Linguistic Transparency Research Articles

Documentation as part of substance use rehabilitation: how workers account for the significance of documentation during interviews

PurposeThe focus of this article is in documentation in substance abuse inpatient rehabilitation. Our article scrutinizes how workers give accounts of the documentation in the inpatient substance abuse rehabilitation unit and what kind of client information the workers record.Design/methodology/approachThe study focuses on institutional interaction and practices. Our data consist of interviews with substance abuse rehabilitation professionals (N = 15). We analyzed the interviews using content analysis and the account concept in keeping with the ethnomethodological research tradition.FindingsStudy shows how workers account for the significance of documentation. Workers deemed documentation significant in four different ways: in gathering basic and rehabilitation information, in storing and transmitting information, as a tool for analysis and assessment and in supporting linguistic transparency in substance abuse rehabilitation. Workers justified the significance of documentation by the legal requirement to record information about clients. Documented information enables clear management of client information and supports substance abuse rehabilitation work in various ways. Documentation contains descriptions of the client’s situation and work performed. Additionally, documentation serves as a tool for communication among social care professional.Originality/valueThus the research show that documentation plays a significance part in the inpatient substance abuse rehabilitation and are connected to its institutional tasks and practices.

Understanding Basic Relational Concepts in Directions: A Study of Native Mexican and U.S. Children in Early Elementary Grades

The present study uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches to examine: (1) U.S. and Mexican children’s ability to understand basic relational concepts in directions; and (2) to analyze language arts and math textbooks to determine the levels of complexity in directions (i.e., number of qualifiers or concepts embedded in the directions). A total of 265 first grade (n = 128) and second-grade (n = 137) children in Mexico were assessed using the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts-Revised (BTBC-R) Applications Booklet. Their performance was compared to the U.S. standardized sample of the BTBC-R to make cross-cultural comparisons. Results from the quantitative study suggest that U.S. children at both grade levels outperformed Mexican children on direction following tasks. Furthermore, both cultural groups demonstrated developmental progression from first to second grade. Qualitative analysis of language arts and mathematics textbooks in both U.S. and Mexico revealed that the majority of instructions had “no complexity.” Mexico’s first grade language arts textbooks had significantly more “no complexity” directives than the U.S. textbooks; whereas first grade math textbooks in Mexico had significantly more “moderately complex” directives than in the U.S. The “very complex” directives were minimal in both cultures. Cross-cultural differences were discussed in terms of linguistic transparency, conceptual complexity, item biases, and the education system.

Managing a discourse of reporting: the complex composing of an asylum narrative

Abstract The aim of this study is to demonstrate how the presence of an emerging written record may affect the content of an asylum narrative, based on which a decision concerning the asylum claimant’s right to receive protection eventually is taken. The lion’s share of studies on interpreter-mediated asylum interviews to date focus on risks involved with assigning non-professionals to perform the interpreting. This study draws specifically on a 3.5 min-long sequence taken from an asylum interview involving a professional interpreter, working between Russian and Swedish, and the corresponding paragraph of the Swedish-language written minutes, produced in parallel by the caseworker at a Migration Agency office. The study demonstrates something that hasn’t been highlighted much in the literature on asylum interviews, namely the mutual impact of the interpreter-mediated communicative format—the specific turn taking order and the restricted linguistic transparency—and the parallel record keeping; the intricate passage from two spoken languages to an asylum narrative in the form of a text written in one of these languages.

Variação diacrônica do grau de transparência linguística do português brasileiro

Neste artigo, analisamos a variação diacrônica do grau de transparência linguística do português brasileiro, focalizando o sistema de expressão pronominal e desinencial do argumento-sujeito de primeira e segunda pessoas. Argumentamos que a transparência desse sistema é afetada diacronicamente por três mudanças em curso na língua: aumento da frequência de expressão pronominal do argumento-sujeito, aumento da frequência de uso do pronome você em detrimento de tu, aumento da frequência de uso da forma pronominal a gente em prejuízo de nós. Além disso, fornecemos dados acerca da primeira dessas mudanças e apresentamos um cálculo quantitativo que indica o papel dessa mudança como fator de diminuição do grau de transparência da língua.

The linguistic transparency of first language calendar terms affects calendar calculations in a second language

Calendar calculations – e.g., calculating the nth month after a certain month – are an important component of temporal cognition, and can vary cross-linguistically. English speakers rely on a verbal list representation-processing system. Chinese speakers – whose calendar terms are numerically transparent – rely on a more efficient numerical system. Does knowing a numerically transparent calendar lexicon facilitate calendar calculations in an opaque second language? Late Chinese-English bilinguals and English native speakers performed a Month and a Weekday Calculation Task in English. Directionality (forward/backward) and boundary-crossing (within/across the year/week boundary) were manipulated. English speakers relied on verbal list processing, and were slower in backward than forward calculations. In spite of the English calendar system's opaqueness, bilinguals relied on numerical processing, were slower in across- than within-boundary trials, and under some conditions had faster RTs than the native speakers. Results have implications for research on temporal cognition, linguistic relativity and bilingual cognition.

A Rabelaisian Scotsman in King Cromwell's Court: Sir Thomas Urquhart, the Hartlib circle and the nonsense of a rational language

The proposals for an artificial, rational language of Thomas Urquhart, laird of Cromarty, are usually seen as an eccentric, peripheral contribution to the debates about language planning of the mid seventeenth century. Yet, as this article shows, Urquhart seems to have composed his language proposals in The Jewel (1652) in direct response to the efforts of Samuel Hartlib and his intellectual network of associates to advance learning at the moment of political and religious reform in the early 1650s, and to have been taken seriously by them. As a prisoner of the Commonwealth after his capture at the Battle of Worcester, Urquhart had urgent personal reasons for impressing those with influence in the new regime. Yet Urquhart was working at the same time on his famously exuberant translation of the first two books of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653). Urquhart's fascination with the utopian dream of linguistic transparency was undercut by his immersion in Rabelaisian episodes in which the inherent ambivalence and excessiveness of language are repeatedly the stuff of nonsense and satire; it was also shadowed by his own personal and political situation as a royalist prisoner of war in a republican Britain.

Linguistic Transparency and Opacity in Compounding

The aim of this study is to identify linguistic transparency and opacity in compounds. Linguistic transparency and opacity analyses the degree to which the meaning of a compound word or idiom can be inferred from its parts. Compounding is a word formation process in which a lexical unit is made up of more than one word functioning as one, not only grammatically, but also semantically. Compounds and the meaning inferred by them may be: full, partial or idiomatic. Detailed analysis of the word classifies linguistic transparency or opacity as follows: two transparent constituents, transparent - opaque constituent, opaque-transparent constituent, two opaque constituents. As of the compositionality principle, constituents of compounds will be analysed separately and as a whole. Analysis will be illustrated with abundant examples of compound words collected by the Dictionary of Contemporary Albanian language and Oxford Student’s Dictionary. Translation of several words from English into Albanian and vice versa will be provided so as to pinpoint the matches and mismatches. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n3s1p590

Some Observations on the Translation of Legal Terminology in the Albanian Language

The translation of legal terminology faces various difficulties that affect the comprehensibility of legal text in the receptive language. This article will analyse the major problems related to the translation of legal terminology, by pointing out various errors that occur during this process through examples in Albanian. The problems associated with the translation of legal terminology will be analysed in two separate groups. First the problems that arise from the specificity of International Law will be analysed. The existence of different legal orders constitutes one of the main causes from where the controversy of concepts and legal institutions or their absence in different orders originates. Each state has its own legal system, therefore its own legal terminology, means that many referents (concepts and institutes) do not have equivalent terms in the language they enter. From this fact translation errors arise related to wrong neologisms or the use of terms that express only partially the meaning of the terms of the language from which they were borrowed. Secondly, the problems arising from language will be analysed, referring to the relationship between the word and concept that varies in different languages. In this case, examples will highlight the positive or negative connotations of some terms, which have affected the choices of terminology in various occasions and in different periods of time. We will also emphasize through examples the ways in which the entirety of meanings of legal terms affects not only the ability to translate them but also the linguistic transparency. At the end we will present findings concerning the problems arising during the process of translation as well as the possible solutions to avoid errors encountered in the translation of legal terminology. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n3p109

The Politics of the Pure Language in Seventeenth-Century Quakerism: Speech, Silence, and the Founding of Pennsylvania

This article revises a long-standing scholarly assumption that early Quaker language theory and practice attempted to reverse the effects of Babel or transcend language. Examining the writings of George Fox and seventeenth-century theorizations of the silent meeting, it argues that the Society of Friends practiced a silent attention to the “inner light” in order to generate a new kind of speech. Significantly, some Friends saw the primarily religious project of redeeming language as allowing for new political possibilities. When William Penn founded Pennsylvania, he attempted to apply Fox’s principles of the “pure language” to the political infrastructure, ideally creating a community based on linguistic transparency and free from state manipulation through language. Penn used the theory of the pure language to establish freedom of conscience as a central value in his commonwealth.

Linguistic influence on mathematical development is specific rather than pervasive: revisiting the Chinese Number Advantage in Chinese and English children.

The relative linguistic transparency of the Asian counting system has been used to explain Asian students’ relative superiority in cross-cultural comparisons of mathematics achievement. To test the validity and extent of linguistic transparency in accounting for mathematical abilities, this study tested Chinese and British primary school children. Children in Hong Kong can learn mathematics using languages with both regular (Chinese) and irregular (English) counting systems, depending on their schools’ medium of instruction. This makes it possible to compare groups with varying levels of exposure to the regular and irregular number systems within the same educational system, curriculum, and cultural environment. The study included three groups of first/second graders and third/fourth graders with varying degrees of experience to the Chinese language and counting systems: no experience (UK; n = 49); spoke Chinese at home and learnt to count in English at school (HK-E; n = 43); spoke Chinese at home and learnt to count in Chinese at school (HK-C; n = 47). They were compared on counting, numerical abilities and place value representation. The present study also measured nonverbal reasoning, attitude toward mathematics, involvement of parents, and extra-curricular mathematics lessons to explore alternative explanations of children’s numeric ability. Results indicated that students in HK-C were better at counting backward and on the numeric skills test than those in HK-E, who were in turn better than the UK students. However, there was no statistical difference in counting forward, place value understanding, and a measure of arithmetic. Our findings add to existent literature suggesting that linguistic transparency does not have an all-pervasive influence on cross-national differences in arithmetic performance.

Affective Trans-scapes: Affect, Translation, and Landscape in Erin Moure's The Unmemntioable

Erin Moure’s The Unmemntioable (2012) tells a story of one of the poet’s heteronyms (E.M. or Erin Moure) taking her mother’s ashes back to Ukraine, while observed, and then followed, by another (E.S. or Elisa Sampedrin). As selves multiply, the landscapes through which they move, split, and superimpose themselves upon each other: Bucharest, Alberta, and the Galicias of both Spain and Ukraine. Words too traverse different languages and different materialities (fonts, colors, alphabets, genres, and pictorial renditions). These multiple versions of person, place, and writing recurrently challenge notions of the interiorized self, authenticity, and linguistic transparency to open up new domains of expressivity that resonate with the cognitive, the sentient, and the affective. The article maps out Moure’s strategies of mobilizing the affective charge of bodies, objects, and words to translate physical and emotional landscapes beyond direct knowledge. We position Moure’s poetic praxis against recent discussions within “the affective turn” in theory about the intensity, transmissibility, and political momentum of affect by Sara Ahmed (2004), Teresa Brennan (2004), and Nigel Thrift (2007). Our argument, therefore, is that Moure’s practice of “transelation” (“a way of foregrounding the translator’s presence instead of pretending to disappear”) in rendering what we have termed the affective trans-scapes of memory and history constitutes a significant contribution to critical work on the ethical dimensions of translation (by Jeremy Munday 2001 and Lawrence Venuti 1995) and a powerful intervention in the rereading of historically affect-laden landscapes, such as those of Galicia, Bucharest, and Alberta.

Giorgio Manganelli and the Illegible Obscene

This article begins by noting a critical, if critically neglected truth about Giorgio Manganelli’s literary production: it is emphatically obscene. I then identify and analyse a pervasive tension between an avowal of a linguistic and rhetorical transparency developed in reference to reproductive organs, and an affirmation of illegibility. Studying ‘La letteratura come mafia’ (1968), ‘La letteratura come menzogna’ (1967), Hilarotragoedia (1964),and other writings that focus on reproductive organs and express both a frustration with cycles of tumescence and detumescence and a lurid horror feminae, this article isolates the rhetorical strategies that enable such an incongruous aesthetic union of the illegible and the obscene.

Melting flesh, living words

This essay argues that the Book of Common Prayer offered new ways to think about the flesh in Reformation England. Whereas the medieval liturgy emphasized the physical vitalism of Christ’s body and blood, the Anglican liturgy defined ‘flesh’ in the context of an ecclesiastical community characterized by linguistic transparency and textual communion. To chart this movement from fleshly presence to spiritual mystery, I show how the rubrics, ornamentations and texts of both the medieval Mass books and the reformed Book of Common Prayer iterated contrasting conceptions of the flesh that emerged from traditional and reformed sacramental theologies. I conclude by showing how secular institutions, namely the anatomy theater and the early modern stage, pressured such a reformation of the flesh by making the physical materiality of flesh, blood and wounds the focus of their spectacles.

‘Let Me In!’ Opacity and Illumination in an Age of Technological Reproduction

Predating Plato’s ancient quarrel with poets by more than two millennia, Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna’s exile songs—the ‘ni-me-šár-ra’—are primal poetic cries at the loss of the real. Rereading Enheduanna’s text as a plausible answering call to Ezra Pound’s century-old ‘Make It New!,’ this article proposes ‘Let Me In!’ as a possible credo for contemporary poets. In this article I investigate two contrary modes, L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E poetry and lyric poetry, to speculate that a poem can act as either a meta-textual invention which problematizes all claims to linguistic transparency (L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E poems), or as enacting illuminatory gestures to guide readers sensorily towards the real (lyric poems), with either mode of material mediation entailing ethical performance. Critiquing a selection of work by contemporary poets Charles Bernstein and Jane Hirshfield, this article proposes to recuperate Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura as a concept that enables a rereading of poetic meaning-making as either purposefully opaque (Bernstein) or purposefully transparent (Hirshfield).

Martin Amis and ‘the Nature of the Offence’: from Expressions of Outrage to the Experience of Scandal

Martin Amis’s choice of topic for Time’s Arrow seems to confirm his reputation as a controversial figure and to turn the novel into material for explosive debate. By proposing a highly visual fictional account of the Shoah, the novel engages frontally with polemical critiques of artistic attempts at representing Nazi crimes. Beyond outraged assessments of visual representation where the Shoah is concerned, however, the novel invites us to question the notion of outrage itself, in its demand for verbal and ethical clarity. In its opacity, Time’s Arrow relinquishes the expression of outrage – a tone perhaps better suited to essays – to elicit scandal. Its denial of epistemological and linguistic transparency erects a stumbling block which threatens to anihiliate our faith in liberal humanist values, in time, and in language. Yet it does not simply turn us into anaesthetised spectators: visually reminding us of our responsibility as political and historical beings, fiction relies on its own devices to create an ethical experience of reading.

On Superficiality: Truman Capote and the Ceremony of Style

This article explores the quality of lightness in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Precisely what kind of lightness do we find in the novel, what are some of its defining characteristics and what are the key strategies by which this effect is achieved? I begin by discussing the narrative’s readability, its linguistic transparency and its deliberate attenuation of supplementary meaning. This transparency, I would like to suggest, ultimately impedes our standard interpretative procedures, frustrating any attempt to reinstate (plausible) symbolic meaning. I then address in greater detail the “depthlessness” of the novel, its emphasis on surfaces and immediate legibility. Finally, I offer an analysis of Holly Golightly herself, making the argument that as a character she shares (and indeed determines) many of the novel’s lighter qualities — attaching supreme value to “the surface of things,” privileging the signifier over the signified and actively pursuing the freedom and mobility of non-meaning.

Hold That Pose: Visual Culture in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Spanish Periodical (review)

Reviewed by: Hold That Pose: Visual Culture in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Spanish Periodical Toni Dorca Hold that Pose: Visual Culture in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Spanish Periodical. The Pennsylvania State UP, 2008. By Lou Charnon-Deutsch. Lou Charnon-Deutsch suggests that today's fascination with visual culture is historically rooted in modernity while preceding 20th-century phenomena such as film, television and, more recently, the Internet. As the author convincingly argues, it was during the late 1800s when advances in photomechanical reproduction enabled periodicals to capitalize on the urge by an increasingly large bourgeoisie to be informed about local, national and world events. As a [End Page 200] result, the encyclopedic goals of the Romantic illustrated press—epitomized in Ramón de Mesonero Romanos' Semanario Pintoresco Español—gave way to other means of combining text and image aimed at a more mundane, voyeuristic and ultimately consumerist audience. In chapter one of her book, entitled "Racial Fetishism in the Late Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Maganize," Charnon-Deutsch examines the Orientalist genre portraits focusing on exotic women, many of whom were adorned with coins. Going beyond psychosexual explanations, the author contends that these women's appeal to a male gaze was indicative of Spain's status as a former colonial power striving to maintain some of its hegemony amidst a lagging economy. Chapter two, "From Engraving to Photoengraving: Cross-Cut Technologies," traces the evolution whereby the implementation of photomechanical technologies in periodicals such as La Ilustración Española y Americana and Blanco y Negro shifted their readership from the moneyed to the middle classes. The possibility of transferring a photograph directly into the pages of a paper or a magazine began to alter also the relationship between written text and image in favor of the latter. Chapter three is devoted to "Torcuato Luca de Tena's Blanco y Negro and Spain's move toward a mass media." A weekly launched in May 1891, Blanco y Negro's success is to be attributed to a combination of moderate prices, the use of the aforementioned new photoengraving techniques, and a festive tone seeking to trivialize class divisions. Owing to these features, the magazine was soon to eclipse its most direct rivals such as the once powerful and more elite Ilustración Española y Americana. Finally, chapter four deals with the graphic depictions of the 1898 Spanish-American War as they appeared in the illustrated press in both Spain and the United States. Chief among the author's conclusions is the realization that, save for a few exceptions, the media clung to their country's political agendas by inflaming the patriotism of their people in the most chauvinistic terms. Support of each nation's foreign policies included not only the exaltation of time-honored national virtues—Spanish honor on the one hand, U.S. humanitarian expansionism on the other—but also, and mostly, the deployment of satirical cartoons poking fun at the enemy. Hold that Pose exemplifies the extent to which the field of cultural studies can indeed expand our knowledge of 19th-century Spain in a way that traditional scholarship may no longer be able to do. The book's methodological rigor, along with a thoroughly extensive research drawn from various disciplines, attests to the critical acumen of an author who is clearly on top of her game. Lastly, and for the ones who believe that style in scholarship matters as much as in the creative arts, Charnon-Deutsch's elegant prose should once and for all put to rest the absurd notion that linguistic transparency is incompatible with intellectual depth. Toni Dorca Macalester College Copyright © 2009 The Board of Regents of the University of Arizona

Equal, That Is, to the Field Itself: Stylistic Mimesis in Critical Writing

THE PHRASING IN THE SINGULAR of this forum's key query--Why do I have to write like that?--allows it to be read either as a rhetorical or non-rhetorical question. As a rhetorical question, it might be rephrased resistantly, in teenager-speak, as And I have to do this why? Non-rhetorically, it asks Why do I have to do this? and raises issue of disciplinary compunctions. Of course, two meanings are not entirely separable. But this brief reflection will pursue second route. Criticisms of baleful language of inquiry are not new, so it is worth recalling at outset that we were once exhorted, both directly and by example, to cultivate this theoretical style. Those who attended ACCUTE in 1980s, and meetings of its lively Theory Group in particular, will recall chain of reasoning: natural or commonsensical language use (whether in critical writing or, for example, Victorian realist novel) laid claims to linguistic transparency and thus occluded traces of its own (power/knowledge) operations. I particularly recall a memorable phrase in circulation at time and even today: the tyranny of lucidity. Even without explicit encouragement in this direction, aspiring critics were offered ample precedent in writings of some key European theorists (who were sometimes victims of clunky and not always idiomatic translation, a factor not entirely incidental to this tale). The bold generic blendings, syntactic experimentations, neologisms, and elliptical formulations of Barthes, Derrida, Irigaray, and Lacan, for example, were read as signaling a new style, one true to gaps, erasures, deferrals, rhythms, connections, and complexities of signifying systems these authors sought to understand. As a result, we remain expectant of, if perhaps now less tolerant of, stylistic density and complexity in writing. But is also important to remember that complaints about (what we might call) overwriting predate advent of theory to North American academy by some fifty to seventy years. Janice Radway notes that by 1920s and 1930s, a set of highly specialized academic discourses and practices had arisen to challenge older generalist or liberal arts educational model. (1) This was result of three factors, all occurring more or less simultaneously from period 1870 to 1915: in United States, rapid growth of dedicated research universities developed on German model; more general professionalization of academia leading to guild and bureaucratic discourses; and--this is Radway's primary interest--the rapid proliferation and thus stratification of print, particularly periodical production, which permitted rise of specialized academic publications but also allowed a broader range of cultural commentators (the dreaded middlebrow) to position themselves publicly and horn in on academic's traditional turf. Thus new was designed not only to meet new knowledge demands but to strengthen demarcations of expertise. I would wish to add a further element, however, which is evidenced by fact that new specialist style involved more than deployment of technical terms or jargon. In addition, it was marked--as its detractors never ceased to complain--by a discursive densification perceived as obscurantist or hermetic. At work is a sort of seepage: new paradigms, and new demands for analytical complexity, create a greater sense of phenomenological complexity (note tail wagging dog), whose description demands a more complex in its turn. Of course, critics always have matched medium to message: consider Matthew Arnold's Attic style, or, even earlier, Pope's Essay on Criticism in which well-known lines of representative verse function as a synecdoche for larger project. We could follow this escalator back to classical times, with critics modelling ways they think writing ought to be: weighty, or witty, or decorous. …

Towards the Blanched Alphabets

In his sixth collection, Towards the Blanched Alphabets, expatriate American poet Gustaf Sobin presents a series of poems composed in the territory between Emerson's announcement that fossil poetry and a more skeptical, post-structualist dismissal of such a romantic portrait of linguistic origins. These poems are by and large meditations that follow from Sobin's encounters with the artefactual detritus-the axheads and potsherds-of the Neolithic cultures that once inhabited the Vaucluse Region in Southern France, where Sobin has lived since 1963. The poetic labor of this book might be called a translation from the heft of these eloquent vestiges into the breath's transparent coinages of the poet. This encounter between the Neolithic and the modern, accompanied by Sobin's deft attentiveness to lineation, leads to a meditation on origin and passage that both quiet and stunning. The book begins with the poem Genesis, in which Sobin translates his almost mystical encounter with a Neolithic needle into a language that rifted with rewards. The following the half of the poem: from the very outset, a needle, a no-thread, run inextricable through the living mass. flared, then guttered, that ore, that either, that that is. (3) The ore of or Sobin's matter here-the isn't that is that permits the flare of recognition. To extend the metaphor, the threadless needle leads to a seam that Sobin mines, opening into a moment of transitory recognition, one that must, invariably, gutter. But the mining occurs all the same, and the poems collected here present the material arrived at by this process. In this sense, these poems convert the artefact's immediacy of the (8) into an identification with people who'd existed...in the sheer immensity of the immediate (41 ). The poems in this book are about the temporally remote becoming spatially simultaneous, an etymology of sorts abolished in the exact same instant as its formula- / lion (7). When this happens, as Sobin puts it in a pithy line, the past and present clot, thesaural (35). Sobin's attentiveness to the material of the past cognate with his attentiveness to the material of In the introduction to his marvelous collection of essays on archeology, Luminous Debris, Sobin describes the connection directly: I'd go out `silexing' after a day's work as a writer, and find myself, once again, scouring the empty expanses before me, scouring the ground for a second set of stray vocables, lost nominals.' This nostalgic coordination of words and things is, however, balanced by a more skeptical semiotics that crops up frequently in this book: For language, as you'd learnt, never more than the arbitrary imprint of a silence. (17) These poems, then, mark the gap between an archeological underworld, legible through its underwriting (8), and an eschatological afterworld with its concomitant after-language (30). Although such skepticism imprinted with post-structuralism, Sobin stubbornly retains a romantic belief that archaic objects permit entry into a bygone moment of linguistic transparency. In a later poem we find the following reversal: for creation, each time, implies anteriority; implies entry, re-entry into those earliest alphabets, languages. (104) In spite of the cautions of post-Saussurian linguistics, Sobin demands for himself an entry into origin: once, every / word, its every / blown vocable I came rippling out of an else- / where that I was (49). The success of several of these poems a consequence of his refusal to refuse the possibilities of creation present in a first language. This trajectory (which occurs in individual poems as well as through the book as a whole) moves from the idea that language a violated silence to a more ambitious, aggressive appraisal of language as a sonorous usurpation ( 17). …

Children's orthographic representations and linguistic transparency: Nonsense word reading in English, French, and Spanish

AbstractThree experiments were conducted to compare the development of orthographic representations in children learning to read English, French, or Spanish. Nonsense words that shared both orthography and phonology at the level of the rhyme with real words (cake-dake, comic-bomic), phonology only (cake-daik, comic-bommick), or neither (faish, ricop) were created for each orthography. Experiment I compared English and French children's reading of nonsense words that shared rhyme orthography with real words (dake) with those that did not (daik). Significant facilitation was found for shared rhymes in English, with reduced effects in French. Experiment 2 compared English and French children's reading of nonsense words that shared rhyme phonology with real words (daik) with those that did not (faish). Significant facilitation for shared rhyme phonology was found in both languages. Experiment 3 compared English, French, and Spanish children's reading of nonsense words (dake vs. faish) and found a significant facilitatory effect of orthographic and phonological familiarity for each language. The size of the familiarity effect, however, was much greater in the less transparent orthographies (English and French). These results are interpreted in terms of the level of phonology that is represented in the orthographic recognition units being developed by children who are learning to read more and less transparent orthographies.