Literary Texts Research Articles

Étude des interférences intralinguistiques en FLE: l'impact des homographes et des pronoms sur l'apprentissage des compléments et articles définis à Osun State University-Nigeria

Study of Intralinguistic Interference in FLE: The Impact of Homographs and Pronouns on the Learning of Complements and Definite Articles at Osun State University-Nigeria Linguistic interference is a psycholinguistic phenomenon which slows down the learning process of the target language due to the existing similarities between it (L2) and the one already acquired (L1). Many research works had been carried out on linguistic transfer and interference. However, among those works, only a significant few have underscored the intra-linguistic interference as a trap associated with understanding the homographs, personal pronoun complements and definite articles in the class of French as a foreign language FLE. Therefore, this paper evaluates the grammatical implications that the distinctions between le, la, la les as personal pronoun complements and definite articles in Allah n’est pas obligé by Ahmadou Kourouma have on Anglophone French learners. The theoretical framework adopted to foreground our claims is linguistic transfer and interference. Percentage (%) is the scale used to interpret their performance while data are analysed based on textual analysis. The text is purposively selected to situate our analysis in the context of a postcolonial Francophone African literary text whose learning is always complicated among Anglophone and Yorubaphone French learners. Five questions were asked to evaluate the language skills of the seventy-five (75) third-year students at Osun State University across twenty corpora drawn from the work. The morpho-phonetic similarities between the definite articles and the personal pronoun complement inhibit the comprehension of instructional materials. In conclusion, contextual interpretation and more rigorous study of the grammatical subject matters are suggested to both teachers and learners, respectively, to eliminate the confusion associated with the teaching and learning of the homographs. To significantly improve academic performance among non-French-speaking learners, authorities should implement the pragmatic interventions outlined in this article, involving teaching professionals and learners alike.

Gender stereotypes in Lola Shoneyin’s the secret lives of baba Segi’s wives

This research focuses on gender stereotypes in selected African literary text. The way in which some African writers view gender inequalities and stereotypes in their characters is explored. We will also be able to see who is involved and affected by these gender inequalities and how. What determines beliefs about the ability and appropriate role of women? An overwhelming majority of men and women born early in the 20th century thought women should not work; a majority now believes that work is appropriate for both genders. Betty Friedan (1963) postulated that beliefs about gender were formed by consumer goods producers, but a simple model suggests that such firms would only have the incentive to supply error, when mass persuasion is cheap, when their products complement women’s time in the household, and when individual producers have significant market power (1). Such conditions seem unlikely to be universal, or even common, but gender stereotypes have a long history. To explain that history, we turn to a second model where parents perpetuate beliefs out of a desire to encourage the production of grandchildren. Undersupply of female education will encourage daughters’ fertility, directly by reducing the opportunity cost of their time and indirectly by leading daughters to believe that they are less capable. Children will be particularly susceptible to persuasion if they overestimate their parents’ altruism toward themselves. The supply of persuasion will diminish if women work before childbearing, which may explain why gender-related beliefs changed radically among generations born in the 1940s.

Figure and Ground in Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss”: A Cognitive Reading

“Bliss” is a masterpiece of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. This article aims to illustrate the prominence of figures and thematic ideas in “Bliss” and to explore its internal cognitive principles based on the figure-ground theory of cognitive poetics. In “Bliss”, the prominence of character, image and theme gives rise to the formation and reversal of “figure” and “ground” within the literary text. Through the conflict between different characters such as extramarital affair or triangle love, the focalization of various images like fire, moonlight and pear tree, and the alienation of narrative techniques and language expressions, for example, the third-person and psychological narratives, as well as the visual changes in color words, “Bliss” successfully achieves the prominence of literary figures, expresses the writer’s emotions and creative intentions, and deepens the connotations of the story’s themes. The prominence of “happy” and “unhappy” figures of the protagonist Bertha Young highlights the story’s grounds and themes: after years of happiness in marriage that may have turned into dreamy illusions, women must rely on their own strength to live independently, confidently, and strongly, correctly recognizing their identities in family, finding their positions in society, and living out brilliance and happiness in daily life.

Sono nel club con la mia gang Uso del drill rap per l’educazione linguistica e letteraria

Starting from the innovative approach operated by Hans Hunfeld and the more recent evidence by Mirco Magnani, this paper deals with the use of literary texts in language education, among which poetic texts are no exception. The present paper aims specifically to argue that even popular songs can place their lyrics as a model for language learning, most notably after considering the recipients of education within a broad objective of inclusivity. The use of songs in linguistic education for Italian as a Second or Foreign Language is already known, but it deals mostly with the classical melodramma or Italian art song. However, here it will be argued that even contemporary music spread among teenagers and youths can belong to the education program for languages. This paper presents the drill music lyrics of Louboutin (2020) by Vale Pain and Rondo da Sosa as a less orthodox but not less valid instrument to teach and learn Italian for foreigners.

Critique du récit pur: gleam of time in Maurice Blanchot’s narratives

ABSTRACT Maurice Blanchot’s itinerary as a critic and writer is marked by a transformation occurring around the beginning of WW2, when Blanchot abandoned right-wing political journalism to focus on literature. His criticism and narrative fictions from the 1940s elaborate the notion of a ‘pure novel’, inspired partly by Mallarmé, in response to historical conditions of the Occupation, in an assertion of literary sovereignty after bitter political defeat. Blanchot casts this pure form of writing through figures of light and luminosity that would transcend, even destroy, empirical experience – moving toward the disaster he will later invoke – thus affording a certain evasion from historical realities, while also betraying an intimate relation to their specific concrete historical conjuncture. The argument is not that Blanchot sublimates / allegorises political disappointment through literary narrative (see Jeffrey Mehlman in the 1980s), but that his literary texts enact a relation to factual political and historical responsibility that ‘pure’ literature fails to liquidate, but rather continually evokes. Tracing out constitutive evasions in Thomas the Obscure, Aminadab, The Madness of the Day, and The Instant of my Death, reveals how Blanchot’s fiction betrays a necessary accounting of the author’s factual history, a historical responsibility called up in the strange vacuous light of literature itself.

Helen Keller’s ‘Sense of light’: life-writing, light-writing and the photosynthetic subject

ABSTRACT Contributors to Mere Light ask how ‘light’ falls in and through the non-visual medium of the literary text, illuminating that medium’s potential to initiate an experience of immediacy. While we might look to the luminous inscriptions of medieval mystics for its template, a fascinating post-Enlightenment exemplar of this paradox is the literary ‘self-recording’ of the deafblind modern ‘miracle’ Helen Keller. ‘Illustrated’ with often surreal photographs that both marked their modernity and complemented their thematic preoccupation with the dynamics of light, Keller’s nine autobiographies strove to replicate her primarily ‘tactual’ sense experience in graphic language while tendering apparently eyewitness images of light. Where these literary dissimulations bring the body of Keller’s disabled I into view, they develop a complex ‘sense of light’ as vibrant, self-actualising literary metaphor, capable of moving between sight and touch, and thus beyond the limits of both. Projecting its speaking I as light’s writing alongside illustrative photographs that projected that I as light-written, Keller’s life-writing synthesises sight and touch. Epitomised in her experimental The World I Live In (1908), this was to ‘photo’ synthesise the mimetic pretenses of post-Enlightenment visualising technologies with a transhistorical disability aesthetics oriented around peripheral – hence invisible – embodiment.

Linguistic analysis of gender stereotypes in the language of mass media

The aim of the research is a detailed analysis of language structures that spread and reproduce gender stereotypes in the field of mass media. The study employed the methods of analysis of language means of gender-oriented text, linguistic analysis of gender markers, comparative analysis for studying gendered vocabulary. Standard statistical methods and Cronbach’s alpha were also used. The use of linguistic means of gender-oriented text in English media discourse can vary depending on different factors such as genre, format, and target audience. For example, gender stereotypes are often used more frequently in news articles than in literary texts. This tendency is determined by the fact that news usually focus on specific events or problems, rather than on the persons involved. In the context of the media, gender stereotypes caused by an attempt to attach events a clear context and explanation, which can lead to greater use of gender distinctions. In contrast, the authors of fiction texts use more creativity and the opportunity to avoid stereotypes regarding gender roles. Further research may cover various aspects of gender equality, in particular, representation of different gender identities and the interaction between them in the linguistic space.

Qualities of Literary Machine Translation: A Corpus-based Case Study

The research assesses and compares the translation performance of two popular machine translation systems, GPT-4o and Youdao AI Translate, in translating into English ten Chinese prose essays excerpted from Selected Modern Chinese Essays 2 by Zhang Peiji. The goal is to discover their linguistic features and investigate how well they can perform in this translation. Through a corpus-based analysis, the research explores the STTR and word/ sentence length of their translations and conducts both automated and human evaluations on their translation quality. It reveals that GPT-4o exhibits higher lexical variety and both the two machine translation systems tend to produce more and shorter sentences than the human translation does. Both of them perform surprisingly well in the translation, as they get relatively high BLUE scores yet low TER scores, as well as high adequacy and fluency rates. Our evaluation results also show that Youdao AI Translate displays generally better performance than GPT-4o in the translation of Chinese-to-English literary texts, and they can complement each other to achieve even better performance, though a certain amount of errors are still present in both of their translations.

A Pragmatic Analysis of Flattering in Some Selected Literary Texts

This study aims at conducting a pragmatic analysis of speech acts expressing flattering in some selected literary texts (Hamlet). Flattering is used to express encouragement, which is false positive evaluation. Flattering assumes the effect of the listener’s feelings, actions and thoughts via the speech acts offlattering. Flattery is a social phenomenon that treads a fine line between acceptable and unacceptable social behavior and brings forward the strategic element of language use. Although flattery was studied in different areas but pragmatic literature has not addressed the phenomenon, despite its potential to inform the interpretive process participants engage in when evaluating politeness strategies in interactions. A pragmatic methodology was used to collect the data. The results of this study show how the characters judge an action to be flattery, what (verbal) acts count as flattery, and the functions of flattery in interactions.

VEDA'S INTERNAL CONFLICT PORTRAYED IN JESSIKA FLECK'S BEWARE THE NIGHT

This study aims to analyze the internal conflict experienced by the main character, Veda, in Jessika Fleck's Beware the Night. Veda is a woman who wants to fight for the revolution of an oppressed community and experiences internal conflict because of several causes around her. This study focuses on examining Veda's personality and internal conflicts. This study uses a qualitative research method to describe the internal conflict in the main character. This study employs the New Criticism theory to analyze the data. The theory sees elements of the literary text using a careful reading technique. The result of this study is Veda's brave and diligent personality. Furthermore, four internal conflicts are found in Veda's character. She fears the Night, lies, and propaganda, struggling with her reality and managing her loyalty to her community. Then, her personality leads her to make the decision to face an internal conflict in her life and protect her community.

Examining the Tale of Keloğlan and Giant Mother Using Psychoanalytic Method: Transition from the Preoedipal Stage to the Oedipal Stage

Psychoanalytic literary theory is one of the frequently used analytical approaches. The theory tries to understand the unconscious motivations and desires of characters in literary works, as well as subjects in real life. This theory, founded by Sigmund Freud and developed by his followers, suggests that the words, behaviors and actions in a literary text can be interpreted through a psychoanalytic lens in order to reveal the repressed desires and anxieties of the characters and the author alike. In the psychoanalytic approach, the oral stage, one of the psychosexual stages, is the period when strong bonds between the mother and the child are at the forefront, and competition with the father has not yet emerged. This period can also be called the pre-oedipal period. At this stage, as sexual differences begin to be perceived, the child turns towards the opposite-sex parent. This phase, which includes the phallic period, is referred to as the oedipal period. During this period, the father, whom the child perceives as positive or negative, is also included in the child's life. Fairy tales have been passed down through generations and have survived until today, both orally and in writing. The effects of situations such as fear and violence that can be found in fairy tale on children and how the child perceives and assimilates this content have attracted the attention of psychoanalytic literary theorists. It is assumed that the language of fairy tale can be effective in solving some unconscious issues of the child in the pre- and post-oedipal periods. In this text; In terms of psychoanalytic theory, the tale of Keloğlan and the Giant's Mother, which is thought to include the issues of the child's pre-oedipal period, has been tried to be interpreted in the light of 'psychoanalytic literary theory'.

Mode of time as a linguistic concept: to the question of language representation in the literary text

Mode of time as a linguistic concept: to the question of language representation in the literary text

The Menzerath-Altmann Law at the Paragraph Level in Written Chinese: Why Register and Text Size Matter?

ABSTRACT This study explores the hierarchical relationship between paragraphs and sentences in written Chinese texts across 9 registers and 20 text sizes using the Menzerath-Altmann (MA) law. Key findings include: (1) The MA law is reasonably applicable at the supra-sentential level in written Chinese, specifically ‘paragraph-sentence-clause’ under certain boundary conditions. (2) Paragraph-level fittings are influenced by both register and text size. Certain fiction registers even show a decrease in goodness-of-fit as text size increases. (3) Media emerges as a potential factor shaping linguistic feature in literary texts. These findings may shed some light on MA law studies at the supra-sentential level.

Тема катынского расстрела в романе Елены Катишонок Джек, который построил дом

The article presents an analysis of the thread of Yelena Katishonok’s novel Jack Who Built the House (2021), related to the theme of the Katyn massacre. In exploring the context and method of incorporating historical material into a literary text, we proceed from the basic concepts of the “New Historicism”. In the narrative about the fates of modern heroes, the writer weaves a thread related to the history of Poland, namel the arrests of Polish officers in 1939, the Katyn massacre, the formation of the Polish Anders’ Army on the territory of the USSR and the commemoration of the victims in Katyn after the war. The fate of the character associated with this thread, Stanislaw Warzynski, is in many ways the biography of a Polish artist who survived in Katyn, Józef Czapski. Katishonok depicts not only memories of historical events, but above all the efforts of several generations to commemorate the victims.

Developing English Proficiency Through Literature: A Language-Based Approach

The main purpose of the study was to find out whether the utilization of a language-based approach through the use of adopted text entitled “The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant, teacher-initiated supplementary materials/modules, and innovative activities in reading, listening, speaking, and writing can facilitate and develop student’s English proficiency. Utilizing a quasi- experimental method, the study revealed that there was a significant difference in the developing English proficiency of students through literature in the pretest and posttest in the experimental group, as well as a significant difference in the posttest English proficiency of students in both groups. The results implied that utilizing literary texts, teacher-initiated module, and innovative activities can have improved the English proficiency of students. Therefore, the act of utilizing literary texts, teacher-initiated module, and facilitating innovative activities for students aside from the school modules in the experiment fared better compared to solely utilizing traditional methods and discussion concerning the students’ English proficiency development and performance. In the light of the findings, the utilization of literary texts, teacher-initiated module, and innovative activities in reading, listening, speaking, and writing was effective in discussing English lessons in regular classes and exhibited favorable results academically. Thus, it was recommended to pursue the method for other English topics aside from the subjects in the research study. Future researchers are encouraged to use the methodology of the language-based approach through literature in developing students’ English proficiency not only for academic purposes, but also for its effects on students' social, psychological, and physical well-being.

Etched in Stone: Shaligrams as Object-Texts

Shaligrams are the sacred fossil ammonites of the Himalayas. Viewed primarily as manifestations of Hindu gods, Shaligrams are obtained by pilgrimage to Himalayan Nepal and are then brought home to families and communities all over South Asia and the Diaspora as household deities. But Shaligrams also contain a variety of natural characteristics that are read and interpreted through long-standing oral traditions that use these features to both determine which specific deity is manifest within the stone and to link each Shaligram with a body of religious stories and local folklore. Therefore, the semiotic interpretation of Shaligrams instantiates ritual practices by which each stone becomes both an object and a text; able to be read by those fluent in its symbolic language. This practice then blurs the line between categories of object and archive; where fossils become literal texts and stones become storytellers.

THE ANALYSIS STUDY OF RENAL TRANSPLANTATION BENEFITS PATIENTS WITH END-STAGE RENAL DISEASE BY IMPROVING ERECTILE FUNCTION: A COMPREHENSIVE SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

Background: Renal transplantation is a highly effective treatment for end-stage renal disease (ESRD), addressing the impact of erectile dysfunction on quality of life. Erectile dysfunction, characterized by the inability to achieve and sustain an erection for good sexual activity, affects the physical and psychological well-being of individuals and their partners. However, research on the impact of renal transplantation on erectile dysfunction has yielded conflicting results. Understanding the beneficial impacts of renal transplantation on erectile dysfunction could potentially lead to more successful outcomes. Methods: Adhering to the PRISMA 2020 standards, this systematic investigation sought to examine complete English literature texts published from 2004 until 2024. Only editorials and review articles that had a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and were published in the same magazine as the submission were considered for acceptance. We utilized many sources, such as ScienceDirect, PubMed, and SagePub, to acquire the literature. Result: The study examined over 40 papers sourced from reliable venues like Science Direct, SagePub, and PubMed. After selecting eight papers for further scrutiny, a comprehensive analysis of the complete corpus of literature was conducted. Conclusion: Renal transplantation has shown significant improvement in erectile function in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD), with a lower prevalence of erectile dysfunction and higher function scores. Factors such as pretransplantation IIEF-5 score, age, and anastomosis to the common iliac artery have significant associations with improved erectile function. However, the exact mechanism behind this effect remains unclear.

“The Horror of It Made Me Mad”: Hysterical Narration in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897)

This article analyzes the hysterical narration styles of two major characters in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) to reveal the ways late-Victorian discourses attempted (and often failed) to distance particular social anxieties from their modern origins. Attending to previous literary criticism regarding socially Othered groups of this period—racialized foreigners, New Women, and the urban poor—as well as (pseudo)scientific studies from the 1870s–80s, this reading notes the ways that Victorian cultural biases surrounding race, gender, and class could be projected onto Gothicized, Orientalized figures in literary texts. Pairing a postcolonial examination of the novel’s spatial and temporal elements with a psychoanalytic reading of this text, I argue that the slowing pace in Robert Holt’s narrative and the compulsive repetition of Marjorie Lindon’s both reflect the novel’s disruption of space and time and structurally parallel the symptoms of a “hallucinatory hysterical attack,” as conceived by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud. Together, these hysterical narratives reveal the failure of particular cultural and scientific discourses to completely bury Victorian anxieties about modernity into different, explicitly Othered spaces and times by collapsing both space and time in the narration of psychic trauma.

Tablets (Du) and Passages (Zhang): the Material Conditions for the Formation of Early Short Passage Texts

Abstract Several studies have addressed the question of whether the people of early China wrote with thin bamboo strips held in their hands or whether they wrote with the support of flat desks. However, scholars have not addressed the distinction between jian (bamboo strips) and larger du (wooden tablets) in everyday writing. In early China, tablets would be held in the hand to write, while strips would be laid flat on a writing desk. Tablets were the main medium of everyday writing during the period spanning the pre-Qin and Western and Eastern Han dynasties. In the drafting of various literary texts, taking court records, and taking classroom notes, tablets were the primary writing medium. Among written materials from before the Western Han dynasty, duan zhang (short passages) were the most common style of writing, and most texts were composed of short passages. Among the early Chinese manuscripts that have been unearthed, short passages are also very common. However, almost no one has raised the question of why a documentary system dominated by short passages was formed in the pre-Qin and Western and Eastern Han dynasties period. The number of characters that a writing tablet can accommodate essentially coincides with the number of characters in short passages in early Chinese manuscripts. In view of its wide use, I propose that the formation of the short passage form was potentially influenced by the material writing medium of the tablet.

ТЮРКСКИЙ КУЛЬТУРНО-ИСТОРИЧЕСКИЙ ТИП В КОНТЕКСТЕ ДИСКУССИЙ ОБ ИСТОРИИ МИРОВЫХ ЦИВИЛИЗАЦИЙ

Turkic cultural-historical type in the context of discussions about the history of world civilizations Summary The article analyzes the historical-cultural types presented in the book "Russia and Europe" by the Russian philosopher N. Danilevsky, published in 1869, and the concept of civilizations put forward by him. The concepts of O. Spengler and A. Toynbee, discussed in the later periods, as a whole, discussions on this level, ideas related to the concepts of "culture", "civilization", "historical-cultural type", as well as literary addresses and texts, and F.M. Dostoyevsky are referred to. As the main reason why the Turkish historical-cultural type cannot take a proper place in these concepts, the rise of the Slavic historical-cultural type against the background of the Russo-Turkish wars is emphasized. It is shown that it is surprising that the Turkish historical-cultural type is not included in the first and subsequent classifications based on the laws and regularities of movement defined by the Russian scientist who had the first role in defining historical-cultural types. Historical facts, evidence and evidence are listed to prove this. Although the indicated error was eliminated by the authors of the Eurasian concept of Russian history in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, it is noted that there is a need for scientific-theoretical confirmation of the existence of the Turkish historical-cultural type and Turkish civilization as an ideological landmark in the historical conditions of the formation of the Union of Turkic States. Key words: N. Danilevsky, “Russia and Europe”, cultural and historical type, crusades, Slavs