Family language policy and maintenance of Persian: the stories of Iranian immigrant families in the northeast,USA

The purpose of this study is to describe family language practices, beliefs, and management approaches in relation to maintenance of Persian in a group of second-generation Iranian immigrant children in different parts of the Northeast United States. The study focuses on this group of Persian-speaking Iranian families to better understand family language policy and its impacts on dual language development of children in areas where the heritage community is more dispersed. The findings show that development of Persian in children of the participating Iranian families was dependent on a variety of factors including but not limited to family language policy. A complex web of connections between family language policy and several sociopolitical factors of the wider society was at work in shaping the language profiles of these families.     

Advocating commodification: an ethnographic look at the policing of Irish as a commercial asset

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two towns in the Republic of Ireland, this article explores the local negotiation, endorsement, and contestation of two community-level Irish language advocacy organizations’ attempts to regulate the use of Irish in business by mobilizing discourses of language commodification to position Irish as a commercial asset. I focus in particular on how local merchants’ positioning in relation to the promoted commodification of Irish articulates with the interplay of these policing efforts with the legacy of national language policy in Ireland. In the two towns, the State’s revitalization policy concerning the compulsory teaching of Irish in the national education system seemed to generate opportunities for encouraging merchant participation: the organizations’ emphasis on a mostly visual form of commercial Irish helped local merchants with bad memories of learning the language to circumvent them and those with more positive recollections to capitalize on them. In relation to the State’s language maintenance policy based on geographically demarcating Ireland’s traditionally Irish-speaking areas, each town’s distance from these regions seemed to influence local merchants’ endorsement of or resistance to the organizations’ attempts to promote the commodification of Irish. This discussion of the localized mobilization of widely circulating commodification discourses to convince business owners and managers of the added value of Irish thus highlights both the opportunities and challenges involved in situated efforts to police language for commodification.     

Translingual Play that Promotes Cultural Connections,Invention, and Regulation: A LatCrit Perspective

Using Latino critical race theory as a lens, this qualitative study explored ways in which young children’s translanguaging practices informed the design of culturally relevant sociodramatic spaces in a bilingual early childhood classroom located along the Texas/Mexico border in South Texas. The authors identified aspects of language development that were evident as children engaged in free play. The findings indicated that bilingual children from the Head Start center where this study took place creatively used language to invent and imagine characters, scenarios, and dialogues. Furthermore, their translingual talk facilitated regulation and control of their free play.     

A semantic constraint on binary determiners

A type quantifier F is symmetric iff F(X, X)(Y) = F(Y, Y)(X). It is shown that quantifiers denoted by irreducible binary determiners in natural languages are both conservative and symmetric and not only conservative. The basic content of this paper was presented at The Semantics Research Group meeting in Tokyo, in April 2008.     

Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives

Much earlier work claims that appositives and expressives are invariably speaker-oriented. These claims have recently been challenged, most extensively by Amaral et al. (Linguist and Philos 30(6): 707–749, 2007). We are convinced by this new evidence. The questions we address are (i) how widespread are non-speaker-oriented readings of appositives and expressives, and (ii) what are the underlying linguistic factors that make such readings available? We present two experiments and novel corpus work that bear directly on this issue. We find that non-speaker-oriented readings, while rare in actual language use, are systematic. We also find that non-speaker-oriented readings occur even outside of attitude predications, which leads us to favor an account based in pragmatically-mediated perspective shifting over one that relies on semantic binding by attitude predicates.     

Forging Agreement: Morphological Disambiguation of Noun Phrases

The research reported here is part of a larger project on the development of a robust dependency parsing scheme GRIP (GeRman Incremental Parsing) that uses the Xerox Incremental Deep Parsing System and provides syntactic annotation in an incremental fashion. It is shown that morphological disambiguation is a crucial step in narrowing down the search space for the correct assignment of dependency structures. Customized disambiguation rules of XIP provide the necessary computational tools to efficiently carry out morphological disambiguation for languages with rich inflectional morphology such as German. A quantitative evaluation on a German test corpus shows that application of XIP disambiguation rules in conjunction with heuristics about the syntactic context of German NPs yields unique morphological analyses in 77.08% of all cases with a precision of 98.93%. This result is achieved by a novel constraint-based approach that integrates phrase-internal concord rules and phrase-external syntactic heuristics into one uniform architecture.*This paper is an expanded version of (Hinrichs and Trushkina, 2002). It provides a more in-depth discussion of related approaches and Appendix A that illustrates the use of syntactic heuristics.     

Distancing Techniques in Fassbinder’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Effi Briest</Emphasis>

Fontane’s ambiguity and complexity in his novel Effi Briest appealed to Fassbinder’s love of intricate social relations. Fontane presents Effi mainly in a restrained neutral manner although it can be argued that the author’s meta-voice adds some touches of subtle criticism. Fassbinder’s approach to Effi in his film of the novel is more distanced, critical and ironic. Clearly influenced by Brecht’s idea of “Verfremdung”, Fassbinder uses an array of distancing techniques in his film: voice-over narration, fades to white, short episodic scenes, captions, various “framing” devices, cool mannered acting, etc., to prevent empathy and to allow the viewers to draw their own conclusions in a calm detached manner. Although less avant-garde, provocative and extreme than much of his other work, Effi Briest remains a difficult film which challenges the viewer. Fassbinder’s film is radical more in terms of style than content—Effi fails to achieve her potential and cannot be considered a Brechtian heroine. Fassbinder has left us with a dense, richly layered modern masterpiece, far removed from undemanding Hollywood films with their easy empathy and escapism.     

The Miracle of Gerald the Pilgrim: Hagiographic Visions of Castration in the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Liber Sancti Jacobi</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Milagros de Nuestra Señora</Emphasis>

One of the most popular tales of the De miraculis Sancti Jacobi section of the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus recounts how a devil impersonated St. James and persuaded an unchaste pilgrim to castrate himself. The following essay shows how this exemplum draws on a hagiographic portrayals of mutilation and purification, and is later adapted in Gonzalo de Berceo’s thirteenth-century Milagros de Nuestra Señora to express preoccupations over the enforcement of vows of celibacy during a time of clerical reform. In his “Romero engañado por el enemigo malo,” the Castilian poet deepens the meaning of eunuchism in the tale, beyond castration anxieties surrounding the ideal of clerical celibacy and mystical visions of emasculation. For Berceo, the significance of the miracle extends beyond one pilgrim’s resurrection from the dead, to symbolize the Marian deliverance of Adam and the bodily renewal and spiritual homecoming of all of his corrupt and feckless progeny.