The Shifting Sub-Text of Japanese Gendered Language

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Goebel Noguchi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Older Women ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
School System ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Japanese Society ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Teachers Union ◽  
Legal Code ◽  
The Past ◽  
Over Time

Sociolinguists (Holmes 2008; Meyerhof 2006) assists to describe the Japanese language a having gender exclusive elements. Personal pronouns, sentence-ending particles and lexicon used exclusively by one gender have been cataloged in English by researchers such as Ide (1979), Shibamoto (1985) and McGloin (1991). While there has been some research showing that Japanese women’s language use today is much more diverse than these earlier descriptions suggested (e.g. studies in Okamoto and Smith 2004) and that some young Japanese girls use masculine pronouns to refer to themselves (Miyazaki 2010), prescriptive rules for Japanese use still maintain gender-exclusive elements. In addition, characters in movie and TV dramas not only adhere to but also popularize these norms (Nakamura 2012). Thus, Japanese etiquette and media ‘texts’ promote the perpetuation of gender-exclusive language use, particularly by females. However, in the past three decades, Japanese society has made significant shifts towards gender equality in legal code, the workplace and education. The researcher therefore decided to investigate how Japanese women use and view their language in the context of these changes. Data comes from three focus groups. The first was conducted in 2013 and was composed of older women members of a university human rights research group focused on gender issues. The other two were conducted in 2013 and 2019, and were composed of female university students who went through the Japanese school system after the Japan Teachers’ Union adopted a policy of gender equality, thus expressing interest in gender issues. The goal was to determine whether Japanese women’s language use is shifting over time. The participants’ feelings about these norms were also explored - especially whether or not they feel that the norms constrain their ability to express themselves fully. Although the new norms are not yet evident in most public contexts, the language use and views of the participants in this study represent the sub-text of this shift in Japanese usage.

scholarly journals Fluency: an aim in teaching and a criterion in assessment

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aud Marit Simensen
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
School System ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Current Method ◽  
Cognitive Skill ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Assessment Criterion ◽  
Classroom Activities ◽  
Teaching Objectives ◽  
Over Time

This article investigates the concept ‘fluency’ from different perspectives. When fluency is an aim in teaching, a thorough comprehension of the concept among teachers is a prerequisite for appropriate planning of instruction, including the choice of appropriate classroom activities. When fluency is an assessment criterion, it is even more important that examiners have a shared perception of the concept. The present article starts by presenting common perceptions of the concept and goes on to explore some of the current research. Next, it provides a historical overview of the place of fluency in teaching theory and explains some of the preconditions for the inclusion of this concept among teaching objectives and assessment criteria. It will also, as an illustration, give an outline of the position of the concept over time in the Norwegian school system on the basis of an analysis of the relevant syllabuses. Finally, the article explicates the notion of language use as a complex cognitive skill and explores current method¬ological ideas about teaching towards fluency.

An historical analysis of species references in American English

Corpora ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-349
Author(s):  
Craig Frayne
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
American English ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The Past ◽  
Corpus Studies ◽  
Google Books

This study uses the two largest available American English language corpora, Google Books and the Corpus of Historical American English (coha), to investigate relations between ecology and language. The paper introduces ecolinguistics as a promising theme for corpus research. While some previous ecolinguistic research has used corpus approaches, there is a case to be made for quantitative methods that draw on larger datasets. Building on other corpus studies that have made connections between language use and environmental change, this paper investigates whether linguistic references to other species have changed in the past two centuries and, if so, how. The methodology consists of two main parts: an examination of the frequency of common names of species followed by aspect-level sentiment analysis of concordance lines. Results point to both opportunities and challenges associated with applying corpus methods to ecolinguistc research.

Dowagers, Debs, Nuns and Babies: The Politics of Nostalgia and the Older Woman in the British Sunday Night Television Serial

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell
Keyword(s):  
Older Women ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Mature Female ◽  
Older Woman ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Popular Television

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Telesca Giuseppe
Keyword(s):  
Structural Analysis ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Past ◽  
Final Goal ◽  
Social Structural ◽  
Country Analysis ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Over Time

The ambition of this book is to combine different bodies of scholarship that in the past have been interested in (1) providing social/structural analysis of financial elites, (2) measuring their influence, or (3) exploring their degree of persistence/circulation. The final goal of the volume is to investigate the adjustment of financial elites to institutional change, and to assess financial elites’ contribution to institutional change. To reach this goal, the nine chapters of the book introduced here look at financial elites’ role in different European societies and markets over time, and provide historical comparisons and country and cross-country analysis of their adaptation and contribution to the transformation of the national and international regulatory/cultural context in the wake of a crisis or in a longer term perspective.

Newman's Early Roman Catholic Legacy, 1845-1854

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Michael Shea
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
European Continent ◽  
The Past ◽  
Immaculate Conception ◽  
Over Time

For the past several decades, scholars have stressed that the genius of John Henry Newman remained underappreciated among his Roman Catholic contemporaries, and in order to find the true impact of his work, one must look to the century after his death. This book takes direct aim at that assumption. Examining a host of overlooked evidence from England and the European continent, Newman’s Early Legacy tracks letters, recorded conversations, and obscure and unpublished theological exchanges to show how Newman’s 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine influenced a cadre of Catholic teachers, writers, and Church authorities in nineteenth-century Rome. The book explores how these individuals then employed Newman’s theory of development to argue for the definability of the new dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary during the years preceding the doctrine’s promulgation in 1854. Through numerous twists and turns, the narrative traces how the theory of development became a factor in determining the very language that the Roman Catholic Church would use in referring to doctrinal change over time. In this way, Newman’s Early Legacy uncovers a key dimension of Newman’s significance in modern religious history.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Downes ◽  
Sally Holloway ◽  
Sarah Randles
Keyword(s):  
Material World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Over Time

This book is about the ways in which humans have been bound affectively to the material world in and over time; how they have made, commissioned, and used objects to facilitate their emotional lives; how they felt about their things; and the ways certain things from the past continue to make people feel today. The temporal and geographical focus of ...

Anti-corruption in History

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Past ◽  
Human Wellbeing ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Legitimate Power ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
Over Time

Anticorruption in History is the first major collection of case studies on how past societies and polities, in and beyond Europe, defined legitimate power in terms of fighting corruption and designed specific mechanisms to pursue that agenda. It is a timely book: corruption is widely seen today as a major problem, undermining trust in government, financial institutions, economic efficiency, the principle of equality before the law and human wellbeing in general. Corruption, in short, is a major hurdle on the “path to Denmark”—a feted blueprint for stable and successful statebuilding. The resonance of this view explains why efforts to promote anticorruption policies have proliferated in recent years. But while the subjects of corruption and anticorruption have captured the attention of politicians, scholars, NGOs and the global media, scant attention has been paid to the link between corruption and the change of anticorruption policies over time and place. Such a historical approach could help explain major moments of change in the past as well as reasons for the success and failure of specific anticorruption policies and their relation to a country’s image (of itself or as construed from outside) as being more or less corrupt. It is precisely this scholarly lacuna that the present volume intends to begin to fill. A wide range of historical contexts are addressed, ranging from the ancient to the modern period, with specific insights for policy makers offered throughout.

Preserving without conserving: Memoryscopes and historically burdened heritage

2021 ◽  
pp. 105971232110008
Author(s):  
John Sutton
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
Sensory Responses ◽  
Over Time

Rather than conserving or ignoring historically burdened heritage, RAAAF intervene. Their responses are striking, sometimes dramatic or destructive. Prompted by Rietveld’s discussion of the Luftschloss project, I compare some other places with difficult pasts which engage our embodied and sensory responses, without such active redirection or disruption. Ross Gibson’s concept of a ‘memoryscope’ helps us identify distinct but complementary ways of focussing the forces of the past. Emotions and imaginings are transmitted over time in many forms. The past is not easily washed, blasted or sliced away. By considering other settings and modes of encounter, we can recognise and applaud the novelty of RAAAF’s interventions while urging further attention to the variable dynamics and rhythms of remembering and of sociomaterial residues.

Text Analysis on Punishment Clauses in Korean Law: Changes in the Number, Level, and Balance of Punishment Clauses Over 30 Years

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaeyoon Kim
Keyword(s):  
Text Analysis ◽  
Civil Engineering ◽  
Sex Offenses ◽  
Web Crawler ◽  
Comprehensive Review ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Legal Code ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Over Time

Abstract For this study, I completed a comprehensive review of punishment clauses in the Korean Legal Code from 1985 to 2016. Using a web crawler and text analysis, I gathered data on the laws and then identified the content of the penal sentence in each clause. By investigating the data, I was able to quantify and assess changes over time in: (1) the number of punishment clauses; (2) the severity of sentences; and (3) the balance between imprisonment and fines. In order to examine the causes of these changes, I separated the data into different sentence levels and sectors. I found that low-level punishment clauses had grown quickly, and some of the sectors responsible for the change included civil engineering and sex offenses. This comprehensive review of the penal sentences revealed issues of concern related to overcriminalization, overpenalization, and an imbalance of punishment level in the Korean Legal Code.

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