26.2595, Review: Anthropological Ling; Applied Ling; General Ling; Historical Ling; Pragmatics; Translation: Klikushina, Polenova (2014)

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Subject: 26.2595, Review: Anthropological Ling; Applied Ling; General Ling; Historical Ling; Pragmatics; Translation: Klikushina, Polenova (2014)

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Date: Fri, 22 May 2015 17:38:17
From: Irina Ustinova [iustinova at semo.edu]
Subject: Collected Articles of the 3rd International Linguistics Conference (Taganrog, Russia)

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-3307.html

EDITOR: Galina T. Polenova
EDITOR: Tatiana G Klikushina
TITLE: Collected Articles of the 3rd International Linguistics Conference (Taganrog, Russia)
PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Irina Ustinova, Southeast Missouri State University

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY 

The present volume is a selection of papers presented at the 3rd International
Linguistics  Conference on the “Questions of the Theory of the Language and
Methodology of Teaching Foreign Languages.” The collection of papers brings
together a wide range of topics under the theme of ‘Linguistics and Methods of
Teaching.’ This book, edited by Galina Polenova and Tatiana Klikushina, and
published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, comprises the preface and forty
nine selected papers presented at the conference held in Taganrog, Russia. The
conference gathered many scholars from such countries as Belarus, Poland,
Uzbekistan, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Greece, India, Turkey, and the
Netherlands,  and from  Russian cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tambov,
Volgograd, Saratov, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, and Stavropol. 
This book is a collection of articles written in three languages—English,
German, and French—with the focus on the research of languages from different
cultural groups, including such widely spread languages as English, Russian,
Italian, French, and German; the indigenous languages as  of Uzbek, Tadjik,
and Kazakh of Central Asia; and non-literate languages, such as the Ket
language of West Siberia and Shetlandic, the dialect of the Shetland
archipelago. 

The categorization of linguistics’ subfields and the articles’ titles suggest
that there are a growing number of directions that researchers are taking in
their approaches to the study of multiple languages. The editors have divided
the book into six sections: theoretical linguistics, lexicology, text studies,
pragmatics, ethnolinguistics, and language teaching methods. 

In a short review, it is impossible to summarize the vast amount of material;
thus I have chosen a selected number of papers to describe in some detail.
Each paper in the collection, however, deserves a full review in its own right
because this collection will be of great interest to scholars in the fields of
philology, linguistics, culture, and humanities. 

In part I “Theoretical and Cognitive Linguistics,” the articles touch on
studies of reference as the meaning of classification (Jewgenija Muracschova),
typology of the category “person” and “non-person” in English interrogative
pronouns (Marina Akhanova), and relations on possession in Germanic languages
(Evgeny Krasnoshcekov). Three scholars - Galina Polenova, Heinrich Werner, and
Larisa Pavlenko - concentrate on the study of the written sources about West
Siberian people and the Ket language, the sole survivor of the Yeniseian
family. While Polenova’s article sets her focus on the universal diachronic
oppositions, such as “singular” vs. “plural,” Pavlenko’s research represents
the study of typology of verbs of motion in Ket.   

Natalya Dodonova’s ’article, titled “Concept: Term and Notion,” looks deeply
into the nature and the interactions of the notions of concept, mental image,
and idea from cognitive linguistics perception. The theoretical point of view
and the interpretation of concept not only as linguo-mental entity, but as
representation of emotional and human attitudes, rely on the views of
outstanding linguists, such as Anna Wiezbicka, and Yuri Stepanov. The author
comes to the conclusion that concept is the multifaceted notion that reflects
culture, mentality, and verbalization simultaneously.

Olga Ikonnikova’s article focuses on the place of adjective in the
part-of-speech system and provides a useful overview of the works of
outstanding linguists such as S. Katsnelson, J. Lyons, H. Wetzer, A.
Wierzbicka and others who point out that adjectives do not have a universal
grammar status and occupy a dual position between nouns and verbs. According
to Ikonnikova, the dual nature of the adjectives can be explained by their
syntactic and morphological functions, as well as their being a part of
attributive and predicative positions. Olga Melnik in her article
“Anthropomorphism in the World Picture” examines the interpretation of the
concepts of space and time in different cultures and compares these concepts
in English, Russian and Karachaev-Balkan languages. She argues that in the
Karachaev-Balkan language, space does not contain the abstract notion of empty
space and is characterized by such parameters as “high-low” and “far-near”;
thus, the author concludes that the space verbalization is the reflection of
the lifestyle of the ethnos and a particular fragment of the world picture. 

In part II, “Lexicology,” some researchers provide comparative analyses of
lexicon in several languages: thus, Barno Avezova characterizes English and
Tajik idioms, V.P. Minaeva classifies the data attesting to the Russian
borrowings into the Ket vocabulary, and Vadim Melikyan represents
phraseosyntactic schemes with Wh-words in English, Russian and Spanish.

Anastasia Rybtsova considers the origin, development, and formation of the
concept “West” in the Russian mentality from the diachronic perspective. The
notion of “West” appeared in the Russian mentality in the tenth century; then
Peter and Catherine the Greats’ eras consolidated the aspirations to learn
from the West and paved the way for Russians to enter the European
intellectual space. However, during the Soviet period the notion of “West”
acquired a negative connotation, and then at the beginning of the 21st century
again it became the synonym of progress. The author concludes that the several
stages of the interpretation of the concept “West” depend on the circumstances
of different times in history.

Irina Khoutyz in the article “The Usage of Anglicisms in Modern Discource :
the Aspect of Intercontextuality” relies on Michail Bakhtin’s idea of
dialogism and applies it to intertextuality. She claims that anglicisms mark
Russian discourse as modern and express the author’s point of view. Camiel
Hamans devotes both of his articles to the issues of productivity and
uniqueness of blends. Following the previous contributions to blends by
Cannon, Marchland, Warren and others, the author distinguishes a few types of
blends, such as most typical (e.g. franglais), complex (e.g. Oxbridge),
composition with a difference (e.g. malware), and combining forms (e.g.
Reagonomics). The author rejects the idea expressed by some scholars that
blends are morphologically irregular and cannot be models for analogical
productivity. He provides an apt description of types of blends and claims
that they have specific patterns of morphological derivation.

The authors who contribute to Part III, “Text,” explore different genres and
types of discourse, such as American advertisements (Tatiana Klikushina), mass
media (Edward Glinchevskiy), Russian and English folk texts (Natalia
Bogatyriova), text linguistics (Sofia Agapova), epigraph (Marina Oleynik), and
Internet communication (I.V. Elov) .

Much of the content of Tatiana Klikushina’s article ‘The Texts of Contemporary
American Advertisements and Commercials’ is devoted to exploring the
characteristics of high quality professional advertising. She analyses
stylistic devices such as allusion, affiliation, parcellation, inversion,
anaphora, and gradation as well as playing techniques based on rhyme, graphic
devices, proverbs, neologisms, etc. in American advertising texts and shares
her experience that the dialogic correlation of verbal and non-verbal
messages, target audience, aim of the company, and disclosure of the topic
lead to successful marketing. 

Sofia Agapova is influenced by the previous studies of Eugenio Copseroi,
Harald Weinrich, and Frantisek Danek on text linguistics and provides a useful
view of their contribution. She also develops her ideas on text linguistics as
a theory that comes on the global level, on top of semantic and structure
analyses, and deals with texts as communication systems. 

In Part IV, “Pragmatics,” L.N. Seliverstova devotes her article to the speech
behavior of Russian politicians, and Galina Matveeva defines the term
‘pragmalinguistics’, while Ashur Yahshiyev focuses on linguo-didactic
interpretation of the dialogue. Karen Kow Yip Cheng’s article is a showcase of
gender issues in Malaysian parliamentary discourse. The words related to
gender, marriage, and human qualities were selected, counted, and analyzed
according to whether they have positive, negative, or neutral connotations.
The author paves the way for  future studies to critically examine discourse
that reveals gender inequality.

Part V, ”Ethnolinguistics and Translation,” contains only two articles. The
article by Viktoria Tuzlukova, Ekaterina Andrienko, and Ekaterina Goosen,
having explored the academic texts on education, emphasizes that the English
language has become the lingua franca of academia and acknowledges the
important role of terminological collocations in the educational texts. 
The objective of Elena Poliakova’s article is to investigate the national and
cultural ethical concepts denoted by Russian and English idioms. The analysis
reveals that the ethical concepts are conditioned by realities typical of the
lifestyle of the specific community, and these have found reflection in the
idiom creations.
 
Two articles included in Part VI, “Language Teaching Methods,” point out the
correction strategies of  second language learners’ mistakes. Sara Servetti
adopts the approach to metalanguage as a specific register used by teachers
and students to motivate their choices when they cooperatively discuss
corrections, especially in grammar. Styliani Tsigka and other researchers
apply computational tools while studying phonological errors in Greek-speaking
language impaired children. 

EVALUATION 

The collection is a fascinating read for specialists, students and
postgraduate students majoring in the humanities, as well as those interested
in issues of language, culture and language teaching methods. As the titles of
the proceedings indicate, the research being undertaken in the field of
linguistics is multi-dimensional and multi-directional. 

The theory of language and speech is represented in synchronic and diachronic
analyses and ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ structures of the different levels of
languages, as well in the typological aspects of the languages belonging to
different families and the search for linguistic universals. Thus, in Marina
Akhanova’s article, the comparison of the category of “person-non person” is
researched in the Indo European, Finno-Ugric, Altay, and Dravidian languages.
The  universal categories of space and time used by humans while creating
their world pictures are examined in the article of Olga Melnik, and that
adjectives share universal grammatical status is concluded in the article of
Olga Ikonnikova. Vadim Melikyan formulates the main rules of syntactic
typology of English, Russian, and Spanish phraseoschemes that allows him to
extrapolate his conclusion to any language. The comparison of language and
speech, the relationship of the same concept in translation, text, and
discourse issues are treated in the volume as well. The comparison of French
and Russian idioms allows Alexander Chervony to conclude that phraseologisms
in those languages have their particular associate links, images and symbols.
In the article of Anatoliy Serebryakov the problem of “semantic excessive
summation” as a literature translation problem is investigated.

While the collection is a marvelous read, still, some critique may be offered.
The lack of an index is a significant drawback. Only a few articles of the
volume begin with the abstracts in English and the inclusion of the key words
that should facilitate library search. The abstracts could definitely add to
the value of the volume; otherwise,  it is impossible for the researchers who
are not trilingual to educate themselves on the subject matter of the
scholarship.

Certain inconsistencies exist in how the authors are introduced; thus, in some
cases the author represents the  country—say Belarus; in other cases, a former
state that does not exist anymore, as Malaya in the Federation of Malaysia; in
 other instances, the authors represent their employment or internship, as in
European Parliament Brussel/Strasbourg  or CIMEC- Universita Degli Stufdi do
Trento.

Some terms should be more thoroughly defined to avoid confusion. In the
article on
anglicisms (p. 170-175), it seems that the term encompasses appropriation of
borrowings from English into modern Russian discourse; however, the provided
illustrations contain not only well established borrowings, but examples of
code-switching of Russian and English as in ‘fashion agentsvo’ or ‘sport
lifestyle.’ 

The articles entitled “Natural vs. Cultural in English and Russian Moral
Consciousness” (p. 360-366) and “Metaphor as a Means of Language World Picture
Organizing” ( p. 249-255) dwell on the concepts of English and Russian
linguocultures and do not take into account that the English language belongs
to multiple linguocultural communities, because English is the native language
not only of Great Britain, but the United States, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand, and each country has its own cultural identity. 

In the very interesting article “The Texts of Contemporary American
Advertisements and Commercials,”( p. 241-248), the author reflects on the
texts in general and illustrates her arguments with mostly newspaper and
magazine ads. However, ads belong to various genres and the choice of
grammatical and lexical elements, stylistics devices, and arrangements of
printed and visual materials are different for newspaper ads, street billboard
ads, and TV commercials. In the article “Scientific and Naïve Images of Space
and Time in Russian and English Folk Texts”(p. 256-264), the definitions of
“Time” and “Space” are derived from Wikipedia, though most academics,
scholars, and teachers reject Wikipedia as a reliable source of information,
considering it a mixture of truths, half truths, non-professional comments,
and even some falsehoods. 

Some spelling typos can be noticed; thus on p. 180 the text states that by
1940 two philosophical ideas appeared in Russia, i.e., Slavophilism and
Westernism. In fact, this division appeared a century earlier, in 1840.
Inconsistency in spelling should be avoided as well; thus, on p. 293 the last
name has two orthographic forms, Kryms’kyy and Krymsky . Some translation
ambiguity or vagueness is presented in various statements, such as “ the
biblical texts allow for a conception of the historical background of concept”
(p. 201) or “It makes absolutely no sense to mention the role played by mass
media in the life of present day society”(p. 230). Grammar errors, such as
noun and pronoun agreement in “Seliverstova devotes their article to the
problems of speech of Russian politicians” (p. 2) should be eliminated. 
 
Overall, diverse in research topics, sites, participants, methodologies and
approaches, the volume, Collected Articles of the 3rd International
Linguistics Conference, should prove to be of great use to academic writers
and scholars. The strength of the volume is the attention it pays to
contemporary approaches to the subfields of linguistics. Contributions come
from both linguists and professional practitioners and the editors should be
commended for bringing together such a group of both well-known and new
scholars who shed light on language and teaching.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Irina Ustinova, PhD, is an Associate Professor at Southeast Missouri State
University, USA. She has taught Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Intercultural
Communication, Research in TESOL to graduate students from the United States,
Brazil, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Ukraine. Her research interests
include English as a global language, language of advertising, cooperative
learning and teaching, semantics, the use of new technologies in the second
and foreign language classroom.





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