Past Issues
EPISTÉMÈ / December 2016 Vol. 16
The Digital Writing : Between Frequent Rules and Sociolinguistic Variation (The Case of Mayotte)
EPISTÉMÈ :: Vol.16 pp.11-46
AbstractDigital tools are everywhere: they occupy a great part of our day even all of it, whoever we are and wherever we are. At the end of 2016, we will reach the number of 3.5 billions of Internet users worldwide, including 48 millions in France. The French people have never used so many digital devices and one of the most common uses is the digital communication. This digital communication is pluri-semiotic: it's done by voice, by image and by writing. This kind of numerical writing is what we are interested in this article. We will explain what these kind of writers produce with it: - A variety of handwriting composed of “écrilectes” (Laroussi & Liénard, 2013; Liénard, 2014a); - “Technological discursive traces” (Paveau, 2013) being all of them a sort of identity marks (Bevilacqua, 2016); - Or a handwriting variation from a particular language, sometimes, "among other languages" (Laroussi & Liénard, 2008, Liénard, 2014b). This last aspect, in particular, it will lead us to focus our interest in the numerical writing of multilingual writers. Based on Jim Cummins' works (1984, 2000), we will try to describe the Mahoran's literacy skills who write this type of language nowadays, and write the languages of Mayotte in the digital networks.
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Scots as a Cultural Marker of Belonging on Forums
EPISTÉMÈ :: Vol.16 pp.47-71
AbstractIn this paper, I examine the role of Scots as an important marker of identity, on an internet forum focused on all things Scottish. The sense of belonging may be complex for people living in heterotopia: Scotsmen abroad, or Canadians with a Scottish heritage… Scots becomes a homelanguage, and its use is a proof of belonging to Scotland. Teaching and translating into and from Scots is highly praised, and help create cooperation between the members, especially between learners, who are eager, and fluent speakers who try and spread the knowledge of the language. These fluent speakers also stress on the importance of the localization of words, that is their enregisterment, and indexical value. Giving a word's origin is justifying one's legitimacy and proficiency. They switch back and forth between Scots and English, with different scopes: Scots is an affective language, whereas English mainly conveys reasoning and prescription. Scots, a minority language offline, becomes a communaulectal discourse bringing members together culturally.
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Tunisian Arabic on Facebook : Post-diglossia or Reversal of the Canonical Model? Analysis of Tunisian Discourse Online
EPISTÉMÈ :: Vol.16 pp.73-99
AbstractFor the last three decades, at least, linguists working on the sociolinguistic situation in Tunisia have described it as being both a diglossia and a bilinguism. For the most part, they have presented the languages as being used under different circumstances, in accordance with the theoretical model described by C. A. Ferguson (1959) and J. Fishman (1967), that is a two-variety system where Literary Arabic would be used in formal situations, while Tunisian Arabic would be used for non-formal settings. By freeing public speech, the 2011 Tunisian revolution allowed the population to use social networks, and more specifically Facebook to write and communicate in a language that the diglossic ideology had confined to orality and non-formal settings for the longest time. Using the analysis of Tunisian internet users' discourse, this paper aims at showing that Facebook has offered a unique chance to Tunisian Arabic—that Facebook users have nicknamed Tounsi—because not only has it taken it out of the familiarity domain, but it has helped reverse the diglossic ideology, which was canonical and rigid, by making it evolve towards normalization, in the Catalan sociolinguistics sense.
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Cultures, and Scriptural Identities : Differentiated Generational Practices
EPISTÉMÈ :: Vol.16 pp.101-125
AbstractIt is our concern with a sociolinguistics perspective that explains our interest in the digital writings as well as in the use of languages i n social networks in the Tunisian context. This paper aims at investigating electronic practices in the Tunisian scriptural landscape in a context of social change and globalization. The question that we propose to deal with is related to the notion of "relationship to writing" and that of the stake of languages t h rough electronic communication. In a plurilingual and post-revolutionary context, as in Tunisia, a country with a democratization of speech and a newborn freedom of speech (oral, then oralised and written), the writers resort to electronic writing by using different languages a n d different scriptural methods, with different levels of frequency. This involves all generations. It is in this debate that our concern with dynamic and perpetually-evolving practices reflects communicative behaviors that are specific to scriptural identities which are both convergent and divergent. This situates writers within a communication that is specific to the intra-group. Our paper will shed lights on the degree of reactivity, assiduity and the mechanisms of electronic writing involving three observed age groups: young, intermediate and elders. This paper also seeks to study to what extent the age variable can be at the origin of both categorization and creation of scriptural identities. The linguistic facts produced by the new technologies would translate the conscious and/or unconscious birth of a new scriptural, cultural, and Tunisian identity in this case: An identity of the extended group which concerns "communities of virtual words" (Laroussi F. and Lienard F. 2013a) as a whole, communities for which the "passage to writing" is the result of " A social construction" (Delamotte, 2000), and an identity of the small group that reappropriates the written word, especially young people by expressing themselves through a new multi-graphic and essentially imaged communication code marking space and time.
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Plurilinguistic construction of digital citizenship
EPISTÉMÈ :: Vol.16 pp.127-149
AbstractThe digital corpuses oblige the researchers to think how to invent new more relevant concepts for their study. We are interested, within the framework of this article, in the question of the multilingualism and its status in the construction of an ethos of the digital citizen or of what Crystal calls a netizen (Crystal, 2001) Through the study of a corpus of tweet collected further to the terrorist attack in Sousse. We aim to understand how are the interactions between the users of the social network Twitter governed by collective linguistic standards? How on-line multilingual linguistic practices participate in the construction of a digital citizenship?
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Blasphemy and Autonomy
EPISTÉMÈ :: Vol.16 pp.153-169
AbstractThe notion of blasphemy is both in the field of linguistics - for blasphemy is an act of language - and theology - for blasphemy is an outrage to God. As is well known, the competence that I possess only affects linguistics. It is therefore in linguistics that I will pose one of the linguistic problems posed by blasphemy: that of the relations between blasphemy and autonomy. The result is to be foreseen: for lack of competence in theology, I will at most be able to pose this problem, without being able to solve it. I am not really sure that he can receive a clear solution. Before turning to this problem, however, I think it is useful to briefly describe the state of blasphemy today.
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The Spectrum of Memory : Animated Documentary In-between Self-Narration and Social Criticism
EPISTÉMÈ :: Vol.16 pp.171-190
AbstractThis is a practice-based research, in the process of creating Ketchup(《番茄酱》), a short work of animated documentary as an exploration of autobiographical memory and trauma memory, the author also experimented with the narration structure and visual metaphor in animated documentary. Since a series of important animated documentary works were first produced starting in 1995, including Drawn from Memory(Paul Fierlinger,1995), Sunrise over Tiananmen Square (Shuibo Wang, 1999) and Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman,2008), animated documentary has revealed a new style of narration for the author themselves, and at the same time a device for social criticism. By using “first person” perspective or even voices, animated documentary can deeply rethink and question social problems and historical trauma. This paper focuses on the spectrum of memory, including the taste of memory, the color of memory, the structure of memory and the metaphor of memory, these aspects of memories will be explored deeply through the cross-dialogue between the above art works and a series of animated documentaries from east European countries. The key point of research of animated documentary also relies on rethinking and redefining what animated documentary is, this paper demonstrates animated documentary is already beyond the discussion of ontology of animation or documentary, it is a new entity with its own identity and potential.
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The Animated Interview in Online Games : The Auto-Animated Documentary and Korean-ness
EPISTÉMÈ :: Vol.16 pp.191-206
AbstractThis paper will examine how animated avatar-based interviews in online games can be in a documentary, which play an important role as the visual research data or form in an ethnography approach. This animated interview is conducted to investigate the issue of the construction of the contemporary identity of the Korean youth, and their ‘avatar' lives (as virtual game characters) and culture in animated online games, such as Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs). In this proposed discussion, I will offer virtual research methods which are applied to my visual practice, using records of avatar-based interviews and participant observation in Korean MMORPGs in relation to ethnography and virtual worlds. This paper will interrogate how these recorded auto-created animations of online practice can be engaged with an animated documentary in ethnography in virtual and real worlds, compared with self-created animation in a non-fiction context. For this reason, I will briefly introduce how the recorded auto-animated documentary is used to produce or purpose the primary data by online practice in a ‘visually based ethnography'. This animated practice engages with specific Korean youth identity, comparing the ‘avatar' with the real lives of participants. Importantly, this paper will mainly indicates the (ethnographic) research method, using the auto-created animated documentary, but not particularly present the meaning of the specific case of 'Korean-ness'. Eventually, this paper will propose new possibilities of auto-animated documentaries in a different or another mode of animated representation between animation and reality. This will facilitate explicating the unknown truth or question in an alternative or non-conventional way to interpret the non-material phenomena and context by representing the visual actuality, event or process.
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Secularism, the Research of the Universal, the Unthought: How Secularism Can Serve the Refoundation of the School System
EPISTÉMÈ :: Vol.15 pp.7-19
AbstractAt the crossroads of a scientific approach and of a secular approach, the research for the universal raises the question of a relationship to the unthought. Epistemological issues appear, from which it seems necessary to question again the relationships between science and secularism. It is in these conditions that secularism, in its dual relationship with the universal and the unthought universal, can serve the refoundation of the school system.
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Towards a Morality without Religion ? The Massolian Movement and Its Influence, 1860-1880
EPISTÉMÈ :: Vol.15 pp.21-54
AbstractThe movement of ideas launched in the early 1860s by Alexander Massol, who has often be forgotten by researchers, and spread in a review “La morale indépendante”, supported by the “loudspeaker”' that the booming Grand Orient de France was, played a great role in the making of a secular civic and moral education and in the birth of free thought in France. Of a Saint-Simonian origin, Massol kept strong links with the Republican Saint-Simonians in Paris and in the province, and was equally linked with the positivist circles of Emile Littré's environment, where Jules Ferry went among other persons. The contribution aims at making the ideas of the Massolian movement known and at studying the networks of influences he might have had from the liberal Empire to the time when the IIIrd Republic launched its education program.
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