Volume 1, Issue 2

This article chronicles the history of mapmaking, showing how the way maps develop is in tandem with the development of patterns of group identity. The central question concerns our ways of conceptualising the physical world and whether these feed into language ideology, that set of beliefs, values and attitudes drawn from our socio-political environment, which directs, constrains and moulds our language behaviour. Benedict Anderson noted the parallel development of mapping, identity and language practices in nation building. My argument here is that it is also possible to see this association in the European medieval world and that there are some indicators that such co-occurrence is discernible in mapmaking, identity formation and language practices in post-national settings. As ever in the social sciences, it would be inappropriate to claim clear cause and effect. However, it is possible to demonstrate that changes in world view co-occur with changes in language behaviour. It may, therefore, be legitimate to hypothesise that the view of ourselves that maps give us and the identities we assume as part of groups thus constructed play some part in the choice of languages we willingly acquire and speak.

This article explores the interactions between culture, linguistic choices and hard news journalistic practices, focusing on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) affair of 2011 as the basis for a comparative analysis across three cultures: France, America and Guinea. The present study is motivated by the growing application of linguistic approaches to media studies and cross-cultural research, whose findings affirm the position that language is a resource capable of articulating and reproducing beliefs, judgments and even ideologies about social realities. Through the lens of systemic functional linguistics, patterns of linguistic choices that vary across the French and English language corpus are identified and then analysed with reference to the key discourses generated by the DSK affair. The results demonstrate the value of grammatical description in unveiling cultural, societal and individual ideologies that ordinarily have limited scope for expression in the hard news genre. Consequently, these findings suggest a tension between the presupposed neutrality of the legal process and the power of the media’s rhetoric in its capacity as an additional yet covert trial participant.

This article focuses on renditions of hyperglossia in a recently published popular linguistics text entitled Babel No More. The article aims to examine in detail the seemingly asymmetrical portrayal of female polyglot prowess relative to spotlighted male linguistic proficiency in the extensive diachronic and synchronic case studies presented in the text and presents historical evidence of female polyglot contributions – past and present – to fill a perceived gap in the proffered record in this widely circulating twenty-first-century text. The seeming contrast of awe for language accumulators versus doubt for actual multilingual competence in a book bearing the subtitle The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners it is argued needs discoursal scrutiny both for what is says and for its brilliant use of covert linguistic strategies to revive and reconstruct eighteenth-century accounts of global asymmetry in women’s cognitive potential 300 years later. By examining three brilliantly crafted critical discourse strategies of Underdefinition, Underreportage; and Selective Visualization, which author Erard employs to simultaneously and systematically “other,” marginalize and trivialize some multilingual speakers while privileging past and present male hyperpolyglots in particular regions of the world, we understand how global exhibitionism of power and cultural knowledge is both revived and sustained in a seemingly interconnected and deterritorialized world of “cosmopolitan” access in the twenty-first century. Eventually then, this article seeks to examine what we lose when we limit ourselves to agenda rather than the pursuit of actual historical and present-day truths with globally spanning rather than regionally oriented evidence. Indeed, the article prods readers to consider what we risk to lose in fields as esoteric as linguistics when current analyses fail to focus on 51% of the world’s population – women.

Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is a functionally oriented linguistic framework that has gained increasing influence in recent years, with important applications in the description and analysis of text/discourse. Despite its popularity, relatively little has been done to automate the parsing of functional structures using this framework. Previous attempts have largely depended on non-statistical, rule-based methods, which have limited their application in more complex scenarios. In this article, we present a data-driven method for the classification and labelling of SFL-based functional roles, trained on a recently developed corpus resource. We describe our efforts to engineer lexical, semantic and contextual features in constructing a system for labelling the process types and participant roles in the transitivity system based on the SFL framework. Initial evaluation shows accuracies of 80.5% and 91.8% for the classification of process types and participant roles, respectively. The system is expected to be an important step in achieving fully automated analysis of functional roles in SFL. In addition to applications requiring analysis of English functional structure, we discuss some of the difficulties and future directions in extending the current system to handle less other languages such as Chinese.