Saila gets more kudos: her dissertation research is Research News of the Week in Helsinki!
One aspect of her research into mobile phone use discovered a "paradox between reachability and disturbance" in which,
“Being in peace seems to be connected to the Finnish concept of humanity and social relationships. Text messages are particularly handy for Finns, as you don’t have to reply right away even though you are reachable,” she says.
Do you want to see what Finnish looks like?
I woke up with this phrase in mind...was it yesterday morning or the day before? My dream life has been so strange, lately. I have made sense of the phenomena as indicative of transition: the dreams of the past few years have done their work, but the dreams of the next phase have not yet taken root. This has been going on for about a month, now. (I kinda wish it would settle!)
I had another deja vu prepping to teach the English writing class - just a blip of text on the computer screen, something I was writing about the week's lesson plan. "Another" only because it has been quite a long while since I had any, and now I've had two deja vu experiences within a few weeks of each other. Possible stimuli for this one are some of the readings Stephen has assigned for the graduate communication course, Language as Action and Performance (this week, Russian formalism and the Prague school of functionalists). Mention of dreams and/or dreaming are explicit in his curriculum for this course...
Seriously! Roman Jakobson (Prague School Linguist, functionalist), describes a kind of aphasia that brings the distinctions between metaphoric and metonymic speech. Metaphoric speech operates by substitution - you say something, I say something about another thing that reminds me of that thing you said - it "re-fills" the same space by replacement of an equivalent. Metonymic speech jumps levels, instead of substitution, you say something, and I say something related in terms of meaning but operating at a different position within a realist hierarchy.
While reading The metaphoric and metonymic poles today (subsequent to a few other articles, too) I became convinced that simultaneous interpreters can orient themselves to the performance of interpretation as verbal art, possibly even a kind of poetry. Some already do, but I think these are possibly a minority? Or, perhaps the dominant paradigm prevents full admission of the poetic latitude often exercised. :-)
