This paper discusses certain phenomena, features, and signs of power or hierarchical roles in writing, writing habits, and especially in spelling (including the regulation of orthography and its everyday practice in offices as well as in popular contexts). The overall framework is anthropo- and socio-semantic, and the material investigated is based on concrete observations, especially data drawn from Hungarian sources. The major manifestations, mechanisms, and signs of power discussed here include the following: belief in the magic power of writing, choice of type of writing, regulation of orthography (spelling reform, language reform), nostalgic romanticism, degradation, ways of catching readers' attention, discrimination, and counter-cultural forms of expression.
The author previously published three papers in this journal concerning the world of SMS: on election SMSs (2003), on SMS as electronic graffiti (2004), and on SMS news (2005). In the present, concluding paper of the series, the folklore-type characteristics of SMS messages are investigated, using methods of folkloristics, textology, and anthropological linguistics. The theoretical point of departure is that folklore phenomena do exist irrespective of historical period or social layer. This is the basis of present-day folklore (also known as post-folklore) or, as it is also referred to in this paper: e-folklore, minimalistic folklore, computer folklore, or SMS folklore. Folklore-type characteristics of the techno-cultural world are described in terms of the paradigms of tradition vs. innovation, spoken vs. written communication (mediality), international vs. national aspects, etc. Within e-folklore, the author's special interest lies in SMS folklore. The most typical text types of SMS folklore are discussed in the following thematic order: festive messages, courtship/ love, chain letters (forwarded letters), funny/tricky/misleading texts, maxims. After a folkloristic/linguistic analysis of the corpus, the author states that SMS as a means of social communication offers human relationships, in particular, those formed by folklore messages, not only a novel medium but also a novel quality. It is not simply the case that traditional Christmas, Easter etc. postcards undergo a shift of medium and can be sent as SMS messages from now on. Three features of that novel quality are as follows: (a) extension of the human brain, of folklore memory (SMS storage, internet databases), (b) automation of contacts: mobile phones and SMS make keeping in touch easy, (c) the psychology of contacts: SMS psychologically alleviates a number of types of inhibition; in other words, messages can be sent by SMS practically uninhibited. It is to be emphasized that although SMS folklore does exhibit anthropological, 'eternally human' characteristics in may ways, it also shows particular features of what is known as postfolklore rather than traditional folklore, due to changes in the general circumstances.
The paper investigates names of settlements, of parts of settlements, and in some cases names of institutions, exploring some aspects of the anatomy of place-names (i.e., the process of their coming into being and the changes they undergo). These aspects are as follows: (1) collective toponyms (common names for groups of places), (2) abbreviated place-names (name distortions), (3) form variants (name distortions), (4) giving new names, (5) folk-etymology (e.g., pejorativisation), and (6) coining variants for place-names (the poetry of toponymy). Recently collected data involve a growing number of new collective toponyms in the wake of regional cooperation; abbreviations and variants of existing place-names keep turning up, and new place-names and variants are generated for various administrative or individual reasons. Furthermore, there are examples of the pejorativisation of place-names (i.e., mockery), but toponyms also provide ground for poetry (poetic competitions or individual resourcefulness).
The author previously published three papers in this journal concerning the world of SMS: on election SMSs (2003), on SMS as electronic graffiti (2004), and on SMS news (2005). In the present, concluding paper of the series, the folklore-type characteristics of SMS messages are investigated, using methods of folkloristics, textology, and anthropological linguistics. The theoretical point of departure is that folklore phenomena do exist irrespective of historical period or social layer. This is the basis of present-day folklore (also known as post-folklore) or, as it is also referred to in this paper: e-folklore, minimalistic folklore, computer folklore, or SMS folklore. Folklore-type characteristics of the techno-cultural world are described in terms of the paradigms of tradition vs. innovation, spoken vs. written communication (mediality), international vs. national aspects, etc. Within e-folklore, the author's special interest lies in SMS folklore. The most typical text types of SMS folklore are discussed in the following thematic order: festive messages, courtship/love, chain letters (forwarded letters), funny/tricky/misleading texts, and maxims. After a folkloristic/linguistic analysis of the corpus, the author states that SMS as a means of social communication offers human relationships, in particular, those formed by folklore messages, not only a novel medium but also a novel quality. It is not simply the case that traditional Christmas, Easter etc. postcards undergo a shift of medium and can be sent as SMS messages from now on. Three features of that novel quality are as follows: (a) extension of the human brain, of folklore memory (SMS storage, internet data bases), (b) automation of contacts: mobile phones and SMS make keeping in touch easy, (c) the psychology of contacts: SMS psychologically alleviates a number of types of inhibition; in other words, messages can be sent by SMS practically uninhibited. It is to be emphasized that although SMS folklore does exhibit anthropological, 'eternally human' characteristics in may ways, it also shows particular features of what is known as post-folklore rather than traditional folklore, due to changes in the general circumstances.
News items constitute a basic genre of the press and the media. One type of content provided by mobile phone companies on a subscription basis is sms news service. Such news items belong to a novel form of mass communication known as new media (polimedia or metamedia), and accordingly they modify our concept and definition of 'news item'. This paper surveys the characteristics of sms news on the basis of twelve criteria of linguistic pragmatic analysis. Thus, a number of features are revealed that fit written language, spoken language, or else, in a modified form, the medium of sms, also known as secondary written language. Such features include the relativisation of orthography, the lack of headlines, the avoidance of repetition, various spoken-language phenomena, misassociation, ambiguity. In sum, sms communication indeed produces a new from of existence for language, leading to linguistic changes not only in private communication but also in media communication.
This paper surveys some new aspects of approaching literary works of art in terms of a sequence of trends in linguistics and literary criticism that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Those trends did not simply follow one another, but they also reflected on one another in many ways and even synthesised the others in certain respects. They included the structuralist, semiotic, textological, pragmatic, and cognitive approaches. In particular, the paper discusses those aspects in Attila Jozsef's poem 'You know there is no remission.' In Part One, some of the structural/textological/rhetorical characteristics of the poem are mentioned (structure, syntactic structure, versification, verbality, vocabulary, word-ethics, some figures, etc.). In Part Two, evidence is provided of the self-addressing character of the poem in terms of a recent, cognitive approach to literary criticism, and the text focus (the centre of textual organisation) and text topic of the poem are determined. The poem's attitude to time is explored, pointing out that rheme-enhancing particles do make it time-confronting. Finally, in terms of the semiotic and cognitive approaches (claiming that language creation is iconic and language use is energy), the iconicity of certain words occurring in the poem is pointed out. The author's aim with the analysis is to bring linguistic and literary approaches closer to one another.
This paper discusses the relationship between thought and text from a textual anthropological point of view. For modern text typology, it critically introduces certain anthropological/folkloristic approaches to the typology of folk genres. On the other hand, it tries to help text typological discourse by discussing interrelationships of memory, thinking, forms of cognition, and figures of thought.
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