LINGUIST List 5.551

Mon 16 May 1994

Qs: Macedonian, Killing vocab, Irony ;-) online, Environment

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Directory

1. lynne murphy, macedonian help needed
2. claudia brugman, Q: 'killing' vocabulary
3. , Irony ;-) Online
4. sharon shelly, Query: Language and/ of environmental studies?

i hope that there is a speaker of macedonian on this list who might
be able to help me to substantiate some claims about the meanings
and usages of temperature terms in that language.

if you are in a position to help me, please contact me at:
104lynwitsvma.wits.ac.za

thanks in advance,
m. lynne murphy
lecturer, linguistics
university of the witwatersrand
johannesburg, south africa

Does anyone have any references for collections and/or semantic analyses of
the vocabulary of killing in English?

Thanks in advance,

Claudia Brugman
University of Otago

*note new email address*
Dr. Claudia Brugman
English Department and
School of Languages
University of Otago
PO Box 56
Dunedin, New Zealand
claudia.brugmanstonebow.otago.ac.nz

Hey all,

Cathy Ball suggested I post to this list an open invitation to share your
thoughts on the difficulty of expressing irony and sarcasm online. I'm
presently writing an article on the subject for WIRED magazine,

I'd like to get your ideas on exactly why humor/sarcasm/irony doesn't work in
email when it can work in other print contexts - books, magazines, etc. I
have a pretty good idea already, I think, but I'd like several points of
view. Also: what can be done about it, and will anything change as people
grow more used to the online culture? Or are emoticons/smileys the once and
future solution to this online limitation?

If you'd like, you can email me directly and we can engage in a bit of a
dialogue on the subject.

Thanks,

David Shenk (DShenkAOL.com)

I have been assigned to teach an interdepartmental first-year seminar course
entitled "Knowledge, Power and Responsibility: Moving into the 21st Century".
The multi-sectioned seminar, required for all incoming students, is conceived
as an introduction to critical thinking, reading and writing. One of the
main sub-themes of the course is the following:

"We face disputes and decisions about our relationship to the natural world;
about environmental and population resources and crises; and about the power
of technology and scientific inquiry to solve these problems."

I am planning to put a linguistic "spin" on my section of this seminar, and
already have in mind some texts for addressing "knowledge, power and
responsibility" in other contexts....But I'd also like to find books or
readings that discuss the nature of discourse about the environment, i.e.
the actual _language_ used to talk about environmental issues, and what
that language might reveal about our values, assumptions, etc.

Does someone out there have any dandy references I could check out?

Thanks,

Sharon L. Shelly
sshellyacs.wooster.edu