Speech Norms Research Articles

VIOLATIONS OF GRAMMATICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL NORMS IN THE INTERNET ARMENIAN

Speakers not always maintain all grammatical norms in oral speech. However, before the Internet came into being the written public speech was predominantly based on preservation of Armenian language norms, which was largely a subject to censorship and editing. Today the situation has dramatically changed. Alongside with numerous mistakes (spelling, punctuation, lexical), a great variety of cases regarding the violation of grammatical norms are evident. The given article is dedicated to the study of these cases. Particularly, the mistakes concerning the plural, the incorrect usage of dates, pronouns and link words, cases of violation of verbal norms, as well as penetration of some common expressions of everyday language into written speech have been considered.

Censored: Whistleblowers and impossible speech

What happens to a person who speaks out about corruption in their organization, and finds themselves excluded from their profession? In this article, I argue that whistleblowers experience exclusions because they have engaged in ‘impossible speech’, that is, a speech act considered to be unacceptable or illegitimate. Drawing on Butler’s theories of recognition and censorship, I show how norms of acceptable speech working through recruitment practices, alongside the actions of colleagues, can regulate subject positions and ultimately ‘un-do’ whistleblowers. In turn, they construct boundaries against ‘unethical’ others who have not spoken out. Based on in-depth empirical research on financial sector whistleblowers, the article departs from existing literature that depicts the excluded whistleblower as a passive victim – a hollow stereotype. It contributes to organization studies in a number of ways. To debates on Butler’s recognition-based critique of subjectivity in organizations, it yields a performative ontology of excluded whistleblower subjects, in which they are both ‘derealized’ by powerful norms, and compelled into ongoing and ambivalent negotiations with self and other. These insights contribute to a theory of subjective derealization in instances of ‘impossible speech’, which provides a more nuanced conception of excluded organizational subjects, including blacklisted whistleblowers, than previously available.

Expressing Gratitude in an EFL Context: The Case of Jordanian Learners

This study contributes to the existing literature on interlanguage pragmatics by investigating intermediate Jordanian English Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ gratitude speech act realization compared to that of native American English speakers. The study considered both aspects of pragmatic competence including pragmalinguistic knowledge (i.e., the use of gratitude strategies) and sociopragmatic knowledge (i.e., the influence of contextual variables). A discourse completion task (DCT) was employed to elicit data from 60 participants divided into two groups: 30 native speakers of American English, and 30 Jordanian EFL learners. Findings revealed that while Jordanian EFL learners and American English native speakers have access to the same gratitude strategies, both groups differed in the order preference of the used strategies and their frequency of use. Furthermore, the two groups showed different patterns in responding to contextual variables (i.e., social power and size of imposition), an indication that different cultural values govern the speech norms of each group. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications that could be implemented in the EFL classroom.

Language change and network games

AbstractStudies of language change and variation in sociolinguistics investigate the correlations between social variables and phenomena like vernacular speech norms, code switching, and dialect continua. In multiple studies, researchers claim one variable as (a) particularly decisive and correlative for a number of phenomena and (b) almost universally applicable: the social network structure (Milroy, ). This article summarizes previous work incorporating network theory in questions of language change and discusses a practice noticeably absent from classical sociolinguistics: the simulation of language change. In simulation experiments, sociolinguistic theories of language change – especially those employing social network structure – can be tested in a virtual society free from the hindrance of data sparseness. In this context, the model of game theory can be utilized to construct individuals' interaction for more robust and feasible results.

Requirements to the Oral Speech on the Russian Language as on the National Language of the Russian Federation

The article addresses the aims of the legal recognition of a language as the national (“state”) language, the legal regulations concerning observance of the standards of the contemporary Russian (“literary”) language as national (“state”) language of the Russian Federation, as well as the problems of implemen­tation of these regulations in the oral public speech. The authors emphasize the role of dictionaries and grammar books approved by the Ministry of Education and Science to provide the implementation of the language legislation and the official codification of the norms of the contemporary Russian standard (“literary”) language as the national (“state”) language of the Russian Federation. The article puts for­ward a number of suggestions for improving the current legal mechanism of codification of language norms for the oral speech with regard to the use of language as a national (“state”) language.

УЧЕБНЫЙ НОРМАТИВНО-СТИЛИСТИЧЕСКИЙ СЛОВАРЬ РУССКОГО ЯЗЫКА КАК ИНОСТРАННОГО: КОНЦЕПЦИЯ И СТРУКТУРА

The article is devoted to actual problems of creation of new types of learning dictionaries of Russian as a foreign language. On the basis of the modern theory and practice of Russian learning lexicography oriented to non-native speakers and on the basis of the problems of teaching of Russian in the contemporary sociocultural conditions it concludes , that among the most important areas of domestic academic lexicografy now should be considered the creation of special standart stylistic dictionaries containing comprehensive reflection of the stylistic system of the Russian language, stylistic characteristics of Russian words and standarts of the literary language and focused on the expansion of language, communication, cultural and linguistic competence of students in the field of Russian speech culture. These dictionaries are not currently available, and it comes into conflict with both the needs of society and the requirements of modern linguistics in teaching Russian as a foreign language. The aim of the article is a summary of the author’s conception of the complex standart stylistic dictionary of the Russian language culturalurological orientation designed for studying Russian as a foreign language, and based on the representation of complex information about the stylistic characteristics of the Russian words and practicing their skills in the use of normative speech. The article presents the results of studies on the preparation of the title of the dictionary, ongoing at the Regional Centre of the Russian language, Voronezh State Pedagogical University. It describes the theoretical bases of this lexicographical work and its preliminary design: the typological features of dictionary, its structure and organization entries. The novelty of the proposed lexicographical development tipe is determined by the characteristics of its organization, the nature of the language material derived not only from the modern Russian language dictionaries of various types, but also of special author’s corpuses as well as relying on modern methods of computer and corpus linguistics.

Hybrid Speech Acts: A Theory of Normative Thought and Language That ‘Has It Both Ways’

In this essay, I propose a novel hybrid metanormative theory. According to this theory, speakers making normative claims express both cognitive and motivational attitudes in virtue of the constitutive norms of the particular speech acts they perform. This view has four principal virtues: (1) it is consistent with traditional semantic theories, (2) it supports a form of motivational judgment internalism that does justice to externalist intuitions, (3) it illuminates the connection between normative language and normative thought, and (4) it explains how speakers can express different conative states when speaking in different normative domains. In the first section, I discuss the theories of Stephen Finlay and David Copp. I show that they each come very close to having it both ways but ultimately fail. Understanding the shortcomings of these views is instrumental to a clear presentation of my own Hybrid Speech Act theory in section two. In the final section, I demonstrate how my view achieves its four advantages.

Assessing Chronic Stress, Coping Skills, and Mood Disorders through Speech Analysis: A Self-Assessment ‘Voice App' for Laptops, Tablets, and Smartphones

Background: Computerized speech analysis (CSA) is a powerful method that allows one to assess stress-induced mood disturbances and affective disorders through repeated measurements of speaking behavior and voice sound characteristics. Over the past decades CSA has been successfully used in the clinical context to monitor the transition from ‘affectively disturbed' to ‘normal' among psychiatric patients under treatment. This project, by contrast, aimed to extend the CSA method in such a way that the transition from ‘normal' to ‘affected' can be detected among subjects of the general population through 10-20 self-assessments. Methods: Central to the project was a normative speech study of 5 major languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). Each language comprised 120 subjects stratified according to gender, age, and education with repeated assessments at 14-day intervals (total n = 697). In a first step, we developed a multivariate model to assess affective state and stress-induced bodily reactions through speaking behavior and voice sound characteristics. Secondly, we determined language-, gender-, and age-specific thresholds that draw a line between ‘natural fluctuations' and ‘significant changes'. Thirdly, we implemented the model along with the underlying methods and normative data in a self-assessment ‘voice app' for laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Finally, a longitudinal self-assessment study of 36 subjects was carried out over 14 days to test the performance of the CSA method in home environments. Results: The data showed that speaking behavior and voice sound characteristics can be quantified in a reproducible and language-independent way. Gender and age explained 15-35% of the observed variance, whereas the educational level had a relatively small effect in the range of 1-3%. The self-assessment ‘voice app' was realized in modular form so that additional languages can simply be ‘plugged in' once the respective normative data become available. Results of the longitudinal self-assessment study in home environments demonstrated that CSA methods work well under most circumstances. Conclusions: We have successfully developed and tested a self-assessment CSA method that can monitor transitions from ‘normal' to ‘affected' in subjects of the general population in the broader context of mood disorders. Our easy-to-use ‘voice app' evaluates sequences of 10-20 repeated assessments and watches for affect- and stress-induced deviations from baseline that exceed language-, gender-, and age-specific thresholds. Specifically, the ‘voice app' provides users with stress-related ‘biofeedback' and can help to identify that 10-15% subgroup of the general population that exhibits insufficient coping skills under chronic stress and may benefit from early detection and intervention prior to developing clinically relevant symptoms.

КОММУНИКАТИВНО-РЕЧЕВАЯ КУЛЬТУРА ВРАЧА

The present article provides insight into communication and speech awareness/culture of the doctor. It sets out to substantiate the phenomenon of communication and speech awareness of the doctor as well as to establish its features in the professional medical communication. The article analyzed the current approaches to typologies of linguistic identities of the speakers on the basis of their speech activities and behavior. It also substantiated the concept of communication and speech awareness of the doctor, identified its main components (normative speech, epistemic and pragmatic components) and shed light on their constituents. Moreover, the article explored how these components are embodied in the medical discourse created by the doctor. The obtained conclusions can be applied for classifying types of communication and speech awareness of the doctor to enhance the effectiveness of communication.

Beyond Accommodation: Disability, Feminist Philosophy, and the Design of Everyday Academic Life

Beyond Accommodation: Disability, Feminist Philosophy, and the Design of Everyday Academic Life Aimi Hamraie “Knowledge . . . is made for cutting” (Foucault 1998, 380). With this proclamation, Michel Foucault calls us to a “slanted perception” (382) whose “deliberate” aim is to “appraise, to say yes or no, to follow all of poison’s traces, and to find the best antidote” for it (382, trans. modified). A cutting knowledge cuts to the chase, cuts the crap, occasionally cuts up with laughter. In that cutting spirit—touché!—we are pleased to introduce here a new regular feature of philoSOPHIA: “Short Cuts.” As the title implies, this section of the journal provides a forum for brief, incisive, explicitly slanted commentaries that cut: reflections, ruminations, rants, appraisals, and agitations on theoretical issues that speak directly to contemporary concerns. We hope these “Short Cuts” will agitate you, our readers: arouse your interest and, as the Latin agitare suggests, set things in motion for other exchanges and short cuts. We encourage you to write your own “Short Cuts” (maximum three thousand words) for consideration in future issues of the journal. [End Page 259] —The Editors Disability has become a hot topic for feminist philosophy in recent years. Special issues of Hypatia and Disability Studies Quarterly, multiple conference keynote addresses, and a growing cadre of scholars are exploring the intersections of feminist and critical disability thought. As a disabled feminist scholar, I perceive these trends as a signal that the field of feminist philosophy is taking up disability concepts and theories in valuable ways. There is certainly much that feminist philosophers can learn from disabled scholars and critical disability scholarship and activism. Unlike dominant medical models of disability, which treat disabled minds and bodies as objects of knowledge for science and biomedicine, critical disability theories foreground disabled peoples’ knowledge and lived experiences. Often in conversation with feminist theories, they define disability as a valuable form of human variation, cultural diversity, situated knowledge, and a basis for relational ethics that should be preserved, and even desired (Mitchell and Snyder 2006; Kafer 2013; Garland-Thomson 2011). Like the feminist imperative to consider the personal as political, a central feature of critical disability scholarship and activism is the integration of our scholarly principles into material practices of access-making, whether in the classroom, at conferences, in web space, or in our writing. To do justice to disabled people’s existence, knowledge, and politics, feminist philosophers [End Page 260] should avoid making disability a mere theoretical resource for their work. Simply developing feminist philosophy with reference to disability is not meaningful or accountable unless feminist philosophers transform the material and cultural arrangements, real-time interactions, and physical spaces in which feminist philosophy takes place. To work toward meaningful access, feminist philosophers could follow Shelley Tremain’s statistical and interview-based documentation of structural inequalities that disabled philosophers experience, and Laura Davy’s suggestion that philosophers “redesign” the questions they ask about disability (Tremain 2013; Tremain, 2016; Davy 2014). To build upon this work, I argue that feminist philosophers must understand their labor as the design of everyday academic spaces and interactions, and accordingly become more accountable for material practices of accessibility. Access, Academic Space, and Material Labor As numerous sources have documented, the lack of meaningful access is particularly severe within the real-time interactions and physical spaces in which academic conferences, including feminist philosophy conferences, take place (Tremain 2013; Perry 2015; Bain 2016b). Disabled philosophers attending or presenting at conferences where disability is a focus of inquiry have found themselves excluded by seemingly neutral and normal physical aspects of the built environment, as well as norms of academic presentation. For instance, the presumption of conference presenters and audiences with normative cognitive, sensory, and physical characteristics governs the norms of oral speech, visual aides such as slides, the presentation of logical arguments, the assertion of expertise, and the analysis of texts—particularly when scholars practice these norms without providing multiple means of accessing their content. The norm that scholars are nondisabled and not chronically ill (and frequently also people with race, economic, and gender privilege) materializes in the ways that we hold conferences within particular types...

'Gender, language and ideology: A genealogy of Japanese women’s language' Momoko Nakamura (2014) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp. xv + 253. ISBN 978-90-272-0649-7 (hbk)

Gender, language and ideology: A genealogy of Japanese women's language Momoko Nakamura (2014) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp. xv + 253. ISBN 978-90-272-0649-7 (hbk)Women's language is a highly salient category in Japan, which most large Japanese language dictionaries define as the style of speech spoken by women since ancient times. For a long time, it has been assumed that this 'speech peculiar to women' is naturally derived from nyooboo kotoba (court-women's speech), the speech created by women in the imperial palace since the fourteenth century, and also from yuujogo (play-women's speech), the speech used by women in the licensed quarters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Japanese society, there is a widespread notion that women have always spoken differently from men, and that these differences are the result of their feminine nature.In this book, Momoko Nakamura emphasizes the heterogeneity of women's linguistic practices in Japan and defends the notion of women's language as an ideological construction, closely linked to historical, political and economic processes. In opposition to the common assumption of women's language as women's actual speech and as a reflection of 'innate femininity', she provides a historical-discourse analysis of written documents, such as conduct books, school textbooks, dictionaries, grammar books and commentaries by intellectuals, in which women's language is prescribed, marginalized and conceptualized in different ways, depending on the historic and political context. This genealogy of women's language in Japan is of great interest for both researchers on Japanese language and language and gender, as it illuminates the importance of history, discourse and ideology in order to deconstruct and denaturalize the relationships between gender and any language. To this end, the author discusses the implications of the analysis in each chapter from this general perspective. The book comprises ten chapters that are organized into four parts, chronologically ordered, from the premodern period of the thirteenth century to the immediate post-WWII (1945-1952).Part 1 addresses how norms of feminine speech are constructed in the discourses of conduct books (etiquette manuals) from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Strongly influenced by the androcentric view of Confucianism dominant in this age, these conduct books establish appropriate ways of speaking for women, thus treating women's speech as an object of regulation, control and normalization. Chapter 1 shows that these normative discourses include not displaying intelligence and not using Chinese words, but are specially focused on limiting women's right to speak, regarding their talk as a dangerous act that can bring trouble to families. It is worth mentioning that these historical discourses on silence or 'not speaking too much' as an ideal for women, and on women's talk as malicious gossip, have also been documented by studies with reference to Spanish (Lozano Domingo, 1995; Acuna Ferreira, 2015) and to many other languages (Spender, 1980; Romaine, 1999).Chapter 2 focuses on the establishment of court-women's speech as another norm of feminine speech in a large number of conduct books which appeared from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Court-women's speech was created by women serving in the imperial palace since the fourteenth century and it consisted of creative word formation to refer to domestic items such as food, kitchen utensils and clothes. Nakamura analyses funny stories and dramatic comic novels in which court-women's speech is represented as a symbol of being upper-class, a way of speaking that servant women refused but probably needed to attain employment at samurai mansions, and even as a style of speech that was also used by men, though this was later prohibited. Conduct books in this period, however, redefined court-women's speech as a norm of feminine speech, as a list of words that all women should use. …

Assessment of Instructional Materials in Speech and Oral Communication: Basis for Curriculum Enhancement

Education promotes development for quality teaching in general which Includes the social aspects brought about by the environmental pressures, the growing interdependence of people and countries, and the changing needs of people and societies. All educational systems aim for quality education to produce students who demonstrate understanding of scientific concepts, critical and creative thinking skills, and love and appreciation for the English language. Thus, educators and concerned government agencies have been mandated and were asked to strengthen English language offerings and teaching to maximize the students' skills and knowledge. Our facility in English, a competitive edge over other Asian nations, as well as in other nations is slowly being undermined by growing perceptions of its deterioration. The perceived deterioration is attributed to many factors not the least of which is the quality of instruction in all levels of our educational system. Thus, the teachers of English especially in speech and oral communication should be adept and resourceful to meet the global competencies. The study used the descriptive- normative research design as it aimed to assess the instructional materials used in teaching speech and topics that can be supplemented by these instructional materials in which the researcher believed has something to do with effectiveness of instructional materials as basis to enhance the curriculum. This method was used to gather the needed and relevant data and information about the research variables. More specifically, the researcher was able to gather data through questionnaire because it covers a small population where the variables were concrete. It further used qualitative questions to qualify data based on international norms in Speech and Oral Communication. Most of the indicators were much accepted by the respondents in assessing the instructional materials offered to enhance the curricular offering in terms of Content and Acceptability.

Attitudes toward Accents of Standard English in Jamaican Radio Newscasting

In Jamaica, in the process of endonormative stabilization, new norms for Standard English speech emerge in a competition between local, British, and American influences. Language attitude research can provide an important perspective on this process from the users’ point of view. This study addresses the issue of competing English norms in Jamaican radio newscasting by studying both newscasters’ language use and the language attitudes of Jamaican university students as the audience. The analysis of language use demonstrates that Jamaican English is the strongest force in the three-way norm competition. The students’ language attitudes toward the linguistic diversity of Jamaican newscasts are multivalent: Jamaican Creole is disfavored in newscasts, and there is overt recognition and support for the national standard variety, while more covertly there is linguistic deference toward exonormative influences. A folk-linguistic assessment shows that the foreign influences have been integrated into the Jamaican students’ notion of Standard English in the context of newscasts. These results provide a Jamaican perspective on the complexity and context sensitivity of endonormative stabilization processes in today’s globalized world.

Functioning of Autobiographical Memory as a Discursive Phenomenon

The article investigates the discursive manifestation of autobiographical memory, enabling to understand the social and communicative nature of this phenomenon. Autobiographical practices represent the social and cultural materialized form of the fixation of autobiographical memory determined by speech norms and memory mechanisms; autobiographical practices are inter-active and inter-subjective, mediate the formation and functioning of this subsystem of memory, reorganizing the preverbal event of the individual past through the concepts fixed by language. The article examines the development of autobiographical memory forms in early ontogeny, the relationship of these processes with the formation of speech and discursive competences. It studies the patterns of discursive actualization of the formed autobiographical memory and demonstration of its functional and structural characteristics. It is shown that the formed autobiographical memory as a personality-cognitive system organizes and arranges the fragments of the individual past; it is involved in the formation of self-identity, has a layered structure that is related to heterogeneous forms of processing autobiographical material and organizational forms of individual experience and performs different functions, all of which determines the patterns of respective discursive practices. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5p122

Социолингвистические факторы приблизительности норм письма в текстах трудовых мигрантов

Социолингвистические факторы приблизительности норм письма в текстах трудовых мигрантов

VERBAL PORTRAIT OF THE CHILD AND THE LANGUAGE GAME

The article analyzes the impact of the language games on the formation of verbal portrait of the child and his linguistic identity. The formation of children's linguistic identity is associated with the development of meta-linguistic and lingual-creative abilities. The retreat from the norms in adult speech is regarded as one of components, which can stimulate language game and provoke verbal activity of a child. One of the key factors shaping the verbal portrait of a child is the personality of the adults and their speech and the communication strategy they develop in dialogue with the child.

VERBAL PORTRAIT OF THE CHILD AND THE LANGUAGE GAME

The article analyzes the impact of the language games on the formation of verbal portrait of the child and his linguistic identity. The formation of children's linguistic identity is associated with the development of meta-linguistic and lingual-creative abilities. The retreat from the norms in adult speech is regarded as one of components, which can stimulate language game and provoke verbal activity of a child. One of the key factors shaping the verbal portrait of a child is the personality of the adults and their speech and the communication strategy they develop in dialogue with the child.

Competing Reflexive Models of Regional Speech in Northern Ohio

Campbell-Kibler (2012) argued that the “northern” or Cleveland accent has been developing as a register (Agha 2003, 2007) in Ohio, primarily positioned as an unstigmatized and idiosyncratic form of linguistic difference from an imagined central Ohio norm. The current study examines northern Ohioans’ orientation to this construct within a larger understanding of their sociolinguistic imagining of Ohio. Northerners are found to share many language ideologies with other Ohioans, including a focus on north-to-south variation, an emphasis on rural versus urban language difference, and a belief in the local existence of unaccented, educated, normative speech. They differ from other Ohioans in sometimes conceptualizing urban speech as standard, failing to mark central Ohio as a distinct region, and subdividing the northeast (their own region) in a Cleveland-centered small region and a larger northeast corner of the state. Most importantly, they differ from central Ohioans in their treatment of the linguistic difference between central and northern Ohio, i.e., the Inland North/Midland dialect boundary (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006). Forty-two percent of northerners and 52 percent of others fail to construct a perceptual boundary between central and northeast Ohio, while 27 percent and 48 percent respectively indicate the north as the divergent speech area. Northerners differ, however, in having a third group (31 percent), who position their own speech as normative and the central Ohio speech as marked, counter to the discourses of central Ohioans. These results support Agha’s (2007) point that individuals’ stakes in particular reflexive models are a key influence on models’ circulation and further show the importance of “unremarkable” as a context-bound and often valuable sociolinguistic meaning, rather than a lack of meaning.

STEPPING OUT AND STEPPING OVER: THE FIGURE OF HYPERBATON

5 4 Y S T E P P I N G O U T A N D S T E P P I N G O V E R T H E F I G U R E O F H Y P E R B A T O N R O S A N N A W A R R E N Hyperbaton, in Greek, means ‘‘overstepping,’’ and in classical rhetoric it refers to an inversion or dislocation of normal word order. It’s a figure I am particularly fond of for the small shock of arti ficiality it inflicts. In the twenty-first century we’re still playing out an argument about modernism, a conflict between an aesthetics of estrangement from sense, and a counteraesthetics of clarity. Each generation since the early modernists – date it when you like, from Mallarmean obscurity or the Anglo-American fractious allusiveness of Pound and Eliot – has developed its own idiom to describe the contest. Eliot announced in 1921 in his essay ‘‘The Metaphysical Poets’’ that ‘‘modern poets must be di≈cult. . . . The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive , more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if possible, language into his meaning.’’ In his essay ‘‘The Constant Symbol,’’ Frost declared testily (of Pound and Eliot): ‘‘There have been works lately to surpass all records for hardness.’’ Elsewhere, he complained about mystery in poetry: ‘‘And if they want it to be – if they’ve got some secrets, let them keep them.’’ Roughly a century later in the United States the argument is reflected in competing 5 5 R claims to revelatory power by experimental poets on the one hand – say, the Language Poets, or more recently the neobaroque (Lucie Brock-Broido, Brenda Shaughnessy) – and on the other, poets who pride themselves on a talkative accessibility (say, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, and Sharon Olds, in their di√ering modes). Hyperbaton is one gesture among many that poets might use to produce an e√ect of strangeness, formality, and literariness. It has particular force when it appears in a poem whose general method tends toward norms of natural speech. Instead of illustrating hyperbaton in a poet of stylized eccentricity, like Gerard Manley Hopkins, I’d like to consider two poets who usually respect what Frost would recognize as sentence sounds. Ivor Gurney, the English poet and composer, lived from 1890 to 1937. He came from a modest background: his father was a tailor. He fought in the Great War on the front lines in northern France, was wounded and hospitalized, sent back to battle, and gassed at Passchendaele. In June 1918 he su√ered a mental breakdown. He had already published one book of poems, Severn and Somme, which came out in 1917 to good reviews. A second collection, War’s Embers, appeared in 1919, but by this time Gurney was already unstable, bouncing between jobs (as a pianist in movie houses, church organist, tax clerk, farm laborer). In 1922 he was declared insane and placed in an asylum, and three months later he was transferred to the City of London Mental Hospital at Dartford, where he remained until his death fifteen years later, intensely productive artistically but prey to delusions, often psychotic. (Gurney was diagnosed with ‘‘delusional insanity.’’ Long after the poet’s death, the psychiatrist William Trethowan concluded that Gurney was schizophrenic, and Gurney’s first biographer, Michael Hurd, repeated the claim. More recently, Pamela Blevins has challenged that diagnosis in Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty, arguing that Gurney su√ered from a bipolar condition, which would explain his ability to keep composing poetry and music for many years in the hospital.) Whatever he su√ered from, Gurney continued to write poems. ‘‘Smudgy Dawn’’ appeared in The London Mercury in 1924, and Gurney placed it in his collection of poems Rewards of Wonder, finished in 1924 but not published until 2000. 5 6 W A R R E N Y Smudgy dawn scarfed with military colours Northward, and flowing wider like slow sea water, Woke in lilac and elm and almost among garden flowers. Birds a multitude, increasing as it made lighter...

The invader, the enemy within and they-who-must-not-be-named: how police talk about minorities in Italy, the Netherlands and France

How people talk about ethnic minorities is a sensitive subject, especially in law enforcement. We know little about it as far as continental Europe is concerned. This article is about how police officers talk about minorities in France, in Italy and in the Netherlands. How do speech norms (‘political correctness’) apply outside the anglophone world? Is there a relation between speech norms and practices? This exploratory study is based on interviews with fifty-five police officers from France, Italy and the Netherlands. In these countries, police officers are aware that displaying overt racism is not socially desirable. Interviews show that there are vastly different speech norms governing decent race talk in the three countries. Specifically, we compare: how police use ethnic categories; how police anticipate accusations of discrimination; and how police theorize the over-representation of ethnic minorities in crime. French respondents respect much stricter speech norms than Dutch or Italian ones.