Slot: 29A-7 Dec.
29, 8:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
Panel: Language Through Culture: Cultural and
Linguistic Environment in Teaching Language
Chair: Olga Mesropova, Iowa State University
Title: "Lazan′ja s rukkoloj i lobster ot
Pinokkio": The Language of the New Russian Food Criticss
Author: Leonid Ivanov, Vinogradov Institute of
Russian Language, Russian Academy of Sciences
Since the
beginning of the 21st century regular restaurant and food reviews have
imperceptibly started to appear in the most important Russian newspapers and
magazines. Dining reports have found their way into the web-media (e.g., a
widely popular gazeta.ru), and finally with Dmitrij Nazarov’s program Kulinarnyj
poedinok appeared on TV. All this shows that the new media
genre: Russian Food Critics or
RFC is emerged. Just a few years before, at the end of the 20th
century the situation looked different. Till late 90s restaurant reviews used
to be published in just one newspaper and its weekly supplement. Before the 90s
RFC was not known at all. This kind of exact chronology makes RFC a convenient
object for those who describe genres and their history for different purposes,
first of all for the study of Russian language.
RFC represents a seldom case in the genre studies,
when both “place of birth” and “parents” of the genre are supposed to be known.
RFC was born on the pages of the first Russian business newspaper of
perestroika time, Kommersant. If the “father” of RFC is believed
to be Aleksandr Vasiljev, journalist and later editor-in-chief of Kommersant, the
role of RFC “mother” may claim Dar′ja
Cyvina, who was appointed to write about her restaurant experience.
This report presents a short history of the
contemporary RFC and contains more detailed characteristics of its linguistic
and compositional features, inclusive some remarks on the structure of a
restaurant review.
One of the typical features of the genre is the high
concentration of foreign lexical borrowings, which do not appear anywhere else,
probably except for the menus of the respective eating institutions. RFC may be
considered as one of the few mass genres mostly saturated with loan words.
Title: Which Ukrainian? The Normative Meltdown
and the Challenge of Teaching Ukrainian as a Second Language
Author: Yuri Shevchuk, Columbia University
During the period of Soviet domination,
the Ukrainian language suffered both external assimilatory pressures and
interference into its very structure. The external pressures pursued the goal
of ousting it from strategic spheres of communication where social values,
hierarchies, and power relations were negotiated, primarily, government, the
press, broadcast media, cinema, and relegating it to marginal use in areas that
had little or no political consequence. The interference into its inner
structure took the forms of changes imposed by fiat in the rules of grammar,
morpho-phonetics, and vocabulary that were designed to remove the features that
marked Ukrainian as distinct from Russian. The goal of this interference was to
facilitate the eventual “convergence” of Ukrainian with Russian.
Today as the
result of these policies, Ukrainian has no universally accepted literary norm. Ukrainian speaking
community is split into those who follow the rules established by the Soviet
regime, and those who call for the revival of pre-Soviet language norms. The
absence of normative unanimity presents a serious challenge in the teaching
Ukrainian as a foreign language.
This paper will consider in detail the
situation “on the ground” in Ukrainian language pedagogy in North America, that
has been traditionally influenced by the presence of Ukrainian diaspora
institutions in favor of the pre-Soviet language norms and the increasing necessity
to find a way out of the normative conundrum and minimize its detrimental
effects on the language acquisition. The paper is based on the author’s
extensive experience of teaching Ukrainian (elementary, intermediate and
advanced levels) at Harvard and Columbia Universities. Special attention will
be paid to how the process of vocabulary and grammar acquisition is affected by
the meltdown of Ukrainian language standard on the one hand and by the
increasing recognition of the Western Ukrainian (Lviv) language variety as
another literary standard alongside the Kyiv-Poltava one. Strategies of meeting
the challenges these phenomena present will be discussed.