'This is a beautiful school.' 'This school is useless!' Explaining disengagement in a Greek vocational school through the examination of teacher ideologies

This multimethod case study of a Greek vocational school explored teachers’ culture (including beliefs about education, teachers’ role, and students’ nature) using the concept of Pupil Control Ideology to explain problems of disengagement and low morale among staff and students, as well as tensions in relationships. A prominent custodial culture was identified in the school using a functional/apolitical pedagogy to transmit ‘legitimate’ knowledge to students whose working-class background did not produce desired outcomes. This generated deficit views of students, teachers’ sympathy, and a seemingly caring school ethos which was, nevertheless, oppressive. Students’ failings were naturalised and vocational education misinterpreted as merely a streaming device in a system honouring academic achievement and middle-class ways. Teachers were blind to these cultural subtleties, believing they acted ‘rationally’ and altruistically. A humanistic subculture emphasising student empowerment and social transformation consisted of a minority of teachers and was rather marginalised. This disallowed meaningful dialogue and the identification of an alternative rationale for the sector, generating strong feelings of futility. Positive change in this school necessitated the deconstruction and (subsequent) reconstruction of custodial teachers’ worldview as embedded in their practice.

Mythotextuality and the evolution of ideologies the reuse of the Epic of Gilgamesh in North American texts

When the scribes of ancient Mesopotamia rewrote the Epic of Gilgamesh over a period of over two thousand years, the modifications made reflected the social transformations occurring during the same era. The dethroning of the goddess Inanna-Ishtar and the devaluation of other female characters in the evolving Epic of Gilgamesh coincided with the declining status of women in society. Since the 1960s, translations into modern languages have been readily available. The Mesopotamian myth has been reused in a wide variety of mythic and mythological texts by Quebecois, Canadian and American authors. Our analysis of the first group of mythic texts, written in the 1960s and 1970s, shows a reversal of the tendency of the Mesopotamian texts. Written at a time when the feminist movement was transforming North American society, these retellings feature a goddess with her high status restored and her ancient attributes re-established. Another group of writers, publishing in the 1980s and 1990s, makes a radical shift away from these feminist tendencies while still basically rewriting the Epic. In this group of mythic texts, the goddess and other female characters find their roles reduced while the male gods and characters have expanded and glorified roles. The third group of texts analysed does not rewrite the Epic. The Epic is reused here intertextually to give depth to mythological works set in the twentieth century or later. The dialogue created between the contemporary text and the Epic emphasises the role that the individual has in society. A large-scale comparative mythotextual study of texts that share a common hypotext can, especially when socio-historical factors are considered, provide a window onto the relationship between text and society. A comparative study of how the Epic of Gilgamesh is rewritten and referred to intertextually through time can help us relativize the understanding of our own time and culture.

French-greek machine translation of imperative sentences: issues in aspect and mood from a controlled language perspective

The present dissertation examines how grammatical aspect and mood are handled by machine translation (MT) systems within the scope of imperative sentences (orders, recommendations) when dealing with the language pair French-Greek (unidirectional, towards Greek). As the grammatical category of aspect is not expressed in the same way in both languages, choosing the correct aspect value when translating a verb from French to Greek can pose problems. We are interested in describing the types of errors that occur and their frequency in a corpus taken from texts pertaining to the security domain and from technical manuals, where imperative sentences are very common. In order to further delimit our research, our sample consists of sentences that comply with the general principles of simplicity and readability provided by several controlled language guidelines and aimed at higher translatability when having MT in mind. In a second phase, this study aims at discovering how modifying some of the control rules would help (or not) the MT systems better decide upon the translation of aspect and mood.

Poetry With People With Dementia: An Evaluation of a Two Year Project Engaging in Poetry Activities With Older People in Residential and Nursing Homes.

This paper is a summary of an evaluation of the first two years of a three year poetry project for older people with dementia. The project was set up with a poet in residence who mentored six poets to deliver poetry activities to older people and those with dementia in residential and care homes in Herefordshire. The project was developed and run by the Courtyards Hereford. The evaluation was undertake through the use of questionnaires that were given to staff and carers undertaking training workshops and the poets, staff and carers in the homes who facilitated the activities and finally by the residents who took part in the project. The main findings were that participants that responded to the questionnaire for staff and carers it had increased confidence and assisted them in gaining more knowledge about the residents, whilst for residents it had a number of positive effects including enhanced communication, increased self-esteem and enhanced self-worth whilst making them feel less isolated.

The Pindaric poetry of Cruz e Silva and the Neoclassical revival among Lusitanian national heroes

António Dinis da Cruz e Silva, member of Arcádia Lusitana, the literary academy he helped to found, introduced the Pindaric ode to the Portuguese literature of the neoclassical period (18th century). This poet imitates the triadic form and the mythological nature of Pindar’s encomiastic poetry, in order to celebrate the deeds of reputed historical figures from the national context, such as sailors, captains, politicians, and even the king himself. As in Pindar’s poetry, the mythological excursus holds an important part in Cruz e Silva’s Pindaric poetry. Winners of athletic games are acclaimed through allusion to the ancient heroes. Likewise, the heroes of the Portuguese history see themselves turned into immortals, since their deeds are reported as comparatively greater than those of Homeric warriors. Among the 44 Cruz e Silva’s Pindaric odes, 18 rewrite the myth of the Trojan War, from its beginnings with Eris (Odes I-II) to its outcome with the imperishable fame of the most conspicuous Homeric fighters (Ode XLII). These 18 compositions (re)tell, in a neoclassical style, the main scenes and themes of the Iliad and Odyssey, alluding directly to their heroes’ deeds. Achilles’ wrath and Hector’s death are topics repeatedly brought up in Cruz e Silva’s Pindaric poetry as models of courage and patriotism for national heroes. This chapter offers a discussion of Cruz e Silva’s neoclassical representation of the Trojan War. To this effect, an interdisciplinary approach is adopted, showing how the Portuguese poet handles the mythological material from Homer and Pindar. In this way, he initiated in 18th-century Portuguese literature a new literary genre, the Pindaric ode. By dealing with Poetry and History, Cruz e Silva perpetuated the life and fame of national heroes long after their deaths.

Cappadocia: where Greek prepositions come to die

The Cappadocian variety of Ulaghátsh is unique among the Greek-speaking world in having lost the inherited preposition ‘se’. The innovation is found with both locative and allative uses and has af-ected both syntactic contexts in which ‘se’ was originally found, that is, as a simple preposition (1) and as the left-occurring member of circumpositions of the type ‘se’ + NP + spatial adverb (2). (1) a. tránse ci [to meidán] en ávʝa see.PST.3SG COMP ART.DEF.SG.ACC yard.SG.ACC COP.3 game.PL.NOM ‘he saw that in the yard is some game’ (Dawkins 1916: 348) b. ta erʝó da qardáʃa évɣan [to qonáq] ART.DEF.PL.NOM two ART.DEF.PL.NOM friend.PL.NOM ascend.PST.3PL ART.DEF.SG.ACC house.SG.ACC ‘the two friends went up to the house’ (Dawkins 1916: 354) (2) émi [ta qonáca mésa], kiríʃde [to ʝasdɯ́q píso] enter.PST.3SG ART.DEF.PL.NOM house.PL.ACC inside hide.PST.3SG. ART.DEF.SG.ACC cushion.SG.ACC behind ‘he went into the houses and hid behind the cushions’ (Dawkins 1916: 348) In this paper, we set out to provide (a) a diachronic account of the loss of ‘se’ in Asia Minor Greek, and (b) a synchronic analysis of its ramifications for the encoding of the semantic and grammatical functions it had prior to its loss. The diachronic development of ‘se’ is traced by comparing the Ulaghátsh data with those obtained from Cappadocian varieties that have neither lost it nor do they show signs of losing it and, crucially, also from varieties in which ‘se’ is in the process of being lost. The comparative analysis shows that the loss first became manifest in circumpositions in which ‘se’ was preposed to the complement to which in turn a wide range of adverbs expressing topological relations were postposed (émi sa qonáca mésa > émi ta qonáca mésa). This finding is accounted for in terms of Sinha and Kuteva’s (1995) distributed spatial semantics framework, which accepts that the elements involved in the constructions under investigation—the verb (émi), ‘se’ and the spatial adverb (mésa)—all contribute to the expression of the spatial relational meaning but with differences in weighting. Of the three, ‘eis’ made the most minimal contribution, the bulk of it being distributed over the verb and the adverb. This allowed for it to be optionally dropped from circumpositions, a stage attested in Phlo-tá Cappadocian and Silliot, and to be later completely abandoned, originally in allative and subsequently in locative contexts (earlier: évɣan so qonáq > évɣan to qonáq; later: so meidán en ávʝa > to meidán en ávʝa). The earlier loss in allative contexts is also dealt with in distributed semantics terms as verbs of motion such as έβγαν are semantically more loaded than vacuous verbs like the copula and therefore the preposition could be left out in the former context more easily than in the latter. The analysis also addresses the possibility that the loss of ‘se’ may ultimately originate in substandard forms of Medieval Greek, which according to Tachibana (1994) displayed SPATIAL ADVERB + NP constructions. Applying the semantic map model (Croft 2003, Haspelmath 2003), the synchronic analysis of the varieties that retain ‘se’ reveals that—like many other allative markers crosslinguistically—it displays a pattern of multifunctionality in expressing nine different functions (among others allative, locative, recipient, addressee, experiencer), which can be mapped against four domains, viz. the spatiotemporal, the social, the mental and the logicotextual (cf. Rice & Kabata 2007). In Ulaghátsh Cappadocian, none of these functions is overtly marked as such. In cases like (1), the intended spatial relational meaning is arrived at through the combination of the syntax and the inherent semantics of the verb and the zero-marked NP as well as from the context. In environments of the type exemplified by (2), the adverb contributes further to the correct interpretation. The analysis additionally shows that, despite the loss of ‘se’, Ulaghátsh patterns with all other Cappadocian varieties in one important aspect: Goal and Location are expressed similarly (by zero in Ulaghátsh, by ‘se’ in the other varieties) whereas Source is being kept distinct (expressed by ‘apó’ in all varieties). Goal-Location polysemy is very common across the world’s languages and, most crucially, prevails over other possible polysemies in the tripartite distinction Source—Location—Goal (Lestrade 2010, Nikitina 2009). Taking into account this empirical observation, our findings suggest that the reor-anisation of spatial systems can have a local effect—in our case the loss of a member of the prepositional paradigm—but will keep the original global picture intact, thus conforming to crosslinguistically robust tendencies.  References Croft, W. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R. M. 1916. Modern Greek in Asia Minor: A Study of the Dialects of Sílli, Cappadocia and Phárasa with Grammar, Texts, Translations and Glossary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haspelmath, M. 2003. The geometry of grammatical meaning: semantic maps and cross-linguistic comparison. In M. Tomasello (Ed.), The New Psychology of Language, Volume 2. New York: Erlbaum, 211–243. Lestrade, S. 2010. The Space of Case. Doctoral dissertation. Radboud University Nijmegen. Nikitina, T. 2009. Subcategorization pattern and lexical meaning of motion verbs: a study of the source/goal ambiguity. Linguistics 47, 1113–1141. Rice, S. & K. Kabata. 2007. Cross-linguistic grammaticalization patterns of the allative. Linguistic Typology 11, 451–514. Sinha, C. & T. Kuteva. 1995. Distributed spatial semantics. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 18:2, 167–199. Tachibana, T. 1994. Syntactic structure of spatial expressions in the “Late Byzantine Prose Alexander Romance”. Propylaia 6, 35–51.

Convergence in word structure: revisiting agglutinative noun inflection in Cappadocian Greek

Cappadocian Greek is reported to display agglutinative inflection in its nominal system, namely, mono-exponential formatives for the marking of case and number, and NOM.SG-looking forms as the morphemic units to which inflection applies. Previous scholarship has interpreted these developments as indicating a shift in morphological type from fusion to agglutination, brought about by contact with Turkish. This study takes issue with these conclusions. By casting a wider net over the inflectional system of the language, it shows that, of the two types of agglutinative formations identified, only one evidences a radical departure from the inherited structural properties of Cappadocian noun inflection. The other, on the contrary, represents a typologically more conservative innovation. The study presents evidence that a combination of system-internal and -external motivations triggered the development of both types, it describes the mechanisms through which the innovation was implemented, and discusses the factors that favoured change.

The Asia Minor Greek adpositional cycle: a tale of multiple causation

This paper examines the interplay of language-internal continuity and external influence in the cyclical development of the Asia Minor Greek adpositional system. The Modern Greek dialects of Asia Minor inherited an adpositional system of the Late Medieval Greek type whereby secondary adpositions regularly combined with primary adpositions to encode spatial region. Secondary adpositions could originally precede simple adpositions ([PREPOSITION + PREPOSITION + NPACC]) or follow the adpositional complement ([PREPOSITION + NPACC + POSTPOSITION]). Asia Minor Greek replicated the structure of Ottoman Turkish postpositional phrases to resolve this variability, fixing the position of secondary adpositions after the complement and thus developing circumpositions of the type [PREPOSITION + NPACC + POSTPOSITION]. Later, some varieties dropped the primary preposition SE from circumpositional phrases, leaving (secondary) postpositions as the only overt relator ([NPACC + POSTPOSITION]) in some environments. In addition, a number of Turkish postpositions were borrowed wholesale, thus enriching the Greek adpositional inventory.

From syntagmatic to paradigmatic spatial zeroes: the loss of the preposition se in inner Asia Minor Greek

We trace the diachronic development of the preposition se in inner Asia Minor Greek from its use to mark a range of spatial functions to its ultimate loss and replacement by zero. We propose that, before spreading to all syntactic and semantic contexts, zero marking was contextually-dependent on the presence/absence of a prenominal genitive modifying the head noun of Ground-encoding NPs and on the presence/absence of Region-encoding postpositions. We attribute these developments to an informational load relief strategy aimed at producing more economical utterances as well as to language contact with Turkish, which favoured structural convergence on the adpositional level between the two languages.