"Framing Counterspaces: Forms and Meanings of Graffiti in Berlin's Linguistic Landscape"

Street art and graffiti are integral parts of Berlin’s urban space, which has undergone dramatic transformations in the past two decades. Graffiti texts constitute a critical comment on these urban transformations. This talk analyzes the connection between the phenomenon of street art and trajectories in urban planning in post-wall Berlin. My current research explores the meaning of various forms of street art (such as graffiti, posters, sticker art, stencils) as texts in Berlin’s linguistic landscape. Linguistic Landscape research pays critical attention to language, words, and images displayed and exposed in public spaces. The field of Linguistic Landscapes has only recently begun to include graffiti texts in analyses of text and space to fully comprehend the semiotics of the street. In the case of Germany’s capital, graffiti writing enters into a critical dialogue with the environment and provides a readable text to understand the city.

Pesiqta Rabbati: a text-linguistic and form-analytical analysis of the rabbinic homily

Pesiqta Rabbati is a unique homiletic midrash that follows the liturgical calendar in its presentation of homilies for festivals and special Sabbaths. This article attempts to utilize Pesiqta Rabbati in order to present a global theory of the literary production of rabbinic/homiletic literature. In respect to Pesiqta Rabbati it explores such areas as dating, textual witnesses, integrative apocalyptic meta-narrative, describing and mapping the structure of the text, internal and external constraints that impacted upon the text, text linguistic analysis, form-analysis: problems in the texts and linguistic gap-filling, transmission of text, strict formalization of a homiletic unit, deconstructing and reconstructing homiletic midrashim based upon form-analytic units of the homily, Neusner’s documentary hypothesis, surface structures of the homiletic unit, and textual variants. The suggested methodology may assist scholars in their production of editions of midrashic works by eliminating superfluous material and in their decoding and defining of ancient texts.

Druze linguistic landscape in Israel: indexicality of new ethnolinguistic identity boundaries

The Druze community in Israel is a distinct religious community currently undergoing important ethnolinguistic shifts. The government's implementation of an official policy has led to the deconstruction and reshaping of the Druze political and national identity to one that differs substantially from that of the Palestinian minority in Israel. In this study, I argue that the visibility, vitality and appreciation of Hebrew in the Druze linguistic landscape are indicative of new ethnolinguistic boundaries of the Druze identity in Israel. The fact that the Druze in Israel are dispersed throughout the Galilee and Mount Carmel area and experience varying levels of language contact as well as divergent economic relations with their Palestinian–Israeli and Jewish–Israeli neighbors suggests that one cannot expect uniformity in the Druze linguistic markets or the processes of social, cultural and linguistic identification. This study will show that Hebrew has become a dominant component of the linguistic repertoire and social identity of the Druze in the Mount Carmel area since it has become the first choice of communication as the linguistic landscape indicates.

The Semantics and Typology of Yes/No Particles (A Cross-Linguistic Study)

Taking the three basic systems of Yes/No particles the group looked at the relative deep and surface structures, and asked what types of systems are present in the Georgian, Polish and Armenian languages. The choice of languages was of particular interest as the Caucasian and Indo-European languages usually have different question-answering systems, but Georgian (Caucasian) and Polish (Indo-European) in fact share the same system. The Armenian language is Indo-European, but the country is situated in the southern Caucasus, on Georgia's southern border, making it worth analysing Armenian in comparison with Georgian (from the point of view of language interference) and with Polish (as two relative languages). The group identified two different deep structures, tracing the occurrence of these in different languages, and showed that one is more natural in the majority of languages. They found no correspondence between relative languages and their question-answer systems and demonstrated that languages in the same typological class may show different systems, as with Georgian and the North Caucasian languages. It became clear that Georgian, Armenian and Polish all have an agree/disagree question-answering system defined by the same deep structure. From this they conclude that the lingual mentalities of Georgians, Armenians and Poles are more oriented to the communicative act. At the same time the Yes/No system, in which a positive particle stands for a positive answer and a negative particle for a negative answer, also functions in these languages, indicating that the second deep structure identified also functions alongside the first.

Linguistic Stylistics

Marina Katnic-Bakarsic. Linguistic Stylistics The practical, i.e. educational, objective of this research was to produce lectures on linguistic stylistics for the students of Sarajevo University, while the theoretical one was to produce a monograph on the subject. This monograph, which can also be used as a university textbook, includes twenty-nine chapters, an index of topics, a bibliography and a list of sources. The theoretical postulates are followed by examples from texts in various functional styles in Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and in some cases Russian or English. Linguo-stylistic problems were investigated from both the structuralist and post-structuralist points of view. Linguistic stylistics is therefore understood as a discipline which studies expressive, stylistically marked language units on all language levels, functional-stylistic language variation and various aspects of intertextuality and metatext. The author introduces a notion of stylistic competence. The stylistic competence of a speaker is directly proportional to his/her knowledge of different varieties of language (i.e. subcodes) and to the successful switching from one subcode to another. Stylistic creativity is a special segment of stylistic competence as a feature of individual style. A new classification of functional styles has also been introduced. This includes six primary styles (scientific, colloquial, administrative, publicistic, journalistic and literary-artistic) and five secondary styles (oratorical, the style of advertisements and commercials, that of comics, that of essays and that of screenplays). A special place is given to the analysis of the style of hypertext and hypermedia, which can be understood only within the post-structuralist theory of text deconstruction and intertextuality. The project also analysed some new topics, including reregistration in literary texts, gender and style of dialogue, and citations as metatextual signals and their role in different types of text. The results therefore offer a new approach to the study of linguistic stylistics both in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the field in general.

Language Construction of Reality in the German Tabloid Press/on Materials of BILD Newspaper/

From the moment of their birth, a person's life is determined by their sex. Goroshko wanted to find out why this difference is so striking, why society is so determined to sustain it, and how it can persist even when certain national or behavioural stereotypes are erased. She believes there are both social and biological differences between men and women, and set out to analyse these distinctions as they are manifested in language. Certain general characteristics can be identified. Males tend to write with less fluency, to refer to events in a verb phrase, to be time-oriented, to involve themselves more in their references to events, to locate events in their personal sphere of activity, and to refer less to others. Goroshko therefore concludes that the male is more active, more ego-involved in what he does and less concerned about others. Women were more fluent, referred to events in a noun-phrase, were less time-oriented, tended to be less involved in their event references, located events within their interactive community, and referred more to others. They spent much more time discussing personal and domestic subjects, relationship problems, family, health and reproductive matters, weight, food and clothing, men, and other women. Computer analysis showed that female speech was substantially more emotional, using hyperbole, metaphor, comparisons, epithets, ways of enumeration, interjections, rhetorical questions and exclamations. The level of literacy was higher in female speech, and women made fewer grammatical and spelling mistakes in written texts. Goroshko believes that her findings have relevance beyond the linguistic field. When working on anonymous texts she has been able to decide on the sex of the author and so believes that her research may even be of benefit to forensic science.