This essay looks at the translatability of the Dutch argumentative operators 'nauwelijks' and 'amper' into English. Their usage and argumentative strenght are compared to 'barely','hardly' and ...Show moreThis essay looks at the translatability of the Dutch argumentative operators 'nauwelijks' and 'amper' into English. Their usage and argumentative strenght are compared to 'barely','hardly' and 'scarcely'. The underlying goal is to determine whether argumentativity is translatable.Show less
I contrast naturally occurring conversation with the Liturgy of the Catholic Mass, focussing on speech acts, implicatures, the intersubjective/argumentative nature of language, and on uncooperative...Show moreI contrast naturally occurring conversation with the Liturgy of the Catholic Mass, focussing on speech acts, implicatures, the intersubjective/argumentative nature of language, and on uncooperative communication. This comparison allows me to determine what the characteristics of Mass are as an activity type (Levinson 1992), and to reflect from a Wittgensteinian point of view on the philosophical implications of the results gained. Ultimately, I show that human communication with the divine, i.e. prayer, closely resembles interpersonal communication in the ethical realm.Show less
This thesis looked for default ironic constructions in Dutch. To do so a new definition of verbal irony was proposed: Verbal irony are utterances that (1) have an argumentative force that is...Show moreThis thesis looked for default ironic constructions in Dutch. To do so a new definition of verbal irony was proposed: Verbal irony are utterances that (1) have an argumentative force that is opposed to the speaker’s evaluation, (2) are incongruent with its (co-text and) context and (3) leave the fact that they are ironic implicit. It is claimed that in Dutch an ironic interpretation can be emphasized by not. Therefore a corpus was set up with tweets containing #not. The ironic tweets in this corpus were analyzed on word frequency and remarkable patterns. This led to a list of words and patterns that were further analyzed. Through the analysis sixteen potentially default ironic constructions were found. These constructions were checked against three criteria for default ironic constructions: (1) not containing semantic anomalies, (2) not containing contextual information and (3) being ironic by default. Three constructions turned out to be default ironic constructions: lekker Adj, DP weer lekker bezig and het gaat weer lekker (deictic adverb) (PP).Show less
This paper is aimed at offering a theoretical discussion and interdisciplinary investigation into theories and concepts concerning categorization and individual and/or group differences in...Show moreThis paper is aimed at offering a theoretical discussion and interdisciplinary investigation into theories and concepts concerning categorization and individual and/or group differences in cognition. From this it is suggested that there is the possibility of miscommunication, or at least degradation of the communicative value of a message, as the result of perception and/or reception differences concerning the connotations (consisting of of all combined properties and implications) of specific lexical items between individuals and/or groups. These differences are suggested to be present both in practical instances of use as well as in people's prototypes of said terms. Based on these theoretical expectations a schematic model is created, and a possible solution in the form of intralingual intersemantic translation is suggested. The theory, model, and solution are exemplified through an investigative qualitative case study into the use of the term sustainability by several political leaders in environmental speeches.Show less
