Linguistic Usage Research Articles

Contemporary public management: a new global paradigm?

This paper takes another look at the much-canvassed idea of a 'new global paradigm' emerging in contemporary public management. It argues that, linguistic usage apart, the 'globality' and monoparadigmatic character of contemporary public management change seems to be exaggerated. Three interrelated objections are advanced against the claim of an emerging new global paradigm. First, it is argued that contemporary reform ideas, particularly those advanced by Osborne and Gaebler, are culturally plural rather than homogenous. Second, it is argued that there are substantial biases towards exaggerating international similarity in public management reforms, but that the similarity weakens when we go beyond semantic packaging to examine the specific content of reform initiatives. Third, it is claimed that there are also built- in biases for overstressing the continuity of contemporary public management reforms, but that in fact there are major obstacles to the emergence of a stable new paradigm in public management. One is the underlying mutual repulsion of the multiple reform paradigms today, and the other is the frequency of self disequilibrating processes in public management reform associated with the production of unintended side-effects and reverse effects.

Whitman's Leaves of Grass: Poetry and the Founding of a 'New World' Culture

If it can be generally stated that nineteenth-century European 'high' culture valued poetic discourse over the less codified practices of everyday language, then Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is an attempt to give everyday American linguistic usage poetic value. Whitman's poem includes discourse that does not comply with the traditions of European poetics but that is proclaimed nevertheless to be poetry in order to suggest that the liberal-democratic American state has a natural beauty equivalent to the most refined poem. Leaves demonstrates this national beauty by including a wide variety of utterances and observations in its epic project, even though this inclusiveness also implies a critique of the project that the work undertakes. The ambitious extent of this collection threatens the identity and distinctiveness of the literary text itself. Like a state with poorly defined borders and institutions, a work that intends to articulate such an inclusive democratic poetic voice challenges the necessary formal distinctiveness that would recognizably make it a form of literary discourse. The result is that Leaves must solicit the willing participation of its readers in order to realize the project that it undertakes. Whitman's poetry requires that the reader constantly renew its discourse by reinvesting it with new poetic meaning and, as a result, reaffirming it as the poetry of a flourishing, liberal American state.

Pseudoanglicisms in Italian: Concept and Usage

AbstractEveryone notices and many people lament the seemingly vast and increasing number of English terms in Italian. But appearances can be deceptive and in a recent study I concluded that, although terms of the order of boss, doping, killer, look, self-service, and sponsor ‘jump off the page’ of an Italian newspaper or magazine when they are used, as a total proportion of Italian linguistic usage such unadapted anglicisms are relatively rare, even in the daily press and the popular weekly and monthly magazines where they are most commonly found. My statistical enquiry showed that such terms seem to account for an average of 0.77 per cent of alllexical items used in these publications, an apparent increase of some seventy-five per cent over figures produced in the 1960s but still representing an incidence of no more than about one item in one-hundred and fifty. So the incidence still seems to be a very low one. These ‘crude’ anglicisms do of course only represent a minority of the recent neologisms Itali...

A Compilação lexicográfica como Alternativa Emergencial à Descrição Terminológica Sistemática

<span>A descrição e a sistematização de dados terminológicos com base em córpus variados de textos de especialidade, embora constitua um dos métodos mais seguros para a obtenção de um retrato fiel do uso lingüístico efetivo, exige um dispêndio de tempo para a concretização de seus resultados que pode afigurar-se longo demais tendo em vista as urgências mais imediatas - tal como se manifestam no contexto brasileiro - particular mas não exclusivamente, da tradução técnica. Propõe-se, como abordagem alternativa, a compilação de dados lexicográficos a partir de dicionários e glossários técnicos já disponíveis no mercado e pré-selecionados em termos de confiabilidade por usuários especializados (tradutores profissionais), como solução emergencial, enquanto a descrição terminológica sistemática nos principais campos do conhecimento não gerar os seus primeiros frutos. Tal compilação deverá ser organizada de forma a tornar cada verbete compatível com sua futura expansão e transformação dos registros, de sua forma lexicográfica simplificada para a descrição terminológica completa.</span>

Political language: Do women make a difference?

Abstract This paper examines the linguistic usage of women and men MPs in Norway in the 1950s and the 1980s. The aim is to uncover any systematic differences between women and men as to sectoral emphases and linguistic categories, as well as change over time in these respects. The rapid increase in the share of women among Norwegian MPs does not seem to have altered the basic patterns apparent already in the 1950s. The clear sectoral differences between women and men are still there in the 1980s. Moreover, as to linguistic usage, measured in terms of group orientation, types of arguments, propaganda techniques and metaphors, men and women seem to have become increasingly similar over time.

Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin (review)

158Philosophy and Literature contrast to his careful, detailed readings of Ashbery, Bishop, and Merrill. Of course, it is difficult to consider entire groups of poets in detail in a single chapter, but no group can be adequately reduced to a single, short poem—and not even its best one at that. His readings of individual contemporary poems outside the boundaries of poetic schools are far more insightful. Ultimately, Shedey's overall diesis is a provocative one, and difficult to fault in general. Poets can embody, or attempt to challenge, the historical consciousness of their age in their work; but they cannot escape it if they are to produce genuine art. A major part of the consciousness of our age is indeed skepticism, and the major poets of our time will be those who manage to confront it direcdy. Shetley's optimism that poetry can appeal to intellectual readers is gratifying, and his book is a useful contribution to the debate about poetry's relation to a general intellectual readership. University of CincinnatiKevin Walzer Dialagues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin, by Walter L. Reed; xii & 223 pp. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1993, $39.95. In one regard, a book of this sort seems to have been almost inevitable, as its subject represents a convergence of two prominent vogues ofrecent decades in Anglo-American literary criticism and theory: interpretation of the Bible "as literature," over the past thirty years, and appropriation of the critical concepts and methods of the Soviet theorist M. M. Bakhtin, from the early 1980s on. However, whether intended or not as a pun upon the labels of the Gospels (kata Matthaion, kata Markon, etc.), die closing phrase in the book's subtitle is somewhat misleading. As the author concedes, references to biblical texts are scarce in Bakhtin's writings; so, strictly speaking, it would be impossible to give anything but the sketchiest account of the Bible "according to Bakhtin" himself. And when Bakhtin does mention the Bible, he "tends to treat it as official, single-voiced discourse, stressing its public, institutional role in dominandy Christian cultures and periods" (p. 14), a tendency that might seem to discourage adapting Bakhtin as a guide for biblical study. (A notable exception to this tendency is Bakhtin's comparison of early Christian writings to GrecoRoman novels as works that represent, in his own words, a "carnivalization of genres widiin the realm of the serio-comical" [quoted p. 77].) Nonetheless, in perceiving—as Bakhtin apparendy did not—"the striking relevance of Bakhtin's philosophy and aesthetics of dialogue to the peculiarly Reviews159 polyform nature of the Bible," Walter L. Reed finds predecessors in Stephen Prickett, Harold Fisch, and Robert Polzin (p. 14; cf. p. 175 n28). More elaborately than they, Reed tries to demonsttate several advantages to approaching the Bible from the vantage of Bakhtin's "dialogics," as opposed to critical strategies obsessed with "narrative": first, that Bakhtin's theory highlights the bearing of authority upon linguistic usage; second, that it fosters an appreciation of the multifariousness of generic structuring and significant forming of the canonical text; third, that it draws together the scriptures' most distinctive formal trait and their central theme, the persistent dialogue between God and his people. What Reed ultimately argues for is a distillation from Bakhtin of a "poetics of responsibility" (as distinct from the oft-practiced "hermeneutics of suspicion") : "an approach to the written word in which form is recognized as a reliable revelation rather than a deceptive disguise" (p. 171). On the whole, Reed admirably fulfills his considerable task, combining a broad overview of the dialogical poetics of the three main "genres" preserved in the Hebrew canon (law, prophecy, wisdom) with an insightful assessment of the "conversation" between the New Testament and the Hebrew scriptures, as well as with a pair of more in-depth Bakhtinian analyses of the Book ofJob as a dialogic "critique of the Hebrew Bible as a whole" (p. 120) and of the Book of Revelation—that "distinctive, intertestamental finale" (p. 143) of the Christian canon—as "a prime example of unifying discourse and the centralizing force in language" (p. 141). Assuming on the model of Bakhtin's historical...

Competing Discourses: Perspective and Ideology in Language

This book discusses and explores the relationship between language and world view. David Lee presents recent research in linguistics, drawing together strands from a number of different areas of the subject: the nature of linguistic and conceptual categories, the role of metaphor in the everyday use of language, gender differentiation and social variation in speech. In this study, David Lee considers a broad range of issues in the light of two contrasting views on language. For much of its history, linguistics has been dominated by a tradition which sees individual languages as uniform, homogenous systems. However, there has always been an opposite view emphasising the complex tensions and cross-currents inherent in linguistic usage. This alternative perspective is explored in the analysis of a wide range of literary and non-literary texts: casual conversations, interviews, newspaper reports, official memoranda, television commercials and extracts from novels. The author describes how both spoken and written texts can be seen as the sites where tensions between competing discourses, stemming from different social positions and perspectives, are illustrated.

Formalism, Language and Information Science

Cybernetics and artificial intelligence are viewed primarily as being a major part of information science which is considered as we would any other scientific discipline. It is suggested that such a science must be capable of formalization. Language is considered as a major feature of science, where mathematics is a specialized part of language. The analysis of language in the form of semantics and pragmatics is regarded as essential to the understanding of any linguistic usage, particularly when some degree of precision is entailed. Discusses information science and its foundations in philosophy, logic and especially in semantics and pragmatics.

Langue populaire américaine et dictionnaires : quelques remarques sociolexicographiques

Although the « popular language » concept is never referred to as such, a socio-lexicographic analysis reveals that popular speech in the US is a form of spontaneous, everyday-life English which comprises characteristics alien to British English ; it is a linguistic emblem of independence. Paradoxically, many Americans take a conservative view of linguistic usage. A discrepancy is therefore visible between the Americans' practice of popular speech and their dislike of linguistic permissiveness.

Methodology, Epistemology and Conventions: Popper's Bad Start

Popper's philosophy is founded on his early conceptions of the problem of demarcation, of its solution, and of the roles of epistemology and methodology. I shall give an account of these, and of his idea of the alternative, ‘naturalistic’ conceptions. I then hope to show that Popper's conceptions are confused. At the beginning of The Logic of Scientific Discovery Popper tells us that “the task of the logic of scientific discovery, or the logic of knowledge, [is]… to analyse the method of the empirical sciences” (Popper 1959, 27), and that its first job is “to put forward a concept of empirical science, in order to make linguistic usage, now somewhat uncertain, as definite as possible, and in order to draw a clear line of demarcation between science and metaphysical ideas” (1959, 38-39).

The Pu Metalanguage in Linguistic Historiography

The historian of linguistic thought, who wants to contribute to the instruction of the practicing linguist of today and not simply cater to a specialist readership outside linguistics proper, may find him/herself in a quandry: On the one hand, s/he is motivated to render seemingly 'dated' theories accessible to the modern linguist; on the other, s/he feels him/herself constrained by his/her professional ethos to present them as objectively as possible, i.e., within their original intellectual context. In describing and analyzing past theories, the historiographer may find him/herself in a dilemma: either depicting them in the light of current research interests (and thus distorting them to the extent of engaging in presentism), or practicing an antiquarian activity which interests no one (because s/he may be engaging in an excessive historicism). Central to the historiographer's task is the careful treatment of the terminology past authors have employed to articulate their theories, i.e., their metalanguage. After presenting three instances where the issue of metalanguage has not been treated adequately — the use of Saussurean terminology in the description of medieval French linguistic usage, the application of our modern understanding of the term to the medieval concept of 'etymologia', and the misleading use of Praguean phonology in the interpretation of a medieval treatise discussing orthographic problems in Icelandic — the paper, while arguing in favour of a measured approach, makes it clear that the historian of linguistics must become more acutely aware of the potential pitfalls of his/her work if the question of metalanguage is not attended to properly.

Discussion: On The Coherence of Instrumentalism

According to a certain type of instrumentalist, we may have good reasons for accepting scientific theories, but never for believing more than their empirical consequences. Horwich (1991) considers several attempts to capture a difference between acceptance and belief, and claims that none of them succeed. He concludes that instrumentalism has not been shown to be a coherent position. However, in the course of his discussion, Horwich himself deploys a conceptual apparatus which is sufficient for formulating the instrumentalist doctrine in a coherent manner. The worst accusation that can be laid against instrumentalists is that they have violated common linguistic usage.

Interlectal Awareness as a Reflex of Linguistic Dimensions of Power: Evidence from Greek

Modern sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that speakers are aware of different varieties of their language. Moreover, such "interlectal awareness" can affect linguistic usage and can involve issues of power in relation to language. In the context of Greek, for example, normative pressures promoting the use of standard (roughly, urban) as opposed to nonstandard (roughly, rural) varieties of the language correlate with the low stylistic status accorded many words, generally of regional dialectal origin, containing the sounds ts or dz . In addition, Greek shows an extension of "interlectal awareness" involving the recognition of non-native forms, as is evident in the way English is providing a new type of learned plural in Modern Greek and is thus enjoying a power in Greece not accorded to other foreign languages.

Variation syntaxique : recherche d'invariants et étude des attitudes des locuteurs devant la norme

Variation, conceived as multiple realisations of the same linguistic unit, is not a relevant notion beyond phonology or morphology. Thus, in syntax : 1) every syntactic structure is a specific set of relations bearing a specific meaning ; 2) different speakers of the same language make different choices among the possible alternatives ; 3) they do not have the same attitude toward the normative mode of linguistic usage. These points are illustrated with examples taken from spoken French relatives and quantifiers.

III. Lucilius

Gaius Lucilius died at Naples in 102/1 B.C. as an old man. He was born probably in 180 B.C., or possibly 168/7 B.C., into an eminent, rich family of the Latin aristocracy in Campania. Lucilius was almost certainly educated at Rome and owned large estates in southern Italy and Sicily and an important house in Rome. He was an eques (cavalryman: the second highest social class), a friend of the great general and politician Scipio Aemilianus, a patron of the arts around whom gathered a group of intellectuals, including poets and philosophers. From about 130 B.C. onwards Lucilius wrote his Satires, in a total of thirty books of which only 1300 fragments survive. Most of these are very brief and can hardly be considered a representative sample, since the vast majority were preserved by later grammarians as examples of oddities of Latin linguistic usage.

The literary asseveration in Irish

A humorous poetical composition appears in the eighteenth century repeatedly using the oath-taking formula dar + noun in order to deny charges of misconduct made against a protagonist. The formula may be referred to the widespread practice of oath-taking in everyday linguistic usage and to the condemnation, in catechismal and devotional literature, of casual oath-taking. The latter can be referred to the legally and socially important practise in the early and medieval period of swearing solemn oaths on sacred objects.

Pādyāb and nērang: two Pahlavi terms further considered

This short article is dedicated to a friend and scholar who has greatly promoted the study of Pahlavi by his masterly work on texts and manuscripts, and, earning thereby the gratitude of all, by his truly admirable Pahlavi dictionary. Pahlavi is a language notorious for the challenges it makes to the lexicographer, not the least of which are to be found in the field of technical religious terms. Since priests, setting down instructions for their fellow-priests, could assume a common basic knowledge of the rituals concerned, they felt evidently no need for a precise or consistent use of terms, but relied on context to make their meaning plain. There was moreover a marked tendency, in written as in spoken usage, to abbreviate common phrases and to deal casually with grammatical forms, while among the Gujarati-speaking Parsis Persian technical terms were sometimes given additional or quite new meanings. A student of religion can hope, therefore, by considering perplexing linguistic usages in the light of observances to contribute a little to the lexicographer's pursuit, a small return for the large debt which all such students owe to the work of philologists

Remorse as a derivative psychoanalytic construct

Arbitrators of linguistic and colloquial usage of affect-laden terms have not fared better with remorse as a concept than has the legal world. In Wechsler's (1981) seminal work on intelligence, he delineates the sophisticated definition of remorse as "a feeling of distress or regret caused by a sense of guilt," while a less acceptable definition is given as "a feeling of unhappiness which is not caused by a sense of guilt." (p. 99). The finer shades of the concept and its variegated implications in the literature have had repercussions in the analytic sphere as well, as evidenced by the recent devotion of an entire issue of The Psychotherapy Patient, a journal for practitioners, to the remorseful patient. The focus of this article is on remorse as a concept and a process, rather than on the remorseful patient. While some of the discussion inevitably has implications for the person who is remorseful, the patient, as such, is beyond its scope. The most comprehensive differentiation of terms relevant to our current topic is to be found in Renshaw (1985), who offers the following clinical demarcations:

Forms of the Priestly Style in the Pentateuch: Patterns, Linguistic Usages, Syntactic Structures

Forms of the Priestly Style in the Pentateuch: Patterns, Linguistic Usages, Syntactic Structures

דרכי הסננון הכוהני בתורה: דנמים שימוי לשון, מכנים. מאת מאיר פארן [Forms of the Priestly Style in the Pentateuch: Patterns, Linguistic Usages, Syntactic Structures] (review)

Hebrew Studies 32 (1991) 156 Reviews Mekhilta Attributed to R. Ishmael," utilizes Mekhilta According to Rabbi Ishmael: An Introduction to Judaism's First Scriptural Encyclopaedia (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), pp. 23, xvi, 105-109, 141, 142, and 24-25. Again in chap. 8, "Is Judaism a 'Biblical Religion,'" in summing up his views he returns to exploit Judaism and Scripture: The Evidence of Leviticus Rabba, pp. xi, xv-xvi, 5, 73-76, 80-84, 90-91, 104-105, and 120125 . Each chapter contains an appropriate introduction and transitions to smooth the flow of the argument or to recontextualize a passage to suit the theme of the present work. Because the author has contributed significantly to the modem discussion of rabbinic literature, and especially to the topic of the present book, it would have been helpful if he had included in the preface references to his previous writings which are reprinted here as he has done in some of his other more recent works. For the reader who does not have access to the volumes just mentioned, or who has not taken the time to work through them, or who needs a summary and another presentation of the author's views on the theme "Writing with Scripture," this book offers a representative sample of his thinking on this subject. Lewis M. Barth Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute ofReligion Los Angeles, CA 90007 .p~ ,'ttD nMlJ .c'DC ,11W, 'W'1O'W ,0'0)' :mm 'Jm~n rWon ,~" [FORMS OF THE PRIESTLY STYLE IN THE PENTATEUCH: PATTERNS, LINGUISTIC USAGES, SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES ]. By Meir Paran. Pp. 400 + XVI. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1989. Cloth, $24.00. In recent years "literary study" has shifted from the goal of reconstructing the development of the text to focus more and more on the received form of the text, emphasizing such things as close reading and interpretation of the canonical text as well as appreciation of formal literary devices including various types of repetition, variation, and structure. The history of the text-much less the reality reflected therein-is less often stressed in an attempt to let the text speak for itself to an audience who is not bound by the chronological or cultural setting of the unknown author. Hebrew Studies 32 (1991) 157 Reviews Both literary trends are alive and well at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, although the boundaries between them are not always that apparent. This is as it should be, for the approaches are by no means as irreconcilable as more polemical scholars in either camp would have us think. The work reviewed here is by the iate Meir Paran, a disciple of Professor Menahem Haran. This fine piece of scholarship, in fact, combines the two aforementioned trends, placing the careful analysis of poetics and literary devices at the service and within the framework of source criticism. Paran's contribution addresses two issues and may be said to follow two agenda. The issue dictating the structure of the work is the style of P. Under this rubric the author includes characteristic sentence structures, literary formations of larger units, as well as individual words and expressions. Paran discusses first the existence of a Priestly style. To establish this, he compares select passages from P, or, rather P and H, with parallel passages in D and the Book of the Covenant. Juxtaposing materials of similar content reveals that P's style is more verbose and tends toward balanced structures looking something like poetry. The main sentence pattern typifying the Priestly passages is the "Short Circuit Inclusio," better tenned "Circular Inclusio" (Paran coins the Hebrew term n'lJ)c [maC 'g61et]). The Priestly Circular Inclusio is a sentence in which a word (usually a verb) at the head of the sentence is repeated pleonastically one or more times in the sentence, bringing the reader full circle back to the beginning of the sentence . So, for example, the instruction for making the incense altar reads m~ illDl>n C'~ '~l> m~ .,~c n:Jrc n'lDln (Exod 30:1) in which the word n'IDl>' is repeated by illDl>n. In this case the second clause is an adverbial clause complementing the predicate and creating a qatal-yiqt61 pattern...