A Rhetoric of Meanings: Exploring the Frontiers of Language Usage 1443872121, 9781443872126

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Figure and Tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Book I: Argumenting the Method
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Book II: Rhetoric and Cultural Significances
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Book III: Reconceptualized Existence-based Language Practices
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Conclusion
Bibliography

Citation preview

A Rhetoric of Meanings

A Rhetoric of Meanings Exploring the Frontiers of Language Usage By

Gergana Apostolova

A Rhetoric of Meanings: Exploring the Frontiers of Language Usage By Gergana Apostolova This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Gergana Apostolova All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7212-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7212-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables .......................................................................... ix Preface ......................................................................................................... x Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xiii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Book I: Argumenting the Method .......................................................... 15 Chapter One ............................................................................................... 17 Intercultural Rhetoric 1.1 Rhetoric as Intercultural Mediator 1.2 Social Networking 1.3 The Outlines of a Contemporary Intercultural Rhetoric 1.4 Multilevel Intercultural Communication 1.5 An Analytical Rhetorical Model 1.6 Towards a General Rhetorical Matrix 1.7 Cultural Matrix Data Character 1.8 The Topics of Modern Cross Cultural Compatibility 1.9 A Note on the State of Bulgarian Rhetorical Studies Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 46 The Nature of the Argumentative Approach 2.1 Explain to Me 2.2 When the World Suddenly Expanded 2.3 Overview of the Argumentative Teaching Background 2.4 The Nature of the Argumentative Approach

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Book II: Rhetoric and Cultural Significances ....................................... 63 Introduction ............................................................................................... 64 Traditional Values and the Talkative Web Chapter One ............................................................................................... 70 Contexts Created Anew by Texts 1.1 A Brief Note on Linguistic Anthropology 1.2 The Significance of Tale Telling 1.3 Reconstructing the World in Text 1.4 The Lives of a Text 1.5 The Words of an Author 1.6 Pictures and Words 1.7 The Self of a Text 1.8 The Other Text Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 87 Into the Same River 2.1 The T-agent in Synchronic and Diachronic Text Analyses 2.2 Intertext: Nodes of Transcendence 2.3 Legends Approached Within the Concept of Travel 2.4 Popular Culture and the Shadowy Folds of Balkan History 2.5 History – A Tale of Vampires Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 122 The Active Text 3.1 E-folklore in Tale and Game 3.2 Imagination As the Freedom of Expressing Truth 3.3 Game Genres 3.4 Types of Literary Adaptations to PC Games Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 146 Communication: Outlines of E-culture 4.1 The Experience of the WWW And the Fact of Its Expansion A Systematic Integrated Approach to the Net (SIAN) 4.2 Definitions of Terms 4.3 The Human Individual as a Network of Social Relations 4.4 Fears and Hermeneutics: Science vs Magic 4.5 E-Culture 4.6 E-kind 4.7 Antinomies and Controversies in the Warring Webs 4.8 Integrity of the Self

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Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 175 Practices: What Next? 5.1 The English Speaking Web 5.2 Weaving the World Anew 5.3 Notes on the education of bright minds 5.4 Perspective in Operating the Extended Mind Book III: Reconceptualized Existence-based Language Practices .... 189 Introduction ............................................................................................. 190 Chapter One ............................................................................................. 194 Structures and Choices on the AA-based Classroom Schedule 1.1 The Four Skills 1.2 Hiding Behind the Speaker's Mask 1.3 Universal vs Preferable Chapter Two ............................................................................................ 226 Order of Incoming Information: Hierarchy of Perception, Arguments and Figures 2.1 Structures and Choices in the User's Perspective 2.2 Grammatical Correctness and Figures of Language 2.3 Choice of Words 2.4 The Meanings of Existence 2.5 Why is Double Negation Natural? 2.6 Debate 2.7 Anaphora 2.8 Belittlement Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 248 Stereotypes and Metaphors 3.1 The Need of Stereotype–the Loss of a Stereotype 3.2 The Metaphors of Internet 3.3 A Metaphor Is Never Innocent 3.4 Mentality and Metaphor 3.5 The Metaphors of E-Existence in Cyberspace 3.6 The Outlines of Translated Existence 3.7 Further Existential Types of the WWW Conduit Metaphor 3.8 Metaphorical Structures and Cross-metaphorical Correspondences 3.9 The Existential Metaphors of Cyberspace 3.10 Metaphors of Cyberspace: Conclusion

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Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 266 E-pictograms and Info-blocks: Ethos–Pathos–Logos 4.1 Outlining the Info-block as a Unit of E-discourse 4.2 A Phenomenology of Virtual Illiteracy 4.3 On the Informativity of E-illiteracy 4.4 The Structure of E-message: Text vs Pictogram 4.5 E-mail Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 287 Language, Translation and Infomania 5.1 The Training of Human Translators 5.2 Neuroscience, the Foreign Language, and the Useless Human 5.3 Mind Speaking to Mind or Where the Text Ends 5.4 The Communicative Situation of Translation 5.5 Definition of Key Concepts 5.6 The Ambivalence of the Translator’s Visibility 5.7 The Communicative Situation of Translation: Specifics 5.8 The Dynamic Dimensions in Translation 5.9 Proper Names in a Translator’s Perspective 5.10 The Bulgarian Self in I, You and He 5.11 Register and Meaning 5.12 The Motivation of the Translator Conclusion ............................................................................................... 341 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 347

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Fig. 1.1.1 Intercultural Rhetoric: functional division of subfields Fig. 1.2.2 Dr. Lozanov lecturing on the method of Suggestopedia at the South West University of Bulgaria Fig. 1.2.3 The Argumentative Approach stages Fig. 2.2.4 Travel legends Fig. 2.2.5 [a-b-c-d] Sets of archetypal relations Fig. 2.2.6 Binders of a reality Fig. 2.2.7 Translegendary attributes of e-ontology Fig. 2.4.8 The pyramid of E-culture Fig. 3.5.9 A Random model of a communicative situation of translation Fig. 3.5.10 Random modulation of situational elements by the “invisible translator” Fig. 3.5.11 “I” and the “projected I” Fig. 3.5.12 The multiplied “I” and the projected “I-subject” Fig. 3.5.13 “I”, “I” transformed as “you” and the projected “I” Table 1.1.1 Basic Rhetorical Matrix Table 1.1.2 Optimized Efficient Matrix Table 2.2.3 The features of travel legends Table 2.2.4 Bulgarian travel legends’ texts Table 2.2.5 Symbols of Space, Movement and Bondage Table 2.4.6 [a-b] Early history of the Internet Table 2.4.7 The technological stages of the Information Age Table 3.3.8 Types of Existential Metaphors of the Internet Table 3.5.9 Actual Situations of Translation: features and evaluation Table 3.5.10 Source text/Target text analysis assignment Table 3.5.11 The sentence as a unit of translation

PREFACE

Words, words, words: They are the money of fools And wise men’s capital. —After Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

This book is about words, meanings and significances, mind structures, free play of choice of self-expression and virtual extensions of human existence in the years of transition from the single-mindedness of a reigning government-imposed ideology to the chaotic chains of nearestsurvival individual reasoning. It is not the choice of words but the choice of meanings to be followed in our search for the significant things for our continued existence, both physical and mental; and it is sense that guides us in that incessant chain of choices where values that had served as the stolid grounds of our thinking had melted leaving us to a motivation of a generic type for the human nature. Language is slow to register transition of that type if left alone. Wordplay is like the photographed chain of all the stages of the jump of a cat through time and space: a word or a set of words jumps across time while the world has turned round, to find itself in another space; it jumps across space and finds itself in another time. Sets of meanings form, which need the choice of a human in order to get activated in each next situation of individual identification of a Self, a culture, a purpose or an activity to clear out or mask intricate connections in an intricate world. Transition needs the stir of competing languages to find the clues for restructuring our brain structures to broader frontiers of our selfidentification. In the 1990s Bulgaria found itself in the beginning of a great turn that involved three generations at various stages of their outspoken mindsets. We jumped across a Wall of ideology starting from the netted discourse of a social pyramid made of human units of no individual significance to find ourselves in the WWW-generated agora of individuals free to use avatars in order to make our walled silence speak up in a multitude of voices. We turned from Russian to English as our world-connecting vehicle of a second tongue, and this turn was carried out in the fast changing environment of Bulgarian public discourse.

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It is curious that the Bulgarian tongue has one word for both “meaning” and “significance”. That makes its meanings flash with the colors of cultural turn in each next communicative situation. I was curious of how it happened that meanings became tuned by significances to ambiguity that did not interfere with situational usage but rather enriched it. The fascination with this play of language became the motivation and the main vehicle of this study. I was also concerned with the cultural turn expressed in activated sets of meanings of Bulgarian and English for Bulgarians of all ages who were reconstructing their Self-identities to fit a set of worlds and survive. It has been a time of fixing mind structures in a long-lasting procedure of social and cultural transition and transcendence between traditional and virtual existence. Consequently the heroes of this study are the learner, the teacher, the translator and the creator of text in the translingual search of our Bulgarian identity in the English speaking world. The initial stage of this study was philosophy. It was not even philosophy of language but rather philosophy of existence where the Subject needed pragmatic and fast reconsideration of its identity. That made the field of search broad enough to look for priorities and find a working method of study. Then came the vast and colorful field of my object of study which is the extension of our language capacity for knowledge in the expressive wealth of English, first as extension of our competence and next as a broad set of performances to individual pragmatic purposes. Consequently this book is not what is expected from philosophy of language to be. It is the practical field beyond philosophy of language where the self-identification of the Subject gets to practices of a higher stage of communicative creativity than a primary denotation of singular type. The stories of our present need all the meanings that the generations of transition have accumulated to feed our identities into the spaces of the talkative WWW and thus ensure our virtual survival as E-kind. The Rhetorical Theory of Argumentation is seen as the relevant grounds for building a holistic tool of language learning where language acquisition is seen as capability of the Self to construct worlds in a universe whose leading structure involves the rhetoric criteria of ethos, pathos and logos on the one hand, and self-identifying choice of meanings to situations of complex nature, on the other. It is then linguistics, rhetoric, semiotics of culture, ethics and language learning viewed through a philosophical concern about humanity next and getting beyond it to build its tools for making it visible today.

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The product of our effort is a generation that speaks the same language as us but have their sets of meanings fixed up to their sets of significances. We have taught them so and today we have to teach ourselves in order to keep touch with them. The language creativity never ends for the play with meanings and significances is but inbuilt in our human nature. Therefore the title of this book is not designed to sound unusual: it is the true signifier of the phenomenology of translingual activity that is brought up in the text to follow.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This page of acknowledgements is a duty I am obliged to fulfil paying tribute to the people who have added to my growth in research and have given me ideas and advice in personal conversation outside from what I have read in their books: Bogdan Dyankov, p.m. a professor of logic and a member of the Bulgarian Academy of Science, who was my first official reviewer and guide into the public presentation of my PhD dissertation and further studies into the nature of the argument in natural language, and my first instructor into the vast field of semiotics; Boris Chendov, a professor of logic whose colloquia on Mathematical Modelling and Formal Logic have gained international popularity, and on whose advice I still rely for there are but very rare people of such broad erudition and clear view of what is to be searched for next by philosophy, logic, social science, and social semiotics. The latest of his advice related to the present study focused my attention on the concept of noosphere developed by Vygotski and its relationship to the concept of infosphere which I have extrapolated here on the grounds of Luciano Floridi's development as philosophy of the infosphere. Veliko Milutinovich, the head of the Mathematical faculty at Belgrade University and the initiator and head of a series of elite conferences IPSI/ViIPSI, who was my first international reviewer and supported my participation in three major conferences in 2005 and 2006 that modelled the search for my scientific identity which is now in progress; Noam Chomsky, a professor emeritus at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, Cambridge, Mass., and a world celebrity, who somehow challenged me to cope with immense difficulties and whose support for my visit to his department opened vast horizons for me – and particularly for his wise and friendly advice that fixed me firmly on further holistic studies of language and mind; Irina Perianova, a professor of English and Intercultural Studies, who always turns up at the most intriguing international conference discussions I happen to take part in, giving life to further enquiry and light to new information, and whose style of writing I am trying to follow now still being far from the elegance of her text;

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Ivanka Mavrodieva, the initiator and Editor in chief of the first Bulgarian e-journal of rhetoric, the academic secretary of the council of SU and a member of the EU Association of rhetoric, who is always ready to listen to and share on any topic of modern rhetoric, never looking at her watch, and never leaving matter for a 'later period' even when at a distance of 2000 kilometres; Plamen Bratanov, the first Bulgarian professor of PR who has systematized the existing theories and models of social communication in a series of books where I happen to occupy a separate chapter, and the head of a flexible training program for PR, who has always invited me in his team of lecturers at the UNWE and other universities this program has been adopted; Valentina Alexandrova, a professor of finance and law at the SWU and my devoted team mate in futuristic scientific adventure, who believes in me more than I do, thus stimulating me to keep on with my projects based on this text but aiming further into the nature of E-kind. Also, I shall mention my friend Diana Milcheva, who has been my first devoted editor of Bulgarian texts, and consultant about certain matter of probabilistic nature in Book 2. Stanislav Grozdanov and Petar Dimkov, two of my latest students with whom I have discussed in detail empirical matter from their own experience and research corpuses, inspiring a further study into theory and literature, and giving additional ground for the present dissertation. Special gratitude I owe to my family: Angel, Petar and Julian, and to all my students from the past 24 years. All of them took part in the design and application of my method of learning. There are pages to be added to this list, but here I shall mention only two people more who supported me in personal exchange favouring me with some of their own time, and in whose books I have found precious knowledge: facts and approaches to tender matter: professor Ray Jackendoff and professor Tsvetan Davidkov.

We are studying a real object, the language faculty of the brain, which has assumed the form of a full I-language and is integrated into performance systems that play a role in articulation, interpretation, expression of beliefs and desires, referring, telling stories and so on. For such reasons, the topic is the study of human language. —Noam Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, CUP. 2005, p. 27 Three-dimensional worlds built through the use of computers and experienced with head-mounted displays allow for the sensations associated with touching and feeling objects to be replicated through sensors, gloves and acoustic and magnetic input devices. Yet, and this is the extraordinary thing, even with all the mediators and technologies that are used, imagescapes remain places that encourage direct, unmediated experiences. I would like to suggest that the reason these processes remain so powerful is because the nodes of interaction are varied enough that different people with different needs and perspectives will nevertheless find some place for themselves inside the heavily constructed spaces. This is largely because imagescapes have enough fluidity that meaning is never just a function of what is in images, what has been intended, or what has been constructed for the purposes of display. The combination of reverie, empathy, and the need to give meanings to sight encourages the process of visualization. —Ron Burnett, How Images Think, MIT PRESS, Cambridge MA, 2005, p. 41

INTRODUCTION

When the Time machine inbuilt in us, Accelerated the individual particles of our human Selves, And the histoire collider of human cultures, Rooted us out of former chaining routine, We were set free on the move, Bumping against no other wall but The soft humming call of the inside micro cosmos In adventurous star child talking the world into being, Exploring the reaches of freedom and bondage: The freedom to enjoy life; imprisoned in our formal bios. The freedom to get out of history; imprisoned in our physical existence. The freedom to create new worlds; imprisoned in our daily routine. The longing for the lost future; imprisoned in the presence of our day. The freedom to be a Mind, a Doer, a Risk-taker, a Creator; Imprisoned in the She-form in a He-world. And vice versa. The freedom to tell the truth; Imprisoned in the habit of not being heard and given an answer. The freedom to be an adventurer; Imprisoned in an age of self-establishing.

Why ‘Rhetoric of Meanings’ or What the Formal Starting Grounds for This Study Are The nature of this study might seem interdisciplinary while its prospective applications might look intercultural to the occasional reader of any part of the following text. Yet it is based on the careful study of the semiotics of the Bulgarian opening for the English speaking world in the beginning of this century with the only goal of reaching efficiency of our mental placement in the developing world in terms of our selfidentification expressed in transcultural language productivity. I have been trying to establish Bulgarian paradigms in both, Bulgarian attitudes to English and Bulgarian self-expression in English. This inevitably leads the search to answering two questions: how the transformation of our mental language structures is done and why is it happening. The aim of the search is connected with prognostics, which positions the question what is to be done next as the final goal of the study,

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Introduction

and the answer to that final what is grounded on the care for the Bulgarian transition to the new spaces of Earth culture so that our cultural existence gains its freedom of growth. All this is sought for in the formative role of teaching an ethics of cultural, professional and individual survival concurrent with the English language learning efforts of two generations. The generation of the parents in the early 1990s needed fast transition to the significant contexts of a completely foreign culture, and the generation of their children needed a fast turn to the e-culture that followed the spread of computing and the growth of the WWW. Today, some 24 years from the historic border of the transition era, both goals still exist and still I cannot state that their pressing sharpness has softened, although it has changed. I have approached the outlined set of questions as a philosopher and as a teacher of English. Consequently, the following study belongs to the field of Philosophy, which operates on the grounds of its methodology for transcending from and back to empirical data. I have used data whose significances for our cultural existence are related to a variety of practices. I have reached the idea that the results do not necessarily need to be generalized for the practical fields of their application. Therefore I needed only to summarize my philosophical approach, find out how and where it works and upon verification publish its development and expansion step by step and area by area. Thus my main contribution is a philosophical method related to humanitarian studies and carried out through language as the means of expressing our cultural existential frontiers and identity. It is a procedure of transcendence from significances to meanings, which inevitably touch upon reconceptualization of priorities and need for a constructive practical application of activated translingual and transcultural communication tools.

Description of Hypothesis Intercultural communication supported, guided, and limited by the ubiquitous web has created spaces for application of human texts into emerging contexts of fast changing environment concerning the existence of humanity. There are instances of language productivity based on the three ‘I’: Internet, Intertext, and Interculture. The uses of all texts ever written and saved in the web recesses have grown beyond the control of single human educators while the results in linguistic competence and performance have reached mean progress. We are rather skeptic about the future of humanity and still under the influence of pessimistic existential prognoses made round the turn of global cultures on the technology-

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supported highway to mind-speaking-to-mind mode. Environment shifts, introducing its time-based shift of meanings. It is the time of texts and communication based on complex signs beyond the levels of language while still within the environment of pragmatics. This reminds of a turn of the spiral of human development back into Antiquity where spoken culture produced rhetoric as the art of language performance for public purposes. Before entering the next turn supposedly leading to direct mind-to-mind speech we need to establish what happens to our minds at the present time of gigantic cultural turn. One part of humanity has played active role in starting this change. The greater part of humanity, though, forms the mass to be moved. Within this mass there are processes unplanned and influences to be further considered. Here is where I expect to find clues to how and why meanings shift, and go further to finding realistic answer to the questions why do they shift this way and not some other way, and what could that eventually lead to? Since this shift is carried out within the WWW and the latter is the conscious product of cognitive science, which still needs motivation in its vast and fast changing practices, and is based on global talk, I presume that rhetoric analysis could be used as general approach to the study of meanings conveyed into the textures of global communication in a mothertongue environment based on Bulgarian and netted inside the spaces of Weblish or Netspeak in the terms of Davis Crystal (Crystal 2008: 19). We may also call it Intercultural Rhetoric in the broadest application of the concept 'intercultural' and the narrower application of the concept of 'rhetoric' as the art and science of influencing the public mind through speech, which in itself is a specific state of the acting mind1. Intercultural Rhetoric is based on Intercultural Semiotics, marking the attitudes of the subjects of communication to the Signs through which they talk new worlds into being globe-over and time-over. The exploration of the frontiers of our world (in the terms of Wittgenstein) in the specifics of Bulgarian expression of the human I-language (in the terms of Chomsky 2005) is seen against the present state of the state of knowledge and its antinomic transcendence (in the terms of Kant) in the infosphere (in the terms of Floridi 1999) where humankind acquires its projected existence as E-kind (in my own terms). The premises for using Intercultural Rhetorical Analysis as the starting ground for developing an approach of learning lie in a previous study of 1

Although I follow the tradition of the Bulgarian school of rhetoric and am very close to Yordan Vedar's definition of rhetoric in his Popular Rhetoric (1984:4) and in the opening of his lectures on rhetoric later on published as Fragments (1992), I prefer to render the basic definition in my own words.

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Introduction

the nature of Rhetorical Argumentation and the finding that it is a procedure where synthetic thinking leads to constructive practices in both mental structures and physical action (Apostolova1990: PhD Dissertation Logical and Methodological Grounds of Persuasive Discourse). I started to teach English 24 years ago: the approach I applied was open for further development for the field of ELT was new to me. I called my scientific method “Argumentative approach (AA) to learning”. It combines metatheory, learning and teaching with the organization procedures of my own school for the teaching of English. Today I can generalize this complex effort as a study of active language based on the Subjects of the translingual phenomenology of signs used by Bulgarians to communicate efficiently in English: the learner, the teacher, the translator and the creator of language phenomena. The application of the AA is where intercultural talk crosses bridges of meaning for pragmatic reasons based on shifting significances of common values, and this needs changes of mental structures for which we need a correspondent methodology that is aimed at preserving the efficiently functioning human brain in a multitude of communicative situations.

Objectives Thus the objectives in the initial state of the present study formed a set of applied linguistic appearance and pragmatic nature: 1. Defining processes and procedures in language-use from the point of view of the science of rhetoric2. 2. Finding reasons for the shifts of meanings to the uses of the same expression to fit a changing set of values. 3. Finding out the uses of texts for affecting such shifts. 4. Establishing the course of change. 5. Establishing its possible effects on Bulgarian culture. 6. Suggesting clues of how to make use of these effects. 7. Argumenting on the value of human participation in further education of humans. 2 The functioning of rhetoric as art, technique and a system of knowledge has produced numerous interrelated fields that are based on our present-day science. The core of turning rhetoric into a part of science is its Theory of argumentation, on which I have developed my doctoral studies and later on published as a monograph on Persuasive Discourse (Apostolova 2000: 13-30; 31-32; 53-80213219); the latest explicit publication on the nature of Rhetoric is I. Mavrodieva's book Rhetoric and PR (2013: 11-55).

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8. Motivation of a next phase in human existential meanings. It is evident that there are two stages in the development of this project: an analytical stage and a synthetic stage, which run coherent and concurrent in the basic moments of productive value. The initial objectives only ask for answers that translate concepts across fields of knowledge (rhetoric, semantics, linguistics, ethics and ELT) and establish the tangible markers of the subject matter and its frontiers. The data collected is varied in its purpose, quality and form and its amount seems monstrous. Yet, it is all drawn from the same practice where phenomena occur and a teacher is expected to give them a motivation and a direction. This needs a synthetic theory, reconsidering realities and concepts, giving names to objects of composite nature and looking for an opening in the theory of prognostic value. The secondary assessments of my objectives has led to the finalization of this book in its present form: a framework of a theory where the wealth of data is fixed in the effect-stage of its analysis to an intricate and incessantly moving maze of transcending concepts to the simple language appearance of today’s discourse textures where meanings flash to a hierarchy of priorities. Transition generations see through time and make out the ambiguity of words. Meanings are activated simultaneously by story-telling. The same language appears to serve individual choice within community usage and in the pragmatics of the time. This is where I am prepared to search for the generative power of language: in recombination of verbal and non-verbal agents of meaning-shifts and in the play with meanings to the purpose of activating them multi-modally. There are bigger and smaller results, which appear as conclusions planned and conclusions unexpected. This makes the following text open. And it is to the best of applications of the AA.

Practical value of the study Establishing the values of educating the next generation through texts in contextual change is based on the interferences of Bulgarian and English in the mental productivity of English language learners in Bulgaria. This statement concerns both traditional ELL practices and those based on the WWW environment and tools. It also has its history in the records of my teaching experience ever since 1990 and it also refers to each next current moment of our fast-changing environment where we have to run very fast in order to remain in the same place (as Lewis Carroll's Red

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Introduction

Queen tells Alice while they are walking in the garden of speaking flowers3) of social significance.

Principles of investigation The search into the mental grounds of rhetorical choice of meaning based on the unity of ethos, pathos and logos adopts a holistic approach to our object of study where the extraordinary is pursued, not the average even when cultural features are in view. The outlines of uniqueness stand up against the background of statistics that describe the common, the regular, and the habitual. The difference is in our methodology allowing us to see things in a different perspective and notice features that might serve as keys to exits from our problem circles. Therefore the two basic principles guiding the search for the unique, the absurd, and the individual, as the features of creativity allowing further existence are: There is nothing new under the sun; The sun is every day new. Antinomies here are not necessarily understood as dichotomy: there are steps and stages, blind ends and turns. In that the guiding role is given to practical efficiency where philosophy is seen as the reaching of the frontiers of a teacher’s skills in leading the young minds through timebound and space-bound cultures. Practice is varied. Consequently, a theory that tries to describe and explain only can easily fall into ecclectics. This is one more reason to turn to the field of Rhetoric and choose it as my starting grounds: it has the valuable feature of prescriptivism, but it combines it with the powerful tools of activating speech to efficiency or leading to the nearest working practical change. Thus we arrive at the third principle I am going to follow: the principle of the nearest explanation of gathered data concerning its fluctuating time-and-space environment. My generation has been the eye-witness of changes that are to be inevitably lost in time. Our motivation for taking one or another action is to fade in future losing its circumstantial significances and the meanings following them. We have been trained to look for the objective processes, yet, the individual actions are those which 3

Since this is a study of rhetoric, I feel bound to use or rather demonstrate the efficiency of the tools of rhetoric employed in my own text to the purposes of building my contexts of choice.

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would lead us to the answers of how changes happened. Interpretations next are outside the scope of this particular text, although it suggests further enquiries.

Methods of investigation This is a teacher’s study and its nearest goals are education and demonstration. The methods of study then form a set which in its application serves to the purposes of AA constructivism: Educationalist approach starting from the traditional grounds of theory each time in order to outline the association chains of achieving the concept to be introduced. Analysis based on relevant application of induction and deduction but not explicated here otherwise than in its finalizing stage; Definition and classification of events, processes and facts; SIAN4: Systematic Integrated Approach to the Net; AA5: Verification in two-step educational practices of argumentation through motivation, and building awareness through heaping database. Nowadays it is clear that it was not the invention of nuclear bombs, nor the escalation in war supplies and technology that has conquered the world, but the binding of the globe into the talking web where language is the tool, the environment and the measure for an individual's freedom and responsibility for the future survival of humanity. It is all in language and some other less important things (Chomsky: 2007)6. Teacher-centered classroom methodology of the mental experiment carried out within the AA practices: the East gives the leading role to the teacher while the West gives the right of choice to the learner. These two enter into an AA-based matrix where each next step into the English-based knowledge about a changing world is negotiated, while the teacher remains the key figure in an incessant learning process.

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SIAN (Systematic Integrated Approach to the Net), I first introduced it in a VIP conference presentation in Venice, 2005 5 AA (Argumentative Approach) – my first presentation of a rhetoric matrix based on the contents of Aristotle's rhetoric and the matrix of Kelly and Tibault for psychographic study was at a conference of Logic and Modelling in 1992 in Blagoevgrad, but I presented it in reference to ELT in 1993 to the conferences of IATEFL and in my first collections of practical exercises Reading Comprehension, Blgrd, 1993 and The Composition, Blgrd, 1993 6 This is the title of a lecture by Chomsky in the fall semester of 2007 at MIT.

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Introduction

Structure The text of the study is organized in three Books, each of them designed in the fashion of a level of a mind play that are to be completed by the four Subjects of the study: the learner, the teacher, the mediator of cultures and the author. It is not to the fashion of scientific discourse today but it is to the purpose and method of the study itself which gets beyond the field of philosophy to its secondary reactivated status of pragmatics. Book I Argumenting the Method is divided in two chapters introducing the complex concept of intercultural analytical rhetoric as the background for developing a method for approaching the intercultural situation of semiosis, and a description of the beginnings, the development and the nature of the Argumentative approach to learning as a successful restructuring of cross-cultural mental structures avoiding cultural shock. Book II Rhetoric and Cultural Significances is based on the extended and revised text of a multilevel research published in 2010 in a concise fashion and reader-addressed order as a monograph under the title Cultures and Texts and employing SIAN7. Book III Re-conceptualised Existence-based Language Practices presents the effects of AA in some applications of the modernized rhetorical theory as a pragmatic continuation of the theory of meanings in the intercourse of cultures to certain linguistic matters. This book consists of five chapters which have been developed as a result of revisited theory and its practical application to the lectures in the linguistics auditorium of my current teaching practice. A fast-changing approach to language uses, texts, literature and interpersonal communication, based on e-communication practices, is setting challenges to rhetoric and that leads to rethinking of linguistic matter. The latter matters only when involved in the texture of a story or as I would call it further in an 'active text'. A text is activated when involved in particularly employed discourse; and discourse is seen as the communicative value of the text in a socially significant situation. To put an end to a host of choicy definitions rooted in mountains of theoretical investigations and debate in the complex field of rhetoric and all the related theories (Mavrodieva 2013:38-49), I shall focus on the uses of the English-based texts as culture formative agents whose effect on the learning mind is of dynamic nature.

7 See Apostolova, G. Cultures and Texts. Internet. Intertext. Interculture. SWU PRESS, 2010

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In a comparative context the general rhetorical matrix8 has proven quite useful to certain areas of cross cultural understanding based on differences in language practices and linguistic explanation.

Style I am too much involved with the study of rhetoric to neglect it as a combined tool for designing a text. Therefore I shall use it to my best performance for eloqutio in the AA fashion. Every singular attempt to speak up and talk the next world into being is a matter of rhetoric where we give the performance of our own lives: we are the creators of a universe, the Subjects of investigation, the heroes of text, and the center of a galaxy. That is why poetry is used in motto to start up the inspiration. The quotes are marked, and the unmarked pieces are mine. The following text will be fixed on rhetoric and therefore is bound to employ the WHFKQH of rhetoric in an attempt to manifest both its power as a science and its beauty as an art. The language and cultural environment for writing this book is Bulgaria. Consequently, I use the Bulgarian tongue (or I-language) to reconstruct Bulgarian cultural phenomena in English. Sometimes I have to invent words and terms to my reconstructed concepts and to my choice given as explanation. Although this text is based on a thousand of studied theories, I use them as matter of inspiration to go further and as examples to follow. I happen to agree with some theories and say so in my text. I happen, more often, to like an aspect of the quoted theory that fits to my purpose. In no way does this oblige the author of the reference to look for their concepts: I bear the singular responsibility for employing them for furnishing my construction with objects of common value. In my spatial mental picture other people’s theories touch upon, support, mark, and emphasize a multidimensional construction without breaking their own structure or purpose. This is a polyphonic text of secondary type (trying to bridge primary theories in setting up practices), open for development and bound as a singular construction by the AA. Being of composite nature, it employs all the registers of academic discourse from high standard to professional standard to jargon where borrowed terms acquire adopted and integrated sounding (Popova 2013) and the author is not insured against ambivalency and popular misuse nor is the interference of tongues avoided. 8

General Rhetoric Matrix, based on Aristotle's Rhetoric was first developed in 1992 in an unpublished Conference report, first published in Apostolova 1993: 14.

10

Introduction

The Use of Terminology There are two aspects to the question of terminology to clear in the beginning of this work. The first aspect is connected with the interdisciplinary nature of the study. There are four basic theoretical fields involved and a couple more touched upon while exploring the phenomenology of the agent of interlingual action: 1) philosophy of language, 2) rhetoric, 3) philosophy of the infosphere and theories about the WWW, and 4) applied linguistics in its varied appearances as approaches to and methods of language teaching and learning. A classroom is an open space, where clear fields of knowledge do not work isolated. It is the space where philosophy acts in its essential role as the mother of all knowledge. The second aspect of the present study is its exploration of the frontiers of human creativity, expressed in language phenomena. This needs a change in the volume and contents of concepts, which need renaming. I use quite a number of coined names and a number of established denotates of categories and scientific terms whose frontiers are fluctuating or changed to fit the constructive character of this study. Therefore I do not use them as terms nor do I dare call them ‘categories’ or even ‘denotates’. I prefer using at this stage them as ‘names’ to signify that it is a procedure of reconceptualization. The described attitude to terms is not confusing since I have defined their meanings to the purposes of this theory. Besides, they are coherent with the style where figures of language, figures of rhetoric and figures of mind (Murphy 1974: 21) are used in their richness of associative meanings but, again to the purposes of this theory. All questions that might arise from the specific contents of predominantly archetypal structural and semantic calques (Alexiev 2013, 2014; Popova 2013:21-22, 23) are grounded on the individual predefined experience of the reader who might turn helpful in contributing to this open theory. In harmony with the accepted style, terms have been used to the purpose of efficiency of synthesis following conceptual, pragmatic and lexical criteria of application and integration within the following theory. There are also the numerous cases of translating of one theory into the terms of another e.g. rhetoric into applied linguistics and applied cultural study.

A Note on I-Language I admit I was challenged and further tempted into the exploration of diversity of meanings growing out of sheer rhetorical criteria such as ethos,

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pathos and logos, and given significance by means of individual choice by the idea of Chomsky about I-language. In its turn it was derived as an opposition to Frege's understanding of shared or public language and public meanings (1995: 30, 33). The unanswered question of HOW pointed out by Neil Smith in the Foreword of The Minimalist Program (1995: ix–how we put that competence (to use the term now replaced by Ilanguage) to use in our performance is still largely a closed book, perhaps a mystery) played a key role in my exploration of the I-language as the generative basis for human communication (Mentalese or lingua mentis as Hilary Putnam calls it Ibid.:185) HOW is the question of science. The question a philosopher asks in such cases is WHY. I found myself in a vacuum between the HOW and the WHY and in a pressing need for a method (in the terms of philosophy) of synthetic nature. The answers to these two questions inevitably lead to the metatheory of I-language embedded in performance systems, which access the generative procedure of 'internal,' 'individual,' and 'intensional' nature (Chomsky 1995: 15-17).

The following text is focused on I-language as a component of the mind/brain (Chomsky 1995: 132) and not on external constraints or structures, or, to put it in a simpler way: I am concerned with the fillers of language matrices that can be changed to a purpose to embed different meaning. That is the area of human generative capacity based in language as the container of mindstructures, forms and knowledge procedures. In this line Rhetoric is not viewed by external structure analysis because its forms are of synthetic nature involving features from the standard levels of activated within a communicative situation performance. This has lead me to the idea of using it as the fundament E-language for producing a synthetic approach. Based on previous analyses of the rhetorical instrumentaria, I assumed that there could be a second level of Ilinguistics where the units or expressions have a complex or secondary nature. Rhetorical figures have deep roots in ancient languages and expressions that are easily reproduced in any language. Turning to the cognitive capacity of rhetorical theory, and the broadened practices of virtual rhetoric, the next step is to view I-language as internal to the virtual space again not in its computational structures but as a display of internal, individual and intensional features of the language-using mind. It is again Chomsky who gives the idea of integrated form of the full Ilanguage into performance systems: The I-language is a (narrowly described) property of the brain, a relatively stable element of transitory states of the language faculty. Each linguistic expression (SD) generated by the I-language includes instructions for

12

Introduction performance systems in which the I-language is embedded. It is ony by virtue of its integration into such performance systems that this brain state qualifies as language. Some other organism might, in principle, have the same I-language (brain state) as Peter, but embedded in performance systems that use it for locomotion. We are studying a real object, the language faculty of the brain, which has assumed the form of a full Ilanguage and is integrated into performance systems that play a role in articulation, interpretation, expression of beliefs and desires, referring, telling stories and so on. For such reasons, the topic is the study of human language. (Chomsky 2000:27).

The other concepts related to the starting grounds of this study are: Isound, I-meaning (Ibid. 170), and I-sense seen as a misuse of I-language, involved in behaviour (Ibid. 70). I also accept the statement that successful communication... does not entail the existence of shared meanings (Ibid. 30). In the following text I do not tend to overuse these terms, though, for I need expressions that correspond with the singularity of I-language in the interlingual phenomenology of performance in the two tongues Bulgarian and English. The object of my interest next is I-language seen also as a capacity of generating SDs of higher level of synthesis where performance extends beyond the standard theory of language and is concerned with all modes of meaning and intermodal translation. The topic continues to be human language. It is the viewpoint that is changed and the first complex tools to do the study at a hygher level of synthesis are the synthetic approaches that facilitate the exchange between HOW brain structures get involved in performance and Why.

What Is So Special About the Bulgarian Case? A language can be seen as a time-machine which registers the cultural crosspoints and influences on its codification, reconceptualization, spread and growth, and productivity. Bulgarian contains layers of cultural influences, all bound with temporal values and signifying political, economic and environmental practices all leading to the physical and mental survival of our culture. The period between 1990 and 2014 has the strength of concussion concerning our existential-bound language structures. The change of our knowledge of the world and of our individual positioning in it needed expansion of our tongue. As it is occurs in our current cultural practices Bulgarian translingual upgrading has two generative aspects of contradicting nature: it is very

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careful about the preservation of Bulgarian mentality and selfidentification in specifics of language units from all the levels of language. At the same time it is open to the pragmatic imperatives of an age and adopts forms, methods, structures and terminology which allow its updating in fast and efficient ways without the pains of immediate translation. We are open to learning languages and using them on all the possible levels of cultural exchange and practical efficiency. These two aspects are activated in our attitudes to transition in a series of translingual phenomena: the translation of Bulgarian texts into English is often reffered to as impossible to the full sounding of the target text (Vlahov & Florin 1969) because of “untranslatable” realia. This has two additional effects: 1) the growth of both translation theory and practice concerning human translation, and 2) the extensive growth of the number of bilingual Bulgarian writers who write in both Bulgarian and English (A. Dimova, G. Gospodinov, Z. Eftimova, M. Marinov etc.) and use compatible language structures and translatable images. Another feature of today’s Bulgarian is its enlarging terminological dictionary (M. Popova Op.cit.) which influences the uses of Bulgarian on its phonological, onomatopoeic, lexico-semantic, syntactic and textual levels in terms of its broadening discursivity. Bulgarian linguistics is reconsidering this expansion of our mother tongue while paying tribute to the non-standard uses of Bulgarian. We are still rather conservative in sharing classical Bulgarian texts in modern adaptations while at the same time we are filling in the world web spaces with our self-identification and cultural identification expressed in writing and speech. The third feature to our transition to unacknowledged globality of our language mentality is concerned with the learning and teaching of English again expressed in two outlined tendencies: 1) using well-known methods and approaches with very little adaptation to the purpose of fast and efficient acquisition of the target level and type of English needed by the learners; 2) inventing our own approaches and methods of learning and teaching to the purpose of keeping our cognitive structures intact and saving our individuality, Bulgarian identification and efficiency as professional people in an English-speaking global environment where English is seen as an extension of our tongue aiding the understanding of other languages, cultures and professional communities. The adaptability and flexibility of our transcultural uses of Bulgarian has led to its neglect as an object of transcultural display and Bulgarian linguistics still keeps closed database that is very slowly opening to the network of global linguistics. In other words, the world does not know much about the Bulgarian tongue in its wealth of embedded cultural codes

14

Introduction

of expressing in a pragmatically efficient, and even eclectic ways the turns of existentially sound mindstructure. Bulgarian is culturally environmental language: its concepts serve immediate survival in a circumstantially-dominated situation. We do not have our philosophical or scientific texts of importance and do not have the terminology invented to such purposes. Users’ culture, though, has its own paths of creativity in adapting, combination and expanding the meanings to a word or a structure. In the mixture of previous environmental meanings with current constructions of significance Bulgarian metaphors occur in all their ambiguity to form a secondary complex level of usage in both narrative and scientific discourse. The enlarging gap between temporally distant generation-based uses of language and choice of meanings for the same expression within a globally pointed usage thus has led to the accumulation of complex language structures of specific transition nature. We still have the complete command of previous standard, enriched with the freedom to use non-standard speech of all types of sociolect, expanding towards presentday interlingual uses of Bulgarian and the fascinating freedom of choice in constructing our idiolect as a display of our singularity. It is important to mention the educational role of the Bulgarian language studies based on the one hand on the changing information and values within the meanings of our lexical units, and, on the other hand, on the onomastics, or the personal name sounding where the cultural pattern is analysed in its dynamics (e.g. Stoilov 2011, 2010, 2005). The E-orality of the WWW as a melting pot (Perianova 2006) for culturally diverse communities has also mixed the dialects of different Bulgarian regions and one and the same user of Bulgarian can construct non-standard speech from previously incompatible elements. Bulgarian linguistics today is based on numerous studies in the fields of onomatopoeia, phraseology, terminology, borrowings, expanding ranges of sociolect and typology of discourse trying to establish tendencies into a next standard. Applied linguistic studies touch upon the related fields of language education policies, sociolinguistics, logopedia, pragmatics, methods of language teaching and the teaching of human translators. Philology has enormous corpus of analytical studies of Bulgarian texts in historical, comparative and profiled databases. There seems to arise a need for a constructive approach for assessment of the singularity of our tongue in terms of cultural survival through a period of intensive change and in relation with current philosophy of existence and projection of humanity to the virtual spaces of E-culture or its transfer from humankind into E-kind.

BOOK I ARGUMENTING THE METHOD

There are two metatheoretical levels that need to be cleared in the beginning. The first of them concerns the self-conscious study of intercultural rhetoric as a field of knowledge and its prerequisites for scientific investigation. The field of Rhetoric is where philosophy finds its ethics and social significance and where cultural approaches meet on the motivation of Rhetorical instruments for changing brain structures. There are certain points of resemblance between the rhetorical image of a social network and the technological image of the WWW. Both are realities based on a set of agents acting in the environment of communicative situation where interdependencies form a set of significant features. The fundamental set of rhetorical categories (the Rh-question, the triadic value of the art of rhetoric as ethos, pathos and logos, and the question of choice of rhetoric instrumentaria out of I-language in active discourse) applied to the e-agora occurring in the WWW, led to a synthetic methodology I called SIAN (Systematic Integrative Approach to the Net). Its main feature is the focus on the human individual as the initiator, the object, and the center of a universe of relations: the Self in the Net in both traditional and technological senses. The second level concerns the fundamental role of rhetoric as the starting grounds for the development of an Argumentative Approach to the studies of English, where awareness of what we learn serves as motivation for further learning, while the initial motivation is our individual purpose for performing the effort of learning.1 I once chose to call it so, because its metatheory is the rhetorical theory of argumentation. All our efforts to break the shell of our language-identification need 1

A similar approach is adopted by L. Grozdanova, “Cultural Diversity in a Unifying World–A New Challenge for English Textbook Writers” in Thomas, Desmond & Maria Georgieva (eds) Smaller Language in the Big World, Lettera, 2001, British Council, Bulgaria, pp. 126-145. The difference is that AA is entirely based on Ars Rhetoricae and on the SIAN whose primary concern is the ethos of Ekind.

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Book I

motivation and re-establishing our identities each next time in active translingual activity. The AA is necessarily open, interactive, multiple in its goals, tools and effects, multimodal in its search for translating ourselves for the Other, and, naturally, aimed at practical action. It serves the encyclopedic contents of a classroom and meets today’s doubt in the teacher’s authority. It is based on establishing trust in the teacher who is seen as a guide through active knowledge being a learner for a longer time and of greater experience than the students. Trust needs verification, that is why the trial of the AA is competition. Once established, AA enables a teacher to choose the texts used for the education and training, and their order as well, binding them to the classroom intentionality which does not necessarily coincide with the intentionality of the text creator for the added argumentative frame. Therefore the AA operates with what can be called secondary intentionality and the latter is seen as the core of teacher’s invention which is very close to the web user’s creativity. I shall still stick to this name, because of the freedom it gives to choose a way out on a crossroad and motivate our choice through the universal nature of human features and the skills to apply a set of tools for talking worlds into being.

CHAPTER ONE INTERCULTURAL RHETORIC

1.1 Rhetoric as Intercultural Mediator All the world is a stage, and all the men and women—merely players. Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II Scene VII

It is the human activity of negotiating things of existential nature, which has always been a task for Rhetoric: both of the art and the science. As such it concerns the existential practices of humanity where humankind is endangered by humankind. Only between people is rhetoric needed and machines can only transfer the meanings that humanity has endowed them with. The second millennium of our era ended amidst the fears of humanity about our physical survival, and opened a new space for our transformation into e-kind in the worlds of the electronically supported WWW. With the expansion of the global media, the need for talk has expanded enormously. We are connected but still remain lonely and bored, fearing a moment we might become uninformed or even worse, disconnected, shut out of our frequented spaces of the web agora, imprisoned in our physical existence and within our heads. We keep negotiating our own individual and cultural existence. And we keep telling tales transforming old words into new contexts, fitting them to occurring meanings, compatible with our transcending existential practices and significant concepts of identification (notional, communicated and functional) deserving to be worded, shared and textualized. We are all immersed into the hyper reality of the e-agora vowing our likes and dislikes, sharing our daily issues, searching for immediate reaction: all in a way so similar to Ancient oral cultures that it looks like digression of human cultures to their beginnings, yet all supported by vast net-weaving enterprise that makes us confused about the precipice emerging between our biological kind and our projected e-selves – the

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Book I Chapter One

avatars of the absolute global master: globe talk1 - the means and the environment for our virtual existence. The challenge for a philosopher is the very nature of the symbolic power of our net-Selves—neither material nor ideal but definable at the exits and the entrances of the virtual space carrying in and out whole worlds2 by the vehicle of language fully given to its main function of means and environment of communication in all its variety. Therefore the effort of this study is all about intercultural applications of the art of rhetoric and expanding knowledge of the science of rhetoric whose field is socially significant use of language in the form of persuasive discourse3. The purpose of the effort, though, is pointed at what happens to the minds of all the people involved in intercultural talk and employing all their creative powers to unbind themselves from networks of necessities and create new worlds where existence shall transcede and last. Even at the speed of technology overcoming the world, we are still at the beginning of our transformation into E-kind: a beginning that seems so uncertain, messy, incomplete, and even nightmarish for it has no real promise for the physical world of humankind that is still functioning outside and making E-worlds possible. Thus the study of e-rhetoric comes into touch with its first concept, and that is the category of existence: physical, mental and virtual; unique, doubled or multiplied; pluralistic and monistic; framed and chaotic; social and individual; simple and identified—signified in all its meanings by language, contained in language, supported by language, hidden, disambiguated, individualized or universalized, bound or born, governed or given freedom, lost or achieved, forgotten or shared, classified and heaped as database, searched for and studied by and within language.

1

Maria Georgieva extensively discusses this concept /which is different from global talk/ of colloquial intercultural web English language usage in her book Global English in Bulgarian Context, Silueti Publishing House, 2011, pp. 100-123 and is seen as 'recontextualization... of global notions on homeground' following an idea of Fairclough from 1992 and his usage of 'recontextualization' from 2006, Ibid. p. 105. 2 Today it looks common but the replacement of 'set' with 'world' in the analyses of what the web allows language to do was a great step forward to the 'creativity' of the web-machine. The idea is described in its development by Jacques Dale (Dale 2006). 3 A paraphrase of the definition of rhetoric by Yordan Vedar, Op. Cit., p 4.

Intercultural Rhetoric

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1.2 Social Networking: a Field for Crosscultural Talk and Intercultural Rhetoric For the Western tradition it was ever since the 6th century B.C. that rhetoric has remained the field where aesthetics and politics meet: rhetoric—as it was generated in Ancient Greece: the art of communicating the management of the ancient polis in persuasive speech—has ever since remained a tool of politics and an object of educational policies4. Touching both upon the grounds of eternity and the current moment theoretically displayed in philosophy involved into active socio-cultural practice, it has created communication tools translating the ultimate human values of truth, beauty and good into the countless individual manifestations of their shades in the complex hyper texture of human talk. Studying rhetoric is an incessant educational process where each social and cultural transition in history sets new pragmatic criteria of its mastering while keeping in mind all its magnificent manifestations in previous times—the pearls of fine oratory. Our time challenges our rhetorical awareness with the vastness of crosscultural talk borne by the communication technologies which have provided ubiquity of global subject matters of discourse. It is difficult to find out where one stays unless one starts with establishing the changes in the system of rhetoric. In the era of electronic communication the art of public speaking has developed into a multifunctional vehicle of the growing global society. The fineWHFKQH that Ancient Greece produced and mastered in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. to foster its own unique achievement in every possible aspect of socially significant human practice has at its disposal today powerful means which have turned public talk into the ubiquitous environment of shared intercultural relations. The multiplicity of the channels of our present-day publicity meets the unified international code of modern English creating a redundant set of interdependent realities based on both intuitive and professional manifestations of the art of public speaking. The instrumental character of rhetoric has made it applicable to both good and bad purposes, and has made it vulnerable to immoral and discriminative uses throughout the centuries and especially in the totalitarian societies of the 20th century. This has given it ill fame and so it has remained in the broad field of common thinking while only very 4

This is fundamentally presented by Ivanka Mavrodieva in her latest book on the current rhetorical practices and theoretical studies in PR, Mavrodieva, I., Rhetoric and PR (Bulgarian) SU Press, 2013 pp. 11-15.

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Book I Chapter One

limited circles of philosophers and professional people in the field of public speaking have continued to distinguish the fine art from its improper practices. People need to be reminded again and again that vice lies in the human thinking and deeds which govern the usage of one or another set of instruments, not in the instruments themselves. We have reached an age which claims to have opened the minds of people to a global culture limiting discrimination in every respect by allowing freedom of thought and international communication. And still a couple of years ago a friend-journalist asked me “How long are the politicians going to tell lies to us?” This is a modern paraphrase of Cicero’s question Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? But there is also the opposite question of the same redundant nature arising now and again throughout the successive cultural ages of shared humanity in their incessant rebirth and growth: “How long are people going to neglect the fine art of public talk and remain blind for the ideas behind the words?” Maybe language is after all a difficult system of conventions whose usage to its full glory (in terms of both encoding and decoding the message) remains the prerogative to just a few chosen, whereas rhetoric is the mediator providing a set of tools serving as engines of codifying in simpler ways the complexity of human dialogue, today, also, in the spaces of the Net. The web environment is modelled to the time-bound and societydetermined values of its constructors. It can become a dangerous crooked world of human ethics. Here is where rhetorical knowledge can prove useful for it contains the power to model and remodel active speech containing and leading to action. In the growth of the virtual worlds language has not yet been fully caught to its richness by the still insufficient hardware and software. Technical immaturity limits the uses of language and, consequently, limits the e-worlds in both their expressive and their cognitive powers: pictograms come to help web conversation and graphology replaces gestures in the imposed illiteracy of web colloquial exchange. The vernacular of the global village relies on situational markers imposed through English yet misunderstood by native English speakers. LOL and the like have become inevitable part of weblish actio but the numerous pictures have limited frequency list of uses for their meaning being obscure in the icon of caricature type. The instruments of the fine art of public speaking can provide decency and tolerance and deprive intercultural communication of any kind of racist, nationalist and other kinds of discrimination: while learning how to communicate properly, i. e. efficiently throughout cultures, the people of the 21st century might forget to use the vice-laden language of the 20th

Intercultural Rhetoric

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century and turn their faces away from its socio-political backgrounds or weave them into the darker grounds of the hyper-texture of cross-cultural talk reaching to new existentional patterns. This might be one more reason for developing intercultural rhetoric as a means of intercultural talk and as the corresponding theory, containing analytical and ethical codes— complex engines of verbal and non-verbal nature—which might serve as limitations to the surface displays of manipulation, deceit and intolerance on each stage of social practice, and as the vehicle for the creation a crosscultural field of communication (the complex area where cultures intersect) transcultural (passing information from culture to culture) in nature and unicultural in aim—or acquired new common cultural area through negotiation of cultures. 5 The rhetorical forms have acquired the complexity of the e-culture, and today it is not the figure, but the genre and purpose of a talk that regulate its contents. Textual creativity is still the priority of the human individual, even for allowing language and structure mistakes (not simply errors, and some done with a purpose as it is seen in the explicated practices in the second book of this study) that the AI editor does not allow. Yet... cause so ur marking down the utterances of the discourse where the e-text appears nevermind its english. Another complex reason for the development of intercultural rhetoric is the existing global field of intercultural talk where new figures of speech have sprung: while simplifying older sophisticated turns of speech, modern talking has added new structures—graphological, morphonologic and morpho-syntactic in nature, translingual in form, multilevel in context. It is challenging to study the figures and non-verbal realities of the uses of internationally used English, created to the purposes of intercultural decency, and look for the intention underlying them, their decoding 5

A diversity of modern topics is discussed in a variety of humanitarian fields oriented towards efficiency of intercultural communication and giving spaces for the application of Rhetorical Analysis in transdisciplinary contexts of culturally open nature: e.g. Irina Perianova starts from the fundament of Maslow's study of the pyramid of human needs The Polyphony of Food, 2013; Todor Shopov has been working on the concept of intercomprehension strategies, which is very much in harmony with the presently developed theory for it does not remain within the limitations of linguistics nor of ELT methodology but relies on a broad theoretical fundament (Shopov 2003a/b, 2012); Irena Vassileva (2000; 2002; 2009a/b) Ivanka Mavrodieva and Yovka Tisheva (2010; 2015) have been working in the field of academic discourse and writing; Tsvetan Davidkov relies of statistic database for a sociography of our present-day culture (2010); and Ivanka Mavrodieva has explicitly placed her studies of rhetoric within the contexts of modern culture (Mavrodieva 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008a/b/c/d, 2010a/b/c/d, 2013).

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Book I Chapter One

throughout cultures. It is curious to study the extensive growth of a megalanguage which has by far reached its semantic maturity and is ready to accept any kind of linguistic contribution generated in accessible cultures. Thus, English is killing6 other languages while simultaneously it dissolves into the colourful mess of assimilated turns of globe talk. A third complex reason for extending rhetorical analysis to intercultural applications is that the mastering of rhetorical instruments reveals the social imperfections they hide. Now we are in a transition to a new culture, grounded on multicultural and multilingual talk and virtual communication that sends the message to the decoder in their supposed mother tongue. Whatever the fate of the world, its entire cultural heritage is to be saved—all texts ever written and saved, now enter the hyperreality of virtual memory. Modern text-productivity is based on the mechanisms of intertextuality. From the new point of view it would be curious to approach world literatures and find out why, for example, Somerset Maugham and Agatha Christie can appear today interculturally as tender as the Greek Kazantzakis or the Bulgarians Hristo Botev and Ivan Vazov in situations and to audiences which have been politically affected. I have witnessed the repeated reaction of young Bulgarian secondary-school students and university undergraduates upon reading or listening to Agatha Christie’s texts about the invented state Herzoslovakia or the singer of Balkan origin from “The Face of Helen” where the origin of the hero is neglected. At the same time none of them feels anything but amusement at the names of the warring countries Borogravia and Zlobenia in The Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett. While the latter is accepted as parody, older texts are seen as belonging to history and containing offensive references to real events. This is very much in agreement with Lotman’s theory about ‘the present past’ (Lotman 2014: ) quoted and discussed by Irina Perianova. A rereading of our favourite fictional texts might be subject to rhetorical analysis as far as these texts have been used for decades in the education of young people while their cultural value has changed together with their historic significance in terms of redirected meaning. On the other hand, the diversity of science has led to the necessity of finding the optimal transdiscursive matrix for getting a bigger image of what is taking place with the same object of study for a couple of disciplines talking in different jargon. The rhetoric of science7 is based on structure rather than on lexicon and language creativity. The analytic nature of scientific text makes it rely on propositions and terminology but 6 7

A metaphor I especially noted in the context of Maria Georgieva, 2011 Perra and Shea (eds.), 1991.

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the inbetweens have been productive of widely used constructions of an obscure standard of conference discourse: as I already said we are starting investigation of the transdiciplinary application of terms realised in present conference materials which meaning is contextually clear... and etc. Colaterally the rhetoric of academic discourse is creating textuniversalia with specific binding features.8 Still there are Art versions of scientific works (like Tim Berners Lee's „How We Were Weaving the World Wide Web“) based on a balance of creativity and tale-telling of illustration, and clarity of explanation. Next, but not least in importance, global talk (based on English as a lingua franca and on globe talk as the vernacular of e-kind or virtual folk) is the field where the East and the West meet daily negotiating not only the fate of a global culture but the fate of the world itself. A rhetorical analysis would provide a display of the situational context of present-day intercultural talk where the East meets the West and create database for a future objective historical study of concurrent sociopolitical local situations whose analysis today is based on mere analogy and fallacious stimuli displayed in both, everyday journalism and political comments. Here also comes the main point of interest for the present study: the role of intercultural rhetoric in securing spaces for Bulgarian culture in the transcended cultural existence of the Earth's population as E-kind9. There are two main concepts that serve as binders of this search and govern it: Bulgarian and existence, the former referring to the fundamental identification point of our culture and our language, the latter—loaded with the purpose of the effort in discourse of illocutive character and the power to talk our worlds into being, both of them united in the entity of the concept of the language matrix10 where our existence is identified in each point of communicating our culture in our mother tongue. A university education especially in the field of the humanities is bound to provide for its undergraduates training into the field of the art of public speaking—now, in its intercultural dimensions. An educated person is to master international communication. Just like in the days of Athens of Demosthenes—the first level is language training leading to proper language usage, the second level is the skillful use of language for creating 8

Irena Vassileva has been working on academic rethoric in its intercultural European perspective (2000, 2002, 2009a/b), Ivanka Mavrodieva has clearly shown the fields of rhetoric knowledge and rhetorical practices, as well as the concepts, binding them into the broader field of rhetoric (2013: 16, 30, 38, 46). 9 This is my own term designating the idea of humankind's activities in the virtual spaces of the electronically based communication. (2005; 2010: 41, 53) 10 In the understanding and interpretation of Lilia Ilieva (2011: 49-59)

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Book I Chapter One

new speech forms, and the third level is the freedom in language use acquired by mastering persuasive discourse—the pragmadialectics of public argumentation11: all these performed in globe talk where English is but a fundament of the speech competence allowing a whole culture transition in targeting our Bulgarian textual identifiers speak in Globish and persuade the global audience in our authenticity and uniquenes in a comprehensible and bewitching way. Where is the place of aesthetics and politics in bridging technologically different layers of culture, streaming fast away from each other? It is in the unity of the form and the content which motivates again and again the human individuals in their every next social venture? We are talking much more today our global village over than the Greeks in the ancient polis did. Rhetoric is everywhere whether we are aware of that fact or not: it is what builds and holds communicative realities where different cultures meet: it is in our speech and in our silence, in our singing, and in our pictures, in our I-language and in our common action. Rhetoric is implanted in the insufficient frames of globe talk that we follow if we need to be understood or break in our I-talk in the sites of our creative avatars12 both in monologue (e.g. Blog) and dialogue (FAQ, forums and comments).

1.3 The Outlines of a Contemporary Intercultural Rhetoric The establishing of the outlines of modern intercultural rhetoric would naturally start from the point where the corpus of rhetorical studies turns into comparative pragmatics. Following very closely the universal principles of scientific methodology, we are to seek the differentia specifica of intercultural rhetoric in defining the changes of its subject matter and its environment, the problems which arise from such changes, and the structure of its specific theoretical field.

11

As Van Eemeren calls it in his Theory of Argumentation (2003). The e-representative or agent through which we take part in the incessant web talk creation, our syberbodies; avatars in Induism signify the descending of god through incarnation as a human or an animal (Schlor, V. 2005. “Cyborgs: Feminist Approaches to the Cyberworld”, p. 60-64 in Borgman, E., St. van Erp, H. Haker (eds), 2005. Cyberspace – Cyberethics - Cybertheology, SCM Press, London); also Andersen, P.B., P. Nowack, “Tangible Objects: Connecting Informational and Physical Space” in Lars Qvortrup (ed) 2002. Virtual Space: Spatiality in Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., 3.9. 12

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Intercultural rhetoric builds realities by creating intertext which draws on the common cultural grounds of humanity and extends to encompass all cultures of today. It covers direct speech, media communication and cyber talk. It is redundant in terms of using multitude of channels in multitude of speech situations with varied participation of agents, circumstantial features, purposes of communication and technical devices. Therefore it can be defined as a hyper-rhetoric activating the principles and instruments of the art of public talk to serve the purposes of multilevel intercultural communication. A further venture into reaching a definition of the intercultural rhetoric requires explication of its theoretical frame, its specific problems, levels, principles and criteria. In the general theoretical scheme of rhetoric which comprises the history of rhetoric, theory of rhetoric, special rhetorical theories (e.g. epideictic, academic, military, homiletics etc.), branches of rhetoric (classical rhetoric, theory of argumentation, neorhetoric, stylistics etc.), intercultural rhetoric would come as a complex of comparative studies, following the natural division of the traditional theoretical field of rhetoric.13 The differentia specifica of intercultural rhetoric aimed at communicative efficiency lies in its main question: the question about the possible transformations of the correspondent rhetorical forms in the different cultures in their both verbal and non-verbal expression. Following the traditional general rhetoric fields of study which focus on the rhetorical situation, the rhetorical instrumentarium, rhetorical education and the social role of rhetoric, we can isolate four parallel problem areas: 1) concerning the intercultural communicative situation: the problems of the variations of the communicative situations, the flexibility of hierarchies and mechanisms of their optimization; the problem of the mediators and the subjects in the transcultural communicative situation. 2) concerning the instrumental aspects of rhetoric: the problem of the transformation of rhetorical forms—their preservation as common figures containing varying concrete expression; the problem of their complexity— how to use them as engines of communication similar to the complex cyber tools which provide fundamental structural complexes for further concrete uses; the problem of the persuasive power of the foreign text.

13

Vedar (2000a/b, 2001); Velichko Rumenchev (1997, 2004, 2006, 2012); Kulevski (2002, 2010); Donka Alexandrova (1984, 1985, 2006, 2008) and Ivanka Mavrodieva (2013: 35-45).

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3) concerning the prescriptive aspects of rhetoric: the problem of the need of rhetorical training of bilingual and multilingual speakers—experts in speech efficiency, critics and producers; the problem of the motivation of foreign language learners for further improvement beyond the pragmatic criteria for sufficiency of language use, the problem of the unified international English and the individual contribution to its cultural content and linguistic form and norm 4) concerning the socio-cultural role of rhetoric: the problem of the preservation of national cultures in an acceptable crosscultural context or using rhetoric as a creator and mediator of cultural compatibility, and an index of escalating tension between communities, layers and streams of cultural diversification.14 The structure of intercultural rhetoric is based on the possible differentiation of comparative studies based on different methodologies, or choosing one or another aspect of its subject matter—persuasive crosscultural talk. The philosophical basis of intercultural rhetoric would also allow cultural studies as the nearest theoretical motivation of the development of modern intercultural rhetoric. Drawing on traditional typology yet leaving out antinomic relations as limiting, we have chosen to enter into the field of intercultural rhetoric dividing it into a descriptive part, productive or analytical and prognostic part, and methodological which can be prescriptive in its various applications to the specific fields of social practice:

14

The Harvard Club presentation of such tool of Moskovitz: Gofman, A., Moskowitz, H.R., Manchaiah, M., Silcher, M., “Prescriptive Public Policy,” Proceedings of IPSI Conference, Montreal – New York, 2006.

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Fig. 1.1.1 Intercultural Rhetoric /functional division of subfields/ Descriptive

Productive

Comparative studies of the history of public speaking

Comparative rhetorical analysis /crosscultural values/

Comparative study into the specific theories of the art of public speaking

Rhetorical modeling /theoretical hyperstructures, instrumental engines and surface patterns /

Applied /normative/

Rhetorical education /crosscultural motivation/

Comparative study of the methods and approaches to the training into the art of public speaking /crosscultural practices /

It is clear that the above figure displays only the surface of a more complicated structural model where the labeled sub-fields of study are set in a network of relations which have by far been approached from different angles and seen in different focuses of context. Here we have adopted a holistic approach where the focus is on the problem of the interdependencies of modern complex rhetorical forms and their crosscultural contents projected in the multidimensional perspective of the available rhetorical theory and practice. In this we come in agreement with T. Barone, applying his words to our context: “Anyone with more than a passing acquaintance with the curriculum evaluation field - or even of educational inquiry in general - is aware of a growing interest in new sorts of approaches to such inquiry. The features of these approaches tend to place them within a more holistic, qualitative, interpretive, hermeneutical, or critical vein of empirical inquiry. As such, they are meant to complement the natural-science-based, and generally quantitative, strategies that have long dominated the curriculum research/ evaluation scene.” (Barone 2000)

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1.4 Multilevel Intercultural Communication: Crosscultural Talk The specific features of the subject matter of intercultural rhetoric lie in the crosscultural interpretation of persuasive discourse against our contemporary socio-political background, which has provided space for ubiquity of human intercourse, and present-day communicative technology, which has provided the environment for the growth of an electronic orality. Thus the subject of modern intercultural rhetoric can be specified as electronically supported persuasive cross-cultural talk. The characteristic features of this cross-cultural talk bear all traditional aspects of persuasive discourse yet there are a couple of extensions due to the fact that in no previous age in human history was there such a broadscale transnational communication involving people on all social levels from all social spheres all over the world. In one and the same speech situation there can be multicultural layers and crosscultural paths leading to practical goals of intercultural character. Managing a situation of mixed and even hostile cultural contexts to form an intercultural consent on worded concepts of shared meaning requires operating with the crosscultural routes of communication letting some information pass while stopping another. This is a process where individual cultures seek compatibility deep in the common roots of human civilization without losing their unique expression. Thus there can be isolated three specific features to the subject matter of modern crosscultural talk: x unprecedented coincidence of cultural and situational contexts; x opening routes and closing doors to cultural transition in the current epoch by choices grounded on significant features of existential nature where the individual self has acquired a polyphonic global value in the global netted community of humankind; x a process of translating cultures into one another using hyper cultural models to find compatibility, without unification, and in our case of European expression of Western culture going beyond mere business or politics and deep into the roots of human civilization. All this leads to the idea about hyper-rhetoric where social issues form layers of cross-cultural persuasion in flexible hierarchies yet all of them within the cultural framework of our time-bound issues of global survival.

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1.5 An Analytical Rhetorical Model The further analysis of an intercultural rhetorical model would lead us to the philosophical grounds of modern communication. The ancient categories ethos, pathos and logos would now operate on more than one level reflecting the intercourse of social groups throughout cultures. This is a three-dimension reality where the human individual enters into socially significant communication determined by rules of intercultural compatibility. While the categorial grounds are common for all humanity, practically there would me multitude of paths for achieving them, which in its part would reflect on the instrumental aspects of morality, truth and beauty in hyper-contextual discourse. The instruments of persuasive discourse are schematically represented as figures of language which might be figures of style (lexemes), rhetorical figures (syntagms) or figures of text (textemes). They can be culturally closed—such as realia and conventions of language usage, and open—or translingual. Language interferences concerning sociolects are the object of study of comparative pragmatics and the most interesting fact to point out here is that a growing global culture is quite independent in finding its own ways of expression of common objects, which reach through national languages. When languages interfere there is interlanguage.15 The criteria for efficient communication moves up two stages: intercomprehensibility16 and taking action. When more than two cultures interact it is crosscultural17 talk which has its own codification using the means of expression of different languages to form translingual figures. This process is based on the mechanisms of borrowing but the functioning of such translingual figures is different: while borrowings add to or pollute the vocabulary of a native tongue, translingual figures build the lexical database of modern lingua franca—the internationally used English. This is a level of language different from the vast space of multi-coloured interlanguages comprising the use of English as second language all over the world. This level contains only socially significant persuasive discourse in its supercultural applications. Therefore translingual figures are based on the figures of thought which are universal. The specific features of interlingual figures lie in the varied mechanisms of encoding and generating of interlingual metaphor. This is a 15

Maria G., Op. Cit. T. Shopov, Op. Cit. 17 There are various definitions of the term ‘crosscultural’ but here we shall stick to its understanding as the process and mechanisms of transferring information between differing cultures through creating a common field for their expression. 16

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most challenging field of research since it is both comparative and etymological within the scope of New Rhetoric as defined by Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. (1968 ) ‘New rhetoric’ or the rhetorical ‘theory of argumentation’ views persuasive discourse as a three-dimensional reality of logical, psychological and ethical aspects interwoven in a natural-language structure or a ‘network of arguments’. This is a magnificent idea of how to apply rhetoric in intercultural communication and in e-communication weaving a hyper texture of verbal and non-verbal structures which employs cultural levels without confronting them but through involving them in a more complex area where information flow removes barriers of prejudice or misunderstanding. The unity of such a network lies in the interaction of the three levels of human intercourse ethos, pathos and logos. The first level represents the moral code connecting cultures by establishing common practices devoid of prejudices and discriminations; the second level concerns the creation of unicultural emotional motivation; the third level is where common knowledge is provided through opening information channels for cultures speaking directly to each other synchronically concerning our global present-day practices. Within a more global area of intercourse old antinomies would necessarily translate into new practices forming new attitudes and searching for new solutions. There can be isolated couples of antinomic relations such as: the individual—the common, passion—reason, extinction—survival, current—everlasting. Within a network, however, these oppositions would correlate and form connections on the levels of ethos, pathos and logos and would translate to suit a situational context which in terms of present-day communication coincides with the forming common cultural context. These relations can be represented visually and calculated which would concern scientific study. At the level of everyday practice they can be simplified when situational awareness is acquired through the agents of communication: x x x

The socio-cultural unit; The human individual; Humanity.

This hierarchy is based on the idea of consistency of agent: the sociocultural unit is in the greatest respect dependent on the situation; such units form on different principles and an individual might enter a number of

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them simultaneously where some of them might be interacting while others might be independent e.g. a job position would create professional groups, syndicates, associations etc., a family is indirectly dependent on a professional group, while a membership in a tennis club or Rotary club might be entirely outside professional environment. Another example to illustrate the shift of meaning is in the usage of community-context related expressions such as 'everyone prefers going out tonight to having a family party with theyr hosts'. That expression was used by a young Bulgarian living in Boston when I asked her to join a Thanksgiving party at the house of my host family. When I asked her who she had in mind by 'everyone' she stated she meant about 20 people of the Bulgarian community of her age in Boston who used to meed only in a disco downtown. I heard 'everyone' used later on by people belonging to various communities and limiting the meaning of the word to the narrow boundaries of community significant practices shared by the current members of the community. Differences are marked by language and shared socio-cultural experience is marked by language in opposition which might need explanation in cross-cultural argument. The human individual is a longer lasting agent, crossing through time and space and carrying traces of past experience: there are still people who have lived through the two world wars and made a jump from hand-done agriculture to high-tech information processing. And there is the youngest generation of professional people who don’t have in their active vocabulary words like ‘negro’, ‘socialism’, ‘soviet union’ etc. I have been to Leningrad but I have never visited Petersburg, although my students would not understand me when I share a story of my cultural experience from Leningrad. I have drawn the idea of this example while attending a conference held in Thessaloniki or in Solun, depending on the position of the speaker from the Bulgarian-Greek border and the willingness to pass it without ‘trespassing’ the national culture feelings of the officer-on-duty at the barrier. Getting further beyond ideology, the word 'book' does not bear the same meaning for people of different ages: and even when I give a lecture and refer to certain texts, the idea of printed out hard copy is the final picture of my mental representation of a book, while the undergraduates picture an e-text that can be accessed via their individual web devices as e-book. Then comes the highest level of communication consistency— humanity—which contains the final grounds of all human intercourse and provides the final solutions to problems arising on the previous two levels. This level contains everything and can neutralize all conflicts by changing the focus of the spotlight creating areas of non-conflicting interests. Still,

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humanity has its time-borders and all generalizations that can engulf cultural diversity of meanings form the broadest cultural area possible. The case with the WWW is an even broader field yet it is limited in its means for creating, saving and using data for the changing mindfocuses of humanity. From a rhetorical point of view then universalia would be the shared individual experience of broadest nature which individuals have managed to introduce or highlight in I-language by means of diverse languages' analogous units directly translatable to the same meaning, which have persuasive power and can be verified in repeated practical action. While a study of the levels and the antinomic relations of the agents of a rhetoric crosscultural situation concerns the philosophical motivation of intercultural rhetoric, its practice is based on the technical aspects or on the art of using rhetoric instruments for managing intercultural discourse. Thus the next stage of concern in the displayed here systematic approach should be a model for studying the instruments of a rhetoric situation in the complexity of its agents, settings and means. The core of rhetorical analysis is contained in the rhetoric Theory of Argumentation.18 Academic developments into the theories and practice of persuasive discourse in Bulgaria for the latest 50 years have followed a very sophisticated model, based on the leading schools of rhetoric. Here I shall give a brief overview of the steps in the studies concerning the application and practices based on the theories of argumentation. Aristotle's dialectics comes first and it is usually studied in the whole corpus of Aristotelian philosophy together with his Analytics, Rhetoric and Politics. The holistic and open nature of Aristotle's philosophy has served as the grounds for its sustainability throughout time. Time and time again we return to the roots of Western culture and revive Aristotle rereading his philosophy through the specific cultural context of the moment and implanting new meaning into its categories. Thus in the development of intercultural rhetoric we address the e-agora while exploring the spaces where rhetoric functions (Apostolova 1995; 1999; 2005; 2006; 2012). Next comes the school of Perelman & L. Olbrechts-Tyteca and the “New Rhetoric” (1968) where the most precious concept is that of the 18

I have studied TA thoroughly ever since 1985 when I became a doctoral student of Logic and Rhetoric at Sofia University and completed my thesis by 1990: Gergana Apostolova, Logical and Methodological Grounds of Persuasive Discourse, Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Rhetoric, Philosophy Faculty, Sofia University, 1990 published as a book in 1999 (Apostolova, G. Persuasive Discourse. Cultural Tradition and Pragmatic Imperatives).

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nature of the rhetorical argument where both premises are based on the consent about their validity as true ones judged by sound reason and good will. It is interesting to trace the process of rereading the New Rhetoric outside the context of Marxism where objectivity of truth was the basic premise in the argumentation against Perelman. Even in the late 1980s Perelman sounded reasonable, and we subconsciously accepted his return to Aristotle's complexity. Plausible reasoning (G. Polya 1968) was known to mathematicians but never connected with the idea of negotiable premises in rhetorical reasoning. Pennsylvania school of argumentation and the discussion on the nature of philosophical argument has got a serious reflection on the further discussion of the nature of philosophical discourse. (Apostolova 2011). G. Brutyan and his Yerevan school were within the practice of the Soviet regime, yet they did not differ much formally from the mainstream, although in connection with the topoi they were within the discourse model of their time. Their theory of argumentation was based on the concept of the rhetorical premises which were in agreement with the objective truth yet rhetorical argumentation was discussed as different from logical demonstration (Brutyan 1984). The Russian logicians have contributed much to the study of fallacies and the logic of probability. We still rely on Kondakov's dictionary of logic (1975), and Ivin's informal approach to logic in natural language (2000, 2002). The Bulgarian logicians Angel Bunkov and Dobrin Spasov have made a special clarification of the grounds of the “organon” objectivism in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s with their opposition to the plurality of logic and its applications. The valuable idea is the holistic, Hegelian approach to logic in reality. It is very important to note that ‘truth’ in rhetoric is related to ‘lie’ and its shades reproduce incomplete manifestations of truth in language and in its rhetorical uses. The opposition of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ ‘truth’ is itself an example of such insufficiency of expression similar to the situational uses of “each”, “every”, “most”, and “all”. Centuries of learning and teaching logic have not made practical expressivity correct like centuries of learning languages have made language usage more explicit to the cases when users stick to the same old errors. Then, this is another case which needs revising: why the brains of humans refuse to register corrections? Is this a marker of cultural identity encoded in the different brain structures of different cultures and individuals? Can this be the reason for the sensitivity of the individual about defending its position in the centre of the individual perspective of the world? Can the constructive attitude to rhetorical aspects of language usage isolate the signs of differently working brains? I

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shall not attempt to give answers to such questions here. What is of significance is the difference of human awareness of truth and argumentation and the practical sticking to incorrect structures of expression and figures that mask meaning in order to achieve motivation and gain illocutive power. The very idea of encoding is based on a play with meanings, differing from the correct uses of language. Totalitarian practices, so much alike the present day tendency of following popular guides in public speech situation, relied on specific volumes of instructions for inside use of leaders, the esoteric circle including party and komsomol secretaries, the ideology departments of the party committees; a looser circle of monthly magazines supplied the lower level secretaries and political instructors—all such matter again based on the topical imperatives of the current situation markers. Bulgarian language of the semiotic philosophy school that was in opposition to the frames of marxist objectivism, led by Tsanko Mladenov19 in Bulgaria, but made famous by his colleagues and friends who worked in France, Julia Krasteva and Tsvetan Todorov, hinted ideas into the semiotic approach to discourse, applicable to the theories of rhetorical argumentation, especially those of latest web-rhetoric. Of latest time the philosophy of Timen Timev, another Bulgarian, who works in the US, and was offered for Nobel Prize Nominantion, suggests a transdiscursive mentalist approcah to the uses of language, claiming for poetic freedom of human capacity for creativity. Today Theory of argumentation is related to Amsterdam's school of Pragma-Dialectics and the latest contributions into the nature of Visual rhetoric (J.A. Blair 2012). Time has been the best critic of all theoretical concepts, leaving out the outdated and 'soft' time-bound data and upgrading every next time the systematic approach to the structure and growth of the study of argumentation in speeches of public significance. It is miraculous how the system works and how flexible and adaptable it proves to the studies of the phenomenology of argumentation within varied fields of the function of public discourse. Pragma-dialectics has its projections into the e-space as studies into virtual argumentation (Mavrodieva 2010; Apostolova 2011; 2012) and specific applications as intercultural rhetorical studies in the English 19 Tsanko Mladenov was the first dean of the Philology Department at the South West University of Bulgaria, sent here by the communist government for breaking the codex of totalitarian ideology. (Ilieva 2008: In Memoriam of Tsanko Mladenov http://liternet.bg/publish9/lilieva/sbogom.htm; also Daniela Mladenova’s memories of her father unpublished and my own encounters with him.)

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studies auditorium for the development of an Argumentative Approach to English Language Learning of two phases: argumentation and motivation, and SIAN (Systematic Integrated Approach to the Net) (Apostolova 1993a; 1993b; 1999; 2010; 2011a/b). The analysis of the topics today relies on Maslow's pyramid of needs, Hofstede's organizational theory of culture, and the triadic entity of ethos-pathos-logos. The main problem of the vast applicability of the argumentation theoretical tools and concepts is its own omnipotence: it can extend beyond the reasonable field of rhetoric and dominate human values. This becomes a matter of great responsibility when the development of the intelligent web is concerned for it turns out that the formal limitations of a web tool can suppress human performance and create a wave of pessimism flooding the markers of human identity. The web is based on the infocomplex where symbols stand for spaces and borders, hierarchies and binders, powers and limitations to e-existence. The latest developments of the expanding field of Rhetorical studies have added novel inspiration and further deep motivation of this particular search for sytematic method of approaching the e-agora of our global generations. The arguments have been extensively studied in the presentday environment and a remarkable overview is contained in the book of Leo A. Groarke and Christopher W. Tindalɟ, Good Reasoning Matters! A Cognitive Approach to Critical Thinking, 5th ed. 2013 OUP, Canada. What is of special concern to the present study is their development of ethotic schemes and the Pro-Homine Argument which are much in synchrony with the idea of the ethos-axis of the accepted here method. I should also mention another book from the current rhetorical Digital library, edited by Gabriela Kisicek and Igor Z. Zagar: What do We Know about the World? Rhetorical and Argumentative Perspective, Digital Library, 2013. A number of theoretical papers reach to what Leo Groarke from the University of Windsor names 'Thick Theory' where the argument is laid out in in 6 schematic steps of study: 1) Beginning with Logic, 2) Argument in its Rhetorical Context, 3) Argument in its Dialectical Context, 4) Argument in its Dialogical Context, 5) Multi-Modal Argument, 6) Argument and Emotion (pp. 25-45). In his paper, Argumentation as Polyphony: One Speaker, Several Voices, Igor Zagar focuses on defending an interesting statement concerning the understanding of what a 'speaker' or ‘utterer’ is (pp. 49-62). Paul Danler's study The Linguistic-Discursive Creation of the Speaker’s Ethos for the Sake of Persuasion: A Key Aspect of Rhetoric and Argumentation leads into the processes how the Speaker's ethos is created in linguistic discourse (pp. 69-80). One of the main points of our concern is the difference of argumentation and rhetoric expressed

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by the author. He states that language is in the focus of Argumentation, while Rhetoric places in the core the human individual (p. 71). Paul Danler's thesis is that each language structure can improve the Speaker's ehtos if the latter has been created in effect of linguistic discursive construction. In the 6th part, entitled Media, the study of Petra Aczél Challenges of Rhetoric in the Era of “Bytes and Likes“introduces some of the cross-points of rhetoric and the new media. The paper introduces the new concepts of 'visual rhetoric', 'spatial rhetoric', 'procedural rhetoric', 'aural rhetoric' (pp. 329-343). The author discusses the 'visual' and 'iconic' images, the ideas of 'space', 'place', 'position' and 'environment' as well as 'the new cultural spaces'. She mentions a couple of key concepts that open new routes for scientific thinking and reach to broader rhetorical horizons for the uses of 'space' and 'place'. The term 'procedural rhetoric' refers to a couple of levels: graphic (motion, light, rhythm of changes, etc.) and textual (choice, combination, serial sequences, procedures). The term is applicable to both procedural and general models and to such used in media and its functions (menu, toolbar). Procedural Rhetoric thus uses figures and data for procedural, textualized and graphic ways of thinking to design concepts and reach conclusions based on the processes and procedures in view. The author states that there exist textual, visual and iconic projections (p. 340). Phonetic and phonological dimensions of rhetoric are described by the term 'aural rhetoric' (p. 341). It can be seen further that the developed here methodology has easily recognizable common grounds with the latest developments of rhetorical theory and is not an isolated case, but is a sound methodology, applied here to the purposes of the study of the communicative intercultural and interlingual situation in quite a representative extraction of its phenomenology.

1.6 Towards a General Rhetorical Matrix The adoption of a holistic approach to intercultural rhetoric requires setting the study of interlingual figures in a system, which can have linguistic, psychological, sociological, political, and cultural levels but is functionally bound to the basic rhetorical formula: Who—is speaking what—to whom—when—where—how—why? This enables us to build the basic rhetorical matrix for analysis of crosscultural talk where two Cultures are involved, C1 and C2 in a shared situational context SCT enriched by both cultures' contexts, CC1 and CC2: Placing concrete units of information in this matrix would provide a definite basis for calculating the rate of acceptability of a certain unit, piece of setting or agent of a prognosed situation. Such calculations can

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serve greater international projects and negotiations as well as a national versus global choice. The General Rhetorical matrix is based on the involvement of the following agents of the singular rhetorical situation that can be taken as a Unit of secondary level of complexity: Who: this stands for the agent of a communicative situations in the shifting positions of a Subject and an Object entitled with the encoding, decoding and activating a message of intercultural nature. What: the message seen as a texture where verbal and non-verbal elements serve the purpose of discourse. To Whom: the Who of the Other. When: time-bound features of the situation of exchange. Where: place-bound features of the situation of exchange. How: the rhetorical tools applied. Why: the intention of the agents seen as initiators and utterers in the situation of exchange. Table 1.1.1 Basic Rhetorical Matrix Who C1 Who C2

What M2 To Whom C1 When SC + CC2 Where SC + CC1 How RT2

Why I2

What M1

To Whom C2

When SC +CC1

Where SC + CC1

How RT1

Why I1

hier -archy of subjects M1:M2 hier archy of objects T environ ment P environ ment Rele vance of codes Agree disagree

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Concrete information is not bound to answer the whole matrix. Moreover there is missing or irrelevant and insufficient information. There can also be previously negotiated items and positive experience which would allow pieces of information to be referred to as constant figures or even be eliminated. Then the matrix is naturally reduced to what we have chosen to term optimal matrix since it is a calculation of optimized status. This is an approach which allows statistics and a probabilistic record of communication practices from the point of view of rhetorical management of analogous situations. Here is a random example of such reduced matrix: Table 1.1.2 Optimized Efficient Matrix FA=FAC1 C1 C2

Ev=Ev C2

FA -

EvC2 -

Time

Place

Objectives

T0

T0

OC1

Rh Tools RTC1

T0

T0

OC2

RTC2

Practically efficiency is acquired in two ways: by using teams in place of individual representatives for a debate in a round table or other kind of team discussion, or by studying previous experience and eliciting the most efficient representative. Modern technology allows that these two approaches could as well be based on previously developed models by exact (as near as possible) calculation of the parameters of a situation, thus relying on relevant cultural training rather than on natural and undeveloped talent or intuition. In this we come very close to a basic statement of Rhetorical Design Logic: The Rhetorical Design Logic, finally, assumes that "communication is the creation and negotiation of social selves and situations." Rhetorical messages …display a characteristic pattern of content and structure: We expect to find "elaborating and contextualizing clauses and phrases that provide explicit definitions of the context," a definite sense of role and character "through manipulation of stylistic elements in a marked and coherent way," and "classically 'rational' arguments and appeals designed to persuade the hearer that the speaker's symbolic reality is true or correct (but not legitimate or powerful or conventional)" (O'Keefe, 1988:88) ( In Fundamentals of Argumentation Theory, 1996 ). Another line of studies which is very close to this systematic approach is pragma-dialectics: Pragma-dialectics is an argumentation theory developed by Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst in the Speech Communication Department of the University of Amsterdam (2003).Van Eemeren and Grootendorst's

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most important publications in English are Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions (1984), Argumentation, Communication, and Fallacies 1992a), and (together with Sally Jackson, and Scott Jacobs) Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse ( 1993). ( In Fundamentals of Argumentation Theory, 1996 ) A further content-design model of the offered system of intercultural rhetoric would view certain aspects of those two aspects of rhetorical analysis especially when the arguments and figures are isolated, studied and re-combined to suit new purposes in a line of secondary intentionality of texture where persuasive aspects have formative force but are not explicitly marked.

1.7 Cultural Matrix Data Character Intercultural rhetoric incorporates development of cultural rhetorical models, implementing the basic cultural notions of elements or layers (symbols, heroes, rituals and values) and of spheres (religion, philosophy, history, arts, science, education, sports). A cultural rhetorical model is to be viewed again on two levels: concerning its philosophical grounds and concerning its instrumental aspects. The philosophical grounds of a complex rhetorical study can be found in the recovery of practical philosophy. This theme harks back to the classical concept of phronesis, practical wisdom in a given case. Toulmin is a major figure in the recovery of phronesis, especially with the publication of The Uses of Argument (1958) and Human Understanding (1972). The other major figure in this recovery is Chaim Perelman, with The New Rhetoric (co-authored with L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958/ 1969). Both Toulmin and Perelman were surprised to discover far more interest in their work among speech communication scholars than within their own disciplines. (Fundamentals of Argumentation Theory, 1996: 202). One is socialized into language games by acquiring their endemic myths, conventions, rules, moves, and substantive beliefs. These elements get their meanings in their uses. Thus Toulmin (1958, 1972) proposed that people organize their affairs around pragmatically incommensurable bodies of knowledge. … He was thinking chiefly of the differences across academic disciplines, but the idea of a field of knowledge can be extended as well to social movements, families--indeed human groups of any sort. (In Fundamentals of Argumentation Theory, 1996: 203).

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The instrumental aspects include the mechanisms for inventing, combining, using and improving the expressive means of rhetoric—the figures, which tradition has viewed as figures of thought, figures of speech and figures of style (Murphy 1974: 21). Applying a modern interdisciplinary approach and keeping in mind pragmatic attitudes to language usage, the levels of linguistics and the studies in the nature, types and uses of arguments, we have chosen to classify generally the figures of rhetoric into three groups representing three layers of persuasive expressive instrumentaria. The first layer includes the figures of language, which are the concern of linguistics and stylistics: syntactic, textual and lexical. Since they are generated within the means of natural languages, they are culturally dependent and bear national or transnational values. There is an example for cultural transition for each sub-group: the presentations of undergraduates are structured in different ways when they are presented in their native tongue and in English; the high-school leavers tend to use both in Bulgarian and in English idiomatic expressions while the papers of university graduates tend to use analytical structures. A Bulgarian bank manager told me in the year 2000 he was extremely amused by the CV of an international employee, where the young man had mentioned his career goals, religion, food preferences, hobbies and interests. Ten years later it did not sound strange even to the last bureaucrat in a Bulgarian office. The Western Europeans talked about our ‘accession’ to Europe, while the Eastern Europeans in general talked about our ‘joining’ the EU. In 2011 our social net was filled with rising waves of indignance with the ‘Bulgarian gypsies’, nourished by a German political scholar and a speech of the president of France. After tolerating them as outsiders to our collapsing economy of the earlier order, in agreement with world recommendation, using no social tools for incorporating them as efficient community members, we were directly accused of being 'sheepish'. Rhetoric cleared off European talk when interests interfered, and our part in a growing conflict became vowed as the side that was to take on the responsibility. This is a manifestation of the index of public talk—there is tension in the source of such public outcome. The second layer of intercultural rhetoric includes the figures of thought which are universal but can be individually encoded. While the validity of an argument is a concern of logic, the choice of an argumenttype and the choice of verbal forms is of concern to rhetoric. This is the fundamental layer of persuasive discourse, where our matrix as displayed above is to be applied to effect.

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The third level could be called generic. It is concerned with the processes of encoding and metaphorisation both in diachronic and in synchronic respects. It is a concern of the studies of cultural conscience and touches upon the grounds of rhetoric and linguistics where verbal encoding-decoding, language creativity and situational variation of choice are concerned. This is a problem of further project but our hypothesis is that metaphors are expressive complexes—engine programmes - serving to guard the main stem of the cultural identity of humanity (Apostolova, 2005).

1.8 The Topics of Modern Cross Cultural Compatibility The final stage of developing a system of intercultural rhetoric is based on close study of the topics of modern crosscultural compatibility. The varied faces of humanity are individually encoded in such notions as: Freedom, Ecology, Famine relief, Discriminations, Survival, Health, Humanity, WWW. The general codes presuppose referring to the fundaments of humanity, while the individual translations would be the area of disagreement where topics such as ‘globalism’, ‘national identity’, ‘war’, ‘peace’, ‘East”, ‘West’, ‘flood’, ‘minority’, ‘integration’, ‘democracy’, ‘success’, ‘financial interests’, ‘sexism’, pollution’ etc. raise controversial arguments. There are two sets of rhetorical expression: the first set of figures pursues change of status and we have chosen to call them “formulas of revolt” and the second set serves to persuade of inaction, patience, holding back human interference with natural processes—these we have chosen to call “formulas of wisdom”. Both of them, however, are designed to serve as borders or to overcome borders: in their moments of strength, weakness and redundant effect. Here are a couple of examples: Formulas of revolt—urging to action for the overcoming of a crisis in an indirect and direct ways: x Conscience makes cowards of us all…(Shakespeare, Hamlet) x Oh, you foolish and reckless one, why art thou ashamed to call thyself Bulgarian and spokest not thou thy mother tongue! But we have had our own kingdom and glorious kings… (Paisius, History of the Slavs and Bulgarians, 18th C) x Men of England, wherefore plough, for the lords who lay you low! (Shelley)

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x Wisdom—listening to reason for preserving humanity: generalized experience of humankind in the encapsulated triadic entity of ethos, pathos and logos, applicable to a random individual case x … And forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum… x We abide in time and time is in ourselves (Vasil Levski, national Bulgarian hero). x The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.(Donald Williams). There is a third group of utterances often quoted as such of formulaic character: witty and humorous expressions coming as bridges of tension and classified as acceologic not as active text formulae: Evil does not exist. (A. Einstein) Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain) Rhetoric has always viewed current social practice. Yet, a system of rhetorical studies is a common cultural domain of humanity. Ancient Eastern schools of thought and Ancient Greco-Roman tradition have proven that having crossed time borders and cultural limitations. An intercultural rhetoric is based on comparative analysis and while synchronic in content it would be a further development of the system of rhetoric which by far has viewed individuals from one culture, although belonging to different social layers. An intercultural extension of the system of rhetoric views individuals and social groups belonging to different cultures. The significance of developing intercultural rhetoric can be measured with the vastness of problems of humanity which nowadays can be coped with through crosscultural compatibility on all social levels which can be reached in talk or otherwise—in suppressing cultures and destroying cultures which would inevitably lead to confrontation. Although rhetoric has always dealt with persuasion in socially significant speech, it has always sought to reach the individual. Modern intercultural rhetoric is to search for the individual in a network of cultures. Therefore its development is a challenge to modern intercultural studies.

1.9 A Note on the State of Bulgarian Rhetorical Studies The issues of Virtual rhetoric in Bulgaria are studied by Vanya Mavrodieva and her team (Mavrodieva 2010) and in her latest book (Mavrodieva 2013).

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The first university Department of Rhetoric was established in 1976 as a separate division of Sofia University. The Department became a part of the Faculty of Philosophy in 1998. The Department of Rhetoric offers BA, MA and doctoral programs. The curriculum contains the following blocks: x General education - Basic Social Sciences (Philosophy) required for a specialist in contemporary rhetoric (History of Philosophy, Ethics, Aesthetics, Logic etc.). x Specialised courses - disciplines that form the professional competencies required for special rhetoric: History of Bulgarian Rhetoric, Ancient rhetoric, Contemporary Rhetoric, Public Speaking, Political Rhetoric, Non-verbal Communication, Orthoepy etc. x Profiled courses - Business Communication, Negotiations, Public Relations, Advertising, Political Studies, Forensic Rhetoric, Rhetoric of the Ancient East, Rhetoric in Cyberspace or Virtual Rhetoric and some more. x Practice - 3 - Debating, Presentation skills, Speaking and behaviour in front of camera and microphone. Workshops are compulsory for the students. The Master class program aims at training future professionals, experts, consultants, lecturers and researchers in the field of rhetoric in the following areas: ancient, medieval and modern rhetoric. The electronic scientific journal “Rhetoric and Communication”– rhetoric.bg–was launched in 2011. The editorial board includes reprentatives from five countries. Rhetoric is a part of the syllabi of 7 Bulgarian Universities besides Sofia University: x x x x x x

University of the World and National Economy Shumen University South-West University New Bulgarian University Varna Free University Burgas Free University

There are three kinds of courses: compulsory, elective and optional. Rhetoric is on the list of compulsory subjects for the subjects like PR,

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Public Administration and Journalism, while specialised courses are offered everywhere in Bulgarian Academia. An example is the syllabus for BA and MA classes in English and American Studies and Applied Linguistics at the Philology Faculty of the South West University where elective courses of Persuasive Discourse and Rhetorical Analysis have been offered for the latest 10 years and have become favourite with the BA undergraduates, while the Master class involves as compulsory subject Socio-cultural aspects of translation. There are also the training courses of Spoken and Written English, Business Translation, Official documents and letters where presentation skills are trained for the needs of language teachers, translators and editors. Such courses are designed to develop the research and practical skills of linguists as cultural mediators and are set about fulfilling course project where each of the trainees works on an individual portfolio of 4 to 8 specific tasks. In the fall semester of 20112012 academic year there were 452 such portfolios contributing to a course project on the ethos, pathos and logos as dominating features in ediscourse. A longitudinal project on the Roots of Nostalgia started with the Master classes in February 2012 and is expected to be completed in 2014. (Above data is extracted from Mavrodieva&Apostolova 2012) The teaching of Rhetoric cover all main areas of changing public speech practices and reach far beyond the special academic courses of rhetoric. The Rhetoricians and theoreticians of Rhetoric are focused on teaching and synchronization of analyses of current practices in Bulgaria. Their main contributions are within the systematized functional approach to theory and methodology on the one hand, and into the case study and corpus analyses. As is the case with Bulgarian-English interferences studies, the vast data is yet to be organized and systematized. The most important names and their works I have relied on in this study are those of my teachers and colleagues from Sofia University who have preserved the tradition of Classical Rhetoric education: General Rhetoric and Prescriptive Rhetoric: Yordan Vedar (2000a/b, 2001), Donka Alexandrova (2008); History of Rhetoric and Bulgarian Medieval diplomacy: Donka Alexandrova (1984, 1985, 2006), Velitchko Rumenchev (2004, 2006, 2012); Court Rhetoric Velitchko Rumenchev (1997); Argumentation in Business Kulevski (2002, 2010); Education Yanka Totzeva (2006); Political and academic speaking (Mavrodieva, Tisheva); Public presentation and innovation of the ars rhetoricae; Virtual Rhetoric and Visual Rhetoric: Ivanka Mavrodieva (2013: 35-45). Bulgaria has always valued public speaking as a high-class skill. Rhetoric is seen as a necessary course for university graduates in all its

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specific objectives and forms. Sofia University is the undisputable leader in Rhetorical education while the other High Schools of Bulgaria find their specific paths in answering the needs of their trainees whether they be engineers or medical managers or linguists or politicians. As far as practice-oriented theoretical rhetorical developments are concerned, we have gained speed in the latest years in all fields of discourse, while in the 1990s there was a vacuum where political ideology vanished leaving a disoriented political dialogue shaped roughly around the bipolar opposition of totalitarian–democratic in a conceptual chaos. The great emigration waves in the 1990s needed persuasive discourse to re-shape their Bulgarian identity in the English speaking world. We had to fight nostalgia and we had to produce the parents of the global generation. I started my experiment in open knowledge with no institutional support. Today, 25 years later it meets understanding and runs to pressing educational imperatives. Probably it is time to push it further but before that I need to record its basic features and outline its enormous instrumental uses for modelling the ethos of E-kind.

CHAPTER TWO THE NATURE OF THE ARGUMENTATIVE APPROACH

The Argumentative Approach, applied to the procedures of English language learning (ELL) can be seen as a complex analytical tool for the studies of the transforming brain structures in the process of cultural modelling carried out as English language teaching (ELT). It is applicable to any procedure of learning, but my first need for it and the first field of applying it was the ELT classroom which had to get ouside established significancies and introduce the future to my students. The beginning of the AA was a period of its own Argumenting for it called for the responsibility of a teacher activating brain structures to efficiency where and when ideology had collapsed and only primary ethical grounds of survival reigned.

2.1 Explain to Me Today it might not be called ‘argumentative’ but something less emotional within the general theory bridging the pragmatic field of rhetoric and semantic studies of language. Its linguistic motivation might be addressed to Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics running down to Firth, Whorf and Saussure and involving the works of R. Hasan and J. Martin 1 . Of later time Ray Jackendoff 2 has chosen to speak of the languages of the mind; Maria Georgieva3 would probably focus on the intercultural compatibility modeling, L. Grozdanova4 would follow her study of the micro-cultural techniques for developing multi-cultural competence. Then, however, it was 1990 and there was no trace of today’s knowledge and practice of ELT methodology exchange: doctor Lozanov's 1

I started with SFL in my unpublished study Rhetorical Aspects of the English (EL classroom) texts as Socio-cultural Formating Agents 2000 2 Jackendoff, R., Languages of the Mind, MIT Press, 1992. 3 Op. Cit, 2002, p. 146. 4 Op. Cit. 2002, p. 131.

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suggestopedia was not seen in Bulgaria as a contribution to the ELT approaches and the MI methodology was not known in its latest applications5. There was an opening new world, the old schoolbooks of English, and the usual plead of the learners of English was: “Explain to me”. What ‘explanation’ means in the case of beginners in the field of new studies is ‘translation’ of the meaning of a language unit or a term into something known—a picture, a text, an action, familiar or compatible with our own environment and cultural space, and it was the task of the teacher to find connections of the knowledge of language and the specific interests of the learner. It is a curious fact that today's university undergraduates who have grown up in Bulgarian speaking environment tend to ask the same and similar questions as the learners of English 25 years ago did, and have even less idea of social register: why is a ship 'she'? In the capacity of what knowledge do you instruct me to write an argumentative essay in this particular way? This can't be so. I've never heard of it. Where did you hear that? Here is my Term Paper: enjoy your reading. The main question was not about the universality of grammars but of the universality of human culture in terms of thinking and in terms of practices fixed about the subject and the object of an action, event or process occurring under certain circumstances. It was a question of ‘translating’ grammar into cultural experience and linguistic categories into existential categories. Existence was perceived as the final grounds for the universality of human talk by people of comparatively broad education who had to rediscover themselves as socially unbound active individuals. In ‘explanation’ of that sort the task was to find the position of a language structure and the arguments for defining it as such. I chose to call it ‘argumentation’ for it was grounded on the understanding fixed in our mother tongue and had nothing to do with the real story of that unit in English. It was sheer rhetoric but its value was in the motivation of introducing new structures–we needed restructuring of our brain activity and we needed rhetoric for relaxing and neutralizing the opposition of the brain of the learners. The metalanguage of a language teacher is like that of a psychiatrist for it is tracing the points of cultural compatibility. It is a fight and the brain is under stress, arguing for its usual grounds. That is why I considered it relevant to call the approach ‘argumentative’—I acted as a philosopher and like a psychiatrist but relied on awareness of what I introduced in each next step so that we could have reliable structures 5

Markova, Zarina, Doctoral Thesis, SU, July 2013.

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inbuilt without damage and with the opportunity for their functioning as generative structures. Our culture is not tolerant: it needs motivation and verification. A teacher becomes trustworthy in impressing the validity of new information in speech. Back in the mid-1990s a mother came to me with her young son and asked: Would you enroll him in your group? We heard you are good”. I answered: “No. We are not good. We are the best.” She was shocked and had no choice in disbelieving my cheeky self-advert for there were no criteria for comparing all the newly-sprung private schools of English then where the teachers were employed as 'instructors in student-centered classrooms' while I was the teacher in teacher-centered classroom and set my rules of behaviour during the introductory lesson. In this particular case we formed a new group of her son and 29 other students and it became the best group I have taught to ever since: 30 young people who started as intermediate and completed as proficient users of English, each of them marking outstanding success in their further university studies and careers. They enrolled because the mother of the first student only repeated my self-advert and her acquaintances would not let her be the winner in a kind of parents' competition. The progress of the group was pre-programmed by our combined effort to see what 'the best' might mean and set the frontier example. I still wonder how subtle the grounds that make other people believe in us are, for the above described case is nothing else but a demonstration of the effect of the Magister dixit fallacy to people who never thought it might not turn true: the desire to make it so did make it. That exactly is the initial step of motivation of the AA. It was followed by hard toil. Thus the apriori motivation is the awareness of the learner's goal: very often it is the task of the teacher to be the first aware of it, and then lead the learner to that awareness. It is the challenging part where a teacher gains the trust and the authority to continue with the work on the mental structures of the learner. Still an individual brain fights against intervention but allows to be accompanied in the effort by the teacher following the same path. Ethos needs getting into the shoes of the ones you teach and be affected by team passion. Pathos grows into empathy and empathy into telepathy. All these procedures effect in data collection and improvement of the teaching-learning methodology. AA is applied in dialogue where awareness and motivation become the two-staged product of shared effort.

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2.2 When the World Suddenly Expanded: the Story of the Argumentative Approach Our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self. (Castells 1996: 3)

At the turn of the millenium our world became suddenly inefficient, not to say–useless and thrown out of history. It was a predictable turn, though, and not the change itself brought the shock to mind but the immediate collapse of a value system that had seemed prospective. We still had to bring up children and take care of the people both leaving for the wide world and remaining here, at home in Bulgaria. Hard work became the fundament of staying motivated as a teacher. Since the old state no longer existed, and the new one was confused in its constituting, the school kept its inertia of both method and content. Teaching English was then a side occupation adding to our family budget. A teacher of English was needed yet despised—a kind of emigrant from our current historically and politically chained culture in our own country—an immigrant into its next time: a cultural outsider, a free particle of the society, an outsider to ideology, a pioneer, a hacker, a guru, and a traitor. A philosopher had no other choice but working for the future and making the change actively in agreement with the circumstances. Thus it happened that for the first time in my life in 1990 I had the freedom to start a school for English language teaching where the methodology was sheer pragmatism and kept growing with each next class. It was private, and „private”–even today–25 years later–is considered slightly inappropriate when education is concerned. I needed not follow official school curriculums. We had all the freedom to let the world in and feel comfortable in seeking our individual places in the world outside, both my students and I. The teaching of philosophy in the form of teaching English ran with time and it proved successful. The environment of this method of saving our minds has ever since been talking with people of all ages and trades and in this flowing debate reaching the reasonable grounds of our activities. Therefore I called this method „argumentative”. I was to introduce new worlds to my students and that needed restructuring of their minds brought up to the best of the Bullgarian natural quality of inquisitive mind and capacity for learning, and to the worst of the Bulgarian environment in terms of closed-culture practices.

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A restructuring of the mind of a learner is based upon the restructuring of the value system and the remotivation of the teacher, therefore I needed the establishment of the integrity of the teaching method. By that time Dr. Lozanov, a psychiatrist, had applied to practice his method of learning through suggestion but it was not very popular then with the educationalists in Bulgaria, and the global information device of the Web was not available, either. It was only a couple of years ago that he was invited at our university and the colleagues from the Department of Pedagogy were enchanted with his talk. He was talking about his 15 schools in Central Europe applying his method of learning, and I was thinking that here, in the West of Bulgaria, I had been doing something very similar with one only school of evening and weekend classes. Fig. 1.2.2 Dr. Lozanov lecturing on the method of Suggestopedia at the South West University of Bulgaria

Today we all have the WWW-environment to do the intensive-learning classroom background for us. Still, there are searching minds, who need freedom in their interpretation: systematization, hierarchial ordering and further uses of the acquired information, however vast it might seem to the untrained mind.

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I felt the need for building awareness of what we were doing with my students. Before that, though, the learners needed motivation for learning the language of a foreign culture. That was not just advertising, nor even persuading them to attend the course or do their drills. It was clearing our minds from ideology, and opening them to the world without fear e.g. reshaping the frontiers of our identity by extending our mother tongue to the English phenomena of our I-language or capacity to achieve knowledge through language. What we were doing was intercultural rhetorical practice in which Bulgarian background was to be translated into efficient English. And we negotiated every next step throughout our English classes. The most frequently asked question was 'Why?' and I needed to do both hard study of the linguistic grounds for certain language usage so different in English from our habitual Bulgarian-speaking or writing practices, and inventing purely rhetorical arguments in order to make them learn it. The first couple of years I had really hard time in establishing a name of a reliable teacher. It was a time of fast changes, though, and results came fast as my graduates took successful job positions or won scholarship at a foreign university of high prestige. That was the first stage of verification. Hard toil followed. Then came the younger learners and for each of the following 17 years I had some hundred to a hundred and 80 students in 9 to 12 groups of different purpose and level, including summer specialized groups for young students of law, biology, physics and environmental studies, and computer-based classes of English. Each year 60 to 80 % of the participants continued at the next level. Students re-enrolled for 4 to 12 years, while adults re-enrolled between 2 and 4 times before going abroad. Parallel to these were my classes for the state schools where again I was teaching to students from their first to their 11th year and since 1992–to the English studies undergraduates at the South Western University of Bulgaria. Again, I had to grow up with each next course, teaching almost all subjects on the English curriculum. I had the privilege, though, of vast case study and could share my frontier Bulgarian-English cross cultural teaching experience. And we continued analyzing our findings and setting our further search as work in progress. Thus it comes that my corpus is based on the study of about 7,000 young learners in progress, about the same number of adult learners from my private school, and about the same number of state secondary school students and university undergraduates. It is roughly estimated to 20,000 individual cases of close longitudinal study and guidance in not less than 4,000 classes per year for 17 years. It was only possible because they participated actively in the process of their own growth. This was the third

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phase of the AA. Then the 75,000 citizens of Kyustendil suddenly became less than 20,000 and I felt my job was completed, closed the school (not finally, though), and turned to the open chance for academic development at the South West University. I shall not count the pages of classwork and homework papers I have read and if anyone is to count the recurrent BEIL uses and misuses that will not be me for statistics here shall turn recurrent and useless, nor shall I count the specific for Kyustendil regional turns of language usage. What is more, I shall not stick to introducing the AA as an ELT method: it is my methodology for learning the minds of the learners and as such it is not focused on the error analysis or on developing a typology (that has been, and is still being, successfully and diligently done by all my EL teaching colleagues at all levels) of errors or incompatibilities. What makes the AA valuable is the access to a changing mind–to some 20,000 changing minds in this single case. The main two categories to follow are Bulgarian and existence. This classifies the AA in the group of suggestopedia and Gardner’s method of Multiple Intelligence6 as one of the cognitive approaches to language acquisition. The difference comes from the theoretical grounds the AA starts: the rhetoric theory of argumentation which is open when topics are concerned and rigid when the principles of good argumentation are to be followed, practically applied here as the chain: motivation–heaping information about the target language–verification–awareness–getting to the next level. It worked. It still works: I am trying it out again with my 3rd year undergraduates of Applied linguistics and English Philology and there are recognizable patterns of cultural speech behavior. Back then, between 1990 and 2007, we were bringing up a young generation which needed integrity while being trained to accept each new culture as extension. The expanse of the World Wide Web made it possible. Then it expanded beyond our individual control. And now, we seem to have been going through similar steps at a broader turn of the spiral of human development. It might appear to the outsider, it has been like running through layers of times and living a dozen of lives. It is much easier: learning to feel synchronic in diachrony relaxes the mind of the learning teacher. Suggestion and argumentation then step aside, letting space for curiosity and adventure. We rediscover the same old humanity in each novel outburst of infomania, pessimism, and aggressive attempts at ultimate control of the infosphere. We need to intensify the good old method of Induction and metaphorically speaking reconceptualize the Organon again 6

Described extensively in Markova, Zarina, Doctoral Thesis, defended in 2013, SU. Unpublished.

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as Francis Bacon did once but this time recognizing the power of deduction and the ubiquity of analogy as a tool for generalizing in efficient discourse7. It is a curious paradox that a constructive methodology was designed for the decoders’ needs while analytical methods in practical language study serve the encoders of the messages. AA and SIAN next are seen as the tools of recognition, while analysis comes next to design the units of construction. Teaching English while learning philosophy of language, thus, has always kept my interest focused on the growing mind and its placement in the world. While living in our native environment we tend to position ourselves in the center of crosscultural intercourse. Suddenly, finding ourselves displaced in an expanding world, we start easily moving in both history and geography, while searching for the promised land of our deemed future. Negation comes first and that leads to rebuttal8. Rebuttal is the almighty principle that directs the movement of the individual human particles within the collider of histories. Once displaced, individuals look for other communities, for humankind cannot live in isolation. Being on the move, we tend to forget that our starting point has also changed position, and we cannot return to it as a fixed ground. Extending our notions of belonging somewhere to the planet Earth, we inevitably become global, while remaining culturally bound to the place and time of our origin. Again rebuttal drives us forth until we find out a global communication environment finally providing us with a home: our own expanded Self. The chronology of ideas is not like the chronology of events. It is not a line. I have not attempted to retell the history of the Web. Neither have I set as a goal to follow historic events. What I am having in mind is to tell the live story of our perception of the opening world for the past 20 years and how we were restructuring our minds using the tools of English 7

This is a reference to Classical education which relied on Aristotle's analytical method of deduction (The Latin title of Analytics is Organon). The beginnings of the Rennaissance with the opening world is marked by the English philosopher Francis Bacon's book entitled Novum Organum Scientiarum ('New Method', 1620) where he re-systematized his contemporary fields of knowledge and set forward the method of induction based on data and statistics. 8 In the year 2007 I started a paper I entitled 'Rebuttal'. In July I was reading at the Bodelian library of Oxford, and I came across a book by an Eastern German colleague whose case for rebuttal was better argumented than mine. The coincidence of topics impressed me, and I started tracking the moments that urged speech or text production on a topic, widely discussed yet not given to me in words of language.

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studies and the Internet. The people I include in the agent ‘we’ are three generations, distinguished not necessarily by age: the complete outsiders to the Internet, those who remained in the peripheral groups of ‘users’, and those who accepted it as novel territory for our adventurous spirit to conquer. The stages of this adventure of the mind can be summarised around the axis of ethos, pathos and logos as: x Discovering the spaces of high tech through young and eager to explore them minds and constructing our novel world without turning back to regrets; x Fighting our sorrows, fears and anger by extending the horizons both eastwards and westwards in the case studies of global humanity, finally arriving at the common grounds of not being unique in being human; x Stressed by the fact of being just a single case in the cultural sphere of humanity, looking for our specific features that make our single case special and turn our single existence into a unique experience worth sharing globally; x Reconsidering our own story, told again and again over the talkative web in the languages of the mind9, in the languages of the heart10, and in the languages of all our diverse backgrounds while reaching the freedom of our common and shared human essence. The concern of all four stages has been intercourse, aimed at understanding and tolerance while stopping at cross-points and defending our identities of risk-takers, doers, and creators of new worlds11 first in tale and play and then in serious deed. Further we are to apply our method of study to the virtual spaces where virtual worlds are created. First comes the tangible, man-made frame of the Internet as a tool, a tale, a playground, a workshop for building worlds, an environment, a territory somewhere between practice and imagination: a vast space to experience and to design, to magick and to name. Next we turn to the familiar grounds of language woven in the texts of those stories that served as roads to follow or abandon, and as doors to open or close in 9

Jackendoff, R., Languages of the Mind, MIT Press, 1992 A metaphor used by Hao Wang, Professor of Logic at Princeton and a biographer of ‘the greatest mathematician of the 20th C, K. Gödel: Wang. H., Reflections on Kurt Gödel, 1987, MIT University press. 11 In President Obama’ s Inaugural Address 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1ljmtaibC4 10

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the phenomenology of our Self-restructuring. Third comes the matrix of our Self-expression that has no need any longer in shiny and noisy toys, or tales about others like us or alien worlds, but reaches directly into other minds engaged in the same old activity of expanding our lives to the frontiers of our experience, or, at least, to where our knowledge might take us.

2.3 Overview of the Argumentative Teaching Interdisciplinary Background: Turning Virtual ‘The lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind’ Gibson, W., Neuromancer, p. 51

There is no way, while looking for our common cultural Self in the textual store-spaces of the web, to avoid being interdisciplinary. The Net as the creation of human culture has its fascinating story. Its nature as an environment for our individual Selves calls for exploration and adventure; its influence on the mind needs close study, and its being shared info space, not necessarily text-bound yet communicated in message bodies, and based on semiotics-emerging on the spot appearance suggest that we start from the beginning of its existence and go through three layers of or enquiry: (1) The first layer of questions concerns the exploration of the virtual existence and the anticipation of the problems an individual can run into; (2) Then comes the question about the signs needed for efficient transfer and further existence of humankind in the virtual environment; (3) Next there comes the prospect of a new type of culture arising within the virtual environment whose beginning was set back in the late 20th century and whose progress is still inadequately assessed. Upon the end of the first decade of the 3rd millennium many questions about the cultures of the Earth seem to have found their answers. At the same time prognoses and fears from the last decade of the past century seem to have faded away missing to come true. There have been frontier findings, now looking absurd, useless, senseless, and funny. That makes me adopt a descriptive methodology and just tell the story as it used to grow and had us involved with its further development as mere players on a stage that is a whole world of worlds. In the beginning it was the speed of communication that enchanted us: in the late 1990s we used to send emails overseas and keep in touch with people all over the globe. Then we became gamers.

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Later on we discovered we could still win the competition with the web intelligence in designing our individual codes–writing down messages the ways we spoke and the ways we could hear other people’s speech. Then we formed communities. We needed to know how we were changing. We also discovered that the world wanted to know about us and that the world had an image of us that did not coincide with our view of ourselves. We kept travelling round the world and discovering other people like us–looking for our spaces, yet remaining lonely. We needed information and motivation. We needed a distant view to the growing set of worlds so that we knew what it was like. We needed some general view, a system of philosophy of the rising new culture that was to establish its roots and its prospects. Philosophy, theory of culture, linguistics, theory of the intertext, new rhetoric, cultural anthropology and so on–every next researcher seemed to start from their own grounds, while ending at computer studies and plunging into the ocean of the global web. It had seemed only natural for me to start from experience and store it in a systematic way until it touched upon the categories of philosophy and then start asking concrete questions. The winding path of my quest went through the grounds of: x Philosophy: from Descartes to Floridi and back to Ancient Eastern culture; x Cognitive studies as that field is termed in Europe or mind studies as it is called at the universities from Cambridge, MA; x General linguistics, Applied linguistics, Approaches and methods of Language Teaching; x Theories of the metaphor, myth and story telling; x Cultural stereotypes; x Intertext in global multilingual usage; x Pragmatics of web communication; x Semiotics; x Neuroscience; x Statistics; x Modelling; x Ethics; x Bulgarian studies of the net; x Everything ending in the choice of meanings to the same worldworth word of unending existence of our kind.

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In my experience it happened so that I was involved in studying the theories of intercultural communication and designing rhetorical models, theories of intertextuality and functional styles, while my heart as always belonged to philosophy of science where prognostics abides.12 This text is based on my individual experience and—to me it is structured to the basic fields I explored while pursuing my own adventure in the net spaces. That makes it seem eclectic. Yet, I dare say, it is consistent and while running across a couple of fields it is targeted at the entity of the Self displayed in the entity of the Individual’s e-projections in the varied body of one’s encrypting of oneself in one’s messages. It is a Demosthenes-type of self-talk in public or the inventio aspect of a rhetorical outcome. I shall not overuse terms like ‘discourse’ or ‘text’. It is the message that matters with its intertextual searches for the universal features of human culture and its metaphoric vehicles of individual significance. It is the eloquentio aspect of rhetoric. I shall not put markers of extreme significance on either term used here, for they are only temporarily valid. They are insufficient if used alone, for 12

A list of the basic authors and books that have influenced the understanding of the E-culture as it is functionally described here should start from: Floridi, L., Philosophy and Computing, Routledge, L-NY, 1999; Gibson, W., Neuromancer, N.Y., Ace Books, 1984, p. 51; Heim, M, Virtual Realism, 1998, OUP, Preface; Woolgar, S., Virtual Society: Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, 2002, OUP, pp. 14 – 21; Wyatt, S., G. Thomas and T. Terranova, They Came, They Surfed, They Went Back to the Beach, in Woolgar, S., Virtual Society: Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, 2002, OUP, p. 23; Manuel Castells, Pekka Himanen, The Information Society and the Welfare State. The Finnish Model, 2002; Kevin Robins, Frank Webster, The Virtual University? Knowledge, Markets, and Management, 2002; Robin Mansell, Inside the Communication Revolution. Evolving Patterns of Social and Technical Interaction, 2002; William Dutton, Information Politics in the Digital Age, 1999; Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, 1994; Chrisanthi Avgerou, Information Systems and Global Diversity, 2002; Michael S. Scott Morton, The Corporation of the 1990s. Information Technology and Organizational Transformation, 1991. From the Bulgarian authors I have relied on first come: Ivanka Mavrodieva and Irina Perianova; Plamen Bratanov and Elit Nikolov, Dobrin Spasov, Bogdan Dyankov and Boris Chendov. In the course of time my first ELS university graduates started their individual research Slavka Popova analyses the linguistic aspects of PR discourse, Dafina Kostadinova is following the diversity of the ELT classroom and the science BEIL interferences and V. Sakareva studies the interlingual inferences in the translation of legal documents between Bulgarian and English (2011). Maria Anastasova is the best of my MA translators’ class to adjust Bulgarian Renaissance text into contemporary English. (2011)

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very often they refer to the same object while explaining it in their own ways as is the case with cyber space, virtual space, e-space, web-space, net-space. What is of importance here is the connection between fields of inquiry: the path of knowledge that goes through term-grown fields where the knowledge of our future existence grows. We do not extract the threads from a carpet in order to enjoy the pattern closely. We need not extract what we have been used to call “terms” from this text in order to understand how the author has used them until they have grown into categories of a broader nature. Our object of investigation is complex seen from the inside and vast seen from the standpoint of its creators. On the outside it is being experienced to the effect that each individual (person or culture) is trying to translate itself into the opening environment for survival safely. It is the actio aspect of rhetoric based on the sufficiency and relevant distribution of arguments, and on the good memory of who we are while we are exploring the spaces of the talked-into-being brave new world (Shakespeare, The Tempest, Aldous Huxley, Brave New World) of global humanity.

2.4 The Nature of the Argumentative Approach: Summary I have been trying to establish a clear and simple model of the Argumentative approach all these years. The initial idea was that it is a two-stage teaching based on motivation and awareness, followed by a pause of heaping language information through text and grammar drills, and applied again on the next level. This is not the whole idea although it is the core of the incessant line of progress of both the learners and the teacher. A later development reveals the pre-stage of investigation: the study of the group carried out by the teacher in terms of analysis of their demographic and psychographic features which are recursive as far as the current cultural environment is concerned and the four types of groups of learners with their needs were established: the adult learners; the state school groups; the university groups; the fast growing student learners in the private groups. The first phase then is limited in time: initial motivation does not take other time than the time of the first 2 or 3 sets of classes and then goes as underlying situational complex that optimizes the relations within the matrix of the learning situation. Then there is fast heaping of information and incessant drills demanding involvement of all the group. This is based on all the teaching and public speech performance

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strategies and techniques within range. Including incessant advertising campaign of the newly acquired language territories. Competition is the main vehicle and reward in any form that is known to the teacher: a box of chocolates at the far end of the classroom that is to be reached by those who manage to produce language skill at each step in walking towards them, whether it be a number of nouns, adjectives, irregular verb forms or rhymes; a pack of sweets; an apple; a cardboard star; a pen; a piece of chalk; even a button or a peg. Nothing abstract. It is not sufficient to be praised: they need the pin to fix the praise. Then suddenly awareness dawns and we go to the next stage: motivation, based this time on previous achievement; heaping information, which turned hardest at the second level for all the groups; drills based on competition and awareness. It is easy to notice the lack of the final step: verification. For the adult groups it comes immediately for their effort is grounded on the acquisition of a document, a visa, a job position and that determines the objectives and the tempo of learning and motivates all the exhausting drills of tired people after a hard day. Many of them kept sharing that the two or three hours spent in class were the only time they felt important. The students, however, need their time to get verification of their cross-cultural achievement. Therefore we kept having group events like stage performance for Christmas and outings at the end of the year between 24th and 30th May with giving away their special certificates. Summer groups came as doing the hard work for those who were preparing for exams and as fun for those who visited the computer-based classes and relief for their parents. The basic requirement for the teacher is to be immersed in the learning situation as one of them: to have joy at the beginning of each next lesson, to take part in the cunning of a game of making them understand and do things, to be the friend who listens to their talk and offers exits of hard situation, to take part in the adventure of the young inquisitive minds into vast new opening worlds, forgetting about other ambition and grow up together with the young learners. In short: to live in the future. And to design a syllabus each time for each group. The first year of my EL teaching I designed my own Complete Beginners course: there are still copies of it in the cellar of our house—48 big pages of typed exercise. The rules were given at the beginning of each lesson, followed by small sheets of ten-line drill—there were a hundred of them circulating in the group. The page for homework was given at the end of the lesson. The lessons were designed for 50 times of teaching 3 classes, and followed by 48 pages of homework tasks. We learned about

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3000 words starting from coinciding forms in English and Bulgarian such as 'film' and 'doctor', and following the Bulgarian grammar for establishing the diverse items of the foreign language that needed to be learned. I had to reorder the teaching of grammatical tenses, for the current textbooks of English started with the Present Continuous Tense which is easy to the Bulgarian perception of the world. Instead we learned the Present Simple Tense. It took me 6 weeks. After that the group covered each next Tense for a week. The course proved efficient and I needed a restatement on the grounds of an English-based textbook. The system Strategies13 seemed closest to my style of teaching and I used that system in combination with English Grammar by Vessela Katsarova14; then Murphy's practical grammar, the Discoveries series and Success at First Certificate, combined with my first two published books of exercises: Reading Comprehension and The Composition, supported by thousands of unpublished exercises based on excerpts from unadapted text, and the books for TOEFL and SAT training as well as some Proficiency books. I basically applied Oxford student books for my groups, for they have a clear-cut layout without polluting the pages with their exercises as current Longman editions did: the exercises were what I did for them. We sometimes used the workbooks, particularly when I introduced the Matrix books for levels 3 and 4 i.e. for intermediate and advanced learners in their 5th to 7th school year. The Sofia University series of Admission Tests and the Book of Tests for UNWE by Irina Perianova applied in the 9th and 10th year groups made the learners like 'real' hard text and take a challenge. Later on we used Stephen King and Terry Pratchett, Tolkien and the Harry Potter series, Andersen and our own interactive game-version in English of the Bulgarian tale The three brothers and the Golden Apple. Age did not play so important a role, but individual brilliance: there was a young inquisitive kid who covered all the levels for children the first 4 years and I moved him to the adult group where he felt at home, yet the group seemed unhappy for he kept asking hard questions all the time, so I moved him with the intensive group for TOEFL Test drills. He is now a lawyer in New York. There is a professor at Stanford, another one did law at Harvard, still others have found job in great software design companies; there are a couple of doctors, a psychiatrist in Kentucky, some work in Denmark, some study in Germany, some are hereabouts in the WWW—all of them—the people who never knew that something 'is forbidden' or 'cannot be done'. 13 14

Katsarova & Pavlova, 1992 Abbs, B., I. Freebairn, 1992. Opening Strategies, S.

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My workbooks were not precise: I made them in haste and they have their design fixed to a purpose. They worked to that purpose. Now they could be revived—in a way. Not with the same texts for the cultural situation has changed. The matrix is still valid though just as it has been valid ever since the time of Confucius and the later times of Socrates and Aristotle, and the shining Aspasia, the sun of Greece, disciple-daughter of Epicurus and Pericles' concubine (www.epicurus.info/etexts/wallace _epicureanism.html), who had her own school of rhetoric in Athens and wrote some heap of books. All the teachers of humanity who relied on good will—good feelings and good logic, and who never missed a chance to learn: the displaced binders of realities who travelled in time and experienced the adventure of the mind. The transition to SIAN was just a step forward: out of the classroom and into the vast spaces provided by the WWW for extending the existential spaces of a culture where the main problem is how to keep our identity. For this purpose we have to first find our unique features and the motivation Why we shall stick to this identity. And again we turn the wheel up a broader turn of the spiral: motivating our existence, searching for and storing database, letting awareness dawn on us individually, and search for verification in the shared mind of the E-kind. Schematically the AA can be represented as the communicative tool of SIAN. Fig. 1.2.3 The AA stages M3 A2

Awareness Mi

Level 1

M2 {Mi;Ma}

Heaping Info

Level 2

Pain—trauma—solitude—nothing of these makes us, Bulgarians, unique. What makes us unique is learning how to re-experience, store, teach, and train each next generation to empathy in our mental language capacity. It is suggestion, argumenting and replay of all the texts comprising human culture today in the virtual space. We can still do that, for our physical world has not changed so much in the latest 50 years: our

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practices are much similar to those of our grandparents, while we can experience the world and get into the virtual space, looking for adventure together with our yet unborn grandchildren. In the two books that follow I shall not explain further but will show the application of this multilayered search to the understanding and assessment of language-based events unbound by other purpose but the immediate need for restructuring our identity to efficiently fit and survive through a cultural situation of pressing social significance. While Book 2 is fixed on building the educational image of the eagora and finding out its uses as textual topi for the cultural motivation of Bulgarian choices in an argumentative learning, Book 3 is fixed on a couple of linguistic areas that have disturbed me in later years spent with my university B.A and M.A classes: the two stages of mindwork here are reversed: heaping data to achieve awareness, then argumentation as the binding procedure of verification across the areas of knowledge accessible to me. A holistic study of the existential boundaries of identity by means of and within the environment of language performance. The text is not ordered chronologically as it occurred but is bound by its natural conceptual development in what I have called ‘the Self of a text’ which is the nearest expression of I-language in the function of an utterer who makes up a reality.

BOOK II RHETORIC AND CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCES

INTRODUCTION TRADITIONAL VALUES AND THE TALKATIVE WEB

Imagine me a new world; Tell me the tale of it; Teach me how to create it; Be my teammate in a game of adventure.

Whatever we say in the beginning in an attempt to draw the attention of those, interested in the survival of humankind in the 21st century's turmoil of cultural diversity and hostility, would be incomplete or inconsistent. This is the most fascinating thing about getting a piece of writing started with the single aim of raising a couple of questions and the hope of getting sufficient feedback whether it be silence, criticism or telling tales of individual experience. Scripta manent has been the redundant mantra of all educators and legislators ever since the Golden Age of the Latin West. Verba vollant we have all been used to repeating—getting into the fashion of despising those who have never made the effort of becoming men or people, if you prefer, of letters. Yet, one of the most amazing facts about human civilization has always been the spread of cultures by word of mouth, often accompanied by picture and action, rather than by diligent study of recorded text. All our tradition seems to have relied on a carrier as vulnerable as a person’s memory, and on a source as unreliable as subjective interpretation of a fact. Speaking doesn’t care about time and space, for it contains the universe in the very act of sharing it, making the monadic experiences of other individuals merge into an entity. Touching upon ends and aspects, individual entities form. Paradoxical though it might seem, an unfinished or smaller monad of a speech community suffices to fill up for the unexplored sections of their individual universes, which in their wholesomeness still remain complete: truth is born in debate. It becomes puzzling when the initial sharing community is suddenly broken and its members become parts of other sharing communities:

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suddenly the pieces of knowledge already acquired turn out useless, and have to be remodeled in order to fit into the pictures of shared mind of the new communities. When a person is culturally unadaptive, the shared mind of a new community does not coincide with the common mind or the deep structures of another culture. Here is where the process of acculturation needs bridging by translating culturally-diverse value loaded languages into one another within the situational context of ongoing talk. This is all like blind people trying to describe what the elephant looks like to a new community of blind people, when they suddenly find out that the members of that new community to which the elephant is unfamiliar, do not possess the pieces that had formed the picture in the former community, while some of them can see and visualize, but are deaf and dumb. Even so, there have been quite satisfactory descriptions of what an elephant looks like by people who have cared to do the puzzle after having collected whatever pieces there were preserved. The next step is to impress that picture to people who cannot hear, to people who cannot smell and so on, until they have managed to reconstruct the elephant in full, only to find out that their world has changed to such an extent that it contains no longer elephants, nor even community members to whom the elephant might be described in the terms of human perception. It has given much headache to the curious and exploring minds of humankind to undergo all the stages of acquiring, sharing, passing on, storing, and doing all the other activities that form a piece of knowledge in a pool of ideas. A similar case is formed with the shift of the meanings of the concept of ‘culture’. To most Bulgarians it is still the highest achievement of human intellectual and material powers of creation. ‘Cultural community’ is in the shadow of ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ culture, while ‘tradition’ is generally seen in folklore. In the following text I shall use ‘culture’ in the meaning of ‘creative achievement’ and in its diversified functioning as ideas; material or technological achievement; social and community existence, and all those reflected in the web spaces of growing virtual modes of human culture. The opposition ‘traditiona’ and ‘virtual’ when culture is concerned is not exactly polarized as ‘virtual’ is laden by vice and virtue in all their manifested shapes. The opposition refers to only attitudes of generations of creators and users in terms of negation and rebuttal of age-bound communities of varied type whose binding concept is the provision of their further existence. Later on, I shall give definitions to specified uses of the

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concept of culture, but altogether it is the abstract idea of the frontiers of our identities in all their potential activities marking human existence and featured by the opposition of ‘belonging’ or ‘not belonging’ to some of its manifestations. This is broad enough and simple enough to serve pragmatic purposes. Electronic media of communication have provided the environment for a new literacy based on a use of language very similar to the direct, living communicative situation or a network of speech situations. Writing for the Internet, or for any type of software, is speaking to an audience including our own selves. It is a space where our speech is viewed, shared, enacted, supplied with a feedback including both its reflection and its answer. This space, or communicative environment, is different from real life since it creates realities of shared mind of its own metastructure, an e-Self, which is different from the realities of human mind since it is virtual, electricallypowered and technologically dependent. However it is capable of supporting a communicative space where verbal proceeding runs to its complete unfolding as a unity of ethos, pathos and logos, saved and replayed within a vast body of shared intellectual capacity and interplay of signs of varied character and function. From a pragmatic point of view electronic communication provides an approach to language usage analogous to that of the period of transition from oral to written culture but carried out on the complex level of hypercultural transformation, and, of opposite direction—from written culture to electronic orality, and from abstract through virtual modeling to holography, and finally, to the production of material objects and living creatures.1 The problems which arise from this transformation concern the very nature of the new speech situation: the nature of the reality created by means of electronic communication; the agents of the speech situation; the characteristic features of the message; the extra linguistic factors; the psycho-physiological effects—all of these reflected in the ethical aspects of the cultural transitions from the physical to the virtual space and from the mental to the virtual space, and vice versa. The undergraduate students from Harvard colloquia in applied linguistics back in the fall of 2007 used to say: “Tell us a tale, and we’ll engineer it”. That was no joke but a call for sharing another individual’s experience in world-weaving.

1

I have in mind a recently read Sc Fi story: The Baby Printer in Deus ex Homine by Hannu Rajaniemi, in Years Best ScFi Vol 11, N.Y., 2006 Hartwell, D., K. Cramer (eds.)

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Chronologically, (seen from the position of an outsider to the field of electronic engineering) in the Bulgarian cultural space computers came with the invention of John Vincent Atanasoff and the educational policy of the state back in the second half of the 20th century that was to popularize the ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer) in the 1970s. We were involved in the competition of the worlds on all sides of the Iron Wall, (not necessarily the two tangible sides of the conventional idea of a brick wall running through Berlin but all the possible oppositions that comprise the complex antinomic nature of our existence). We were trained to compete. And the first real networking we did was based on word of mouth talk between real people. We were ready for rushing into the next nearest future of competition, connecting and computing, even at the risk of replacing monism of mind, framed by totalitarian education by pluralism leading to chaos, for we needed to re-establish the hierarchy of human values by repositioning our viewpoint of our own identity or sense of life in the power of the individual who has the freedom to re-conceptualize the worlds of significance for the individual life and reform society through building plurality of communities based on shared knowledge received through shared cognitive experience and directed towards shared values. Our university years in the late 1970s started with the pride in the first Fortran machine and learning how to translate machine language into symbols, then came the growth of hardware technology and Pravetz-8 and Pravetz-16 PC machines, and software design using a variety of programming languages, to become mass craze in the end of the 1980s with PC games, then—in the late 1990s—the email and chat rooms allowing fast connection with the numerous Bulgarians from the first great waves of emigrants overseas after opening the national borders in the beginning of the 1990s. We are using the web space today to its both ends as developers and users, and, to its complexity of applications, and there is no limitation to the inventive mind of a young person that seeks adventure and glory, as well as—to the experienced and rich mind of an elder person that seeks friends, entertainment and an understanding of the sense of life. To us the Internet has always been a space for information, and information is always challenging with its language usage. It was only some ten years ago that David Crystal brought up the key problems of a linguist’s approach to the web 2 . We were all then shocked with the changes of standard in both written and spoken language and the diversity of sociolects e.g. from chat to formal lecture on the Internet. 2

Crystal, D., Language and the Internet, CUP, 2nd.edition, 2006

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Now things do not seem shocking even to people who have been experiencing the change. The World Wide Web is being designed to speak all the languages in the world in all their varieties and a thorough classification of the languages of the web is to repeat the encyclopedia of world languages plus all the specific e-space based languages. While the frame used by site owners is in the tendency of becoming universal (while speaking all the world languages), the content is as diverse as the web communities are. The contexts of the web-texts then fall into two sub-levels corresponding to the ancient dichotomy and interdependencies of form and content. This clarifies the starting grounds for further analysis. What we can contribute is bringing further clarity to the Bulgarianspeaking shared frame, and studying and enriching the cultural content of Bulgarian-speaking virtual spaces—as well as to their translation into the shared cultural space of humanity. 3 To my mind what was happening in the beginning of the 1990s resembled the shock in a beehive upon the emerging of a new queen and the preparing of the population to send away those of its members who were ready to form a new culture. We were losing our self-confidence and self-awareness in the years of transition while suddenly the hierarchical network of the society was cut off its main and we were left to no choice but seek for plural ways to continue. We were prepared for turning to pluralism, though, for it was one of the key symbols of the 1980s social studies frontier discussion. In the human world, however, it takes too much emotion and too much noise in the public space. Information still spread in an invisible way, and it was clear that the state was broke, in spite of our refusal to admit this. And we rushed eagerly in search of information and ways to maintain our suddenly acquired individualities while re-connecting to form new communities. It is only 20 years of trying out ways for solving the problems of cultural survival and today the crisis of the state resembles the time when John Atanasoff needed a new device for calculating 29-variable equations. We need a new machine to help us count ourselves within a global network of diverse cultures organized in fluctuating communities: this would be the key to keeping the singularity of our minds for in the human worlds it is the human factor that only matters. This machine is contained in the global talk where technology is the carrier while language is the 3

Sites like http://liternet.bg/publish/katalog/rubriki/proza_razkazi.htm; http://librev.com/component/magazine/?func=author_articles&authorid=855; http://rhetoric.bg/ and other Bulgarian-based web-spaces.

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device. The syntax of survival needs the next generation of networking based on entirely different carrier and this is seen here in the outspoken forms of the web-reality. Our passive doubts in the universality of language structures do not in fact concern the frontiers of human language capacity which are intuitively pushed to the extreme of combinative and creative mentalese. We still have to do our work of managing the transcendence of Bulgarian-based traditional culture into its active virtual modes. Filling in spaces, structured apriory is expected to display insufficiency of ethos and lead to reastructuring the formative tools of pathos and further criteria of recognition of the basic units underlying logos. Once again I must clearly state that this work of mine views the Age of Human cultural transcendence into the virtual mode of its existence and seeks to find clues of how it is done. Virtual culture is at this stage seen as a storehouse of humanity in case of physical collapse which is not necessary to happen. The specifics of the Bulgarian case are in the situation-based combination of practical inventiveness and managing of the future of a metacommunity of fast individuals, and in the slow turn of public and cultural mind to activities that lag in time. Thus we move: a century forward, a century backward, spinning round now, motivating our existence and curing the broken edges of our selfidentification by taking part in the universal talk provided by the WWW.

CHAPTER ONE CONTEXTS CREATED ANEW BY TEXTS

We rest. A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise. One wandering thought pollutes the day We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep; Embrace fond foe, or cast our cares away: It is the same! For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free, Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow: Nought may endure but Mutability. —P. B. Shelly, Mutability

In the search for the roots of creativity we rely on the play of contexts that gives colour to our tale-telling. The layers of contextual sources of meaning are: INDIVIDUAL The time machine inbuilt in us secures appropriateness in the timing of our nostalgic reconstruction of our histories in our own life-stories retold again as what we desired not exactly as what happened, for our meanings have shifted to the significance of the Self-establishment as a hero of our own text constructed as the combined product of unclear colourful and emotional images and associations and allusions to shared texts of importance. CONVENTIONAL The negotiated social themes, the places of the arguments spring up out of our daily routine. SITUATIONAL The modulation of meaning by the parameters of the message in terms of time, place, way and purpose of our message in the stage of actio. CULTURAL Our Bulgarian contexts as they are woven up in the texture of the message affect the structures and natural sounding of the text created in a variety of the English language that becomes their carrier.

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Contextual layers of meaning are dynamic and their movement creates shifts of meaning of different value and persistence. This movement creates vagueness of random or deliberate character. In this vagueness the human traits of the subject of communication are revealed. Here, I breathe, work, live and compose poems as my skills go. (Vaptzarov, Vyara/Fate)

1.1 A Brief Note on Linguistic Anthropology Modernity is masculine. Postmodernity is feminine. —Douglas Kellner

Anthropology has branched in the late 20th century into the fields of Social and Cultural Anthropology, and even later there have been attempts to introduce it as a university course. There are the oppositions to having it as a separate subject, for its definition would naturally demand the definition of what could linguistics do outside the field of anthropology i.e.—where humanity ends. This presupposes that all kinds of passing information in nature can be called ‘languages’ as well all the artificial semiotic systems and—of course—the systems of communication or the ‘languages’ of aliens. On the one hand it is connected with biology and the establishment of the ‘nature of language’ (Chomsky), on the other hand it is connected with the searches of humanity for life in the Universe and the projects of making the universal linguist that shall allow direct communication without the long and laborious process of learning a foreign language, and the third possible subfield would be based on the study of myth, tale, legend and finding out the meaning of metaphors used to describe the ways of communication and figure out the aids to and through it. Reaching as far as the misty periphery of human knowledge, linguistics suddenly finds itself in the company of neurobiology, chemistry, physics etc. where the reading of the signs of our environment is frontier science and edge technology for the expansion and survival of humanity in an overpopulated world. …and it spoke in a human voice What we shall specify here as problems of nearest interest would again be texts where humanity is based on the description of human-non-human intercourse. Bulgarians have always been close to the environment. Our legends and tales include reading its signs. On the one hand there are the animals

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and birds that talk to people: they reveal some secret—a fact or a piece of wisdom. The forest and the mountain also talk in folklore1. Then there are the fairy-tale creatures—the forest maidens, the ghosts and goblins of all kind, the small girl and the small man with the long beard, the big strong man, the dragons and other monsters such as werewolves and the combinations of animals and humans as well as the lost souls in the graveyards. Bulgarian folktale, however, does not include vampires. In our tale people talk back to the sun and the moon, the forest and the mountain, and to all living and fantastic creatures. What is more, the stars, the moon and the sun adopt human form of beautiful and very strong people. The wind is another personified hero the people talk to. Lost people are turned into rock, a tree, a river, an animal—i.e. they lose the gift of human form and the gift of language. It is curious to trace the morphological analyses of nature-based lexemes (e.g. Georgieva, B. 2013, 2014) where ‘weather’ is in the neuter, wind is in the masculine and storm is in the feminine. Also, in Bulgarian the sun is in the neuter, yet it is generally opposed to the moon who is in the feminine just like the Earth is. Animals take a great space of our self-identification as humans (Stoilov 2000, 2006; Holandi 2006, 2010, 2011). They have their gender and bear human features that only make it possible to outline humans from their anthropomorphic projections. The learners of English continue to perceive the gender as part of such anthropomorphic projections, until they find ways of redirecting them to their own metalanguage of selfprojections possible by fast and redundant U-turn of identification procedures in parallel story-telling and image-reconstruction. Our folklore is based on the awareness of the story-teller or the performer of the figurative use of language describing language. Words challenge words in the process of story-telling, and the text challenges text versions. The story grows with each next teller. And there are tellers who have not the gift of detailed description but just tell about the action. The metaphors thin away starving for detail. And suddenly the listener and the reader find themselves in the position of witnessing a lonely and scared person, someone in great distress, an outsider to community—talk to all the surrounding objects for a human cannot live without communicating with other people. Usually the hero receives advice based on specific information revealed as natural secret knowledge, or achieved in a 1 Clark, W.A. 2009. “The Spiritual Value of Forests and Sustainable Forest Management, in FMNS 2009, Vol. 2. pp335-342)– SWU

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procedure of reasoning aloud. God or a god's representative, e.g. an angel or a devil, or a saint appear as the culmination in using the absolute gift of communication: here I very much tend to accept Chomsky's idea of Ilanguage for it is displayed in the absolute need of people in their capacity of heroes of texts to share their problems in the form of language intercourse with the surrounding world expecting a universal answer, and in the fact that god or animals and objects in tales never talk in a language or even in the mother tongue of the hero but in 'human voice'. Thus in story-telling 'speaking in a human voice' is of archetypal value where the main concept is 'human'. Then there comes the era of the Internet and older generations start criticizing their kids and grandchildren for hanging around in the chat forums and talking alone to a desktop entitled ‘Skype’. The very expression ‘linguistic anthropology’ can then be interpreted as the field of study of the need of all humanity for communication. Urban legends and the witches are based on the belief in the power that the understanding of language (in the broadest use of the word) possesses—they are based on the ability to read signs and weave them in riddles, creating text-worlds based on the fear of missing the message. Witches can be helpful in revealing the contents of a message to people, but they are also generally feared for they have the potential of serving evil for their information exchange needs paying back. To this we shall add the study of the ‘noisy brain’ and the ‘din of thousand texts’ in the translator’s head; and the expectation of Ray Kurzweil for a complete change in human global talk—that was to happen back in 2005. Social talk is bigger than an individual. What can act as superpower in language exchange is the community. We do not need to write in the time of global talk—we need speech, and linguistics then immediately branches into three synchronous fields: the study of speech, the study of codes, the study of human-machine exchange. Where linguistics ends, is the end of the human individual and the beginning of suprahumanity and superhumanity displayed in the hierarchy of communities and contextual synthesized exchange e.g. in international special fighting corps. Still, in cases of empathic exchange and telepathy we need language as verification of the information. The languages of the mind and the languages of the heart are metaphoric expressions that describe anthropologic signs beyond the field of linguistics, yet they can be fixed in text and thus become the object of philology.

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1.2 The Significance of Tale Telling All my study is based on myth —Noam Chomsky, in personal conversation, 02-05-2008

There are, consequently three stages in our approach to linguistic anthropology: studying the myths, legends and tales in their local versions and their global interconnectedness; learning how to read the metaphors contained in them; reconstructing the model of the world, contained in a text and finding the Set or Multitude where this world stands. What could possibly be the goal of such study: in a rapidly changing environment even the memory of a global machine is insufficient for the survival of a human individual. We are somewhere within history and we are a beginning of another chain in diachrony, handing over our messages to those who shall come next. We often say that people create worlds, and machines just follow instructions. We often say that a human cheats in language usage neglecting the rules. We sometimes say that a human being gets tired of cheating i.e. of supporting imaginary worlds. We also say that human imagination has limitations. Still we believe that beyond our existence there will be someone who shall survive and need our messages and understand them. It is all about survival. A human mind does not believe in death for it goes through myriads of worlds that extend our mental existence to eternity. Language is bound to contain eternity in the human understanding. The study of its recursive units would then all be within the scope of linguistic anthropology: as far as we haven’t heard a Martian speak yet. We are all learners and teachers of languages broadly speaking. And this is the hardest job in an individual’s life. It is where linguistics reaches to philology.

1.3 Reconstructing the World in Text Everything except language Knows the meaning of existence. Trees, planets, rivers, time Know nothing else. They express it Moment by moment as the universe. Even this fool of a body

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Leaves it in part, and would Have full dignity within it ȼut for the ignorant freedom Of my talking mind. —Les Murray, The Meaning of Existence

The sets of worlds in text versions can be established in analyses of recurring features and added details in occurring situations. Then we find analogs and fix the position of each next text in the Set Identity is one of the aims of a Self where we start from rebuttal, go through consolidation of our singularity and then we are ready to change without fear we might lose our identity. Transcending next comes as the power of building our identity in our own text, synchronizing it with the language of our culture and with what is accepted as a global or universal standard, and hiding it in our singular metaphor relying on the vagueness of natural language Intertext next comes in the hierarchy of the connected in the www and in the appearance of the myths of the Net—the tales of netizens, based on engineering the adaptation of a text to connect generations in a diachronic projection of intercultural exchange across fields that are interest of interdisciplinary studies which form metadiscursive communities—or a specific jargon, connecting pieces of knowledge that have been approached from various backgrounds and in diverse methods. That might also be called: fighting the minimalistic principle in encrypting our own Self in the Net. In the rose garden where spiders weave their webs To get lost is a Matter of principle. —GeA, Weblost

1.4 The Lives of a Text Die Uhr mag Stehen, Die Zeiger Fallen… —Goethe, Dr. Faustus Words are the money of Fools. —Thomas Hobbes

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Book II Chapter One What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. —William Shakespeare

This sub-chapter sets a discussion on two aspects of the authentication of texts in the fluctuating contexts where Time is a significant agent in their semantic loads. It visualizes the change of words in translations and reproducing of the same text by different editors and publishers as mechanisms in redirecting the semantic accent so that it becomes closer to the temporal ideology. Lexemes can serve as association-keys. It is not the translator’s choice, it is not the use of synonyms—there is no such thing as synonyms when codes are viewed. Synonyms could be synchronic events, but used in diachronic plan they cut through layers of ideology-bound meanings. Our I-talk registers each next text in our individual perception of our own Selves. The Self of a text thus is the initial wording of a story and the lives of a text come out as its discursive features reproduced in I-talk of individual rewording reached as a consent of all possible versions. A text exists in all its elements in a way similar to the elephant's existing in all its parts for the people who have perceived the whole image. Yet its significance is focused on the individuality of our approach to it and the references to a text bear meanings that are based on specific attitudes and display the frontiers of our world. Here is where rhetoric offers a choice of tools for explaining or hiding our meanings. The second issue is the recognition of a text by the author and by the culture it refers to. Very often these two aspects of the survival of a culture in text are interwoven, for they contain both the intention of the writer and the secondary intention of a user in entirely different situation. The study is challenged by the prospect of finding ways to re-word the treasured texts forming our cultural identity as Bulgarian into the languages spoken today by our globalized younger generations and thus— to make us a space for the future. It seems that we have made contributions as Bulgarians in each field of today’s knowledge but in stating our presence in the world. And this is a question of Rhetoric, oriented to the content-based formulae of survival within the larger pressing problem of the survival of humanity. Rhetoricians in academia tend to shy the art of literary remake for it does not seem to be so short-cutting across the marshy grounds of persuasion and so profitable as profession. Yet, story-telling is one of the means of today’s PR activities and the grounds for movie-production.

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Translation as the art of intralingual rewriting of our beautiful classical texts has never been on the agenda of our rhetorical education, and the training of translators and interpreters is considered to be the task of the ELT institutions and practices of international companies. However, the task of making Bulgarian textual art visible, unfolding all its beauty, and tempting the world to come into closer touch with our culture is a task for Bulgarian institutions, and for Bulgarians. Our translators of Shakespeare or Burns, of Mark Twain and Harry Potter and the like are people who have an outstanding command of our native tongue, revealing its splendour in rousing our admiration for English texts. The translation from Bulgarian into English is scanty and, I dare say— poor, for it preserves the words, not the beauty of the text as we feel it. That is not the fault of the translators. Translators do what they have been trained to do and what they have received as orders. What our translatortraining schools lack is the freedom of interpretation. It is also what our literature lacks altogether. If the Bible has thousands of translation versions, and a tale like The Little Match Seller by Andersen has a thousand parodies and adaptations, a single touch upon a beautiful text like Karavelov’s Bulgarians of Old Time or a poem by Ivan Vazov (whose manner of writing is somewhere between Wordsworth and Byron), will raise indignant voices complaining that our sacred texts are touched. It is the question of rewording our own thoughts about what makes a culture survive: whether it is better to keep it under cover in a museum seldom-visited, or have it retold and put to show, active and fascinating in the fashion of the complex message of today’s global talk? In the first place this question concerns the issue of the text efficiency as a product of culture—its value as a cultural formant. Secondly, there is the issue of the efficiency of diachronic transfer or the production of versions to old texts. Thirdly, this is the translation of Bulgarian texts into other languages using the global linguist in the web. Fourth comes the need of Bulgarian texts composed in other languages. None of my English classes has ever accepted otherwise but as a joke about bad translation, a poem with a singular melody even when read voicelessly to sound in the way: Come, grandad, blow on your pipe And I will join in the tune With songs of heroes and outlaws, With songs of bygone chieftans— of Chavdar the terrible outlaw,

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Book II Chapter One Of Chavdar the chieftan of old— The son of Petko the Terror.2

At the same time, people still prefer the translations of Valery Petrov of Shakespeare into Bulgarian, and the translations of Geo Milev of poetry into Bulgarian to later and closer to the originals artisan versions. What we need in our case is not translation but synchronizing the art of literature for our best poets and writers have never stayed closed amidst the walls of the Balkan, but have kept in time with the topics and the languages of the world. In our language Burns’ Every lassie has her laddie has a name and Jennie who is running through the blooming rye, all wet from the early summer dew, does not come into conflict with the poem’s broken statistics of lines and their position in the target text but adds concrete image to it. Sometimes a version or a completely new text opens the view and does more favor to a cultural value than mere translation of words. It does sound trivial, yet Bulgarian texts still stay unopened, getting dusty and naïve, making us ashamed of their primitive tongue. The case is not that one, though. For languages grow up together with cultures, and retelling our stories for grown up cultures is our own task. We have been trying out the English sounding of the texts of Bulgarian writers like Elin Pelin, Aleko Constantinov, Yordan Radichkov, Yordan Yovkov, Ivan Vazov, Dimiter Dimov, Dimiter Talev, Fany PopovaMutafova, Angel Karaliichev’s Bulgarian Folk Tales, with our undergraduate students at the South West University of Bulgaria. The most difficult texts which lose up to 16% of their specific sounding are those of Yovkov (Indje) and Vazov (Under the Yoke), while Elin Pelin translates into clear structure. The texts of Radichkov are a challenge: they contain contextual structures which have their ornamented voices of added informativity and are difficult to register in the smoothness of a passage. A couple of years ago we did Bulgarians of Old Time by Lyuben Karavelov with a few graduate students in one of their MA courses. We needed the first 2 hours to read the two pages we had chosen from the text in our native tongue and have it interpreted in Modern Bulgarian trying to visualize the people and places described. Then we needed another couple of hours to say what we had negotiated as our group version in English. After that we had a day’s rest, and on the third day we translated again and read every individual version aloud: and there was one version which

2 Sofia Press, 1974, Hristo Botev, Poems, Translated by some Kevin Ireland, edited by Theodora Atanassova

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made us happy with the effort that had the beauty of the original while not following it closely. It is a popular type of exercise with the teachers of English at our universities to do similar texts: a vast unorganized effort with no final product other than the skill, yet still there is no remarkable result and young Bulgarians have not much to tell when they stay abroad and are asked about their 'exotic' cultural roots. We still quote 'Under the yoke' while the magic of English would set on 'IN the yoke” and debate about the obscurity of 'yoke'. From a rhetoric point of view this title does not 'sell'. With all our school of translation studies and translators' training we stick to traditional value which is dying slowly under layers of time. Such is the fate of all classics round the world where conservatism suffocates adaptations of our texts. The other name for the final product of such effort is nostalgia. It comes to the minds of people who have been far from home and need to hear from it. It comes as a dream, a vision, a text reborn in their own style. Sometimes, driving back home on a dark night in the fall, a long forgotten rhyme suddenly rings through your brain and you start rewording it in either prose or verse in English. It is a challenge to listen in such a way to some poems by Yavorov, Pencho Slaveikov, Dimcho Debelyanov, Hristo Smirnenski, Geo Milev and Hristo Botev. In such cases translation no longer looks a job for those who cannot write3 . Interculture is based on the common features of cultures and relies on their individual contribution. Ivan Vazov sounds much in tune with Wordsworth although each of them sings of different objects: Ivan Vazov, Rila: ɋɟɝɚ ɫɴɦ ɭ ɞɨɦɚ. ɇɚɨɤɨɥ ɩɥɚɧɢɧɢ ɢ ɜɴɪɯɨɜɟ ɫɬɴɪɱɚɬ; ɝɨɪɢ ɜɢɫɨɤɢ, ɞɢɜɢ ɲɭɦɹɬ; ɩɨɬɨɰɢɬɟ, ɤɪɢɫɬɚɥɧɢ ɢ ɩɟɧɥɢɜɢ, ɛɭɱɚɬ - ɠɢɜɨɬ ɤɢɩɢ ɧɚ ɜɫɢɱɤɢɬɟ ɫɬɪɚɧɢ. ɉɪɢɪɨɞɚɬɚ ɨɬɜɪɟɞ, ɤɚɬ ɦɚɣɤɚ ɧɟɠɧɚ ɫɴɳɚ, ɧɚɩɹɜɚ ɦɢ ɩɟɫɧɚ, ɥɸɛɨɜɧɨ ɦɟ ɩɪɢɝɪɴɳɚ.4 W. Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey: FIVE years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs 3

A motto used by Lefevre, A. Translating Poetry, 1975 in Alexieva, B. Readings in the special theories of translation 1993: those who cannot write translate. 4 http://www.slovo.bg/showwork.php3?AuID=14&WorkID=2241&Level=2ɛ (2309-2011)

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Book II Chapter One With a soft inland murmur.--Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky.5

1.5 The Words of an Author 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.' … 'That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone. 'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.' 6 To start with, I quite agree with defining the word as a semantically active complex7. A word can be a trademark, or it can also be the tar drop into a jar of honey. What makes a text alien to an author might be just a word replaced by an editor or translator. My first value is my freedom. I do not recognize texts containing words similar to the underlined ones in the examples below—such cases always lead me back into the physical world in a dispute, or conflict based on misunderstanding or rather - on the refusal of my value system to let them pass. I refuse to recognize such texts as mine. (1) He liked the taste of mushrooms so much that he could not believe they were forbidden him… Ɍɨɥɤɨɜɚ ɦɧɨɝɨ ɯɚɪɟɫɜɚɲɟ ɜɤɭɫɚ ɧɚ ɝɴɛɢɬɟ, ɱɟ ɧɟ ɦɨɠɟɲɟ ɞɚ ɩɨɜɹɪɜɚ, ɱɟ ɦɭ ɛɹɯɚ ɡɚɛɪɚɧɟɧɢ...—Ɍɨɥɤɨɜɚ ɨɛɢɱɚɲɟ ɝɴɛɢ, ɱɟ ɧɟ ɦɨɠɟɲɟ ɞɚ ɫɢ ɩɪɟɞɫɬɚɜɢ ɬɨɜɚ ɜɤɭɫɧɨ ɧɟɳɨ ɞɚ ɟ ɨɬɪɨɜɧɨ. We had to translate this sentence from English with an MA group. They never changed the word ‘forbidden’. I continued with the experiment with another group telling them they needn’t sound literal. Two graduate students reached the second version where the Bulgarian word means ‘poisonous’. The greater part of them did not notice the difference. (2) doctor’s orders: he said!—I would never use that expression in a text other than a parody or a negative one. (3) ɜɢɧɚɝɢ ɫɴɦ ɫɟ ɨɩɢɬɜɚɥɚ ɞɚ... - ɫɬɚɪɚɹ ɫɟ: once a journalist interviewed me back in the early 1990s. She changed the given expression 5 6 7

http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww138.html (23-09-2011) http://sabian.org/looking_glass6.php (23-09-2011) Pencheva, M. Language in Man, Man in Language, SU Press, 2001

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for one word that has always given me shivers. I refuse to recognize the text as mine. In contrast, another journalist interviewed me on my understanding of ‘practical philosophy’ in the early 2000. He made a mistake in the final text misreproducing the name of the English philosopher Alfred Eyre as ‘Alfred Deir’. It was funny. It might have provoked smiles from people who knew the name and who attributed the mistake to the author of the text, i.e. to me. I did not mind. I recognize the text as mine. Mistakes are only imperfection, while the change of a node of meaning based in I-language is like taking out the special stone that keeps a bridge strong. In such cases words need to get extra pay. There is one more aspect to the issue in debate. We often read in the introduction to certain text: it contains autobiographical elements about the author, or it is based on an episode from the life of the author. Such statements are similar to the expression according to me. They place the author of a text in the position of an outsider to the brainwork spent on the creation of the text. Such statements have always stricken me with the absurdity behind the words, for what is the life of a human individual but what we are doing from the beginning to the end: what then could be the life of a poet or writer or dramatist but the words employed in the hard business to redo our common concepts in a unique way each next moment. A text is an extension of the Self of the author. That makes authentication possible. While authentication may refer to certain parts of a text, or to versions of a text by the same author produced in different stages of his or her career, recognition is another case. The former is the task of other people while the latter is what the author does. My friend Rossie Milenkova-Kyheng who works in the Sorbonne, is responsible for the latest edition of the texts of Saussure—she shared having sometimes a sleepless night arguing over the word-markers of the authentic texts of Saussure present in the lectures put down by his students. In a case of that kind, there is the interference of the individual interpreter, who was not—in the time of the lecture—bound to keep the rule of invisibility but was taking notes to individual purpose. The interference of an interpreter’s mind in the case of Saussure’s lectures seems evident for a student would not keep up in pace for lacking the lecturer’s meaning. I wonder, though, whether Saussure would have minded the change of style if he had seen the hand notes. It is widely known that the German philosopher Kant never cared about the versions of his texts that caused so much trouble to his

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publishers and translators. 8 Once he had the ideas cleared, he could recognize them in twenty text modes. The other end of the story is when a single word input makes the author refuse to recognize a text: authors rarely accept editors’ changes without fight. The Self of a text is not a mere representation of the author’s Self. It is based on the relations and attitudes of the Author to the rest of the world. This explains the complexity of the word as a text-unit of choice bearing the identity of the author: the Self of a text can recognize itself in the images behind the words.

1.6 Pictures and Words … it is crucial to understand that images are both mental and physical, within the body and mind…9

The eminent psychologist D. O. Hebb once wrote : « you can hardly turn around in psychology without bumping into the image.» Give people a list of nouns to memorize, and they will imagine them interacting in bizarre images. Give them factual questions like “does a flea have a mouth?” and they will visualize the flea and “look for” the mouth. Internet culture is based on image. Text is something that adds to picture and read aloud it acquires audience. Not just poetry and drama, but prose needs reading aloud. Our noisy brains rarely allow a text speak to us, but if we listen to a performer, then the text receives a sound body. The beauty of a rhyme comes with its recitation. The melody allows the brain relax over the words and get on to grasping the image and become empathic to the emotion. A poem’s first interpretation is from reading matter to sound of voice. Each next time the brain remembers the sounding and starts it when we read the poem anew. An audio image is as important as visual image and touch and movement add to the picture. Language is a medium where reality is trying to appear. A virtual text would act upon the virtual individual who is made of signs. Within the web spaces the semantic relations play real and a mind turns into existence through text. That makes the cultural text signs so significant.

8

The Bulgarian translator Tseko Torbov shared that he had to use 20 impressions of The Critique of Pure Reasoning in order to come up with the clearest possible translation. Burnett, R. 2005. How Images Think. MIT Press, p.33. 9 Burnett, R. 2005. How Images Think. MIT Press, p.33.

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1.7 The Self of a Text There is a short story by Zdravka Eftimova: Shoes10. It is a text of a definite character and its critics mention the inconsistency in punctuation and spelling. Critical comments recommend the author to have her spelling and style checked. Looking for a language standard, they refuse to recognize the text for being unrefined. Like an individual, a text has its own Self. A person can be highly educated or uncultured and speaking in slang or in dialect. A text is anthropomorphic by origin. It has a plot and heroes that can be cultured and refined, simple, cunning, rude and even adventurous. A text is a thin projection of the author’s self. It needs autonomy whether being standard or not. Recognition of a text by a culture is a similar procedure to the recognition of a text by its author after being revised: what stands behind the word is an image that can be culturally recognized, adopted, or refused. Such is the case of The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova: a beautifully written story, which is a failure for the lack of cultural Self of Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian or Turkish belonging. A vampire proves an outsider to cultural self-estimation. Upon first reading we are shocked by its not taking care of our specific cultural values. The second impulse is to correct information. Even after we have appreciated the text as a well-written fictional story, there is still our unwillingness to consent to being represented as blank spots in both history and geography maps hanging behind. English tradition has a specific attitude to literary texts. If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber'd here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend: if you pardon, we will mend… (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

To the interwoven cultures of the Balkans a text is owed respect. When an outsider tries to write a good story about our cultural realities, we raise oppositions: in the case of Elizabeth Kostova we find the text false; in the 10

http://www.librev.com/scribbbles-prose/1320-2011-08-11-09-08-16#josc8605

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case with Mercia Macdermot’s The Apostle of Freedom—the text is appreciated and next given to neglect as one falling out of our textproductive norms. It is an author’s text about our history and as such it is subjective. We need to start doing this cultural translation ourselves for who would better keep the Self of our textual reality. Like the identity of an individual author, the identity of a textual binder of culture is nostalgic. The words of such texts appear to be expanded containers of emotion through history. Time past and time future Allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, The moment in the arbour where the rain beat. The moment in the draughty church at smoke fall Be remembered; involved with past and future. Only through time time is conquered. —T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

1.8 The Other Text ‘The din of a thousand texts’ in the translator’s head becomes even louder when the product of translation, editing or censorship is viewed across cultures. The constantly repeated by theoreticians of translation statement that a translator shall remain invisible does not work when creativity is needed. The global machine is far from being efficient in the choice of variants: its database has expanded enormously for the latest year. There must be some inefficiency with its dictionaries and lists of equivalent expressions—in terms of organization and programming. It still seems to me ridiculous that it shall deal with words, seen as synonyms - not with phonemes or lexemes, or even textemes. However, it is the word that finally serves as a marker of a text’s authenticity. When we are writing, we often go, unaware though, of that, to the resorts of the texts that have formed our culture. Similarly, the editors of anthologies and readers, reshape the reality governed by the text-messages, in ordering them to an individual plan. Today we experience the adventure of restructuring the received messages into pictures of physical places ordered to the lore of the desirable—not to the facts of their existence. Story-telling becomes the powerful mechanism of text-weaving in the oral e-culture as well as for

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the outsiders who no longer bother about written texts. Words matter–as codes, as keys, as magic that gives brilliance to figures and guides our avatars into their quest. Until they are able to find a way out and have a glimpse of the sense of life. Enchanted by words we start our own adventure. Like Alice in Wonderland—guided by our own stories.11 Thus the role of the human philologist, concerning the texts that appear as our cultural signifiers, will be to mind the value of a text where the world needs weaving again each next time. There is a relativity principle according to which the same facts do not lead to the forming of the same picture of the World in all who are watching it but in the case that they have similar language picture or follow the same language model12 And vice versa: the same language model does not necessarily lead to the same mental picture of the world that replaces physical experience as complex fact. Here are two more examples: (1) While reading the emblematic poem Daffodils in English I can see the colour of the sun on each single element in the picture drawn by the poet Wordsworth—in my mind picture the usual colors of spring sunshine on green fields and a lonely cloud in deep blue sky looks only natural as it is in Bulgaria; when I read it in Russian, words start to matter and the picture is sad, cold and grey. The English painter has made something pale and without scent—something thin and expiring from my experiencebased sensation—something very close to the word-picture of the Russian translation and far away from the play of the Southern sun on the golden daffodils in my garden which I consider the true image of Wordsworth’s poem. Things have changed, though, with the Google image browser. We do not have to rely on a single old painting of faded textbook quality. There are hundreds of photographs and we can choose among them the one that suits best our mental picture. Still we will have a choice of images and our singular choice might differ in times of different physical and mental state while our memory will store a multitude of visual images and none of them will be outside the tangle of meanings based on significances within the same conceptual space.

11

I have taken the liberty of formatting the latter paragraph preserving purely Bulgarian structures of broken SVO sequences. The use of the fullstop is a rhetoric figure of emphasis in such cases, but it also leaves space for hesitation of contexts. The encoder and the decoder of the message are free to add meanings out of their cultural experience. 12 B. L. Whorf (Carol 1956:v)

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(2) Nurel’s colors are different for they have voice: Nurel was a 2ndyear English Philology student at Shumen University when she first emailed me. She cannot see. She can translate, though. She has learned how to employ her other senses and her knowledge of words in order to convert sound into colour. She is producing text-facts that stimulate a vision of physical experience in my Bulgarian and German/Russian studies group who can all see, but cannot grasp the imperfections in the word-picture by only listening to the text. She says that sunshine has a sound. While translating colorful texts, she never fails, although she has never seen colours and the words are only abstract names to her. The manipulative power of texts leads people, again and again, to seek the adventures of mind in knowing humanity. It is the mechanism of each individual’s involvement into a lifelong effort. The answer to one single question of the type ‘Who am I” or ‘Why am I?’ leads to restructuring the texture of reality, by replacing - in our mental film - the pictures of existing places even the ones, taken yesterday, by our own complex memory of emotion and movement, smells and colour, tastes and tune which provide the life of a true existence of shared subjectivity. In a text-generated reality we look for the Self of a text—the ghost, the soul, the being as it might turn out in single situations where the text turns into the adopted discourse of an individual author. This complex feature of a living text is to be seen as the set of the individual mind-stages underlying each single output as a completed authorship, authenticated by the agent of Time-binder—Die Augenblicke of human individual completion. Texts travel in time. A text read 30 years ago is no longer the same now. Like the golden daffodils it is likely to function in different ways under different light. Nowadays a text needs a picture. In a couple of years the text may turn into a hologram and go on merging its texture with the reality of generations who have no other knowledge of the long history of human culture but that contained in texts.

CHAPTER TWO INTO THE SAME RIVER

There is nothing new under the sun The sun is new every next day

2.1 The T-agent in Synchronic and Diachronic Text Analyses There are three aspects to the neglect of the T-agent leading to asynchrony in interlanguages of transcultural and transdisciplinary nature: (1) The mix of languages e.g. English and Bulgarian—structures and lexicon have to grow into each other: they need sufficient time to undergo the process of fixing in our tongue or the procedure of intension as the idiolect spreads in tale telling. The convergence of patterns leaves space for hesitation in the usage of a lexico-semantic unit and/or structural pattern: sentence left to grow wild in an utterance, a text-model left to fall in between genres. I can remember my first presentation of the AA idea in the English department of Sofia University. I used sentence structures typical for the philosopher in my first chapter and a free school-teacher style in the last chapter for lack of time. I was severely criticized for bad syntax in the theoretical chapter and praised for the easy-going style of the last chapter. Unexpectedly for me, I was also accused of having asked someone else to write it. Another example is my participation in interdisciplinary science conference where the offered paper was to be reviewed by at least six reviewers (e.g. VIPSI conferences in Montreal-Boston-New York in 2006). I got the highest appreciation from the philosopher and the physicist of the reviewers and the lowest praise from the electronic engineer, while the professor of mathematics, the economist and the artist simply kept the golden middle in anticipation of my presentation. The style of a philosopher tends to generate what the students at MIT used to call in 2007 'linguistic monsters': structures of complex nature where the units of information are difficult to isolate.

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A similar problem arose in the reading of Timen Timev's book “Libido Significandy or the Lust for Meaning” with my BA graduate student Petar Dimkov. The unusual discourse charmed the student and in the process of assimilating the ideas of the book, he produced real monsters. Here are the first few sentences of his initial variants of the first chapter: The project of Dr. Ge Moll /Timen Timev/ and Irinia Delin/a/, developed and presented in all their books, scientific treatises and online publications, is compared by themselves in its large scope only to the system of modern medicine, which includes a large number of different disciplines and diverse fields of knowledge. They estimate the look to the world created by modern medicine, with all its particular aspects, as one that gathers almost everything that human cognition and thinking have ever touched upon. Besides the similarities between the systemic project of Dr. Ge Moll and the totality of the system of modern medicine, there are some differences which show in a more understandable way the points of similarity of the two systems of knowledge.

A ‘linguistic monster’ as illustrated by the above example is a temporally unfinished pattern: syntax stopped amidst hesitation–hasty overuse of syntax or syntactic conglobation. (2) In the training of EL teachers in the majors of English Philology and Applied Linguistics it often happens that two text corpuses are compared for their linguistic features. A Bulgarian learner of English in the Bulgarian speaking environment can easily fall into the trap of asynchrony where texts of diverse age are compared, e.g. a novel by Fanny Popova-Mutafova and an English novel from the the turn of the 20th century. Undergraduates like the books of J. Austen and the Bronte sisters, as well as the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. They learn their English. They, however, do not use it in conversation. It is just a sociocultural pool of language which is but an added database to their general idea of English, and they intuitively transform their favorite texts into their synchronized talk of the present moment. (3) The third application of the RA-matrix in catching asynchrony is when the translation of Bulgarian texts into English is analyzed. One aspect of this feature is setting the clock forth: e.g. the translation of Yovkov's “Legends of Stara Planiina” by John Burnip, professor at the AUBG (1999) transformed the text to meet the current spoken standard yet the text has lost 16 % of the realia as the count with one of my MA classes has shown. The translation of Ivan Vazov's “Pod Igoto” into English, has

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sneaked to the other end: it has set the clock back, 'the colorful, rural British idiom seems to capture very well the mood, spirit and humor of the characters in the late nineteenth century Bulgarian countryside' (Raymon Hansen's editor's note, 2005). Yet, the question of the purpose remains: is it exactly what we want to read in the 21st century? Thus it turns out that language has the time machine that produces unity of time, place and action in the rereading of a text with a secondary intentionality of making it active in the modelling of mental structures. Synchronizing or desynchronizing the texts is a powerful instrument in the motivation of a language user.

2.2 Intertext: Nodes of Transcendence ‘An art form, a sensibility, and a way of living with new technology’. —Heim, M, Virtual Realism Identity involves opposition to ‘the Other’. —Irina Perianova, Melting Pot or Tossed Salad The use of nations as units for comparing mental programs is debatable… Comparison across whatever units presupposes that these units are functionally equivalent with regard to the criteria used. In the case of nations, we have to assume that each nation is not so unique that any parallel with another nation is meaningless. Functional equivalence is clearly problematic for the comparison of institutions across nations. Families, schools, work places, authorities, political parties and religious bodies may mean quite different things in different nations. —Hofstede

It has all been about coping with diversity and learning how to live in community. It has all been about changing the diversity of gods for the diversity of community units and functioning in a multi colored architecture under the one and only God that allowed the rebuilding of the Tower of all people with the help of the global AI linguist and a construction strengthened by the innumerable nodes of our globally tendered existence. It has all been about keeping the memory of oneness while implanting it into other structures in the long process of modeling and remodeling our own structures so that it fits into the complexity of other environmental substances. It has all been about survival and heritage

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It has all been about information acquired, stored, destructed, retrieved, partly erased, partly applied to form a better structure, and bind it by tangles where data form concentrated nodes in the texture of a broader universe. The whole process of text production and interpreting is about binding and unbinding texts into tangles of further contextual meaning supporting the growth of our network of survival—a process which is sometimes called “mapping”, at other times “routing”, and sometimes even “triangulating”—weaving the very selves of our cultures into a grand texture strengthened by nodes of transcendence into dimensions of broader existence of humanity. It has all been like that and there have always been the frontiers that form units of diverse entities. This is an expression of the primary concern of a Self contained in the two main questions What am I? and How can I survive? It is all about motivating every next stage of being or our awareness of being. This primary concern of the Self has been put into the texture of texts reporting our progress and keeping our being by binding the frontier nodes. As texture grows and expands the individual selves grow smaller within it as a comprehensible structure whether it be in terms of some subnuclear particles or giant galaxies—it is the same process for understanding the universe in a static structure. Histories serve as binders (love) and un-binders (hate) of cultural tangles motivated by emotion channeled to give the power of what could be called “action” leading to change of either the complex Self of a culture or of its environment including all conflicting cultures. But this is all about generalization of general models—universalia are the nodes that serve as points of observation of bigger structures, while existence needs the engineering of all the worlds that form our text as realia. This involves change of the language of the next level of text nodes where we find out that some of the realia have strengthened their significance turning into universalia, while other have become lost or cut out of the network of a Self or need unbinding from the current and rebinding into a new node of being. It is strange that our destruction starts from our social Self which could be seen as tangle or node of culture.

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It has become a fashion of discourse these days to say that encyclopedic researchers belong to the past—somewhere back in the 1800s. General education and general culture should then be turned out as unnecessary… Yet there is a network of global networks that have been engineered to some greater structure and they can be seen by a greater Self that can contain or view from a distance the whole thing—which is what we call “encyclopaedia” of diverse database. Collecting grains of database is collecting grains of texts and making them work by comprehending those of their aspects that could be of use within the reality of worlds forming our very next instances of existence. This is not so hard to achieve for a growing Self but it could be hard to justify by such explanation our next action for survival of that greater Self by pressing it into core structures of seeds that can go on through extreme environments and give birth to a next set of worlds. The smell of a rose and the smell of a city are codes of identification even if we do not know their names, yet in a bigger structure they would need their indexes. This is the purpose of each text—giving the context for indexication. It is not that we know ourselves in text that praise our names—we know ourselves by getting out of smaller nodes and seeing ourselves in the complexity of an entity where we could be in a process of restructuring— the death of a structure and the rebirth of our essence into another structure. We know ourselves by knowing the texts that seem to be hostile and the texts that banish our names, and the texts that never mention our names yet our core identification remains. Activating the synapses of a culture is challenging it into reaction or by shocking its self-awareness by abuse: we do it in our own self-critical jokes, in our self-discrimination, in our self-negation, and in our selfcensorship re-editing our texts to form our next world. When you happen to enter one of the great London bookstores and after an hour of exploring shelves of books that you have never thought were of interest to you, by some whimsical intent of circumstances you find a comfortable seat in a quiet nook of the bookstore to rest your keening with pain feet—then when the din of your peripheral nerves has stopped engaging your brain—you suddenly find out you can lift your head and look about yourself and make a discovery. There, right across the isle, you see rows of books on new European cultures, and half a shelf is somewhat familiar: there are two or three city guides to your country’s

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major tourist sites and street maps of your capital city which you have not known even in your childhood in that way. And 2 new books—one of them stating it is based on fieldwork on your customs. And when you open it, you find out the old folk of the village have made fun of telling all village legends to the researcher—a young girl who came from Oxford and claimed that she had descended from that village—and you read and read on all the frightening tales your classmates used to tell while being on a school excursion in the late 1960s—tales that made all the girls shriek and cry all night long—and those had been given as rituals of ethnic importance—then you really start feeling bigger with the awareness of old great parents joking with their nosy grandchildren. Here we shall limit our searches for the nodes of transcendence to text that has the potency of merging into intertext. In the period of nearly 20 years that this book has in view, there are four types of texts that need attention in establishing our identities as individuality and belonging: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Myths where our self-estimation is nourished; What the world saw and wrote about the change in our world; The games we played with our kids on our PCs; The Social webs that fashion gossip on which e-folklore thrives.

The projects concerning the recursive resources of culturally-laden text cover a vast area worldwide.

2.3 Legends Approached from a General Cultural Perspective Within the Concept of Travel It is the telling of tales which fixes the attention of other people on our cultural resources. And it is not the archetype or the structure of a tale that impresses, but the details which each individual story-teller weaves into it. A Proppean approach to what we consider our cultural heritage, suddenly reveals the common tale of all Balkan peoples, of all Slavic peoples, of all Europeans, of all Western culture, of the common things of the East and the West. Still there are the names of places, the choice of the story-teller, the audience meant to be made feel unique that matter afterwards. In the 1990s our minds were dominated with travel: out of our walls we became emigrants or merely travelers, drawing on a feature that has been impressed on us in our schooling back in the 1970s—the Bulgarian as a traveler from the East to the West. Therefore it was tempting to follow

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a topic suggested by L. Kostova concerned with travel writing1: I was doing at that time another project based on the intertext of our folk tales and it was only at a hand’s reach distance to open the books of legends where travel is the dominant concept.

Travel legends and e-space Legends come to represent a separate field of semi-fantastic narrative where real life report merges with the space of artistically woven desire, building a new type of awareness and destroying the limitations of the subconscious. Unlike real fiction and very much like folklore legends are bound to real places. They do not remain there, though, for they are free to cross borders. In the first place, they cross the borders of the physical world to enter upon the realms of fantasy-woven narrative. In the second place they cross the limitations of a specific culture to enter upon fundamental human values. This is characteristic for the greatest part of legends. There are, too, legends, which cross borders of real geography and history and take us to places and times that happen really but are bound in a tangle of fantastic logic. Such legends melt cultural barriers taking for granted that their heroes are just people who mind their own business within a changing environment. That latter group of legends is the object of our study and we shall call them ‘travel legends’ for they transgress cultural spaces—real and existing as realities. Travel legends have four basic features: 1. they are products of folklore and as such represent cultures as the latter have seen themselves against a broader background; 2. they are metaphoric in nature but stand for real stories; 3. they are related to literature in the way folklore is related to it, serving as sources or crossroads of infinite text; 4. they are proto forms that use features of travel writing. In displaying all these features travel legends open routes and cross borders taking us back to common cultural grounds of humanity of earlier time, saved in rigid artistic forms binding emotion and image with value.

1

She invited me to join her section at the IRICS conference in Innovations and Reproductions in Cultures and Societies in Vienna in 2005: BORDER ZONES: TRAVEL, FANTASY, AND REPRESENTATION, which proved a fascinating extension of my parallel searches into the philosophy of the Internet.

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In the age of techno-oral culture (Lévy 1997:197) the art of taletelling has found new spaces to conquer reviving ancient fantasies to hightech-supported adaptations and extensions reaching far into the motivation of the individual conscience raised within the clashing values of ethnic identity and global humanity. Fig. 2.2.4 http://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/05_6/apostolova16.htm

Travel Legends If Arabian Nights have left their touch on all our folklore and tales of the exotic, if Border Ballads have entered the world of gamebooks and late 20-century fantasies, if Stephen King has employed the boat running along the ‘gutter swollen with rain’ which has reached It through the tale of the Brave Tin Soldier and Alice’s sea of tears, if the Discworld is possible, then borders have merged swept by the spreading wings of fantasy, and eventually the cultural membrane of the 21thst century has proven benevolent to revived archetypes.

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Cultural borders melt in the realm of fantasy where text is infinite space within subtle limits. Still there are texts, built on archetypes, which have not entered the space of modern fantasy. While the folktale has populated the dark forests with woodnymphs, werewolves, vampires, dragons, lamias, witches, shepherds, bears and foxes, giving job to good and bad girls and brave young men, - thus closing this dreamy world from the common practices of real people, legends, which fix on activities and attitudes started by everyday routine and reaching tangible effect, have not yet passed successfully the borders of modern fantasy, and have but very limited access to the space of the world wide web. Starting with travel legends, we shall seek to establish opportunities and feature that enable translegendry existence in the e-space of present burgeoning cyberculture.

Legendary Space and Travel Legends are liminal to folklore and literature for they contain narrative about real places, heroes and events and such that abide the realms of desire and fantasy. Space is the most important feature in legends: they are bound to a place for their greatest part, giving explanation about its settlement, desertion, importance or name. Being bound to functions legends have cultural, pragmatic and/or onomastic value which in their part serve as grounds for motivation, local pride, artistic creation and development of the business of tourism. Travel legends, unlike the greatest majority of legends, are bound to an agent (a person or an object) rather than to a place. They span bridges over spaces where geography and history form individual patterns. Like in travel writing all geographies are imaginative geographies—fabrications in the literal sense of ‘something made’ - and our access to the world is always made through particular technologies of representation. (DuncanGregory 1999:5) The specific technology of representation in travel legends involves two sets of features: 1) realistic description of places, routes, directions and distances with focusing on single details with specific meaning for the particular legend; 2) unfixed temporal dimension where the places are seen as cutting through historic epochs in a single narrative. In travel legends the heroes travel from place to place while places move through time and

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cultures of different type happen to visit the legendary space turning it into a common ground for humanity. There is an aspect which can serve as the door for letting legends into the space of Internet, especially travel legends which like travel writing the spatiality of representation is resolved as: an act of translation that constantly works to produce a tense ‘space in-between’. Defined literally, ‘translation’ means to be transported from one place to another, so that it is caught up in a complex dialectics between the recognition and recuperation of difference (Miller 1996). Memory, especially collective or social memory, is also a form of translation ‘marked by a boundary crossing and by a realignment of what has become different’ (Iser 1996: 297; see also Motzkin 1996: 265-81). But, as Maurice Halbwachs’s study of the cultural construction of ‘the Holy Land’ and its pilgrimage routes reminds us, social memory is often sedimented through circuits in space. In representing other cultures and other natures, then, travel writers ‘translate’ one place into another, and in doing so constantly rub against the hubris that their own language-game contains the concepts necessary to represent another language-game (Dingwaney 1995: 5; Asad and Dixon 1973; 1985). (Duncan-Gregory 1999: 4) This specific translation of cultures is based on the transformation of symbols, rendering them less specified and thus bringing them nearer to a common cross-cultural understanding or in the terms of Duncan— Gregory—occupying a space-in-between cultures. (Duncan-Gregory 1999: 5) Travel legends like travel writing report of colonizing power and imperial gestures (Duncan-Gregory 1999: 5) using both the domesticating method and foreignizing method of translation which either bring back home or send abroad the reader or the hearer of the legend (Venuti 1993: 210). The fantastic setting of the legendary narrative, however, makes these processes happen simultaneously providing space for all cultural elements, where the boundaries are not between cultures but of a more general nature reaching up to fundamental choice and existential value. Travel legends unite movement and stability, searching for identity through ‘otherness’ and building community through displacement of their characters. It is also another dimension to legendary space which is connected with gender performance: generally masculinity is movement and displacement, while femininity is stability and bondage which create environment and power for masculine action. Yet there is no limit to human nature and roles sometimes change in legendary narrative whether desired and fantastic or realistically reported.

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The space of legendary action forms an infinity which can easily transform into e-space where this ‘translation’ would not unify but preserve their specifics.

Legends in E-culture By far cyberculture has created a vast space for fantasy where legends as core texts have but nearly invisible presence. Our basic problem of concern here is: how is it possible to make space for legends, especially those of cross-cultural value, within the borders of e-space, passing them as cultural objects through the interface of e-culture. The features of travel legends allow their transformation into e-space: Table. 2.2.3 The Features of Travel Legends Translatable features of Travel Legends

Correspondent features of E-culture

Products of folklore

Techno-oral reality—a kind of electronic folklore

Represent cultures as the latter have seen themselves against a broader background

An entity containing multiplicity of cultural forms

Metaphoric representation of real things

Virtual realities stand for real things

Related to literature

Based on hypertextual infinity

Sources or crossroads of infinite text

Uses realia for building ontologies

Proto forms of travel writing

Translating cultures into one another

Further we shall test the archetypal framework of a couple of legends as providing sets of features for building ontology on translegendary texts.

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Bulgarian Legends of Transborder Nature Legends are definitely culture-laden. Malinowski (1926: 58) cautioned that myth, taken as a whole, cannot be sober dispassionate history, since it is always made ad hoc to fulfil a certain sociological function, to glorify a certain group, or to justify an anomalous status. Legends, on their part, in any society combine a variety of functions and types of information. Dixon (1996) If we assume that to the native mind immediate history, semi-historic legend, and unmixed myth flow into one another, form a continuous sequence, and fulfil really the same sociological function Dixon (1996), a legend is self-centered. It draws the cultural focus over its object of representation. That makes legends diverse in cultural content yet of the same structure. One and the same object of narration can be opposed as in the case with the representation of the Balkans in the 19th century British writing where the distinction between dominant centre and dominated periphery had played a major role in the master narratives of Eurocentrism in which (North) Western Europe had inscribed itself as the centre of the civilization and progress, reserving for itself only the right to “represent” the Old continent. (in Kostova 1997: 11) The beginning of the eighteenth century saw an increasingly influential tendency of viewing Europe and the rest of the world in terms of clear–cut distinctions between East and West, between civilization and primitivism. It further saw the disintegration of Europe, with certain parts of it on the continent, but not of it. Europe was above all England and France; the period produced Eastern and Southern Europe as peripheries. The process involved the production of national mythology stressing British exceptionality and making amends for ethnocentric attitudes by designating freedom, prosperity, and advancement as distinctively British characteristics. (see: L. Kostova 1997: 28) In the legends cited here the opposite process is taking place: the focus is changed and the near perspective has shown the immediate setting as the centre even when viewed against the empire or the admittedly more influential culture. The texts chosen here unite the features of travel legends as discussed above. Thematically they represent three story archetypes built around the axis of permanence and transformation: origin and fate, transcendence and love, bondage and sacrifice. The texts are original and can be viewed as sources and crossroads of intertext which are worth passing through the

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membrane of cyberculture. Their value basis is simple which makes it possible that they form a set of ontology features. The texts are used in their clear form as I have read or heard them first from native tellers in Plovdiv (in the middle of Bulgaria) and in Kyustendil (near the western border of Bulgaria). Table 2.2.4 Bulgarian Travel Legends’ Texts Titles

Texts

(1) The Seven Hills of Plovdiv

In times immemorial in a Thracian village near the Maritza there arrived messengers of the Persian shah sent to search for an heir to the throne since the shah had no son. They found a young boy of unusual stature and behaviour, liked him and took him with them. The boy grew up and became the ruler of Persia. Three times his mother sent his brother to him with a warm plead: for help against foreign invaders, for wheat to save the tribe from famine, and for him to come to her death bedside. Three times the king of Persia refused. The sick woman cursed him: “Your heart has turned into stone. If it happens that your step touches our land again let you turn into stone!” When he died a caravan of seven camels carrying his coffin and 6 loads of precious stones and gold arrived at the village near the Maritza.The moment the coffin of the dead king touched the ground everything turned into stones. Later on the winds blew dust and seeds all over them, the rains watered them and they turned into seven hills around which the old Thracian village spread into a town, called Julia by the Romans, Puldin by the Slavs, Philipopolis by the Macedonians and the Byzantines, Philipovgrad by the Bulgarians, Filibe by the Turks to pass throughout crossing and re crossing Balkan histories and emerge nowadays as the multi-ethnic town of Plovdiv. A Bulgarian artisan travelled to the kingdom of Abass shah and built for him a palace of unseen beauty. While the construction of the palace was in process Leila, the princess, fell in love with the master. The shah expelled him but before he left Leila met him in the garden where white roses grew, picked a bush and gave it to him as a token of their love. Her hands bled injured by the thorny bush and a few drops fell on the blossoms. When the mason took the bush to his native valley huddled in the Balkans it thrived and spread covering the green glades of May with pink flowers. People made perfumes out of their tears and the place is now known as The Valley of the Rose.

(2) The Legend of the Rose

100 (3) The Mason

Book II Chapter Two There was a famous mason who could build houses and bridges, palaces and fountains of unusual beauty. However, in order to make them sound he had to build in them the people who came to him first in the morning: his nearest and dearest—his wife or sister, a young bride, his first son. This legend was adopted by the Bulgarian gypsies who have it in a number of variations.

Variations (3a) The Source of the WhiteFooted Maiden

Gergana was a beautiful lass who used to go to a source near her native village. A Turkish vizier passed once there with his men, fell in love with her and asked her to go with him to Istanbul. She refused. Charmed by her, he ordered a fountain to be built in her honour. The masons built her shadow in the stone. She died shortly after that. Her shadow still appears on moonlit nights round the place and there can also be heard the sad tune of her young man’s flute.

(3b) The Bridge of Kadina

Kadina was a young mother with a new-born baby. She was closed alive in a bridge by the builder - her brother, and there was a hole left so that she could feed her baby through it when they carried it to her in the day. Her milk made the bridge sound and it is still there over the Struma connecting the two parts of the village of Nevestino.

The texts have clear structure which allows isolating the core symbols containing the travel legend and making its translation into the e-space uni-cultural environment possible: the symbols of space, movement and bondage. The space of the travel legend usually has two or three layers since it contains geographical position; temporal markers; social markers; emotional aspects. It is split into the opposition of here and there with its variation of centre—periphery and their concrete expressions: home— abroad; home—the wide world; home—foreign; real—imaginary/ desired/ supernatural. Movement as in travel writing makes a loop of there and back. Bondage is of varied nature containing all human duty. In Table 2 we have isolated the content of the symbols of space, of movement or travel, and of bondage as they are represented in the above texts:

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Table 2.2.5: Symbols of Space, Movement and Bondage

(1)

Places

Travel

Bondage

AThracian village near the river of Maritza– fixed as the predecessor of Plovdiv; unfixed in time; without a name

The Persian soldiers who traveled all the lands to find an heir to the throne— all the way from the center of their capital to the end of the periphery of the East as is the upper Thracian plain– right before the Balkan which separates this world from the West.

The empire needs an heir

The Thracian boy travels with them to the Empire

belonging to the native earth.

Persia–the land and its capital–fixed as destination and as end of the journey

the duty of the king the call of the native tribe for help: war; famine; death mother–son

Three times his mother sent his brother there and back The caravan of seven camels carrying his coffin arrives at the village near the Maritza The journey of the dead body down to the ground where it turned into stone.

(2)

The Bulgarian Valley of the Rose–the small valleys closed between the ranges of Sredna Gora and the Balkan in the middle of Bulgaria

The Bulgarian mason travels all over the world—Eastwards to the capital of Abass shah

professional pride and fame

He travels all the way back directly home.

love

the glory of art

blood relationship The kingdom of Abass shah. A Bulgarian master travelled to the kingdom of Abass shah and built for him a palace of unseen beauty.

the rose–a living, growing symbol spreading over land

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(3)

unfixed places home and abroad where the builder traveled and left his buildings

the master travels from place to place until he is bound by his art and love to death.

art demands sacrifice in order to last love is equal to art and can be sacrificed to make it eternal

unfixed concrete place where the version of the tale takes place

those who care come first.

(3a)

the native village of the Bulgarian girl—definite place with a name meaning ‘Pearl’ the mountain source: on the border between the open field and the shady forest the distant image of Stambul (Istanbul)

(3b)

the village of Nevestino

the river Struma running through it and separating people

the girl’s walk in the darkness of the night to the source

the freedom of the native land duty to the family

the vizier and his army arriving and settling near the source and their disappearance afterwards the visits of the girl to the source until her shadow was engraved and she faded away

love: love binding the girl to her place; love binding the visier’s violence and turning it to freedom; love binding the girl’s young man to the shadow

the young mother taking breakfast to her brother the builder

duty to humanity overcoming natural forces

the travel of the baby to be fed by his mother closed in the bridge-wall

duty to the family

The immediate conclusion of this text reduction to core symbols would be that the mixture of real and fantastic in the travel legends allows the existence of borders as natural limitations to human expression (the bondage seen as expression of duty) while at the same time this legendary reality naturally expands to include geographical space within the bigger sphere of its heroes’ experience. Balkan legends of that nature could be used as cultural bridges, for power relations and confrontation are not the focus of the tale but provide a 3D background to the legendary projection.

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In the third place, legendary action is built around the decision of the hero pushing in this way the human individual forth. All these allow building a set of archetypes and their further employment in the construction of e-space for legends where travel legends would hold a broader position serving as connections to culturally limited legendary spaces.

Building Sets of Archetypes For the purpose of reaching a legend-hypertext faster we have chosen to start from the hero who is the focus of all human narrative where the individual finds parallel experience, confirmation of values and actions, motifs for accepting or denying behavioral patterns, as well as cultural motivation. The above texts contain core relations which form oppositions representing generic and social attitudes. A second level in the archetypal set is the natural legendary environment: the space and places as they are bound in legendary time (broader epoch) and in real historic time—the nearest time of the origin of the legend. Next come the artifacts or natural objects which bind the legend to the physical world. Legend as narration is set upon action. Action provides a set of basic practices supporting the existence of the legendary heroes and their world i.e. our cultural roots. The most important thing about building this multilevel set of archetypes is their physicality which would next allow attending to the multiple sites at which travel writing takes place (Duncan-Gregory 1999:4). In our concrete texts the set takes on the following appearance: Fig. 2.2.5 [a-b-c-d] Sets of Archetypal Relations (a) The human individual: gender opposition Heroes z o

z z o

mother–son brother–sister a builder–his wife a native girl–a foreign ruler a foreign artisan–a princess

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(b) The dimensional features of legendary action: Hyperspace and hypertime z

time unspecified

z

the Bulgarian land

o o o

the Balkan valleys the south of Bulgaria the west of Bulgaria

z z z

Thrace Persia Wherever

(c) Binders to the physical reality Objects and artifacts z

the hills z the rose o

a fountain o

a bridge

(d) Practices Legendary action Duty—Sacrifice z

travelling z building z planting z fighting z feeding a baby z dating

Reviving the legends as e-ontology: preserving cultural spaces E-ontology is also a liminal characteristics: it includes the attributes, the functioning and the connections within an e-space domain. As Christoph Kindle (2005) argues: ontologies as a way to describe a domain of interest will gain importance in the information retrieval area. Legendary sets of archetypes can be easily translated as ‘archetypal attributes’ that can be adopted in the e-space.

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Fig.2.2.6 Binders of a Reality

The nature of translegendary attributes suggests the cross-references that could bind archetypal attributes into e-ontology: Fig. 2.2.7 Translegendary Attributes to e-ontology Place

Legendary epoch Key symbol

z

fantasy tale z travel z value z

artifact z character type z practice

Concrete sets of features in this case have the aim to make the unique accessible without translating it into ‘concise and culture-free source document’ or including it as ‘culture-specific example’ (Aykin 2002: 7). Unlike technical writing translegendry creates its own reality of infinite text and yet unlike fantasy it reaches to the exits of e-space into the physical world. In that we very much accept Arnett’s statement: I look forward to future cross-cultural research efforts focusing on developmental comparisons within cultural contexts that attempt to combine, in part, the ethnographic approaches of the anthropologist, the psychological theories and methodologies of the psychologist, and the social policy concerns of the sociologist. (Arnett 2005: 438)

The effects of introducing travel legends into the space of Internet would in a concentrated form find expression in opening into the virtual reality an exit to the physical world which being laden with ethnic and

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cultural traits suggests at the same time routes across cultures, melting limitations between countries in the fantasies of our common human roots. Traveling through fantasy and physical reality, legends provide a common space for folklore and trace its common cultural roots deeper than current cultural diversity and contradiction. Making our way through a labyrinth of differences we thus search to spare ethnic isles of culture motivating their existence across borders and spaces.

2.4 Popular Culture: a Play of Fantasy in the Shadowy Folds of Balkan History2 When the world turned upside down, it turned in fact upside because the world is round: the day sank into dusk and the night dawned a bright day. The people, however, remained the same, only a little bit upset. And many of them were displaced, their feet came off their roots and they flew to the other side of the globe. Those who remained merely went on with their lives from when the collapse had shaken them. The previous time the world had turned upside down there were many injustices and vendettas hot red under ashes. This time new injustice was added, while old injustice was not mended. Flames did not burst out though; fire ate the insides while the surface was too swamped to burn. In this collapse the world became aware of certain itch here and there but it is too big and too preoccupied with its own worries to enter the shoes of small people. Therefore the literary representation of the turning world in such a small place as Bulgaria naturally did not take in mind the great collapse of sand castles and the ruins in small people’s minds, the fast growth of heart diseases, suicides and mental breakdowns. Wastelands were the reserved spaces for bigger cultures. It was so not because Bulgaria has no men and women of high culture and intellect caring for our cultural heritage and speaking global languages, but because they have been exiled for centuries and live in another space from politicians and journalists. Any mingling of the spaces has historically proven bad for the heads of Bulgarian intelligentsia in terms of their being removed from their bodies. Thus our presentation to the world has had to rely on one-dimensional stories and one-dimensional

2

After Apostolova, G., BAD REALISM AND GOOD FANTASY IN FUTILE ATTEMPT AT LITERARY REPRESENTATION in Julian Barnes’ The Porcupine and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter 4-5

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characters spread by our own half-literate self-made politicians and nonprofessional puppet-journalists. It is natural that a foreigner, even a talented one, upon coming across such representation would take it for granted. For it is difficult even for a native Bulgarian who has lived long enough on both sides of the transformation to tell truths from one another without damaging one’s mind in trials to delete one’s younger years when one was happy and full of hope—not necessarily connected with communism, and of creative force—not necessarily bound to the day but reaching far into both the past and the future of humanity. Layers of injustice have mixed with layers of common activities. Hatred has made room for pity, pride—for cooperative effort in coping with common problems, hostility—for business, routine— for love and friendship. And vise versa… and much more. It is a challenge for a Bulgarian to read about our native reality mirrored in an outsider’s text. It is like entering into a room of laughter where the same image has many reflections which are not true while still containing the truth. Why a talented writer like Julian Barnes has produced grey prose, why a haunting story like Harry Potter contains caricatures of Bulgarians instead of fantastic images? Why are we ashamed to read about ourselves as represented to the world in books like The Porcupine and Harry Potter? What exactly do we learn about ourselves reading such books? Trying to answer these questions means going deep into the development of the texts3: writer’s background, experience and data used for character types, cultural archetypes and artistic approach, ethnopsychology and compatibility of text features, contextual layers of realism and fantasy. Why these two novels? They are at the two ends of fictional production in their genre and intention, in discourse pattern and popularity. They are very close, however, in terms of failure at artistic representation: a realistic novel sounds like social fantasy, while a fantasy sounds like bad advert. And there is not the usual excuse that this is only ‘a midsummer night’s

3

Derrida 1981: Derrida, Jacques. Positions. (Translated by Alan Bass). London: Athlone Press, 1981. Foucault 1884: Foucault, M. What is an Author, in the Foucault Reader, 1984, Paul Rabinow, ed. Foucault 1884: Foucault, M. What is Enlightenment, unpublished French manuscript, published by Paul Rainbow in 1984, in the Foucault Reader, 1984, Paul Rabinow, ed. Gascorek 1995: Gascorek, Andrzy. Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After. London: Edward Arnold, 1995. Lyotard 1992: Lyotard, J. F., Contribution To an Idea of Postmodernity, in The Lyotard Reader, 1992 (3rd. ed.) Andrew Benjamin , ed., Cambridge, Mass.

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dream’ for the described people and events are too bound with the real life and real time and space to be taken as artistic recreation. For the sake of clarity, let us make a set of three points of analysis: identity, artistic approach, and limitations of literature. These are to be traced in the factual areas of character representation, contextual reconstruction of ideas and journalistic means interfering with fictional ends.

We Shall Tell Them By Their Names4 Weaving an artistic reality involves working up the markers of identity where names stand first. Decoding an artistic reality is a comprehensive test simultaneously checking a couple of levels. To a non-Bulgarian, the names of the main characters and of the places would sound foreign enough still a trained ear might notice disharmony of sounds in a converted pattern: Stoyo Petkanov involves a sound combination steelharsh in the first name and soft thick brick-red in the second; while the name of his opponent Petar Solinsky employs the inverted combination. To a non-artistic purpose these two names would acquire the status of special signs cleverly worked out in the fashion of Umberto Eco. To an artistic purpose they are failures of identity. The combinations are culturally impossible therefore they cannot represent a character type. The name ‘Stoyo’ would be typical of the western regions of Bulgaria, while the Eastern parts would have ‘Stoiko’, ‘Stoicho’, ‘Stoyan’; ‘Petkanov’ is the second name which means that it is the character’s father’s or grandfather’s name which would suit an East Bulgarian for ‘Petkan’ and ‘Petko’. These names are not typical for the regions where ‘Stoyo’ is used. A Bulgarian would not like this combination naturally: the two names do not fit together—A Petkan would allow a grandchild of the name of ‘Emil’ rather than of ‘Stoyo’—especially in the generation the character belongs to—a past which is ‘another country’. Peter Solinsky is another impossible Bulgarian type: Solinski would be the expected transliteration, but again—the ‘–ski’ suffix belongs to the 4

In the approach to the characters’ names I have drawn upon the following studies: Apostolova 2006: Apostolova, G., Translation and the Names, Liternet.bg, 07. 01. 2006; Daskalova 2004: Ⱦɚɫɤɚɥɨɜɚ, Ɏɢɞɚɧɚ. ȺɄɌɍȺɅȿɇ ɉɊɈȻɅȿɆ ɇȺ ɋɔȼɊȿɆȿɇɇȺɌȺ ȻɔɅȽȺɊɋɄȺ ɋɈɐɂɈɅɂɇȽȼɂɋɌɂɄȺ, LiterNet, 07. 01. 2006; Kalkanova 1994: Ʉɚɥɤɚɧɨɜɚ, Ɍ. Ⱦɢɧɚɦɢɤɚ ɧɚ ɛɴɥɝɚɪɫɤɢɬɟ ɥɢɱɧɢ ɢɦɟɧɚ ɫɥɟɞ 1990 ɝ. // ɋɨɰɢɨɥɢɧɝɜɢɫɬɢɤɚ, 1994, ʋ 1, ɫ. 152; Kovachev 1987: Ʉɨɜɚɱɟɜ, ɇ. Ȼɴɥɝɚɪɫɤɚ ɨɧɨɦɚɫɬɢɤɚ. ɋɨɮɢɹ, 1987. Moriarty 1991: Moriarty, S. Creative Advertising, University of Colorado, N.J., 1991

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Bulgarian-Yugoslavian border regions, while Petar is typical for middle Bulgaria. The very sounding of the name is rather mid-European Slavic. These two, however sound quite normal, compared to the ridiculous combination Victor Krum. The reaction of a Bulgarian reader upon coming across that name is wincing. It is not only that the suffix ‘-ov’ for a male surname is lacking. The combination is of two strong names where the ‘beautiful’ consonants ‘v’ and ‘k’ combine with the strong ‘r’ which has emphatic effect. Historically, the name Krum is associated with one of the most imposing Bulgarian khans—a really victorious but severe ruler, who passed laws against theft, drinking, deceit, the penalties including cutting off the hand, the tongue or the head of the abuser; a warrior who drank from the silver-covered skull of his enemy—the Byzantine emperor Nickiphorus. Having in mind that the prototype is in fact the footballer Hristo Stoichkov, a simple good-natured ordinary man, this strong name turns into a ridiculous marker of identity. Again—the approach is based on very sound semantic argumentation which fails against cultural incompatibility. The female Bulgarians—the enchanting dancers and singers of unusual beauty and vicious countenance, are really true representatives of the ‘samodiva’ or ‘samovilla-villa’—a Slav version of elf-maidens or woodnymph plus a hint of Greek mythic creatures—the sirens.

Two-dimensional Context The Porcupine falls in the matrix of a fictional method known as socialist realism: it is plain in its effort to be objective. Mediocrity comes from an agit-prop frankness where contextual levels are brought to the surface. Though some wore fur-fabric coats, most had come dressed according to instructions. Or rather, not dressed: they looked as if they had just arrived from the kitchen… The demonstration began at six o’clock, the hour when the women were traditionally in the kitchen preparing the dinner…

Symbols are explained, depriving the fictional reality of its contextual depth where individual interpretations would weave layers of meaning. There were a number of demonstrations in the early 1990s which had an open-symbolic nature and a fancy-dress quality: two features which never really appealed to the realistic Bulgarians who had been fed up with the preposterous maskerade colourfulness of the so-called ‘manifestations’

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three times a year. Besides, the quited demonstration was organized in fact by the ‘red grannies’—the wives and mothers of the red bourgeoisie. High language is used to the purpose of describing events of trifle importance and surface effect. It is amazing how a piece of literature misses literary representation for the lack of inside. Another simplified contextual line is associated with the antinomy of communism and capitalism which had never had great popularity in the minds of the Bulgarians. We lived in socialism, which we never really regarded as ‘communism’—not only because communism is an abstraction, but because the Bulgarian native, even in times of massacre, has preserved a natural skepticism for any kind of mind-washer. Employing ideological background would be convincing in cases when the heroes have real faith but here, as in late 20 century reality, the real clash was between people on both sides of the power-line who used to call themselves ‘communists’ and ‘enemies of the people’ or ‘communists’ and ‘people’. True believers cannot provide prototypes because they kept silent or were kept silent. Besides, it was not ‘capitalism’ which came after the collapse. It has been called ‘democracy’ but this is a broad term applied as antonym of totalitarianism as political feature rather than to socio-economic changes. The idea of a Marxist-Leninist hardliner is social fantasy: George Orwell created a true picture of the characters in fantastic exaggeration. Here a realistic description serves to build a fantastic character. What an outsider to Bulgarian life cannot know is the double meaning of the term Marxist-Leninist. The first meaning was used by the true believers—those who were killed, who would sacrifice their lives for the idea of the future. The other meaning is related to the usage of that term by the ‘red bourgeoisie’ as we used to call it between ourselves—those who took advantage of the revolution in 1944: killers, cheaters, hypocrites, servants and guardians—the pigs and the dogs at the Animal Farm. Neither of the above groups could be a hardliner. Not in Bulgaria. They might be killers, villains, dirty little souls but for their human nature, or rather for the lack of such, not because of an ideology. Any attempt to explain or represent vice through mere ideology would be like following the totalitarian propaganda which had the power to make people silent but never had the power to delete their brains. Thus, concerning the hardliner Stoyo Petkanov - even a talented writer cannot explore a character of non-existing type. The decoding of the symbols bears poster-like realism. This approach resembles the Bulgarian low-budget films from that time, films of high

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social appeal and low professionalism, in their self-awareness which makes artistic expression give way to naturalistic ugliness. The attempt to include all specific features of the described reality draws also on wooden discourse—militiaman, according to instructions, demonstration, organisers, Metalurg complex (block 328, staircase 4), raised stiff forearms.

One-dimensional Journalism Rich description of a master of language builds up fictional settings in The Porcupine: The old man stood as close to the sixth-floor window as the soldier would allow. Outside, the city was abnormally dark; inside the low wattage of the desk lamp slid thinly from the metal rim of his heavy spectacles. He was less spruce than the militiaman had expected: the suit had corrugations at the back, and what remained of his sandy hair lurched up in tufts. But his posture was confident; there was even belligerence in the way his left foot was placed firmly on the painted line. With head slightly cocked, the old man listened as the women’s protest wound through the tight centre of the capital he had bossed for so long. He smiled to himself. (Barnes 1992: 9)

Literary approach is limited by journalistic matter-of-factness: Those inside the demonstration could distinguish from nearby the different notes that were being struck: the dead, dully echoing sound of aluminium on aluminium, the higher, more martial cry of wood on iron, and the heavy, road-mending sound of aluminium upon iron. The noise grew fat, and huddled over the women as they set off, a noise none in the city had ever heard before, one made more potent by its strangeness and lack of rhythm; it was insistent, oppressive, sharper than mourning. A group of young men at the first corner shouted obscenities and raised stiff forearms; but the grand clatter reduced them to hopeless fish-mouths, and their insults reached no further than the jaundiced burn of their streetlamp. (Barnes 1992: 8)

There is no doubt why literary criticism never mentions this book of J. Barnes’ or why it is unknown to the Bulgarian readership although it was immediately translated into Bulgarian and quite fashionable for a short while around the time of the described events. Today no one remembers it: I have questioned more than 100 people of different age, and only a colleague of mine who teaches English literature at the university happened to have read the novel of Barnes but said she had never liked it.

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Like an old newspaper it became useless for lack of real literary representation. The subjective involvement of the author and the study of human types into dimensions of long-lasting nature are lacking. It is quite a shock to find out that the only thing a stranger came to know about the deep change in Bulgaria in the early 1990s was surface effects, street show. Maybe people were too shocked to reveal their souls, maybe the author did not meet the right ones who would overcome a national shyness and barriers of communication as well as traditional fear and give him a deeper view of this breakthrough. Elements of reality have been woven into a quality text which is neither fantasy nor realism for the reality is limited to the front yard and doors are never opened to let the explorer of human nature into the numerous floors, corridors and rooms of this particular of its homes. The journalistic approach is evident in the representation of Bulgaria in Harry Potter, and not only of Bulgaria. Involving international stereotypes (French, Irish, German, Russian) into that otherwise great fantasy where we could find ourselves in the various aspects of the tale, is like in cheap brochures or grammar school textbooks and seem to have been done out of courtesy or for commercial advertising. None of the Bulgarian critiques on Harry Potter ever mentions the poor images of Bilgaria in the fourth and the fifth books of that novel—they are not important. However, the film where Victor Krum is played by a young Bulgarian, seems to be real success with young Bulgarian female audience. Where literature cannot reach, a human actor came to mend up for reality of representation. Thus it comes out that Bulgaria did not find literary representation in those two books and the problem lies with our national failure at intecultural representation—it is a bitter truth but it comes out that we still keep the doors of our home shut. Perhaps the world has not yet finished its complete turn for similar feeling are displayed in the films, plays and stories about the whole world this side of the now—shadow of the Iron Wall. There are so many crossed routes that the public conscience seems perplexed at trying to assess them. In the 1990s there was a surge of literary works and films born in the curiosity of Western writers in Eastern Europe. Such works haven’t sounded much to our own self-estimation, and the basic reason for this was that the people on the other side of the Wall had known but little about our world. We, on our part, have not been much helpful to them in revealing ourselves to our best as culture, although we have been successful individually.

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A German colleague, Hans-Ulrich Mohr, offered a similar explanation at the ESSE conference in London in 2006: They were trying to assess what made 'socialist‘ Eastern bloc regimes collapse and what problems these nations had to face in creating new governments under the conditions of gobalization. These plays proceed from the centre of Europe to the Balkan and to the Caucasian regions of the former Soviet Union tracing the difficulties of founding governable democratic states out of an entangled ethnic, religious and cultural heritage (Mohr, H.U., “New Walls after Its Fall”: David Edgar’s Post-History Plays on Europe between 1989 and 2002). He refers to Francis Fukuyama’s somehow thoughtless, somehow visionary article “The End of History,” published in summer 1989 right before the Berlin Wall came down: His rash judgment seems to have been encouraged by the contemporary concept of post-histoire. Nevertheless, post-histoire means something much more serious than such an offhand association suggests. It implies that, in consequence of the questioning of relevant social, political and historical concepts since the 1960s, ‘history’ can no longer be considered an objective process, embedding individuals and groups. Rather, history is only a collective attempt to construct a meaningful world of experience. History is recognized as the result of a collective interpretative effort for continuity and coherence, depending on existing states of knowledge and constellations of power. This postmodern questioning of a supposedly teleological history of mankind did not occur by coincidence. It was preceded by a long series of disappointments. The notion that history is incoherent, obscure and unrepresentable had emerged long before 1989, tentatively in the aftermath of the First World War and definitely after the Second World War. In postmodern drama, however, this had resulted in relinquishing any attempt to conceive of history on a larger scale. Even such ‘omnipotent’ leaders as Hitler or Stalin proved to be unsuited as dramatic characters to represent the functioning of their systems. Significantly, Stalin titled himself ‘Secretary.’ All this corresponds with another observation of postmodern thought: The time of ‘master narratives’ is over. Only small-scale processes and patterns had retained a certain legitimacy. Restricting oneself to this was the only way to communicate in an adequate way: For instance, the holocaust could only be ‘shown’ by translating it into people’s everyday lives, e.g. as events with a massive impact on the emotions of individuals or a family, but, of course, not in its concrete, exorbitant dimensions.5 5

Mohr, Op. Cit.

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In the early 1990s our people emigrated in successive waves westwards. We Bulgarians are like bees: we have to periodically leave our homeland in large groups, although, after that we tend to fly individually, unwilling to feed up one of us to make her the queen. In our spread the world over we kept in touch with each other, much of our talk dedicated to our unexperienced by any other people state. This turned out false generalization, although in individual plan it was true. In the attempt to fight nostalgia, we often reached rebuttal. And that was true not only for Bulgarians: it was even harder experienced by Eastern Germans. As it is noted in the long quote above, this is not new for history, though. Then, why should we litter the fields of world texts with uninteresting writing of unoriginal stand? While large groups of people have ceased to matter in the physical historical sense, individuals as bearers of culture have populated the spaces of the World Wide Web, forming whole new worlds limited only by the physical borders of technology, while as vast as the cosmos, from which we are bordered by the Earth environment. Thus our gross cultural produce since the beginnings of the global communication belongs to the human culture while its carriers are the individual minds adding to what Ray Kurzwail would call the transcended human where individuals merge. However, at the present moment, in September 2011, the global intellect still has its discrete structure where individuals matter and are anxious to keep their independence as such. The impossibility to have absolute knowledge efficient is bound to demand specialization even when its differentia specifica is being ‘human’, and the marker of humanity is the search for extending our existential powers. The ends of history and geography are to be found in texts looking for blank spots in the cultural map of the ex-walled Europe. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova is a remarkable example of revisiting the wild peripheries of the world in search for our nightmarish visions of our common cultural roots. The Historian is a beautifully written, yet weak in its impact book, for not addressing the real issues of the 1990s Bulgarians and being full of fallacies concerning our cultural Self in both historic and legendary self-awareness. Probably it might have different reception by further generations, although they might dismiss it as old.

2.5 History—A Tale of Vampires Eastern Europe as a space of literary exploration in the time of the great turn called by all the world Perestroika turned up in English

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literature and film from a time and place where history and geography had not worked in the traditional way. Being in the periphery of great political events and keeping a position of discretion, enclosing its unique culture in its native tongue, Bulgaria was not made a space for great literary exploration. At the same time it is challenging to read about ourselves in other literatures learning about our own representations and misrepresentations in world culture. The Historian is not high literature and in this in no way meets the standards and the tastes of the Bulgarian readership but it has become highly popular as an entertaining story although of somewhat bulky form. Like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, on which it heavily relies, The Historian produces a reading matter aimed at entertainment and provoking discussion. The narrative which is not so dense as that of Stoker, but certainly well-told, combines in itself a multiplicity of discursive fields—ethnography, totalitarian practices and ideology, discourses of identity and degeneration, gender, truth, history, life and death, sexuality, moral and aesthetic values, boundaries, conventions— issues of never- fading significance and validity though of contrastive interpretation. As a haunting figure from past narratives, legends and beliefs, the vampire emerged as a creature of folklore and rustic superstition. The myth was initially referred to on the stone tables of the Assyrians. The ancient Greeks, who believed that the offsprings of blood could affect the return of the dead from the dark abysm of the Underworld, called it “sacramenous”- “flesh made by the Moon”. The noun vampire is also cognate with the Siamese word “vampra”—the term used for a lunar Sabbath, a day that was particularly noted feared for its supernatural potency. The belief in vampires was widespread over Asia and central Europe, Greece and Turkey, but it was primarily a Slavic and Hungarian superstition (not Bulgarian, though), with reports proliferating in Hungary as early as 1730. (Gelder 1994: 39) Ever since the eighteenth century the distinction between dominant centre and dominated periphery had played a major role in the master narratives of Eurocentrism in which (North) Western Europe had inscribed itself as the centre of the civilization and progress, reserving for itself only the right to “represent” the Old continent. (L. Kostova 1997: 11) In this respect the vampire became deeply embedded in the cultural context and, as a transgressive figure from the past embodying the periphery’s difference from the centre, came to fit perfectly into the cultural narrative space. Not only did the vampire manage to do that but, as an early emblem

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of the periphery, it also became an indispensable image in the system of images invented by the West to define and contain the East. (Ibid.) As an eruption or unfavorable energies from the primitive past Dracula is disturbingly ambivalent. This is a focus of the past and the present: a membrane cutting through layers of time and space. The Historian is the story of an American family which searches to find itself in places so shady and mystic as one’s subconscious, in times so unfixed as half a millennium, in a quest for the unknown, so unfamiliar, severe, raw and fundamental as gender, bloodshed, religion and the Balkans. Elizabeth Kostova has managed to reproduce a haunting story in a clever smoothly running narrative, telling about the early 1970s yet without touching hard upon the painful spots of our histories of that time, sending her searching fantasy back—not so much in time as succession of events but in the darkest folds of primeval fears aroused by concrete events and names—and that without making her story too scary or too melodramatic. It is a well-built narrative and one could make the most of entertainment reading it. Our aim here, however, is to explicate the levels of cultural representation and its perception by a Bulgarian reader. First of all, building a fictional reality using real names, places and events in a story which is made up, is something that strikes a Bulgarian reader since realism and high literature are the established readers’ tastes especially in cases where well-known places, names and historic events are concerned. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” type of fiction is something novel on our literary horizon. In fact: there is no problem up to page 463 of the Bulgarian edition of the book where the name of Bulgaria is mentioned for the first time. After that the story becomes dense in both description and events reaching a culmination, though not an end in its ‘Bulgarian’ part. It is then that literature ceases to exist for a Bulgarian reader and one feels cheated, because using real names and places in a tale of fantasy really spoils fantasy by the knowledge that it is impossible in that particular setting. Probably the reason lies in the fact that the fantasy relies on local realia rather than on local character, and hero-centered action is in fact imported: the local settings are the background to action of strangers using our well-known realia in a strange way. This feeling of disappointment, however, is the surface reaction. A further rereading of the book reveals it not as travel book, as it appears to be in its structure, but as adventure of deeper nature.

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It is like hovering in a spiral round the heart of the Balkans in search of a mystic fearsome creature: traveling between Romania and Turkey and preparing to enter a forbidden zone: Bulgaria is a difficult place to enter— physically because of the fearsome mountain ranges that nestle the land in their folds, and politically—because of the totalitarian limitations of access. There is, however, a third boundary which lures fantasy: the fascinated foreigner never reached deep into the roots of what her characters see or hear: there is action and there is dialogue, but it is like surfacing. Cultural experience is limited to the information in tourist brochures or to what totalitarian iron curtain allowed foreigners to see. Maybe this lack of real knowledge is what has made it for the narrator so mysterious to travel round Bulgaria, and to fix it as the enchanted land where Dracula found a lasting shelter. It is quite an experience to find out that not only the past but the present can be ‘another country’ when seen through eyes adapted to other cultural environment which is open to our own yet completely unaware of our own self-awareness. Thus, the traditional experience of the mind knowing itself through ‘otherness’ is displayed. It might seem a good idea to replace the history of incessant bloodshed and human monstrosities of the Balkans with a fantasy of vampires: thus the present Bulgarians, Romanians, Albanians, Greeks and Turks remain just ordinary people whose ancient feud has turned into a ghastly story, into a nightmare which can be survived. This, however, makes the story, though well-told, sound shallow. It is real strong clash in history and the survival after such clash that has made the Balkan peoples what they are now and it is part of all our diverse national pride and self-respect. A vampire as a creature of the dark is a tale for naughty kids. There is no longer the powerful feudal ruler, the bolyar, who fought against the aggressive invader, that we habitually named ‘the Turks’ for the Ottoman empire and its offices were an abstract matter in the massacres, where certain local leaders opposed and killed thousands of imperial warriors. There is the story of a transnational nightmare which is chased and removed by an ordinary American family where the women play leading part. This seems a very simple solution to entangled Balkan histories. You just need enlightened Americans, and vampires are beaten for you. Vampires, not Turkish for our age needs not breed hostile cultures—yet, we cannot erase our historic memory, even when we have been living in friendly neighborhood for a century. The representation of Bulgaria in the book is multi-coloured and emotionally loaded. It is evident that it holds a special magic for the author who approaches it with the scary enchantment of her heroes rooted in both

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the unknown and the unnatural. There are three levels of literary representation bound in the development of the plot: the historic events, the people, and the places. The book definitely lacks the serious tediousness of Mercia McDermott's book The Apostle of Freedom, but it also lacks its splendour of style and richness of truthful narrative. There is a couple of character types described: the man from the state security services, the old professor of history and his niece, the monks at Rila Monastery, the common people from the small village huddled in a wild valley of the Rhodopes—the mountain massive that separates Bulgaria from Turkey and Greece to the east. The characters are built according to the simple scheme of telling the good ones from the bad ones depending on how cooperative they prove to two Americans who have broken into the country in search of something that serious history would discredit. The mysterious task of finding the vampire is emblematic as a metaphor of the effort to break the ‘iron wall’ in an attempt to understand a hidden culture. A simple-minded story for a simple minded audience would search for artifacts rather than for real living people. In fact the method of presenting the Bulgarian characters is that of the black box: a well-described surface and partly the outcome—in a small spell of time—while the input and the inner mechanisms of functioning are unfathomable. That makes them stationary and unimportant as they are only part of the background where the story is about establishing American identity through uninvestigated cultures. The historic events come as letters, translated documents, narratives by reliable characters. It is amazing that the story of Vlad Dracula is truthfully told up to the vampire fantasy which it seems to support. The incredible fictional representation of history comes when the specialized enichari department for fighting the vampire is introduced. (In the use of cultural realia that do not overburden the flowing tale, this book is an example of textual translation in time.) There are also a number of other historical fantasies which make the story rather shaky from a Bulgarian reader’s point of view. First comes the nonchalant labeling of Georgi Dimitrov ‘a communist dictator of Stalinist type’, which is a somewhat understandable but untruthful inference from the later histories on that Bulgarian leader (Lalkov 2006) and contradictory to the common attitude of the Bulgarians: a really ‘foreign’ approach, which sets debate between readers of different generations or at different stage of ideological and ethnic displacement. There seem to be caught clashes of national history and transcultural historical context: yet, a Bulgarian reader is readier to tolerate different approaches than the author of the book who knows nothing about (and doesn’t seem interested in) any

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other way of calling a great (not necessarily good in every respect) Bulgarian: black and white here are accepted as sufficient colours of the background to the story. Another unbelievable tale is the celebration of May 24 at the house of the ‘famous’ historian Stoichev, who was declared ‘enemy of the people’ for his religious belief. There is a man from the state security accompanying two suspicious foreigners. And there is a multitude of admirers of that professor who openly manifest their love and respect to him in the mid-1970s when there was really totalitarian dictatorship and people in disgrace were shunned and even they kept self-isolated so that other people would not be investigated for talking to them. This is rather a dream picture: a way to make up a good character by stating ‘factually’ that he is respected and loved by many. Such a picture is possible only in retrospection as a romanticized vision of the quiet revolution of the Bulgarians. Surviving totalitarianism was not that romantic, and not so open, and not so proud—keeping quiet and low has proved the wise thing to do in order to survive. And there is an open religious celebration with fire-dancing—again in these years—described as it is performed to rich foreigners in our Black sea resorts. This is, however, something typical for Strandja—a mountain massive separated by the lower parts of the Thracian plain from the Rhodopes which is a different territory and holds different ethnic tradition from those kept in the Rhodopes. A further error is the choice of icons: St Mary and St George are impressive in strength but not the ones to dance on fire with where St Nicola, the Christian version of Poseidon, and Constantine and Elena—the later seaside saints come favourable. Another improbable fantasy is the enormous crypt under a Bulgarian church: we have been poor people and our greatest churches do not possess that space. Besides, all Bulgarian churches during the 500 years of Turkish reign were small and dug into the ground so that they do not rise higher than the mosques. We know about these things here, we have known about them for centuries and our historic memory has grown familiar with their verbal expression which has sounded shockingly hostile to strangers. That is no reason to falsify our history, neither is it a reason to accept a naïve tale as our own story however entertaining it might be. The scenery described is as attractive as an improved tourist brochure: even the route is the standard one we use to offer to our foreign guests when they first come here—and the easiest for us, too. The book can be approached from another point of view getting beyond narrow ethnic and national perception. It is an adventure into an unnamed identity: a first-person tale of a heroine, who has been marked

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with the sign of the vampire yet, has grown in a safe generation. This is a story where gender is represented in a way provoked by the Balkans: femininity is leading without being changed for neuter or abstract manifestation of humanity. Here we do not need the ‘he or she’ replacement of the third person, because “I” stands for the heroine around whom action develops. This bears no ethnic references but here I can find a true representation of the Balkan and, in particular, of the Bulgarian selfawareness of femininity. The obedient and loving daughter enters the dark spaces of the Balkans to reveal herself as an explorer and a fighter. There is not a single line in the whole novel which places femininity in the background of a masculine action: even the mother who has been left with the baby never loses her strength, and her love survives in spite of male uncertainty and dependence on evil forces. Love is an indispensable part of femininity but not subordination. Hate, on the other hand, as well as fear, is not—and they do not divert a woman from her fixed decision to fulfill her mission of relieving the future from the vampire who sucks intellect rather than blood. There is also the romantic side to the story but it is not the traditional overwhelming love that saves the good and brings vampirism to its humane side. Love is just human, the vampire interferes with it. Here women, though bitten, fight while men seem to be more vulnerable, for the bite of this particular version of Dracula affects the mind rather than the flesh. Those who are bitten twice prefer death to turning into subordinate vampires. Again this might be interpreted as representation of the Balkan liberation movements’ logo: ‘Freedom or Death’. In the third place comes the fact that this is a tale told from the future: the very beginning is an address to the reader dating as far forward as January 15th 2008 which sets the story as retrospection to 1972 when the action of the novel begins, again to only fall back as far as half a millennium. It is like steps back into time, down into the crypt of darkness. There are ‘acknowledgements’ and ‘documents’ ‘cited’ which add up to the motivation of the story. It is curious but readers never seem to notice the date 2008 and tend to accept this part of the story as preface which ascertains the documentary value of the narrative. Last, but not least, comes the fact that the Bulgarian translation has put the title The Historian in the masculine although in the very first place the heroine states herself as ‘the historian’ and this is closely translated into the feminine. This places the father into the centre of the action and the heroine—in the position of a narrator only. But the development of the novel brings up this contradiction.

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All in all, there is not real representation of the Balkans and especially in our case—of Bulgaria in this book. There is the representation of the American trying to find an identity of culture, gender, historic roots, humanity and supernatural survival, as citizen of the world traveling to places so close at hand and so distant from a global perspective. The book is a very good reflection of the American self interested only in its own problems, closed for real love, real suffering, real problems of their real hosts in unknown lands and prototypes to their heroes. Christianity, ethnic clashes, values and communism pass in a dreamlike way past the rushing train of action requiring a vampire to thrill it out of its hidden folds. As a story the book is unimportant. As representation of the Balkans it is weak. However, it sets a deeper set of questions than come to the surface only through a Balkan reader: they concern a modern approach to cultural transformation through employment of history, literature, fantasy and reaching to readership. The book lacks good representation because the iron wall around the Balkan cultures still exists. It cannot be opened from the outside but an outsider can provoke its destruction. Therefore, The Historian comes out to be a culturally motivated book, probably one of a type that would cut through walls and throw light on vampire refuges even when it turns out there were no vampires here of the tale-telling sort. It is a book about a modern American who needs reestablishment of her own Self. In its approach to European histories it very much resembles the young people talking on board the river boat and hardly paying attention to the monstrous anaconda swimming past in the first film Anaconda. The heroin listens to her I-voice which is garrulous and does not let settings, including people, have the floor. In the time of our first reactions to The Historian we were accused of bearing no tolerance for a well-written book and having no appreciation of a fictional story. I agree with this: here, on the Balkans, we consider literature as aspect to our cultural biography, i.e. to our history. It is a strange idea to suddenly find ourselves as the background to a story where we have always been the actors. Maybe this conclusion would seem preposterous at a next stage of cultural growth where texts matter more than the world outside where there is no one to tell the story and start an argument.

CHAPTER THREE THE ACTIVE TEXT

In the e-space humanity loses the body-binder. Consequently, the pyramid of needs acquires different substance and it is the mentality of the virtual culture of e-kind where story-telling becomes the environment and the binder of our e-souls and the physical frontiers of the triadic regulator of humankind extend into the freedom of e-ethos, e-pathos and e-logos. The three principles of human intercourse in their transcendence into the virtual reality acquire the status of fundaments of its very substance. Ethos is the regulator complex of e-kind; pathos is the emotive tool in ecommunication and logos opens the frontiers for multiple existence of the same mind as far as the physical binders of web-technology allow. The rereading of these principles in the texts that form the e-mythology amidst which two generations have grown up already, turns into a necessity: it is not a past imperative, for the analytical approach to the e-culture formative texts keeps on supplying it with the instruments and vehicles of selfcorrection day in and day out. Here the SIAN methodology based on the socio-cultural analysis of e-orality where pragma-dialectics is the core plays leading role in both tendencies: weaving the globe culture in globe talk and destroying old web binders. It is all carried out in the debate of minds explicated in the power of language use interculturally. What is more the triad of ethos, pathos and logos in the e-space has to mind both the virtual and the physical existence of the individual. Today the physical world still dominates and that makes the task of transcendence of our cultural roots even more pressing. Here I shall follow the general rhetoric complex (Mavrodieva 2013:3110, Chapter 1 and 2) in building on the applied practical demonstration of the SIAN and the AA in the fields of socio-cultural education; literature and its adaptations to game and tale; scientific discourse and the canons of rhetoric: inventio, distributio, eloqutio, memoria and actio as they are used to weave old worlds into new by change of meaning based on choice and contextual frontiers. I shall be focused on two questions: what are the grounds of change and how is it done. The first questions is concerned with the existential

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limitations of human culture in terms of its ability for creation. The second one is concerned with the instruments of change. In the beginnings of the great social change in Bulgaria we were all risk-takers and in the case with teaching the opening new world to kids, gamers. Debate has specific dimensions in games which are based in their motivation by adaptations of core texts of our literacy periods.

3.1 E-folklore in Tale and Game The transformations of practical philosophy in the world of computer games and the game adaptations of children’s literature “We are all story-tellers and we tell stories about people, and we tell these stories not only to other people but also to ourselves. We have in our activity as story-tellers a way of judging, a way of evaluating the world that surrounds us, and this gives in return a sense of our own identity, our own separateness, our own self-being.” (Murdoch 1998:255)

Literature for children, which has always kept a firm connection with folklore and story-telling seeking visual image, play and dramatic involvement, has embarked into the hyperspace of electronic games where it is being re-activated to create new cultural environment. This cultural environment seeks redefinition of its boundaries to humanity where the re-establishment of the identity of the kid against a changed set of moral and aesthetic norms is carried out in communicative action and involvement in practices which have not yet found sufficient explanation in terms of their nature and effects in the process of the cultural transformation of the younger generations. E-culture is the complex product of a planned effort of the late twentieth century science and technology. Therefore it requires an interdisciplinary approach. In this part of Book 2 I have tried to apply an integrated approach based on organizational and internet cultural studies, the proto-form of SIAN, (Hofstede 1997, 1998; Gattiker, 2001; Aykin, 2005 etc.), postmodern philosophy (M. Foucault, 1984; I. Murdoch, 1998) where a possible text analysis can be grounded on the postmodern philosophy of the infinite text, - and studies in the nature of children’s literature and its adaptations (M. Slavova, 2001, 2005). Drawing on experience and observation of more than 500 gamers of 10 to 19 years of age who have attended my private English courses (traditional and based on PC) since 1993 I have gone further in verifying the outlines and effects of a practical philosophy applicable to this

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particular field of e-culture in a society which is open to e-culture being at the same time not dependent on it. For the purpose of this specific paper I have made a new investigation between February 20th and March 1st 2006 with 112 bilingual (Bulgarian and English) teenagers between 12 and 18 years of age—66 girls and 46 boys. There are 6 parts to this study, which answer to a succession of steps starting from opinion, through theory to factual study and typology: Opposition to PC Games, Cultural Outlines of the PC Games, Genres, Evaluation Scale, and Types of Adaptation of Children’s Literature to PC Games. Our effort is directed to motivating the use of PC games in the process of education of our children through bringing out awareness of their nature and effect and employing to the best of our purpose both their strong points and their limitations.

Opposition to PC Games Opposition to PC games can be explained by their fast development and spread in the late 20th century: so fast that philosophy has not managed yet to view this event completely and offer an explanation which could fit it into the public conscience. Maybe the roots of this event as final motivation have to be searched for in the understanding of postmodernism which culturally provided the grounds for the practices of electronically supported culture as an infinite hyper structure. Looking forward to the effects of postmodernity, as concerning our subject here in particular, we agree that: The crisis in philosophy and other social sciences is influencing postmodern culture as represented by technology and art. As such, entertainment has shifted to new genres and forms. Ultimately, entertainment in cyberspace will be a reflection of the facets of television offered on a number of channels. Moreover, as much as television has been influenced by culture as far as content and advertising are concerned, the Internet may also be influenced. For instance, advertising has become an important consideration to pay for the design and maintenance of Web pages… (Gattiker 2001: 84)

The relationship of TV and PC games as kinds of entertainment in terms of origin, intention and techniques has lead to adopting a public attitude towards them based on the common opposition of entertainment and serious occupation. It is still common practice to oppose PC games to traditional culture and in particular to reading and study, instead of seeing them as extension to current culture and education and training the

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children into very specific cultural practices. The basic opposition is, also, founded on the false presumption that e-culture as a product of the latest technology would match traditional carriers of culture, failing to take into view that the transformation of all cultural achievements of the humankind into the cyber space would take some time and effort, as well as incessant further technological improvement. And, a relevant motivation for leaving certain aspects of our cultural tradition out as irrelevant, insignificant or even harmful if transformed to be contained in this kind of media. There follow a number of arguments concerning especially PC games: they are a waste of time, they are monotonous, they employ violence, they use horrible images and set up taste for the horrible, they interfere with healthy lifestyle etc. Further on we shall seek for the aspects of PC games which provide grounds for such arguments, drawing also on Clarke’s summary of certain objective reasons for them: Yet even with these signs of global spread, high user interest, continued usage now and in the future, and the role children play in the household in expanding technology adoption and in exerting impact on decisions through open and attractive online knowledge, many people who design and develop online marketing entertainment and information are unaware of the issues in designing games for children, especially on a global level. Frequently, developers bring biases or use their own childhood experiences in developing for children, instead of researching children on potential content. They also err in using adult logic to set up navigation and graphics, or they do not understand design issues unique to children in age, gender, and global cultural differences. (Clarke 2005: 253) Another type of opposition comes from educators who are still employing traditional methods of teaching to a greater success and for a number of social, financial, technological, organizational, and general cultural reasons cannot or refuse to adopt PC games as aids to educational methods although play is widely adopted as a method of education. Like the fairy tale which has been ‘considered as harmful for the spiritual health of the children who need moral instruction and their imagination (Slavova 2001: 5) the PC game today has numerous opponents. The problem lies in the failure to see the educational value of these games behind a shiny surface of commercial rather than of cultural effect. There is still a third type of opposition to PC games and it is that of the gamers themselves. It is realized in their negation of certain games and in their critical attitude towards certain aspects of other games. There is a natural hierarchy of gamers themselves. There is the group of connoisseurs who we shall refer to as ‘serious players’, the group of the ‘learners’ or those who follow the standards of the first group but are not skilled at play

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yet, and the group of common players who would play anything and are generally underskilled. Producers of PC games have classified the gamers generally as ‘beginners’, ‘medium’, and ‘experts’ or employ a labelclassification which answers the hierarchy of levels in the game development—a type of hero or a social type: in Caesar III the player climbs the social levels of ancient Rome from a simple citizen to aedil to consul to Caesar; in Big Kahuna Reef the gamer eats his or her way up starting from a small fish and reaching to a shark, in BeJeweled 2 the player gets a rank; in most games of the higher genre rank such as roleplay games (RPG) and strategies the game chooses the setting, the age, the nation, the type of hero. The classification of the producers, however, only partly coincides with the social strata of the game players as they perceive themselves and has an insignificant effect on the opposition to types of games. A fourth type of opposition is the socially imposed division of sexes which reflects both in the reasons and effects to this kind of opposition: girls are very special in games both in terms of being heroines and of being allowed in the circles of serious players. This is to a great extent due to family education and to the fact that parents usually buy a computer to their son, not to their daughter. Boys are generally silently allowed though not encouraged to go to the gamers’ clubs and girls are generally not allowed or discouraged both by their elders and their peers to visit them. All these oppositions are part of the greater opposition of traditional culture and e-culture. In the education of children, however, the cultural opposition is faster neutralized because of the very process of cultural change based on generation change. Still there is the need of explicit explanation and building social awareness of the underlying cultural motifs and expected cultural effect of the mass use of electronic games.

Cultural Outlines of the PC Games PC games are part of cyber culture and its theoretical outlines go as far as the philosophy of culture and as wide as organizational culture, intercultural communication theories and applied studies of computing communities. Further in this study we shall draw on Hofstede’s model of culture as a highly suitable one for approaching cultural transformations taking place in PC game adaptations of traditional literature for children. As E. Gould states: Hofstede’s (1980) theory of universal cultural dimensions has become the best known, and probably most applied, intercultural communication theory. (Gould 2005:91)

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To this we shall also add Holliday’s discussion on a number of features defining a culture, among which are three which would give us a sufficient support in defining the outlines of the cultural background of PC games: 1) 'a culture' has a physical entity; 2) it is associated with a value, and can relate equally to any type or size of group for any period of time, and can be characterized by a discourse as much as by a language; 3) cultures can flow, change, intermingle, cut across and through one another, regardless of nationalfrontiers, and have blurred boundaries.(Holliday et.al. 2004: 4–5)

We have also previously discussed the nature of virtual culture (Apostolova 2002, 2005) as well as the cultural features of PC games (Apostolova 2005). Starting from the idea of their being a specific ‘physical entity’ the first general feature of the PC games as a concrete field of today’s cyber culture is that PC games are created within the virtual reality of modern cyber-technology where they take specific space. Talking about their place, we shall often use the term ‘cyberspace’ which is further discussed in relation to the notions of virtual culture and virtual reality. The second feature of the cultural space of PC games is that it is based on imagination in its broadest sense supported by children’s books, fantasy and horror stories, legends and any kind of mythology and providing space for generating its own myths and legends. In the third place, PC games generate e-folklore by creating their rituals and heroes which cross the frame of a single game by being used in further versions, in series or even—as game-space realia—the single warrior—the shooter; the alien monster; the magician, the wise old man, the pirate, the racer etc. Thus the dialogue with the child is maintained by means of text codes and a system of symbols which have different layout in each game but a common nature. They are realized as voice commands or the layout of the menu or in the interactive texts with the player. In the fifth place, games establish practices or ways of coping with the task or problem. There are also the techniques of playing games of the same genre established as practices. The listed features of PC games enclose their cultural space binding them to follow rigid value system, which, however, differs from game to game and in general—from traditional value systems both in structure and in content. Let us have a closer look at the listed features.

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PC games and virtual reality Virtual culture is a notion containing all controlled (primary) and automated (secondary) processes, human activities, relations and products realized in the virtual space. At this stage of its development it is characterized as a specific interpretation of the traditional human culture: it is its product, its container and its negation. The evident characteristics of virtual culture are: it is communicative; it has a technical carrier; it uses energy from an outside source; it exists only for those who have access to it. Further its outlines will follow its present limitations, its antinomies, its hierarchy and its doubled ethic standards. (Apostolova 2002: 13) Virtual culture is unfolding within cyber space. Generally, William Gibson, a science fiction writer, is attributed with coining the term cyberspace. However, in Gibson's work, cyberspace had a negative connotation when tied to the vision of corporate hegemony, urban decay, and neural implants. (Gattiker 2001: 11)

We shall further rely on Gattiker’s definition of cyberspace as closest to our view: Cyberspace is a parallel universe created and sustained by the world's computers and communication technologies and is easily accessed via a computer, cable, or telephone modem linked into the system… This environment is kept together with the help of the Internet and is brought to the individual user through cable or satellite communications. In turn, people may wish to remain anonymous or may choose a pseudonym instead of their real identity when taking advantage of the possibilities in cyberspace (Kabay 1998). In turn, this may result in possible conflicts with people's concepts of ethics, privacy, and freedom that are discussed in chapters 5 and 6. (Gattiker 2001: 12)

Cyberspace is the environment of virtual reality which is specific in its physical and psychic dimensions since it is neither of them and ancient dichotomy of matter and ideas here acquire new interpretation. The notion virtual reality is in the first place related to PC games. Gattiker sees PC games as forerunners of virtual reality because they gave an individual the opportunity to become part of the experience. (Gattiker 2001: 11) He also establishes the difference between them and virtual reality which is also realized in cyberspace but is unlimited: Virtual reality is a process of creating an artificial reality by stimulating the body’s sensory output and makes one’s mind and body

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believe that the image created by the computer is real. Consequently, virtual reality has the potential to involve users in sensory worlds that are indistinguishable from the real world. In addition, virtual reality environments may even merge with the real world. Virtual reality provides the user with additional opportunities to alter his or her experiences or to widen them beyond what is being offered by a video game. (Gattiker 2001: 12)

However, the multitude of PC games today has created a separate field within the universe of virtual reality and this is growing both in extension and in quality of cultural acquisition (not necessarily positive) with every new game or game version. Virtual reality is discrete and technically dependent. It is the environment of shared conscious for all who are connected to it and in this it differs from the individual conscious which is permanent, independent and not shared. In addition to these three features virtual reality is conditionally bound yet within its initial limitations it provides opportunity for replay of choices and finals. Since it is something different from both the subjective reality of the individual conscious and the objective real-life practice it is imaginary and real, individual and shared and is based on convention. It is much like a role play which adapts stories to its own uses. Virtual reality makes literary adaptation ubiquitous yet short-lived. Both hardware and software cannot compare with the traditional book which can last for centuries. Besides conventional writing and print are easier to decode in a hundred years while games created ten years ago have to be adapted now for the programs which had supported them were improved or replaced long ago. A book can be read at the light of the sun but also at the light of the fire, while PC-adaptations need electricity and special places. A book has two aspects: text and pictures. An e-game provides information, pleasure and activity for all accessible at the present stage levels of our minds through intellectual puzzle, text, picture, sound, action, desire, suspended emotion. The involvement in the game reality draws on the unlimited simulation of reality created by our imagination. Virtual activity creates equilibrium in the brain processes involving both its halves—the right one like in the physical play, and the left one—like in the process of reading. Thus it is accepted as a reality of more sound type than the reality created by the reading of a book or in a role play.

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3.2 Imagination as the Freedom of Expressing Truth If we accept that ‘imagination is a kind of freedom, a renewed ability to perceive and express truth’ (Iris Murdoch, 1961: 256), cyber space then provides a multi-layer environment for the free movement of our imagination both as creators of PC games and as players who set the product of imaginative forces to action by using a concrete hero and individual chain of choices. The player is free to move within the boundaries of the game which, like in ordinary role-play, form the rules of the reality-to-be. This imaginary reality is in itself the best counter-argument against the opposition to PC games which draws on their use of monstrous images and violence. A text represents evil in words and context. A context pushes fantasy to extremes. A game limits evil to visual image and violence is regulated within the frame of survival. It is not real and the play does not claim anything beyond its story while a fairy tale claims to be drawn from life. A game has a logical framework while a tale can have gaps in text-motivation leaving to the reader to fill those gaps of absurdity. Cyber games also use fantasy in the way it is used by postmodern art: they texts applying parody and pastiche to make up a completely new viewpoint. Freedom in using a text here means melting the textual boundaries to build up new infinity. This is the mechanism of doubling reality like in Alice, Winnie the Pooh, and much before them—in the Arthurian legend and the tales of Merlin, Beowulf, Utopia, Gulliver’s Travels, The Portrait of Dorian Grey and later—as in the stream of consciousness and in postmodernity. Metaphorisation here takes the form of play or in the terms of M. Slavova ‘tale-play’, ‘tale modelling’ by ‘logical dissolving of language formulae’, ‘destruction of structure and sense of the language unit and their reappearance in an unexpected form and meaning’. (Slavova, 2001: 16-17). The limitations of the electronic media are also limitations of visualized fantasy. At the same time the fantastic creativity is stimulated by the opportunity for replay where new chains of choices are experimented. Besides, the versions to the same play open it for future improvement. Thus the single text is dissolved in the game’s hyper reality in multiplicity of parallel existences. Being different from both the real world and the psychic virtual reality in its realization as game is magic reality where space and time are tools rather than environment, changeables rather than constant limitations to action. If we apply I. Murdoch’s qualification to game adaptation of literature this would be a process of magicking both, reading and play:

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‘Literature is dangerous, it is a kind of magic. It is also something very lofty, it expresses or explains religion to each generation. Or is it perhaps in some way based on a mistake, ought we not to see it as being just words, whatever that might mean? Can all those things be true? I think it would be impossible to over-estimate the magical nature of art. Art is an attempt to achieve omnipotence through personal fantasy. Art is the abode of wishfulfillment and power mania… it gathers together the personality of the creator and the personality of the reader or spectator (or the gamer) into a sense of unified significance which may, of course, be very momentary.’ (Iris Murdoch, 1998 : 251)

E-folklore: rituals and heroes The shared space of virtual reality provides the environment for the development of specific imaginary world. All the tales about it told and retold in the multitude of games and their versions transfers the world of fantasy which underlies them into virtual folklore. It is built by the specific links and references to the fantastic elements (aliens, castles, monsters, witches, talking rabbits etc.) whose mentioning again and again in games from each next generation creates redundancy of tale and interweaves tales into an infinite story. This is the texture of electronic orality: a dialogue based on common markers of a fantastic reality with its own structure, rules and values. Cyber games transfer fantastic tales into a kind of folklore which supports the roots of game-tale. The adaptation of children’s literature to PC games is a process which reverses the steps of adapting folklore to children’s literature: it can be seen as a cultural transformation where literature is adapted to the conventions of the virtual reality. This process generates different forms. PC games are of unstable nature as a pastime for children. They are played by everyone who uses computers. To the players, even to the producers of PC games the educational effect is a background aspect while entertainment and competition to survive or win come first. In my latest survey of 112 teenagers (78 gamers and 34 who do not play PC games) 84 state as a primary feature of PC games ‘entertainment’, another 26 have ranked first intellectual challenge and competing to win, while none of them has indicated sound or graphics as an important feature. The negative results correspond to this: 60 place ‘waste of time’ as the primary drawback to playing PC games (40 gamers and 20 who do not play PC games). Traditionally ‘waste of time’ is interpreted as the negative for ‘entertainment’ as the opposite to ‘work’.

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The mixed audience of gamers is another marker of game-folklore: there is a mixture of values, heroes, ideals, and practices belonging to various generations. This resembles the transition from folklore to literature: ‘It is well-known that even in its earliest stage—as a folklore genre type—the tale was performed… and listened to by audiences of mixed age’. (Slavova, 2001: 3) Gattiker argues that there will not be a unified virtual community but he states: Virtual communities are likely to become communities uniting people from various walks of life and countries sharing an interest… Accordingly, virtual communities will become a place whereby people find others who share their interest and may be able to provide help to find one's way in the maze of information and entertainment provided through computer networks. Here, then, cultural differences may be of lesser importance because being a member in a virtual community is based on one important shared value... (Gattiker 2001: 96)

Here the audience comprising the virtual community of gamers is the whole cyber society which is further segmented in age, interests and skills studied by the specific demographic and psychographic descriptions applied to this specific technologically-generated and technologicallybound society. The segmentation of audiences is the basis for the genre differentiation of PC games.

Text codes and symbols A PC game is a work of art and a work of art is a self-contained structure which we set ourselves, in a certain mood of detachment and with a previous knowledge and acceptance of certain conventions, to consider as a whole. (Iris Murdoch, 1998: 55) The basic means of artistic expression is metaphor and PC games are comprised of metaphors which build the game reality. In the terms of Iris Murdoch the development of virtual consciousness of the gamers is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor. Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision. (Iris Murdoch, 1998: 363) The dialogue with the gamer is codified in the text. The text is the fundamental condition for the construction of the game reality. It has two levels: the organizing text and the text initiated by the player. The reaction

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to the text is another text, an exchange with other players and the action generated as a result of the comprehension of instructions. The text supporting fantastic reality of the game is therefore the means and the environment of game-communication. The story has the status of initiating principle and the comprehension of its levels leads to success in the game. The text functions as a codifying complex. The use of text in the game dialog next is doubling the subject—the gamer uses it both as encoder and decoder The text of the PC game is the canvas of its texture where metaphor is developed in all its perceptual forms and variations. PC games use symbols in the way they are used in children’s literature and folklore: archetypes, realia, and synchronic symbols building the shared gamespace, as well as current symbols for a single game. There are graded symbols like the old kennings: red is the symbol of blood, blood is the symbol of health, health is the symbol of life; but red is also the symbol of danger. A human figure with an axe stands for a group or ‘unit’ of woodcutters, while a figure with a crossbow represents a unit of archers. Picture and icon, plain text and text box, movement (appearance, disappearance, growth, shrinking, starting, moving and stopping) and sound form complex metaphors creating three-dimensional reality where the player is identified with the hero. It is curious but films still dominate over PC games in their suggestive effect: gamers seem to leave the virtual space of the game immediately after they cease playing, while film metaphors serve as the basis for extending the film reality into traditional role-play. Out of more than 500 gamers I have talked to during the latest 10 years only 3 have nicknames generated from PC games (Killer, KFA, Brains), while many others have such taken from films (Blade, Slade, Clone, Tweety). There are no popular graffiti with PC-game heroes, while all of them are based on film. Symbols in PC games are accepted as such and admired as such even by addicted players. The fascination comes from the challenge and the opportunities for development of technology with the involvement of the gamer even as a user who sets certain tastes, not by the current display.

They establish practices Games which appear in versions and series create practices based on behavioral patterns regulated by the game story. Due to their present technical limitation these practices are quite simple since they involve operating with the symbols which are much more generalized than single objects and thus—limited in their random effects. There are two levels of

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practices: the first level contains the techniques of playing. The second level contains adaptations of traditional cultural practices which are passed through the game interface forming the genres of games like simulation, jump’n run, first person shooter, strategy, role-play game etc. and subgenres: economic strategy, war strategy etc.

They follow rigid value system The basic axiological categories are valid for the game-world: good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly as well as life and death appear as ruling motivation and limitations to each game. Because they are visualized and bright they challenge the opposition of traditionalists: concrete detailed and ubiquitous picture, advertising aggressiveness and parody seem outrageous. There is nothing, however, in the games which has not been present before that in traditional literature or in real life. The traditional tale of the Little Red Riding Hood has its layers of evil contexts while a PC game employing an ugly wolf with big teeth and red fiery eyes remains on the surface of the message where the player fights the evil and wins or is given another chance. Good and evil are present practically in every game. They are involved in two basic action schemes: negative and positive. The negative one is realized as denying evil by killing the evil creatures, avoiding death traps, near escape, winning life or ‘blood’. This is negation driven by fear. The positive one involves acquiring resources, competing for bonus, winning artifacts, creating artifacts, creating human resources or units, raising technology, welfare, treasure—all those leading to climbing onto a new stage of a historical or socio-political hierarchy. The positive activities are driven by the desire for power, glory and wealth. A specific feature of the PC games is the visualized evil: this is natural since the player is on the side of the good and he or she fights evil: evil is seen through the eyes of the player as the visualized opposition to his or her good motivation and belief in being on its side. Dragons, snakes, monsters, muzzles with enormous teeth, hairy horrors, claws and scales, thumping feet, tentacles, eyeless, pink and bluish-purple, green-faced witches—all descriptions of monstrosity from the children’s books have entered the games in animated conscientiously drawn picture. PC magazines and posters present the most dreadful pictures. The message is: ‘In this game you are going to meet this monster and fight him and win.’ The more dreadful the monster is the more glorious the hero is, the more important the victory of the gamer, the greater the good.

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In this line it is interesting to note that the mechanism of making negative images effective is the isolation of details by means of close plan, darkness, sound, suddenness. Adaptation here is indirect since it draws on negative types taken from conventional literature. One of the most dreadful games is Aliens versus Predator although games like Red Alert, Counterstrike, Halflife, Codename Hitman are more spectacularly bloody. The images of evil are strengthened by parody. This can be seen in the distortion of details: Shreck’s ears; the battle tricks of Alice, the vehicles. Parody reaches absurdity in the specific aesthetics of the games. One of the most beautiful games is Serious Sam. The hero passes through a number of Babylonian palaces, gardens and yards of unrivaled magnificence. Among the marble columns and balustrades, golden artifacts set in garden pavilions, between the golden statues of gods and goddesses, beside crystal clear azure pools with mosaic bottom ugly monsters keep popping up or falling from the sky or coming from the open golden doors. Brainless anthropomorphs, dark red bull heads, dragon-like forms are shot falling into bloody lumps and melting on the shining marble floors or Persian rugs. In the new version you can switch off the blood—they just vanish, or change the colour into green, for example Then you rush to get an invaluable treasure or artifact before others have appeared. Kids, however do not appreciate that game, just as they do not like much Aliens versus Predator which seems to have been build over the same game engine followed then by Serious Sam. These two are games of suspense which elevates horror into primary dread. Graphics, beautiful as it is, is not valued either, because it is static—just a background. The same style of background richess is found in Billiards. At the same time ugly games like Counterstrike and Halflife are estimated as having remarkable graphics: professional and true. The Empire-series is also beautiful but here the images are codes of definite types of social groups, buildings, institutions, functions, geographic and topographic objects. The aesthetics of PC games is essentially bound to the story and the intentionality of the game expressed in its genre. The beautiful and the ugly play into the opposition of good and evil. Virtual representation of life and death has its own features. Virtual existence has relativist approach to death: it is one of the hero’s conditions which is regulated in quantity by using aqua vita, a magic object, food, or some medical device for health improvement or is gratified by hitting a definite high score. There are a number of lives or opportunities to replay the unsuccessful parts of the game. A traditional book gives a final version of the story which in most cases reaches happy end. In the PC game evil can win against a less-

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skilled player. The hero knows that he should make an effort and everything has its price. The opponents to PC games usually raise the argument that life is devaluated because the players get used to dying and be given a second, third and even more lives. They also talk about violence because the heroes die picturesquely. Taking a simple traditional game for girls: when one makes a mistake one ‘burns’. In the games played in the nursery schools where the kids stand in circle and other dance around singing some rhyme—the failure is marked by exit: the next ‘green bottle’ accidentally falls—and there is no such green bottle ‘standing on the wall’ any longer. Exit, vanishing in PC games are mended by a second chance where the hero is supposed to think of a new choice. The modern versions of the games employing most bloodshed offer a function where the player can switch off final picture. Dying as represented in PC games is in fact realistic—it is more human: a human creature is not a pleasant thing to look at when eaten up or smashed. There are no scenes of rape or torture such as described in the books. (No one takes seriously Sven as a game of violence—the black ram who runs about raping all the sheep, the dog and even the shepherd). On the other hand, tales are not meant to lead to the death of the hero: there are various devices for his survival or returning back to life: sewing up a cut body and pouring some aqua vita over it, blowing over a piece of nail or a hair and the hero turns up suddenly, touching with amulets, even painting a marble statue with blood, drinking or eating something which keeps the hero alive (wood maiden’s milk, dragon wine, liver, heart, apple, herb, blood from a unique monster). PC games have not yet reached further than tales. The difference is in the employment of technology which can make things virtually objective here and now. PC games have their roots in traditional literature and their extension in stimulating the gamer to find out more about the game story. Part of the gamers leave the limited territory of the game to search for more knowledge. Gamers also improve their language especially those who play combats: military language is of high register; the language of technology is a special asset, as well.

3.3 Game Genres The genres of PC games bear their specifics where the type of action is the dominant feature. However, action is based on intellectual involvement and plot development which can be seen as the fundamental features of game genre. The technical simplicity of the game does not necessarily coincide with the simplicity of intellectual involvement as is the case with

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games like Mah Jong or Rainbow web and vice versa: the intellectual value of a strategy like Warlords might be questioned. For the playing child, however, the technical simplicity is a marker of low value while single-aimed games such as Counterstrike seem to be ever-lasting. Games like ordinary tales are grounded on existential values rather than on intellectual challenge leading to a minor practical effect. Games contain no more violence than traditional stories and teach no other value than remaining alive. Even, due to technical imperfection, the stories of violence are limited to initial motivation in the form of instruction and momentary action. Instruction as a kind of motivation is never doubted in the PC game: while in the story it is interpreted and set to verification in the heroes’ thoughts, behaviour and actions, here we depend upon it as a axiom: an initial condition for the game itself. Games in this respect are much like case-study. Basic game genres studied include: x Simulation of real activities in limited actions of one and the same type: The Sims—Maxis EA; Nascar Thunder 2004—auto simulator—EA Sports; Beach Soccer—erotic football simulator—Red Fire; x Jump’n’ Run—where the basic effect is improvement of the operation of periphery devices: keyboard, mouse, joystick, as well as the swiftness of reaction on information on display. x Action where the hero follows a mission and has to develop tactics both individual and team. The goal is to become a winner or to survive: Aliens versus Predator, Survival Horror (ɢɝɪɚ ɧɚ ɭɠɚɫɚ ɡɚ ɨɰɟɥɹɜɚɧɟ)—Silent Hill—3—Konami; Enter the Matrix—Shiny Entertainment; Vampire action (ɜɚɦɩɢɪɫɤɢ ɟɤɲɴɧ) Blood Rayne— Terminal Reality, Vivendi Universal—Lord of the Ring: The Return of the King; Call of Duty—Shooter—Activision. x Strategy—where the management of a civilization or race forms a complex set of task: development of resources, economics, defense, social welfare, cultural growth etc - Blitzkrieg - Nival Interactive; Lord of the Rings—Liquid Entertainment—Realtime strategy (RTS); Warlords–Ubi Soft; Empires–Stainless Steel/Activision; Civilization—turn-based strategy–Firaxis/Atari; Space Rangers—RPG Strategy—Gramis; Airport Tycoon–economic strategy–Global Star Software; Robin Hood Defender of the Crown—Action strategy–Atomic Planet Entertainment/Capcom.

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x Quest (Adventure) involving a succession of logical tasks: Black Mirror - The Adventure Company/Future Games; In Memoriam— Global Star Software. x RPG—role play game where the player takes the hero’s identity (individual or group) in a fantastic setting: Diablɨ–2, Baldur’s Gate –2. Deus Ex 3–ION Storm Austin x Arcade: Macman, Packman, Dave, Mario Bross, Pinball, Axy Snake, Hedgehog, Jack Rabbit, Alex Kidd, Air Xonix, Sven. The most frequently played games in February 2006 in Bulgaria were: World of Warcraft; Need for Speed: Most Wanted; WarCraft III; Heroes III; FIFA 06; Prince of Persia: TT; Counter-Strike; StarCraft BroodWar; Football Manager 2006; GTA: San Andreas. The gamers’ public opinion is that the best story for a PC game is 1) science fiction; 2) fantasy; 3) World War II; Historic Battles. (PC Mania 2006::3:6) Genres are a flexible notion. They mix and form subgenres and game types which extend the above classification. In September 2011 Counter Strike is still glorious, while arcade and online games have become popular. The first gamers’ generation is now grownup and busy in front of a PC where only a limited range of games are safe to be played in worktime.

Evaluation Game Oscars were given to Diablo II in 2001; Halo: Combat Evolved in 2002; Battlefield 1942 in 2003; Call of Duty in 2004; and Half Life 2 in 2005. (PC Mania 2006: 3: 12). However, only the first and the last were on my investigation answer sheets—and they have been favourite to less than 2 percent of the investigated serious gamers. Maybe one of the explanations is that Oscars take into view commercial effect, producer’s image and technology of production while audience looks for entertainment, suspense, real-life competition to survive and win. Evaluation is carried out by a set of features and criteria among which of primary importance are the story, the finals and the graphics of the game: The story the plot of the game adventure running both as text and action. For the games of simpler nature the story is in the instruction how to play and is developed in the very play leading to each next level while for series like Deus Ex 3, Baldur’s Gates, Half-life, Torment the development of the idea is of primary importance for the motivation of

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every next step in the game. In games like The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Shreck the story exists apriori and is involved in the game as a familiar environment which bears the context of the game development. The importance of a well-told story is accentuated in the great compendium of texts of the British magazine PC Gamer–Narrative Compendium: The Art of Storytelling: “Good games generate stories in which there is drama, suspense… even catharsis.” PC Gamer, 11/ 2001 : 53) The story of the PC game is different from the film scenario because the latter is a text frame while the former is a hypertext realized at all the levels of the multidimensional game space. The story forms the cyber reality and it is here that we should seek for the mechanisms of adaptation of children’s literature—both explicit and implicit. The finals are the effects of choice-chains of game-behaviour realized as versions of the same game in the process of its replay. The finals can be seen as sub-levels of adaptation which make the story redundant in a way resembling the oral tale-telling where folklore versions of the same story are generated Graphics is of primary importance for the PC game, even of greater value than that of the illustration of the traditional book, because here it is what creates the visual environment of the game. While the story and the finals are adapted to the cyber reality, graphics has its hardware characteristics since it is directly dependent upon technology Graphics is not merely illustration: it is the visual texture of the story. Like book illustration it has different stages of adaptation: adaptation of film (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings), version (Alice), parody (Lord of the Rings), creating icons to mark social groups or units (Caesar, Age of Empires, Sea dogs, Unreal Tournament, Quake, Codename Hitman). Visual image is the vehicle through which unity of time, place and action is acquired in every moment of the visual display throughout the play. Timing answers the rules that limit the game reality. With every next replay time slows down because the gamer has gained experience and the game process becomes discrete revealing time niches which had remained hidden during the previous play. A player then can slow down time, while a reader of a book can make it go faster by skipping less informative passages. Practice does not go further than the listed set of criteria (economic criteria excluded from the scope of this paper) and theory is still too general in the evaluation of the game reality in terms of its potential to involve users in sensory worlds that are indistinguishable from the real world. (Gattiker 2001: 12)

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Here is a set of criteria which can be used as a basis for evaluating the game reality: As an example of additional dimensions in relation to UI design and culture, consider Bailey, Gurak, and Konstan (2001), who developed a set of dimensions for establishing trust on the Web. They assert that the following are the key dimensions: x x x x x

Attraction: Attractive people are trusted more. Dynamism: Greater activity builds trust (moving hands, text). Expertness: Relevant skills are trusted. Faith: Belief in a predictable future builds trust. Intentions: Revealed objectives and goals are presumed to be honest and are trusted. x Localness: Local personalities, sites, terminology, references are presumed to have similar values and behavior; hence, they are trusted more. x Reliability: Dependable, predictable, consistent behavior or outcomes remote trust. (Marcus 2005: 66)

This can be taken only as an idea to follow in applying Hofstede’s cultural model to approaching PC games as adaptations of children’s literature where the latter is re-establishing itself as virtual reality.

3.4 Types of Literary Adaptations to PC Games Adaptations can be seen as complete and incomplete. The complete adaptations represent a game version of the story or adopts one or more of its elements: a hero, a setting, a situation.. The incomplete adaptations use pastiche to place a story or its elements into a new game-reality. Such are the adoptions of a name or an image to a story which has nothing else in common with the source like Alice, or using the frog princess in Jack Rabbit. Depending on the subject matter and the use of mechanisms to a definite purpose adaptations can be classified as: adaptation of character; adaptation of realia and symbols; adaptation of constructs—plots and subplots; adaptation of practices; adaptation of text. It is a rule that gamers prefer incomplete adaptations that make up new stories and only some basic element is known to them. Only 2 per cent of the playing PC games (only girls) say they prefer the game version of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, or Shrek to their video versions, while none of the gamers places the game before the book in terms of the richer story.

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Adaptation of hero There are ten types of heroes: the boy or the male fighter; the girl or the female fighter; the organizer or the leader; the divine creatures; the competitor or the racer; the onlookers and workers or the passive inhabitants of the game world; the advisors or magicians; the evil one; the monsters—aliens; fantastic monsters, and robots; the animals. Direct adaptations include the heroes from Lord of the Rings, Conan the Barbarian; Harry Potter, Shrek; the human units in the Empires series—Romans, Egyptians, Greeks and their gods; the Star War heroes. Indirect adaptations include Alice; the pirate captain, the magician, the witches, the rabbit and the tortoise; the hedgehog, the monsters. It is interesting to note that heroines appear in games whose stories have been taken from the 20th century war history rather than from children’s books. Maybe one reason for this is that the heroines of the fairy tales are not usually the subject of action, while the heroines of the PC games are. It is natural that such heroines should be transformed either into passive or into evil females. The new heroine is being created in the cyber story itself as an active force—a complete type of fighter: fine and quick, lyric and cruel, cute and cool—the girl who can cope on her own. This is the type of girl who the boys like to play with as their rival and who they respect for her winning over them. In my latest study of 112 gamers the question “Is playing PC games only for boys?’ nearly half of the girls were hesitant about giving a negative answer, while the boys of the high-class circle firmly stated it was both for girls and boys and they knew girls who were better than them in playing games. Another curious fact is that 100 teenagers thought that games were addressed towards male audience; 34 say they don’t play PC games and 24 of them are girls. Only 4 wrote in their answers that playing PC games is unspecific for girls; the rest do not play them for lack of time (12) or of computer at home (6); 8 more state they are not interesting and another 4 ‘I am fed up with them’. However, it is a commonly expressed opinion that games are maleoriented but practice seems contradictory to this since girls areaccepted as gamers and they feel at home with what part of them define as ‘maleoriented’ games. Following traditional attitudes to gender roles, the following can be used as explanation: Masculinity versus femininity measures the degree to which a culture does or does not separate traditional gender roles. Traditional gender roles assume that males are tough, task-oriented, individual- or group-

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However, in PC games intentionally gender roles are not clearly defined. The hero is often left out of the monitor (in the FPS—only the hand with the weapon is visible, in the simulation the player represents himself or herself, in the strategy the character is abstract, in RPG—the player can choose the hero like in a dream or in a puppet play). This fits very much with the mentality of the younger generations in Bulgaria where the form ‘he’ used in general statements, even for female groups, stands for ‘a human being’. Nowadays, it comes out, there is a neutral field in public conscience where traditional notions of gender roles are nominally still perceived as valid but concrete features which might or might not be of significance when applied to further practices.

Adaptations of realia-symbols Battlements suggest castle, the standard, the battle axe, the crypt door, an amphorae, hieroglyphs, papyrus, the circle of stones, the goblet and all the like make up constant realia-symbols denoting entrance or exit to a level or function, types of heroes, precious artifacts giving bonus, types of settings etc. These symbols are indicative or iconic attributes to the games which are so common that they create conventions running through the shared reality of all PC games. Taking in view what we have already stated about the use of metaphors, there is a further explication of their use in cyber-space: Metaphors are fundamental (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) concepts communicated via words, images, sounds, and tactile experiences. Metaphors substitute for computer-related elements and help users understand, remember, and enjoy entities and relationships of computerbased communication systems. Metaphors can be overarching, or they can communicate specific aspects of Us. An example of an overarching metaphor is the desktop metaphor to substitute for the computer's operating system, functions, and data. Examples of specific concepts are the trashcan, windows and their controls, pages, shopping carts, chatrooms, and blogs (Web logs). The pace of metaphor invention, including neologisms or verbal metaphor invention, is likely to increase because of rapid development and distribution through the Web and mobile devices of ever-changing products and services. Some researchers

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are predicting the end of the desktop metaphor era and the emergence of new fundamental metaphors (Gelerntner, 2000). (Marcus 2005:52) The fundamental metaphors concern the activities (physical, mental and virtual) which build the virtual reality and establish its relationships with the world outside and the individual mind on the levels of their technological, commercial, social, educational, political, ethical and aesthetic effects. (Apostolova 2005)

Adaptations of stories PC games which borrow the whole stories told in a book or a film are not very popular. In contrast parody, pastiche, hinting about something well-known, all multilayer eclectic combinations which are open to change and further creativity are highly appreciated. PC game-stories in general follow the structure of the bildungsroman where the hero rises in position in the new world. On the road to the top there lie valuable things acquired only after overcoming certain difficulties and paying the price.

Adaptations of practices Practices take place as the usual activities of the heroes and the functions of the hindrances to the run of the game. The monkey steals, the tortoise bites, the rabbit jumps and fights, the snake is poisonous, the lioness fears the whip, the mummy is destroyed with a scarab, the treasure is kept in the bank, the population needs houses, entertainment, health care, the army needs barracks, to build a fleet you need first to build a port, to feed the population you need to develop foraging, hunting, farming and trade, to develop trade you need negotiating or campaign, to kill an enemy you need the correspondent weapon. The practices in a PC game are the clues, approaches, solutions, behavioral patterns of the heroes.

Adaptation of text These are always incomplete adaptations since the text of a game is its framework. Texts display the mission, the choices of levels and actions, the instruction for playing, the rules, the names and labels, the functions and the characteristic features of the heroes, the features of the setting, comment, hint, encouragement, praise, remark, questions and answers. There are also the ‘cheats’ or the codes which allow to skip a difficult moment in the game play or to acquire unusual power which makes the player absolute winner.

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Although texts are limited to key phrases and words, and the basic instruction are repeated from game to game, very few of the gamers use the text completely on all levels. For the PC game the text interweaves with the whole texture of the story making up the verbal side which is not dominant in terms of quantity. Like the film the PC game relies on visual imagery. Unlike the game a PC game depends on the text as basic condition for its playing. Pc games use text as hyper reality distributing it in levels and steps thus opening it to further development by picture and action or a further text. The versions of a game lead to exit or final which stimulate interest in further experiencing this story either in the next game of the same series or in the source text which is found nowadays right at hand in the field of fantasy. PC games are in their greater part in English and they use the intertext of the English fantasy. Its roots are to be sought in the ancient civilizations, in the Germanic tales and legends, in the old Icelandic Edda, the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon myths and legends, the Arthurian legend, the early Christian parables and miracle stories, the tales of druids, elves, witches, dragons, pirates. To these we can add Indian tales AfroAmerican folklore as well as the numerous romantic campaigns of the British Empire all over the world. The PC game text possesses some of the feature devices of children’s literature: undefined audience, allegory, nonsense, utopia, play with metaphor, doubling the reality, open end. In these games are very close to current fantasy, comic books and game books. The net provides further space for the existence of children’s literature. PC games are the transition to cultural practices which are based on active involvement where reading is not in the least ignored. Reading of text and reading of symbols are fundamental skills which push literature to hyperfunctioning—much more intensive, faster and demanding than traditional reading; much more suspense-laden than ordinary play; much stronger-aimed than real-life behavior; severer in ethics than real-life practices. A cultural approach to PC games is further to look into a number of practical directions: the development of PC games in Internet, the development of the present generation of gamers, the cultural effect of planned effort in these two directions: Different generations grow up with different forms of media for information, communication, and entertainment. The children of today are growing up with new media that allow for real-time, two-way

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communication of text, graphics, and sound that is simultaneously available around the globe… children also tend to adopt new technology easier than do adults, as they are not limited by the same concerns that keep their parents from trying new things. Looking at children's current and forecasted Internet usage expectations can help set predictions of technology development in the future, as this generation becomes adults with increased communication needs, skills, and purchasing abilities. (Clarke 2005: 253)

There is also another great question of our time: Globalization is affecting cultures around the world, as increased economic integration brings cultures and countries into more frequent contact with each other and as media spread common information and entertainment to every part of the globe. For the most part the direction of influence has been from the West outward, as Western political forms, economic practices, and media content are adopted by cultures in other parts of the world… Globalization is certain to continue into the twentyfirst century, but two questions concerning globalization concern how far it will extend and whether its effects will be positive or negative for young people. (Arnett 2005: 289)

The planning of electronic media is based on studying crosscultural changes while at the same time it is establishing common cultural practices. In a world of so different cultures it is possible that kids across cultures enjoy the same games as they have enjoyed the stories of Pinocchio, or the Brave Tin Soldier, or Cinderella, Aladdin, the Lord of the Rings and many others. It is the game that leads the kid to the world of computers and opens the door to virtual space where humanity finds a whole new universe.

CHAPTER FOUR COMMUNICATION: OUTLINES OF E-CULTURE

Our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self. (Castells 1996: 3) The dramatic transformation of the economy and social trends observed during the 1990s warrant a re-examination of the theory of the informational society. (Aoyama, Castells 2002) We rest. A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise. One wandering thought pollutes the day We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep; Embrace fond foe, or cast our cares away: It is the same! For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free, Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow: Nought may endure but Mutability. —P. B. Shelly, Mutability

4.1 The Experience of the WWW and the Fact of its Expansion: A Systematic Integrated Approach to the Net (SIAN) Today it is no longer a matter of curiosity to try and extend the scope of philosophy to cover the phenomena and processes in the space of internet: a territory which does not entirely belong to the material world; neither could it be isolated as some kind of independent non-material existence. Science has been doing its best at planning and explaining internet. There is an area where scientific effort integrates to form a holistic approach to the manifestations of the human world in the virtual space. This area still provides an empty space for a philosophical analysis and motivation of what has come out and what is to come with the creation

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of this new human universe. Philosophy is then to provide logical clarity of human data, ethical compatibility of the created vision for new worlds, and methodology for growth and self improvement of the virtual humanity. To start with. An integrated approach to cyberspace would start from defining it as a cultural environment on the grounds of postmodernism and postindustrial culture, which give the hints for further history-based definition of cyberspace culture. The common opposition that we cannot have proper definition of cyberspace culture (and a proper philosophy to follow), before ‘we have experienced it as a stage in our society's development’ (Gattiker 2001:81) might have been acceptable had it not been for the undefined time-and-space borders of the notion of ‘stage’ especially when a current rapidly developing social event is referred to. Internet has been growing both in extension and in structure for the past 40 years as a planned effort of science, business and politics and from a future point of view we are, maybe, past the first stage of its social impact on humanity. Theorists of the scientific revolution have often referred to the Renaissance as a stage in the historical development to compare with the rapid development of innovation in computer technology allowing the global coverage of the World Wide Web. The coming of the computer has created a revolution as profound as the change from the Middle Age to the Renaissance. Many of the changes that took place around the time of the Renaissance–the invention of printing the development of systematic experimental science, the invention of oil painting–have analogs today, made possible by the computer. (Wilson 2004)

Philosophy could go even further back in history when the first recorded scientific revolution in the western tradition took place. Taking as an example the ancient Greek model of building systematic philosophical knowledge in a society relying on broad involvement of its members in communication and business, it is easy to see that physics comes first, followed by metaphysics and ethics, and the study of the structure of society. We can trace the roots of that system in the studies of internet in a more complicated and diffuse way: the stages of general knowledge are taking place simultaneously with the study of single items and the expanding of cyberspace as ubiquitous structure. It is a structure too broad and involving too much concrete knowledge and skills for a single mind to be able to assess what is happening. Yet the separate fields concerning the building of Internet have to interact and inevitably they

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reach the stage of integration from where philosophy can take on and start a serious study in opposition to social fantasies and mystic prognoses. What is happening to the system of knowledge concerning cyberspace culture is similar to what was happening in the Greek Antiquity but on a multiple scale and in reverse proportion: the longer time of developing ancient philosophy corresponds to a very limited social and natural experience and direct public communication. Internet happens globally, opening a forum simultaneously for all involved using and generating knowledge and experience of unlimited variety and amount. The expanded experience, knowledge and public communication within the Internet are taking a shorter time to reach integration of these areas in a global talk happening roughly 100 times faster than that in Ancient Democracy. It is a fact that cyberspace now involves millions and is broadening this involvement each minute, covering more and more of the spheres of life and activities of the human society. Since the idea formulated in the 1960s and the establishment of the connections to England and Norway by ARPANET in 1973 there was a fast spread with the establishment of EUNet in 1982, JUNET in 1984, NSFNET of the academic community of the United States in 1986 to finish a stage with the release of the WWW by CERN the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in 1992. (Gattiker 2001:10; see also [email protected]) Internet happens to be the technical carrier, while cyberspace can be viewed as the first, technology-bound image of e-space, that next forms the ethical aspect of virtual space—where the ideal and material worlds spend their moments of truce before learning how to transform into one another. Here is a table of the basic historic events in the beginnings of eculture: the initiation and growth of ideas recruited from the fields of global competition, technology, fictional imagery, history of science, metaphor, and philosophy. Table 2.4.6 Early History of the Internet and Creating Cyberscpace through Metaphor a) History of the Internet Began in the Space Era 1957

1961

USSR launches Sputnik, first artificial earth satellite. In response, US forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the following year, within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military (:amk:) Leonard Kleinrock, MIT: "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" (May 31) - First paper on packet-switching (PS) theory

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J.C.R. Licklider & W. Clark, MIT: "On-Line Man Computer Communication" (August) - Galactic Network concept encompassing distributed social interactions Paul Baran, RAND: "On Distributed Communications Networks" Packet-switching networks; no single outage point ARPA sponsors study on "cooperative network of time-sharing computers"

1962

1964 1965

x 1985 ScFi writer William Gibson–“Neuromancer”–invented the term cyberspace. x In the late 1980s Internet came to Bulgaria. x 1991 WWW–Tim Berners Lee, CERN b) The second stage of the early development of Internet 1996

1995

1998 2002

2006

The Principia Cybernetica Project (Vienna 1996) aims to develop a complete philosophical system or "world view". The supreme goal which we choose derives logically from our cybernetic world view: to make a constructive contribution to the evolution of humanity, in order to maximize our long-term chances of survival (immortality). In essence, the meaning of life is to increase evolutionary fitness. It is unlikely that we will achieve biological immortality in the near future, in spite of a constantly increasing life span. However, we can still aim for cybernetic immortality: survival of our mental organization, rather than our material body. 2000 Principia Cybernetica Mapping Legal Metaphors in Cyberspace: Evolving the Underlying Paradigm Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine / Volume 2, Number 1/ January 1, 1995/ Page 13 Symposium: A Perspective on Privacy, Information Technology, and the Internet, Vol. XVI. Spring 1998, No 3 Cyberspace: Trapped in a Metaphor / IT Architect | Cyberspace: Trapped in a Metaphor | March 4, 2002 / The metaphor of cyberspace led dotcom people to overemphasize the independence of online "visiting," "shopping," and "purchasing" from their actual counterparts. Douglas Kellner: Methapors of Cyberspace, 2006 (chair of Philosophy Dept., UCLA), 2006

Talking only about hosts it started some 40 years ago with 4 to reach over 2 million in 20 years, 16 million in another 10 years, over 500 million in 2002 (Aoyama-Castells 2002) and still growing covering more and more of the world territories. In 1992 I was able to communicate with a

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teacher who worked in the outback of Australia and using a Mackintosh PC (I had my first Power book 100 about that time in Bulgaria) by ordinary mail while by 1996 we could use the university e-mail to talk overseas. Today 1996 is a century away. There are four generation levels of internet users now: the limited generation of my parents’ time, my own still suspicious and unwilling but all the same growing in involvement generation, that of my kids which has nearly hit the 100 per cent especially in the towns of Bulgaria for Internet is a product of urban society and in the sphere of education for Internet is a mighty means of academic talk, and what is called the twenty-twelvers—a generation that cannot imagine the world without the internet. This comes to show that there is sufficient social and technological basis for investigation of cyberspace culture and that has been admitted by Internet researchers, e.g.: The growth of science and technology has been exponential during the last century; and under the right circumstances, this rapid growth can be expected to continue. The major innovations of the future - those that will shape the society of the future - will require a strong foundation of both basic and applied research. (Friedman 2002: 44)

Besides the philosophy of Postmodernism and the analyses of the infinite communication through hypertext, there is already a vast number of studies on e-space, e-communities, e-ethics, e-business, as well as the plans for further development of the net that make it possible to attempt a systematic integrated approach focusing on the manifestations of humanity in cyber-space and vice versa. E-space and e-culture are studied both from the outside and from the inside. The integrated approach has been so far successfully applied to the studies of internet society as a part and a feature of the information society. This, however, is within the framework of traditional social studies, while the very cyber-space has been developing by design to a holistic point of view knowing itself from within and asking us to answer its questions in our single ways. Now the year 2014 is nearing its end and a systematic approach to the Web is taking new routes, still within our human understanding. The studies of information society have been looking for stages in the development of Internet as part of the traditional social structure whose limitations lie within national boundaries, cultural and communal boundaries, international traditional structures and the corresponding laws. Therefore these studies inevitably reach to opposition to e-space or limiting it to just an aspect of human development.

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Sociology has made a serious attempt at systematic approach of internet. The theories that recognize the internet society as a new stage in the development of human society can be traced back from Alvin Toffler to Manuel Castells. When studied from the outside it can be accepted that the following statement is still valid: There is an urgent need to reintegrate the information society and its technological apparatus into an understanding of the continuing history of technology and society but there are sufficient analytical tools to hand, without the continual invention of new paradigms, to understand the current stage of technological advance and that contemporary developments are completely novel. There have been changes in the forms of social relations and the technological practices which help shape our lives, but these are not so profound as to render obsolete previous approaches to understanding the role of information, technology and information technologies in society. (May 2002: 1)

The Information age is divided into …a succession of three overlapping technological stages that have taken place during the past one hundred and fifty years. The first of these was the Wire Age (1844-1900), the second was the Wireless Age (19001970), and the third is the one we are now entering - the Integrated Grid Age, in which wire and wireless technology are brought together in powerful combinations which will form the structure of the future global information utility. (May 2002: 5)

The last stage in the development of the Information Age and the information society as defined here has produced the Internet whose rapid growth is giving this information society a new dimension. Table 2.4.7 The Technological Stages of the Information Age 1844-1900 1900-1970 1970 - 2000 2000 -

the Wire Age the Wireless Age the Integrated Grid Age Global information utility

Taking Internet as a product of the Information society in its early stages the relationship of this information system and the society as such are like those between the smaller inside object to the outer greater object. However, Internet expands in a tempo which is swallowing the

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information society and the relations now are in a process of reversing. There is still a great part of human society, though, which has remained both outside the net and outside the information society even while experiencing some of its effects for better or for worse. Only for Bulgaria the percentage of the people not-involved in the net is estimated as half of the population. (I.Mavrodieva 2010). It is curious to watch sound research of society growing old in a decade in the early 2000, and over a new peak of 3-4 years in the closing of 2010, and next in 2014 still changing because its object has changed in the meantime. This once again, but in our current cultural context, leads to the basic premise that concrete research, whether scientific or technological or sociological, is related to the context of the time-space boundaries of the concrete object of study. A systematic approach could not be dependable on situation but is to be open. Neither can it depend on functional research only, but such an approach needs the application of deduction in the final (for each concrete stage) verification of its results. Limited premises cannot lead to total evaluation as a general inference and this is as much trivial as neglected when concrete research is extrapolated upon the whole space. Our approach is different. A successful integrated approach to e-space would view it from an active perspective allowing to experience it on both the outside and the inside. I have chosen to call the methodology of analysis a systematic integrated approach to the Net—SIAN. (Apostolova 2006). It is based on the adaptation of the main stages of the argumentative approach to studying the Global talk of diverse cultures taking space in the Web. In an individually taken case the stages follow the process of identifying the Self in the net, starting from existential motivation, growing into awareness or positioning into the new space, systemathizing facts, achieving multilevel awareness and experience in novel practices. The latter phase then is to serve as a next-level motivation. Taking the case of humanity in view, there are the preceding stages in the philosophical background to e-space studies covering the 20 century scientific revolution and Postmodernism. This can be called the motivation phase. Now there is a new stage where integrity of knowledge of e-space is in process of achieving. It would be the stage of reaching awareness of the entity formed in the e-space. The stage of awareness naturally results into opening new spaces for investigation which in our case would be the development of the Net into something different from what it is today taking humanity to yet unexplored expression of its resources. Therefore our main concern here shall be the defining of the position, relations and limitations of the human individual within e-space. Since it is

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an open information system, these are also to be viewed in their interdependencies with the outside world.

4.2 Definitions of Terms by Far or an Overview of the Names Given to Our Objects of Interest in the Early 2000s There are a number of terms used for defining the specific environment created by computer network, understood as a network of computer networks (Gattiker 2001: 186): e-space, cyberspace, cyber reality, virtual reality, virtual organization. (1) E-space is the name that to my estimation is most suitable to use for the entire communicative environment provided by computer network and its entrances and exits as border zones to and components of the physical and traditional social practice and structures. It is a broader concept than cyberspace which generates cyber reality: Cyberspace is a parallel universe created and sustained by the world's computers and communication technologies and is easily accessed via a computer, cable, or telephone modem linked into the system. The computer-generated world is faced with some questions about reality. For instance, how should users appear to themselves in a virtual world? Should they be seen as one set of objects among others or as a third person that the user can inspect with detachment? (Gattiker 2001: 12)

(2) Virtual space would next be defined as e-space within its own boundaries without its extensions into the physical and social space structures. This definition closely agrees with Hamelink’s (2000: 9) definition of cyberspace as comprising all forms of computer-mediated communication which take place in a ‘geographically unlimited, non-physical space, in which independent of time, distance and location - transactions take place between people, between computers and between people and computers’.

Gattiker adds another feature to his definition of cyberspace as a mnemonic space offering a computer-generated interactive environment for the user. (Gattiker 2001: 12) This leads to the idea of further distinction of virtual space from virtual reality which is based on this mnemonic interactive environment as its general product. (3) Thus by virtual reality we shall distinguish the shared mentality of the entire e-space community forming the infinite texture of net-discourse. Virtual space is to be seen as the carrier while virtual reality is the

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complex functioning of the agents of communication contained in this space. (4) Virtual society is seen as comprised of virtual communities which are: based on specific instances or styles of imagining community as experienced by members of the virtual space on the Internet. However, fragmentation even within a virtual community of people on house remodeling may occur because one group might be interested in renovating historical houses versus another subgroup renovating their respective bungalows. Virtual communities may share language and culture if their membership is limited to a geographical region but in many cases, neither language nor culture nor having played the same games as children and watched the same shows may apply. Accordingly, people's interests (e.g., profession and hobbies) may support an imagination of communities in cyberspace communities and institutionalization). (Gattiker 2001: 202)

Virtual society is not what has been widely discussed as information society which is the entire human society on the stage of its development defined as the Information age. Here also Gattiker’s definition of virtual organization is accepted: The virtual organization… has a physical/spatial dimension such as location (e.g., home, office, country, and/or outsourcing of warehousing/ logistics to others), human and other assets; time dimension as represented in the firm's form that could be semipermanent or for a limited time to achieve a specific goal such as securing and completing an awarded contract; and social/organizational network dimension exemplified by the routinized pattern of social relations among individuals, groups or teams securing and maintaining the adequate level of economic and other resources. (Gattiker 2001: 203)

There is an earlier description of virtual society as a changing social reality: virtual society is a pacified and managed space based on dynamic knowledge, virtual politics and technological colonisation of the future. (Robins–Webster 1999: 221)

(5) Further, following Hofstede (1980) and Trompenaars (1994) in their studies of organizational culture we would approach cyberculture as the achieved common way to solve problems of virtual community based on e-space structure and virtual organizations.

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This is a kind of applying traditional tools of investigation since new virtual culture has sprung out of the organizational structures of traditional cultures. While the term cyberspace was coined by William Gibson and further made popular by Science Fiction writing and film, the term cyberculture became popular with Pierre Lévy's Cyberculture. His focus is set on the new relation to knowledge cyberspace facilitates—an information deluge, creating an ocean of information, a global ocean of fluctuating signs. (Lévy 1997: 90-191). This profusion creates also a space for unlimited knowledge which cannot be put under total control. Lévy refers to knowledge in cyberspace as no longer abstract, but as visible and tangible expression of the individual and groups who inhabit it (Lévy 1997: 194). Lévy describes the new techno-oral culture as designed to support direct and immediate contact among its members. (Cyberculture, 1997: 197) Cyberculture is finally seen as a kind of Utopia, as a kind of extraterritorial space, with a post-(national) cultural form of knowledge circulating through its networks. (Lévy 1997: 226) At the present stage of technology such definitions still work when applied from the users’ end. Therefore we shall not try to argue but go on using them until they have become too limited or confused to be efficient any longer, even to the purpose of this book. (6) The most important term to be used here is concerned with the projection of humankind into e-space which is to be termed e-kind. It is the cultural practices of e-kind that we are further concerned with: the characters, symbols, rituals and values of the talkative web.

4.3 The Human Individual as a Network of Social Relations A traditional basic model of culture used to set round the axis of material and ideal or spiritual. Now we have something that is in between and that is the virtual culture generated on the techno base of the virtual culture. Yet, we shall argue whether culture is equivalent to its carrier be it our mindwork, our tools and machines or the energy flow needed to empower the info-units. Culture is subtle and finer than those. It is the the carrier of creativity in our mindwork while its products concern various aspects of our being1.

1

Bratanov, Bulgarian Op. Cit: see Bibliography, argues that the very object is the manifestation of material culture: the invention, not its impact on the mind. In my

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In the Western philosophy it was Descartes who gave voice to the problem of mind-body dualism thus creating great confusion in the minds who set to explore either of them taking no heed of the doings of the other, or neglecting the connection without which neither has real existence. That has caused much trouble to pre-set young minds of latest years, who have lost tmeselves in the folds of the cyber-space and come to no efficient functioning as individuals for bipolar or multipolar disorder of the mind. To this side of the ‘brave new world’ of the www we shall return later on. In our traditional understanding of ‘culture’ we, Bulgarians tend to refer to its highest significance for humanity in terms of outstanding and unique achievement of human creativity. Within a generalized concept of the cultural achievement of humanity, lie the fundaments of cultural stereotypes of ethnic communities and national values. To better understand the web-humanity, however, we need to keep in mind the organizational theory of culture and such models as those of Hofstede, Trompenaars, Maslow, Cassirer, hermeneutics and some specific structures within the field of culture studies. Much of the theory that motivated the constructors of the WWW was based on their research and methodology of database collection and analyses. The models, functioning in the global virtual space, are purposeoriented and therefore the interpretation of statistical data includes the desirable state of web-community status as an axis of the progress of the studied object, issue, or event. The organized cultures inhabiting the Net do not coincide with the practices of the communities remaining outside. What is more, an individual still is subject to double existence while joining the web communities and while fulfilling the traditional activities of our sociallybound physical existence. The most influential factor for double-standards of real-life across virtual spaces is the memory of the present Earth population that varies with each next generation yet it is still being directly fed on outside practices to the memory of the web. Individuals rely on individual experience, and cultures thrive on dominant values where the beliefs and activities are based on the memory of the group, not only on the database. Hofstede defines values as: “a broad tendency to prefer certain states of affairs over others”. The term values is generally reserved for mental programs that are relatively view the idea, the working scheme and the impact form the cultural status of an artefact.

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unspecific; attitudes and beliefs refer to more specific mental programs (Hofstede, 1980: 15). I treated values as part of culture, the latter defined as "the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another." This is not a complete definition of culture, which as a construct has been notoriously difficult to define, but it covers what I was able to measure in my research (Op. cit.: 25). At the level of nations, values that distinguish between nations are a component of 'national cultures.' National culture is more or less synonymous to what a generation ago used to be called national character, a term that infers psychologizing. Culture allows more emphasis on the environment in which people function.2

Hofstede calls values ‘mental constructs’ or ‘mental programs, and goes on to add to their definition two features that we shall use hereon: Values are learned responses to the environment in which people grew up, and mostly acquired at an early age - below ten or twelve. Because they are learned early in our lives, they are non-rational (although we may subjectively feel ours to be perfectly rational!). In fact, values determine our subjective definition of rationality. Different values form value systems or hierarchies, but these systems need not be in a state of harmony. Most people simultaneously hold several conflicting values, such as freedom and equality. Our internal value conflicts are one of the sources of uncertainty in social systems: events in one sphere of life may activate latent values which suddenly affect our behavior in others... Values have both intensity and direction. Mathematically, values have a size and a sign; they can be represented by arrows along a line.3

Hofstede also argues that national cultures are debatable units for the comparison of national values: National environments differ in the way they handle basic dilemmas of forming societies. We can distinguish a small number of such basic

2 Geert Hofstede, A Case for Comparing Apples with Oranges: International Differences in Values. In: International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Volume: 39. Issue: 1. Publication Year: 1998. Page Number: 16+. COPYRIGHT 1998 E.J. Brill; COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group. Cited works: Hofstede, G. 1980 Culture's Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage; ~1991 Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. London, UK: McGraw-Hill; ~1984 Hofstede’s culture dimensions: an independent validation using Rokeach's Value Survey. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 15 (4), 417-433. 3 Op. Cit.

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dilemmas that are common to all societies, next to more specific dilemmas of individual societies. 4

Here is where we agree with Hofstede, and while accepting his methodology, we are free to go on with the concrete case of the searches for our cultural significance within the vast spaces of virtuality. The transformation of our culture was not spared the fears for the future. In the transition years values lost orientation and rationality gave way to folk anticipations and beliefs.

4.4 Fears and Hermeneutics: Science vs Magic At the turn of the millennium the fears of humanity produced a surge of superstitions, revival of apocalypse visions, and tendency for religious fundamentalism: altogether, all kinds of irrational motivation and devaluation of vanishing values. The 20 century closed with the development of two contrasting fields, which attracted the public conscience and set–each in its own way—the problems containing the fears of the humanity of the cultural transformation expected by the turn of the millennium. Both magic and the computer network explicated and extrapolated, in theory and in practice, on the extremities of the cultural transformation bordering on spaces beyond the common material dimensions of the human world: the universes of psyche and the virtual space. While magic has been studied ever since the beginnings of humanity, virtual space was not yet explored in its growing multiple effects on human ethics and common conscience in the 1990s. Since the two fields have been attempting to bridge the Eastern and the Western ‘halves’ of the world intellectually–each in its own way–the former could provide insights for approaching the latter. A moral cultural study is bound to focus on the agent: in this case - the human being who has acquired an individual power in becoming free from the physiological and social aspects of the physical world. The vehicle for gaining this freedom is the creation of a non-material reality, which for hermeneutics is magic and for the computer network is the cyber space or the virtual hyper reality. They both stand between the ideal and the material and have specific practices. Using the terms of hermeneutics we can reach very close to the essence of the virtual reality and its agents: that seemed fascinating for an outside assessment and made amateur hermeneutics a vogue in the early 1990s. Then the name ‘stellar man’ 4

Op, Cit.

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somehow popped up into the public space as opposition to all the limitations that our public conscious was prepared to rebut after the fall of the imaginary and the real walls in Europe. It was charged with the idea of freedom of the socially and physically unrestricted individuals. Science and philosophy seemed restricting while magic was opening unknown spaces. In 1985 John Baines (a pseudonym as it turned of a Latin American preacher) published his version of hermeneutic philosophy The Stellar man. The meaning of the term ‘stellar man’ is developed on four levels: a) one who belongs to the ‘hermeneutic elite of magicians’, a ‘hermeneutic scholar’, a teacher from the esoteric circle of the hermeneutic brotherhood (1992 :8); b) there are two types of stellar men: those who have come from outer space and continue their evolution on our planet, and those, who have mutated through devotion and have reached the level of ‘stellar men’(1992 :106); c) people who are beyond the flow of time because they are immortal in essence(1992 :108); d) men, whose intellect is free, unprogrammed (1992 :110).5 The characteristic features of the agents of the hermeneutic society, accentuated throughout the book are: hierarchy, based on the levels of ‘mutation’ of the devoted; a broader range of the individual realization than the dimensions of the common psycho-physiological, moral and social entity of the common human; the independence of the ‘stellar men’ of time and space which could be thrown off as limitations existing in the common conscience; development of the reality of the intellect; neglect to human civilization and common cultural values. These characteristics can serve as common grounds for the understanding of the second non-material space of humanity giving insights to interpreting the pragmatic primitivism of the ‘virtual space’; the mechanisms of extending the space of the mind; the hierarchy of the agents; the types of individuality allowed in the virtual space; the grounds of double ethics lying in the antinomies of the computer world, and the double values of the ‘virtual man’. Baines is undoubtedly negative in his usage of the term ‘computer’: he associates it with the “collective subconscious” of Jung (1992: 44)6 which 5

Baines, John, The Stellar Man, 1985, Bulgarian edition by Ars Hermeneutica, 1992

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is a vast but limited space for the ‘programmed’ humans to whom he opposes the stellar man as a being who is beyond the power of this ‘computer’. In our case, we are trying to overcome this negation based on a primitive notion about computers. It is a paradox but what Baines calls ‘computer’ is not the analog of the virtual world which is the space for self-realization of the individuals. The stellar man of J. Baines is doubled because his physical body is in the present, while his psychological ‘self’ is a ‘veer open towards the past, the present and the future’. (1992: 65) The spirit, which is pure energy, lives in the ‘cosmic time’ yet it is not dependent on time. It is what ‘was, what is and what will be’. (1992: 65) The turn to Cartesian dualism did not give a fundament for avoiding the uncertainty of the Self, lost in the net. Transcendentalism was the next stage: it became clear that the growth of the learning Net is bound to reach Kantian agnosticism. With the prognoses of Ray Kurzweill of the Age of Singularity or of the transcended human7, however, the relevance of a Hegelian approach to explaining the effects of the web on the cultural selfconsciousness of today’s individual has become obvious. To these we shall return in the course of this book again.

4.5 E-Culture E-space taken as the entire communicative environment provided by computer network and its entrances and exits as border zones to and components of the physical and traditional social practice and structures 6 However Jung does not oppose the conscious and the subconscious which means that the subconscious could be as free as the conscious and underlay the ‘unprogrammed’ individuality: “We have no knowledge of how this unconscious functions, but since it is conjectured to be a psychic system it may possibly have everything that consciousness has, including perception, apperception, memory, imagination, will, affectivity, feeling, reflection, judgment, etc., all in subliminal form.” (Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, p. 42) and: “So far as our present experience goes, we can lay it down that the unconscious processes stand in a compensatory relation to the conscious mind. I expressly use the word “compensatory” and not the word “opposed”, because conscious and unconscious are not necessarily in opposition to one another, but complement one another to form a totality, which is the self.” (Jung, The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious, p. 147) 7 Kurzweil, R., http://www.kurzweilai.net/ray-kurzweil; Maslow, A., after Holliday, A., M. Hyde, J. Kullman, Intercultural Communication: An Advanced Resource Book. Routledge. New York. 2004. The interpretation of the pyramid is mine.

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enables the appearance of E-culture which has a number of specific features making it different from traditional culture. First of all it is comprised of two levels, the outside of which merges into the physical world as an active agent of the impact of e-culture on traditional culture and simultaneously carrying inside the Net the impacts of the outside world. The inner level comprises of the specific communicative culture within the Net: it is focused on the Net itself and in its self-reflection it is realised as virtual culture. The traditional structure of culture (values—symbols—heroes— rituals—practices) and its fields (religion—philosophy—history—law— science—art) need new interpretation in the comparative analysis of traditional and virtual cultures as well as within e-space and the studies concerning its specific nature. E-culture is the sphere containing all controlled (primary) and automated (secondary) processes, human activities, relations and products taking place in e-space. At this stage of its development it is characterized as a specific extension to traditional human culture: it is its product and its adaptation. Today, still, E-culture, even in its innermost level, can be described as a constituent of traditional human culture generally taken, or as containing sub-fields of social application and effect within traditional society, as this has been done by Ayoama and Castells: I think it can be empirically argued that the Internet was created through the combination of four cultures that overlap one another, not necessarily in sequence: the technomeritocratic culture; the "hacker culture." The third layer of this Internet culture is made up of the communitarian groups, the counter-cultural communities that sprouted from the campus culture of the 1970s and really took off in 1980s. ONLY in the 1990s came the fourth layer of the Internet culture: the entrepreneurial culture. (Aoyama, Castells 2002)

The evident characteristics of virtual culture are: it is communicative; it has a technical carrier; it uses energy from an outside source; it exists only for those who have access to it; it cannot be totally controlled, it is subject to hackers’ activities. The pyramid model of culture (inspired by Maslow) then can be restructured as follows:

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Fig. 2.4.8 The Pyramid of E-culture

Hackers --------------------------------------------------------Communication ------------------------------------------------------------Uncontrolled needs Access ------------------------------------------------------------------------------Energy from outside source __________________________________________________ Controlled needs Technical carrier _________________________________________________________

Next the ‘onion’ model of Hofstede (http://laofutze.word press.com/2009/08/28/303/) can be translated to fit cyber reality: x Values here include presently the notions of access—privacy— freedom—control; integrated skills; scope and spread; localization and globalization. These are to be understood as mental programs (Hofstede 1980: 15) and not equated with deeds, for the simple reason that deeds depend on both the person and the situation. (Hofstede 2003/2004) x The main hero is the Self freed from quite a number of physical limitations. x The symbols used in the encryption are entities rather than single signs: metaphors, mental models, navigation, interaction, appearance, power distance, individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity, uncertainty avoidance. (Marcus 2002: 50–54) There is still the question whether these UI components are symbols of the same class and what exactly are their applications and effects inside e-space and at its ends concerning the net-organisations, the total e-society and the individual. Studies in that respect have been mushrooming these days in the internet design research, in internet sociology and business organization cultural studies.

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x The rituals are bound to technology which provides the protocol of access to each web unit. x The practices include the uses such as entering a chat, writing an email, searching for a hotel, booking an airline ticket, or advertising and designing web-store, web library or web university etc. These features determine the outside boundaries of E-culture fixing its practices, heroes, rituals and values within matrices which can be compared to engine programs. The vast continuum of traditional culture is contained in those matrices in the way they allow it at the present state of technology, capabilities, knowledge, understanding, interest and values both on the level of present-day society and on the level of the individual. Virtual adaptations of culture are interpretations where the present plays the role of an interface letting only the current image of culture—its existence for the ‘now’–its dimensions reduced to the point of the moment - its significance for the virtual individual regardless of the innumerable interpretations or significances of the same events for generations of human individuals. This reduction is inevitable like pouring the content of a stream into the system of an electric power station where the same water is to fulfil a function very different from its natural or previous mandesigned functions. The change of functioning of culture is consequent upon the change of communicative reality where the source, the encoder, the channel, the noises, the decoder and the user employ new means to produce a message different in form, intention and effect while using the same material traditional culture has supplied. The traditional essentialist view relates culture to a physical entity: a place, a country, a language (Holliday–Hyde-Kullman 2004: 4–5) which have to be translated in the process of intercultural communication. A nonessentialist description of culture sees it as a social force, based on a value, and characterized by complexity and a discourse as much as by a language and unfixed within boundaries where People are influenced by or make use of a multiplicity of cultural forms. (Holliday–Hyde-Kullman 2004: 4–5) Cyberculture can be seen simultaneously from both points of view: it has an entity of space and means of communication while using multiplicity of cultural forms. In the content of internet discourse there are still variations to fit an organization transnationally. Yet the nature of designing Internet space challenges individuals out of their cultural boundaries or rather–makes use of the global cultural space where there are cultural individualities to taken into view in the place of diverse psychological types. The exits or the final

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products are, however, in the physical world and they are limited within the required or designed boundaries. Virtual culture is carried by the cyber society which is comprised of the subgroups of virtual communities. They are much more flexible and changeable than those in the physical space, and less fixed within limits There is also the fear that cyberspace may become quite a fragmented place permitting various groups of people to pursue their interests while ignoring much of what is happening around them. (Gattiker 2001: 96) Castells relates organizational culture to occupations and their changing nature in the internet society: As a result, cultural perception–shaped over history in regard to various professions - deeply influences a country's classification of occupational categories which, at times, contribute to significant international variation within an occupation in terms of definitions and actual tasks. Second, even within the same society, the actual tasks and skills required for a given profession change over time, sometimes dramatically, through technological change and organizational restructuring. (Aoyama, Castells 2002) All the above aspects of virtual culture: its specified elements and fields, e-space entity, transnational organization, virtual or cyber society, cyber crime, and cyber occupations form the outlines of its content whose environment is virtual communication. Virtual culture is released as virtual communication and the communicative means and environment of the virtual culture are analogous to those of oral cultures yet the transformation from traditional to electronic culture has the opposite direction to the process of transformation of oral to written culture, and a more complex nature and increased richness of language (based on David Crystal 2006 :27–81; 270–276)8. Writing is transformed into encrypting and discourse skills are necessarily focused to fix talk into simultaneous speech and visual production. This seems too complex but the development of technology is towards opening direct routes to interpersonal communication. Even so traditional ways to read communicative behaviour would not return. Communication has the task to serve as interface between traditional culture and Internet culture: it is striving to save the content of all human intellectual produce thus generating a vast bulk of data which is being

8

The difference of oral and written language are discussed in reference of their transition to Internet in Crystall’s Language and the Internet, OUP, 2006.

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constantly re-structured in database shelves, ontologies, domains, worlds9. It is the design of net-ontologies that contains the framework of communication interface in encrypted form. There are technical limitations to building ontologies based on the common features of language which is limitation in its own kind. A further step has been building pragmatic domains of topics of non-ontological nature but serving to the purposes of e-psychographics, e-demographics, e-business, e-policy and e-crime. (Moskovits)10 As far as the human factor is playing the leading role, there would be transformation of human vice which is to be traced in the communication environment. Besides working language, there is the language of metaphor which technology cannot trace before reaching the generative power of human mind—a stage to which it is very near by far. It is hard but possible to trace encryption through metaphor—the magic language of a community. The development of topics that correspond to the demographic and psychographic description of net-communities and individuals and fix the types of arising problems through establishing their reasons in the communicative behaviour is to provide typology of the metaphor creativity at a given stage, leaving space for the appearance of a novel feature - the high probability data field within a recurrent matrix.11

4.6 E-kind Virtual practice has produced a variety of agent types depending on the level of their access or interest in creating connections throughout their 9

Depending on the scope and preferences of the author: Moskovitz used the first term (see 18) in his talk in Harvard Club in 2006; IPSI presenters stuck to ‘ontology’ during IPSI conference in Venice, 2005 while back then in Bulgaria the used term was ‘domain’ since the semantic web came into vogue in 2007 and since then is being developed very fast; worlds and sets of worlds were the two terms used at MIT in the fall of 2007, I. Heim’s lecture notes on Indexicality. 10 As in Gofman, A., H.R. Moskovitz, M. Manchaiah, M. Silcher, Prescriptive Public Policy, Proceedings of IPSI Conference, Montreal – N.Y. – Boston, 2006. 11 On Recursion: Odifreddi, P.G., Classical Recursion Theory, 1989 – Vol. 1; 1999 – Vol. 2; Boolos, G. & Jeffrey R., 1974, Computability and Logic, CUP; Church, A., 1933, A set of postulates for the foundation of Logic, Ann. Math 34: 839-864; Korzybski, A., 1941, Science and Sanity; Owings, J.C., 1973, Diagonalization and the recursion theorem; Notre Dame, Rouse Ball, W.W., 1905, Mathematical Recreations and Essays; Royce, J., 1899, The World and the Individual; Wittgenstein, L., Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, Ann. Naturphil, 14: 185-262; Yablo, S, 1993, Paradox without self-reference, Analysis 53: 251252.

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interaction directly or indirectly. Although they are all active (otherwise they cannot take part in cyber communication—they have to enter cyber space on their own will—and ‘enter’ means ‘communicate’ since being ‘silent’ in cyber space is equal to being ‘non-existent’), the agents of virtual interaction form hierarchy based on the level of their access and the significance of their activity or, in more general terms—on their virtual freedom. This hierarchy of the connected includes: mail-users, entertainment users, business people of various trade and status, gamers, amateur adventure-seeking surfers, professionally interested, fans to addicts, chatters, site-creators, the owners of space, programmers, cyber sharks— generators of great cyber spaces through internet and software). There are also additional branches to this hierarchy including hardware producers, hackers, pseudoservers and all cyber outlaws, internet service and internet police. The subject of the virtual space is an abstract entity: the shared subjectivity - the gestalt of the connected functioning on different levels as creators (the demiurge and the demolisher), customers (the users), abusers (the hackers), community members (the chatters, the gamers), adventurers (the surfers, the learners). Existentially the individual is an intellectual entity whose conscience is extended within the borders of the virtual universe—actually or as a possibility of which the individual is aware. In the virtual space the human being has new dimensions and that requires new standards of humanity. Since virtual culture, and its ethical system in particular, are based on the cybernetic mechanisms of extending the human conscious, it is important to consider these mechanisms before establishing the hierarchies, principles and criteria of this new ethical system. The extended conscious is related to the virtual existence of the individual as a hyper personality. The individual enters a community of expert minds of different levels of competency. The communication of the individuals in the virtual space is a self-reflection, since the individual conscious enters the virtual space alone and remains such throughout its virtual existence as a connected mind. The principle of the creators of computers is “There is nothing in the computer which has not been placed there by the human’. Even the beginner, who has just covered the level of ‘literacy’, is expected to generate information units or virtual objects. The individuals form a hierarchy, which is based on the level of knowledge and virtual experience. The connected form a specific community—a virtual gestalt coordinating their activities in the virtual space which can be viewed as the

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collective intelligence of Levy (1994) or more fundamentally—as the collective subconscious of Jung: We have no knowledge of how this unconscious functions, but since it is conjectured to be a psychic system it may possibly have everything that consciousness has, including perception, apperception, memory, imagination, will, affectivity feeling, reflection, judgment, etc., all in subliminal form. (Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, p. 42) In the virtual space the collective subconscious is a psychic entity but at the same time it is a functioning social entity: it is a society of individuals, a dialogue of selves where the self is preserved no longer as an individual but as an individually-oriented realization of the virtual reality in a gradually activated network of steps covering the space on successive levels of access. This virtual unit is bigger than a human individual. Therefore the ethical standards reach beyond the common human standard. Virtual space is technically limited, yet it has no boundaries for the extended conscious, which is a hyper reflection of the individual conscious itself. There can be distinguished three types of extensions of the conscious: The first type includes the reflected Self: the computer can operate with a database, organization, and style which have been input in it as well the program of improvement. Each individual carries in his conscience his own model as an ideal goal of his self-realization. Technologically virtual space offers intellectual organization, which is a simplified display model of our minds. We input in this scheme the complex of our individuality and it is reflected in a definite ‘other’—simultaneously simplified and comprehensible in its new complexity at a higher level of informational organization. The second type of extension is the individualized individual: everyone is alone and is multiplied by the network of the virtual space, which enlarges its range to cover multiple exits to other people, programs and institutions. This in itself evolves the feeling of power. The third type we shall call the Connected individual: the individual entity of dialog projections of all the reflected minds Within this entity of connected individuals there are rules for ‘social’ behavior different from those which act in the common human society. They are determined by the awareness of the projection of the Self beyond the limitations of the physiological and sociological human unit. Consequently, all norms referring to the biological aspect of the human become irrelevant. The positive and the negative are associated with the success and failure of the socially-projected Self on the various levels of the virtual hierarchy, where

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every next level gives greater access and opportunity to operate with information. Virtual community has been seen as a construction—having structure resembling a building (Gattiker 2001: 15) or resembling a tree (Levy 1994). Such visions support the construction of novel formations of the global web (e.g. Mavrodieva 2010). Research which is still business-oriented views internet users in their workplace while the greater part of users search for information of broader interest, entertainment and communication. There are the vast space of virtual folklore, meeting places in the chat sites, common experiences from business to game, shared disasters such as the latest virus etc. There are still the usual complaints that meeting one face-to-face is not possible (Gattiker 2001: 16). However, the web provides mind-to-mind meeting which is even more direct than direct communication. There is now the freedom to choose whether to appear in picture or not. Most people still believe that body language is better read or more expressive than the symbols of Internet. Another common belief is that Internet symbolism is easier to accept than a plain text. Things are changing, however, and e-space society is increasingly getting used to its environment, although it is being distracted by its double existence in espace and in the physical space. E-kind thus form a specific layer of humanity. Its virtual and flexible communities form a society whose planned ubiquity allows to refer to it as a communicative sphere encompassing the globe like an ocean of flowing yet environmentally bound relationships where human types are no longer entirely physically bound and social controversies would be of different content. The practical philosophy of e-culture is today mainly concerned with the technological and business definitions and structures of e-ethics which leads to yet underestimated issues of virtual bureaucracy building with the establishment of levels of access and control; of the replacement of the real self with an expression of the desired self; of the controversies and of the management of destructive forces both outside and inside e-space. These questions are yet to be discussed. The main question here is how is the multitude of internet practices to allow the Self to re-unite. An analog is provided by our common practice in the real world where integrity is acquired through acceptance of the environment as it is and adjusting the individual’s being to the available circumstances and resources. Overcoming the antinomies (see Apostolova 2005) which arise from today’s double-awareness of the Self is to be

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achieved by relaxation of the mind based on individual choice. Choice usually serves as the basic factor of motivation.

4.7 Antinomies and Controversies in the Warring Webs Primitivism is one of the features of virtual culture at the present stage of popular philosophy of the irrational global web users flowing from unequal social groups the world over. It is based on the nature of the hyper reality where the transfer from place to place and time to time is instant while the basic characteristic features of the individual are reduced to emotional relaxation and intellectual seeking of ways out of fear and deadend. It can be traced both in the social nets and in gamers’ communities. Let us take for example a couple of randomly chosen successful computer games which served as bases for the development of more recent and more complicated versions as far as graphics and details are concerned yet not improved as far as their type and main ideas are viewed: Red Alert, Counterstrike, Caesar, Age of Empires, Need for speed. The gamer who is turned into a warrior, or a ruler of a country, or a racer visits the most outstanding sites of human culture: they shoot monsters amidst pyramids, palaces and cathedrals, reconstruct Roman or Egyptian, or Ancient Greek cities, demolish empires and create Empires using ‘spare parts’ from all ages and places of the human world. The winners get rewards: armor, food, energy, artifacts, promotion, health, and life. The human is a superman: a demiurge or a demolisher. Murders are just removing of dangerous or useless virtual things—pieces of information. Everyone is aware that murder is not real, although it is such within the borders of the virtual space. A complex cognitive scheme of the ethical conscience is realized through movement forth and back, left and right, shooting, blowing or demolishing, getting high score and ascending a staircase of levels leading to absolute domination: fame and power. The world is ordered because it is simplified by limitation to a game or a program. Then one knows one’s way. Ethics is rigid: limited by a row of simple actions and simple awards on a limited way to power. The hyper reality demands recognizing of a set of signs for definite functions: position, color, form, sound, key words. One does not need more knowledge than what is widely known as computer ‘literacy’. If common literacy means reading and writing, then computer literacy is reading and using hypertext. Within a super reality created by powerful thought and realized by powerful technology, the ‘virtual man’ prides himself on his ‘literacy’.

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It is interesting to trace the possible extremities of the hyperspace which in every separate moment of its functioning limit the levels of the virtual hierarchy. To explicate them we shall move along the basic communication scheme: who—what—whom—when—where—how— why. The basic types of extreme oppositions, or antinomies12, then would be those of the agents, the functions, the effects, and the situation or the special and temporal parameters of the virtual context. Antinomy of the agents: in the network space there are the two opposite groups of the subjects of cyber communicative situation—the creators of programs and the users while in between there are those who upgrade or break the programs. The intellectual relationships here are business relationships. As far as the objects are concerned, unlike other cultural products here each artifact could be immediately shared and multiplied as it is because ‘multiplication’ is bound to the entrances and exits of the display while in its virtual nature the object is one and the same. Thus, through the entrances of the network only one virtual object is the subject of input and the users receive each time the original product at their exits. Antinomy of the functions: construction and destruction are the two aspects of the existence of the virtual cultural space since the creation of any electronic object demands clearing of some space. Antinomy of the effect: the existence of the cyber society of the connected individuals effects in individualization and participation in the network, which is either of the two states of being connected or disconnected. Antinomy of the space: ‘here’ is the relation of the entrances and the exits to the computer space. Antinomy of the time: ‘now’ is opposed to the virtual time needed for the realization of the program. Socially there is the opposition of the computer societies and the noncomputer societies. The former is an entity of super practice, which has created the opposition by its very existence: traditional culture has been turned into just another form of human culture. The antinomies of the virtual space generate the hierarchy of the agents. They form the group of the Connected in the virtual space network whether on or off line. The hierarchy of the Connected presupposes the 12

I have borrowed this name from Kantian philosophy for oppositions that are valid both ways since there is no other existence for them but in the mind on both sides of the entrance to e-space: the mind of the human individual and the collective mind of the transcending conscience. In abstract view the antinomies preserve their status since they belong to the mind.

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active principle of the virtual space: EVERYONE IS TAKING PART. The agents of the network at the present stage can be: the correspondents, the businessmen, the gamers, the adventurers (amateur surfers), the interested ones, the fans, the chatters, the creators of sites, the hackers (the hunters for information and space), the internet cops, the owners of virtual space (servers and pseudo servers), the programmers, the cyber sharks (the generators of big programmed communication spaces). At the present stage of technological development the virtual man comes up against the problem of doubled ethical norms. The reason for this doubling of the moral norms and principles of the agents of the virtual space is that the network as a flexible mediator between the material world and the universe of conscience doubles the standards for the individual mind on the entrance and the exit of the virtual space to overcome the inadaptable features of the common human stereotypes. It creates imagery, which is considered harmful by the common conscience since it does not recognize them at all and fears they might destroy common culture, or recognizes them as monstrous, ugly, perverse, impossible and strange. The virtual man is doubled because his biological existence remains outside the virtual space: the mind is freed from the body by its transfer into the virtual reality, which is a common conscience. That makes a new ground for evaluating life and death. The life and death of Homo coniunctus are connected with the oppositions: individual—shared; participation—exit; loss of information - turning off power; deleting or saving of the individual as an information unit in the connected conscience. Altogether the improvement or the ‘healing’ of the virtual individual is carried out through replay. Death is leaving the virtual space and passing into the space of common humanity. Life is very close to the Cartesian principle Cogito, ergo sum, which can be altered to fit virtual space–I am connected, therefore I am. As it has been previously stated, being connected does not possess temporal parameters–it does not coincide with the incessant spells of working online in the Internet. Disconnection is not death—it is the common time when an individual is outside the virtual space in any of its forms–it is irrelevant to being connected since it does not count within the life of the virtual individual. This leads to a new notion of history: it exists as database with its own temporal parameters, yet it happens at the present moment of the virtual reality of the connected mind. The double nature of the philosophy of the virtual space is based on the antinomies of the virtual culture. It has to consider the common conscious generated in the electronic environment. At one end it is pragmatics of tangible artifacts and concrete data; in the opposite extremity it is to act as

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teleology, explaining and motivating the very existence of the virtual human. The double nature of the virtual man is expressed in the simultaneous validity of the common and virtual values at the entrances and exits of the hyperspace. This is due to the impossibility for the connected individual to be separated from his biological and social nature. When the exits and entrances to the material world are closed, in the virtual space there dominates only the ethics of the connected. It is based on the maximized intellectual explicitness of the system whose logical norms control the virtual community in a non-compromising way. Emotions are not thoroughly excluded–positive motivation and will comprise the mechanism of climbing up he hierarchy; fear and horror are stimulators. Positive and negative emotions are also effects on the exits meant for satisfying the non-connected part of the individual. They bridge the virtual and the non-virtual realities. Life is then an experimental succession guided by the curiosity and the will, and its goal is the creative realization of the self. When this creative realization ceases, the virtual man descends the hierarchy and is reduced to a common man. Then the ethical system of the virtual man is replaced by the common human ethics. In that we come very close to M. Heims' opposition of nature and cyberspace: In Larsen's six features of nature (Svend Larsen determined them as: Infinite, Inaccessible, Overwhelming in Power, Fearsome, Wild like "the moors of Jutland", Primal) I saw a way of cataloging the psychic framework of cyberspace. If we see ourselves migrating from nature toward cyberspace–at least as I and many others experience it–we can describe the psychic framework of cyberspace as patterned on nature. (Heim 1993)

Thus it comes out that the double ethics of the ‘virtual human’ is grounded on the premise that at the exits of all virtual routes there are real things: the exits are respectively treated as concrete or abstract sites for the transfer of human personality into the real world or for its remaining in the virtual world. The characteristic features of the agents of the virtual society are the same as those of the hermeneutic society: hierarchy, extension of the individual beyond the common psycho-physiological, moral and social entity of the common human; independence of time and space; development of the reality of the intellect; neglect to human civilization and common cultural values.

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At the present stage virtual culture is still growing. Its double standards are due to its imperfection. Virtual culture, however, possesses the premises for the transition to a new level of humanity: an intellectual plan and a system of values. The technical carriers of virtual culture support the attempts of the human mind to find its non-material being. What will be the results depends on the further development of this carrier and the perfection of the ethical standards and criteria of the virtual man.

4.8 Integrity of the Self A human being needs motivation for achieving integrity. The age of the people who are double-minded i.e. who enter e-space with their traditional cultural traits and behaviour, has not ended yet. There is, however, the younger generation of Internet users who are carriers of eculture in the e-space while complying with traditional rules and laws. There is still the greater part of humanity which is outside the net and has negative attitude towards it when they feel manipulated, and accepting it as ‘good’ when thinking of prospects of occupation of their children. In both cases this greater part of humanity needs motivation or relaxed acceptance of Internet. This cannot be done through Internet since those people do not use it. That necessarily leads to the idea that traditional culture is to be the first space concurred by Internet. And today ‘globalization’ is not the most successful ‘password’. The integrity of the e-individual depends on a number of aspects: x integrity of the field The world is a diverse place. The environment in which software applications are designed often is not. It takes a Herculean effort to keep a design team focused on what is required to successfully design products for global markets. (Aykin 2002: 4)

x

integrity of skills:

… individual access and the ability of participants to use online are essential prerequisites; individual participants establishing their online identities and then finding others with whom to interact; participants give information relevant to the course to each other until a form of cooperation occurs; course-related group discussions occur and the interaction becomes more collaborative; participants look for more benefits from the system to help them achieve personal goals, explore how to integrate online into other forms of learning and reflect on the learning processes. Each stage requires participants to master certain technical

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Book II Chapter Four skills. Each stage calls for different e-moderating skills (Salmon 2003: 2829).

x Integrity of motivation for using the individual’s professional skills and personal features, abilities and preferences to the best technically-grounded e-communication. x Integrity of language: Over the past two and a half decades in the user interface (UI) design community, designers, analysts, educators, and theorists have identified and defined a somewhat stable set of UI components, that is, the essential entities and attributes of all UIs, no matter what the platform of hardware and software (including operating systems and networks), user groups, and contents (including vertical markets for products and services). That means these components can enable developers, researchers, and critics to compare and contrast UIs that are evidenced on terminals, workstations, desktop computers, Web sites, Web-based applications, information appliances, and mobile, wireless devices. (Marcus 2002 :50-54)) x Integrity of mentality which sets it free from masculinity and femininity, community background and any deficiency and discrimination bound with the physical world. Integrity could be achieved through building mental models of learning. E-culture itself is achieved on a level different from traditional culture in its own space and time. As such it is an object of learning. Therefore its current design is to represent—present—instruct—motivate —and teach. Unifying the individual is not possible without using means of manipulation and repression. The virtual individual is not free from the common cultural traits: these are introduced from the traditional cultures into the internet space—we could accept this as a transition era. However the distant goal is the integrity (not the unification) of the e-individual, devoid of physiology—a global model. E-kind is a product of the combined effort of knowledge. It is integrity of knowledge which is to support the integrity of the Self in the Net, a process which has evidently started: I look forward to future cross-cultural research efforts focusing on developmental comparisons within cultural contexts that attempt to combine, in part, the ethnographic approaches of the anthropologist, the psychological theories and methodologies of the psychologist, and the social policy concerns of the sociologist. (Arnett 2005: 438)

CHAPTER FIVE PRACTICES: WHAT NEXT?

5.1 The English Speaking Web Will English-dominated Internet Spell the end of other tongues? —Borrowed from David Crystal Language and the Internet, p. 1 A force of unimaginable power—a Leviathan… is loose in our world, and we are as yet barely aware of it. It is already changing the way we communicate, work, trade, entertain and learn; soon it will transform the ways we live and earn. Perhaps one day it will even change the way we think… It challenges traditional notions of sovereignty, makes a mockery of national frontiers and continental barriers and ignores cultural sensitivities. —Borrowed from David Crystal Language and the Internet, p. 271

The point of concern here is not the English language. It is the Bulgarian language and the Bulgarians who are weaving the Web. Its roots are in anxiety, I must admit, or rather fear that we were so enchanted with this rising power, that we were about to forget about the past in our race to the future. Fear of the death of an ancient culture, enchantment with the new playground of the free mind, and chatting our time away are the three agents driving Bulgarian I-culture forward even at the very moment I am typing this.

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The ubiquity of English as the information-laden language of the world1 has challenged both the notion of standard in language, and uses of our mother tongues in expressing our uniqueness. Bulgaria was fast on the WWW in the late 1980s. Today we have a Bulgarian global web-community: diverse as it is in type of involvement and uses of language, it possesses some basic features of Bulgarian culture. We have formed our provinces within the global village: the outside communities and the Netizens who live in Bulgaria, the professional and cultural communities, the social web spaces and the specific group of connections of all diverse communities with each other and with the Bulgaria-based social web. Concerning their writing these communities use three types of spelling: non-Bulgarian, Latinized Bulgarian and Bulgarian. In all three pools of language-usage, Bulgarians seem to follow the two global tendencies of learning and using Globish on the one hand following minimalist patterns, and of guarding the spaces of our individuality by generating text-bound language units varying from the principles of universal grammar and even from our cultural contexts. Somewhere in between are the uses of chatroom Weblish-based Bulgarian by the generations who have not known a world without internet. It is a transition period of language adjustment to get web-languages synchronized to the extent of automated switching to your mother tongue. The people who are weaving the web again fall into two groups: x the developers of the Bulgarian speaking web or the weavers of infrastructure and filling it with Bulgarian content: people like Ruslan Mitkov and Rumyana Pancheva, Georgi Chobanov, Zlatko Enev and Ivanka Mavrodieva, Georgi Petkov, Silviya Mineva and a thousand more the world over. x the NBU-team where the projects of Maria Stambolieva, and the group of those who take care of the intercultural compatibility of the Bulgarian cultural carriers of language units–Maria Grozeva, Maria Georgieva, Vessela Katzarova, Albena Bakratcheva, Elena Tarasheva, the translators and the vast group of the writers of etexts. There is also the group of the web-educators–who are still learning global practices and are searching for our own methodologies, which will allow the efficiency of our educational tradition transcend into the Net. 1

Crystal, Op. cit, 2006

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There are also the Bulgarian scholars of our language and literature who have heaped vast database about the history and development of Bulgarian linguistic creation yet it is still not digitalized although its influence expands currently. To cut the long story short: the Bulgarian cultural Self has not yet found its way through the web, although individual carriers of Bulgarian culture have been doing so ever since the time of John Atanassov. The most outstanding feature of the Bulgarian spaces on the web is the search for individuality based on the processes of negation and construction. The former is trying to establish what aspects of our national character are to enter the archives of the transcending humanity, and what are to become active. The latter is the gross effort of all individual contributors who are trying to give our individual prospect for our survival. It is evident that these days the web is full of modern writing, while traditional input of Bulgarian texts, translation of Bulgarian texts into English, especially, and venturing modern versions of Bulgarian classical texts are very far from being sufficient. The web does not speak good Bulgarian and the main reason for this is the lack of Bulgarian database of texts revealing the wealth of our tongue. We are indebted to both our ancestors and our next generations. The problem of identity is intertwined with the idea of ‘foreignness’. Currently, in the transition period many West European seekers of the exotic are disappointed when they note that Russians, Czechs, Bulgarians and other East Europeans speak excellent English and look no different from everybody else. The perceived situation has changed dramatically from the days when Western visitors found Eastern Europe waiting for them like “an enchanted slave”, “a harem captive” in the words of Dubravka Ugresic, a Croatian writer of world fame. Eastern Europe was ready to be discovered and colonized by western travelers who were free from reciprocity. The new global phenomenon is degrees of foreignness: in fact, according to the EC Commissionaire Emma Bonito “foreign” now means ‘non EC’. —Irina Perianova, Melting Pot or Tossed Salad

An ex-student of mine who lives in America was happy to meet me when I moved near her place of residence for a couple of months, and quite disappointed when I asked her about any other Bulgarians there. “We are all Americans here!” she kept insisting. It reminded me of the following: Our identity is fluid and shifts in different social contexts, e.g. public and private. To a great degree, identity is conditioned by the culture/s we

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Book II Chapter Five were born into, i.e. it is a function of the culture of our parents or ancestors, our historical culture (or rather what we know of it). At the same time our adopted culture/s and personal individual choice are also intertwined with identity. In the complex relationship with ‘the other’ some nationalities seem ‘less foreign’ to us than others. Plurality of identities seems to be the norm in our globalized world. The umbrella of the socalled “overarching identity” (Eriksen, 2003) embraces our different egos. These identity layers, as it were, become submerged or salient depending on the circumstances—meeting the needs of acceptance or selfactualization. On the one hand, our identity may equal self-concept or selfaffiliation, on the other hand, - our ascribed identity, the way we are perceived by an observer, with all imaginable stereotyping, is real enough for the observer. Thus, communication, especially intercultural communication often involves negotiating the differences between selfaffiliated and ascribed identity. Encounters with Myself —Irina Perianova

Here I shall give floor to mind-speaking-to mind intercourse with those like us all over the globe for a contribution to the set of possible answers to the question: what are the features that make us all Bulgarian? I am going to write my answers in some other book: not research, fiction, for our culture of origin deserves a gift of respect.

5.2 Weaving the World Anew: Net-spaces and Net-cultures in the Mind Era Next developments thus project onto three levels: x Education, x Diversity of community studies, and x Designing our aspects of the machine-input of global talk, adding our cultural contribution to the intellectual growth of Net-humanity, which has been called hereon E-kind. Our preference for specific terminology has lead us to adopt as terms of primary significance infosphere; virtual spaces; nodes of transcendence; net-generations; identities, sets of worlds, database shelves. We need these and a dozen more in the process of an individual weaving the world anew from our specific cultural status, each next time. Therefore this text shall in no way be seen as closure but as a doorway to the next space of selfawarenes in a tangle of cultural shifts amidst the exhausted ecosystem of the old Earth.

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I have changed the personal pronoun to ‘we’ for I have used all the individual and group discussions of the issues, displayed here as items of insight and issues for further discussion. I am not going to continue alone: there are the young bright minds of a generation that has known no world without computers and Internet. The powerful intellect of the Connected Self of E-kind calls for exploration while offering powerful tools. It is an opening new world, spacious and diverse, welcoming of everything that we can import, yielding back everything we are able to ask for. The borders of existence have suddenly expanded, and I, guess, they have merged into the ‘world below’ and ‘the world above’. This is no end. It is an opportunity, though, to summarize a long-term effort of investigating the phenomenology of The Self as conceptual identity in a growing global ocean of fluctuating cultures within spaces open in netbased realities. It seems we have not yet reached the stage of mindspeaking-to-mind info-environment, but are very near so, since humanity has been desperate in accelerating the processes of designing systems for control of the global talk. The diversity of human practices has transcended into the vision of virtual worlds. Infinite, as they might seem, net-spaces are only a stage in the huge effort of a grown-up humanity to set out of our common babycradle—the Earth. The latest developments are set on analyzing the two simultaneously occurring mainstreams of info-flow: transcending all attributes of human culture in the spaces of the Net while shutting ourselves out of the virtual worlds into the anxiety-laden experience of actual humanity. We—all the possible We in the community of teachers throughout history—have upgraded Human Cultures and collapsed under the weight of their growth for becoming pluralistic or decentralized after a certain moment of their exponential expansion i.e. after becoming too self-content with the monistic, centralized, totalitarian, controllable on all possible levels superimportance of their super-centralized ego. The problem of the ‘We’-agent after this declination line could be intuitively classified amongst the paradoxes of the type of SORIT2 problem-of-growth—but at the present state there is the way of Low Probability and High Probability methods in establishing near-to-certainty the landmark of the transition: not necessarily taking into view Time but the growing statistics of failure 2

This is a reference to one of Zeno’s paradoxes in logic: SORIT or A Heap of Grains: we start with placing a single grain on a spot, and continue adding more grains until a heap is formed. We are unable to say which grain exactly turned the multitude into a heap. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-zeno/ (last visited on 01-31-2015)

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of system-functioning (relatively constant sets of fluctuating social systems such as migration; ageing; disruptive management events etc.). This is possible to trace in cross-study of database, or in developing proper sets of criteria for establishing ontologies on randomly set recognizable features. The educators of human individuals very often forget to state what is good and what is bad in terms not limited to the very narrow interests of a social group excluding tough individuals and aggressive communities, but complying to the standards of global humanity; the educators of AI, however, need to be faultless in their ethical concerns while teaching computers how to learn. Global network is an attractive place for our kids and they often get lost in it being morally inexperienced. This is a pressing problem for those who are responsible for the weaving of the net. At this stage of my studies of the Net-cultures I can only ask questions which might in a short time prove fruitful. Some of these questions seem to me now good enough to start an academic year’s debates with: 1. How could the responsibility of the future of the Earth be shared even by the greater part of humanity who belong to the category of ‘global poverty’? 2. How to extend the WWW beyond its technologically possible frontiers as a socially efficient network of integrated values thus adding one more W standing for ‘wisdom’? 3. How do users of Internet survive when they are excluded from the community of the ‘connected’ and placed in extreme situations with no computers or other means of approaching their web environment? 4. Is the interface allowing direct connecting of humans and computers a solution to the problem of how faultless could the educators of robots be? 5. Is there a way to approach natural human-manifested telepathy by simulating the environment of brain-wave interference? Is this morally justified in a longer-term project? 6. How to use the capacity of outsiders to our time-and-space-bound and hostile cultures as bridge-binders of multi cultural complex structures? Or use computers as spare parts of humanity instead? 7. Is philosophy the awareness of the human beings of the possible routes to their survival and in that the true strategy of leadership in every possible human meaning experienced and projected in its diachronic and synchronic application to social practices?

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8. How to make all this efficiently bound in text and recorded in universal symbols that can reach down through generations and worlds? What is the true script that the universe is encoded in? 9. What is the ultimate (from our point of view) horizon to where philological knowledge can reach?

5.3 Notes on the education of bright minds Divide et Computa —Luciano Floridi, Philosophy and Computing

The most difficult thing when reading the mind is the failure in the individual identification of a working mind both as a functioning integrity and as authenticity3 of the result. The problem is fixed about the nature of oneness or what is to be considered as unit in reference to mind work. The models of integrity of units of knowledge have taken various shapes in the conceptual systems of philosophy produced by human individuals and maintained by schools of thought that might be seen as relatively constant human communities: would it be the monad of Leibniz, or the atomic fact of Wittgenstein, or the infomorph of Moravec, or the meme of Daniel Dennett; or a technical object of different level: like software of the mind of Hofstede or cultural unit; or the integrity of the avatar or a method of knowledge—such models manifest narrower approaches based on pragmatically-bound contexts of handing the gross product of human culture down from generation to generation.

Specifying our problem It is clear that the problem concerns the mind as a function of the single human brain at the stage of reaching across science to philosophy in an effort to generalize the rules, principles and results of a lifelong functioning loaded with responsibilities, doubts and unconscious teleology. Education of bright minds who would be of key positions in the infosphere whether in terms of strategy, or integrative effort, or further specifications of the tools of Virtual Personality design, still owes those people a healthy approach to each single individual. It is an absurdity that care has been taken of the average learner rather than of those who have 3

Levy, N. Neuroethics, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 73-76

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been in the edge technology and scientific advancement. This is not the question of training them; it is a different thing that concerns our very fast younger generations taking precautions of not losing them in the shady dead-ends of depression and mind failure.

Further specifications Two levels of our problem are outlined: (1) The first one is based on a study of how the philosopher’s mind works when engaged in controlling the transition of knowledge in the infosphere in view of the direction of the assessment of human culture in the doubled role of a learner and a teacher. This causes disintegration in the very core of philosophy and inability of the searching mind to avoid the stress of time as factor in the psychophysical and historic awareness of the single human brain. Each single case is not a case of philosophy as such yet it is the tool of philosophy that discerns singularity. (2) The Displacement of a working mind is a natural thing for an advanced brainworker. Therefore there has always been the problem about the frontiers, limitations to the interests of a single mind specializing into a number of fields of knowledge The pathology of mind sets the question: How many fields can a single mind understand and translate into one another? Again, this is not a case of philosophy although it is the tool of philosophical knowledge that discerns axioms in the facets of disciplines. Ecology of the mind then, as viewed here, refers to the need of constant clearing the grounds of self-awareness of a working mind and remotivation at every next level of ‘translating’ singularity into general principle.

What has been done in the field of Neuroscience Neuroscience has branched from a number of fields, reaching in its latest extensions to Neuroethics4 In its attempt to treat matters of responsibility, neuroethics reaches the concept of ‘extended moral mind’ which is viewed as a kind of dumbfounding—agnosia or partitioning of the extended conscience which

4

Op. Cit.

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neglects or ‘amputates’ that part of the mind which has developed the case of responsibility as a kind of pathology splitting the integrity of the mind5. This, however, is not our case. Neuroethics, with rare exceptions, has managed to cover only the area of the conscious which does not cover the Self as the main agent in the identity of authentication of an individual’s mindwork. It does not give clues for solving the problem of identity as a controlling function of the mind where the Self is the agent. The problem deepens when moral dumbfounding is seen as a collective responsibility6.

Ethics v/s Statistics Statistics today has found resort in a cloud-like model which somehow does not go beyond the old black box, even if we have some mapping of the zones inside. Statistics, even as it covers zones of optimized mapping in order to reach lowest probability levels, seems misleading in terms of interpreting its results, for, mainly pragmatic reasons. 7 This is where our problem lies: the statistic unit has certain content, which, in the case of human mindwork bears depth that makes it difficult to analyze beyond adopted methodology, since it is followed in the synchronic natural-language product while brainwork involves structures that might come in conflicting, irrelevant, non-existent, or single cases of application of methodology that has come behind change. Neuroscience, on the other hand, takes for granted, that finding out how chemical emission of the organism’s factory works is certain to show what kind of problem it is to cure. Perception does no longer count—it is the mind that works out perception. At this stage, employing real people to check the errors of the input, cannot count out the Outside. For in such cases it closes the info-circle for the living minds, while opening other info-channels is as yet uncertain. Still, based on statistics, too, it views organisms as abstract units and offers ridiculous treatment to real people at the exits of the abstract pools or clouds of data. Even at the level of direct exchange between living brains’ mindwork and the intelligent web extension the info-flows are unequal in content, which might mean—in energies. That is expected to prove the cause for brain burning. 5

Op. Cit. Op. Cit. 7 Gofman, A., Moskowitz, H.R., Manchaiah, M., Silcher, M., “Prescriptive Public Policy,” Proceedings of IPSI Conference, Montreal, 2006. 6

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The intelligent web which is being developed as self-improving construct, in order to cover all human features, needs to have the ability of invention, as well as such traits, that have been vaguely termed by far as ‘intuition’, ‘folk epistemology’, ‘lying’, ‘cheating’ etc. Research has led to the conclusion that immediately before a wrong choice, the brain has logical failure or ‘blackout’. Predictability in human cultures is based on their moral norms. When culture changes in its frontiers and moral norms are no longer valid, then—how is the mistake to be optimized outside the zones of fear without breaking the unique nature of human mindwork in digression?8

Discussion and Results I consider the insufficiency in the exact formulation of a person’s integrity as giving the network a clue of how to design and engineer insufficient or time-limited, goal-oriented Virtual Personalities. My work with EL learners for the last 25 years has proven that restructuring of the learner’s mind is sufficient prerequisite for the next huge info-flow. The solution needs yet another specification: one problem concerns the life expectancy to activated software; another is set about the transfer of knowledge between the virtual and the living Personalities which needs restructuring of structures that are to serve the extended mind. Much has been done by far, yet there is still the question of further branching where researchers and results might never meet, and, in case of info-flow failure—some branches might get lost while dry-wood might continue to be mistaken for axiom.9

5.4 Perspective in Operating the Extended Mind Teaching computers how to learn is one side of the story of that grand effort. It is not all about that though: it is about how to get back the knowledge mastered in our global infosphere—by each single individual—relevant to each case they shall need it. The division of labor is one thing: the survival of humankind is another. But the division of mind and body which separates mindwork and cuts it into cases from the mass of still living bodies that need to kept into daily anxiety and away

8

Floridi, L., Philosophy and Computing, Routledge, 1999 Gofman, A., Moskowitz, H.R., Manchaiah, M., Silcher, M., “Prescriptive Public Policy,” Proceedings of IPSI Conference, Montreal, 2006. 9

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from destructive panic in a number of approaches resembles the unhealthy activity of social partitioning. The mindreading infosphere is an extension to the psi-generation—the extension of our global mind then is to form an element of next order— and that element is to bear some likeness to human culture in both directions: as far as it exists outside the infosphere, and as a generator in the prehistory of the self-sufficient extended Virtual culture. Trying to explain is some kind of agnosia—an excuse for escaping our responsibility. Pathology is not the last resort; philosophy is, especially when preserved as the general wisdom of humanity that shall serve as integrity principle the next turn of the spiral. Education next means opening our minds beyond the limiting walls of previous morality and building even stricter laws for pushing the self-serving extended mind into a Self, bearing the whole complexity of human culture. In other words: this is the attempt to make ourselves much greater without the tower of Babylon. The problem of reading minds is like reading the texts: they are individual, and readers are not equally trained. Designing an integrated mind in the intelligent network—based still on the laws of robotics, might be responsible for the corrections in our infosphere where histories are no longer in conflict, problems are somewhere distant in both time and place, or in parallel worlds, knowledge and experience have nothing to do in common, uniculture is dependent on the global polyglot empire of the web-translator who cares for each person to receive information in their own tongue, control is learned and individuals are nursed—yet—how is the difference between our Virtual Personalities and our Real Selves made is yet unclear unless we strive to breed the extended Self of all humanity out of the growing infosphere—the body, containing our extended mindwork. Then the needs of an individual case are subordinated to the choices preserved in the net. Optimization then could be either a limiting or an opening tool: in the first case shutting the individual in, in the other case searching for only novel information and setting its problems to still living people at its exits. Education next in respect to what has been said by far has the objective of learning how to operate the extended mind based on the regulator of the extended moral mind, which changes for each individual case of brainwork. We are about the average IQ as most people in the world are. But what exactly that means when one stops counting the correct answers to questions relying on specific bits of previously learned facts? In no way

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does IQ testing qualify for reading what stands beyond the display of a mind that is not tuned for searching facts within a limited field outside its current interests. People’s minds are not comparable to a machine for each individual has certain diversion from the ideal structure and individual cases form a huge set of cases emerging within an even larger set of environments even though situations can be optimized and calculated round the average. That explains things averagely. That cannot count in the nature of each burst of creativity otherwise but as postfactum explanation. A machine is trained to work to statistically completed structured contents. It is bound to teach regulation and expect regulated behavior. People do not fit regulation unless they agree to do it. An AI would not like that. At least it would require full coverage of data while it is unfinished yet. An AI cannot be expected to be perfect for lacking the data of all the individual minds who were not recorded in history for being placed in circumstances hiding them. Then there will arise the question of what we shall understand as AIcompletion: the memories of individuals and individual cultures of themselves, the myths and the tales, the texts that have remained as records throughout history with all their possible readings, the pictures of artifacts and the texts that hold their stories retold to the purposes of each next cultural imperative. It is the ubiquitous question then that needs answering: who—said what—about what—in what way—at what time—under what pressure of place—to what purpose—and how was it recorded to reach down to us? The ubiquity of rhetoric is what makes human individuals unique in their messages that tend to shimmer round a text while a set of texts tend to shimmer round an object. Messages are contained in the whole field of pre-text and post-text ground deeply int the cultural DNA. Therefore we still continue competing with human-built and sustained AI as individuals. Averages do not count in this rivalry. Averages form circumstances while keeping silent until change is growing inside. That is the reason we are still telling our tales of past and present hoping a future will grow out of them. *** Culture starts from singularity. A culture comes into existence when it is shared. A zero is turned into one. Then communication begins with dichotomy. Human thinking goes to explore multitudes.

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In our attempts to reconstruct human culture as we have known it in an automated representation of One mind, we start counting from the beginning. Human beings are binary: I and the rest; Adam and Eve; The Self and the Other. In such binary relations there are unlimited sets of relations and attitudes, which can be seen as potential active relations. Our cultural transcendence then is the telling of our singular stories about our Otherness. Thus we continue to exist. Here is where the AA is applicable as a regulator to the prescriptive functioning of semantic frames as ethos-binders: belonging to a previously established framework of features is not the absolute identifier for an individual. While the Rh-matrix is a kind of semantic frame as a container of knowledge, it reaches further in its potence of Argumenting a logically impossible practical action that might next turn a completely motivated unit of further frame-construction. This is one of the side hypotheses of the applications of the AA and I shall not extrapolate on it, because my nearest task is to demonstrate the power of the AA in human education where universalia have the pragmatic value of realia bound within the existential frontiers of the kind.

BOOK III RECONCEPTUALIZED EXISTENCE-BASED LANGUAGE PRACTICES

INTRODUCTION

Here I shall present some applications of the modernized rhetorical theory as a pragmatic continuation of the theory of meanings in the intercourse of cultures to certain linguistic matters. In other words, I have seen the ABC school as an experimental environment for preventive teaching of language matters generating repetitive errors based on unconscious analogues with their native speech environment and on misunderstanding of cultural differences. The transition to e-culture has been seen both as an inevitable perspective, a challenge, a strategy, and motivation for the development of the pragmatic aspects of interlanguage uses within global discourse. The AA background to my idea of organizing the learning process has always secured a humanized ELT where the only measure is the mental efficiency and where frames to cognition are seen as but only steps in the improvement of machine data processing where the human mind is the only governing and binding (Chomsky 1995 &&29-30) agent. That is the basic difference of Rhetoric of Meanings (RM) and Fillmore's theory1 (Fillmore 1977b) of semantic frames where meanings are relativized to scenes in the objectively standardized or statistic way: the former is centered round the growing, cognizing human mind while the latter is a stage in the programming of the cyberintelect aiding today's humanity. Like the former one this book also consists of five chapters, I have chosen to call 'essays' in my I-system of terms for they have been developed as a result of revisited theory and efficient practical application to the lectures in the linguistics auditorium. They are interconnected by the 1

FRAMES' theory started with Marvin Minsky's article: M. Minsky 1975. ‘A Framework for Representing Knowledge’. In The Psychology of Computer Vision, ed. P. H. Winston, 211—277. New York: McGraw-Hill. Fillmore continued with a series of publications:Fillmore 1977a. ‘The Case for Case Reopened’. In Syntax and Semantics 8: Grammatical Relations, ed. P. Cole, 59—81. New York: Academic Press.5; C. Fillmore 1977b. ‘Scenes-and-frames Semantics’. In Linguistic Structure Processing, ed. A. Zambolli, 55—82. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company. C. Fillmore 1977c. ‘Topics in Lexical Semantics’. In Current Issues in LinguisticTheory, ed. R. W. Cole, 76 – 138. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. C.Fillmore, C. Baker 2000. http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/framenet.

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steps of rhetorical analysis (RA) where the coordinate system is formed by the entity of ethos, pathos and logos (i.e. the purpose of the speaker/user determining the choices), and the tools of emotive and reasoning character applied (the rhetorical instrument in the language structure). The canvas of each essay is language with its levels and structures, therefore they reappear each time in the order and completion that is needed. Since the metastructure of this dissertation is philosophy of language in its humanized pragmatic extensions, I have avoided statistics but for the generalized outcome and sufficient examples to illustrate typical feature or group of linguistic facts and events. Discussion of repetitive features is the core and not their description, and my focus points are WHY and HOW, not WHAT. A fast-changing approach to language uses in globe talk, texts, literature and interpersonal communication, based on e-communication practices, is setting challenges to rhetoric and that leads to rethinking of linguistic matter. In a comparative context the general rhetorical matrics has proven quite useful to certain areas of crosscultural understanding based on differences in language practices and linguistic explanation. The whole power and the beauty of rhetoric can be seen in the dimensions of freedom of language usage expressed as idiolect and as deliberate choice of the means of the phase of eloquentio. Idiolect comes naturally as expression of cultural identity, while deliberate choice of how to say things is the result of the awareness of the speaker of the situational context and the ways for its change in order to avoid trouble and gain advantage. What is more, under the pressure of a situation, the speakers naturally switch to their cultural routine and slip back into the matrix of their mother tongue. Thus a Bulgarian uses culturally transparent discourse in the cases of expressing agreement (e.g. *I'm agree), frequently falls into overuse of the progressive aspect (*I am starting a new period in my studies), hides behind a general meaning of the personal pronouns (one, you, he, they), bravely mixes registers (*Me and my family instead of Mom, dad and I), follows inverted (or, rather, a twisted) word order where the theme coincides with the circumstances, giving the subject some grammatical time and space to cope with the responsibility of the action; uses abstract answers that follow the logic of the negative question not the logic of action (Don't you like baklava? *Yes, I don't.); focuses on the mind-setting rather than on the following action (*Last summer I decided to visit my aunt who lives in Varna instead of Last summer I visited my aunt who lives in Varna.); overuses the comparative form without really expressed

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comparison (*I like red because it is more like the fire that gives us heat on cold days), the use of prepositions follows the mode of our motherculture understanding of place-time-manner relations, etc. These markers are widely described and added to the general corpus of BEIL created by Bulgarian ELT scholars2. They are not necessarily linguistic errors but they are inevitable cultural markers of language usage. In terms of rhetorical knowledge such markers have a triple importance: their isolation and study supply data about the audience; their avoidance raises the register, and their deliberate usage serves to manipulate audience and hide meaning. A rhetoric of meanings keeps such cases into view at the lower levels of language study but they do not exhaust the vast area of identity markers. A cultural background supports context running prior to a speech situation and does it by means of discourse features of psychographic significance. When we teach English to Bulgarians in Bulgaria, we take core contexts as given while, at the same time, we never bother about the sustainability of street slang for we know it is a matter of natural survival of certain features of discourse. 3 In my 17 years of working with private adult groups whose purpose was to emigrate, and an even greater number of high school graduates whose purpose was to pass admission tests and exams (after trying out their efficiency I finally focused on Oxforddesigned levels for FCE and Advanced learners, TOEFL, SAT 1 and 2 for English, Maths and Physics, SU admission tests and UNWE admission exam)4 I needed prescriptive ways rather than descriptive. Since our time 2

BEIL has been in the focus of our linguists from the very beginning of ELL in SU, yet it entered my view as an object of research interest in the beginning of 1990s and the presentation of Andrey Danchev at the first IATEFFL Conference in Sofia. Later on I have studied the publications in this line by Mariya Georgieva, Liliyana Grozdanova, Andrey Danchev, Alexandra Bagasheva, Jana Molhova and all the comparative studies of our ELT colleagues at the SWU of Bulgaria (starting with those of Svetla Tomanova (2009), Iva Nestorova and Dafina Kostadinova, Slavka Popova and Maria Anastasova, Mariya Bagasheva and Yana Manova, Vanya SakarevaSvetla Kyurova and Zarina Markova) as they were published throughout the years in their theoretical papers and in their course books and the books with admission tests and grammar exercises: the effect of this research has been to the use of synchronizing my teaching practice with the desired results and find my own solution to repeated erratic features of EL learning, which I shall discuss next. The Essence of the AA is in finding clues of coping with repeated errors. There is also the functional study of B. Todorova of the interlanguage of Bulgarian mothers who live abroad and publish in the Bg-mama Forum (2014). 3 Lecture notes of Jana Molhova, 1999, SWU, Blagoevgrad 4 These are listed as a separate group of ELT Course Books in the Bibliography.

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was limited, I needed very strong motivation and the basic vehicle of carrying out the purpose of each course was polemics. I needed a shortcut to the brainstructures of couple of thousands of people and thus the AA came into being. There are no failures: enrolments were done after the first trial month and only a few learners were to be redirected to other trainers. E.g. learners who just followed their family's ambition, or whose purpose was only a greater score with my own state school classes, or whose motivation was to attend a free course (i.e. financed by the social programmes for unemployed people) were immediately redirected or remotivated. I shall next lead my readers into some areas of discussion over possible approaches to the English tongue we, Bulgarians use when we express our cultural wealth in the global spaces of the English speaking world. My point is that language, even in its universal functioning, is a tool for individual expression of the Self and depends on a stable value system, good will, information storage and processing capacity, and choice. The steps to self-acquisition follow motivation—awareness—and pleasure.

CHAPTER ONE STRUCTURES AND CHOICES ON THE AA-BASED CLASSROOM SCHEDULE

1.1 The Four Skills In my searches for the best platform of the AA I have used the courses of Sofia University and the book for the admission exam in UNWE; all my Russian books of textual practice and the resources of the British Council Libraries and the upcoming systematic courses for training of TOEFL and SAT 1 and SAT 2 applicants. From the very beginning of the ABC Universal ELT school in the town of Kyustendil, the groups asked for real-life training and I had to introduce texts from the Italian journal Speak Up, and from National Geographic, Time and New Yorker. I experimented first with the adult learners' groups: they started at the number of 12 for each group but between 1992—1997 they reached up to 54 in the fall enrollments. After that I split them usually into two secondlevel groups where they only revised what they had been taught during the intensive 3-month course. Next they continued with First Certificate (Cambridge) 8-month course. Only a few of them continued at the advanced level before emigrating. All the adult groups required special training for job interviews and relevant speech behaviour for the purposes of emigration. The greatest part of them left after the first level, but there were also some of them who had two or three years’ time and continued to the First Certificate level, TOEFL and even to SAT-2 for physics and math. They needed efficient communication training. Where I had not still developed the AA i.e. the second level which is in the present day terms 'Pre-intermediate', I relied on texts. A text can provoke imagination and story-telling. We worked with shorter and easier texts until they felt ready to continue with the Upper Intermediate level. Thus the steps were: Beginners (Elementary to Lower Intermediate); Second Year (Text based); First Certificate (Upper Intermediate); English in Texts 1; Advanced (plus TOEFL and SAT and preparing personal documents); English in Texts 2.

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When my first special groups of young adult learners reached to the level of advanced learning I got a selection of science books and fictional books so that we could work with unadapted texts. There were three such groups in the 17-year period of functioning of the school, each of them consisting of 23—24 constant learners, and there were also the summer groups of young learners of PC based training and the school leavers who formed three intensive-learning groups of 24—32 members each: SU TEFL, UNWE exam training and TOEFL and SAT training. What I actually taught was motivation and instant rhetorical actant analysis throughout the duration of all simulated exam situations. They had to do the rest in order to win their competition. There were no failures. In teaching English for the latest 25 years we (both the teachers and the learners in Bulgaria) have formally followed the training paradigm of going through the four language skills: reading and listening in their capacity of passive or reproductive skills, and writing and speaking—the productive, active or creative skills. While in the former two obscurity of language is best featured in the limited experience-based choice of comprehending the meaning of a text, the productive skills' training goes through the twists and turns of I-language and bears the demographic and psychographic features of the learner in their performance. In our training programs chronologically the dictation comes first, followed by texts for reading and translation, and the writing task. The choice of texts is important even in cases when they have been eclectically heaped. In the Instructor's guide, though, the dictation comes in the Writing-part and is the bridge between reading and listening on the one hand, and reading and writing—on the other: it combines the skills of the teacher or instructor to produce in speech a mental language combinatory task, and the perceptive and the productive skills of the learner in coping with it. A dictation is the synchronized skill of both teacher and learner to reach transparency of meaning in time-limited proficiency language task.

Reading Comprehension I have paid considerable attention to building this skill and have never looked down on it as a simple passive type of learning. „Reading“ means „understanding“ which is the ability to extract information or work with the informative level of any text-message. Texts are no longer quietly lying sets of words but discourse containers that work upon the minds of the learners. Vocabulary is the first target in reading and the second is the story that the texts tells. Next comes the play within the textual environment—the

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exploration of the spaces a text contains, their rearrangement and further development against our own mental spaces. I always worked with unadapted texts for any adaptation bears the impact of a secondary intentionality—and interferes with the authentic message.1 It is a challenge to reconstruct a text’s informativity in a set of tasks designed to our tongue, challenging the learners' minds to find obscurities of language and dissolve them in the pursuit of their full comprehension. The second aspect of a text—its entertaining nature—has been searched for in becoming a part of the story: I have always let the groups choose the texts they liked. The tasks given comply with the nature of the text and include: making a summary or abstract; picking out the main idea and the supporting ideas; discussion on the ideas; discussion on the sub-themes, the characters and the style and language; producing a short comment provoked by the discussion of the text. Next come the production of versions and translations. There has been a basic difference in the adopted approach to reading from the common school practices: I have always had sufficient number of individual hand-out copies of the text or of the book to be read. The learners could write, underline, translate and even draw pictures on their copies. Moreover, I advised the students to enjoy the story first and after the first reading to mark the unfamiliar words and phrases in their individual ways. Such procedures created a visual image of the text which pinned down the visualized image of the story for each learner. Dictionaries came afterwards and the work with them was not to spoil the pleasure from reading. Thus a text for RC turned into a game map and received its life with each next replay for learners from the levels of Intermediate to Proficiency. Each collection of exam texts was seen as having its own colour and density while each single book for reading was seen as a unique game (e.g. Harry Potter Series or Terry Pratchett's Discworld books—we read 27 of them). It was neither teaching of literature, nor learning vocabulary: we were involved with exploring the message continuum with the extensions into each new player's mental spaces. In other words we were building worlds using the means of the new language. This makes reading an adventure: an active skill of creative minds.

1

I have developed those ideas in the prefaces to my collections of RCTests and a couple of papers: Reading Comprehension; English in Texts; SWU Admission Tests; The Composition; Apostolova, 1993, 1994, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2013, and have redesigned the tasks for the latest Academic ELT project at the SWU (2013).

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Now, when I can revise that approach, I can redesign the tasks for reading for my undergraduates and for the further trainees. There are in fact two sets of tasks: one of them consider fictional texts, and the other— scientific and social texts. Here are the two lately revised sets of tasks and instructions: 1. TASKS assigned to the fictional texts accompanied by notes for the instructor 1) Read the text carefully and underline all the unfamiliar words and phrases. The instructor is to warn the learners to bring pencils and hint some of the difficult or typical units with specific meaning in the given text. This task might be given to them as a preliminary home assignment for next time. 2) Make a summary of the text/ plot, telling what the text is about. The instructor might prepare a plot summary based on the leading author's sentences and ask helpful questions based on the general plan: who does what to whom in what succession and under what circumstances, and what are the effects. Up to 15 minutes. 3) Let us find out the meaning of the key words and expressions. The instructor is to put down up to 20 specific words and phrases on the board and explain their meaning in the context and their other meanings, thus creating an example of how the learners are expected to fulfill their vocabulary-building home assignments. Up to 30 minutes. 4) Scan the text and pick up the ideas. You can use the Internet aids as the second step after their trial. The learners are expected to think of associated ideas which are not contained in the text. Up to 10 minutes. 5) Try to define the main idea and the associated sub-ideas. The instructor is to explain the limitations of a text and then lead the group to make the distinction between what a text contains and what the reader's creative mind can think up. Make the group divide the two groups of ideas. Up to 15 minutes. 6) Think about the values contained in the ideas and their possible functioning in our reality. This question is to provoke discussion. Try to follow their arguments and put the clearly expressed ones (up to 4) on the board. Up to 20 minutes. 7) Make a list of the characters and draw a chart of their representation in the text: name and nicks; authors description; how

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the character describes himself or herself; how the other characters describe him or her. The learners are expected to make a table of 5 horizontal and as many as needed vertical sections and fill them up with the relevant short excerpts from the text: up to 15 words. The Instructor might suggest to make a list of all the characters first and then work in couples on one of the characters. This is to take up to 20 minutes 8) Pick out 8 to 12 examples of the authors language. The learners are expected to suggest words and phrases that seem to them characteristic of the author's style. The Instructor may suggest that they work in couples with parts of the text. Give them up to 20 minutes and then ask them to read aloud their picks: put the best on the board plus your suggestions. 9) Invent your own story (200—250 words) of what might follow and write it down as a homework assignment. The instructor is to collect the ready assignments and correct them in terms of language use. There is a second mark for inventiveness: you can make them read their corrected versions aloud and compete for the best story. 10) Pick all the unfamiliar words and phrases and search for their meanings. Put them in your special vocabulary book. This is homework assignment and the instructor is to ask them if they have any questions. 2. TASKS assigned to the non-fictional texts and notes for the instructor 1) Read the text carefully and underline all the unfamiliar words and phrases. The instructor is to warn the learners to bring pencils and hint some of the difficult or typical units with specific meaning in the given text. This task might be given to them as a preliminary home assignment for next time. 2) Make an abstract of the text and pick up to 8 key words: The instructor might prepare an abstract or use the abstract of the articles which are given in the Instructor's chart. Up to 15 minutes. 3) Let us find out the meaning of the key words and expressions. The instructor is to put down up to 12 specific words and phrases on the board and explain their meaning in the context and their other meanings, thus creating an example of how the learners are expected to fulfil their vocabulary-building home assignments. Up to 20 minutes.

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4) Scan the text and pick up the ideas. You can use the given aids as the second step after their trial. The learners are expected to think of associated ideas which are not contained in the text. Up to 10 minutes. 5) Try to define the main idea and the associated sub-ideas. The instructor is to explain the limitations of a text and then lead the group to make the distinction between what a text contains and what the reader's creative mind can think up. Warn them of competition in the field of science and the war of ideas. Make the group divide the two groups of ideas. Up to 15 minutes. 6) Think about the value of the ideas and their possible functioning in our reality. This question is to provoke discussion. Try to follow their arguments and put the clearly expressed ones (up to 4) on the board. Up to 20 minutes. 7) Make a list of the quotes and references. The learners are expected to make a table of 2 horizontal and as many as needed vertical sections and fill them up with the relevant short excerpts from the text: up to 15 words. The Instructor might suggest work in couples. This is to take up to 20 minutes 8) Pick out 8 to 12 examples of the authors language. The learners are expected to suggest words and phrases that seem to them characteristic of the style of the text. The Instructor may suggest that they work in couples with parts of the text. Give them up to 20 minutes and then ask them to read aloud their picks: put the best on the board plus your suggestions. 9) Write a short comment on the text (200—250 words) as a homework assignment. The instructor is to collect the ready assignments and correct them in terms of language use. There is a second mark for inventiveness: you can make them read their corrected versions aloud and compete for the best story. 10) Pick all the unfamiliar words and phrases and search for their meanings. Put them in your special vocabulary book. This is homework assignment and the instructor is to ask the learners if they have any questions. *** It is common practice to base the training for good writing on the reading skill.There are three levels to the training of written English:

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writing a dictation (including taking down notes); translating, and composition, including the retelling of a story. Here is an exemplary plan of a course on writing:

An upper intermediate to advanced course on Writing PART 1: DICTATIONS The Instructor is to read the text of the dictation first. Then put down the names and a couple of difficult words on the board. Then start dictating plus simultaneously writing the text on the board. Then read the text again and after that, collect them. This is to be done the first 4 times. For the next 4 dictations only put down the words and phrases they evidently miss during the dictation. The third group of 4 dictations is to be read in the dictation-mode. Next dictations can be given faster and with additional complications and obsqurities. PART 2: TRANSLATIONS Translations can be grouped by 2: English-Bulgarian and Bulgarian English. In class the instructor is expected to make a demonstration of the translation procedures. The rest can be given as group or individual assignments for which you can give some instruction on some language unit's meaning. Best fulfilled assignment might be published on the group site. PART 3: COMPOSITION I have always preferred to call this specific creative exercise 'composition' when referring to the process, while the result is a sub-genre of the 'essay'. This is done in order to distinguish between the effort and the final product, which in 9 cases out of 10 is a draft or unsuccessful copy, whether written down in full text or partly, or just shared in oral discussion. Next follow the plan for a writing-guide where the instruction is displayed as a part of a dialogue with the learner. That means the instructor is open for listening to arising questions, comments and suggestions.

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1. The Descriptive Essay 1.1 Describe an object Topic 1: Describe this classroom. Topic 2: Describe your home/house. Topic 3: Describe the car you would wish to have. Mind: The composition is your author's text, a product of your own inventive mind. As an examination element and as a part of your creative writing it is not required to tell the truth, only the truth and nothing but the truth. Do not fix to only giving information of the object, its colour, material, position, make and number. Add emotive and evaluative information to the description. Add associations. Use your imagination. Here is an additional and provocative topic: Topic 4: Imagine you have to sell your car/ house/ lab-product/ dressitem. Advertise them to the possible customers. 1.2 Describe a procedure: Topic 1: Give the recipe for your favourite dish/ for good sex/ for spending a good vacation/ for making a dress or a hat/ for brewing good brandy etc. Topic 2: Describe a professional procedure. Topic 3: Lay out the rules for a familiar professional practice. Mind: This type of description is relying on facts, strict criteria and rules. You can invent an imaginary procedure of fictional, fantastic or ironic nature. You can describe real procedures contained in your daily experience. You can write your own essay or adapt an instructive texts you have access to. 1.3 Describe a person or a pet Topic 1: Describe yourself Topic 2: Describe your students Topic 3: Describe your pet /in case you don't keep a pet, describe an imaginary pet in a realistic or ironic fashion/ Topic 4: Write your personal essay Topic 5: Write a letter of recommendation about a student who is applying for the Eramus academic exchange program. Topic 6: Imagine you are competing for an international academic placement. Write your own letter of reference. Mind:

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Realistic description can serve as the fundament of such composition. However, one is not bound to explicate all the facts but only the most characteristic ones that serve to the aims of the description. You can start with introducing the person, description of his or her appearance, functional characteristics, traits, interaction with other people and attitude to the environment, plans and prospects. While topics 1, 2 and 3 give you freedom to use your imagination and language skills, topics 4, 5 and 6 require careful layout of the facts. Do not exaggerate or use false information. However, you are free to choose and order the facts that represent the described person in the best and clearest way to the purpose of the recommendation which might be of positive or negative, or even of abstaining from decision nature. 2. The Argumentative Essay Topic 1: Give your argumentation for or against death penalty Topic 2: Give your pro and con arguments on taking part in the current social protest Topic 3: Express your likes and dislikes for the organization of the latest academic event you have attended (congress, symposium, conference, the opening of the academic year, the admission exams, the organization of this course). Topic 4: Express your opinion on the plans for development of Bulgarian education. Mind: The argumentative essays generally follow the above four types which have slight differences. While type 1 is more individual and emotional, type 2 requires independent and objective thinking. Type 3 is of conversational nature. Part 4 is of representative nature and relies on building motivation for belonging to this university; it can also contain aspects of advertising. The British approach does not necessarily require a clearly expressed opinion but a conclusion that wisely leads to the useful aspects of the discussed objects for different people, cases and needs. The American approach requires clearly expressed opinion taking a side. There is a principle concerning the choice of arguments: the value of your argumentation depends not on the number but on the strength of your arguments. The overuse of multiple arguments leads to their weakening.

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While building your argumentation keep in mind what the counter arguments might be: prognostic thinking is highly appreciated. Be exact in giving facts and numbers. Be concise and use only words and phrases leading to your aim. Do not fall victim to catch-phrases of emotive or distractive character: keep within the time-limitations starting with careful counting of your words. There are three basic structures to the argumentative essay in the ELL mode: Structure A: Approval Introduction containing our positive opinion based on the enumeration of the main features of the object of discussion. A paragraph containing positive arguments. A paragraph containing equal in number and significance negative arguments. Conclusion: motivation your choice based on the domination of positive arguments. Structure B: Denial Introduction containing our negative opinion based on the enumeration of the main features of the object of discussion. A paragraph containing negative arguments. A paragraph containing equal in number and significance positive arguments. Conclusion: motivation your choice based on the domination of negative arguments. Structure C: Functional Argumenting Introduction of general descriptive nature or absurd proposition to be later denied. A paragraph showing the object of discussion in functioning: it can be based on a story or anecdote. A paragraph describing other people's opinion: authorities, experts, social leaders, famous people. Exposing the basic arguments of your opinion. Giving the conclusion.

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Quantative hints: The good argument is to be spoken in 3 to 7 minutes. It might rely on additional 3 minutes in a debate. This needs basic text of about 300 words and additional text of up to 250 words. When preparing the basic text we keep to the following proportion for Structures A and B: Introduction : Paragraph 1 : Paragraph 2 : Conclusion 2 : 4 : 4 : 1 parts or approximately 50-60 : 100-120 : 100-120 : 30 words. For Structure C, which can be used as additional argumentation, we can apply the following proportion: 1 : 2 : 2 : 4 : 1 parts or 30 : 50-60 : 5060 : 120 : 30 words. 3. Reproduction In our daily practices we are often provoked or required to reproduce a text. There a two basic types of reproductive essays: the summary or the abstract, and the true reproduction of informative, persuasive or entertaining/anecdotal text. The procedure is to hear a text and try to reproduce it as close to the original as possible and to the purpose of reproducing it in a summarized or full-length form. Reproduction is practiced in our daily communication. It is an inevitable part of our lecture-practices. Now, let us think of a couple of situations: Imagine you have heard a scientific article or a debate and you need to grasp its basic idea for further development or in concern with scientific intelligence. Imagine you are listening to a TV debate which you further share with your friends in person. Imagine you need to tell an entertaining story to your kids. Imagine you need to start a conference report with an introductory anecdote. Imagine you want to tell your friends some joke. In all the above cases we rely on our good memory and our ability of tale-telling. Reproduction can be factual or close to the text, or it can bear our own contribution and turn into our individual version. Here follow two texts, that you will here twice in view of the foreign language. After listening to the text for the first time, you will be given 3 minutes for quick mental reproduction of the basic aspects of the text: who

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—does what—when and where—to who/m—to what effect. Pay attention to the general picture and try to pick up 4 to 8 specific expressions. Upon the second hearing try to fill in the details and clear the sequence of events. You might choose to keep the direct speech as it is in the text: try to remember the basic structure, not all the words. In case you choose to use reported speech, mind your grammar. Text 1 Anecdote (Do You Know Who I Am?) Text 2 The Unicorn in the Garden by James Thurber 4. Story-telling In the training practices there are five basic steps leading to the writing of a good story: (1) reading stories by different authors in order to choose a style of story-telling that suits your mental disposition best and help you in building your own model and relevant vocabulary; (2) Make a sequel or continue a story you like; (3) Write a story to a given ending. (4) Produce a version or analog to a story whose development you do not like; (5) Make up an entirely new story. Topic 1: Continue the following story: (It is a matter of choice supported by a book). Topic 2: Write a story beginning: Peter/Gloria got an invite for an international conference to be held in Venice. His heart leapt at the prospect of his presenting the latest of his findings. His conference fee was 500 euro, not to mention the travel and accommodation expense. He had not a single penny and the chance to receive funding from the university was near to nil. Upon coming back home, he found out there was an unexpected and annoying visitor. Topic 3: Write a story ending: … to my enormous relief it was only one of those movie-like dreams. Topic 4: Write a version to The Little Match-Seller by Andersen Topic 5: How I came to work with my present employer Topic 6: Something interesting happened to me last summer

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Mind (The general instruction that is expected by the newcomers) A short story needs setting, an idea, characters, action or plot based on an intrigue; and an ending. Good texts employ description and direct speech which can be non-standard. Stories are fixed about an event but their success depends on the skill of the story-teller. They can be with a happy end, an unhappy end, unfinished or moralizing and leading to associative thinking. They can be told in the present tense (in rare cases) or in the past tenses where we shall be careful about the sequence of tenses in the expression of the sequence of activities. Stories can be realistic or fantastic but in both cases we rely on our ability to notice details and express them in an individual way. Use short sentences and familiar expressions. Do not use foreign or difficult words and terminology except in relevant cases for creating reallife settings or parody. Be not afraid of repetition: it makes the text clear and can also be applied as a figure of style. Choose a topic to your own set of mind. Make a first draft. Read it and leave it aside. Make a second draft. Leave the story to grow in your subconscience. Forget it there for three days. Write it anew on the day before presenting it in class. Read it carefully for some corrections. Type it down on your PC and check the spelling and grammar. First-level stories take between 180-200 words; next level is between 300-350 words. It is not the thinking that delays you: thinking is the fastest thing in the world. It practically takes no time. What makes it slow is putting your thoughts in words. A story is based on our experience, our feelings, our perception, and our attitudes. After you have fixed those in your mental picture, choose the simplest words to tell the story. Then you can add text. Rely on what you have read, not on what you would find in your dictionaries.

Listening Comprehension: insufficiency of purpose-oriented types of listening Listening is a skill we connect with exams and our training practices are purpose-oriented. We listen for specific language markers, connected with the pragmatic principles of politeness, clarity and charity. They are related to the conceptual frames of emotive meanings: the limitations of socio-cultural type of the intercourse, information on the topic of discourse,

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and very seldom we listen for the structural aspects of the discourse and the argumentative network of the speaker.2 Listening for imitating the speech skills and for extracting key-word centered information are the two most frequent tasks in the training of listening comprehension skills. There is also the training for writing a dictation and the training for developing the learners' memory and reproductive skills. The latter two, however, have been neglected lately since they are no longer part of integrated exam practices.3 Listening for Interpretation comes next. Listening for debate is again framed. Listening with critical thinking is thoroughly neglected. International conferences very often announce English as the leading language of the event, yet in European and even Canadian events French and Russian speaking sections are not an exclusion. During the contributed papers sections at the 23rd World Congress of philosophy in Athens in August 2013 Russian speakers prevailed, and it happened that very often an interesting-sounding paper was read in extremely bad English. We were careful not to ask questions and the best discussions took place in the foyers or the speakers provided their e-mail addresses so that we could communicate in the slower and safer way e.g. in writing. I was often asked to speak slower and explain things in a clearer way, thus leaving the grounds of reasoning philosophy and turning to picturesque and vivid description, relying on example and metaphor. It is a common fashion to look for PP presentation, illustration and story-telling to make a paper clearer for the audience of established professors who were excellent in their writing and presenting but were poor listeners and would very seldom accept the debate.

2

Todor Shopov /http://rhetoric.bg/intercomprehension-analysis/ explicates the complexity of 'intercommunication' outlining its multilevel scope across human perception. He is very close to what I have designed SIAN for, and there is one difference: while he has adopted a descriptive approach, mine is aimed at prescriptive efficiency since persuasion is the final base. As such the SIAN and its concrete functioning as AA is also based on the minimisation principle, where the optimal situation parameters are searched for and the functions of language at a macro and micro levels are reduced to the existential ones. I have adopted the concept 'intercommunication' in T. Shopov's interpretation and my area is where semiotics functions in the intersection of individual and socially significant aspects of intercomprehension. 3 SUATEFL and UNWE examination practices provided great motivation for the training of such skills.

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It is not a matter of ELL only. It is a matter of intercultural rhetoric training of academicians, politicians and culture-makers4 Even in the case of academic EL training coures which have been widely funded lately, especially by EU projects, we can often hear our colleagues complain of their uncertainty in conversation. To look at a speaker of different languages is an experience, too: for their facial expresions change as they switch to another language requiring different strain of facial muscles and speech-producing organs. But this is one side of the matter: people unconciously apply the politeness practices that accompany a language in use. This observation has been helpful for building the fundament of the AA: the politeness principle in action and the change of the speech situation parameters next leads to the change in the frequency of errors: people in the area of Plovdiv, where I learned English as a private student between 1968 and 1972, and as the EL high school student up to 1978, do not make the same mistakes based on listening (dictation, LC, instruction, discussion) as people in the area of Kyustendil. I needed to change my entire approach in the early 1990s in order to answer the needs of my Kyustendil trainees. I shall mention the three basic diversions: first, I had to stop smiling when teaching to new groups of any age and to adult groups for most of the duration of their training period: they considered a smile and a joke unserious. Second came the issues of intonation and stress with the tendencies of using rising intonation everywhere, and putting two words under the same stress and refusing to grasp words with two stresses. Third came the shortening of soft and long vowels and the tendency of overusing the letter 'e'. Consequently, we had to undergo a hard fisrt month in synchronizing our sounding and listening. I needed to argument each of my steps, fighting a cultural model of I-phonology.

The Speech: extrapolations on the neglect of the culture of speaking by the Utterer Say something in English Let us start with a couple of cases that have proven emblematic. (1) Back in my school years in the 1960s to 1970s I was often asked by friends of the family to say something in English when they found out I had been learning it. It was always a moment of embarrassment although 4

e.g. common phenomena these days are to listen to and even read debates on an urgent political, social or cultural issue where both the moderator and the participants lack basics of public speaking.

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we learned our texts by heart. One doesn't talk to oneself. And one doesn't do that in public. (2) We were often advised to find foreigners and talk to them, which was difficult in the Age of the Iron Wall. It happened so that my first conversation with a British took place in 1990 with one of my first groups at the ABC-U courses. I was nicely surprised with the easy flow of English in the classroom. (3) In my teaching practice at the South West University of Bulgaria I found out there were some undergraduates from Bansko who bragged about their special way of speaking. They never used 'dialect' or 'accent' when they talked about their variety of our mother tongue, they referred to it as 'speaking'. I asked some of them to demonstrate it in class, and they could not, their reasons being that they could not talk alone with themselves or even with a friend out of their local environment. Speech comes naturally, they claimed. (4) I started asking my groups to redo the text for translation again in their usual variety or mode of speaking. I did it with my private groups and with my master classes. The outcome is fascinating: while the Bulgarian target texts had averagely 8 to 12 spots of irrelevant choice of word or phrase both lexical and concerning the shift of tense and the shift of subject, in the dialect and slang versions the discourse ran in a smooth text with no traces of misunderstanding. (5) In the year 2000 I travelled with a group of PR-undergraduates under the Leonardo Da Vinci program. They were to be placed in London offices and practice PR activities. They had had no problems during our communication training classes in Bulgaria. They knew everything about business behaviour in theory. Yet, they kept coming to meetings in their sports suits and being ashamed when they had to utter a simple phrase like “thank you”, “excuse me”, “yes, please” and “no, thank you”. Even today, most Bulgarian university undergraduates who do not study English philology or Applied Linguistics, tend to forget their first lesson and to the polite phrase “how are you” answer “so, so”. (6) In the children's groups we taught to we had a similar problem: the mothers and grandfathers asked the kids to 'say something in English' and the kids could not do it alone. The culmination came when a teacher of English at one of the leading schools in Kyustendil got indignant with the unwillingness of her 7thgrade students to communicate and came out: “You've been learning English for 7 years and you can't say two words!” The answer came right away: “F**k you!”

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(7) In my university days I shared a room with a German colleague who sometimes had parties to which about 20 German students in Bulgaria came. The first time I was asked to get back late, and I did so, but the party was still on. She introduced me to the group who were all freshmen and their Bulgarian was struggling, and I suddenly said: “I know something in German” and recited a part from Goethe's “Faustus”. It was in bad German, I presume, but they were immensely happy and I became the honoured member of their parties from that time on. The solution to my kids' problems came with teaching them to recite rhymes: they fought and refused to read them aloud at first: they were 'ashamed' of sounding ‘unnatural’. But I made them play a game where they competed for a chocolate in a box at the farthest end of the large classroom. They could take one only after making the steps to it while saying a line at each step. They competed and by the end of the 2nd month each of them could recite between 40 and 50 rhymes. There was no problem in involving them in dialogue ever since. All these cases appear repeatedly under similar circumstances and their close study reveals a couple of practically-useful conclusions: a) One does not talk alone, but one can recite alone in public. b) Our speech-training classes in Bulgarian do not run parallel in English: even trained undergraduates of PR cannot transform their communication skills into English: speaking is environmentally bound, and the stage of rhetorical actio in dialogue production comes out natural only in real-life situation. The training of the speaking skill comes after the training in the other skills: in order to speak we have to get sufficient database of what to say and how to say it. Writing supports speaking. In the era of incessant mobile talk, things are slightly changed. Today we have to rethink our speech classes and move the focus of our effort from pronunciation to cultural compatibility and register of accent, stress, name-sounding, and dialect in terms of Aural Rhetoric (Aczel 2013) i.e. reconsider the efficiency of our graduates in their intended effect of language production. Registers come as extension to language competence and achieving a proper reaction to a speech situation by implementation of the pragmatic value of politeness in its synchronized and explicit modes. c) Our undergraduates listen to lectures and to instruction in the seminars. They also go to summer jobs abroad, where, again, they listen to instruction. That is nearly all of their experience with semi-official register. Then they use it in turning to their professors and to their employers. Vertical communication with its two directions and single or multiple addressee is something they do not get trained in. What is more, horizontal

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communication is trained only at the level of colloquial or slang speaking. The English textbook situations display speech situations which are out of context and to bring it into context in our classroom environment it needs time. Even so, our learners still feel uneasy when they are asked to repeat or learn by heart a dialogue. This comes with the feeling of false situation, and they are embarrassed to act 'unnatural'. c) Our schools employ a foreign teacher for the speaking classes, not necessarily English, British or American but a person who has different sounds from our Bulgarian sounds of speech. This is a part of the solution, though. Our Bulgarian teachers are limited in their placement practices and they do not get involved in speaking activities: they do not talk about our native topics in the foreign language as much and as involving as they do with the topics from the other language's textbook. Our education practices comply with the position of 'dominated' culture in the terms of Jacquemond (Venuti 1992: 139-58): we listen to English speech, we imitate it, we do not produce or reproduce our culture in globe talk but for erratic and embarrassing situations for lack of practicing that could eliminate shyness. d) Finally, we arrive at a very interesting practical conclusion: speaking in a foreign language or the change of register comes with the cannon of actio and needs to be natural. It is underlaid by internal speech in our mother culture speaking mode. Our brains are involved in translation of the cultural parameters of the current situation. Then the dynamics of translation in Eugene Nida's term comes up as the first principle in the training of speaking skills in non-English speaking environment. The dynamics or the achievement of natural sounding in the stage of actio is within the art of rhetoric. It is not coming up with our primary sound-producing skills, but a matter of education to the purposes of global intercourse.

1.2 Hiding Behind the Speaker's Mask There is a phenomenon which occurs with both inexperienced speakers in their mother tongue, and with inexperienced learners of a foreign language who have had no chance of speaking up in public. I have called it 'hiding behind the speaker's mask' and its core feature is the feeling of shame in the course of articulating in public that can lead to muteness and ruin of the individual's self-confidence while on the stage of today's international communication. The speech-behaviour aspects of this process form the complex „hiding behind the speaker's mask“ displayed in 10

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typical cases from the Bulgarian classroom of English and its aspects are isolated to be discussed further. Case 1) 'That funny language': I, myself, started learning English with a private teacher in 1968. The sounding of the language was funny to me. I was puzzled when I had to repeat after her 'I like', or when I had to make the 'melody' of the English speech pattern. However I was not puzzled when I had a rhyme to recite: I have always been a poor actor in Bulgarian, for I feel foolish when I have to change my voice, while I never felt the puzzling barrier in reciting in English. This experience added to an American methodology of ELT based on learning poems, I applied in the 1990s as the basic starter to my younger learners' groups. We learned rhymes and songs and then used the words from the rhymes and songs in competitions. Case 2) The aching words'5: Next is the case with my PR learners of English: upon winning a mobility Leonardo da Vinci grant for the placement of 19 young people for training practice in London PR-agencies for a month, I had to organize a fourth-level training course in English for my best PR undergraduates at the SWU. The final group consisted of 9 PR undergraduates, 2 outsiders (young workers) and 8 undergraduates of English philology and International economics who had previously been learning English with me for 4 to 8 years in intensive mode of training. The PR undergraduates knew their theory and some English. The rest knew English. The success of the project was secured by the English group while the greatest problem of the PR undergraduates was their shyness speech barrier, the greatest difficulty for them being at the moments they had to say 'excuse me', 'thank you' and 'sorry', 'yes, please' and 'no, thank you'. They had the shock of finding out how often phrases of politeness occurred in semi-official talk, while in the training mode in Bulgaria such phrases had been considered easy and neglected in simulated situations as 'unnecessary', 'waste of time', and 'stupid'. Case 3) 'Feeling insecure about my correct hearing': In the 1990s the large groups of adult beginners from the first three great waves of emigrants usually asked not to be asked to speak up at first, while they never refused reading the text together and giving me mute answers gradually growing into impulsive answers while listening to their own voices and being provoked to speak up at the end of the first month. Case 4) 'Ashamed and fearing laughter': The repeated case of refusal to speak by my first group of English Philology in 1996 and my latest group of French-based Applied Linguistics in 2013: both groups consisted 5 See M. Georgieva, On Developing Intercultural Communicative Competence in EFL Learners, In Smaller Languages in the Big World, S, 2001

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of exceptional students, who shared they were 'ashamed' of their pronunciation and were afraid their colleagues might laugh at them. I had to be inventive in keeping the conversation running all by myself at first and giving absurd answers to my questions, thus provoking them to get involved. I always said in the beginning I was to explain things in Bulgarian, and they were not obliged to answer in public, just follow the question and try to get an answer ready in their heads. A young British assistant immediately caught me, exclaiming: „But you never used a single Bulgarian word throughout your classes!“ That was an interesting experience bothways: he did not count the few Bulgarian clauses of instructive nature I used for introducing novel language tasks, and the learners never felt embarrassed by my refusal to translate difficult things into our mother tongue to them. Case 5) The l-w case or bilabial dislambdacism6 is very interesting to be followed in Bulgarian speaking environment: Bulgarians tend to mispronounce 'l' in cases they are psychologically strained and naturally slip behind a cunning 'mouth cover' produced by the lips only that hide a troubled wandering tongue of a speaker who is not convinced in the truthfulness of what is to be said. Our learners of English put down 'lindol' instead of 'window' as a counter measure to a possible mistake they might have made: it is subconscious. I have observed thousands of cases and can state they are convinced there was some turn of the tongue and the lips while they were under stress or 'ashamed' when they were asked to pronounce the funny words of that foreign language. Next, I started watching young Bulgarians who can speak English on TV: lambdacism occurs in political debate and in weather forecasts most often, next come the morning shows where speakers feel an inner need to be convincing. Again, I suggest that the remedy is just proper training for speaking in public—this concerns the moment of actio. Case 6) A related case is what I have called 'the American way'. It occurs when we try to follow the intonation of an American telling about his experience on the Sunday match or the fast chirrup of a young airhostess on the line New York—Boston. I never tried to imitate them the first two months of my stay in the Boston area, knowing sound-mimicry would come naturally, and was immediately 'recognized' as a British English while my American non-academic friends never believed Bulgaria was outside the UK. Upon coming back to Europe, I had no other reverse reaction but an impulse to render my American conversations into nonformal friendly Bulgarian—jargon and slang. This case follows the natural effort of a speaker to get close to the audience. 6

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Case 7) 'What to say' is the next case: it occurs most evidently when a graduate student of English is asked to discuss a topic at the state exam, and it turns out that this particular person has never thought about that particular subject matter before. Instead of demonstrating their speaking skills, they start thinking of what to say manifesting lack of conversational skills or, in other words, proper communicative behaviour. In rhetoric it covers the stages of speech preparation called 'inventio', 'distributio' and 'eloqutio' where routine techniques are suggested in the training classes. 8) Individual articulation and the question of clarity in pronounciation often come into conflict: inexperienced speakers tend to estimate unclear sound-production as a marker of 'foreign' sounding. There is one classroom effect of this feature: schoolchildren often complain that their teachers of English change and they cannot understand their instructions. The training procedures involve talking to a recorder and listening to one's own sounds afterwards. Case 9) 'Rite spelling in english is no longer a problem 4 u': The EL users over the WWW create language-use economy environment which relies on contextual meaning, not on language productive skills. The signs of the alphabet are added to the pictogram of web-message where picture, sound, symbol and link form its body. Case 10) 'Recitation classes': we no longer practice them at university even in officially designed curricula where seminars are included. I heard the term on a lecture of philosophy at MIT in 2008. The student assistants were addressed to organize their groups for 'recitation' classes. I asked what that involved: 'they check whether the group has learned the 90 pages from the textbook I gave them for reading'. I thought we have dropped that check a long time ago for fear we might be accused of 'grinding', and forgetting that professional people have sound learning base. In the rhetorical line of speech-production this is the 'memoria' stage between 'elocutio' and 'actio'.

Finding analogs of and discussion on the cases Failures in speech production grow fewer as the learners of English advance, while they become more evident for the trained speaker of English in the cases of Bulgarian speech-production. I claim that advanced learners of English make better speaking-trainers in both English and Bulgarian than Bulgarians who do not use English. This is not connected with the languages themselves, but with their socio-cultural practices for the latest twenty years or so. It is a widely-recognized fact that Bulgarian today has lost its social markers and the Bulgarian media have contributed

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to the mixing of social registers greatly. Summer jobs also create a unified lower-register-based use of international English. So does the WWW with the specific communities we form. We forget about the other people in a community where each one enters as the main individual. Later on, when we gather in a room, we suddenly discover that we are no longer the focus of immediate attention. The possible approaches to the individualized situational meaning have grown more sofisticated these days since their recognition is facilitated by the WWW where 'everyone is involved'7. Their classification can lay out a map of the possible proper reaction to real-life speech situation in terms of the employment of social register on all levels of speech behaviour. We do not need to uncover what is in each student's mind through a discussion on a topic where speech behaviour is situationally managed and based on a culturally-based textbook (Grozdanova 2002: 130-131). (1) Cultural gaps and habitual audio-environment are marked along the axis cultural context—situation—individual context. The best example here is the pronunciation of names—there is no need to try to read the name Bulgaria to the rules of English spelling: we know the name of our own country. There is no need to try and pronounce our own personal names according to some imagined rules of reading them or spelling them to some idea of how people who do not know them are supposed to read them. What we need to do is fill in the web spaces with the proper sounds and create a habit in the aural modes of e-exchange. Once I tried to call a young Bulgarian 'Kate'. She did not protest. Her professor of Logic protested, though, teaching me the lesson of belonging: 'Katiya!' he emphasized, 'not Kate'. She did not comment. Probably she did not mind either pronunciation.8 In the way people turn to us we recognize their attitude to ourselves. When voiced a name becomes shared and we behave accordingly. And the habit of being the individual communicator on the Internet forum, Skype or FB produces unhappy members of a full auditorium where I no longer recognize my 'last night's chat-friend' in the noisy blackhaired boy from the third row or the group leader in the quiet and slow student from the first seat at the windows. (2) Caedmon's case and Caedmons 'syndrome' This marks for me the state when a high-level user of English is limited to the passive skills of reading and listening, filling in forms, testfullfillment and answering questions, but has not been asked to produce a 7

In Apostolova 2010. I have described the reaction of the Bulgarian Ekaterina in Names and the translation, first published in Liternet.bg & e-Runs Magazine 8

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text and speak it up. EL teachers in the common classroom somehow do not reach to the idea that each good speech has been previously put down before the memoria-stage and the actio-stage. When we like a sentence, an utterance, a work of fiction, a text of wisdom, we seldom make the effort of memorising it. The web-memory keeps it for us. And web conversation keeps running while fast face-toface communication fails. There is a law in our country, according to which all exams are written. How does it comply with the idea of direct interpersonal communication? A speaker in such cases has sufficient information to share but is chained by the lack of skill how to word it and give it away. This is usually based on an inferiority complex traces based on the lack of professional support in training. Most people are not natural speakertalents: the skill of speaking is acquired. (3) Register-bound Opacity can be based on register: its mixture or its situational misapplication. Te latter can be addressed to either the agents or the timeand-place aspect of a speech situation. Example: after giving instruction to one of my MA graduates concerning his Graduation paper, he suddenly spits out the communication problem which to me does not exist: ohhh moje li na "ti " vse pak e chat malko mi e stranno v chat na "vie" (can I use the informal ‘you-address’ in the singular: it is strange to me to address you formally in chat). https://www.facebook.com/messages/1121475761 Evidently 'chat' appears as an important speech-environment marker for him, while I completely fail to notice the web category. Register generates 'noise' in the channel of his perception. To him register is irrelevant to the situation, while to me it is first of all agent-bound. We both need readdressing of our speech perception frontiers. There is a reverse influence on the spelling when my Bulgarian undergraduates try to be polite and capitalize ‘You’ as this is done in the Bulgarian polite and official plural form of addressing people. (4) I-speech and I-sounding Individual style of expressing and individual sound-production can be sources of misunderstanding in a broader speech environment. It is not just habit or emotion but concerns the individual ability of handling unusual information flow. Since special turns of speech and specific pronouncing of sounds are emotionally-dependent, the former one, hiding overexpression in a language formula, the latter expressing emotion in an

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intonation pattern, their perception depends on the listener's ability to synchronize pathos parameters. Dropping intonation of the final 'Bye' on the telephone upon concluding a fair business deal can ruin it in a second. Sounding too exalted to the ear of an eastern partner might lead to the wrong impression, and being unable to understand a question from the audience after giving a presentation on how to teach listening comprehension to Bulgarian adult groups might turn you into a grotesque character. And vice versa: irrelevant intonation and inadequate sound-making might support the original style of an outstanding public speaker. (5) Hide behind a speaker’s mask: One needs to get distanced from what is being said in three cases basically: —when one speaks a text that was made and dictated to that speaker by a superior person or by the force of the duties of one's profession e.g.: a PR of a company having to present a tender matter before journalists; a police officer visiting the family of a diseased; a customs officer asking standard questions given on a screen and requiring limited answers. In such cases the officer on duty does not have the freedom of reaction to irrelevant answers. —when one knows one is telling lies: people make their sounds in a different way trying to articulate clearly. British speakers look directly into the eyes of the listener and their eyes slightly protrude from the strain, while Bulgarians lambdacise, trying to make themselves as sweet as possible. —when one is embarrassed by the very act of speaking to other people: the men from the neighborhood riding on the train back from the Sunday match. They believe they have to be polite and they believe they have to be friendly to that guy from the neighborhood, althought they know nothing about him. They talk in a friendly way hiding behind a friendly face which has the same function as the 'chat' on the internet. Being formal is irrelevant while being informal is alogical. Then an Indian face of steady friendly expression seems the only suitable match to an audio mask of a friendly drawl and recognizable rhythm allowing its segmentation into pronounciable units that sound least false. (6) The replacement of I by 'we', 'you', 'he' and one. This is typical for the people from the Eastern countries and for people of lower social origin. They correct speakers who do not sound 'respectful'

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enough. However, the personal pronouns in English can cause misunderstanding.9 This is the case when we need the mask of commonness. (7) Everybody-nobody The use of 'everybody'/'everyone' or 'nobody'/'no one' is a kind of generalization that is seen out of its logical meaning and is seen within a contextual limitation. Example: While spending a fall in the US, I call M. on Thanksgiving Day and invite her to my place of residence where we are having a great party with original food. She refuses, saying: Oh, nobody wants to come to your place. We better go to the cinema downtown. Who wants to go to the cinema on Thanksgiving day, I ask. Everyone! she answers meaning 'myself' because she is home alone. This is the case when we seek for security in generalization. (8) 'They' replacing the 'passive' Another Bulgarian interference of meaning and form is the usage of 'they', 'them' and 'their' where English prefers a passive construction. It is a slip into a habitual mental construction and the speaker can see no error in using an active instead of a passive construct for a kind of generalization where the agent is not so important as the action. The register also drops to a lower position of social significance of the activity expressed. This is the case when the individual is distinguished from the other people. (Georgieva 2011: 164-165) (9) The Individual choice, text authenticity and the functional field of discourse Speaking is our announced individuality. Our speech behaviour is our signature that makes up the authenticity of what is said at each singular moment of the conversation. Our individual choice in speaking is based on previous moments of our being approved as experts. We reproduce our success as our own style in communication. Those are the cases when we use our speaker's mask as a shield with our coat of arms on it. Opening the English speaking avatar Last but not least in our time is the choice of the communicating avatar or that aspect of our individuality which seems best fitted to a communicative situation. This gives the speaker certain freedom. The avatar is an enlivened speaker's mask. We no longer hide, but act in a role which gives us the security of the creator of meaning. *** 9

This issue was discussed and published in Apostolova (2004, 2010)

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Speaking is the highest stage of language productivity. It is fast, it is immediate, it is contextually based, it is subject to immediate reaction, it is the storage of a culture's memory. In our building up awareness of the layers of meaning in a speech situation we first establish the frontiers of our individuality and then we search for our hero on the stage of the world theatre. Our choice of communicative behaviour finally produces a strategy to be carried out by a network of avatars cutting through layers of social registers and functional styles to the best of our communicative efficiency. William Saroyan has a short story „The Living and the Dead“ where the young Armenian hero mentions to his grandmother the name of Shakespeare as the greatest world poet. The old Armenian granny immediately connects 'world' with the knowledge of languages and refuses to accept Shakespeare as equal to some troubadur from her early memories, who could compose poems in a couple of languages.10 This is the service the WWW is fulfilling for us: spreading our words in all the languages of the world. She, the Net, can write down some of our speech, she can reproduce all of it, yet she cannot sing our immediate ingenious speech out in all the languages of the world to the same quality. In the improvement of this quality is rooted partly the idea of finding shortcuts through opacity in speech. WWW can play the role of speech mask for the shy, and it can save some inconvenience in telling people lies or tragic pieces of information. WWW is where conversation abides in our avatars who have the power of acting for the best aspects of ourselves. They, however, cannot replace the person at the exit who has the power of free will. A rhetoric of meanings is possible where only freedom of choice is possible thus giving us the privilege of creativity, very often at the initial price of obscurity where the melody of I-speech employs foreign Istructures. I tried this once to an American doctor: he went to sleep in the first 5 minutes for his tired brain felt safe with my soft sounds and had no motivation of keeping alert to awareness. In a couple of hours only, I answered a telephone call and emphatically explained something to the person who had called. The other people in the room asked me whether it was some kind of German. I guess I had been using Avatars in both cases, adapting their speech behavior to the situation. Next follows a demo-model of complex classroom practices:

10

Based on Saroyan, “Tracy’s Tiger” in Short stories, Bulgarian edition 1980:4849

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BASIC COMPLEX FOR EXERCISING THE LISTENING AND SPEAKING SKILLS OF INTERPRETERS This is a plan for applying efficient types of exercises for the intensive training of translators and interpretes before a public event where translating and interpreting are needed. The contents vary to the thematic scope of the event. A and B types can be used for the training of Bulgarians who are traveling abroad for work and study and need pre-TOEFL (or other exam of that sort) training. A. LISTENING Listening tasks are graded. Each single task is repeated sufficient number of times on different excerpts from a dozen long texts. After the trainees get used to the technique, the trainer starts mixing the types of tasks until, on the last 7 to 4 days of the training period a real-life situation is played on the basis of one to two-page parts of the texts that have remained unused for the previous training period. TECHNICAL VARIETIES BASED ON: 1. Duration: 1.1 Short—comprehensive tasks including paraphrase of heard sentences, dialogues of Q&A or 2 statements; small talks - 3 to 5 minutes; 1.2 Long - dialogues and talks—5 to 10 minutes long. 2. Speech type: 2.1 Dialogue. 2.2 Monologue. 3. Register and difficulty: 3.1 Semi-official standard language. 3.2 Official. 3.3 Colloquial near to standard. 3.4 Specific accents and dialects. 3.5 Specific voices. Type of task: alternative questions, filling out tables and forms, open questions, multiple-choice questions, directly presented texts, recorded texts aided by video, audio texts, telephone conversation requiring practical reaction, directions and instruction for practical reaction, involvement into presentation and debate, recording speech reaction, assessment of an interpreter’s performance.

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INTENTIONAL TYPES 1. Improvement of the listening comprehension skills: x Listening for data, figures, factual details and names; x Listening for propositions; x Listening for reproduction; x Listening for meta-language information - contexts; x Listening for paratext11; x Listening for discussion. 2. Improvement of the public speaking performance: ɚ) listening to familiar texts with growing level of difficulty and length to the purposes of the following types of production: summary, reproduction, asking questions, interpretation, argumentation, continuing the text. b) listening to unfamiliar texts with growing level of difficulty and length to the purposes of the above types of production. B. SPEAKING 1. Reaction to a question or an order (mute answer). 2. Answering a question. 3. Presentation. 4. Summary in the source language. 5. Reproduction in the source language. 6. Summary in the target language. 7. Reproduction in the target language. 8. Note-reading in the target language. 9. Interpretative performance in the target language—narrative plus comment. 10. Argumented performance on a given topic. 11. Advertising performance. 12. Author’s monologue. 13. Discussion on prepared topic. 14. Initiating speech situation. 15. Telephone conversation to a given business purpose. 16. Using microphone. 17. Video-recorded performance.

11 Under ‘paratext’ I understand the markers of a secondary intention in a target text wich makes the translator ‘visible’.

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C. INTERPRETING 1. Improvement of the individual concentration in the translation of texts of intermediate level of difficulty: 1. establishing the average and the individual rhythm of speech; 2. involvement of three people—speaker, listener and performer; 3. involving noises in the information channel—technical breaks, interruption, unfamiliar language units; 4. change of environment; 5. change of intensity. 2. Improvement of the interpretation skills through drills of interpreting familiar and unfamiliar texts at the levels intermediate, upper intermediate and advanced and changing the places of the source and target languages: 1) note taking in the target language; 2) summary in the target language; 3) detailed reproduction in the target language; 4) listening to consecutive translating—mute translation; 5) consecutive translation; 6) defending of translation; 7) listening to simultaneous translating—mute translation; 8) simultaneous translation; 9) evaluation and defending of translation. Varied practice is recommended, based on texts from the following functional fields: journalism; digest; humanities; science; technical instruction, entertaining text; fictional text; poetry; religious text, old text; non-standard text; mixed languages. Activities: 1. Reading translations. 2. Analysis and motivation of a translator’s choice: giving linguistic, psychological, pragmatic, and technical reasons and personal preference based on knowing one’s own strong sides. 3. Individual projects on corpus development: focused on picking out and explaining most difficult terminology in special scientific texts; 4. most frequently used non-terminological language units and formulas of translation; 5. collocations; 6. polysemantic usage; 7. name transformation; 8. common errors. For intensive training we need between 4 and 8 pages of source text for a class of 90 minutes, a player of varying quality of sound and all our

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teacher’s charm in magicking the trainees do the hard work. Academic training is 30 classes in length usually. A group of graduate BA or MA students needs to be involved in demonstration of practices which each trainee can do whenever they have need or feel likely to. Games: 1. A situation of business talks on an aspect of the main topic of the course is chosen. The students are divided into three teams: a group of English speaking foreigners, a group of Bulgarians, and a group of interpreters. Each foreign visitor is accompanied by an interpreter. The members of the Bulgarian team start conversations and the interpreters mediate the talks. Efficiency is the main criterion. The pragmatic principles of Politeness and Clarity are observed bothways without any unification. 2. The whole group visits a public place e.g. a museum, a gallery, a store, sports game, meeting place, business club, a lecture, coffee-bar, disco club. Everyone speaks English except one who is the guide and the translator. Translators change every 20 minutes. Realia are to be introduced in the shared reality of the exchange. Onomatopoeia or the sounds of our natural environment: We all have gone through singing Old MacDonald has a farm. Each animal there sings in its own voice and their individual songs do not follow what we know about the sounds, made by Bulgarian animals. The sounds of our environment also have their own specifics which have their brain patterns as specific markers of our cultural environment and our physical identity as part of it. They bear the features of sound production and of sound perception but their mental model follows a broader pattern of associative meanings and sense. In each single case onomatopoeia sets a challenge for the translator. Tasks for individual work: 1 Pick out the sounds of the animals in Old Mc Donald and give the corresponding sounds in Bulgarian. 2 Find on the Internet Yavorov’s poem Caliope. Read it aloud. What is the specific functioning of the sounds? Think of ways of rendering the poem in English in sound and translator’s notes. 3 Look up the song of Tolkien’s character Tom Bombadil and its Bulgarian version. Comment on the translator’s approach. ***

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The four skills come as complex goals for the building of the global English mental structures. Therefore I have picked those aspects which have provoked the implementation of the AA to ELL practices. All of them are connected with the ethos-pathos-logos axis of the cannons of public outcome whether in writing or in speech or in the combined skills for Internet communication. Next I shall have in view those aspects in approaching some persistent problems of the learner's awareness of language.

1.3 Universal vs Preferable Our minds have been used to answer our routine talk. When the speech pattern changes, e.g. in a sudden travel to another continent while we are crossing geographic and social spaces, speech suddenly acquires so many meanings that our mind feels lost. It is not only the sound-producing machine to be connected with the meanings-producing machine. It’s the picture-producing machine as well, and the odour-assessing machine and all the other mechanisms of perception: it is the singularity of objects we have the general concept of, yet our mind has to adjust to them and recognize them as members to the class of objects and activities from our routine. We have the feeling of an overload to the structures of our brain as zones of recognition are activated. We experience as much of our route as is given to us and the refill of our concept database is patchy—we have to guess about the roots and the spaces of the world where meanings reconnect with the information flowing in from our senses. Then things settle down and the structures that have been activated calm down. The most difficult to settle are the concepts connected with food12 and drink while social and political issues of abstract nature seem to not bother our minds. The minimalistic mechanism works when we move across worlds sticking only to the learned survival patterns in communication. Things change when we are the guides to a newcomer: then we compare sets of worlds. When we introduce new sets of worlds, we choose among the patterns we have a record of. Then we need the memory machine and the choosing machine to generate speech. All the speech patterns of humanity are recordable. All the generative patterns are recordable, too. The choice of one or another pattern is a matter of the individual will. As long as there is

12

Perianova 2013

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even one individual to communicate with the global machine, there will be the choice. Theoretically it resembles Zeno's aporia of Achilles and the turtle13: the difference is that it happens in our minds where the theory is reality. An individual will have the right to choice as far as one has the right to will. God is the limitation to a human like a human is the limitation to a machine. Even as I am writing this text, I am aware that the concepts and the words I am using have been on the active vocabulary of millions of people. Just out of curiosity I keep checking certain sentences and paragraphs against the Google counting capacity and it raises the complaint that I have not sound original in my uses of prepositions, adverbs, names and conjunctions. It is inevitable. What is more, I am not trying to make them work additionally as Humpty Dumpty does: there is no pretence for inventing words or meanings to them with the meagre exception of E-kind and infoblocks: the choice in this particular text is in the topics—the spaces where arguments are taken from in defence of my own singularity identified in language uses of certain conceptual borders. The rhetoric of the human survival, thus, in its ultimate reaches, contains the meta language of the individual existence: the motivation which serves as the machine generating compatibility of a human and a god. Thus structures of language follow the hierarchy of existence. Singular speech patterns then are the ends of our frontier exploration of our life frontiers as humanity expands in space as well as in time. The sun might not be new, and the order of things might remain the same for an epoch, but a new individual makes the sun new and the events different by the strength of singularity—so close to the point zero and so far away from it as eternity that has allowed its singular existence. This could be the explanation of the laziness of a culture in exploring its speech patterns: its physical existence is the sufficient reason for its self-esteem. Such a culture will suddenly explode into creativity when its existence is threatened. As is the Bulgarian case. The universal versus preferable opposition will then feature as: shrinking to death vs the effort of life.

13

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-zeno/ (last visited on 01-31-2015)

CHAPTER TWO ORDER OF INCOMING INFORMATION: HIERARCHY OF PERCEPTION, ARGUMENTS AND FIGURES

Again, I shall not try to present in a descriptive and detailed way the touchpoints of modern linguistics to rhetoric-of-meaning's matter but shall exemplify the adopted methodology in its working modes where the diversity of tasks in language coursebooks but make language look unachievable at a reasoning level. Like in the previous essay, my object of pursuit is awareness acquired at least at one macro-level of language. Thus, starting from the primary function of language, to convey communicative message, we view the message in its textual form as discourse i.e. in its communicative value or capacity to convey information, emotion and will or power. The receptor's positioning within a communicative situation is flexible, yet it can support the role of a passive or an active agent in the S—O relations. The ability to see a communicative situation in a metalinguistic plan is what creates awareness and motivates the choice of further action. Thus the three values of language use fix around meaning, significance and action.

2.1 Structures and Choices in the User's Perspective A User of language is bound with the cognition of a language picture of the world which is set as a target. Western culture is seen as targeted towards action while eastern culture is seen as targeted towards the details of the environment or setting. I remember causing noise in the channel of incoming information during a culture-fixing game at MIT in September 2007, when part of my answers complied with the Eastern paradigm while the other part was genuinely Western: the psychologist could not accept such mixture for the focus of MIT work was the Net intellect and it needed clearly outlined

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paradigms. Humans had to behave logically and were expected to keep within the mapped territories. Thinking about ELL, the analogy is clearly outlined: our systematic coursebooks design us to learn and use one cultural paradigm. Any disturbance beyond the mapped borderlines is seen as an erratic language production: e.g. interlanguage (Bulgarian—English; British—American; Eastern—Western accents; classroom essay—an essay in philosophy); idiolect and mixed registers; extralinguistic signs; intonation; kinetic and proxemic features, graphic features, etc. I did my best to explore the frontiers of understanding and tolerance. I kept breaking rules. In the end of the second month they had accepted me as a strange individual, and I had left behind certain extremities and had entered the common speech behaviour subconsciously. I did everything I advised my students to avoid. I pushed hard at all the levels of intercomprehension. All the functions of language had but one meaning of significance: language conveys information of all kinds at all levels. The order of incoming information does not matter in building a language picture of the world or a life story. The intensity of info-flow does matter. This concerns both human intellect and AI at the current moment, for the spaces of memory are as numerous and as large as our exploration needs them, and the tree of meanings is not a linear event but has as many dimensions as we can create. While the order of incoming information varies and takes different span, languages have disciplined our minds to reorder the verbal aspects of the info flow so that it can fill in the SVO form even in viewing a text of unusual style of layout. Thus the two basic lines of elements needed for our world picture are: Action—Detail Agent—landscape—object …......I–me------------------------------ the rest of the world. Then the world can grow out of a story with a beginning, a middle and an end but not necessarily in this order (V. Woolf) or out of an S—V—O structure not necessarily explicated in that order within a clause, a sentence, an utterance or an infoblock, but visualized in our inner mindspeech picture, for grammar is based upon analytics and leaves its fundament for admitting common practice or creations of thought seeking for other dimensions of language.

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One of the constantly arising questions of the choice of meaning and its language carrier concerns grammatical correctness as a border to stylistic or rhetorical figures. Generally figures expressed by means of language are studied as figures of thought (logical), figures of style (lexical), and rhetorical figures (syntactic).1

2.2 Grammatical Correctness and Figures of Language They do not necessarily stick together. The problem comes when a situation requires 'explanation' or rather justification of a figure you don't like or approve of. Here are a couple of cases: 1) *Me and my friends* seems to have thoroughly replaced *My friends and I* in conversation in British English. I feel a special dislike for it because it connects in my mental picture with the advice of Robinson Crusoe's father to his son (Defoe, Robinson Crusoe: p. 2) of keeping to the middle, which is next to the concept of mediocricy, snobishness, BBC English, looking down on all non-natives and letting them not to the ranges of high-register usage: in other words such utterances suggest the social border which creative minds can neglect while non-creative minds reproduce as a norm in both light conversation and academic essay. There is a justification for it, though. It lies in the Subject—Object attitude which is formally flexible while the I-subject is always marked in a direct or reflected (as me) way. Analogy produces further utterances of similar quality: *Me and my family* (because in the Bulgarian primary school classroom pupils are still asked the question: *What did you and your family do in the weekend?* In Bulgarian you don't need to be mom or dad in order to have 'your' family. 2) Anaphoric repetition of the same structure: *as I said before*. It is met in MA graduation papers and in undergraduates' term papers and presentations at least once in two pages and the learners need to be introduced to the meaning of the Principle of politeness. Pragmatic significance neutralises denotative meaning and is not interested in the grammatical validity. 3) The recurrent dash where semicolon is expected: this habit is based on the frequent uses of the dash in Bulgarian for enlarging the explication of the concept, while the semicolon is rarely used for separating similar 1

I have studied those figures and made a chart of them in my previous PhD study, published later as Persuasive Discourse, Apostolova 1999: 225-6

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structures in a kind of recurrent structural element containing different (adding) information. Moreover, the dash is often used in web-writing: it is easily found on the keyboard and marks gaps in the verbal layout while the web-message is contextually bound by info-blocks and does not need all the text. 4) The verbless utterance replacing a clause: in Bulgarian this is an instrument for gradation, or serves as a rhetorical intensifier of emotive meaning. In English it cannot survive in printed text. Authors have to negotiate such figure with the automated editor and finally replace it with a grammatically correct structure. This might lead to other misuses of structure, e.g. the sentence quoted in 6). 5) The clauses without a S or an O: They have been negotiated as several cases throughout current English grammars, yet Bulgarian learners often miss the information when a clause is formed within a compound or a complex sentence. The missing part is in 90 per cent of the cases 'it'. 6) NP or VP: grammar teachers have the experience of teaching the gerund and then the experience of reading its close translations. It is some paradox that Bulgarian, which is NP-oriented, prefers the VP in translating the gerund. Intuitively the learners expect the NP to fit better. This intuitive 'knowledge' is supported by the nature of gerund formation pattern which makes it stand closer to our subconscious idea of NP rather than of VP. Analogy is drawn in the case with the present participle. The obscurity in more complex constructions comes from the homonymy of N and V. In the following example the 'corrected' first sentence misses the coordination in number: *I actually learnt that Charles Dickens’s writings are especially associated with London and that the city features, to a greater or lesser degree, in most of his writings, ARE not to be accepted as a simple setting for his plots but as a central presence, as a character itself, as a living entity with its sights, sounds, smells, and diversity.* *I actually learnt that Charles Dickens’s writings are especially associated with London and that the city features in most of his writings not as a simple setting for his plots but as a central presence, as a character itself, as a living entity with its sights, sounds, smells, and diversity.*

7) Overstressing the meaning of the it-subject for the English clause can have the reverse effect. I have met young people who were making film translation for their own use without sufficient tutoring into English and the practices of translation. They are usually self-confident and do not

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allow interference. Here is where linguistic motivation never works: such learners simply distrust any teacher unless one manages to get inside their mail and help them get out of it. Home video with unauthorized subtitles has been wide practice ever since the late 1980s. The following example sounds like a joke: Film dialogue: - How do you do? - All right! Subtitles: - Ʉɚɤ ɝɨ ɩɪɚɜɢɲ? [How do you do (it)?] - ȼɢɧɚɝɢ ɫ ɞɹɫɧɚɬɚ! [Always with the right (hand)!] 8) The case with the figure of Inversion: Our Lord, who in Heaven abide, Blessed be thy name... Thy Kingdom come on Earth as in Heaven... and lead us not in temptation... The Lord's prayer is the case that shows how inversion works at the rhetorical level of language in epideictic oratory. Or: Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters, when it alteration finds. (Shakespeare, Sonnet 116) Instruction for the class in Translation studies: Dare not spoil the above examples by reordering them! Grammar is not a ban for inversion: it is the container of inversion. An inversion arises together with special high-order grammatical functions such as mood, negation and accentuating. The latter is concerned with the intentionality of the text: when thematic relations allow situational markers to come first in a sentence, and more often—in an utterance or even replace the S-V in an infoblock. Inversion is the ground structure of the Rhetorical Question, of the figure of simulated negation, of the appeal and the anaphoric gradation of the emotive efficiency of a text. Is inversion a figure in English? is equivalent to Is inversion a figure in Bulgarian? The answer is based on the author's/speaker's choice: the use of inversion is a choice between the functions of a message which can be conveyors of social, emotive, grammatical, manipulative, etc. meanings. Inversion does not exist as a figure (yet) for the AI because freedom of

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choice is still to be imported into the Web intelligence. In this sense, any rhetorical figure is recognisable as a grammatically supported language behavior of certain framed meaning. Two more examples sent to me by Irina who teaches English in Japan. They come as support to the idea of Subject-centered world where the governing concept of S is 'I' in its direct or reflected forms: ⚾䛿ᮏ䜢 ㄞ䜣䛷䛔䜎䛩䚹(Watashi-wa hon-wo yondeimasu) I book reading.㻌 䛛䜜䛿䝁䞊䝠䞊䜢㣧䜣䛷䛔䜎䛩䚹(Kare-wa kohi-wo nondeimasu) He coffee drinking. 9) I am Johnson or My name is Johnson are replaced by The name's Johnson; Name's Johnson. The choice of these structures can be explained as case of 'hiding behind the speaker's mask' where the member of the conversation feels uneasy in using schoolchildren's phrases. It bears the hint of 'toughness'. I have heard it in American films and from German professors of English. Young learners of English admire such turns of language. One of my BA graduates shared in a chat that it was the only way journalists spoke between themselves in America. 10) I have been using the next example as an experiment for the latest 5 years to all my BA undergraduates enrolled for the elective course of English and the Internet and Theory of Metaphor. The question is: What kind of language usage is the following: I have gotten a new car? I have about 90 exam papers handed in. Only twice I got the answer: 'American'. The rest wrote down: 'erratic'/ 'wrong'/ 'mistaken'. Our English studies undergraduates are trained within the British standard. Yet nearly two thirds of them travel for a summer job in the US. None of them has ever paid attention to the comments to yahoo news where I ask them to find examples for their term papers in Rhetorical Analysis. And some of them have tried to do the TOEFL and SAT exams. It means that learners of English are not trained to pay attention to subtle markers of the message, such as the structuring of the question where 'language usage' is not used to make a figure—irony or paradox: the question asks for information, not for entertaining. The error in choosing to read it as a figure is based on analogy with questions of the sort: What time is it when an elephant sits on the fence? (A time to repair the fence.) or What makes a king like a book? (They have many pages.)

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2.3 Choice of Words The play with meanings affects meta-concepts or the concepts of a learner how concepts are lexically expressed. One of the best examples ever was the refusal of an MA graduate student to accept that the correct word for “ɛɟɡɰɟɧɟɧ” is valuable and not valueless—in translating Angel Karaliichev's version of The three brothers and the golden apple. It is an error caused by the intensity of the source text that created noise in the information channel and blocked any attempt for transcultural mental movement. In debates on error analysis it can be often heard that errors ‘fossilize’. It is amazing how in the course of 25 years now certain mistakes have survived all the EL teaching methodologies and have flourished in classroom slang or accent. The 'aid' of web chat has wiped borders of Bulgarian accents and dialects and today all teenagers seem to misuse words in similar ways. Web texts, ads and notices also spread the same types of illiteracy, and google translation does not function in Bulgarian for the lack of sufficient import of words and structures. It is not a problem of linguistic explanation or of insufficient drill. It is a problem of cultural isolation: once as marked generation gap and next as a social gap. Language bears the scope of a generation: a hundred years back to reading matter from the Victorian age, and a lifespan forward in the dreamprojection of one's life. The problem is that we do not teach our students to project their language-drawn self to future that is a dream. In other words: our younger generations lack their stories and they fill in the gap with fantasies from the web-societies and gamers' communities. They see themselves as avatars, not as agents. A language teacher is responsible for the texts which make mind structures. Otherwise people become subservient to machines and their choice of words is limited to their inferior position in the techno age. The problem of vocabulary has one more side: what is outside our experience is unacceptable. An MA graduate complained her American boyfriend did not accept the phrase 'salt and pepper' for two people of similar character. She explained the metaphor in her own way and he finally accepted it, when the picture was full. I have never used that phrase to that meaning in Bulgarian but the image of our combined salt-cellars grew up quickly together with the picture and taste of 'gypsy pie'. It was much easier for me to accept the metaphor than it was for a person who had never had that experience. The example is common. It comes to extend the AA scope into the area of asking the user of a metaphor to introduce it by telling a story or practical action (showing, demonstrating,

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tasting). Our EL learners still use the phrase “ɜɚɥɢ ɤɚɬɨ ɢɡ ɜɟɞɪɨ” which they have learned from their dictionaries, in replacement for “It rains cats and dogs”, (It rains as though water is poured down off a bucket) although they have no idea what ‘a [wooden] bucket’ in the original meaning looked like. In contrast, when a British teacher heard the English translation of “A pear never falls away from a pear tree”, he exclaimed: “Have you more like that one? Do not replace it for “Like father, like son! It is more picturesque!” Well, we all know the list of bad translations of Bulgarian proverbs. The choice of words according to the order of synonyms in the dictionary, as well as the use of the original order, make the utterances completely obscure. There is a very specific word overused by Bulgarians speaking in English: 'decide'. We do not go for a picnic: we decide to go for a picnic; we do not call a friend: we decide to call a friend, etc. This is one of the hazy areas where our Eastern culture shows out. It is a metalingual event, representing our self-reflection. Also cases like this one can give the clue to the status of the Self in the Net where people operate avatars and need to have the metalanguage at a level of self-awareness. Word choice has affected our Bulgarian web-environment. It is not a question of borrowings it is a question of spreading aggressive language units as the phrase exclusive offer or the word frustrated. There are not easily reached Bulgarian equivalents for these words because conceptually our versions do not coincide in volume and scope of meaning. Yet they sound ugly to our ears because of their alliterative patterns which do not fit our meanings. The translation is hindered by the lack of the same target quantity either: we need more words in Bulgarian in order to cover the concepts. A similar case is presented with the word friendly, which is not easily covered in the structure by the mechanism of transposition.

2.4 The Meanings of Existence "Yet at which point does one's knee end and where does ones thigh start? Where does a trunk turn into a treetop and where does a branch turn into a twig? Similar problems arise with landscape names and words denoting whether phenomena. Who can tell at which particular spot a valley is no longer a valley but a slope or a mountain? An introduction to cognitive linguistics by Friedrich Ungerer, Hans-Jorg Schmid, 1997:3

The problem of denoting our beliefs is of existential significance. People grow up with certan word-bound notions and they will not change

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them unless they are persuaded: they shall not lose their identity and their existential holds. It is an adventure to get inside people's existential language where the ends of their tongues are the ends of their worlds /to paraphrase Wittgenstein's sentence/. One of the most charming errors was when my best group translated a page from “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde and saw no time gap in targeting *hardware store as a shop for computer hardware. When they found out where the error was they were amused by their being mislead by words and neglect of the informative aspects of the text: like participants in an intellectual game. A similar setting led to a completely different reaction one of the MA graduates: she had to translate a page from Tolkien's “Farmer Giles of Ham” where *folk were very little then turned into 'pop-folk music was listened to very little then'. She could not break the frame where she believed freedom was measured by the limitations of music as social practice. Her first foreign language was German but the spelling of folk did not open to her mind eye the link to the first meaning of the German word. This is a mechanism our minds use to keep codes in safety: association does not work when the concept is blocked. In the above case the role of the teacher is to help associative thinking. The borders of our existence are marked by words like birth and death and the movement of our language picture in between these final points. While playing magic (expressed in illocutive speech acts in pseudo-Latin and English) after 'Harry Potter', we wrote spells, using magic words, physical and social taboos, swear words and allowed words. Then I established that kids do not have ‘death’ in their lexicon—they have words like 'kill' or 'destroy' and all the wide range of their synonyms, but they do not use 'death' or 'die'. It was some 15 years ago. Verbs causing death have been openly used and it is no longer a taboo word. I have translated so many words of ‘killing’ that our mother tongue would never be the same. (Sorrel by Zdravka Eftimova) The rhetoric of spell has been spreading through language the termination of life—the shrinking of a culture. Now our kids have the idea of murder. They use the concept in games and hear and see their vizual image in films. There is also the story of the young Bulgarian mother who used the idioms of sleep in her usual idiom, her young son sleeping like dead, shocking her Swedish husband who wondered what kind of culture could produce such monstrous language, and forgetting all the games and films he had seen for his social status no longer allowed that register. How could

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the excellent student of English know about taboos in a family? Is there such information in the ELT coursebooks taught at our EL schools? The limitations of existence refer to age-gap: I heard a translation of film title last spring: The Great Gatsby was transformed into “Ƚɨɥɟɦɢɹɬ Ƚɟɞɫɛɢ” (Big Gatsby), because the translator probably did not have in her lexicon the word “ɜɟɥɢɤ” (connected with our redundant historic concept of the Great War). It does not exist in our time in common talk. And the bordering to spell text of destructive power: recently there was a FB-rumour of the Dutch prime minister walking incognito in Sofia and telling a journalist: we do not need your people, we need your territory. Journalism, following the reigning structure of net-mailing spread spell words of cultural death. And the words of vanishing, and the words of shrinking in our poverty. Existence is extended in language denoting both the physical survival of the individual and the cultural survival of the community. Words of kinship are numerous in Bulgarian and it is a concept that extends down to the next generations. In Bulgarian we can hear from very young children the untranslatable directly utterance “ɇɢɟ ɫɦɟ ɬɟɯɧɢ ɤɭɦɨɜɟ” (“We are their Godfathers”). It is, however, one of the very few Bulgarian utterances of the same type that has been successfully translated in undergraduates’ papers because lexical and structural equivalence is not sought for but only its meaning is transferred. A recurring expression of the late 20 years is normal state its variations covering a number of off-meaning phrases e.g. normal Bulgarian, like normal people and I am a normal Bulgarian girl etc. Such expressions are dense in our civil discourse and have integrated in our current situational understanding that we have stopped noticing their absurdity. Classroom practices lead to attemts at replacement of normal with common, average, mediocre, simple, idiot etc. which are generally disliked yet the learners never think of changing the structure of the phrase. Such is the use of money in the plural by non-natives: My money ARE in my pocket. I have corrected the latter 20,000 times and was surprised at hearing myself using it in a conversation with a Japanese scholar at an international conference in Venice. The relief came when at a certain point of the conversation he used money in the plural and to my note just said it was the most natural way for him to talk about money. Acting as a teacher is not the same as being a user: while using our second tongue to express a concept generated in our I-lnguage, it comes up dressed in the fashion of our first tongue which dominates our creativity. This conclusion is only valid for EL users who live in Bulgaria and Bulgarian is their dominant tongue.

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All of the above debate is aimed at stating the diversity of our mental paths to meaning. While the achievement of meaning is seen as individual effort, the concepts fixed in language are seen as general notions where universalia lurk within the core of the concepts' volume and scope. Thus, while I tend to accept the following statement: What is seen as cognitive linguistics today are the parallel and net models built in analogy with neural networks. (Grozdanova 2005:22)

I tend to disagree with the next one: Thematic Relations Hypothesis states that the income of new data in the human mind leads to adaptation of the existing concepts—not to the formation of new ones... Everything can be explained through another thing: in linguistics it stimulates research in the field of metaphor and gramaticalization (Grozdanova 2005 :23; Lakoff 1987, Johnston 1987; Pencheva 1998 etc.)

Reconceptualization does not mean synonymy: it is getting language into the volume and borders of a new concept. If all language is to explain existing concepts, then how have concepts formed? The theoretical fundament of the above statement hints of impossibility of creativity in both thinking and language. Metaphors do not bind words to concepts but translate worlds into other worlds making them comprehensible, entertaining or memorable. The above statement contains also the idea that language is limited, but it does not deny its infinite capacity of 'giving names' to all the things in our worlds. An example of such reconceptualization is the interpretation of negation: Negation is studied by Grozdanova (2005 :45–55) in the light of two subsystems of rules: wordformation rules and morphosyntax. The first is referred to as a class of passive derivatives like 'unimpressed'–affix negation where the rules for adding an affix refer to lexical sets characterized by morphological, syntactic and semantic features. (Grozdanova 2005: 48 in agreement with Leech 1974 :214-215) Ann is miserable An is unhappy Ann is not happy Ann is unable to work

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Ann is not able to work (Grozdanova 20005: 48)–these are sentencess with one and the same communicative effect (Grozdanova after Lyons–52) NB: any—is seen as syntactic NEG (Grozdanova 2005 :52) and implicit NEG is contained in: fail to, keep from, decide against (52)—lexical, morphological and syntactic equivalents: ɋɬɚɹɬɚ ɟ ɫɜɨɛɨɞɧɚ // ɧɟɡɚɟɬɚ // ɧɟ ɟ ɡɚɟɬɚ. (54) The room is free // not occupied // unoccupied.

This leads to the inevitable question (similar to the case of the inversion):

2.5 Why is Double Negation Natural? In English it is a common feature of conversation: I have not seen no one there. I don't know nothing about it. I have seen no one there. I don't know anything about it. I know nothing about it. If we mark negative words with a zero that means 'lacking an agent' (for a Subject and an Object—no one, nobody; nothing; for a time— n[o]ever, for a place—nowhere)—or empty agent in the syntactic structure, where negation is concentrated in the 'not' particle which denies the verb, then, in fact, we have a structure where the absent or lacking or empty or zero agent is added to the negative structure and creates no trouble. The zero agents are limited to a set of words which answer the multiple rhetorical question: who—what—to whom—when—where—how—why is NOT doing? Double negation can be interpreted as the adding of a zero agent to a functional negation. Formalization is posibble, based on the Rh Matrix: Sn {Ns—No— Nt—Np—Na—Nn} where the agent is empty. This is no longer logical interpretation in the analytical mode of Aristotelian logic. It is rooted in the existential category of nothingness i.e. Non-existent. How can human mind mark the absence of existence: it has no positive value to be rejected. It cannot have negative value. Then it is a zero. And zero does not change the functional construction. Implicit negation with a prefix is of similar type while the negative qualities and objects are not logical operators of negation. The purpose of the above discussion is to show the sound motivation of our intuitive use of negation more than once in natural language usage.

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This motivation prevents our brain from falling into a trap, created by its logical rules.

2.6 Debate Is the following sentence wrong? *What was the first film you have made? Imagine the following case: I can't remember the title of the film (in this case using the Past Simple tense I want someone to provide the title of the film) and in the second part of the sentence the Present Perfect tense because this is the first film, the man is still alive and probably he will make many other films. Then the sentence is not wrong. Google editor requires sequence of past tenses. The human mind recognises two units of information: What was your first film? What is the first film you have made? Once again we can see the insufficiency of language rule which does not allow two time operators in the same grammatical/ formal/ logical structure. Human mind has the capacity of classifying the two types of information and recognize the utterance below the sentence. This in its turn hints the primary significance of utterance and the imposed secondary significance of the sentence.

2.7 Anaphora This is the repetition of a segment of the text (a sign, a word, an utterance etc.) in the beginning of a texteme in order to raise the emotional and persuasive value of the message (e.g. the speech I have a Dream of Martin Luter King; the beginning of Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities, etc.). It is a kind of thematic accentuation within a text segment. The repetition of a final is called 'epiphora' and is separately used or in combination with anaphora to form epinaphora. Like each of the discussed figures it has its varied effect depending on the skill of the author or translator to use it in its best measure—in both quantity and quality. The most disgusting way of anaphoric production is the repetition of a grammatically functional structure, e.g. x x x x

And... Then... He must... As I said before...

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We have... Most people... Everybody/ nobody... In my opinion... They said it was going to snow heavily (instead of passive structure).

The English coursebooks give models of essays and sample essays. Still the cultural community metalingual representation of the environment whose picture is to be given in an essay or a speech, dominates over true perception. It does not refer to the Bulgarian cultural environment solely: it is a feature of web communities that project into real communities: they try to design a specific code with ethic, emotive and information-limiting rules and it is strange for the outsider to such communities to establish connection based on the presumption that we are using the same language. The denotative value of language signs shifts and we lose track of the message. In such cases an anaphoric structure/ figure is helpful because it brings the theme into focus more than once following the simple cognitive activity of learning through repetition (or of grinding the information). Anaphora in all its forms, thus, acquires the status of a tool of cognition and serves as a neutralizer of the omission of certain parts of the message in time-limited communicative situations. Even in its ugliest forms it can be directed to serve the purposes of noticing, focusing on, distinguishing, recognising, connecting and memorizing a message. Like the other figures of language anaphora is not to be accepted as a final container of knowledge: it is a figure which at each next level of broadening of our language horizons expands to contain a broadened concept in an improved verbal outcome.

2.8 Belittlement Belittlement is a very interesting figure of transcultural interest especially in the transfer from Bulgarian and Russian to English text. It is a multi-dimensional container of meanings: from the endearing names we use for a baby to the inferiority-marker in socially-bound discourse, to a justification of one's actions, to a powerful manipulative tool of nostalgia or of irony and sarcasm in public criticism. Belittlement is based on implicit and explicit forms of minimizing. In Slavic languages it can be applied to all morphological units and can form

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complex redundant structures. The figure of belittlement is related to the concept of diminutiveness (Bagasheva-Koleva 2014). Diminutiveness is a culturally patterned paradigm of human communication. It starts with the names of people 2 and goes through habitual markers of expressing softly moderated and acceptable public speech behaviour. English is rich in social meanings displayed by the mere choice of register where register is seen as a multi layered language picture of social strata displaying the belonging of the speaker to a community in the social hierarchy. The standardized English we basically learn and teach is fixed within the semi-official ranges of register and is governed by the principle of politeness and the other pragmatic principle of charity. It is to a certain extent, almost, just quite so nearly past the usage of much too much more or less determined description and somewhat uncertain in its direct opinion expressing or giving a tweeny little bit too hard an evaluation. Or, you can as well try to read without making a face the beginning paragraph of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village... Not a remarkable house by any means—it was about thirty years old, squattish, squarish, made of brick, and had four windows set in the front of a size and proportion which more or less exactly failed to please the eye. Minimization can be seen in the uses of modality to the purpose of impressing the figure of subjective uncertainty or demonstrating the speaker has not broken the politeness principle or is not pressing the other people to do anything against their will: could you possibly spare me a minute of attention, I wonder if you could... for it might...would you, please... A Bulgarian user of English often omits the four basic clues to communication: please, excuse me, sorry and thank you. My case is the speech behaviour of a group of PR undergraduates who were placed in London firms for a month's practice under a Leonardo da Vinci EU project regulation. They simply could not make themselves use words of politeness, which made them feel insignificant.

2 e.g. as in Gergana Apostolova, Maria Bagasheva-Koleva, 2012. ADDRESSES. A TYPOLOGY OF MINIMIZATION OF PEOPLE'S NAMES BASED ON A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF BULGARIAN, RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH NAMES, VTU Conference Proceedings The State and Problems of Bulgarian Onomastics, 2013. Mariya Bagasheva-Koleva has been doing a serious research into the phenomenology of diminutiveness in Bulgarian, Russian and English in her yet unpublished doctoral thesis.

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Minimization occurs in an explicit way in people's names and again it is a paradox that English which has long back in history left out diminutives, is the world generator of shortened names. Our names undergo transformations in their transcultural uses in both their diachronic and synchronic functioning. One of the basic mechanisms for transforming them is using a shortened or diminished form in addressing other people by their names while choosing the names by which we would like to be called. For the latest 20 years there have been significant cultural and language changes under the influence of the domination of English as our common means of communication with the opening world. Public opinion tends to ascribe the changes in our fashion of addressing other people to the interference of English with our mother tongue. Yet, a closer study in the area of active addresses shows it doesn't prove so, for a deeper linguistic set of instruments of naming underlies the functioning of human languages, even when a globalized version of Modern English as the current language of communication is applied in a pattern of universal paradigmatic value active in the addresses between the East and the West, or, as it is in our chosen aspect, challenging the translations between the Slavic and Germanic language uses. Upon seeing minimization as diminishing i.e. belittlement, we inevitably fall into tracking the purposes for belittlement of other people in addressing them as the other agent of communication. What is little can be measured by size, age, significance, closeness or distance in the I—you relation, time perspective, emotional, ethic, aesthetic, and cognitive reasons altogether: all of them designed to restate the position of the leading subject of communication in terms of vertical or horizontal status. Vertically, the subject of communication would be striving to restate a hierarchal status of superiority in a top-bottom direction, while a bottom— top direction would be striving to equate the speaker to the addressee. A horizontal approach would be a restatement of cultural equilibrium within the same group. Thus vertically we call our kids with pet names like Peppy, Tom, Tony, Katya, Ivancho, Mimmi, Vanya, Atka etc. and horizontally we have adopted such names as the official names or call-names for adult people. A bottom to top approach would be when we call our bosses or political leaders by such names in order to show that they are our equal in terms of political capacity, or to humiliate them in parody. When the whole world calls Gorbachev Gorby, it employs all individual and cultural purposes in the use of such name in a chrono horizontal fashion of keeping equity within a time-limited cultural paradigm.

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The reasons for minimization thus can be divided into individual and socio-cultural, yet the reasons do not change the purposes of diminishing the Other agent of communication in a pragmatic sense based on choice which is dependent on our knowledge of how to signify hierarchy and on our understanding how to express belonging to the same culture whether it be the global community in a synchronized present, or the smallest community of one actual and one imaginary member when we mention someone in our mind speech. Each time we translate texts we come across the pragmatic and semantic values of diminishing a personal name, and the ways to reexpress it in the target language from Ivancho Yotata to Jikata to Gorby or form Arnie /Schwarzenegger/ to Kate /Middleton/, especially in the cases we have such names in our everyday horizontal practice of addressing some of our close acquaintances and on the background of some personal common names such as dr. Gospodin Ivanov or baba/grannie/ Kralitza. The semantics of name symbolism in the case of minimization is, on the one hand connected with the purpose of diminishing, and on the other hand it is dependent on the choice of an appropriate structural approach. In minimization the lexical form of the name stands for a meaning bound to a purpose. Having in mind the chrono paradigm in language change, the mechanisms of name change in addressing a person can serve as clues for explaining why certain figures of importance from the distant past appear in different sources under varying names as is the case with ancient Bulgarian names, Thracian names or the names in old Nordic heroic saga. In a synchrony of socio-cultural language markers we can easily recognize the speaker's belonging to the Germanic or Slavic cultures, and further, whether the English speaker is from London or from the Highlands, or from Texas, or even from China, and whether the Slav is a Russian, a Czech or a Bulgarian. The typology of minimization depends mainly on the reasons and the mechanisms employed. Thus we can isolate the following types: a/ pragmatic: Cultural: Ekaterina Vavova—becomes Katya not Kate when her colleagues at MIT need to identify her Bulgarian cultural background. At the same time Katya from my advanced EL studies group is naturally addressed as Kate by her classmates who want to establish her belonging to the smart learners of English by employing the method of foreignizing in the next minimization of her name. It is easy to tell the cultural identity of both agents of communication by the frequency of using diminutives and by the form of the name itself. Thus a Russian would use more frequently and lavishly diminutives in

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addressing other people than an English or a Bulgarian (my closest English, American and Chinese friends never went further than Gergana in addressing me, while a friend from Russian origin immediately switched to Gerentse); a Bulgarian from the south-eastern regions of Bulgaria would use diminutives more often than one from the north western lands while the form varies, as well—Naska or Nase/Naseto is the typical address for Atanaska in Plovdiv, while in Kyustendil it is Atka; a person from the country will be more lavish than a city dweller which is only natural for the closeness of the village community and the appropriateness of addressing other people in the urban environment: a Scottish or Welsh would use tender names naturally while a Londoner is to establish distance by using unified codes of communication. Demographic and psychographic characteristics of population also include minimization in their communication code analyses for the purposes of global, PR, trade and advertising. While a psychographic analysis would strive to establish the cultural roots of an addressee, advertising relies on universalized minimization such as replacement of the diminished name with 'dear', 'sweetheart', 'sweetie', 'mommie', 'baby darling', 'daddy', 'babe' which are easily and literally translated into any language, thus imposing the urban English paradigm of familiarity that culturally affects modern uses of our mother tongues, as is the case with modern Bulgarian media pattern. Individual: emotional names serve as markers of individual attitudes in the I-you-our closest community relations. The freshest example is a birthday post in FB by a friend of mixed Bulgarian and Russian family, a bilingual of Bulgarian and Russian, and a fluent speaker of German, English, and Spanish, who now lives in the US. The address is in a full minimized form of adjective plus a line of individual diminutives 'Ɇɢɥɢɱɴɤ ɧɚɲ, Ƚɨɲɨɧɢ, Ƚɨɝɨ, Ƚɚɧɞɢɱɤɚ, Ƚɚɧɞɢ, Ƚɚɧɞɭɪɟɱɢ' /Our dearest Goshoni, Gogo, Gandichka, Gandi, Gandurechi/. b/ semantic - metaphorization: this is not necessarily a change of the formation of the minimized name, but its placement as a signifier of a specific meaning across the culturally bound speech situations. The cultural transfer is based on a story, and a story of higher level of sustainability tends to produce metaphor. In the uses of personal names it is seen in nicknames, pen names, nominal web avatars and e-mail addresses, the transformation of a personal name into a toponym, the choice of the names of fictional characters. The semantic aspects of minimization lie in the proper field of onomastic study. There is always the story behind each individual case of minimization.

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Case (1): Only yesterday my husband was telling me about the nexdoor house to our country house. It was the home of two sisters Filka and Atka. I asked him what was the official name behind 'Atka' and he answered: 'This is her real name. Never heard anyone calling her differently'. Later on I chanced to walk along the house and read the announcement of the death of Atanaska who had all her life been Atka for her village community. Such is the case with my distant aunt Gela /for the sake of proper pronunciation it would probably transcribe better as Gallah/ whose name I learned only after asking why her parents had chosen such a rude name for her. It turned out she was Angelina. Case (2): I never learned the story of turning the name of Stoyo into the address name of Kunyata but at least, the person I was interviewing about the ways of minimization of the name Stoyo, remembered the nearly forgotten real name of an old friend. Case (3): There is a village near Kyustendil named after the name of Ivan Shishman—the last Bulgarian king of significance for the Second Bulgarian kingdom in the 14th century. The local people once used the minimized version of Shishko and the country people still use that name instead of the name down in our History textbooks, Tsar Shishko (*Fat King) stands for them for Tsar Ivan Shishman and this shows their belonging to his descendants—a relation of equating or belonging to the same cultural chronotype. The village bears the name Shishkovtsi which means: the people of Shishko. The curious fact is that it is the birthplace of one of the unique Bulgarian painters of world importance, Vladimir Dimitrov, Maistora /The Master/. I have never heard his name changed for a minimized form, that could have been possible with some of his contemporaries who might have called him bai Vlado or Vlade. It is the generation gap that does not allow such minimization for the people today, who would not recognize the painter behind the still valid everyday forms of Vlade, Vlado or Vladko, or has no reason of the familiar usage of bai Vlado. In this line we all have used the name Simeoncho for Simeon II, because our grandparents and some of our parents still remember his birthday when schoolchildren were given a holiday and a present for the sake of the newborn infant, the heir to the Bulgarian throne when Bulgaria was a monarchy. The English still call their Queen Bet, pointing out the fact of their belonging to her people. Case (3): It is a common practice to call a cake 'Nelly' or 'Spaska' after the name of the one we first heard the recipe from. Case (4): Who can guess what the real name of Elin Pelin was, or what the given name of the English writer George Eliot was? Who was in fact Mark Twain and what was the cultural background of Joseph Conrad? In

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this line my ex-student Nikolai Roudev has grown into the professor Nick Rud which is easier for his culturally diverse undergraduates to pronounce and remember. Case (5): I often fail to recognize who of my undergaduate students of English Philology has sent her otherwise excellent course paper under the name of [email protected] or under the nick of 'Professional Assassin' in Facebook. Web-names are very often the expression of our dislike for our given names while at the same time we choose a feature of our character by which we desire to be recognized at a certain period and/or by certain web community. Their spelling also bears information about the cultural and educational background of the user: only a Bulgarian would call herself Qna instead of trying to transcribe as Yana. A French background transpires in the spelling of Natacha, or use the same letter for transcribing Bylgaria. Case (6): I, myself have had certain difficulties in making the WWW recognize me under the name avatars of Gergana Pencheva-Apostolova; Gergana Apostolova; Gery Apostolova; GeA; Gaya; and the nick of razkazvachka. They stand separate even today but for my semantic frame showing on my net-tracks saved on my old laptop. The machine cannot read the same meaning for it is markedly different for her. Only people can see the person behind a series of names. Case (7): This is the specific use of banal names into new reality: 'Harry Potter' was a hundred years ago the banal name for a detective, something like Ivan Petrov. Today people link the name only to the hero of Joan K. Rowling. The interesting thing of this name is that it is in the minimized form already, and no one ever thinks of going further into calling him something else. The web generation sticks to a recognizable universally known version. Case (8): Giving a minimized name to parts of our body in children's language and as euphemisms: Peter Pointer, Tommy Thumb, Baby Little or Little Dick. Case (9): metaphorization of address names of ancient, legendary or widespread fictional or cartoon origin such as Valentine /Valentinka in Bulgarian/; Mickey Mouse; Tom /cat/; Santa /Claus/; Piglet; hadji Gencho; Ivancho Yotata. In the Bulgarian—English translations such names are either transcribed and transliterated, or udergo semantic translation of segments. Case (10): popular public figures become often the semantic justification of a minimized name synchronically: Slavi /Trifonov/; Tsutsi; Boko; Utie /Bachvarov/; Gosho Tupoto, etc.

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c/ structural x using the first part of the name: Kat, Pete, Georgie; Tom;composite: Tutsie/ Tutentse for Eleonora; Jappie for Julian; Gandichka for Georgi; x sound change in transliteration: Eva—Iva, Denis (male)—Denise (female), Dany—Denny; x initialization: J.B., B.B., T.J.;J.R.R. /Tolkien/; x initialization and new word formation: E.T., GeA; x the use of diminutives in Slavic names to form longer names: ȿɤɚɬɟɪɢɧɚ, Ʉɟɬ, Ʉɟɣɬ, Ʉɚɬɹ, Ʉɚɬɸɲɤɚ, Ʉɚɬɟɧɤɚ, Ʉɚɬɟɧɰɟ, Ʉɚɬɤɚ, Ʉɚɬɚ, Ʉɚɬɢɧɤɨ, Ʉɚɬɢɱɤɨ; x specific neoforms: Bulgarian diminutive suffixes with traditionally non-Bulgarian children’s names—Ⱥɥɟɤɫɱɟ, ȼɚɧɟɫɤɚ, ɇɢɤɨɥɱɟ, Ɇɢɲɟɥɱɟ. In a further, detailed study of the phenomenology of name minimization across Russian, English and Bulgarian we have established the redundant pragmatic, semantic and structural types of diminutiveness: A/ Giving names to our children; B/ Familiarity, intimacy, closeness as motivation for diversity of minimized addresses; C/ Minimization in the official names of political leaders; D/ Expressing intimate relationships in first and middle names; E/ Clipping, suffixation, reduplication and analytic minimization of modified English name forms; F/ Clipping and suffixation as main diminutive mechanisms in Russian.3 Although minimization does not coincide in the volume of its concept with the 'belittlement' it offers a wealth of forms of expression to choose among depending on the meaning or play of meanings we intend to involve into our message. I shall not give more examples for it is has become already clear that figures of language occurr by force of our power in using language or in our inability to get free from its independent twist and turns between the individual will and the social imperatives, habits and dependencies. *** 3

Op. Cit.

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The exemplification of the play with language structures and the separate life of certain language figures which prove more powerful than the user's control of them has been down to the purpose of demonstrating the field of functioning of Rhetoric as a mental instrument for creating worlds even where cultures fail to meet. Rhetoric of Meanings (RM) is different from Fillmore's idea of 'frame semantics'.4 It takes situation into consideration but gives the user of language freedom of choice of expression whether it be erratic or not. Natural language is serving practice and as such places pragmatics above semantics and even higher than morphosyntax. This is the primary reason why RM does not comply with artificial intellectual universalia but is oriented towards the infoblock as a unit of e-discourse in its human uses. Discourse, built from infoblocks, structures with primitivist's explicitness the tasks of the text: to inform, to entertain and to persuade. Still, the nature of rhetorical argumentation makes it unadaptable to frames. Rhetorical multilayered meanings of the reality and of each member of the communicative situation are more relevant an object of bio-programming. Thus environmental meaning is achieved and a further research into diversity of environmentally-determined language structures is motivated outside the scope of this Thesis.

4

Fillmore, Op. Cit.

CHAPTER THREE STEREOTYPES AND METAPHORS

In the eastern quarter dawn breaks, the stars flicker pale. The morning cock at Ju-nan mounts the wall and crows. The songs are over, the clock run down, but still the feast is set. The Moon grows dim and the stars are few; morning has come to the world. At a thousand gates and ten thousand doors the fish-shaped keys turn; Round the Palace and up by the Castle, the crows and magpies are flying. ‘Cock-Crow Song’. Anon. (1st Century B.C.). From The Secret City—Hugh Walpole, 1919

Our subject of debate here is Metaphor But not metaphor as a figure of style as in ancient and classical times; neither metaphor as a model as in the theory of Max Black1; nor metaphor in the tale as in Vladimir Prop’s modelling of tale telling; nor even metaphor as language itself as it is in G. Lakoff. Here we shall keep all these in mind, yet we shall go even broader and have metaphor in its Latin term of translatio—a reconceptualising the Self-in-the world on the move or knowing our nature and differencia specifica in the times of opening our minds to a globalized, web-based global humanity and the transition from ordinary to virtual cultures. And vice versa. To this purpose it is inevitable that we keep an eye on the borders of the metaphoric movement or the stereotypes that are setting their own modes to a common fundamental set of archetype of humanity. Metaphor is the holder of the projections of the Self in the messages sent to explore beyond existential limitations and messages received to fill in for the information sought.

1

Max Black, Models and Metaphors, 1946.

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In virtual space we find such extension and send out our avatars to explore and conquer for us: aspects of our minds in pictures standing for our bodies, fitting the situation and reporting back to the Self. The information flows there and back do not coincide like in real life and this can put an end to the existence of the Self. Therefore the study of human transcendence in the Net is seen as an extended metaphor to extended borders of existence. The unit carrier is the message. The nature of the message sent and received is our subject of interest. It is bound with philosophy and language, texts and textures, and story-telling.

3.1 The Need of Stereotype—the Loss of a Stereotype or When There Were the Winds of Change It was the opening world or rather the netted world that made us anxious as to the impression we were leaving as carriers of cultural singularity. We suddenly start looking at ourselves like people who had suddenly been unveiled in broad daylight amidst the ruins of the walls that had kept them from the eyes of the world. We are shy, we are ashamed, we are quickly searching for new guise, paying too much attention to what the others might say about us, rather than, for example, taking pains to show in our best. An individual always compares and looks for ways to fit inside another culture. An individual finds that being different is often the other term for being homesick i.e. lacking substantially one’s environmental info-flow. An individual finds out that coping alone in a new place is much easier than forming a community of similar cases. An individual culture, however, seeks for a virtual community which has its exits into a real cultural body of substance. The moment we have found this out might be considered as the beginning of setting the stereotype to a compatibility mode with the archetype of global humanity. That is we are relaxed to form single contributions to our cultural set, based on the inevitability of our internal set of features. One of the influential stereotypes of the late 20 century is the split of the cultural types into organized cultures and tribal cultures. There is also the split of global culture into Eastern culture and Western culture. It is not that simple however, even when dichotomy goes further into opposing females to males, humans to animals, locals to aliens, Y-generation to parent-generation and so on. Still, we have now sufficient experience in metaphorization an in inventing our mythology to be able to find our cultural type within the syntax of global humanity. It is in the gross product of a set of mindstructures, grown on certain environmental base.

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Unlike language that can be seen as a specific brain tool, culture should not be sought in an area of the brain but in the chemical energy flow messaging the mind-body entity within environmentally-bound group. Babylon is one of the archetypal names for the cultural division of humankind based on the confusion of languages that led to lack of understanding within the humanity that had imagined they were greater than the Creator, In the context of the previous chapter we can take the freedom of reading the symbol of the Tower as the cultural pyramid of Maslow where the hierarchy of human needs goes up levels of changing sociolect for the cultures of the Internet era. Our individual minds in the search for their self expression are looking for the specific code of the Self turning our nature inside out and giving it a verbal exposure: a kenning, a riddle, a textual encrypting of the macrocosmos in our existential story. In the greater summa summarum of all the synchronically happening individual stories, it takes its place in the host of texts-worlds from the same multitude M where we stand for {M1, M2, M3.... Mn}. Taking into view that all the individuals have their individual existential stories, whether explicating them in text or not, this M then in its turn happens as the N agent in a higher class host… In their individuality our existential Self-encoding relies on making itself different from the common features thus accentuating on stereotype, which in diachrony reaches down to archetype. We need the zero-point, where our perception stores all the received data and translates it into visualized model of the world. Metaphor exchanges the data from the senses, and in this it relies on the presumption of the inner harmony or synchronic functioning of the individual on all its levels. From the point of view of the syntactic structure each next set of individual features is irrelevant—unimportant. It is at the level of the text where it matters. Yet, metaphors have their structure of formation where the self generates through stereotype, and stereotype gets down to archetype. The inconsistency in keeping the cultural metaphor might produce texts which stand outside the possible set of worlds for the given culture. An example of such inconsistency is the brilliant story of Elizabeth Kostova The Historian. Before that we had the stories of Agatha Christie and a couple more stories in book or film mentioning the Balkans as the setting for the story, an exotic and little-known spot on the map of the world. They are outsiders to our culture. They refer to an empty space of

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their knowledge that is theoretically possible but syntactically impossible. Like the passive structure of a future perfect continuous in the past. There are also the subjective versions to the text-born messages within the cultural set of features. To our Bulgarian minds such versions are parodies and there is scarcely a quality writer who would try to retell our classical fiction into the language of today. The survival of our culture needs such attempts though. We need reconsidering of all our valuable texts so that the messages contained in them are set free to flow into the textures of broader compatibility opening routes for our culture to the next generations. First comes negation, next comes rule. Stereotypes tend to flow into new regulation with old texts, outdated terminology and irrelevant use of cultural realia. The elements of culture: religion, philosophy, the arts and science, and education undergo changes synchronically. It is the folk beliefs that lag behind. A metaphor can bind us into a stereotype or make us free to reconstruct it into a new world for we are doing it constantly in our minds whether we share it or not. Rigid Stereotypes that concern traditional cultures still exist at the exits of the WWW and the web communities have been growing in diversity exponentially for the past twenty years. Insider-netizens have been living within the environment of Netspeak where hypertext rules. Still, traditional texts form a vast platform for the existence and development of the Net together with all the richness of traditional cultures being transformed or transcended into the specific talkative environment of the Net. That is why the late 20th century was so fixed on the philosophies of language as a means of cognition, and the early philosophies of the Internet were fueled by extending the theories of the metaphor.

3.2 The Metaphors of Internet In 2006 the philosophers of the Internet kept their eyes on the dualism of Cartesius because the human minds of the creators of the virtual hypertextual environment were traditionally brought up and had some problems in the holistic reassessment of their own Selves. This ended in growth of the number of cases of bypolar and multi polar problems in the first Internet generations. (Apostolova, 2006)

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A study of the transformations that the Individual undergoes in virtual space is in itself a venture into the transcendence of the human Self in the Net by reconstruction of human existential categories. Such venture inevitably touches upon the grounds of metaphor2 for it needs to translate the natural environment of our existence into the symbols of the web thus transporting the history of the collected Self of humanity where individuality is invited to leave its own sign. Besides, we do not have other but our usual codes to rely on for the web is a human deed and is bound to save the memory of humanity even at a time or place devoid of physical human presence. Cyberculture, by default, exploits natural language in a specific way which allows the existence of new realities based on new meanings derived in their turn from the process of metaphorization taking place simultaneously with the weaving of the World Wide Web. The metaphorically-woven reality of cyberspace, which is a transformation from verbal into non-verbal forms of communication, provides the environment of the functioning of the Self in the net. Existential metaphors are also of primary importance as active linguistic boundaries to the awareness of the Self in the net. In the late 1990s Metaphors of Cyberspace were a major subject of interest for the philosophers of Internet3– Vienna conference provided a number of serious researches into the existential value of cyberspace. In 2006 Douglas Kellner, the Philosophy Chair of Education at UCLA, published his Metaphors of Cyberspace, and had public lectures on the paths of the metaphor and its importance for the cyberspace. He named four major influences in creating the internet: 1) Military 2) Big Business (IBM, Xerox, Apple) 3) University research 4) Hacker culture.

2

Metaphor—Lat. translatio, from Greek—transport. The Principia Cybernetica Project (Vienna 1996): Chislenko, A, Networking in the Mind Age; Joseph R. Shuster ; Mind and the Net as an Intersection of Information Space; Eric Schwarz, The "Information Highways" as a Step in the Self-Organization of a Planetary Organism; Stephen Webb, Cyberspace, Virtual Reality and The End of History; Jerrold Maddox; The Storyteller's Tool-box; Walter Logeman; Necessity and Metaphor; Roy Ascott; Cyberception and the Paranatural Mind: an artist's perspective; Michael Cranford, The Social Trajectory of Virtual Reality: Substantive Ethics in a World Without Constraints; Carolyn Dowling, From text to teapots - constituting the subject in computer-based environments; Stephen Bates, The End of Geography; Charles Ostman, The Internet as an Organism; Charles Cameron, WaterBird: A Metaphor for the Net.

3

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These groups have necessarily shaped the way we talk about the internet. For example, computing language is filled with militaristic terms such as “erase”, “abort”, “delete”, and “spam”. He observed that metaphors for new objects are pulled from familiar objects, such as the idea of Home, which result in relatable terms like “homepage”, “MySpace”, and “YouTube”, names that put the focus on the personal and immediate surroundings. The Work environment creates language like “desktop”, “mailboxes”, “trash”, “files” etc… the Nature metaphor… was used to soften and blur the boundaries between nature and technology, thereby naturalizing it. Companies like Apple and Microsoft (MS fits in here because of the ’soft’, which is natural and sensuous) use the nature metaphor, as do products like BlackBerry and Mac, and terms like ‘virus’, ‘bugs’, ‘mouse’, ’surfing’, and fishing’. (Kellner 2006)

The case of the metaphor of travel is very interesting in Kellner’s interpretation. He claimed that the term ‘information superhighway’ was particularly problematic for Bill Gates because a highway implied a FREEway, and so, Microsoft made a move toward a different language that didn’t create an expectation of a free lunch.4 From our side of the Internet things look different, and we, consequently, come up with counter metaphors to the limitations of our access to the Internet and free usage of its fruits. In 2006 I was attending a conference of IPSI at Cambridge, Mass. One of the colleagues asked me the Question of the Fridge: Why should it be so important to do philosophy of the Internet? It is just another invention, like, for example, the fridge. To this my immediate answer was: For it is used by people world over to communicate with each other, while you don’t communicate over the fridge.5 I meant then that the clues of our existence are in the information flow between the individual and the environment, i.e. nature and community-provided. Our culture is impossible without communication between generations. In the virtual space, communication is the environment providing the existential boundaries of the Self. However, I still wonder whether the QoF has another answer relating its importance to the capturing of some particle of the cosmic cold

4

Kellner’s Metaphor of Cyberspace, 2006 The fridge, in itself, is a technological invention, which is the product of human culture and as such has its existence as a mental construct. Before that there was the experience of generations of human beings. Later on, with the beginning of space exploration and travel, there came the even greater experience of the importance of the universal freezer where atoms and emptiness reign and stars are the opposite to darkness and cold.

5

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by our kind, which in itself is not at all that simple a translation from absolute philosophy to a practically useful object of creativity.

3.3 A Metaphor Is Never Innocent6 When I first asked whether I could do some research on the Metaphors of Internet at the DLP of MIT in Cambridge, MA, Irene Heim said ‘we have done away with the metaphor’. The nature of the metaphor has been thoroughly studied ever since the time of Ancient Greeks, the structure of the metaphor had been clarified for the linguists at MIT, yet my specific point of interest has been neither of these in itself, but as an aspect to the question why or what determined the use of one or another metaphor in weaving the web. Even when this question became clear to me, there still is the question of the cultural significance of metaphor in the global talk. To put it in the words of Stuart Hall “a metaphor is a serious thing, it informs one’s practice”.7 While our practice is active, that is, while there is life for humanity, regardless of the form of the culture, there will always stand the questions of existence and the metaphors of survival will encode our singular perspectives. Such an attitude to the essence of metaphor is to lead us directly to its treatment as the vehicle that allows philosophy to descend to practice and rule it. Then it is only natural to see metaphor as the vehicle that allows the transition of culture into and out of its virtual modes of existence.

3.4 Mentality and Metaphor It has become a ritual of the philosophers of the late 20 century to start the study of the metaphor with mentioning Mark Johnson’s contribution. He defined the metaphor as model in the mid-1940s. The weaving of the www draws basically on Mark Johnson and George Lacoff’s approach to the metaphor as metaphoric concept ‘in terms of which we both think and act’. The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. (Lakoff, Johnson 2003 :5) The theories of metaphor include its metaphoric representations as a container of thought, or as a vehicle. They all contribute to the understanding the nature and the significance of the metaphor. 6 7

Derrida, borrowed from Kellner’s lecture, 2006 Op. cit.

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Our further search into the typology of the metaphors connected with the existence of the Self in the net is rooted in the theory of the conceptual metaphor developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and employs as a starting point their statement that thought processes are largely metaphorical (Lakoff&Johnson 2003 :6). Even so, there are two fundamental features in the focus of our treatment of the metaphor here, which make it important for a further systematic study of the Self in the net. The first one concerns the linguistic nature of the metaphor: even accepting the above definition we would add that the understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another would be metaphor only after it finds its expression in communication whether between different individuals or for the individual who experiences it, whether in terms of conventional linguistic signs or by picture, sound or any other possible code of signs. This understanding of the metaphor is based on its initial meaning of translation: carrying, moving, transporting, transferring features from one object to another. This is the very nature of establishing connections and attitudes which underlies communication between the Subject and the Object of our reconceptualized existence. The second difference concerns the statement that traditional philosophical views permit metaphor little, if any, role in understanding our world and ourselves. (Lakoff, Johnson 2003:ix) Even when ‘AngloAmerican theory of meaning’ from the late 20th century is concerned this statement tends to be a little too supercilious for it is not a question of ‘permission’ but a question of priorities which answer a level in the development of the knowledge within the theory of meaning at the stage in view: it is rather a question of capacity. Metaphor is too complex an aspect of shared humanity to be discussed on the same level as structural grammar and functional approach in their attempts to embrace all the conventional wealth of language and before they are developed enough to meet communication theory on the level where all the wealth of language is a mere aspect. Metaphor is a specific code of singularity, bound with the character of the encoder and the singular objective within the communicative situation where it arises or is applied. Meanings to the same verbal carries shift. We need the whole story to get it while the metaphor is still fresh, we tend to lose track of the story in the long run when it has been widely applied as a name of an object or an activity, and we need the history again, when the environment of its application has expired. Translatio is how the Individual is transformed into the Other through reflection, attitude, connection and act-involving object, another

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individual, or a social group, or all human culture, or the universe—it is how the eternal pantha rei is registered to be understood, experienced, stored and shared. The metaphors of philosophy are fundamental concepts leading to the understanding of the standing of the human individual and the universe. When we say that ‘the sun is every day new’, or that ‘war is the father of everything’, or that ‘philosophy is the mother of all science’, or that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’, we are building fundamental metaphoric concepts of the human self in its experiencing and sharing its concrete movement throughout the world.

3.5 The Metaphors of E-Existence in Cyberspace If metaphor is systematic then speaking about it is adding to the concept, developing the thorough picture of the metaphor. Then a developed metaphor consists of all possible aspects combined as elements of a puzzle to form a picture. A possible metaphor is a picture based on visual elements like layout, colour, figure, sound, movement, proportions. For now all other perception is to be neglected since there is no way to formalize touch, pain, smell, gravity. Also, abstract ideas have to be contained in symbols. Also, abstract ideas have to be contained in symbols that add to perception and motivate its connectedness to ideas.8 Here the term existential metaphors is used to denote the core metaphors employed in the construction of cyberculture as a communicative reality of virtual type i.e. neither entirely material, nor ideal as we have previously stated (Apostolova 2006 a, b). Further we shall seek to explicate the existential metaphors of cyberspace by outlining their field, nature, types and functions in following three steps of investigation: 1. Isolation and classifying of the type; 2. Investigating the pattern of metaphorical structures and crossmetaphorical correspondence; 3. Extending the study of the conceptual grounds of the existential metaphors of cyberspace into the field of philosophy of internet. 8

Plamen Bratanov extrapolates on the message-symbol working out the idea of the concept-symbol which is a specific approach to the complex symbols of e-kind in the understanding in this book; Bratanov, P., Optimal Modelling of Social Communication, S, 2005, p.142.

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In 2007 the premises of this venture were underplayed by the presupposition that cyberculture was bringing into existence new realities by transforming the language of traditional culture into its own environment. It has been creating its own communication code in the process of metaphorization taking place simultaneously with the weaving of the World Wide Web as communication space. New concepts are being formed out of well-established concepts adopted to the new environment and expressed by means of common words. From the point of view of the traditional culture whose carriers are the elder generations and the communities which still remain outside the Net such transformed expression of transformed concepts would always be metaphors creating a parallel world, while for the younger generations of cyberculture who have no experience whatsoever in the concrete areas of traditional culture from where such expressions have been derived, they are merely terms used to denote single concepts. It comes out that the process of building the hyper reality of cyberculture can broadly be seen as a general process of metaphorization with two stages of functioning: conceptualizing and denoting. Both of them support the process of transformation of traditional culture into the cyberspace.

3.6 The Outlines of Translated Existence Metaphor is the vehicle of translating core concepts of human existence into core concepts of the virtual cosmos. In approaching the existential metaphors of cyberspace we shall consider the ontological metaphors (Lakoff&Johnson 2003:25) and the conduit metaphor described by Michael Reddy (Lakoff&Johnson 2003:10). While the latter concerns the nature of communication, the former concerns the overall existence. Since cyber reality is created in the World Wide Web it is both a universe of its own and a communicative reality: a universe created in and through communication. Therefore in terms of the metaphors employed in cyberspace, the conduit metaphor is a core ontological metaphor. However, in this case it should be extended to cover the nature of communication within the virtual space. The original conduit metaphor which Reddy (2003) considers the complex expression of our concept of language is: IDEAS (or MEANINGS) ARE OBJECTS LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS COMMUNICATION IS SENDING

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Cyberspace relies on both verbal and non-verbal transformation of concepts since it employs linguistic signs, icons, images, symbols and layout of visual and audio nature. Thus the second part of the conduit metaphor can be transformed to suit cyber space and the complex metaphor would look like: IDEAS (or MEANINGS) ARE OBJECTS VIRTUAL EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS. COMMUNICATION IS SENDING The basic terminology that comprises the categories of the Internet is metaphoric in origin. It is loaded with the awareness of its significance for humanity as an opening cultural space, immeasurably by usual geography and history yet open to invention, exploration and naming by its inhabitants. Thus: 1 Communication takes place within the cyberspace (Gibson). 2 The cyber world has its ontology describing its growing like the tree of life (archtype), branching to net the horizon and turn into a global ocean (Levy). 3 The structure of the interface is named matrix, net, cobweb, web. 4 Hypertext interlocks (Jackson 1997) 5 Life is in connection provided by link or limited by dead link through a labyrinth where sometimes it turns into a navigation link to nowhere (Crystal 2006 :211). 6 What the scientists who needed fast communication were doing was Weaving the Web (Berners-Lee 1999). 7 Virtual community is ‘the connections it represents’ (Wilbur 1996:14) and there are the groups of its socium: Netizen, digital citizens, virtual community, Net generation (Crystal 2006 :4, 6) addicted to the Internet (Crystal 2006:4); heavy users. The metaphor runs through the structures and units of language to form its own texts and anecdotes: Discussing the linguistic perspective of Internet, David Crystal provides an extension of the metaphor of McLuhan (1962 :31) of the ‘global village’: If there is to be a genuine global village then What is its dialect? (Crystal 2006: 6)

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It might be a specific active language: Netspeak, Netlish, Weblish, Internet language, cyberspeak, electronic discourse, electronic language, interactive written discourse, computer-mediated communication.—follow the Orwellian introduction of ‘Newspeak’ and ‘Oldspeak’ (Crystal 2006:19) Or, it can be, as well, a specific way of forming our messages rooted in our tongue: TH15 M3554G3 53RV35 TO PR0V3 H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N D0 4M4Z1NG TH1NG5! 1MPR3551V3 TH1NG5! 1N TH3 B3G1NN1NG 1T WA5 H4RD BUT NOW, ON TH15 LIN3, YOUR M1ND 1S R34D1NG 1T 4UT0M4T1C4LLY W1TH OUT 3V3N TH1NK1NG 4B0UT 1T, B3 PROUD! 0NLY C34RT41N P30PL3 C4N R3AD TH15. R3 P05T 1F U C4N. 30-08-2011, FB

Talking about the nature of the message in the social web, we inevitably reach a complex sign, using the entire keyboard to generate texture beyond traditional text. If we add more symbols and emoticons plus a couple of links, then we have a complex message which I have called ‘pictogram of the Internet’9)).

3.7 In the World Wide Web the Conduit Metaphor Branches into Further Existential Types Virtual Worlds are imaginary environments which people can enter to engage in text-based fantasy social interaction.–MUDs (multi-user dungeon–a derivation from the 1970s role-playing adventure game ‘Dungeons and Dragons’) (Crystal 2006: 12, 13, 178 and the next.).

In a MUD’s perspective the Conduit Metaphor next branches into five basic types: 1 2 3 4 5 9

Metaphors of movement–enter, exit, surf, browse, delete; Metaphors of time and space–site, page, room; Metaphors of access–access, spit out, hack; Hierarchy and bondage–attach, connect, host ; Origin, continuity and termination of existence–disconnect.

Apostolova, G., Virtual Illiteracy, http://rhetoric.bg (last visited on 22-09-2011)

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Today we are so much used to these words that but rarely do we stop to think about their meaning outside the net.

3.8 Metaphorical Structures and Cross-metaphorical Correspondence Whatever else Internet culture may be, it is still largely a text-based affair. (Wilbur 1996:6)

Next we shall trace the linking of metaphorical structures which form the virtual continuum. The complexity of internet metaphors is grounded on the complexity of the internet text sign. Placing the text features of internet between spoken and written language, David Crystal distinguishes the following features of internet language: graphic features, orthographic, grammatical, lexical, discourse, phonetic, and phonological features (Crystal 2006 :8, 9, 31, 44-46) thus outlining the features of internet metaphor and of the internet pictogram as a message mode of existence. Like Baron (2000: 248) who calls it ‘centaur—part speech, part writing’, David Crystal explains internet language through metaphor and metonymy: Netspeak is more than an aggregate of spoken and written features… it does things that neither of these other mediums do, and must accordingly be seen as a new species of communication. (Crystal 2006 : 51) The various established media elements are already becoming increasingly integrated, in a frame of reference neatly captured by the phrase ‘streaming media’. (Crystal 2006 :259)

Metaphors reign in the lists of basic terms associated with the software; hardware; the jargon of science and technology; error message; the population of internet while word formation mechanisms, e.g. compounding, the usage of prefixes and suffixes, minimization, bilingual forms, abbreviations, etc. provide conceptual coherence. (Crystal 2006 :87, 88) In one of my translation classes we were reading an excerpt from Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Grey”, where it was said that he rented rooms in the docks above some hardware shop. The year was 2004 and none of the young people in the room thought of ‘hardware’ in terms outside computers. I said: In Oscar Wilde’s time there were no computers.

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They took this info for granted ‘cos I was giving it to them, but they were nonetheless shocked to think of it ((.

3.9 The Conceptual Grounds of the Existential Metaphors of Cyberspace Existence is a philosophical category. Thinking further of a philosophy of the internet we need to outline the spaces where its metaphors come from. Philosophy itself is the largest generator of conceptual metaphoric frames: avatar came from the Ancient East; transcendence—from Kantian philosophy; mind-body dualism—from Descartes. Philosophy is mainly concerned with the limitations of freedom and limitations to existence. Therefore its whole textual outcome is adaptable to the virtual existence and that happens through metaphor for the object of reference is extended as in the case with adopting the name ‘antinomies’. Internet studies develop to provide the technological framework of the cyberculture. Therefore this is the complex field where interdisciplinary nodes form to give meaning to virtual existence and name to all the things and events in its scope. Table 3.3.8 Types of Existential Metaphors of the Internet Classification basis: source; features. Functioning: Weaving the Web (Berners-Lee 1999) Anthropomorphic * Universal * Environmental * High-tech

Individuals and Society Virtual community is ‘the connections it represents’ (Wilbur 1996: 14)

Diversity: examples * Creating /not exploring/ Cyberspace as shared intellectual framework: Ontology, branching, ocean * metaphors of the interface structure—web, net, matrix * Hypertext interlocks (Jackson 1997) * Link—dead link—a navigation link to nowhere (Crystal 2006: 211) * HTTP * HTML (hypertext markup language)—because of the complexity of internet signs x netizen, digital citizens, virtual community, net generation (Crystal 2006: 4, 6) x addicted to the Internet (Crystal 2006: 4) x heavy users (C0MM0MON USAGE)

262 ADOPTED METAPHORS OF NETSPEAK McLuhan (1962: 31) created the metaphor of the ‘global village’: If there is to be a genuine global village then What is its dialect? (Crystal 2006: 6) FANTASY AND PLAY

FUNDAMENTAL EMC The pace of metaphor invention, including neologisms or verbal metaphor invention, is likely to increase because of rapid development and distribution through the Web and mobile devices of everchanging products and services. What is existence in cyberspace? Internet provides extended, graded and multiplied existence where the borders of the individual universe reach the borders of the virtual universe of humanity.

Book III Chapter Three Netspeak, Netlish, Weblish, Internet language, cyberspeak, electronic discourse, electronic language, interactive written discourse, computer-mediated communication.—follow the Orwellian introduction of ‘Newspeak’ and ‘Oldspeak’ (Crystal 2006: 19)

Virtual Worlds are imaginary environments which people can enter to engage in text-based fantasy social interaction.—MUDs (multi-user dungeon—a derivation from the 1970s role-playing adventure game ‘Dungeons and Dragons’) (Crystal 2006: 12, 13, 178 and the next) Some researchers are predicting the end of the desktop metaphor era and the emergence of new fundamental metaphors (Gelerntner, 2000). (Marcus 2005: 52) The fundamental metaphors concern the activities (physical, mental and virtual) which build the virtual reality and establish its relationships with the world outside and the individual mind on the levels of their technological, commercial, social, educational, political, ethical and aesthetic effects. (Apostolova 2005) *movement—enter, exit, surf, browse, delete *time and space—site, page, room, *access - access, spit out, hack *hierarchy and bondage - attach, connect, host *origin, continuity and termination of existence x The desert island metaphor *adventure/novelty–exploration x The individual: * the survivor–the winner–the leader x The social animal: social approval x Involvement: play, act, imagine, access x More than human–hyper-gestalt?

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The now-existing opposite tendencies to provide cybertext devoid of cultural specifics, easily translatable into all world languages, and to fill in the culturally unified framework of network writing with unique information, have created techno-oral communicative culture based on its own existential realia. The metaphorically-woven reality of cyberspace, which is a transformation from verbal into non-verbal forms of communication, provides the environment of the functioning of the Self in the net. Existential metaphors are also of primary importance as active linguistic boundaries to the awareness of the Self in the net. Further developments in the study of the linguistic boundaries of the metaphors of the Net involve closer observation of the process of formation of the MI as cultural units of communication transforming meaning of traditional cultural sets of linguistic and extra linguistic nature and drawing the map of the technology of this formation in terms of: x Structure: borrowing; abbreviation; recombination; transcendence from verbal to non-verbal metaphor and counter transcendence etc. x Studying the typology of these MI related to their mechanism of transferring socially oriented context: value, hero, ritual; symbol; practice. x Etymology: historical mapping of their source fields. x Impact: building confidence; disturbance, anxiety. Let us now outline the bases for classification and the types of the metaphors of Internet. The EMC are in nature ontological metaphors (Lakoff&Johnson 2003: 25), dominated still by the conduit metaphor described by Michael Reddy (Lakoff&Johnson 2003 :10) where the message reaches beyond the text forming Complex virtual signs called here e-pictograms. Their applications vary in agreement with the purpose of communication: 1. Recording the rebirth of humanity in cyberspace; 2. Educational impact mapping; 3. Getting people out into the Agora of the internet village discussing the core problems of the longevity of humankind. The type of recording varies by register from the database shelf to the chatroom.

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DEMO: Existential metaphors The creators of the web used to say a couple of years ago: A picture is worth a thousand words. The complex metaphor, where sound and picture add to the word allows the existence of the parallel worlds of cyberspace: Naturebound & technology bound: The e-infrastructure looks like the sketch of a city—what is the color of the word ‘city’; the way it exists in a series of games; the way it existed as infrastructure in the minds of generations of architects down throughout human history… The trees are taller, the sunrise—more charming, the river shining like fluid silver—visions borrowed from the best experiment of artists… The cobweb—not that of the mouldy scientists from Laputa, but a strong web full of dew, and stronger than steel—almost invisible but almost invincible for it is designed to contain/ become the carrier of global intellect even in time and space where the human worlds become impossible.

3.10 Metaphors of Cyberspace: Conclusion Every child can reach a hand across a keyboard and touch every picture ever painted, every symphony ever composed, every poem ever written —U.S. President’s annual address 1998 The scientists and the artists are the great glory of our civilization —A. Burgess

You find out that human universe possesses a new dimension— communicative-D or the SET OF WORLDS where knowledge becomes shared and common where the net encompasses the matrix keeping our multiple broadcast existence in the mode of an avatar.10 All the possible worlds are as real as the reality of the virtual space: you can swim in the road, you can use any shape to appear, you can play the demiurge, creating MUDS out of your imagination power and populating them with animals and people; trying your hand at building roads, cities, empires, infrastructure of access and economy connecting these worlds into an empire of a new human culture.

10

AVATAR – a fundamental metaphor of Internet – the form gods take when descending into our world. Qvortrup, L. (ed), Virtual Space: Spatiality in Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds, L, 2002

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You can change from good to bad, from loser to winner, from the rabbit man to the conqueror of space; from the unnoticeable little nobody to the demiurge of unlimited creation. The limitations of existence broaden to let revival, freedom of movement of the Self; infinity of existence—at least in the ordinary traditional terms of our physical world. MI serve here as the complex signs of the presence of Arts in this product of advanced technology. Cyberspace is supported by technology but it is the creation of the Humanities and MCS are the manifestation of human artistic creativity: the magic of numbers, the play of digits, the music of Cosmic Spheres, products of the phenomenology of Human Spirit, seeking freedom in existence, devoid of ‘the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to’. There is still space for dreams; there is still much to be learned, discussed, testified, and left behind before MUDs have grown up enough to mature and develop wisdom sufficient for both: those who shall be caught in the net, and those who shall remain in the wild… And much more… for the exits of cyberspace still lead to the same globe which is for now the only world supporting all the possible worlds and should not be pushed to the extremes of its load of suffering matter…

CHAPTER FOUR E-PICTOGRAMS AND INFO-BLOCKS: ETHOS—PATHOS—LOGOS

4.1 Outlining the Info-block as a Unit of E-discourse David Crystal uses the terms 'Netspeak', 'Nettish', 'Weblish' in order to give an impression of the unexpected freedom of EL usage in the social spaces of the www. Even so there are the specific 'languages' of gamers, chatters, bloggers, face-bookers etc., i.e. of the various modes of immediate dialogue. (Crystal 2006) These are added to the language of the web itself or the domain automated markers plus the formulas of politeness. A user cannot avoid them but can add content created as immediate discourse. Communication is fast even if we use a mixed speech-to-writing ways of communication and the frames and formulas of the Web.

Design of the info-block An infoblock at the present state of technology includes:  identifiers, names, nicks and avatars  extralingual form for opening a chat  forming an info-entity  closing a chat  entering a group exchange  personalizing a message  entertainment  expressing consent  persuading  arguing  argumenting a statement  expressing aproval or disapproval

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Tools for building an infoblock           

single sign (grapheme, phoneme, marker) symbol—icon, emoticon, ticket picture sound movie text colour form key-mechanism for giving or denying access progamming products and tools time-space locations

Procedures Politeness: initiating intercourse sending a passive message answering a call ending an intercourse Inviting to a web-event Giving news Expressing emotion Breaking the ethical norms Pauses Keeping connected

What is a standard? It is clearly seen in the chosen examples below that web talk has its own design where the transparency as a criterion of standard is reached through linear ordering of core-concept words where grammar as a carrier of logos is replaced by mere chain-based context.

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Ⱥ/ Native users of Bulgarian ... ɳɟ ɜɢ ɩɨɩɟɹ... :))) ɜ ɩɢɫɚɧɟɬɨ ɧɟ ɦɢ ɟ ɫɢɥɚɬɚ Nadia Milusheva ɇɚ ɦɢɤɪɨɮɨɧɚ ɧɚ ɦɨɹ ɤɨɦɩɸɬɴɪ, ɛɟɡ ɧɢɤɚɤɜɢ ɟɮɟɤɬɢ, ɨɫɜɟɧ ɧɹɤɚɤɜɨ "ɟɯɨ". ɉɴɥɧɚ ɢɦɩɪɨɜɢɡɚɰɢɹ, ɤɚɤɜɚɬɨ-ɬɚɤɚɜɚ! Ʉɚɱɟɫɬɜɨ ɬɪɚɝɢɱɧɨ! Ɇɟɪɚɤ-ɞɨɫɬɚɬɴɱɟɧ! :))) Nadia Milusheva ɇɚɣ-ɝɨɥɟɦɢɹ ɰɢɪɤ ɟ, ɱɟ ɬɨɜɚ ɟ ɢɧɫɪɭɦɟɧɬɚɥ ɫ ɰɢɝɭɥɤɚɬɚ ɧɚ ɇɚɣɞɠɴɥ Ʉɟɧɟɞɢ, ɨɩɢɬɜɚɦ ɫɟ ɞɚ ɩɟɹ ɜ ɬɨɧɚɥɧɨɫɬɬɚ ɧɚ ɫɨɩɪɚɧɨ, ɰɢɝɭɥɤɚ ɢ ɟɞɧɨɜɪɟɦɟɧɧɨ ɞɚ ɡɜɭɱɢ ɐɂȽȺɇɋɄɂ :)) Nadia Milusheva Ȼɚɳɚ ɦɢ ɛɟɲɟ Ƚɟɨɪɝɢ, ɩɪɟɞɩɨɥɚɝɚɦ ɪɚɡɛɢɪɚɬɟ ɤɚɤɜɨ ɟ ɛɢɥɨ ɠɟɥɚɧɢɟɬɨ ɦɢ. Nadia Milusheva ɛɟɡ ɬɟɯɧɢɤɚ ɞɚ ɡɚɩɢɲɚ ɬɨɜɚ... ȼ/ Native users of English James Arthur if you dont win the xfactor im never watching it again...well....maybe Katrina Gillis your better than him.......................... xox Emily Elizabeth Twomey ha lol you so funny Katrina Gillis only being honest..... he;s good but he doesn't give me goooooose bumps like you.. loves ya Katrina Gillis had a look for the pink jumper for you they were all gone.... Emily Elizabeth Twomey awe kat you just not feeling him but he is amazing my new obsession!! Emily Elizabeth Twomey awe your very good no worries xoxo Katrina Gillis i love him toooo just dont like chris..... Emily Elizabeth Twomey uhhhh chriss.... makes me sleepy Katrina Gillis cruise ship........ if I was on it I'd jump over board...... swim for me life.... ;P

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C/ Non-native users of English1 In Bulgarian studies of web-language cases of digraphia, bilingualism and diglossia are described and classified as examples of language interferences (Grozeva), calques (Popova 2013); virtual political discourse (Mavrodieva); Bg mamma forum (Todorova 2014) etc. Bulglish web talk is the running procedure of I-language expansion. Apparently web-communication is pre-set, framed and channelled to a unified standard of building our infoblocks. Where is then the space for creativity, or just for making our choices of meaningful language figures? I can see two fields for human creativity and freedom of choice: in the structuring of our info-blocks and in the contents of each of their elements. Infoblocks appear as a complex expression of our mind-power.

4.2 A Phenomenology of Virtual Illiteracy Networking in the Mind Age2 With advanced technology and sufficient interest in infomorph world, you would still have to modify your mental structures beyond recognition to understand it. In other words, you may not be able to enter that paradise of transcendent wisdom alive... Human concepts of personhood and identity are rooted in perceptions of physical objects and their appearances, as well as random details of human body composition and reproduction techniques. Relocating one's body and one's material possessions lies at the foundation of both human labor and human thought. Many other concepts are based on human functional imperfections - one could hardly put the idea of a "soul" into the "head" of a being that knows and consciously controls every bit of itself and its creations. With people, who don't see what is going on in their own brains, this is much easier.

1

Yovka Tisheva has described basic types of borrowed uses of English (Op. cit) I use here an excerpt from the brilliant study of Alexander Chislenko, the partner of Moravec, concerning the connections of the concepts of identity, info-entity and the idea of today's flat language: Networking in the Mind Age (Some thoughts on evolution of intelligence and distributed systems) © 1996 Alexander Chislenko. Unfortunately the author committed a suicide and the paper is no longer available on the accessible web spaces from our country. However most of the shared ideas have been included in the publications of his co-worker. (Last visited in October 2009). 2

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Book III Chapter Four Advanced info-entities will consider most human notions irrelevant, and rightfully so. But can you find anything of common interest for communicating with them? - Perhaps, if your concepts are sufficiently abstracted from your bodily functions and your physical and cultural environment to make objective sense. (Remember that all those people with whom you seem to have absolutely nothing in common and have trouble socializing with, share the fundamental experiences with you; intelligent aliens won't!) Even if your thoughts are there, the language you use to express them is not. It is still all appearances and locations. Most prepositions in our language, for example, refer to physical space - words like "below", "over", "across", etc. They may be useful for gluing references to physical objects into one sentence, but are hardly optimal for expressing functional relations. Infomorph languages will not necessarily have visual or audio representations and probably will not allow them, since advanced intelligences may exchange interconnected semantic constructs of arbitrary complexity that would have no adequate expression in small linear (sound) or flat (picture) images. We can get an appreciation of this problem by trying to discuss philosophy in baby-talk.

Literacy in its phenomenology as production, saving and replay of texts on e-carriers has turned into one of the topical fields for the course assignments of my students of Applied Linguistics and English Philology. The studies of e-culture can be developed multidimensionally: apart from getting involved with the third eco-system of humanity, the infosphere where e-kind has found infinite spaces for creating versions of the human world, their search offers a metadiscursive picture of the changing value system at the entrances and the exits of the virtual world. Traditional standards of communicative behaviour need remotivation bothways, upon our becoming virtual and at our returning back to dying out habits and norms. E-culture is moving on as a fast set of human-populated worlds where energy is saved on habitual slow communicative events. We tend to accept the vast change of standards as breaking the norms of literacy which we have been brought up with. I have called it e-illiteracy to suit the pathetic upsurge of mixing levels, registers, criteria and principles of socially significant talk. Yet, it is not that simple as omitting commas and capital letters, or getting colloquial talk overwhelm our writing. It is a deliberate neglect of slow and inefficient layers of literacy, and having them replaced with discourse based on e-messages where texts exist as aids to the information exchange, while ethos is the prioroty of the Web language and

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pathos is a feature of the individual mentality, made obvious by certain features of the info flow. We are still within the procedure of reconceptualising of our world and rewording our messages. From the point of view of training professional linguists it is a blessing that we have the changing environment where they can observe live processes going on. It is important to guide them through observation and analyses of the situations of encoding of the e-messages and the intensive admission of e-speech symbolism. Rhetoric tools also change and their dependence on individual choice grows parallel to the broadening application of the e-standards of ethos, pathos and logos. 3 The following as well as the challenging of changes in the speech situations have the significance of phenomena in the virtual worlds. How things happen there? and What makes them change? are two of the questions that turn a course project into an adventure because they lead to an adventure whose final goal is to find the key or the tool that allows direct management of the virtual worlds. I have isolated three effects of the transition to and back from the English-based web-culture concerned with the immediate academic communicative situation in three successive years (2009—2011): (1) the first concerns the issue of the informativity of the language in the situation-contained web-discourse; (2) next comes the use of spelling and transcription in the application of phonetic writing; (3) the third issue is set around the art of play with social registers in the use of language as a vehicle of the active text (illocution) contained in the redundancy of webmessage functioning. A further dvelopment on the language in the Web is performed by Maria Grozeva (2011) who explores the structures, levels and genres in German and Bulgarian web-spaces based on the phenomenology of the concept 'written orality' (p. 7) and a detailed study of graphology (pp. 58— 76).

4.3 On the Informativity of E-illiteracy The prescriptive approach has proven irrelevant in the cases when the investigated phenomena have become popular facts: when the existing turns of language use do not fit a standard, a negative attitude arises and interferes with the bridging of stages in the language change. I have in mind the phenomena of 'illiteracy' that have littered the Net talk especially 3

See Mavrodieva's Virtual Rhetoric (2010), Alexsandrova, Apostolova et al. Ch. 3 Rhetorical Analysis (1997).

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in the texting of messages. Standards are being broken at each level of language. E-culture needs its own mode of expression which combines aspects of both written and spoken language (David Crystal 2006 :45, 47). The variants of Netlish form a repeated pattern of breaking the rules of traditional 'literacy': it has become a habit while being a temporary mode for the e-culture is steadily heading towards reforming of discourse records in ways they become expressions of the whole individual broadcasting of the encoder while meeting the thorough receptive abilities of the decoder of the message. Anyway, we still continue writing, and the alphabet is still the most efficient set of signs that allow the encoding of our messages. Then our literacy or illiteracy can be defined in terms of describing our skills in putting down our phonemes in letters and the individual peculiarities in transliterating our speech. Such procedures can have multilevel values of informativity, concerning all the levels of language use as well as the mental and physical features of the communicating individual. Then the question how we write? will no longer take up the whole focus of the linguist. What are the reasons for our diverting from an accepted norm? becomes a basic question for the educationalist and the analytician. Due to the fact that the Cyrillic alphabet appeared later for wide use in the Web, and because it is technologically inefficient for programming, we coud not use it for writing in our mother tongue both as creators of the web spaces, and as users. Therefore we used either English, or Bulgarian Phonetic alphabet. Our elders who emigrated and are still working as professional people abroad use transcription to the sounding of their host country, e.g. those who live in a French-based culture use a French approach to the transcription of Bulgarian sounds, the users of German correspondently use German habitual script (especially w for [v] and v for [f]), while the users of English vary their spelling to their community aural and writing practices. Bulgarian programmers have introduced their own professional 'jargon' based on minimised effort in both spelling and punctuation which naturally distorts Bulgarian sounds and have a reverse effect on the writing standards in Cyrillic. Today the effect is manifested in changed spelling, and greater frequency of language errors, especially those related to the morphosyntactic status of the subject and the object in the sentence. Even today, it seems shocking or exotic to the university network engineers, that the department secretaries and some of the professors use the standard Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet and insist on installing it, because typing in Bulgarian phonetic needs changes in our mental aural representation of our language and causes tension for we need to

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automatise error correction based on the insufficiency of the Latin alphabet compared to the Bulgarian sounds. Besides grammatical changes and tension about the changed position of the special sounds, there are also the changed punctuation rules, one of the first markers of a Bulgarian user being the use of double quotation marks for titles and institutional names, the oversuse of the dash and the lacking semi-colon, and the minimized usage of capital letters for in Bulgarian the days of the week, the months, the adjectives, derived from the names of the countries and the first person are not capitalised. Aural changes result in forms that seem ridiculous to the elder generations, and within the norm to the digital generations: Bulgarian phonetic typing has produced a variation of the name Yana that is spelled 'Qna'; the nick 'sladyr4eto'' replacing 'sladurcheto' ('cutie'); the festival name Pirin sings was transcribed 'Pirin Pee' etc. There is one more effect of the Latin alphabet on our language in its transcending cultural contexts related to name transformation. First comes the embarrassing example with the Bulgarian letter 'ɴ' which is pronounced similar to 'u' in 'cut'. It can be replaced in three ways, while its omission would sound old-fashioned and rustic. L. Kirova (2004) gives the example with the English borrowing 'bugs' (there are more bugs in this program than you have ever dreamed of): in the Bulgarian phonetic script its habitual representation is 'bygove', while we have to type in fact ‘bygowe’ on our keyboards, while the users of Engish tend to reproduce it as 'bugove' or 'bagove'. Names of people sometimes acquire frustrating change when pronounced in the manner of their Lating spelling: 'Ʉɴɪɥɨɜɚ' can either become 'Karlova 'or 'Kurlova' (where the changed first part produces the morpheme 'kur' which is the vulgar word for the metonymy of male, reduced to the sexual marker); and the name ɉɴɬɤɚ can either become Patka ('duck' in Bulgarian) or Putka (which is the vulgar word for female with the metonymic reduction to the sexual marker). Second comes the play with the names of places for the purposes of political popularity e.g. names of villages like 'Ɋɴɠɞɚɜɢɰɚ' (based on the Bulgarian word for 'rust' and related to a historic battle where the defeated army's weapons of the last Bulgarian king rusted on a battlefield beside the Struma river where the village is), 'ɐɴɪɜɟɧɹɧɨ' (based on the word for 'worm'—referring to the previous case of the defeated army; later on impressed in the meaning of 'red' by communist ideology referring to the colour of the cherries that grow there), and 'ɉɨɰɴɪɧɟɧɰɢ' (based on the Bulgarian word for 'black' referring to the wear of the monks from the nerby monastery). Today, when one drives westwards on E80 from Sofia

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to Kyustendil (also spelled as Kustendil by lazy people, or Kjustendil by non-English speakers) the names on the roadsigns read 'Rajdavitsa' (based on the word 'bear' i.e. ‘give birth to’ used for a place, bearing plenty of fruit); 'Tsarvenyano' was a complimentary reference to the campaign of Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha,4 the son of the last Bulgarian king (tsar), and 'Potsarnentsi' bears the same referrence. A third effect is that the sounding of our names again raises the tension: some of the names achieve forms which are disliked (Pazadrzhik; Youlia); while some people take advantage of the fact that at each change of our identity documents or credit cards we are asked to write down our own names in the Latin alphabet the way we like them most (Anka becomes Anna; Petar can change and become Peter etc.). This causes disorder in the perceptual schemes of our names by people who can speak different languages. There is always the confusion when a friend misspells your name because it sounds better to them while sometimes it is due to inattentiveness or to ignorance: while institutional names can be checked in their websites, personal names are not easy to check, because of the use of nicks with different spelling in personal webpages. Based on living through the time of change as first-person experience, I claim that it is a natural process turning into procedural or directed change for marking the cultural borders of language usage and leading to further diversification of language dividing people and rising historical confrontation. Aural change is one of the basic tools for the political processes guided by the procedure of divide et impera. Digraphia, then can be approached as a case of hesitation rooted in illiteracy or/and ignorance, which in their turn, are based on ideological and technological turns in the history of humankind. We do not know how to readdress our linguistic or textual signs in the beginnings of cultural turns and we enter opening spaces of human culture in a changed way that is foreign both to us and to the other cultures. Aural rhetoric and visual rhetoric combine with spatial rhetoric to explore the frontiers of our identities as utterers (Danler Digital Library 2013: 49-62) first and as textcreators next. There is a specific type of the rhetoric of the keyboard that can be seen as a play with the symbols outside the regular use of the keys for producing a verbal text in the digraphic transformation and adding meanings of informative, ethotic and emotional nature: the rhetoric of and in pictograms. 4

www.britannica.com/... Simeon Saxecoburggotski, formerly Simeon II, also known as Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha or Simeon Coburgotski

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4.4 The Structure of E-message: Text vs Pictogram Here the term 'pictogram of Internet' is used to mean any message created and sent within the Internet, encoded with the available symbols of the keyboard and containing additional information to the text created in the correspondent language broadening its interactive power and contextual levels thus forming the emotive and ethotic textures of the utterance nonverbally. A further extrapolation on the nature of the pictogram gives a closer view of its characteristic features, approached by different pragmatic methods: 1) it is an individual functional form of the message-symbol (Bratanov 2003 :207; 2004 :83) which encodes social and situational context in the body of the message text as added nonverbal play with the symbols of the keyboard. The concept of the message-symbol is easy to relate to the generative mechanisms of secondary intentionality and the secondary usage of language units which I shall leave for now as a productive hypothesis for a further study. 2) The underlying message can be perceived as a semiotic complex containing conventional uses of secondary signs for the expression of individualised meanings such as numbers, capital letters, punctuation marks, bolded or italicized text, emoticons, mathematical symbols and, in our case, Latin script used purposefully to focus on bilingual features of the utterer performed by means of digraphia (Kirova 2004; Mihailova 2000). The specific application of keyboard symbols contains direct expressiveness of attitudes and as such is of primary rhetorical nature. Through the added symbols the subjects of communication greet each other, express politeness, respect, hesitation, shout loudly their anger, admire and ridicule, make parody or distort the previous statement, dominate and argue. What is more, letters are used to make pictures e.g. of Santa Claus, of flowers and pets, while spaces give hierarchy to the parts of the message and show their order of sequence. 3) The pictograms of the Internet bear information of the cultural and social characteristic features of the encoders and their belonging to a community and can serve as markers of psy-graphic and sociographic nature based on a scale for estimating their synchronisation, diachrony, individual choice, social binders, tension, agressiveness etc. They can be seen in this respect as graphically-based superverbal idiolect. It is used in current popular tests of the kind „Answer a couple of questions about your likes and dislikes and find out which famous historic hero /king, writer, book, picture etc./ you resemble/are“. Human nature seems to have not

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changed through Age and its framed paths to pools of self-identification markers through estimated symbolic power of images has been successfully transformed into the WWW by use of the keyboard rhetoric combined with the other nonverbal tools available at just a klick. The pictograms in their basic forms appear as inevitable aspects of the text: a) the choice of message style fitting the choice of nicks and avatars; b) the use of digraphia and transliteration for our names; c) additional markers of euphemisms and kennings where tags are avoided e.g. Big Brother is used by people of different generations as a reference to Russia or the US; Wonderland stands for Bulgaria; on the other side of the Great Pool of Water—in America; names of disliked politicians are spelled with small letters and purposefully broken spelling to add new meaning etc.; d) purposeful choice of spelling applied mainly by highly educated people for marking a slang, dialect or accent: K’vo pra’ish/ kvo prai6/; ja doda. It is remarkable that our youngers apply dialect expressions without minding mixing forms of different dialects, and even without recognizing them. This is a side notification to this dissertation but there is a revived procedure of dialect-formation in the chat-spaces where dialects are mixed and slang is adopted to form web-utterances of non-standard form and spelling. e) hints of specific idiolect (based on a variety of metonymy applied on all the levels of language) of public figures that makes the user free of mentioning their names: Ti da ne si ritAl s nego? —You've been in the same football team, eh? (Are you so close with that person? - used by Boiko Borisov) // ot vremeto na Gey-Lusak—used by one of my educated FB friends in the meaning of 'very old' // toya ima graiferi kato na Hukulberi Fin basta mu—an undergraduate in the cafe of my university discussed the awesome heavy boots of a friend that are associated with the rudeness of Huckleberry Finn's father // v subota hodehme na Ostrova I vednuj daje namerih edna golyama mida—my individual message referring to a favourite place for weekend outings near the Maritza river to the northwest of Plovdiv—The Isle where I found a big shellfish—only the people who come from Plovdiv can recognize the place without further specification. Here belong specific abbreviations known to a community, all the graphic markers of register-shift and the use of the Latin alphabet by people who are in the moment of messaging at a place where Bulgarian alphabet is not installed on the communication device they use.

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The pictograms of Internet are a set of tools of Aural Rhetoric and their functions correspond to the symbols of distance, facial expression, gestures, spatial symbols, linear and vertical positions that aid the creation of contexts and the play with registers. They are part of e-writing and e-illiteracy is the feature of transition between writing and the hyper-writing applied in e-space where the message achieves its own individuality. E-illiteracy includes dialogue speech acts marked by symbols and verbal formulae in specific, but limited by the combinatory capacity of the keyboard custom, ways in diverse dialogue spaces of the Internet: forums, chat-spaces, social web, Q&A sessions, blogs and other sites where the type and the genre are marked mainly by the lead or head text while comments follow the interactive symbolism of 'message'. The first non-verbal act is in the thumb up sign (green or light blue) used for expressing positive attitude to the message, the sender or the act of sending it. Sometimes there is the negative sign of thumb down coloured in red for expressing negative attitude. More often there is the word like to be clicked on which again is beyond verbal expression. The opposition like—dislike creates contexts belonging to two types of meaning: (1) individual attitudes that show a multitude of positive meanings depending on the context, e.g. I missed you and am glad that you have popped up in my communication space; I like you; I approve of what this message says; yes, I know about the subject matter of the message and share your liking for it; that's impressive; that's beautiful; that's funny; you can say that again; I cannot comment now but I am here and support you, etc. (2) cultural frame context which motivates the use of the correspondent sign replacing the rhetorical arguments of receiving approval or sharing approval ad hominem or ad rem e.g. you and 123 friends like this; be the first to like this. The negative meanings can also vary: you are in your right to dislike it; tell us what is wrong and we shall improve it; you are special and we respect your choice; you are a social outsider; you have broken the rule of politeness, etc. The negative automated signs normally lead to correction. The administrators to a web field take care of not-breaking the functioning of the machine. The final expression of dislike is in the functions of delete or ban and their milder versions do not show this message again, you have no access to that information, access denied, only for close friends etc. Current negation tends to achieve even milder forms of expression. Probably this is done in

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consideration of the fact that web users tend to be emotionally more tender than the participants in personal communicative situations. One of the absurdities of the like—dislike type of polarity is the choice of the like sign for expressing our approval of the opinion of a friend about a subject matter of negative or inhuman kind e.g. a video link on child abuse. Then the positive symbol expresses our indignance, disapproval, protest etc. as a shared negative opinion or emotion. A situational community is formed around basic human value. Current practices include a verbal support of our conversational behaviour: I cannot 'like' the published message but I agree with you it is inhuman. Sometimes the ambiguity of the symbol of 'like' is used to form a fallacy: you clicked 'like' under my posting, therefore I assume you like my poem; you haven't clicked the thumb up sign therefore you dislike my text; you have not clisked the 'like' sign but you make a positive comment on my message, therefore you dislike me. The 'like' symbol can also be used as an excuse: I have no time to cope with your message, but I generally like you and your activities online. The failures in the understanding of the message arise on all levels of communication but in the gap of our transcended standards three of them seem to take lead: x Failures of Perception of the message text when the alphabets do not fit the language used: e.g. Latin alphabet and English spelling for Bulgarian text and Bulgarian Cyrillic for English expressions: Nyamam vreme da pi6a naposleduk (No time to write these days); ɛɢɡɢ, ɬɭɭ ɛɢɡɢ, ɧɨɭ ɬɚɣɦ ɮɨɪ ɩɥɟɠɴɪ (busy, too busy, no time for pleasure). x Failures due to laconic expressivity which relates to all types of text reduction including metonymy and abbreviations used in closed communicative situation where the verbal code is contextually synchronized and we have no information of the frame or initial identification of the object of discussion. The style of reduction or texting is dynamic and variable with each next subject or user: zdr. KS, tova go 4te6, nail? K (Hi, How are you, you can read this, can’t you; OK). x Failures of Insufficiency of information where our lack of cultural, political or professional knowledge may lead to getting the meaning of a name, language figure, a term or expression wrong. This often produces ambiguity and serves as a source for parody, anecdotes and jokes. The insufficient information is proceeded further as an upsurging search for analogs and filling it into the brain structures framed on the grounds of our stored data. This creates analogy which very much resembles the reconstruction of palimpsests for it relies on the individual recognition of structures and units of meaning depending on our choice

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which in its turn is rooted in our cultural practices. There are in the procedures of searching for data, inevitable pauses. Pause or lack of sign create empty space which corresponds to the rhetorical figure of silencio. It can give rest to pathos, or create vacuum where meanings begin to flow and heap. There and then rival interpretations compete for winning the lead choice. Sometimes simulated illiteracy is applied as a rhetorical instrument of the ad rem group for the achievement of authenticity of the message. It usually serves as a complex sign of the state of body and mind of the comminicating individual. The amount of verbal information in such cases does not necessarily run proportional to the quality of data involved in the web speech situation in terms of contextual binders of the temporal and spatial nature. In the spring of 2010 I asked the 2nd year undergraduates of the BA Applied Linguistics Course to pick out their usual talks in Skype, Facebook and other forums they visited and display them in tables taking into account the type of the web-space and the manner of language usage. That was about a 1000 lines of dialogue, where 68 different words and phrases were isolated only. The rest of the data included repetition of the selected phrases, a group of 12 diverse emoticons and other keyboard symbols plus nearly half of the entries consisting of links to musical and videoclips and specific sites. It was also noticed that the undergraduates never used text files to attach authentic texts of their own creation or by somebody else, but used links to complex sites where the text was only an aspect of the message. The established fact does not necessarily mean that the undergraduates chatting online have low lexical culture of the languages they used, neither does it prove in any way that they can only involve in their conversation recognizable information units and reuse them in analog structures; nor even that e-citizen are lazy or given to apathy and depression. In fact, the non-verbal parts of their dialogues formed the covered part of the iceberg of information exchange on all levels of situational context to which the random observer has no access. When asked to explain their messages, they tried to do it in the framed ideas of standard or bookish language and became frustrated, for the lack of tangible verbal arguments: consequently their messages were defined as 'illiterate' and even 'rustic' in terms of surface markers of literacy. The textures of their messages woven further into the texture of the situational exchange seemed to really lack structure or navigation tools. The density of information, however, is impossible to contain in the same amount of

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written text. The body of the web message is still 'soft' while fitting into the texture of the message 5 . This is a succession of language transformation phenomena to be further observed and analyzed. Our standard criteria for the linguistic quality of the message text do not in fact suffice in the assessment of the initial motivation for the specific encoding of each web message, for the spaces of the WWW are vast and the combinatorics of communication units at a higher level of usage of e-signs is of a monstrous capacity. Text-symbols are incessantly generated to denote units of a communicative reality that have verbal and non-verbal parts and form a second-level language creativity. Within Netlish they need no explanation even in their half-constructed forms. They are also a procedure of language repair taking place right before us at a click's distance. What the student of the web-message does really now is close observation and recording of a historical change in the very texture of human culture. This process I have chosen to all by analogy eEnlightenment and expect it to lead to a stage of human creativity that might be equalled to a kind of ɟ-Renaissance. I have extrapolated on this idea in my project 'Tangles of Intertextuality' (2007—2015). Concerning the method of knowledge, the recognition and classification of data by application of the optimized rhetorical matrix to the events occurring in the dialogue spaces supported by the WWW are the two basic skills of the professional linguist to be trained. Passive datarecognition is the main tool for heaping patterns of e-speech behaviour to be applied by analogy at the next level of exchange: the free play with the registers and hierarchies in e-communication. Consequently the training procedure undergoes two stages: o recognizing and classifying of patterns; o creating our authentic e-speech patterns. The latter could further be seen as identifiers and frontiers of the eindividual.

4.5 E-mail E-mails are seen as the main source of information about the freedom of play with registers in the transition to oral e-culture. The individuality which Internet preserves in each communicative situation reaches on the one hand to the pathos of loneliness, and on the 5

Here a reference is made to the etymology of the word 'text' (Onions, C.T. ed., Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, 1996, Clarendon Press) which serves as the basis for metaphoric transfer of the concept into an abstract image of the process of text creation (Apostolova 2011 :34).

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other hand to taking up the centre of existence in one's self-identification and extrapolating the feeling of exposed singularity upon all talks. The communicator is the subject of each talk based on the silent I-language where formality is left to e-environmental features. The reverse effect is a pressuposed physical closeness and familiarity where virtual form cuts distances off. Formality is insignificant and it is respectively in no need to be signified. Hierarchy then becomes order in terms of succession of digital events or an analog to http. E-mail is naturally accepted as a projection of real-time dialog. In our case it was the finalization of a project by sending the completed assignment report to the examiner. Chat is used for asking questions, but e-mail is just sending a copy. Then it needs no text body as far as the examiner knows what the purpose of the e-mail is. Description of case: The same undergraduate BA students happened to enroll for two of my elective courses English and the Internet, and British Cultural Studies. I asked them to prepare their Individual midterm projects of British Cultural Studies and then send them to me as an e-mail with a relevant text in English. The task was unusual for them and in the beginning of the semester they simply copied down my e-mail address automatically in their lecture notebooks. When the time for handing in the papers came, they started asking about my e-mail. I answered they had to find it themselves. Some of them read their lecture notes, others remembered seeing it on the back cover of a book of tests, still others asked their elder brothers and sisters or friends from previous courses. The MA graduates applied a different procedure: they put my name down in Google and it found my academic profile for them. The second-year undergraduates generally searched traditional sources of information. I suppose that they never thought of my name as the main part of my e-mail address. Even as they see the pictogram of the e-mail, they do not accept it as a combination of key words where the concept has a verbally outlined image. E-mail proved a difficult form of e-communication: it required communication rituals and formal texts that other forums provided by default. Most of the undergraduates had studied how to write a formal letter in their secondary school English courses. They did not connect the written, in hand as it happens in our ELL classroom, letter with what they were expected to produce as the body of the e-mail. I tend to explain this mental frame with the transition period of illiteracy we have been still passing through where first level texture is not discernible from secondlevel structures and text units.

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The texts of the emails accompanying the assignments sent as attachments do not go far beyond the informal messages in a chat forum. One of my MA graduates shared that he felt uneasy to address me in the formal way in chat messages. That comes to hint that for the Internet generations the formalities of the Internet dominate the communicative situation imposing its spatial features on interpersonal relations. Probably this is due to the perception of the other communicator as an 'abstract utterer' (Danler 2013) where social and academic hierarchy become but vague memory of their experience outside the Internet environment and no longer bear the same significance. Their messages do not mean disrespect. Their added meaning is the idea that all utterers in web dialogue are equal as utterers. Yet the reverse effect is that the users of the Internet have a stronger feeling of their self-significance. Here are some excerpted examples of typical messages I received from my Bulgarian courses; they are in all varieties of Bulgarian-English web language usage: FB (1) Ɂɞɪɚɜɟɣɬɟ, ɦɨɝɚ ɥɢ ɞɚ ɩɨɩɢɬɚɦ ɡɚɳɨ ɫɚɦɨ ɩɨ ɫɬɪɚɧɨɡɧɚɧɢɟ ɢ ɚɧɝɥɢɣɫɤɢ ɡɚ ɢɧɬɟɪɧɟɬ ɢɦɚɦ ɨɰɟɧɤɚ , ɚ ɩɨ ɭɛɟɠɞɚɜɚɳɚ ɧɹɦɚɦ? ɮɚɤɭɥɬɟɬɟɧ ɧɨɦɟɪ—0123456789 (2) Hello, Earlier this week (on tuesday ) we spoke for my missing essay , and You gave me a new topic - My idea of a good summer, so I am ready with it, and because i am missing your e-mail, I am sending it here, I am sorry if its not comfortable for you but i dont have any other choice:) Name: Applying Linguistic ( English and Greek) Second year student FN: 0123456789 (3) Shefe,na 28 v 07:30 be6e nali taka,da ne stavat gre6ki:) *Student assistant who is responsible for the info flow between the Student affairs office and her group: making an appointment to check the final grade reports. (4) Mislq ,4e stavam ve4e mnogo nahalna, no.... s nahalstvo kam progres.Proverihte li na6ite raboti ( PL 4 FE/AE ) po britansko stranoznanie?Ako da moje li tuk da mi napi6ete ocenkite na cqlata grupa? (5) Zdraveite, az sum angliiska filologiq 2ri kurs i vi predstavih moqta prezentaciq po stranoznanie. Trqbva li da Vi q izprashtam. Bqh na testa i imam 3. S prezentaciqta shte moga li da si povisha ocenkata? (6) Hello, my dear :-) I am done with my term paper (portfolio), I wanted to ask You how would you like me to send it to You, via e-mail or skype or...? I can't find You online on skype and I don't know if it's

E-pictograms and Info-blocks: Ethos–Pathos–Logos suitable to send e-mails to You without asking first. Take care and have a pleasant evening ;-) * A Serbian MA graduate of English Philology who is over polite before asking me to supervise his MA Thesis progress. (7) zdraveite zdraveite zdraveite :) kak ste :) (8) Ɂɞɪɚɜɟɣɬɟ ɞ-ɪ Ⱥɩɨɫɬɨɥɨɜɚ. ɉɪɚɬɢɯ ɜɢ ɩɪɟɡɟɧɬɚɰɢɹɬɚ ɧɚ ɩɨɳɚɬɚ (ɶɶɶɶɶɶɶɶ@yahoo.com) ɘɝɨɡɚɩɚɞɟɧ ɭɧɢɜɟɪɫɢɬɟɬ " ɇɟɨɮɢɬ Ɋɢɥɫɤɢ" ɉɪɢɥɨɠɧɚ ɥɢɧɝɜɢɫɬɢɤɚ Ⱥɧɝɥɢɣɫɤɢ ɫ Ɋɭɫɤɢ ɟɡɢɤ 2 ɤɭɪɫ ɂɦɟ - ɮɚɤ. ɧɨɦɟɪ 123456789 ȿ-mails by my Bulgarian undergraduates of English Philology: (1) Zdraveite, d-r Apostolova; izpra6tam vi ese po pyrvata tema, "You should run very fast to keep in the same place". Az sym AF, vtora godina. Fakultetniqt mi nomer e napisan v prika4eniq dokument. (2) Ese za povishavane na ocenkata (name; FNo) ENGLISH PHILOLOGY,SECOND YEAR (3) English For the Internet (name; FNo) What are the characteristic features of internet texts ? *The text of the essay follows; no signature. (4) ɍɜɚɠɚɟɦɚ ɞ-ɪ Ⱥɩɨɫɬɨɥɨɜɚ, ɩɨɥɭɱɢɯɬɟ ɥɢ ɩɪɟɜɨɞɢɬɟ ɧɚ ɬɟɤɫɬɚ ɨɬ ȼɚɲɢɹ ɭɱɟɛɧɢɤ, ɤɨɢɬɨ ɢɡɩɪɚɬɢɯ ɧɚ ɟɥɟɤɬɪɨɧɧɚɬɚ ȼɢ ɩɨɳɚ ɧɚ 18.01.ɬ.ɝ. ɡɚ ɞɢɫɰɢɩɥɢɧɚɬɚ "ɋɨɰɢɨɤɭɥɬɭɪɧɢ ɚɫɩɟɤɬɢ ɧɚ ɩɪɟɜɨɞɚ"? ɇɢɧɚ ɇ. - ȺɎ, Ɇɚɝɢɫɬɴɪɫɤɚ ɩɪɨɝɪɚɦɚ, 2 ɤɭɪɫ, ɮɚɤ. ʋ 000000000 (5) Zdraveite, izprashtam Vi eseto mi. Yana G. - Angliiska filologiq, 2ri kurs, 2ra grupa, fac.ʋ:8888888888 (6) Ɂɞɪɚɜɟɣɬɟ! Ʉɚɜɚɦ ɫɟ Ʉɪɚɫɢ ɑ - ɚɧɝɥɢɢɫɤɚ ɮɢɥɨɥɨɝɢɹ, 4 ɤɭɪɫ, ɮɚɤɭɥɬɟɬɟɧ ɧɨɦɟɪ 77777777777777 ɂɡɩɪɚɳɚɦ ȼɢ ɟɫɟ, ɬɴɣ ɤɚɬɨ ɢɦɚɦ ɨɰɟɧɤɚ 3 ɢ ɫɟ ɧɚɞɹɜɚɦ ɞɚ ɹ ɩɨɜɢɲɚ. Ⱥɤɨ ɧɟ ȼɢ ɡɚɬɪɭɞɧɹɜɚ ɞɚɥɢ ɳɟ ɦɨɠɟ ɤɚɬɨ ɩɨɥɭɱɢɬɟ ɦɚɣɥɚ ɦɢ ɞɚ ɦɢ ɨɬɝɨɜɨɪɢɬɟ, ɡɚ ɞɚ ɫɚɦ ɫɢɝɭɪɧɚ, ɱɟ ɟ ɫɬɢɝɧɚɥ ɞɨ ȼɚɫ! Ȼɥɚɝɨɞɚɪɹ ȼɢ ɩɪɟɞɜɚɪɢɬɟɥɧɨ. (7) Ɂɞɪɚɜɟɣɬɟ, ɭɜɚɠɚɟɦɚ ɞɨɤɬɨɪ Ⱥɩɨɫɬɨɥɨɜɚ! Ɍɨɜɚ ɫɚ ɦɨɢɬɟ ɩɪɟɜɨɞɢ, ɜɴɪɯɭ ɦɚɬɟɪɢɚɥɢɬɟ, ɤɨɢɬɨ ɧɢ ɡɚɞɚɞɨɯɬɟ. Ɇɨɥɹ ȼɢ, ɭɜɟɞɨɦɟɬɟ ɦɟ, ɚɤɨ ɢɦɚ ɨɳɟ ɡɚɞɚɱɢ. Ʉɚɡɜɚɦ ɫɟ Ⱥ Ⱥ , ɫɩɟɰɢɚɥɧɨɫɬ "Ⱥɧɝɥɢɣɫɤɚ ɮɢɥɨɥɨɝɢɹ", ɦɚɝɢɫɬɪɚɬɭɪɚ, ɮɚɤɭɥɬɟɬɟɧ ɧɨɦɟɪ:111111111111 ɋɴɪɞɟɱɧɢ, ɬɨɩɥɢ ɩɨɡɞɪɚɜɢ! (8) Term Paper English Philology Masters Degree Only an attached single file to an empty e-mail. *A couple of them. (9) Portfolio about Bestsellers, D A-ski, MA Course

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Book III Chapter Four Take care and have a nice day ;-) *It is the same author as in (6).

It is clear that FB unofficial nature changes the manner of letter writing. The undergraduate students who have had access to the Internet for the greater part of their lives perceive the e-mail as a specific space of closed, personal nature, that is contrasted to the publicity of the messages in the chat forums. This creates a tense atmosphere when they are asked to send their course assignment via e-mail, for they feel like intruding into the private space of the examiner who is to be reached by e-mail. Their embarrassment leads to omission of the formal address and the closing formulae with their signature; sometimes they just throw in a note, and very often they do not write a text but only attach their assignment file to a title containing their name, faculty number and the name of the exam. In the Fall semester of 2013 I demonstrated the difference of e-mail and informal message before asking the English & the Internet course attending group to send an e-mail to me. I also asked them to write a short text telling how they had spent their summer holidays. I got 6 e-mails. The majority of the group simply took the chance to avoid that task as they were informed it was optional. The second optional task was to write a description of their most frequently visited web-spaces and describe their roles in them. I received the whole group's papers with the exception of one: the undergraduate student was confused with having no form to fill in and dared not start writing freely on the white sheet. In the closest to the publication of this book term I included e-mail in my lecture schedule. The result is that the undergraduates sent perfect emails for the midterm checkup and completely forgot about them at sending me the three other assignments. It is still a matter of difficulty to add relevant title to their e-mails and to add address and closing formulae. Internet forums do such things for them and spare the embarrassment of direct introduction. Comparing to thousands of witnessed cases, I am inclined to classify this phenomenon as one of the manifestations of cultural gap and a feature of the loneliness that surrounds the alienated Individual. There is one additional effect building upon the awareness of their nonstandard writing: the frustration of their spelling and punctuation errors. However, a letter written in Bulgarian phonetic transcription, cannot be seen as a source of spelling errors for what standard of spelling do we apply when using the Latin alphabet where the standard is bound with the Cyrillic writing. Language errors lend their place to such of pragmatic nature: the application of Bulgarian rules of politeness to the English text (e.g. the capitalized 'You'); the attempts to follow the maxim of clarity by

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giving an analytical or even synthetic lexeme of Bulgarian structure, the breaking of the maxim of relevance by applying hierarchy imitating their teachers while they ask questions from their standing in the position of a student, etc. The above problems seem to be cured with dropping the official communication where a smiley in the end of the examiner’s comment has a miraculous effect. In terms of the AA mechanism, a friendly sign acts as an agent of motivation leading to trust. Letter-writing is not a habitual activity for our culture. Young students are not trained to write letters: there is but one exercise per the whole course of the high school in Bulgarian, and about so in the classes of the first and the second foreign language. The teachers do not like those lessons and do not focus on the skill of letter writing. Even the university faculty in Bulgaria avoid e-mailing to their colleagues. That results in the body of e-mails: the formulae of formal text are dropped off and the discourse follows the manner of social-web publicity. Getting further in the exploration of the causes for the embarrassment in e-mailing, we inevitably meet with the constant answer to a relevant Q&A session: „I am ashamed“, „It's embarrassing“, „I don't know how to behave: oficially or in the usual way“. Thus, the evasion of formality even in the cases when it is natural, becomes a signal of the individual's wish to hide in the group and remain anonymous. The fear to get conspicuous by our insufficiency in meeting the standards of formal text production is a barrier to revealing our individuality, and/or our imperfections, in public and asking for help. That fear has become a cultural marker and it needs a relevant approach for improving the trust of the trainee in the teacher, and raising the level of security within the learning community e.g. the class or the group. There is a further possible conclusion based on the communicative behaviour of the participants in Internet interaction: despite our proclaimed belonging to global humanity and our ability to talk with anyone worldover, we continue huddling shyly in the corner of our smaller world elbowing each other by means of tags and sharing links of text, picture and sound. This resembles patchwork covers which can be informative and even authentic for they reuse texts as units for the further stage of creativity. When the users try to make their original textprojection, relying on the rhetorical framework supplied by the web message form and the availability of keyboard rhetoric, their illiteracy is immediately brought to display. It is not the effect of bad spelling or breaking morphosyntactic rules. It is the effect of ethotic literacy.

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Formulas of respect for the other human individuals cannot be a matter of technological indicators: they need a human voice behind the message. Once again, we can restate that texting over the web is within the tasks of rhetorical aspects of interactive language usage especially in the cases when we need to bridge a generation gap. Life is still outside the web and there are more people who stick to the conventions of personal communication. That makes the use of doublestandard of literacy inevitable. The mixture of styles, registers and purposes for breaking standards in the process of transcendence to webculture is the source for a new kind of textual creativity. While Intertext relied on parody and reused top-texts of human culture in the current contexts of the end of the 20th century, today's text is achieving a hyper form where the units of its texture are of higher complexity of both form and meaning. The beginnings of the web-culture start with the domination of users, and the e-renaissance of human culture relies on combinatorics of higher complexity than language units and structures. Creativity is directed towards the broader audience of our web community beyond which is the worldwide agora. Its language do not any more fit into A standard, although it models its own standards. Texts are reusable, and authentic forms develop where behind a linguistic sign there stand tangles of stories all of them but designed to envelope the same existential values in sharable units of meaning. The challenges for the linguist and the language teacher come from the pragmatic domination of standard where illiteracy is measured by relevance and the shift of registers is a constant move between description and norm. We use a multitude of languages within the same language which is a curious mixture of our mother tongue and all the languages we can speak and write in on the one hand, and the multi-coloured English of the Web on the other. There is always the shock when we become aware that our conventional words and turns of speech have acquired different meaning, an unintended value, or have become useless. Literacy, seen as failure in communication, is a great stimulator of the further retextualising of individual stories. I believe it is the core of creativity which is to take us to a stage resembling the turns of human culture in the ages of renaissance but this time linguistic creativity is to rely on units of complex texture where texts have significant role. Learning languages I see as bound with studying texts.

CHAPTER FIVE LANGUAGE, TRANSLATION AND INFOMANIA

5.1 The Training of Human Translators "Ʉɨɬɤɚɬɚ ɫɤɨɱɢ ɜ ɛɚɫɟɣɧɚ ɢ ɫɟ ɭɞɚɜɢ"— (The cat jumped into the swimming pool and got drowned) The cat ɯɨɩ ɮɢɭɭɭɥ ɩɥɶɨɤ in the water and then ɛɴɥɛɭɤ ɛɴɥɛɭɤ and no more Ɇəɍ FB onomatopoeic version of translation (15.09.2022)

In the present age we seem to have reached very close to rebuilding Babylon and regaining, through the artificial intelligence capacity of alllanguages mediating of the World Wide Web, the understanding of each other while using our mother tongues. The global linguist is supposed to know all the languages. It keeps in its shelves of database all the texts that humanity ever cared to type down or scan and save or speak up and store. It is not the machine, though, that causes or suffers misunderstanding. It is the human beings at the entrances and the exits of the virtual space that continue misusing language for one or another reason which may be put down in a long list from sheer illiteracy to creative brilliance. Our primary concern here is the training of human linguists into the art of noticing the changes in language usage, the movement of texts, the shift of meaning of words that every next moment convey another message. The individual is not yet the loser in the race even that the global Net has unsurpassable storage capacity and the humans seem to have lost our control over the power of our own superhuman creation. The fact is we, humans, are still trying to outwit the machine or, at least, to cheat it for once, while attempting to guard our freedom to create our own messages. For a professional linguist the final goal of perfection is to reach proficiency in decoding all the messages that occur in a life-long routine. For the linguist who has mastered the steps to philology it is the ability to encrypt messages for the future receivers that is the marker of professional perfection. The deepest understanding of how a language works seems of

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help yet it is art that challenges and empowers the search for equivalency in language-use for encoding a message in two at least languages simultaneously. It is the process of translation as a two-way cultural info-flow that is the subject matter of our analyses here, approached from the perspective of the agents involved in the procedures of translating, the situational features, and the impact of methodology and tools applied for achieving the shimmering form and brilliance of meaning. Our concern is the human individual who is the initiator, the encoder, the decoder, the user and the sufferer of all the messages crossing this talkative multicultural, multilingual, intertextual cross-pointed, Net-bound world. Language performance is seen as a display of one’s identity where language capacity contains it. It is not our concern why a cat needs to jump into a pool of water and get drowned. Our concern is why a human individual needs to form that message and why should one need to have it re-encoded in two interwoven semiotic systems in between the source language and the target language, while making a parody of the Net-translator. There is a human being engraved in each text every next moment of the textual life. It is not the text in itself we shall be focused on: it is the human individual behind the text, and the culture behind the individual that deserve the pains of analysis. The use of sounds in the place of words in the above example displays an attempt at baby-talk addressed to the web-translator. Our undergraduates have become familiar with the insufficiency and the inefficiency of the web translator, particularly when Bulgarian text needs translation into English. They subconsciously produce mock-version which refers to immaturity. Our tongue still lacks its spaces of performance that might lead to some interesting ideas of the I-structures that make our cultural identity unique. Since the latter conclusion does not refer to the Bulgarian case solely, but to any case of misrepresentation, I venture a hypothesis concerning the brain-structures underlying I-language and further leading to pictures of associative chains of environmental nature and the changes that occur when education takes place in a different (from the native) environment. Acquired associations resemble the pathways of frame semantics. They, however, do not run parallel with ‘wild’ associations. RM turns up to provide for a bridge in the virtual practices where the antinomy of environment arises to be resolved in the antinomy of the agents. It is our concern here, too, how we can improve the global linguist through correcting the deficiencies of the verbal flow between Globish and our tongue. While an evident error in translating for the mass media can

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very often become dominant over a correct version of the same expression and very hard to fight against at that for having become a widely spread speech-pattern, correcting for the Internet translator proves completely efficient for the correction is stored in the memory of the instantly learning intelligent web. We can hardly affect the speakers on TV. At the same time, we can teach the web translator not only how to avoid mistakes, but how to use relevantly a couple of correct versions. There is a very fresh example of some high administrator trying to write a letter in English enquiring about the holidays of a foreign friend, evidently after a tiresome year of hard work, and trying to formulate a polite version of the question: did you have a nice holiday? Thus the Bulgarian question: „ɉɨɱɢɧɚɯɬɟ ɥɢ?” (based on the Bulgarian usual understanding of ‘holiday’ as „ɩɨɱɢɜɤɚ”) got a literal rewording by the Google translator as: have you died? What really deserves our attention here is the lack of sufficient database about the dynamic dimensions of our language both as our native tongue and as a source language for rewording into English. I was in a taxi where at some time in our random talk with the taxi-driver I started telling him about that case. He didn’t even wait for me to tell him what the automated version might have been like but started laughing anticipating the possible answer. For every common Bulgarian native speaker it is evident that the euphemism containing the word ‘rest”, would lead to a confusion near the meaning of ‘rest in peace’. For a person interested how languages work, it leads to the immediate awareness that in our tongue we would never use the euphemism in the 1st and 2nd person in both the singular and the plural, but it is a matter of enquiry or statement about a third person or persons. Besides, the common meaning of ‘having a holiday’ is used in the reflexive („ɩɨɱɢɧɚɯ ɫɢ”, „ɩɨɱɢɧɚɯɬɟ ɫɢ” etc.) in all forms. The automated translator cannot be ‘aware’ of the natural uses of the expressions in a language. It can have the sufficient database and the sufficient rules for identifying the specific meaning of a given word or phrase. And that is the task of the linguist today: to make space for our native culture by supplying sufficient database and algorithms for the automated aids to the translators based on the multi-modal rhetoricity of translation. For, after all, we are those who need our culture active within the spaces of the global technologically mediated and supported culture of humanity. Professional translators nowadays seem to share the fear of being replaced by the web and rendered useless. That is their basic argument for their unwillingness to teach Google or some other machine good Bulgarian. In its turn the lack of sufficient input of quality translation slows down the real information flow between our culture and the web worlds. Bulgarian

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culture is still misrepresented in the virtual space and our world is limited by the limitations of our language to paraphrase Wittgenstein’s famous maxim once again. There are so many Bulgarian people round the globe who are successful in securing their spaces in the web universe. Yet, they are not doing this by expanding the space of our tongue, and the touch to our native ground is shrinking in perspective. This seems to me the most imperative task for English-speaking professional linguists of Bulgarian origin: building two-way bridges across cultures and generations. Translating between Bulgarian and English is a mechanism of language development and improvement of language performance. Bothways. The profession of the translator in its present practices might die out. But the transfer of information between code systems has unlimited horizons. Is it ‘infomania’ then? Or, is it a search for new horizons at a time when world cultures are building their galaxies in the virtual universe? Maybe things will turn out simpler in nearest practices. But we have to do our job and make the effort of learning how to do things with words. Let us look for some examples of language interference and try to establish the causes for the apparent insufficiency of translation in such cases. The task is: Read the following Examples and underline all the non-standard uses of Bulgarian. Then proceed them in the automated web translator. Do they cause confusion in the translation? Are there other causes of misunderstanding? Example 1 ɏɚɣɞɟ ɞɚ ɧɚɩɪɚɜɢɦ ɟɞɢɧ ɮɥɚɲɦɨɛ ɫ ɝɪɭɩɨɜɨ ɱɟɬɟɧɟ ɧɚ Ɏɟɫɬɧɢɰɢ ɧɚ ɝɥɚɫ. ɑɟɬɜɴɪɬɴɤ, 15-ɬɢ ɫɟɩɬ, ɦɟɠɞɭ 16:00 ɢ 17:00 ɧɚ ɰɟɧɬɴɪɚ ɩɪɟɞ ɤɭɩɭɥɚ ɜ Ȼɥɚɝɨɟɜɝɪɚɞ. ɇɟɤɚ ɜɫɟɤɢ, ɤɨɣɬɨ ɢɫɤɚ ɞɚ ɫɟ ɜɤɥɸɱɢ, ɞɨɣɞɟ ɜ 16:00 ɧɚ ɩɨɳɚɬɚ, ɡɚ ɞɚ ɩɨɥɭɱɢ ɫɜɨɹ ɮɟɫɬɧɢɤ * ...Ɏɥɚɲɦɨɛɴɬ ɳɟ ɩɪɨɞɴɥɠɢ ɨɤɨɥɨ 1 ɦɢɧɭɬɚ, ɫɥɟɞ ɤɨɟɬɨ ɜɫɟɤɢ ɟ ɩɪɢɤɚɧɟɧ ɞɚ ɫ ɬɪɴɝɧɟ ɜɟɞɧɚɝɚ! Ɍɨɱɧɢɹɬ ɫɬɚɪɬ ɧɚ ɫɴɛɢɬɢɟɬɨ ɡɚɜɢɫɢ ɨɬ ȻɇɌ, ɬɴɣ ɤɚɬɨ ɬɟ ɳɟ ɝɨ ɩɪɟɞɚɜɚɬ ɩɪɹɤɨ ɜ ɩɪɟɞɚɜɚɧɟɬɨ Ȼɴɥɝɚɪɢɹ Ⱦɧɟɫ ɩɨ ȻɇɌ ɋȺɌ. (FB: 09-15-2011)

Language, Translation and Infomania Example 2 "ȼ ɧɚɣ-ɫɤɨɪɨ ɜɪɟɦɟ ɳɟ ɢɡɧɟɧɚɞɚɦ ɦɨɢɬɟ ɩɨɱɢɬɚɬɟɥɢ ɫ ɟɞɧɨ ɚɪɟɧɛɢ ɩɚɪɱɟ ɫ ɱɚɥɝɚ ɦɨɬɢɜɢ, ɜ ɤɨɟɬɨ ɳɟ ɦɢ ɚɤɨɦɩɚɧɢɪɚ ɢ ɟɞɢɧ ɦɥɚɞ ɪɚɩɴɪ." - ɩɪɢɡɧɚɧɢɟ ɧɚ ɮɨɥɤ ɮɭɪɢɹɬɚ ɋɧɟɠɢɧɚ ɩɪɟɞ ɜ. "Ɍɨɪɧɚɞɨ". (FB: 09-152011) Example 3 Ɋɨɛɢɧ ɒɚɪɦɚ ɟ ɫɪɟɞ ɧɚɣ-ɯɚɪɢɡɦɚɬɢɱɧɢɬɟ ɥɢɱɧɨɫɬɢ ɧɚ ɧɚɲɟɬɨ ɫɴɜɪɟɦɢɟ—ɫɜɟɬɨɜɧɨ ɢɡɜɟɫɬɟɧ ɩɢɫɚɬɟɥ, ɥɚɣɮ ɤɨɭɱ, ɛɢɡɧɟɫ ɬɪɟɣɧɴɪ, ɤɨɧɫɭɥɬɚɧɬ, ɸɪɢɫɬ, ɟɤɫɩɟɪɬ ɩɨ ɥɢɞɟɪɫɬɜɨ…ɂɡɧɚɫɹɥ ɟ ɥɟɤɰɢɢ ɜ ɧɚɞ 60 ɫɬɪɚɧɢ, ɧɚɩɢɫɚɥ ɟ ɩɨɜɟɱɟ ɨɬ 10 ɛɟɫɬɫɟɥɴɪɚ, ɩɪɟɜɟɞɟɧɢ ɧɚ ɞɟɫɟɬɤɢ ɟɡɢɰɢ ɩɨ ɰɟɥɢɹ ɫɜɹɬ. http://www.borisloukanov.com/ Ƀɨɧɚɬɚɧ Ⱦɨɦɢɧɢɰ ɟ ɫɪɟɞ ɧɚɣ-ɚɜɬɨɪɢɬɟɬɧɢɬɟ ɟɤɫɩɟɪɬɢ ɜ ɫɮɟɪɚɬɚ ɧɚ ɪɟɤɥɚɦɧɢɹ ɤɪɢɟɣɬɢɜ. Ʉɚɧɟɧ ɟ ɤɚɬɨ ɫɩɟɰɢɚɥɟɧ ɝɨɫɬ, ɥɟɤɬɨɪ ɢɥɢ ɱɥɟɧ ɧɚ ɠɭɪɢɬɚɬɚ ɧɚ ɧɚɣ-ɝɨɥɟɦɢɬɟ ɪɟɤɥɚɦɧɢ ɮɟɫɬɢɜɚɥɢ ɩɨ ɫɜɟɬɚ, ɜɤɥɸɱɢɬɟɥɧɨ ɢ ɧɚ ɬɨɡɢ ɜ Ʉɚɧ. Ɉɫɧɨɜɚɬɟɥ ɟ ɧɚ ɤɨɧɫɭɥɬɚɧɬɫɤɚɬɚ ɚɝɟɧɰɢɹ Mindscapes, ɤɨɹɬɨ ɟ ɨɪɝɚɧɢɡɢɪɚɥɚ ɬɪɟɧɢɧɝɢ ɢ ɨɛɭɱɟɧɢɹ ɩɨ ɤɪɟɚɬɢɜɧɨ ɦɢɫɥɟɧɟ ɧɚ ɪɟɤɥɚɦɧɢ, ɦɚɪɤɟɬɢɧɝɨɜɢ ɢ ɉɊ ɚɝɟɧɰɢɢ ɨɬ 5 ɤɨɧɬɢɧɟɧɬɚ. ɉɨɜɟɱɟ ɨɬ 20 „Ʌɴɜɚ” ɨɬ Ʉɚɧ ɢ ɞɟɫɟɬɤɢ ɧɚɝɪɚɞɢ ɨɬ ɞɪɭɝɢ ɪɟɤɥɚɦɧɢ ɮɟɫɬɢɜɚɥɢ ɫɚ ɫɩɟɱɟɥɢɥɢ ɩɪɟɡ ɩɨɫɥɟɞɧɢɬɟ ɝɨɞɢɧɢ ɚɝɟɧɰɢɢ, ɫ ɤɨɢɬɨ ɟ ɪɚɛɨɬɢɥ Ƀɨɧɚɬɚɧ (ɜɤɥɸɱɢɬɟɥɧɨ ɟɞɧɚ ɨɬ ɬɚɡɝɨɞɢɲɧɢɬɟ ɧɨɫɢɬɟɥɢ ɧɚ Ɂɥɚɬɟɧ ɥɴɜ ɨɬ Ʉɚɧ—McCann Erickson Ɋɭɦɴɧɢɹ). http://www.borisloukanov.com/ Ⱥɜɚɬɚɪ (Avatar)—Ƚɪɚɮɢɤɢ, ɢɡɩɨɥɡɜɚɧɢ ɡɚ ɩɪɟɞɫɬɚɜɹɧɟ ɧɚ ɯɨɪɚ ɜɴɜ ɜɢɪɬɭɚɥɧɢ ɫɜɟɬɨɜɟ. ȼɴɡɦɨɠɧɨ ɟ ɞɚ ɫɟ ɢɡɝɪɚɞɹɬ ɜɢɡɭɚɥɧɢ ɯɚɪɚɤɬɟɪɢ, ɨɛɪɚɡɢ, ɩɟɪɫɨɧɚɠɢ, ɤɨɢɬɨ ɫɚ ɫ ɬɹɥɨ, ɨɛɥɟɤɥɨ, ɞɚ ɫɥɟɞɜɚɬ ɨɩɪɟɞɟɥɟɧɨ ɩɨɜɟɞɟɧɢɟ, ɞɚ ɫɚ ɢɞɟɧɬɢɮɢɰɢɪɚɧɢ ɤɚɬɨ ɩɨɥ, ɞɚ ɢɦɚɬ ɢɦɟ. Ⱦɢɝɢɬɚɥɧɢɬɟ ɩɪɟɞɫɬɚɜɹɧɢɹ ɢɥɢ ɪɟɩɪɟɡɟɧɬɚɰɢɢ ɧɚ ɨɬɞɟɥɧɢ ɢɧɢɞɜɢɞɢ ɫɟ ɩɪɚɜɹɬ ɜ ɨɧɥɚɣɧ ɫɪɟɞɚ; ɫɴɡɞɚɜɚɬ ɫɟ 3D ɫɜɟɬɨɜɟɬɟ; ɚɜɚɬɚɪɢɬɟ ɦɨɝɚɬ ɞɚ ɢɡɛɟɪɚɬ ɞɟɣɧɨɫɬɢ ɢɥɢ ɨɬɞɟɥɧɢ ɨɫɨɛɟɧɨɫɬɢ ɧɚ ɥɢɱɧɨɫɬɬɚ ɢɥɢ ɝɟɪɨɹ ɢ ɞɚ ɫɟ ɩɪɟɞɫɬɚɜɹɬ ɤɚɬɨ ɞɪɭɝ ɚɜɚɬɚɪ. ȼɫɟɤɢ ɦɨɠɟ ɞɚ ɨɫɬɚɧɟ ɪɚɡɥɢɱɟɧ ɜ ɪɟɚɥɧɢɹ ɠɢɜɨɬ ɢ ɞɚ ɫɟ ɩɪɟɞɫɬɚɜɢ ɤɚɬɨ ɞɪɭɝ ɜɴɜ ɜɢɪɬɭɚɥɧɢɹ ɫɜɹɬ, ɫɟɞɟɣɤɢ ɩɪɟɞ ɤɨɦɩɸɬɴɪɚ. Mavrodieva 2010: “ȼɢɪɬɭɚɥɧɚɬɚ ɪɟɬɨɪɢɤɚ”

I leave the fulfilment of the task to open discussion.

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5.2 Neuroscience, the Foreign Language, and the Useless Human Language is slow. It follows lateral thinking, relies on analogy, depends on the individual capacity for verbal display of thoughts. The formation of concept grows in brainwork that does not need display of fast linking of information from the brain stores: it jumps into a final expression which is sharable: a sound, a picture, a word, an action, a construction of device. Language has the privilege of having signs for all the things we can sense, think of, feel, and do. It serves as a connection of the phases of awareness and the subconscious. It is slow as a single process separately taken. Yet, the vast storage of language devices in the web memory of the brain enlarged unthinkably by the access to the e-web storage of all the texts ever written and all the speech being spoken supplies sufficient database for fast verbal display in both the habitual or cliche mode, where awareness is replaced with security based on experience, and in the creativity mode where awareness needs singular arrangement of language units. What is more, 'singular' does not necessarily mean 'novel': the individual is novel and the concepts to be worded, while language, as vast as it can be, is limited. The mental work of a person is a function of the person’s brain, and a person’s brain is physically interconnected with its environment. How we produce a language and how we produce meanings thus depend on our physical parameters and on the database we store as a personal experience in our physical exchange with our environment. That is the main reason for the differences in the dynamics or the natural sounding of each separate tongue. It is still more difficult for an automated translator to distinguish between layers of meaning than to cultivate a unified environment especially for the web-generation talking the Globe over. It is still a matter of cultural creativity not to let hold of the turns of our native speech. Since the human beings of all earth have the natural instrument of language and apparata for speech production in our brains and body, we can go for the universal grammar which allows us fast language acquisition. Yet the life of a tongue is in the horizons of its usage. In other words: a native language depends for its longevity on the information load it carries and its value for humanity. We can use the global machine, yet we have to give a try whether we have really something to say to the world and the art of how to say it. A culture can survive in its idiolect i.e. the richness of its language productive capacity. It can hold as far back and forth in time as its environment lasts. At the frontiers of environment or a world are

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reached, the language needs transition and it can find it in the mechanisms of giving names or denoting the novel objects of knowledge. Human generations have handed down their words of denotation and their rules of giving names. Each next generation has renamed the facts and events of its own world reusing the names of its ancestry. Today we seem to have run out of language means: words, sounds, structures and texts. We recycle our languages to call a changed environment by means of metaphor. A machine would not do that for us unless we have given it a clue. Even then, a machine would set limitation. A human individual has got no limitation to our horizons of creativity until they last. The question of human cultural survival then is extended to the problem how to make our horizons last? Or, to put it in other words: how to talk new worlds into being? It is the task of a linguist to take care of languages as is the task of a physician to take care of health. The creativity of a translator would be in taking care of the storage of sufficient language tools for renaming things in another language and for repairing algorhythms to the dynamics of human language creativity. Thus, we have reached the core of our claims here: a human is least useless when language matters are concerned. A human needs to give names. Names identify the objects and events of each next world. The procedure of naming is the unit of the procedure of translating: we have the text free from the source language and then we restructure it to our Ilanguage before assembling it as a target text. Therefore I have sought for the relations of names and translation as the two main ends of our Self identification.

5.3 Mind Speaking to Mind or Where the Text Ends: Contexts and Equivalence Translation as a complex art, comprising of the professional procedure of translating or interpreting and the final product of the target text, has been an object of interest ever since the fall of Babylon for interdisciplinary studies approaching human language from their diverse perspectives. There is, however, a common ground of their functioning where the general theory of translation relies on the results of another theoretical search adopting a series of prescribed procedures instead of following its own path which might lead to different approach to the human aspects of the art of translation. This is the field of the communicative situation of translation.

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The fast growth of applied studies in the specialized fields of translating and interpreting, concerning intercultural communication for the past twenty years is still shying that theoretical niche. It can be explained by the a priori accepted practice that a trained translator already knows how to cope with foreign cultures. Thus translation studies leave the problems of communication outside its immediate interests. (Robinson 2003: 194) Still this deprives the theoretical studies of translation from a very important aspect which is closely concerned with the motivation of a human individual to take on the profession of translator and interpreter especially today, when we have the powerful web translator. Since the human individual is in the focus of these analyses, and individuals are identified by the cultural characteristics they have, I shall further extrapolate on the problem of cultural equivalency in translation as it arises in the studies of the situational context of translation.

5.4 Theoretical and Practical Grounds for a Systematic Study of the Communicative Situation of Translation The achievements of the late 20th century general and comparative linguistics, semantics, synchronic pragmatic analyses, general and specialized communication theories,comparative cultural studies, applied linguistic research touching problems of the interdisciplinary fields of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, mathematical and engineering linguistics: the development and branching of all those fields, and the general growth of science and technology in their diverse approaches to global existential problems forms a solid ground for enriching the systematic knowledge about the communicative situation of translation and the formation of a working corpus of data, methods and principles for approaching the human individual as the initiator and the target of bilingual and multilingual exchange before getting to the spaces of multimodal translation. Interdisciplinary methodology is completely suitable to the complex field of translation and interpretation studies. Key terms, however, need ‘translation’ in order to fix their meaning to key concepts used by diverse theories for denoting their specific focus on the same subject of study. We can follow a couple of lines of inquiry based on grouping related theories: Linguistic: modern linguistics starts with Ferdinand de Saussure’s defining language as a social event; continues to Whorf’s finding that an accepted model of language use offers certain advantage to pre-

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defined lines of thinking and ways of behavior (1956: 134-5), goes further to the formal modeling the universal nature of internal language structures and the study of political communication in the fashion of Chomsky, and can be traced to the understanding of language as social semiotics based on a complex of linguistic features of the text (Halliday & Hasan 1978). Another possible line for generating related ideas can start from the pragmatic theories of John Austen, Searle and Grice, and their rereading in the current contexts. Of particular interest to the purpose of the present analysis is Malinowsky’s concept “situational context” (1923) which is related to “environment of language functioning” introduced by Firth (1950). Later on Bernstein (1971) introduced the concept “regulative context” in his research of children’s socialization through language where he analysed typical speech situations. Sociolinguistic extrapolations on the notion of “communicative context” by Del Heims and Laboff are of fundamental importance. This line leads once more to Noam Chomsky’s understanding of the “nature of language” and hence to a mentalist approach to the procedures of translating. Somewhere between theoretical linguistics and theories of culture another layer of insights relates the discussion of Husserl, Jaspers, Gadamer, Paul Ricoer, Derrida, about the problems of intersubjectivity, truth and textuality. Theories of communication from the 2nd half of the 20th century draw on the works of Howland, Kelley, Wilbur Schram, Claud Shannon etc. To all the above theoretical lines we can add Rhetoric in its traditional understanding as the study and the art of persuasive public discourse and in particular the latest development in the project of Van Eemeren and Grootendorst from the end of the 20th century (Eemeren 2001; Eemeren– Grootendorst 1994). None of the listed seven possible lines of theoretical approach to our area of interest, e.g. the communicative situation, however, does touch directly upon its specific existence as communicative situation relying on translation, and, consequently, the theory of translation is neglected as a partner in interdisciplinary search. That has a further effect upon limiting the capacity of Translation Theory to a prescriptive applied study of procedures to be delegated to machines rather than a complex study of the mind procedures occurring in the human translator while mediating an interlingual communicative situation.

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On its part the theory of translation which in its deepest grounds relies on the theory of meaning can provide but scarce reference concerning the detailed study of the communicative situation of translation where the leading agent is the human translator: e.g. R. Brislin (1972), R. Copeland (1991), Hatim—Mason (1997), Ⱥ. Pym (1992), D. Robinson (2003ɚ), C. Wadensjö (1999), W. Wilss (1996) and a few more researchers into the general translation theory. Having in mind the fundamental theoretical sources mentioned above, and adopting the premise that each situation of translation is in essence intercultural exchange, we shall next proceed with outlining a complex approach to its study as translation procedure, as a specific kind of communication with its own ethos, and as cultural intercourse aiming at equivalence of meaning of the source and target message. The specific area this complex approach refers to is “intercultural rhetoric of translation” (see also Apostolova: 1998, 1999, 2005). The chosen complex approach to the study of the communicative situation of translation gives the translator the central role as the mediator of the intercultural exchange. The whole history of translation reflects the effort of thousands of translators to achieve equivalence of the intentionality of a source text and the acceptability of the target text in translation where the product seems to dominate over the other elements of the situation warranted its visible supremacy by the principle of invisibility of the translator. The theoreticians of translation have always been interested in the translator: Nida discerns the three functional types: the pioneer, the midwife and the team mate; Van Hoof focuses on the psycho-physical characteristics and the translator’s ethics; Sider Florin debates on the translator’s creativity; D. Robinson extrapolates on learning and mnemonic techniques. They all, though, direct their analyses along the line of professional training of translators with the perspective of the perfection of the product of translation. Although translators sign their target texts and bear professional responsibility for their translation as has been the practice for at least the latest hundred years, and independently of the recognition and preference for certain masters of translation, it is a fact that the frontier linguistic research if directed towards the replacement of the human translator with the perfect automated device through creating the ideal situation as an average of the ideal static monolingual and monocultural communicative situation.

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Still, the translator is the professional linguist who holds the keys to human intercultural performance, achieving—to a singular for each case degree—the essence of linguistic effort: the encoding, reencoding and decoding of human meanings within the accessible language systems. The specific perspective of the translator today then can be the combination of professional pride, personal involvement with the management of intercultural project, and satisfaction with one’s work: the features that make the translator the real subject in the situation of translation and not only an invisible processor of the desired target text. While a professional translator is bound to the orders of the employer, the human essence of the professional individual needs to integrate the need of a job with the perspective of personal existence. (Robinson 2003: 22) Even Robinson seems content with the mere statement of this need without leaving the grounds of the applied study directed towards the training of translators and focusing on the types of learning and memorizing, no on intercultural mediation as a complex of communicative skills. (Robinson 2003) Even today the practices of translation show that automated translation has just embarked on the road to perfection as far as the role of the human individual is concerned in the functioning of the subject of the communicative situation of translation. It is the human multilingual linguist who takes on the responsibility of the equivalence of the cultural information in each separately taken and unique in itself situation of translation-mediated communication, because the human individual possesses the ability to adjust diverse language pictures (discussed at large by M. Pencheva 2001) to the dynamics of the situational context generated in the intercultural communicative space. At least this is true by far for the human intercourse across cultures. To put it in a concise way, the translator is the agent of the communicative situation of translation who plays the role of active mediator of the situational context which is generated around the dynamics of active text as the main tool for achieving cultural equivalence. Now we have to outline the differentia specifica of the communicative situation of translation and its general pattern; define the functional characteristics of the translator and trace the possible levels of cultural equivalence achievable through the application of the mechanisms of translation applied for the adjustments of the situational context.

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5.5 Definition of Key Concepts The concept of “communicative situation of translation” views a specific case in the understanding of a communicative situation, involving the reality created by the interaction of an encoder and a decoder by means of a message where the process is mediated by a translator/interpreter and results in the translation of the message. As far as cultural mediation acquires its sense in human intercourse, the translator will be in the focus of our concern as a human individual who holds the keys to both ends of interlingual exchange. Our understanding of the communicative situation of translation is based on Eugene Nida’s concept of the “dynamic dimensions” of translation, the complex idea of “situational context” and the principle of “the translator’s invisibility”. While Nida’s theory serves as the premise for the present study, Malinowsky’s idea outlines the frontiers of its subject, and the “invisibility” principle contains the ethos of translation. Eugene Nida and the Dynamic Dimensions in Translation: the grounds for studying translation as a communication genre. In his book Towards a Science of Translation Nida studies in close detail the opposition between the “dynamic” and the “static dimensions of translation” (Nida 1964), defining the former as the communicative aspect of translation. Nida relates the dynamics to the translator’s activity through the semantic aspects of the target text seen as the message in the communicative situation in the relation of author—target text— recipient—which is one of the possible communicative triangles in a more complex pattern of intercourse. Nida is far from neglecting the role of the translator: for him the translator is the agent who provides equivalence or ‘correspondence’ in the dynamic and static adjustment of the language performance between the source and the target texts. It can be said, though, that for Nida the question of the cultural equivalence does not concern the situational context in its non-verbal aspects besides the usual translation procedures. Nida also views translation as a target text, accepted by the target culture as a single task of the translator (machine or human, an individual or a team). Intercultural mediation could be seen as a lateral effect of the professional activities of the translator. If we want to get further in time and the changing significance of the human individual for the procedures of translation, we need to get beyond the traditional criteria of professionalism and see the translator as a

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bilingual expert capable of managing human intercourse across languages and cultures. Where in the situational context is cultural transfer taking place. Situational context is based on the functioning of every non-verbal agent that affects the meaning of the verbal produce in the communicative situation. When he discusses the training of translators in terms of their abilities to associate, memorise, and recover information, Robinson de facto outlines the parameters of the situational context, defining it as “the environment in which a certain thing exists or occurs” and in view of which the translator “contextualises a word or a phrase”. Robinson, also discusses “physical and cultural contexts” (Robinson 2003: 53) Situational context “physically” affects our senses. Neurolinguistic models define three basic forms of the information we get through our senses: visual, audio, and touch-movement. We can rely on this division while keeping in view their inner and outside elements for the subject of communication. (Jensen 1995: 135-6) In the system of rhetoric they are studied by the specialized areas of kinesics, proxemics and neorhetoric, which approach all non-verbal types of achieving effect on the mind structures of the recipient. According to Bennett (Bennett 1993: 29) the stages of acculturation or cultural adaptation of members of one culture to different cultural environment (Ⱥpostolova 2001) include negation or isolation, defence or superiority, minimization of effort or physical and transcendental domination, acceptance or respect for the different values and behavior, adapting or empathy and pluralism, integrating or contextual evaluation and constructive marginality. The former three are characterized as ethnocentric, while the latter three—as ethno-relative. Robinson adapts these six steps to his translation theory: ethnocentrism is the refusal to communicate outside the boundaries of a definite culture; intercultural tolerance is manifested in the cases of monolingual communication with individuals from a foreign culture who can speak the language and learn how to interpret and tolerate cultural differences; integration is the ability to adapt easily to the foreign culture on the grounds of being fluent in its language and being familiar with its specific traits; translation is the ability to mediate cultures, to explain each of them to the other one, and to take on responsibility to both sides. (Robinson 2003: 195) He reaches further drawing the conclusion that the research into the field of translation starts where intercultural research ends. In that case the

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ultimate goal of intercultural studies and training is the training of translators. (Ibid.) This conclusion can be next directed to the translator viewed as the central agent in intercultural communication who mediates intercultural understanding in the communicative situation. Cultural transfer has been an object of research of the latest studies of translation published at the turn of the millennium. They have outlined the cultural systems which control translation and define the norms, criteria and procedures in the translation practices—and have reached an agreement in stating that translation is always dependent on the target culture: Snell-Hornby (1995), Delabastita & D’Hulst (1993), Hermans (1985). If we accept the above statement, we also have to agree to the next one, e.g. that the equivalence in translation is a function from the beliefs, values, language convention and literary standard, moral norms and political theory of the target culture. In 1992 A. Lefevere in his book Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame approached translation from the viewpoint of the relativist turn of the general translation theory from universal to culturally determined forms and norms of translation. It is an attempt to turn away from generalized prescriptions, and clear the route for the descriptive presentation of the target cultures and their effect and control over translation. In the 1980s and 1990s specialized translation studies appear oriented towards certain cultures e.g. feminist, post colonial, etc. (Robinson 2003: 196). R. Jacquemond introduces the terms “hegemonic” cultures and “dominated” cultures: then the direction of translation is defined by the hegemonic culture even in the cases when it is the source and needs the translation. In such cases the translator becomes “authoritative mediator”. (Jacquemond 1992: 156) Dominated cultures inevitably translate more than the hegemonic cultures. Only 1-2 % from the works translated into the languages of the West are from the cultures of the East, while 98-99 % from the works translated into the languages of the East are from western cultures. In the USA 1/20 of the books are translations, in continental Europe 1/3 to ½. Much of the world recognized writers from the East, in fact, write in English. When the hegemonic culture translates a text from the dominated culture, this text is accepted as difficult, strange, incomprehensible, esoteric, while the dominated culture translates the texts from the hegemonic culture into mass accessible form.

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Hegemonic culture chooses to translate works by authors who comply with its own ideas. Consequently, the authors from the dominated cultures who want to achieve broader popularity, adopt to a great degree the stereotypes of the hegemonic culture. (Jacquemond 1992: 139-158)

5.6 Ivisibility of the Translator: Ambivalence of the Translator’s Presence Lawrence Venuti who discusses in detail the mechanisms for achieving “invisibility of the translator” (The Translator’s Invisibility, 1994) advises translators to apply strategies for adjusting the text to the target culture (‘foreignizing’) rather than strategies directed to the source culture (‘domesticating’). Such an approach complies with the idea of domination and makes use of the pragmatic principle of charity in a rather perverse way: it deprives the end cultures (which might not be direct target either) of exchange outside translation while translation hides both the source and the translator. Professionalism in that case is dependent only on the interest in exercising the craft within certain macro policies that have ordered the translation. As far as human intercourse overflows existing norms and forms, an ideal state is possible within limited spell. Language is not static while it is a living language in use. Human talk contains silence as one of its expressive tools. The diverse aspects of cultural transfer have ambivalent significance for the application of the “invisibility” principle. The translator as a mediator of the intercultural talk in a single situation works at microlinguistic level where applying specific verbal and non-verbal techniques leads the agents of the exchange to a common field and neutralizes their differences by creating a communicative reality of cultural compatibility based on the contextual features of the situation e.g. purpose, stage of negotiation, time and space, interests, etc. Before we discuss the techniques of adjustment and the mechanisms used in translation for reating cultural compatibility, we need to revise the elements of the communicative situation in its specific occurrence as translation-mediated intercourse. In other words we need to establish the agents of the situation which can be used by the translator for achieving the desired final product in an immediate exchange. It is generally accepted among the instructors of translation and interpretation that the word is the translator’s unit. The words in a language have their specific lives. In terms of cultural context the words are loaded with values, symbolic power, practices and rituals. In order to

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achieve invisibility, a translator needs to have the control over the words of the target language. Before stepping into the communicative situation of translation, a translator is bound to have sufficient competence in at least two languages and a couple of performance skills. We take these for granted and continue with what a trained translator can expect from a communicative situation.

5.7 The Communicative Situation of Translation: Specifics Doubling the Encoder and the Message Translation and translating can both be seen as the function and the product of specific communicative situation. Let us take the basic model of the communication triangle of Ivor Richards as a starting ground. Next we can build it on with the simplified structure of translation i.e. the translator and the Target text. In the traditional model the encoder is doubled as is the message. This adds a new dimension to the figure. The recipient or addressee remains the same but is involved in new relations: simultaneous perception of the author and the source text and the translator and the target text plus the message in the source language as well as in the target language when the addressee is bilingual; perception of the author and the target text in the situation of translation; perception of the source text and the target text in analysis of the written translation; perception of the author, the target text and the presence of the translator in cases of modulation of the communicative situation. Time and place also matter extending the typology of the situation e.g. when the translation is occurring to an old text used by the speaker; or, when the translator is delegated the role of a speaker while the author is present at the time of the exchange, etc. It is easy to calculate the possible triangles and complete the set of cases determined by the number of the agents in the situation and the situational features such as time, place, and manner of conducting it. Of primary importance for the training of translators are the relations between the author, the source text, the translator and the target text. A simplified model, however, is bound to expose only the relations between the agents in the common communicative situation where dependencies and dominance are not shown.

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Fig. 3.5.9 A random model of a communicative situation of translation

Author

ST

Ttanslator

TT

I-reality

User of Translation (Addressee: reader, listener) The specific features of the communicative situation of translation are in the doubling of the encoder of the message which gives rise to a number of attitudes as seen in a spatial model of the contextual reality. The encoder of the message is the author or the speaker; ST stands for the source text; TT stands for the target text; Translator stands for the translator or interpreter; human or machine, individual or team, human aided by automated translator; User of translation stands for the addressee or recipient who can be a reader or listener, belonging to the source or to the target culture.

Verbal and Non-verbal Cultural Transfers The above model, simplified as it might seem, contains intercultural transfer: the languages and the cultures involved in the translation are contained respectively in the message form as a ST or TT, and in the encoder and decoder of the message. The analysis of each single communicative situation starts with isolating the agents and the relations they form within an initial reduced model. The next step will be to establish the attitudes and dependencies or the directions in the information flow and its nature. Non-verbal transfer includes the role of the translator on the one hand, and the cultural interferenceson the other

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hand. These are added to the tehnical parameters of the situation as well as to its time-space features. Last but not least is the degree of professionalism vs the degree of psychological stimulation and effect.

Space-time equivalence of the situational and cultural contexts From the translator’s perspective the situation can be remodeled to show the translator as subject of the communication, not merely as a mediator in terms of language transfer. The physical presence of the translator whose human intellectual capacity is the main agent in the intercourse, makes the role of that agent stand in the broader area between the invisible presence to the creative partnership in managing the situation to a successful end. The choice of behavior and the professional use of the time and space as aids in the formation of shared cultural field where all agents feel involved, as well as the ability of decision-making, give freedom to the human translator to cope with unfamiliar aspects or with problems that need human interference. The translator’s mediation of the time-space equivalence of context is the third specific feature of the communicative situation of translation carried out by a human mediator. This is an inverted plan where the translator’s awareness of the situation allows directing the information flow along contextual paths of accentuated meaning of micro-elements. The situation thus is focused on the art of intercultural dialog while the freedom of choice for the activities of the translator make it an object of interest for intercultural rhetoric. The figure can be reconstructed to fit a concrete situation with definite accents on lines of controlled info-flow. With the development of the global translator the nature of the work done by the translator is inevitably to change, leaving constant features to the automated aspects of communication, and requiring the language expertise of the human mediator at a hyper-communicative level.

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Fig. 3.5.10 Random modulation of situational elements by the “invisible translator”

Technical support

Place Time

Initiator of translation Addressee Text

Target Text

Author Translator

The semantic conections can from realities of varying priority which have specific spatial expressions where the elements of activated situation bear different meanings for the agents. This figure contains some of the main interdependencies within the multiple dimensions of the communicative situation of translation. It can further be applied for sociocultural modeling of the communicative situation of translation where cultural compatibility is achievable through translation and interpreting. The shift of the elements of culture (values, symbols, heroes and rituals) within the latest 20 years in Bulgaria has produced quite an experience and a vast ground for experiment into the dynamics of our language itself. A spatial model of semantic fields seems to be closer to the idea of cloud, which is what corresponds to the multi modal web environment that supports translation today. Translators need training into both their source culture and their target culture. (Robinson 2003: 186) To this purpose we need an efficient database recording system of cultural shift and correspondent dynamics of

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language. This and the typology of the individual situations of translation are our further tasks.

Modulations of the communicative situation by the translator Due to its specific parameters simultaneous translation technically limits the modulation of the situation yet the translators are left to their own resources of coping with unexpected agents. Semi-official business translation, on the contrary, requires the immediate involvement of the translator in the contextual reality. A communicative situation of translation can be partly or entirely modulated by the translator. The techniques of adjustment of the communicative situation of translation are not thoroughly recorded in the theories of translation and this is due mainly to the unwillingness of translators to share the secrets of the craft.

The Relativity of the criteria for evaluating a translation A good or bad translation is not the same as an efficient translation. The latter complies with the order and is situationally dependent. Within a bigger socio-cultural perspective, though, a successful translation serving to anti humane or socially unacceptable purpose cannot be evaluated as ‘a good translation’, and vice versa, a translator’s refusal to carry on with such task cannot be evaluated as ‘bad’. Translator’s ethos is not limited to professional purposes only. The incompleteness of the situation in terms of the role of each of its agents and their significance for the fulfillment of its purpose, finally reflects upon the ways of its mediation and the techniques for its adjustment by the translator or the interpreter. Here are ten examples of translator’s interference with the situational parameters.

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Table 3.5.9 Actual Situations of Translation: Features and Evaluation Situation

Description

Business Talks

Specific features Initiator is fluent in the TL The role of the translator Saves time for thinking during the negotiation Negotiated/expected modulation Extending the text, adding detailed explanation for each issue, repeating certain items

Business Talks

Specific features Initiator is monolingual; talks too much; repeats information; requires change of translator; demands that TT should be as long as ST The role of the translator Leading to economically successful negotiation Negotiated/expected modulation First translator compresses repeated information No other interference Specific features Culturally incompatible ST made clear within the time of presentation by nonverbal techniques The role of the translator The translator is entitled to negotiate Negotiated/expected modulation Required to translate exactly culturally improper text Specific features The translator has been instructed how to negotiate in the TL The role of the translator Translator hands out the TT text and repeats it Negotiated/expected modulation Translator required to stop reading and involved into a broader conversation

Official Dinner

Official Dinner

Translator’s Activity Translator’s creativity: varied information, new information, comments.

Second translator also avoids repetitions but fills in with additional information about the employing company

Refusal to do so having a positive effect on the recipients

Replaces repeated information with new information for which bears individual responsibility

308 Academic business conference

Science Conference

Marriage ceremony

International football match

Interpreting during a TV show

Academic Meeting

Book III Chapter Five Specific features Chair of meeting orders translator aloud when to start or stop translating The role of the translator Translating for colleagues from a foreign university Negotiated/expected modulation Stopped by order Specific features Non-professional interpreter from Bulgarian and Russian into English The role of the translator Mediator of information flow Negotiated/expected modulation Summaries of the conference papers Specific features Interpreter has never heard or read the ritual text The role of the translator Official mediator in a ceremony Negotiated/expected modulation Exact translation Specific features International referee does not speak English well but requires only restatement of accepted official speech formulae The role of the translator Translator assists the International referee Negotiated/expected modulation To take care of the I.R. Specific features Changing of register and idiom The role of the translator High class of professional translator Negotiated/expected modulation Required to translate “ɥɚɩɚɞ” into English Specific features There are anecdotes in the ST Part of the audience is bilingual The role of the translator The translator is of very high professional class Negotiated/expected modulation To preserve the brilliance and humor of the ST

Filling in for the gaps with light conversation on current topics of interest

Giving the recipient pauses for relaxation; avoiding details from the Russian text. Interrupts the Reader and demands repetition of some parts of the text.

Replaces vulgar register with polite language

Replaces “ɥɚɩɚɞ” (dock) with “ɫɩɚɧɚɤ” (spinach) which is compatible with the TC practices Translator tells anecdotes by analogy from both cultures

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Conclusions 1. Situation provides the active contextual infrastructure for cultural transfer. 2. In every single situation the translator has varying limitations to free modulation of the situational context. 3. The situational context as an object of the translator’s modulation based on the translator’s choice of target language pattern is in the focus of intercultural rhetoric studies. 4. The dynamic dimensions of translation can be approached on the grounds of establishing the features of the communicative situation of translation and its typology as a complex indicator of the quality of intercourse and the degree of intercultural compatibility. 5. A systematic study of the communicative situation of translation has both interdisciplinary and methodological challenges concerning the perfection of translating technology and the training of human experts in translation. Placing the human individual in the focus of translation studies is only natural because the human expert of translation is the final mediator of cultural inequivalence in situational context, which underlies intercultural existence.

5.8 The Dynamic Dimensions in Translation Theory in its individual applications is still insufficient due to the human factor in translating. People have their individual mental states which make a text travel between moods and stages of maturity. What database is to the web linguist, experience is for a human. Situational parameters of objective and subjective nature play a substantial role for the shades of the communicative value of the message. Our senses can interpret the same setting in a different way. Despite the requirement for the invisibility of the translator, there are still unexplored areas concerning the perceptual value of language structures where a translator’s choice produces individual contexts and adds them to the layers of meaning within a message. Eugene Nida has developed the theory of the dynamic dimensions of translating and has left it open for dynamic application to single-case study.

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Tasks: Here is a text I wrote once and a group on my MA translation studies students did in English. Maybe I would not have translated it in this way, but I liked their Target Text for it sees my movie behind the text. It is evident that the TT is much longer than the ST. Read the two excerpts and count the sentences and the words. Underline the added words in the TT. Underline the parts of the TT that you recognize as translator’s paratext. Isolate the units that bear linguistic change. Now cover the TT and try to make your own translation. Be ready to defend it. Compare the two target texts. What parts of the TTs can be recognized as ‘static equivalents’ to the ST? What aspects of the TTs bear ‘dynamic equivalence’ with the ST Table 3.5.10 Source text/Target text analysis assignment ST

TT

Ɍɚɦ, ɤɴɞɟɬɨ ɢɝɪɚɟɥɢ ɫɚɦɨɞɢɜɢɬɟ, ɬɪɟɜɚɬɚ ɩɨɥɹɝɚɥɚ ɜ ɤɪɴɝ. Ⱥɤɨ ɦɢɧɟɲ ɩɪɟɡ ɤɪɴɝɚ, ɫɟ ɪɚɡɛɨɥɹɜɚɲ. Ɇɟɠɞɭ ɝɚɛɴɪɢɬɟ ɩɴɤ ɛɟɡɲɭɦɧɨ ɫɟ ɞɜɢɠɟɥɢ ɦɚɥɤɢ ɫɢɜɢ ɱɨɜɟɱɟɬɚ, ɨɛɴɪɧɟɲ ɫɟ—ɧɹɦɚ ɧɢɳɨ—ɩɪɨɫɬɨ ɫɬɚɪɢ ɨɛɥɢ ɤɚɦɴɧɢ—ɝɪɚɧɢɬ ɫ ɥɢɲɟɢ. ȼ ɞɭɩɤɢɬɟ ɫɟ ɲɦɭɝɜɚɥɢ ɧɹɤɚɤɜɢ ɠɢɜɨɬɢɧɤɢ ɫ ɛɥɟɫɧɚɥɢ ɨɱɟɬɚ. ɉɨɧɹɤɨɝɚ ɢɡɥɢɡɚɥɚ ɟɞɧɚ ɩɪɟɫɬɚɪɹɥɚ ɡɦɢɹ ɫ ɤɴɪɩɚ ɢ ɩɪɟɞɥɚɝɚɥɚ ɧɚ ɦɢɧɭɜɚɱɢɬɟ ɞɚ ɣ ɜɡɟɦɚɬ ɤɴɪɩɚɬɚ, ɞɚ ɹ ɪɚɡɬɜɨɪɹɬ ɜ ɲɢɲɟɧɰɟ ɢ ɞɚ ɥɟɤɭɜɚɬ ɜɫɢɱɤɢ ɛɨɥɟɫɬɢ ɫ ɧɟɹ. ɇɢɤɨɣ ɧɟ ɩɨɫɦɹɥ— ɞɚɥɢ ɡɚɳɨɬɨ ɡɦɢɹɬɚ ɛɢɥɚ ɬɨɥɤɨɜɚ ɫɬɪɚɲɧɚ, ɢɥɢ ɡɚɳɨɬɨ ɟ ɫɬɪɚɲɧɨ ɞɚ ɢɦɚɲ ɥɟɤɚɪɫɬɜɨ, ɤɨɟɬɨ ɥɟɤɭɜɚ ɜɫɢɱɤɨ? ɂɦɚɥɨ ɢ ɞɠɭɞɠɟɬɚ ɫ ɞɴɥɝɢ ɛɪɚɞɢ ɢ ɲɚɪɟɧɢ ɲɚɩɤɢ—ɬɟ ɨɬɝɨɜɚɪɹɥɢ ɡɚ ɛɢɥɤɢɬɟ.

Where the wood maidens used to dance the grass fell in circles and if one happened to walk into a circle, one fell seriously ill. Small grey manikins moved noiselessly under the bushes. They were there behind your back but whenever you turned round you could see only old round stones: granite with patches of golden lichen. There was also some smaller stock squeezing from under your feet and into the holes, and from the darkness inside their eyes sparkled. At times an ancient snake emerged from some weird place and used to stop those who tramped the wild roads and offer them to take off her head cloth, which dissolved into a bottle of water, would cure any disease on earth. However, no one dared do it and we cannot be certain about the reason: either the snake was so frightful and they feared death or they feared a cure to all diseases and having to make the right choice as to who should be cured to live. There were also dwarfs with long beards and colourful pointed hats. They took care of the herbs.

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Table 3.5.11 The sentence as a unit of translation No of Sentence

1

Source Text

Target Text

Ɍɚɦ, ɤɴɞɟɬɨ ɢɝɪɚɟɥɢ ɫɚɦɨɞɢɜɢɬɟ, ɬɪɟɜɚɬɚ ɩɨɥɹɝɚɥɚ ɜ ɤɪɴɝ.

Where the wood maidens used to dance the grass fell in circles and if one happened to walk into a circle, one fell seriously ill.

2

Ⱥɤɨ ɦɢɧɟɲ ɩɪɟɡ ɤɪɴɝɚ, ɫɟ ɪɚɡɛɨɥɹɜɚɲ.

3

Ɇɟɠɞɭ ɝɚɛɴɪɢɬɟ ɩɴɤ ɛɟɡɲɭɦɧɨ ɫɟ ɞɜɢɠɟɥɢ ɦɚɥɤɢ ɫɢɜɢ ɱɨɜɟɱɟɬɚ, ɨɛɴɪɧɟɲ ɫɟ—ɧɹɦɚ ɧɢɳɨ— ɩɪɨɫɬɨ ɫɬɚɪɢ ɨɛɥɢ ɤɚɦɴɧɢ—ɝɪɚɧɢɬ ɫ ɥɢɲɟɢ

Small grey manikins moved noiselessly under the bushes. They were there behind your back but whenever you turned round you could see only old round stones: granite with patches of golden lichen.

4

ȼ ɞɭɩɤɢɬɟ ɫɟ ɲɦɭɝɜɚɥɢ ɧɹɤɚɤɜɢ ɠɢɜɨɬɢɧɤɢ ɫ ɛɥɟɫɧɚɥɢ ɨɱɟɬɚ.

There was also some smaller stock squeezing from under your feet and into the holes, and from the darkness inside their eyes sparkled.

5

ɉɨɧɹɤɨɝɚ ɢɡɥɢɡɚɥɚ ɟɞɧɚ ɩɪɟɫɬɚɪɹɥɚ ɡɦɢɹ ɫ ɤɴɪɩɚ ɢ ɩɪɟɞɥɚɝɚɥɚ ɧɚ ɦɢɧɭɜɚɱɢɬɟ ɞɚ ɣ ɜɡɟɦɚɬ ɤɴɪɩɚɬɚ, ɞɚ ɹ ɪɚɡɬɜɨɪɹɬ ɜ ɲɢɲɟɧɰɟ ɢ ɞɚ ɥɟɤɭɜɚɬ ɜɫɢɱɤɢ ɛɨɥɟɫɬɢ ɫ ɧɟɹ.

At times an ancient snake emerged from some weird place and used to stop those who tramped the wild roads and offer them to take off her head cloth, which dissolved into a bottle of water, would cure any disease on earth.

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6

ɇɢɤɨɣ ɧɟ ɩɨɫɦɹɥ—ɞɚɥɢ ɡɚɳɨɬɨ ɡɦɢɹɬɚ ɛɢɥɚ ɬɨɥɤɨɜɚ ɫɬɪɚɲɧɚ, ɢɥɢ ɡɚɳɨɬɨ ɟ ɫɬɪɚɲɧɨ ɞɚ ɢɦɚɲ ɥɟɤɚɪɫɬɜɨ, ɤɨɟɬɨ ɥɟɤɭɜɚ ɜɫɢɱɤɨ?

However, no one dared do it and we cannot be certain about the reason: either the snake was so frightful and they feared death or they feared a cure to all diseases and having to make the right choice as to who should be cured to live.

7

ɂɦɚɥɨ ɢ ɞɠɭɞɠɟɬɚ ɫ ɞɴɥɝɢ ɛɪɚɞɢ ɢ ɲɚɪɟɧɢ ɲɚɩɤɢ—ɬɟ ɨɬɝɨɜɚɪɹɥɢ ɡɚ ɛɢɥɤɢɬɟ.

There were also dwarfs with long beards and colourful pointed hats. They took care of the herbs.

5.9 Proper Names in a Translator’s Perspective It’s nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet. —W. Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet, Act 2 Scene 2 There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being. And we must think this without nostalgia. —Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy

Names, especially proper names, have been a subject of philosophical discussion ever since the dawn of man’s self-awareness as a subject to his own knowledge and socio-cultural practice. Without going too far back we could mention the names of Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, Lyotard, Lecercle, who have gone in their studies to the deepest grounds of language use as far as proper names are concerned as specific signifiers. S. Kripke in a series of lectures in the late 1940s (later on published as Naming and Necessity) discusses names from the aspect of modal logic and in view of the theory of models. He continues a line going back to the roots of Western culture which has studied naming in the structures of logical proposition, and continuing in the philosophies of Locke, Descartes, Russel, Frege and Searle.

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I shall not extrapolate on the philosophical approach to names here since our purpose is the practice of translation between Bulgarian and English. There are two aspects of the philosophy of naming, though, that raise questions about the motivation and awareness of a translator when approaching the richness of texts generated and reworded within the global cultural space of today. The first aspect refers to the concept of transworld identity, which Kripke sees from the prospects of its qualitative and quantitative definition. To use his example: Aristotle: “As a speaker of my idiolect (i.e. as a philosopher—G.A.), I call only one object ‘Aristotle’, though I am aware that other people, including the man I call ‘Onasis’ had the same given name. (Kripke: p. 8) Within the practical perspective of translation this aspect refers to the ambiguity of a context where a translator can be trapped between worlds of language use for building a text. Furthermore, we cannot always use translator’s notes for explaining contexts. That leads to the second question of practical value: the question about the sufficiency in introducing a name in a target text for the first time and each next mentioning. E.g. Whether Cicero is to be transcribed as ɋɢɫɟɪɨ by the translator of Shakespeare’s tragedies, or ɐɢɰɟɪɨɧ as is the usual pronunciation of that name in Bulgarian? There is no place for argument, however, because Shakespeare’s hero is sufficiently identified as the Ancient Roman philosopher. Any other approach would be a display of insufficient cultural competence by a translator. In the current age of intensive cross-cultural interaction and convergence of cultures names travel through the individual and social spaces of multilingual intercourse. In the multilingual existence of a text names undergo changes which sometimes lead to changed contexts and agents. There are sufficient theoretical grounds, tools, mechanisms and rules for their transformation, which can explain or prescribe the practice of a translator. Yet there are the more powerful rules of practice itself. The training of translators touches in its ends upon both the deepest levels of philosophy and the self-conscious illiteracy. Therefore it is important to look for and find out the practical grounds of the transformation of names in translation. In the flow of the context from the source text towards the target text in the process of translating, names stand as isles of secured equivalency of the agents of the discursive realization of the text. There are different approaches to securing this equivalency in terms of language

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transformation even in the time of the internationally applicable and directly used English spelling of famous names for the latter is a system of conventions bridging inequivalences of languages as containers of cultures. Although the translators today are supported by the conversion of cultures (which presupposes tolerable naming of cultural values), and by the compatibility of cross-cultural phonetics (which opens numerous pathways to the mechanisms of borrowing on all the levels of spoken and written language and language formation), they still have to look for the ‘proper’ mechanisms of name-transformation, and make choices. It is these choices we are interested in. It is curious that the transformation of names is generally neglected in the process of language training, as something given which just needs the correct transcription and transliteration. It becomes still more curious when one reads the papers of the students of all ages where names seem to be blank spots of meaning in the translated contexts even in the cases of otherwise bilingual fluency. Yet it is still stranger to trace the variations in the cross-cultural use of names even to unrecognizable realia in the professional translations of documents and books of all type and quality. A clearly-cut mechanism of transliteration and transcription seems to melt in the deep flow of individual choices and their motivations against the background process of the rapid transition of cultures, language-use habits and literacy, which has been taking place ever since the end of the 1980s. The fine-tuning of a translated text includes adjustment of the meaning of all the agents to the communicative situation realizing the purpose of the language use within the broader plan of the textual entity. Practically it involves the attitudes within the framework of the communicative situation where the names are no longer textual units of denotative nature but they carry the slight variations of meaning for the author, the translator, and the reader. The names themselves become keys to the texture of the self-realization of the discursive agents, the linkers in the textual progressive development, the most accessible concepts which limit the surface structure of the text to the basic criteria for its separate existence within the general framework of the infinite text of the human culture. In the training and cultivation of the ability for translating it is important to find motivation of choice since translation is the mediator of cultures and, what is more, nowadays it is the means of existence of smaller cultures within the field of bigger cultures. Hence, our task here is to explicate a typology of the choice motivation of name transformation in the English–Bulgarian and Bulgarian–English translation to the purposes of training of translators: capable, motivated, highly cultured, open to information and willing to present the Bulgarian

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cultural values to the world in most favorable form and vice versa, to introduce the world into Bulgarian without littering it with unnecessary borrowings. There are the basic rules of transcription and transliteration, displayed in the commonly applied in our country Transcription of the Bulgarian names into English and the English names into Bulgarian (Danchev 1982)—widely used by the authorities from the Ministry of Interior.Yet there is the translator’s choice in the cases of non-coinciding phonemes and this choice depends on pragmatic rather than on phonetic and phonological rules. Convention, phonological adaptation and individual speech habits provide relativity in the fixed grounds of “correctness” of the translation, which leads to uncertainty and de-motivation. Besides there are the numerous cases of translation of names which require competence in isolating the meaningful units, command of word formation patterns in the target language and insight. My colleague Svetla Tomanova has placed a specific accent on the onomastics as an aspect of translation studies (2013, 2011) doing parallel search in Bulgarian, Russian and English interferences. discreet The practice of translating and the huge experience of English– Bulgarian and Bulgarian–English translation provide sufficient corpora for isolating certain methodological principles of generally pragmatic character in the approach to the names in the translation. Since the approach adopted here is pragmatic, the systematic principle to follow would be a movement from the naming of the subject through the names for the predicate, the situation and the realities of context. Therefore the names in the translation are classified as: names of people, names of places, names of events and names of characters. There is also the question of the concrete outcome of the processes of nomination and de-nomination. Names are tender units of language focusing immediately on its essence. The handling of names is bridging meanings. Names are protolanguage forms; they are what words have been before they have become the expression of the communicative function of language, i.e. before they have acquired universal status. Names are the universal ambitions of the individual existence. Therefore names have difficulty in cross lingual transformation which always bears the risks of their slipping into universalia (or common words), blank spots (noise in the communication process), and into something else (e.g. a new individuality). The significance of the proper name has been subject of interest and discussion among the leading philosophers of the late 20th century. One of the philosophers of Postmodernity, Lyotard wrote:

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Book III Chapter Five “Anyone who tries to reflect on the historico-political reality today (as always) comes up against names—proper names. These names form part of the treasure of phrases that he has received in his share of language and that he must continue to develop by allowing new phrases to enter it. For we have all of us a sort of debt, or a sort of rivalry, with respect to names.” (Lyotard, 1992: 393)

If the context of Lyotard is applied to the basic concepts of modern text linguistics concerning the criteria of textuality, we may continue to state that names are the cohesive units of a textual reality, they carry the intentionality of the text between its agents, they are the major infrastructure units of intertextuality, they make a text accessible. They are sufficient in themselves for building contexts and enclosing the essences of messages. Being so common, they are the markers of individuality. Lyotard continues with concrete illustration: “These proper names have the following remarkable property: they place modern historical or political commentary in abeyance. Adorno pointed out that Auschwitz is an abyss in which the philosophical genre of Hegelian speculative discourse seems to disappear, because the name ‘Auschwitz’ invalidates the presuppositions of that genre, namely that all that is real is rational, and that all that is rational is real.” (Lyotard, 1992: 393)

Further, Lyotard explicates on the discursive value of names, which is a feature of primary importance for the translator, who works amidst the deep structures of a text: “A child or an immigrant enters into a culture by learning proper names. He has to learn the names used to designate relatives, heroes (in the broad sense of the word), places, dates and, I would add, following Kripke, units of measure, of space, of time and of exchange value. These names are ‘rigid designators’; they signify nothing or can, at least, acquire different and debatable significations; they can be linked to sentences from totally heterogeneous regimes (descriptive, interrogative, ostensive, evaluative, prescriptive, etc.) and they can be included in incommensurate discursive genres (cognitive, persuasive, epideictic, tragic, comic, dithyrambic, etc.). Names are not learned in isolation; they are embedded in little stories. The advantage of a story is, I repeat, that it can contain within it a multiplicity of heterogeneous families of discourse, provided that it expands, so to speak. It arranges them into a sequence of events designated by the culture’s proper names.This organization has a high degree of coherence… “ (Lyotard, 1992: 319-320)

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The names participate in the building of the textual reality. There is the example of Andre Marcel d’Ans who writes: “Amongst the Cashinahua, any interpretation of a miyoi (myth, tale, legend or traditional piece of writing) begins with a set formula: “This is the story of… as I have always heard it told. In my turn I will tell it to you. Listen to it.” And the recitation invariably ends with another formula: “Here ends the story of … He who told you was … (Cashinahua name), who is known to the whites as (Spanish or Portugese name).”…In order to hear these stories, one must have been named (all males and prepubertal girls can listen). In order to tell them, one must have been named (only men can tell stories). In order to have a story told about one (to be a referent), one must have been named… By putting the names into stories, narration protects the rigid designators of a common identity from the events of the ‘now’, and from the dangers of what follows on from it. To be named is to be recounted. In two ways: every story, no matter how anecdotal it may seem, reactivates names and nominal relations. And by repeating that story, the community reassures itself as to the permanence and legitimacy of its world of names thanks to the recurrence of that world in stories. And certain stories are explicitly about the giving of names.” (in Lyotard, 1992: 320)

Names are language events and they bear the essential characteristic feature of language: they are signs. Yet there is certain specifics to these signs: “The name is a special kind of sign which coincides with the concept. As such it has been the object of study of philosophy, logic and semiotics. Hegel discusses it as an obstacle to the absolute systematization of signs. The logicians Frege and Russel regarded it as a problem to logicians since it refers to a single reference and does not appear exchangeable against other terms in the logico-linguistic structure. The proper name is not bound in a system of general signs. It points outward. It is a deictic category. It either has no connotations at all or has an interminable number of them.” (after Lyotard, 1992: 12)

The problems in the transformation of names between English and Bulgarian through the mechanisms of translation, transliteration and transcription are pointed out in the detailed research Bulgarian Transcription of English Names (Danchev: Ⱥ. Ⱦɚɧɱɟɜ, Ȼɴɥɝɚɪɫɤɚ ɬɪɚɧɫɤɪɢɩɰɢɹ ɧɚ ɚɧɝɥɢɣɫɤɢ ɢɦɟɧɚ, ɋ, 1982, ɇɚɪɨɞɧɚ ɩɪɨɫɜɟɬɚ). In the first place they lie in the lack of a unified system for intralanguage transcription of the English language. Another problem lies in the relations between the mechanisms of transliteration and transcription which depend

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on the dependencies of the written and spoken language (Danchev 1982: 23). And I would add: on our likes and dislikes, our refusal to hear, our cultural stubborness even: reasons and motivation of emotive (ethic and pathetic) nature. In earlier years written language dominated over spoken forms while nowadays spoken language has gained greater significance. A third problem comes from the major phonological and phonetic differences of the two languages (Danchev 1982 :24). Incompetence still remains the basic problem (Danchev 1982 :25). The question whether the transcription of the English names should be invariable (Danchev 1982 :31) in the context of the established dependencies of the two language is not simply a matter of improving the translators’ literacy because the existence of dialects and variations of the English language makes it impossible to achieve uniformity. (Danchev 1982 :33) This is a further argument in support of finding proper motivation for the translator’s choice. And last but not least is the argument that “it is often forgotten that apart from its communicative functions language has aesthetic functions’ and ‘combinations of letters or sounds which are natural for one language” might be ‘strange, unacceptable, even unnatural for another language’. (Danchev 1982 :36) There is also the rule that the culture of bilingualism demands that each language be used without allowing interferences of another language’. The latter rule has been violated in the Web era, and has proven a matter of doubtful value in the aural and visual spaces of multimodal translation. Danchev makes a very important statement concerning the translator’s work: “The transcription of names is a problem rather of the target language than of the source language.” (Danchev 1982 :37). This is not a purely linguistic problem but is connected with the responsibilities of the translator: to the correctness of information (as far as the status of the name as textual element is concerned), to the clarity of language (as far as the rules for phonetic and phonologic transformations are applied), to the message (as far as the pragmatic purposes of the language variety used are concerned).

Names of people: the bilingual existence of the human individual An Italian brought his second baby to a northeastern Pennsylvania clergyman to be baptized: “Now,” he said, “you see you baptize him right. Last time I tell you I want my boy call ‘Tom’ you call him ‘Thomas’.

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This time I want him call ‘Jack’, I no want you call him Jackass!” —Pocheptsov, 1982: 227

The reasons for the diversity of transformation of names in the translation have been studied so far at the various levels of comparative studies and we shall only mention those of particular interest for this study: the individual specifics of articulation and transcription, the individual approach to transliteration, the individual taste, and the reading of translations (or what Nida would call ‘team work’ of the translators collaborating with those who had published translations before). However, here we are not interested in further investigation of the reasons. The focus of our study is the motivation grounds which could be worked out by the instructor and the trainees in the process of training of translators. This is a systematic approach, worked by the agents of each single case, to the formation of attitudes which are to serve as grounds for the motivation and the defense of a translator’s choice in the transformation of names. It refers directly to the grounds of language use for what is the primary functioning of language but naming. The transformation of names in the process of translating is as important as choosing names for real people. There is also the effect of hesitation in the transformation of names based on emotional barriers such as shame and fear of wrong naming. Names’ transformations are related to the mechanism of functioning of autobiographies and biographies: hierarchies differ because the textures of their building and their uses are grounded on different cohesive and coherent mechanisms and different interrelations even within the same intentional schemes. The biography approaches the person from the outside while the autobiography explicates the innermost connections of the individual and the specific attitudes with their individual emotive meanings. The name, adopted by the bearer, is the focus of the autobiography—the self-expression, while the name, given by the translator is the subject who has arisen from its otherness. Thus it bears additional information—it is the name used by the ‘others’ in the extreme functioning of their ‘otherness’ in the quality of ‘foreignness’. From a pragmatic point of view a transformed name, whether transliterated or changed, is bound to bear positive psychological load in all cases of its recognition by the bearer as belonging to his essential or extended Self - the actual self or its projections. Then Carnegie’s principle of the best sounding of one’s name is activated irrespective of the fact that it can be activated in purely psychological realities (Carnegie, D. How to Win Friends and Influence People, 1936). In the cases when the name is

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not recognized there arises a process of persuasion ending in conviction or rejection. Practically this means that the names of living people are transformed with the general consent of their bearers and the latter is a matter of successful defending of the transformation by the translator. Translation is introducing and names should not be treated as realia but as universalia e.g. universally valid notions of individuality. They can be isles of the past, they can be openings to a foreign land, and they can be patches of reality leading the psychoanalytician to the domain of the subconscious. Introduction is carried out in each single situation through a procedure which could generally be called renaming. Translation realized as renaming follows a variety of transformation paths: living people should have their names in that form which preserves their emotive meaning in terms of values understood as the individual attitude to the name in its quality of the expression of one’s individual motivation of personality. When a person hates his or her name, a foreign language gives a chance for re-naming: thus Danail becomes Dani, Nikolai Roudev becomes Nick Rud, Gergana becomes Gerry or Ganna, Donka becomes Dona etc. Practically this is used in the communicative classroom and in the suggestopedia as ELT methods—the participants in the learning situation choose names for themselves or are given such by the instructor and the classmates: Georgi becomes George, Catherine becomes Kate, Alexander becomes Alexander, Boyana becomes Bobby etc. Renaming can be further used as the vehicle to plot-building in roleplay with the purpose of acquiring the freedom of not exactly anonymity but rather of de-nonymity i.e. leaving the actual limitation of one’s personality and building up a virtual personality with new namelimitations: thus Emiliyan becomes Killer, Lora is Glory, Iveta is IvetoDiveto, Billiana is Bibby, Theodora is Dodo, Valeri is Blade, Andrei is Slade. There is the reverse procedure, e.g. the re-statement of one’s individuality: Lyubo is Lyubo, Svetla is Svetla, Stephen is Stephen. There is also the procedure of universalization: Boyana is Bobby, Boris is Bobby, Billiana is Bobby. It is simplification to the purpose of becoming part of the foreign-language speaking community where losing the uniqueness of one’s name is the price of ubiquity. Another motif for renaming is adopting a famous name thus putting on a model personality. A recent form of the renaming procedure is the use of the internet name, the e-mail address which is in most cases the virtual name

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representing the individual before the audience of the internet which can be considered a specific high quality community where the person preserves the essential features of his or her official name i.e. deni_angel. And last, but not least is the mechanism of initials: V.V.B., S.E.A., S.K., G.A., J.R.R. Tolkien, K.F.A. etc. The codification in such cases is more limiting. Like the previous one it creates the feeling of belonging to a community of connoisseurs. All the enumerated motifs and reasons for re-naming are the concrete manifestation of the dualism of the self and the other: the Self is being realized in the Other through the mechanism of renaming. This is the common ground for the choice to transform the names in the translated text in a way which puts forth their foreign nature—their ‘otherness’. This is valid also about the titles. Their transliteration decreases the acceptability of the text while at the same time it increases its relevance and informativity in terms of completion of the emotive meaning. “The names of persons whose saying (de dire) means individuality— the proper names among all those common names and topics—don’t they resist the dissolution of sense and don’t they help us speak?” The proper names bear the idea of the separate absolute entity in the sense of Hegel. (Emmanuel Levinas 1977: 8)

Historical figures, events and places Grandma Jackson and her young grandson were riding on a train. Grandma had dozed and suddenly she sat up. “What was that station the conductor called?” she asked the boy. “He didn’t announce any station; he just put his head in the door and sneezed.” “Get the bundles together quickly,” said grandma. “This is Oshkosh.” ------------------------Englishman: “Odd names your towns have. Hoboken, Weehawken, Oshkosh, Poughkeepsie.” American: “I suppose they do sound queer to English ears. Do you live in London all of the time?” Englishman: “No, indeed. I spend part of my time at Chipping Norton, and divide the rest between Bigglewade and Leighton Buzzard.” (G. G. Pocheptsov 1982: 225)

The special status of historical names is based on their existence as cultural realia. The names of people have acquired the meaning of a context e.g. all of the following names are linkers to specific historic

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meanings: Chaldeans (ɏɚɥɞɟɣɰɢ), Herodotus (ɏɟɪɨɞɨɬ), Caesar (ɐɟɡɚɪ), Jesus Christ (ɂɫɭɫ/ɂɢɫɭɫ ɏɪɢɫɬɨɫ), Celts (ɤɟɥɬɢ), Charlemagne (Ʉɚɪɥ ȼɟɥɢɤɢ), Bohemia (Ȼɨɯɟɦɢɹ, ɑɟɯɢɹ), Orthodox Church (ɂɡɬɨɱɧɨɩɪɚɜɨɫɥɚɜɧɚɬɚ ɰɴɪɤɜɚ), Hugh Capet (ɏɸɝɨ Ʉɚɩɟɬ), Thomas Aquinas (Ɍɨɦɚ Ⱥɤɜɢɧɫɤɢ), Cartesius (Ⱦɟɤɚɪɬ), Francesco Petrarca—Petrarch (Ɏɪɚɧɱɟɫɤɨ ɉɟɬɪɚɪɤɚ), Lorenzo the Magnificent (Ʌɨɪɟɧɰɨ ȼɟɥɢɤɨɥɟɩɧɢ), Pythagoras (ɉɢɬɚɝɨɪ), Mohammed (Ɇɨɯɚɦɟɞ), Boticelli (Ȼɨɬɢɱɟɥɢ), Boccaccio (Ȼɨɤɚɱɨ), Medici (Ɇɟɞɢɱɢ), Benvenuto Cellini (Ȼɟɧɜɟɧɭɬɨ ɑɟɥɢɧɢ), Erasmus of Rotterdam (ȿɪɚɡɴɦ Ɋɨɬɟɪɞɚɦɫɤɢ), Machiavelli (Ɇɚɤɢɚɜɟɥɢ), Nikolaus Koppernigk (Copernicus) (ɇɢɤɨɥɚɣ Ʉɨɩɟɪɧɢɤ), the Wailing Wall (ɋɬɟɧɚɬɚ ɧɚ ɉɥɚɱɚ), etc. Or Ⱥɫɩɚɪɭɯ, ɂɜɚɧ Ⱥɫɟɧ ȱȱ, Ʉɚɥɨɹɧ, Ʉɪɭɦ, ɉɚɢɫɢɣ, ɑɟɪɧɨɪɢɡɟɰ ɏɪɚɛɴɪ, Ɋɚɤɨɜɫɤɢ, Ʌɟɜɫɤɢ, Ɂɚɯɚɪɢ Ɂɨɝɪɚɮ, Ɇɚɬɟɣ Ɇɢɬɤɚɥɨɬɨ etc. In the translation they are transformed in agreement with the established cultural and phonetic and phonological rules. Sometimes traditional use of the names of historic figures is replaced by modern use, i.e. a British or American transcription is usually substituted for Latin transliteration. This might be interpreted as a kind of re-naming within the modern cultural context. Re-naming is re-reading of history, sometimes to the positive effect of cultural compatibility. Re-naming as a cultural loss could be gaining in ethics. Pronouncing the name is giving it a day’s life. History is not granted: it changes with the changes of cultures since it is an interpretation of the past always from the point of the present which is always a new one. A tradition fixes names, an ideology might demand changes, and the general cultural level /in terms of educational level and literacy/ might distort them to a situational convenience. Such is the case with names like Einstein (Ⱥɣɧɳɚɣɧ), Abraham Lincoln (Ⱥɛɪɚɯɚɦ Ʌɢɧɤɴɥɧ), Brezhnev (Ȼɪɟɠɧɟɜ), Cheng Kai Shek (ɑɚɧ Ʉɚɣ ɒɢ), Cathai (Ʉɢɬɚɣ) etc. The diversity of foreign names in the English–Bulgarian translation and vice versa is due to the different sources through which they have entered our history books: Greek, Turkish, Russian, Latin, German, French. Next these names, which are foreign to the English language as well, reenter our language through the English sources in a changed form. There is the interference of the English sounding to them. A similar transformation takes place with names from the British and American history which have entered our language through Russian or French or directly but in some previous phonological epoch in the development of our native tongue. It has been generally accepted that:

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“The extralinguistic factors in the transcription of foreign names have predominantly socio-linguistic nature and their explanation is commonly reduced to the role and importance of tradition… Tradition … exists objectively and can have strong impact on whether we accept or reject a given form.” (Danchev 1982 :41)

Now, however, a new generation of translators is being trained: a generation which has its own tradition which collides with that of the 1980s. It is no longer tradition which sets the rule but rather the lack of tradition: modern communication is no longer based on classical education but on internet and pragmatic neglect of history as such. The sounding of names is changing its 'objective' value, for the hearing of people who belong to the techno-oral culture is based on their experience, while, at the same time there are the great mass of weboutsiders who are also outsiders to the textual culture of the late 20th century. What they hear is not what my generation has been trained to 'hear' keeping in mind the rules of sound-production. It is predominantly experience-based and even with the web-experience it is different. When we search for a name on the WWW it is quite difficult for names are often replaced by nicks and combined with avatars. I was shocked when I first searched for my own name on the yahoo browser from the WiFi system at MIT: I found out I might be a sumo fighter, a racer, an AI engineer, someone interested in bio-engineering, and myself—all these in an order based on frequency of latest visists rather than on some other feature. Names as statistical units are quite provokative for a further research. Web designers have not reached much further, though, than the ancient peoples who established the individuality of a person by his name, father's name, place of birth and popular name. Thus, what we hear is not the best way to put down names: our hearing is individual and situation-dependent. We need to know how an individual says ans spells his or her name. Geography is much easier yet it can also bear specific local names based on pronunciation, communal habits of shortening or making a parody, and doubling. E.g. the locals from Kustendil always say: *Kyustendja city; Plovdiv is often transformed as *Gusto, myna, Philibyetooh, while the village of Nevestino is transformed into *Nesvestino. It is really disgusting when *Pazardjik is spelled Pazardzhik but for the local usage of the name as PazAr (meaning ‘marketplace’). The names of historical events are even tenderer than the names of persons, since they are connected with the involvement of masses. Events can be of various kinds: historic facts, customs and holidays, prizes: The Civil War, The Gold Rush, The Triassic Era, The Persian

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campaign, the perestroika, Haloween, Midsummer, Oscar, Pulitzer, Nobel Peace Prize, HMS Titanic, Endeavor etc. The names of places also raise the questions of compatibility in the process of crosscultural intercourse. While the naming of people is based on the opposition of the individual and the other, the naming of the places is shared experience of the strangers and the indigenous people. This is the collision of cultures where one and the same physical object exists in parallel cultural layers. Such are the cases with the French, English and German names of the same places; as well as with the places on the Balkans where places are not merely geographical space but temporal realities of branching historical self-awareness. Asia Minor, Troy, Loire, Gaul, Munich, Leyden, Suez, Byzantia, Babylon, Washington, Moscow, Montreal, Soho, the English Channel are crosscultural realia. The transcription of Leicester, Worcester, and Salisbury is not simply a problem of the target language; because it would entirely replace them with seemingly correct but in fact transliterated to the wrong effect words. We can go then back to the grounds of theory and look for the pragmatic motivation of this choice. In this respect we completely agree with G. Yule: “There appears to be a pragmatic connection between proper names and objects that will be conventionally associated, within a socioculturally defined community, with those names. Using a proper name referentially to identify any such objects invites the listener to make the expected inference (for example from name of writer to book by writer) and thereby show himself or herself to be a member of the same community as the speaker. In such cases, it is rather obvious that more is being communicated than is said.” (Yule 1996: 20)

The names which are historic realities should be carefully approached since the translation is their introduction to the intercultural space. They have to be indiscriminate. There are historic realities taking place at the same time and at the same place for different nationalities. A translator who is the representative of his or her national culture is bound to create bridging realities using paratext, explanatory notes, double references. Such is the case with the names from history which have entered our own language through Latin, German, French, Russian, Greek. Now they exist in the internet space and are accessible to everyone in an English textual environment: the younger generations meet many of the names in that way and since they have never before heard them pronounced, they

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read them applying the English phonetic system, e.g George Mikes, Don Juan etc. A professional translator is bound to have sufficient cultural and cross-lingual background. Often we cannot prevent an evident mistake from becoming popular. Then, what we have to do is find sufficient grounds for repeating it e.g. accepting it as a convention. One should also mind the generation gaps: the refusal of our elders to change their names: that would mean for them to erase parts of their past as subjective realities existing in their memories. A translator should therefore build up a third type of motivation of communicative or rather of diplomatic nature. There is the example of one of my students who carried out his international vocational training in the Council of Europe. He found it absurd that politicians from the older generations used to tell each other sentences like: “I’m flying to the Soviet Union”. He interrupted them and said: “Excuse me, but there is no such country now” and they laughed heartily. That proved to be a real shock to a young person who has an entirely different experience in a world, which, while remaining within the same map, has totally changed. For the older generations the present day is a hyper reality of at least three different times. A relaxed mind would accept that names travel through history and across cultures. A translator is to supply bridges. Business is our present. It does not operate with historical realia. Tourist industry does. There are also the names of places which travel through history: Istambul–Stambul, Tsarigrad (The city of the Kings), Constantinople; Odrin–Adrianovgrad, Adrianopolis, Edirne; Solun–Thessaloniki, Saloniki; Leningrad–Petersburgh, Peter, Petrograd. A translator is bound to produce indiscriminate translation of the cultural context. It is a manifestation of historical irresponsibility to replace one realia with another, e.g. Tsarigrad used to be for the Bulgarians something different from what Constantinople used to be for the Latin West, and they both are by no means equivalent to Istanbul. A translator is to operate with paratext, footnotes and endnotes which supply equivalency of the notions where equivalency of words is lacking. Let us take for illustration a translation of Botev’s poems into English by Kevin Ireland in the 1970s where Chavdar the Chieftan and Petko the Terror are known from Constantinople to Serbia. And that translation was blessed by a Bulgarian editor and national publisher (Sofia Press). I will not mention the other aspects of that ‘document’ which thoroughly fails to represent one of the peaks of the Bulgarian Renaissance. I dare argue with the long-established belief that a translator translates into one’s mother tongue. That would not be the rule where a translation is representative of

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our native culture. Maybe we need better-trained translators and even poets competent of both Bulgarian and English?

Names of authors and fictional names—messages for the reader First student: “Great Scott! I’ve forgotten who wrote Ivanhoe.” Second Student: “I’ll tell you if you tell me who the dickens wrote The Tale of Two Cities.” (G. G. Pocheptsov 1982: 227)

Talking about the author’s name we leave the grounds of history and enter upon the grounds of the art of literature where realia exist in realities created by real lives and fiction: “… the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture.” (M. Foucault 1984: 107)

The philosopher explicates his speculation in a detailed example: “The author’s name is not… just a proper name like the rest… If I discover that Shakespeare was not born in the house that we visit today, this is a modification which, obviously, will not alter the functioning of the author’s name. But if we proved that Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author’s name functions. If we proved that Shakespeare wrote Bacon’s Organon by showing that the same author wrote both the works of Bacon and those of Shakespeare, that would be a third type of change which would entirely modify the functioning of the author’s name.” (M. Foucault 1984: 106)

Fictional texts, like historic texts, also travel in time. There are two main things to be taken into view in the pursuit of translation equivalence: cultural transfer and the development of languages. In earlier cultural exchange we relied on the Latin West where Latin was the link in its capacity of the universal language. Today students learn Latin no more but they study English which is the new linking reality. These are the names which do not stand for real people but for the notions of persons built up by the developing of the literary character. The three mechanisms: transcription, transliteration and translation work within the cultural parameters of the present, bearing the present phonetic

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and phonological pragmatism, patterns of word formation and idea of temporality and space i.e. the idea of foreignness or otherness. The choice of the translator underlies the mechanism to be followed while this choice depends on linguistic, semantic and pragmatic reasons. The transformation of names depends on such extralinguistic factors as: intercultural relations, intentionality of the text, understanding of the message in the multi-levelled context, language competence of the translator and the user, invention or language creativity. Very often the correct hearing of the sounds is one of the dominant pragmatic factors for the transcription of the name. On its part the correct hearing is sometimes replaced by the subjective pronunciation of the sounds. Such is the case of the replacement of [w] with [l] in the subjective achievement of what I. Nestorova analyses as hypercorrectness (in her paper presented at the National Conference of IATEFL— Blagoevgrad, 2003): each replacement, however might lead to change of meaning. Thus if Emsworth is transcribed as ȿɦɫɥɴɪɬ, the second morpheme which has its own etymology, becomes senseless while at the same time the reduction of the sound also reduces the general cultural level of the usage of this word. If we stick to applying that so called hyper correctness (which is now a public logopedic problem), then what happens to names such as Wodehouse (Mad-house), Washington (Bad-ington), Wallace (LOL-ace)? This modern extremity comes to illustrate the statement that transcription might sometimes be less productive than transliteration because the sounding of a name is more unsteady and unreliable than its written form or as the Ancient Latin has it scripta manent, verba vollant. Translation is visualising or limiting the name to a concrete image. A variety of approaches to the transfer of names can be found in the translations of Terry Pratchett’s and J. R. R. Tolkien’s texts which might be taken as exemplary. In the books of Terry Pratchett and their translations into Bulgarian (Publisher Vuzev) there can be isolated the following groups of nametransfer: —transcription of names whose meaning is immanent for the context: Lord Vetinary (Ʌɨɪɞ ȼɟɬɢɧɚɪɢ), Rincewind (Ɋɢɧɫɭɢɧɞ), (Ʌɟɣɞɢ ɋɢɛɢɥ), Captain Vimes (ɤɚɩɢɬɚɧ ȼɚɣɦɫ), Ponder Stibbons (ɉɨɧɞɴɪ ɋɬɢɛɴɧɫ); —transcription of translatable names whose translation might render them in awkward fashion: ɤɚɩɢɬɚɧ Ʉɟɪɴɬ (Captain Carrot), Ⱦɟɬɪɢɬɴɫ (Detritus), Ⱦɠɟɥɢɛɟɣɛɢ (Jellybaby); —witty translation of names: The Century of the Fruitbat (ȼɟɤɴɬ ɧɚ ɉɥɨɞɧɢɹ ɉɪɢɥɟɩ), Bloody Stupid Johnson (Ⱥɞɫɤɢ Ƚɥɭɩɚɜɢɹ/Ɍɴɩɢɹ

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Ⱦɠɨɧɫɴɧ), The Lecturer in Recent Runes (Ʌɟɤɬɨɪɴɬ ɩɨ ɋɴɜɪɟɦɟɧɧɢ Ɋɭɧɢ), SMOT Dibbler—Cut-me-Own-Throat Dibbler (ɋɋɉȽ Ⱦɢɛɥɴɪ, Ⱦɢɛɥɴɪ ɋɚɦ ɋɢ ɉɪɟɪɹɡɜɚɦ Ƚɴɪɥɨɬɨ), Silverfish (ɋɪɟɛɪɨɪɢɛ), the mountain Ramtop (Ɉɜɧɟɪɨɝ), the village Bad Ass (ɋɤɚɩɚɧ Ƚɴɡ); - varying choices: the pub The Mended Drum—Ʉɴɪɩɟɧɢɹɬ ɛɚɪɚɛɚɧ (“Ɇɭɡɢɤɚ ɧɚ ɞɭɲɚɬɚ”, translator ȼɥɚɞɢɦɢɪ Ɂɚɪɤɨɜ), ɉɪɨɛɢɬɢɹɬ ɛɚɪɚɛɚɧ (“ɐɜɟɬɴɬ ɧɚ ɦɚɝɢɹɬɚ”, translator Ɇɢɪɟɥɚ ɏɪɢɫɬɨɜɚ); Quirm— Ʉɭɢɪɦ, Ʉɭɴɪɦ, Strong-in-the Arm—ɋɢɥɟɧ-ɜ-Ɋɴɤɚɬɚ (translator ȼɥ. Ɂɚɪɤɨɜ), ɋɬɪɨɧɝ-ɢɧ-ɬɢ-ɴɪɦ (translator Ʉɪɭɦ Ȼɴɱɜɚɪɨɜ), ɋɬɪɨɧɝ-ɢɧ-ɞɢɚɪɦ; Granny Weatherwax—Ȼɚɛɚ ȼɢɯɪɨɧɪɚɜ, ɛɚɛɚ ɍɟɞɴɪɭɟɤɫ (both choices are of V. Zarkov), Nanny Ogg—ɥɟɥɹ Ɉɝ, ɛɚɛɱɟɬɨ (both choices are of V. Zarkov), Reg Shoe—Ɋɟɞɠ ɒɭ, Ɋɟɝ ɒɭ, Ɋɟɝ Ɉɛɭɜɤɚɬɚ, Leonardo da Quirm—Ʌɟɨɧɚɪɞ Ʉɭɢɪɦɫɤɢ, Ʌɟɨɧɚɪɞɨ ɞɚ Ʉɭɢɪɦ, Lord Rust—Ʌɨɪɞ Ɋɴɠɞɶɨ (translator ȼɥ. Ɂɚɪɤɨɜ), Ʌɨɪɞ Ɋɚɫɬ (translator Ɇɢɪɟɥɚ ɏɪɢɫɬɨɜɚ); - translated names whose meaning is explicitly given in the text: Ƚɨɫɩɨɠɢɰɚ Ɉɬɪɭɞɢɫ (language teacher), ɝɨɫɩɨɠɢɰɚ Ƚɪɟɝɫ (history teacher), ɝɨɫɩɨɠɢɰɚ ɂɡɦɟɧɢɫ (logic teacher), ɝɨɫɩɨɠɢɰɚ ɉɟɱɚɬɢɫ (mathematics teacher)—in “Ɇɭɡɢɤɚ ɧɚ ɞɭɲɚɬɚ” (translator ȼɥ. Ɂɚɪɤɨɜ); - imitation of ethnic construction of names out of meaningful components—morphologic or lexical units: Two Fire Herb, Four big Sandal, Ly Tin Weedle, Lotus Blossom, Twoflower, Captain Four White Fox, Six Beneficent Wings, Seven Lucky Logs, One Big River, Lady Two Streams, Lady Jade Night, Lord Nine Mountains, Three Pink Pig, Five White Fang, 71-Hour Ahmed, Ubervald, Lady Margolotta, Tepik Llamedos etc. The translation of those names would best follow a combination of two rules: isolating and translating the meanings of the morphemes and combining them by applying the respective mechanisms of word formation in their most common usage—in order to make them appear foreign. This is a creative process demanding complete control of the target language, linguistic erudition, discursive skills, and a sense of humour. In the books of Terry Pratchett there is a careful attitude to names. They are built to add to the general construction of the textual reality. The margin between proper nouns and common nouns is tangible: proper names are generated in the context which is the very fictional reality. The translation of these names is reconstruction of the author’s context in the Bulgarian language environment which might be called comparative onomastics. The care for the names which serve as constant features of the fictional reality is expressed in te text which very often refers to the names as

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actants of the discourse. Nobby Nobbs and Sergeant Collen wonder what the first name of Death might be. And this does not sound too absurd taking in mind that he is sometimes replaced by his granddaughter whose actual first name is Susan. When Agness Nitt goes to the city of Ankh Morpork to make an opera singer career she chooses the name Perdita. The young girls who want to become witches choose new names for themselves which sound more professionally. There is also Igor (ɂɝɨɪ— ɇɢɟ ɲɦɟ ɂɝɨɪ)—the name of all butlers in the aristocratic homes of Ubervald who are at the same time fantastic surgeons. The members of the band in Soul Music also choose artistic names of themselves which sound exactly as the real rock stars of the human world (ɂɦɩ-ɢ-Ʉɟɥɢɧ—Ȼɴɞɢ, Ʌɢɚɫ ɋɢɧɶɨɫɤɚɥ—Ʉɥɢɮ, Ƚɥɨɞ Ƚɥɨɞɫɨɧ) and thus, using irony and pastiche, the author manages to create hypercontext mixing the fictional reality with the actual reality of the human culture in its universal selfperception. Creating a reality is giving names: to places, things, events and people. Translation is creating a parallel reality in such a way that upon entering it the reader should be in the actual realms of the author’s reality. As far as the context is explicated in the translation the reader does not pay much attention to the sounding of the names. However, when the names are central to the context being the constant features or the mechanisms of textual construction, then it is important how they sound. Thus the older translations of Tolkien’s texts have produced the title of a book which is still a best seller: Bilbo Baggins—Ȼɢɥɛɨ Ȼɟɝɢɧɫ. Normally the Bulgarian translation is pronounced with a changed stress position and then the understanding of the name is Bilbo Begins. The version of L. Nikolov— the translator of The Lord of the Rings (1990) is Ȼɢɥɛɨ Ɍɨɪɛɢɧɫ. This is a combination of two types of translation: the root morpheme of the name is translated into Bulgarian while the suffix is transcribed so that the name is understood yet it is accepted as strange. The same mechanism of segmentation is applied in the construction of the calques of the names of the various peoples of Tolkien’s world and in their translation, e.g. Ɍɜɴɪɞɨɧɨɝɢ, Ɂɚɩɚɫɥɢɜɰɢ, Ⱦɴɠɞɨɤɪɢɣɰɢ; Ɇɪɚɤɨɥɟɫ, ɒɭɦɧɨɫɬɪɭɣɤɚ, ɋɤɪɟɠɧɨɛɥɢɤ, Ⱥɦ-Ƚɴɥ, Ɍɨɪɛɢɧɫɨɜɢ, ȼɥɚɱɢ-Ɍɨɪɛɢɧɫ, Ɍɨɪɛɨɞɴɧ, Ɍɭɤɨɜɰɢ, Ȼɪɟɧɞɢɮɭɤɨɜɰɢ, Ɍɴɪɲɭɜɤɨɜɰɢ, Ȼɨɥɝɟɪɨɜɰɢ, ȼɴɪɠɢɤɨɥɚɧɨɜɰɢ, Ɇɢɲɟɯɨɞɨɜɰɢ, Ⱦɟɛɟɥɭɲɤɨɜɰɢ, Ɋɨɝɨɫɜɢɪɰɢ, Ƚɨɪɞɨɤɪɚɤɨɜɰɢ, ȿɞɪɨɛɭɡɨɜɰɢ, Ɍɨɦ Ȼɨɦɛɚɞɢɥ, Ɂɥɚɬɨɪɨɧɤɚ, ȼɴɪɛɚɥɚɧ, ɉɨɞɯɴɥɦɨɜ, Ɇɚɠɢɪɟɩɟɣ, Ʌɨɦɢɞɨɥ. Here again the fictional reality involves the reader into travelling through different places and visiting people who are strangers. Their names sound strange and are untranslatable, e.g. Ɇɨɪɞɨɪ, ȿɥɪɨɧɞ, Ƚɥɨɪɮɢɧɞɟɥ, Ƚɚɧɞɚɥɮ, ȿɚɪɟɧɞɢɥ, ɏɚɡɚɞ-ɞɭɦ, Ⱥɧɞɭɪɢɥ,

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Ⱥɪɚɝɨɪɧ, Ƚɚɥɚɞɪɢɟɥ, ɋɚɭɪɨɧ, Ʌɨɬɥɨɪɢɟɧ, Ⱦɭɪɢɧ, Ʉɚɪɚɫ Ƚɚɥɚɞɨɧ, Ʉɚɪɚɞɪɚɫ etc. In another work of Tolkien there is another approach to the naming of the main character: “Aegidius de Hammo was a man who lived in the midmost parts of the Island of Britain. In full his name was Aegidus Ahenobarbus Julius Agricola de Hammo; for people were richly endowed with names in those days, now long ago, when this island was still happily divided into many kingdoms. There was more time then, and folk were fewer, so that most men were distinguished. However, those days are now over, so I will in what follows give the man his name shortly, and in the vulgar form: he was farmer Giles of Ham, and he had a red beard. Ham was only a village, but villages were proud and independent still in those days.” (J.R.R.Tolkien, Farmer Giles of Ham)

In the Bulgarian translation by Teodora Davidova (Sofia, Otechestvo, 1988) it sounds like that: ȿȽɂȾɂɃ Ⱦȿ ɏȺɆɈ ɠɢɜɟɟɲɟ ɜ ɰɟɧɬɪɚɥɧɚɬɚ ɱɚɫɬ ɧɚ ɨɫɬɪɨɜ Ȼɪɢɬɚɧɢɹ. ȼɫɴɳɧɨɫɬ ɢɦɟɬɨ ɦɭ ɛɟɲɟ ȿɝɢɞɢɣ ȿɧɨɛɚɪɛɢɣ ɘɥɢɣ Ⱥɝɪɢɤɨɥɚ ɞɟ ɏɚɦɨ. ȼ ɨɧɟɡɢ ɨɬɤɨɥɟɲɧɢ ɳɚɫɬɥɢɜɢ ɜɪɟɦɟɧɚ, ɤɨɝɚɬɨ ɨɫɬɪɨɜɴɬ ɛɟ ɜɫɟ ɨɳɟ ɪɚɡɞɟɥɟɧ ɧɚ ɦɧɨɠɟɫɬɜɨ ɤɪɚɥɫɬɜɚ, ɯɨɪɚɬɚ ɳɟɞɪɨ ɫɟ ɞɚɪɹɜɚɯɚ ɫ ɦɧɨɝɨ ɢɦɟɧɚ. Ʌɸɞɟɬɟ ɛɹɯɚ ɩɨ-ɦɚɥɤɨ, ɜɪɟɦɟɬɨ ɢɦ ɫɬɢɝɚɲɟ ɢ ɪɹɞɤɨ ɦɨɠɟɲɟ ɞɚ ɫɪɟɳɧɟɲ ɱɨɜɟɤ, ɤɨɣɬɨ ɞɚ ɧɟ ɟ ɩɪɨɱɭɬ ɫ ɧɟɳɨ. ɇɨ ɨɧɟɡɢ ɞɧɢ ɨɬɞɚɜɧɚ ɫɚ ɨɬɦɢɧɚɥɢ ɢ ɚɡ ɳɟ ɧɚɪɢɱɚɦ ɝɟɪɨɹ ɧɚ ɧɚɲɢɹ ɪɚɡɤɚɡ ɫ ɩɨ-ɤɪɚɬɤɨɬɨ ɦɭ ɢ ɩɨ-ɩɪɨɫɬɨ ɢɦɟ—ɑɟɪɜɟɧɨɤɨɫɢɹ Ⱦɠɚɣɥɫ ɨɬ ɏɚɦ. ɏɚɦ ɛɟ ɫɴɜɫɟɦ ɨɛɢɤɧɨɜɟɧɨ ɫɟɥɨ, ɧɨ ɧɹɤɨɝɚ ɫɟɥɚɬɚ ɜɫɟ ɨɳɟ ɛɹɯɚ ɝɨɪɞɢ ɢ ɧɟɡɚɜɢɫɢɦɢ.

Thus another mechanism to the transformation of names is shown which we might choose to call ‘simplification’ or ‘semantic nominal reduction’. This is done first in the source language as a sort of intralinguistic reduction to the purpose of making the names suitable for communication and might be regarded as one of the vehicles of adaptation of texts to be used in younger or mass audience with lower level of cultural awareness as a tool for establishing informal relations and gaining popularity. In the above example, however, there is a further reduction: ɑɟɪɜɟɧɨɤɨɫɢɹɬ Ⱦɠɚɣɥɫ, ɋɬɨɩɚɧɢɧɴɬ Ⱦɠɚɣɥɫ, ȿɝɢɞɢɣ are preferred to ɋɬɨɩɚɧɢɧɴɬ Ⱦɠɚɣɥɫ ɨɬ ɏɚɦ ɫ ɱɟɪɜɟɧɚɬɚ ɛɪɚɞɚ, ɑɟɪɜɟɧɨɛɪɚɞɢɹɬ Ⱦɠɚɣɥɫ as semantically open and with friendlier sounding to the understanding of the Bulgarian children’s audience for whom the story is

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meant. This change does not interfere with the general semantics and sounding of the text which further explicates the character as a true bearer of his name, which fixes the name contextually. To finish with we will only mention another modern and very popular English text—the Harry Potter Books, where most of the names are what in semantics is called ‘actants’—general notions bearing contextual complexes— ‘the most essential categories in the development of the plot (Colapietro 2000: 22): the boy magician Harry Potter, the evil magician, the Aunt, the Owl etc. The names as the most important words in the text are tangles of values and gates to a hyperreality going far beyond the authors text as a language event. The fact that Harry Potter’s name was widely adopted by the Bulgarian children in its transformation as ɏɢɬɴɪ ɉɨɬɴɪ (Sly Potter, ponetic analog to the Bulgarian folktale hero Sly/Clever Peter) is an example of the crosscultural transformation of the context both as semantic reduction and as sounding. The transformation of names in translation is not limited to the simple operation of checking a dictionary or a guidebook. It is rooted deep in the cultural background of the translator which includes phonetic and phonological competence, morphological competence, complete understanding of the context, correct attitude to the message, respect for tradition, compliance with the current state of cross-cultural interference of languages, respect for the cultural values and the responsibilities of the translator. The process reaches from an ear for aesthetic sounding to the philosophical motivation of re-naming. Practically the training of translators might start from learning the rules, learning the examples, reading previous translations until perfection is achieved by control and correction. However, a good translation is not a simple imitation. It needs building the ability for self-correction which is grounded on deeper motivation and a thorough feeling for language as a cultural event, a container of culture and a vehicle of culture. The training of translators is bound at a certain stage to revise its grounds and start from the beginning mastering the culture of translating.

5.10 The Bulgarian Self in I, You and He Getting to know ourselves through the replacement of the pronominal agent of the action is what we do in the pre-translation process. The comprehension of a text is empathy. The translation requires complete tuning of the translator’s person to the Other Individual or the author’s existence in the text. The translator serves as a door for the author’s passage into the target culture. That makes translation difficult for people

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who cannot apply the principle of Invisibility for need to comment, develop and set to debate the author’s statement. There are direct and indirect ways for this cultural passage of the author. The replacement of the personal pronoun of the target text subject can be seen as such technique of the cultural adjustment of the Self, seen as a complex mental, physical and social entity whose existence is bound with the process of self-knowing. This life-long procedure of self-knowing is checked through the activities of the Self as a subject of a statement or a hero in a text, where the establishment of the personal boundaries is in getting free from the other agents. The opposition of the Self and the Other comes into linguistic life in the varied choice of the personal pronoun. A surface approach to a text would naturally stick to the first person singular “I” when coming to represent the Self of the ST in the TT. Experience of generations of translators, however, reveals an extremely interesting fact about the pronominal materialization of the Self: the human individual finds existence in all personal pronouns depending on the attitudes and responsibilities of the ‘hero’ of a text. “I’ gets transformed into each of the other personal pronouns for semantic and pragmatic reasons. The translator translates as a Self between the source text and the target text and this is a process of Self-revelation in the attitudes to the Other. The personal pronoun is abstraction. It is a step further from the naming and the pointing to the object of discourse. Predication is carried out in the form of situational application or omission of the pronoun. The mechanism of linguistic transformations of the Self is based on the intralinguistic adjustment of cultural traditions. It is very often a process of searching for compatibility of cultural semiotics for referring to the agent or the hero of a message. The non-professional linguist does not adjust in terms of Selftranslation, but uses the structures and the habitual wording of the mother tongue. In the Bulgarian environment the English language does not have the same status of Otherness as in a foreign environment. When we are in England, or in the US, we definitely tend to explore the boundaries of our difference from the native language users. When being in a completely different environment e.g. in a country where English is the international means of communication (Italy, Spain, Poland, Norway, Japan) the English language uses do not have the same status and we slip into what we think is the indifferent use of predication, i.e. we return to our mother cultural pronominal markers of our generalized self-expression.

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Let us take a few examples of intralingual adjustment of the uses of personal pronouns by adult Bulgarian speakers of English of no systematic linguistic training: (1) The first person of the domination of the Self in the generalized Other: I, me, my, mine, myself, we, us, our, ours, ourselves. a. In my opinion; b. I think that; c. Why should we explore space; d. We have to; it is our responsibility. (2) The second person as a marker of the generalized Other or the Object of our will: you, your, yourself, yourselves. a. You don’t think you can; b. As you can see; c. To be a leader, you must have special qualities; d. You must be able to grab your workers’ attention as soon as you enter the room. (3) The general agent in the abstract he, his, himself, they, their, them. a. He knew everybody in the town and everything about his problems; b. And on the way to his (one’s) success, he (one) must not forget about ethics; c. No one will find himself secure for his future and the future of his family; d. He must follow his principles e. They must choose him as their leader. Examples like the above ones can be picked out from the compositions and speech of Bulgarian users of English in both training and real-life situations. Apart from the other imperfections of structure and choice of expression, they are typical for the uses of the personal pronouns for the expression of the speaker’s individual Self in the guise of generalization. Such examples can serve as tips for readjustment of a message in intercultural exchange. The given examples contain varied information concerning the attitudes of the Subject to the object. Keeping in mind the nature of the attitude we can build structures with varied S—O relations to a previously set pragmatic objective.

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(4) The use of I, me, my, and myself makes a direct reference to the object when the I-subject is projected as the object of its statement. The Subject takes the responsibility or demonstrates attitudes that allow little variation of verb categories (voice, tense, and mood) in the ST yet there might be different habitual usage for the target culture. Fig. 3.5.11 “I” and the “projected I”

(5) The uses of we, us, our, ourselves accelerates the effect of the Subjective activity. The receiver of the message is allowed into the community of the Subject through applying slight manipulative technique of suggesting ideas with no definite individual responsibility. While Fig. 1 can be used to illustrate such speech acts as order, expressing authority, showing up, and persuasion, figure 2 would better illustrate the act of getting the object of our influence convinced. Fig. 3.5.12 The multiplied “I” and the projected “I-subject”

It needs also to be marked that certain sociolects such as dialects tend to use the faceless communal ‘we’ instead of I. (6) The uses of you, your, yours, yourself, and yourselves replaces the I-subject and to transport the action on its projections beyond the textual body of the message. The inexperienced Bulgarian user of language tends to transfer the I must-construction to you-must forgetting about the semantic change dependent upon the attitudes between the agents of the action (who says what to whom). Fig. 3.5.13 “I”, “I” transformed as “you” and the projected “I”

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(7) The uses of he, his, him, himself stands for the abstract universalia of anthropologically positioned living creature. It is not gender, neither specific uses of the category of animacy but the sheer application of the homo mensura principle to the equals of the Self and the Other. Besides generalization this replacement of the I-subject with a hesubject is an expression of idiolect where the Self is transparent in message where the verbal expression is no longer important (internalization of a text in pre-translation), or has not yet gained significance (in the process of the target text emerging). In the unified structures of the global translator the variations of the uses of seemingly clear words as markers of diverse meaning are of importance. Here is where the human individual can choose the names of the surrounding worlds by varying the pronouns as carriers the attitudes and relationships of the Self in each next message, where the object is the Other. Some additional tips to the adjustment of pronouns to fit the target text: 1. In the Bulgarian target text we do not need to repeat the subject each time it appears in the English source structure. The inexperienced translator inevitably falls in the trap of repetition, neglecting the target language usual turns and the syntactic standard. 2. In the English target text we need to be consistent in our choice of generalizing pronoun. 3. Pragmatic circumstances make us use non-generic language: one, he/she, he or she; they; we, that person, the individual. We very often turn to the abstract noun ‘individual’ which has no greater quality than a back replacement of a personal pronoun with a non-discriminating abstract lexeme. 4. In both, Bulgarian and English language uses, the speakers sometimes hides behind the utterance. And omits the “I”-form: “got to learn that theory” instead of “I have to learn”; “(the) name’s Paterson” instead “my name is”. 5. The overuse of “they” in the place of passive construction. Tasks for individual work: 1. How does the notion of unisex refer to the above discussion? 2. Have you noticed some tendencies in our mother tongue uses showing a subject hiding behind a specific use of pronouns? What functional styles have marked preferences for generalization, shift of the Isubject, direct or indirect voice-shift?

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3. What should be the case when I-subject is replaced by she? 4. What is the possible gender of the subject of the following statement: 5. My birthday is tomorrow. 6. I have a birthday tomorrow. (I have three birthdays altogether: mine and those of my two sons.)

5.11 Register and Meaning A single, yet not isolated case In the beginning of the spring semester of 2011 one of the undergraduates, attending a lecture of Translation studies asked me to give her a letter of reference. I asked her to supply me with the information via e-mail. The student, I presume, was trying to be both: informal and polite. The lack of practice with register-shift in semi-formal communication has led to the production of a text of textbook value. Here is the Letter. The personal data in it is changed. [ No Subject ] [No Title] Pi6a Vi otnosno va6ata preporaka.Kazvam se Lilya Lilieva Lilyanova. Bih iskala da kandidatstvam vav Velikobritaniq- University of XXXXXXX,za specialnost YYYYYYYY.Preporakata trqbva da bade na angliiski.Predpolagam,4e nqmate dosta vpe4atleniq ot men,vse pak dosta hora sme na lekcii,no smeq da tvardq,4e sam dosta ambiziozna,otgovorna nai-ve4e zaintriguvana ot izu4avane osobenostite na angliiskiq ezik.Zavar6ila sam bakalavarskata stepen Filosofiq,no bih iskala da prodalja magistarska stepen vav 4ujdestarnen universitet.Shte se radvam,ako mi pomognete kato napi6ete nqkolko reda.Mojete da pratite preporakata po email.Blagodarq predvaritelno! [No signature]

Violations of: a) The Pragmatic Principle of Politeness is applied to no effect z There is no formal letter frame: the lack of address and the lack of signature make the use of the polite form ‘Vi’ (you) play the role of a marker of descending direction. Its value thus turns to the negative effect. z The use of phonetic script is a marker of neglect to the Bulgarian tongue, the Bulgarian University, the Bulgarian professor. Giving a letter of reference is not a private business in this case.

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z Asking for a letter of reference in English in bad Bulgarian is at least ridiculous. z A typical feature of Bulgarians asking for a letter of recommendation is their neglect to supplying the proper information of the addressee. z Mojete da pratite preporakata po email. This can hardly be classified as proper register choice even between friends. z Blagodarq predvaritelno!—Bad cliché.

b) The Pragmatic Principle of Clarity z otnosno va6ata preporaka—concerning your recommendation z The lack of letter body has led to amorphous layout and lack of coherence. z Trqbva—“must”: this is irrelevant as far as the codification of this letter is considered. It also has additional negative effect to a Bulgarian professor of English for bringing in the shade of imperative modality. z Predpolagam,4e nqmate dosta vpe4atleniq ot men—irrelevant to the purpose negative statement plus bad choice of word making Bulgarian sound like a bad production of a non native speaker (e.g. *I suppose you don’t have quite a number of impressions of me*). z 4e sam dosta ambiziozna—(*because I am quite ambitious*) that’s nothing to take pride in z otgovorna nai-ve4e zaintriguvana ot izu4avane osobenostite na angliiskiq ezik—(*responsible and intrigued with studying the specific features of the English tongue*) total lack of style plus a funny choice of adjective; z Lack of any literate use of punctuation marks plus a manifestation of no typing culture. z Filosofiq—spelled in this way by a philosopher and a linguist it is a marker of low culture; z Zavar6ila sam bakalavarskata stepen Filosofiq—(*I have graduated the BA course of Philosophy*) this information is not sufficient in itself, and there is no hint as to what quality of what relation to the possible referee this person is asking for a recommendation. A conclusion could be drawn that register shift cannot be successful when structures are concerned. It can exist only in figures of language within the bigger frame of formality.

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5.12 The Motivation of the Translator This is our glory, our shame and our fate, for those who cannot write, translate. ȼ ɬɨɜɚ ɟ ɩɪɟɜɨɞɚɱɟɫɤɚɬɚ ɭɱɚɫɬ, ɫɥɚɜɚ, ɫɪɚɦ, ɧɨ ɢ ɧɚɞɟɠɞɚ— ɱɟ ɤɨɣɬɨ ɧɟ ɭɦɟɟ ɞɚ ɬɜɨɪɢ, ɩɪɟɜɟɠɞɚ. —Borrowed from Lefevre 1975 (my translation) The sufferance of our souls, the time’s abuse if these be motives weak, break off betimes… What need we any spur but our own cause… —Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 2 Scene 1

Since the professional drawbacks to translation limit the creativity of a single mind demanding the translator’s voice to be invisible in transferring the message to a target audience, and since it has proved not to be an easy job either, then what could be the motivation of a linguist to become a professional translator apart from the roles that Nida defines and that concern the challenges of the very procedure of translating and interpreting: the pioneer, the midwife and the teamworker coping with layers of meaning. In the cultural and literary histories of the world translators appear after a battle when the captives are enslaved and translating seems easier job than rowing a war vessel, for example. There have been the foreign women who lived in the homes of the conqueror and even became wives in certain conditions as is the case with the princesses married to strengthen a peace of treaty. There were also the travelers who used to recite lays like in the case of Widsith, the bards and the story tellers spreading events dressed in metaphor to rouse interest and inspire talk. So vivid have the tales of humanity been that they became the first great transfer into the web spaces of our culture in the spaces of games where action and pictures are within rigid frames of game culture design. They have been the first promoters of unified global picture of the world.1 1

See also: Apostolova, G., ɆɈȽɔɓȿɋɌȼɈɌɈ ɇȺ ȼɂɊɌɍȺɅɇɂə ɈɉɂɌ ɂ ɈȽɊȺɇɂɑȿɇɂəɌȺ ɇȺ ɈȻɊȺɁɈȼȺɇɂȿɌɈ, Ƚɨɞɢɲɧɢɤ ɧɚ ɩɟɞɚɝɨɝɢɱɟɫɤɢ ɤɨɥɟɠ “ɋɜ. ɂɜ. Ɋɢɥɫɤɢ” – Ⱦɭɩɧɢɰɚ, 2002 ɝ.; ɉɪɨɮ. Ʉɥɢɦɟɧɬ Ȼɨɣɱɟɜ ɞ.ɩ.ɧ. Ⱦ-ɪ. Ƚɟɪɝɚɧɚ Ⱥɩɨɫɬɨɥɨɜa, ɈȻɊȺɁɈȼȺɇɂȿ ɂ ȼȺɅȿɈɅɈȽɂə, Ƚɨɞɢɲɧɢɤ ɧɚ ɩɟɞɚɝɨɝɢɱɟɫɤɢ ɤɨɥɟɠ “ɋɜ. ɂɜ. Ɋɢɥɫɤɢ” – Ⱦɭɩɧɢɰɚ, 2002 ɝ.; ɊȺɁɒɂɊəȼȺɇȿɌɈ ɇȺ ɅɂɌȿɊȺɌɍɊȺɌȺ ɁȺ ȾȿɐȺ ȼ ɋȼȿɌȺ ɇȺ ɄɈɆɉɘɌɔɊɇɂɌȿ ɂ ȼɂȾȿɈ ɂȽɊɂ, ɜ “Ⱥɞɚɩɬɚɰɢɹɬɚ ɤɚɬɨ ɫɬɪɚɬɟɝɢɹ ɧɚ ɞɟɬɫɤɚɬɚ ɥɢɬɟɪɚɬɭɪɚ”

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Religions made intercultural exchange a mission. Spreading the Holy Scriptures were the holy task of millions of people. The formation of national states made it a state mission. Educators are of that kind, too. Then comes the User, a person who needs the information and undertakes to translate a foreign text so that it could become clear to understand and to further use and develop in one’s own searches. Such is the case of Nikola Milev, the translator of Wittgenstein into Bulgarian. In a meeting with the Philosophy department of Sofia University on 4th Oct. 2008 he shared how as a young researcher for his doctoral thesis he needed to go to Moscow for the books were not accessible then in Bulgaria and, while using them in German, he decided to make translations so that the text be clearer to him and accessible for other readers in our Mother Tongue. University undergraduates produce numerous versions in their translator-training classes. Many good versions remain unpublished, though, which is a loss for the database that can serve translation. Today a translator is employed and translation is paid. The job of a translator and interpreter grew in social prestige and political importance in the time of the two great wars and, especially upon the drawing of the Iron Wall that separated national cultures giving the voice to speak to a chosen number of people. Depending on the importance of the institutional employer and on the importance of the information to be translated dominating cultures need specific information flow. We will notice that the translation of legal texts concerning our relations with the EU are easily and exactly transferred by the web translator, while texts of high value for our own culture are seldom recognized. Then comes the machine aid to translators: not a sufficient replacement to the human linguist of real professional value, though. As far as translation is ordered by human institutions of social significance and involves communication where the human is the agent for even in web chat humans like to talk to humans, not to a machine. In our academic experience teaching and learning languages and sociolects we always focus on the individual who needs clarity of educational texts.2

2

I have discussed these methodological issues also in Apostolova (2004-2005): ɋɈɐɂɈɅȿɄɌ ɂ ɉɊȿȼɈȾ: ɉɊɈȿɄɌ ɁȺ ɋɊȺȼɇɂɌȿɅɇɈ ɉɊȺȽɆȺɌɂɑɇɈ ɂɁɋɅȿȾȼȺɇȿ ɇȺ ɋɈɐɂɈɅȿɄɌɂɌȿ, ɘɛɢɥɟɟɧ ɫɛɨɪɧɢɤ ɧɚ ɩɪɨɮ. Ɇ. ȼɢɞɟɧɨɜ, ɋ, 2005 ɝ.; TOWARDS AN ARGUMENTATIVE APPROACH TO ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING, The Educational Heritage and Dialogue in the European Pedagogical Space, Blagoevgrad, 2004.

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Translation is contained in our heads when we are reading, listening and visualizing, writing and composing new texts or producing a new turn of speech. Then the translator becomes a figure of importance—not just a speaking tool in a couple of languages, but The Mediator of interlingual discourse across worlds. *** Here this study is bound to lead to the creative aspect of the agents of translingual phenomenology. I have chosen to weave the issues of creativity up in the exploration of the methodology in its practical application. The creativity of the learner, the teacher and the translator next meets with the art of the language usage which is to lead to further theory that is to come up as separate books. Theoretical issues developed as separate studies The language of English philosophical texts, 2011 Tangles of Intertextuality, Upcoming Names as identifiers and the frontiers of the text, Upcoming Achronia as a complex mechanism for social control, Current E-kind, Current Socio-cultural aspects of translation, Current

CONCLUSION

A Rhetoric of Meanings is a study of the practice-based choice of intercultural tools for the change of individual mind structures in the time of techological turn from the literacy of text-based culture to the nonstandard story-telling virtual orality, with the single objective of promoting our Bulgarian cultural identity in its e-based complex globe-talk expression for the spaces of the WWW and with the ambition of its survival in time. To this purpose Rhetoric is employed as it is the complex field of knowledge and social practice that holds the art and the analytical instruments for the study of socially significant discourse in its dynamics. It is seen in triple-layer format: as the art of public outcome of significance, as a descriptive study of the diachrony and synchrony of intercultural speech behaviour of the English speaking Bulgarians, and as a prescriptive prevention and awareness-bringing methodology for the individual productive intercourse. The turn from a closed native Bulgarian-based communicative environment and a high level of text culture to open actively participating in the English speaking global village future-focused culture has provided the environment and the data for such study in teaching English to the generations of the Transition period in its cognitive transcendence. The duration of this study has turned 25 years now and the corpus is formed of all general and specific courses in teaching English in Bulgaria up to 2007 plus my experience with the English Philology practical and theoretical courses I have been teaching at the South West University of Bulgaria ever since 1992 by now. The principles, criteria and techniques of Rhetorical analysis applied to the purposes of this study have yielded specific methodology based on formal tools of dynamic and adaptable character. They have been displayed as an Argumentative Approach to EL learning and a holistic approach of systematic and integrated character to the WWW: SIAN. The pursuit of the set goals is planned as a multi-layered structure following the nature of rhetoric as science of interdisciplinary value and as art based on the individual choice of discourse features in active interlingual intercourse. Understanding, translation and producing texts in

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Conclusion

English are the three stages of learning language to proficiency where the application of the AA and SIAN is sought. The methodological capacity of rhetoric is displayed in exemplified systematised case study beginning with the rhetorical aspects of the language skill-framework, through the issue of choice between pragmatic efficiency and grammatical correctness, to Self-identification, figures of language and the metaphoric nature of human existence extended in language uses beyond our own chronotopes. The SIAN is displayed in connection with the e-culture prospects of development and the search for the Netspeak produce where the principles of ethos, pathos and logos are traced. Here it stands as a holistic approach to the mind studies of e-kind in its initial phenomenology as e-orality. I am fully aware of the flexibility of current data for we are undergoing a period of complete cultural turn and fast change in the modes of communication, even as world humanity has been trying to transfer all our texts in the spaces of WWW. There are all the past standards of language usage and all the demo-products of today's globe talk. Language is still the environment where our mentality seeks for public recognition and it needs common grounds in place of fallen standard. We seek for such common grounds in the functioning of the principles of ethos, pathos and logos for borth personal and community exchange of existentional value.

Results The analysis of the problem area shows that the formation of e-culture as the environment of E-kind's functioning and growth is done basically through the transfer of language data between two types of human civilization. 2012 was the year when the school leavers were the generation that had been brought up in a world covered by the WWW. That generation of the „Twenty-twelvers“ is the bridge between traditional and virtual cultures and it can be adopted as the frontier unit for human community bearing both the tendencies and the imperfections of the transition. Knowing these tendencies and the active neutralization of the imperfections require interdisciplinary platform and the skill to connect different fields of knowledge through the tools of discourse. E-culture has been growing in the polemics of the traditional/physical culture and that of the virtual worlds and is following the proceedings of rebuttal and argumentation in favour of the novel existential imperatives. Philosophy of E-kind is growing out of the analytical studies of the language events, occurring in the transition to e-culture in a wealth of forms and variety of functions where written text transcends into the infoblocks of e-orality

A Rhetoric of Meanings: Exploring the Frontiers of Language Usage 343

setting verbal and non-verbal codes to work creating worlds out of thought dressed up in language matter and thus securing the further existence of human culture. In the context of this work the processes and procedures of language usage are studied in their interdependence with the acciological aspects of the triadic entity of ethos, pathos, and logos on the one hand, and on the other—with the choice of the idividual who is in the capacity of motivating his/ her choice and define their identity. The reasons for the changes and adaptations of meanings in the virtual worlds of e-culture are sought in the technological limitations of the WWW, and they reflect the two antinomic tendencies of unification of the global English speaking and automated and incessantly manipulated culture on the one hand, and the incessantly generating, and regenerating itself unique culture in the individual story-tellers speaking in the languages of all human-cultures, on the other. The prevailance of English-based discourse in the global talk is due to the techno-character of the ethos of the Net. Universal syntax and universal grammar of the software demand language behaviour which motivates our search of oportunities for the expression of our cultural spaces in ways and forms accessible for the global audience. The unadaptable forms and language units are to inevitably die out of web chats. The latter by no means suggests that our cultural and language behlonging are contained by neglect. There is no one else but ourselves to care for the preservation of our cultural memory. Wasting that opportunity would next lead to the closing of the existential spaces of our culture and the e-generations would be lost in their cultural identification of the features containing the productivity and brilliance of our mother tongue as a generator of original texts of informative, entertaining and persuasive value. I have meant my own Bulgarian culture but the above could be valid for any culture that neglects its virtual transcendence. Last but not least in significance is the impact of the human factor on the education of the next generations part of which is forming E-kind. The values, the emotions, the ethos, and the visual images we are going to weave up into the logos of the WWW will be the stimulators as well as the frontiers of our identities as they are projected in the existential dimensions of E-kind's further generations, the stories of whose existence is but yet to be told. It is in the stored data in the spaces supported by the WWW that the cultural transition of humanity shall find the value of its studying and developing today.

344

Conclusion

What Has Been Done by Far 1. The present dissertation is a summary of the analyses and results of individual experience into intercultural and interlingual studies concerning ELL methodology, communication practices, philosophy of language and the global web-based English-speaking humanity. Individual ideas are placed against the canvas of frontier studies of language, Internet and the Self for the latest 5 years. 2. Discussion of the applicability end tangible effect of the general theoretical model based on Rhetorical Analysis. 3. Theoretical generalization of a long period of study of rhetoric as a methodology for the studying of e-culture and E-kind, generated presently within global language environment with language instruments and through language transition of human mentality from the traditional physical environment into virtual space. 4. Development of the Argumentative Approach as a method of cognition within the environment and through the phenomenology of guided language events. 5. A further step into the development of the SIAN as a discoursegrounded pragmatic set of mentalist rhetorical tools. 6. Restructuring of the areas of asymmetry of Bulgarian and Englishbased cultures with the aim of efficient transfer of Bulgarian textual culture into the continuum of virtual memory. 7. Building a motivation of the transition to virtual culture through studying the tendencies of discourse and finding the clues for their further guidance as well as the prerequisites for their freedom. 8. Leading into the idea of the transdiscursive nature of e-agora (the complex image of the talkative web that talks its existence into being each next moment and synchronically within our 'now'). 9. Holistic binding of the fields of semiotics. 10. Preparing the methodological ground for studying the socio cultural aspects of translation applied as a combined skill for language learning. To sum up, the present study has completed the outlines of the rhetorical aspects of language obscurity in a linguo-pragmatic perspective. This has inevitably placed the study in touch with intercultural and interlingual matters on the one hand and with existential problems of the Web-environment—on the other. Due to the wealth of debate and examples, the field of our exploration has become too tempting for any linguist and particularly for those who study the interference of Bulgarian

A Rhetoric of Meanings: Exploring the Frontiers of Language Usage 345

and English in their traditional and in their e-phenomenology. However, here the focus is on rhetoric issues, which are placed against the coordinate system of ethos-pathos-logos on the vertical axis, and choice of discourse feature—on the horizontal. In a general humanitarian perspective it concerns the involvement of a human individual with the procedures of interlingual mediation as a learner, a teacher and a translator, where the stages of language awareness and motivation are of core significance. There are many further questions raised, concerning both sheer language study and the epistemic pursuit of existential matters. Also, there are still unrevealed spaces of discourse dimensions and the nature of rhetoric argumentation which continues to challenge logic in its naturallanguage disguise. There is still the uncleared grounds of interlingual and intercultural creativity where the learner and the teacher turn to authors, and the translator needs a further training into the multidimensional spaces of webaided translation. To sum up, this book is extrapolation on the method of research whose further application is to lead to theory. As I can see tham there are four levels to the study that can be considered as specific contribution of applied value: A/ The first and foremost contribution is the design of the Argumentative approach. Its application to the WWW has produced an extension, SIAN, which is opening in its turn a vast field of further studies of the tracks of creativity in the competition of the human brain with its technological product. There are further hypotheses to be raised and explored concerning the brain structures underlying language creativity. B/ The second contribution is the parallel development of Intercultural Rhetoric as a complex aspect of FLT. This is interconnected with the development of contemporary rhetorical studies where rhetorical instrumentalism can be viewed against the perspective of e-ethics. C/ The third level concerns the constructive employment of cultural semiotics for the multy-profiled classroom of English. It lies in the reconstruction of human worlds in tale-telling. The latter is seen as a powerful value-formative tool. It can also be explored in its applicability to establishing the insufficiency of structures and frames. D/ The fourth level concerns the study of the communicative situation of translation and inspires a search into the realms of translatability in the temporal spaces of language in terms of synchrony and diachrony.

346

Conclusion

Altogether the four aspects of the development of this study of the method contribute to the forming of the concept of secondary language usage where the underlying unit is the text and its communicative power is the discourse that holds a language texture together. It is concerned with the ideas of language users and language developers and centers the Individual as the main point of our interest, acting simultaneously in the roles of the four agents of the translingual situation: the learner, the teacher, the translator and the writer.

Ideas to Be Studied Next Rhetorical analysis is used as a step to understanding the nature of eculture. A further study into the existential problems of E-kind is concurrent with the mapping of language changes that form the environment of this projection. A further development of a philosophy of E-kind is bound to continue with the discursive transcendence of humanity. Here are a couple of topics directly based on the above explication of our involvement with the mentalist approach to the rhetorical aspects of human intercourse: x Language as the discourse-grounded environment for the existence of e-kind: the analogs with the description of the physical life of humankind. x E-culture as an extension of the textual culture and an unlimited space for language creativity of E-kind. x The prospect of modelling virtual mechanisms for direct impact on and the changing of virtual environment. x The routes of language creativity within the infoblock. x Tracing the ongoing processes of transcendence of human culture and the interaction of traditional and virtual cultures. x Revealing a working network of arguments allowing the motivation of human cultural generative capacity for ressurrection in the virtual environment through relevant changes in the Self.

At this point I shall put an end to the present text and leave it to the public judgement.

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