Was Swift correct that “reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired” (Letter to a Young Gentleman)? If so, what recourse is there to change attitudes especially among those who continue to fervently believe unjustified claims and act upon them in a way that affects other people? I will answer the…[Read more]

This chapter will focus on the overlap and benefits of a humorous and philosophical attitude toward the world and our place in it. The first part of this chapter’s title borrows from Kierkegaard and before him the Christian apologist Turtullian, who once quipped about the central contradictory tenets of Christianity, in putatively ironic f…[Read more]

The discovery of mirror neurons in both primates and humans has led to an enormous amount of research and speculation as to how conscious beings are able to interact so effortlessly among one another. Mirror neurons might provide an embodied basis for passive synthesis and the eventual process of further communalization through empathy, as…[Read more]

I argue that the overt subjugation in the system of American slavery and its subsequent effects offer a case study for an existentialist analysis of freedom, oppression and humor. Concentrating on the writings and experiences of Frederick Douglass and the existentialists Simone De Beauvoir and Lewis Gordon, I investigate how the concepts of…[Read more]

In the first part of this paper, I will briefly introduce the concept of incongruity and its relation to humor and seriousness, connecting the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and the contemporary work of John Morreall. I will reveal some of the relations between Schopenhauer’s notion of “seriousness” and the existentialists such as Jean Paul Sartr…[Read more]

In this paper I borrow from Maria Lugones’ work on playful ” world-traveling ” and W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of ” double consciousness ” to make the case that humor can facilitate an openness and cooperative attitude among an otherwise closed, even adversarial audience. I focus on what I call ” subversive ” humor, that which is employed by or on…[Read more]

This paper begins by taking seriously former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ response in his What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? to systematic violence and oppression. He claims that direct argumentation is not the ideal mode of resistance to oppression: ” At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.” I…[Read more]

This paper investigates the relationships between forms of humor that conjure up possible worlds and real-world social critiques. The first part of the paper will argue that subversive humor, which is from or on behalf of historically and continually marginalized communities, constitutes a kind of aesthetic experience that can elicit enjoyment…[Read more]

PhD dissertation in Saami linguistics, University of Oulu, Finland, 2009.

Kaluza’s law is a proposed restriction in the metre of Beowulf against the resolution of light-heavy sequences: words like cyning ‘king’ can only resolve and count as the equivalent of a single heavy syllable under more restricted circumstances than can words such as wudu ‘wood’. There has been debate about how to define these ‘restricted…[Read more]

Der computergestützte Sprachvergleich (Wu et al. 2020) hat zum Ziel, Sprachvielfalt und Sprachgeschichte mit Hilfe einer Mischung aus computerbasierten und nicht-automatischen aber formalen Methoden zu untersuchen und dadurch grundlegende Fragen zur Entwicklung spezifischer Sprachfamilien (Sagart et al. 2019) oder zur Typologie von Sprachvielfalt…[Read more]

Der computergestützte Sprachvergleich (Wu et al. 2020) hat zum Ziel, Sprachvielfalt und Sprachgeschichte mit Hilfe einer Mischung aus computerbasierten und nicht-automatischen aber formalen Methoden zu untersuchen und dadurch grundlegende Fragen zur Entwicklung spezifischer Sprachfamilien (Sagart et al. 2019) oder zur Typologie von Sprachvielfalt…[Read more]

Un esquema utilizado en mis clases de Comentario de Textos Literarios Ingleses para explicar las diversas dimensiones o parámetros de análisis funcional del discurso: la relación entre interlocutores o ‘tenor’, el canal comunicativo, medio o ‘modo’, y la función interactivo-comunicativa o ‘dominio’. ___…[Read more]

Master Thesis from 1991 (!) on the Turkish of 2nd generation migrants from Turkey in Germany, the influence of German as well as the restricted use of Turkish and the development of the mother tongue outside the actual language area.

This paper presents a dialectometric analysis of Scottish Gaelic morphology, with a focus on the noun phrase, using previously unpublished data from the Linguistic Survey of Scotland. Fifty-five morphological features were extracted across 201 survey points, and the data subjected to a variety of analyses, including cluster analysis, regression,…[Read more]

This file contains an overview of the early adopters of the Neo-Latin term dialectus, together with sample passages in which the term features as well as information on the publication data of the works in which the term appears. The overview also offers information on the social, geographical, and scholarly background of the early adopters.

This is a critique of the logicist theory of truth and facts set forth in the final section of John R. Searle’s book ‘The Construction of Social Reality’ (1995). Searle’s logicist account, much in the line of his theory of speech acts, is contrasted to a pragmaticist and interactionalist perspective on truth, facts, and discourse. Keywords:…[Read more]

Review of A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages by R. D. Fulk, 2018.

The field of Chinese Historical Phonology is traditionally dealing with a large number of complex and diverse types of data. While the data diversity can be conveniently dealt with in qualitative approaches, computational possibilities that have arisen during the past two decades offer new possibilities and new challenges for the field. In the…[Read more]

English abstract: A proposal to roughly classify acts of discourse into three broad categories, according to their stance vis à vis the broader cultural conversation in which they occur or to which they belong. An act of discourse (a move in a conversation, a published text, etc.) may either fully partake of the accepted conventions of the…[Read more]