Communication and Language Learning in Virtual Environments through an Eco-semiotic Lens

The paper explores the interface between the new theoretical approach of ecolinguistics and language educational practices in the new digital environments that we have plunged into during 2020-2021. From the standpoint of ecological communication and eco-semiotics, the exploration highlights its impact on language learning and education in general, as re-contextualized in the new digital spaces we have all been experiencing as educators and learners. The theoretical input from semiotics and conceptual linguistics on the one hand, and educational ecology on the other hand, is paired with a direct empirical analysis of the students’ language learning experience at the USAMVBT University of Timisoara, Romania, the University of Tetova, North Macedonia, and Lomza State University from Poland. Our aim is to better understand how to sustain students’ communicational skills and their overall adaptation to the emerging digitalised educational environment across fields of study.

La Pata de Cabra, Satire and Free Speech in Nineteenth-Century Mexico City

The article examines how La Pata de Cabra (The Goat's Hoof ), an over-the-top fantastical Spanish comedia de magia (magic play), came to figure centrally in serious debates about Mexican politics and society between 1845 and 1857. The article explores the play's popularity and its resonance in the press – it spawned at least half a dozen satirical newspapers – to argue that satire became a critical political language and form of expression that broadened and sustained debates in an era marked by volatile and often heavily restricted press freedoms. The article's focus on the La Pata phenomenon brings two fields of study, theatre and the press, into productive and necessary conversation.

Forensic Linguistics function in Evidentiary and Investigative Contexts

Recently, forensic linguistics has been an arena of significance in many fields of study especially in judicial systems, legal and forensic matters, investigation, and open-source intelligence across the globe. The term typically refers to legal and professional analysis of recorded or written language by experts (forensic linguists) to provide expert and correct interpretation. It is particularly used in legal matters especially in the court and criminal justice systems. In the court system, forensic linguistics is heavily applied to examine language evidence – either recorded in voice or handwritten in civil matters or crimes. The analysis or examination is carried out for two major reasons. First, the analysis is utilized when relevant investigations are carried out with a focus to help in identifying witnesses or suspects in specific cases or scenes, or the determination of the significance of writing or utterance to a case. Secondly, forensic linguistics plays a pivotal role when written or spoken language samples are presented to a court as evidence. In such contexts, forensic linguists provide expert testimonies of correct interpretation of the samples. As such, language analysis is significant in any judicial matters and systems provided the questionable language constitutes crimes. In most cases, crimes such as threats, hate speech, bribery, hate literature, coercion among others necessitate the use of a linguist expert for correct and most importantly professional interpretation. Evidently, the concept of forensic linguistics is ascribed to provide the truth from recorded speeches or voices and written languages in the face of a crime or relevant legal investigation matters. This paper will posit on the different ways and methods that forensic linguistics is applied to investigate and provide professional interpretation of recorded and written languages in evidentiary and investigative contexts.

Analyzing the generalizability of the network-based topic emergence identification method

Topic evolution helps the understanding of current research topics and their histories by automatically modeling and detecting the set of shared research fields in academic publications as topics. This paper provides a generalized analysis of the topic evolution method for predicting the emergence of new topics, which can operate on any dataset where the topics are defined as the relationships of their neighborhoods in the past by extrapolating to the future topics. Twenty sample topic networks were built with various fields-of-study keywords as seeds, covering domains such as business, materials, diseases, and computer science from the Microsoft Academic Graph dataset. The binary classifier was trained for each topic network using 15 structural features of emerging and existing topics and consistently resulted in accuracy and F1 over 0.91 for all twenty datasets over the periods of 2000 to 2019. Feature selection showed that the models retained most of the performance with only one-third of the tested features. Incremental learning was tested within the same topic over time and between different topics, which resulted in slight performance improvements in both cases. This indicates there is an underlying pattern to the neighbors of new topics common to research domains, likely beyond the sample topics used in the experiment. The result showed that network-based new topic prediction can be applied to various research domains with different research patterns.

Q Methodology

Q methodology is a research method that focuses systematically on people's internal and subjective viewpoints. Since its introduction as an alternative form of data collection and analysis, Q methodology has been utilized in various fields of study. However, although its use would enable an enriched understanding of individuals' subjective accounts of reality, it has not been fully exploited yet, and the use of it is still in its infancy. Thus, sparked off by the scarcity of interest in the use of Q methodology, this chapter attempts to provide an overview of this research method with a specific reference to what it is and how it is implemented. The chapter concludes with an example of a recent Q study for illustrative purposes. It is believed that this account is of relevance for researchers in various fields of study with its focus on Q methodology, which is an underutilized but a valuable tool to gain deeper insights into subjective realities experienced by individuals.

Three Good Things

Let us consider some good things that have happened before the year 2021 concludes: 1) On February 1, 2021, researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) announced that the autism spectrum disorders may be caused by defects in the mitochondria of brain cells of the eye. The research continues. 2) In the year 2021, many people have adopted the term “on the spectrum” to refer to the many brain dysfunctions that can and cannot be named and diagnosed yet. 3) Yale University Child Study Center and The Jim Henson Institute have invited many experts from many fields of study together to discover what happens when spectrum and non-spectrum children and adults look at puppets. What are they looking at? What do they see? Why don't we already know what they see? Are we looking at the important things? The chapter will explore these questions and specifically learning and the impact of puppets further.

Academic Work and Life of Public Administration Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Slovenia

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the lives of people, including higher education students. Thus, the main aim of the chapter is to present the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on academic work and life of public administration students in Slovenia compared with their counterparts from other fields of study. The analysis is based on 1,049 Slovenian respondents, covering 211 students from public administration and 838 students from other fields of study. The results show that at the time of the lockdown public administration students were the most satisfied with real-time online lectures, followed by asynchronous forms of lectures. Compared with the students from other fields of study, they were in general more satisfied with provided course assignments and feedback on performance but less satisfied with lecturers' response, openness, and information. They also found it more difficult to focus, adapt, and achieve better performance in the online environment and were in general less confident in computer skills compared to their counterparts from other fields of study.

The alexithymia manifestation and the correlation with personality traits in students of Russian higher educational institutions

Актуальность статьи обусловлена в первую очередь, возросшим в последнее время интересом среди исследователей не только к когнитивной, но и эмоционально-личностной сфере личности. Так, многие ученые (Я. Плампер, О. Симонова, И. Троцук и др.) отмечают поворот науки в сторону эмоций (так называемый «аффективный» или «эмоциональный» поворот), что свидетельствует о важности изучения и развития именно эмоционально-личностной сферы человека. В то же время данные некоторых исследований указывают на возрастание выраженности алекстимии, в частности, в студенческой среде. Поэтому авторы статьи видят актуальность исследования феномена алекситимии у студентов разных направлений подготовки с целью изучения и установления связей между склонностью к алекситимии и особенностями личности, а также рядом личностных особенностей, определяющих выбор будущей профессии. В соответствии с этими положениями авторами была разработана программа эмпирического исследования уровня выраженности алекситимии и особенностей личности на примере студентов гуманитарных и технических направлений обучения; сформулированы гипотезы, подобраны задачи и методы (в том числе, количественной и качественной обработки данных); проанализированы и описаны результаты и практические рекомендации, которые нашли отражение в публикации настоящей работы. Статья предназначена для работников системы образования, преподавателей высших учебных заведений, студентов и их родителей; специалистов, работающими в области психологического консультирования и психотерапии, а также для широкого круга лиц, заинтересованных в психологии. The relevance of the article is primarily due to the recently increased interest among researchers not only in the cognitive, but also in the emotional and personal sphere of personality. So, many scientists (such as Jan Plamper, O. Simonova, I. Trotsuk, etc.) note the turn of science towards emotions (the so-called "affective" or "emotional" turn), which indicates the importance of studying and developing the emotional and personal sphere of a person. At the same time, data from some studies indicate an increase in the severity of alexthymia, in particular, among students. Therefore, the authors of the article see the relevance of the study of the phenomenon of alexithymia in students of different fields of training in order to study and establish links between the propensity to alexithymia and personality traits, as well as a number of personal characteristics that determine the choice of a future profession. In accordance with these provisions, the authors have developed a program of empirical research of the level of alexithymia expression and personality traits on the example of students of humanities and technical fields of study. Therefore, hypotheses are formulated, tasks and methods (including quantitative and qualitative data processing) are selected; the results and practical recommendations that are reflected in the publication of this work are analyzed and described. The article is intended for employees of the higher education system, teachers of higher educational institutions, students and their parents; specialists working in the field of psychological counseling and psychotherapy, as well as for a wide range of people interested in psychology.

THE UNCANNY: DEVELOPMENT AND PERSPECTIVES ON THE FUTURE

In 1919 Sigmund Freud raised the interest in the uncanny by claiming in his essay "Das Unheimliche" that something can be familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Since the emergence of the concept in the 20th century, many scholars have presented their own definition of the uncanny. The concept originates from the German unheimlich but the meaning reaches far beyond its dictionary definition. As Masschelein suggests, the word itself "is untranslatable qua form and content" (Masschelein 2011, 7) and as long as the uncanny cannot be understood literally, the ambiguity of the term can lead to a multitude of interpretations. The aim of this paper is to explore how the perception of the uncanny has been changing through the years in connection with the Freudian definition. The paper offers an overview of various interpretations of the concept starting from 1906 until today. The juxtaposition of the most significant views on the uncanny shows how the concept has gradually formed a basis for various fields of study such as literature and art. The paper presents future perspectives of the uncanny where it no longer refers only to the motif of the double or supernatural elements but it also tackles the problems of body transformations and politics.