Linguistic innovations in IRC: Cypriot-Greek phonological features

The Cypriot Greek variety (CG), spoken in the island of Cyprus, is relatively distinct from Standard Greek (SG) in all linguistic domains and, especially, in the area of pronunciation. Youth language, within the Greek-Cypriot context, is an area of study that has, until recently, received little attention. Tsiplakou (2004) makes reference to the emergence of a new slang among young Greek-Cypriots, influenced by new comedy series, in which the actors make extensive use of ‘exaggeratedly peasant’ CG. As these comedy series become increasingly popular, the use of marked regional features becomes evident in the speech style of young Greek-Cypriots. A preliminary study has also revealed that marked CG linguistic features are equally evident in the online interactions of young internet users (Themistocleous 2005). In this study, I examine the use of CG phonological elements in a corpus of messages collected from channel #Cyprus, of Internet Relay Chat (IRC). It is demonstrated that young Greek-Cypriots use language in creative ways, in order to represent in writing phonological features, typical of their informal speech.

Written Cypriot Greek in online chat: Usage and attitudes

This paper investigates the attitudes of Greek-Cypriot internet users towards written Cypriot Greek (CG) in online chat. CG does not have a standard official orthography and it is only used in informal oral communication. With the emergence of computer-mediated communication (CMC), a novel Romanized form of CG is used instead of Standard Greek (SG) in online environments (Themistocleous 2005). To investigate language attitudes, an online questionnaire was distributed electronically to Greek-Cypriot internet users. The results show that the majority of the informants have positive attitudes towards written CG, a practice that goes against the results of previous attitudinal surveys. In this paper, I demonstrate how the internet can influence and change the attitudes of Greek-Cypriots towards their regional variety. It is argued that the unconventional and norm-free character of CMC allows internet users to use their non-standard variety in a domain where the standard would be expected to be used.

Introduction: the legacy of Greek political thought

This Introduction offers context for the individual papers by examining the intersections and productive tensions between political thought and classical reception studies. While Plato and Aristotle have long been privileged interlocutors for political philosophers, classical reception studies has pluralised both this ancient canon and given rise to a more complex understanding of the modern heirs of ancient political thought. Similarly, the insights of studying the history of political texts and ideas across a longer tradition calls into question the fixity of concepts such as democracy, empire and political freedom. Indeed, we query the very notion of tradition by emphasising how the past has been repeatedly constructed and reconstructed in divergent modern political discourses and conversely how modern political theories and realities have been shaped and reshaped by an idea of antiquity. The Introduction closes with a brief survey of the collected papers.

Pragmatic abilities of high-functioning Greek-speaking children with autism

This paper reports on the findings of the pragmatic abilities of Greek-speaking children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Twenty high functioning children with ASD and their typically developing age and vocabulary controls were administered a pragmatics task. The task was based on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV) in the context of a larger study targeting the grammar of Greek-speaking children with autism, and assessed the children’s abilities in communicative role taking, narrative, and question asking. The children with ASD showed an uneven profile in their pragmatic abilities. The two groups did not differ in communicative role taking and question asking. However, the children with ASD had difficulties on the narrative task, and more specifically, on the items assessing reference contrast and temporal links. Yet, they performed similarly on the mental state representations and the false beliefs items. Despite their good performance on mental states and false beliefs, the ASD children’s lower performance on reference contrast can be interpreted via Theory of Mind deficits if we assume that the former involve an additional level of complexity; namely, quantifying the amount of information available to the listener. Lower performance on temporal links is in line with the ASD children’s attested difficulties in organizing events into a coherent gist. Their overall profile, and, in particular, the dissociation between the different sections of the task, does not support single deficit accounts. It rather indicates that the deficits of individuals with ASD stem from distinct deficits in core cognitive processes (Happé & Frith, 2006).

A reappraisal of Baskerville's Greek types

Ιn the eighteenth century the printing of Greek texts continued to be central to scholarship and discourse. The typography of Greek texts could be characterised as a continuation of French models from the sixteenth century, with a gradual dilution of the complexity of ligatures and abbreviations, mostly through printers in the Low Countries. In Britain, Greek printing was dominated by the university presses, which reproduced conservatively the continental models – exemplified by Oxford's Fell types, which were Dutch adaptations of earlier French models. Hindsight allows us to identify a meaningful development in the Greek types cut by Alexander Wilson for the Foulis Press in Glasgow, but we can argue that in the middle of the eighteenth century Baskerville was considering Greek printing the typographic environment was ripe for a new style of Greek types. The opportunity to cut the types for a New Testament (in an twin edition that included a generous octavo and a large quarto version) would seem perfect for showcasing Baskerville's capacity for innovation. His Greek type maintained the cursive ductus of earlier models, but abandoned complex ligatures and any hint of scribal flourish. He homogenised the modulation of the letter strokes and the treatment of terminals, and normalised the horizontal alignments of all letters. Although the strokes are in some letters too delicate, the narrow set of the style composes a consistent, uniform texture that is a clean break from contemporaneous models. The argument is made that this is the first Greek typeface that can be described as fully typographic in the context of the technology of the time. It sets a pattern that was to be followed, without acknowledgement, by Richard Porson nearly a century and a half later. The typeface received little praise by typographic historians, and was condemned by Victor Scholderer in his retrospective of Greek typography. A survey of typeface reviews in the surrounding decades establishes that the commentators were mostly reproducing the views of an arbitrary typographic orthodoxy, for which only types with direct references to Renaissance models were acceptable. In these comments we detect a bias against someone considered an arriviste in the scholarly printing establishment, as well as a conservative attitude to typographic innovation.

Muriel Rukeyser: poetry and the body

The human body occupies a central place in Rukeyser’s poetry. Her characters’ physical experiences inspire their search for an artistic form and a holistic vision that reconciles the corporeal and conceptual aspects of their life. My thesis deals with Rukeyser’s reconciliation of disparate aspects of existence through the image of the human body and the practical experiences she underwent in her personal life and incorporated in her poetry. I discuss her poetry of the 1940s, where a tension is observed between the artist’s personal life and her art, which she attempts to resolve by adopting an artistic form that accommodates her quotidian experiences. I study, mainly through her poetry of the 1950s, Rukeyser’s poetic technique in the light of her organicist poetics and the combination of tendencies to coercion and suggestiveness distinguishing her style. I examine her portrayal of the suffering body in her poetry of the 1960s and 1970s. By means of their physical experiences, the ill, her despised and the imprisoned protagonists undergo a process of development whereby they perceive the different aspects of their identity and attempt to broaden perspectives on their situation by reconciling them. I argue that Rukeyser’s engagement with physical encounters and with the poem as an inclusive, organic body enables her to reconcile disparate elements in her poetry, such as her personal life and her art, her individual existence and the public world, as well as the distinct aspects of her characters’ identity. Her vatic outlook, which integrates distinct aspects of experience, is consistent with Merleau-Ponty’s idea of human perception as characterised by the two interdependent positions of immanence and transcendence. Rukeyser’s poetry depicts her physical engagement with quotidian events of her life as a factor of artistic inspiration. These situations constitute shared human experiences that enable her to imagine the links binding her to other people and the world at large. The poet’s personal experiences inspire her search for an artistic form that accommodates them. Her perception of the concrete aspect of her individual existence gains significance when it is linked to social and political issues. Both the private and public are thus seen as interconnected, and they affect the existence of each other while retaining their distinctness.