Contextual Identities

Emilia Parpală is Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Craiova, Romania. Her academic interests include stylistics, poetics, semiotics, imagology, and verbal communication. Her first book, Poetics of Tudor Arghezi: Semiotic Models and Text Types [in Romanian] (1984), pioneered the practice of generative poetics in Romania. Another book, Semiotic Poetry: The Generation of the Eighties [in Romanian] (1994), was based on the idea of isomorphism between theory and literary practice, and was reconsidered in the 14 articles of her volume Romanian Poetic Postmodernism: A Semio-pragmatic Perspective (2011), as a result of a research project she coordinated between 2009 and 2011. Professor Parpală is the author of four theoretical syntheses on stylistics (1998, 2005, 2006), poetics (1998), general semiotics (2007), and verbal communication (2009). Since 2008, she has coordinated an international conference in Craiova and edited nine volumes of proceedings. She has published more than 100 articles in scholarly journals both in Romania and abroad, and is the Vice-President of the Romanian Association for Semiotic Studies (ROASS) and a member of the Romanian Writers’ Union.Leo Loveday has served as Graduate School Professor of Linguistics at the Faculty of Letters of Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, since 1991. He obtained his PhD in Sociolinguistics from Essex University in 1990. He is the author of three books: The Sociolinguistics of Learning and Using a Non-Native Language (1982); Pergamon: Explorations in Japanese Sociolinguistics (1986); and Language Contact in Japan (1996). His most recent publications include Five Innovative Strategies in Japanese Female Anthroponyms Today (2013) and The Proscription and Legitimisation of Names in Japan (2014). His current main areas of interest are socio-onomastics, the anthropology of identity and issues in cross-cultural politeness.