scholarly journals The Grammaticalization of Catalan anar (‘to go’) + Infinitive for the Expression of Perfective Past: A Diachronic, Corpus-Based Perspective

2022 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. p30
Author(s):  
Marc Gandarillas

This study constitutes an exploratory analysis of the grammaticalization cline of anar (‘to go’) + infinitive in Catalan to express perfective past (e.g., va arribar ‘s/he arrived’). Our research interest primarily lies in diachronically tracing the evolution of this grammatical change, which appears to be unprecedented in other Romance languages (e.g., Spanish, French), in which the construction has instead led to the expression of a near and/or intentional future. A gap in research is found in the fact that there have been few corpus-based, pragmatic approaches to the matter. We base our theoretical framework on the definition of grammaticalization by Hopper and Traugott (2003) and a number of related publications (Alturo 2017, Pérez-Saldanya & Hualde 2003). Critical items (N=346) were retrieved from the diachronic corpus CICA (11th-18th c.) and subsequently analyzed in the light of pragmatic factors, establishing a three-stage cline based on Segura (2012). Results show how informative bridging contexts are in shaping grammaticalization processes, as they highlight the challenges of tracing a grammaticalization process based on corpora of literary texts. A discussion follows on the identification of potential next steps that might be useful in complementing our own research.

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-112
Author(s):  
Dipak Lungeli

Robert and Tiresias, disable protagonists respectively of Raymond Carver's Cathedral and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex with their super cripple qualities challenge the imperatives of ableist ideals. Protagonists’ blindness leads them to insight whereas their counter characters’ sight leads them to darkness. Such a role reversal leads to a questioning of dichotomies and establishes an alternative view to the definition of blindness and insight. To support this claim, I use Lennard J. Davis’ concept of disable bodies in literature, Rod Michalko’s notion of fictional explorations of disability, and Nickianne Moody’s model of disability informed criticism backed up by Judith Butler’s notion of body politics, Rosemarie Thompson’s idea of extraordinary bodies, and different critical readings on body. This framework of interpretation validates disable bodies as cultural construction. It also regards literatureas apt venue to challenge culturally assigned definition of ability and disability in favor of new body possibilities. The theoretical framework thus discovers Carver and Sophocles redrawing the concept of able-bodiedness and deeply rooted cultural hierarchies like able/disable, sight/blind, sight/insight, body/mind, visible/invisible, and inside/outside in their literary texts.


Author(s):  
Ebele Peace Okpala

The image of African women has evolved over the years. The study traced and critically analyzed how African female persona and experience have been depicted starting from pre-colonial, colonial to postcolonial eras using selected literary texts. It highlighted the impacts made by feminist writers towards a re-definition of the African woman. The theoretical framework was hinged on Feminist theory. Feminism, feminist ideologies and their proponents were also highlighted. The research revealed that the image of pre-colonial and colonial African women as portrayed in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine, Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel, Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, El Saadawi’s The Woman at Point Zero, Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter among others was ascribed a second class status. The Postcolonial African women have come to the awareness of their rights and roles through the numerous intellectual and political campaigns of African feminist writers. Their image has changed from being in the kitchen, bearing and rearing children to also shouldering responsibilities as most powerful men in the community as depicted in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of the Yellow Sun among others. The study recommended the acquisition of good education and self-development as the major strategies to confront the impediments orchestrated by patriarchy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
Noémi Bíró

"Feminist Interpretations of Action and the Public in Hannah Arendt’s Theory. Arendt’s typology of human activity and her arguments on the precondition of politics allow for a variety in interpretations for contemporary political thought. The feminist reception of Arendt’s work ranges from critical to conciliatory readings that attempt to find the points in which Arendt’s theory might inspire a feminist political project. In this paper I explore the ways in which feminist thought has responded to Arendt’s definition of action, freedom and politics, and whether her theoretical framework can be useful in a feminist rethinking of politics, power and the public realm. Keywords: Hannah Arendt, political action, the Public, the Social, feminism "


Buildings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Ning Gu ◽  
Peiman Amini Behbahani

Computational creativity in built environment (BE) design has been a subject of research interest in the discipline. This paper presents a critical review of various ways computational creativity has been and can be defined and approached in BE design. The paper examines a comprehensive body of contemporary literature on the topics of creativity, computational creativity, and their assessment to identify levels of computational creativity. The paper then proceeds to a further review of the implications of these levels specifically in BE design. The paper identifies four areas in BE design where computational creativity is relevant. In two areas—synthesis (generation) and analysis—there is considerable literature on lower levels of computational creativity. However, in two other areas—interfacing and communication—even the definition of computational creativity is not as defined and clear for the discipline, and most works only consider the role of computers as a supporting tool or medium. These open up future research opportunities for the discipline.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joschka Briese

AbstractThis article presents a sign- and usage-based model of intentionality following the works of Robert B. Brandom and T. L. Short. The concept of discursive intentionality is established within Brandom’s theory of language explains discursive and practical reasoning as well as attributive and ascriptive practices. Discursive intentionality is distinguished from other intentionalities of conceptual proximity. Because Brandom’s concept of signs is underdetermined in his works, it will be complemented with T. L. Short’s theory of intentional signs. This dual theoretical framework leads to an innovative analysis of verbs which locates discursive intentionality at the semantic/pragmatic interface. After giving a definition of discursive intentionality, it will be diagrammed by breaking it down into different components (relata, relations, and predicates). Finally, it is tested regarding the plausibility of the diagrammatics of discursive intentionality, using the intentional verb “to promise” to differentiate between the ascription of intentionality and intention.


2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (Suppl. 3) ◽  
pp. 19-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Westfall ◽  
Nicole E. Logan ◽  
Naiman A. Khan ◽  
Charles H. Hillman

The effects of optimal and insufficient hydration on human health have received increasing investigation in recent years. Specifically, water is an essential nutrient for human health, and the importance of hydration on cognition has continued to attract research interest over the last decade. Despite this focus, children remain a relatively understudied population relative to the effects of hydration on cognition. Of those studies investigating children, findings have been inconsistent, resulting from utilizing a wide variety of cognitive domains and cognitive assessments, as well as varied hydration protocols. Here, our aim is to create a primer for assessing cognition during hydration research in children. Specifically, we review the definition of cognition and the domains of which it is composed, how cognition has been measured in both field- and laboratory-based assessments, results from neuroimaging methods, and the relationship between hydration and academic achievement in children. Lastly, future research considerations are discussed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-46
Author(s):  
Antonio C. Cuyler

This article represents a snapshot and analysis of U. S. service arts organizations’ DEI statements and activities in 2018. At that time, many primarily White-serving U. S. cultural organizations responded defensively to accusations of elitism and a harmful rigged funding system that maintained the status quo by awarding most cultural funding to these organizations while undermining the health and vitality of cultural organizations by and for historically oppressed communities (Sidford, 2011). Furthermore, Helicon Collaborative (2017) found that even with a host of cultural equity, “diversity” projects (Tseng 2016), and public-facing DEI statements, little had changed within six years. Therefore, this study uses directed and summative content analysis to investigate the research question “what do cultural equity and diversity statements communicate about cultural organizations’ positions on DEI?” This study also uses Frankfurt’s (2005) essay On Bullshit and Laing’s (2016) two-prong definition of accountability as a theoretical framework to examine if and how cultural organizations hold themselves accountable for achieving DEI in the creative sector. Lastly, readers should keep in mind that the public murder of Geor-ge Floyd in 2020 has hastened all of the service arts organizations’ access, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI) work examined in this study.


Author(s):  
Moreno Bonda

The investigation of medieval literature poses a number of challenges, even to native speaker researchers. Such difficulties are related to (a) linguistic – syntactical and lexical – obstacles, (b) to the ability to recognise dense networks of interdisciplinary references and, (c) mainly to the cognitive challenges posed by “unfamiliar modes of expression”. The aim of this research is to discuss a methodological approach to deal with these unusual manners of composition, technically known as modal difficulty, in medieval literature. The theoretic setting is represented by Davide Castiglione’s monographic study Difficulty in Poetry (2018) and the specific definition of modal difficulty elaborated by James E. Vincent in the premise of his treatise on American poetry (2003). A study case illustrative of challenges in medieval literature analysis has been chosen to illustrate the speculative reasoning: the references to the celebrated mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci (1170–1242) – known for having introduced the Arabic numbers to the Europeans – in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Preliminarily, the author discusses unfamiliar mathematical notations implemented from the 13th to the 18th centuries. Subsequently, adopting cognitive linguistics principles and hermeneutic as methodological tools, several veiled citations of the mathematician’s cogitations – such as the chess comparison in Paradise XXVIII, 91–93 and the quadratic expression in Paradise XXVII, 115–117 – are deciphered and illustrated. The analysis of Dante’s cognitive frame indicates that the recourse to Fibonacci’s formulas is functional to depict the incommensurable multitude of the divine in words. In the conclusions, the case studied is adopted as a model to illustrate how the reflection on unusual forms of expression could be employed to investigate ancient literary texts. A preliminary analysis of the frame-notation relation could help, as an example, to recognise mathematical formulas that were expressed in a verbal and non-symbolic notation.


2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Gasser ◽  
P. Ciais

Abstract. We develop a theoretical framework and analysis of the net land-to-atmosphere CO2 flux in order to discuss possible definitions of "emissions from land-use change". The terrestrial biosphere is affected by two perturbations: the perturbation of the global Carbon-Climate-Nitrogen system (CCN) with elevated atmospheric CO2, climate change and nitrogen deposition; and the Land-Use Change perturbation (LUC). Here, we progressively establish mathematical definitions of four generic components of the net land-to-atmosphere CO2 flux. The two first components are the fluxes that would be observed if only one perturbation occurred. The two other components are due to the coupling of the CCN and LUC perturbations, which shows the non-linear response of the terrestrial carbon cycle. Thanks to these four components, we introduce three possible definitions of "emissions from land-use change", that are indeed used in the scientific literature, often without clear distinctions, and we draw conclusions as for their absolute and relative behaviors. Thanks to the OSCAR v2 model, we provide quantitative estimates of the differences between the three definitions, and we find that comparing results from studies that do not use the same definition can lead to a bias of up to 20% between estimates of those emissions. After discussion of the limitations of the framework, we conclude on the three major points of this study that should help the community to reconcile modeling and observation of emissions from land-use change. The Appendix mainly provides more detailed mathematical expressions of the four components of the net land-to-atmosphere CO2 flux.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (16) ◽  
pp. 87
Author(s):  
Patricia Fernández Martín

El objetivo del presente trabajo es profundizar en la historia del funcionamiento de las construcciones castellanas {tener/llevar} + participio, tomando como centro de estudio la lengua de los siglos xvi y xvii y estableciendo ciertas comparaciones, a lo largo del texto, con otras lenguas romances, en especial el asturiano. El punto de partida se encuentra en la idea de que los problemas que crean estas construccionesse deben esencialmente a la doble naturaleza del participio (adjetival y verbal), solo comprensible inserta en un continuum entre el puro adjetivo y el puro verbo. Para ello, comenzaremos estableciendo, en el marco teórico, nuestro concepto de perífrasis verbal de participio y su aplicación a las construcciones que nos ocupan en el español de los Siglos de Oro. En una segunda parte, analizaremos el funcionamiento de dichas estructuras en el español clásico, empleando un corpus formado por tres génerosdiscursivos, escritos entre 1519 y 1656, que componen sendos subapartados (novelas picarescas, epístolas y crónicas de Indias). La principal conclusión es que los géneros discursivos no afectan a las construcciones de participio en la misma medida en que puede afectar a otros fenómenos gramaticales, como los pronombres personales.The aim of this work is to deepen in the history of the Spanish structures{tener/llevar} + participle, taking into account the language of the 16th and 17th centuries and offering certain comparisons with other Romance languages, specially Asturian. The starting point lies in the idea that the problems that create these constructions are essentially due to the dual nature of the participle (between a verb and an adjective), which can be only understood into a continuum, whose ends are the pure adjective and the pure verb. For that, we will start setting our concept of participial periphrases in the theoretical framework, as well as its applicationto the Spanish language spoken in the Golden Age. Then, we analyze how these structures work in that Spanish, using a corpus formed by three discourse genres (picaresque novels, letters and chronicles of the Indies), whose texts were written between 1519 and 1656. Finally, all of which allows to conclude that the discourse genres do not affect the appearance of the constructions of participle in the same extent that it may affect other grammatical phenomena, such as personal pronouns.


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