scholarly journals SYNTAX AS AN OBJECT OF PARODY

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-51
Author(s):  
Boris Ju. Norman ◽  

In the mind of the native speaker, there is an idea of the syntactic “optimum”, which allows them to use linguistic units most effectively to achieve a desired communicative effect. It contains a set of pieces of intuitive (“naïve”) knowledge about the parameters of the sentence, the organization of its structure, the rules of correspondence of lexical and grammatical meanings, etc. Deviations from this optimum can become independent objects of not only scholarly research, but also parody in a literary text. The article analyzes the problem lying on the borderline between linguistics, literary criticism and psychology: What syntactic features of the original text are enhanced or hyperbolized in parody? Analysis of numerous examples from Russian fiction allows the author to make a conclusion about the metalinguistic significance of certain features of the structure of the text. Collections of literary parodies (by A. Arkhangelsky, A. Ivanov, etc.) were subject to a special (continuous) analysis. The following syntactic phenomena were identified as the object and reason for their reflection in the parodies: a) excessive length of the sentence; b) artificial complication of its structure, specifically by means of chains of consecutive subordination, homogeneous members, abundance of epithets, etc.; c) absolutization of elements of oral, official and other speech styles, including the “telegraph style”; d) violation of the isosemy rule; e) non-realization of obligatory syntactic valency (unmotivated ellipsis); f) separation from the sentence of its part (parcellation), etc. These phenomena, used systematically, obtain a linguo-psychological characterization of salience (identifiability against the general background). As a result of the study, the author made up a list of syntactic facts that acquire the role of secondary signs in a work of fiction, along with other stylistic categories. Such a list, on the one hand, is intended to serve the convergence of scholarly (“academic”) and mass (“secondary school”) grammar, and, on the other hand, is of interest to experimental psychology, which studies the problems of perception and comprehension of the text.

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rasheed S. Al-Jarrah ◽  
Ahmad M. Abu-Dalu ◽  
Hisham Obiedat

AbstractThe purpose of our current research is to see how Relevance Theory can handle one specific translation problem, namely strategic ambiguous structures. Concisely, we aim to provide a conceptual framework as to how the translator should cope with a pervasive ambiguity problem at the discoursal level. The point of departure from probably all previous models of analysis is that a relevance-theoretic analysis would, we believe, require that a “good” translation benotthe one that representsan interpretationof the text, but the one which leaves the door open for all interpretations which the original text provides evidence for. Hence,the role of translator is not to ‘interpret’ but to ‘translate’. If this is true, ambiguity resolution should not be a viable alternative. In other words, what the translator should do is empower the audience with all it takes to let them work out all the explicatures (linguistically inferred meanings) and entertain themselves with the implicatures (contextually inferred meanings) of the original. Direct Translation, along the lines laid down by Gutt (1991/2000), is the method of translation which can, we believe, bring about the desired results because “it tries to provide readers with contextual information that enables them to draw their own inferences” (Smith 2000: 92).


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 39-54
Author(s):  
Gorana Bikić-Carić

"Some Features in the Expression of the Noun Determination. Comparison Between Five Romance Languages. In this article we would like to compare the noun determination in five Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian). All the languages examined here share the main uses of articles: known referent, generic use, unique entities, abstract names, inalienable possession for the definite article, or introduction of a new element into the discourse and description for the indefinite article. However, we wanted to show some peculiarities. We used the same text in five languages, (La sombra del viento, Carlos Ruiz Zafón) which is part of the RomCro corpus, composed in the Chair of Romance Linguistics of the Department of Romance Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Zagreb, Croatia. The results of the analysis showed a clear difference between French and the other languages. As expected, French uses the indefinite article in plural much more often, as well as the partitive article, which does not exist in Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. Likewise, the possessive adjective is more common in French than in other languages which use the definite article instead. But what is particularly interesting are the differences which indicate a ""change of perspective"", namely a different kind of article than in the original text. Our conclusion is that the noun can have several characteristics at the same time (description or determination by complement, generic use or absence of specific referent etc.) of which the author (or the translator) chooses the one to highlight. Likewise, we have underlined the role of article zero, which can carry different values (unspecified referent, but also unspecified quantity or even definite article value if the noun is introduced by a preposition), depending on its relationship to other articles in the language.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Porta ◽  
Andrea Mazzon ◽  
Cristina Usardi

<p>The recent legislative and ministerial standards require to the teachers to change the way of "doing school" and to put “emphasising on the needs in order to build, through dialogue between the different disciplines, a coherent and unified profile of cultural meanings”. The National Guidelines regarding OSA (specific objectives of learning) formulated on the European directives based on the “knowledge society”, recommend to improve interdisciplinary connections. The predominantly linear path of disciplinary knowledge, found in text books, consents an internal order in the mind rather than to induce the “ability to connect”, encouraging the development of complex thought. This methodology created over time a superficial knowledge that leads to permanence of “commonplaces” and “misconception”.</p><p>These are the questions: is theatre foreign to science? Is it possible to promote scientific knowledge through drama? This tool indicates the separation or the link between 'two cultures'?</p><p>Our proposal was to produce a training module. We realized a scientific script with didactic value titled “Geo Time Travel – An Explosive Adventure”.</p><p>The plot tells of a near future, where the most technically advanced school classes will have the opportunity to confront each other in breathtaking cultural challenges in order to win the coveted prize up for grabs. Just before the start of the semifinals we know the science teacher who will accompany her most brilliant students during the test. The group is informed that the next test is timed and will consist of a journey through time, so in a few seconds the team is preparing to start. It is precisely the haste to be a bad adviser: in a cloud of smoke, the participants find themselves in a completely different era from the one they have planned. How far back have they gone? How will the group get away with gladiators, famous naturalists, mysterious traders and Sibylline prophecies? Will students be able to move on to the final phase?</p><p>The procedure predicted:</p><ul><li>- the analysis of pedagogical needs</li> <li>- the analysis of the misconceptions or prior knowledge</li> <li>- the selection of the focalised scientific concepts</li> <li>- the application of the new knowledge</li> </ul><p>The teacher, in this case a scriptwriter, composed the script, inserting interdisciplinary topics, developing a good plot to capture the attention but being careful not to trivialize main concepts. It was important to introduce playful scenes in order to make the show more dramatic and a little less academic.</p><p>The role of the teacher changed: she was the director or was joined by the director. Each student received a role: who the actor, who the prompter, who the lighting or audio technician.</p><p>We created the schedules to observe before, during and at the end of the experience.</p><p>It was important to change the traditional way to evaluate the performances of students.</p><p>We’ll represent the drama in theatre and the research will focus on understand the reaction of both a general public and a public of students. The data collected will be analysed with different statistic methods.</p>


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Lange ◽  
Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov

Teesid: Artikkel käsitleb tõlkeprotsessi ilukirjandusliku teksti tõlkimisel, kus keeleline ja sotsiaalkultuuri­line informatsioon on allutatud kunstilisele struktuurile. Et tekst ei kodeeri tähendust ühemõtteliselt, nõnda et seda saaks de- ja rekodeerida, rakendab tõlkija tähenduse lahti tinglikust keelemärgist ja vormistab selle teisiti, toetudes tekstis ära tuntud tugipunktidele. Tõlge on tõlkija intentsionaalne lausung, mis sõltub tema teadmistest ja kognitiivsest filtrist. Teoreetilise tõlkepoeetika rakendamist praktikas kirjeldab tõlkija Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov Jaan Malini luuletuse „Keele meel“ tõlkimise näitel.S U M M A R YThe article describes the process of translation in the light of Henri Meschonnic’s suggestion that the poetic compatibility of source text and target text is of central significance, not the differences between the languages and cultures involved. Departing from the premise that no text is determined by its linguistic or social contin­gencies, the goal of translation is to produce a new text that does in the new language what the original text does in the original language. The linguistic and cultural information of a source text is subject to its poetics.In order to illustrate the practical implications of this approach, the article highlights translational solutions that cannot be explained in linguistic terms given that they attempt to maintain the specifics of the original. The translator proceeds by pretending to know what a text (and its author) is doing; it is the cognitive filter of the translator that gives the source text its meaning. In an account of her translation of Jaan Malin’s ”Keele meel“ into English, Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov begins with the analysis of the poem. This entails separating the whole into its component parts and identifying their relations. Reading with a view to translating unravels the texture of a poem, exposing the lexical, semantic and phonetic strands that constitute its coherence. The article then offers an account of how the translator experiences the original and navigates through it towards a new poem in translation, recognising that languages differ in what they can and must do. The latter, primarily a grammatical reality, is accompanied by a semantic one: the implications that stem from lexical connotations are inevitably different in the original poem and in the new poem. However, the supposed intent of the original is what a cognitive approach sees as a possibility of translation. This does not involve the transferral of isolated lexicalised items, but allows the translator to overcome the dilemma of retaining both form and content by adopting the role of writer, by working with language that is at no more at her disposal than it is for the writer of the original.The analysis of the original enables the translator to avoid seeing the poem as fixed language in a solid object or searching for a single invariant meaning. Between the reader and the poem a situation of dialogue is established that involves asking questions of the poem in order to find what meanings it insists on. Questions like what does this word (image, rhyme, comma, etc.) do in/to the poem? how would the poem be different if this word (rhyme, etc.) were replaced by another or removed altogether? give the translator an idea of all the features that constitute a text; thus the use or absence of metre, form, layout, punctuation, lineation, rhyme, diction and syntax, etc. in the translation can be settled. Questions have to be directed not only at the denser parts of the poem, but even at those places where there seems to be univalence of meaning or standard language usage. Any detail or device, singly or together with another element(s), may be a hinge on which the poem turns. The guiding principle is that any choice made by the writer inevitably involved the rejection of alternatives. The elements on the page are both more and less than any answer anyone (translator or reader) can give. The objective is to interact with the text rather than wander aimlessly through the space that is opened up by reading.In producing multiple drafts which explore and experiment with the devices employed in the original, the translator highlights the comprehensive set of values that account for its coherence. This, in turn, will test the translating language and its possibilities; the translating language may become subtly altered in the translation process, as the translator works under the influence of the syntactic and semantic systems of the original. There is an interdependence between imitation and creation in play here, which the translator explores. It is a process of synthesising, as the translator homes in on the most tenacious elements of the original and the expressive potential of her own language.Reading a text generates conjectures that are infinite in number, but ultimately they will have to be tested against the text’s coherence. Translating with a focus on stylistic features as mental constructs rests on the claim that the mind stands between a word and its referent. By aiming to translate the mind rather than linguistic expression, a translator can discover options and make textually relevant choices between them.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 431-443
Author(s):  
Vitalii Shymko

This article contains the results of a theoretical analysis of the phenomenon of natural language understanding (NLU), as a methodological problem. The combination of structural-ontological and informational-psychological approaches provided an opportunity to describe the subject matter field of NLU, as a composite function of the mind, which systemically combines the verbal and discursive structural layers. In particular, the idea of NLU is presented, on the one hand, as the relation between the discourse of a specific speech message and the meta-discourse of a language, in turn, activated by the need-motivational factors. On the other hand, it is conceptualized as a process with a specific structure of information metabolism, the study of which implies the necessity to differentiate the affective (emotional) and need-motivational influences on the NLU, as well as to take into account their interaction. At the same time, the hypothesis about the influence of needs on NLU under the scenario similar to the pattern of Yerkes-Dodson is argued. And the theoretical conclusion that emotions fulfill the function of the operator of the structural features of the information metabolism of NLU is substantiated. Thus, depending on the modality of emotions in the process of NLU, it was proposed to distinguish two scenarios for the implementation of information metabolism - reduction and synthetic. The argument in favor of the conclusion about the productive and constitutive role of emotions in the process of NLU is also given.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-78
Author(s):  
Laura Sasu

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to identify and investigate the role of Romanian post-communist witness literature for contemporary historiography in outlining national and social (self-)images. This type of literature, written mostly by former political detainees, is perceived by literary criticism as a specific borderline segment partly relevant as historical documents and partly as literary texts. Applying the conceptual pattern coined by Giorgio Agamben. in his analysis based upon the national socialist concentration camp, to post-communist depositional literature reveals two focal directions of imagological relevance: on the one hand, the points of similarity and difference of totalitarian practices in creating stereotypes, cultivating the sense of absolute antagonist otherness and promoting distorted ethnic, social and national images and. on the other hand, the particular contributions and limitations posed by the post-totalitarian depositional discourse in (re)-creating national and social (self-)images.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 124-130
Author(s):  
Nadiia Boiko

The article deals with the analysis of the short stories by O. Konyskyi from the point of view of irony functioning in them. S. Kierkegaard compared irony to divine madness, which, like Tamerlane, did not leave a stone unturned, because “in the irony, negativity takes precedence over positivity, freedom over necessity”. In the modern literary criticism, irony is seen, on the one hand, as an aesthetic category, the characteristic feature of which is the lack of care to make the reader laugh; it is primarily a matter of marking of the author’s perception of reality (“Ironic meaning” by S. Pokhodnia). On the other hand — irony is viewed as a stylistic figure, which is based on allegory and which testifies to the potential of the individual authorial style. However, in both cases, to understand the true meaning of an ironic statement, it is necessary to have a context, which is its main semantic background. In a number of works by O. Konyskyi, irony serves as a means to express certain traits of character and behaviour of the character and is exemplified through epithets and comparisons. Less often, it becomes a means to construct the text and a plot-forming factor, as is in the story “And we are people!” The subject of the study is irony as a complex (two-tier) message, the purpose to understand the hidden content of which requires context. The object of the literary analysis is comprised of the short stories by O. Konyskyi, that have not yet been considered from this point of view. The latter fact informs the novelty of the study. The purpose of the article is to clarify the place and the role of irony in the bulk of short stories by this writer. The outlined goal determines reaching the following objectives: to trace the dynamics of the apperiance of different types of irony in the short stories by O. Konyskyi; to identity the dependence of the frequency and the form the ironic expression; to find out the influence of the author’s ironic approach on the form the work. As a result of the analysis by means of the approaches of biographical, historical-literary and empirical research methods, it was possible to find out: despite the fact that irony is not a dominant feature of O. Konyskyi’s worldview, in his short stories works with textual irony stand out.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rini Kaushal ◽  
Aradhana Balodi Bharadwaj

Music is the natural surge in the numinous ocean of the mind. It is the one of the most influential form of art in debt of its own qualities of eccentricity and dynamicity and functions as a medium of studying, pleasure, and entertainment. An effective contribution in listening to and performing music is valuable to everyone throughout the different societies around the globe. The purpose of this study was to analyze the effect of musical training in enhancing social attributes such as leadership, motivation and curiosity-exploration amongst instrumental musicians and non-musicians, where the hypotheses stated that instrumental musicians will show greater tendencies of leadership, motivation and curiosity-exploration. A sample comprising of 40 instrumental musicians (20 male and 20 female) and 40 non-musicians (20 male and 20 female) from the age group 17-35 years were studied using an online version of the questionnaires. The results revealed that musicians showed greater tendency of practicing democratic leadership than non-musicians who preferred authoritarian leadership slightly more, whereas no significant difference was found between the motivational levels and curiosity-exploratory skills of both the groups. Further analysis of the data links the role of environmental factors, socio-economic background and the constant transforming trends for the change in the approaches of both musicians and non-musicians, which in turn also influences their social preferences.


1999 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 19-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Gibson

In this paper I propose to consider Ovid's poem as a document of literary criticism, which offers us a striking treatment of the role of the audience in reception. Ovid's concerns are twofold: on the one hand he is concerned with the ostensible manner in which his own works have been read, but he also discusses a wide range of other texts, and in doing so, offers readings of them, which, I will argue, illustrate the open-ended nature of reception and meaning.Now, undoubtedly we are sometimes too willing to label works as ‘anti-Augustan’ or ‘Augustan’, as if that was all that could be said about them; the glib use of such terms often seems to obscure more complex and more interesting questions (theAeneidand theGeorgicsare familiar examples). But with Ovid, however, such issues are at least raised by the poet himself, since the exile poems do deal with Ovid's attitude to Augustus, and the twin possibilities of writing poetry which can offend the emperor, or which can please him. Now while Ovid's famous explanation of the causes of his exile as ‘carmen et error’ (Trist.2.207) may perhaps be a smokescreen — Ovid adducing theArs Amatoriaas his fault in order not to have to go into the details of what theerrorwas that had offended Augustus —Tristia2 must still be considered on its own terms; Ovid writes as if it is possible for Augustus to be offended by his poetry, and therefore the issue is an important one.


2021 ◽  
pp. 26-42
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Ćwikła

Management in the Anthropocene and What Comes Out of It. Analysis of the Literature on the Entanglement of Phenomena The Anthropocene is a term that not only conjures up all kinds of images in the mind but provides an impulse to reconsider the scope of human responsibility for man-triggered processes and its place in the system of related factors on our planet. At the same time, it is a term treated by many with ambivalence, reluctance, and caution, as it often harbingers the imminent environmental doom, the awareness of which may change the current balance of political and economic forces. Additionally, it is still involved in emphasizing the central role of the human, it is sometimes romanticized and can lead to an aestheticization of the climate catastrophe instead of taking actions resulting not from the will of heroism, but from humility. The ongoing debate on the Anthropocene in the field of management studies is of extraordinary importance, because it provides a framework for undertaking any activity – the activity which either aggravates or alleviates the negative environmental impact. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the contexts in which the scientific literature in the field of management talks about the Anthropocene and to explore the level of gravity that is assigned to management in this conventional geological and cultural era. Particular attention is paid to the dominant trends of reflection which illustrate a wide variety of attitudes towards the Anthropocene, including the one that places the Anthropocene against the background of efforts to maintain the status quo and the one that perceives it as a prelude to concocting alternative or even anarchist visions of management. The paper focuses on theoretical voices, which determined the method of analysis based on the study of language and the interpretation of narratives and metaphors.


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