Orienting the reader

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-92
Author(s):  
Marla Perkins

This study examines strategies that authors can use in texts to keep readers active and accurate participants in the literary conversation and sets forth a taxonomy of those strategies: initiating the literary conversation, anticipating, preventing and correcting possible misunderstandings, and keeping readers engaged as interlocutors. A case study on Burmese Days, by George Orwell, reveals a pattern of interactions between stated information and assumed knowledge. Orwell’s strategies indicate that he assumes that readers are competent, participatory readers (literary conversants), and he uses that assumption to convey locational information. Among these strategies are the following main categories: emphasizing closed-class semantics over open-class implicatures; providing more detail about more important information and less detail about less important information; reviewing the most important information from multiple perspectives; and perhaps most importantly, leaving some information for readers to infer. All of Orwell’s strategies assume the best about readers’ knowledge and willingness to participate and leave room for a pragmatically productive give-and-take that closely resembles conversation.

Author(s):  
Mari C. Jones

Although, as Winford (2003) states, ‘There are in principle no limits […] to what speakers of different languages will adopt and adapt from one another’, it is generally accepted that open class items such as nouns and verbs are more easily borrowed than closed class items, such as pronouns, which are generally considered to be embedded at a ‘deeper’ level of the linguistic system. This chapter presents a case study of four different varieties of Gallo-Romance spoken in Mainland and Insular Normandy, which are in contact with two different superstrates, respectively French and English. It explores whether contact with its typologically different superstrates is causing change within the pronominal systems of Mainland and Insular Norman. Specifically, it examines whether we find ‘pronoun sharing’ (where borrowed surface forms are integrated ‘wholesale’ into the Norman utterance) or ‘pronoun sparing’ (where, despite the intensive contact, the pronouns of Norman remain ‘intact’).


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-498
Author(s):  
Reski Ramadhani ◽  
Lia Maulia Indrayani ◽  
Ypsi Soeria Soemantri

This research is intended to discuss the illocutionary acts used in a speech mainly assertive. The writer attempts to analyze the categories of assertive illocutionary act occurs in the utterances of Donald Trump’s political speech in last America’s general election. This is a case study that employed a qualitative method with a descriptive approach. The writer uses Ancont software to classify the data. The function of this software is to observe the frequent words occur in the data. Then, it shows that the total number of words that occurred in Donald Trump’s speech is 3046 words. Through those numbers, there are 901 types of words. However, the data used is only the open classes instead of the closed class words or grammatical category. After reducing the data, the five frequent words which are categorized as an open class appeared are ‘job’, ‘is’, ‘new’, ‘American’, and ‘are’. In this case, the data are analyzed based on the frequents words and the writer also reduces the data which are not categorized as assertive illocutionary acts. From the data analysis, it reveals that the categories of assertive illocutionary acts mostly appeared in Donald Trump’s political speech are a statement of fact and assertion. Then, the dominant category used in the speech is a statement of fact containing a convincing. It can be concluded that most of the utterances used by Donald Trump are, besides attempting to represent himself, to convince the citizens supported by some facts about the issue that he believes to be the case in order to establish a positive perspective toward his arguments.   


Author(s):  
Catarina LELIS

The brand is a powerful representational and identification-led asset that can be used to engage staff in creative, sustainable and developmental activities. Being a brand the result of, foremost, a design exercise, it is fair to suppose that it can be a relevant resource for the advancement of design literacy within organisational contexts. The main objective of this paper was to test and validate an interaction structure for an informed co-design process on visual brand artefacts. To carry on the empirical study, a university was chosen as case study as these contexts are generally rich in employee diversity. A non-functional prototype was designed, and walkthroughs were performed in five focus groups held with staff. The latter evidenced a need/wish to engage with basic design principles and high willingness to participate in the creation of brand design artefacts, mostly with the purposeof increasing its consistent use and innovate in its representation possibilities, whilst augmenting the brand’s socially responsible values.


1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shoji Azuma ◽  
Richard P. Meier

ABSTRACTOne of the most striking facts about exchange errors in speech is that open class items are exchanged, but closed class items are not. This article argues that a pattern analogous to that in speech errors also appears in intrasentential code-switching. Intrasentential code-switching is the alternating use of two languages in a sentence by bilinguals. Studies of the spontaneous conversation of bilinguals have supported the claim that open class items may be codeswitched, but closed class items may not. This claim was tested by two sentence repetition experiments, one with Japanese/English bilinguals and the other with Spanish/English bilinguals. The results show that the switching of closed class items caused significantly longer response times and more errors than the switching of open class items.


2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 301-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Fortoul Obermöller

The Case Study section of the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation serves two purposes. First, the case studies presented are concerned with problematical issues that are pertinent to students of entrepreneurship. Thus they constitute appropriate teaching and learning vehicles on a variety of postgraduate and undergraduate programmes. Each case study is accompanied by a set of guidelines for the use of tutors. Second, it is envisaged that those engaged in entrepreneurial activities will find the cases both interesting and useful. The case of PSA Peugeot Citroën's electric passenger car is an example of an innovation perceived as a failure because of its disappointing sales volume. Yet, by limiting our assessment of the electric passenger car to a short-term perspective, we may miss out on an essential part of its value. As part of a wider innovation process, the electric passenger car project is a significant step for PSA in its expertise regarding electric vehicles. Key learning outcomes: (a) to understand that innovation is a complex process with fuzzy frontiers, both in time and space; (b) to understand that innovation is a long-term investment with spillovers into other projects; (c) to be aware of the multiple perspectives that may be adopted when examining innovation; and (d) to be aware of the impact of labelling a project a failure.


2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 515-536
Author(s):  
MATTHEW BABCOCK

This essay explores the interdisciplinary origins and historiography of early North American scholars approaching territoriality – political control of territory – from an indigenous perspective in their works. Using the Ndé (Apaches) as a case study, it reveals how adopting an interdisciplinary approach that addresses territoriality from multiple perspectives can further our understanding of cultural contestation across the continent and hemisphere by highlighting the ways indigenous peoples negotiated, resisted, and adapted to European conquest.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Getz

Natural languages contain complex grammatical patterns. For example, in German, finite verbs occur second in main clauses while non-finite verbs occur last, as in 'dein Bruder möchte in den Zoo gehen' (“Your brother wants to go to the zoo”). Children easily acquire this type of morphosyntactic contingency (Poeppel & Wexler, 1993; Deprez & Pierce, 1994). There is extensive debate in the literature over the nature of children’s linguistic representations, but there are considerably fewer mechanistic ideas about how knowledge is actually acquired. Regarding German, one approach might be to learn the position of prosodically prominent open-class words (“verbs go 2nd or last”) and then fill in the morphological details. Alternatively, one could work in the opposite direction, learning the position of closed-class morphemes (“-te goes 2nd and -en goes last”) and fitting open-class items into the resulting structure. This second approach is counter-intuitive, but I will argue that it is the one learners take.Previous research suggests that learners focus distributional analysis on closed-class items because of their distinctive perceptual properties (Braine, 1963; Morgan, Meier, & Newport, 1987; Shi, Werker & Morgan, 1999; Valian & Coulson, 1988). The Anchoring Hypothesis (Valian & Coulson, 1988) posits that, because these items tend to occur at grammatically important points in the sentence (e.g., phrase edges), focusing on them helps learners acquire grammatical structure. Here I ask how learners use closed-class items to acquire complex morphosyntactic patterns such as the verb form/position contingency in German. Experiments 1-4 refute concerns that morphosyntactic contingencies like those in German are too complex to learn distributionally. Experiments 5-8 explore the mechanisms underlying learning, showing that adults and children analyze closed-class items as predictive of the presence and position of open-class items, but not the reverse. In these experiments, subtle mathematical distinctions in learners’ input had significant effects on learning, illuminating the biased computations underlying anchored distributional analysis. Taken together, results suggest that learners organize knowledge of language patterns relative to a small set of closed-class items—just as patterns are represented in modern syntactic theory (Rizzi & Cinque, 2016).


2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 814-825 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Weber-Fox

The role of neurolinguistic factors in stuttering was investigated by determining whether individuals who stutter display atypical neural functions for language processing, even with no speech production demands. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were obtained while 9 individuals who stutter (IWS) and 9 normally fluent speakers (NS) read sentences silently. The ERPs were elicited by: (a) closed-class words that provide structural or grammatical information, (b) open-class words that convey referential meaning, and (c) semantic anomalies (violations in semantic expectation). In standardized tests, adult IWS displayed similar grammatical and lexical abilities in both comprehension and production tasks compared to their matched, normally fluent peers. Yet the ERPs elicited in IWS for linguistic processing tasks revealed differences in functional brain organization. The ERPs elicited in IWS were characterized by reduced negative amplitudes for closed-class words (N280), open-class words (N350), and semantic anomalies (N400) in a temporal window of approximately 200–450 ms after word onsets. The overall pattern of results indicates that alterations in processing for IWS are related to neural functions that are common to word classes and perhaps involve shared, underlying processes for lexical access.


Author(s):  
Katia González ◽  
Rhoda Frumkin ◽  
John Montgomery

In this chapter, the authors discuss ways in which pedagogical considerations involved in using a theoretical framework for self-inquiry and socially constructed knowledge led to the selection and implementation of mapping as a tool to (1) activate prior knowledge and scaffold content and process for pre-service educators working with students and families who are at risk and (2) assist adult learners in organizing multiple perspectives during small and large group discussion, while developing critical thinking and shared leadership skills through meaningful connections and action. A case study on how the utilization of a multidisciplinary approach informed the type of curriculum decisions to engage learners is provided. The case study also illustrates when and why instructional techniques and strategies were introduced and embedded to encourage both interactions and discussions focusing on modeling the ongoing use of skills for critical thinking and how each mapping strategy/tool served as a formative and summative assessment plan to improve verbal and written communication.


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