Habitus realisation: Negotiating identities through Chinese looks and Chinese language

The increasing linguistic and cultural diversity of our contemporary world points to the salience of maintaining and developing Heritage Language of ethnic minority groups. The mutually constitutive effect between Heritage Language learning and ethnic identity construction has been well documented in the literature. Classical social psychological work often quantitatively structures this phenomenon in a predictable linear relationship. In contrast, poststructural scholarship draws on qualitative approaches to claim the malleable and multiple dynamics behind the phenomenon. The two schools oppose but complement each other. Nevertheless, both schools struggle to capture the detailed and nuanced construction of ethnic identity through Heritage Language learning. Different from the extant research, we make an attempt to ethno-methodologically unearth the nuisances and predicaments embedded in the reflexive, subtle, and multi-layered identity constructions through nuanced, inter-nested language practices. Drawing on data from the qualitative phase of a large project, we highlight some small but powerful moments abstracted from the interview accounts of five Chinese Australian young people. Firstly, we zoom in on the life politics behind the ‘seen but unnoticed’ stereotype that looking Chinese means being able to speak Chinese. Secondly, we speculate the power relations between the speaker and the listener through the momentary and inadvertent breaches of the taken-for-granted stereotype. Next, we unveil how learning Chinese has become an accountably rational priority for these young Chinese Australians. Finally, we argue that the normalised stereotype becomes visible and hence stable when it is breached – a practical accomplishment that we term ‘habitus realisation’.

Rhetoric and Representation : Exploring the Cultural Meaning of the Natural Sciences in Contemporary Popular Science Writing and Literature

Kirjallisuuden- ja kulttuurintutkimus on viimeisten kolmen vuosikymmenen aikana tullut yhä enenevässä määrin tietoiseksi tieteen ja taiteen suhteen monimutkaisesta luonteesta. Nykyään näiden kahden kulttuurin tutkimus muodostaa oman kenttänsä, jolla niiden suhdetta tarkastellaan ennen kaikkea dynaamisena vuorovaikutuksena, joka heijastaa kulttuurimme kieltä, arvoja ja ideologisia sisältöjä. Toisin kuin aiemmat näkemykset, jotka pitävät tiedettä ja taidetta toisilleen enemmän tai vähemmän vastakkaisina pyrkimyksinä, nykytutkimus lähtee oletuksesta, jonka mukaan ne ovat kulttuurillisesti rakentuneita diskursseja, jotka kohtaavat usein samankaltaisia todellisuuden mallintamiseen liittyviä ongelmia, vaikka niiden käyttämät metodit eroavatkin toisistaan. Väitöskirjani keskittyy yllä mainitun suhteen osa-alueista popularisoidun tietokirjallisuuden (muun muassa Paul Davies, James Gleick ja Richard Dawkins) käyttämän kielen ja luonnontieteistä ideoita ammentavan kaunokirjallisuuden (muun muassa Jeanette Winterson, Tom Stoppard ja Richard Powers) hyödyntämien keinojen tarkasteluun nojautuen yli 30 teoksen kattavaa aineistoa koskevaan tyylin ja teemojen tekstianalyysiin. Populaarin tietokirjallisuuden osalta tarkoituksenani on osoittaa, että sen käyttämä kieli rakentuu huomattavassa määrin sellaisille rakenteille, jotka tarjoavat mahdollisuuden esittää todellisuutta koskevia argumentteja mahdollisimman vakuuttavalla tavalla. Tässä tehtävässä monilla klassisen retoriikan määrittelemillä kuvioilla on tärkeä rooli, koska ne auttavat liittämään sanotun sisällön ja muodon tiukasti toisiinsa: retoristen kuvioiden käyttö ei näin ollen edusta pelkkää tyylikeinoa, vaan se myös usein kiteyttää argumenttien taustalla olevat tieteenfilosofiset olettamukset ja auttaa vakiinnuttamaan argumentoinnin logiikan. Koska monet aikaisemmin ilmestyneistä tutkimuksista ovat keskittyneet pelkästään metaforan rooliin tieteellisissä argumenteissa, tämä väitöskirja pyrkii laajentamaan tutkimuskenttää analysoimalla myös toisenlaisten kuvioiden käyttöä. Osoitan myös, että retoristen kuvioiden käyttö muodostaa yhtymäkohdan tieteellisiä ideoita hyödyntävään kaunokirjallisuuteen. Siinä missä popularisoitu tiede käyttää retoriikkaa vahvistaakseen sekä argumentatiivisia että kaunokirjallisia ominaisuuksiaan, kuvaa tällainen sanataide tiedettä tavoilla, jotka usein heijastelevat tietokirjallisuuden kielellisiä rakenteita. Toisaalta on myös mahdollista nähdä, miten kaunokirjallisuuden keinot heijastuvat popularisoidun tieteen kerrontatapoihin ja kieleen todistaen kahden kulttuurin dynaamisesta vuorovaikutuksesta. Nykyaikaisen populaaritieteen retoristen elementtien ja kaunokirjallisuuden keinojen vertailu näyttää lisäksi, kuinka tiede ja taide osallistuvat keskusteluun kulttuurimme tiettyjen peruskäsitteiden kuten identiteetin, tiedon ja ajan merkityksestä. Tällä tavoin on mahdollista nähdä, että molemmat ovat perustavanlaatuisia osia merkityksenantoprosessissa, jonka kautta niin tieteelliset ideat kuin ihmiselämän suuret kysymyksetkin saavat kulttuurillisesti rakentuneen merkityksensä.

Book Review: "Language learning beyond the classroom"

Language learning beyond the classroom is part of a growing body of literature focused on teaching and learning in contexts that are informal and unstructured. Areas include so-called shadow education and informal pedagogies. Shadow education refers to the privatised tutoring supplementing school curricular that is a pervasive feature of education in parts of Asia (Bray & Lykins, 2012) and increasingly evident in Australia. Informal pedagogies refers to teaching in informal contexts and was the focus of a Special Interest Group (SIG) at the recent American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual conference in Chicago. Presentations in the SIG included designing tools for supporting learning in science classes after school and in sites such as zoos...

Language change as an evolutionary process

In the thesis it is discussed in what ways concepts and methodology developed in evolutionary biology can be applied to the explanation and research of language change. The parallel nature of the mechanisms of biological evolution and language change is explored along with the history of the exchange of ideas between these two disciplines. Against this background computational methods developed in evolutionary biology are taken into consideration in terms of their applicability to the study of historical relationships between languages. Different phylogenetic methods are explained in common terminology, avoiding the technical language of statistics. The thesis is on one hand a synthesis of earlier scientific discussion, and on the other an attempt to map out the problems of earlier approaches in addition to finding new guidelines in the study of language change on their basis. Primarily literature about the connections between evolutionary biology and language change, along with research articles describing applications of phylogenetic methods into language change have been used as source material. The thesis starts out by describing the initial development of the disciplines of evolutionary biology and historical linguistics, a process which right from the beginning can be seen to have involved an exchange of ideas concerning the mechanisms of language change and biological evolution. The historical discussion lays the foundation for the handling of the generalised account of selection developed during the recent few decades. This account is aimed for creating a theoretical framework capable of explaining both biological evolution and cultural change as selection processes acting on self-replicating entities. This thesis focusses on the capacity of the generalised account of selection to describe language change as a process of this kind. In biology, the mechanisms of evolution are seen to form populations of genetically related organisms through time. One of the central questions explored in this thesis is whether selection theory makes it possible to picture languages are forming populations of a similar kind, and what a perspective like this can offer to the understanding of language in general. In historical linguistics, the comparative method and other, complementing methods have been traditionally used to study the development of languages from a common ancestral language. Computational, quantitative methods have not become widely used as part of the central methodology of historical linguistics. After the fading of a limited popularity enjoyed by the lexicostatistical method since the 1950s, only in the recent years have also the computational methods of phylogenetic inference used in evolutionary biology been applied to the study of early language history. In this thesis the possibilities offered by the traditional methodology of historical linguistics and the new phylogenetic methods are compared. The methods are approached through the ways in which they have been applied to the Indo-European languages, which is the most thoroughly investigated language family using both the traditional and the phylogenetic methods. The problems of these applications along with the optimal form of the linguistic data used in these methods are explored in the thesis. The mechanisms of biological evolution are seen in the thesis as parallel in a limited sense to the mechanisms of language change, however sufficiently so that the development of a generalised account of selection is deemed as possibly fruiful for understanding language change. These similarities are also seen to support the validity of using phylogenetic methods in the study of language history, although the use of linguistic data and the models of language change employed by these models are seen to await further development.

Heräämisten poetiikkaa : Lajeja ja intertekstejä Arvid Järnefeltin romaaneissa Isänmaa, Maaemon lapsia ja Veneh'ojalaiset

Poetics of Awakenings. Genres and Intertexts in Arvid Järnefelt s Novels Isänmaa, Maaemon lapsia and Veneh ojalaiset This doctoral dissertation focuses on Arvid Järnefelt s (1961 1932) novels Isänmaa (1893), Maaemon lapsia (1905) and Veneh ojalaiset (1909). The study applies the genre theory and concepts Alastair Fowler has introduced in his Kinds of Literature (1982). Fowler s theory of the novel is developed further and applied to Finnish realist novels. The generic analysis is supplemented by intertextual analysis, which is mainly based on the idea of specific intertextual relations as presented by Kiril Taranovsky. Generic and intertextual analyses form the basis for hermeneutic interpretation, in which attention is paid to the fact that the novels are written by the designated writer in specific historical and cultural circumstances. Instead of the author s intention , the study focuses on the realised intention , in other words the novels as they are published. Järnefelt s first novel Isänmaa is understood to be a classical Bidungsroman that depicts the socialisation of a young male protagonist. From an intertextual point of view, the novel appears to be a novel of conversion, too, due to the biblical allusions concealed in the depiction of the events. Furthermore, Isänmaa is seen to stand in an intertextual relation to Hegel s, Snellman s and Topelius s writings. Maaemon lapsia is argued to be a thesis novel, which persuades the reader to adopt a certain ideological and political stance, namely Henry George s view on the private ownership of land. The novel is modulated by the generic repertoires of fairy tale and tragedy. The mythical frame of the novel supports the thesis novel, as it gives universal validity to the particular events depicted in the novel. Maaemon lapsia also comments on the contemporary political debate on the relations between Finland and Russia by presenting the relationship as analogous to the relationship between tenant farmer and landowner. Veneh ojalaiset exhibits a wide range of genres. Comic, tragic and mythical mode is combined with, for example, family novel, romance, conversion novel and revolutionary novel. From a rhetorical viewpoint, the novel is an apology, which accuses society of generating criminality by means of unjust laws and procedures. The novel discusses the question of resistance to evil by using the themes of Faust and Job, as well as by confronting the philosophies of Epictetus and Nietzsche. The novel is a thesis novel, which disputes the possibility of violent revolution as a way to a better society and recommends passive resistance for an individual living in an unjust society. The poetics of Järnefelt s novels is regarded as the poetics of conversion, as all the novels in focus depict the protagonist s awakening to see the society in a new light, be it a patriotic vision of the reality or a conception of the unfairness of society.

Language in Acquisition : Early Lexical Development and Associations between Lexicon and Grammar Findings from Full-Term and Very-Low-Birth-Weight Finnish Children

The aim was to analyse the growth and compositional development of the receptive and expressive lexicons between the ages 0,9 and 2;0 in the full-term (FT) and the very-low-birth-weight (VLBW) children who are acquiring Finnish. The associations between the expressive lexicon and grammar at 1;6 and 2;0 in the FT children were also studied. In addition, the language skills of the VLBW children at 2;0 were analysed, as well as the predictive value of early lexicon to the later language performance. Four groups took part in the studies: the longitudinal (N = 35) and cross-sectional (N = 146) samples of the FT children, and the longitudinal (N = 32) and cross-sectional (N = 66) samples of VLBW children. The data was gathered by applying of the structured parental rating method (the Finnish version of the Communicative Development Inventory), through analysis of the children´s spontaneous speech and by administering a a formal test (Reynell Developmental Language Scales). The FT children acquired their receptive lexicons earlier, at a faster rate and with larger individual variation than their expressive lexicons. The acquisition rate of the expressive lexicon increased from slow to faster in most children (91%). Highly parallel developmental paths for lexical semantic categories were detected in the receptive and expressive lexicons of the Finnish children when they were analysed in relation to the growth of the lexicon size, as described in the literature for children acquiring other languages. The emergence of grammar was closely associated with expressive lexical growth. The VLBW children acquired their receptive lexicons at a slower rate and had weaker language skills at 2;0 than the full-term children. The compositional development of both lexicons happened at a slower rate in the VLBW children when compared to the FT controls. However, when the compositional development was analysed in relation to the growth of lexicon size, this development occurred qualitatively in a nearly parallel manner in the VLBW children as in the FT children. Early receptive and expressive lexicon sizes were significantly associated with later language skills in both groups. The effect of the background variables (gender, length of the mother s basic education, birth weight) on the language development in the FT and the VLBW children differed. The results provide new information of early language acquisition by the Finnish FT and VLBW children. The results support the view that the early acquisition of the semantic lexical categories is related to lexicon growth. The current findings also propose that the early grammatical acquisition is closely related to the growth of expressive vocabulary size. The language development of the VLBW children should be followed in clinical work.

Three-year-olds are sensitive to semantic prominence during online language comprehension

Recent evidence from adult pronoun comprehension suggests that semantic factors such as verb transitivity affect referent salience and thereby anap- hora resolution. We tested whether the same semantic factors influence pronoun comprehension in young children. In a visual world study, 3-year- olds heard stories that began with a sentence containing either a high or a low transitivity verb. Looking behaviour to pictures depicting the subject and object of this sentence was recorded as children listened to a subsequent sentence containing a pronoun. Children showed a stronger preference to look to the subject as opposed to the object antecedent in the low transitivity condition. In addition there were general preferences (1) to look to the subject in both conditions and (2) to look more at both potential antecedents in the high transitivity condition. This suggests that children, like adults, are affected by semantic factors, specifically semantic prominence, when interpreting anaphoric pronouns.

Language Influence in Services: Perceived Importance of Native Language Use in Service Encounters

A defining characteristic of most service encounters is that they are strongly influenced by interactions in which both the consumer and the service personnel are playing integral roles. Such is the importance of this interaction that it has even been argued that for the consumer, these encounters are in fact the service. Given this, it is not surprising that interactions involving communication and customer participation in the service encounters have received considerable attention within the field of services marketing. Much of the research on interactions and communication in services, however, appear to have assumed that the consumer and the service personnel by definition are perfectly able to interact and communicate effortlessly with each other. Such communication would require a common language, and in order to be able to take this for granted the market would need to be fairly homogenous. The homogenous country, however, and with it the homogenous market, would appear to be gone. It is estimated that more than half the consumers in the world are already speaking more than one language. For a company entering a new market, language can be a major barrier that firms may underestimate, and understanding language influence across different markets is important for international companies. The service literature has taken a common language between companies and consumers for granted but this is not matched by the realities on the ground in many markets. Owing to the communicational and interaction-oriented nature of services, the lack of a common language between the consumer and the service provider is a situation that could cause problems. A gap exists in the service theory, consisting of a lack of knowledge concerning how language influences consumers in service encounters. By addressing this gap, the thesis contributes to an increased understanding of service theory and provides a better practical understanding for service companies of the importance of native language use for consumers. The thesis consists of four essays. Essay one is conceptual and addresses how sociolinguistic research can be beneficial for understanding consumer language preferences. Essay two empirically shows how the influence of language varies depending on the nature of the service, essay three shows that there is a significant difference in language preferences between female and male consumers while essay four empirically compares consumer language preferences in Canada and Finland, finding strong similarities but also indications of difference in the motives for preferring native language use. The introduction of the thesis outlines the existence of a research gap within the service literature, a gap consisting of the lack of research into how native language use may influence consumers in service encounters. In addition, it is described why this gap is of importance to services and why its importance is growing. Building on this situation, the purpose of the thesis is to establish the existence of language influence in service encounters and to extend the knowledge of how language influences consumers on multilingual markets.

Finite-State Spell-Checking with Weighted Language and Error Models

In this paper we present simple methods for construction and evaluation of finite-state spell-checking tools using an existing finite-state lexical automaton, freely available finite-state tools and Internet corpora acquired from projects such as Wikipedia. As an example, we use a freely available open-source implementation of Finnish morphology, made with traditional finite-state morphology tools, and demonstrate rapid building of Northern Sámi and English spell checkers from tools and resources available from the Internet.

Language identification using parallel sub-word recognition

Parallel sub-word recognition (PSWR) is a new model that has been proposed for language identification (LID) which does not need elaborate phonetic labeling of the speech data in a foreign language. The new approach performs a front-end tokenization in terms of sub-word units which are designed by automatic segmentation, segment clustering and segment HMM modeling. We develop PSWR based LID in a framework similar to the parallel phone recognition (PPR) approach in the literature. This includes a front-end tokenizer and a back-end language model, for each language to be identified. Considering various combinations of the statistical evaluation scores, it is found that PSWR can perform as well as PPR, even with broad acoustic sub-word tokenization, thus making it an efficient alternative to the PPR system.

Language models for online handwritten Tamil word recognition

N-gram language models and lexicon-based word-recognition are popular methods in the literature to improve recognition accuracies of online and offline handwritten data. However, there are very few works that deal with application of these techniques on online Tamil handwritten data. In this paper, we explore methods of developing symbol-level language models and a lexicon from a large Tamil text corpus and their application to improving symbol and word recognition accuracies. On a test database of around 2000 words, we find that bigram language models improve symbol (3%) and word recognition (8%) accuracies and while lexicon methods offer much greater improvements (30%) in terms of word recognition, there is a large dependency on choosing the right lexicon. For comparison to lexicon and language model based methods, we have also explored re-evaluation techniques which involve the use of expert classifiers to improve symbol and word recognition accuracies.

El Libro del caballero Zifar entre la literatura ejemplar y el romance caballeresco

Integran este número de la revista ponencias presentadas en Studia Hispanica Medievalia VIII: Actas de las IX Jornadas Internacionales de Literatura Española Medieval, 2008, y de Homenaje al Quinto Centenario de Amadis de Gaula

Romance policial, psicanálise e cultura contemporânea em Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza e Dennis Lehane

Esta tese traça um estudo comparativo entre o Romance policial contemporâneo e o discurso psicanalítico na produção ficcional de Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza (1936-) e Dennis Lehane (1963-), tomando, por base, relações de aproximação entre os métodos investigativos na literatura e na psicanálise. Para isso, o corpus constitui-se dos romances O silêncio da chuva (1996) e Espinosa sem saída (2006), ambos do escritor brasileiro e Sagrado [Sacred] (2004) e Paciente 67 [Shttter Island] (2005), do ficcionista norte-americano. A análise destas narrativas revela pontos de aproximação entre os dois discursos inseridos no cenário cultural caótico e desajustado. E questiona a emergência deste novo contexto sociocultural, onde personagens sem identidade definida, sendo o principal deles, o detetive, realizam sua flânerie através de deslocamentos constantes associados à paisagem e em busca do desvendamento do crime urbano. Como seres de ficção perdidos, estes private eyes precisam encontrar os desajustes psíquicos de toda espécie de criminosos daí a representação da cidade, que ora se converte no solo para a flânerie dos investigadores, ora contribui para o apagamento e/ou ocultamento das subjetividades criminais. A relação entre os discursos policial e psicanalítico aponta para a associação entre a obscuridade do texto literário e o da cultura onde estamos inseridos sem falar do mal-estar de um e de outro campo, que tem a ver com as transformações da esfera da sociedade contemporânea