The interplay of cultural expectation, gender role, and communicative behavior

A number of pragmatic studies have reported on gender variations in compliment-responding linguistic behavior. However, how people of different gender roles react to compliments was rarely compared. The earlier literature reported that men and women’s values and priorities are incompatible, something which can have a significant impact on their reactions to compliments. The present study, therefore, investigates how people of different gender roles pragmalinguistically respond to different kinds of compliments, such as on appearance, ability, possessions, or personality traits. A discourse completion test, designed to elicit people’s compliment-responding patterns under different scenarios, was then distributed to 600 male and female adult informants. The results showed that the respondents’ reactions to compliments were mostly conditioned by their own gender roles. In addition, the male and female participants’ preferential compliment-responding behaviors were manifestations of the social expectations on masculinity and femininity in their particular speech community.

Can’t always get what I want: Cultural expectations of emotional support in entrepreneurship

In this article, we develop three ideal types of cultural expectations informed by a qualitative critical event analysis of Danish entrepreneurs’ expectations of emotional support, informing a broader conceptual framework and future research agenda of cultural expectation alignment of support behaviour. We suggest that family relations associate with altruism and a family logic, friends with mutualism and a community logic and businesspersons with egoism and a market logic. These cultural expectations shape how entrepreneurs emotionally react to received support, or lack thereof, from these role-relations, and consequently outcomes of the support. Thus, effects of social support are about ‘what you get’ relative to ‘what you expect’.

Challenging “Getting Better” Social Media Narratives With Intersectional Transgender Lived Experiences

A dominant media narrative of “getting better” over time is often projected onto LGBTQ people’s personal life experiences. In this research study, I examine this narrative’s role in transgender people’s emotional well-being throughout transition. A “getting better” narrative was pervasive in my qualitative analysis of 240 Tumblr transition blogs and 20 interviews with bloggers, signaling that it impacted people’s self-concept both as presented on social media and when talking about their experiences. This narrative causes undue emotional harm given contrast between one’s post-transition reality, which may involve distress (despite greater congruence between one’s body and identity), and a dominant cultural expectation of happiness. I argue that an intersectional approach to understanding trans people’s emotional well-being—by considering multiple salient identity facets and life transitions—makes trans lives more livable by complicating the cultural imperative to feel better, and to present a unilaterally positive self-image online, post-transition. Even though trans people on average feel better after gender transition, everyday realities are often in contrast to the dominant narrative’s positioning of gender transition as a process with a single, simple goal of feeling better. Challenging the “getting better” narrative gives trans people the freedom to live and exist in their post-transition identities, whether or not they feel “better.”

Going Against the grain: An FPDA of The Epic of Gilgamesh

The aspects of ones identity are positioned within a context prescribed by culture and they are according to cultural expectation. The present study aims to add/explore power dynamics that are embedded in the discourses of Ishtar and Shamhat. This study is concerned with how in The Epic of Gilgamesh, the two female characters: Ishtar and Shamhat are received and perceived by their immediate audience. The present study through feminist Post Structured Discourse Analysis (FPDA) (Baxter, 2003) lens analyzes characters of Ishtar and Shamhat, the focus of the study is to inspect the ways through these characters negotiates their positions, identities and relationships in a society that is dominated by patriarchal traditional discourses. It is concluded that both female characters in their respective discourses are victorious in their persuasion of action and manner of speaking.

Paul, the Gift and Philippians

This paper employs a basic insight from John M. G. Barclay’s book, Paul and the Gift, that the word χάρις in first-century Greek very often referred to a gift, especially his “perfection” of the word as “conditional.” In Paul’s lifetime the common cultural expectation was that the recipient of a gift accepted that a return gift was normative and expected—whether physical or not. This understanding is thoroughly discussed in Seneca, De Beneficiis which describes how the obligation to reciprocity in giving and receiving is expected of all civil persons, apart from civic position and status. This is because the function of a gift is the building or maintaining of relationships. This purpose is shown to be the case also in Philippians with reference to the passage employing the lexeme (Phil 1:7, 29; 2:6-11) and in 4:10-20 where Paul discusses the gift he received from the Philippian church.

On the Difficulties of Translating Haiku into English

The haiku is among the most concrete of poetic experiences, focusing on objects and sensations encountered in the natural world, including human nature. This is one reason why, while all literary texts, and especially poetry, can pose enormous difficulties to translators, haiku has unique ones. This essay is a pragmatic investigation into how issues of language, prosody, and cultural expectation can be resolved to recreate in English a living poem that retains the source text's content, emotional nuance, and aesthetic atmosphere. It proposes the idea of ‘aesthetic equivalence’ and applies it to a number of renowned haiku considered notoriously resistant to English rendition. A number of previous English translations of them are also critiqued.

Theological Underpinnings of the Modern Philosophy of Mathematics.

The study is focused on the relation between theology and mathematics in the situation of increasing secularization. My main concern is nineteenth-century mathematics. Theology was present in modern mathematics not through its objects or methods, but mainly through popular philosophy, which absolutized mathematics. Moreover, modern pure mathematics was treated as a sort of quasi-theology; a long-standing alliance between theology and mathematics made it habitual to view mathematics as a divine knowledge, so when theology was discarded, mathematics naturally took its place at the top of the system of knowledge. It was that cultural expectation aimed at mathematics that was substantially responsible for a great resonance made by set-theoretic paradoxes, and, finally, the whole picture of modern mathematics.