Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language, and Poeticity

The later Wittgenstein famously holds that an understanding which tries to run up against the limits of language bumps itself and results in nothing but plain nonsense. Therefore, the task of philosophy cannot be to create an ‘ideal’ language so as to produce a ‘real’ understanding for the first time; its aim must be to remove particular misunderstandings by clarifying the use of our ordinary language. Accordingly, Wittgenstein opposes both the sublime terms of traditional philosophy and the formal frameworks of modern logics—and adheres to a pointedly casual, colloquial style in his own philosophizing. However, there seems to lurk a certain inconsistency in Wittgenstein’s ordinary language approach: his philosophical remarks frequently remain enigmatic, and many of the terms Wittgenstein coins seem to be highly technical. Thus, one might wonder whether his verdicts on the limits of language and on philosophical jargons might not be turned against his own practice. The present essay probes the extent to which the contravening tendencies in Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy might be reconciled. Section 2 sketches Wittgenstein’s general approach to philosophy and tracks the special rôle that the language of everyday life occupies therein. Section 3 reconstructs Wittgenstein’s preferred method for philosophy, which he calls perspicuous representation, and argues that this method implements an aesthetic conception of philosophy and a poetic approach to philosophical language, in which philosophical insights are not explicitly stated, but mediated through well-worded and creatively composed descriptions. Section 4 discusses how Wittgenstein’s philosophical poetics relates to artificial terminologies and grammars in philosophy and science.

Stilogenost vremenski raslojene leksike u Rječniku bosanskog jezika autora Dževada Jahića

The paper initially discusses some theoretical aspects of functional-stylistic stratification of vocabulary, with an emphasis on spoken language and its impact on standard language in terms of generating new stylistic values. Spoken language belongs to the colloquial style, so given its great potential in creating the connotative meaning of words, its boundaries are not clearly set, and in the communicative act almost every word can undergo semantic modification, resulting in special semantic or stylistic nuances. Stylistic nuance of vocabulary finds its foundation in filling communicative gaps, which, through different use in different contexts, can activate the desired effects in an effort to obtain a nuance of meaning that is appropriate to the circumstances in which it occurs. Furthermore, the paper pays special attention to the stylogenic values of time-layered vocabulary, ie passive vocabulary in the Dictionary of the Bosnian Language by Dževad Jahić. By using vocabulary that has gone out of use in the text in the modern sense, its functional orientation comes to the fore, which, given the context in which it is used, can have different degrees of stylistic expressiveness. Thus, the stylistic character of lexemes with the qualifier of archaism, historicism, historical and obsolete lexicon is considered, taking into account the examples excerpted from the material given with each entry. After conducted analysis, the stylistic function of passive vocabulary is nothing but the expression of the historical originality of an event. Using terms from the former era of existence helps writers to get their literary work on a truer and more convincing painting of a certain period, thus transmitting historical, social and cultural patterns and material culture of a region.

Frazematyczny potencjał połączenia wyrazowego bieda z nędzą we współczesnej polszczyźnie

Phrasematic Potential of the Word Combination: bieda z nędzą in Contemporary Polish The combination of synonymous words, whose origin may be associated with folk demonology and personified notions of Bieda [Poverty] and Nędza [Misery], has become the basis for a few phrasemes that are authenticated in contemporary Polish language. The analysis of research material that includes a variety of texts, differing in terms of topic, genre and style, is the evidence that apart from the phraseme bieda z nędzą, which is registered in dictionaries, also other multi-verbal units, whose basic element of composition is this particular word combination, are used in Polish. The primary significance of the analysed phrasemes results from the presence of two synonymous words denoting a difficult financial situation, which leads to the hyperbolisation of the phenomenon. From the pragmatic perspective, however, they are used mostly as negative evaluation units, referring to the material sphere, but also to various fields, phenomena and events, which, according to the speaker, are characterised by low quality, have visible shortages and symptoms of poverty, or result from negligence or bad taste. As expressively and axiologically marked terms, which are characteristic of the colloquial style, these phrasemes are encountered in comments and discussion forums, as well as media coverage, especially in headlines. Longer phrasemes, which are joined by a clear rhyme, are the elements of intertextual games in various cultural texts: artistic works, blogs and chrematonyms.

Developing a Dietary Lifestyle Ontology (DILON) to Improve the Interoperability of Dietary Data (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Dietary habits offer crucial information on one's health and form a considerable part of the Patient-Generated Health Data (PGHD). Dietary data are collected through various channels and formats; thus, interoperability is a significant challenge to reusing the data. The vast scope of dietary concepts and colloquial style of expression add difficulty to the standardization task. Common Data Elements (CDE) with metadata annotation and ontological structuring of dietary concepts address the interoperability issues of dietary data to some extent. However, challenges remaining in making culture-specific dietary habits and questionnaire-based dietary assessment data interoperable require additional efforts. OBJECTIVE The main goal of this study was to address the interoperability challenge in dietary concepts by combining ontological curation of dietary concepts and metadata annotation of questionnaire-based dietary data. Specifically, this study aimed to develop a Dietary Lifestyle Ontology (DILON) and demonstrated the improved interoperability of questionnaire-based dietary data by annotating its main semantics with DILON. METHODS By analyzing 1158 dietary assessment data elements (367 in Korean and 791 in English), 515 dietary concepts were extracted and used to construct DILON. To demonstrate the utility of DILON in improving the interoperability of multi-cultural questionnaire-based dietary data, ten Competency Questions (CQs) were developed that identified data elements that share the same dietary topics and measurement qualities. As the test cases, 68 dietary habit data elements from Korean and English questionnaires were instantiated and annotated with the dietary concepts in DILON. The competency questions were translated into Semantic Query-enhanced Web Rule Language (SQWRL), and the query results were reviewed for accuracy. RESULTS DILON was built with 260 concept classes and 486 instances and successfully validated with ontology validation tools. A small overlap (72 concepts) in the concepts extracted from the questionnaires in two languages indicates the need to pay closer attention to representing culture-specific dietary concepts. The SQWRL queries reflecting the 10 CQs yielded the correct results. CONCLUSIONS Ensuring the interoperability of dietary lifestyle data is a demanding task due to its vast scope and variations in expression. This study demonstrated that, when combined with common data elements and semantic metadata annotation, ontology can effectively mediate the interoperability of dietary data generated in different cultural contexts and expressed in various styles.

Способы репрезентации семантики запрета в тувинском языке

Introduction. The article discusses the linguistic manifestation of prohibition semantics in Tuvan, analyzes the grammatical and lexical means of its expression, determines the semantic differences of the prohibition indicators and their functional/stylistic features. Goals. The paper aims to describe the grammatical and lexical means of expressing the semantics of prohibition in modern Tuvan, to analyze their meanings, pragmatic and stylistic functions. Materials and Methods. The study employs the descriptive method, functional/semantic and communicative/pragmatic approaches. The research material was provided by examples from digital sources of Tuvan-language texts available at: http://www.tuvancorpus.ru/. Results. The research of Tuvan language materials confirms the data from typologically different languages that indicators of the negative imperative are stylistically universal transmitters of the prohibitive meaning. Other means of expressing prohibition — besides the negative form of the future tense –бас — are stylistically marked. When it comes to express a prohibition, intonation holds an important place since it interacts with the former’s formal indicators proper, context and communicative situation. The paper identifies several types of prohibition (the prohibitive) that have received grammatical and lexical expressions in the Tuvan language — the regulative, preventive, constative, and corrective. Semantically, a comparatively wider range of prohibition values is possessed by the analytical form Tv-п болбас ― a special grammatical indicator of prohibition expressing the regulative, preventive, and constative. For other grammatical means within this system of indicative indicators, transfer of prohibition values is not a key function of theirs. This is the case of the future negative -бас (regulative, preventive) and the past -ды. The latter conveys a value of the admonitive. The system of lexical and grammatical means of expressing prohibition is distinguished by the lexemes хоржок (preventive), болзун, адыр (corrective) that have no certain part of speech status within the modern language. The prohibition lexeme болзун is a grammaticalization of the verb бол- in the meaning ‘to finish’ for the third imperative. There are two verbs бол- and сокса- that implicitly express prohibition/correction. The considered lexico-grammatical and lexical means of prohibition belong to the colloquial style. The formal style employs a number of special lexemes with the meaning of the regulative formed from the stem хору-. This word-formation nest includes verbs, adjectives, adverbs. The results of the study in the functional/semantic field of prohibition in the Tuvan language shall be demanded in further research on modality in the Turkic and other languages.

Об изменениях в лексике русской лирической поэзии

The paper intends to present the general tendency of lexical change in Russian lyrical po- etry during the last two hundred years on some arbitrarily selected examples. The odes of Lomonosov were accomplished in the lofty style based on Slavonic, rhetorical, and other “poetical” devices. In Derzhavin’s ode Felica, enthusiastic and ironical elements, pathos and everyday talk are combined. In Zhukovski’s romantic poetry the objective sense of words is overshadowed by their emotive overtones. In avoiding the grandiloquent romantic lexis, Nekrasov describes the hopeless hard life of Russian peasantry with deep sympathy, and reliably reproduces the popular speech. In the cited poem of Akhmatova, the psychic drama of the heroine is expressed by a peculiar connection of words belonging to different stylistic layers. The entirely prosaic lexis and syntax of Blok’s short poem suggests the poet’s feeling about the hopeless immobility of life in a condensed metaphoric shape. Vino- kurov’s poem relates an imagined accidental meeting of former lovers after thirty years of their separating in an entirely colloquial style. Since a poem of genuine aesthetic value appears as a complex artistic work, its components mutually strengthen, supplement, or compensate each other. Thus, the increase of colloquial elements in the poetic vocabulary does not necessarily indicate a process of “depoetization”.

Wypowiedzi wartościujące jako istotny aspekt dyskursu wideoblogowego na przykładzie kanału „Stanowo” o tematyce kryminalnej

The subject of the paper is valuation statements present in videoblog discourse. The material is based on audiovisual recordings broadcast on the “Stanowo” channel. The aim of the analysis is to explore the way in which judgements are expressed that relate crime seen as a sensitive aspect of social life. It has been shown that the author rarely uses messages marked axiologically in her material. Her priority is to present facts accurately rather than to make judgements. Statements involving valuation of facts do appear in her statements, especially in those in which the author manifests her emotional involvement in the story. This leads to a conclusion that there is a close relationship between expressiveness and valuing, as revealed in the material studied. Irony, contrasting and comparisons are the most common linguistic tool used by the author to express value judgements. The use on names is a metaphorical sense also plays an important role. Three pillars of the stories presented are assessed: the event itself and its circumstances, the victim and the perpetrator. It has been shown that valuation of the facts discussed has two objectives: the presentation of personal positions, which facilitates the creation of a kind of sender-receiver relationship, and the release of tension generated by the absorption of information about violent events. In the conclusion it has been stated that the way reality is valued by a popular video blogger may cause her axiological perspective to be adopted especially by young, morally unformed viewers. Therefore, it should be regarded as positive that the author does not deviate from generally accepted patterns of assessing the behaviour of victims and perpetrators. On the other hand, the style of the presented valuation statements can be assessed negatively – the author uses colloquial style, however, this form of language is out of keeping with the solemnity of the events under discussion.

Saul Bellow

Over a career of six decades, Saul Bellow (1915–2005) published novels, short stories, essays, and plays that attracted immense attention from the public and the literary establishment. The value of his creative work was recognized with numerous awards, including three National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The fourth child of Jewish parents who immigrated from Russia, Bellow spent the first years of his life in Lachine, Canada, before he and his family moved in 1924 to Chicago. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1937, he spent a semester at the University of Wisconsin studying anthropology but quit his graduate study to become a writer. In 1938 Bellow married the first of his five wives. In 1944 he published his first novel, Dangling Man, a novel of existential alienation. Three years later he published The Victim, a novel about anti-Semitism, but it was his next novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), that catapulted Bellow from relative obscurity to being regarded as one of the most important living American writers. This long picaresque novel was narrated by its larky eponymous hero in a vivid, colloquial style. Herzog (1964) secured his reputation as one of America’s foremost writers. With its complex style that captures the interior life, the novel was a surprising bestseller. The publication of Humboldt’s Gift (1975) was probably instrumental in his being awarded the Nobel Prize the following year. In this complicated novel with its inextricable blending of high and low culture and many flashbacks, the narrator ruminates on widely divergent subjects and describes his comic involvement with a variety of colorful people, especially the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, modeled on Delmore Schwartz, and the gangster Rinaldo Cantabile. Bellow continued to publish for the next twenty-five years, but like John Updike and some other white male writers of his generation, Bellow’s reputation was hurt to some extent by critics upset by his white masculine-centered orientation. His popularity with the public and with critics is less than it was at the high point of his career in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, but he is still regarded as one of the major 20th-century American writers. His fiction is known for its unique narrative voice, its ability to portray the intricacies of human consciousness, its metaphysical speculation, and its comedy.

The stylistics of verbal predicate in Yakut language: colloquial style

This article is dedicated to the currently relevant within Yakut linguistics problem of language and speech normalization of functional styles. An attempt is made to reveal the linguistics peculiarities of the colloquial style of Yakut language through the prism of verbal predicate as one of the key components in a sentence. As a result of semantic-stylistic and statistics-linguistics analysis of verbal predicate in the colloquial style, the author identifies its qualitative and quantitative characteristics. Special attention is turned to the intercalation changes of verbal predicates in colloquial style that take place under the influence of Russian language. The article determines frequency of the use of forms of verbal predicates in literary style, which allowed to objectively assess indicators that were revealed by means of application of the semantic-stylistic method. Functionality of verbal predicates in colloquial style is defined by their lexical-semantic meanings, structural-semantic parameters and means of expression, as well as utilization and prevalence of certain verbal predicates in colloquial style is substantiated by extralinguistic specificities of this speech style. At the initial stages of normalization process of functional styles of Yakut language, it is important to give an objective assessment to the ongoing within colloquial style intercalation changes under the influence of Russian language by determining its negative and potentially positive aspects.