Alan Durant

‘Culture’ and ‘Communication’ in Intercultural Communication

Two major influences on contemporary societies dictate that diffusion and hybridization of communicative norms will be an increasingly significant feature of our communication landscape: Transnational population flows; and the impact of mediated communication, including by means of the Internet. This study explores implications of different ways of viewing the ‘cultural’ and ‘communication’ dimensions of intercultural communication in such volatile circumstances. It considers the risk of reproducing cultural stereotypes in characterizing the speakers engaged in intercultural communication and the types of communication they engage in. It also examines the ‘inter’ that allows intercultural communication to be something active, with scope for creative fusion, initiative and change. By way of conclusion, we suggest that intercultural communication studies may need to be reconceptualized if the field is to engage adequately with further possible convergence (including communicative convergence) between cultures.

Rock revolution or time-no-changes: visions of change and continuity in rock music

Discussions of rock or contemporary popular music are very often suffused with suggestions of massive and remarkable ‘change’ (in musical style, in surrounding fashions, etc.). Just as often, however, they are filled with virtually opposite visions of endless repetition, or continual ‘sameness’ (the music all merely sounding alike). Diverging in this way, views of change in popular music tend towards extreme polarisation – so much evidently depending upon the scale and scope of comparison, and indeed much of the problem centring on the domain or level in music isolated as the one most likely to offer explanation of the underlying processes.

How to write essays and dissertations : a guide for English literature students

The first book that literature students should read, this guide reveals the distinct set of skills, conventions and methods of essay and dissertation writing. Taking students through the various stages of writing, from planning to final submission, it offers specific guidelines and a lively, detailed commentary on actual examples of student work at each stage.

11. Linguistic analysis in trade mark law: current approaches and new challenges

Trade mark law regulates a field of commercially and culturally important language behaviour by means of a conceptual framework that differs significantly from any corresponding terminology or overall approach in linguistics or related fields. The chapter describes the interaction that has taken place between law and linguistics on this subject. It begins with a summary of the main legal measures governing verbal signs used as marks, taking European Union trade mark law as the main point of reference but introducing US law as appropriate. The chapter then describes how courts address language-related questions, and asks how compatible the understanding of communication relied on in trade mark law is with accounts developed in other fields. Highlighting both commonality and contrast, the authors examine the contribution made to trade mark law by linguists in two major traditions: an applied linguistic tradition of expert evidence; and an interdisciplinary tradition of efforts to understand trade marks in semiotic terms. Both traditions have been mainly concerned with US trade mark law. The chapter argues, however, that although it is largely US scholars who have paid most attention to linguistic issues in trade mark law, the insights and unresolved questions raised can also illuminate approaches taken by European courts. The chapter concludes by asking how research might be developed further in collaboration between lawyers and linguists.

HAVE A BREAK and the changing demands of trade mark registration

This article explores, from the point of view of both law and linguistics, how far the application and effect of the law of registered trade marks is shaped not only by legislative initiative but also by changing consumer behaviour and the shifting linguistic currency of the particular signs used (or proposed for use) as marks. It does so by focusing on the thirty-year campaign to register HAVE A BREAK for a chocolate bar, marketed as ‘KitKat’. It considers the changing approach of courts both to inherent distinctiveness and to distinctiveness acquired through use. It also considers the relationship between the average consumer test for distinctiveness and the public interest in leaving certain signs free. It suggests that while the present trade mark regime is open to the registration of slogans, it is not clear that courts have sufficiently considered the public interest implications of increasing trade mark protection in this way.

The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature@@@Theory Formation and the Study of Literature@@@In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics

Revised and edited version of an academic conference held at the University of Strathclyde, July 1986. Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Tuning and Dissonance

There is an important sense in which to think of music, either directly or in metaphor and analogy, is to conceive mellifluous arrangements of sounds which offer pleasures of harmony and agreement. A whole range of literary and pictorial representations testify to this broad conception. Indeed to trace the sounds of music in their apparently widening development in Europe and the United States (in monophonic, polyphonic, dodecaphonic and polytonal musics, and in sounds of the emerging new instrument technologies) can be to imagine a kind of continuous extension or evolution, as an ever greater range of sounds and means of sound generation are employed to create enjoyable aural effects.

Music and its Language

Playing and listening to music remain especially resistant to description and commentary. The difficulty of finding a vocabulary to speak of musical forms within their social contexts, whilst at the same time accounting for their expressive or affective potential, makes extremely precarious any notion of response that makes claim to something more than personal impression. In addition, the range of relations involved in a musical performance or experience involve considerations far more complicated than can be handled within present boundaries of formal musical analysis. These fundamental problems are widely acknowledged by musicians, by listeners, and by commentators. And they perplex discussions or assessments of musical activities, as well as participation in them. Indeed, they have contributed to the widely held view of music which attaches particular value to its assumed radical unknowability: in reverence for directly sensuous experience, music is often valued as a kind of immediate sensuality, seemingly something literally breathed into the body from the air.

False Relations and the Madrigal: An Alchemy of England’s Golden Age in Music

It is frequently affirmed (but is no less striking on account of repetition) that music and song in England, rising in turmoils of the Reformation and dispersing in currents of the 1620s and 1630s that were later consolidated in the Restoration, passed through a brief period of excellence, a Golden Age. The view occupies a place in conceptions of a national musical heritage: much subsequent history of music, the reasoning goes, has its centres of activity on the European continent, and more recently in the United States and elsewhere; and in this sense an important individuality of achievement can be identified in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century music in England, shaped as it was by forces at that time crucially different from those prevailing on the adjacent continent.

Performance: Sound and Vision

It is a familiar and understandable usage to speak of ‘listening’ when describing acts of perceiving or consuming music. There are the attitudes of visual exclusion, the closed eyes or simultaneous engagement in conversation, dancing, working—various suggestions of a superfluousness of visual attention for pleasures of sound. And from oral traditions of poetry onwards, there is a recognisable mythology of blind music-makers: Homer, by tradition, and Milton; Maria Theresa Paradis, for whose playing Mozart composes his Piano Concerto No. 18 (K 456) in 1784; or again, singers and instrumentalists in blues, extending customs of accompanied begging in the Southern United States—Blind Lemon Jefferson, Gary Davis, Sonny Terry, Blind Willie Harris or Blind Willie McTell; currently, musicians in jazz, rock and soul— Roland Kirk or Ray Charles; Jose Feliciano or Stevie Wonder. There is more widely, too, the specialist skill of piano-tuners: a mythology of especial attentions to sound in the absence of sight.