Range Of Text Types Research Articles

Von „Studierenden“, „Mitarbeiter*innen“ und „Professoren“ – Geschlechtergerechte Personenbezeichnungen zwischen Varianz und Normierung

Gender-fair language has been a controversial and topical issue in Germany for over 50 years, both in public and in the professional discourse of German linguistics. In this article, two contiguous studies of gender-fair language at German universities are presented. In the first part, university guidelines for gender-fair language usage are subjected to a content analysis. In the second part, linguistic practice in the area of person reference is studied using a corpus compiled from a range of text types used in the internal and external communication of universities. The relation between the existing variance of language use and institutional attempts at standardization of gender-fair language are examined. In the two studies presented, the interplay between theory and practice becomes evident: There are tensions between theories motivating the options presented for gender-fair language and the goals formulated in university guidelines clash with the observable variation in language use. This work contributes to the current dialog on compulsory regulations on gender-fair language by providing data from writing practice while shedding light on ongoing processes of language change.

Lexical Structure as a Marker of Ideology in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments and Two Thousand Seasons

Recent work in the field of Critical Discourse theory, such as that by Norman Fairclough and Teun van Dijk, suggests that it is possible to uncover ideologies inscribed in a text by focusing on elements of discourse. Drawing on the Bakhtinian theory that considers language as a field of ideological confrontation and insights from Critical Discourse Analysis, this article examines how vocabulary mediates ideologies in two novels by Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah, namely Fragments and Two Thousand Seasons. Although critical linguistics has been concerned to widen the scope of stylistics, not just by including as its object of study a wide range of text types, literary and non-literary, but also by allowing insights from other disciplines of the social sciences to be used for a better understanding of the text to be analysed, this article limits its discussion to literary analysis underpinned by socio-cultural knowledge.

What can we learn from young adolescents’ perceptions about the teaching of reading?

Young adolescent students are at a critical time in their schooling. Once they embark into secondary schooling their prospects of achieving well across a range of curriculum subjects can often depend on their ability to critically analyse and understand a range of text types. This article focuses on 34 young adolescent students’ views about learning to read. By better understanding what works for these young adolescents, teachers and educators can further enhance effective learning environments for students’ reading development. The research study explored the views of 11 to 13 year old students who came from six schools. Overall, the school populations had a higher representation of students from diverse cultural backgrounds, than in the majority of New Zealand schools. Five of the schools were in low to mid socio-economic areas and one school was in a higher socio-economic area. The small group interviews with the students found that they appreciated teachers using explicit teaching strategies to guide their learning during reading. Many of the students valued learning to read as they perceived it as an essential skill for their long-term wellbeing and career opportunities. It was apparent that these young adolescents valued learning to read in a safe and respectful learning environment. Irrespective of socio-economic or cultural backgrounds, the students viewed learning as a serious matter. Learning to effectively read and comprehend was viewed as a foundation to their success in the future.

Expanding the Range of Text Types Used in the Primary Grades

Primary-grade students’ experiences with text should prepare them to critically read an extensive range of text types throughout their schooling and career, a primary goal of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). However, research demonstrates that narrative text overshadows other text types in the primary grades. The purpose of this article is to share four approaches to help primary-grade teachers purposefully and successfully expand the range of text types read, written, and discussed in their classroom. By increasing young children's experiences with different types of texts, teachers can augment their students’ knowledge, prepare students for texts they will encounter throughout life, and promote student interest in a range of genres.

Graphical Editor for Manuscripts

Existing software for handling textual variants suffers from a number of faults, and is generally designed for a narrow range of text types. This paper develops a new data structure for variants, suitable for a wider range of texts, which also solves most of the problems associated with the representation of variant data. A prototype applet, which can graphically display the new data structure is described, as also the current state of the editor being developed from it.

The ‘Genius of language’

SummaryThe so-called ‘genius of language’ may be regarded as one of the most influential, and versatile, metalinguistic metaphors used to describe vernacular languages from the 17th century onwards. Over the centuries, philosophers, grammarians, trans­lators and language critics etc. wrote of the ‘genius of language’ in a wide range of text types and with reference to various linguistic positions so that a set of rather diverse types of the concept was created. This paper traces three prominent stages in the development of the ‘genius of language’ argument and, by identifying some of the most frequent types as they evolved in the context of the various linguistic dis­courses, endeavours to show the major transformations of the concept. While early on, discussion of the stylistic and grammatical type of the ‘genius of language’ concentrates on surface features in the languages considered, during the middle of the 18th century, the ‘genius of language’ is relocated to the semantic, interior part of language. With the 19th-century notion of an organological ‘genius of language’, the former static concept is personified and recast in a dynamic form until, taken to its nationalistic extremes, the ‘genius of language’ argument finally ceases to be of any epistemological and scientific value.

The ‘Genius of Language’: Transformations of a Concept in the History of Linguistics

The so-called ‘genius of language’ may be regarded as one of the most influential, and versatile, metalinguistic metaphors used to describe vernacular languages from the 17th century onwards. Over the centuries, philosophers, grammarians, trans­lators and language critics etc. wrote of the ‘genius of language’ in a wide range of text types and with reference to various linguistic positions so that a set of rather diverse types of the concept was created. This paper traces three prominent stages in the development of the ‘genius of language’ argument and, by identifying some of the most frequent types as they evolved in the context of the various linguistic dis­courses, endeavours to show the major transformations of the concept. While early on, discussion of the stylistic and grammatical type of the ‘genius of language’ concentrates on surface features in the languages considered, during the middle of the 18th century, the ‘genius of language’ is relocated to the semantic, interior part of language. With the 19th-century notion of an organological ‘genius of language’, the former static concept is personified and recast in a dynamic form until, taken to its nationalistic extremes, the ‘genius of language’ argument finally ceases to be of any epistemological and scientific value.

Wörterbuch der Redensarten zu der von Karl Kraus 1899 bis 1936 herausgegebenen Zeitschrift ‘Die Fackel’ ed. by Werner Welzig (review)

MLR, 97.4, 2002 1023 and are more or less tangentially related to the main themes of the previous sections, bearing mainly on reception (from Franz Michael Felder to Jules Verne), on Austrian realism, and on ethnic and nationalist tensions. Perhaps inevitably, this is the section that contributes least coherently to the re-evaluation of the importance of the period for later developments. But the volume is then rounded off by a final ingeniously conceived section entitled 'Panorama', which contains well-documented studies of two reflective and critical attempts to synthesize the achievements of the period, the twenty-four-volume survey Die Osterreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild launched by the ill-fated Crown Prince Rudolph (Christine Zintzen) and the Deutsch-osterreichische Literaturgeschichte founded in the 1890s under the editorship ofJohann Willibald Nagl, a dialectologist, and Jakob Zeidler, a Baroque specialist, and later completed by Eduard Castle. This last chapter is by Gerhard Renner, Deputy Director ofthe Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, which holds Castle's Nachlass; in the context of the period up to 1890, however, the main emphasis properly falls on the work of Nagl and Zeidler and its critical reception. A mere review cannot do justice to the wealth of material in a volume on the scale of Literarisches Leben in Osterreich i848-i8go. It should be of seminal importance forthe light it sheds on the complex currents and ever-shifting literary climate of the decades linking the upheavals of 1848 with the very differentupheavals of the/m de siecle. For the most part, moreover, it can be read and reread with pleasure. University of Exeter W. E. Yates Worterbuch der Redensarten zu der von Karl Kraus i8gg bis ig36 herausgegebenen Zeitschrift (Die Fackel'. Ed. by Werner Welzig. Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. 1999. 1056 pp. ?125.21. Compiled by a team of researchers headed by Professor Werner Welzig, President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, this sample of the seemingly endless stylistic innovation ofthe 22,586 pages of Karl Kraus's Die Fackel is not merely quantitatively substantial; its 930-page core consists of 144 articles documenting all instances of a particular idiomatic phrase. With its alphabetical structure, it aspires to being a compendium of and stimulus for modern German usage, not least because, as the editor reminds us, the raw material of Kraus's hypersensitive language satire over four decades comprised the widest range of everyday discourse, whether the Viennese vernacular of 'da gibt's keine Wurschteln', folklore like 'alles gerettet!', or catchphrases and neologisms. On another level, the same applies (given the integral role of varied typefaces in the satirist's range of text-types) to its status as a record of the history of German typography, as Anne Burdick reminds us in an Englishlanguage essay about her (excellently conceived) graphic design. The Redensarten of the title are a catch-all for idioms, cliches, and gefliigelteWorte. As a 'text dictionary', it does not typically gloss lemmas with a definition, but illus? trates them co-textually with substantial passages quoted fromDie Fackel. The editor invites us to supplement the reference function (of, say, a glossary or concordance) by reading serendipitously, an aim implicit in the macrostructure governingthe selection and grouping of examples. This intention may be thwarted physically by the large format (30.5X22.7 cm); nevertheless, perhaps the single most significant achievement of this 'dictionary' structure, with its sheer weight of thematically grouped selections and cross-references, is the challenge to read Kraus's allusive, intertextual, tonally nuanced web of language in the same associative and non-linear manner in which it was conceived. The sudden shift in an article on 'Butter auf dem Kopf to 'Dreck am Stecken' may characterize the peculiarities of German idiom as such, 1024 Reviews but other trails of wordplay, say, between 'Brett', 'Kopf, and 'Blatt' ('die Blatter, die die Welt bedeuten'; 'sich vors Brett gestoBen fiihlen'), lead to the quintessential Kraus (as do 'Blatt', 'Fahne', or 'Farbe', to his target the press). Documentation also covers his inventive variations on geflugelteWorte (deus ex machina, afterthe Titanic disaster, becomes God's vengeance against technology), on proverbial phrases ('den Schmock zum Gartner machen'; 'der Parasit [hat] die Rechnungohne den...

A Comparative Analysis of Text and Music and Gender and Audience in Duke Bluebeard's Castle

Andrea Fábry discusses in her article, "A Comparative Analysis of Text and Music and Gender and Audience in Duke Bluebeard's Castle," the image of Bluebeard as a metaphor for gender relations. Béla Bartók's opera and its libretto represent a prime example of the metaphor that in turn can be found in a range of text types, from fairy tales through novels to films. In the article, Fábry analyzes Bartók's contribution to the metaphor, namely with his opera, Duke Bluebeard's Castle. She relates the opera to the text of the opera's libretto, written by film theoretician Béla Balázs, and places her analysis in the larger historical framework of audience research in modernity. The analysis reveals that in a pronounced misogynistic artistic climate of the time and working from a libretto whose tragic ending denies transcendence to the female character of the opera, Bartók's opera can be understood as the representation of simplistic domesticity where the real story remains un-mediated and un-narrated.

Standard Australian English

The author traces the development of the concept Australian English from the 1940s to the present time, noting a radical change in both public and individual acceptance of it. He briefly surveys the extent of the scholarly documentation of Australian English in dictionaries and style manuals, and addresses the question of Australianness in a range of text types and registers.

A COGNITIVE PROCESS MODEL OF DOCUMENT INDEXING

Classification, indexing and abstracting can all be regarded as summarisations of the content of a document. A model of text comprehension by indexers (including classifiers and abstractors) is presented, based on task descriptions which indicate that the comprehension of text for indexing differs from normal fluent reading in respect of: operational time constraints, which lead to text being scanned rapidly for perceptual cues to aid gist comprehension; comprehension being task oriented rather than learning oriented, and being followed immediately by the production of an abstract, index, or classification; and the automaticity of processing of text by experienced indexers working within a restricted range of text types. The evidence for the interplay of perceptual and conceptual processing of text under conditions of rapid scanning is reviewed. The allocation of mental resources to text processing is discussed, and a cognitive process model of abstracting, indexing and classification is described.