Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Tobias Warner
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Extended Reflection ◽  
The Given ◽  
Language Question

The introduction situates postcolonial language debates in a comparative perspective before pivoting into the book’s central interventions. Written for a broad, nonspecialist audience, it is designed to be approachable as a standalone essay. Rather than seeing the postcolonial language question as mainly a struggle over authenticity or commitment, the introduction argues for recognizing it as an untimely gesture of refusal of the given conditions of a literary present and as an invitation to imagine other configurations of literary culture. A revisionist reading of two landmark 1960s conferences on African literature models this approach. Drawing on unpublished transcripts, the introduction shows that efforts to institutionalize African literature at these two gatherings led to the first stirrings of the language issue. It concludes with an extended reflection on the challenges and possibilities of a practice of literary comparison that does not take for granted the universality of literature.

scholarly journals Question-aware memory network for multi-hop question answering in human–robot interaction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinmeng Li ◽  
Mamoun Alazab ◽  
Qian Li ◽  
Keping Yu ◽  
Quanjun Yin
Keyword(s):  
Question Answering ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
Knowledge Graph ◽  
Robot Interaction ◽  
Natural Language Question ◽  
Memory Network ◽  
The Given ◽  
Fine Tune ◽  
Language Question

AbstractKnowledge graph question answering is an important technology in intelligent human–robot interaction, which aims at automatically giving answer to human natural language question with the given knowledge graph. For the multi-relation question with higher variety and complexity, the tokens of the question have different priority for the triples selection in the reasoning steps. Most existing models take the question as a whole and ignore the priority information in it. To solve this problem, we propose question-aware memory network for multi-hop question answering, named QA2MN, to update the attention on question timely in the reasoning process. In addition, we incorporate graph context information into knowledge graph embedding model to increase the ability to represent entities and relations. We use it to initialize the QA2MN model and fine-tune it in the training process. We evaluate QA2MN on PathQuestion and WorldCup2014, two representative datasets for complex multi-hop question answering. The result demonstrates that QA2MN achieves state-of-the-art Hits@1 accuracy on the two datasets, which validates the effectiveness of our model.

The Politics of African Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Attwell
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
International Markets ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Transnational Politics ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Relationship

Noting that many pre- and post-colonial oral forms have always been political, the article focuses on the literary culture wars that arose in the context of mid-20th-century decolonization. These debates include the question of whether writers should use indigenous or colonial languages; the complexities of publishing with access to local and international markets; the adaptation and indigenization of European forms to African value-systems, mythic structures and social realities; and the relationship between cultural decolonization and debates in Europe after 1968, when the emphasis fell on questioning realism. The article concludes by noting that the cultural nationalism of the 20th century is giving way to new forms of transnational politics.

Individualismus in der Übersetzung des Titels Things Fall Apart aus dem Deutschen ins Yoruba

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-108
Author(s):  
Omotayo Fakayode
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
African Literature ◽  
The Body ◽  
Title Page ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Original Source ◽  
German Translation ◽  
Things Fall Apart

Abstract Scholarly studies on the notion of retranslation have focused majorly on the body of texts and not specifically on titles. The issue of retranslation of titles considered in this study assesses the indirect translation of the title of Chinua Achebe’s novel into Yoruba through German. In view of this, the notion of individualism extending from the European literary culture into the African literature through translation is criticized. Based on the intersemiotic approach adopted by the Yoruba translator on the title page and the German translation of the title of the original source text, the study concludes by proposing a two-way approach to the interpretation of the title Things Fall Apart.

UNIVERSAL AND SPECIFIC FEATURES IN METAPHORICAL PROJECTIONS OF GERMAN AND RUSSIAN SPORTS DISCOURSE

2019 ◽  
pp. 226-237
Author(s):  
Roman Belyutin
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Sports Communication ◽  
Cultural Code ◽  
The Given

The article deals with the peculiarities of German and Russian sports discourse functioning by the example of metaphorical representations. Metaphor is not only an important mechanism for cognition and communication, at the same time it functions as a cultural code which enables linguists to discover universal and nationally coloured concepts, discourse areas fixed in the collective identity and so on. It is possible to determine a degree of distinctive and universal character of German and Russian sports discourse in three basic directions: analysis of interdiscourse projections; identification of metaphorical borrowings; study of metaphorical «import» of sports concepts in the «intradepartmental» communicative area created inside the sports discourse. The study makes it possible to get as accurate results as possible due to comparative perspective applied to research one of the most essential areas of sports communication – sports jargon, which distinguishes itself against the general background by its bright, vivid and sometimes provocative metaphors. As observations have showed, the given level of the discourse has both zones of coincidence and difference in metaphorical representation of facts, events, phenomena embedded in the sports worldview by the participants of sports discourse. The article aims at promoting the discussion about the issue whether it should be spoken of the existence of one discourse presented in different languages or of a diversity found in discourses associated with one topic and studied as parallel in any language.

scholarly journals Формирование и развитие концепта «молодежь» в истории русского и китайского языков

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 213-223
Author(s):  
Alla Kozhinowa ◽  
Wang Wenjuan
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Special Place ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
The Given ◽  
The Way

The concept of youth in the history of the Russian and Chinese languagesThe article examines the way the concept of youth was formed in historical and comparative perspective based on the Russian and Chinese languages. Particular attention is paid to the means of expression of the given concept which holds a special place among mental constructions connected with the reflection of the idea of human age division in the language picture of the world based on the diametrically different cultures.

Innovations of Candidate Selection Methods: Polling Primary and Kobo under the New Electoral Rules in Taiwan and Japan

2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 635-659 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHING-HSIN YU ◽  
ERIC CHEN-HUA YU ◽  
KAORI SHOJI
Keyword(s):  
Electoral Systems ◽  
Candidate Selection ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Institutional Factors ◽  
Selection Methods ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
Large N ◽  
Electoral Rule ◽  
The Given

AbstractThis paper explores the linkage between electoral systems and candidate selection methods (CSMs) by analyzing two innovations of CSMs in Taiwan and Japan: polling primary and kobo, respectively. With an assumption that parties’ CSMs reflect their strategies to win elections, this article offers the rationale behind why and how major parties in Taiwan and Japan adjusted their CSMs to meet the challenges posed by the transition of electoral rules in each country from single non-transferable vote (SNTV) systems to mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) systems. We argue that a party's choice of CSMs reflects its rationale for maximizing the prospects of winning under the given electoral rule, which counters the ‘no-finding’ conclusion in some previous large-N studies on the linkage between electoral systems and choices of CSMs. Additionally, our findings highlight the importance of institutional factors, such as electoral systems, in explaining CSM reforms in a comparative perspective.

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