acquisition of French and, on the other hand, to the ambiguity of criteria for evaluation. Therefore, at the level of applied linguistics, we suggest the integration of DMs in the learning path as a full category, an integration that must be carried out on several axes – semantic, syntax and prosodic – and be based on an authentic oral corpora of the spoken language. At the theoretical level, we use transversal analysis in order to give yet another argument in favor of a semantical-enunciative approach to discursive markers.


Author(s):  
Leonarda Myslihaka

Knowing at least one foreign language has become almost a necessity. However, in learning a foreign language, communication definitely plays a crucial role. Moreover, without communication there is no interaction, language teaching or learning. Communication is considered as very important and more and more is used as a useful tool to organize a pupil – centered lesson. In this article is treated the need to strengthen and highlight the communicative aspects in teaching foreign language, in our case French language, for a better learning of the language. The objective of learning a foreign language is to develop at pupils the communicative competences in this language. More and more we are going towards a method where communication is the one that realizes successfully the process of teaching and learning. The hypothesis that is set in the article is: Is communication the core element in teaching and learning a foreign language? Other research questions and cases that will be treated are: Communication methods of the foreign languages. What communicative skills are required to develop at pupils/students who learn a foreign language and the strategies of their lessons?; Linguistic competences and their communication role; Communication and the importance of interaction; Oral communication in teaching / learning French language, in the French and Italian language department, in “Aleksandër Xhuvani” university, Elbasan.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 4-19
Author(s):  
Adriana R. Díaz ◽  
◽  
Hugo Hortiguera ◽  
Marcia Espinoza Vera ◽  
◽  
...  

In the era of quality assurance (QA), close scrutiny of assessment practices has been intensified worldwide across the board. However, in the Australian context, trends in QA efforts have not reached the field of modern/foreign languages. This has largely resulted in leaving the establishment of language proficiency benchmarking up to individual institutions and programs of study. This paper discusses the findings of a cross-institutional collaborative research project focused on the comparative analysis and review of assessment practices in the Spanish language majors at the University of Queensland (UQ) and Griffith University (GU), both members of the Brisbane Universities Languages Alliance (BULA). The project had a two-pronged focus; on the one hand, establishing comparable student academic achievement standards, specifically for oral assessment in intermediate level courses; and, on the other hand, providing tools and resources to train teachers (continuing and sessional staff) in consensus moderation (CM) practices through an online platform. The results presented here offer practical pedagogical suggestions to support planning and review of oral assessment, thus contributing to QA management in languages other than English.


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