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This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whether Kiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking in multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language High German', a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of German' speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane.
On 6 June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to fight the Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO). Between August 1982 and February
1984, the US, France, Britain and Italy deployed a Multinational
Force (MNF) to Beirut. Its task was to act as an interposition force to
bolster the government and to bring peace to the people. The
mission is often forgotten or merely remembered in context with
the bombing of US Marines’ barracks. However, an analysis of the
Italian contingent shows that the MNF was not doomed to fail and
could accomplish its task when operational and diplomatic efforts
were coordinated. The Italian commander in Beirut, General Franco
Angioni, followed a successful approach that sustained neutrality,
respectful behaviour and minimal force, which resulted in a
qualified success of the Italian efforts.
A Little Piece of the Shire
(2014)
Previous studies have indicated a higher risk of disordered eating in certain types of elite sports such as aesthetic sports (e.g., rhythmical gymnastics, figure skating). But even though some studies on risk factors for disordered eating in sports exist, most research on this topic is based on cross-sectional data with limitations on causal inferences. We examined sports-related risk factors for disordered eating in a 1-year longitudinal study with two assessment points. The participants were 65 adolescent athletes from aesthetic sports (mean age 14.0 +/- 2.2years) who completed measures of disordered eating, social pressure from the sports environment, sports-related body dissatisfaction, desire to be leaner to improve sports performance, and emotional distress resulting from missed exercise sessions. All variables were relatively stable in the mean. Individual changes in the desire to be leaner to improve sports performance were associated with individual changes in disordered eating. Furthermore, a cross-lagged partial correlation analysis showed that the desire to be leaner to improve sports performance was predictive of disordered eating and not vice versa. The results of our study indicate that athletes are more at risk for disordered eating if they believe it is possible to enhance their sports performance through weight regulation.
The German Sonderweg thesis has been discarded in most research fields. Yet in regards to the military, things differ: all conflicts before the Second World War are interpreted as prelude to the war of extermination between 1939–1945. This article specifically looks at the Franco-Prussian War 1870–71 and German behaviour vis-à-vis regular combatants, civilians and irregular guerrilla fighters, the so-called francs-tireurs. The author argues that the counter-measures were not exceptional for nineteenth century warfare and also shows how selective reading of the existing secondary literature has distorted our view on the war.
The focus in this article, through a reading of the German-Australian
newspaper Der Kosmopolit, is on the legacies of entangled imperial
identities in the period of the nineteenth-century German
Enlightenment. Attention is drawn to members of the liberal
nationalist generation of 1848 who emigrated to the Australian
colonies and became involved in intellectual activities there. The
idea of entanglement is applied to the philosophical orientation
of the German-language newspaper that this group formed, Der
Kosmopolit, which was published between 1856 and 1957. Against
simplistic notions that would view cosmopolitanism as the
opposite of nationalism, it is argued that individuals like Gustav
Droege and Carl Muecke deployed an entangled ‘cosmo-
nationalism’ in ways that both advanced German nationalism and
facilitated their own engagement with and investment in
Australian colonial society.
Across currents
(2017)
Affect Disposition(ing)
(2018)
The “affective turn” has been primarily concerned not with what affect is, but what it does. This article focuses on yet another shift towards how affect gets organized, i.e., how it is produced, classified, and controlled. It proposes a genealogical as well as a critical approach to the organization of affect and distinguishes between several “affect disposition(ing) regimes”—meaning paradigms of how to interpret and manage affects, for e.g., encoding them as byproducts of demonic possession, judging them in reference to a moralistic framework, or subsuming them under an industrial regime. Bernard Stiegler’s concept of psychopower will be engaged at one point and expanded to include social media and affective technologies, especially Affective Computing. Finally, the industrialization and cybernetization of affect will be contrasted with poststructuralist interpretations of affects as events.
Affect Disposition(ing)
(2018)
The “affective turn” has been primarily concerned not with what affect is, but what it does. This article focuses on yet another shift towards how affect gets organized, i.e., how it is produced, classified, and controlled. It proposes a genealogical as well as a critical approach to the organization of affect and distinguishes between several “affect disposition(ing) regimes”—meaning paradigms of how to interpret and manage affects, for e.g., encoding them as byproducts of demonic possession, judging them in reference to a moralistic framework, or subsuming them under an industrial regime. Bernard Stiegler’s concept of psychopower will be engaged at one point and expanded to include social media and affective technologies, especially Affective Computing. Finally, the industrialization and cybernetization of affect will be contrasted with poststructuralist interpretations of affects as events.
Alien Horrors
(2022)
H. P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre abounds with stereotypes of the racialized poor. As scholars have noted, Lovecraft’s work turns those he viewed as ‘Others’ into ‘aliens.’ Poor people of color (as opposed to the orderly White rural population and White working class) in Lovecraft’s stories are foreign, diseased, and criminal, and they threaten social and cosmic orders as they are in league with a nebulous entity that waits to wreak indescribable havoc. This chapter analyzes three ‘Lovecraftian’ novels published in 2016 - Cassandra Khaw’s Hammers on Bone,Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country. These works elucidate the connection of Trump’s 2016 rhetoric in campaign and presidential speeches and the White supremacist imagery used by Lovecraft. In these novels, the racialized poor have a special connection to an astronomical, evil entity à la Lovecraft. As carriers of numinous genes or parasitic entities (literally having ‘an alien within’) they become empowered. They thus occupy a pivotal position in forestalling or bringing about the destruction of societal order; that is, of White supremacy. Exploring the alleged risk posed by this ‘underclass,’ these works seem to foretell current representations of protesters as ‘riotous mobs’ that threaten the body politic Trump sought to make great (and White) again.
Boyle, T.C.
(2022)
T.C. Boyle, or Thomas Coraghessan Boyle, is probably best known for his 1995 novel Tortilla Curtain , which quickly became a staple of high school and college syllabi. Tortilla Curtain deftly illustrates what Boyle does best: acerbically tracing the irrationality that governs human thought and the resulting contradictory and often unethical behavior (mostly in relation to xenophobia, environmentalism, and the intersections of gender). Despite often casting a critical eye over US American society, Boyle's works are accessible reads with fast-paced and eventful plots. This combination has produced a number of international bestsellers. In fact, Boyle is so popular in Germany that translations of his works have been published before the original versions came out in English. However, his talent for depicting the impotence of reason in the face of base desires, selfishness, group dynamics, and indoctrinated ideologies is also a weakness: at times, Boyle's satire reproduces what it means to criticize, coming close to naturalizing the hedonistic, prejudiced, and emotionally charged behavior of his characters.
Prosodic information is crucial for spoken language comprehension and especially for syntactic parsing, because prosodic cues guide the hearer's syntactic analysis. The time course and mechanisms of this interplay of prosody and syntax are not yet well-understood. In particular, there is an ongoing debate whether local prosodic cues are taken into account automatically or whether they are processed in relation to the global prosodic context in which they appear. The present study explores whether the perception of a prosodic boundary is affected by its position within an utterance. In an event-related potential (PRP) study we tested if the brain response evoked by the prosodic boundary differs when the boundary occurs early in a list of three names connected by conjunctions (i.e., after the first name) as compared to later in the utterance (i.e., after the second name). A closure positive shift (CPS)-marking the processing of a prosodic phrase boundary-was elicited for stimuli with a late boundary, but not for stimuli with an early boundary. This result is further evidence for an immediate integration of prosodic information into the parsing of an utterance. In addition, it shows that the processing of prosodic boundary cues depends on the previously processed information from the preceding prosodic context.
By 'by'
(2005)
Conceptual Capacities
(2007)
This essay sets out to theorize the “new” Arctic Ocean as a pivot from
which our standard map of the world is currently being
reconceptualized. Drawing on theories from the fields of Atlantic
and Pacific studies, I argue that the changing Arctic, characterized
by melting ice and increased accessibility, must be understood
both as a space of transit that connects Atlantic and Pacific worlds
in unprecedented ways, and as an oceanic world and contact
zone in its own right. I examine both functions of the Arctic via a
reading of the dispute over the Northwest Passage (which
emphasizes the Arctic as a space of transit) and the contemporary
assessment of new models of sovereignty in the Arctic region
(which concentrates on the circumpolar Arctic as an oceanic
world). However, both of these debates frequently exclude
indigenous positions on the Arctic. By reading Canadian Inuit
theories on the Arctic alongside the more prominent debates, I
argue for a decolonizing reading of the Arctic inspired by Inuit
articulations of the “Inuit Sea.” In such a reading, Inuit conceptions
provide crucial interventions into theorizing the Arctic. They also,
in turn, contribute to discussions on indigeneity, sovereignty, and
archipelagic theory in Atlantic and Pacific studies.
The objective of the present paper is to explore the potentials and challenges inherent in con- ceptualizations of global citizenship education (GCE) in the context of foreign language edu- cation. Specifically, we argue for a critical approach to GCE that emphasizes the significance of language as symbolic power by drawing on the concepts of critical literacy (e.g., Freire 1983; Janks 2014) and symbolic competence (Kramsch 2006; 2011; 2021). To illustrate the necessity of such a critical approach to GCE, we critically analyze teaching materials designed for the English language classroom as provided by the curriculum framework (KMK/ BMZ 2016). The analysis reveals how reliance on dominant Western liberal and neoliberal epistemologies, norms, and discourses might inadvertently reinforce the very inequalities that GCE actually seeks to address. By foregrounding the relationship between language, symbolic power, and GCE, we further redesign these teaching materials and incorporate pedagogical and methodological principles which are in line with a critical literacy and symbolic competence.
Alexithymia describes difficulties to identify and describe one's emotions. Previous research focused on difficulties associated with the later processing stages of appraisal in alexithymia. We tested whether early processing deficits are apparent in alexithymic persons and whether these abnormalities contribute to later processing difficulties. 20 participants were selected and identified as either having high (HDA) or low (LDA) degrees of alexithymia. IAPS pictures were presented while EEG was recorded. For HDA subjects processing of emotional pictures was accompanied by reduced P1 amplitudes most pronounced for pleasant and neutral pictures. In response to unpleasant pictures the P3 amplitudes were reduced. These amplitude modulations were predicted only by one alexithymia facet. P1 amplitudes systematically covaried with P3 amplitudes supporting the assumption that deficits in early emotional processing contribute to later processing deficits.
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.
Focus on English Linguistics
(2021)
Forging an Italian hero?
(2018)
Over the last two decades, Amedeo Guillet (1909–2010) has been turned into a public and military hero. His exploits as a guerrilla leader in Italian East Africa in 1941 have been exaggerated to forge a narrative of an honourable resistance against overwhelming odds. Thereby, Guillet has been showcased as a romanticized colonial explorer who was an apolitical and timeless Italian officer. He has been compared to Lawrence of Arabia in order to raise his international visibility, while his genuine Italian brand is perpetuated domestically. By elevating him to an official role model, the Italian Army has gained a focal point for military heroism that was also acceptable in the public memory as the embodiment of a ‘glorious’ defeat narrative.
This article discusses how Alex Garland’s The Beach (1996) engages with conceptions of utopian islands, nation, and colonialism in modernity and how it, from this basis, develops a different spatiality that reflects on a more deterritorialized form of imperial domination within late twentieth-century globalization, as exercised by the United States. The novel is shown to subvert, but not to abolish, two spatial formations that originated in early modernity: nation and utopia. Building on Jean Baudrillard’s elaborations regarding simulation and simulacra, the article argues that The Beach creates a hyperreal narrative that does away with the idea of isolated, bounded spaces and that in form and content corresponds with the worldwide dominance of the United States at the end of the twentieth century.
The grammatization of European vernacular languages began in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance and continued up until the end of the 18th century. Through this process, grammars were written for the vernaculars and, as a result, the vernaculars were able to establish themselves in important areas of communication. Vernacular grammars largely followed the example of those written for Latin, using Latin descriptive categories without fully adapting them to the vernaculars. In accord with the Greco-Latin tradition, the grammars typically contain sections on orthography, prosody, morphology, and syntax, with the most space devoted to the treatment of word classes in the section on “etymology.” The earliest grammars of vernaculars had two main goals: on the one hand, making the languages described accessible to non-native speakers, and on the other, supporting the learning of Latin grammar by teaching the grammar of speakers’ native languages. Initially, it was considered unnecessary to engage with the grammar of native languages for their own sake, since they were thought to be acquired spontaneously. Only gradually did a need for normative grammars develop which sought to codify languages. This development relied on an awareness of the value of vernaculars that attributed a certain degree of perfection to them. Grammars of indigenous languages in colonized areas were based on those of European languages and today offer information about the early state of those languages, and are indeed sometimes the only sources for now extinct languages. Grammars of vernaculars came into being in the contrasting contexts of general grammar and the grammars of individual languages, between grammar as science and as art and between description and standardization. In the standardization of languages, the guiding principle could either be that of anomaly, which took a particular variety of a language as the basis of the description, or that of analogy, which permitted interventions into a language aimed at making it more uniform.
In the shadow of Valerian
(2023)
Introduction
(2021)