Pragmalinguistic aspects of compliments and praise in English: a study of speech acts as tools for effective communication

This article is an attempt to examine the differences between mass and popular culture in the historical and sociocultural dimensions. The author traces the relations of these two phenomena to the general sphere of culture and its main principles. The key point of the article is that culture is a kind of arrangement, cultivation, education, and perfection. On the other hand, manifestations of mass culture are associated with the decline of its sublime foundations. Therefore, there is a necessity to compare the ‘high’ and ‘low’ levels of culture. The rise of commercial activity and the common consumption became the turn point of the emergence of a non-elite level of culture. Industrialization and urbanization accelerated the development of mass media, which helped bring the goods of civilization to the majority of people. Due to market mechanisms, the spread of wealth took place under the dictates of commercial success. Artistic and aesthetic parameters of culture did not fit into the pragmatic requirements, and marketing programs of mass production weakened those parameters. Wide-ranging conformism, infantilism, and consumerism were increasing. These trends are well known as mass culture. The indicator of this condition of culture is simplification of tastes. At the same time, there was a popular traditional lower culture, the main features of which were accessibility and commonness, and it had an unofficial and peripheral status. However, these two formations (elite and popular culture) did not enter into rigid antagonism. The author is analyzing the development of a popular culture from the ancient to the modern times. It is concluded that culture not only creates high ideals but also may be limited to simpler meanings. The author shows that the popular culture also opposes mass culture due to creation of alternative forms of resistance. It means that popular culture has not completely collapsed into conformism but kept the protest intention. Thanks to this alternative particularity, pop-culture has gradually become significantly different from masscult. It allows for grasping distinctions between these two kinds of culture. Finally, popular culture remains the domain of the formation of ideas in which social players express the values of their everyday life. Article received 14.02.2019

Letter from the Editors: Contemporary Popular Culture and Social Criticism

BLURB FOR TOTAL PROP MAILER Total Propaganda moves the study of propaganda out of the exclusive realm of world politics into the more inclusive study of popular culture, media, and politics. All the participatory functioning elements of the society are aspects of membership in the popular culture. Thus, the values of popular music, media, politics, debates over social issues, and even international trade become everyday propaganda to which everyone may relate. To emphasize the necessity for new thinking about propaganda, Edelstein creates the concepts of the new propaganda and the old, and he devises a language of uninyms to convey their meanings more quickly. Oldprop is characteristic of mass cultures and utilizes totalitarian methods of conflict, hegemony, minimization, demonization, and exclusiveness to achieve its goals. By contrast, newprop is created by members of the popular culture to allow them to engage in accomodation, enhance the individual, and promote inclusiveness. Shifts in the old and the new propaganda are tracked across social issues such as race, religion, sexuality, gender, gun control, and the environment, as well as in fashion, politics, advertising, sports, media, and politics. Central to the concept of total propaganda is that it is not simply additive; it is the product of new energies that are produced by the fusing of propaganda in such related forums as music, art, advertising, sports and politics. It is these synergies, and their production of new energies, that make total propaganda greater than the sum of its parts. Edelstein concludes that the most important distinction that should be drawn between mass culture and popular culture is its text; i.e., its propaganda. In a popular culture, everyone creates and consumes propaganda; in a mass culture almost everyone consumes it but only a few create it. This formulation offers new ways to discuss power and ideology in media texts. As an example, where once the least informed and the least educated were the most subject to propaganda, now the most informed and most educated often are the first to create propaganda and the first to consume it. FORMER BLURB COPY.......It is widely recognized that the mass media provide us with ample information which we use to construct some sense of the world around us. It is not as widely recognized that consumers of media messages are active in this constructive process, making meanings that are sensible to them in particular life circumstances. The media target a younger, more media savvy generation who are more likely to be participants in the messages than members of any previous generation. This participatory aspect of new media is central to what the author defines as the new propaganda. Although critical and cultural theories are often prohibitive for undergraduate students, the author's formulation offers an accessible way to discuss power and ideology in media texts. Without using the critical discourse, he provides compelling arguments that power and ideology are created and maintained through the active participation of audience members. The conceptualization of the old and new propagandas helps move the study of propaganda out of the realm of world politics into the study of popular culture. The author views all of the participatory functioning of the society as aspects of membership in a more embracing popular culture. This point of view recognizes that the mass media are extremely important forces in the consumer's construction of reality and that they are no longer exclusive channels for disseminating the messages of the powerful elites. Instead, the media -- particularly the new media -- are accessible to and used frequently by less powerful members of society -- children, ethnic minorities, and marginal members of society -- to create realities that more satisfactorily fulfill their needs. NEW BLURB COPY FOR GENERAL CATALOGS... Total Propaganda is a fresh answer to the question of the inclusiveness of the popular culture. It demonstrates how the values of popular music, media, politics, debates over social issues, and international trade have become everyday propaganda to which everyone relates in some way. Edelstein demonstrates that the most important distinction that can be drawn between mass culture and popular culture is its text (i.e., its propaganda). In a popular culture, everyone creates and consumes propaganda, whereas in a mass culture, almost everyone consumes but only a few create it. This book presents a new language of propaganda that makes it possible to draw comparisons between mass and popular cultures. The language is used to observe shifts in propaganda across various social issues -- race, religion, sexuality, gender, gun control, the environment, print and broadcast media, new technologies, and politics. It also examines fashion, advertising, sports, and lobbying. Total Propaganda is not defined only quantitatively; it mirrors the synergies that have come about in every social and political realm and the energies that these synergies produce. As such, the sum of total propaganda is greater than the sum of its parts.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a challenging Natural Language Processing task for a language as rich as Portuguese. When applied in a scenario appropriate to informal language and short texts, the task acquires a new layer of complexity, handling a particular lexicon to the domain in question. In this paper, we expanded the UlyssesNER-Br corpus for NER task with Brazilian Portuguese comments about bills. Additionally, we enriched the annotated set with a formal corpora, in order to analyze whether the combination of formal and informal texts from the same domain could improve NER. Finally, we carry out experiments with a Conditional Random Fields (CRF) model, a Bidirectional LSTM-CRF (BiLSTM-CRF) model, and subsequently, we realized fine-tuning of a language model BERT on NER task with our dataset. We concluded that formal texts helped identification of entities in informal texts. The best model was the fine-tuned BERT which achieved an F1-score of 73.90%, beating the benchmark of related works.KeywordsNamed Entity RecognitionCorpus annotationInformal textLegal text

Total Propaganda

MLR, 100.2, 2005 583 the thistle] (Chapter 2), and secondly a very conscious parallel to V. V Maiakovskii (Chapter 3). As faras Krasnov is concerned, Rogachevskii warily defines this parallel as 'dangerous' because of its highly hypothetical, almost exclusively psychological, nature. Much more convincing is the parallel with Maiakovskii; the peculiar similarity is often referred to in critical literature, but scarcely studied in detail. Maiakovskii's megalomania, narcissism, and latent split personality find an interesting correspon? dence in Limonov, as Rogachevskii demonstrates in his detailed analysis ofthe texts of the two writers. They share not only topics, poetic devices, and literary idiosyncrasies, but also the centrality of love, which obsesses both of them, and the proximity of the love theme to its 'dark side', i.e. death. Particularly fascinating, as Rogachevskiiunderlines , is Limonov's perception of revolution as the 'highest and final stage of the pro? cess ofthe quest forlove' (p. 11o), embodied in pathetic, brightlyemotional images. As far as intertextuality is concerned, Rogachevskii's approach is not always convincing; Alexander Zholkovsky's analysis of the literary origins of Limonov's narcissistic self springs to mind as a wide-more ranging approach in this respect (' Intertextualmalgre lui: The Case of Limonov', in Zholkovsky, Text Counter Text: Rereadings in Russian Literary History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 147-78). In my opinion, the most interesting part of this study is Chapter 4, devoted to Limonov and his critics. Much more than the chapters dedicated to the biography, these pages shed light on the cultural and literary context in which the writer grew up and shaped his poetic and public self. Relationships with the critics?always prob? lematic, as one can easily understand?seem to be as important a factor in defining Limonov's behaviour and literary creation as current history, reality,or private life. Limonov is always provocative, arguing with critics and discussing with his reader? ship, and seems to be very disappointed when readers or critics do not pay attention to what he says. On the contrary, it is in perpetual dialogue, discussion, and conflict (whether verbal or otherwise) that he is able to find new expressive energy and inexhaustible polemic verve, which perhaps suggests that his whole work can be read as an extended, dramatically contemporary version ofthe underground man's rebellion. Rogachevskii's bibliography is impressive, and will be a precious source forfurther research on the writer. Unfortunately, it omits certain of Limonov's works (especially earlier ones) and does not list all the titles referred to in the notes. The note system is cumbersome, with 723 notes on 68 pages, which would seem a rather heavy luxury for a monograph. University of Udine Rosanna Giaquinta Kommerz, Kunst, Unterhaltung: Die neue Popularkultur in Zentral- und Osteuropa. Ed. by Ivo Bock, Wolfgang Schott, and Hartmute Trepper. (Analysen zur Kultur und Gesellschaft im ostlichen Europa, 13) Bremen: Temmen. 2002. 343 pp. ?20.40. ISBN 3-86108-345-0. This volume offersa wide range of articles on popular culture in Central and Eastern Europe. It adds a number of themes to the debate on contemporary mass culture in Russia, so well covered in Adele Barker's Consuming Russia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). Moreover, it presents a wider context for the development of mass and popular culture in Eastern Europe by offeringarticles on the cultures of Russia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia. In the introduction Hartmute Trepper explores the concepts of mass and popular culture, providing a theoretical framework for the chapters to follow, but she most importantly makes comparative comments on the approaches and themes dealt with in the individual chapters. The second introductory essay by Miloslav Petrusek on 584 Reviews mass culture in post-Communist societies explores in sociological terms the cultural trends in Central and Eastern Europe with regard to the role that popular culture played in a changing political and social climate after 1989. The main body of the volume is subdivided into five sections of unequal length. They cover literature, television, film,youth culture, and advertising. The firstsec? tion on literature is wide-ranging and full. It covers literature for the masses in three of the four regions, beginning with a...

The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

Medieval English Manuscripts:

Justify My Love

The new socio-economic situation in our in recent decades is characterized by an active implementation in public consciousness of popular culture. Today there is foreign and national cultural and philosophical literature a noticeable lack of consensus about nature of popular culture that still causes a mismatch positions of contemporary scholars about its conceptual apparatus. Popular culture is a concept that has many scientific and theoretical approaches to their study and determination of its features today. According to researching evolution of term begins on general concept of category of and theory of society and object of theoretical study of popular culture is in 30 – 40's of XX century. The transition to an industrial is most active phase of study of popular culture. According to phenomenon of mass culture within humanities and specialized in modern is ambivalent. The ideological position is considered concept of mass culture is very subjective and depends on conventional reference points or topics that are selected by any researcher or public character to justify his relationship to popular culture. Most Russian culture experts believe that culture that created masses is ground on which later arises and flourishes high art because it reflects spiritual, emotional and experienced fixed tastes and feelings of individual states and their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with world, focus on achieving harmonious interaction with it, embodies hopes, desires and ideal representation of masses. They distinguish following characteristics of mass culture: proximity to basic human needs, growing demand for its products focus on natural, closer to instinctive, primitive sensuality and emotion, always strict subordination of power in society, simplicity in producing a quality product consumption. Ukrainian and Russian researchers interpret identically that popular culture and folk art is in a provider. Ukrainian scientist Danilyuk A. explores concept of popular culture in relation to folklore and proves that it has a number of features. First of all it points to its connection with classical culture, which makes it different from folk; argues that one reason for spread of mass culture in is withering away of folklore. Russian scientist Ivanov G. consideres identity and popular culture, such as impact of latest features in formation of identity. He emphasizes that popular culture has both positive and negative effects on human identity. Polish scientist and science fiction Lam S. argues that popular culture is the amount of social technologies. Thus we can conclude that mass culture is actually not culture in general and that is form, which takes cultural development in terms of industrial civilization, in terms of mass industrial society. Today popular culture represents a higher socio-cultural category, a new form of socialization and inculturation individual guidance in his life and work conditions that are constantly changing, a new system of manipulating his mind, needs, interests, demand, and value orientation and behavior. At beginning of XXI century popular culture is a specific way of understanding of reality and adapt to it, describing specifics of production and distribution of cultural property. Recently popular culture is firmly entrenched in our and therefore became object of studing of modern Ukrainian scientists and cultural studies. Some authors explore key aspects of problem field of phenomenon of mass culture in new plane in domestic scientific thought. Among them Ukrainian scientists such as: Hundorova T., Zabuzhko O., Svidzinsky A., Vovkun V., Masenko L., Poplavsky M., Sinkevych O. and work of young scientists Zastolska V., Danilyuk A., Logvinov V., Pohribna V. etc. Therefore analyzing contemporary socio-cultural reality Zastolska V. offers a definition of mass culture as one that is not based on development and modification of certain provisions relating to analysis of state of culture and in socio-cultural development and to its theoretical reflection as full of cultural modernity with relevant theme. Professor Svidzinsky A. examines popular culture based on highly controversial nature of interaction of culture with consciousness of individual. According to Vovkun V.: Culture is absorbed into mainstream culture moreover not his cut or not able to recommend or develop a strong centralized state. Popular culture as a phenomenon has a right to exist, but problem is that? for example, inUkraineit is usually not Ukrainian. Ukrainian scientist Masenko L. analyzes mass culture in relationship between concepts and language of popular culture. In her view language barrier between elite and mass culture slows and complicates process of establishing a new for several reasons. Mishchenko N. emphasizes that negative interpretation of popular culture does not meet modern social and cultural processes. Denisyuk Zh. in thesis of culture as a factor in transforming national and cultural identity in context of was first who examines popular culture as one of main agents of cultural globalization which has impact on national and cultural identity. Popular culture is an universal crops or characteristic of general population, cosmopolitan, a variety of contemporary culture. Therefore modern mass culture is a complex form of organization and structuring of cultural life of that creates and cultural product and consumer.

By this study it is aimed the solution of problems in the teaching of lexis in Italian and any other language. From a didactic and educational viewpoint it is aimed the students’ acquaintance with these levels of research, the students’ improved ability with these tasks and studies of similar nature so that they may be able to solve on their own problems in the field of culture and civilization. Polysemy in the general framework in Albania in the teaching and learning of foreign languages. The difficult problematic of polysemy in the learning of foreign languages and languages in general in intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced level. An in-depth analysis of its explanation using scientific and research means. Polysemy is a lexical and semantic mechanism, which is a key to the enrichment of a foreign language dictionary, as well as to the Albanian one. In the framework of teaching of foreign languages, the lexis remains a very difficult aspect to solve, because there are involved other important teaching processes such as education, civilization which are not considered as primary goals. The scientific research will be done through a detailed research in the Italian language dictionaries and in literary texts. The methodology is focused on the analysis of the polysemantic structure of words from the viewpoint of etymology, grammar, semantics, meaning definition, examples and their phraseology. I will also illustrate it based on theoretical literature. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n2p265

During the last 2 decades there has been a dramatic resurgence in literary and cultural productions by Americans who identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or queer (LGBTQ). Comprehensive in scope and accessible to students and general readers, this encyclopedia explores contemporary American LGBTQ literature and its social, political, cultural, and historical contexts. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries written by expert contributors. Each entry cites works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. Students of literature and popular culture will appreciate the encyclopedia's insightful survey and discussion of LGBTQ authors and their works, while students of history and social issues will value the encyclopedia's use of literature to explore LGBTQ American society. During the last 2 decades, there has been a dramatic resurgence in the literary and cultural productions of Americans who identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or queer (LGBTQ). The works of these authors have gained popular attention and are increasingly important to the curriculum. They also reflect many of the issues central to contemporary American society. Comprehensive in scope and accessible to students and general readers, this encyclopedia surveys contemporary LGBTQ American literature and its social, political, historical, and cultural contexts. Included are hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries on such topics as: ; African American Gay Literature; Dorothy Allison; Bisexuality; Christopher Bram; Augusten Burroughs; Peter Cameron; Patricia Cornwell; Michael Cunningham; Christopher Durang; Leslie Feinberg; Harvey Fierstein; Gay Graphic Novel; Gay Jewish American Literature; Gay Rights Movement; Jewelle Gomez; Homosociality; Gary Indiana; Larry Kramer; David Leavitt; Leslie Larson; Ursula LeGuin; Lesbian Graphic Novel; Audre Lorde; Armistead Maupin; Terrence McNally; Lenelle Moise; Dale Peck; Puerto Rican Gay Literature; Queer Pedagogy; Sapphire; Sarah Schulman; Reginald Shepherd; Michelangelo Signorile; Transgender Young Adult Literature; Carla Trujillo; Edmund White; Emanuel Xavier; And many more. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and lists additional sources of information, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected general bibliography of print and electronic resources for student research. Students of American history and society will welcome the encyclopedia's use of literature to explore LGBTQ social issues, while students of literature and popular culture will appreciate the extensive exploration of authors and their works. FEATURES AND BENEFITS: ; Hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries discuss authors, literary works, movements, genres, and social issues.; An alphabetical list of entries offers a quick survey of the encyclopedia's contents.; A guide to related topics quickly and conveniently directs readers to entries likely to interest them.; Entry bibliographies help students find sources of additional information on specialized topics.; A selected, general bibliography directs students to the most helpful print and electronic resources on contemporary LGBTQ American literature.

One of the major issues in contemporary text linguistics is the analysis of the cognitive principles of distributing information in a literary text. Literary text unlike other types of the texts holds subtextual and conceptual information which could be encoded by the readers when they identify foregrounded parts of the text. Foregrounding is the type of cognitive principles of distributing information in the text and its main function is guiding the readers in interpretation of hidden and conceptual message of the text by showing some signals (important extracts) to the readers. In this article, the types and techniques of foregrounding are discussed, and their usages are observed in the short story The Luncheon by S. Maugham.

Informal short texts on the web are rich in emotions as they often reflect unfiltered immediate reactions to breaking news events. The emotion density, however, stands in contrast to its poverty of linguistic contexts and features for emotion classification. This paper tackles that challenge by proposing orthographic features based on orthographic code mixing and code-switching for both non-ML and ML approaches. Our results show that orthographic features routinely outperform grammatical features for emotion classification for short texts in all approaches as expected. Orthographic features were also shown to make more significant contributions, especially in terms of precision and in formal texts when state of the art deep learning algorithms are applied. This result confirms the effectiveness of the orthographic change feature to the task of emotion classification. These results are argued to be applicable to all languages because of the common code-shifting in languages with non-Latin orthographies, and the use of non-letter symbols in all languages.

This essay is inspired both by an increasing disciplinary contention that Chaucerians engage with popular culture and by a refreshed critical interest (reflected in the burgeoning field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) in sharing pedagogical innovations and interests with peers within a public forum.2 Notwithstanding lingering professional suspicions about the value of the popular, engagement with popular culture involves the need both to better communicate Chaucer’s aesthetic distinction to the culture at large and to embrace the popular in our teaching. This essay offers a brief meditation on the value of the popular and offers two theoretical approaches that one might use to introduce the study of Chaucer’s popular constructions into the classroom. I suggest, in short, that Chaucer’s reproduction in popular culture has both pedagogical and critical value—both as interpretations of his poetry as it is adapted to