Linguistic Transformation Research Articles

Swearwords reinterpreted

Abstract Swearwords are common on the Internet nowadays. In addition to traditional forms and functions, new features and uses have been created as disguises and hedges, or even as deviants from insults. Focusing on the ‘new swearwords’ prevalent in Chinese social media, we identified the most commonly used novel swearwords developed and favoured by the young Chinese netizens, and analysed their linguistic features and uses on a Chinese social network site. We discovered that certain swearwords have undergone linguistic transformation to take up new grammatical and pragmatic functions. The invention and prevalence of these new swearwords raise interesting points on the roles played by the Internet and social media in bringing netizens together and in enabling them to create web content in their speech community.

Swiss German dialects spoken by second-generation immigrants: bilingual speech and dialect transformation

ABSTRACTGerman-speaking Switzerland is characterised by a type of diglossia where the ‘low variety’ is used in almost all domains of everyday communication. For children of immigrant workers, a Swiss German dialect normally constitutes one of their two first languages. Nevertheless, one can observe two different scenarios how the dialect enters the repertoire of these multilingual subjects.The first scenario entails the combined use of a heritage language (e.g. Italian) and a Swiss German dialect. Code-switching among peers of the same ethnic group serves a wide array of discourse and social functions, above all the expression of a composite bicultural identity, but the employed varieties do not differ structurally from those of monolingual speakers.The second scenario, instead, gives rise to a structural transformation of the traditional dialects. For instance, an individual speaker may be perceived as originating from a particular region of Switzerland on the basis of his or her vowel qualities, whereas at the same time the voicing of (normally unvoiced) plosives makes him or her recognisable as a person with an immigrant background. Our analysis focuses on these linguistic transformations of dialects into ‘(multi-)ethnolectal’ dialects, whose social function seem to lie in the signalling of an allochthonous (‘non-Swiss’) identity.

‘Pens that confound the label of citizenship’: self-translations and literary identities

The linguistic and cultural identity of transnational writers who choose to write in an adopted language or to self-translate, has gained increasing interest among researchers over the last decade. Approaches to the topic have ranged from textual analyses of translingual narratives and language memoirs to more ontological investigations of the processes of identity-formation in transcultural frameworks. Acknowledging that there is no one-to-one correspondence between linguistic units and ethnic, social or cultural formations, this paper considers the relationship between the literary practices of contemporary translingual writers and the role of language both in the formation of personal identities and in the reconfiguration of constructions of national identity and literary belonging. Specifically, I examine how two contemporary women writers, Francesca Marciano and Jhumpa Lahiri, who each represent a remarkable case of self-conscious linguistic transformation, interrogate the traditional construct of a monolingual, mono-ethnic and mono-cultural national identity. I argue that their autofictions reflect the multilingual and transcultural reality of contemporary transnational literature and instantiate broader issues connected with the definition, categorisation and consequent evaluation of literary canons and literary citizenship.

Языковые трансформации в лингвистическом ландшафте г. Нур-Султан

Языковые трансформации в лингвистическом ландшафте г. Нур-Султан

Reflections on the relation between direct/indirect methods and explicit/implicit attitudes

Abstract The paper discusses the relation between direct/indirect methods and explicit/implicit attitudes against the background of how the issue of consciousness (or awareness) is understood and treated in a great deal of research. We focus on the use of techniques that purport to probe the implicit language attitudes held by respondents, and discuss some recent suggestions to modifications of traditional indirect methods. Our main point is that the use of indirect methods does not per se tap into implicit language attitudes in the sense of unconscious language attitudes. In that regard, aspects of how the indirect elicitation is designed and conducted are of pivotal importance. Our insistence on adding the consciousness perspective to the methods-and-attitudes issue derives from our experiences with describing and explaining the recent radical linguistic transformation (homogenization) of the Danish language and speech community. We have found unconscious attitudes – or what we prefer to call subconsciously offered attitudes – to have been a main driving force in that transformation. In investigations with other research interests than sociolinguistic change, an insistence on the importance of securing subconsciously offered attitudes in addition to the consciously offered ones may be of less relevance.

Linguistic Transformations in Translating Legal Terminology from Russian into English and German

Цель работы - проведение анализа особенностей и проблем юридического перевода. Необходимо отметить, что перевод юридического текста должен отвечать требованиям точности, сжатости, ясности, однозначности терминологии, сохранения правовой надежности и прозрачности перевода, а также соотноситься с целевой аудиторией текста перевода. Таким образом, в условиях расширения международных связей и обмена информацией переводоведение на сегодняшний день считается самостоятельной научной дисциплиной со своей теоретической базой, концептуальным аппаратом и терминологией. При переводе юридической терминологии с русского на английский и немецкий языки применение различных переводческих трансформаций обусловлено двумя основными факторами - различиями в структурах языков и различиями в юридических нормах. Отмечается, что юридические тексты характеризуются наличием жесткой структуры, институциональности, перформативного характера, интертекстуальности, а также ряда других черт, которые определяют специфику перевода юридических текстов. Таким образом, следует сделать вывод, что помимо необходимости выбора между различными вариантами одного и того же термина, его синонимами переводчику приходится производить лексико-семантические замены при отсутствии прямых аналогов в правовых системах стран или давать описательный перевод.

American Orientalist Discourse: the Linguistic Formation and Transformation

The Middle East region had been the epicentre of American orientalist discourse since the American independence from Britain. After independence, American linguists, travellers, missionaries, politicians, sailors and traders scrutinized the anarchy and uncertainty of that region and employed them to produce works that prioritized American identity formation. This research rests on conducting an analysis of how American orientalism was created and how the various encounters between Arabs and America affected the linguistic course of this academia. This study considers the major encounters in the course of Arab-America relationship that brought major transformations to orientalism such as: the Barbary war, the creation of Israel, oil and terrorism. Since the American independence, American orientalism focused on building American identity in comparison with Arabs and their practices. Modern American orientalism has undergone various and huge transformations resulted mostly from formidable threats to American interests and the American retaliations to those threats. These encounters, whether political, economic or military, brought representation of Arabs to the top of American orientalist agenda and left a huge impact on image of Arabs in literature. Therefore, this study is based on the analysis of these different factors in order to know the different perspectives of this orientalism through its different stages.

Динамика языка XX века в лингвистических концепциях K. Фосслера, Э. Косериу и P. А. Будагова

В статье сопоставляются взгляды известных лингвистов ХХ века, которые отличаются оригинальностью суждений по вопросам системы и нормы языка. Эстетическая функция языка всегда привлекала внимание лингвистов разных эпох, а непрерывность языкового развития рассматривается в русле новых гуманитарных направлений каждым учёным по-своему. В данной статье взгляды трех выдающихся филологов, К. Фосслера, Э. Косериу и Р. А. Будагова, отражают многомерное видение языка в постоянно меняющихся парадигмах и в динамике языковых преобразований. Однако их различные убеждения только укрепляют статус языковой нормы, которая отражает особенности языка определенной эпохи. Несмотря на принципиально разные подходы в осмыслении сути языка и роли нормы в языковом развитии, наибольший интерес представляют точки пересечения во взглядах этих выдающихся исследователей.

Cultural Representation Through Translation: an Insider-Outsider Perspective on the Translation of Tourism Promotional Discourse

Intercultural communication, and particularly tourism translation, means making the cultural values of a given destination accessible to an audience that is not familiar with them. The purpose of tourism information is in fact to negotiate the encounter with the Other, a negotiation involving different stakeholders, the main ones being, on the one hand, translators and intercultural mediators and, on the other, international tourists. In the attempt to provide accessibility to international visitors, qualified as Outsiders, cultural identities will have to be mediated. Translators and intercultural mediators with different degrees of expertise in the field of tourism set themselves the task of translating the foreign into discourse, so as to produce a sense of otherness that will be recognised as different from the familiar. However, this process is extremely delicate, as it undergoes sophisticated stages of linguistic and intercultural transformations. Translators will have to find a balance between an adaptive, naturalising strategy of translation, which makes the foreign destination accessible to Outsiders, and the necessity to maintain a certain authenticity flavour (MacCannell 1976), because cultural diversity, rather than identity, is at the basis of the tourist offer. Translators and mediators will also have to find ways to stimulate the visitors’ curiosity and capture their attention. To this end, translation strategies that go beyond lingua-cultural transfer processes will be discussed, with special attention to models specifically derived from the field of Tourism Studies

There Goes the PTA: Building Parent Identity, Relationships, and Power in Gentrifying Schools

In cities across the country, school communities must contend with new challenges introduced by gentrification and the arrival of middle class and white families. This collaborative research study looks at schools where parent organizers are attempting to intervene in processes of gentrification that may further marginalize lower-income families of color. Based on interviews with diverse parents at three gentrifying schools, the study applies existing organizing models to urban schools undergoing racial, class, and linguistic transformations. The findings indicate that parents and organizers can develop an inclusive and equitable school community by rooting their shared identity in school/neighborhood history, emphasizing relationship building, and ensuring that parent leadership structures and practices remain responsive to lower-income families. Implications and limitations of the model also are discussed.

In evidence: Linguistic transformations of events in police interview reports

The aim of this article is to examine how police investigators reproduce interviewees’ utterances in narratives, in direct and indirect reported speech, and by enclosing words in reports in quotation marks. Drawing on a larger study of professional writing, the pertinent research question for the current investigation is how writing techniques in police interview reports convey evidential value in the form of reported utterances. A corpus of police reports on domestic violence is explored from the theoretical perspectives of critical discourse analysis, polyvocality and reportative evidentiality. A new analytical framework for polyvocal texts is developed in terms of utterance, source and framer. The results show that it is difficult to determine whether or not words placed within quotation marks are meant to present verbatim quotes. Another finding is that police investigators are not consistent in documenting utterances from different sources, or in showing whether utterances are embedded in other utterances. This may obscure the structure of the original events and the source of crucial utterances, resulting in unclear evidential status for police reports.

Distance Measures for Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Sets and Their Applications in Multiple Criteria Decision Making

Hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTSs) provide a linguistic and computational basis to increase the flexibility and richness of linguistic elicitation based on the fuzzy linguistic approach. Based on the traditional Hamming distance, Euclidean distance and generalized distance, some new class of distance measures for hesitant fuzzy linguistic numbers which include the hesitance degree of hesitant fuzzy element are provided and some linguistic scale functions are applied. We also define the continuous distance measure between two collections of HFLTSs. Furthermore, the proposed distance measures based on TOPSIS method for hesitant fuzzy linguistic multiple criteria decision making are developed, which calculate the distances between the alternatives and the positive ideal solution, the negative ideal solution, respectively. Then, the relative closeness degree to the ideal solution is calculated to rank all the alternatives. The main characteristics of the proposed distance measures are that it not only considers the hesitance of the hesitant fuzzy elements but also deals with linguistic transformation problem under different semantic situations, which efficiently avoid information loss and distortion. Finally, an example is provided to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the developed method, which are then compared to the existing methods.

‘I’ll be one of them’: linguistic mudes and new speakers in three minority language contexts

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we study the phenomenon of linguistic mudes or transformations in linguistic practices, in the case of highly proficient speakers of Irish, Basque and Catalan and we investigate the extent to which speakers in the three contexts share ideologies and experiences related to the process. Such an investigation will deepen understanding of the triggers behind the mudes and what it means to successfully become a new speaker of Irish, Basque or Catalan. This is necessary in order to develop a better understanding of how new speakers respond to the linguistic repertoires that they encounter in the various social milieus in which they navigate. The study relates to broader questions of policy towards the three languages in question: as all are operating within a revitalisation framework it is essential to understand the experiences of new speakers who have adopted the languages in order to guide future policy development.

Saxa Loquuntur: Prague’s Speaking Stones

This essay examines two rival cultural institutions built in 1880s Prague: the New German Theater (Neues Deutsches Theater) and the Czech National Theater (Národní divadlo). Although their translational fates were different, the two buildings must be studied together, their cultural meanings emerging from the dialog between them. Opera, more than any other cultural form, was a contested space of national struggle. The stones of both theaters were designed to deliver messages as eloquent, as meaningful, and as ideologically tinted as the musical languages played within them. But as the understanding of the choice of repertoire, the design of the productions, and the tongues in which opera was sung have changed over time, so too have the messages that these buildings deliver. This essay takes as its backdrop not only the stories of these iconic buildings, but more broadly the double cultural history of Prague and the historical and cultural transformations of Central Europe from 1880 to 1960 with the many linguistic conversions, transformations, and remakes which took place there.

Fuzzy Intelligent System for Patients with Preeclampsia in Wearable Devices

Preeclampsia affects from 5% to 14% of all pregnant women and is responsible for about 14% of maternal deaths per year in the world. This paper is focused on the use of a decision analysis tool for the early detection of preeclampsia in women at risk. This tool applies a fuzzy linguistic approach implemented in a wearable device. In order to develop this tool, a real dataset containing data of pregnant women with high risk of preeclampsia from a health center has been analyzed, and a fuzzy linguistic methodology with two main phases is used. Firstly, linguistic transformation is applied to the dataset to increase the interpretability and flexibility in the analysis of preeclampsia. Secondly, knowledge extraction is done by means of inferring rules using decision trees to classify the dataset. The obtained linguistic rules provide understandable monitoring of preeclampsia based on wearable applications and devices. Furthermore, this paper not only introduces the proposed methodology, but also presents a wearable application prototype which applies the rules inferred from the fuzzy decision tree to detect preeclampsia in women at risk. The proposed methodology and the developed wearable application can be easily adapted to other contexts such as diabetes or hypertension.

Языковые средства достижения функциональной эквивалентности при переводе художественного диалога (на примере итало-русских переводов романов А. Барикко)

The achievement of functional equivalence in the translation of the dialogues of literary texts is discussed. The main objective of the study is to identify linguistic means of realization of the principle of functional equivalence in the translation of dialogues from Italian into Russian. To achieve the objective the comparative analysis is made of some fragments of the works of Italian writer A. Baricco “Ocean Sea”, “Silk” and their translations into Russian language. The analysis identifies linguistic transformations, enabling to make in text of the translation the communicative effect created by the original. Special attention is paid to the characteristic function of the dialogue, consists in the fact that this kind of speech communication is actively involved in creating the characters. The author also dwells on the stylistic features of dialogues that reflect the main features of spoken language. The theoretical part of the work defines the concepts of functional equivalence within the framework of current research on translation, in this connection, the importance of retaining in the text the translation of a communicative effect which has been modeled by the author in the text source is underlined. It is concluded about how to recreate the communicative effect of a text in translation from Italian to Russian language. The relevance of the study is to describe lexical and grammatical means of realization of the principle of functional equivalence, which can be applied in translational work.

Abnihilization of the Etym: Joyce, Rutherford, and Particle Physics

This essay examines one of Joyce's references to new physics in Finnegans Wake: the allusion to Ernest Rutherford in the opening section of the third chapter of Book II. The composition of Finnegans Wake coincided with the development of the theory of relativity and quantum physics, which resulted in a variety of references to these new scientific developments in the book. The essay argues that among the many Wakean passages referring to new physics, the allusion to Rutherford stands out by virtue of being personal in nature and broad in references. The analysis of the linguistic transformations in the text of the passage suggests that Joyce saw a parallel between the work of the man who ‘split the atom’ and two aspects of his own work: the constant pattern of death and rebirth which is fundamental to the world described in Finnegans Wake, and his own lexical practice in creating a new kind of language to describe that world. References to quantum mechanics in the Rutherford passage are blended with allusions to relativity, the second component of new physics, and the text is placed in a cluster of other references to various elements of the subatomic world.

Language and Identity Explored

<p>The relationship between language and identity is widely discussed in applied linguistics, sociology, communications and other related scholarly fields. Furthermore, many researchers have focused on the post-Soviet region, which given its unique historical context allows for testing of this relationship. The widespread bilingualism as a result of historical russification and the linguistic transformations that occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union make the region a ‘sociolinguistic playground’. Recent events in Ukraine have given grounds to further explore this relationship, now in attempt to link language and identity as potential forces for geopolitical change in the region. This paper presents an overview of existing research, theories, and opposing perspectives related to the relationship between language and identity, and considers complications such as historical russification, religious influence, socioeconomic factors, and education with regards to the Ukrainian and post-Soviet context. I aim to illustrate the significance of language and its effects on socio-political change in the case of Ukraine, by presenting arguments and complications in support of the relationship between language and identity.</p>

La construcción y articulación de la hegemonía menemista frente al campo empresarial y el establishment􀀃 internacional en los años 90

This article analyzes the construction and articulation of Menemist hegemony in Argentina in the nineties, focusing on the interpellations and discursive strategies of Carlos Menem in the business world and international establishment. Likewise, the Laclau hegemony theory is implemented. In conclusion, Menem realized a dual interpellative strategy: first towards the neoliberal nucleuses in order to convince them to implement and perpetuate the pro-market reforms without ceding the course of action; and second, towards the great nonneoliberal entrepreneurs so that they would transform their established identities and adopt neoliberal ideas. This strategy assumed two historical phases, under a series of not merely linguistic transformations that dialectically legitimized and indirectly demonstrated the interpellative success of the Menemist speech.

Roman Literature: Translation, Metaphor & Empire

The Romans understood that translation entails transformation. The Roman term “translatio” stood not only literally for a carrying-across (as by boat) of material from one country to another, but also (metaphorically) for both linguistic translation and metaphorical transformation. These shared usages provide a lens on Roman anxieties about their relationship to Greece, from which they both transferred and translated a literature to call their own. Despite the problematic association of the Greeks with pleasure, rhetoric, and poetic language, the Roman elite argued for the possibility of translation and transformation of Greek texts into a distinctly Roman and authoritative mode of expression. Cicero's hope was that eventually translated Latin texts would replace the Greek originals altogether. In the end, however, the Romans seem to have felt that effeminacy had the last laugh.