Swings and roundabouts: The impact of legal drafting on the language and understanding of copyright law and the need for educational materials†

Legislators face the challenging task of drafting copyright law, which takes into account the views of various stakeholders, intended policy and technological developments, whilst ensuring that the wording and language that is used is accurate and precise. Meeting these objectives means that the law in its legislative form can be hard-to-understand, complex and not easily accessible to the layperson. This article explores steps, which have been put in place by various organisations and online resources, to assist in the understanding of copyright for the public and schools, with particular focus on education and teaching materials – as presented on Copyrightuser.org.     

A Glimpse of Medieval Curonian Vernacular Architecture in Egils Saga SkallagrÍMssonar

Interviews were conducted with native Russian and Finnish speakers living in Estonia to examine their perspectives on language policy and usage. The aim was to paint a picture of how they perceived Estonian language policy, providing an insight into the cognitive frameworks within which they work, and into the social and historical factors shaping their discursive environments. For Finnish informants, official monolingualism was not normal, while de facto monolingualism seemed to be. For Russian speakers, the opposite seemed true: those interviewed accepted Estonian's official status but wanted to see more use of Russian ‘on the ground’. Their perspectives reflect their worldviews, which have been shaped by their personal, family, and community realities and experiences.     

宅基地使用权取得制度研究

宅基地使用权的用益物权性质以及基本特征确定了物权功能的主导地位。但鉴于中国社会的现实情况，宅基地使用权的生存保障功能仍应存在。中国宅基地使用权取得规范的制度变迁呈现出逐渐与社会现实脱节的特点。宅基地使用权的初始取得主体包括一般主体和特殊主体，出让金的缴纳应当不同，行政审批应当坚持，权利救济程序应当完善。宅基地使用权的继受取得应当市场化，但还是应受到优先购买权、权利期限、权利登记等具体限制。     

Signs and Images——Two Dimensions about the Relation between Language and Picture

With the problems of ‘the predication of literature termination’ and ‘the image times’, the relation of language and picture is the foundation to talk about the ‘picture theory of literature’. From the dimension of signs, language is real reference and picture is phantom reference. Because the signs themselves have predetermined standards as referred concept or meaning. But from the dimension of image, picture is a real presentation and language is phantom presentation, because of the image-consciousness as a perceptual intuition. The two dimensions, as sign or image, are inseparable showing the characters of language and picture and bringing in the deep integration between them.     

论警察语言沟通力的表征与要素

警察语言沟通力是警察在与别人交往时关注、接收、记忆、解析及表达语言的能力。警察语言沟通力的表征是:对语言关注、接收、记忆、解析、构造的敏感、迅速、正确;语言表达符合规则、清晰、流畅、达意、适速、简要;能随机应变地使用语言,有感染力、说服力。警察语言沟通力的要素是:语言注意,语言感觉,语言记忆,语言思维,语言行为及其所产生的表情、声音、文字,语言意志与情感。     

论留置权的成立及其对外效力

不同于质权和抵押权,留置权是一项法定担保物权。我国担保法、物权法、合同法与海商法等法律构造了现行的留置权规范体系,在成立要件上表述不一,导致法律适用的困难。明确留置权的构成要件对认定留置权是否成立及其对外效力具有重要的意义。     

泰国华文教育的现状与前瞻

本文论述泰国华文教育发展的历史和社会背景,分析了泰国华文教育的现状以及各种类型的华文教育,指出当前泰国华文教育所存在的问题,并提出解决这些问题的方法。     

Oppositional symbolic values of language display,or the case of “English” drinking in France

This article examines the linguistic manifestations of the tension between notions of a healthy national drinking culture and the increasing homogenisation of problematic drinking practices in an era of globalised marketing and media influence. Taking the proliferation of English in France when it comes not only to alcohol advertising, but also public health discourses and mass media commentary as its object, this paper discerns patterns of and motivations for English language borrowings in French when discussing alcohol and immoderate drinking practices. Findings point to a double indexicality in these borrowings. On the one hand, the widespread use of English in alcohol advertising draws on and creates positive associations between English and Anglo-American culture and, on the other, the public health community's use of English terms like binge drinking designates problematic drinking behaviours as foreign and anathema to traditional modes of French alcohol consumption, and by extension to French cultural identity.     

Embodiment and meaning: moving beyond linguistic imperialism in social semiotics

Social semiotic approaches to multimodality have tended to take language as the model for other modalities even when their professed aim is to move away from it. This kind of “linguistic imperialism” causes problems for theorising the relationship between the two basic semiotic planes of expression and interpretation in different modalities, and how the affordances of the expression plane relate to the meanings of the interpretation plane in each case, as well as in understanding the particular role of language in multimodal texts. The current paper brings together insights from semiotics, sociology of music and philosophy of language, as well as critiques of social semiotic approaches, in order to argue that the missing element in accounts of semiotic systems like language and music is the fundamental role played by embodiment in both these systems.     

Noting Silence

Abstract

In coming to words, language "reserves" itself: it holds back its event, keeping it illegible and silent. It is possible to see much of modern innovative or "experimental" poetry as such an experience of reticence and stillness, an experiment of language listening to itself "speaking" in order to allow the force of the illegible to come to speech. How this silence both limits what can be said and holds what has been written open to the possibilities of saying otherwise comes from the "restraint" characteristic of the specific way in which language "speaks", that is, arrives each time singularly as words precisely by withholding this very arrival from signification. Myung Mi Kim's poetry stands out among contemporary American poets precisely for its specific attentiveness to this simultaneously "generative" and "constraining" force of silence. To understand better the workings of this force of silence, I examine Kim's poetry in the context of Heidegger's reflection on language, specifically his point about the withdrawal and restraint "essential" to the unfolding of language. I suggest that this withdrawal marks the poietic momentum of language, which can be traced, though, only by way of a listening response. This listening response becomes in turn a kind of constraint under which poetic thinking operates, a holding back of assertions and statements in favor of a listening which responds precisely to how the saying withholds itself from what comes to be said. Exploring the proximity between Kim's poetry and Heidegger's thinking, this essay examines how this withdrawal—a restraint at play in language itself—necessitates the attitude of poetic "reservedness".