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No Longer Printing the Legend: The Aporia of Heteronormativity in the American Western (1903-1969)
(2023)
This study critically investigates the U.S.-American Western and its construction of sexuality and gender, revealing that the heteronormative matrix that is upheld and defended in the genre is consistently preceded by the exploration of alternative sexualities and ways to think gender beyond the binary. The endeavor to naturalize heterosexuality seems to be baked in the formula of the U.S.-Western. However, as I show in this study, this endeavor relies on an aporia, because the U.S.-Western can only ever attempt to naturalize gender by constructing it first, hence inevitably and simultaneously construct evidence that supports the opposite: the unnaturalness and contingency of gender and sexuality.
My study relies on the works of Raewyn Connell, Pierre Bourdieu, and Judith Butler, and amalgamates in its methodology established approaches from film and literary studies (i.e., close readings) with a Foucaultian understanding of discourse and discourse analysis, which allows me to relate individual texts to cultural, socio-political and economical contexts that invariably informed the production and reception of any filmic text. In an analysis of 14 U.S.-Westerns (excluding three excursions) that appeared between 1903 and 1969 I give ample and minute narrative and film-aesthetical evidence to reveal the complex and contradictory construction of gender and sexuality in the U.S.-Western, aiming to reveal both the normative power of those categories and its structural instability and inconsistency.
This study proofs that the Western up until 1969 did not find a stable pattern to represent the gender binary. The U.S.-Western is not necessarily always looking to confirm or stabilize governing constructs of (gendered) power. However, it without fail explores and negotiates its legitimacy. Heterosexuality and male hegemony are never natural, self-evident, incontestable, or preordained. Quite conversely: the U.S.-Western repeatedly – and in a surprisingly diverse and versatile way – reveals the illogical constructedness of the heteronormative matrix.
My study therefore offers a fresh perspective on the genre and shows that the critical exploration and negotiation of the legitimacy of heteronormativity as a way to organize society is constitutive for the U.S.-Western. It is the inquiry – not necessarily the affirmation – of the legitimacy of this model that gives the U.S.-Western its ideological currency and significance as an artifact of U.S.-American popular culture.
Auf Twitter sind viele Journalisten mit persönlichen Accounts präsent und damit ein potenzieller Interaktionspartner für das Publikum. Untersuchungen aktiver Twitterer zeigen, dass auf der Netzwerkplattform politisch interessierte, persönlichkeitsstarke Nutzer interagieren, die sich vom Durchschnitt typischer Internetnutzer unterscheiden. Nachrichtenjournalisten berichten über negative Erfahrungen im direkten Publikumskontakt auf Twitter. Anders als bei Nutzerkommentaren auf Nachrichtenseiten sind öffentliche Anschriebe und Kontakte zu Journalisten auch unabhängig von einem Beitrag möglich. Zu diesem Phänomen existieren bislang jedoch kaum Studien. Über ein Tracking der Anschriebe wird daher erstens untersucht, wie häufig Politikjournalisten 2017 überhaupt in Tweets erwähnt wurden. Zweitens wurden die Nutzer befragt, die die Journalisten angeschrieben haben. Eine Nutzergruppe aus mehreren zehntausend Accounts nimmt Adressierungen vor. Die Erwähnungen verteilen sich unter den Journalisten ungleich. Die Nutzung von Blogs als alternative Informationsquelle und starke politische Orientierungen erklären das Vorkommen häufiger Interaktionen. Als Hauptmotivationen für Interaktionen zeigen sich das Bedürfnis nach eigener Meinungsäußerung und Kritik sowie das Weitergeben von neuen Informationen und Feedback an Journalisten. Sind diese Motivationen ausgeprägt, tendieren die Nutzer eher zu häufigen Interaktionen.
Stress position in English words is well-known to correlate with both their morphological properties and their phonological organisation in terms of non-segmental, prosodic categories like syllable structure. While two generalisations capturing this correlation, directionality and stratification, are well established, the exact nature of the interaction of phonological and morphological factors in English stress assignment is a much debated issue in the literature. The present study investigates if and how directionality and stratification effects in English can be learned by means of Naive Discriminative Learning, a computational model that is trained using error-driven learning and that does not make any a-priori assumptions about the higher-level phonological organisation and morphological structure of words. Based on a series of simulation studies we show that neither directionality nor stratification need to be stipulated as a-priori properties of words or constraints in the lexicon. Stress can be learned solely on the basis of very flat word representations. Morphological stratification emerges as an effect of the model learning that informativity with regard to stress position is unevenly distributed across all trigrams constituting a word. Morphological affix classes like stress-preserving and stress-shifting affixes are, hence, not predefined classes but sets of trigrams that have similar informativity values with regard to stress position. Directionality, by contrast, emerges as spurious in our simulations; no syllable counting or recourse to abstract prosodic representations seems to be necessary to learn stress position in English.
Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht erstmals systematisch die Intonation des Luxemburgischen, mit dem Ziel, ein Inventar der gängigsten Intonationskonturen sowie deren Funktion zu erstellen und damit Vergleiche mit Intonationssystemen anderer Sprachen zu ermöglichen. Datengrundlage für diese formale sowie funktionale Analyse bildet sowohl geskriptetes als auch ungeskriptetes Sprachmaterial von zwölf luxemburgischen Muttersprachlern in monologischer und dialogischer Form. Insgesamt können sechs verschiedene Konturen ermittelt werden, wobei vier davon in mehr als einer Funktion vorkommen. Auf diesem Ergebnis basierend werden die Unterschiede bzw. Ähnlichkeiten zu den Intonationssystemen der beiden weiteren Landessprachen in Luxemburg – Deutsch und Französisch – erarbeitet. Die kontrastive Analyse zeigt, dass sich beide Systeme substanziell von dem des Luxemburgischen unterscheiden, auch wenn die Unterschiede zum Deutschen aufgrund ähnlicherer prosodischer Strukturen leichter zu vergleichen und damit eindeutiger sind. In einem weiteren Schritt wird der Transfer luxemburgischer Strukturen in die beiden Fremdsprachen untersucht, um mögliche Interferenzen aufzeigen zu können. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Sprecher häufig muttersprachliche Konturen in die Fremdsprachen importieren.
This study scrutinizes press photographs published during the first 6 weeks of the Russian War in Ukraine, beginning February 24th, 2022. Its objective is to shed light on the emotions evoked in Internet-savvy audiences. This empirical research aims to contribute to the understanding of emotional media effects that shape attitudes and actions of ordinary citizens. Main research questions are: What kind of empathic reactions are observed during the Q-sort study? Which visual patterns are relevant for which emotional evaluations and attributions? The assumption is that the evaluations and attributions of empathy are not random, but follow specific patterns. The empathic reactions are based on visual patterns which, in turn, influence the type of empathic reaction. The identification of specific categories for visual and emotional reaction patterns are arrived at in different methodological processes. Visual pattern categories were developed inductively, using the art history method of iconography-iconology to identify six distinct types of visual motifs in a final sample of 33 war photographs. The overarching categories for empathic reactions—empty empathy, vicarious traumatization and witnessing—were applied deductively, building on E. Ann Kaplan's pivotal distinctions. The main result of this research are three novel categories that combine visual patterns with empathic reaction patterns. The labels for these categories are a direct result of the Q-factorial analysis, interpreted through the lense of iconography-iconology. An exploratory nine-scale forced-choice Q-sort study (Nstimuli = 33) was implemented, followed by self-report interviews with a total of 25 participants [F = 16 (64%), M = 9 (36%), Mage = 26.4 years]. Results from this exploratory research include motivational statements on the meanings of war photography from semi-structured post-sort-interviews. The major result of this study are three types of visual patterns (“factors”) that govern distinct empathic reactions in participants: Factor 1 is “veiled empathy” with highest empathy being attributed to photos showing victims whose corpses or faces were veiled. Additional features of “veiled empathy” are a strong anti-politician bias and a heightened awareness of potential visual manipulation. Factor 2 is “mirrored empathy” with highest empathy attributions to photos displaying human suffering openly. Factor 3 focused on the context. It showed a proclivity for documentary style photography. This pattern ranked photos without clear contextualization lower in empathy than those photos displaying the fully contextualized setting. To the best of our knowledge, no study has tested empathic reactions to war photography empirically. In this respect, the study is novel, but also exploratory. Findings like the three patterns of visual empathy might be helpful for photo selection processes in journalism, for political decision-making, for the promotion of relief efforts, and for coping strategies in civil society to deal with the potentially numbing or traumatizing visual legacy of the War in Ukraine.
In spite of the wide agreement among linguists as to the significance of spoken language data, actual speech data have not formed the basis of empirical work on English as much as one would think. The present paper is intended to contribute to changing this situation, on a theoretical and on a practical level. On a theoretical level, we discuss different research traditions within (English) linguistics. Whereas speech data have become increasingly important in various linguistic disciplines, major corpora of English developed within the corpus-linguistic community, carefully sampled to be representative of language usage, are usually restricted to orthographic transcriptions of spoken language. As a result, phonological phenomena have remained conspicuously understudied within traditional corpus linguistics. At the same time, work with current speech corpora often requires a considerable level of specialist knowledge and tailor-made solutions. On a practical level, we present a new feature of BNCweb (Hoffmann et al. 2008), a user-friendly interface to the British National Corpus, which gives users access to audio and phonemic transcriptions of more than five million words of spontaneous speech. With the help of a pilot study on the variability of intrusive r we illustrate the scope of the new possibilities.
This paper tested the ability of Mandarin learners of German, whose native language has lexical tone, to imitate pitch accent contrasts in German, an intonation language. In intonation languages, pitch accents do not convey lexical information; also, pitch accents are sparser than lexical tones as they only associate with prominent words in the utterance. We compared two kinds of German pitch-accent contrasts: (1) a “non-merger” contrast, which Mandarin listeners perceive as different and (2) a “merger” contrast, which sounds more similar to Mandarin listeners. Speakers of a tone language are generally very sensitive to pitch. Hypothesis 1 (H1) therefore stated that Mandarin learners produce the two kinds of contrasts similarly to native German speakers. However, the documented sensitivity to tonal contrasts, at the expense of processing phrase-level intonational contrasts, may generally hinder target-like production of intonational pitch accents in the L2 (Hypothesis 2, H2). Finally, cross-linguistic influence (CLI) predicts a difference in the realization of these two contrasts as well as improvement with higher proficiency (Hypothesis 3, H3). We used a delayed imitation paradigm, which is well-suited for assessing L2-phonetics and -phonology because it does not necessitate access to intonational meaning. We investigated the imitation of three kinds of accents, which were associated with the sentence-final noun in short wh-questions (e.g., Wer malt denn Mandalas, lit: “Who draws PRT mandalas?” “Who likes drawing mandalas?”). In Experiment 1, 28 native speakers of Mandarin participated (14 low- and 14 high-proficient). The learners’ productions of the two kinds of contrasts were analyzed using General Additive Mixed Models to evaluate differences in pitch accent contrasts over time, in comparison to the productions of native German participants from an earlier study in our lab. Results showed a more pronounced realization of the non-merger contrast compared to German natives and a less distinct realization of the merger contrast, with beneficial effects of proficiency, lending support to H3. Experiment 2 tested low-proficient Italian learners of German (whose L1 is an intonation language) to contextualize the Mandarin data and further investigate CLI. Italian learners realized the non-merger contrast more target-like than Mandarin learners, lending additional support to CLI (H3).
Three Kinds of Rising-Falling Contours in German wh-Questions: Evidence From Form and Function
(2022)
The intonational realization of utterances is generally characterized by regional as well as inter- and intra-speaker variability in f0. Category boundaries thus remain “fuzzy” and it is non-trivial how the (continuous) acoustic space maps onto (discrete) pitch accent categories. We focus on three types of rising-falling contours, which differ in the alignment of L(ow) and H(igh) tones with respect to the stressed syllable. Most of the intonational systems on German have described two rising accent categories, e.g., L+H* and L*+H in the German ToBI system. L+H* has a high-pitched stressed syllable and a low leading tone aligned in the pre-tonic syllable; L*+H a low-pitched stressed syllable and a high trailing tone in the post-tonic syllable. There are indications for the existence of a third category which lies between these two categories, with both L and H aligned within the stressed syllable, henceforth termed (LH)*. In the present paper, we empirically investigate the distinctiveness of three rising-falling contours [L+H*, (LH)*, and L*+H, all with a subsequent low boundary tone] in German wh-questions. We employ an approach that addresses both the form and the function of the contours, also taking regional variation into account. In Experiment 1 (form), we used a delayed imitation paradigm to test whether Northern and Southern German speakers can imitate the three rising-falling contours in wh-questions as distinct contours. In Experiment 2 (function), we used a free association task to investigate whether listeners interpret the pragmatic meaning of the three contours differently. Imitation results showed that German speakers—both from the North and the South—reproduced the three contours. There was a small but significant effect of regional variety such that contours produced by speakers from the North were slightly more distinct than those by speakers from the South. In the association task, listeners from both varieties attributed distinct meanings to the (LH)* accent as opposed to the two ToBI accents L+H* and L*+H. Combined evidence from form and function suggests that three distinct contours can be found in the acoustic and perceptual space of German rising-falling contours.
Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Besonderheiten diskursiver Strategien, sowie struktureller und sprachlicher Merkmale der japanischsprachigen Textsorte Literatur-Rezension. Auf der Grundlage der herausgearbeiteten textlinguistischen Merkmale werden Didaktisierungsbeispiele für den Fachtext-Leseunterricht entworfen. Ziel ist somit der Entwurf einer textlinguistischen Fundierung der (Fach-)textlektüre am Beispiel der Textsorte Rezension.
Die Materialbasis der vorliegenden Studie bilden 45 Rezensionen literarischer Neuerscheinungen aus dem wöchentlich erscheinenden Rezensionsorgan Tosho shinbun (Die Bücherzeitung) des Jahres 1999.
Die Kriterien für die Analyse werden aus einem Modell des Textsortenwissens von Fix 2006 abgeleitet (Teil I). Bei der Analyse stehen daher Aspekte im Zentrum, die den Aufbau von Wissen (Schemata) über die Textsorte bzw. Textsortenkonventionen und deren struktureller und sprachlicher Realisationen dienen können. Übergeordnete Phänomene wie Tempusgebrauch oder Fachsprachlichkeit werden ebenfalls untersucht. Eine quantitative Auswertung der Ergebnisse ermöglicht Rückschlüsse auf die didaktische Relevanz eines beobachteten Phänomens (Teil II).
Kriterien zur Textauswahl und Progression bei der Didaktisierung ausgewählter Rezensionen liefert ein Ansatz von Sandig 2000, die eine Klassifizierung von Texten auf der Grundlage der Prototypentheorie vorschlägt. Danach verdichten sich bestimmte Kommunikationsmuster zu mentalen Textschemata mit unterschiedlichen Ausprägungen je nach Prototypikalität der Texteigenschaften.
Das konstruktivistische Leseprozessmodell von Wolff 1990 schließlich liefert die Vorgaben, nach denen die Ergebnisse der Textanalyse anhand ausgewählter Beispiele lesedidaktisch aufbereitet werden (Teil III).
Der Anhang (Teil IV) bietet eine Zusammenstellung von in den untersuchten Rezensionen verwendeten Ausdrücken, der sich auf die Darstellung, Interpretation, Analyse und Bewertung von literarischen Werken beziehen.
In her poems, Tawada constructs liminal speaking subjects – voices from the in-between – which disrupt entrenched binary thought processes. Synthesising relevant concepts from theories of such diverse fields as lyricology, performance studies, border studies, cultural and postcolonial studies, I develop ‘voice’ and ‘in-between space’ as the frameworks to approach Tawada’s multifaceted poetic output, from which I have chosen 29 poems and two verse novels for analysis. Based on the body speaking/writing, sensuality is central to Tawada’s use of voice, whereas the in-between space of cultures and languages serves as the basis for the liminal ‘exophonic’ voices in her work. In the context of cultural alterity, Tawada focuses on the function of language, both its effect on the body and its role in subject construction, while her feminist poetry follows the general development of feminist academia from emancipation to embodiment to queer representation. Her response to and transformation of écriture féminine in her verse novels transcends the concept of the body as the basis of identity, moving to literary and linguistic, plural self-construction instead. While few poems are overtly political, the speaker’s personal and contextual involvement in issues of social conflict reveal the poems’ potential to speak of, and to, the multiply identified citizens of a globalised world, who constantly negotiate physical as well as psychological borders.