The Polish society has perceived privatization as an issue of special importance which enables a free market economy in a short time. Privatization has always raised hopes and expectations. It is the lack of experience in the field of ownership transformations, the level of their complexity and the economic, legal, psychological and other conditionings that have confronted those transformations with many hindrances. They have also raised numerous moral and ethical dilemmas among the staff of privatized companies and founding organs including (...) the staff of the Voivodship Council of Łódź. The decisions of the Working Board of one company about the future path of privatization have raised concerns among the staff uncertain of the fate of their place of work. In such cases the voice of the staff, which previously contributed to the company’s financial status, has always been decisive when choosing the path of privatization; this concerns mostly workers’ partnerships. It was John Paul II’s words about people of conscience who are needed in Poland, which were said in Skoczów, that were crucial for privatization decisions by the Voivodship Council of Łódź. (shrink)

This paper aims at highlighting the role of higher education institutions in Lodz in the regeneration of urban space and in building the international brand of a university town. Higher education institutions in Lodz are managers and administrators of many historic buildings that testify to the identity of the city and its rich historic legacy. Besides renovating these buildings, universities provide them with new functions by opening them up to local and international communities. Innovation in regenerating cultural heritage (...) may become a distinguishing feature of both Lodz universities and international city’s brand strategy. The key challenge to Lodz is to complete the global regeneration of a post-industrial city in social, cultural, economic, and spatial dimensions using EU funds. (shrink)

The article discusses the history of academic co-operation between the British and Commonwealth Studies Department at the University of Lodz and the Australian Embassy in Poland. Over the years the co-operation took the shape of a regular academic exchange and led to substantial academic, educational and cultural projects on Australia which resulted in a number of book-length studies.

The book is addressed to all readers interested in cognitive science, and especially in research combining a logical analysis with psychological, linguistic and neurobiological approaches. The publication is the result of a collaboration between the Department of Cognitive Science at University of Lodz and the Department of Cognitive Science at Lund University. It is intended to provide a comprehensive presentation of the key research issues undertaken in both Departments, including considerations on meaning, natural language and reasoning, linguistic as well (...) as numerical competence, the theory of decision making, modelling of conceptual representations, cognitive and game theoretic approach to social interactions. (shrink)

The goal of the article is to compare methods of financing ARs and ERs based on the data from the 1st half of 2013 and 1st half of 2014 from the K. Jonscher 3rd Municipal Hospital in Lodz. All the stays in the AR/ER in the 1st half of 2013 and the 1st half of 2014 were analysed. Based on the presented data, it can be clearly seen that the new method of financing AR/ER services proposed by the NFZ (...) will beyond doubt have negative outcomes, and will certainly not improve the financial situation of hospitals. (shrink)

White lies, lies that are beneficial to the addressee and uttered out of concern for them, are pervasive in daily life. This raises a prima facie question: if white lies are so common, are they still lies? I tackle this question from the perspective of speech act theory, using the case of white lies to shed light on the broader question of whether lying itself can be considered a type of speech act. Adopting Sbisà’s (Uptake and Conventionality in Illocution. (...) class='Hi'>Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 5 33–52. Reprinted in Marina Sbisà (forthcoming), Essays on Speech Acts and Other Topics in Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) neo-Austinian approach that places the emphasis on the achievement of certain conventional effects, I claim that malicious lying cannot be a type of speech act. However, white lies are a type of speech act, a claim which finds support in three types of evidence: the conventionality of means by which white lies are performed, their online processing, and their acquisition. Moreover, the existence of a continuum between white (harmless) lies (which are a type of speech act) and malicious (harmful) lies (which are not) suggests that whether an utterance performs a certain type of speech act or not can be a matter of degree. In other words, the property itself of being a speech act of a certain kind, an utterance’s speech-act-hood, so to speak, may be graded. This is an interesting result, which applies to speech acts more generally, beyond lying. (shrink)

This paper examines a number of proverbs in English and Persian to shed light on certain pragmatic issues involved in translation. By analyzing three sets of data within the pragmatic framework, we found that the translatability of proverbs should be characterized as a continuum, rather a clear-cut dichotomy. Depending on the universality or culture-specificity of background cultural information associated with proverbs, three main categories, namely translatables, semi-translatables, and untranslatables are proposed. These categories fall along different points on a postulated continuum (...) of translatability. Our study also shows that implicatures and presuppositions, when applicable to translatability, influence it in an incontrovertible manner. On top of this, the indubitable role of metaphor in the conceptualization of proverbs, and as a result, on the translatability of them is acknowledged. (shrink)

This contribution takes a look at video-sharing platforms to highlight a popular entertainment format which consists in re-framing political discourse for the purposes of entertaining the audience and, at the same time, providing an evaluation of that discourse. Evaluations of political discourse uncover the role and importance imputed to it by those who are outside of the political system, but who are directly impacted by it, that is, the people. A sample of French-language data, collected from YouTube, is examined for (...) the categories of evaluation which are used by the authors, which are conjectured to represent the ideas ordinary citizens have about political discourse. Reframing political discourse carries these evaluations through offensive language and humor. Teasing out the relevant parameters of evaluation can provide a basis for understanding how regular citizens gauge political discourse. Appropriateness appears to be an important evaluation criterion pertaining to the characteristics of political discourse, occurring in a particular context. (shrink)

This study examines the conflict strategies used in the highly adversarial and popular Arabic-language talk show broadcasted weekly on Al-Jazeera satellite channel, known as Al-Ittijah Al-Mu’aakis 'The Opposite Direction'. The study identifies the conflict strategies and verbal conflict expressions and approaches them in the light of Interactional Sociolinguistics. The analysis of three episodes debating three different topics shows that disputants used several types of strategies including "impoliteness", "aggravated impoliteness", topic restriction, lengthy holding of the floor, and sarcasm. The speakers' bald-on-record (...) expressions of disagreement are expected as a result of the controversial and polemical nature of the show, which creates fierce competition between the two guests to present their arguments in an aggressive way. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to describe the general conditions for the development of creative industries in Podlaskie Voivodship from Poland. This region on the background of the country is characterized by the highest level of cultural diversity and multiculturalism policy. However, there are a number of barriers for the creative industries. First article discusses the regional characteristics and then the basic theoretical approaches and conclusions of the author’s own research. The following sections discuss the conclusions and recommendations (...) for regional policy and management of cultural sector entities that may be relevant also for other culturally diverse regions. (shrink)

In contemporary literary Hindi there is an abundance of Perso-Arabic loanwords which often function similarly to words of Sanskrit origin. Despite their semantic proximity, each of them can have different connotational meanings and cultural associations. Furthermore, depending on the context, one of them will be preferred to the other. This situation can become an issue when translating from Hindi into Polish. In this paper, I will investigate whether these loanwords should be considered as a third language in translation. If this (...) is the case, they make the text a multicultural one, and, thus, raise the question of how to translate them into Polish, being at the same time focused on a monolingual recipient and their cognitive comfort while not impoverishing and distorting the process of translation. Moreover, I will propose an approach which can be of assistance in achieving this goal, relying on French and Latin loanwords used in the Polish language. (shrink)

The article focuses on Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and its recontextualisation 50 years later in view of the rising anti-immigration sentiment and Brexit campaign. Having discussed the dynamics of the threat construction process and its role in shaping public attitudes to migration and policies related to it across time and space, we proceed to analyse Powell’s speech in terms of lexical, grammatical, and discursive fear-inciting devices and strategies. While doing so we draw on the insights from neuroscientific research (...) on the role of lexis in fear stimulation and functional-cognitive models of grammatical structure. The second part of our analysis is meant to demonstrate how the semiotic potential of cyberspace and social media, along with multimodal integration of various forms, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity they enable, endow fear-inciting discourse with new spatiotemporal and affective qualities. To this end we examine one of the most popular YouTube videos making “Rivers of Blood” speech part of its anti-immigration stance. (shrink)

This article discusses findings of a qualitative study on strategies of othering observed in anti-immigrant discourse, by analysing selected examples from the UK and Polish media, together with data collected from interviews with migrants. The purpose is to identify discursive strategies of othering, which aim to categorise, denigrate, oppress and ultimately reject the stigmatised or racialised ‘other’. We do not offer a systematic comparison of the data from the UK and Poland; instead, we are interested in what is common in (...) the discursive practices of these two countries/contexts. In using newspaper together with interview data, we are combining representation and experience in identifying not only strategies of othering, but also how these are perceived by and affect the othered individuals. The paper uses the following data: 40 newspaper articles – 20 from the UK and 20 from Poland, and 19 interviews – 12 from Poland and 7 from the UK. The analysis that follows identifies five shared strategies of othering: a) Stereotyping; b) Whiteness as the norm; c) Racialisation; d) Objectification; e) Wrongly Ascribed Ethnicity. We conclude with the research limitations and outlining possible next stages, such as working with a larger corpus, investigating frequency, or including other media genres. (shrink)

Once we perceive a situation as a danger, threat, or shock, the information about a fearful stimulus is immediately sent to the amygdala, which, being a component of the limbic system, is responsible for fear and anxiety processing, and plays an important role in emotion and behaviour. As the research suggests, the message about a potentially frightening situation can reach the amygdala long before we are even consciously aware of it. Then, the amygdala is to trigger a fight-or-flight reaction, marked (...) by our increased heart rate and respiration to prepare for action (cf. LeDoux 2007). The aim of the research is, first, to account for the most prototypical cognitive scenario of fear through the prism of Cognitive Linguistics (cf. Kövecses 1986, 2015) and supply it with this neuroscientific and psychological knowledge of fear. We learn that in addition to the most common human reactions to fear, i.e. the one of a fighter or the one of a runaway, a modern man reacts to fear by denying it as well as by displacing fear from their subconscious mind. Second, by investigating the novel metaphor FEAR IS AN ILLNESS OF THE BRAIN, we aim to propose a novel constructive cognitive scenario of fear, which helps us deal with this unwanted emotion in contemporary situations that generate fear, e.g. in the era of (post)Covid-19 pandemic (WHO 2021, July 15). (shrink)

Ethnography of Singapore Chinese Names: Race, Religion, and Representation Singapore Chinese is part of the Chinese Diaspora. This research shows how Singapore Chinese names reflect the Chinese naming tradition of surnames and generation names, as well as Straits Chinese influence. The names also reflect the beliefs and religion of Singapore Chinese. More significantly, a change of identity and representation is reflected in the names of earlier settlers and Singapore Chinese today. This paper aims to show the general naming traditions of (...) Chinese in Singapore as well as a change in ideology and trends due to globalization. (shrink)

This study on the Speech Act of Promising builds on an article by Egner which claims that in many African Societies a promise is most often made not to be committed to its content but to be polite and save one's own or the addressee's face. While Egner opts for a Speech Act Theory approach to explain the phenomenon and comes to the conclusion that the speech act of promising may occur minus commitment, thus refuting the standard SAT claim, I (...) have opted to treat the issue within Relevance Theory and claim that a true speech act of promising cannot be without commitment since it is a performative and institutional speech act which has to be committed by its very nature. I have rather explained that the concept PROMISE can be used as an ad hoc concept PROMISE* which conveys a speech act of "saying that" and which is a broadened version of the encoded concept to make commitment optional and include issues of politeness and face saving. While Egner claims that a committed speech act can be determined by linguistic indication most of the time I claim that the intended interpretation falls out naturally from the relevance theoretic comprehension procedure which is: "Follow the path of least effort in determining cognitive effects and stop when your expectation of relevance is fulfilled". Unlike Egner I claim that at the root of using non-committed promises as a face saving device are shame oriented cultures that need these kinds of mechanisms for politeness more than guilt oriented cultures. (shrink)

Assuming that “YouTube provides a deindividuated interactional context where social identity, including ethnic identity, is salient”, we focus our analysis on the online discussants’ identity narratives in order to investigate what makes each identity narrative into a cohesive specific ethos and how this ethos is coherent with the positioning of the party and their leaders. Our methodology includes qualitative analysis as well as a quantitative approach. Our findings confirm that the emotions and ideologies salient in the leadership speeches and keywords (...) are perpetuated, reinvented and re-enacted in avatars, pseudonyms and comments, constructing therefore a coherent virtual community. We also conclude that the ethos of this virtual community was built on the concept of resisting the loss of sovereignty, symbolically co-constructed with myths, memories and a glorious past, instilling pride and unity, while cultivating anger, resentment and contempt against the “enemy”. (shrink)

The language of emotions is culturally conditioned and a conceptualization of emotions is determined by the value systems adopted in given cultures, as well as by personal experiences in recognizing, valuing, and communicating those emotions. It is believed that sometimes certain emotions have no lexical equivalents in particular languages. Even within one culture and one language, we can observe a gray area in the meaning of terms from this field. This is not surprising, given the subjective perception of the world (...) by each member of a specific community, as well as the multitude of emotions themselves. Although most information about other people’s emotions comes to the recipients through language, talking or writing about them is not simple. Emotions are among the concepts that are not very clearly delineated in our experience and therefore other, more comprehensible concepts, such as spatial orientations or objects, should be used when referring to them. In the novel The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya, emotions are conceptualized and represented for instance by liquids, small animals, natural forces, and substances with some specific taste (sour, bitter, etc.). Our goal was to figure out which emotions and their linguistic instantiations are only typical for the Russian language and which ones would fall in the universal category. The paper will focus on the description and the way emotions are conceptualized from a cognitive linguistic perspective, drawing on CMT (Conceptual Metaphor Theory), conceptual metonymies, and cognitive models. (shrink)

The information about patients being murdered by Lodz ambulance doctors using pancuronium bromide , published in the Gazeta Wyborcza,1 was repeated in the international press—for example, in the British Medical Journal.2 The account of a Gazeta Wyborcza reporter who had been working as an undercover stretcher bearer and witnessed the reported events, does not prove that any murder was committed. It was the media that presented the information in a negative light. So far the police have not charged anybody (...) with murder. The ambulance workers and doctors who were selling information about the dead to funeral parlours have been detained.Although it has not been proved that any patients were murdered in Lodz, the way the matter was treated by the media could lead one …. (shrink)

‘Tool of Empowerment’: The Rhetorical Vision of Title Nine This study of the mail order catalog Title Nine, a California-based women's athletic clothing company, employs symbolic convergence theory and fantasy theme analysis through the context of third wave feminism. The catalog, named after the federal law in the United States that was intended to equalize opportunities between men's and women's participation in sports, creates a distinct social reality in an effort to empower readers. Similar studies have analyzed stereotypical representations of (...) women in magazines and advertising. However, this study offers insight into a newly emerging phenomenon in a niche market, the mail-order catalog, and in the artifact under study, it offers a medium where creators intend to do more than sell women's clothing. Within fantasy theme analysis is the fantasy type, a moral or social more that repeats itself through various actors or settings within the artifact. Four fantasy types put forth by Title Nine have been identified by the researcher, including a.) "I am superwoman," b.) "I am a mom," c.) "I am an advocate for women," and d.) "I can be anything.". (shrink)

This paper highlights areas of concern in the assessment of pragmatics, with the intent of stimulating fresh thinking about the assessment of pragmatics both for research purposes and as a part of classroom instruction. It starts by considering what aspects of ability in pragmatics to assess, and then contrasts the trade-off between the feasibility of obtaining data and the ultimate importance of the data. Next, the conspicuous lack of assessment of ability in L2 pragmatics in language classes is noted. Then (...) follow sections on topics all relating primarily to the assessment of pragmatics for research purposes – the use of mixed methods, data elicitation procedures, and norms used in determining the appropriateness of any given performance in pragmatics. The last two topics deal, respectively, with the perceived relevance of the given assessment by the learners and with the value of collecting verbal report data from the respondents as a means for validating the assessment measures. Finally, considerations regarding the most prominent of these issues are provided. (shrink)

This study aims to establish ideological effects of the pre-pandemic metaphor use in the mainstream media on users’ perceptions of their relationship with technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve that, 120 media articles from global mainstream media sources during the pre-pandemic period were collected and analysed at three levels: (1) metaphor identification; (2) deconstruction of conceptual source domains; (3) the coding of metaphorical expressions into psychological types of interpersonal relationships that are projected on technologies. The established metaphorical patterns were (...) tested in an online survey with 100 young adults and adults from Lithuania during the COVID-19 pandemic period of 2019-2020. The research findings resulted in the ideological perceptions of Reversed Agentivity and Mechanised Action characterising our relationship with technology and pointing out to the loss of individual autonomy, a lack of personal growth and more fragmented personal identity during the pandemic. (shrink)

The present study investigates linguistic choices and strategy selection of American speakers of English, Russian native speakers, and American L2 learners of Russian in their complaints by exploring the interaction of social factors and gender. The data was elicited through an open-ended discourse completion questionnaire and an assessment questionnaire. The qualitative analysis shows significant differences between genders in the group of Russian speakers. The major finding was that Russian males were more judgmental and direct in their complaints, but they were (...) also more humorous and ironic than Russian females. Fewer differences were observed in the group of American speakers and American L2 learners of Russian. The findings indicate similar gender differences within each group and across groups in terms of strategy selection and the number of words. Some of the differences were statistically significant.The findings of the interlanguage analysis open areas for pedagogical intervention so that L2 learners better understand how to address males and females, as well as which linguistic strategies to use to minimize offense while negotiating a problem in Russian culture. (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)

All human activity including motion is construed mentally with reference to different objects and spatial relations that are relevant (Waliński 2014). Following the work of Talmy (1985, 2000) on categorization of languages on the basis of motion events into verb framed languages and satellite framed languages, this paper addresses the typology of the Tugen language regarding motion events. It takes into consideration the reclassification of the V-languages into equipollent frame and the doubling frame, (Slobin 2003; Croft et al. 2010). Further (...) it explores the hybrid system as expounded by Schröder (2016) on the categorization of V-languages so as to cater for languages that do not fit into the equipollent and the doubling frame. This paper analyses motion events in Tugen, a Kalenjin language belonging to the southern Nilotic cluster. In this analysis, Tugen is seen as both verb framed language and satellite framed as a result of prevalence of deictic directionals and the applicative. The language also bears an associated motion affix which relates simultaneous motion to non-motion events. The associated motion affix renders the motion events to be satellite framed. The occurrence of deictic directionals on motion events that are verb framed can also be taken to be instances of doubling frame. (shrink)

This article deals with the problem of different distributions of the Spanish pronouns le and lo ‘him, her, polite you’ that may be observed in different realms of the Spanish speaking world. In this paper, as a starting point, the more established and traditional case theory will be compared with the Control System Hypothesis in a particular corpus of a non-standard, Peninsular variant of Spanish. The hypothesis that will then be tested is that the use of the pronouns under focus (...) in this particular variant, as well as in all variants, is based on one and the same semantic substance, but that speakers may apply this substance for different communicative needs, resulting in different distributions of the forms in different language samples of the respective speakers. These differences, then, are not representative of different meanings, but may be representing cultural differences of the respective speech group. The case in focus is middle-class Spanish of the 60s as represented in a novel by Miguel Delibes, and particularly how men and women are addressed. This corpus was chosen because of its particular, non-standard distribution of the pronouns in question, being therefore of particular interest to test the hypothesis. (shrink)

It is a study of the discursive construction of high achievers’ identities in American culture. A corpus of 100 commencement speeches delivered during 2016 and 2017 graduation ceremonies in American universities has been used to analyse how commencement speakers, as a rule highly successful individuals, construct their identities through discourse. Besides celebrating academic achievements, one of the communicative purposes of the commencement speech is giving the graduates advice for the future. It has been investigated how the speakers legitimize their qualifications (...) as a role model and the source of life wisdom. Due to the specificity of the discourse to be investigated, based on the foundations of American ethos of hard work and drive for success, Critical Discourse Analysis has been chosen as a methodological approach which can most adequately help analyze the discursive formation of identity. As the discourse to be analyzed is agentive discourse, culture-specific both in its form and content, I have decided to combine Critical Discourse Analysis with cultural studies. (shrink)

"End-Of-Law week drinkS @ ACT Magistrates Court: Friday 20 May 2005." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (198), pp. 24.

A Relevance-Theoretic Classification of Jokes Relevance Theory pictures communication as an inferential activity that adjusts, in parallel, the explicit content of utterances, the implicated premises and conclusions that can be derived, and the right amount of contextual information needed to obtain them. When applied to jokes, a relevance-theoretic classification may be proposed depending on whether the humorist plays with the audience's inferential activity aimed at an explicit interpretation, with the audience's inference devoted to deriving implications or with their access to (...) the right amount and quality of contextual information needed to obtain relevant interpretations. In this paper three types of jokes are proposed which focus on these aspects. A fourth type is also added, but this time referred to broad contextual assumptions on social or cultural values of society that are targeted by humorists. (shrink)

Is the Concept of Incongruity Still a Useful Construct for the Advancement of Humor Research? The perception of incongruity is considered to be a necessary, though not sufficient, component of the humor experience. Incongruity has been investigated in the philosophical tradition for centuries, and it goes back as far as Aristotle's definition of the comic as based on a particular form of απάτη. In modern times, many theoretical models, as well as empirical works, are based on this concept. The question (...) is here raised whether the concept of incongruity has already been examined and exploited to its full potential, and nothing new, of theoretical or experimental usefulness, may be drawn from it. It is proposed to conceptualize incongruity as follows: a stimulus is perceived as incongruous when it diverts from the cognitive model of reference. In this perspective, a number of observations are advanced which point to a heuristic property of incongruity still open to interesting developments, both for theory and for applications. (shrink)

A critical edition with facing-page translation, of Guglielmo Ebreo's treatise of 1463. It also contains dance tunes in facsimile and in annotated transcriptions based on the choreographies.

The aim of the paper is to establish a relation between the cooperative principle formulated by H.P. Grice in pragmatics and the principle of sincere cooperation laid down in the founding Treaties on the European Union and interpretated by the Court of Justice of the European Union, intimately linked to the ethical imperative of cooperation, in a cultural framework shared by the Member States. The key concepts are ratio and value and the case-law analysed is provided by the recent cases (...) of the Romanian magistrates. The principle of cooperation reasserted also as the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism is the main obligation and it implies compliance with agreements and action to obtain certain effects. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the linguistic concept of implicit offensiveness. On the one hand, implicitness will be juxtaposed with indirectness as the two concepts are not conceived of here as synonymous. On the other hand, a typology of offensiveness (vs offensive language and vs offendedness) will be proposed, as well as the overarching term ‘covert meaning’ that will span figurative implicitness and non-figurative implicitness. The gradability of various forms of covert meaning and its (...) overlap with overt meaning (subsuming explicit literal meaning and implicit literal meaning) will also be discussed. In the analysis, two sample implicit concepts will be examined (irony vs sarcasm) based on corpus data (of general English and dedicated offensiveness corpus) and using non-contextual embeddings. Theory-wise, the paper demonstrates that implicitness is a complex term which is fuzzy and gradable; methodology-wise, it shows how computational tools can be used to attest theoretical assumptions related to offensive covert terms. (shrink)

On the basis of internet forum and press media data, this article studies the expression of hostile attitudes towards multilingualism and multiculturalism in the context of debates about immigration. The forum data are drawn from the BBC’s Have Your Say website, which is a moderated forum that excludes polemical and abusive postings. Nevertheless, it still seems to provide its users ample opportunity for airing strongly anti-immigrant attitudes. The narratives in which these attitudes are being expressed are exemplary stories of the (...) posters’ supposed encounters with the use of foreign languages in the street, in the workplace or at school. This presence of foreign languages in the British public sphere is evaluated as being problematic and is “explained” as a result of mass immigration, which serves to reinforce the scenario of a culture mix that will destroy British “home” culture. Media coverage of immigration partly supports such vilification of multilingualism and multiculturalism, and the reports and comments often seem to be drawn from similar narrative-argumentative templates as those of the discussions on Have Your Say. In conclusion, we argue that counterspeech informed by Critical Discourse Analysis has to develop alternative narratives and figurative scenarios that question the bias against linguistic and cultural diversity. (shrink)

The present paper aims to report on the preliminary findings from the initial stages of ongoing research on hate speech in Lithuanian online comments. Comments are marked strongly by such phenomena as flaming and trolling; therefore, in this genre we can expect a high degree of hostility, obscenity, high incidence of insults and aggressive lexis, which can inflict harm to individuals or organizations. The goal of the current research is thus to make an attempt to identify some features of verbal (...) aggression in Lithuanian by applying the principles and instruments of corpus linguistics, which proved to be a useful approach when dealing with such issues as trolling. It is expected that further analysis of those features will help to identify and define formal linguistic criteria that could facilitate identification of hate speech in public discourse. The data has been obtained from the Lithuanian corpus of user-generated comments collected from one major Lithuanian portal, www.delfi.lt. The corpus consists of all the comments posted in the year 2014 and in total includes 17,909 comments, which make up 1,160,109 words. For the initial data analysis, linguistic aspects, such as wordlists, collocations, and formulaic language, were analysed by using the AntConc software. The interpretations of the results are still very tentative, but what the initial findings show is that overt aggression does not feature among the most frequent and most salient features of comments. Aggression is, in our data, indirectly expressed through creative language use, which can mainly be studied through qualitative analysis. (shrink)

Two Conceptions of Wittgenstein's Contextualism How should we understand Wittgenstein's proposals that "the meaning of a word is its use in the language" and that a name only has a meaning in a language-game? Are they incompatible with occasion-invariant semantics? In this paper I present two leading interpretations of Wittgenstein's contextualism: James Conant's meaning-eliminativism and Charles Travis's meaning-underdetermination. I argue that, even though these two interpretations are very similar, the latter gives a more nuanced account of Wittgenstein's contextualism which does (...) not involve a commitment to the claim that words have no meaning outside immediate contexts of use. (shrink)

A scholarly confusion of tongues, or, is promising an illocutionary act? Technical terms, I argued elsewhere, should not be re-defined without a profound reason; for such a re-definition furthers misunderstanding and is therefore undesirable. If my argument is on the right track, then we have reason to acknowledge the original definition of ‘illocutionary acts’ established by John L. Austin; any subsequent re-definition, unless it is specially justified somehow, must count as a terminological mistake. I use this argument, in order to (...) proceed against what appears to me a highly problematic terminological situation, namely, the present existence of a double-digit number of different definitions of the term "illocutionary act." Against my argument, I met the objection that the co-existence of several different intensional definitions of ‘illocutionary acts’ eventually is not very problematic, given the alleged fact that the extension of the term is indisputable. In this paper, I argue that the objection fails, because its central premise is false: William P. Alston, Bach & Harnish and John R. Searle have very different opinions as to whether, for instance, promising is an illocutionary act, even though promises are commonly supposed to be extremely obvious cases. Additionally, I consider the objection that the term "illocutionary act" is indispensable as a means of referring to those various things it is used for; I discard this objection by demonstrating that, and how, at least the accounts under consideration in this paper could easily do without the term. (shrink)

Presuppositions and Appropriateness of Assertions In this paper I aim to compare and evaluate two theoretic approaches to pragmatic presuppositions: the Common Ground account and Propositional Context account. According to the Common Ground account proposed by Stalnaker, it is appropriate to assert a sentence p that requires a presupposition q only if q is mutually believed as accepted as true and taken for granted by the interlocutors. Otherwise, Gauker claims that the ground of propositions taken for granted coincides with what (...) he calls the objective propositional context, that is the set of objectively relevant propositional elements that speakers ought to share in order to evaluate the appropriateness of utterances so as to reach the goal of a conversation.The main purpose of my paper is to show that, according to the Propositional Context account, a theory of presupposition has to take into account a normative-objective notion of context. Secondly, I aim to develop a criticism of Gauker's point of view claiming that the Propositional Context account does not account for the number of ways in which a proposition can be taken for granted by the speakers depending on the context. Finally, I propose to integrate Gauker's account with a further condition for appropriateness of assertion which states that: in order to appropriately assert a sentence p that requires a presupposition q, speakers ought to recognize how they should justify q in a specific communicative context. (shrink)