Popular Culture in Linguistic Perspective (selected issues)

Huntington's disease in popular culture: a brief historical perspective.

In Ruth Rendell’s 1988 London mystery House of Stairs, the narrator suggests a startling sea change in the world of Huntington’s disease (HD). “The newspapers and television and magazines have been full of Huntington’s lately,” she observes. “Huntington’s has become a fashionable disease, displacing multiple sclerosis and even schizophrenia in the public’s curiosity.” [1]. She refers, no doubt,...

Pragmatic expressions in cross-linguistic perspective

This  paper  focuses  on  some  pragmatic  expressions  that  are  characteristic  of  informal  spoken English, their possible equivalents in some other languages, and their use by EFL learners from different  backgrounds.  These  expressions,  called  general  extenders  (e.g.  and  stuff,  or something), are shown to be different from discourse markers and to exhibit variation in form, funct...

Christianity and Popular Culture

Myths of Popular Culture

The aim of this article is to explore some critical moments in the formation of ‘popular’ culture studies. This objective is not exhaustive, cannot be exhaustive in the space of a single article, since popular cultural studies have grown into an academic industry which not even five live-times of academic work by any individual can exhaust! This article is therefore, a rapid but hopefully, prov...

Issues In Linguistic Segmentation

This paper addresses discourse structure from the perspective of understanding. It would perhaps help us understand the na,ture of discourse relatiolls il" we better understood what units of a text. can be related to one a.nother. In Olle ma.jor theory of discourse structure, Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann &: Thompson 1988; Imrea.l'ter simply RS'T), the smallest possible linguistic units tha...