The Social Imaginary of Culture/Civilization in the Arabic Literary Tradition

Charles Taylor’s contribution to social imaginaries offers an interpretive framework for better understanding modernity as secularity. One of its main aspects is conceiving of human society in linear, homogenous time (secular time). Looking into the Arabic intellectual tradition, I will argue in my paper that Taylor’s framework can help us understand major social and intellectual transformations. The Ottoman and Arabic modernization process during the 19th century has often been understood by focusing on certain core concepts. One of these is tamaddun, usually translated as “civilization.” I will be mostly talking about the works of two “pioneers” of Arab modernity (which is traditionally referred to as an-nahḍa, the so-called Arab Renaissance): the Syrian Fransīs Marrāsh and the Egyptian Rifāʿa aṭ-Ṭahṭāwī. First I will focus on Marrāsh’s didactic novel “The Forest of Truth” (1865), as it offers a complex view of tamaddun, which has sometimes been construed as merely a social and political reform program. The category of "social imaginary,” however, is useful in grasping the wider semantic scope of this concept, which is reading it as a signifier for human history conceived of in secular time, as Taylor defines it. This conceptualization of human history functioning within the immanent frame can also be observed in the introduction to “The Extraction of Pure Gold in the Description of Paris” (1834), a systematic account of a travel experience in France that was written by the other “pioneer,” aṭ-Ṭahṭāwī. Finally, in translating tamaddun as “the modern social imaginary of civilization/culture,” the talk aims to consider this imaginary as a major factor in the emergence of the “secular age.” Furthermore, it suggests the importance of studying (quasi-) literary texts, such as historiographical, geographical, and self-narratives in the Arabic literary tradition, in order to further elaborate continuities and ruptures in social imaginaries.

(Anti-)cliticization in Mapudungun

This article describes the formal behavior of some elements found in Mapudungun (isolate, South America): a question particle, a postposition, and several 3rd-person markers. Framed in terms of current theories of phonological and grammatical words, the paper argues that a useful characterization of the Mapudungun elements under scrutiny should acknowledge (a) that clitics are interestingly heterogeneous regarding how different bound elements stand in paradigmatic opposition to each other, and (b) that some of these elements can be meaningfully be called anti-clitics (i.e., they are p-words that are part of larger g-words).

Word and the Americanist perspective

Even though recently appeared reference grammars of lesser-known languages usually do pay attention to issues to do with wordhood, studies of the theoretical and typological import of wordhood-related questions in indigenous languages of the Americas are not numerous. This publication aims to address the challenges posed by individual phenomena found in the Americas to the received views of wordhood.

Benefaction proper and surrogation

The semantic role of beneficiary is usually conceptualized in very general terms, typically without an intensive definition of what can constitute a benefit in the particular construction under study. Among those accounts that have proposed to discuss benefaction as related to the notion(s) of surrogation, substituting, and/or deputing, Kittilä (2005) proposes a distinction between recipients, beneficiaries, and recipient-beneficiaries based on the binary features [reception] and [substitutive benefaction]; the recipient includes only reception (and the beneficiary only substitutive benefaction), whereas both features are relevant with recipient-beneficiaries. This paper proposes an alternative account (i) by defining benefaction proper in terms of a prototype related to possession (and thereby to reception) and a periphery, and (ii) by defining surrogation as a separate notion that can, but need not, coalesce with benefaction proper. Thus, the beneficiaries’ condition improves because they are relieved from having to carry out a given action themselves.

Recent developments and open questions in the field of semantic roles

This introductory chapter briefly introduces a few milestones in the voluminous previous literature on semantic roles, and charts the territory in which the papers of this volume aim to make a contribution. This territory is characterized by fairly disparate conceptualizations of semantic roles and their status in theories of grammar and the lexicon, as well as by diverse and probably complementary ways of deriving or identifying them based on linguistic data. Particular attention is given to the question of how selected roles appear to relate to each other, and we preliminarily address the issue of how roles, subroles, and role complexes are best thought of in general.

Nominal compounds in Mapudungun

It is perhaps unsurprising that the rich agglutinative-polysynthetic verb morphology of Mapudungun has drawn most attention in linguistic studies. So far unnoticed in the literature are Mapudungun complex noun phrases, which show a puzzling distribution in terms of the internal structure they display. Some complex NPs are head-final (mapu-che ‘people of the land’). Others are head-initial, and of these a subset appears to be less lexicalized. In some cases, all three possibilities are found with the same components: mamüll-che ‘wood people’, che-mamüll ‘people made of wood’, and che mamüll ‘wood-like people’. The present paper reviews the comparatively modest literature on these phenomena, deals with them in an account based on semantic factors, and places them in a broader typological context.