This research paper analyses the intersection of language, childhood emotional neglect, and family dynamics in Jerry Pinto’s novel Em and the Big Hoom (2012). The novel portrays the life of a dysfunctional family in Mumbai, India, where the narrator, the son, and his sister cope with their mother’s severe bipolar disorder and their father’s emotional detachment. The paper draws on the critical perspectives of scholars such as Sarah Ahmed and Cathy Caruth to examine the role of language in the transmission and representation of trauma. This research paper employs the theoretical frameworks of trauma studies and family systems theory to explore the intersection of language, childhood emotional neglect, and family dynamics in Pinto’s novel. Through a close analysis of the text, this paper shows how Em’s bipolar disorder and her use of language both reflect and are shaped by the family dynamics of emotional neglect.
Gender differences are manifested not only in the physiological characteristics of a person, but also in the speech communication. This article presents the research data obtained at the phonetic and lexical levels of the language. The purpose of this work is to determine the speech characteristics that distinguish men and women at the studied language levels. The identification of the peculiarities of the speech of men and women supplements and clarifies the results of research in the field of gender studies. Before beginning the discussion on the specifics of male and female speech, it is important to understand what gender linguistics is and to learn a little about the history of this study. Until recently, linguists focused only on studying the differences in languages that were related to differences between groups of people (psycholinguistics, ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistics). But no one paid attention to the gender difference of the speech. Only recently have linguists begun to pay attention to the peculiarities of male and female speech
This article seeks to identify the main discursive strategies employed by Langston Hughes in constructing entities, people’s images and entire social reality in his poetic discourse. More specifically, this article examines how the discursive strategies contribute to the construction of whiteness and blackness. Data was generated from sixty purposively selected Hughes’ poems, which were analysed using thematic analysis and Van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis. Van Dijk’s CDA was selected as a theoretical framework in this study as it draws knowledge from several fields, including sociology, psychology, politics and economics, which contribute to deepening the insights of this study. The analysis of data revealed that Hughes constantly constructs whiteness and blackness through four discursive strategies, which are actor description, resource description, self-identity descriptions and norm and value descriptions. The findings also show that these strategies contribute to the construction of whiteness and blackness by means of highlighting the positive-self and negative other-representations as well as the power relations between Whites and Blacks. It is hoped that this study deepens the understanding of Hughes’ poetic discourse and adds novel insights into whiteness and blackness in the American context.
From the point of word formation, the phenomenon of lexical blending is a common productive process, entailing the notion of combination of lexemes in so many languages. In the vast majority of literature on blends, they preserve a linear formation of segments with a shortening of both lexemes. However, in sign languages where morphological categories are mainly encoded by non-concatenative morphology, signed blends can be created by the general mechanism of templatic structures, the combination of lexical bases into a non-linear sequence. Specifically, the main purposes in this study are (i) to provide a comprehensive definition of blending formation in signed modality, (ii) to determine whether there are any structural regularities in the formation of lexical blends in Turkish Sign Language (TÄ°D), and (iii) to classify TÄ°D blends according to well-defined criteria. The corpus data to be studied currently include 109 blending formations. Overall, the results demonstrate that TÄ°D data has familiar properties of blends (named complete blends here) in established spoken languages, as well as modality-specific types of root, simultaneous and initialized blends. We propose a modality-specific categorization, in which blend formation is not limited to linear organization and actual source words.
This qualitative single-case study examined the impact of a course informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) on teacher candidates’ knowledge about genre and language. The study was conducted with nineteen teacher candidates and lasted one semester. Data was collected through analysis of two texts: a published children’s book and a student text written by a fourth-grade bilingual student, both written in fictional narrative genre. Texts were given at the beginning and end of the course. Data was analysed through a rubric developed by the course instructor based on the SFL theory. In the rubric, twenty SFL areas regarding language and genre were created and participant comments falling under the proper area were noted on the rubric. Table of frequencies and graphs were created to present the data. Participants’ original responses were also given to provide a meaningful context for the findings. Overall results indicated that although participants did not use metalanguage to the fullest potential, they were able to identify language and genre related items with higher frequency in both texts at the end of the course. Furthermore, at the beginning of the course, participants considered the published text as having the function of giving information to a reader and teaching how to respond to literature. However, after the course participants began to use it as a model to teach how to write genre- and language-specific information. Finally, analysis of student text indicated that after the course participants learned to see the issues of children’s writing beyond mechanics.
