Blurring the Boundaries between Real Worlds, Discourse Worlds and Text Worlds

Blurring the Boundaries between Real Worlds, Discourse Worlds and Text WorldsWhat do the article title ‘Black Widow Breaks Up With Kylo Ren’ and a Twitter message saying ‘The scene in The Departed where Mark Wahlberg shoots Matt Damon is the blueprint for how to handle corrupt cops’ have in common? Clearly, they both combine references to actors and movies, but do they combine them through the same cognitive technique(s)? This paper starts by addressing the question of how these two instances of reference differ. The line of argumentation that is supported suggests that a world-building theory needs to be employed in order to understand the difference. In doing this, the paper aims and contributes to the theoretical advancement of world-building approaches by arguing for the introduction of the concept of ‘Real Worlds’ in research on Text Worlds and Discourse Worlds. Data set sample analyses employing the Real World concept are included to verify the main theoretical premise. The analyzed texts cover traditional genres such as political speeches as well as modern-day, boundary-blurring genres such as Twitter messages. Zacieranie granic między światem rzeczywistym, światem dyskursu i światem tekstu Co mają wspólnego artykuł zatytułowany Czarna wdowa zrywa z Kylo Renem i wiadomość na Twitterze o treści „Scena w The Departed, w której Mark Wahlberg strzela do Matta Damona, jest schematem postępowania ze skorumpowanymi gliniarzami”? Oczywiście oba łączą odniesienia do aktorów i filmów, ale czy łączą je za pomocą tych samych technik poznawczych? Artykuł rozpoczyna się od odpowiedzi na pytanie, czym różnią się te dwa przypadki odniesienia. Wynikiem zaprezentowanej argumentacji jest sugestia, aby w celu zrozumienia różnicy między nimi wyjść od teorii tworzenia światów. Opowiedzenie się za wykorzystaniem koncepcji „świata rzeczywistego” w badaniach nad światem tekstu i światem dyskursu ma na celu rozwój i wzmocnienie teorii tworzenia światów. W weryfikacji podstawowej przesłanki teoretycznej w artykule uwzględniono wyniki analizy próbek ze zbioru danych, w których wykorzystano koncepcję „świata rzeczywistego”. Analizie poddano zarówno teksty reprezentujące tradycyjne gatunki, takie jak przemówienia polityczne, jak również teksty, w których dochodzi do zacierania granic międzygatunkowych, na przykład wiadomości w serwisie społecznościowym Twitter.

A Brief Discussion on the Causes and Countermeasures of College Students' Psychological Confusion and Mental Health Problems

College period is one of the most critical periods of one person’s life for it is an important period of establishing world concept, outlook on life and values. Various challenges and pressures have had a great impact on the mental health of college students. In that case, college students’ psychological confusion and mental health problems occur frequently and the overall condition of college students’ psychological problems is worrying. The mental health of college students has also attracted the attention of colleges and the society. Besides, the mental health education courses have been adopted to guide college students. This article aims to analyze the causes of college students’ psychological confusion and mental health problems and also the obstacles or difficulties in solving them from the perspective of college students' cultivation of positive psychological quality and mental health education. And corresponding solutions from both the outside and personal perspectives.

Serb unity talk will invite hostility from neighbours

Significance The new holiday is part of wider efforts by Serbia's leadership to encourage unity among Serbs in the region and promote the idea of a 'Serbian World' concept, where the precise meaning is kept vague. Impacts References to President Vucic as leader of a wider Serb community, not just Serbia, will be used as he seeks re-election. The 'Serbian World' provides a specific idea against which other national leaders can build counter-narratives. The region will be pulled in different directions between nationalist rhetoric and cooperative projects such as the Open Balkans Initiative.

“Marvel vs. World”

Following Eric Hayot’s argument that modernity is a theory of the world as the “universal,” this paper traces the “world concept” in Marvel Comics industry (MC) and its synergy with the film industry of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Speaking from the field of World Literature Studies, I show how superhero comics activate the “world concept” through the global dissemination of the infinitely stretchable Marvel Universe. My argument is that by operating in terms of a universe with moldable diegetic rules, the popular culture of MC and MCU does not merely reflect the current state of the world concept, but also affects its evolution and its spread. The universality of the modern worldview has come to be less concerned with the realist effect and more with increasing all-inclusiveness and infinite stretchability. The increased plasticity of the world concept puts a great pressure on world literary ecologies and increasingly expands and shapes what Beecroft called global literary ecology. What Marvel Comics has done in recent decades, especially through the interplay with the film industry, is to show how the expansion of the world concept entails that however large we imagine the world to be, it is always already too small.

Beyond the shrinking world: dementia, localisation and neighbourhood

‘Dementia-friendly communities’ herald a shift toward the neighbourhood as a locus for the care and support of people with dementia, sparking growing interest in the geographies of dementia care and raising questions over the shifting spatial and social experience of the condition. Existing research claims that many people with dementia experience a ‘shrinking world’ whereby the boundaries to their social and physical worlds gradually constrict over time, leading to a loss of control and independence. This paper reports a five-year, international study that investigated the neighbourhood experience of people with dementia and those who care for and support them. We interrogate the notion of a shrinking world and in so doing highlight an absence of attention paid to the agency and actions of people with dementia themselves. The paper draws together a socio-relational and embodied-material approach to question the adequacy of the shrinking world concept as an explanatory framework and to challenge reliance within policy and practice upon notions of place as fixed or stable. We argue instead for the importance of foregrounding ‘lived place’ and attending to social practices and the networks in which such practices evolve. Our findings have implications for policy and practice, emphasising the need to bolster the agency of people living with dementia as a route to fostering accessible and inclusive neighbourhoods.

«RussianWorld» as a Political Technology and Tool of Aggression: New Analytical Structure (Yakubova L., Golovko V., Primachenko J. Russian peace in Donbass аnd in Crimea: Historical Origins, Political Technology, Instrument of Aggression: (Analytical Report.) – Kyiv, 2018. – 227 p.)

The article reviews a collective monograph of the scholars of the Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine that comprehensively clarifies the historical origins of the concept of «Russian world», as well as its application as a political technology and tool of aggression. The study is characterized by a thorough and diverse source base. The authors presented a multifaceted analysis of the theory and practice of the «Russian world» concept, which should be the basis for the deconstruction of one of the most destructive ideologies of our time.

Stereotyped Zoonyms in Rusin Phraseology

The article regards stereotypes for presenting zoonyms in Rusin phraseology in the psycho-cognitive aspect of ethnic mentality. The zoonymic metaphors are considered to be double-natured: originally, the animal character epitomizes human features, and then, the human is seen through animalist characteristics. The ability to metaphorically nominate a human in the phraseological world concept is mostly revealed in the names of domestic animals. Stereotyped zoonyms in Rusin phraseology are based on the anthropomorphic analogy: zoonyms are used to analyze a person’s psycho-emotional and physiological states and characteristics. Zoonyms are quite frequent in paradoxes in which folk humor can be easily traced: there they creatively trigger the instances of irony as a basis for generating some witticisms. Zoomorphic metaphors are semantically dominated by lowered emotive estimating features being the most powerful expressive means to lower the addressee’s status. Negatively charged zoomorphic nomination is mainly connected with features of character, behavior, intellect, physique, social status, and psychology, which compare a person with a beast. Zoonyms are used to denote the relations of space, time, measure, and quantity. Stereotypically related phraseology units with zoonym components had been shaped in the Rusin culture through naïve beliefs, traditions and myths. As evaluating stereotypes, zoonyms are found in curses or biddings of grief, jokingly uttered. Presented in linguistically arranged texts, zoonymic stereotypes appear to reveal strong connections between language, culture and ethnic entity, as well as main features of Rusin mentality.

Interactions on Facebook and Twitter: A Communicative Action Perspective

The study examines interactions on Facebook and Twitter from a communicative action perspective. The objectives of this study are to: identify the nature of action(s) by interlocutors on Facebook and Twitter and examine the world(s) portrayed by these interlocutors. The study adopts Habermas’ theory of communicative action to study the nature of actions and the three-world concept that exist among users of Facebook and Twitter. Insights from interpersonal pragmatics and politeness were also found useful in the analysis of data. A total number of 275 messages were used comprising five posts from Facebook with randomly selected 165 comments and three tweets with randomly selected 102 comments. The research observes that most participants on Facebook and Twitter acted or commented strategically in the sense that the stance they took were motivated by reasons and facts and not merely opinions or emotions. The findings also reveal that many interactants showed that they operate in the objective world by abiding by the social norms and facts.

KOMI-PERMYAK LEXIS OF THE THEMATIC GROUP “FLORA” FROM AN ETHNOLINGUISTIC POINT OF VIEW (on the material of modern nicknames)

The article is dedicated to the lexis of the thematic group "Flora" that motivated the modern nicknames of the Komi-Permyaks living in the Perm region. Within the framework of ethnolingustics, thematic (ideographic) spheres of secondary meanings are identified in the group’s vocabulary. It is concluded that floristic lexicon is used to sign the existential, physical, psychoemotional and social characteristics of a person. Within these spheres more specific groups of cultural-semantic connotations are distinguished. The person is characterized from the following positions: 1) existance: the man is a living being, it is an element of a certain world concept; 2) physical and physiological characteristics: the person has primarily physical traits such as height, physique, the shape of the body and its parts. There are also exterior traits including the features of facial expressions, dominant color in appearance and the general aesthetic properties of a person's appearance. In addition, the person’s sexual orientation and health status are taken into consideration. 3) psycho-emotional characteristics: as a willing being, the person shows preferences, primarily for food, and dependence on some bad habits; as an emotional being, the person shows fear; 4) socially significant features: first of all, the human participation in public life is essential (in our case, the ability to be a participant in certain events or the tendency to asocial behavior), features of speech behavior, the presence of kin (family) relationships and also ethnoterritorial, ethnic identity and ethnicity. There is a contradiction between the fact that the vocabulary of flora has linguistic and cultural concerns, and the fact that such vocabulary is rarely applied creating nicknames. It is concluded that nicknames are a significant source of ethnocultural information about the nominators and the bearers of such names.

Compradors, Neo-colonialism, and Transnational Class Struggle: PRC relations with Algeria and India, 1953–1965

This study of China's relations with Algeria and India shows that the Mao-era emphasis on the transnational function of class made it fundamentally sceptical of the privileged status of the nation-state and transformed Beijing's posture towards the Third World in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Beijing's sense of a growing matrix of transnational class forces damaged relations with India, a key Third World moderate, and spurred closer ties with non-state, revolutionary movements like the Algerian Front Libération Nationale (FLN). Thus Beijing retreated from the post-Korean War phase of moderate diplomacy during which it had eschewed support for revolution abroad under the rhetoric of the ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’. This article relates Beijing's class analysis of the growing challenges in its relations with India to the arc of interactions between the communist Chinese, the FLN revolutionaries, and the newly post-colonial Algeria. It demonstrates that because of Beijing's understanding of how the domestic class category ‘comprador’ facilitated ‘neo-colonialism’ (an emerging Third World concept), China's anti-imperialism must be understood through its perception of the transnational function of class forces. This understanding of the post-colonial dilemma—how far to maintain or sever ties with the West, which grew partly from Chinese perceptions of Indian politics—explains the curious difficulty that Beijing faced in maintaining cooperative relations with many newly independent nations like Algeria. The emphasis on transnational class struggle also provides an interpretation of Beijing's foreign policy which is intimately linked to domestic politics and affirms the contribution of ideology to the Sino-Soviet split.