Cultural Evolution, Memes, and Proper Names

2018 ◽  
pp. 84-103
Author(s):  
Sonia Vaupot
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Cultural Translation ◽  
Proper Name

Based on the theory of cultural evolution and memetics, this paper examines the procedures of translation of proper names as memes. Firstly, it proposes an overview of contemporary theories of cultural translation, including the theory of cultural evolution. Secondly, on the basis of the above-mentioned theoretical framework of cultural evolution and the use of the proper name, the central aim of this paper is to analyze the role of memes in translation. Lastly, after presenting and categorizing the proper names as realia words and memes, this paper will verify the (un)translatability of proper names from a multilingual point of view (French, English and Slovene) and illustrate the use of some translation procedures for the rendition of proper names as cultural memes.

DIRECTIONS OF ASSOCIATIVE IDENTIFICATION OF PERSONAL NAMES

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (28) ◽  
pp. 118-128
Author(s):  
Olena Karpenko ◽  
Tetiana Stoianova
Keyword(s):  
Proper Names ◽  
Mental Lexicon ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Sound Symbolism ◽  
Personal Names ◽  
Communicative Process ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Scientific Value ◽  
The Brain

The article is devoted to the study of personal names from a cognitive point of view. The study is based on the cognitive concept that speech actually exists not in the speech, not in linguistic writings and dictionaries, but in consciousness, in the mental lexicon, in the language of the brain. The conditions for identifying personal names can encompass not only the context, encyclopedias, and reference books, but also the sound form of the word. In the communicative process, during a free associative experiment, which included a name and a recipient’s mental lexicon. The recipient was assigned a task to quickly give some association to the name. The aggregate of a certain number of reactions of different recipients forms the associative field of a proper name. The associative experiment creates the best conditions for identifying the lexeme. The definition of a monosemantic personal name primarily includes the search of what it denotes, while during the process of identifying a polysemantic personal name recipients tend have different reactions. Scientific value is posed by the effect of the choice of letters for the name, sound symbolism, etc. The following belong to the generalized forms of identification: usage of a hyperonym; synonyms and periphrases or simple descriptions; associations denoting the whole (name stimulus) by reference to its part (associatives); cognitive structures such as “stimulus — association” and “whole (stimulus) — part (associative)”; lack of adjacency; mysterious associations. The topicality of the study is determined by its perspective to identify the directions of associative identification of proper names, which is one of the branches of cognitive onomastics. The purpose of the study is to identify, review, and highlight the directions of associative identification of proper names; the object of the research is the names in their entirety and variety; its subject is the existence of names in the mental lexicon, which determines the need for singling out the directions for the associative identification of the personal names.

scholarly journals Historical and Social Background of English Name Giving Process

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arab World English Journal ◽  
Natalya N. Zerkina ◽  
Vladimir V. Mikhailov ◽  
Oksana A. Lukina
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Direct Connection ◽  
Factors Influencing ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
Confessional Identity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Globalized World

The article focuses on historical and social background of English name giving process. Proper names are considered as a leading group of onomastic units due to its extra linguistic component and direct connection with a human being. The processes of globalisation influence on all spheres of life and name giving process is not an exception. Challenges of nomination are explained in the article. The actuality of the paper is defined by the authors’ point of view who cling to the idea that in modern globalized world only a proper name could be an only identifier of the national and confessional identity of an individual. Historical milestones that impact on name giving process are mentioned and social factors which influence name giving process are classified and described. Proper names have passed a long evolutionary way from a word – the identifier of a person among similar to legally significant sign of a linguistic personality, a register component which defines a social status and position of the individual in society. The research is relevant in the linguistic, social, national and cognitive aspects, as it demonstrates an interaction between language and society. At the modern stage of the English anthroponymics progress, the researchers described social factors influencing name giving process.

scholarly journals BESTIARIES: A NEOBARBARIC ENCYCLOPE DIA OF STRATEGIES

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 39-50
Author(s):  
G. Dalla Bontà ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Main Approach ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture ◽  
Method Analysis ◽  
Creative Career

In the context of Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov’s audacious “lifelong” project, an encyclopedic perspective can be traced quite clearly through various approaches, languages and methodologies throughout the artist’s creative career. Prigov’s Bestiaries not only deviate from the traditional path of encyclopedic genealogy; they are the prototype of later, more pronounced taxonomic projects, and even act as a reference to what he called his “lifelong project”. Our task is to show how the Bestiaries series is not only a study of the Russian cultural space, but is also the very concept of Prigov’s anthropology from the beginning of the history of culture to the present day in a post-Soviet and even post-human perspective, thus asserting itself as a proto-encyclopedia of his New Anthropology. In the process of researching, methods such as theoretical, general philosophical analyses (systemic method, analysis, analogy, synthesis) were used, including the analysis of texts, interviews and artistic production of Prigov. The sociological methods are also taken as the basis for drawing conclusions and the main approach moves from a semiotic and poststructuralist point of view, especially the theory of culture of Yuri Lotman, the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and George Bataille. Thus, we have outlined the importance of the Bestaries in presenting the theory of cultural evolution of Dmitry Prigov and his “new anthropology”, referring to this series on the role of the visual conclusion of his new anthropological system

HUMANKIND AND DISEASE

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-204
Author(s):  
W. H. McNeill ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Ecological Role ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
Forms Of Life

It is not absurd to class the ecological role of humankind in its relationship to other life forms as a disease. Ever since language allowed human cultural evolution to impinge upon age-old processes of biological evolution, humankind has been in a position to upset older balances of nature in quite the same fashion that disease upsets the natural balance within a host's body. Time and again, a temporary approach to stabilization of new relationships ocurred as natural limits to the ravages of humankind upon other life forms manifested themselves. Yet sooner or later, and always within a span of time that remained minuscule in comparison with the standards of biological evolution, humanity discovered new techniques allowing fresh exploitation of hitherto inaccessible resources, thereby renewing or intensifying damage to other forms of life. Looked at from the point of view of other organisms, humankind therefore resembles an acute epidemic disease, whose occasional lapses into less virulent forms of behavior have never yet sufficed to permit any really stable, chronic relationship to establish itself.

Do adult-children dialogical interactions leave space for a full development of argumentation?

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Greco ◽  
Teuta Mehmeti ◽  
Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont
Keyword(s):  
Adult Children ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Educational Context ◽  
Conceptual Clarification ◽  
Full Development ◽  
Opening Stage

Abstract This paper sets out to analyse a case study of adult-children interaction in an educational context from a perspective of argumentation. We select a case in which 3 argumentative discussions are opened and we analyse them with the aim of understanding whether they are fully developed from a point of view of argumentation; or whether they are cut short and why. Our focus is not on the children’s individual productions but on the process of interaction. We assume the pragma-dialectical model of argumentation and the AMT as a theoretical framework. Our findings show that none of the discussions opened gets to a concluding stage, either because the teacher shifts the discussion on a different issue, or because the opening stage is not clear, or because the argumentation stage is not adequately developed. These findings contribute to conceptual clarification about how to interpret the role of a teacher.

scholarly journals Cultural Translation as a Multidirectional Process in the Seventeenth-Century Madurai Mission

2021 ◽  
pp. 401-426
Author(s):  
Giulia Nardini
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Cultural Translation ◽  
Master Narrative

AbstractIn the seventeenth-century missionary context of South India, the Jesuit Roberto Nobili (1577–1656) engaged in a multi-directional process of translation, translating his Catholic mission, doctrine, and literature for a Tamil audience and adapting it to local Tamil beliefs, practices, and literature for the Roman Catholic context. Adopting theories from translation studies (Frege, Nida, Lefevere and Venuti), this paper suggests a model of “cultural translation” not only as a metaphor but as an analytical tool. Straddling the binary notion of orthodoxy-unorthodoxy, this mechanism pursues two goals: (1) it uncovers the role of translations in the construction of religions and social identities; (2) it applies the theoretical framework of “cultural translation” to illuminate the historical context of Jesuit missions in India and beyond. In doing so, it contributes to the analysis of transculturality and challenges the traditional master narrative of a homogeneous Christianity.

scholarly journals On the translation-proper of toponyms in Romanian translations at the beginning of the 19th century

Diacronia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dinu Moscal
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Lexical Meaning ◽  
Incipient Stage ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Real Challenge

The translation of certain toponyms that had not yet been assimilated to the Romanian language at the beginning of the 19th century represented a real challenge for translators at that time. A first aspect to be considered here is the linguistic status as proper names and the possible translation options that could not be correlated to any tradition. A second aspect is the precarious stage of Romanian geographical terminology, reflected by the terminological variation for the same concept and the lack of semantic affinity, either real or related to the actual terminology. This article addresses mainly the first aspect mentioned above. The issues addressed are as follows: a concise presentation of the concept of proper names translation, the distinction between untranslatable and translatable or partially translatable proper names, the factors motivating the option of translating or not the translatable terms from a toponymic collocation. Our corpus reflects the incipient stage of the translation of translatable or partially translatable toponyms in Romanian, a stage in which the translator is free to decide upon translatability. Compared to the actual norm, the different choices from one translator to another or even those opted for by the same translator—especially the option of not translating toponyms that are nowadays translated in most languages—reveal the lack of importance of linguistic meaning (that is the lexical meaning of the etymon) of the proper name as far as its functioning was concerned, as well as the role of this non-functionality in identifying the linguistic status of a proper name.

PPOPER NAMES AS ONE OF THE WAYS OF EXPRESSION OF THE AUTHOR'S POSITION IN THE SYSTEM OF MEANS OF TEXT-FORMATION IN “THE SIXTH HOUR” (CHAS SHESTYI) TRILOGY BY V.I. BELOV

2020 ◽  
pp. 238-243
Author(s):  
N.V. Komleva
Keyword(s):  
Proper Names ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Functional Units ◽  
Narrative Forms ◽  
Text Formation ◽  
Semantic Aspect

The article deals with the study of proper names as means of nomination, images of reality, and functional units of the main textual categories. The analysis of transformations of characters' names in various narrative forms in the subject organization of the novel allows to reveal the role of a character's proper name in the semantic aspect of the text.

Working on the Dictionary of Nizhny Novgorod Proper Names: the Structure of the Dictionary Article

2020 ◽  
pp. 20-37
Author(s):  
Olga Ivanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Dictionary Entry ◽  
Historical Information ◽  
Structure Information ◽  
Word Combination ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
Draft Version ◽  
User Friendly

In discussing the structure of dictionary entries for linguoculturological dictionaries of proper names, the author emphasizes the great importance of creating dictionaries of this type, both from the point of view of the language and from the point of view of culture, since such lexicographic sources serve to reflect and preserve the cultural space of the region. The aim of the study was to determine the optimal structure of an entry in a dictionary of proper names. Using the descriptive method as well as methods of analysis and interpretation, and leaning on the existing draft version of the dictionary of proper names of Nizhny Novgorod, the author postulates that the optimal dictionary entry should include brief information about the meaning of the word (or word combination), analysis of its morphemic structure, information on its grammatical features (e.g. declension paradigm), a list of its possible syntactic roles, etymological information, historical information, and visual material (photographs, drawings, etc.). To illustrate her point, the author includes several examples of dictionary entries of proper names of different types (toponyms, hydronyms, anthroponyms, etc.) and follows them up with a discussion of the main principle for constructing an entry article of a linguistic-cultural dictionary of proper names, namely: the need to combine linguistic information about the word (or word combination) and cultural-historical information about the object that has this specific proper name. This principle for constructing a dictionary entry is consistent with the principles of the linguocultural approach to language learning, which is highly relevant in modern linguistic science. This structure would provide the dictionary with the widest possible application and make it user-friendly for journalists, local historians, public figures, and teachers, including those teaching Russian to foreigners.

Refining our understanding of the “elephant in the room”

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Whiten
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Critical Factors ◽  
Technological Culture

Abstract The authors do the field of cultural evolution a service by exploring the role of non-social cognition in human cumulative technological culture, truly neglected in comparison with socio-cognitive abilities frequently assumed to be the primary drivers. Some specifics of their delineation of the critical factors are problematic, however. I highlight recent chimpanzee–human comparative findings that should help refine such analyses.

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