The Origin and Functioning of Myth: Linguistic Conditions

The article identifies two approaches to determining the linguistic conditions of the emergence and functioning of the myth. The first approach assumes that the myth is a manifestation of unconscious (M. Müller) or conscious (E. Cassirer, R. Barthes) distortion of language. Within this approach it is impossible to escape from myth because the presentation of the facts of the world in language is inescapable, which is always imperfect. These distortions are meant for political influence, as according to the proponents of the conscious mythologizing of language. Philosophy is tasked with resisting such distortions and, consequently, myth creation in general. This approach seems simplified, because the myth is identified here with the linguistic form of its distribution, reduced to the analysis of distortions of language presentation. At the same time, the psychological and epistemological preconditions of the myth, its unique status in the life of communities are lost. Conditions for the development of the second approach arise through the critique of classical rationality by several influential thinkers who undermined the belief in the exclusive ability of discursive language to present the truth (F. Nietzsche, L. Wittgenstein, M. Heidegger). The second approach assumes that the myth emerges and continues to exist due to the inability of the logos to present some important aspects of reality, especially its existential dimension (P. Tillich, H. Blumenberg, L. Hatab, K. Morgan). In this case, myth and logos become alternative and at the same time closely connected linguistic ways of presenting the truth. Logos (the language of science) presents primarily abstract causal connections of essences. At the same time, mythical narratives are better than science at presenting the mysteries of origin and existence, creating a hierarchy of values for communities.

Translating Methods of Realies in English, Russian and Kyrgyz Culture

This article is devoted to the problem of translation of linguistic realities in English, Russian and Kyrgyz cultures. The article is an overview of the realities in the mentioned cultures. An attempt is made to find ways to overcome the linguo-ethnic barrier when translating concepts from the Kyrgyz language, reflecting the national character. The essence of this problem boils down to the fact that the main requirement of translation is to preserve the originality of the translated text and to study the cultural component of the text. It should be aimed at identifying the differences between the original and the translation, not only because of the linguistic form, but also because of the cultural one. The main purpose of the article is to analyze the elements of the linguistic specificity of translation of realities in English, Russian and Kyrgyz cultures. The subject of the research is ethnic elements — objective problems arising during translation, and methods of their solution, that is, the transfer of cultural realities during translation. The article examines the theory of cultural realities in the translation aspect and analyzes the main features and methods of translating words-realities. The selected realities are analyzed from the point of view of their translation methods to identify the most effective ones. To solve the set specific tasks, the following methods were used in the work: analysis, synthesis, classification and generalization of the data obtained. As a result of the study, material was obtained, the analysis of which made it possible to conclude that the choice of one way or another way to overcome the linguo-ethnic barrier depends on the situation of intercultural communication, as well as on the goals of the participants in the communication.

Genre games: Edward Gorey's play with generic form

<p>This thesis examines Edward Gorey's play with form and content across five literary genres, how that play results in the style that has come to be known as the "Goreyesque" and how the Goreyesque has influenced later artists and writers. Gorey consistently places style ahead of thematic and moral considerations, removing the purpose of each genre to reveal what remains in its absence. In doing so, Gorey maps out the boundaries of each form, providing genre- and period-specific details that act as signposts to how his audience should approach each narrative. With these markers in place, Gorey's readers are thus made aware of which genre expectations rule each piece. These expectations, however, are undermined as Gorey removes the audience-understood literary endgame, so that the work appears in all respects to be an accurate representation of the chosen genre, yet is missing the central heart. Gorey's melodramas present scenarios in which deep familial loss and suffering are at the forefront of each narrative, yet as a result of the distance that Gorey places between the text and his readers, these works ultimately lack sentimentality. His Dickensian narratives, while populated with virtuous orphans and embittered, isolated men, lack moral pronouncements and just rewards, resulting in exceptionally bleak, nihilistic endings that provide little or no social commentary. His children's literature, although full of mnemonic systems, rejects all pedagogical functions in favour of inviting in adult audiences to luxuriate in sound and linguistic form. His mystery and detective fiction, while containing secrets, crimes and criminals, ignores any pretence of decoding the central mysteries. His Gothic horror revels in supernatural excesses, yet engenders no fear. By tracing Gorey's play with genre, we can identify the aesthetic parameters of the Goreyesque, and examine how they manifest in the works of other artists and writers, notably Tim Burton, Neil Gaiman and Roman Dirge. In manipulating genre expectations, Gorey does more than simply leave readers with the shell of narrative purpose. Instead, he draws attention to the absence and pushes beyond expectation to reinvention. He normalizes the strange and fantastic by removing the very things that make the ordinary extraordinary. He infuses his works with a distance that shifts their purpose from generating high emotion and strong reactions to encouraging minute attention to narrative detail. Gorey's fantasies therefore represent odd, underwhelming moments that are otherwise ignored in the search for the uncommon and unique. By underplaying the significance of the events in his stories, Gorey represents and refreshes our concepts of the fantastic, and highlights the strangeness in the overlooked.</p>

Genre games: Edward Gorey's play with generic form

<p>This thesis examines Edward Gorey's play with form and content across five literary genres, how that play results in the style that has come to be known as the "Goreyesque" and how the Goreyesque has influenced later artists and writers. Gorey consistently places style ahead of thematic and moral considerations, removing the purpose of each genre to reveal what remains in its absence. In doing so, Gorey maps out the boundaries of each form, providing genre- and period-specific details that act as signposts to how his audience should approach each narrative. With these markers in place, Gorey's readers are thus made aware of which genre expectations rule each piece. These expectations, however, are undermined as Gorey removes the audience-understood literary endgame, so that the work appears in all respects to be an accurate representation of the chosen genre, yet is missing the central heart. Gorey's melodramas present scenarios in which deep familial loss and suffering are at the forefront of each narrative, yet as a result of the distance that Gorey places between the text and his readers, these works ultimately lack sentimentality. His Dickensian narratives, while populated with virtuous orphans and embittered, isolated men, lack moral pronouncements and just rewards, resulting in exceptionally bleak, nihilistic endings that provide little or no social commentary. His children's literature, although full of mnemonic systems, rejects all pedagogical functions in favour of inviting in adult audiences to luxuriate in sound and linguistic form. His mystery and detective fiction, while containing secrets, crimes and criminals, ignores any pretence of decoding the central mysteries. His Gothic horror revels in supernatural excesses, yet engenders no fear. By tracing Gorey's play with genre, we can identify the aesthetic parameters of the Goreyesque, and examine how they manifest in the works of other artists and writers, notably Tim Burton, Neil Gaiman and Roman Dirge. In manipulating genre expectations, Gorey does more than simply leave readers with the shell of narrative purpose. Instead, he draws attention to the absence and pushes beyond expectation to reinvention. He normalizes the strange and fantastic by removing the very things that make the ordinary extraordinary. He infuses his works with a distance that shifts their purpose from generating high emotion and strong reactions to encouraging minute attention to narrative detail. Gorey's fantasies therefore represent odd, underwhelming moments that are otherwise ignored in the search for the uncommon and unique. By underplaying the significance of the events in his stories, Gorey represents and refreshes our concepts of the fantastic, and highlights the strangeness in the overlooked.</p>

Novel metaphor translation is modulated by translation direction

Previous translation process research has pointed to an increased cognitive load when translating metaphoric compared to literal language. Yet, studies conducted thus far have not examined the role of translation direction (i.e., L1–L2 vs. L2–L1) in novel metaphor translation and have not tested whether and how this process might be modulated by the linguistic form of a novel meaning. In the present study, Polish (L1) – English (L2) translation students translated novel nominal metaphors (A is B), novel similes (A is like B), and literal sentences, in either L1–L2 or L2–L1 translation directions, while their translation behavior was recorded using a keystroke logging method. The results revealed longer translation durations for both metaphors and similes relative to literal utterances. Furthermore, we found slower translation times for novel nominal metaphors compared to novel similes and literal sentences, yet only in the L2–L1 translation direction. Such results might indicate that novel meaning translation is more cognitively taxing in the case of novel nominal metaphors, which require a more robust activation of comparison mechanisms, relative to novel similes. Importantly, this effect might be stronger when translating in the direction in which access to semantic representations is potentially more automatic (i.e., L2–L1 translation).

Role Relations in George Orwell’s 1984: Agency-Goal Analysis

This research paper concentrates on George Orwell’s novel 1984, published in 1949. The novel explicates the ugly lifestyle of citizens under the rule of a powerful totalitarian ruler Big Brother. Being a ruler, the Big Brother has ultimate political power, and that is, in the narrative, linguistically asserted. This research paper examines how such political and social power of a character/person is imposed in the linguistic territory of a narrative in the light of Critical Discourse Analysis. Critical Discourse Analysis evaluates how the social and political agency of any person in any given discourse works in the linguistic form, theorists like Anthony Giddens elaborate on the role of agency in shaping the social structure. For the purpose of examining the agency in the narrative, with a particular focus on agency-patient role relation, this research brings in the role relations as the trope and, thus, concludes that totalitarian rulers drain out the agency of the citizens even in linguistic form, along with socio-political agency.

On the Issue of “(not) decent” Linguistic Form in the Public Information Space

The article justifies the advantages of using the additional criterion of “respectable precedence” for an objective assessment of the linguistic form used in the media discourse, according to the parameter “decent / indecent”. The authors, referring to the data of modern research, notice the lack of a common understanding and unambiguous definition of indecent vocabulary, highlight the objective and subjective factors that complicate the solution of this problem, emphasize those features of the media text that make the concept of “(not) decent” linguistic form very relative. The criterion proposed by the authors takes into account the practice of using a controversial linguistic unit in respectable public communication and relies on representative data of electronic text corpora, which makes it possible to verify the results of linguistic analysis. The article presents the outcomes of expert assessment of vocabulary with negative connotation using the above-mentioned criterion.

Encoding semantic relationships in literary texts

Encoding meaningful semantic relationships in literary texts is almost as difficult as defining and identifying them. Defining the types and the components of semantic relationships that can be extracted from literary texts is a quite challenging task because literature is full of implicit and oblique messages and references. Subsequently, identifying and encoding semantic relationships in literature is even more challenging because often relations do not have neither clear nor standard linguistic form and usually they overlap each other. This paper discusses modeling and encoding issues concerning the mapping of relationships of cultural content in literary and humanities texts, highlighted by the case of the ECARLE project annotation campaign. On handling these modeling and encoding issues the paper proposes a methodology of minimalistic and flexible annotation techniques, combined in order to generate human annotated training data for a Relation Extraction machine learning system. The proposed methodology utilizes the available TEI tagset, and, without any further customizations, allows the mapping of relations formed by named entities in a simple yet flexible way, open to reuse, interchange, conversion and visualization.

“Mock Jewish” in Early Twentieth-Century Tunisia: Linguistic Form and Social Meaning

The article presents a sociolinguistic profile of “Mock Jewish,” or the stylized varieties of Judeo-Arabic deployed for humorous purposes in early twentieth-century Tunisian public culture. We assembled a corpus of texts from both print and audio-visual media, including newspaper columns, television and radio performances, folktales, and plays, in which “Jewish” (yahūdī) or “Israelite” (isrāʾīlī) voices are stylized with exaggerated forms of linguistic difference. The purpose of the analysis is not to evaluate the inauthenticity of Mock Jewish vis-à-vis Judeo-Arabic proper, but to understand how performers deploy these markedly “Jewish” stylistic tactics to create diverse social meanings and assess the effects of these performances on language and society. We argue that Mock Jewish forms part of the broader “ideologies of linguistic differentiation” that construct Jewish speech as separate and distinct from non-Jewish varieties. However, the performances of Mock Jewish are not limited to sectarian polemic, but engage diverse targets, derive from different motivations, and provoke divergent responses from audiences.

A spring of living waters in a pool of metaphors: The metaphorical landscape of 1QHa 16:5–27

This research article focuses on the use of the water metaphor in column 16 of the Hodayot. Previous scholarship has often concentrated on the garden metaphor in this section, particularly on its intertextual links with the book of Isaiah. By drawing on contemporary metaphor theory, in particular blending theory, I show how the author of the Hodayot creates poetry through a multiple blended network of garden and water metaphors, and how aspects of the linguistic form of the poem, in particular the phrase מבוע מים חיים‘well of living waters’, can be read as an expression of this blend. The aim of this study is to contribute (1) to the study of the Hodayot and its poetic practices, against older dismissals of the poetic quality of the Hodayot, and (2) to our understanding of semantic constellations and the conceptual world of ancient Judaism.Contribution: This article fits within the scope of HTS’s theme ‘Historical Thought and Source Interpretation’ as it contributes to our insights into ancient Jewish thought through the interpretation of a religious source text using metaphor theory.