Academic literature on the topic 'Linguistic portrayal'

Abstract Power, conforming to particular political groups of the society, is exercised on the masses by making them believe in the legitimacy of that dominance. This association enables the groups to exercise their power and promulgate their ideologies through their discourse as well. One illustration of this discourse appears in the form of political manifestos. Utilizing the tool of language, the political actors (as agents of political parties) set agendas, pertinent topics and position their stance in these manifestos. Framed under critical discourse analysis, the current study attempts to investigate this act of ‘legitimation’ promulgated by Chilton (2004) and the strategies of Authority Legitimation, devised by Van Leeuwen (2008). The article illustrates how the power-holders utilize their linguistic resources to authorize their stance, idea, and action. The study helps explicating the relation between power, ideology and language and promulgates consciousness regarding the reality constructed by humans, as social and political actors.

AbstractThe study starts with the definition of local, translocal, and global linguistic context in the digital space. Facebook as a social media platform provides opportunities for everyday digital literacy practices such as code play. Code play allows mixing codes and repertoires usually with a humorous reference. We argue that creative interaction among languages creates the methodological need for a translingual approach besides the traditional code-switching theory to explain online linguistic phenomena. Adopting a netnographic approach, this paper presents two participants’ linguistic history, online linguistic practices, and perceptions of their own digital literacy, exploring their portrayal of (multi)linguistic identity which has local, translocal, and global resonance. The paper exploits possibilities of code play to accomplish communicative goals through code-switching and translingualism with a linguistically diverse audience.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is well-acclaimed for its almost non-intrusive portrayal of characters’ state of mind. Many studies approach it from biographical, socio-historical, philosophical, and other non-linguistic perspectives, and most linguistic investigations deal with illustrative examples of a single linguistic device in this novel. Few are concerned with the presence of particular linguistic patterns that explain how the intricate flow of thought is successfully depicted. This paper offers a detailed elaboration on the criteria for categorizing thought presentation in Leech& Short’s model and distinguishes cases of ambiguity. A case study of Mrs. Dalloway’s flower purchase scene illustrates how different types of thought presentation along with different reporting clauses are used to convey the variation in the character’s mental state and the negotiation between her inner voice and the outside world.

This article explores Stowe's use of dialect in her controversial novel. Though some critics have mentioned the 'colorful language' of Stowe's characters, most debates about Uncle Tom's Cabin have not centered on the dialect representation in the speech of her characters. This article provides an objective analysis of Stowe's use of literary dialect in the speech of three characters (Aunt Chloe, George and Mr Haley) using the methods of quantitative linguistics. The frequency of occurrence of linguistic features and the distribution of non-standard features among Stowe's characters demonstrates that Stowe was, in several respects, remarkably accurate, both linguistically and historically. Stowe's characters' dialects illustrate an interesting period in the history of American dialect formation. Recent studies in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) and the investigation of its origins have suggested a close relationship between AAVE and Southern White Vernacular English (SWVE) as a result of the sociohistorical context in which AAVE began. This relationship is reflected in the similarities between the speech of Aunt Chloe and Mr Haley and shows Stowe's portrayal of these dialects to be historically accurate. Stowe's linguistic accuracy is evidenced by the fact that each character's use of linguistic features mirrors that of actual speakers, in terms of specific dialect features and their frequency of use, and her distribution of features across social variables matches that found in sociolinguistic research.

This paper investigates English language textbooks from the point of view of cultural development in pedagogical text. The focus of present study was to analyze contrasting and shared perceptions of congenital Islamic culture in pedagogical text broadly written in English language textbooks formed by Punjab Textbook Board (PTB) at Elementary level i.e. 6th, 7th, and 8th grade classes. Appropriate implications of linguistic modality make possible to build ideological viewpoint related to cultural development in political, social, institutional and media discourse, so, using critical approach with the combination of CDA framework by Fairclough and SFG by Halliday. This study examines the said institutional discourse from different perspectives to clue that how fundamental Islamic philosophy is sharply described under different circumstances. The study is also an exposure of authors’ viewpoint related to portrayal of Islamic culture and needs of cultural sensitivity in such a text related to young learners’ education. In this way, this paper reveals the straightforward instances related to implicit portrayal of Islamic ideology with the help of numerous modality indicators. It has been observed that language textbooks are not only an authentic source of language learning but also a reliable system of cultural development. Findings of this paper expose that writers, policy makers and publishers of PTB want to portray Islamic ideology intentionally within the pedagogical text of English language textbooks at elementary level, so, the findings of this paper would be helpful for learners, educationists, course designers, institutions and language teachers. Keywords: Modality, Textbooks, Ideology, Discourse

This article analyzes the portrayals of Spanish in The Squatter and the Don (1885), a novel written in English by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, a Baja Californian who immigrated to Alta California at the time of its annexation to the USA in 1848 and became the first Hispanic American woman writer. Her novel had an ideological purpose, namely, to denounce the land dispossession of the Californios — i.e. Hispanic settlers in California during the Spanish-Mexican period — and to propose an alliance between the Anglo and Hispanic elites. It also had a financial purpose, since writing was for Ruiz de Burton one of many ways in which she attempted to achieve financial prosperity. The representation of language was thus dictated not just by linguistic or aesthetic considerations, but also by the author's interpretation of the conditions prevalent in late 19th-century California, where Spanish had become subordinate to English. Ruiz de Burton's positive attitude towards bilingualism is revealed in her portrayal of protagonists as proficient in both languages. Yet, her awareness of the biases and limitations of her intended Anglo readership is also evident in the fact that Spanish use in the novel is sporadic and restricted. Comparison of her literary and non-literary code mixing highlights some consistent differences between both text types providing additional evidence of Ruiz de Burton's purposeful manipulation of linguistic codes in her artistic production.

The literature on J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter is prolific. People have written on various topics dealing with issues such as translation, etymology and diverse areas concerning the language. In this essay, I examine whether linguistic features such as reporting verbs, adverbs of manner and adjectives contribute to the depiction of heroic and villainous characters. Before conducting this research, my assumptions were that there would be a great difference in the value of the words depending on the character they were associated with. I wanted to see if the heroic characters used verbs and adverbs with positive connotations, and the villainous characters verbs and adverbs with negative connotations. I also wanted to know if the adjectives describing the characters could, in themselves, clearly indicate whether a character was a hero or a villain.

The results of my research suggested that the choice of particular verbs and adverbs contributed only indirectly to the depiction of the characters. Without context, it was not possible to know if the character was a hero or a villain simply by identifying the verbs and adverbs used to describe their speech. By contrast, the choice of particular adjectives did appear to indicate more clearly whether a character was hero or villain. Finally, the results of my research indicated that context, rather than the use of particular linguistic features was often the most important factor in contributing to the portrayal of characters in the novel.

The corona virus has spread steadily and led to consequences on a larger scale than anyone could have imagined, and it is not at all surprising that we want to find someone to hold responsible. Who is to blame for this terrible situation that we have to live through?  By taking an ecolinguistic approach, primarily inspired by Arran Stibbe (2021), this study explores how human and non-human animals are being blamed for the corona crisis in a corpus based on 15 news articles. To demonstrate blame through linguistic portrayal, the data are processed through four different lenses: facticity, appraisal, erasure and salience. The study finds that both human and non-human animals in general are portrayed as being to blame for the corona crisis. However, bats are most frequently portrayed as the responsible entity and human blame is often downplayed by linguistic erasure. Ecolinguistics can convey how language establishes asymmetries between groups and uncover how those asymmetries have an effect upon a broader social context. With this in mind, the way the texts blame entities for the corona crisis has real-life consequences. Firstly, non-human animals risk being killed to reduce the spread of the virus based on shallow arguments and groundless evaluations. Secondly, human blame risks not being evaluated properly and therefore there is a risk that harmful human behaviour can continue.

As climate change becomes more destructive to our planet, some governments have taken action towards a more sustainable future. One being the UK, where a Climate Emergency was declared in 2019, which affects public corporations and news outlets. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how do news reports portray natural disasters from an eco-linguistic perspective. This qualitative study focuses on analysing data regarding the 2019-2020 wildfires in Australia through the linguistic choices made in the texts by incorporating a combination of corpus linguistics, eco-linguistics and media discourse. The corpus under investigation consists of 41,055 words collected from 4 different UK-based news outlets. In order to analyse the data, I chose three search words (fire, climate and animal) to further investigate by using both corpus- and eco-linguistics. The results showcase a consistent pattern within the selected search words: fire and climate are portrayed as threats whereas animals are portrayed as victims. Yet, the most remarkable finding is regarding climate, as it is viewed as a cause rather than an effect caused by human actions. This study is a step towards a better understanding of climate change in news reporting; providing an insight on what the discourse is lacking but should be included.

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2013.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation reports on a study that straddles the applied linguistic fields of discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis and a sociolinguistic field recently referred to as “queer linguistics”. The study investigated the linguistic construction of gay mobilisation in South African media discourses across a period of almost 30 years. It aimed to identify characteristics of the Discourse that topicalised the gay liberation movement, considering specifically the linguistic means used in articulating on the one hand the need and the right to gay liberation, and on the other hand the public opposition to acknowledging gay rights. It invoked a social theory identified as ‘framing theory’ in analysing the different kinds of views, attitudes, social positions and arguments motivating for or agitating against the institution and protection of gay rights in post-apartheid South Africa. The project takes Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), particularly its applications in considering features and functions of media discourses, as its primary theoretical framework. First, following the insistence of the Discourse-historical approach put forward by Wodak (1990), it gives an overview of the social and historical context against which the recognition of gay rights in South Africa developed. It follows the analytic methodology suggested by van Dijk (1985) in considering issues of ‘language and power’, and the ways in which the access of elites to media attention is drawn on to support and give credence to particular ideologies. Supplementary to the application of CDA methods, an analytic approach from the fields of Social Movement Theory and Collective Action Framing is introduced to make sense of the discursive strategies implemented in the Discourse thematically tied to the South African gay liberation movement, particularly from the early 1980s up to 2006. This period was marked by the movement’s pursuit of social mobilization. Attention went to the ways in which arguments for and against gay rights were instantiated in the media using a variety of different frames. Such analysis could disclose the extent to which the "anti-apartheid" master frame was utilised by actors of the gay liberation movement. Based on their circulation demographics, two local South African weekly newspapers, City Press and Mail & Guardian, were screened in order to identify articles and letters to the editor relevant to the gay liberation discourse. The full complement of published items topicalising homosexuality directly and indirectly were collected as two corpora in order to assess the ways in which they contributed to public discourses of gay liberation. Two analytic exercises were done: first, the content of the full data-set was “tagged” and categorised according to the textual nature of the newspaper item, and the kinds of frames used in its presentation; second, a number of articles and letters were selected from the corpora for detailed analysis that would illustrate the use of the various strategies and frames found to characterise the Discourse. The first more quantitative analysis provided an overview of patterns, trends and editorial practices typically used in the media representations. The second more qualitative analysis provided insight into the finer details of media presention of ideas aimed at affecting the knowledge and attitudes of the intended and imagined readers. The findings of these analyses were presented in terms of quantifiable results as well as detailed descriptions. In broad strokes, the quantifiable findings showed that the Mail & Guardian corpus was significantly more outspoken in advocating for gay rights than the City Press corpus, and that both publications frequently framed homosexuality in terms of “tolerance”, “religion” and “rights”. The quantifiable findings also showed that in their discourses of gay tolerance and gay rights, both the City Press and the Mail & Guardian made significant use of frames typically and widely used by the media in the discourse of political change at the time. The detailed analyses investigated the textual reproduction of the authors’ ideologies, drawing attention to their regular reliance on certain types of arguments used for and against gay rights in the selected newspapers.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie proefskrif lewer verslag oor ‘n studie wat die toegepaste taalwetenskapterreine van diskoersanalise en kritiese diskoersanalise asook ‘n sosiolinguistiese terrein wat sedert onlangs “queer-taalwetenskap” genoem word, betrek. In die studie word daar ondersoek ingestel na die linguistiese konstruksie van gaymobilisering in Suid-Afrikaanse mediadiskoerse wat oor ‘n tydperk van bykans 30 jaar strek. Die doel van die studie was om eienskappe van die Diskoers wat die gaybevrydingsbeweging topikaliseer te identifiseer, met inagname van spesifiek die taalkundige middele gebruik tydens die artikulering van die behoefte aan en die reg tot gaybevryding aan die een kant en die openbare weerstand teen die erkenning van gayregte aan die ander kant. Die analises van die verskillende standpunte, gesindhede, sosiale posisies en argumente ten gunste van of teen die instelling en beskerming van gayregte in post-apartheid Suid-Afrika beroep hulself op ‘n sosiale teorie wat as “ramingsteorie” (Engels: framing theory) geïdentifiseer is. Die projek neem kritiese diskoersanalise as hoof teoretiese raamwerk aan, veral kritiese diskoersanalise se toepassings in die oorweging van kenmerke en funksies van mediadiskoerse. Eerstens, deur die aandrang van die Diskoers-historiese benadering voorgestel deur Wodak (1990) te volg, word daar ‘n oorsig oor die sosiale en historiese konteks gegee waarin die erkenning van gayregte in Suid-Afrika ontwikkel het. Die analitiese metodologie voorgestel deur van Dijk (1985) word gebruik tydens die oorweging van kwessies rakende “taal en mag” asook wyses waarop sogenaamde “elites” se toegang tot media-aandag betrek word om geloofwaardigheid aan bepaalde ideologieë te verleen. Aanvullend tot die toepassing van kritiese diskoersanalise-metodes word ‘n analitiese benadering uit die terreine van Sosiale Bewegingsteorie en Kollektiewe Ramingsteorie betrek om sin te maak uit die diskursiewe strategieë wat (spesifiek van die vroeë 1980s tot 2006) geïmplementeer is in die Diskoers wat tematies aan die Suid-Afrikaanse gaybevrydingsbeweging verbind is. Hierdie tydperk is gekenmerk deur die beweging se nastrewing van sosiale mobilisering. Aandag is verleen aan die wyses waarop argumente ten guste van en teen gayregte geïnstansieer is in die media deur gebruik te maak van ‘n verskeidenheid rame. Só ‘n analise kan die mate waarin die “anti-apartheid” meesterraam deur spelers in die gaybevrydingsbeweging gebruik is, onthul. Gebaseer op hul oplaagdemografie is bydraes in twee Suid-Afrikaanse weeklikse koerante, City Press en Mail & Guardian gesif om artikels en briewe aan die redakteur relevant tot die gaybevrydingsdiskoers te identifiseer. Die vol getal gepubliseerde items wat homoseksualiteit direk en/of indirek topikaliseer, is as twee korpusse versamel om sodoende die wyses te ondersoek waarop hulle bydra tot openbare diskoerse van gaybevryding. Twee analitiese oefeninge is uitgevoer: eerstens is die inhoud van die volledige datastel geëtiketteer en gekategoriseer op grond van die teks-aard van die koerantitem en die tipe rame wat in die item se aanbieding gebruik is; tweedens is ‘n aantal artikels en briewe uit die korpusse geselekteer vir gedetailleerde analise wat die gebruik van verskeie strategieë en rame sou illustreer wat bevind is om kenmerkend van die Diskoers te wees. Die eerste, meer kwantitatiewe analise het ‘n oorsig gegee oor patrone, tendense en redaksionele praktyke wat tipies in die mediavoorstellings gebruik is. Die tweede, meer kwalitatiewe analise het insig gegee in die fyner besonderhede van mediavoorstelling van idees wat daarop gemik is om die kennis en gesindhede van die bedoelde en denkbeeldige lesers te affekteer. Die bevindinge van hierdie analises is in terme van kwantifiseerbare resultate asook gedetailleerde beskrywings aangebied. In breë trekke het die kwantifiseerbare bevindinge daarop gedui dat die Mail & Guardian-korpus beduidend meer uitgesproke as die City Press-korpus was in die bepleiting van gayregte, en dat beide koerante gereeld homoseksualiteit in terme van “toleransie”, “godsdiens” en “regte” geraam het. Die kwantifiseerbare bevindinge het ook aangetoon dat beide City Press en Mail & Guardian beduidend van rame gebruik gemaak het wat tipies en wyd in daardie stadium deur die media gebruik is in die diskoers van politieke verandering. Die gedetailleerde analises het ondersoek ingestel na die tekstuele reproduksie van die skrywers se ideologieë, en spesifiek die aandag gevestig op hul gereelde staatmaking op sekere tipes argumente wat in die geselekteerde koerante vir en teen gayregte gebruik is.

In recent years localisation has risen on the agenda in the humanitarian sector. It is seen to have great deal of benefits including being more cost efficient, more sensitive to culture and context and offers quicker responses. Opponents to this claim that it is too difficult to know whichactors can be trusted and that there is a risk that they do not comply with the humanitarian principles. In addition to this, concerned voices have risen that criticise the use of the term ‘local’. It lacks a common definition and is often used without a discussion of who it refers to. Changing this is of vital importance if the humanitarian sector wants to work against the power imbalances that remain from colonialism. Critical localism is a theory that criticises this arbitrary use of ‘local’ and sets out a framework for a variety of factors that should be taken into consideration when discussing and defining the ‘local’. This thesis is a case study conducted through a theoretical thematic analysis thatinvestigates if the localisation initiative Local to Global Protection complies with the guidelines of critical localism, with an additional focus on Eurocentric presence in academic work. The results from this study can be used to shed light on the problem with an arbitrary portrayal of ‘local’ while also offering real examples from the humanitarian field on how to avoid it. The findings showed that the initiative complied with the guidelines to a large degree. Its strongest area was the way ‘locals’ were presented from their own point of view instead of letting large international actors present their view of them. The part that showed most room for improvement was the lack of representation of the authors own bias in the portrayal of the ‘local’.

This study seeks to answer the following research questions: which stereotypical linguistic profile characteristics and/or typical linguistic profile characteristics, if any, can be found in the old film and the new film respectively? Does the time difference between the films seem to have affected the female characters’ language use, if so in what way? Works by Lakoff (2004), Coates (2004) and Holmes (2013) are used to create a profile for stereotypical female speech and a profile for typical female speech. These profiles are applied to the transcripts of two Disney Princess films; one old film representing the classical Disney Princess films, and one new film representing the modern Disney Princess films. In order to suit this study all non-conversational utterances such as singing, and non-human utterances, are removed from the transcripts. The features are counted and then converted to frequencies of 1 feature per 100 words, in order to account for the differences in amount of words uttered. The results show that stereotypical features as well as typical features are present in both films. However, the old film contains more stereotypical features than typical features, and the new film contains more typical features than stereotypical features. Therefore, it would appear that the old film presents a more stereotypical image of women than the new film. Furthermore, the results indicate that power relations, and not just gender differences, play an important role in both films. The importance of these power relations would benefit from further investigation in future studies.

This dissertation has two main purposes. On the one hand, it aims at comparing the gender stereotypes presented in the television commercials in China and in Europe. Considering the cultural, historical and socio-economical differences between these two contexts, it is interesting to examine the gender role models offered and used by the advertising industry in European Union and China in order to see if the gender stereotypes are similar and to evaluate to which extent they reflect, challenge or reinforce the gender roles of the society where they are broadcasted. On the other hand, the objective of this dissertation is to establish the degree of adequateness and effectiveness of the existing regulatory framework through an analysis of the positive and negative aspects of the regulatory acts issued to safeguard a fair representation of genders in the EU Member States and in China.

This study aims to explore how textbooks aiming at the course English 6 in the Swedish upper secondary school display male, female and transgendered characters in fictional texts. The study also seeks to investigate what genders are represented in the authors of the analysed fictional texts in the textbooks. The method of the study was a mix between critical discourse analysis and content analysis. Content analysis was used in a quantitative way as a starting point to get an overview of the results for the critical discourse analysis which was used qualitatively. The study showed that authors identifying as male were the most common and represented at a higher rate in the textbooks. Among the results it was also shown that transgendered characters and authors identifying as something else than male or female were not represented at all. The study’s conclusion is that teachers will need to provide a greater variety to their classrooms than what is provided by the textbooks in terms of gender related issues and questions, since students should be given a variety of texts and authors during their English education according to the syllabus (Natl. Ag. f. Ed. 2013).

The French Revolution ushered in a remarkable change in language, with both neologisms and new meanings for existing words. Supporters and critics of the Revolution often utilized a dictionary format for new or existing words to portray it in either a favorable or a pejorative manner. Provisionally funded in 1790, the Académie, rooted in the traditional high French of the court and elite, ignored the linguistic innovations, leading François-Urbain Domergue to attempt to form a body that would codify Revolutionary language, although it never came to fruition. Ultimately, partially because of its closeness with the monarch and in part because of the lateness with which Talleyrand presented a plan on educational reform, the Académie survived the reform agenda of the National Assembly, enabling it to continue work on the fifth edition. However, it disregarded not only linguistic innovations but also the societal transformation brought about by the National Assembly.

This concluding chapter argues that Indians were portrayed in a number of ways across the last decades of the nineteenth century, most of them following familiar stereotypes and patterns of visual and linguistic representation. In general, the pictorial press represented Indians as racial outsiders and cultural curiosities, usually in an “us versus them” manner where Euro-American standards and values were the norm and Indian standards and values were abnormal and thus deviant. This was a journalistic form of racial simplification and cultural “othering” that almost always separated Indians from whites. This separation, in turn, was the inevitable result of nineteenth-century ideas about race and racial difference and it played out in the pictorial press in Indian images that made Indians nearly always appear “Indian” to one degree or another.

Chapter 8 explores how a fascination with a “native language” emerged in literary circles through a simultaneous indebtedness to traditional British prose and verse forms, and Anglo-American linguistic affiliation with indigenous-language roots. By 1815, the “Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society” would declare this “native language” a uniquely “American idiom” to be discovered on the American continent through the “numerous novel forms” of Indian languages. In his early novels, James Fenimore Cooper seized upon the aesthetic value that could be constructed from Indian languages and from the figure of the noble savage. I show how Cooper’s novels build upon beliefs in the prelapsarian quality of indigenous languages. I argue that the regenerative potential that Cooper’s novels portray as arising from Indian words functions as aesthetic compensation for the violence and repeated violation of treaty agreements that characterized US and Indian relations in the early nineteenth century.

This chapter seeks to portray the meanings of some basic kin terms in English and some other European languages in a new way, holding on to two principles: that all the meanings one posits have to be open to intuitive verification by ordinary native speakers, and that the meanings posited for individual kin words should ‘add up’ to a coherent overall picture. To achieve this, the chapter aims at an account which could make sense in a developmental as well as cross-linguistic perspective: there must be some imaginable developmental progression from the meanings of children’s kin words such as mummy and daddy to the meanings of kin terms hypothesized as operating in adult speech. The chapter shows that semantic components phrased in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) allow us to ‘reconstruct’ such a progression in a way which is both rigorous and testable and which makes sense to ordinary speakers, including language learners.

The present study investigates speech, writing, and thought presentation in a corpus of 19th-century narrative fiction including, for instance, the novels Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Oliver Twist, and many others. All narratives typically contain a reference to or a quotation of someone’s speech, thoughts, or writing. These reports further a narrative, make it more interesting, natural, and vivid, ask the reader to engage with it, and, from a historical point of view, also reflect cultural understandings of the modes of discourse presentation. To a large extent, the way a reader perceives a story depends upon the ways discourse is presented, and among these, speech, writing, and thought, which reflect a character’s disposition and state of mind. Being at the intersection of linguistic and literary stylistics, this study develops a new corpus-stylistic approach for systematically analyzing the different narrative strategies of historical discourse presentation in key pieces of 19th-century narrative fiction, thus identifying diachronic patterns as well as unique authorial styles, and places them within their cultural-historical context. It shows that the presentation of characters’ minds reflects an ideological as well as an epistemological concern about what cannot be reported, portrayed, or narrated and that discourse presentation fulfills the narratological functions of prospection and encapsulation, marks narrative progression, and shapes readers’ expectations as to suspense or surprise.

Based on long-term fieldwork in a rural Tibetan region in China’s northwest (2002-13), The Battle for Fortune is an ethnography of state-local relations among Tibetans marginalized underChina’s Great Develop the West campaign and during the 2008 military crackdown on Tibetan unrest. The study brings anthropological approaches to states and development into dialogue with recent interdisciplinary debates about the very nature of human subjectivity and relations with nonhuman others (including deities). The author does this by drawing on a linguistic anthropological approach to contested presence (as an ongoing “battle for fortune”). For most Tibetans, the active presence of deities and other invisible beings has been the ground of power, causation, and fertile or fortunate landscapes. The author thus takes divine beings seriously as interlocutors and parties to exchange in Rebgong, refusing to relegate them to a separate, less consequential, “religious” or “premodern” world. The book thus challenges readers to grasp the unpredictable, even violent, interpersonal dynamics at the heart of development projects in China and elsewhere. And it encourages a more multidimensional and dynamic understanding of state-local relations than mainstream accounts of development and unrest that portray Tibet and China as a kind of yin-and-yang pair for models of statehood and development in a new global order.

This chapter offers readings of two recent Russian novels, Valerii Votrin’s Logoped (The Speech Therapist, 2012) and Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Zakhvat Moskovii: natsional-lingvisticheskii roman (The Occupation of Muscovy: a national-linguistic novel, 2012). Votrin represents a linguistic dystopia governed by strict orthoepic norms. The story is told through the portrayal of two persons, a speech therapist representing the authorities, and a journalist, expelled for his oppositional views. Gigolashvili’s novel tells about a young German student of Russian and his encounter with the grammar nazi movement, a group of self-appointed language mavens who monitor, expose and ridicule linguistic liberties and orthographic errors in highly aggressive ways. Both novels can be read as responses to language legislation and language cultivation, highly topical issues in present-day Russian language culture.

The chapter seeks to, through the theoretical lenses of the linguistic discourse theory of Appraisal, analyse the notions of journalistic ‘objectivity' in Zimbabwean newspapers comparatively. The focus of analysis here is news reports of the factional politics within the ZANU PF political party, specifically with regards to the demise of the political career of former Vice President Joice Mujuru and how it is framed within these factional wars. The chapter seeks to comparatively analyse the portrayal of Joice Mujuru and the ZANU PF factional wars within both the public and private owned newspapers (The Herald and NewsDay, respectively). Within the Zimbabwean political landscape ZANU PF, led by incumbent president Robert Gabriel Mugabe, embodies the national narrative. In fact, because of its role in the liberation of the country from the British colonial masters, ZANU PF has technically appropriated the national metanarrative and the story of the Zimbabwean nation-state cannot therefore, since independence in 1980, be told outside the ZANU PF polity and ideology.

This short chapter provides a summary of Part I of the book. It emphasizes the claim that all aspects associated with usage events have the potential to become conventionalized and entrenched. These include the forms and meanings of utterances, the interpersonal and cognitive activities involved in their production and comprehension, and the cotextual, contextual, and social characteristics of utterances. The chapter also highlights the special role played by pragmatic associations as mediators between interpersonal and cognitive activities and their conventionalization and entrenchment. Forces affecting usage are portrayed as fairly stable sociopragmatic and emotive principles whose concrete manifestations are, however, subject to change.

Today, gender representation in media and advertising could be responsible for creating and maintaining female stereotypes that have a negative impact on women's psychological and social well-being. From a psychological point of view, women have to face several issues including the objectification of their body, which could have negative effects on their mental, emotional, and physical health; furthermore, the portrayal of the female body as a sexual object could be associated with aggressive inclinations and behaviours against women, but also with cyber-bullying victimization in terms of body-shaming and revenge porn. Finally, it is relevant to consider how the use of gender stereotypes in advertising and media could lead to a distorted perception of gender roles, mostly based on outdated socio-cultural expectations of how men and women should behave and present themselves, that could be passed on to the next generations.

The interpreters' cultural role has evolved significantly over time. Understanding the profession's history is necessary to understand its cultural evolution. Prior to professionalization, history portrayed interpreters as intercultural agents who held power as essential players, working as cultural and linguistic mediators. With the advent of conference interpreting in the Nuremberg Trials, a new professional image reflected the primary role of the interpreter as a linguistic medium. Due to the more interactive communicative activities involved, dialogue interpreting reflected a broader cultural role. This chapter discusses how the cultural role of the interpreter evolved over time, and within specializations. It gives an overview of the evolution of the cultural role in historic interpreting, conference interpreting, community interpreting, and in the medical interpreting specialization.

In her introductory chapter, the author specifies the aims of the study and its theoretical background. Basing her approach on Leech and Short’s (1981) and Semino and Short’s (2004) categories of discourse presentation, she further develops their model to suit 19th-century fiction and to enable corpus annotation for quantitative next to qualitative investigation, in order to allow for systematically investigating the previously impressionistic observations about discourse presentation modes in historical English on a sound empirical basis. She further outlines how her corpus-stylistic approach will be enriched by contextualization to address the portrayal of subjectivity as well as diachronic pragmatic differences between 19th- and 20th-century narrative fiction. Defining the key issues in her approach of New Historical Stylistics, the study is to provide new insights into the nature of 19th-century narrative fiction that are useful for corpus stylistics, text-linguistics, historical linguistics and pragmatics, as well as narratology and literary criticism.

Like Julian Pitt-Rivers, Godfrey Lienhardt (1921–93) was a student of E. E. Evans-Pritchard at Oxford. His great ethnography Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka, published in 1961, is regarded as one of the great social anthropological studies of religion. In his research (1947–50) on this southern Sudanese nomad population (neighbors of the Nuer, the people researched by Evans-Pritchard), Lienhardt approaches religious symbolism, imagery, and leadership as informed intimately by the Dinka’s own everyday experience of the world. He altered dominant social anthropological perspectives on religion of the time by drawing attention to the discrepancy and contradictions that existed between people’s everyday experience of “religion” and their conscious, reflexive articulations about those practices. The attention to skepticism and ambiguity is evident in this essay (first published in 1982, and reproduced here almost in its entirety) that reflects on the interaction between the Dinka and Italian Catholic missionaries, who had been in the Sudan since the mid-nineteenth century. Lienhardt begins by asking, “What kind of translation, as it were, of experience is required for a Dinka to become a nominal or believing Christian?” He responds to this question with circumspection, stressing the challenges in any missionary encounter, which he aptly characterizes as not one of simple straightforward instruction and conversion (or rupture), but one fraught with gaps in understanding and divergent intentions on both sides. Many of these gaps inhere in language, both idiomatic and semantic terms, with many ideas being “caught in translation,” leading Catholicism to “stick” unevenly and in unpredictable ways across the Dinka world. Thus the Dinka accepted the Church mostly, Lienhardt suggests, through ideas of progress and mostly material development that were quite foreign to Dinka experience and, somewhat ironically, also to the ideas and principles taught by the missionaries. Catholic doctrine and eschatology were thus absorbed into the Dinka life-world through a kind of “linguistic parallax” (a displacement or change in the perception of objects in space from different points of observation). Lienhardt erroneously characterizes the church as “the bearer of a theoretically unified body of theological and social doctrine”—a portrayal similar to widespread views even today. But the acuity of his attention to the intricacies and uncertainties of the exchange of meanings that is part of missionization—and to the political economic realities shaping the encounter—distinguishes this work as a pioneering study in the anthropology of missions, especially in colonial Africa. In this respect Lienhardt’s essay might be seen as a precursor to a great tradition of poststructuralist works on African religious missionaries, postcolonialism, and social transformation.¹ His focus on Catholicism, however, provides us a glimpse of the dynamics of “syncretism” in situ as a process that cannot be understood outside its social, historical, and political context.

Starting with mid-19th century, song collecting in Brittany has remained important especially as the status of the Breton language depreciated in favour of French. Today the traditional Breton ballads (gwerziou) are an important instrument of remembering and understanding of both the past of the Breton people, and of their culture, as well as treasure of folk Breton language. The present chapter aims at analysing the representations of women in the traditional Breton ballads, ranging from witches, such as in Janik Kokard's leprotic lover, sinners such as Mari Kelen or saints like Bertet, Virgin Mary's kind midwife, all with the end of understanding the engines that led to (un)customary representations in which the woman is portrayed as both by the gaze of male sovereignty and the restrictions and projections of Catholicism.

One Thousand and One Nights, which can be traced back to as early as the 9th century, is probably the greatest introduction to Arabic culture through literature. This colossal and diverse book has drawn the attention of scholars, researchers and students to classic Arabic literature as well as influenced many prominent authors and filmmakers. It is not just a book of careless and unconnected stories but rather a piece of esteemed literature which has been read and analysed in many countries all over the world. However, it is also true that this book has been criticised for its sexual promiscuity and degraded portrayal of women. The aim of the presentation is to prove that underneath the clumsy and seemingly funny structures of One Thousand and One Nights, there is a description of overflowing sexuality. Through the sexualised or erotic description of female bodies, the book gives agency to women but at the same time depicts them derogatively, and thus fulfils the naked desire of the then patriarchal society. The presentation will highlight how sexual promiscuity or fathomless female sexual craving is portrayed through figurative and grammatical language, which objectifies the female characters but at the same time enables them to be playful with the male characters, and thus motivates them to become more powerful than the males. Finally. the presentation will focus on language or narrative as an act of survival from the perspectives of the female characters, which is most evident in the case of Scheherazade who saved not only her life but also lives of countless maidens by her mesmerizing storytelling talent.

This study aims at exploring verbal and visual expressions of Asian American immigrants depicted in Malaka Gharib’s I was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir (2019). Telling a story of the author’s childhood experience growing up as a bicultural child in America, the graphic memoir shows the use of code-switching from English to Tagalog and Arabic as well as the use of pejorative terms associated with typical stereotypes of the Asian American. Apart from the verbal codes, images also play a significant role in this graphic memoir by providing visual representations to support the narrative. By applying theories of code-switching, this paper examines the types of and reasons for code-switching in the graphic memoir. The linguistic analysis is further supported by non-narrative analysis of images in the memoir as a visual representation of Asian American cultural identity. This study reveals that code-switching is mainly applied to highlight the author’s mixed cultural background as well as to imply both personal and sociopolitical empowerment for minorities, particularly Asian Americans. Furthermore, through the non-narrative analysis, this paper shows that in her drawings, Gharib refuses to inscribe stereotypical racial portrayal of the diverse characters and focuses more on beliefs, values, and experiences that make her who she is, a Filipino-Egyptian American.

The wide variety of the components of signs stems from verbal communication to visual gestures, ciphers, images, music, and Morse code. Barthes’ Semiotic Theory restructured the theory of analyzing signs and allowed for a new understanding and interpretation of signs through seeing diverse cultures and societies. Saussure’s definition of the sign as a combination of signifier and signified led Barthes to further elucidate sign as connotative (cultural) and denotative (literal) processes. Semiotics can be applied to all aspects of life, as meaning is produced not in isolation but in totality, establishing multiple connotations and denotations. In the article “The World of Wrestling” published in Mythologies (1957), Barthes focused on images portrayed by the wrestler resulting in understanding of the wrestler’s image and the image of spectator. In Morse code, gestures can make any sport a spectacle of suffering, defeat and justice, representation of morality, symbols, anger, smile, passion etc., from which derive denotative and connotative meanings. Similarly, Thomas Sebeok identifies sign as one of six factors in communication, and which makes up the rich domain of semiotic research. These are message, source, destination, channel, code, and context. The present paper will focus on a dialogic relation between semiotics and sports, thus making it a text that reproduces meaning and represents certain groups. It focuses on various aspects of semiotics and their relation to sports. The paper also contemplates the versions and meanings of signs in sports that establish sport as an act of representation.