Language, Space and Place

While a number of sociolinguistic studies have examined intraspeaker variation and how it allows a speaker to negotiate identities related to class, much of the existing work on speakers and their physically-delimited communities has focused on interspeaker variation. The present study examines (th) and (dh)-stopping in two sociolinguistic interviews conducted as part of the Language and Communication in the District of Columbia (LCDC) project (Schilling and Podesva 2008). It examines topic-related style-shifting in two African American speakers, matched for age, from one neighborhood in the District of Columbia known for its high integration and cross-racial acceptance. As Washington, D.C. is a city whose rate of racial segregation is increasing (US Census 2010), I argue that these speakers use this ethnoracially-marked phonological variant in topic-based style shifting as a means of aligning with the race-neutral identity of the community of Takoma. Statistical results, supported by discourse analyses of the content of both speakers' talk, reveal that both speakers vary their rates of the stopped variant to contrast constructed dialogue of Takoma residents and non-Takoma residents and in talk about their relationships with their community in ways which reinforce the indexical links they make between themselves and the reification of Takoma as racially-neutral, integrated space. Many studies have shown that processes understood to be indexical of racial and class identities on an interspeaker level also function on an intraspeaker level (e.g. Rickford and McNair-Knox 1994). This study provides evidence that speakers' indexical relationships to their physical community can be studied at the level of the individual speaker as well.

This study examines the contrastive lexical semantics of a selection of landscape terms in English and the Australian Aboriginal language, Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara. It argues that languages and cultures categorize the geographical environment in diverse ways. Common elements of classification are found across the languages, but it is argued that different priorities are given to these factors. Moreover, the study finds that there are language-specific aspects of the landscape terms, often motivated by culture and land use. Notably, this study presents ethnogeographical concepts as being anchored in an anthropocentric perspective, based on human vision and experience in space. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) technique of semantic analysis is used throughout, and it is argued that this methodology provides an effective tool in the exploration of ethnogeographical categories.

FROM THE BACK COVER: What is the essential nature of meaning? . . . . . This book answers by examining interpretive theories from the past and present. It finds that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation, a struggle that reaches crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand, this crisis is mollified by Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology, which argues that we are always already in a meaningful relationship to the objects of the world. On the other hand, this crisis is exacerbated when phenomenology, structuralism, and aesthetic theory directly make meaning into an object of study. . . . . . . . . These historical developments culminate with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose non-hermeneutical phenomenology delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity. Intriguingly, Lacan's work reveals meaning to be sexual in nature. By integrating his notion of sexual difference with his work in discourse theory and topology, this book demonstrates how the subject's struggle with meaning can be suspended.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . GENERAL DESCRIPTION: Broadly speaking, the majority of books on Jacques Lacan focus on the earlier periods of his career. They also tend to target the psychoanalytic clinical community, or else discuss his work in various political, social, and cultural contexts. But in almost all cases these books refrain from a detailed exegesis of his actual texts. They instead prefer to comment on his theoretical apparatus as a whole before turning to its practical implications. . . . . . This book positions itself against this grain. Firstly, it closely analyzes some half-dozen key Lacanian texts. This analysis is organized under a single thematic – the question of meaning – in order to advance the reader's understanding of the trajectory of Lacan's thought across his entire career, as well as to promote the book's thesis that the field of meaning can be suspended. Accordingly, an initial chapter takes up the hermeneutical tradition from Flacius onward. This is then supplemented by a chapter which surveys phenomenological, structuralist and aesthetic theories of meaning and their differing methods of textual analysis. Together these two chapters provide a unique context for the sustained analysis of Lacan's texts which begins in the third chapter, an analysis that forms the bulk of the book's content. This contextualization potentially widens the book's appeal to any scholar wishing to explore his relationship to those textual objects he interacts with on a daily basis. And because this book assumes the reader has little to no familiarity with Lacan, the reader will find patient explanations of the basics of his theories before slowly being led up to the more difficult theories of his late years. Again the argument is that Lacan has something to offer all scholars. His work is not just reserved for psychoanalysts. . . . . . It is with his late theories that the serious student of Lacan will find the book's most original contribution. For in the fourth chapter a detailed account is provided of how Lacan derived his infamous formulae of sexuation from Aristotelian logic. These formulae are then extensively discussed against the backdrop of interpretive theory and textual analysis, showing how these formulae capture much more than just the difference between the sexes. Strikingly, this difference is also found to run through meaning itself, something the final chapter aims to demonstrate. It does this by amalgamating three key components of late-Lacan: sexuation, discourse theory and his use of topological spaces. This amalgamation is a first in the literature. But this amalgamation is not just useful in demonstrating the book's thesis. It further suggests how seemingly divergent aspects of late-Lacanian theory can be made to work together.

Framed in a critique of digital and new media studies, this dissertation returns to the roots of the study of communication and interaction in rhetoric, linguistics, semiotics, information theory, and cybernetics to develop a philosophy and theory of communication anchored in a pre-symbolic concept of gesture. This reevaluation of communication processes allows for the articulation of communication as dynamic interaction in spacetime, which allows attention to communicative agency and the relations among communicators, communications technologies, and the environments and ecologies in which they are necessarily situated. This, in turn, while drawing from assemblage theory, affect theory, embodied and distributed cognition, interactional sociology, and relational psychology, provides a novel conceptualization of agency in human and non-human forms, as well as the relations among them. The foregoing is anchored in a relational ontology that critiques many of the contemporary, taken-for-granted assumptions about character of ‘information’.

Contemporary theorizations of neoliberalism are framed by a false dichotomy between, on the one hand, studies influenced by Foucault in emphasizing neoliberalism as a form of governmentality, and on the other hand, inquiries influenced by Marx in foregrounding neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology. This article seeks to shine some light on this division in an effort to open up new debates and recast existing ones in such a way that might lead to more flexible understandings of neoliberalism as a discourse. A discourse approach moves theorizations forward by recognizing neoliberalism is neither a ‘top down’ nor ‘bottom up’ phenomena, but rather a circuitous process of socio-spatial transformation.

У статті представлений аналіз семантичних особливостей дієслів спрямованого руху на горизонтальній площині та основні критерії їх класифікації. Виокремлено три типи дієслів відповідно до спрямованості руху. Критеріями класифікації є контактність/дистантність руху, точна/неточна локація, наявність вказівки на суб'єкт/об'єкт переміщення.

Recent sociolinguistic research on narrative has underlined the understanding of place as being both spatially defined and socially constituted through shared experience as well as contestation. Drawing on studies on the philosophy of place and the ‘small stories’ perspective, this study approaches place as an abstract concept in which spatial environment, people, objects, and activity come together as a unified, complex structure. Two Indonesian narratives are examined to illustrate the connectedness between the different elements that make up that structure. Ambiguous uses of temporal phrases and person references suggest that these elements (e.g., people and objects) are often undifferentiated. It is argued that the narratives are not simply stories about place but are stories enabled by place, that is, by presence in a spatial environment, encounter with people and objects, and engagement in shared activities through time, and which highlight self identity as being deeply embedded in the identities of others.

The focus of this book is how Slavic languages represent spatial relations, and how spatial cognition and perception influence the understanding and linguistic coding of nonspatial domains. Individual analyses concentrate on the semantics of selected prepositions and cases in Bosnian/ Croatian/ Serbian (B/ C/ S), providing a comparative perspective on other Slavic languages, primarily Russian and Polish. The opening analysis discusses the main theoretical notion - metaphorical extension - exemplifying the relation of spatial usages of linguistic items to non-spatial usages. This is followed by an analysis of the most basic spatial relations, "in-ness" and "on-ness." The meaning network of prepositions equivalent to on and in helps explain the meaning of the cases they combine with: the accusative and locative. Another crucial spatial relation, proximity, is taken into account in the semantic analysis of the B/ C/ S prepositions kod and pri, their Slavic equivalents, and cases they combine with: the genitive and locative. The next chapter deals with the spatial meaning of the dative case, examining dative's prepositional usages, the bare directional dative in B/ C/ S, and the semantic relation of the bare directional dative to other meaning domains of this case.

Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that violence is 'irrational' marks particular cultures as ‘other’. Neoliberalism exploits such imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of reason. Proceeding as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to putatively ‘irrational’ and ‘violent’ peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity, separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world.

Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that violence is 'irrational' marks particular cultures as ‘other’. Neoliberalism exploits such imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of reason. Proceeding as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to putatively ‘irrational’ and ‘violent’ peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity, separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world.

The year 2011 saw unprecedented waves of people occupying key locations around the world in a statement of public discontent. In Egypt, the protests which took place between 25 January and 11 February 2011 culminating in the ouster of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak have now come to be known as the Egyptian Revolution. Media reporting of the revolution often portrayed it as a ‘spectacle’ playing out on the stage of Tahrir Square which was dubbed ‘the symbolic heart of the Egyptian revolution’. Tahrir Square quickly became a space serving various functions and layered with an array of meanings. This paper explores the relationship between the discourse of protest messages and the space of Tahrir Square during the January 25 revolution, demonstrating how the two were mutually reinforcing. The messages are drawn from a corpus of approximately 2000 protest messages captured in Tahrir Square between 25 January and 11 February 2011. The analysis is presented in the form of six conceptualising frames for the space of Tahrir Square which take into account both its geographical and social context. The conceptualisation draws from the field of geosemiotics, which posits that all discourses are ‘situated’ both in space and time (Scollon & Scollon 2003), and on the Lefebvrian principles of the production of space which provide a useful framework for interpreting urban space (Lefebvre 1991).

This book explores both theoretical and practical issues of language use in a migration context, using data from a German urban immigrant community in Canada. Through this transcontinental perspective, the book makes a new contribution to the literature on both language and identity and language and globalization.

In this chapter, I explore practices of rock carving on the Anatolian peninsula from a diachronic perspective, with special emphasis on the Late Bronze Age and Early–Middle Iron Ages (ca. 1600–550 BC). Linking together the materiality of monuments, rock-carving technologies and issues of landscape imagination, I focus first on the commemorative rock reliefs across the Anatolian landscape, sponsored by the Hittite , Assyrian and Syro-Hittite states . Rock reliefs were carved at geologically prominent and culturally significant places such as springs, caves, sinkholes, rivers sources or along the river gorges. They constituted places for communicating with the underworld, the world of divinities and dead ancestor s. I then venture into the Urartian and Paphlagonian rock-cut tomb-carving practices and Phrygian rock-cut sanctuaries of the Iron Age to argue for the broader dissemination of the idea of altering karstic landscapes for cultic and funerary purposes. I maintain that rock monuments can only be understood as always being part of a complex assemblage in the long-term history of places. Using a limited number of examples, this chapter contributes to studies of landscape and place in Mediterranean archaeology by promoting a shift of focus
from macro-scale explanations of the environment to micro-scale engagement with located practices of place-making.

The rise of the commodified city has encouraged new attention to the symbolic systems that structure our understandings of difference and inequality in urban areas. This paper analyzes one of those systems, namely discourse. I examine how the term diversity has developed multiple meanings over the past 10 years in Mt. Pleasant, a gentrifying neighborhood in Washington, DC, and I trace these developments and their connections with changes in the local economy, politics, and demographics. In the mid-1990s, diversity indexed community discourses about social justice and equal opportunity. Later, diversity began to signify a commodified resource. As real estate prices drastically rose, the term's meaning became associated with the "lifestylization" of urban space: Diversity has come to reference stimulating cultural experience, and is used to promote commercial investment in the neighborhood and sell upmarket real estate. Analyzing such shifts in discourse illuminates the micro-mechanics of how local visions of multicultural urban spaces can lose their focus on justice and equality. [

Place to Place is a book that brings together nine artists' experiences of creating artistic work for a specific site.

"Art is not what these artists are primarly making, to say that would be to islolate their practice and thinking - rather they are creating a dialogue about place, which through art, they open up, develop and share"

Thats what the artist Lisa Torell writes in the introduction to the anthology "Place to Place", for which she is editor. "(Niklas Östholm, Konstfrämjandet Stockholm)

With the artists: Eva Arnqvist, Henrik Andersson, Kajsa Dahlberg, Annika Eriksson, Johanna Gustafsson Fürst, Hans Rosenström, Martin Tebus and Magnus Thierfelder.



Translation: Åsa-Linnea Strand
Design: Research and Development, researchanddevelopment.se Print management: Wonderful Books, Rik van Leeuwen
The book has been made possible by support from Folkrörelsernas Konstfrämjande and Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art and Creative Writing (UiT).

This article discusses Volume 17 (1) where the editors (Garrido and Sabaté-Dalmau) push for a sociolinguistic, discourse-analytic and linguistic anthropological agenda in the study of transnational trajectories of multilingual workers and emergent entrepreneurial selves. I review this lens as suitable to document how language both mediates and becomes object of explicit attention/talk in institutionalised arrangements and subject-formation processes that enable such arrangements. In doing so, I focus on the alignments of market rationality, sovereignty, and citizenship that emerge across the articles in the volume, with focus on how they mutually constitute distinctive milieus of labour and life at the edge of emergence. I propose to think of these alignments via Ong's (2006. Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.) analysis of variegated modes of neoliberal governmentality to articulate the set of paradoxes and contradictions identified by the authors of such articles. This, I argue, necessitates a kaleidoscopic framing of neoliberalism whereby the analysis of semiosis goes hand-in-hand with attention to dynamics of mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. I also suggest that such an exploration may also benefit from in-depth engagement with developments stemming from the spatial turn, for they help us map specific trajectories onto the patterns of global circulation of professionals, ideas about language, and resources.

This study focuses on language in interaction to investigate digital queer geographies. Data analysis focuses on temporal aspects of online text-only chatting in addition to the spatial and discursive. Discourse analysis is applied to interactions in which men who desire men interact in a specific type of place semiotics. Extracts are taken from a corpus of 300,000 words of chatting data that was gathered from online chat rooms. Ongoing dialogues occur simultaneously in these conversations but in layers created by different scales of time, and discursive links are made to yet higher timescales via references to spatialities both within and outside of the chat room. Different experiences of space and time (i.e. chronotopes) intersect periodically in a process in which the constant use of language shapes a negotiation of normativities. The analysis in this study will examine conversations to explore how this particular process relates to the subversion or continuance of homonormativity by the participants, shedding light on the role of language and semiotics in queer geographies.

The research project concerns language socialization
among urban immigrant adolescents. A large number of
interactions shows that among the factors that play a role in
rising to peer social status and in acquiring certain language
features, space seems to be important. As well, the subjects
identified as leaders seem to have an affirmative and
representational function in terrritorilized spaces that do not
necessarily correspond to exogene categories, be they administrative, media or popular. I will attempt to determine
to what extent and how territories and reference spaces are
constructed, and with what characteristics they are associated
with respect to language practices and identity building.

This chapter examines the semantics of selected words for standing-water places in English, French, and the Australian Aboriginal language Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara. It uses standing-water places as a case study to argue that languages and cultures categorize the geographic environment in diverse ways, influenced by both geography and a culture’s way of life. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) technique of linguistic analysis is used to present semantic explications of the nouns. Furthermore, the chapter investigates the semantic nature of nouns for kinds of places, and shows how to approach the treatment of nouns for landscape within the NSM framework. The chapter finds that the meanings of landscape concepts, like those of other concepts based in the concrete world, are anchored in a human-centred perspective.

Dieser Beitrag diskutiert, wie deutschsprachige Immigranten in Kanada sowie deren Nachfahren durch das Sprechen über Essen einen deutsch-kanadischen Raum konstruieren und sich innerhalb dessen in Bezug auf Gruppen-zugehörigkeit positionieren. Die anschließende Diskussion dieses Beitrags widmet sich nicht nur der Tatsache, dass Sprechen über Essen eine Rolle im Immigrationskontext spielt, sondern wie es in spezifischen diskursiven Kontexten eingesetzt wird. Die Analyse fokussiert darauf, wie durch das Sprechen über Essen sowohl die horizontale Dimension des Raumes (z. B. zeitliche Beschränkung bzw. Kontinuität) wie auch die vertikale Dimension desselben (z. B. Hierarchie und Abgrenzung von Gruppen) konstruiert wird.

Although Heidegger’s explicit account of “poetic dwelling” belongs to his later philosophy, there are important indications that he was already engaging with the core matter of the notion in his early thought. Contrary to the idea that in Being and Time, “dwelling” amounts to mere practical coping with the environment, we would like to demonstrate that the notion is already a poetic issue in his early thought, as it requires the appropriation of our relation to the world via an authentic experience of fin- itude. Following a topological mode of thinking, the paper thematizes the connections between Heidegger’s early and later thought, and elucidates the following three points: First, “freeing” and “letting” appears as the appropriate ethos of a poetic experience of finitude, one that maintains the “clearing” of meaningfulness. Second, a topological reading of Being and Time can explicate the notions of authenticity and inauthenticity as different disclosures of the clearing where human being-world correlation occurs. Third, the notion of “keeping-still” (Schweigen) can be interpreted as an authentic disposition that frees space for the disclosure of existence. The paper concludes that an authentic experience of finitude through “stillness” appears to reorient human ethos by releasing “discourse” from absorption in “idle-talk” and that such an act of existential re-orientation of one’s disposition towards the world is the essence of “authenticity,” and Heidegger’s early “poetic dwelling”.

Keywords: Heidegger, Being and Time, poetic dwelling, finitude, Gelassenheit, silence, authenticity, topology.

This study examines the impact of typological constraints on second language acquisition. It explores the hypothesis of a conceptual transfer from first to foreign language (L1 to L2). Based on Talmy’s (2000) distinction between Verb- and Satellite-framed languages, corpus-based analyses compare descriptions of voluntary motion events along three paths (UP, DOWN, ACROSS), elicited in a controlled situation from native speakers (Russian, English) and Russian learners at two levels (upper- intermediate and advanced) acquiring English in a classroom setting. Results show that in spite of considerable differences between Russian and English native speakers’ performance, particularly with respect to the relative variability in their lexicalization patterns, idiosyncratic forms and structures produced by L2 learners rarely mirror motion conceptualization in their first language, which suggests the absence of a substantial transfer from L1.

An evidence of cultural change is often a change in the relationship between the community and its surrounding space. As long as such a relationship entails a corresponding linguistic expression, this second becomes altered as a result of a change in the first.

In a previous paper (Liebscher and Dailey-O'Cain 2009), we posited that attitudes toward language are not merely static thoughts in people's minds, but are constantly constructed in interaction. Following on this work, in this paper we investigate the ways in which German-speaking migrants and their descendants in urban Canada use language attitudes in interaction to construct a specifically German space within Canada. Our focus is on their attitudes t oward each of the various languages and language varieties present in the participants' linguascape: German dialects, standard German and English, and code-mixing, and in our analysis, we observe the ways that these migrants negotiate who has authority over these forms, as well as how attitudes can shift when speakers' connection to their country of origin is interrupted through migration. Though the direct focus of the research questions we address in this paper is on what it means to be German in urban Canada, we also address broader issues of how urban minority groups construct and maintain minority identities after migration.

The three Frames of Reference recognized in the current inventory of spatial-language types are differentiated by their placement of the Anchor from which the vector of search space from Ground to Figure is calculated (Levinson 1996). In certain well-recognized examples, Anchor merges with Ground. The existing analysis treats this merged component as analytically Ground rather than Anchor; its location in or out of the speech situation is therefore taken to be independent of the Frame of Reference typology. Instead, I treat this component as analytically Anchor, making its speech-situation status criterial to the typology. Four, not three, Frames of Reference now appear. The fourth, “Direct”, frame, distinguishes binary locutions with a speech participant as Ground/ Anchor (e.g. ‘in front of you’) from ‘Object-Centered’ binary locutions in which Ground/ Anchor is not a speech participant ( e.g. ‘in front of the kettle’). This four-frame analysis corresponds better than does the three-frame one to the logic of rotation sensitivity which has been used to show Whorfian parallels between language and conceptualization across cultures. I close by discussing the application of the Frame of Reference typology to pointing gestures, and show how recognition of the fourth frame of reference allows us to bring discussion of these, and the linguistic demonstratives and locatives with which they so frequently co-occur, fully within the Frame of Reference typology.

Semantička i gramatička svojstva prefiksa o-/ob- u slovenskim glagolima za izražavanje emocija. A cognitive linguistic view of South Slavic prepositions and prefixes (str.5-17) / Ljiljana Šarić


Semantic and grammatical features of o-/ob- in verbs of emotion in Slovene (str.19-39) / Agnieszka Będkowska-Kopczyk

Kretanje od – do u hrvatskome. Analiza polazišta, ciljeva i dvojnih čitanja dativa. Moving od(-) and do(-) in Croatian. An account of sources, goals and dual readings of the dative (str.41-69) /
Maja Brala-Vukanović, Anita Memišević

Orphan prefixes and the grammaticalization of aspect in South Slavic. Osamostaljeni prefiksi i gramatikalizacija vida u južnoslavenskim jezicima (str.71-105) / Stephen M. Dickey

Prijedlog i prefiks nad u južnoslavenskim jezicima s naglaskom na makedonskom jeziku.The preposition and prefix nad in South Slavic languages with emphasis on Macedonian (str.107-150). / Liljana Mitkovska, Eleni Bužarovska

Prijedlog uz u hrvatskome: kognitivni pristup. The Croatian preposition uz: A cognitive approach (str.151-190) / Ljiljana Šarić

Kognitivnosemantička analiza prefiksa uz u hrvatskom jeziku. A cognitive semantic account of the prefix uz in Croatian 191-218 (str.191-218) / Ljiljana Šarić

Kognitivna analiza bugarskih prijedloga i glagolskih prefiksa nad i pod


A cognitive analysis of the Bulgarian prepositions and verbal prefixes NAD and POD (str.219-260)/Ivelina Tchizmarova

What grounds gave birth to December’s revolt and most importantly, what new grounds has the revolt given birth to in return? The political background of the events of those days and their repercussions are dis-cussed extensively in the next part of this book. What we have tried to do here is to take a look at the actual, physical grounds of the uprising and its legacies — to read it, that is, through its inscription in the urban space of the city of Athens. To look at urban struggles in new sites of confrontation that have opened up there since; everyday reminders that December lives.