Transcending Epistolary Communication: Prayer in First Thessalonians

Tang Studies 25 (2007) WORDS FOR THE DEAD AND THE LIVING: INNOVATIONS IN THE MID-TANG "PRAYERTEXT" (JIWEN~X) ANNA M. SHIELDS UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE COUNTY The new ninth-century interest in writing about personal experience was a critical development in late medieval culture, part of the growing intellectual autonomy characteristic of the Tang-Song transition. In the era known as the mid-Tang, roughly 790 to 830, this turn toward the personal took many forms, from examining intimate subjects, such as love affairs or the death of children, to adopting unconventional, even eccentric styles in texts of self-representation.! This diversity of mid-Tang literati explorations of personal life may sometimes obscure a common concern among influential writers of the period, a concern that reveals the more profound shift underway. Literati such as Han Yu, Liu Zongyuan, Liu Yuxi, and Bai Juyi desired not only to increase the acceptable topics of wenzhang X ~ but also to expand its potential. The defenses of literary culture in the mid-Tang political sphere offered by very different literati demonstrate that this commitment pervaded the post-Rebellion period;2 the turn to the personal should also be seen as part of literati efforts to reform and deepen the significance of writing. Writing about personal life gave literati a way to connect individual experiences to the values of the mid-Tang elite community and, more importantly, allowed them to reinterpret those shared values individually. The increasing circulation of texts from the late eighth century onward gave this writing greater impact, as compositions of all genres were frequently sent to fellow literati, then copied, recopied, and collected. By exploring personal experience in a range of texts that they circulated widely, mid-Tang literati contributed unique voices to ongoing cultural debates and refashioned inherited literary genres to suit their individual needs. 1 Stephen Owen has examined this literary turn in The End of the Chinese "Middle Ages':' Essaysin Mid-Tang Literary Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). In this article, I focus less on the texts of the private sphere and more on the social significance of writing about personal experience. 2 See Peter Bol, "This Culture of Ours':' Intellectual Transitions in Tang and Sung China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 108-47; and Anthony DeBlasi, Reform in the Balance: TheDefense ojLiterary Culture in Mid-Tang China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 111 Shields: Wordsfor the Dead and the Living In this essay, I examine three responses to the death of friends as examples of the innovations that personal writing brought to mid-Tang literature. In the three prayer texts (jiwen ~)() for the dead I discuss here, Liu Zongyuan, Liu Yuxi, and Bai Juyi address the spirits of their deceased friends (all of whom were themselves famous literati) and communities of the living, moving outward from the close circle of companions to mid-Tang elite society and even to posterity. As I have argued elsewhere, mid-Tang literati wrote of personal experience most commonly in genres that emphasized communication, interaction, and selfrevelation , thus, in genres such as letters, exchange verse, and new informal modes of prose writing such as the ji ~c, "record."3 The prayer text genre shared this communicative function: unlike grave memoir inscriptions, which were expected to be respectful but factual accounts of the deceased, or poems of mourning, which gave writers lyrical outlets for sorrow, jiwen were vehicles for literati to express their praise and grief directly to the spirit of the departed. Writing within the context of friendship also helped close the distance between different readers by exploiting certain assumptions about literary exchange among friends-for example, the expectation of sincerity, and the implied close relation between writer and addressee. This framework of intimate exchange allowed mid-Tang writers to bring a new informality, an eclectic blend of registers, and an emphasis on direct emotional expression into some of the most serious and formulaic literary genres, including funerary texts. The fact that mid-Tang literati sought to experiment with funerary writing, perhaps the most conservative realm of Tang literature, also points to the broader significance of their turn to the personal. In the hands of the strongest...

This paper proposes an approach to verb-noun constructions that allows them to be understood holistically, which facilitates the acquisition of their distinctive features (for example, the presence or absence of an article) and their effective correlation with certain communicative functions and situations. Therefore, their use will not only be lexically and grammatically appropriate, but the apprentices will be able to make use of them as a whole acquired and associated with a certain communicative situation or function. As a result, their fluency will gain naturalness and will be closer to native.

As is well known, the absolute evaluation of the Chinese SAT test from 2022 requires adjusting the difficulty of the existing CSAT test. On the other hand, the number of examinees participating in the Chinese test of the CSAT every year is on the decline. Now, as a Chinese teacher, it is necessary to consider the alternatives in various ways as to how to overcome and cope with changes and crisis factors in the external environment for the Chinese test. In addition, in order for “evaluation,” which determines teaching and learning, to meet the final goal of Chinese language education, “improving Chinese communication skills,” it is necessary to closely review and review the questions on the Chinese test. This paper will focus on the following research questions to explore the tendency of the questions that measure the “communication function” of the CSAT Chinese test for 10 years from 2013 to 2022. : (1) What are the high frequency Chinese words used in the communication function question for 10 years? ; (2) What are the ‘communication functions’ and ‘communication situations’ that are mainly dealt with in the communication function questions, and what are the characteristics of these functions compared to the ‘communication function items’ presented in the ‘Chinese Language Curriculum’? ; (3) Based on the above analysis results, what is the plan to improve the question of communication function under the absolute evaluation method?

The purpose of the article is to determine the general and specific features of Ukrainian embroidery as a type of carrier of documented information.
 The methodology. We chose the most adequate among the existing general scientific approaches and methods: informational and communicative, sociocultural, comparative, classificational, and terminological. The information and communicative approach made it possible to consider Ukrainian embroidery as a carrier of social information, a channel of communication that ensures the transmission of information encoded in the symbols of embroidery in time and space. It helped prove that each element of an embroidered document carries a certain information load; to substantiate that Ukrainian embroidery has an informative and communicative function: colourful ornaments are not just patterns, but also meaningful signs-symbols that preserve and transmit national cultural traditions for a long time. The sociocultural approach made it possible to investigate the embroidered document as a means of connecting a person to the spiritual ideals and values of the Ukrainian nation; to understand one’s historical roots, national and cultural identity. Its cognitive abilities contributed to the deepening of ideas about Ukrainian embroidery as a unique artistic product, a phenomenon of the spiritual and material culture of the Ukrainian people. The application of the comparative approach made it possible to carry out a comparative analysis of the main modern concepts of the general classification of the document; determine the essential features of the embroidered document; to reveal the specific features of embroidery in different regions of Ukraine by type of ornament, embroidery technique, colour scheme, origin, distribution and residence. The classification approach made it possible to find out a set of general signs of the division of documents into types; detect their presence or absence in the embroidered document; to enrich the modern classification with specific distinguishing features of the embroidered document. The application of the cognitive potential of the specified methodological approaches made it possible to consider Ukrainian embroidery as a whole, to give it the status of one of the types of the document.
 The results. The study of Ukrainian embroidery in the paradigm of documentology significantly enriches the theoretical and methodological foundations of this science, allows to expand the class of authentic documents, to prove the correctness of the definition of the concept of document in the ISO 5127.2017 “Information and documentation” international standard in its broadest sense as “recorded information or a material object, which can be used as a unit in the documentation process”.
 For the first time, the concept of “embroidered document” was introduced into scientific circulation, the genetic feature of which was recognized as embroidery as a way of recording information on a material carrier. On the basis of the basic characteristics of the document classification, the specific features and properties of the embroidered document are determined: on the material basis, it is a fabric document; according to the origin of the material basis — natural, artificial, combined; according to the features of recording information on the carrier — manual, mechanical, technetronic, combined; according to the material structure of the information carrier — tape, card, sheet and non-traditional form; according to the nature of the symbolic forms of information recording and transmission — analog (iconic), symbolic (ideographic), textual, combined; according to the technique of applying signs-images — embroidered. The given arguments seem to be sufficient for the conclusion that Ukrainian embroidery fully meets all the basic features of an authentic document as a carrier of important social information, which should take its proper place in the scientific discourse as an object of documentology and cultural studies.
 The scientific novelty. The innovation of the research results is that, based on the application of the general document classification, Ukrainian embroidery is presented for the first time as a type of document. A new concept of “embroidered document” was introduced into scientific circulation, its scope and content were defined, common and distinctive features of an embroidered document as a specific means of communication were studied. A new promising scientific direction of documentology has been created, which investigates the patterns of development and functioning of the embroidered document as a type of authentic information carrier.
 The practical significance. The results of the research will be useful in practical and educational activities; in fields related to information and documentation; for specialists in decorative and applied art and exhibition activities, museum workers, librarians, etc. The identified specific features of the embroidered document will contribute to the arrangement of its varieties and the establishment of qualitatively new properties.

This paper deals with a Javanese traditional formula widely known as “jarwa dhosok”. By this formula and motivated by various intentions, Javanese people used to conform wittily the literal meaning of Javanese words with the creative meaning resulted from extension or modification of their consisting syllables. By using a number of data collected from website and added with ones I had found during my 40 year stay in Yogyakarta, I focuse my attention on the approaches of creation, semantic domains, and communicative functions by structural, contextual, and interpretative methods. Mostly “jarwa dhosoks” are created by treating the words to be defined as acronyms with final syllabic rhyming pattern, some of them are done with initial and combination of initial and final syllables. Jarwa dhasa created by various kinds of sound changes are much fewer in number. The practises of creating “jarwa dhosok” are used to fulfill various kinds of pragmatic function, mainly emotive, connative, poetic, jocular, and metalinguistic function, etc. Even though most of words to be defined in “jarwa dhosoks” are created to be semantically conformed with the intentions, many of them might be difficult to comprehend by outsiders or unfully pledged speakers without comprehensive understanding of the Javanese cultural practices in its broadest sense.

This article is devoted to the nature of collocations in French. Collocations that have the features of a syntactically and semantically integral unit are a poorly studied linguistic phenomenon. In a broad sense, these are meaningful sequences in the text, that is, a combination of two or more words that tend to occur together. Collocations perform communicative and expressive functions, reflecting the linguistic picture of the world of the people.

El cine puede considerarse, en un sentido amplio del término, como un lenguaje o, mejor dicho, un hecho de lenguaje. Pero este tiene una serie de funciones pragmáticas (la comunicación o el conocimiento) que quedan fuera de la experiencia estética, la cual parece escapar o ir más allá de esa lógica meramente utilitaria. El análisis textual trata de explorarla, primero construyendo una teoría y luego verificándola en el estudio concreto de una película. En este caso hemos elegido The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962).

In linguistics at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, the religious functional style is actively studied, which became possible as a result of changes in the socio-political situation in Russia. The subject of the study is the language of religious communication, individual religious genres, and the style system. The purpose of this work is to describe the compositional structure of previously unexplored prayers and to develop a basis for their classification. The subject of the study is the compositional structure of prayer as a genre of religious style. The research material was 120 texts of prayers of New Apostolic Christians created in a non-liturgical situation of communication. The specifics of creating prayers in this religious community is that the texts are created anew each time, while the canonical prayer "Our Father" is a model, which corresponds to the constructive principle of religious style — proto-textuality. By the method of categorical-textual analysis, it was found that each of the created prayers has a compositional structure containing in the main part from one to three compositional blocks correlated with the three main intentions of prayer — request, gratitude, praise. The study proposes to classify prayers based on the number of intentions included in the text and identifies mono-, bi- and polyintentional compositional structures of prayer texts. During the analysis of the texts, it was found that the main compositional structure found in the texts of the New Apostolic Christians is a biintentional structure containing the intentions of gratitude and requests in a strictly fixed sequence. The results of the work can be applied for further research of prayer texts in both liturgical and non-liturgical situations of communication.

A 15-year-old learner with severe handicaps who exhibited minimal intentional communicative behavior was taught to discriminately encode three classes of communicative functions, including requesting, rejecting, and commenting. A single symbol (want) represented the requesting function, and another symbol (no) represented the rejecting function. Four signs from American Sign Language represented each of four object labels taught in the commenting function. Communicative functions were taught in a mixed sequential paradigm (requesting, requesting/rejecting, and requesting/rejecting/commenting). Elicited probes were administered after each acquisition criterion was reached to assess generalization across communicative situations. Results suggest that a series of pragmatic discriminations can be established early in a sequence of communicative intervention. Further, the learner used requesting and rejecting spontaneously in other classroom environments. Results are discussed in terms of content, selection, and sequencing in communication intervention programs designed for learners with severe handicaps.

<p><em>The religious ceremonies such as Panca Yajna especially in Hinduism in Bali is done any time by Balinese societies that consist of several clans, groups of Dadia, Merajan, Banjar Pakraman, and Customary Village. Each group has a variety of cultures and interests related to their belief systems or related to their religious life. One of the Panca Yajna activities is Rsi Yajna which is Nilem Jro Kubayan Ceremony in Penglipuran Village. The purpose of Nilem Jro Kubayan Ceremony is for inner purification by one of their citizens who will become Jro Kubayan. Every ceremony activities is performed depending on the facilities and infrastructures of the offerings that is used in the procession. Every infrastructure is used having its own meaning and function. The religious activities is performed depending on the communication. Communication is an interaction process which is done by someone with other people to achieve a purpose together. Communication can be done in verbal or non-verbal as a sign or symbol which is used during communication.</em></p><p><em>According to the explanation above, then the problems are formulated as follows, (1) what are the forms of symbolic communication in Nilem Jro Kubayan Ceremony Procession in Penglipuran Village? (2) what are the functions of symbolic communication in Nilem Jro Kubayan Ceremony Procession in Penglipuran Village? (3) what are the meanings of symbolic communication in Nilem Jro Kubayan Ceremony Procession in Penglipuran Village? The theory that is used in this research are the theory of symbolic communication, the theory of structuralism functional, and the theory of interactionism symbolic. The type of this research is a qualitative research that used observation, interview and the study of librarianship. The data analysis technique uses descriptive method.</em></p><p><em>Based on the data analysis, the results of the research are obtained as follows, (1) the forms of symbolic communication in Nilem Jro Kubayan Ceremony Procession in Penglipuran Village are verbal and non-verbal form, (2) the functions of symbolic communication in Nilem Jro Kubayan Ceremony Procession in Penglipuran Village are as offering function, social function, endorsement function, communication function. (3) the meanings of symbolic communication in Nilem Jro Kubayan Ceremony Procession in Penglipuran Village are Religious meaning, social meaning, and education value meaning. </em></p>

This paper is dedicated to a specific religious community, a women's Orthodox association founded in the early twentieth century in a southern Bulgarian town with mixed population and complex cultural history. We explore the place visions and miracles played in the establishment of the association and its present‐day role in the local society. The impact of this small group of women, united in a moral community, on the religious and social life of a Balkan town is explained with attention to what might be described as “politics of divine intervention” in a world of continuous political, ethnic and religious strife. The stories of miracles, dreams narratives and other accounts of divine intervention in the broadest sense allow us to articulate the interweaving of hidden history, social order and religious life.

In Indonesia, candidates, especially presidential candidates, are busy crafting positive narratives to build a positive image. In this study, we will look at language use from the macro level, namely, the situation and function of communication, as well as at the micro level, which is how the verbal interactions of language users communicate their ideas in front of the public. The current article uses qualitative with descriptive and interpretative types. Analysis of the Speech Accommodation Model in the first debate of the 2024 Indonesian presidential candidates reveals several key insights into how candidates strategically adapt their language to connect with different audiences and achieve their communication goals. The analysis highlights the dynamic nature of accommodation, with candidates shifting their linguistic styles based on situational factors, such as the topic of discussion, the perceived attitudes of the audience, and the rhetorical strategies employed by their opponents. This research provides valuable insights into the complex interplay between language, identity, and power in political communication. By examining how candidates navigate linguistic diversity and negotiate their rhetorical stance, we acquire a deeper understanding of the strategies employed to engage, persuade, and mobilize voters in pursuing electoral success. And detail model used by all candidates is summed up as follows; inward convergence, outward convergence, divergence, con in dive accommodation, and over-accommodation.

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Texts are manifestations of language in use. In the attempt to describe the use of linguistic expressions in a text, the linguist must relate the communicative function of the text to its grammatical structure. The more comprehensive and less definite the text to be described, the more difficult the task of stating this relationship. Therefore, it is advisable, given the current status of linguistics and communications research, to begin with short texts that have a clearly definable communicative function.1

The Russian language is notorious among English speakers for its grammatical complexity. In particular, the acquisition and usage of punctuation rules of Russian as a foreign language, as well as for native speakers, presents considerable difficulty. One reason for this problem is the existence of substandard uses of punctuation that deviate from standard punctuation rules to convey particular communicative nuances. Some punctuation patterns in Russian are not dictated by syntactic context; but instead vary according to the author`s choice of communicative style. Guidelines for such usage are not provided in the majority of Russian textbooks and guides on orthography. General information about such deviations can be found, for example, in the guide “Orthography and Punctuation” by Valgina & Svetlysheva; however, substandard use of punctuation marks in the Russian written language remains poorly described. This presents a problem for students trying to master Russian punctuation, especially for nonnative speakers. This paper focuses on the essence of substandard use of punctuation marks (substandard punctuating), in particular the use of contextually conditioned marks. I explain such punctuation by using a communicative approach to Russian punctuation. This paper analyzes examples of sentences with identical wording but different punctuation strategies. The examples are taken from textbooks, guides and monographs on modern Russian punctuation. I conclude that these variants in punctuation are regular and represent an integral part of the Modern Russian punctuation system. However, by using substandard punctuation in accord with one`s intention the author should be able to “protect” his text from misunderstanding. Identifying a context where punctuation is not fixed by the syntax, but rather allows communicative variation, can be challenging for the student. In this case, for example, an editor should apply to some new set of rules to suggest the proper punctuation in different communicative situations. The traditional approach to the codification of Russian punctuation rules does not allow for a description of all variety of usages and, most importantly, does not in fact register the necessary punctuation patterns in long-term memory of a native speaker of Russian. Therefore, modern Russian punctuation rules need to be revised in terms of actual usage and communicative function in texts of different styles. This topic is, in fact, broader than the present article, which simply introduces the problem.