Papers by Mihaela-Viorica Constantinescu
Parliamentary discourses across cultures : interdisciplinary approaches
Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2012
This volume looks at the growing interest of different specialists in the problems associated wit... more This volume looks at the growing interest of different specialists in the problems associated with political discourse, in general, and parliamentary discourse, as one of its major sub-genres, in particular. Its main goal is to offer a deeper understanding of the diversity of parliamentary practices across space and time. The papers aim to highlight the role played by local social and historical factors, ideologies, collective mentalities, and social psychology in building up culture-specific traditions of political institutions. Approaching the problems from a large variety of theoretical perspectives, the investigations are based on flexible, interdisciplinary, and multi-layered methodologies, offering an image of the multifaceted manifestations of parliamentary debates. The volume addresses specialists in several fields, such as linguistics, discourse analysis, history, political science, sociology, (social) anthropology, (social) psychology, media and communication.
Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium, Nov 21, 2023
This article highlights the civic role of humour as revealed by the analysis of two Romanian onli... more This article highlights the civic role of humour as revealed by the analysis of two Romanian online satirical publications (Times New Roman and Cațavencii). The analysis will emphasise different humorous strategies and the crisis narratives deployed by the journalists, in accordance with the profile of the publication. While a ludic frame is preferred for the Times New Roman authors, the authors from Cațavencii use aggressive humour or articles with humorous insertions in order to make accusations against public or private power structures. Satirical publications are not only meant to entertain the public, but also to raise awareness to critical issues such as the environmental aspects (for example, climate change, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, etc.). The analysis will also tackle the appraisal of humorous articles by the public and the risk entailed by the lens of humour on the public's perception of the topic: illegal logging in Romania.
The European Journal of Humour Research
The article focuses on identity investment in stand-up comedy and online sketches performed by Ro... more The article focuses on identity investment in stand-up comedy and online sketches performed by Romanian (or of Romanian descent) comedians acting abroad (France and United Kingdom). It aims at highlighting various humorous strategies that could be construed around a shared feature: the importance of the performer’s stage identity (persona). The analysis is based on a theoretical framework which combines stance(taking) studies and discourse approaches to humour. Immigrant’s (as marginal performers) humour reveals subversive humour: a means of coping with reality, aimed to expose and challenge power structures. The comedians explore stereotypes regarding Romanian or Eastern European immigrants in France and the UK. The differences in staging the stereotypes depend on the comedian’s identity investment in the persona he creates during the humorous performance, as well as on the degree of marginality he assumes for that persona.
Studii şi cercetări lingvistice, Nov 30, 2023
Acest număr tematic reunește articole de micro-și macropragmatică, unele cu deschidere spre stili... more Acest număr tematic reunește articole de micro-și macropragmatică, unele cu deschidere spre stilistică, punând în evidență aspecte variate ale comunicării orale sau scrise, online și offline, din diverse spații culturale și perioade istorice, în genuri discursive variate. De aici și titlul: Aspecte pragma-retorice și stilistice ale comunicării offline și online. Ceea ce conferă unitate acestui caleidoscop de subiecte este perspectiva funcțională de interpretare: autorii sunt preocupați să descrie și să explice mecanismele subiacente diverselor uzuri ale limbii. Și, nu în ultimul rând, se orientează spre abordarea unor subiecte care au atras interesul cercetătorilor în domeniu și își propun ralierea la interpretările moderne ale unor fenomene comunicative mai noi sau mai vechi. Una dintre temele de actualitate în cercetarea pragmatică internațională este comunicarea în spațiul virtual, interesată, pe de o parte, de particularitățile care disting acest tip de discurs de formele tradiționale (orale și scrise, monologale și dialogale), iar pe de altă parte, de caracteristicile genurilor discursive emergente. Trei articole din volum se înscriu în această direcție, analizând forumul, podcastul și comentariile postate online, chiar dacă o fac din perspective diferite. Bianca Alecu analizează un tip particular de interacțiune pe forumul Reddit, așa-numitele Ask me anything (rom. Întreabă-mă orice), și demonstrează că, prin particularitățile structurale și de conținut, acestea alcătuiesc un gen discursiv distinct, cu următoarele trăsături: (i) titlul are triplă funcție (asertarea identității, invitația de participare la interacțiune, captatio); (ii) elementul paratextual AMA setează așteptările utilizatorilor în legătură cu tipul de interacțiune; (iii) interacțiunea este structurată pe baza perechii de adiacență întrebare -răspuns; (iv) sunt abordate teme identitare într-un discurs de tip autodezvăluire, cu consecințe asupra gestionării rolurilor conversaționale (gazda care răspunde întrebărilor și participanții care pun întrebări cu diverse grade de complexitate). Cezar Bălășoiu își organizează articolul în jurul conceptului de diagraf, aparținând sintaxei dialogale analizate din perspectivă cognitivă. Diagraful este un mecanism prin care un vorbitor își construiește contribuția verbală preluând și reutilizând creativ o secvență folosită de un utilizator anterior, ceea ce generează un efect de rezonanță între secvențele rostite de doi (sau mai mulți) utilizatori. Autorul ilustrează funcționarea diagrafurilor printr-un studiu de caz: construirea etosului fictiv al groparului, în diverse podcasturi, de către un personaj cunoscut și urmărit în comunitatea online (teologul, istoricul și ghidul cultural Damian Anfile). Prin diagrafurile co-operative, gazda podcastului participă la co-construcția acestui etos. Analiza punctează aspecte diverse ale funcționării și complexității diagrafurilor: concentrare maximă a unui conținut, transformare creativă a replicii interlocutorului, schimbări de registru și ale tipului de colaborare discursivă, Colegii, prietenii și studenții îi știu prea bine generozitatea și entuziasmul, darul de a-și pune permanent întrebări, de a refuza clișeele și certitudinile; dintr-o aparentă fragilitate se desprinde lama de oțel a inteligenței creative și a onestității științifice". Celor care semnează articolele de aici li se adaugă cu urări de sănătate și succes:
Certainty and Uncertainty in Dialogue, 2014
The paper presents some evidential and epistemic strategies that appear frequently in old and pre... more The paper presents some evidential and epistemic strategies that appear frequently in old and present-day Romanian parliamentary debates. By evidential and epistemic strategy we mean the manipulation of evidential and epistemic markers, either grammaticalized or pragmatic, in order to achieve various interactional and rhetorical aims. We have in view not only encoded evidential and epistemic meanings, but also (interactional) inferentially conveyed evidential and epistemic meanings. Modality can be manipulated in various ways: the usual ranking of evidentials can be reinterpreted for argumentative means: i.e., hearsay can be sometimes rejected, while, in other cases, it can be presented as more reliable than perceptual evidence.
Comunicarea Bona-Fide vs. Non Bona-Fide În Discursul Parlamentar Românesc Din Secolul Al XIX-Lea
LIMBA ŞI LITERATURA ROMÂNĂ
Page 73. COMUNICAREA BONA-FIDE VS. NON BONA-FIDE ÎN DISCURSUL PARLAMENTAR ROMÂNESC DIN SECOLUL AL... more Page 73. COMUNICAREA BONA-FIDE VS. NON BONA-FIDE ÎN DISCURSUL PARLAMENTAR ROMÂNESC DIN SECOLUL AL XIX-LEA MIHAELA N. CONSTANTINESCU1 Universitatea din Bucureşti 1. Introducere Studiile ...
lingv.ro
The paper intends to present, from a pragma-rhetorical point of view, the main marks of the verba... more The paper intends to present, from a pragma-rhetorical point of view, the main marks of the verbal aggressiveness, as revealed in the parliamentary debates, with reference to certain rhetorical and argumentative choices. The data are represented by several Romanian parliamentary debates, ranging from 1866 until nowadays. The present approach questions the difference in the verbal aggressiveness, by comparing the early Romanian parliamentary debates and the present-day ones. It is true that, throughout the parliamentary interaction, the indirectness softens the verbal attacks of the MPs, but the degree of indirectness is highly variable. The paper focuses on the rhetorical devices and on insults, the latter directed either at the adversary's person or at his/her discourse. The comments point out some frequent cases of fallacies. In the authors' opinion, impoliteness, sometimes rudeness, in the debates, could be revealed by studying the way other MPs and other debates are evaluated and staged.
DIVERSITÉ ET IDENTITÉ …
THE 17 TH CENTURY ROMANIAN TESTAMENTARY MACRO-SPEECH-ACT IN THE EUROPEAN CONTEXT. STEREOTYPY AND ... more THE 17 TH CENTURY ROMANIAN TESTAMENTARY MACRO-SPEECH-ACT IN THE EUROPEAN CONTEXT. STEREOTYPY AND INNOVATION In this paper we focus on the 17 th century Romanian testamentary d i s p o s i t i o n s , a d v a n c i n g t h e i d e a t h a t t h e t e s t a m e n t s c o u l d b e i n t e r p r e t e d a s a composite speech act. We will investigate this kind of documents not only from the structural and lexical point of view, but also in a pragmatic and rhetoric perspective. In the analysis of testamentary dispositions various communicative phenomena are at stake, such as the structure of the documents, produced by a testator within a certain culturalhistorical framework, with certain intentions, using certain textual instruments. The 17 th century Romanian testamentary dispositions follow ancient patterns, and have a standard structure. Compare to the western testaments, the Romanian testamentary dispositions restrain themselves to essential requirements just on a need to know basis. Towards mid 17 th century they increasingly became a space in which the testators express their feelings, opinions and perceptions. We will investigate several formulae that aim to avoid any violation of a testament (the socalled clauses of warning comprising threats of anathema or malediction).
The article focuses on greetings and phenomena related to greetings from the perspective of pragm... more The article focuses on greetings and phenomena related to greetings from the perspective of pragmatic act and speech act theories. Greetings reflect a communicative behaviour with ritual roots. The analysis is based mainly on a corpus of written texts from the 17 – 19 centuries and on several corpora of present-day spoken Romanian. Greetings are utterances whose goal varies across time: in the premodern and at the beginning of the modern Romanian society the goal of a greeting is both to produce gratification and to highlight the obligations of social inferiors towards their superiors, in a rigid hierarchy (the preferred allopracts being mainly nonverbal). When the social hierarchy gradually begins to lose its rigidity, greetings are used to produce gratification and social bonds or even to promote a type of self-image. In the transition from marking social obligations to marking social bonds, some ritual forms have become conventionalized, obscuring for their users their original m...
Attitude and Stance in Discourse, 2022
The analysis proposed in this chapter is mainly discursive, as it focuses on rhetorical strategie... more The analysis proposed in this chapter is mainly discursive, as it focuses on rhetorical strategies displayed in the texts of mid-nineteenth century Romanian journalists that convey a humorous stance. This analysis is also informed by the sociolinguistic approach to stance in its aim to explore particular subject positions (social roles and identities taken by Romanian journalists in the humoristic press), as well as the interpersonal relationship between journalists and readers (which can highlight power relations). The context is extremely important: 1859 is the year of the Union between the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, at that time vassals of the Ottoman Empire. The two Principalities each had its own administration and institutions, and the transition from two separate (albeit similar) systems of governance to a unified system was not simple. The Principalities gained a new constitution (replacing the Organic Regulations, issued during the Russian Protectorate of the early 1830s) in 1856, at the Congress of Paris, in the wake of the Crimean War, as well as the protection of the great European powers. 1859 is also the official birth year of satirical publications in the Principalities, as the press in general benefited from the political changes. Nevertheless, sociopolitical turmoil affected the press in a number of ways, starting with a lack of financing and means of distribution for journals or magazines, and ending with censorship. The focus of this chapter is a nineteenth century satirical magazine titled Nichipercea; its main contributor was N.T. Orășanu, an important figure in mid-nineteenth century Romanian humoristic journalism. Orășanu collaborated on the first Romanian satirical magazine, Țânțarul (The Mosquito), in 1859 (Trifu 1974). Between 1859 and 1862, the author was imprisoned on five occasions for press-related offences. The publications he was the main author of are Nichipercea (the name is a euphemism for the devil) and the series that followed Nichipercea's suspension in the 1860s. In general terms, the author aligns with a public that sees the reorientation of Romanian society towards Western Europe as a way of achieving democratic autonomy (from the Ottoman Empire). The old cultural and political model of the Principalities emphasised humble subordination to higher social-political power, following the Ottoman model, as opposed to the Western model of modernity and democracy (Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu 2018). The chapter has the following structure: section 2. is dedicated to the definition of stance and to the prominence of stance in (humoristic) journalism, section 3. is concerned with the relationship between stance, identity, and positioning, section 4. contains the analysis proper (focusing on identity and ideological load in satirical magazines), while section 5. offers a discussion of the data and closing remarks.
A perspective on “impoliteness” in early modern Romanian court and diplomatic interactions
Journal of Historical Pragmatics
The paper focuses on impoliteness dealt with from a historical pragmatics perspective (Jucker [ed... more The paper focuses on impoliteness dealt with from a historical pragmatics perspective (Jucker [ed.] 1995; Culpeper and Kádár [eds] 2010; Jucker and Taavitsainen [eds] 2010; etc.). The approach adopted in this study favours a first-order im/politeness view (Watts et al. [eds] 1992; Eelen 2001; etc.), which is mainly concerned with the evaluation of behavioural elements by the participants in a communicative event. As im/politeness in Romanian is under-researched from a historical sociopragmatic perspective, this analysis tries to fill a gap exploring the seventeenth to early-eighteenth century cultural patterns and their characteristics in only two main Romanian provinces, Moldavia and Wallachia (separate states from the Middle Ages until their union in 1859).My analysis is limited to the understanding and practices of “impoliteness” in official settings (court and diplomatic interactions), aiming to capture the production and evaluation, as well as some self-reflexive aspects (Eelen...
L’exagération dans le roumain quotidien. Bref regard sur les interactions verbales
L’analisi linguistica e letteraria XVI (2008/1). Special issue: Word meaning in argumentative dialogue, 2009
Retorică și ideologie politică în dezbaterile parlamentare românești din secolul al XIX-lea – al XX-lea. Socialist, socialism, comunist
Text și discurs. Omagiu Mihaelei Mancaș, 2011
Umorul ca strategie a (im)politeții
Limba română: ipostaze ale variației lingvistice. Actele celui de-al 10-lea Colocviu al Catedrei de limba română, vol. II Pragmatică și stilistică, 2011
Sugestii de analiză a umorului literar
Studii de lingvistică. Omagiu doamnei profesoare Angela Bidu-Vrănceanu, 2011
Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, 2011
Modernitate și interdisciplinaritate în cercetarea lingvistică. Omagiu doamnei profesor Liliana Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu, 2012
Parliamentary Dicourses across Cultures: Interdisciplinary Approaches, 2012
Limba română: variație sincronică, variație diacronică. Actele celui de al 12-lea Colocviu internațional al Departamentului de lingvistică (București, 14-15 decembrie 2012), 2013
Abordări și cercetări didactice în domeniul disciplinelor filologice. Actele celui de-al 12-lea și al 13-lea Colocviu Internațional al Departamentului de lingvistică (București, 14-15 decembrie 2012 și 13-14 decembrie 2013), 2014
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Papers by Mihaela-Viorica Constantinescu
Volumele, însumând peste 700 de pagini, adună, în semn de recunoaștere științifică, gratitudine și afecțiune, contribuții ale unor lingviști din mai multe centre universitare și de cercetare din România și din străinătate, reflectând preocupările științifice ale celor două personalități omagiate: stilistică, retorică, pragmatică, analiza discursului, istoria limbii române, istoria limbii române literare, dialectologie, lexicologie, semantică, fonetică, studii culturale.
Prin varietatea temelor, diversitatea perspectivelor teoretice și metodologice, modernitatea și actualitatea interpretărilor propuse de autorii studiilor, lucrarea se adresează cercetătorilor și studenților preocupați de domeniul lingvisticii și de interferențele acestuia cu arii de interes conexe, precum literatura, folclorul, antropologia, sociologia, istoria.