Lexical Quantors: From Term to Discursive Practice

The paper looks into the emergence of terms and neologisms related to COVID-19 outbreak, which are treated as lexical quantors (LQs). A LQ, as a linguistic nominative unit, reflects the amount of language knowledge (LK) represented in a certain segment of language worldview (LWV). It is represented by a word or a phrase, which constitutes some quantum of information to designate a certain segment of LWV. It has a systemic character and is reflected in the semantics of a linguistic unit. This research is aimed at exploring COVID-19 lexical quantors both in terminological and general vocabulary aspects and it defines the major language concepts for special purposes (LSP). It is characterized by the word formation means expressing all types of LK with the prevalence of a denotative special meaning. General COVID-19 lexical units employ all word formation means to render both denotative and connotative components of LQs meanings revealing also social, cultural, and axiological aspects of LK. The boundary between COVID-19 terminology and general lexical units is quite blurred when the transition from one layer of vocabulary to another is observed. Word formation is viewed as the process of constructing LQs in terms of aggregated, condensed and modified knowledge means. In conclusion, the informative potential realization of LQ is manifested in various discursive practices, namely: media, politics, and public service announcements (PSA) that embrace both linguistic and socio-cultural characteristics of communication.

Toward Decolonizing Development Education: Study Tours as Embodied, Reflexive, and Mud-up

The relevance of development studies has come under intense scrutiny with increasing calls for development education to decolonize its materials, pedagogies, and discursive practices. This article draws on a short-term study tour to India, where co-building a mud house with a tribal community and local university became a creative, intercultural site, encouraging reflexivity and learning through embodied insights. Such learnings “from” and “with” knowledges negated by Western modernity are in essence decolonial pedagogies, enabling students to critically examine their own preconceived ideas of development, while building skills to meaningfully navigate the contested contemporary field. Study tours, we argue, have immense potential toward decolonizing development education.

Truth and fake news in the classroom: the sense construction and the discoursive ethics in literacy practices

This paper aims to present a proposal of literacy practice, which reflects current and relevant topics such as truth (FOUCAULT, 2014) and the fake news (FONTANA, 2021), from the perspective of discourse ethics (SOUTO MAIOR, 2020). In this proposal, we articulate the reflection on those topics together with the production of a review – a textual genre widely used in the academic sphere. We situate our proposal in the perspective of Applied Linguistics (AL), by focusing on the issue of language as a social practice, which reflects constitutive aspects of society and culture that is crossed by discursive practices built from ideological threads (FABRÍCIO, 2006) and, for this reason, are present in literacy practices. In this proposal we have used the movie called "The invention of lying" (2009), because we could realize this movie as a useful resource that allow subjects to reflect about different aspects which they face in their social context and is related to writing and reading process in the world (LIMA; SOUTO MAIOR, 2020)

Fiction May Confront Theories. Locating Determinism of the Newspeak in G. Orwell’s 1984

The paper focuses on the relationships between theory and practice and the consequences of dislocating theory from practice as they are illustrated through fiction. The case study carried out here concerns an exemplary novel, Ninety Eighty-Four by George Orwell, observing how the literary discourse can display a confrontation between two linguistic models, each resulted from a different theory: “instrumentalism” (Winston Smith) and “determinism” (O’ Brien). Also, the possibility of identifying an Orwellian model as opposed to the Sapir-Whorf and the linguistic models deserves examination. Newspeak is full of problematic aspects: ideology shapes the language by means of “wooden language” (la langue de bois, in Françoise Thom’s terms). Therefore, the historical “regime of relevance” (Galin Tihanov) makes possible a peculiar (use of) theory: an instrument that translates the ideology becomes the very essence of the determinist theory on the language in a totalitarian state. In discussing the practical consequences of literary theory, Stanley Fish points out that they are inexistent, because theory can never be united with practice, as it is actually impossible to separate theory from practice – a similar observation made by Steven Knapp and Walter B. Michaels. Whether consequences are real poses a challenge: following Edward Said’s argument, Steven Mailloux observes that theory can be consequential by rhetorical means: theory does what all discursive practices do and that is that it attempts to persuade its readers (or population in a totalitarian state) to adopt its point of view, its way of seeing texts and the world.

Dealing with sentient surplus: A moral economy of greyhound rehoming

This paper explores greyhound rehoming as a practice through which the sentient surplus of New Zealand's racing industry is dealt with. We bring nature-society geography and moral economy scholarship into productive alignment to ask how and to what effect new forms of value are (re)generated from greyhound bodies and lives that have been cast outside the pale of value as surplus. Accounts offered by both literatures tend not to venture beyond the commodity and are yet to fully engage with the entangled nature of morality and the economy. We seek to address these gaps by mapping the workings of a project that attempts to deal with the moral-economic excess of a capitalist nature(culture). By drawing on interviews with five key rehoming actors and an analysis of industry-affiliated documentary material, we trace the material and discursive practices that are aligned around surplus greyhounds in the interest of making value realisable again. Out of our analysis emerge three configurations through which the bodies and labours of these creatures are brought back into the pale of value: as companions-in-waiting, as undead things, and as transformational figures. While these orientations are contested and the value generated from them unevenly distributed, they see value in this capitalist natureculture be reworked so that accumulation can continue. We argue that sentient surplus is a productive paradox that allows the moral and the political to be brought into a fraught but ultimately productive alignment that obscures the contingencies, asymmetries and grim realities of value creation and distribution in greyhound worlds.

Global Authenticity, Local Authority: Epistemic Power, Discursive Geographies, and the Creation of Civil Society Knowledge Networks

How do networks of civil society organizations spread and contest ideas around the globe? This chapter focuses the ways practitioners within development-focused civil society organizations use spatial discursive practices to label, organize, defend, and undermine the spread and application of ideas. In particular, I look at the way members of civil society organizations defend and promote ideas as authentic and/or authoritative, navigating the need to have their knowledge and practices accepted both by beneficiaries and elite international epistemic communities. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with two multi-sited case studies of civil society organizations, ranging from global foundations in the USA and Switzerland to their national and regional NGO partners in Kenya and Kyrgyzstan. Actors in both of these networks defend a varied array of ideas that underpin their ecological interventions through invocations of local particularity and global expertise. This chapter thus addresses the ways epistemic communities are formed and knowledge is produced and legitimized via discursive geographies and identities.

Iconography and Roman Religion

Roman iconography depicts religious practices, divine figures, mortal worshippers, and beliefs about the gods. Religious imagery reflects the importance of religion in Roman conceptions of the past, the fashioning of self-identity, and discursive practices. Representations of sacred spaces and occasions often emphasize their topographic arrangement within landscapes, giving religious imagery a strong sense of place. Inside sanctuaries, decorative imagery is augmented by iconography that facilitates ritual activity, illustrates cult-specific details, and shapes the experience of visitors. Religious iconography also highlights the contested natures of artifacts as well as the ways images enacted and reacted to social tensions. Although legal experts attempted to categorize the sacrality of images and artifacts, thoughts about an image’s status were mutable and rooted in personal experience and local factors. Many sacred images possessed agentive and talismanic properties, and manifested divine powers and presence.