Linguistic Anthropology

Contemporary theorizations of neoliberalism are framed by a false dichotomy between, on the one hand, studies influenced by Foucault in emphasizing neoliberalism as a form of governmentality, and on the other hand, inquiries influenced by Marx in foregrounding neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology. This article seeks to shine some light on this division in an effort to open up new debates and recast existing ones in such a way that might lead to more flexible understandings of neoliberalism as a discourse. A discourse approach moves theorizations forward by recognizing neoliberalism is neither a ‘top down’ nor ‘bottom up’ phenomena, but rather a circuitous process of socio-spatial transformation.

This paper sets out at the beginning different definitions and approaches to the linguistic phenomenon -Code-Switching. Through my work, I will highlight five different factors that motivate code-switching in a bilingual speaker although the reasons for code-switching are many . I will talk about the role of ethnic solidarity, social class, topic, affection, and persuasion in motivating switching codes. I will use different approaches and case-studies conducted by researchers from inside and outside Lebanon to back up my discussion.

Preface
Throughout all of Europe we find examples of folk-belief assigning special qualities to the seventh-born son or daughter of a family. At times these attributes were positive, at times negative. However, they always had a magical aura about them (Bloch [1924] 1983). For the most part, these beliefs have been written off as superstitious residue from times past and as a result little attention has been paid to documenting the concrete social practices associated with them. An exception to this tendency is the work of Marc Bloch, who in 1924, called attention to the supernatural powers attributed to the seventh son and at times, to the seventh daughter, born after an uninterrupted series of the same sex, remarking that seventh-born children were credited with a “particular supernatural power” (Bloch [1924] 1983: 293, 296). Writing in 1924, Bloch observed that “La croyance sous cette forme a été et est sans doute encore très largement répandue dans l’Europe occidentale et centrale: on l’a signalée en Allemagne, en Biscaye, en Catalogne, dans presque toute la France, dans les Pays-Bas, en Angleterre, en Escosse, en Irlande […]”  (Bloch [1924] 1983: 294-295).

Specifically, Bloch noted that from at least the 16th century onwards, children born into a seventh position in their family supposedly had the power to heal by touch. Such extraordinary people, often deemed sorcerers, even devils, were also referred to by a variety of expressions such as mahr (German) or murawa (Polish) and consequently they had the ambivalent privilege of tapping into powers that were inaccessible to normal humans. Specifically, they were viewed as having healing and divinatory powers, which could entail shape-shifting (Vaz da Silva 2003). That is, those individuals were endowed with the ability to take the form of an animal. From the point of view of modern Western thought this belief causes the dividing line between humans and animals to become blurred. Nonetheless, that blurring or fusion of two natures would be in accordance with the cosmology of native peoples in other parts of the world, especially contemporary hunter-gatherers, where such animistic beliefs also prevail (Bird-David 1999; Brightman 2002; Ingold 2000; Willerslev 2007).

It is quite clear that the qualities assigned to the seventh-son or daughter harken back to an earlier animistic mindset, notions of nonhuman personhood and social practices that in turn connect back to shamanic modes of healing. At the same time, as noted in the earlier chapters of this study, the fused nature of the Bear Son, the half-human, half-bear being known as Hamalau “Fourteen” in Basque, reflects a similar blurring of the Western human-animal divide and related cultural conceptualizations.

And as Bertolotti has demonstrated in his detailed and extraordinarily well researched study Carnevale di Massa 1950 (1992), European versions of the Bear Son folktales, e.g., Giovanni l’Orso, may well reproduce much earlier beliefs, more in consonance with the cosmovision of hunter-gatherers who inhabited these zones in times past. More concretely, the fact that the figure of Hamalau is grounded in the belief that humans descended from bears allows us to consider the significance and symbolism of this character’s own genesis: he is born of a human female, but his father is a bear. In this sense, he is a double-natured intermediary occupying the ontological ground between humans and bears.

The number of people who speak English has gradually increased all over the world since the mid-16th century. According to David Crystal (1988), the number of English speakers during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I ranged between five and seven million while in 1952, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, the number reached 250 million. This huge increase in the number of English speakers in the world is the result of the expansion of the English language from the British Isles to different areas and continents in the world. The expansion of English has been labelled by linguist Robert Phillipson as "linguistic imperialism". According to Phillipson, linguistic imperialism is the "dominance asserted and retained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages" (1992). As a result, English became the most dominant and most powerful language in the world that motivated many linguists and language researchers, as Braj Kachru call it an "International Language". The term "International Language" has been used after English became the mother tongue and the second language spoken by non-native English speakers from different areas in the world. David Crystal (1992) argues that more than two-thirds of English speakers are non-natives. The status of English as an International language is the result of the British colonial expansion during the last two centuries in North America, Oceania, West Africa, South Asia, and South America. The British colonial activity, in addition for spreading the English language all over the globe, has resulted in the creation of new varieties of English which were influenced by the aboriginal languages of the colonised countries.

As the use of qualitative inquiry increases within the field of social work, researchers must consider the issue of establishing rigor in qualitative research. This article presents research procedures used in a study of autoethnographies that were written regarding the experience of being Jewish. In this project, the researchers utilized reflexivity, audit trail, triangulation by observer, peer debriefing, member check and prolonged engagement in order to manage the threats to trustworthiness as discussed by Padgett (1998). Implications of the project suggest that research procedures utilized by qualitative researchers to establish rigor are an important way to increase our confidence that the voice of the participants is heard, therefore fitting the mission of the social work profession.

In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning. We posit an alternative approach based on the power analytics of Michel Foucault which focuses on ‘what is actually done’, as opposed to Habermas’s focus on ‘what should be done’. We discuss how the Foucauldian stance problematises planning, asking difficult questions about the treatment of legitimacy, rationality, knowledge and spatiality. We conclude that Foucault offers a type of analytic planning theory which offers better prospects than does Habermas for those interested in understanding and bringing about democratic social change through planning.

The papers in this volume all address aspects of communication that are often dismissed as "trivial" or "small talk", and argue that such forms are in actual fact crucial instruments for sustaining a Goffmanian level of social cohesion through conviviality. Contributors: Jan Blommaert, Piia Varis, Fie Velghe, Zane Goebel, Tilmann Heil and Ben Rampton.

The development of the 48 Greek constellations is analyzed as a complex mixture of cognitive layers deriving from different cultural traditions and dating back to different epochs. The analysis begins with a discussion of the zodiacal constellations, goes on to discuss the stellar lore in Homer and Hesiod, and then examines several theories concerning the origins of the southern non-zodiacal constellations. It concludes with a commentary concerning the age and possible cultural significance of stars of the Great Bear constellation in light of ethnohistorical documentation, folklore, and beliefs related to European bear ceremonialism.

At the same time that case studies are widely used and have produced canonical texts, it may be observed that the case study as a methodology is generally held in low regard, or is simply ignored, within the academy. For example, only 2 of the 30 top-ranked U.S. graduate programs in political science require a dedicated graduate course in case study or qualitative methods, and a full third of these programs do not even offer such a course. In contrast, all of the top 30 programs offer courses in quantitative methods and almost all of them require training in such methods, often several courses. In identifying this paradox of the case study’s wide use and low regard, Gerring rightly remarks that the case study survives in a “curious methodological limbo,” and that the reason is that the method is poorly understood. In what follows, we will try to resolve Gerring’s paradox and help case study research gain wider use and acceptance.

Recent interest in how anthropology and linguistics relates to mathematics has led to recognition that mathematical thinking is a function of language in ways not previously recognised. Ethnomathematics, cognitive linguistics, and anthropology are all pointing to a way of understanding mathematical ideas based on human experience and cultural activities. Formal mathematics can be seen to have developed from metaphors deeply embedded in our languages. This raises the question of relativity in mathematics. Do different languages embody different types of mathematics? This chapter examines some emerging evidence in the grammar and syntax of indigenous languages, i.e. languages structurally very different from the Indo-European linguistic tradition. The educational consequences of the possibility of different mathematical thinking is briefly discussed.

Recent developments in the study of language in society have moved the field increasingly away from linear models towards complex models. The complexity of timespace as an aspect of what is called “context” is of key importance in this development, and this article engages with two possibly useful concepts in view of this: chronotope and scale. Chronotope can be seen as invokable chunks of history that organizeing the indexical order of discourse; scale, in turn, can be seen as the scope of communicability of such invocations. Thus, whenever we see chronotopes, we see them mediated by scales. The cultural stuff of chronotopes is conditioned by the sociolinguistic conditions of scale. This nuanced approach to timescale contextualization offers new directions for complexity-oriented research in our fields.

In this article, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa critique appropriateness-based approaches to language diversity in education. Those who subscribe to these approaches conceptualize standardized linguistic practices as an objective set of linguistic forms that are appropriate for an academic setting. In contrast, Flores and Rosa highlight the raciolinguistic ideologies through which racialized bodies come to be constructed as engaging in appropriately academic linguistic practices. Drawing on theories of language ideologies and racialization, they offer a perspective from which students classified as long-term English learners, heritage language learners, and Standard English learners can be understood to inhabit a shared racial positioning that frames their linguistic practices as deficient regardless of how closely they follow supposed rules of appropriateness. The authors illustrate how appropriateness-based approaches to language education are implicated in the reproduction of racial normativity by expecting language-minoritized students to model their linguistic practices after the white speaking subject despite the fact that the white listening subject continues to perceive their language use in racialized ways. They conclude with a call for reframing language diversity in education away from a discourse of appropriateness toward one that seeks to denaturalize standardized linguistic categories.

This is my PhD dissertation. The third chapter might be interesting since it shows that the natural scale was the primary scale used in European antiquity (the so-called Folk Music Scale). It combined with the early diatonic scale (stacking thirds on the diatonic scale that those instruments couldn’t play) to create our modern scale. The Highland bagpipe is an ossified hybrid between the two.

The fourth chapter might be of interest to composers because it explains the rhythm of languages (especially English) and also the pitch-patterning of the spoken word which is used as the basis of melody.

The link brings you to the University of Otago library which is open and non-private. So you have to force your web browser to continue to the site.

ABSTRACT:
The purpose of this study was to investigate through archival and musicological analysis the audio recordings of Fenian lays made in the middle of the last century. These recordings were made from informants who learned the material orally; they contain cultural elements that assist in comprehending the musical mechanics of Fenian lays at a time when their performance practices were being extirpated by foreign musical influences. These elements include Indo-European (IE) thematic material, poetics, language register, pitch structuring, rhythm, and vocal techniques. Audio recordings of Fenian lays from Ireland, Scotland, and Nova Scotia, Canada were analysed in terms of their linguistic-musical material. Results show that the rhythm of the lays did not display a repetitive musical metre but the more complex structure of speech. However, rhythmic patterns did alter with volume. Also, resonance tuning was apparent. Many characteristics associated with volume in lay recordings exist in declaimed speech as well; both may be seen to act as a bridge between speech and metered song. Lay poetry appeared to be syllabic, which is unusual for a stress-timed language; this reflects an Indo-European genesis that is supported by the presence of oral formulaic language. Both stress and accent shifted pitch by poetic line to match spoken characteristics. A high language register was present, which does not indicate composition by the intelligentsia for use at court, but rather a fear-induced protective linguistic device apparent in all social classes. Moreover, the addition of delineated pitch to spoken declamation may be seen as an attempt to further increase the communicative register. The pitch structure was seen to be anachronistic, matching the linear scales played by pastoral instruments, particularly that of wooden shepherd trumpets used since at least the beginning in the Early Neolithic Age.

Archaeology seems to support the idea of widespread Minoan trading contacts and a significant number of Minoan colonies. The distribution of the place name “Minoa” in the Aegean and in the eastern and central Mediterranean also appears to imply Minoan colonies. However, we must not forget that it was the famed archaeologist Arthur Evans who gave the Minoan civilization its name. It is possible that the Minoans went by a different name entirely. If the Bronze Age Cretan king was known as “Minos”,  it is quite possible that the king’s colonies were named “Minoa” after him, but this is just speculation.

This article presents what we term a raciolinguistic perspective, which theorizes the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race. Rather than taking for granted existing categories for parsing and classifying race and language, we seek to understand how and why these categories have been co-naturalized, and to imagine their denaturalization as part of a broader structural project of contesting white supremacy. We explore five key components of a raciolinguistic perspective: (i) historical and contemporary colonial co-naturalizations of race and language; (ii) perceptions of racial and linguistic difference; (iii) regimentations of racial and linguistic categories; (iv) racial and linguistic intersections and assemblages; and (v) contestations of racial and linguistic power formations. These foci reflect our investment in developing a careful theorization of various forms of racial and linguistic inequality on the one hand, and our commitment to the imagination and creation of more just societies on the other.

Careful cross-disciplinary investigation of ancient DNA samples recently published supports a demic diffusion model for the expansion of Indo-European-speaking peoples of Yamna directly into central and western Europe through the Bell Beaker culture, challenging previous archaeological and linguistic theories based on the expansion through the Corded Ware culture. Potential consequences of this new model in archaeological and linguistic investigation are outlined, among them the development of a stable framework of time and space for Indo-European dialectal classification, allowing for a more precise dating of Indo-European branches and their splits and expansions, and why and how they might have occurred.

The ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts form the oldest sizable body of religious texts in the world. Discovered in the late nineteenth century, they had been inscribed on the interior stone walls of the pyramid tombs of third-millennium kings and queens. From their content it is clear that they were concerned with the afterlife state of the tomb owner, but the historical meaning of their emergence has been poorly understood. This book weds traditional philological approaches to linguistic anthropology in order to associate them with two spheres of human action: mortuary cult and personal preparation for the afterlife. Monumentalized as hieroglyphs in the tomb, their function was now one step removed from the human events that had motivated their original production.

This essay focuses on a paradoxical transformation that happened within Soviet ideological discourse at the very end of perestroika, around 1990-91. The Party's attempts to revitalize Soviet ideology by returning to the original word of Lenin unexpectedly produced the opposite result. The unquestionable external Truth from which Soviet ideological discourse drew its legitimacy-and that had always been identical with Lenin's wordsuddenly could no longer be known. This shift launched a rapid unraveling of the Soviet communist project. At the center of this unexpected transformation was the search for the true Lenin-a kind of Lenin that Soviet party theorists, bureaucrats, historians, and scientists hoped was still hidden in the midst of his unpublished texts and unknown facts of his biology, life, and death.

Esta obra aplica a la fraseología un punto de vista que podemos situar dentro de la corriente neohumboldtiana llamada en Rusia "linguo-culturología", y se centra en este caso en la motivación, tanto etimológica como psicolingüística, que sobrevive en mayor o menor grado en el lenguaje figurado en general y los frasemas en particular. Contiene 39 contribuciones que tratan diversas facetas de la cuestión desde perspectivas complementarias.
Dmitrij Dobrovolski’j, en Cross-linguistic equivalence of idioms: does it really exist? se enfrenta a la noción de la equivalencia fraseológica interlingüística, la inseparable otra cara de la moneda de cualquier teorización de lo específiico-cultural o de lo universal. Antonio Pamies Bertrán trata del propio concepto teórico de "motivación fraseológica" (A propos de la motivation phraséologique). Ángel López García proporciona un enfoque neurolingüístico acerca del acceso al lexicón mental en Neurolinguistics of the lexicon-syntax interface. Luis González García se ocupa de la variación fraseológica, y más concretamente de las manipulaciones, desviaciones que reviven la motivación de los componentes en fraseologismos, a partir de un corpus de conocidas canciones modernas españolas, en Modificación o desautomatización de fraseologismos en la música española actual. Juan de Dios Luque Durán enumera factores concretos que permiten concretar algo que en términos humboldtianos resultaba demasiado etéreo y romántico, aunque no por ello inexistente: "la mentalidad nacional" (Un ejemplo de la interrelación de cultura y lenguaje: el carácter nacional español en fraseologismos y otras formas de expresión lingüística).Completan esta parte "teórica" Lucía Luque Nadal (Culturemas y fraseologismos históricos como “esquemas ideológicos prototípicos”: estudio interlingüístico), e  Irina V. Zykova, que trata los estadios y niveles de la investigación fraseológica trans-lingüística de la semántica fraseológica (Contrastive studies: levels and stages of research on phraseologisms of different languages).
El enfoque histórico-etimológico esta representado por Natalia Med (Mecanismos de formación de la semántica valorativa en la fraseología de las lenguas románicas) y por Marc Ruiz-Zorrilla (Sobre la aplicación de la modelación semántico-estructural en la etimologización de los frasemas del español). Su maestro Valeriï Mokienko (hay por cierto en el índice una misteriosa errata en su nombre de pila) estudia los biblismos como fuente de la "europeización" de muchos fraseologismos (Biblismen als Quelle der Europäisierung nationaler Phraseologismen und Sprichwörter), tema que Anna Zholobova también aborda para nuestra lengua en Uso actual de los bibleísmos fraseológicos en español y ruso. Andrey Grigorev, en The Byzantine tradition and semantics of Russian biblical expressions, estudia la tradición bizantina en los biblismos rusos; también la religión, como caldo de cultivo cultural de la motivación metafórica, aparece en Dragana Mršević-Radović, con el tratamiento etimológico-histórico del trasfondo cultural de la fraseología serbia: L’esprit et l’âme dans la phraseologie serbe – approche historico-étymologique; o en Rosa Piñel (La imagen del Diablo en la fraseología española y alemana) seguido por el trabajo de Teodora Kyryakova-Dinieva sobre aspectos culturales de las fórmulas gemelas en biblismos alemanes y búlgaros.
El aspecto cultural sincrónico en la fraseología es tratado por Elisabeth Piirainen que aborda la motivación fraseológica desde la perspectiva de la intertextualidad en sentido amplio (Idiom motivation from cultural perspectives: metaphors, symbols, intertextuality); Nana Stambolishvili, en Phraseologismen als kulturelles Gedächtnis, trata el rol de los fraseologismos como "memoria cultural"; Nader al Jallad, muestra en A Linguo-cultural study of “generosity” in Arabic un estudio lingüístico-cultural sobre la generosidad en la cultura árabe. El simbolismo animal y su reflejo en la lengua no podían faltar a este estudio, y se aborda en varias lenguas. Kamila Tutaeva lo trata en La simbología del oso en la fraseología rusa: estudo linguo-cultural; Josefina Velasco en Del cerdo se aprovecha todo (aproximación a un análisis ideográfico); Rayna Holandi en Language symbolism in animalistic phraseology (a contrastive study on English and Bulgarian) y Natalia Sourgouladze, que estudia los zoónimos en francés y georgiano en L’étude de la particularité sémantique des zoonymes et des somatismes animaux dans les langues française et géorgienne.
La historia es otro de los grandes "puentes" para las proyecciones conceptuales que vinculan la herencia cultural nacional al acervo fraseológico. Joanna Szerszunowicz analiza peculiaridades intraculturales del polaco en relación a citas célebres, pese a ser relativamente recientes, en On intracultural "winged words" and their translation equivalents (based on Lech Wałęsa’s words). Otro elemento importante a este respecto son los estereotipos. Sabine Geck realiza un estudio contrastivo alemán-español de las fórmulas rutinarias y los scripts culturales del aspecto social de la comida en Guten Appetit! Routineformeln und das Script der Mahlzeit aus interkultureller Perspektive (deutsch-spanisch). Katarina Kekic aborda los clichés raciales y nacionalistas en Racismo y xenofobia en la fraseología: el caso del serbio, tema que también aborda más adelante Anda Rădulescu (Sur quelques difficultés de traduction en français des parémies roumaines formées à partir des noms de peuples).
Todos los grandes dominios fuente de la productividad metafórica son examinados: el pensamiento, el habla, los gestos, el cuerpo... Alexandra Stavtseva, en Semantic and functional peculiarities of English and German phraseological units denoting human intellectual abilities examina las características funcionales y semánticas de unidades fraseológicas del alemán y el inglés que conceptualizan mediante imágenes la inteligencia o la carencia de la misma. Carmen Mellado analiza el trasfondo cultural de las metáforas metadiscursivas en Valores semánticos y pragmáticos de la fraseología de callar en alemán y español, complementado por el trabajo José Alejandro Calero sobre La fuerza ilocutiva socialmente reprochable en el léxico: análisis contrastivo checo-español. Irina Skrypnik analiza las similitudes y diferencias de las expresiones de relaciones interpersonales en ruso e ucraniano en Interpersonal relationships in Ukrainian and English: similarities and discrepancies (on the material of the somatic phraseological units). Joanna Szerszunowicz se ocupa de la carga cultural en la metaforización de los nombres propios (On selected source domains of onomastic phraseology in a cross-linguistic perspective). Ilaria Meloni estudia la lexicalización de los gestos corporales (cinegramas) en los frasemas del alemán y del italiano en Zur Versprachlichung mimisch-gestischer Zeichen. Kinegramme im Deutschen und im Italienischen. Erika Kržišnik y Jasmina Markič estudian los cinegramas y las metáforas anatómicas en El componente roka y mano-brazo en las fraseologías eslovena y española, tema que también examina Elizabete Aparecida Marques en La mano como base metonímica de locuciones verbales y adverbiales: un estudio comparativo entre el español y el portugués.
Los estudios de tipo onomasiológico también son parte ineludible de esta problématica, y en este sentido ambén hay varias aportaciones relevantes: Iovka Tchobánova (Estudio de la embriaguez  en  la  fraseología portuguesa), Luis Luque Toro (Una aproximación cognitiva a los conceptos de consejo, vicios y malos hábitos en la fraseología española), Saliha Iggui (Noms de plantes et phraseologie en berbère); También están presentes dialectos y lenguas minoritarias como el lapón o el danés occidental, tratados por Anna Idström (Inari Saami metaphors of hunger) y Torben Arboe (Phraseological aspects of Jutlandic (western Danish).
Se trata como vemos de una obra densa y completa dedicada por entero al trasfondo motivador de la semántica fraseológica, cuyos casi 40 capítulos se complementan y convergen hacia un mejor conocimiento de esta faceta del fenómeno fraseológico, tan importante para explicar tanto la dinámica de la fijación como la de la idiomaticidad.
    Reseña de José Manuel Pazos Bretaña
    Universidad de Córdoba
    (Publicada en Language Design, 13 (2011)

This monograph, High Correlation Linear A-Linear B vocabulary, grammar and orthography in Linear A, by Richard Vallance Janke and Alexandre Solcà, is the largest study into the genesis of a Mycenaean-derived superstrate in Linear A ever undertaken by these authors. This is merely the draft paper, and as such it has yet to be approved for final publication by the editorial board of Les Éditions KONOSO Press. Since this is a draft paper only, we urgently request that any and all visitors to View Comments apprise us of any and all errors, whether orthographic, grammatical or syntactical. We have already proof-read this monograph at least 150 times, but before it can be approved or is approved for final publication by Les Éditions KONOSO Press, it must be absolutely free of errors of any kind. So if you spot any errors whatsoever, please let us know at once. We of course welcome any and all comments, observations and criticisms on this major new and entirely revolutionary study into the possible/probable existence of a Mycenaean-derived superstrate in Linear A. We realize that a great many critics will object to our hypothesis, some of them vociferously. But all we ask is that you keep an open mind, whoever you may be, with our thanks in advance.

Thank you
Richard Vallance Janke and Alexandre Solcà

This chapter calls for an embodied sociolinguistics—or, more precisely, an embodied sociocultural linguistics (Bucholtz & Hall 2008). Drawing on scholarship from a variety of approaches that contribute to this interdisciplinary field, we discuss work on embodiment that centers on several important analytic areas: the voice; the bodily semiotics of style and self-presentation; discourses and counterdiscourses of the body; embodied motion, action, and experience; and the mediation of embodiment by material objects and technologies. In the five realms we examine, we consider in particular how a focus on bodies broadens sociocultural linguists’ understanding of the key concepts of indexicality, discourse, and agency. Recognizing that these and other core concepts are both material and linguistic is crucial to the ongoing development of sociocultural linguistics as a fully embodied field of inquiry.

El volumen que aquí se presenta contiene trece estudios realizados por destacados estudiosos de centros de investigación y docencia tanto de México y como de España, Francia e Italia. En éstos se abordan ―desde diferentes perspectivas― ya de manera general o particular, la realidad de los pueblos originarios de México en distintos momentos de su historia. El libro está dividido en dos apartados. En la primera parte se concentran los estudios de carácter, filosófico, histórico, antropológico y cultural que analizan desde una visión general y diacrónica el concepto de identidad y ciudadanía de los indios hasta aspectos específicos pero torales de las culturas milenarias de México, como es el tocante a la cosmovisión indígena y su interpretación occidental.

A rewiew of the Czech translation of the book Language Instinct by Steven Pinker.
… The Language Instinct is the second of Pinker's popular works translated into Czech. In 2008 Academia (edition Galileo) published Pinker's Words and Rules (2000), translated to Czech by Jozef Genzor as Slova a pravidla (ISBN 976-80-200-1641-6).  The Language Instinct is translated by Markéta Hofmeisterová, a reviewer, editor and translator who has been lately working mainly for the Dybbuk editing house, translating from English e.g. works by Leonard Michaels, Alan Bennet and Michal Matzenauer. Working on Pinker's book she has had to face many problems typical for scientific texts:  The Language Instinct is a book about language and it comments on numerous examples taken from English and treated as technical linguistic data. When translated to Czech, much of this meta-linguistic data loses the actual characteristics commented on in the author's text, so the reader can’t possibly know what the author is talking about. In such situations a translator can substitute Czech material with the same characteristics, or alternatively appropriately adapt the author's comments. The former is usually difficult, sometimes impossible, and it always requires a high level of expertise in the scientific framework; the latter on the other hand consists in modifying the author's text to an extent hardly acceptable in translation.  Markéta Hofmeisterová has tried to overcome the problem by leaving the English examples in the text and providing the Czech translation in the brackets (the format is unfortunately inconsistent, which doesn’t help the reader's orientation). The commentaries in the text then often apply only to the English originals and not to the Czech translations,  and the reader not well versed in English will easily miss(understand) the author's points. ...

77zfs article addresses the relationship between discourse, textual and social order, and power by means of an examination of the concept of genre. It begins with a critical review of the way genre has been used in linguistic anthropology. A distinction is delineated between approaches that take for granted the status of genre as a tool for classifying and ordering discourse and those that contend with elements of generic ambiguity and dynamism. Proceeding to outline a new approach to genre, the discussion analyzes a wide range of intertextual relations that are deployed in constituting generic links. A series of examples contrasts strategies for minimizing gaps between texts and generic precedents with strategies for maximizing such gaps. A final section points to the ways that investigating generic intertextuality can illuminate questions of ideology, political economy, and power.

North Finnic religions underwent a transformation during the Iron Age. This paper argues that the transformation occurred through the assimilation of Scandinavian ritual practices that produced a new type of ritual specialist that gradually displaced inherited forms of shamanism (and later displaced Sámi shamanism). Within the context of the volume, this is addressed in the framework of conversion. This paper concentrates on changes in conceptual modeling systems and the relationships of Finnic gods to the corresponding gods carried with the Germanic models. The text is oriented to scholars interested in Scandinavian or Germanic traditions with little or no knowledge of the Finnic traditions discussed. The study shows that comparisons of these traditions can be mutually illuminating.

Der Aufsatz behandelt eine auf germanischen Modellen beruhende religiöse Umwälzung in den nordostseefinnischen Kulturen. Dieser Prozess passierte, bevor das Christentum eingeführt wurde, und verdrängte den traditionellen Schamanismus, wodurch das mythologische System vollständig verändert wurde. Dieser Aufsatz konzentriert sich auf die Veränderungen in den Vorstellungssystemen und auf die Beziehungen der finnischen Götter (Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, Ukko) zu den entsprechenden germanischen Göttern (Odin, Thor), wobei gezeigt wird, dass ein Vergleich dieser Traditionen gegenseitig erhellend sein kann.

A meta-pattern-analysis of the mitochondrial DNA phylotree and current distribution of language families indicates that over the last 200,000 years there are robust correspondences between mtDNA haplogroups and language macrofamilies. This study is a thought experiment, a top-down derivation of the Homo sapiens sapiens (‘Proto-Human’, ‘Proto-World’) language phylotree, which can be tested against bottom-up prehistoric linguistic reconstructions. It establishes a relative chronology for dating the emergence and branching of the global array of language macrofamilies. The language phylotree is crosschecked against archaeological data and fossil mtDNA studies, which support many of the correlations. Results imply L3M and N dispersed out-of-Africa at around 80,000 years ago with both Afrasian and Nile-Sudanic languages and mythological systems. After a 3-to-5000-year pause in SW Asia three Borean language superfamilies emerged, Borean-N (Dené-Caucasian), Borean-M (Eurasiatic) and Borean-R, the latter including language families of SW Asia and Europe as well as SE Asia and Sahul. Alternative short-chronology hypotheses for language evolution, dating of sapiens sapiens out-of-Africa and a ‘southern route fast track’ from SW Asia to Sahul do not appear supported by either mtDNA genetics or archaeology. A hypothesis aligning all language families to the mtDNA phylotree yields a more differentiated and different chronology to the dyadic out-of-Africa dispersion model proposed in Fleming, Zegura, Harrod, Bengtson & Keita (2013).

This paper explores the scope for research on language and super-diversity. 12 Following a protracted process of paradigm shift, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology are well placed to engage with the contemporary social changes associated with super-diversity. After a brief introductory discussion of what super-diversity entails, the paper outlines key theoretical and methodological developments in language study: named languages have now been denaturalised, the linguistic is treated as just one semiotic among many, inequality and innovation are positioned together in a dynamic of pervasive normativity, and the contexts in which people orient their interactions reach far beyond the communicative event itself.

Back cover text: If the new fin de siècle marks a recurrence of the real, Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power epitomizes that development and sets new standards for social and political inquiry. The Danish town of Aalborg is to Flyvbjerg what Florence was to Machiavelli: a laboratory for understanding the real workings of power, and for grasping what they mean to our more general concerns of social and political organization. Politics, administration, and planning are examined in ways that allow  a rare, in-depth understanding. The reader witnesses, firsthand, the classic and endless drama which defines what modernity and democracy are and can be.

An ethnographically revised linguistic landscape study can be used as a sensitive methodological tool for detecting the complexities of urban space in superdiverse areas. The data used in this book are from an inner-city neighborhood in Antwerp (Belgium), which has become superdiverse over the past decade and a half. Rather than analyzing the contemporary patterns in terms of synchronically juxtaposed 'pluralities' of scripts as indexes of cultural 'belonging', this new methodology enables us to historicize individual signs and complexes of signs, so that they begin to inform us of the multiple histories that coincide in superdiverse space. Multiplicity is thus replaced by complexity: nonlinear, multifiliar and stochastic patterns of presence, entitlement and power in social space.

Taken together, the works of Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault highlight an essential tension in modernity. This is the tension between the normative and the real, between what should be done and what is actually done. Understanding this tension is crucial to understanding modern democracy, what it is and what it could be. It has been argued that an effective way of making democracy stronger is to strengthen civil society. This article contains a comparative analysis of the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to the question of democracy and civil society. More specifically, the discourse ethics of Habermas is contrasted with the power analytics and ethics of Foucault evaluating their usefulness for those interested in understanding, and bringing about, democratic social change.

Rationale
The notion of stance and stancetaking has been increasingly appealed to as the motivations for patterns of language use found in discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistic variation. There is considerable interest in using the concept in all of these fields, but there remain important recurring questions such as “What is it?” “How do I find it?” and “How is it useful?” This book will attempt to move the answers to those questions forward.
Synopsis
The book is both theoretical and methodological exploration of the usefulness of the notion of stance and stancetaking for a broadly-conceived field of sociolinguistics. The first part of the book is theoretical; after a brief discussion of how I conceive of stance, I explain how it relates to and draws from other similar ideas such as footing, positioning, and other ideas. I then explicate a theory of stance more fully. In part II, I develop the ideas further by applying stance and showing how it has been, and how it can be, used to explain patterns in discourse/interaction and sociolinguistic variation.  The final section is a ‘how to’ primer for researchers who want to use stance in their analyses. Stance can be a very abstract and ‘fuzzy’ topic; the style of this book will be such that while it uses jargon as necessary, it does not presuppose an extensive background in any of the target subfields, only a basic understanding of what one would learn in an introductory sociolinguistics course.
While most my own research and examples are in English, I will provide notes on what kinds of devices and possibilities there are for other languages. I hope the book inspires researchers in other languages  to test the model presented for other languages with a view to revising it.

This article provides an analysis of the problematic of foresight in traditional Chinese thought, articulating it with current developments in the epistemology of futures studies, planning theory, and strategic management. It is argued that in Chinese thought the answer to the question " Can the future be predicted? " depends on the forecasting horizon: whereas the immediate future can be sensed and taken advantage of by immersing oneself in the evolving situation, the remote future is fundamentally unpredictable. These dual answers are entrenched in discussions of what constitutes wisdom, opening up productive spaces of encounter between the problematic of foresight and the problematic of wisdom. https://doi.org/10.6531/JFS.2018.22(3).00A35

South Korea enjoys much success with the exportation of popular media, including music, movies, and TV shows. One underlying component of this success seems to be Korea’s powerful and precise media manufacturing system. For Korean boy bands, Jung (2011) claims that constructing a “transnational” identity that relies on the production of a “manufactured versatile masculinity” allows idol boy groups to appeal transculturally to fans across borders with their flexible masculine identities. This hybrid masculinity is “multi-layered, culturally mixed, simultaneously contradictory, and most of all strategically manufactured”. Consistent with the performative nature of gender (Butler 1990), this multi-faceted masculinity is constructed through performances in different outlets such as music programs, reality TV, and game shows.

In the past, Kpop idol groups largely focused on the pretty-boy, soft-masculine image. In the last decade, though, more “tough, manly, and beast-like” groups have emerged, combining their hyper-masculine image with “soft masculinity” performances (Jung 2011). According to Jung’s analysis, each of the members in these idol groups is capable of producing a variety of masculinities individually. However, I argue that some boy bands adopt a strategy by which their group’s collective hybrid masculine image is constructed cooperatively through discourse, distributing the gender-work across its members. This effort, what I call distributed masculinity, depends on the discursive work done by all participants involved, including band members and TV hosts. By looking at the interaction that takes place in “Aegyo Contests,” a common segment on Korean variety TV, I show how each group member’s masculinity is negotiated and defined vis-à-vis requested performances of aegyo. Aegyo is a concept that is shaped largely by culturally shared ideas of cuteness in South Korea. One aspect of aegyo is a speech style that is strongly associated with women and femininity (cf. Moon under review, Abelmann 2003).

This collective expression of hybrid gender shows that gender’s performative nature allows for creative expressions of femininity and masculinity beyond that of just an individual. The process suggests how groups can express collective gender identity and how that identity is molded interactionally.

This book surveys earlier attempts to demonstrate a genetic relationship between the Basque language and various languages in the Caucasus, and analyzes their shortcomings in methods and focus, while acknowledging a residue of valid evidence, assembled over the course of more than a century. The author has added to the earlier evidence: the current book proposes more than 600 Euskaro-Caucasian etymologies. The focus is placed on the comparison of Basque with North Caucasian. (In this model, “South Caucasian” [Kartvelian] is “unrelated” to the other two families.)
The book also includes a comprehensive comparative/historical system of Euskaro-Caucasian phonology, which analyzes regular correspondences of vowels (including a postulated Euskaro-Caucasian ablaut system), vowel umlaut, unit consonants and consonant clusters, and “irregular” phonetic developments (metathesis, haplology, assimilation, dissimilation, expressive forms, contamination and blending).
There is an overall emphasis on lexicon (etymology) and phonology; morphology occupies a comparatively smaller place, though there are discussions of productive and submerged morphology (chapter V), pronouns,  (pp. 406-412), and verbs (pp. 413-443).
Finally, the book includes the proposal of a holistic anthropological scenario for the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis, in which results from genetic linguistics, archaeology, and human genetics are synthesized, concluding that a population speaking a Euskaro-Caucasian language arrived on the coast of Spain ca. 7.5 – 8 millennia ago, bearing a Neolithic culture that included cultivation and processing of grain and pulse crops, husbandry of small and large cattle and swine, and dairying practices. Recent genetic results indicate that the transmission of this language and culture to the present-day Basque Country was primarily by demic diffusion, with some secondary admixture with local hunter-gatherers. The evidence shows that the modern Basque language is not a lineal descendant of the unknown language(s) spoken by European Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, but rather the descendant of a colonial language that arrived in Iberia no more than eight thousand years ago.

In this paper, I will argue that the evolutionary puzzle of language diversity, or Why do people speak so many different languages in the world? could be better evolutionary understood if associated with group's immunity hypothesis. Although there is only this limited evidence for my hypothesis, this study suggests that historical pathogen prevalence could also play an important role promoting human language diversity in our adapted ancestor pass.