Suchergebnisse

The present volume is a multidisciplinary collection of research articles exploring language use, language contact and multilingualism in the history of Turku, the first town in Finland, founded around the turn of the fourteenth century. Consisting of an introduction by the editors and nine case studies in the fields of linguistics, history, archeology, and literary and cultural studies, the volume participates in a wider discussion on multilingual communities while offering a closer look into linguistic encounters in Turku and its immediate vicinity. The volume covers the period from the Middle Ages (c. 1100–1500) to the latter half of the twentieth century. The case studies illustrate the wide array of languages, linguistic varieties and registers that the inhabitants and travellers used in their daily lives, the specific contexts in which certain languages were used, and the effects of these linguistic encounters at personal, social or institutional levels.

Tradition and literature are not held back by borders. Transnationality is, for example, geographic, symbolic, or linguistic movement and action. Different kinds of cultural transitions and migrant traditions are connected with transnationality. Studying the multilingualism of literary texts or diverse cultural identities, transnationality is a prolific angle. In the 102nd Yearbook of the Kalevala Society Foundation, the topics cover for example migration and return migration, material things crossing borders, and places of music culture. At a more theoretical level we are asking how studying transnationality enriches the disciplines with roots in the national sciences.

The topic of the book is the incremental growth of linguistic knowledge from lexical to structural-cum-textual during the so-called later language development. Language mastery does not presuppose any acquaintance with prescriptive grammar but, instead, concerns the core of language which the so-called consensus principle applies to: the most frequent words and structures are mastered with certainty by everybody, but uncertainty increases as less frequent and more variable phenomena are taken into consideration. It is the goal of the study to make explicit the knowledge that is common to school children of different age groups, and to show how it develops both in its core and in its fringe areas. The mastery of less common aspects exhibits considerable statistical variation. The research embodies methodological pluralism insofar as it has been carried out by means both of the corpus method and the experimental method. Here experimental subsumes writing tasks, paper-and-pencil tests, and behavior under experimental conditions. The amount of participants native in Finnish varies from 300–2000. The book has a bipartite structure: mastery of meanings (Part I), and mastery of forms (Part II).

This collection of articles sheds light on the role of human language in interspecies interaction. The book shows that language is not necessarily what separates us from other creatures. It can also be seen as yet another dimension of human existence that is deeply rooted in our shared history and everyday life with other living beings. This volume contains six individual research articles, two short reviews, an opening introduction to the themes of the book, and an extensive, theoretical closing chapter. The studies draw on methodologies and theoretical approaches including conversation analysis and a cognitive, usage-based approach to grammatical constructions. The book further explores the interfaces of linguistics, biosemiotics, and posthumanism. The studies show how linguistic and interactional approaches can contribute to our understanding of how human and non-human animals communicate with each other during embodied activities, how human language users make sense of interspecies encounters in speaking to or about animals, and how human language is thereby impregnated by the presence of other species. The individual research articles study, e.g., interaction with co-present animals, dialectal cow calls, parliamentary speeches, narratives of nature observation, and historical laws.

Väitöstutkimus analysoi julkisia poliittisia performansseja poliittisena viestintänä. Poliittiset performanssit voidaan ymmärtää julkisissa tiloissa toimeen pantuina 'näytöksinä', joiden tavoitteena on luoda arkisiin rutiineihin yllättäviä katkoksia ja synnyttää uutta toimintatilaa jonkin yhteiskunnallisen ongelman esiin nostamiseksi. Performanssit synnyttävät katkoksia monin tavoin, mutta erityisen leimallista niille on näkyvän, vallalla olevan visuaalisen järjestyksen murtaminen tuomalla siihen erilaisia 'häiritseviä' (disruptive) elementtejä: resistoivia kehoja, valtaa parodioivia kuvia, karnevalistista protestointia, katuteatteria jne. Poliittisten performanssien viestintä perustuu puheen sijaan tai ohella toimijoiden oman kehon ja sen kantamien erilaisten visuaalisten merkkien julkiseen esittämiseen, joskus hyvin äärimmäisellä tavalla, kuten esimerkiksi nälkälakoissa ja polttoitsemurhissa. Väitöskirjassa tällaista viestintätyyliä kutsutaan visuaaliseksi ja esteettiseksi politikoinniksi. Tutkimuksessa analysoidaan useita esimerkkejä performatiivisesta poliittisesta viestinnästä ja kehitetään teoreettisia ideoita sen ominaispiirteiden tulkitsemiseksi. ; In this doctoral thesis I study a phenomenon which I have titled as public political performance. By public political performance I refer to a public event (a 'show', display, demonstration) the purpose of which is to expose in public and challenge those social-political norms, practices, and relations of power which usually remain invisible in the sway of routine political life. I am interested especially in how performance works as a form of non-linguistic, or wider than linguistic, political communication. I theorize and analyze, through several illustrative examples, performances from three perspectives: as corporeal (bodily), visual, and aesthetic communication. In construction of theory I use and partly rework ideas from thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Ranciere. The study shows that public political performance is a sensitive, even volatile phenomenon because it often manifestly exposes the fundamentally violent power structure of society – as when, for example, street demonstrations induce strong counter reactions from the police and political authorities – and puts this order under critical public scrutiny. Political authorities do not take such challenges lightly, which is why public performances sometimes instigate serious political controversies. The key theoretical ideas of the study relate to performance as something done and en/acted. On the one hand, performance discloses the nature of politics as a 'doing.' This means in simple terms that, in order to subsist, the political world needs to be done, performed, and 'iterated,' every time anew. The term performative describes this social-constructivist side of politics. That the constitution of the social and political power is based not on any 'natural' ground but on continuous re/iteration of certain ways and routines is often revealed only when it is visibly and noticeably disrupted. This is what political performance typically does. On the other hand, performance signifies a particular kind of public show which resembles but does not equal theatrical shows. Performance is theatrical in being an 'art-like' communicative act, yet it is more surprising and unpredictable compared to regular theatre and, because of this, usually more difficult to approach and interpret. Political performance as a contingent and sometimes oddly appearing public event with a surprise effect brings forth the importance of disruption for politics. It alerts us to situations where the normalized political performatives are being visibly questioned by bringing into public space – 'in your face' – diverse disrupting elements like resisting bodies, parodying images, and carnevalism. The relationship between these two, performatives and performances, creates an edgy and 'chiasmatic' political space from which much of political life gains its driving force. This basic idea and relationship constitute the key starting point for this study's theoretical reflections. Political performance is an important subject for political studies for several reasons. The purely knowledge-based reason is that that in directing attention to the corporeal and visual aspects of politics and political communication, performance brings into view phenomena and conceptual possibilities which are too often ignored by political researchers and theorists. The relevance of performance for the field can also be justified from another perspective, through reference to its political and democratic significance. The discussions and analyses carried out in the study show that there are political circumstances where citizens see public performance as the only available means of participation in political communication, with other channels of communication forbidden or marginalized. There are also situations where citizens create, through setting up a performance, space for public communication and action where it has not existed before. Political performance as a way of contesting existing political realities can therefore have special value for political freedom. Political and democratic theory needs to understand, I shall argue, also that category of political action which performs political freedom rather than asks for it.