Elena Buja - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Elena Buja
Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov. Series IV: Philology and Cultural Studies
This small-scale study aims to trace the changes that have occurred in the Korean family institut... more This small-scale study aims to trace the changes that have occurred in the Korean family institution in a time span of about one hundred years, more specifically, since the beginning of the 20th century, when Korea opened its borders to foreigners, until the present, as well as to identify the causes that have led to these changes. The theoretical framework I will employ is thematic analysis, defined by Berelson (1952, 18) as “a research technique for the objective, systematic, and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication”. The data subjected to analysis come from a number of novels authored by Korean and Korean-American writers, such as H. Lee (1997) Still Life with Rice, S. Park (2011) This Burns My Heart, and NJ. Cho (2018) Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, to mention just a few. The reason behind opting for literature as a source of information is that I consider it to be a cultural product of particular socio-cultural circumstances inextricably linked to history....
Redefining Community in Intercultural Context, 2019
Redefining Community in Intercultural Context, 2013
Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brașov Series IV Philology Cultural Studies, 2021
The events that occurred in the Korean peninsula in the past 100 years, such as the conversion of... more The events that occurred in the Korean peninsula in the past 100 years, such as the conversion of Koreans to Christianity, appealed to many women especially due to the fact that “it advocated human rights, social equality, and other democratic principles” (De Mente 2017, 661), the Japanese colonization of the country (1910-1945), which granted the Korean women the right to institutional education, and the rapid growth of industry starting with the early 1960s, a phenomenon that enabled young girls to work outside their houses as soon as they graduated from high school or college were important factors in the social emancipation of Korean women. This emancipation brought with it a change in the ‘jobs’ or ‘occupations’ women had, from more traditional ones, like jungmae (matchmakers), haenyeo (sea divers), to more modern ones, such as factory workers, university professors, or office employees. The current paper aims to bring to the fore these changes by making use of primary data gat...
Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brașov, Series IV: Philology. Cultural Studies, 2020
War and political rebellions turn people into beasts, and while men bring about most of these dre... more War and political rebellions turn people into beasts, and while men bring about most of these dreadful events, it is women and children who have to suffer their consequences. The aim of my paper is to bring to light the common fate of women in two spatially distant and culturally different societies (Korean and Romanian), showing that in the past century they were victims of both foreign and native violence. During WWII, Japanese soldiers have sexually exploited Korean women, whereas their Romanian sisters fell prey to the Russian soldiers withdrawing from war. Later on, during the communist regime in Romania and in the aftermath of the Gwangju Uprising in Korea in 1980, the Romanian and Korean women became the victims of their own compatriots. To illustrate this sad fate, I have employed fragments excerpted from various Romanian and Korean novels, as well as secondary data. The framework I made use of is the social theory according to which "agency /action and social structure are recognized as major dimensions of social reality" (Sibeon 2004, 117) and are in strong connection with power and interests. This theory claims that it is humans in the world that do things, but very often these things are performed by individual actors that have power or are empowered by institutions. Irrespective of whether the men who were the agents/actors of women's abuse had physical or political power over their victims, what happened to the Romanian and Korean women (and most probably to women in other parts of the world) is unpardonable.
The present paper aims at presenting the attitudes the Moldovan-Russian bilinguals have both towa... more The present paper aims at presenting the attitudes the Moldovan-Russian bilinguals have both toward Romanian and toward the former dominant language, Russian as well as the attitude of the two groups of monolinguals toward the afore-mentioned bilingual people. To this aim I have interviewed a couple of Moldovan students studying at ‘Transilvania ’ University of Brasov and accessed a number of internet forums. Hopefully the findings of the analysis will bring to light a positive bilingual attitude and behaviour on the part of my subjects.
This paper studies the patterns of communication among the ethnic groups living in the Transylvan... more This paper studies the patterns of communication among the ethnic groups living in the Transylvanian rural district of Caţa, aiming at identifying the people’s willingness to communicate and the non-conflictual nature of the dialogue in this rural area. The framework employed in the analysis is Dell Hymes’s (1974) interactional S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G schema. The study is based on data collected by the first author during two periods (August – September, 2012 and January, 2013), using two instruments: the direct, participant observation and the interview. The participants are representatives of four ethnic groups, namely Romanians, Hungarians, Germans and Roma people. The findings of the analysis show that the inter-ethnic communication in Caţa is non-conflictual and non-exclusive due to the people’s openness to adapt to the others and that the limitations of the intercultural dialogue are rather suggested by the administrative authorities and the national ethnic organizations.
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Philologica, 2010
This paper is meant as an attempt to show the way in which by analysing the discourse of a newspa... more This paper is meant as an attempt to show the way in which by analysing the discourse of a newspaper article, we may uncover a certain culture in a specific period of its historical development. In order to do that, I have chosen an article from a Romanian satirical newspaper, Academia Caţavencu 1 , which I found particularly interesting as it poses a number of problems for the analysis. The analysis is based on Widdowson's (1979) view of discourse-as-process, the focus being on three main aspects, namely the role of context, topic and the representation of discourse content, and the nature of reference in text. Hopefully, by investigating these aspects I could bring further evidence in support of the idea that a text can be regarded as an interaction between the writer and the reader.
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 2021
This paper1 aims to offer a picture of the darkest period in the history of the Korean women, nam... more This paper1 aims to offer a picture of the darkest period in the history of the Korean women, namely that of the Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). The only advantage Korean women enjoyed as a result of their country’s annexation to Japan was access to institutional education, even if this was done in Japanese and from Japanese course books. But this came with a price: many of the Korean teenaged females were turned into comfort women (sex-slaves) for the Japanese soldiers before and during the Pacific War. Not only did these girls lose their youth, but they also lost their national and personal identity, as they were forced to change their Korean names into Japanese ones and to speak Japanese. To build the image of the fate of the Korean women during this bleak period, the research method I have used is a simplified version of content analysis, “an analysis of the content of communication” (Baker 1994, 267). I have explored the content of fragments from a couple of novels authored...
The paper aims at bringing to the fore the errors that occur in the production of children’s earl... more The paper aims at bringing to the fore the errors that occur in the production of children’s early words in an attempt to see what phonological processes young learners of Romanian resort to in order to simplify adult targets. The data employed come from four longitudinal corpora and from diaries kept by colleagues of mine and they have been analysed in the framework of “developmental universals” and “particulars” (Slobin 1985). The findings reveal that, to a large extent, Romanian-speaking children adopt similar strategies in dealing with challenging targets as their English peers, but also strategies determined by language-specific features.
One of the many fascinating aspects of James Morier's novels is his way of depicting ethnic d... more One of the many fascinating aspects of James Morier's novels is his way of depicting ethnic differences in a humorous way. His 1834 novel Ayesha illustrates an intercultural romantic relationship between a Christian English lord and a Muslim Turkish maiden, in which the author satirizes the stereotypes attributed by Christians to Turkish Muslims and vice-versa, also offering the reader an insight into late 18 th century multiculturalism in Turkey. The aim of the present paper is to explore the ways in which James Morier organizes the humorous narrative fragments in order to elicit laughter and the extent to which the current theories of humour can be applied to these particular fragments, in an attempt to understand the cultural pluralism as well as the feelings and concerns of particular groups of people living in the Middle East at the turn of the 18 th century.
The Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education, 2008
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 2019
International relations often cause culture shock not only for the foreigners visiting a country ... more International relations often cause culture shock not only for the foreigners visiting a country but also for the residents of that country. While nowadays this shock can be diminished by making people who move to another country become more aware of and understand the differences between cultures through all sorts of sources of information, this was not so easy at the end of the 19th century. In this paper, my intention is to bring to light the culture shock experienced by one of the first French persons to set foot in the Joseon Kingdom (current Korea) and by the first Korean woman who travelled to France at the turn of the 19th century. I will investigate some non-verbal elements of culture, such as artefacts, food, and habits, which often make foreigners feel frustrated and confused, becoming incapable of interacting in a meaningful way in the new culture. The framework I will use is the “culture shock model” put forward by Oberg (1954), according to which this phenomenon unfold...
The paper investigates the way in which a teacher's non-verbal behaviour (i.e. my own behavio... more The paper investigates the way in which a teacher's non-verbal behaviour (i.e. my own behaviour) in class may influence students' motivation. The study is based on the analysis of anonymous feed-back provided by my students along a number of years. What their honest opinions reveal is that they pay a great deal of attention not only to the message itself but also to the way you convey a message. At the same time, they may help a teacher improve his/her teaching style in order to motivate students to attend classes.
Annales Universitatis Apulensis. Series Philologica, 2010
The Twelfth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 12)
This small-scale study aims to trace the changes that have occurred in the Korean marriage cultur... more This small-scale study aims to trace the changes that have occurred in the Korean marriage culture in a time span of about one hundred years, more specifically, since the beginning of the 20 th century, when Korea opened its borders to foreigners, until the present, as well as to identify the causes that have led to these changes. The theoretical framework I employed is content analysis, whereas the content (data) subjected to analysis is represented by fragments excerpted from a number of novels authored by Korean and Korean-American writers, which are categorized according to their themes and coded in terms of non-verbal elements. The focus is on such nonverbal codes as rituals, exchange of artifacts, eligible age for marriage, as well as on the status roles created by marriage in the Korean culture. The primary data is supplemented with information coming from the Korean society trend survey, conducted by Statistics Korea. The findings of the analysis reveal a slow, though obvious change in the marriage traditions that can be related to Western influence, the spread of Christianity, as well as to the massive industrial, technological, and economic development of Korea.
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica
Final consonant deletion has been attested in the acquisition of English (Johnson–Reimers 2010), ... more Final consonant deletion has been attested in the acquisition of English (Johnson–Reimers 2010), Chinese (Hua 2002), Dutch (Fikkert 1994), Hebrew (Adi-Bensaid 2015), Spanish (Goldstein–Citron 2001), and Indonesian (Ulaimah et al. 2016). Previous studies on the acquisition of Romanian phonology (Buja 2015a, b) indicated an extremely low incidence of this phenomenon among the Romanian-speaking children. A possible explanation for it could be the inconsistency in collecting the data (child diaries and longitudinal corpora). By means of an experimental study, i.e. a picture-naming task, this paper aims to prove whether Romanian children do drop final coda consonants. The words describing the pictures presented to the children have a C1(-2)VC1 structure (e.g. drum ‘road, way’, cap ‘head’, nas ‘nose’). The subjects in this small-scale research study were nine monolingual Romanian children aged between 2 and 4 years, who were recorded by their parents. Their spontaneous or imitated product...
Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov. Series IV: Philology and Cultural Studies
This small-scale study aims to trace the changes that have occurred in the Korean family institut... more This small-scale study aims to trace the changes that have occurred in the Korean family institution in a time span of about one hundred years, more specifically, since the beginning of the 20th century, when Korea opened its borders to foreigners, until the present, as well as to identify the causes that have led to these changes. The theoretical framework I will employ is thematic analysis, defined by Berelson (1952, 18) as “a research technique for the objective, systematic, and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication”. The data subjected to analysis come from a number of novels authored by Korean and Korean-American writers, such as H. Lee (1997) Still Life with Rice, S. Park (2011) This Burns My Heart, and NJ. Cho (2018) Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, to mention just a few. The reason behind opting for literature as a source of information is that I consider it to be a cultural product of particular socio-cultural circumstances inextricably linked to history....
Redefining Community in Intercultural Context, 2019
Redefining Community in Intercultural Context, 2013
Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brașov Series IV Philology Cultural Studies, 2021
The events that occurred in the Korean peninsula in the past 100 years, such as the conversion of... more The events that occurred in the Korean peninsula in the past 100 years, such as the conversion of Koreans to Christianity, appealed to many women especially due to the fact that “it advocated human rights, social equality, and other democratic principles” (De Mente 2017, 661), the Japanese colonization of the country (1910-1945), which granted the Korean women the right to institutional education, and the rapid growth of industry starting with the early 1960s, a phenomenon that enabled young girls to work outside their houses as soon as they graduated from high school or college were important factors in the social emancipation of Korean women. This emancipation brought with it a change in the ‘jobs’ or ‘occupations’ women had, from more traditional ones, like jungmae (matchmakers), haenyeo (sea divers), to more modern ones, such as factory workers, university professors, or office employees. The current paper aims to bring to the fore these changes by making use of primary data gat...
Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brașov, Series IV: Philology. Cultural Studies, 2020
War and political rebellions turn people into beasts, and while men bring about most of these dre... more War and political rebellions turn people into beasts, and while men bring about most of these dreadful events, it is women and children who have to suffer their consequences. The aim of my paper is to bring to light the common fate of women in two spatially distant and culturally different societies (Korean and Romanian), showing that in the past century they were victims of both foreign and native violence. During WWII, Japanese soldiers have sexually exploited Korean women, whereas their Romanian sisters fell prey to the Russian soldiers withdrawing from war. Later on, during the communist regime in Romania and in the aftermath of the Gwangju Uprising in Korea in 1980, the Romanian and Korean women became the victims of their own compatriots. To illustrate this sad fate, I have employed fragments excerpted from various Romanian and Korean novels, as well as secondary data. The framework I made use of is the social theory according to which "agency /action and social structure are recognized as major dimensions of social reality" (Sibeon 2004, 117) and are in strong connection with power and interests. This theory claims that it is humans in the world that do things, but very often these things are performed by individual actors that have power or are empowered by institutions. Irrespective of whether the men who were the agents/actors of women's abuse had physical or political power over their victims, what happened to the Romanian and Korean women (and most probably to women in other parts of the world) is unpardonable.
The present paper aims at presenting the attitudes the Moldovan-Russian bilinguals have both towa... more The present paper aims at presenting the attitudes the Moldovan-Russian bilinguals have both toward Romanian and toward the former dominant language, Russian as well as the attitude of the two groups of monolinguals toward the afore-mentioned bilingual people. To this aim I have interviewed a couple of Moldovan students studying at ‘Transilvania ’ University of Brasov and accessed a number of internet forums. Hopefully the findings of the analysis will bring to light a positive bilingual attitude and behaviour on the part of my subjects.
This paper studies the patterns of communication among the ethnic groups living in the Transylvan... more This paper studies the patterns of communication among the ethnic groups living in the Transylvanian rural district of Caţa, aiming at identifying the people’s willingness to communicate and the non-conflictual nature of the dialogue in this rural area. The framework employed in the analysis is Dell Hymes’s (1974) interactional S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G schema. The study is based on data collected by the first author during two periods (August – September, 2012 and January, 2013), using two instruments: the direct, participant observation and the interview. The participants are representatives of four ethnic groups, namely Romanians, Hungarians, Germans and Roma people. The findings of the analysis show that the inter-ethnic communication in Caţa is non-conflictual and non-exclusive due to the people’s openness to adapt to the others and that the limitations of the intercultural dialogue are rather suggested by the administrative authorities and the national ethnic organizations.
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Philologica, 2010
This paper is meant as an attempt to show the way in which by analysing the discourse of a newspa... more This paper is meant as an attempt to show the way in which by analysing the discourse of a newspaper article, we may uncover a certain culture in a specific period of its historical development. In order to do that, I have chosen an article from a Romanian satirical newspaper, Academia Caţavencu 1 , which I found particularly interesting as it poses a number of problems for the analysis. The analysis is based on Widdowson's (1979) view of discourse-as-process, the focus being on three main aspects, namely the role of context, topic and the representation of discourse content, and the nature of reference in text. Hopefully, by investigating these aspects I could bring further evidence in support of the idea that a text can be regarded as an interaction between the writer and the reader.
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 2021
This paper1 aims to offer a picture of the darkest period in the history of the Korean women, nam... more This paper1 aims to offer a picture of the darkest period in the history of the Korean women, namely that of the Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). The only advantage Korean women enjoyed as a result of their country’s annexation to Japan was access to institutional education, even if this was done in Japanese and from Japanese course books. But this came with a price: many of the Korean teenaged females were turned into comfort women (sex-slaves) for the Japanese soldiers before and during the Pacific War. Not only did these girls lose their youth, but they also lost their national and personal identity, as they were forced to change their Korean names into Japanese ones and to speak Japanese. To build the image of the fate of the Korean women during this bleak period, the research method I have used is a simplified version of content analysis, “an analysis of the content of communication” (Baker 1994, 267). I have explored the content of fragments from a couple of novels authored...
The paper aims at bringing to the fore the errors that occur in the production of children’s earl... more The paper aims at bringing to the fore the errors that occur in the production of children’s early words in an attempt to see what phonological processes young learners of Romanian resort to in order to simplify adult targets. The data employed come from four longitudinal corpora and from diaries kept by colleagues of mine and they have been analysed in the framework of “developmental universals” and “particulars” (Slobin 1985). The findings reveal that, to a large extent, Romanian-speaking children adopt similar strategies in dealing with challenging targets as their English peers, but also strategies determined by language-specific features.
One of the many fascinating aspects of James Morier's novels is his way of depicting ethnic d... more One of the many fascinating aspects of James Morier's novels is his way of depicting ethnic differences in a humorous way. His 1834 novel Ayesha illustrates an intercultural romantic relationship between a Christian English lord and a Muslim Turkish maiden, in which the author satirizes the stereotypes attributed by Christians to Turkish Muslims and vice-versa, also offering the reader an insight into late 18 th century multiculturalism in Turkey. The aim of the present paper is to explore the ways in which James Morier organizes the humorous narrative fragments in order to elicit laughter and the extent to which the current theories of humour can be applied to these particular fragments, in an attempt to understand the cultural pluralism as well as the feelings and concerns of particular groups of people living in the Middle East at the turn of the 18 th century.
The Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education, 2008
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 2019
International relations often cause culture shock not only for the foreigners visiting a country ... more International relations often cause culture shock not only for the foreigners visiting a country but also for the residents of that country. While nowadays this shock can be diminished by making people who move to another country become more aware of and understand the differences between cultures through all sorts of sources of information, this was not so easy at the end of the 19th century. In this paper, my intention is to bring to light the culture shock experienced by one of the first French persons to set foot in the Joseon Kingdom (current Korea) and by the first Korean woman who travelled to France at the turn of the 19th century. I will investigate some non-verbal elements of culture, such as artefacts, food, and habits, which often make foreigners feel frustrated and confused, becoming incapable of interacting in a meaningful way in the new culture. The framework I will use is the “culture shock model” put forward by Oberg (1954), according to which this phenomenon unfold...
The paper investigates the way in which a teacher's non-verbal behaviour (i.e. my own behavio... more The paper investigates the way in which a teacher's non-verbal behaviour (i.e. my own behaviour) in class may influence students' motivation. The study is based on the analysis of anonymous feed-back provided by my students along a number of years. What their honest opinions reveal is that they pay a great deal of attention not only to the message itself but also to the way you convey a message. At the same time, they may help a teacher improve his/her teaching style in order to motivate students to attend classes.
Annales Universitatis Apulensis. Series Philologica, 2010
The Twelfth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 12)
This small-scale study aims to trace the changes that have occurred in the Korean marriage cultur... more This small-scale study aims to trace the changes that have occurred in the Korean marriage culture in a time span of about one hundred years, more specifically, since the beginning of the 20 th century, when Korea opened its borders to foreigners, until the present, as well as to identify the causes that have led to these changes. The theoretical framework I employed is content analysis, whereas the content (data) subjected to analysis is represented by fragments excerpted from a number of novels authored by Korean and Korean-American writers, which are categorized according to their themes and coded in terms of non-verbal elements. The focus is on such nonverbal codes as rituals, exchange of artifacts, eligible age for marriage, as well as on the status roles created by marriage in the Korean culture. The primary data is supplemented with information coming from the Korean society trend survey, conducted by Statistics Korea. The findings of the analysis reveal a slow, though obvious change in the marriage traditions that can be related to Western influence, the spread of Christianity, as well as to the massive industrial, technological, and economic development of Korea.
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica
Final consonant deletion has been attested in the acquisition of English (Johnson–Reimers 2010), ... more Final consonant deletion has been attested in the acquisition of English (Johnson–Reimers 2010), Chinese (Hua 2002), Dutch (Fikkert 1994), Hebrew (Adi-Bensaid 2015), Spanish (Goldstein–Citron 2001), and Indonesian (Ulaimah et al. 2016). Previous studies on the acquisition of Romanian phonology (Buja 2015a, b) indicated an extremely low incidence of this phenomenon among the Romanian-speaking children. A possible explanation for it could be the inconsistency in collecting the data (child diaries and longitudinal corpora). By means of an experimental study, i.e. a picture-naming task, this paper aims to prove whether Romanian children do drop final coda consonants. The words describing the pictures presented to the children have a C1(-2)VC1 structure (e.g. drum ‘road, way’, cap ‘head’, nas ‘nose’). The subjects in this small-scale research study were nine monolingual Romanian children aged between 2 and 4 years, who were recorded by their parents. Their spontaneous or imitated product...