A cross-linguistic study of lexical iconicity and its manifestation in bird names

Abstract This dissertation is a cross-linguistic study of lexical iconicity. The study is based on a genealogically stratified sample of 237 languages. The aim is to contribute with an empirical study to the growing dialogue focusing on different forms of lexical iconicity. The conceptual framework of the present study is based on an analysis of types and means of lexical iconicity in the sample languages. Archaeological and cultural evidence are used to tie lexical iconicity to its context. Phenomena related to lexical iconicity are studied both cross-linguistically and language-specifically. The cognitive difference between imitation and symbolism is essential. Lexical iconicity is not only about the iconic relationship between form and referents, but also about how certain iconic properties may become conventional, means used to create sound symbolism. All the sample languages show some evidence of lexical iconicity, demonstrating that it is a universal feature. Nine comparisons of onomatopoeic verbs and nouns, with samples varying between six and 141 languages, show that typologically highly different languages use similar means for creating words based on sound imitation. Two cross-linguistic comparisons of bird names demonstrate that a vast majority of the Eurasian names of the common cuckoo and the world-wide names of crow and raven of the 141 genera are onomatopoeic.

Èvoljucija sistemy glasnyh fonem v nekotoryh russkih govorah Vologodskoj oblasti

The present dissertation analyses 36 local vernaculars of villages surrounding the northern Russian city of Vologda in relation to the system of the vowels in the stressed syllables and those preceding the stressed syllables by using the available dialectological researches. The system in question differs from the corresponding standard Russian system by that the palatalisation of the surrounding consonants affects the vowels much more significantly in the vernaculars, whereas the phonetic difference between the stressed and non-stressed vowels is less obvious in them. The detailed information on the local vernaculars is retrieved from the Dialektologičeskij Atlas Russkogo Jazyka dialect atlas, the data for which were collected, for the most part, in the 1940 s and 1950 s. The theoretical framework of the research consists of a brief cross-section of western sociolinguistic theory related to language change and that of historical linguistics related to the Slavonic vowel development, which includes some new theories concerning the development of the Russian vowel phonemes. The author has collected dialect data in one of the 36 villages and three villages surrounding it. During the fieldwork, speech of nine elderly persons and ten school children was recorded. The speech data were then transcribed with coded information on the corresponding etymological vowels, the phonetic position, and the factual pronunciation at each appearance of vowels in the phonetic positions named above. The data from both of the dialect strata were then systematised to two corresponding systems that were compared with the information retrievable from the dialect atlas and other dialectological literature on the vowel phoneme system of the traditional local vernacular. As a result, it was found out (as hypothesised) that the vernacular vowel phoneme system has approached that of the standard language but has nonetheless not become similar to it. The phoneme quantity of the traditional vernacular is by one greater than that of the standard language, whereas the vowel phoneme quantity in the speech of the school children coincides with that in the standard language, although the phonetic realisations differ to some extent. The analysis of the speech of the elderly people resulted in that it is quite difficult to define the exact phoneme quantity of this stratum due to the fluctuation and irregularities in the realisation of the old phoneme that has ceased to exist in the newest stratum. It was noticed that the effect of the quality of the surrounding consonants on the phonetic realisation of the vowel phonemes has diminished, and the dependence of the phonetic realisation of a vowel phoneme on its place in a word in relation to the word stress has become more and more obvious, which is the state of affairs in the standard language as well.

Mauwake reference grammar

This dissertation provides a synchronic grammatical description of Mauwake, a Papuan (Trans-New Guinea) language of about 2000 speakers on the North Coast of the Madang Province in Papua New Guinea. The theoretical background is that of Basic Linguistic Theory (BLT), used extensively in analysing and writing descriptive grammars. The chapters from morphology to clause level are described from form to function; in the later chapters the function is taken more often as the starting point. Any theory-specific terminology is kept to the minimum and formalisms have been avoided in accordance with BLT principles. Mauwake has a classic 5-vowel system and 14 consonant phonemes. With its simple phonology it is a typical representative of the Madang North Coast languages. For a Papuan language there are relatively few morphophonological alternations. Nouns are either alienably or inalienably possessed. There is no obligatory number marking in nouns or noun phrases. Pronouns have several different forms: five for case and three for other functions. The dative pronouns are treated as [+human] locatives, and they have also grammaticalised as possessives. The verbal morphology is agglutinative and mainly suffixal. Unusual features include two distributive suffixes, and the interaction of the derivational benefactive and the inflectional beneficiary suffixes. The applicative suffix has either transitivising or causative but not benefactive function. The switch-reference system distinguishes between simultaneous and sequential action, as well as same or different subject in relation to the following clause. There are several verbs denoting coming and going, and they may combine with one of three prefixes to indicate bringing and taking. Mauwake is a nominative-accusative type language, and the basic constituent order in a clause is SOV. Subject and object are the only syntactic arguments. There is no indirect object, but a clause can have two or even three objects. A nominalised clause with a finite verb functions as a relative clause or a complement clause; one with a nominalised verb has several different functions. Functional domains described include modality, negation, deixis, quantification, possession and comparison. As there are four negators, Mauwake has more variation in negative expressions than is usual in Papuan languages. Clause chaining is the preferred strategy for joining clauses into sentences, but coordination and subordination of finite clauses are also common. The form of a complement clause depends on whether it is of the fact, action or potential type. Tail-head linkage is used as a cohesive device between sentences. The discourse-level features described are topic and focus.

"Four Ways of Writing the City" : St. Petersburg-Leningrad as a Metaphor in the Poetry of Joseph Brodsky

The present study discusses the theme of St. Petersburg-Leningrad in Joseph Brodsky's verse works. The chosen approach to the evolving im-age of the city in Brodsky's poetry is through four metaphors: St. Petersburg as "the common place" of the Petersburg Text, St. Petersburg as "Paradise and/or Hell", St. Petersburg as "a Utopian City" and St. Petersburg as "a Void". This examination of the city-image focusses on the aspects of space and time as basic categories underlying the poet's poetic world view. The method used is close reading, with an emphasis on semantical interpretation. The material consists of eighteen poems dating from 1958 to 1994. Apart from investigating the spatio-temporal features, the study focusses on exposing and analysing the allusions in the scrutinised works to other texts from Russian and Western belles lettres. Terminology (introduced by Bakhtin and Yury Lotman, among others) concerning the poetics of space in literature is employed in the present study. Conceptions originating from the paradigm of possible worlds are also used in elucidating the position of fictional and actual chronotopes and heroes in Brodsky's poetry. Brodsky's image of his native city is imbued with intertextual linkings. Through reminiscences of the "Divine Comedy" and Russian modernists, the city is paralleled with Dante's "lost and accursed" Florence, as well as with the lost St. Petersburg of Mandel'shtam and Akhmatova. His city-image is related to the Petersburg myth in Russian literature through their common themes of death and separation as well as through the merging of actual realia with the fictional worlds of the Petersburg Text. In his later poems, when his view of the city is that of an exiled poet, the city begins to lose its actual world referents, turning into a mental realm which is no longer connected to any particular geographical location or historical time. It is placed outside time. The native city as the homeland in its entirety is replaced by another existence created in language.

Turning the Kaleidoscope - (E)FL Educational Experience and Inquiry as Auto/biography

This book is a study on learning, teaching/counselling, and research on the two. My quest has been to find a pedagogically-motivated way of researching learning and teaching interaction, and in particular counselling, in an autonomous language-learning environment. I have tried to develop a method that would make room for lived experience, meaning-making and narrating, because in my view these all characterise learning encounters between language learners and counsellors, and learners and their peers. Lived experience as a source of meaning, telling and co-telling becomes especially significant when we try to listen to the diverse personal and academic voices of the past as expressed in autobiographical narratives. I have aimed at researching various ALMS dialogues (Autonomous Learning Modules, University of Helsinki Language Centre English course and programme), and autobiographical narratives within them, in a way that shows respect for the participants, and that is relevant, reflective and, most importantly, self-reflexive. My interest has been in autobiographical telling in (E)FL [(English as a) foreign language], both in students first-person written texts on their language- learning histories and in the sharing of stories between learners and a counsellor. I have turned to narrative inquiry in my quest and have written the thesis as an experiential narrative. In particular, I have studied learners and counsellors in one and the same story, as characters in one narrative, in an attempt to avoid the impression that I am telling yet another separate, anecdotal story, retrospectively. Through narrative, I have shed light on the subjective dimensions of language learning and experience, and have come closer to understanding the emotional aspects of learning encounters. I have questioned and rejected a distanced and objective approach to describing learning and teaching/counselling. I have argued for a holistic and experiential approach to (E)FL encounters in which there is a need to see emotion and cognition as intertwined, and thus to appreciate learners and counsellors emotionally-charged experiences as integral to their identities. I have also argued for a way of describing such encounters as they are situated in history, time, autobiography, and the learning context. I have turned my gaze on various constellations of lived experience: the data was collected on various occasions and in various settings during one course and consists of videotaped group sessions, individual counselling sessions between students and their group counsellor, biographic narrative interviews with myself, open-ended personally-inspired reflection texts written by the students about their language-learning histories, and student logs and diaries. I do not consider data collection an unproblematic occasion, or innocent practice, and I defend the integrity of the research process. Research writing cannot be separated from narrative field work and analysing and interpreting the data. The foci in my work have turned to be the following: 1) describing ALMS encounters and specifying their narrative aspects; 2) reconceptualising learner and teacher autonomy in ALMS and in (E)FL; 2) developing (E)FL methodologically through a teacher-researcher s identity work; 4) research writing as a dialogical narrative process, and the thesis as an experiential narrative. Identity and writing as inquiry, and the deeply narrative and autobiographical nature of the (E)FL teaching/counselling/researching have come to the fore in this research. Research writing as a relational activity and its implications for situated ways of knowing and knowledge turned out to be important foci. I have also focussed on the context-bound and local teacher knowledge and ways of knowing about being a teacher, and I have argued for personal ways of knowing about, and learning and studying foreign languages. I discuss research as auto/biography: as a practising counsellor I use my own life and (E)FL experience to understand and interpret the stories of the research participants even though I was not involved in their course work. The supposedly static binaries of learner/teacher, and also learner autonomy/teacher autonomy, are thus brought into the discussion. I have highlighted the infinite variability and ever-changing nature of learning and teaching English, but the book is also of relevance to foreign language education in general.

Merenkulun turvallisuuden koetinkiviä : Terminologisen tiedon poiminta teksteistä

The methodology of extracting information from texts has widely been described in the current literature. However, the methodology has been developed mainly for the purposes of other fields than terminology science. In addition, the research has been English language oriented. Therefore, there are no satisfactory language-independent methods for extracting terminological information from texts. The aim of the present study is to form the basis for a further improvement of methods for extraction of terminological information. A further aim is to determine differences in term extraction between subject groups with or without knowledge of the special field in question. The study is based on the theory of terminology, and has mainly a qualitative approach. The research material consists of electronically readable specialized texts in the subject domain of maritime safety. Textbooks, conference papers, research reports and articles from professional journals in Finnish and in Russian are included. The thesis first deals with certain term extraction methods. These are manual term identification and semi-automatic term extraction, the latter of which was carried out by using three commercial computer programs. The results of term extraction were compared and the recall and precision of the methods were evaluated. The latter part of the study is dedicated to the identification of concept relations. Certain linguistic expressions, which some researchers call knowledge probes, were applied to identify concept relations. The results of the present thesis suggest that special field knowledge is an advantage in manual term identification. However, in the candidate term lists the variation between subject groups was not as remarkable as it was between individual subjects. The term extraction software tested here produces candidate term lists which can be useful, but only after some manual work. Therefore, the work emphasizes the need to further develop term extraction software. Furthermore, the analyses indicate that there are a certain number of terms which were extracted by all the subjects and the software. These terms we call core terms. As the result of the experiment on linguistic expressions which signal concept relations, a proposal of Finnish and Russian knowledge probes in the field of maritime safety was made. The main finding was that it would be useful to combine the use of knowledge probes with semi-automatic term extraction since knowledge probes usually occur in the vicinity of terms.

Between Herbals et alia: Intertextuality in Medieval English Herbals

This study reports a corpus-based study of medieval English herbals, which are texts conveying information on medicinal plants. Herbals belong to the medieval medical register. The study charts intertextual parallels within the medieval genre, and between herbals and other contemporary medical texts. It seeks to answer questions where and how herbal texts are linked to each other, and to other medical writing. The theoretical framework of the study draws on intertextuality and genre studies, manuscript studies, corpus linguistics, and multi-dimensional text analysis. The method combines qualitative and quantitative analyses of textual material from three historical special-language corpora of Middle and Early Modern English, one of which was compiled for the purposes of this study. The text material contains over 800,000 words of medical texts. The time span of the material is from c. 1330 to 1550. Text material is retrieved from the corpora by using plant name lists as search criteria. The raw data is filtered through qualitative analysis which produces input for the quantitative analysis, multi-dimensional scaling (MDS). In MDS, the textual space that parallel text passages form is observed, and the observations are explained by a qualitative analysis. This study concentrates on evidence of material and structural intertextuality. The analysis shows patterns of affinity between the texts of the herbal genre, and between herbals and other texts in the medical register. Herbals are most closely linked with recipe collections and regimens of health: they comprise over 95 per cent of the intertextual links between herbals and other medical writing. Links to surgical texts, or to specialised medical texts are very few. This can be explained by the history of the herbal genre: as herbals carry information on medical ingredients, herbs, they are relevant for genres that are related to pharmacological therapy. Conversely, herbals draw material from recipe collections in order to illustrate the medicinal properties of the herbs they describe. The study points out the close relationship between medical recipes and recipe-like passages in herbals (recipe paraphrases). The examples of recipe paraphrases show that they may have been perceived as indirect instruction. Keywords: medieval herbals, early English medicine, corpus linguistics, intertextuality, manuscript studies

A Sketch of the Phonology and Grammar of Rajbanshi

This dissertation is a synchronic description of the phonology and grammar of two dialects of the Rajbanshi language (Eastern Indo-Aryan) as spoken in Jhapa, Nepal. I have primarily confined the analysis to the oral expression, since the emerging literary form is still in its infancy. The grammatical analysis is therefore based, for the most part, on a corpus of oral narrative text which was recorded and transcribed from three informants from north-east Jhapa. An informant, speaking a dialect from south-west Jhapa cross checked this text corpus and provided additional elicited material. I have described the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language, and also one aspect of its discourse structure. For the most part the phonology follows the basic Indo-Aryan pattern. Derivational morphology, compounding, reduplication, echo formation and onomatopoeic constructions are considered, as well as number, noun classes (their assignment and grammatical function), pronouns, and case and postpositions. In verbal morphology I cover causative stems, the copula, primary and secondary agreement, tense, aspect, mood, auxiliary constructions and non-finite forms. The term secondary agreement here refers to genitive agreement, dative-subject agreement and patient (and sometimes patient-agent) agreement. The breaking of default agreement rules has a range of pragmatic inferences. I argue that a distinction, based on formal, semantic and statistical grounds, should be made between conjunct verbs, derivational compound verbs and quasi-aspectual compound verbs. Rajbanshi has an open set of adjectives, and it additionally makes use of a restricted set of nouns which can function as adjectives. Various particles, and the emphatic and conjunctive clitics are also considered. The syntactic structures studied include: non-declarative speech acts, phrase-internal and clause-internal constituent order, negation, subordination, coordination and valence adjustment. I explain how the future, present and past tenses in Rajbanshi oral narratives do not seem to maintain a time reference, but rather to indicate a distinction between background and foreground information. I call this tense neutralisation .

Englanniksiko maailmanmaineeseen? : Suomalaisen proosakaunokirjallisuuden kääntäminen englanniksi Isossa-Britanniassa vuosina 1945 2003

This doctoral thesis focuses on the translation of Finnish prose literature into English in the United Kingdom between 1945 and 2003. The subject is approached using translation archaeology, interviews, archival material, detailed text analysis and reception material. The main theoretical framework is Descriptive Translation Studies, and certain sociological theories (Bourdieu s field theory, actor-network theory) are also used. After charting the published translations, two periods of time are selected for closer analysis: an earlier period from 1955 to 1959, involving eight translations, and a later one from 1990 to 2003, with a total of six translations. While these translation numbers may appear low, they are actually rather high in proportion to the total number of 28 one-author literary prose translations published in the UK over the approximately 60 years being studied. The two periods of time, the 1950s and 1990s, are compared in terms of the sociological context of translation activity, the reception of translations and their textual features. The comparisons show that the main changes in translation practice between these two periods are increased completeness (translations in the 1950s group often being shortened by hundreds of pages) and lesser use of indirect translation via an intermediary language (about half of the 1950s translations having been translated via Swedish). Otherwise, translation practices have not changed much: except for large omissions, which are far more frequent in the 1950s, variation within each group is larger than between groups. As to the sociological context, the main changes are an increase in long-term institution-level contacts and an increase in the promotion of foreign translation rights by Finnish publishing houses. This is in contrast to the 1950s when translation rights were mainly sold through personal contacts by individual authors and translators. The reception of translations is difficult to study because of scarce material. However, the 1950s translations were aggressively marketed and therefore obtained far more reviews and reprints than the 1990s translations. Several of the 1950s books, mostly historical novels by Mika Waltari, were mainstream bestsellers at the time, while current translations are frequently made for niche markets. The thesis introduces ample new material on the translation of Finnish prose literature into English in the UK. The results are also relevant to translation from a minority literature into a majority one. As to translation theory, they lead us to question the social nature of translation norms and the assumption of a static target culture. The translations analysed here are located in a very fragmented interculture and gain a stronger position in the Finnish culture than in the British one.

Non-finite constructions in Old English : with special reference to syntactic borrowing from Latin

My dissertation is a corpus-based study of non-finite constructions in Old English (OE). It revisits the question of Latin influence on the OE syntax, offering a new evaluation of syntactic interference between Latin and OE, and, more generally, of the contact situation in the OE period, drawing on methods used in studying grammaticalization and language contact. I address three non-finite constructions: absolute participial construction, accusative-and-infinitive construction, and nominative-and-infinitive construction, exemplified respectively in present-day English as - She looked like a pixie sometimes, her eyes darting here and there, forever watchful (BNC CCM 98); - My first acquaintance with her was when I heard her sing (BNC CFY 2215); - Charles the Bald was said to resemble his grandfather physically (BNC HPT 175). This study compares data from translated texts against the background of original OE writings, establishing dependencies and differences between the two. Although the contrastive analysis of source and target texts is one of the major methods employed in the study, translation and translation strategies as such are only my secondary foci. The emphasis is rather on what source/target comparison can tell us about the OE non-finite syntax and the typological differences between Latin and OE in this domain, and on whether contact-induced change can originate in translation. In terms of theoretical framework, I have adopted functional-typological approach, which rests on the principles of iconicity and event integration, and to the best of my knowledge, has not been applied systematically to OE non-finite constructions. Therefore one more aim of the dissertation is to test this framework and to see how OE fits into the cross-linguistic picture of non-finites. My research corpus consists of two samples: 1) written OE closely dependent on the Latin originals, based on editions of two gloss texts, five translations, and Latin originals of these texts, representing four text types: hymns, religious regulations, homily/life narrative, and biblical narrative (180,622 words); and 2) written OE as far independent from Latin as possible, based on a selection from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE) and representing five text types: laws, charters, correspondence, chronicle narrative, and homily/life narrative (274,757 words).

Análisis de la preposición hacia y establecimiento de sus equivalentes en finés

Title of the Master's thesis: Análisis de la preposición hacia y establecimiento de sus equivalentes en finés (trans. Analysis of the Spanish preposition hacia and the finding of its equivalents in Finnish) Abstracts: The aim of this Master thesis is to provide a detailed analysis of the Spanish preposition hacia from a cognitive perspective and to establish its equivalents in Finnish language. In this sense, my purpose is to demonstrate the suitability of both cognitive perspectives and Contrastive Linguistics for semantic analysis. This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter includes a presentation and a critical review of the monolingual lexical processing and semantic analysis of the Spanish preposition hacia in major reference works. Through this chapter it is possible to see both the inadequacies and omissions that are present in all the given definitions. In this sense, this chapter shows that these problems are not but the upper stage of an ontological (and therefore methodological) problem in the treatment of prepositions. The second chapter covers the presentation of the methodological and theoretical perspective adopted for this thesis for the monolingual analysis and definition of the Spanish preposition hacia, following mainly the guidelines established by G. Lakoff (1987) and R. Langacker (2008) in his Cognitive grammar. Taken together, and within the same paradigm, recent analytical and methodological contributions are discussed critically for the treatment of polysemy in language (cf. Tyler ja Evans 2003). In the third chapter, and in accordance with the requirements regarding the use of empirical data from corpora, is my aim to set out a monolingual original analysis of the Spanish preposition hacia in observance of the principles and the methodology spelled out in the second chapter. The main objective of this chapter is to build a full fledged semantic representation of the polysemy of this preposition in order to understand and articulate its meanings with Finnish language (and other possible languages). The fourth chapter, in accordance with the results of chapter 3, examines and describes and establishes the corresponding equivalents in Finnish for this preposition. The results obtained in this chapter are also contrasted with the current bilingual lexicographical definitions found in the most important dictionaries and grammars. Finally, in the fifth chapter of this thesis, the results of this work are discussed critically. In this way, some observations are given regarding both the ontological and theoretical assumptions as well regarding the methodological perspective adopted. I also present some notes for the construction of a general methodology for the semantic analysis of Spanish prepositions to be carried out in further investigations. El objetivo de este trabajo, que caracterizamos como una tarea de carácter comparativo-analítico, es brindar un análisis detallado de la preposición castellana hacia desde una perspectiva cognitiva en tanto y a través del establecimiento de sus equivalentes en finés. Se procura, de esta forma, demostrar la adecuación de una perspectiva cognitiva tanto para el examen como para el establecimiento y articulación de la serie de equivalentes que una partícula, en nuestro caso una preposición, encuentra en otra lengua. De esta forma, y frente a definiciones canónicas que advierten sobre la imposibilidad de una caracterización acabada del conjunto de usos de una preposición, se observa como posible, a través de la aplicación de una metodología teórica-analítica adecuada, la construcción de una definición viable tanto en un nivel jerárquico como descriptivo. La presente tesis se encuentra dividida en cinco capítulos. El primer capítulo comprende una exposición y revisión critica del tratamiento monolingüe lexicográfico y analítico que la preposición hacia ha recibido en las principales obras de referencia, donde se observa que las inadecuaciones y omisiones presentes en la totalidad de las definiciones analizadas representan tan sólo el estadio superior de una problemática de carácter ontológico y, por tanto, metodológico, en el tratamiento de las preposiciones. El capítulo segundo comprende la presentación de la perspectiva teórica metodológica adoptada en esta tesis para el análisis y definición monolingüe de la preposición hacia, teniendo por líneas directrices las propuestas realizadas por G. Lakoff , así como a los fundamentos establecidos por R. Langacker en su propuesta cognitiva para una nueva gramática. En forma conjunta y complementaria, y dentro del mismo paradigma, empleamos, discutimos críticamente y desarrollamos diferentes aportes analítico-metodológicos para el tratamiento de la polisemia en unidades lingüísticas locativas. En el capítulo tercero, y en acuerdo con las exigencias respecto a la utilización de datos empíricos obtenidos a partir de corpus textuales, se expone un análisis original monolingüe de la preposición hacia en observancia de los principios y la metodología explicitada en el capítulo segundo, teniendo por principal objetivo la construcción de una representación semántica de la polisemia de la preposición que comprenda y articule los sentidos prototípicos para ésta especificados. El capítulo cuarto, y en acuerdo con los resultados de nuestro análisis monolingual de la preposición, se examinan, describen y establecen los equivalentes correspondientes en finés para hacia; asimismo, se contrastan en este capítulo los resultados obtenidos con las definiciones lexicográficas bilingües vigentes. Se recogen en el último y quinto capítulo de esta tesis algunas observaciones tanto respecto a los postulados ontológicos y teórico-metodológicos de la perspectiva adoptada, así como algunas notas para la construcción de una metodología general para el análisis semántico preposicional.

Readers' resposes versus reader-response theories : An empirical study

This study examines both theoretically an empirically how well the theories of Norman Holland, David Bleich, Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish can explain readers' interpretations of literary texts. The theoretical analysis concentrates on their views on language from the point of view of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. This analysis shows that many of the assumptions related to language in these theories are problematic. The empirical data show that readers often form very similar interpretations. Thus the study challenges the common assumption that literary interpretations tend to be idiosyncratic. The empirical data consists of freely worded written answers to questions on three short stories. The interpretations were made by 27 Finnish university students. Some of the questions addressed issues that were discussed in large parts of the texts, some referred to issues that were mentioned only in passing or implied. The short stories were "The Witch à la Mode" by D. H. Lawrence, "Rain in the Heart" by Peter Taylor and "The Hitchhiking Game" by Milan Kundera. According to Fish, readers create both the formal features of a text and their interpretation of it according to an interpretive strategy. People who agree form an interpretive community. However, a typical answer usually contains ideas repeated by several readers as well as observations not mentioned by anyone else. Therefore it is very difficult to determine which readers belong to the same interpretive community. Moreover, readers with opposing opinions often seem to pay attention to the same textual features and even acknowledge the possibility of an opposing interpretation; therefore they do not seem to create the formal features of the text in different ways. Iser suggests that an interpretation emerges from the interaction between the text and the reader when the reader determines the implications of the text and in this way fills the "gaps" in the text. Iser believes that the text guides the reader, but as he also believes that meaning is on a level beyond words, he cannot explain how the text directs the reader. The similarity in the interpretations and the fact that the agreement is strongest when related to issues that are discussed broadly in the text do, however, support his assumption that readers are guided by the text. In Bleich's view, all interpretations have personal motives and each person has an idiosyncratic language system. The situation where a person learns a word determines the most important meaning it has for that person. In order to uncover the personal etymologies of words, Bleich asks his readers to associate freely on the basis of a text and note down all the personal memories and feelings that the reading experience evokes. Bleich's theory of the idiosyncratic language system seems to rely on a misconceived notion of the role that ostensive definitions have in language use. The readers' responses show that spontaneous associations to personal life seem to colour the readers' interpretations, but such instances are rather rare. According to Holland, an interpretation reflects the reader's identity theme. Language use is regulated by shared rules, but everyone follows the rules in his or her own way. Words mean different things to different people. The problem with this view is that if there is any basis for language use, it seems to be the shared way of following linguistic rules. Wittgenstein suggests that our understanding of words is related to the shared ways of using words and our understanding of human behaviour. This view seems to give better grounds for understanding similarity and differences in literary interpretations than the theories of Holland, Bleich, Fish and Iser.

Kulttuurierot ja kielimuuri valtanäkökulmasta suomalais-puolalaisessa työyhteisössä

The thesis deals with cultural differences and language barrier in a Finnish-Polish working environment. The object is to find out what kind of language and cultural practices prevail and what are their consequences. This qualitative research focuses on problem solving strategies used to manage language barrier and cultural differences and their effect on power relations within the working environment and in relation to e.g. parent company, business partners or customers. The research data was collected by half-structured individual interviews of 24 Finns and Poles in seven companies in Poland. The research indicates that language practices as well as Polish employees' language skills significantly affect information flows: those Poles, who have good language skills, are less dependent on their Finnish superior and thanks to their contacts with Finnish parent company they gain adequate information. Different time perceptions next to the perceived slowness of Finns are one of the most important factors causing cultural conflicts in the researched working environments. Most often mentioned by Finns were issues of trust. However, the problematic issues brought up most were often things that the respondents could not influence since they did not concern the closest working environment but others. It seems that the contrast that used to be strong between superiors and subordinates in Poland has - partly due to the Finns' informal management style - in these mixed working environments transformed into a contrast between own working environment and the outsiders.

Intermediate Past BE : A Paradigm Reshaped With Data Drawn From HARES

In this paper, I look into a grammatical phenomenon found among speakers of the Cambridgeshire dialect of English. According to my hypothesis, the phenomenon is a new entry into the past BE verb paradigm in the English language. In my paper, I claim that the structure I have found complements the existing two verb forms, was and were, with a third verb form that I have labelled ‘intermediate past BE’. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first section, I introduce the theoretical ground for the study of variation, which is founded on empiricist principles. In variationist linguistics, the main claim is that heterogeneous language use is structured and ordered. In the last 50 years of history in modern linguistics, this claim is controversial. In the 1960s, the generativist movement spearheaded by Noam Chomsky diverted attention away from grammatical theories that are based on empirical observations. The generativists steered away from language diversity, variation and change in favour of generalisations, abstractions and universalist claims. The theoretical part of my paper goes through the main points of the variationist agenda and concludes that abandoning the concept of language variation in linguistics is harmful for both theory and methodology. In the method part of the paper, I present the Helsinki Archive of Regional English Speech (HARES) corpus. It is an audio archive that contains interviews conducted in England in the 1970s and 1980s. The interviews were done in accordance to methods used generally in traditional dialectology. The informants are mostly elderly male people who have lived in the same region throughout their lives and who have left school at an early age. The interviews are actually conversations: the interviewer allowed the informant to pick the topic of conversation to induce a maximally relaxed and comfortable atmosphere and thus allow the most natural dialect variant to emerge in the informant’s speech. In the paper, the corpus chapter introduces some of the transcription and annotation problems associated with spoken language corpora (especially those containing dialectal speech). Questions surrounding the concept of variation are present in this part of the paper too, as especially transcription work is troubled by the fundamental problem of having to describe the fluctuations of everyday speech in text. In the empirical section of the paper, I use HARES to analyse the speech of four informants, with special focus on the emergence of the intermediate past BE variant. My observations and the subsequent analysis permit me to claim that my hypothesis seems to hold. The intermediate variant occupies almost all contexts where one would expect was or were in the informants’ speech. This means that the new variant is integrated into the speakers’ grammars and exemplifies the kind of variation that is at the heart of this paper.

Preliminary phonological analysis of the Limi dialect of Humla Bhotia

The purpose of this research was to analyse the phonological system of the Limi dialect of Humla Bhotia. Humla Bhotia is a Tibeto-Burman language that is spoken by approximately 4000 5000 people in the far northwestern Humla province of the Kingdom of Nepal. The language has not previously been the subject of analysis. The data base for this thesis was collected on two different dialects of Humla Bhotia in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, from February to May 2000. I had three language informants who speak Humla Bhotia as their mother tongue. One of the informants speaks the Upper Humla dialect and the other two informants speak the Limi dialect. In this thesis I have concentrated on the phonology of the dialect of Limi but occasionally I also make reference to the Upper Humla dialect. The Limi data base consists of 600 words elicited in isolation, sentences where words have been checked for consonantal and pitch variation, and five texts comprising 117 sentences. Firstly, I have studied the geographical location, population and dialects of Humla Bhotia. Five dialects were identified: Limi, Upper Humla, La Yakba, Nyinba and Humli Khyampa. Information on the dialect areas is based on the accounts of seven mother tongue speakers of the language and on Nancy Levine s (1988) anthropological research of the ethnic group Nyinba. Secondly, I have analysed the phonological system of Limi from the viewpoint of American stucturalism much along the lines followed by Pike 1966 [1947] ja 1967 [1948]. In defining the prosodic elements I have also used acoustic analysis. In the Limi dialect there are 7 vowel phonemes. No vowel clusters occur within the same syllable. In this preliminary analysis 29 contrastive plosives, 8 affricates and 5 6 fricatives were found. The data also revealed 4 nasal phonemes, two rhotic phonemes, one lateral phoneme and two central approximants. Further research is however called for to check the phonemic status of these segments. Four contrastive prosodic elements were encountered: nasalisation, length, phonation type and pitch movement. There are two contrastive types of phonation: tense and lax. Many words were found with a third type of phonation, modal phonation. How modal phonation relates to the prosodic system is unclear at this stage and is therefore left for further research to determine. There are two contrastive pitch movement tonemes: a rising toneme and falling toneme. The falling toneme occurs in free variation with a level pitch contour. Rising appears to be linked with lax phonation and falling with tense phonation.