Creative Use Of Language Research Articles

Language, Social Media and Ideologies: Translingual Englishes, Facebook and Authenticities

Language, Social Media and Ideologies: Translingual Englishes, Facebook and Authenticities

„Homo sovieticus” piszący: O „Zapiskach oficera Armii Czerwonej” Sergiusza Piaseckiego

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how a soldier and amateur writer, who is the protagonist of Sergiusz Piasecki's novel, Zapiski oficera Armii Czerwonej (Notes of a Red Army Officer), restricted by the apparatus of terror and propaganda of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, gradually frees himself from linguistic enslavement (caused by the use of Soviet newspeak). The author of the text focuses on the analysis of the protagonist's speech, pointing out elements that limit creative use of language, as well as the events that gradually lead to his liberation from the enslavement of newspeak, thus demonstrating its ineffectiveness in permanent and ruthless restriction of human freedom.

Am I trolling?: A CA-informed approach to Gangjing in a Chinese online forum

Because digital affordances of the Internet have provided spaces for linguistic creativity, a large number of popular terms derive from the Internet. Analyses of these forms serve as a lens through which essential aspects of social realities can be analyzed. This study focuses on the use of a trolling label Gangjing popularized in Chinese digital interaction. Collecting data from interactional threads in Baidu Post Bar, the CA-informed study investigates what communicative actions netizens perform in using the term and what responsive behaviors it triggers. Pragmatic notions such as identity construction and relational acts are adopted to interpret its use. Results show that Gangjing is used to show disagreements, delegitimize others as irrational participants, express negative emotional stances, and invite people for entertainment. Different responsive behaviors, including resisting, criticizing, mocking, attacking, and playing, are triggered. Overall, the creative trolling label can function as an interactional resource accomplishing interpersonal functions. By nuanced analyses of the dynamics of a popular reference term rooted in Chinese language and culture, the study adds to the current interactional approach to creative language use in online communication while providing new insight on interpretations of online trolling discourse.

The Novelist as a Historian: A Study of the Nigerian/Biafran War Account from the Perspective of Chukwuemeka Ikeh’s Sunset at Dawn

The novelist is a creator and a creative writer whose foundation is lodged in imaginative thinking. It is in the creative writer’s ability to recreate events, which had either taken place or could take place, through the use of fictive characters, and creative use of language. This study therefore introspects the events of the Nigerian/Biafra civil war from the perspective of the novelist as a historian, in doing this the study examines the events of the civil war from the literary perspectives and accounts of a literary giant Chukwu Emeka Ikeh’s Sunset at Dawn. Data for the study is collected from secondary sources, the text under study and other Nigerian/Biafran war novels, historical books about the civil war, and internet sources. The study adopted the theory of historicism as a frame work. It highlighted the civil war era from the perspective of the writer under study, from the beginning of the conflict to when it became a full-blown war, the killings, starvation, hunger and the end of the war. The study identified some of the remote causes of the war to be the fear of political domination among the three major ethnic groups in Nigeria, deep seated ethnic resentment and acrimony among others. This study recommends that similar situation in future can only be averted through power devolution, all- inclusive leadership style and equitable distribution of the nation’s resources.

The Use of Literature in Language Teaching: A Pedagogical Approach from the Nepali Perspective

The use of literature in language teaching is still contentious though literature occupies limited space in the language syllabi. The language teachers assume that literature has less contribution to language teaching, believing that literary materials are challenging to handle in the classroom. However, I believe that literary materials are rich in content and have the creative language use to contribute to language teaching. In this juncture, this study analyzes the use of literature in English language teaching in general and the pedagogical approaches to be practiced in particular by using qualitative and analytical research design. For this purpose, the three texts of literature: Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” (story), Kamala Das’s “An Introduction” (poem), and Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (drama) have been used as the primary texts to design the activities under three levels of interaction. These literary texts are analyzed to show the use and pedagogy of literature in language teaching. The study concludes that literature in language teaching contributes to the language development and aesthetic purpose. Exploring the literary texts involves students in (preliminary) interaction to draw the information of the text for conceptualization. Likewise, the activities under reading between the lines inculcate different skills in students such as discussing, analyzing, exploring and characterizing; and literary texts in beyond the text section involve students in aesthetic purpose-based activities in which students apply the critical lenses and create their own texts. This study provides many language teachers with insights to handle literary texts more effectively to sharpen students’ language, inferential and intellectual skills.

Merleau-Ponty’s Embodied Ontology and Literature: Gesture, Metaphor, Flesh, and Sensible Ideas

This essay traces out the importance of the poetic and creative use of language to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. Why Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment inevitably had to turn towards a poetic use of language and to see the overlap between literature and philosophy in articulating an ontology is examined. The tie between a deeper sense of metaphor and the structure of the flesh of the world is explored. The attempt to articulate the latent background of perception leads to the essential role of what will be called the “physiognomic imagination”, which is a different use of imagination than “make-believe” and is key to the unfolding of the depths of perceptual sense. Understanding the efficacy of the literary use of language to the manifestation of further sense also requires an understanding of the temporality of the institution and the ongoing becoming of the real in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. This essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s turn to poetic language was both a source of his insights for ontology and the way that he came to express his own philosophy as a necessary outcome of fidelity to the phenomenology of perception. Given the parallel structure of the flesh of the world and metaphor, the dialogical nature of the perceptual encounter with the “voice of silence”, and the increasing importance of physiognomic imaginations, the temporality of institution and “sensible ideas” to his indirect ontology, the literary and poetic use of language had to assume a central role in the articulation of the flesh ontology as well as to the further manifestation of sense. This assertion is meant to rectify the reading and commentaries that fail to see this necessity and instead interpret Merleau-Ponty’s increasing use of poetic language as merely a residue of his evolving writing style and not as the necessary outcome of his ontological insights. This essay is also meant to address phenomenologists who fail to turn to literature and the poetic expression of embodied ontology as failing to carry forth Merleau-Ponty’s revisioning of philosophy and centrality of perception and embodiment.

VIOLENCE AND BIGOTRY: REGRESSIVE INNOVATION IN KEVIN BARRY’S CITY OF BOHANE

Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane is one of the most celebrated recent works of Irish fiction. It is set in 2053, and tells the story of a people living in an environment of constant conflict where senseless acts of violence and bigotry are prevalent. This surprisingly negative imagining of Ireland in the future cannot be ignored considering the modern history of the country. The contemporary history of Ireland is fraught with a long and desperate struggle against the English Empire and its colonial forces as they tried for centuries to take over their neighboring island and completely colonize Ireland and its people. The English used two main weapons to further their goals in this matter: brutal military force and cultural sabotage. The cultural sabotage that the English brought to Ireland was mainly done by replacing Gaelic with English as the language of the Irish, and portraying them as culturally inferior and uncivilized in comparison to their English neighbors. Irish literature of the past few centuries has struggled to come to terms with this history of violence and dehumanization perpetuated by the English. Surprisingly, Kevin Barry in his novel callously repeats and escalates most of these negative stereotypes that have plagued Irish literature for years. The following study takes a closer look at the history of colonial violence and negative Irish stereotypes, and argues that City of Bohane is regressive in its depiction of Ireland as culturally ignorant and violent. That is to say, while the story is set four decades into the future, the author inexplicably insists on moving back in time to unearth and repurpose major colonial stereotypes that portray the Irish as uncivilized and backwards, to the great detriment of his innovative style and creative use of language in this novel.

A sociolinguistic study of address terms in a Nigerian university’s staff club

Abstract This article explores the sociopragmatic functions of address terms in social interactions at the University of Calabar Senior Staff Club. It takes into perspective the metalinguistic categories of address terms, their motivations, and the cultural and sociolinguistic parameters that determine their choice among Club members. The study is rooted in social identity theory and community of practice (CoP) analytical framework as are theorized in contemporary sociolinguistic literature. The study identifies nicknames, titles, acronyms, formulaic appellations, clipped personal names and extended personal names as the primary types of address terms in the Club, and articulates that the use of address terms is a social construction of identity that enacts intimacy, fosters collective belonging, and enhances solidarity. Conversely, address terms can also reinforce social division and inequality given the hierarchical structure of the Club which does not license reciprocal use of some address terms. The study concludes that address terms are a site of highly creative use of language which is reflexively framed through humour, clipping, lengthening, language play and other linguistic devices. Generally, address terms provide mechanisms for members to bond socially and adapt flexibly to the socio-academic environment of the Club.

Sprachwechsel in der neuesten litauischen Migrations- und Mobilitätsliteratur

Language Change in the Most Recent Lithuanian Literature of Migration and Mobility. When discussing literary multilingualism within the Lithuanian literary scene, researchers usually refer to different groups of authors. Some were born and socialised abroad immediately after the Second World War, some left Lithuania after 1990, but producing their texts in different linguistic contexts all of them write consistently in one language, English or Lithuanian. In the most recent Lithuanian migration and mobility literature, however, one can observe examples of intra-textual bilingualism or multilingualism, which illustrate the integration problems of Lithuanian (labour) migrants into foreign societies on the one hand and the development of multiple global identities on the other. The paper examines these spreading tendencies focusing on the exemplary novel Stasys Šaltoka (2017) by Gabija Grušaitė and discussing the structure and functions of the intra-textual code-switching. The creative use of language directed against conventional linguistic purism shows that the young generation of Lithuanian authors tends to break language and cultural borders. The authors Unė Kaunaitė, Gabija Grušaitė and others show that the playful use of multilingualism can be subversive, ironic, but at the same time can highlight the problems of language dominance and thus political, social and cultural exclusion, express group mentality, identity changes, etc. The way that Lithuanian literature deals with multilingualism, expressed explicitly or implicitly, reveals the extent to which certain literary texts can be described as transcultural, in line with the current tone of European and global migration and mobility literature.

It … he [the Moon] didn’t look tasty! Transnational children’s use of metaphors as a transcultural tool to gain symbolic power in family discourse

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to set out to explore how children living in Polish-English transnational families in the UK develop symbolic competence and symbolic power in home settings. By focusing on the children’s use of metaphor in family discourse when talking about the Moon, from a cognitive discursive perspective, this study explores the children’s creative use of language in achieving their social goals. It moves beyond seeing language, cognition and culture as bounded systems but rather powerful meaning-making resources that are part of the children’s complex discourse-worlds. The findings show how transnational families provide children rich opportunities to develop intercultural or ‘transcultural’ competence.

Train of Language, Train of Thought: Notes on an Exophonic Anomaly

The creation of poetry with literary value in a non-native language often invites questions about how this is possible to achieve. This question, however, can be turned around: is there something in being an exophonic poet that, rather than being an obstacle, could make the development and maturing of a poetic language possible? Adam Zagajewski writes that ardor, not irony, can be primary building blocks, and about the ideal of being ‘in between’. Ben Lerner writes about the sources of Hatred of Poetry and sees poetry as a potential that can never be completely realised. Being between languages causes the reality of language as one of many possibilities to be always present. The result can be construed as a poetic of time and light, but also of a reconciliation at depth warranted by the poetic ethos. Language becomes aware of itself, its autonomy and inherent lack of objectivity, and this becomes less naive and prone to cliches, but this awareness need not spiral into self-dissolving irony. Rather, it may seek to reconcile the possible ways of seeing the world into a new sense of sincerity. It inspires creative and playful use of language, gives heightened awareness of possible metaphors even where the sense of the transferred image is absent within the framework of one language. This has the potential to change perception of language and reality in a way that makes poetry almost possible.

Developing Communicative Capability in Foreign Languages through Digital Storytelling


 
 
 In the instructed second language teaching context, it is important to engage students in the meaning-making process to provide them with opportunities to develop communicative capability through the creative use of language. Second language acquisition research shows that while learners go through similar developmental stages in grammatical development, the rate of development differs from one individual to the next. Therefore, a language learning task needs to foster the development of communicative capacity while considering the current linguistic resources available to learners. This paper discusses Digital Storytelling (DS) as a method to create an opportunity to encourage students to develop more holistic communicative capability. Digital stories are short multimedia productions created by students that combine a first-person narrative with image and background music. This paper draws on some DS productions by intermediate Japanese language students from the Australian National University and discusses various communicative devices employed to make their story more engaging. DS allows students to transfer language they learned in the classroom to more authentic communication situations. It is a student-centred learning experience focusing, not only on using the language but also engaging in creative thinking and effective communication, with the added advantage of developing effective technical literacy.
 
 

“Flipgrid netiquette”: unearthing language ideologies in the remote learning era

ABSTRACT Flipgrid as an asynchronous video-mediated online discussion platform has offered a space for teachers and students to interact and show their thinking in remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. While Flipgrid discussions can afford educators the chance to build on students’ creative language use, the choices teachers make when designing the discussions can also perpetuate standard language ideologies and purist language norms. This study presents a critical analysis of free and available teaching materials designed to support the use of Flipgrid, highlighting examples that foster or constrain student language choice and body positioning according to socially constructed norms for “Flipgrid netiquette.”

Cleft Construction Is a Salient Feature in the ‘City of Glass’ a Novel by Paul Auster: A Stylistic Study

The present study is an attempt to investigate using the grammatical devices of cleft construction as a stylistic feature in the ‘city of Glass’ a post-modernist novel by Paul Auster. The purpose behind using cleft sentence is to highlight the element which is a part of the sentence and it is important for the author’s perspective. The construction of cleft sentence composes of a matrix clause headed by copula and relative or relative-like clause. Both (matrix and relative) reflect a simple logical proposal, That could’ve been conveyed in the consisting of a specific attribute without changing the truth circumstances. So this structure allows the writer focusing on the important element that he /she believes to reveal the creative use of language.

КОМУНІКАТИВНИЙ ПІДХІД ДО ФОРМУВАННЯ ГРАМАТИЧНОЇ КОМПЕТЕНТНОСТІ МАЙБУТНІХ УЧИТЕЛІВ ІНОЗЕМНОЇ МОВИ

The article deals with peculiarities offorming future foreign language teachers’ grammatical competence in realization of communicative approach. The notion "future teacher’s grammatical competence" and its constituents are specified. The constituents offoreign language teachers’ grammatical competence comprise grammatical knowledge, grammatical skills (receptive and reproductive) and grammatical awareness (students' ability to register and recognize grammatical phenomena in oral and written speech, features and patterns of their formation and functioning). The types of communicative exercises, characteristic for the formation of grammatical competence of future foreign language teachers in the process of realization of the communicative approach, are offered and substantiated. The grammatical competence of the future foreign language teacher as a component of professional competence can be defined as intuitive (determining the creative and spontaneous use of language) and intellectual (which can be manipulated consciously) knowledge and ability to use grammatical resources of the language which can be achieved due to the integrated approach to learning grammar material, which provides an organic combination of conscious and subconscious components in the learning process, which will ensure their success in further professional activities. While communicative approach realization communicative (linguistic) tasks are prioritized. After all, it is the latter that bring the development of grammatical skills and abilities closer to the conditions of real communication - motivated and purposeful. Each grammatical structure can be carefully processed and automated thanks to the creative approach of the teacher to the selection of tasks.

A joint learning approach with knowledge injection for zero-shot cross-lingual hate speech detection

Hate speech is an increasingly important societal issue in the era of digital communication. Hateful expressions often make use of figurative language and, although they represent, in some sense, the dark side of language, they are also often prime examples of creative use of language. While hate speech is a global phenomenon, current studies on automatic hate speech detection are typically framed in a monolingual setting. In this work, we explore hate speech detection in low-resource languages by transferring knowledge from a resource-rich language, English, in a zero-shot learning fashion. We experiment with traditional and recent neural architectures, and propose two joint-learning models, using different multilingual language representations to transfer knowledge between pairs of languages. We also evaluate the impact of additional knowledge in our experiment, by incorporating information from a multilingual lexicon of abusive words. The results show that our joint-learning models achieve the best performance on most languages. However, a simple approach that uses machine translation and a pre-trained English language model achieves a robust performance. In contrast, Multilingual BERT fails to obtain a good performance in cross-lingual hate speech detection. We also experimentally found that the external knowledge from a multilingual abusive lexicon is able to improve the models’ performance, specifically in detecting the positive class. The results of our experimental evaluation highlight a number of challenges and issues in this particular task. One of the main challenges is related to the issue of current benchmarks for hate speech detection, in particular how bias related to the topical focus in the datasets influences the classification performance. The insufficient ability of current multilingual language models to transfer knowledge between languages in the specific hate speech detection task also remain an open problem. However, our experimental evaluation and our qualitative analysis show how the explicit integration of linguistic knowledge from a structured abusive language lexicon helps to alleviate this issue.

Metaphoric Interpretation of Communicative Values in Today’s Flash Fiction

Referring to literary texts, this article considers the possibilities of systematisation and interpretation of the values of Russian culture. For specialised analysis, the author chooses flash fiction by Denis Dragunsky, Mikhail Shishkin, and novel prose by Pavel Krusanov, Alexey Slapovsky, Alexey Salnikov, and Maria Stepanova. The purpose of the research, which is carried out within the field of axiological stylistics, is to identify relevant communicative values with the help of the latest Russian prose. A brief outline of the politicisation and depoliticisation of the Russian language and basic values of culture provides a general idea about the basic values on the time scale of the twentieth and twenty-firstcenturies. The coordination of stylistic and linguacultural methods of analysis identified a strategy of word-centrism, which is common for the authors chosen and finds its expression in the formation of an open supra-textual lexical paradigm. Each component of the paradigmatic row nominates a communicative value and at the same time acts as an object of the author’s metaphorical interpretation. The verdict on the “dead” language of the totalitarian era and the “stillborn” language of modern mass literature, full of viruses of vulgarity, profit, and consumerism, is accompanied by the construction of a detailed metaphor of the road, which makes it possible to put forward a socially significant task of linguo-axiological construction. Based on metaphorical diagnostics of speech existence, there are distinguished numerous axiological constants, i.e. a living language and a living word. Not “the only true” word, but a word charged with emotional energy should become an instrument of linguo-axiological construction, which is to be carried out on the basis of creative use of language as a system of possibilities. The ethnotype of a real Russian writer is formed, which is contrasted with the linguacultural type of a successful word seller. The Russian writer, who selflessly serves the Russian language, is to pave the way to a living language by creating texts, which would continue the traditions of classical Russian literature as an imperishable national value.

Culture in Translation: A Comparative study of the role played by Culture in Literary Translation

Human Language is one of the most prominent achievements of man in the course of evolution. These languages are intrinsic, multifaceted as well as extremely capricious. Yet, it is also crucial to identify that comprehension of the language of a certain community is the right way, if not the only way towards understanding the culture of the respective community. Culture encompasses a gamut of attributes varying from the assortment of dishes catering to our rich palate to styles of communication and translation which is the process of reproducing the receptor language the nearest natural equivalent of the source language, aids in transcending the language barriers existing amidst communities and universalising cultures. This study examines the role played by culture in the process of translation with special reference to Martin Wickramasinghe’s Madol Doova and its’ English Translation by Ashley Halpe. By means of secondary sources and a highly qualitative approach, which predominantly comprised content analysis of the afore mentioned literature, the study explores the cultural concepts inherent to Sri Lanka and the methods employed by the translator to transfer the notions behind them without any distortion to the source text as well as their purpose, efficacy and success. The findings suggest that there is an undeniable, rather an influential role portrayed by culture in creative fiction, and that it could be successfully transcended upon the depth of understanding the translator has on both source and target cultures, the techniques he or she employs as well as the creative use of language.

Hipoteza o ponovnim prijevodima: studija slučaja dvaju hrvatskih prijevoda Uliksa Jamesa Joycea

The retranslation hypothesis was introduced to translation studies by Berman (1990) and Bensimon (1990). According to the hypothesis, retranslations tend to be closer to the source text and more foreignizing in nature, while initial translations aim to bring the source text closer to the target audience by domesticating it. Recent research challenges the validity of some elements of the retranslation hypothesis as well as its universal applicability. The aim of the paper is to examine whether the hypothesis is applicable to the first translation and retranslation of a radically modernist text such as James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. A comparative analysis of selected segments from two existing translations of the novel into Croatian, the 1957 translation by Zlatko Gorjan and the 1991 retranslation by Luko Paljetak, is carried out. The closeness of the target texts to their source texts is measured in two ways. The first parameter is the number of times a translation strategy is applied. In this part of the analysis the taxonomy of translation strategies provided by Chesterman (2016) is used. Another factor considered to be a suitable parameter for estimating the closeness of a target text to its source text is the preservation of instances of creative language use, particularly suitable for analysing the translations of Ulysses. The contradictory findings related to the two observed parameters lead to the conclusion that the retranslation hypothesis does not provide a sufficiently comprehensive methodological framework for explaining the phenomenon of retranslation. In its conclusion, the paper suggests that each translation and retranslation should be observed individually and with respect to the context in which they were created.

The language of mental images: Characterizing hippocampal contributions to imageable word use during event construction

Accumulating evidence suggests that the hippocampus plays a critical role in the creative and flexible use of language at the sentence or discourse level. Yet it is currently unclear whether the hippocampus also supports language use at the level of single words. A recent study by Hilverman et al. (2017) found that amnesic patients with hippocampal damage use less imageable words when describing autobiographical episodes compared to healthy controls, but this deficit was attributed to patients' deficits in episodic memory rather than impairments in linguistic functions of the hippocampus per se. Yet, in addition to affecting word use by way of its role in memory, the hippocampus could also impact language use more directly. The current study aimed to test this hypothesis by investigating the status of imageable word use in amnesia during two different types of language production tasks. In Experiment 1, participants constructed narratives about events depicted in visually presented pictures (picture narratives). In Experiment 2, participants constructed verbal narratives about remembered events from the past or simulated events in the future (past/future narratives). Across all types of narratives, patients produced words that were rated as having similar levels of imageability compared to controls. Importantly, this was the case both in patients' picture narratives, which did not require generating details from episodic memory and were matched to those of controls with respect to narrative content, and in patients’ narratives about past/future events, which required generating details from memory and which were reduced in narrative content compared to those of controls. These results distinguish between the quantity and quality of individual linguistic details produced in amnesia during narrative construction, and suggest that the use of imageable linguistic representations does not depend on intact episodic memory and can be supported by regions outside the hippocampus.