It is widely accepted that political discourse in recent years has become more openly racist and more filled with wildly implausible conspiracy theories. Dogwhistles and Figleaves explores certain ways in which such changes—both of which defied previously settled norms of political speech—have been brought about. Jennifer Saul shows that two linguistic devices, dogwhistles and figleaves, have played a crucial role. Some dogwhistles (such as “88,” used by Nazis online to mean “Heil Hitler”) serve to disguise messages that would otherwise be (...) rejected as unacceptable, allowing them to be transmitted surreptitiously. Other dogwhistles (like the 1988 “Willie Horton” ad) work by influencing people in ways that they are not aware of, and which they would likely reject were they aware. Figleaves (such as “just asking questions”) take messages that could easily be recognized as unacceptable, and provide just enough cover that people become more willing to accept them. Importantly, these work against the background of a divided public. They are particularly effective in influencing people who are conflicted yet malleable—those who don’t want to be racist, for example, but are willing to be convinced that something which seems racist really isn’t. Saul shows how these dogwhistles and figleaves have both exploited and widened existing divisions in society, and normalized racist and conspiracist speech. (shrink)

Provides a comprehensive introduction to the major philosophical theories attempting to explain the workings of language.

The spread of English is so much an integral part of globalization that it has become an essential global literacy skill. In Asia, this poses immense challenges to governments and English language teaching and teacher education professions as they attempt to meet this demand from students for a high level of English proficiency. This volume examines English language education policies across ten Asian jurisdictions, the corresponding teacher education policies, and how these policies affect teachers and teacher educators. (...) Each chapter covers a different jurisdiction, and is written by a scholar engaged in the implementation of government policies on English language and teacher education, providing the reader with insiders' perspectives. It gives a fascinating glimpse into the remarkable similarities in the challenges posed to these countries and the critical issues that have emerged from the local responses despite their markedly different socioeconomic, political, cultural and historical backgrounds. (shrink)

In the early 1760s, the entry dedicated to the term “social” in Diderot's Encyclopédie claimed that it was “un mot nouvellement introduit dans la langue.” Strictly speaking, this description was inaccurate: “social” had already appeared (though very sporadically) in seventeenth-century French texts. But the essence of the Encyclopédie's argument was correct: “social” had been so marginal in French up until the mid-eighteenth century that its wide deployment in enlightened discourse from the 1740s onward could be treated as a new appearance. (...) The article main argument is that “social's” new appearance in the mid-1740s was of considerable intellectual importance. To support this argument, the article is divided into three parts. The first outlines the general premises of the research into the word “social” and its significance. By placing this research within the ongoing investigation of the semantic field around “société” in enlightened philosophy, the article claims that such an investigation is much more than an etymological exercise. The special epistemological status of “social” in enlightened philosophy makes an understanding of the reasons for its rapid domination of French philosophical discourse a most rewarding project from the perspective of intellectual history. The second part of the article provides empirical evidence for the argument that “social” had been all but completely absent from French intellectual discourse before the mid-eighteenth century. It is of course harder to ascertain the absence of a word before a given point in time than to confirm its presence, but many different indications substantiate the essence of the Encyclopédie's claim. These indications also allow one to follow “social's” discursive rise after about 1745 and to speculate about the identity of the author(s) responsible for it. All evidence lead to two philosophes, the article claims: Diderot and Rousseau. Finally, the third part of the article presents an argument about the reasons for “social's” rapid naturalization in French enlightened thought and discusses what the philosophes tried so intensively to do, achieve, or express with “social.” Possible answers to this question lead to a reevaluation of mid-eighteenth century enlightened thought in general and contemporary philosophes in particular. Most importantly, such answers allow us to reflect on how we write and think about the intellectual achievements of the mid-eighteenth century, and in what way we, too, still inhabit the mental universe the philosophes helped to create. ☆ I would like to thank Keith Michael Baker for his encouragement and helpful criticism of a previous draft of this article. (shrink)

Natural language processing based on large language models (LLMs) is a booming field of AI research. After neural networks have proven to outperform humans in games and practical domains based on pattern recognition, we might stand now at a road junction where artificial entities might eventually enter the realm of human communication. However, this comes with serious risks. Due to the inherent limitations regarding the reliability of neural networks, overreliance on LLMs can have disruptive consequences. Since it will (...) be increasingly difficult to distinguish between human-written and machine-generated text, one is confronted with new ethical challenges. This begins with the no longer undoubtedly verifiable human authorship and continues with various types of fraud, such as a new form of plagiarism. This also concerns the violation of privacy rights, the possibility of circulating counterfeits of humans, and, last but not least, it makes a massive spread of misinformation possible. (shrink)

What is the point of language? If we begin with that abstract question, we may be tempted towards a high-minded answer: “People say things to get other people to come to know things that they didn't know before” (Stalnaker, 2002, 703). The point is truth, knowledge, communication. If we begin with a concrete question, “What has language to do with race?” we find a different point: to attack, spread hatred, create racial hierarchy. The mere practice of racial (...) categorization is controversial: are race terms natural or social kind terms? What does categorization do to the categorized? (Outlaw, 1990; Omi and Winant, 1994; Appiah, 1996; Andreason, 1998; Kitcher, 1999; Zack, 2002; Haslanger, 2008; Glasgow, 2009). But there is worse than mere categorization to contend with. (shrink)

In a continuation of the conversation with Fitch, Chomsky, and Hauser on the evolution of language, we examine their defense of the claim that the uniquely human, language-specific part of the language faculty (the “narrow language faculty”) consists only of recursion, and that this part cannot be considered an adaptation to communication. We argue that their characterization of the narrow language faculty is problematic for many reasons, including its dichotomization of cognitive capacities into those that (...) are utterly unique and those that are identical to nonlinguistic or nonhuman capacities, omitting capacities that may have been substantially modified during human evolution. We also question their dichotomy of the current utility versus original function of a trait, which omits traits that are adaptations for current use, and their dichotomy of humans and animals, which conflates similarity due to common function and similarity due to inheritance from a recent common ancestor. We show that recursion, though absent from other animals’ communications systems, is found in visual cognition, hence cannot be the sole evolutionary development that granted language to humans. Finally, we note that despite Fitch et al.’s denial, their view of language evolution is tied to Chomsky’s conception of language itself, which identifies combinatorial productivity with a core of “narrow syntax.” An alternative conception, in which combinatoriality is spread across words and constructions, has both empirical advantages and greater evolutionary plausibility. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Tarskian model theory is almost universally understood as a formal counterpart of the preformal notion of semantics, of the “linkage between words and things”. The wide-spread opinion is that to account for the semantics of natural language is to furnish its settheoretic interpretation in a suitable model structure; as exemplified by Montague 1974.

The article discusses the peculiarities of the functioning of Ukrainian fantasy fandom as well as its transformations related to two main aspects: 1) from “the old” fandom to the new one and 2) from the ordinary forms of existence during the peaceful times to existence during the wartime after Russian full-scale invasion in Ukraine in February 2022.The article indicates the general transformation of the scholarly research of the fandom in the Western academic context. It is possible to present it as (...) the flow from an “ethnographic” or external interpretation of the fandom as a part of the mass culture that depends on the specifics of the popular culture production, to the “internal” or integrated descriptions of the fandom functioning as a separated sphere of social activity.The article argues that there are two stages of the existence of Ukrainian fantasy-related fandom. “The old” fandom emerged in the pre-computer era and was based on the Soviet fandom, which influenced its peculiarities. For instance, there are such aspects as statelessness, the absence of national representation (and the dominance of Russo-centrism as the common cultural platform), the importance of direct interpersonal contacts, distancing from contact with authorities, and the tendency to reduce the presence of the fandom in the shared urban space.Unlike “the old” fandom, “the new” one is developing under the influence of new communicational technologies, which erases the barriers to entering the fandom for new members, enlarges the zones of potential contacts, eliminates geographic and territorial barriers, etc. Moreover, “the new” fandom is more integrated into the urban space and is more available for communications. For the Ukrainian fandom, the transition from “the old” fandom to the “new one” means focusing on domestic cultural issues as the fandom becomes Ukraine-centric.Russian military aggression against Ukraine, from annexing Crimea in 2014 to the full-scale invasion in 2022, became the inner catalyst for the development and transformation of the Ukrainian fandom. The external existential threat led to the transformation of the practices, implemented by the fandom and to the rise of the Ukrainian popular culture, which is closely related to the fandom. During the full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian fandom, preserving its core responsibilities (communication and social activity around popular culture functioning), spreads its new topical responsibilities: apart from the domestic volunteer work, which unites the majority of Ukrainian communities, it includes the educational activity, gaining subjectivity during international communication with the foreign fandom of Europe and the USA, charitable activity, etc. (shrink)

The COVID pandemic has sparked fear among many people worldwide and has thus led to the emergence of a variety of conspiracy theories. Individuals believing in these theories come from various social and demographic backgrounds, some of them being mere skeptics, while others are more radical and extreme. The present paper investigates the use of language in a conspiratorial anti-COVID Facebook group with the aim of describing the linguistic features and strategies employed to share and spread conspiracy theories (...) and to form a common identity. The results show that the group uses features typical of extremist groups, such the ideological in- and out-group presentation, the use of agentless passives to create fear, and intertextual references. Further strategies detected in the data are the misrepresentation of scientific knowledge, the use of colloquial language, humor, and irony, among others, which are used to create a bond among the groups’ members and to set themselves apart from the government and the rest of the population, whom they perceive as enemies and oppressors. (shrink)

The language of entropy is examined for consistency with its mathematics and physics, and for its efficacy as a guide to what entropy means. Do common descriptors such as disorder, missing information, and multiplicity help or hinder understanding? Can the language of entropy be helpful in cases where entropy is not well defined? We argue in favor of the descriptor spreading, which entails space, time, and energy in a fundamental way. This includes spreading of energy spatially during processes (...) and temporal spreading over accessible microstates states in thermodynamic equilibrium. Various examples illustrate the value of the spreading metaphor. To provide further support for this metaphor’s utility, it is shown how a set of reasonable spreading properties can be used to derive the entropy function. A main conclusion is that it is appropriate to view entropy’s symbol S as shorthand for spreading. (shrink)

The iconic revolution changing the routine of everyday communication is gradually leading to the creation of a linguistic structure that combines visual and verbal tools in both formal and semantic aspects. Computer and mobile applications today enable high-tech imaging that ensures the spread of iconic communication in mundane interactions and the possibility of a creative combination of verbal and iconic codes for language users who navigate in a world of images in an increasingly confident manner. The iconic revolution (...) that accompanies this expansion of new communication technologies thus leads to serious changes in language use, thereby enhancing the transmission of verbal and iconic language to become a key element of mundane communication. This article argues that this turn in communication technology guided the attention of Kristóf Nyíri, an eminent figure in contemporary Hungarian philosophy, to the problem of the relationship between icon, language, and tradition. The aim of the present essay is twofold: to shed light on the relevance of Nyíri’s analysis and thoughts on the relationship between tradition and language in the history of communication, and to identify, using Nyíri’s model of pictorial meaning as a starting point, the relevant aspects of the conception of technological determinism in answering questions from the philosophy of language and mind. (shrink)

The way language as a human faculty has evolved is a question that preoccupies researchers from a wide spread of disciplines. In this book, a team of writers has been brought together to examine the evolution of language from a variety of such standpoints, including language's genetic basis, the anthropological context of its appearance, its formal structure, its relation to systems of cognition and thought, as well as its possible evolutionary antecedents. The book includes Hauser, Chomsky, (...) and Fitch's seminal and provocative essay on the subject, 'The Faculty of Language,' and charts the progress of research in this active and highly controversial field since its publication in 2002. This timely volume will be welcomed by researchers and students in a number of disciplines, including linguistics, evolutionary biology, psychology, and cognitive science. (shrink)

This chapter explores the possibility that the development of the Chavín Horizon may have stimulated the expansion of one of the major central Andean language families, particularly Aymara, once spread much more widely and further north than today. Pre-Chavín cultures on the coast and in the highlands are reviewed and found to be unlikely sources of this expansion. While the Chavín Horizon may provide a possible source for the first expansion of Aymara, in terms of both its chronology (...) and widespread geographical impact, the ‘strong hypotheses’ proposed to explain the expansion are found to be unconvincing, particularly that linking the expansion to the adoption of maize as a staple. Other hypotheses emphasizing the role of religion and cosmopolitanism are proposed as possible alternatives. The current discussion is placed within the larger context of the history of Andean archaeology and historical linguistics and is viewed as an important step forward in resolving this long-standing problem. (shrink)

How can English language teachers contribute to peace locally and globally? English language teachers and learners are located in the global civil society – an international network of civil organizations and NGOs related to human rights, the environment, and sustainable peace. English, with its special role as an international language, is a major tool for communication within this network. On the local level, many teachers are interested in promoting reconciliation and sustainable peace, but often do not know (...) how to do so. This book provides information, analysis, and techniques to help teachers around the world take action toward this goal. Balancing, in a readable and accessible way, the global and the local, core and periphery, cultural diffusion and resistance, theory and practice, pessimism and optimism, outsider and insider perspectives, the expert role and the apprentice role, and prescriptive and elicitive methods, it offers an alternative to literature about critical applied linguistics, globalization, and peace education that is simply too complex and wordy to spread easily from theoretician to the classroom teacher. _The English Teacher in Global Civil Society_: synthesizes threads from many fields and topics into a coherent and empowering argument for the activist role English language teachers can take to promote social change draws on humanistic education, peace education, cross-cultural understanding, problem-posing, cooperative learning, and critical thinking methodologies to help English language teachers learn how to teach conflict resolution skills in their classrooms covers issues in critical applied linguistics, approaches and methodologies in ESL/EFL, global and local curricular issues, and specific skill areas such reading, writing, and speaking suggests a new goal for English language teachers: global citizenship. This engaging, informative, provocative, and highly readable book is a welcome resource for English language teacher trainers, pre-service teachers, practicing classroom teachers, and Peace Corps workers around the world. (shrink)

Most Artificial Intelligence theories of language either assume a syntactic component which serves as “front end” for the rest of the system, or else reject all attempts at distinguishing modules within the comprehension system. In this paper we will present an alternative which, while keeping modularity, will account for several puzzles for typical “syntax first” theories. The major addition to this theory is a “marker passing” (or “spreading activation”) component, which operates in parallel to the normal syntactic component.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Figurative Language and the “Face” in Levinas’s PhilosophyDiane PerpichThe value of images for philosophy lies in their position between two times and their ambiguity.—Levinas, "Reality and Its Shadow"Imagery... occupies the place of theory's impossible.—Le Doeuff, The Philosophical ImaginaryFor many readers, and perhaps above all for Levinas himself, there is something deeply dissatisfying about the account of the "face of the other" in Totality and Infinity and yet the (...) importance of this figure for the major ethical claims of the book can hardly be overstated. The fundamental thesis broached through the notion of the face is the difference between the way in which things are given to consciousness (the order of ontology) and the way in which human beings are encountered (the order of ethics). Whereas things are given to consciousness in sensible experience through the mediation of forms or concepts, the face is present, according to Levinas, in its "refusal to be contained" in a form (Levinas 1969, 194). A passage early in Totality and Infinity defines the face as follows: "The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me" (50–51, italics in original). A face is thus a very peculiar sort of "phenomenon." In effect, it is non-phenomenal; it does not appear as such and remains exterior to concepts.1 Rhetorically, the face is an image that represents the inadequacy of every image for representing alterity. That is, it represents the impossibility of its own representation and so the problems begin. [End Page 103]In "Violence and Metaphysics," Derrida suggests that Levinas's claim that the absolute alterity of the other refuses conceptualization is undermined from the outset since in order to have meaning as an other, to be recognized and respected as an other, the other must first of all appear: "it is impossible to encounter the alter ego..., impossible to respect it in experience and in language, if this other, in its alterity, does not appear for an ego (in general). One could neither speak, nor have any sense of the totally other, if there was not a phenomenon of the totally other, or evidence of the totally other as such" (Derrida 1978, 123). In what sense can we think or represent absolute alterity if, strictly speaking, it is unthinkable and unrepresentable? And, further, what are we to make of the performative contradiction insofar as Levinas's discourse doesprecisely what it says it is impossible to do? As Derrida notes, even if one cannot thematize the other, "this impossibility and this imperative themselves can be thematized" (123). The difficulty here is that if there "is" an alterity of the type that interests Levinas, then there is no way to represent or speak about it literally—in which case the question arises, in what sense is it? And if one can speak about it, then it is not unrepresentable and thus is not absolute in the sense Levinas says it is.A further contradiction in the notion of the absolute alterity of the face arises owing to the fact that insofar as Levinas's notion of an absolute other forbids us from assigning to the other any determinate predicate, it seems as if all unique, singular faces are the same. As Jean-Luc Marion formulates this problem: "how can one assign an identity to the origin of the appeal such that one can specify which face is involved each time, but without thereby reducing it to a visible phenomenon in the mode of a spectacle?" (Marion 2000, 226). Marion makes a virtue of this feature of Levinas's account, suggesting that "it belongs to the very sense of the appeal that it remain essentially anonymous, and not by default but by excess—the excess of alterity over what it alters" (240). Anonymity, on this view, belongs to the formal structure of interpellation and Marion therein... (shrink)

This study problematizes English language teaching departments in Turkey that have ignored the importance of radical pedagogy, the history of British colonialism and neoliberalism in the curriculum because Orientalist, Occidentalist and neoliberal discourses have led to the exclusion of critical discourses in ELT in Turkey. Therefore, the possible reasons for the absence of some curricular topics present a complicated structural problem. Exclusionary practices of ELT departments can be ascribed to Turkey’s political regimes that have reinforced both nation-state ideology and (...) Anglo-American neoliberal policies. The English language has also been reified as a gateway to westernization and globalization under the feeling of urgency and fear of falling behind. Therefore, the spread of English has been allowed in almost all spheres of life even if neglecting local, national and international languages has violated linguistic human rights. This paper proposes that the dominance of English can be deconstructed by including radical pedagogy and the history of British colonialism and neoliberalism into the curriculum and by prioritizing linguistic human rights to allow more space for the survival of other languages. (shrink)

The topic of The Prophets' Languages has led to a broad interest due to the sacred status of the Prophets. It has been of interest to people of all religious and social orientations. Despite the complexity of this topic and the necessity of studying it from various aspects such as archaeology and the study of ancient calligraphy, we limited our study to Islamic sources and references only. We extrapolated what was mentioned in these books. Other than the Holy Qur’ān, it (...) will be concerned with books of interpretation, history, biography, hadith, its explanations, language books, etc. This study has been divided into three main points, an introduction, and a conclusion. The first point dealt with the origin of the languages spoken by the Prophets (peace be upon them) and their proximity to each other: Syriac, Coptic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. All of these languages belong to the Semitic language. In terms of their convergence and similarity with each other, some linguists considered it dialects of one language, the Semitic language of origin. It has branched out from it as a result of the expansion, development, and development of life. Looking at today, the dialects of the Arabs in Egypt, Morocco, Jazira, the Levant, and Iraq, each branched out and most of it emerged from the mother tongue Arabic. There is a discussion among researchers on which of the languages are closer to the Semitic language. Four languages are listed as possibilities: Hebrew, Babylonian, Assyrian, Syriac, and Arabic. The truth is that it is not easy to get to know the origin of the Semitic language, and everything that has been said is not outside the circle of speculation because of the loss of definitive evidence and the temporal dimension. As for the second point, this study investigated the linguistic geography that the Semitic language covered and spread in, by tracking the people who spoke the Semitic language, their places of residence, and their influence, as all of them settled in the Near East and its vicinity. If we look at the Semitic language, with its eastern and western branches, we see that it was concentrated in Babylon, Assyria, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Yemen, the Levant, and Jerusalem regions, and among the most famous tribes and nations that settled in this region are Saba, Himyar, Ad, Thamud, Jirhm, Samaria, Nabat, the people of Palmyra and others. Mostly likely, the Arabian Peninsula is the cradle of the Semitic people, although some say that Abyssinia was the cradle of the first Semites. In the third point, the number of prophets and messengers mentioned in the Noble Qur’ān was enumerated in clear terms. Among the twenty-five prophets are the following: Adam, Idris, Noah, Hood, Saleh, Lot, Ibrahim, Ismail, Ishaq, Jacob, Yusef, Shuaib, Ayyub, Dhu al-Kifl, Yunus, Moses, Aaron, Elias, Al-Isa, David, Solomon, Zakaria, Yahya, Jesus, and Muhammad (peace be upon them). The study of this point came by following the inductive and deductive approach, whereby the first approach is based on extrapolating the life of each prophet in isolation from others in detail, tracing his life, place of living, and residence, whom he married etc. The deductive method relied on deducing the language that each of the prophets (peace be upon them) spoke. Some prophets mentioned the name of the language in which he spoke in the Islamic sources. This study concluded that of the prophets mentioned in the Noble Qur’ān, seven of them spoke the Syriac language, three of them spoke the ancient Egyptian language (Coptic), eighteen of them spoke the Hebrew language, three of them spoke the Aramaic language, and nine of them spoke in Arabic. Some of the prophets spoke one language while others spoke more than one language due to their numerous travels and the people they interacted with. This study is considered a preliminary study to open the field for in-depth studies for researchers in this field, and every part mentioned in this research is suitable for being an independent scientific study in its own right. (shrink)

In a continuation of the conversation with Fitch, Chomsky, and Hauser on the evolution of language, we examine their defense of the claim that the uniquely human, language-specific part of the language faculty (the “narrow language faculty”) consists only of recursion, and that this part cannot be considered an adaptation to communication. We argue that their characterization of the narrow language faculty is problematic for many reasons, including its dichotomization of cognitive capacities into those that (...) are utterly unique and those that are identical to nonlinguistic or nonhuman capacities, omitting capacities that may have been substantially modified during human evolution. We also question their dichotomy of the current utility versus original function of a trait, which omits traits that are adaptations for current use, and their dichotomy of humans and animals, which conflates similarity due to common function and similarity due to inheritance from a recent common ancestor. We show that recursion, though absent from other animals’ communications systems, is found in visual cognition, hence cannot be the sole evolutionary development that granted language to humans. Finally, we note that despite Fitch et al.’s denial, their view of language evolution is tied to Chomsky’s conception of language itself, which identifies combinatorial productivity with a core of “narrow syntax.” An alternative conception, in which combinatoriality is spread across words and constructions, has both empirical advantages and greater evolutionary plausibility. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. According to a common prejudice, especially prevalent among philosophers in the continental tradition, the philosophy of everyday language (sometimes referred to as Oxford philosophy), with its focus on what we usually say and mean, fundamentally expresses a positivist attitude. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), who significantly contributed to the spread of this view, interprets the appeal to the concept analysis in these philosophers' writings as purely ideological: it fails to recognize (...) the constructed nature of the social and views the social as a domain of brute facts where critical thinking should cease. Therefore, to grasp the essence of the ordinary language philosophy, it is crucial to identify the prerequisites for the emergence of this philosophical style and delve into its historical context. M e t h o d s. In this article, the author employs the method of historical-philosophical reconstruction to clarify the conditions of the formation and genesis of Oxford philosophy. General scientific methods of cognition – such as analysis, synthesis, and generalization – are used to elucidate key ideas and concepts that influenced the development of Oxford philosophy's method. Additionally, methods of systematization and comparison are applied. R e s u l t s. The article identifies the historical prerequisites for the formation of Oxford philosophy, specifying the key ideas and concepts that impacted the development of the ordinary language philosophy. It clarifies the distinctions and interconnections between the concepts of the philosophy of everyday language and Oxford philosophy. C o n c l u s i o n s. For ten years following the end of the Second World War, the University of Oxford became a hub of exceptionally productive philosophical activity. This period laid the groundwork for the emergence of a new and original philosophical movement known as the "Ordinary language philosophy" or "Oxford philosophy". However, equating the ordinary language philosophy entirely with Oxford philosophy is not accurate. The former term pertains specifically to the methodology of analyzing natural language expressions in the post-World War II era. In contrast, Oxford philosophy encompasses a broader historical context, including the pre-war period of philosophical activity at the University of Oxford. Thus, Oxford philosophy should be understood as a historical-philosophical stage that ultimately led to the formation of the philosophy of everyday language. (shrink)

If the cortex is an associative memory, strongly connected cell assemblies will form when neurons in different cortical areas are frequently active at the same time. The cortical distributions of these assemblies must be a consequence of where in the cortex correlated neuronal activity occurred during learning. An assembly can be considered a functional unit exhibiting activity states such as full activation (“ignition”) after appropriate sensory stimulation (possibly related to perception) and continuous reverberation of excitation within the assembly (a putative (...) memory process). This has implications for cortical topographies and activity dynamics of cell assemblies forming during language acquisition, in particular for those representing words. Cortical topographies of assemblies should be related to aspects of the meaning of the words they represent, and physiological signs of cell assembly ignition should be followed by possible indicators of reverberation. The following postulates are discussed in detail: (1) assemblies representing phonological word forms are strongly lateralized and distributed over perisylvian cortices; (2) assemblies representing highly abstract words such as grammatical function words are also strongly lateralized and restricted to these perisylvian regions; (3) assemblies representing concrete content words include additional neurons in both hemispheres; (4) assemblies representing words referring to visual stimuli include neurons in visual cortices; and (5) assemblies representing words referring to actions include neurons in motor cortices. Two main sources of evidence are used to evaluate these proposals: (a) imaging studies focusing on localizing word processing in the brain, based on stimulus-triggered event-related potentials (ERPs), positron emission tomography (PET), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and (b) studies of the temporal dynamics of fast activity changes in the brain, as revealed by high-frequency responses recorded in the electroencephalogram (EEG) and magnetoencephalogram (MEG). These data provide evidence for processing differences between words and matched meaningless pseudowords, and between word classes, such as concrete content and abstract function words, and words evoking visual or motor associations. There is evidence for early word class-specific spreading of neuronal activity and for equally specific high-frequency responses occurring later. These results support a neurobiological model of language in the Hebbian tradition. Competing large-scale neuronal theories of language are discussed in light of the data summarized. Neurobiological perspectives on the problem of serial order of words in syntactic strings are considered in closing. Key Words: associative learning; cell assembly; cognition; cortex; ERP; EEG; fMRI; language; lexicon; MEG; PET; word category. (shrink)

Africa, along with Asia, is the continent with the highest number of ‘living’ indigenous languages. European languages, mainly English, French and Portuguese, have spread throughout all African nations during the last 200 years; however, until today, the use of these ‘foreign’ languages has been mostly restricted to certain domains, such as higher education, politics and business, and also to a relatively small number of people. According to Scotton (1982: 68) only 10 per cent or less of the rural African (...) population have a considerable competence in the imported languages, even though these are in many instances the official languages of their home countries. African vernaculars are generally not in danger of being replaced by European languages. However, we observe a diminishing use of African vernaculars, not only in an increasing number of domains, but also with regard to the absolute number of indigenous languages; that means, in short, that linguistic vitality and variety on the African continent is decreasing. (shrink)

In the ten years following the end of World War II, Oxford Universitywas a center of extraordinarily fertile philosophical activity. Out of it arose a new and distinctive philosophical movement, variously known as “ordinary language philosophy,” “linguistic analysis,” “conceptual analysis,” or simply “Oxford philosophy.” Although it was centered in Oxford, by the end of the 1950s philosophers based throughout Britain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and other Englishspeaking former British colonies were publishing work debating the philosophical concerns (...) of the movement and reflecting its distinctive style of thinking and writing. By the mid-1960s, however, this way of doing philosophy was already in decline at Oxford, and by the mid-1970s the philosophical climate at Oxford University had become more or less typical of philosophy departments elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Ordinary language philosophy is now a historical movement, rather than an active force in contemporary philosophical discussion. In many respects, it is useful to think of philosophical movements as intellectual fashions, not unlike changing fashions in architecture or clothing. The question of what accounted for the rise and fall of a particular philosophical fashion is of historical and sociological interest, and the methodology developed to answer the question should be of general applicability in the study of other intellectual or academic fashions, such as the current dominance of “Theory” in English studies, or the period of “Behaviorism” in theoretical approaches to experimental psychology. So it should be of fairly widespread interest if we can develop a method of accounting for the relatively rapid spread of Oxford philosophy beyond its home base, and for its eventual decline as a force in philosophical thought. In this paper, then, I shall be pursuing answers to these questions. To what extent was ordinary language philosophy a movement, in the sense that, say, Phenomenology and Logical Positivism were philosophical movements? To the extent that there was a recognizable movement, what factors account for its decline during the 1960s and 70s? (shrink)

The idea that language is metaphoric in nature has often been suggested or stated since Vico and Rousseau. Derrida, too, often writes about metaphor and the impression he gives is that he is arguing for the metaphoric nature of both thought, whether philosophic or not, and language. Interpreters like de Man or Culler have helped to spread this impression. If it is correct, Derrida shares a pan-metaphoric view of language and whatever can be made with it. (...) It is useful to refer to Derrida's view because in my opinion he has been very good at saying what language is, even if he has been very much in the wrong in seeing no distinction between language and language use. Let us consider first what he has been good at. (shrink)

This article considers the origins of alphabetic writing, tracing its probable source to ancient Egypt, southern Levant or the Sinai during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (17th century BCE). It supports the view that the earliest scripts were acrophonic representations of a West-Semitic language, whose use developed under the rule of the Hyksos in Egypt but was arrested there with the expulsion of this foreign dynasty at the end of the 16th century BCE. The development is then traced through the (...) Levant, with particular attention given to the emergence of cuneiform alphabetic scripts in Ugarit (c. 1300 BCE). This form of writing disappeared with the fall of Ugarit, but linear alphabetic scripts were preserved in a variety of Near-Eastern languages, notably Aramaic and Phoenician. These two languages, by becoming linguae francae respectively of the Syria-northern Mesopotamia and the Anatolia-Eastern Mediterranean regions, brought about the spread of alphabetic writing up until the 8th century BCE. The article concludes by examining the influence of the Phoenician script on Greek, Etruscan and ultimately Latin forms of writing. (shrink)

The current study investigates the infiltration of code-switches into Jordanian social settings. It is also to examine Jordanians' attitudes toward the spread of code-switches in different social settings, the rationale behind the spread of code-switches, the role of media, types of code-switches and linguistic dominance. To illustrate the existence of this phenomenon, a corpus consisting of more than two hundred code-switches has been built up. Most importantly, to measure Jordanians' attitudes toward the phenomenon, more than three hundred questionnaires (...) have been delivered in Amman city. (shrink)

While some aspects of mouthings have been previously investigated, many topics in the use of this cross-modal contact phenomenon in sign languages remain unstudied, and not much is known about mouthings in Russian Sign Language, in particular. This article examines various aspects of mouthings as these are used by native RSL signers and aims to contribute new insights into the use and origin of mouthings in this sign language. Based on novel data from the online RSL Corpus alongside (...) additional elicited data, we describe the distribution, forms, functions and spreading patterns of mouthings. Our findings furthermore show that sign languages exhibit more extensive variation in the use of mouthings than has previously been thought. Moreover, we – thus far uniquely – describe mouthings also as a written-language-based contact phenomenon. This study has the potential to provide a better understanding of the nature of such contact-induced features as mouthings in sign languages in general and reveals a complex interplay of the modalities of signed, spoken and written languages. (shrink)

The relevance of this study consists in the entire society’s strong awareness of the need for gender equality, not only in a practical sense but also at the level of communicative culture. This culture strongly influences people’s self-awareness and often determines their role in everyday life, depending on the attitude inherent in the lexical units that are applied to an individual. The purpose of the study is the most complete consideration of the specific features of gender stereotype functioning and development (...) in the Kazakh language in different aspects, the identification of types of gender vocabulary, and consideration of the historical and cultural context of the development and functioning of a gender stereotype in the Kazakh language. Both linguistic and historical methods were used, which allowed for considering the communicative culture of the Kazakh language not only in modern realities but also in a historical context. As a result of the study, the phraseologisms of the Kazakh language, including gender stereotypes, were considered, and the features of gender stereotype development in the historical context were considered. As a result of the study, a conclusion was made about the specific features of the development and functioning of the gender stereotype in the Kazakh language, its spread in the communicative culture of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the influence on the perception of individuals due to the use of gender-coloured lexical units in their address, and the definition of gender stereotypes of “masculinity” and “femininity” was made, which allowed for a more accurate classification of the gender-coloured group of lexical units in the Kazakh language. (shrink)

The dispersal of the Romance language family by the Roman Empire is an attractive model for examining the spread of Quechua. Wari and Tiwanaku are often considered the first Andean empires, during the Middle Horizon. Despite being contemporaries sharing the same religious iconography, they were unlikely to have spoken and dispersed the same language. Tiwanaku material culture rather implies ethnic and linguistic diversity, not least in its best-documented colonization in Moquegua. Wari, meanwhile, appears culturally and administratively unified, (...) colonizing and controlling a territory across southern Peru, from Cuzco to Nasca. If Wari was responsible for a language dispersal, then this should represent its core territory; and it is indeed the heart of Southern Quechua. In northern Peru, Wari presence seems less intense, its rule more complex and indirect. The Moche region remained essentially beyond Wari influence, while for the central coast and distant Aguada culture more research is needed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the use of language in the construction of identity in the constitution of an anti-state group, which is a part of the sovereign citizen movement in Austria. The group, called ‘Staatenbund Österreich’, had been active for several years before the government charged them with high treason. The group believes that the government is illegitimate – an assumption which allows them to legitimize their behavior. The movement, which is spreading across the globe, has started in the (...) US in the 1970s, and yet, it is still impossible to estimate the actual danger they pose, even though they have been reported to become increasingly violent. The present paper investigates the constitution of the ‘Austrian Commonwealth’ in order to find out how they manage to create an identity for their group, how they legitimize themselves and their claims, and how their language use compares to other extremist groups. (shrink)

We provide a new text corpus from the social medium Telegram, which is rich in indirect forms of divisive speech. We scraped all messages from one channel of supporters of Donald Trump, covering a large part of his presidency from late 2016 until January 2021. The discussion among the group members over this long time period includes the spread of disinformation, disparaging of out-group members, and other forms of offensive speech. To encourage research into such practices of poisoning public (...) political discourse, we added automatic annotations of offensive language to all messages. We further added manual annotations of harmful language to a portion of the posts in order to enable the analysis of more implicit forms of online harm. (shrink)

The pivotal thesis of Cunningham’s critical discussion is that Husserl failed to realize that consciousness is essentially "language-using consciousness." The spread of argumentation throughout her analysis is designed to show that this failure on Husserl’s part resulted in a number of unhappy consequences. It occluded the primacy of the social context; it misconstrued what is at issue in the phenomenological transcendental and eidetic reductions; and it led to unwarranted claims for an apodictic foundation of science and metaphysics. The (...) launching-pad for Cunningham’s critique is Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, of which she offers, in her own words, "a somewhat oblique commentary." This work by Husserl is selected because it illustrates most clearly the conflict between linguistic performance and the quest for certainty. Cunningham works out from this conflict, from time to time calling upon the later Wittgenstein to help her demonstrate the untenability of Husserl’s separation of language from intentional consciousness. After correcting this mistake by Husserl she then goes on to show how attentiveness to the language-using posture of consciousness is able to bridge the chasms between essence and existence, the transcendental and the transcendent, the ideal and the real—chasms which remained unbridged throughout Husserl’s intellectual development. (shrink)

The first half of this article is critical: it develops an interpretation of Kant as trying, and failing, to limit our judgments to phenomena and abstain from making claims about noumena, and an interpretation of Wittgenstein as trying, and failing, to develop a theory of meaning that abstains from attempting to say the unsayable. On the reading offered, both Kant and Wittgenstein find themselves saying things that by their own lights cannot be said: in Kant’s case, claims about noumena, and (...) in Wittgenstein’s case, structural claims. While Kant attempts a solution of the problem which also fails, Wittgenstein bites the bullet and leaves his Tractatus, for the most part, void and meaningless. The suggested response is a dialetheic approach—either as an alternative or, potentially, as an amendment to a Kantian or Wittgensteinian theory. According to this approach, certain problems in philosophy arise from true contradictions and thus require a theory that makes sense of contradiction. A subgroup of these problems (among them the noumenal and structural issues in Kant and Wittgenstein) are about things that both are and are not ineffable. The second half of the paper develops a dialetheic account of ineffability and a concise formal theory to ensure that contradiction at the limits of language does not spread to other areas. (shrink)

Now that the age-old dream, which never materialized, of a universal language has evaporated, we note that English is in the process of becoming if not the universal at least an omnipresent language. In many multilingual countries it has become the language of communication. Globally it is imposing itself as the language of business, aviation and scientific research. Is this a pure benefit for humanity, or does it conceal risks or even dangers? Is the spreading of (...) English a secondary effect of Americanization? Is linguistic diversity being sacrificed? Only if the countries affected submit to linguistic and cultural homogenization. The ideal - which remains within reach - would be to accept English as a practical tool of communication without ceasing to strive for the maintenance and strength of other languages in symbiosis with their own cultures. (shrink)

Summary The emergence of quantum theory in the early decades of the twentieth century was accompanied by a wide range of popular science books, all of which presented in words, and a few in images, new scientific ideas about the structure of the atom. The work of physicists such as Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr, among others, was pivotal to the so-called planetary model of the atom, which, still today, is used in popular accounts and in science textbooks. In an (...) attempt to add to our knowledge about the popular trajectory of the new atomic physics, this paper examines one book in particular, co-authored by Danish science writer Helge Holst and Dutch physicist and close collaborator of Niels Bohr, Hendrik A. Kramers. Translated from Danish into four European languages, the book not only explained contemporary ideas about the quantum atom, but also discussed unresolved problems. Moreover, the book was quite explicit in identifying the quantum atom with the atom as described by Bohr's theory. We argue that Kramers and Holst's book, along with other ‘atomic books’, was a useful tool for physicists and science popularisers in trying to understand the new quantum physics. (shrink)

Currently, the Internet information and communication network has become an integral part of human life. People use social networks such as Twitter, VKontakte, Facebook, etc., to establish global contacts, exchange opinions, gain knowledge, etc. The active participation of not only individual users, but also information organizations in the entire world space makes it necessary to develop measures that correspond to modern trends in the development of information and communication technologies to ensure national security, in particular, the organization of events related (...) to countering the strengthening of ideas of extremism and terrorism. Countering the spread of aggressive information on the global network is an urgent problem of society and government agencies, this task is solved by filtering unwanted Internet resources. However, terrorist and extremist groups rationally use web technologies to perform various functions, including information dissemination, propaganda, fundraising and extremist missions. In such a situation, the Internet poses a threat to national security. In this paper, we investigate the issue of creating semantic analysis models to identify extremist messages in the Kazakh language. For the study, a proprietary text corpus was assembled and models based on bigrams and word input methods were proposed. According to the results of experiments, the proposed model shows the highest indicators for evaluating machine learning methods. (shrink)

The spread of English as the world lingua franca has evoked the rethinking of the significance of native-speaker norms and models in teaching English, and as a result, the target of pronunciation teaching and learning has shifted from imitating native accents to achieving speech intelligibility. The Lingua Franca Core proposal introduced a list of phonological features in English that are, arguably, the minimum required to achieve intelligibility and argued that mispronouncing these features is expected to cause a breakdown in (...) communication among non-native speakers. As a consequence of this, it has been suggested that LFC be prioritized in teaching and learning English pronunciation. In response to the LFC proposal, researchers have become polarized; while some have found LFC a promising approach, others have argued against its appropriateness as a target of pronunciation teaching and learning. This paper evaluates the controversial position of the LFC proposal in the literature, focusing on three main dimensions: the LFC’s potential to result in intelligible communication, its teachability and its scope of function as an alternative target to the NS models, and the influence of different attitudes on the success of implementing the LFC. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This corpus-assisted critical discourse study examines news reports published by China’s official English-language media from 2000 to 2018, with the goal of understanding how they represent LGBTQ+ issues within the China’s socio-political context. Analysis reveals that the discussion of LGBTQ+-related topics has been consistently discouraged in China’s official English-language media, and the few news reports which have appeared in these media sources have focused on preventing the spread of HIV/aids through homosexual behaviors, on promoting LGBTQ+ rights, (...) and on advocating for the liberalization of sex education in China. The range of these focuses indicates that, despite widely-held negative stereotypes regarding homosexual behaviors and their relation to the spread of HIV/aids, the official English-language media of China have endeavored to project a positive image of the Chinese central government’s efforts to construct a society that is open, inclusive, and tolerant of LGBTQ+ individuals. This study also discusses positive changes in the social well-being of LGBTQ+ persons in China as evidenced first by the more liberal attitudes that gradually have resulted from the efforts of Chinese netizens to influence LGBTQ+-related governmental policies and second, by the more positive representations of LGBTQ+ issues being communicated to global audiences through the China’s official English-language media. (shrink)

Most substantive (content-bearing) words are polysemous, but polysemy is cross-categorial; for instance, the lexical forms ‘stone’ and ‘front’ are associated with families of interrelated senses and these senses are spread across their manifestations as three words, noun, verb and adjective. So, the ultimate unit underpinning polysemy is not a word but the categoryless root of the related words, which must, in some sense, track the interrelated families of senses. The main topic of this paper is the vexed question of (...) the meaning of roots and the backdrop is a view of words as delineated syntactic domains which allow assignment of atomic content (non-compositional meaning), and whose actual meanings are, in the first instance, pragmatically inferred in the throes of communication, some of them subsequently becoming established, so stored in a lexicon and directly retrieved in comprehension. Three different positions on the meanings of roots are outlined, and their merits and shortcomings are discussed: (a) inherent underspecified meanings; (b) meanings conditioned by grammatical context (allosemy); (c) meaninglessness. I argue that, overall, the current state of the evidence favours the third position: roots are categoryless, meaningless (perhaps phonological) indices. (shrink)

It is the aim of the present study to introduce the reader to the ways of thinking of those contemporary philosophers who apply the tools of symbolic logic to classical philosophical problems. Unlike the "conti nental" reader for whom this work was originally written, the English speaking reader will be more familiar with most of the philosophers dis cussed in this book, and he will in general not be tempted to dismiss them indiscriminately as "positivists" and "nominalists". But the English (...) version of this study may help to redress the balance in another respect. In view of the present emphasis on ordinary language and the wide spread tendency to leave the mathematical logicians alone with their technicalities, it seems not without merit to revive the interest in formal ontology and the construction of formal systems. A closer look at the historical account which will be given here, may convince the reader that there are several points in the historical develop ment whose consequences have not yet been fully assessed: I mention, e. g., the shift from the traditional three-level semantics of sense and deno tation to the contemporary two-level semantics of representation; the relation of extensional structure and intensional content in the extensional systems of Wittgenstein and Carnap; the confusing changes in labelling the different kinds of analytic and apriori true sentences; etc. Among the philosophically interesting tools of symbolic logic Lesniewski's calculus of names deserves special attention. (shrink)

In this chapter we shall examine the characteristic properties of a construction wide-spread in the world’s languages, the passive. In section 1 below we discuss defining characteristics of passives, contrasting them with other foregrounding and backgrounding constructions. In section 2 we present the common syntactic and semantic properties of the most wide-spread types of passives, and in section 3 we consider passives which differ in one or more ways from these. In section 4, we survey a variety of (...) constructions that resemble passive constructions in one way or another. In section 5, we briefly consider differences between languages with regard to the roles passives play in their grammars. Specifically, we show that passives are a more essential part of the grammars of some languages than of others. (shrink)

There are many internationally developed text-matching software systems that help successfully identify potentially plagiarized content in English texts using both their internal databases and web resources. However, many other languages are not so widely spread but they are used daily to communicate, conduct research and acquire education. Each language has its peculiarities, so, in the context of finding content similarities, it is necessary to determine what systems are more suitable for a document set written in a specific (...) class='Hi'>language. The research focuses on testing the existent text-matching software systems on a set of documents prepared in the Latvian language. The corpus includes documents containing verbatim plagiarism, paraphrasing, translation plagiarism and original text to test both false positive and false negative cases. In total, 16 different text-matching software systems are compared on the plagiarism coverage using the prepared document corpus. The research presented is a part of an international initiative “Testing of Support Tools for Plagiarism Detection ” established under the European Network for Academic Integrity. (shrink)

Given the diversity of explanatory practices that is typical of the sciences a healthy pluralism would seem to be desirable where theories of explanation are concerned. Nevertheless, I argue that explanations are only unifying in Kitcher's unificationist sense if they are backed by the kind of understanding of underlying mechanisms, dispositions, constitutions, and dependencies that is central to a causalist account of explanation. This case can be made through analysis of Kitcher's account of the conditions under which apparent improvements in (...) unifying power may be judged spurious. But to clarify what is at issue I consider an archaeological case in which debate about the merits of an ambitious explanatory account reproduces exactly the intuitions that divide Salmon and Kitcher. The case in question is the “demic-diffusion” account of contemporary linguistic diversity advanced by Renfrew in the late 1980s: the thesis that the diffusion of agricultural populations, itself attributed to demographic pressure, was responsible for the spread of the ancestral root languages (e.g., proto-Indo-Eurpoean) that account for the existence and distribution of linguistic macrofamilies. The credibility of this powerfully unifying argument pattern depends entirely on the plausibility of its claims about the conditions and mechanisms actually responsible for the explanandum, the spread of agriculture, and not on an elaboration of its unificationist virtues. (shrink)

This study represents an attempt to sketch a processing model of phonological development in children acquiring their first language. The investigation is framed within a local connectionist network in which activation spreads between levels and inhibition within levels. Three ways are focused on in which an emergent processing system may diverge from a fully developed one—hypoactivation (too little activation due to underdeveloped links), hyperactivation (too much activation due to overloaded links) and impaired self‐inhibition. With a view to determining how (...) children's productions relate to these three “error mechanisms,” one widespread phonological process, consonant harmony, is subjected to examination. Hypoactivation is found to capture the great majority of harmonic patterns. Hyperactivation and impaired self‐inhibition play a more marginal role and are only needed to account for exceptional cases of harmony. The feasibility of the psycholinguistic model is demonstrated with the help of computer simulations that were run with noise on both fully developed and developing networks. The model makes a number of predictions including the claim that difficult sounds are acquired in coda positions first. (shrink)

The importance of history has been powerfully reaffirmed in recent years by the appearance of major new authors, pathbreaking works, and fresh interpretations of historical events, trends, and methods. Responding to these developments, Roger Chartier engages several of the most influential writers of cultural history whose works have spread far beyond academic audiences to become part of contemporary cultural argument. Challenging the assertion that history is no more than a "fiction-making operation" Chartier examines the relationships between history and fiction (...) and proposes new foundations for establishing history as a specific kind of knowledge. Michel de Certeau's description of Michel Foucault's writings as "on the edge of the cliff," provides Chartier with an image he finds appropriate not only for Foucault but for many other recent historians--including de Certeau. Exploring the relationships between discursive practices and nondiscursive practices, Chartier examines the "heterology" of de Certeau pursues the "chimera of origin" and the causes of the French Revolution in Foucault's work and raises four pertinent questions for the metahistory of Hayden White. He follows the work of Louis Marin into the distinctions between interpreting a painting and interpreting a text. And a trio of essays treats the historical sociology of Norbert Elias and his work on power and civility. Throughout, Chartier keeps his focus on historians who have stressed the relations between the products of discourse and social practices. (shrink)