Linguistic stigmatization and discrimination of the LGBT+ community as reflected in the lexis of contemporary Polish and in multi-genre statements within conservative public discourse

Saving Us From Them

Idiomatic and proverbial expressions are important components of the oral tradition of Sesotho sa Leboa, and therefore a knowledge of the literal meaning of words as they appear in dictionaries without inclusion of their figurative meaning seems to be a shortcoming. An idiom or a proverb possesses one basic meaning, i.e. the meaning to which the idiom or proverb is basically meant to refer, but each idiom or proverb is made up of several lexical items. Each of these lexical items has its own meaning, which usually differs from the figurative sense of the idiom or proverb. Even though the meaning of the words in an idiomatic or proverbial expression seems to differ from the sense of the idiom or proverb, there is to a certain extent a relationship. It is this relationship which lexicographers can assist to explain in their definitions in order to clarify both the literal and the figurative meanings of words in Sesotho sa Leboa. This article aims to stress the importance of having specialized dictionaries which will give users detailed etymological explanations of the meaning of idiomatic and proverbial expressions as used in Sesotho sa Leboa. The etymological analysis of the meaning of these lexical items (idioms and proverbs) will provide a better understanding of these expressions and enrich dictionaries with detailed definitions. This will create a better understanding of the relationship between the literal meanings of the expressions and their real (i.e. figurative) meanings. Keywords: diachronic analysis, etymology, figurative expression, idiom, lemmatization, lexicology, metaphor, metaphoric expression, proverb, synchronic analysis, terminography.

Self

In three experiments, we examined why some idioms can be lexically altered and still retain their figurative meanings (e.g., John buttoned his lips about Mary can be changed into John fastened his lips about Mary and still mean "John didn't say anything about Mary"), whereas other idioms cannot be lexically altered without losing their figurative meanings (e.g., John kicked the bucket, meaning "John died," loses its idiomatic meaning when changed into John kicked the pail). Our hypothesis was that the lexical flexibility of idioms is determined by speakers' assumptions about the ways in which parts of idioms contribute to their figurative interpretations as a whole. The results of the three experiments indicated that idioms whose individual semantic components contribute to their overall figurative meanings (e.g., go out on a limb) were judged as less disrupted by changes in their lexical items (e.g., go out on a branch) than were nondecomposable idioms (e.g., kick the bucket) when their individual words were altered (e.g., punt the pail). These findings lend support to the idea that both the syntactic productivity and the lexical makeup of idioms are matters of degree, depending on the idioms' compositional properties. This conclusion suggests that idioms do not form a unique class of linguistic items, but share many of the properties of more literal language.

The main objective of the presented paper is to provide an overview of references to the term good change (Polish: dobra zmiana) in the context of its discoursive evolution. The expression was first introduced into the Polish discourse during the parliamentary campaign of the Law and Justice party (PiS) before the election of October 25, 2015. In the periods following its introduction — during the first year of the Law and Justice government (10.26.2015–10.26.2016), and after one year until now (10.27.2016–6.09.2017) — the phrase has gained new meaning. The analysis is based on fifty examples of the usage of the expression good change featured in various articles published online. Nevertheless, apart from online articles — which constitute the majority of the analyzed material — the paper includes also entries on TV channels’ or news agencies’ webportals, and anecdotal uses.

The use of lexical resources in linguistic analysis has expanded rapidly in recent years. However, most lexical resources, such as WordNet or online dictionaries, at this point do not usually indicate figurative meanings, such as conceptual metaphors, as part of a lexical entry. Studies that attempt to establish the relationships between literal and figurative language by detecting the connectivity between WordNet relations usually do not deal with linguistic data directly. However, the present study demonstrates that SUMO definitions can be used to identify the source domains used in conceptual metaphors. This is achieved by identifying the relationships between metaphorical expressions and their corresponding ontological nodes. Such links are important because they show which lexical items are mapped under which concepts. This, in turn, helps specify which lexical items in electronic resources involve conceptual mappings. Looking specifically at the concept of PERSON, this work also establishes connectivity between lexical items which are related to “Organism.” Therefore, the methodology reported herein not only aids the categorizing of lexical items according to their conceptual domains but also can establish links between these items. Such bottom-up and top-down analyses of lexical items may provide a means of representing metaphorical entries in lexical resources.

The article examines the functioning of legal lexical items in journalistic texts on economic issues, which usually transcribe journalism.
 The research analyses some legal nominations used with known and interpreted meanings in dictionaries, as well as those that need explanation, as lexicographical works do not record them.
 Particular attention is paid to lexical items that have acquired figurative meanings.
 The use of legal nominations in economic journalism shows not only to the intersectoral character of certain terms, but also to the transition of language units from one scope, branch, activity to another.
 We conclude that due to figurative meanings the terms lose their uniqueness, which makes it possible to trace the processes of determinologization in the Ukrainian language.
 Keywords: legal vocabulary, journalism, figurative meaning, stylistic role.

The article examines the functioning of legal lexical items in journalistic texts on economic issues, which usually transcribe journalism. The research analyses some legal nominations used with known and interpreted meanings in dictionaries, as well as those that need explanation, as lexicographical works do not record them. Particular attention is paid to lexical items that have acquired figurative meanings. The use of legal nominations in economic journalism shows not only to the intersectoral character of certain terms, but also to the transition of language units from one scope, branch, activity to another. We conclude that due to figurative meanings the terms lose their uniqueness, which makes it possible to trace the processes of determinologization in the Ukrainian language. Keywords: legal vocabulary, journalism, figurative meaning, stylistic role.

In this paper, I am attempting to throw into relief significant aspects of the function of television debate as a public sphere. My working assumption is that public dialogue, including its televised versions, involves primarily the establishment of a meaning horizon which delimits what is to be said and known, and which authorises as true certain meanings and knowledges at the expense of others. Put differently, there is a 'politics of truth' at play in every mediated debate which is central in the constitution of the debate as a public sphere. It is precisely this politics that I want to examine in this article. Using empirical material from a prime-time debate programme in Danish television, which is concerned with the right to privacy of public personalities, I analyse the forms of interactional control and dialogic organisation employed in the debate, so as to address the following questions: What are the communicative practices which confer upon the television debate genre the legitimacy of public debate? Which are the principles by which communication is regulated? Which are the domains of meaning construed by this regulation? And which is the potential for democratic deliberation released in these domains?

IntroductionFor over five years, Romanians have been using their bodies in public spaces to challenge politicians’ disregard for the average citizen. In a region low in standards of civic engagement, such as voter turnout and petition signing, Romanian people’s “citizenship of the streets” has stopped environmentally destructive mining in 2013, ousted a corrupt cabinet in 2015, and blocked legislation legalising abuse of public office in 2017 (Solnit 214). This article explores the democratic affordances of collective resistive walking, by focusing on Romania’s capital, Bucharest. I illustrate how walking in protest of political corruption cultivates a democratic public and reconfigures city spaces as spaces of democratic engagement, in the context of increased illiberalism in the region. I examine two sites of protest: the Parliament Palace and Victoriei Square. The former is a construction emblematic of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and symbol of an authoritarian regime, whose surrounding area protestors reclaim as a civic space. The latter—a central part of the city bustling with the life of cafes, museums, bike lanes, and nearby parks—hosts the Government and has become an iconic site for pro-democratic movements. Spaces of Democracy: The Performativity of Public Assemblies Democracies are active achievements, dependent not only on the solidity of institutions —e.g., a free press and a constitution—but on people’s ability and desire to communicate about issues of concern and to occupy public space. Communicative approaches to democratic theory, formulated as inquiries into the public sphere and the plurality and evolution of publics, often return to establish the significance of public spaces and of bodies in the maintenance of our “rhetorical democracies” (Hauser). Speech and assembly, voice and space are sides of the same coin. In John Dewey’s work, communication is the main “loyalty” of democracy: the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in the uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (Dewey qtd. in Asen 197, emphasis added) Dewey asserts the centrality of communication in the same breath that he affirms the spatial infrastructure supporting it.Historically, Richard Sennett explains, Athenian democracy has been organised around two “spaces of democracy” where people assembled: the agora or town square and the theatre or Pnyx. While the theatre has endured as the symbol of democratic communication, with its ideal of concentrated attention on the argument of one speaker, Sennett illuminates the square as an equally important space, one without which deliberation in the Pnyx would be impossible. In the agora, citizens cultivate an ability to see, expect, and think through difference. In its open architecture and inclusiveness, Sennett explains, the agora affords the walker and dweller a public space to experience, in a quick, fragmentary, and embodied way, the differences and divergences in fellow citizens. Through visual scrutiny and embodied exposure, the square thus cultivates “an outlook favorable to discussion of differing views and conflicting interests”, useful for deliberation in the Pnyx, and the capacity to recognise strangers as part of the imagined democratic community (19). Also stressing the importance of spaces for assembly, Jürgen Habermas’s historical theorisation of the bourgeois public sphere moves the functions of the agora to the modern “third places” (Oldenburg) of the civic society emerging in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe: coffee houses, salons, and clubs. While Habermas’ conceptualization of a unified bourgeois public has been criticised for its class and gender exclusivism, and for its normative model of deliberation and consensus, such criticism has also opened paths of inquiry into the rhetorical pluralism of publics and into the democratic affordances of embodied performativity. Thus, unlike Habermas’s assumption of a single bourgeois public, work on twentieth and twenty-first century publics has attended to their wide variety in post-modern societies (e.g., Bruce; Butler; Delicath and DeLuca; Fraser; Harold and DeLuca; Hauser; Lewis; Mckinnon et al.; Pezzullo; Rai; Tabako). In contrast to the Habermasian close attention to verbal argumentation, such criticism prioritizes the embodied (performative, aesthetic, and material) ways in which publics manifest their attention to common issues. From suffragists to environmentalists and, most recently, anti-precarity movements across the globe, publics assemble and move through shared space, seeking to break hegemonies of media representation by creating media events of their own. In the process, Judith Butler explains, such embodied assemblies accomplish much more. They disrupt prevalent logics and dominant feelings of disposability, precarity, and anxiety, at the same time that they (re)constitute subjects and increasingly privatised spaces into citizens and public places of democracy, respectively. Butler proposes that to best understand recent protests we need to read collective assembly in the current political moment of “accelerating precarity” and responsibilisation (10). Globally, increasingly larger populations are exposed to economic insecurity and precarity through government withdrawal from labor protections and the diminishment of social services, to the profit of increasingly monopolistic business. A logic of self-investment and personal responsibility accompanies such structural changes, as people understand themselves as individual market actors in competition with other market actors rather than as citizens and community members (Brown). In this context, public assembly would enact an alternative, insisting on interdependency. Bodies, in such assemblies, signify both symbolically (their will to speak against power) and indexically. As Butler describes, “it is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future that is not the future of unpayable debt” (10). Butler describes the function of these protests more fully:[P]lural enactments […] make manifest the understanding that a situation is shared, contesting the individualizing morality that makes a moral norm of economic self-sufficiency precisely […] when self-sufficiency is becoming increasingly unrealizable. Showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still, speech, and silence are all aspects of a sudden assembly, an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics […] [T]he bodies assembled ‘say’ we are not disposable, even if they stand silently. (18)Though Romania is not included in her account of contemporary protest movements, Butler’s theoretical account aptly describes both the structural and ideological conditions, and the performativity of Romanian protestors. In Romania, citizens have started to assemble in the streets against austerity measures (2012), environmental destruction (2013), fatal infrastructures (2015) and against the government’s corruption and attempts to undermine the Judiciary (from February 2017 onward). While, as scholars have argued (Olteanu and Beyerle; Gubernat and Rammelt), political corruption has gradually crystallised into the dominant and enduring framework for the assembled publics, post-communist corruption has been part and parcel of the neoliberalisation of Central and Eastern-European societies after the fall of communism. In the region, Leslie Holmes explains, former communist elites or the nomenklatura, have remained the majority political class after 1989. With political power and under the shelter of political immunity, nomenklatura politicians “were able to take ethically questionable advantage in various ways […] of the sell-off of previously state-owned enterprises” (Holmes 12). The process through which the established political class became owners of a previously state-owned economy is known as “nomenklatura privatization”, a common form of political corruption in the region, Holmes explains (12). Such practices were common knowledge among a cynical population through most of the 1990s and the 2000s. They were not broadly challenged in an ideological milieu attached, as Mihaela Miroiu, Isabela Preoteasa, and Jerzy Szacki argued, to extreme forms of liberalism and neoliberalism, ideologies perceived by people just coming out of communism as anti-ideology. Almost three decades since the fall of communism, in the face of unyielding levels of poverty (Zaharia; Marin), the decaying state of healthcare and education (Bilefsky; “Education”), and migration rates second only to war-torn Syria (Deletant), Romanian protestors have come to attribute the diminution of life in post-communism to the political corruption of the established political class (“Romania Corruption Report”; “Corruption Perceptions”). Following systematic attempts by the nomenklatura-heavy governing coalition to undermine the judiciary and institutionalise de facto corruption of public officials (Deletant), protestors have been returning to public spaces on a weekly basis, de-normalising the political cynicism and isolation serving the established political class. Mothers Walking: Resignifying Communist Spaces, Imagining the New DemosOn 11 July 2018, a protest of mothers was streamed live by Corruption Kills (Corupția ucide), a Facebook group started by activist Florin Bădiță after a deadly nightclub fire attributed to the corruption of public servants, in 2015 (Commander). Organized protests at the time pressured the Social-Democratic cabinet into resignation. Corruption Kills has remained a key activist platform, organising assemblies, streaming live from demonstrations, and sharing personal acts of dissent, t

International audience

The present study is devoted to identifying lexical items of Bashkir language containing the component sas (‘hair’) exploring their semantic features, ethno-linguistic the meanings, and determining the place of these lexemes within the Bashkir linguistic worldview. The object of investigation comprises the lexical and dialectal composition of the Bashkir language, folklore materials, ethnographic and mythological data related to the studied lexeme, as well as works by Bashkir writers and poets. Lexical items with the component sas have not previously been subjected to specialized study in Bashkir linguistics. The results show that this component participates in forming lexemes both with direct and figurative meanings, creating names for animate and inanimate entities, anthroponyms, biblionyms, artionyms, and numerous dialect variants of lexemes containing the element sas. Many rituals, customs, prohibitions, omens are associated with the concept of sas, which reveals such ethno-linguistic values as hair’s sacredness, its symbolic representation of roads, prosperity, female beauty. It has been found during the research that the notion of ‘hair’ and corresponding lexical units occupy an important position in family ritual vocabulary, including childbirth ceremonies, weddings (nikah), funerals. In the Bashkir linguistic worldview, hair is considered a treasure of feminine beauty. It was forbidden for Bashkir women to cut their hair short or walk with loose hair; they had to hide it from strangers’ eyes and always braid it into plaits. This influenced the emergence of many hair accessories with protective functions, whose names contain the component sas. Names of hair adornments form a distinct semantic subgroup in Bashkir with multiple dialect variations.

The lexical item that denotes the basic chromatic category of “black” manifests a remarkable semantic mobility in many languages, migrating from a neutral designation of the darkest colour on the visible spectrum to a dense network of figurative, axiological and culture-specific meanings. Building on approaches from cognitive linguistics, ethnolinguistics and cultural semiotics, the research addresses two objectives: first, to trace the diachronic and synchronic trajectories of literal and figurative meanings of both lexemes; second, to reveal how culturally embedded value systems motivate convergences and divergences in their semantic extensions. A hybrid corpus consisting of the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Uzbek National Corpus, complemented by a manually compiled sub-corpus of folklore, proverbs, media discourse and literary texts, was subjected to qualitative analysis supported by quantitative frequency measures. The findings demonstrate that although both lexemes share core symbolic associations with darkness, secrecy and moral negativity, the Uzbek qora displays a wider range of ambivalent or positive meanings linked to fertility, protection and social hierarchy, whereas English black is more rigidly polarised between negative and reclaimed positive values. The discussion interprets such asymmetries through the prism of cultural metaphor theory and historical contact influences. The study contributes to cross-cultural semantics by illuminating how identical perceptual stimuli generate distinct semantic constellations when refracted through different cultural lenses.

The article presents characteristic properties of slang words and expressions used in nonofficial communication of health professionals in English-speaking countries recently. It defines structural and semantic peculiarities of English medical slang and subjects it concerns. Analysis of scientific literature and non-standard medical lexical units demonstrated that slang words and expressions were formed by means of structural changes such as word reduction, compounding, abbreviations, or acronyms, and semantic transformations such as metaphorization and metonymy. The most common mechanism of structural formation of English medical slang units was found to be abbreviations, or acronyms, often with figurative meaning. The possible difference between abbreviations and acronyms was defined and illustrated. Different kinds of word reduction and compounding were determined and demostrated. Semantic ways of formation of nonofficial words and expressions were shown to be metaphorization and metonimia and metaphor when the object was attributed alien signs was more common. To make speech more expressive facetious expressions were often used. Sometimes new words incomprehensible to wide audience were formed from two unselectional in denotation parts, the first one being a part of an English word and the second one – a Greco-Latin terminoelement.English medical slang concerns different subjects including medical drugs; therapeutic notions; health care professionals and their characteristics; patients and their conditions; medical procedures; medical institutions and their units. Lexical items denoting medical drugs were formed by word reduction, compounding, abbreviations, sometimes with metaphor. Slang units denominating therapeutic notions were constituted by all abovementioned means. The dominant mechanism of formation of nonofficial lexical items denoting people was metaphor, sometimes with structural changes, and slang words and expressions referring to patients and their conditions often having offensive meaning. Non-standard words to define medical procedures were foremost constituted by word reduction. In formation of slang items denominating medical institutions and their units, metaphor sometimes with word reduction or compounding was used. To introduce professional slang words and expressions to students for examples of tasks built on matching slang units with their definitions are suggested.In conclusion the authors assert that introduction of English medical slang to students enriches their professional vocabulary by lexical items relevant in modern nonofficial communication of medical professions of English-speaking countries and thus motivates them for language learning.

Rhetoric mainly aims to affect the recipients and bring ideas into their minds, employing figures of speech and other rhetorical means. It is one of the significant argumentative mechanics employed by a writer in delivering a speech. Therefore, the present study tracks figures of speech (simile, metaphor, and metonymy) and other persuasive means in the publicity discourse in the tradition of Ibn Hazm Al-Andalusi. It highlights their persuasive, argumentative impact in winning over the recipient and the attempt to build a publicity discourse based on stimulating the recipient to achieve persuasion towards the proposed idea and the desired purpose.