Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (138) (remove)
Language
- English (138) (remove)
Keywords
Institute
- Institut für Romanistik (138) (remove)
A grammar of authority?
(2021)
Directive Speech Acts (dsas) are a major feature of historical pragmatics, specifically in research on historical (im)politeness. However, for Classical French, there is a lack of research on related phenomena. In our contribution, we present two recently constructed corpora covering the period of Classical French, sermo and apwcf. We present these corpora in terms of their genre characteristics on a communicative-functional and socio-pragmatic level. Based on the observation that, both in sermo and apwcf, dsas frequently occur together with terms of address, we analyse and manually code a sample based on this co-occurrence, and we compare the results with regard to special features in the individual corpora. The emerging patterns show a clear correspondence between socio-pragmatic factors and the linguistic means used to realise dsas. We propose that these results can be interpreted as signs of an underlying "grammar of authority".
A few months before his death, A. v. Humboldt attended the celebration in honor of the 127th birthday of George Washington at the US legation in Berlin. A letter to the American Envoy, Joseph A. Wright (1810 – 1867), underlines Humboldt’s admiration for the fi rst president of the United States. At the same time Humboldt asked the diplomat to mail a letter to the German-American Bernard Moses (1832 – 1897) in Clinton, Louisiana, who had named his son Alexander Humboldt Moses (grave on the Hebrew Rest Cemetery #2 in New Orleans, burial plot A, 12, 5). It appears to be possible that the Moses family still owns Humboldt’s letter.
The author's recently published monograph on Alexander von Humboldt[1] describes the multiple images of this great cultural icon. The book is a metabiographical study that shows how from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present day Humboldt has served as a nucleus of crystallisation for a variety of successive socio-political ideologies, each producing its own distinctive representation of him. The historiographical implications of this biographical diversity are profound and support current attempts to understand historical scholarship in terms of memory cultures.
In his “Essay on the Fluctuations in the Supplies of Gold” (1838) Humboldt presents a global history of the flow of precious metals from antiquity to the 19th century. This paper traces Humboldt’s economic thinking within his natural and historical research, starting with an outline of his educational background which incorporated late mercantilist and early liberal influences. It then discusses a world map and four charts drawn by Humboldt, which combine historical and contemporary statistical data into a cartographical vision of a global economic circuit. In a next step, the article explores Humboldt’s application of natural and historical research methods in the field of political economy, using the example of his 1838 essay. Finally, the article addresses Humboldt’s discussion of platinum, a precious metal whose limited natural distribution contradicted the idea of free global exchange.
A Prophet of Divine Wisdom?
(2020)
In the nineteenth century, the reception of Giambattista Vico’s writings came along with nationalist interpretations of his Scienza Nuova as an ‘Italian Science’. This tendency was based upon an increased examination of the role that the philosopher Pythagoras and his Italian school of Croton played in Vico’s hierarchical conception of the ancient Greek and Italian civilizations. Writers, archaeologists and historians used the New Science as a metonymic reference work for their own nationalist concepts by updating the Pythagorean myth in accordance with relevant narratives of exclusive genealogies concerning an ancient Italian wisdom. These narratives follow tendencies in Vico’s own writings that were quoted strategically and mixed with further interpretations of the Scienza Nuova as reliable testimonial for a glorious Italian history. A theological poet characterized by deeper insight into the secrets of nature and some parts of the divine providence, Pythagoras gains his special position in Vico’s general conception of knowledge.
Acclimatization
(2003)
Together with their wives Otto and Richard Schomburgk arrived in Port Adelaide (South Australia) on August 16th 1849. The essay looks at how these two brothers, who had received their scientific training and promotion in the circle surrounding Alexander von Humboldt, reacted to the unfamiliar conditions in the young British colony. Some indication will be given as to the differences between the Schomburgk brothers treatment of the natural resources of the new colony and that of the English colonists of the time.
Acknowlegements
(2011)
In a previously published article in HIN under the title of “Eduard Dorsch and his unpublished poem on the occasion of Humboldt’s 100th birthday,” I elaborated on Dorsch’s poem that was read in Detroit in front of a German-American audience on Sept. 14, 1869, a day widely celebrated in the US in honor of Humboldt. Although it was not surprising that Dorsch wrote the occasional poem in the first place given his affinities with Humboldt’s world of thought, a discovery of a second occasional poem upon further research in Dorsch’s voluminous papers was indeed unexpected, in this case read on the same date in Monroe, Michigan. Although there are a number of similarities between the Detroit and Monroe versions, there are enough differences that warrant this addendum to my original article.
Address on the opening of the Alexander von Humboldt Season
in Quito, Ecuador, on 13 February 2019
(2019)
Alexander von Humboldt
(2020)
In the middle of the 19th century the question whether expanding civilization and industrialization had an effect on climate was discussed intensely worldwide. It was feared that increasing deforestation would lead to continuous decrease in rainfall. This first scientific discussion about climate change as the result of human intervention was strongly influenced by the research Alexander von Humboldt and Jean-Baptiste Boussingault had undertaken when they investigated the falling water levels of Lake Valencia in Venezuela. This essay aims to clarify the question whether Alexander von Humboldt can be counted among the leading figures of modern environmentalism on account of this research as is being claimed by Richard H. Grove in his influential book Green Imperialism. Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (1995).
When it comes to footnotes, Alexander von Humboldt was ahead of his times even though his references leave much to be desired by today’s academic standards. This article examines the footnotes of Humboldt’s Essai politique sur l‘île de Cuba (1826). While it is not always easy to decipher his sometimes cryptic references, the undertaking is worthwhile: Humboldt’s footnotes do not only reveal his vast networks of knowledge. They also provide glimpses of ongoing, contemporary disputes among different scholars that involve Humboldt’s writings. They also present Humboldt’s reactions to such disputes. Exploring Humboldt’s footnotes consequently allows the reader to access both Humboldt the scholar and Humboldt the human being.
The article provides historical background for Alexander von Humboldt’s expedition into Russia in 1829. It includes information on Humboldt’s works and publications in Russia over the course of his lifetime, as well as an explanation of the Russian scientific community’s response to those works. Humboldt’s ideas on the existence of an active volcano in Central Asia attracted the attention of two prominent Russian geographers, P. Semenov and P. Kropotkin, whose views on the nature of volcanism were quite different. P. Semenov personally met Humboldt in Berlin. P. Kropotkin made one of the most important geological discoveries of the 19th Century: he found the fresh volcanic cones near Lake Baikal.
Soon after Humboldt’s Russian expedition, and partly as a result of it, an important mineral was found in the Ilmen mountains – samarskite, which later gave its name to the chemical element Samarium, developed in 1879. At the beginning of the 20th Century, the Russian scientist V. Vernadskiy pointed out that samarskite was the first uranium-rich mineral found in Russia.
Alexander von Humboldt’s descriptions of volcanic mountains in his travel journals (Reise auf dem Río Magdalena, durch die Anden und Mexico) show both his reliance on and impatience with literary conventions and travel narratives. Using Goethe’s Italienische Reise and Bürger’s Münchhausen as points of comparison for literary treatments of the volcano ascent, Humboldt’s process of writing is examined. Humboldt shows the failure of the existing discourse and begins to experiment with narratives which fragment and recombine personal and historical modes of writing with, in this case, images from new technical inventions which visualize landscape according to fundamental scientific principles. While the inclusion of scientific prose is relevant, Humboldt’s link to modernity is based on experimental narrative techniques which draw upon changing sets of discourse practices to describe complex realities.
Though Humboldt’s travels to the Americas have been analyzed from a wide range of viewpoints, there are specific aspects that still await further investigation. Little is written about Humboldt in the field, specifically how he moved between different locations and simultaneously measured and mapped places and phenomena. The aim of this article is to discuss the triad movement-measure-ment-map that led to the development of specific practices of knowledge building on the move. Humboldt’s search for the connections between the watersheds of the Orinoco and the Amazon rivers and the resulting maps and drawings are used as an example to point out his cartographic impulse in his quest to understand and explain the physical world.
Bibliographie critique
(1993)
Die besondere Beziehung zwischen Humboldt und Darwin, zwei der bedeutendsten Persönlichkeiten in der Welt der Naturwissenschaften und der Biologie des 19. Jahrhunderts, wird detailliert auf den verschiedenen Ebenen ihres Kontaktes analysiert, sowohl was das real stattgefundene persönliche Treffen betrifft, als auch hinsichtlich ihrer Korrespondenz und der Koinzidenz von Ideen. Dieser wechselseitige Blick zeigt uns wie sich die beiden Gelehrten gegenseitig wahrnahmen, ob sie wirklich versuchten, mit dem Paradigma ihrer bedeutenden Vorgänger zu brechen, oder ob sie lediglich schrittweise das bereits erlangte Wissen erweiterten, bis es durch die Erstellung einer genialen Idee zu einem Bruch des bisherigen Wissens kommt. Bekannt ist die wiederholte Referenz von Darwin auf die Werke Humboldts, insbesondere auf die Tagebücher des deutschen Naturwissenschaftler und seine Art der Beschreibung der amerikanischen Natur in ihrer ganzen Reichhaltigkeit. Weniger bekannt hingegen sind andere Verweise in seiner Autobiografie, sowie die wissenschaftliche Verwendung des Humboldtschen Werkes oder die Zitate in seiner Korrespondenz, die in diesem Beitrag aufgezeigt werden. Darüber hinaus wird die Verwendung der frühen Schriften von Darwin durch Humboldt in einigen seiner Publikationen, vor allem im Kosmos, erwähnt.
Deep into the second half of the twentieth century the traditionalist definition of India as a country of villages remained dominant in official political rhetoric as well as cultural production. In the past two decades or so, this ruralist paradigm has been effectively superseded by a metropolitan imaginary in which the modern, globalised megacity increasingly functions as representative of India as a whole. Has the village, then, entirely vanished from the cultural imaginary in contemporary India? Addressing economic practices from upper-class consumerism to working-class family support strategies, this paper attempts to trace how 'the village' resurfaces or survives as a cultural reference point in the midst of the urban.
Connecting the new world
(2012)
This article explores the link between the profound technological transformations of the nineteenth century and the life and work of the Prussian scholar Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). It analyses how Humboldt sought to appropriate the revolutionary new communication and transportation technologies of the time in order to integrate the American continent into global networks of commercial, intellectual and material exchange. Recent scholarship on Humboldt’s expedition to the New World (1799-1804) has claimed that his descriptions of tropical landscapes opened up South America to a range of ‘transformative interventions’ (Pratt) by European capitalists and investors. These studies, however, have not analysed the motivations underlying Humboldt’s support for such intrusions into nature. Furthermore, they have not explored the role that such projects played in shaping Humboldt’s understanding of the forces behind the progress of societies. To comprehend Humboldt’s approval for human interventions in America’s natural world, this study first explores the role that eighteenth-century theories of progress and the notion of geographical determinism played in shaping his conception of civilisational development. It will look at concrete examples of transformative interventions in the American hemisphere that were actively proposed by Humboldt and intended to overcome natural obstacles to human interaction. These were the use of steamships, electric telegraphy, railroads and large-scale canals that together enabled global trade and communication to occur at an unprecedented pace. All these contemporary innovations will be linked to the four motifs of nets, mobility, progress and acceleration, which were driving forces behind the ‘transformation of the world’ that took place in the course of the nineteenth century.
It has often been pointed out that there is some overlap between epistemic modality and evidentiality (Chafe & Nichols 1986, Cornillie 2007, De Haan 1999, Dendale & Tasmowski 2001, Plungian 2001, Squartini 2004). In this paper I would like to offer several reflections about the necessity of drawing a boundary between modality and evidentiality. Starting from the typological category of evidentiality - extended here for use in pragmatic studies - I will then explore demarcation problems in Romance languages, which lack grammaticalized forms for expressing evidentiality. The underlying premise of this paper is that evidentiality as marker of the origin of the speaker's knowledge stands in relation to the speaker's pragmatic stance. Because the perspective of the speaker is thus incorporated into the utterance, it seems appropriate to analyse the applicability of the deictic category. Finally, under the aspect of deixis, I shall attempt a demarcation between evidentiality and modality.
In recent years the category of evidentiality has come into use also for the description of Romance languages. This has been contingent on a change in its interpretation from a typological category to a semantic-pragmatic category, which allows an application to languages lacking specialised morphemes for the expression of evidentiality. In the following we will first describe the theoretical framework in which we use the category of evidentiality for the description of Romance languages. A key question to be elucidated here will be the determination of evidentiality as a deictic phenomenon. This will also be the basis for discussing the distinction between evidentiality and epistemic modality.
Everything is interrelated, even the errors in the system : Alexander von Humboldt and globalization
(2010)
In this paper evidential and modal adverbs will be studied, such as French apparemment, évidemment, visiblement, Italian apparentemente, evidentemente, ovviamente, and Spanish aparentemente, evidentemente and visiblemente. The development of their signification will be discussed, including German adverbs like offensichtlich. In these means of expression, the functional-semantic categories evidentiality and epistemic modality seem to overlap: on the one hand, they are used if the state of affairs talked about cannot be verified, that is, if there is still a moment of insecurity concerning the transmitted information. Then adverbials with a special structure (preposition + article + nominal form of a verb) will be analysed, and we will examine if they behave in the same way.
The present paper discusses the relationship between evidentiality and (inter-) subjectivity and argues that the two semantic-functional categories need not be mutually exclusive. In the use of certain means of expression and in certain contexts, both evidentiality and (inter-) subjectivity may be conveyed simultaneously. I thereby differentiate between two meanings of intersubjectivity, namely ‘intersubjectivity1’ and ‘intersubjectivity2’. Intersubjectivity1 refers to the notion of common or general knowledge: certain means of expression are seen as being intersubjectively used when the speaker shares or assumes sharing knowledge with the interlocutor. Intersubjectivity2 is related to particular discourse functions of certain means of expression in interactional settings, paying attention to the speaker-hearer constellation.
In order to substantiate the theoretical part of the paper, I then present a qualitative analysis of Portuguese, Spanish and English examples, which are taken from the Corpus do Português, Corpus del Español and the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
In recent years, the category of evidentiality has also come into use for the description of Romance languages and of German. This has been contingent on a change in its interpretation from a typological category to a semantic-pragmatic category, which allows an application to languages lacking specialised morphemes for the expression of evidentiality. We consider evidentiality to be a structural dimension of grammar, the values of which are expressed by types of constructions that code the source of information which a speaker imparts. If we look at the situation in Romance languages and in German, drawing a boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality presents problems that are difficult to solve. Adding markers of the source of the speaker’s knowledge often limits the degree of responsibility of the speaker for the content of the utterance. Evidential adverbs are a frequently used means of marking the source of the speaker’s knowledge. The evidential meaning is generalised to marking any source of knowledge, what can be regarded as a result of a process of pragmaticalisation. The use of certain means which also carry out evidential markings can even contribute to the blurring of the different kinds of evidentiality. German also has modal verbs which in conjunction with the perfect tense of the verb have a predominantly evidential use (sollen and wollen). But even here the evidential marking is not without influence on the modality of the utterance. The Romance languages, however, do not have such specialised verbs for expressing evidentiality in certain contexts. To do this, they mark evidentiality – often context bound – by verb forms such as the conditional and the imperfect tense. This article shall contrast the different architectures used in expressing evidentiality in German and in the Romance languages.
Humboldtian science aims at an empirically supported transdisciplinary and at the same time transareal development of a world consciousness. In the development of this world consciousness, not only Europe and the Americas, but also Central Asia and especially China play an important role. The Humboldt Center for Transdisciplinary Studies (HCTS) in Changsha, is attempting to address the fact that China has been largely left out of international Humboldt studies and that Alexander von Humboldt was intensively engaged with Central Asia and China for decades. Therefore, the Humboldt Center in Changsha sets itself the goal of expanding Humboldt Studies to include this important aspect, to stimulate and coordinate special research work, and to build scientific and cultural bridges between Germany and China, Europe and Asia.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote recently that “when Church began to paint his great canvases, Alexander von Humboldt may well have been the world’s most famous and influential intellectual.” Humboldt’s influence in the case of the landscape artist Church is especially interesting. If we examine the precise relationship between the German explorer and his American admirer, we gain an insight into how Humboldt transformed Church’s life and signaled a new phase in the career of the artist. Church retraced Humboldt’s travels in Ecuador and in Mexico. If we compare the texts available to Church and the comparison of Church’s paintings and the texts and images of Humboldt’s works we can arrive at new perspectives on Humboldt’s extraordinary influence on American landscape painting in the nineteenth century.
When it comes to autobiographical narratives, the most spontaneous and natural manner is preferable. But neither individually told narratives nor those grounded in the communicative repertoire of a social group are easily comparable. A clearly identifiable tertium comparationis is mandatory. We present the results of an experimental ‘Narrative Priming’ setting with French students. A potentially underlying model of narrating from personal experience was activated via a narrative prime, and in a second step, the participants were asked to tell a narrative of their own. The analysis focuses on similarities and differences between the primes and the students’ narratives. The results give evidence for the possibility to elicit a set of comparable narratives via a prime, and to activate an underlying narrative template. Meaningful differences are discussed as generational and age related styles. The transcriptions from the participants that authorized the publication are available online.
A frequently mentioned if somewhat peripheral figure in the historiography of late nineteenth-century linguistics is the German sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893). Today Gabelentz is chiefly remembered for several insights that proved to be productive in the development of subsequent schools and subdisciplines. In this paper, we examine two of these insights, his analytic and synthetic systems of grammar and his foundational work on typology. We show how they were intimately connected within his conception of linguistic research, and how this was in turn embedded in the tradition established by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), especially as it was further developed by H. Steinthal (1823–1899). This paper goes beyond several previous works with a similar focus by drawing on a wider range of Gabelentz’ writings, including manuscript sources that have only recently been published, and by examining specific textual connections between Gabelentz and his predecessors.
During his trip to New Spain in 1803, Alexander von Humboldt visited large tracts of New Spanish territory, which includes modern Mexico and part of the United States. This trip provided the data for his geographical Atlas of the region, as well as information about the ancient Mexican cultures that he would later include in the general Atlas and in other major works, such as Vues des Cordillères. Likewise, Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain displayed a comprehensive physical, natural, economic, and social description of Mexico in the colonial period, which will also be analysed. With these works, Humboldt presented a new geographical and cultural image of New Spain to the European audiences. In addition to this, his work made important contributions to cartographic knowledge.
Humboldt's works on Mexico
(2000)
Humboldt wrote about Mexico from the perspective of a scientific explorer and naturalist. His works include his diaries, the Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne, the Tablas géograficas, the Vues des Cordillères and a geographic atlas. Concerning the scientific aspect, the lack of a section on Mexico in the Relation historique is not a real deficit, since this can be found in the Essai. But only the diaries and letters from the journey, both published by the Alexander-von-Humboldt Research Centre, Berlin, can be considered an adequate substitute. The following will show the origin of Humboldt's writings on Mexico, offer historical and bibliographical facts and present the publications "Beiträge zur Alexander von Humboldt-Forschung", as well as Humboldt’s handwritten estate as far as they are available to us.
If Humboldt had a laptop
(2001)
The difficult publication history and expensive editions of Alexander von Humboldt’s volumes on the expedition to the Americas have resulted in incomplete library holdings which has limited scholarly access and sometimes caused unbalanced scholarship. A plan for a Humboldt Digital Library examines the structures and features of this representational system in print and proposes models for converting these materials to electronic form. Several issues posed by Humboldt’s works include: establishing authoritative standard editions in several languages, creating high-resolution access to the many visual innovations in the works, and using software to restore the grand concept that all of the separate disciplines of study can be seen as interrelated parts of the whole. Using techniques of geographic visualization, a prototype is planned which will connect this historical body of knowledge with modern scientific databases.
Immanuel Kant mentions in his Physical Geography the waterfall of the Bogotá River in South America, known today as the Salto de Tequendama, which is located near Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia. Kant claims that this was the highest waterfall in the world, which is not true. Alexander von Humboldt could not know anything about it, but he visited the Salto in 1801, just before the publication of Kant‘s Physical Geography, and went to personally measure the height of the Salto. In this paper we make a comparison of both personalities who, unknowingly, were united by their interest in the Salto de Tequendama.
Introduction
(2012)
Introduction
(2008)
Since 2011 the Comorian Island of Mayotte has been France’s 101st département, thereby becoming part of the European Union. As a result, France has consolidated and strengthened its strategic position in the Indian Ocean. With the change of political status in 2011, new developments have occurred in Mayotte. It is still unclear whether the expected economic boom, extensive social benefits or injection of EU regional funds can help to alleviate poverty and raise living standards. There is concern, however, that massive immigration to Mayotte from the surrounding territories is diminishing any progress and will continue to do so. Not only France but also the EU will have to adapt to new immigration problems due to this new external border. In this situation one thing is clear: the language contact between French and the local languages, which is the result of political developments, is leading to new dynamics. The diglossic situation east of Africa, between French as the dominant language and local languages like Shimaoré or Shibushi spoken in Mayotte will become more marked in the next few years.
La polisemia prohibida : la recepción de José Martí como sismógrafo de la vida política y cultural
(1995)
Languages about Languages
(2018)
In the history of Humboldt research both brothers have been traditionally seen as representing the dichotomy between the humanities and the natural sciences. Today however, their similar approach to using and forming scientific language could be used as a starting point for conceiving a university, museum and even forum under one single Humboldtian science.
The assumption of linguistics relativity and the definition of languages as epiphenomena are certainly known as two contradictory positions from the last century. But I will start my discussion of them in the period of their appearance and then use this as a basis to evaluate the heuristic value of these positions in present day linguistics. I will start with the definition of language as an epiphenomenon and then I will go on with the linguistic relativity.
The notion of ʽepiphenomenon’ is usually used to exclude certain aspects of a scientific object because they are considered to be deduced from others. In linguistics, restrictions of the research object were made, invoking the notion of ʽepiphenomenonʼ, which was partially done with a polemical attitude, and was always responded to polemically.
From its very beginnings, Cuban literature has been a literature with no fixed abode: written between Cuba and Mexico (Jose Maria Heredia), Cuba and Spain (Gertrudis Gomez de Avellanedo), Cuba and the US. (Cirilo Villaverde), or between Cuba, Europe and the Americas (Jose Marti), but to mention the outstanding figures in Cuba's 19(th) Century. This article tries to unfold and develop the consequences of this new perspective by insisting on the specific "frictional" character of Cuban literature and culture today
Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca, for several centuries doubtlessly the most discussed and most eminent writer of Andean America in the 16th and 17th centuries, throughout his life set the utmost value on the fact that he descended matrilineally from Atahualpa Yupanqui and from the last Inca emperor, Huayna Cápac. Thus, both in his person and in his creative work he combined different cultural worlds in a polylogical way.1 Two painters boasted that very same Inca descent – they were the last two great masters of the Cuzco school of painting, which over several generations of artists had been an institution of excellent renown and prestige, and whose economic downfall and artistic marginalization was vividly described by the French traveller Paul Mancoy in 1837.2 While, during the 18th century, Cuzco school paintings were still much cherished and sought after, by the beginning of the following century the elite of Lima regarded them as behind the times and provincial, committed to an ‘indigenous’ painting style. The artists from up-country – such was the reproach – could not keep up with the modern forms of seeing and creating, as exemplified by European paragons. Yet, just how ‘provincial’, truly, was this art?
Meaning and Function
(2022)
The use of the word functional in the most diverse theories and approaches has contributed in no small measure to the confusion in linguistics today. This article does not claim to give an overview of the different directions of functionalism in linguistics. Rather, the aim is to present what Coseriu‘s view characterised as functional in his time and to what extent his theory outlined a path that still makes sense in functional-cognitive linguistics today. This will involve an examination of Coseriu‘s difficult-to-identify concept of function. Furthermore, the article will also show that functional thinking is relevant for current grammatography.
Meaning and Function
(2021)
The use of the word functional in the most diverse theories and approaches has contributed in no small measure to the confusion in linguistics today. This article does not claim to give an overview of the different directions of functionalism in linguistics. Rather, the aim is to present what Coseriu‘s view characterised as functional in his time and to what extent his theory outlined a path that still makes sense in functional-cognitive linguistics today. This will involve an examination of Coseriu‘s difficult-to-identify concept of function. Furthermore, the article will also show that functional thinking is relevant for current grammatography.
Networking knowledge
(2015)
Global citizenship and diversity are well-represented concepts in today’s higher education. Learning outcomes and competencies are designed to sensitize students to the many cultural backgrounds of U.S. learning institutions. Nevertheless, true globality, as represented through diverse discourses and perspectives of the world, still seems neglected in curricula and course assignments. This article explores the possibilities offered through a new shared space in education where different forms of networked knowledge and multifaceted perspectives can build a global platform of exchange in a diverse student population. The universal science concept described by Alexander von Humboldt at the beginning of the 19th Century illuminates this intertwined approach to knowledge of the world, which has the potential to positively impact contemporary curricula and course design. Von Humboldt’s writings emphasize inclusion and interplay among cultures and natural phenomena. By inviting our students to be active representatives of diverse discourses, these interconnecting links will become more transparent. In turn, productive forms of knowing about the world may enrich current learning objectives and thereby reflect a true global citizenship as it evolves in a new shared space of education. Keywords: global citizenship, plurality, diverse discourses, multicultural education.
This essay shows in what sense Alexander von Humboldt created a new discourse on the New World. In his view of the Americas, he was able to subvert the dominantly spatial history of the 'new hemisphere' found in Cornelius de Pauw or Guillaume-Thomas Raynal by introducing dynamic and vectorial structures that allow us to focus on the Americas not as 'the other' but as a highly interrelated part of the world. Humboldt's Weltbewusstsein ('world consciousness') develops a new discourse that can be best understood as a complex answer to the second period of accelerated globalisation.
Plantae des États-Unis
(2018)
A recently discovered manuscript sheds a new light on Alexander von Humboldt’s stay in the USA in 1804. The document contains his notes on conversations with President Thomas Jefferson and botanist G. H. E. Mühlenberg. Humboldt also collected information on useful and medicinal plants, listed North American naturalists and documented consumer prices.
In this paper we discuss how Alexander von Humboldt conceived a past to New Spain in his Political Essay on New Spain (1811) and how this text was, in turn, appropriated by the Mexican historiography during the 19th century.
In order to do so, we analyze how the Prussian drew from American sources, particularly from the text of the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero, written shortly before. We also study Humboldt’s conceptions of text and of history, highlighting the place of the indigenous in the composition of his reasoning. Finally, we give examples of how the Mexican nationalist historiography read and reinterpreted the Political Essay.
This paper presents a corpus-based approach to the meaning of verb phrase idioms and proposes a set of parameters for the systematic description of their meaning in different contexts. It also discusses polysemy and vagueness in relation to idioms and offers criteria for the operationalisation of this distinction.
Presentacion
(2002)
The Prussian geologist Leopold von Buch was a lifelong friend of Alexander von Humboldt and had a significant influence on Humboldt’s geological ideas. In a talk, held in Berlin in 1831, which is published here for the first time, von Buch presented the Duria Antiquior of 1830 by the English geologist Henry De La Beche. The Duria Antiquior is widely regarded as the earliest depiction of a scene of prehistoric life from deep time. The print raised new questions about the processes of geohistorical change. The talk reveals that Leopold von Buch was a true scientist of the Romantic Age. His descriptions of geohistorical organismic transformations are taken from pictorial examples of organismic transformation from the classical literature. The talk also illustrates how influential English geologists were for geo-historical reconstructions in Germany.
The present paper is concerned with the phenomenon of reporting on the speakers’ thinking when both the reporting and the reported clauses originate in one and the same speaker, i.e. the performative uses of the verbs sp. creer and pt. achar (‘think’). The data are retrieved from the CdE-NOW and CdP-NOW. Adopting both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, I concentrate on reporting on thinking with and without the overt expression of the subject pronouns sp. yo and pt. eu. In doing so, the constructions (yo) creo (que) and (eu) acho (que) as well as parenthetic and right-peripheral creo yo and acho eu are studied. According to the corpus data and compared to other possible constructions with creo and acho, creo que and acho que represent the most frequent constructions if searching for the ‘node’ creo or acho, that is, if the non-use of the subject pronoun exceeds its explicit expression.
This article presents and discusses João Guimarães Rosa as an outstanding Brazilian author whose literary work, especially Sagarana, expresses aesthetically different ways of life-forms between human beings, animals, plants, and landscapes. Movement and transformations are the basic principles in which the melody of prose expresses itself as a language in and as motion. Although based in Brazilian culture, Rosa shows the conviviality of different logics which are not reduced to one myth of the Brazilian people, but produce multiple ways of co-existence between different life-forms and culture narratives. The translingual title “Sagarana” already alludes to the transitions between two languages, regions, and cultures: the Icelandic “saga-” and the Tupic-Word “rana” which means “similar” or “alike.” The interpretation figures out the correlation of different provenances (“Herkünfte”) which emerge from Rosa’s craft of storytelling. In its center, the Sertão arises as a region of nature whose forces are connected with the life of human beings. As fractal of the world, it symbolizes Brazilian relations as a world of its own and at the same time as a part of the world of others. From this point of view the essay turns world literature upside down: it emphasizes on the one hand that the epoch of world literature since Goethe has come to an end and that the meridian has shifted to Latin America. On the other hand it can be observed that the lusophonic world between Brazil and Angola, Portugal and Kap Verde develops new perspectives on literatures of the world beyond the fixed coordinations of periphery and center. Rosa’s ways of world making already shift the perspective from the local to the global as a miniatured model of a universe which reveals interpretations of a better understanding of the world as world fractals.
The paper aims at considering characteristics from one field of contemporary visual studies that has for a long time been neglected in academic research: Pictorial signs on Social Network Sites (SNS) are an outstanding class of semiotic resources that is greatly shaped by processes of technological and collective sign production and distribution. A brief examination of the scholarly research on the pragmatics and semiotics of pictorial signs on SNS shows that the heterogeneity of visual signs is often neglected and that it mostly concentrates on one aspect of these pictorial signs: their technological production or their purpose for individual self-disclosure. The paper therefore considers the semiosis of pictorial signs on SNS in a holistic perspective as one the one hand produced by individual and collective meaning making as well as on the other hand a product of technological framing. It therefore develops a techno-semiotic pragmatic account that takes into consideration both processes. Starting from a prominent class of pictorial signs on SNS during Tunisian Revolution, the Tunisian Flag graphics, the paper than shows that communicative and social interaction functions on the graphic interface of SNS (‘like’-function, sharing and commenting option) are not only directly inscribed into the pictorial frame, but also greatly influence the reading of a pictorial sign. The location of images on the SNS’ interface has an impact on its meaning and on the social functions of a pictorial sign, as profile pictures are directly linked to the online identity of the user. Through technological sign processing, the polysemy of the image is reduced. We therefore consider the images on the one hand as individual self-narratives and on the other as instances of SNS’ visual culture that brings out dominant visual codes but also allows social and political movements to spread.
This article derives from two interdisciplinary research projects funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, involving the application of psychological experimental techniques to the study of poetic form and reader response. It discusses the semantic and expressive effects of space and pattern in innovative forms of contemporary British and American poetry. After referring to some historical and theoretical contexts for these issues, the article analyses the results of experiments using eye-tracking, manipulations of text, memory tests and readers' recorded responses and interpretations. The first group of poems studied were lineated, with extended spaces within lines and displacement of lines from the left margin. Referring to a poem from Geoffrey Hill'sCanaan(1996), the authors show that such use of space may serve to articulate syntactical structures, but may also promote richer interpretation by encouraging cross-linear semantic connections. The second technique studied was the break from linear into postlinear poetry, as an initially lineated sequence shifts to pages of dispersed text. In readings of Susan Howe'sPythagorean Silence(fromThe Europe of Trusts, 1990), the authors detected more radical effects of space, shape and pattern, with associated consequences for interpretative strategies and aesthetic responses. Finally, the article discusses the potential for both mutual support and heuristic challenge between an empirical study of reader response, and a historical-theoretical approach as exemplified by Jerome McGann's interpretation ofPythagorean Silence.