CONCORDIA DISCORS vs DISCORDIA CONCORS

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Authors: Gina Măciucă

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Authors: Constanze FIEBACH

Besides the medical usage, in everyday language the term schizophrenic is usually used to refer to something ambivalent, paradoxical and contradictory. This fact does not come as a big surprise with regard to the word’s Greek origin schizein, which means “(to) split” and phrén, which means “spirit”. Scientists who study this slang usage characterize it as metaphorical and complain about an association of schizophrenia with a multiple personality, which schizophrenia is not. Although the medical term ‘Spaltungsirresein’ has been considered obsolete for a long time and the phenomenon of multiple personality has its own name, in slang language the usage of ‘schizophrenic’ continues to exist. To what extent the everyday usage is metaphorical shall be discussed in this article.

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Authors: Ioana ROSTOŞ, Mihai CRUDU

The paper entitled Das Thema als Metapher des Denkens (Theme as Metaphor of the Thought) aims at offering an overview of the main categories of themes, as presented in the book Sprache und Denken. Eine romanistische Perspektive (Language and Thinking. A Romanistic Perspective) by Professor Michael Metzeltin. Ph.D. Metzeltins’ views on the speech act, the cognitive processes and the wording of different themes are compared against various theses formulated by the Romanian linguist Ioan Oprea.

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Authors: Laura-Elena MIHĂILEASA

In the article “The Rejection of the Metaphor. Thoughts on the Kafkian Style” we argue that the simplicity of the Praguean writer’s style and the purposeful avoidance of metaphor are based on the conviction that reality is one, indivisible and uninterpretable, and that literature should express this reality. For Kafka, metaphor is not a way to reveal the essence of reality, but a trap that alienates the writer from the essence of things. By trying to find the limits of the correspondence between literature and reality and attempting to reach the utopia of the total correspondence between word and world, Kafka builds his own style, one characterized by great simplicity, clearness and concreteness, where metaphor is used parsimoniously.

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Authors: Danielle Verena KOLLIG

Hostility towards transsexualism has not only persisted in nonacademic communities, but also in academic scholarships, based not only on identifications of gender with sexuality and sexual identity, but also on the linguistic conventions of dichotomies of matter and ideas. Nietzsche’s aesthetics not only challenges this tradition of linguistically constructed dichotomies, but also the exclusive separation between genders and sexual identities. Referring to The Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the article examines how Nietzsche’s ideas of language as a system of metaphors contributes to an understanding of transgender respectively transsexual issues as non-regressive expressions of selfhood, challenging rather than confirming gender dichotomies.

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Authors: Carmen Dărăbuş

The paper Gaea – Passive Principle; the Social Symbolization of the Myth observes, in the Naturalistic esthetic context, with realistic nuances, the relationships of the characters with property. The Earth, a strong symbolic presence in universal literature becomes a metaphor of germination, of the opposition with the sky. The Earth structures communities and individual destinies in a circular construction in the novels The Earth by Emile Zola and Ion by Liviu Rebreanu, but then becomes again the primordial chaos. Masculine and feminine principles are in perpetual confrontation; at the symbolic-anthropological level, earth, life and death are in a cosmic connection, viewed as a condition of the eternal revival. The human regnum, the animal regnum and the vegetal regnum are, more often than not, indistinct in their vibrations. Apparently a passive principle, the earth provokes in the human being all his latent instincts, ready for the Dionysian exultation and for death.

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Authors: Anissa DAOUDI

One of the reasons for the relevance of idiom studies is the pervasiveness of figurative language in everyday discourse (Cieślicka: 2005). However, despite the frequency of idioms, they remain an obstruction to a lot of foreign language learners. The comprehension and interpretation of idiomatic expressions has been the focus of much debate in recent literature. Yet, despite the fact that there exists extensive research on processing idiomatic expressions in the monolingual mode, much less has been written about the way in which bilingual language users comprehend and interpret idiomatic language. The present study aims to fill in the gap by highlighting the issue of bilingual figurative competence. It starts with a brief overview of idiom comprehension models. Then, it presents and analyses a study conducted on the strategies Arab learners use to decode idioms. The results of the field research are analyzed, discussed and conclusions are drawn, in a last instance.

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Authors: Angela Coșciug

From ancient times French, Spanish, Romanian and Russian have been in contact. Interferences between these languages can easily be observed today. These interferences are mainly in the phonetics of these languages, especially at the qualitative and quantitative levels of the vowels. This aspect allows the researchers to include all these languages among the Indo-European languages.

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Authors: Maria CONSTANTINOU

The Japanese word tsunami meaning “harbor wave” became well known after the natural disaster caused in Sri Lanka in December 26, 2004. In both French and Greek, tsunami does not seem to restrict itself to its literal meaning. It is constantly being re-used and re-contextualised in a multiplicity of different contexts, giving rise to an abundant production of new metaphoric meanings. This article sets out to study the semanticinnovations as they unfurl in the journalistic discourse both in French and Greek. It favours a semantic and discursive approach, while having recourse to the semic analysis as developed within the field of Rastier’s Interpretive Semantics.

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Authors: ULRIKE SCHRÖDER

This paper focuses on the differences in the use of the conceptual metaphor (RAPPER’S) LIFE IS WAR in German and Brazilian rap lyrics based on the analysis of 150 German and 150 Brazilian rap lyrics. The results reveal crucial differences concerning the mapping of the adversary in both corpora. We will also show that the differences point to divergent discourse contexts, speech act types and speech functions in which each cultural rap style is embedded.