Coercing the Delta. The French Grammar of Control in the African Landscape of Colonial Louisiana, 1699-1732

The long-term transformation of the Louisiana delta beginning in 1699 has been primarily understood as a French colonial struggle for the control of nature. Yet, in order for French colonisers to control nature, they first sought to control enslaved Africans. While slave coercion was a daily problem for French inhabitants, documentation of the 'routinized violence' of chattel slavery is predictably absent in records of the built environment. As a result, the building of colonial New Orleans, beginning in 1718, has become a story of French design, not of enslaved African labour. This paper examines the accounts and correspondence of French colonisers who veiled their own dependence on indigenous, indentured and enslaved people by adopting a performative language of mastery as they projected or described labour projects essential to the 'control of nature'. What colonisers could not master in person they performed on paper via pronouns, tenses, constructions and the passive voice. The 'French' Louisiana delta is better understood as an African-built landscape reinscribed on Indigenous territory under French coercion.

The meaning(s) of practice: Puzzling through performative language practice with refugee learners

This article features an investigation into the semantics of the term ‘practice’ coexisting in a multidisciplinary research context. The background of the discussion is a government-funded study with refugees and asylum seekers in Ireland, where process drama, music and dance were used to facilitate second language learning – an approach known as performative language pedagogy. The research is framed by exploratory practice, a methodology that considers ‘practice-as-research’ and ‘understanding-for-practice’ in second language education. An investigation of the meaning(s) of the term ‘practice’ was imperative as a semantic gap existed between the use of the term ‘practice’ in exploratory practice (the research methodology underpinning the study) and the concept of ‘practice’ in performative language pedagogy (the teaching approach used in the study). This article presents findings from twelve qualitative interviews with teacher/artists and practitioners that point towards a shared understanding of practice when working with refugees in language education settings.

Skammens retorik i indvandringsdebatten

The rhetoric of shame has become predominant in the public sphere. This is especially the case in immigration debates. Here citizens express shame over the way their nation treats immigrants and refugees, or argue that others ought to be ashamed of themselves because of their treatment of foreigners. This article study the rhetorical use of shame and the reactions and counter argumentation to such appeals. I examine one month’s press coverage of the immigration debate in Denmark. Based on this I establish four forms of rhetorical shame and three forms of rhetorical reactions to the demand for shame. The four forms are: felt individual shame, ascribed individual shame, felt collective shame, and ascribed collective shame. The three forms of rhetorical reactions are: referring to established facts, counter attack on opponents tone and style, and populist accusation of elitism. My analysis suggests that the rhetorical use of shame in public debate is neither effective nor a beneficial to a good deliberative debate. My study also suggests that the use of shame as a rhetorical performative language game, may – over time – contribute to a rhetorical working through that influences our attitudes and acts in a beneficial way

The linguistic characteristics of the language of human rights and its use in reality as the kingdom of God in the light of Speech Act Theory

Human rights, a language that keeps public order, is realised in ordinary life by language characteristics according to social rules. Despite this fact, research that considers the linguistic features of human rights relating to its use and effects in terms of the kingdom of God in the present world seems to have not been attempted or seldom attempted. Thus, this article proposes to examine the language of human rights by means of Speech Act Theory. The approach is predicated upon the language use as performative acts. The approach shows the language of human rights with performative language by seeking to uncover the operation and effects of language of rights in real-life situations. The thrust of this article implies how we can explain the semantics of human rights and execute them in ordinary life in terms of God’s kingdom.

Synergetics of Verbal-Communicative Activity: the Philosophy of System Development in Diachrony

The first known model of verbal communication was proposed by Aristotle in science, but this direction began to be develop actively only in the XX century. During the study of language as a form of the realization of VC researchers have built new and refined already known models: information, code, semiotic, performative, language and others. Thus, they completed the overall picture, but they did not explain the connection of all elements of VC as a single system, which generates an endangered result, as well as they did not take into account the entire composition of elements of VC, which includes consciousness, thinking and experience (knowledge and skills). However, the amount of accumulated scientific knowledge through the isolation and location of research does not give answers to the basic questions of philosophy of language, linguistics and psychology in understanding the connection of consciousness, thinking, experience (knowledge and skills) and language (as the second signalling system). The verbal communicative activity is polydimensional and multidimensional. It means that the presentation and study of it in a linear form is not enough. The proposed review of the models known to science and the reference to the systematic analysis of the components of the VC (linguistic (language), psychological, cognitive, intellectual, psychophysical, as well as social aspects of the personality of the communicant) provides the basis for developing a synergistic model of VC as a functional system that would show an interconnected link of the functioning of consciousness, thinking, experience (knowledge and skills) and language (second signalling system).

Introduction

Mediation strategies are deployed when people use translation, interpreting, lingua francas, intercomprehension, language learning, or any combination of these to communicate in situations where there is more than one language in play. Such choices can be seen as enacting trade-offs between the goals of mobility (across geolinguistic borders) and inclusion (primarily into labor markets and government services). Mediation strategies are nevertheless selected in accordance with complex sets of criteria by which they are evaluated and compared in each particular situation. Case studies suggest that, if seen as performative language policy, the strategies tend to give more priority to social inclusion than to language diversity. They might thus constitute a challenge to some approaches to official language policy.