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Copyright of Revista Foco (Interdisciplinary Studies Journal) is the property of Revista Foco and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article reviews recent developments in Song of Songs scholarship with a focus on publications within the South African context. The article provides an overview of the interpretation of the Song of Songs and describes the main lines of research. Research on the Song of Songs continues the trends of recent years, with an emphasis on literal interpretation. However, there is renewed interest in patristics, allegorical interpretation as erotic or intertextual allegorisation, and reception history. Interpretation in the context of a myth seemed outdated, but it is also back. Southern African studies have contributed to these fields and to contextual studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is acknowledged truth in the sphere of legal hermeneutics, that when interpreting a legal norm, we should not always rely only on grammatical and word-for-word interpretation, and we should also refer to other ways and methods of interpretation, because sometimes the norm may seem simple, but in reality its understanding requires a complex approach. We are dealing with such a case in relation to the issue of holding a referendum in Georgia. In this case, no one disputes the democracy of the referendum, the issue only concerns the admissibility of holding a referendum under the conditions of occupation of a part of the country's territory, which is aggravated by one norm of the Organic Law of Georgia "On Referendum", literal interpretation of which leads to the only conclusion, that holding a referendum in Georgia is not allowed before the restoration of territorial integrity. The present article is an attempt to answer this question not only with one approach but in a comprehensive manner, applying the main methods of legal hermeneutics.

Copyright of Revista Catalana de Dret Públic is the property of Revista Catalana de Dret Public and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The current paper looks at the meaning of denominal verbs, i.e. verbs derived from nominal roots, through an experiment testing how Romanian children (Mean age: 4, Age range: 3-5) and adults understand nonce (non-existent) denominal verbs created from existing nouns such as a cireşi ‘to cherry’ or a vulpi ‘to fox’. We show that children tend to be more “literal” in their interpretation, understanding such novel denominal verbs as actions/processes involving the actual entity denoted by the nominal root. In contrast, adults prefer ‘figurative’ interpretations in certain contexts, for instance, when the nominal root refers to an animal (a vulpi ‘to behave like a fox’). The results can be explained either cognitively, through children’s preference for literal interpretations at this stage in language acquisition, or structurally, through a preference for a structure which is simpler from a lexico-syntactic point of view, combining mostly action “light” verbs (rather than a whole range of light verbs) with nouns (rather than roots or OBJECT like N entities). In addition, we notice that both children and adults show an animacy bias, mostly producing sentences referring to animate entities, as well as an intransitivity bias, using intransitive verbs more than transitive ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many years, Karaite exegesis was relatively unknown to numerous Biblical scholars. This situation has been changing with an increasing access to source materials. As a result, more and more Karaite exegetical treasures representing the trends of Karaite Judaism have come to the fore. Among them, there is the Commentary on the Book of Hosea by Yefet ben Eli, one of the most significant representatives of Karaism in the tenth century. Yefet ben Eli exhibits a remarkable knowledge of Hebrew etymology, which enables him to provide unique answers to the interpretative problems in the Masoretic Text. His apologetic concern for prospective Muslim readers of his commentary is also noteworthy. Although, in general, Karaism sought to concentrate on the literal sense of the Scripture, Yefet ben Eli does not shy away from recourses to rabbinic oral tradition. Nevertheless, his exegetical contribution remains unique, as clearly demonstrated by the selected examples from his Commentary.

For many years, Karaite exegesis was relatively unknown to numerous Biblical scholars. This situation has been changing with an increasing access to source materials. As a result, more and more Karaite exegetical treasures representing the trends of Karaite Judaism have come to the fore. Among them, there is the Commentary on the Book of Hosea by Yefet ben Eli, one of the most significant representatives of Karaism in the tenth century. This Karaite exegete exhibits a remarkable knowledge of Hebrew etymology, which enables him to provide unique answers to the interpretative problems in the Masoretic Text. His apologetic concern for prospective Muslim readers of his commentary is also noteworthy. Although, in general, Karaism sought to concentrate on the literal sense of Scripture, Yefet ben Eli does not shy away from recourses to rabbinic oral tradition. Nevertheless, his exegetical contribution remains unique, as clearly demonstrated by the selected examples from his Commentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Romanian Review of Private Law / Revista Română de Drept Privat is the property of Universul Juridic Publishing House and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the modern era, there is a widespread belief that Islamic thought in general and Islamic legal thought in particular enter into a dull process. This phenomenon has largely been linked to the literal interpretation of the basic features of Islam rather than teleological. In this context, it is a fact that Imam Shāṭibī is the most prominent alternative of the lexical interpretation approach that prevails in the tradition with his emphasis on the teleological interpretation. In this article, the vision of Imam Shāṭibī is tried to be examined in the framework of these two types of interpretation, by studying al-Muwāfaqāt, which is the basic work of Shāṭibī. As a result, based on the opinions of the author in various parts of his work, it has been tried to put forward that he adopts and proposes a common ground between the literary comment and the teleological comment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers Philo of Alexandria's metaphor in which he used the dual nature of embodied existence (body and soul) to argue that both literal and allegorical readings are legitimate. It examines the metaphor in the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CTM) developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson that argues that experience is the key to meaning. A metaphor occurs when we apply a pattern that we have observed in one setting (gestalt) to another. In this case, Philo has drawn on a Platonic/Stoic understanding of being human and applied it to contested hermeneutics within the Alexandrian Jewish community in an effort to maintain a sense of unity among two groups. The metaphorical experience is the recognition that Scripture is polyvalent in the same way that being human is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study looks at the recognition of written idioms by Romanian business students learningEnglish as a second language. An experiment has been conducted, in which 114 students ofeconomic sciences were given definitions of idioms, with the task of finding the idiom that best fitsthe definition. They were also asked to rate the degree of familiarity with the idiom (1 – Familiar, 2– Less familiar, 3 – Unfamiliar). The analysis of the students’ matches reveals that less than half of the students involved in thestudy were able to make a clear connection between the idiom and the proposed definition. Uponfurther evaluation, we are confident in our assessment that students in the field of business are inneed of a more detailed course presentation on idioms and colloquial language commonly found ina corporate office building.

Extant contextualist theories have relied on the mechanism of pragmatically driven modulation to explain the way non-indexical expressions take on different interpretations in different contexts. In this paper I argue that a modulation-based contextualist semantics is untenable with respect to non-ambiguous expressions whose invariant meaning fails to determine a unique literal interpretation, such as 'lawyer' 'musician' 'book' and 'game'. The invariant meaning of such an expression corresponds to a range of closely related and equally basic interpretations, none of which can be distinguished as the literal interpretation. Moreover, what counts as a literal interpretation as opposed to a non-literal one is arguably vague. The nonuniqueness of the literal interpretation and the vagueness in the literal/non-literal divide doubly challenge a modulation-based semantics, for modulation is supposed to operate on a unique literal interpretation to generate a clearly non-literal interpretation. Lastly I contend that non-ambiguous expressions which lack determinate literal interpretation are amenable to a Radical Contextualist semantics, according to which the invariant meaning of such an expression directs its interpretation to congruent background information in context. Thereby, these expressions exhibit semantically driven context sensitivity without displaying indexicality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]