Problèmes de linguistique générale
About: This article is published in Language.The article was published on 1968-03-01. It has received 1838 citations till now.
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TL;DR: For instance, the authors proposes a conceptual entry point for a two-way dialogue between the East and the West, which can be used as a conceptual premise upon which to bridge the divide between the Chinese and Western traditions.
Abstract: In the world today, rapid globalization has drastically shrunk the geographical distance between the East and the West and greatly facilitated exchanges between different cultures and traditions. In the comparative studies of Eastern and Western literatures and cultures, however, an opposite trend characterized by the anxiety of cultural relativism prevails. It has been aptly reduced to this claim: "[T]he East and the West are so distinctly different that ways of thinking and expression cannot be made intelligible from one to the other, and therefore the knowledge of one must be kept apart from that of the other" [Longxi Zhang xvii]. The viability of comparative studies, as is recognized, rests on the fundamental notion that two cultural objects juxtaposed for comparison should share some common ground, or that a valid frame of reference be applicable to both of them. In the comparative studies of Chinese and Western traditions, because these traditions are recognized as founded on different and often unique ontological premises and epistemological assumptions, it is difficult to locate a common conceptual entry point for a two-way dialogue, let alone a common conceptual basis undergirded by Chinese and Western philosophical thought, to establish a viable paradigm of comparison. The current absence of such a conceptual basis in the international context of globalization, which calls for dialogues between different cultures and traditions, cannot but force us to ask: is there a Chinese philosophical concept that signifies, as another Western philosophical concept does, the ontological and epistemological conditions of human existence, one that can be used as a conceptual premise upon which to build a bridge across the divide between the Chinese and Western traditions? Undaunted by the seemingly unbridgeable gap between Chinese and Western traditions, some scholars have made valiant efforts to locate a common conceptual ground. Following the lead of Qian Zhongshu, a Chinese erudite of the twentieth century, some scholars have also noted that the Dao (Tao) in Chinese philosophical thought and Logos in Western philosophical thought are remarkably comparable [Qian 408]. The compatibility of the Dao and Logos, however, has been problematized by other scholars, who argue that the differences between the Dao and Logos are more profound than their apparent similarities. James J. Y. Liu, for example, questions the universality of logocentrism as claimed by Longxi Zhang in both the Dao and Logos: "Zhang's comparison of dao to logos fails to take into account an important difference: in the West, logos is identified with God, but Lao Zi took great pains to say that dao is not the true name of the ultimate" [Liu 25]. Moreover, while in Lao Zi's conception, the Dao is a
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate the relationship between personhood and family in light of the impact that radical embodied cognition has had in anthropological theory over the past years, and argue that this kind of interrupted seriality amounts to a narrative strategy of triangulation that fosters the creative imagining of familial persons.
Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between personhood and family in light of the impact that radical embodied cognition has had in anthropological theory over the past years. The paper is based on a study of onomastic seriality among siblings and cohabiting cousins in Brazil, where it became clear that interruption of the series is more common than full compliance. Since name attribution is a central aspect of launching early personal ontogeny, the paper argues that this kind of interrupted seriality amounts to a narrative strategy of triangulation that fosters the creative imagining of familial persons. The paper attempts to deepen our understanding of the modes of operation of personhood by diverging from the established representationist theories of cognition that remain dominant in anthropological circles.
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Abstract: Mais je n'ai jamais ressemble a cela! --Comment le savez-vous? Qu'est-ce que ce "vous" auquel vous ressembleriez ou ne ressembleriez pas? Ou le prendre? A quel etalon morphologique ou expressif? Ou est votre corps de verite? Vous etes le seul a ne pouvoir jamais vous voir qu'en image, vous ne voyez jamais vos yeux, sinon abetis par le regard qu'ils posent sur le miroir ou sur l'objectif (il m'interesserait seulement de voir mes yeux quand ils te regardent): meme et surtout pour votre corps, vous etes condamne a l'imaginaire. Roland Barthes. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes I Roland Barthes's self-questioning comment to a younger picture of himself seems to be an appropriate epigraph in the present study, the intention of which is to investigate the ways the subject views itself as a bodily instance. As Barthes suggests, this image does not necessarily correspond to a recognizable self. On the contrary, his questioning of identifying oneself with a given representation of one's own body gives rise to a series of highly interesting--and, indeed, creative--results. The object of my study will be to explore the narrative dynamics that allow the writing subject to obviate the impossibility of representing itself as a corps de verite. This will be the magnifying glass through which to look at Violette Leduc's autobiographical oeuvre, where the failure of self-recognition engenders a series of highly ingenious moves. Moreover, autobiography, with its interest in self-representation and its ongoing search for the subject's coincidence with language, appears to be the privileged domain in which the translation of the subject's body into words takes place. The figure of Violette Leduc (1906-1972) remains at the margins of Existentialism, and her writing is constantly haunted by issues revolving around the body. In her times, Leduc's focus on an unveiled and unconventional representation of the body and of sexuality contributed to a misinterpretation of the scopes of her writing and to a precarious though strong public success. Through this study of La Folie en tete (1970), the second of the three volumes of autobiography (1) written by Leduc, I intend to show how rich in theoretical complexity and narrative craftsmanship Leduc's depiction of the body is. The textual analysis of her work will illustrate how revealing her achievements are for a better understanding of the creative potential resulting from the writer's apprehension of the limits of language in representing herself. In recent theory, the body has been seen as taking part in the constitutive process of the subject in its own right, and as acting in conjunction with other processes of subjectivity-building such as language. In the Cartesian legacy of Western thought, language and the body have been viewed as separate entities pertaining the former to the domain of discursivity and the latter to the domain of corporeality. In opposition to this view, recent notions of the body have forwarded an idea of subjectivity where the traditional predominance of the mind over the body is challenged. As a result, the ontological roots of the belief in the binary constitution of the subject have been undermined. (2) My analysis is founded on a notion of the subject as the unfinished outcome of interactive processes between interior and exterior that constantly displace its position as well as its definition. According to this view, the body is not to be seen as a pure, natural corporeal entity, nor is it to be viewed as the effectual product of a social, historical, and cultural context. Interior and exterior are not conceived as fixed and unchangeable entities, but as participating elements in processes of making meaning through their very interaction, interdependence and interchangeability. It is also important to premise that any attempt to find an origin in such processes, or a starting point, or to establish a cause-effect relationship between what has usually been viewed as a distinctly two-term postulate is doomed to failure. …
4 citations
TL;DR: The authors provide an overview and a reassessment of outstanding contrasts between English and French in lexical morphology: the productivity of compounding and conversion in English; the existence of and the constraints on conversion in French; the place of Romance and neo-classical compounds; the development of N+N compounds in contemporary French; and they show that basic morpho-syntactic differences are ultimately responsible for some of the semantic and stylistic effects observed in translation studies, with special attention to the link between compounds and metonymy.
Abstract: Starting from the observation that word-formation has received renewed attention in linguistics but remains marginal in the field of contrastive linguistics, the aim of this article is twofold: (a) to provide an overview and a reassessment of outstanding contrasts between English and French in lexical morphology: the productivity of compounding and conversion in English; the existence of and the constraints on conversion in French; the place of Romance and neo-classical compounds; the development of N+N compounds in contemporary French; (b) to show that basic morpho-syntactic differences in lexical structure are ultimately responsible for some of the semantic and stylistic effects observed in translation studies, with special attention to the link between compounds and metonymy in English and their translatability into French.
4 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the semantic and pragmatic values of different uses of creo in colloquial conversations are explored to determine what triggers attenuation, and the results suggest that the attenuating function of creO is a consequence of pretending strategies used by the speaker.
Abstract: The article analyses the development of attenuation functions in different uses of creo in colloquial conversations. This propositional attitude verb, the most polysemic and polyfunctional one in its category, has been traditionally considered an attenuating device because it can be used by speakers to convey distancing from their message. However, the fact that it is a subjectifier in its first person form could be understood as a contradiction with its function being primarily attenuating. This paper explores the semantic and pragmatic values of the different uses of creo in order to determine what triggers attenuation. 215 examples from two conversational corpora, VAL.ES.CO. 2002 and VAL.ES.CO. 2.0, have been analysed. The results suggest that the attenuating function of creo is a consequence of pretending strategies used by the speaker.
4 citations