Open-Access-Bücher zu den Sprachen & Kulturen Afrikas, Asiens und Ozeaniens

In der let­zten Zeit sind u.a. diese frei ver­füg­baren Titel erschienen:

Approaches to Arabic Popular Culture

Peter Kon­erd­ing / Felix Wiede­mann / Lale Behza­di | https://doi.org/10.20378/irb-49890

Over recent years, Ara­bic pop­u­lar cul­ture has become a focal point of West Asian and North African stud­ies. Most of the new research deal­ing with it con­cen­trates on the ‘pop­u­lar’ as opposed to an intel­lec­tu­al ‘high’ cul­ture far from the harsh and hier­ar­chi­cal­ly orga­nized real­i­ty many Ara­bic-speak­ing soci­eties face today. Pop­u­lar cul­tur­al prac­tices are thus seen as a rejec­tion of the elite and a stance against those who have ‘some­thing to loose’ with­in par­a­lyzed and con­ser­v­a­tive com­mu­ni­ties. Albeit not deny­ing the sub­ver­sive polit­i­cal poten­tial asso­ci­at­ed with these prac­tices, this vol­ume intends to take a more nuanced and broad­er per­spec­tive. Ara­bic pop­u­lar cul­ture might engage with eman­ci­pa­to­ry claims, but it might as eas­i­ly fol­low the cap­i­tal­ist rule­book of glob­al mar­ket­ing. It might fight against oppres­sive author­i­ties, yet it can equal­ly become their sym­bol.
Approach­es to Ara­bic Pop­u­lar Cul­ture there­fore close­ly looks at the aes­thet­ic impli­ca­tions of a top­ic rang­ing from Lebanese hip hop over Alger­ian pop nov­els to jiha­di chants in the ‘Islam­ic State’ as well as from Egypt­ian mahra­ganāt music over sar­cas­tic sto­ries about hash dens and time trav­el in down­town Cairo to Sau­di-Ara­bi­an YouTube-influ­encers. Thus, the the­o­ret­i­cal scope widens and the read­er is tak­en on a delight­ful jour­ney to the unset­tling plea­sures of con­tem­po­rary Ara­bic art and cul­ture.

All structures great and small. On copular sentences with shì in Mandarin

H. Cheng | https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3206651

This dis­ser­ta­tion pro­vides a descrip­tion and analy­sis of the Man­darin cop­u­la shì and cop­u­lar struc­tures con­tain­ing it. On the basis of a com­pre­hen­sive descrip­tion of the syn­tac­tic dis­tri­b­u­tion of shì and prop­er­ties of dif­fer­ent types of cop­u­lar sen­tences (pred­i­ca­tion­al, spec­i­fi­ca­tion­al, and equa­tive), this study pro­pos­es a uni­fied struc­tur­al analy­sis for pred­i­ca­tion­al and spec­i­fi­ca­tion­al cop­u­lar sen­tences in Mandarin.It is pro­posed that shì is a func­tion­al ele­ment in the struc­ture of the clause. Impor­tant­ly, shì is not a verb, and cop­u­lar struc­tures in Man­darin con­tain no verb phrase at all, which is con­sis­tent with pro­pos­als about pronom­i­nal cop­u­lar ele­ments in oth­er lan­guages. Spec­i­fi­ca­tion­al cop­u­lar sen­tences are analysed as invert­ed pred­i­ca­tion­al cop­u­lar sen­tences, derived via pred­i­cate inver­sion. This analy­sis cap­tures both the under­ly­ing sim­i­lar­i­ties and the dif­fer­ences between the two types of cop­u­lar sen­tences. It is also point­ed out that the third type of cop­u­lar sen­tences, equa­tives, is clear­ly dis­tinct from both pred­i­ca­tion­al and spec­i­fi­ca­tion­al cop­u­lar sen­tences and should thus be analysed in a dif­fer­ent way.The dis­ser­ta­tion also pro­pos­es that tense is not always syn­tac­ti­cal­ly expressed in Man­darin cop­u­lar struc­tures. While sen­tences with a stage-lev­el pred­i­cate express tense syn­tac­ti­cal­ly, those with an indi­vid­ual-lev­el pred­i­cate do not.

The semantics of word division in West Semitic writing systems

Robert S.D. Crellin | https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/74540

Much focus in writ­ing sys­tems research has been on the cor­re­spon­dences on the lev­el of the grapheme/phoneme. Seek­ing to com­ple­ment these, this mono­graph con­sid­ers the tar­gets of graph­ic word-lev­el units in nat­ur­al lan­guage, focus­ing on ancient North West Semit­ic (NWS) writ­ing sys­tems, prin­ci­pal­ly Hebrew, Ara­ma­ic, Phoeni­cian and Ugarit­ic. While in Mod­ern Euro­pean lan­guages word divi­sion tends to mark-up mor­phosyn­tac­tic ele­ments, in most NWS writ­ing sys­tems word divi­sion is argued to tar­get prosod­ic units, where­by writ­ten ‘words’ con­sist of units which must be pro­nounced togeth­er with a sin­gle pri­ma­ry accent or stress. This is opposed to oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties includ­ing Seman­tic word divi­sion, as seen in Mid­dle Egypt­ian hiero­glyph­ic. The mono­graph starts by con­sid­er­ing word divi­sion in a source where, unlike the rest of the mate­r­i­al con­sid­ered, the phonol­o­gy is well rep­re­sent­ed, the medieval tra­di­tion of Tiber­ian Hebrew and Ara­ma­ic. There word divi­sion is found to mark-up ‘min­i­mal prosod­ic words’, i.e. units that must under any cir­cum­stances be pro­nounced togeth­er as a sin­gle phono­log­i­cal unit. After con­sid­er­ing the Sitz im Leben of such a word divi­sion strat­e­gy, the mono­graph moves on to com­pare Tiber­ian word divi­sion with that in ear­ly epi­graph­ic NWS, where it is shown that ortho­graph­ic word­hood has an almost iden­ti­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion. The most eco­nom­i­cal expla­na­tion for this is argued to be that word divi­sion has the same under­ly­ing basis in NWS writ­ing since the ear­li­est times. There­after word divi­sion in Ugarit­ic alpha­bet­ic cuneiform is con­sid­ered, where two word divi­sion strate­gies are iden­ti­fied, cor­re­spond­ing broad­ly to two gen­res of text, poet­ry and prose. ‚Poet­ic‘ word divi­sion is tak­en as an instance of main­stream ‘prosod­ic word divi­sion’, while the oth­er is mor­phosyn­tac­tic in scope antic­i­pat­ing lat­er word divi­sion strate­gies in Europe by sev­er­al cen­turies. Final­ly, the mono­graph con­sid­ers the dig­i­tal encod­ing of word divi­sion in NWS texts, espe­cial­ly the dif­fi­cul­ties, as well as poten­tial solu­tions to, the prob­lem of mark­ing up texts with over­lap­ping, viz. mor­phosyn­tac­tic and prosod­ic, analy­ses.