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Books > Language & Literature > Literary & linguistic reference works > General
How can irregular political situations, which impact the lives of millions, become normalized? Specifically, within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how can 50 years of Israeli control over the Occupied Territories become accepted within Israeli society as a normal, possibly even banal phenomenon? Conversely, how can such a situation be estranged from daily reality, denied any relation to who "we" are? This volume explores these questions through the lens of two central discourses that dominate the Israeli debate regarding the future of the Occupied Territories: 1) Occupation Normalization Discourse, which portrays Israeli control of the territories as a "normal" part of life; 2) Occupation Estrangement Discourse, which portrays this situation as distant from Israeli reality. In addressing these discourses, the authors develop a new methodological tool, Dialectic Discourse Analysis, which examines discourse as a process of perpetual positing and synthesis of oppositions through the discursive construction, differentiation and mediation of self and other. Through this approach, the authors illustrate that these discourses are dialectically constituted in opposition to one another, feeding off one another, each enabling the other to exist. This dynamic has resulted in a fixed discourse, preventing any progress towards a synthesis of oppositions.
Proverbs supposedly contain the wisdom of the common folk--eternal truths to be passed down through the ages. They are short, often humorous, expressions that teach lessons or give practical advice, and they are perhaps the best indicators of attitudes and beliefs of any form of folklore. Not only reflecting culture, proverbs also perpetuate the cultural dictates of the past, including the fears, prejudices, and misconceptions of their predominately male authors. Because they are generalizations, proverbs sometimes impede accurate observation and analysis and stifle original thought. Like many other traditions and cultural practices, proverbs often promote misleading stereotypes of women. This reference book collects more than 800 American proverbs about women and analyzes their significance. The volume begins with introductory chapters that explore the relationship between proverbs and culture and the image of women presented in proverbs. The chapters that follow are devoted to particular categories, such as wives and 6~rriage, mothers and daughters, women as property, and old women and grandmothers. Each chapter includes a brief introductory overview and a listing of proverbs relating to the topic. The proverbs were gathered through an extensive review of journal articles, proverb dictionaries, and other literature. In addition to true proverbs, the volume includes some phrases, sayings, and proverbial comparisons. Not included are expressions that contain words like "mother" or "daughter" but do not really describe women or comment about them. The book then presents a concluding analysis of how American proverbs portray women, an alphabetical index of proverbs, and an extensivebibliography.
This collection of essays and translations reflects the Viennese-born author-translator's Austrian-Jewish heritage as well as representing his broad involvement as a cultural mediator between his native and adopted countries. The essays - on Herzl, Zweig, Kraus, Kafka, Werfel, Waldinger, Csokor, Trakl, and the winegarden songs of Vienna - highlight the great Jewish contribution to Austrian culture, and they are supplemented and illuminated by the short prose of Zweig, Herzl, Beer-Hofmann, Polgar, Buber, and others.
Nantong Chinese is an in-depth account of an interesting and endangered Sinitic language spoken in Nantong, China, in an area in the Northern Yangtze River Delta about 800 square kilometers in size and 105 kilometers northwest of the city of Shanghai. The Chinese language consists of several hundred local varieties known as Sinitic languages or Chinese dialects, each representing a unique linguistic system. This book offers a comprehensive and systematic insight into one such system that is even more complex and more interesting than standard Mandarin. The unique vocalization and other linguistic features of Nantong Chinese make it unintelligible to most Chinese people. All the important linguistic aspects of Nantong Chinese are covered, including its phonetic, lexical, morphological and syntactic subsystems. Nantong Chinese will be of interest to professionals and students in linguistics worldwide.
This volume provides general linguists with new data and analysis on languages spoken in China regarding various aspects of space and quantification, using different approaches. Contributions by researchers from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Europe, the United States and Australia offer insights on aspects of language ranging from phonology and morphology to syntax and semantics, while the approaches vary from formal, historical, areal, typological, and cognitive linguistics to second language acquisition. After separate volumes on space and quantification in languages of China, the studies in this volume combine space and quantification to allow readers a view of the intersection of the two topics. Each article contributes to general linguistic knowledge while discussing a particular aspect of space or quantification in a particular language/dialect, offering new data and analysis from languages that are spoken in the same geographical area, and that belong to various language families that exist and evolve in close contact with one another.
This work contains a comprehensive description of Kwaza, which is an endangered and unclassified indigenous language of Southern Rondonia, Brazil. The Kwaza language, also known in the literature as Koaia, is spoken by around 25 people today. Until recently, our knowledge of Kwaza was based on only three short word lists, from 1938, 1943 and 1984. Like the language, the culture and the history of its speakers are undocumented. The Kwaza people as an ethnic group have been decimated by increasing ecological, physical, social and cultural pressure from Western civilisation since contact in the past century. This is the situation for many indigenous peoples of Rondonia and of the Amazon region in general. Linguists expect that the majority of these peoples will cease to exist as distinct language communities during the coming decades. The present work is intended as a contribution to the documentation and preservation of the languages of the Amazon basin. In this respect, Kwaza has represents an especially urgent case in view of its undetermined classification, the lack of documentation and its endangered status. This work is based on the authors personal fieldwork conducted between 1995 and 2002, and it consists of three parts. Part I contains a thorough description of the phonology and morphosyntax of the language and a concise overview of its social, cultural and historical context. Part II contains a diverse selection of transcribed and translated texts with interlinear morphological analyses. Part III is a dictionary of Kwaza, including many examples and an English-Kwaza register. This complete description is of interest to linguists in general, scholars of South American languages in particular, and anthropologists and historians interested in the Guapore region.
This book studies the Tangwang language, providing the first comprehensive grammar in English of this Chinese variety, with detailed analysis of its phonology, morphology, and syntax. This fills a gap in the literature, as previously only a few articles on this language were available. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach, examining genetic data to determine historical patterns of population migration, as well as linguistic data that focus on the influence of the Dongxiang (Santa) language as a consequence of language contact on the Silk Road. The concluding chapter argues that Tangwang has not yet become a mixed language, and that syntactic borrowing has a stronger impact than lexical borrowing on languages.
This dictionary is the "greatest hits" compilation of more than 100 books, journals, papers, and articles. It contains more than 15,000 key French economic, legal, medical, military, political, sociological, and colloquial terms. It also contains important abbreviations and a short historical outline. One look will convince you of the value of this work
Sixteenth-century Italy witnessed the rebirth of comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy in the pastoral mode. Traditionally, we think of comedy and tragedy as remakes of ancient models, and tragicomedy alone as the invention of the moderns. Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy suggests that all three genres were, in fact, remarkably new, if dramatists' intriguingly sympathetic portrayals of and sustained investment in women as vibrant and dynamic characters of the early modern stage are taken into account. This study examines the role of rhetoric and gender in early modern Italian drama, in itself and in order to explore its complex interrelationship with the rise of women writers and the role women played in Italian culture and society, while at the same time demonstrating just how closely intertwined history, culture, and dramatic writing are. Author Alexandra Coller focuses on the scripted/erudite plays of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, which, she argues, are indispensable for a balanced view of the history of drama and its place within contemporary literary and women's studies. As this book reveals, the ascendancy of comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy in the vernacular seems to have been not only inextricably linked to but also dependent on the rise of women as prominent stage characters and, eventually, as authors in their own right.
This book summarizes the results a three-year longitudinal project on Mandarin development among children of Indonesian mothers, the second largest non-Mandarin speaking immigrant group in Taiwan. These children were acquiring their first language while interacting primarily with a non-native learner of the language. The book discusses phonological, lexical and syntactic development to provide a better understanding of the language development of the children of immigrants and has important implications for language education policy and language acquisition theories.
Georgian: A Comprehensive Grammar constitutes a complete reference work addressing all major elements of Modern Georgian grammar and usage. It provides a systematic and accessible description of the language's phonology, orthography, morphology, and syntax. The focus is on contemporary spoken and written usage, with attention devoted throughout to differences of register and genre. Points are illustrated with examples drawn from a range of authentic written and recorded sources such as press, radio, and television. The grammar is designed for a wide readership including students of Georgian, particularly at the intermediate and advanced levels, as well as scholars of Georgian and theoretical linguistics.
This book decodes commercial news discourses from the perspective of cognitive semantics. It attaches considerable importance to the bodily experientialism and linguistic embodiment advocated in discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics and explores the complex yet thought-provoking correlation between overt language and covert cognition by focusing on contrastive analyses of metaphors, image schemas, and stance markers in texts. On the basis of the analyses, the author discusses the linguistic applications, lexical devices and personal experiences, along with their embodied mechanisms, revealing the linguistic strategies, embodied cognitive linguistic actions and constructive thoughts used in media discourses on product promotion, human resources deployment, and commodity problem resolution. In turn, this sheds light on how linguistic selections and cognitive mechanisms are used in composing media news and on how public cognition on certain social and business issues might be framed. The combination of cognitive semantics and commercial discourse analysis offers comprehensive and rewarding insights into the cross-cultural research of both cognitive actions and linguistic behavior reflected in news reports and highlights the correlation between the use of wording and cognitive construction in discourses, which broadens the scope of discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Further, the use of analytical measures and the effective integration of discourse analysis and cognitive semantics lend the book additional analytical authenticity, providing an empirical foundation for cross-cultural communication studies.
Both as an intermediary to Western culture and as a cultural force in itself, Japan had a significant impact on the development of modern Chinese literature. However, for the most part, the links of this Sino-Japanese literary relationship has only just begun to receive scholarly attention, making this book's exploration of Japan's role in shaping Chinese cultural modernity an important addition to the literature. By comparing and contrasting what appear to be similar narrative modes between the shishosetsu and work coming out of the Creation Society, Keaveney explores how Chinese writers both appropriated and reconceptualized this Japanese approach. By letting their work retain both self-referentiality and articulations of social concerns, the Chinese authors were able to make the form far more political than it ever was in the hands of Japanese writers.
This work is full of things better left unsaid: hackneyed phrases, idioms battered into senselessness, infuriating Gallicisms, once-familiar quotations and tags from the ancient classics. It makes a formidable list, amplified as it is with definitions, sources, and indications of the cliches, venerability in every case.
This book explores current thinking about the role of corrective feedback in language learning and teaching. Corrective feedback is a topic that is of relevance to both theories of second language learning and language pedagogy. Younghee Sheen, an Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at the American University in Washington D.C., offers a new perspective by reviewing a wide body of research on both oral and written corrective feedback and its contribution to second language acquisition. She also reports the results of her own study, pointing to the need to examine how individual factors such as anxiety and language aptitude mediate learners' ability to benefit from the oral and written feedback they receive. This book is an important resource for students and scholars of applied linguistics and second language acquisition. It will also be of interest to language teachers and teacher educators wanting to deepen their understanding of error correction strategies in the classroom.
Natural languages - idioms such as English and Cantonese, Zulu and Amharic, Basque and Nicaraguan Sign Language - allow their speakers to convey meaning and transmit meaning to one another. But what is meaning exactly? What is this thing that words convey and speakers communicate? Few questions are as elusive as this. Yet, few features are as essential to who we are and what we do as human beings as the capacity to convey meaning through language. In this book, Gaetano Fiorin and Denis Delfitto disclose a notion of linguistic meaning that is structured around three distinct, yet interconnected dimensions: a linguistic dimension, relating meaning to the linguistic forms that convey it; a material dimension, relating meaning to the material and social conditions of its environment; and a psychological dimension, relating meaning to the cognitive lives of its users. By paying special attention to the puzzle surrounding first-person reference - the way speakers exploit language to refer to themselves - and by capitalizing on a number of recent findings in the cognitive sciences, Fiorin and Delfitto develop the original hypothesis that meaningful language shares the same underlying logical and metaphysical structure of sense perception, effectively acting as a system of classification and discrimination at the interface between cognitive agents and their ecologies.
This edited book explores critical issues relating to Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI), setting out their similarities and differences to demystify the terms and their implications for classroom practice. The authors show how CLIL and EMI practices are carried out in different institutional contexts and demonstrate how both approaches can benefit language and content acquisition. This book is addressed to second/foreign language teaching staff involved in teaching in English at primary education, secondary education, and higher education levels.
Modern Korean breaks new ground in the field of Korean studies by providing students at last with an intermediate-level language text. The volume emphasizes the development of reading proficiency, but the exercises reinforce skills learned through conversation practice. They use a communicative approach emphasizing student-student and student-teacher interactions in real-life scenarios. Twenty-four lessons are divided into two groups of twelve lessons each. A single lesson consists of a main text, written in expository or descriptive prose that often incorporates a conversational style; a dialogue; a discussion of new word usage and structural patterns; substitution and grammar drills; exercises; and a vocabulary list. The second half of the book introduces Chinese characters found in each lesson. Modern Korean may be used for classroom instruction or self-study. Main text topics cover a wide range of subjects including Korean history, geography, holidays, literature, customs, and people, allowing students to develop a better understanding of Korean society and culture while improving their language skills.
21st Century education is at the cross-roads. It can continue to be defined by a narrow scope, benefiting the median student who can muster moments of brilliance assisted by the technology he or she so easily wields, or it can salvage what was deemed noble by tradition and merge them with the modernistic tools and educational innovations of the new century. Education has reached a point where its students and parents have either seen the limitations of the system and accepted them, or have forged some external responses to them. These retorts can be seen in the following manifestations: the rise of after- school athletics, where sports are now played that have been deemed too aggressive for school, the explosion of tutoring centres who are capitalizing on the fact that process has been a small part of the curriculum and rudimentary skills are overshadowed by what can be best described as educational pulp, and finally, the growth of the independent/private schools and home schooling, where total abdication from public systems has come to rest. Comic books, robotics, industrial arts, instrumental music, cooking, camping, fine art, and other genuine experiential initiatives need to be examined by today's schools. The empty promises of video games and their ethereal claim to genuine experience has produced a significant student body that is resigned to mediocrity, and virtual encounters that provide neither the authentic feeling of victory, nor the reviled sting of true defeat. Students are looking for the genuine, in their teachers, lessons, and activities. 21st Century education by comic book or by hook will rest in the power of professional dynamism and the authentic teaching of practice, process, and prolonged proficiency.
This book presents a theory of autistic subjectivity from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. Dr. Brenner describes autism as a singular mode of being that is fundamentally linked to one's identity and basic practices of existence, offering a rigorous alternative to treating autism as a mental or physical disorder. Drawing on Freud and Lacan's psychoanalytic understanding of the subject, Brenner outlines the unique features of the autistic subjective structure and provides a comprehensive synthesis of contemporary work on the psychoanalysis of autism. The book examines research by theorists including Jean-Claude Maleval, Eric Laurent, Rosine and Robert Lefort that has been largely unavailable to Anglophone audiences until now. In this book autism is posited to be a singular subjective structure not reducible to neurosis or psychosis. In accordance with the Lacanian approach, autism is examined with detailed attention to the subject's use of language, culminating in Brenner's "autistic linguistic spectrum." A compelling read for students and scholars of psychoanalysis and autism researchers and clinicians. |
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