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- Volume 6, Issue, 2013
English Text Construction - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2013
Volume 6, Issue 2, 2013
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Re-reading August Wilson’s Fences: The influence of the Black Aesthetic and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
Author(s): Felix Nwabeze Ogoanahpp.: 213–237 (25)More LessAugust Wilson’s Fences is perhaps the most controversial in his ten-play chronicle of the African American experience in the 20th century. The play’s conflict centres on Troy’s alleged highhandedness against his son and his extra-marital affair. The morality behind these issues has been the subject of debate since the play debuted in 1987, and the protagonist is generally believed to be a villain. This paper challenges this negative perspective, which is largely based on Western socio-cultural paradigms and logic, and provides an alternative reading of the play by reasserting the influence of the Black Aesthetic on Wilson, and by linking it to a specific African pre-text: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Keywords: August Wilson’s Fences; African world view; Black Aesthetic; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart; intertextuality
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English and lexical inventiveness in the Italian linguistic landscape
Author(s): Paola Vettorel and Valeria Franceschipp.: 238–270 (33)More LessThe study of the linguistic landscape has seen a growing interest in recent years, focusing on written information publicly available in a given territory, city or area (Landry & Bourhis 1997). English is widely present in the linguistic landscape worldwide (e.g. Cenoz & Gorter 2006, 2008; Shohamy & Gorter 2009; Shohamy et al. 2010), often in its lingua franca role (Bruyèl-Olmedo & Juan-Garau 2009), and Italy appears to be no exception (Ross 1997; Schlick 2003; Griffin 2004; Gorter 2007; Coluzzi 2009).This paper investigates examples of lexical inventiveness involving English in a set of data gathered in the linguistic landscape of some cities and towns in Veneto (Northern Italy), each with different though complementary contextual characteristics. Signs containing English, either monolingually or in combination with Italian, were selected and analysed as to lexical creativity, as well as semantic shifts/extensions. The data shows that English is often employed both in monolingual and in hybrid/bilingual processes at several linguistic levels, from orthography to word-formation (Huebner 2006), testifying to its pervasive presence in expanding circle contexts, either as a (globalized) symbol of modernity or in appropriating linguistic practices. Keywords: English in the linguistic landscape; lexical inventiveness; word-formation; English and local languages; English as a Lingua Franca
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Competing for coverage: Exploring emerging discourses on female athletes in the Australian print media
Author(s): Helen Caplepp.: 271–294 (24)More LessThis paper reports on findings from a research project conducted on behalf of the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) examining the portrayal of female athletes in the Australian news media. While the project as a whole includes analyses of both print and broadcast news media, we focus here on findings concerning the reporting on sportswomen in print newspapers. Using social semiotic tools for investigating ideational/representational and interpersonal/interactional meanings in language and images, qualitative analyses of both the headlines and photographs are reported on. The findings suggest that Australian sportswomen are now treated both verbally and visually as serious athletes who are very much in control of their emotions. However, the extent of this coverage remains greatly impoverished in comparison to that for male athletes. Keywords: Australian sports reporting; text-image relations; female athletes; multimodality; evaluation
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Notions of (inter)subjectivity
Author(s): Jan Nuyts
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A case for corpus stylistics
Author(s): Michaela Mahlberg and Dan McIntyre
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