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dominiquehicks15

Education and the Language Gap: Secretary Arne Duncan's Remarks at the Foreign Language... - 0 views

www.ed.gov/...emarks-foreign-language-summit

education language foreign-language school change US generation

shared by dominiquehicks15 on 22 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • dominiquehicks15 on 22 Oct 14
     
    It is an honor to be here at the University of Maryland which has worked closely with the Department of Education for more than 20 years to advance the teaching of languages such as Hebrew, Farsi, Chinese, and Russian. As President Obama said on Monday: "Our generation's Sputnik moment is now."
Lisa Stewart

Figures of Rhetoric in Advertising Language - 9 views

business.scu.edu/...rhetjcr.htm

wordsrus advertising

shared by Lisa Stewart on 18 Nov 09 - Cached
  • the discipline of rhetoric was the primary repository of Western thinking about persuasion
  • The principal purpose of this paper is to contribute a richer and more systematic conceptual understanding of rhetorical structure in advertising language
  • Rhetoricians maintain that any proposition can be expressed in a variety of ways, and that in any given situation one of these ways will be the most effective in swaying an audience.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • the manner in which a statement is expressed may be more important
  • a rhetorical figure occurs when an expression deviates from expectation
  • With respect to metaphor, for instance, listeners are aware of conventions with respect to the use of words, one of which might be formulated as, words are generally used to convey one of the lead meanings given in their dictionary entry. A metaphor violates that convention, as in this headline for Johnson & Johnson bandaids, "Say hello to your child's new bodyguards," accompanied by a picture of bandaids emblazoned with cartoon characters (from Table 2)
  • listeners know exactly what to do when a speaker violates a convention: they search for a context that will render the violation intelligible. If context permits an inference that the bandaid is particularly strong, or that the world inhabited by children is particularly threatening, then the consumer will achieve an understanding of the advertiser's statement.
  • every figure represents a gap. The figure both points to a translation (the impossibility in this context of translating "Say hello to your child's new petunias" is the key to its incomprehensibility), and denies the adequacy of that translation, thus encouraging further interpretation.
  • metaphors that have become frozen or conventional: e.g., the sports car that "hugs" the road.
  • an important function of rhetorical figures is to motivate the potential reader.
  • Berlyne (1971) found incongruity
  • (deviation) to be among those factors that call to and arrest attention.
  • "pleasure of the text"--the reward that comes from processing a clever arrangement of signs.
  • Berlyne's (1971) argument, based on his research in experimental aesthetics, that incongruity (deviation) can produce a pleasurable degree of arousal.
  • Familiar examples of schematic figures would include rhyme and alliteration, while metaphors and puns would be familiar examples of tropic figures.
  • Schemes can be understood as deviant combinations, as in the headline, "Now Stouffers makes a real fast real mean Lean Cuisine."
  • This headline is excessively regular because of its repetition of sounds and words. It violates the convention that sounds are generally irrelevant to the sense of an utterance, i.e., the expectation held by receivers that the distribution of sounds through an utterance will be essentially unordered except by the grammatical and semantic constraints required to make a well-formed sentence. Soundplay can be used to build up meaning in a wide variety of ways (Ross 1989; van Peer 1986).
  • Many tropes, particularly metaphors and puns effected in a single word, can be understood as deviant selections. Thus, in the Jergens skin care headline (Table 2), "Science you can touch," there is a figurative metaphor, because "touch" does not belong to the set of verbs which can take as their object an abstract collective endeavor such as Science.
  • For example, a rhyme forges extra phonemic links among the headline elements.
  • "Performax protects to the max," the consumer has several encoding possibilities available, including the propositional content, the phonemic equivalence (Performax = max), and the syllable node (other words endin
  • Because they are over-coded, schemes add internal redundancy to advertising messages. Repetition within a text can be expected to enhance recall just as repetition of the entire text does.
  • The memorability of tropes rests on a different mechanism. Because they are under-coded, tropes are incomplete in the sense of lacking closure. Tropes thus invite elaboration by the reader. For example, consider the Ford ad with the headline "Make fun of the road" (Table 2). "Road" is unexpected as a selection from the set of things to mock or belittle. Via
  • This level of the framework distinguishes simple from complex schemes and tropes to yield four rhetorical operations--repetition, reversal, substitution, destabilization.
  • s artful deviation, irregularity, and complexity that explain the effects of a headline such as "Say hello to your child's new bodyguards," and not its assignment to the category 'metaphor.'
  • The rhetorical operation of repetition combines multiple instances of some element of the expression without changing the meaning of that element. In advertising we find repetition applied to sounds so as to create the figures of rhyme, chime, and alliteration or assonance (Table 2). Repetition applied to words creates the figures known as anaphora (beginning words), epistrophe (ending words), epanalepsis (beginning and ending) and anadiplosis (ending and beginning). Repetition applied to phrase structure yields the figure of parison, as in K Mart's tagline: "The price you want. The quality you need." A limiting condition is that repeated words not shift their meaning with each repetition (such a shift would create the trope known as antanaclasis, as shown further down in Table 2).
  • the possibility for a second kind of schematic figure, which would be produced via an operation that we have named reversal. Th
  • rhetorical operation of reversal combines within an expression elements that are mirror images of one another.
  • The rhetorical operation of destabilization selects an expression such that the initial context renders its meaning indeterminate. By "indeterminate" we mean that multiple co-existing meanings are made available, no one of which is the final word. Whereas in a trope of substitution, one says something other than what is meant, and relies on the recipient to make the necessary correction, in a trope of destabilization one means more than is said, and relies on the recipient to develop the implications. Tropes of substitution make a switch while tropes of destabilization unsettle.
  • Stern, Barbara B. (1988), "How Does an Ad Mean? Language in Services Advertising," Journal of Advertising, 17 (Summer), 3-14.
  • "Pleasure and Persuasion in Advertising: Rhetorical Irony as a Humor Technique," Current Issues & Research in Advertising, 12, 25-42.
  • Tanaka, Keiko (1992), "The Pun in Advertising: A Pragmatic Approach," Lingua, 87, 91-102.
  • "The Bridge from Text to Mind: Adapting Reader Response Theory to Consumer Research," Journal of Consumer Research,
  • Gibbs, Raymond W. (1993), "Process and Products in Making Sense of Tropes," in Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed
  • Grice, Herbert P. (1989), Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Leigh, James H. (1994), "The Use of Figures of Speech in Print Ad Headlines," Journal of Advertising, 23(June), 17-34.
  • Mitchell, Andrew A. (1983), "Cognitive Processes Initiated by Exposure to Advertising," in Information Processing Research in Advertising, ed. Richard J. Harris, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 13-42.
Lara Cowell

Why Slang Is More Revealing Than You May Realize | Time - 0 views

time.com/...-dictionary-oed-lowkey-highkey

slang language_evolution social inclusion exclusion communication generational gap identity

shared by Lara Cowell on 06 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Lara Cowell on 06 Feb 23
     
    slang captures elements of humanity that are not recorded elsewhere. "What slang really does is show us at our most human," says Jonathon Green, a scholar of slang. It is the linguistic equivalent of our "unfettered Freudian id," proof of how deeply we desire social affirmation, how subversive we can be and, in some ways, how unchanging humans are. After all, while the words may change, the thematic areas (sex, drugs, crime, insults, etc.) have remained unwavering for half a millennium. So has slang's primary purpose: to playfully disguise true meaning in a way that determines who is in the know and who is out.
Lara Cowell

Why emoji mean different things in different cultures - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...t-things-in-different-cultures

emoji technology texting language_evolution culture conversation

shared by Lara Cowell on 19 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Lara Cowell on 19 Feb 23
     
    Despite claims that emoji are a universal lingua franca, emojis are neither "universal", nor a true "language". Instead, they are "at most a linguistic tool that is being used to complement our language". In other words, emojis do not and cannot by themselves constitute a meaningful code of communication between two parties. Rather, they are used as a way of enhancing texts and social media messages like a kind of additional punctuation. They help express nuance, tone and emotion in the written word. Emojis offer a chance for the average email writer, SMSer or social media poster to imply an emotional context to their messages, to express empathy. With emojis, they can do this as simply and naturally as using a facial expression or gesture when talking to somebody face-to-face. Yet relying too heavily on emojis to bridge that gap can cause problems of its own. We may all have access to more or less the same emojis through our smartphone keyboards, but what we mean when we use those emojis actually varies greatly, depending on culture, language, and generation.
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