“Wor(L)D”: Aesthetic and Experienced Multilingualism in Akvilina Cicėnaitė’s Novel “Anglų Kalbos Žodynas” / “A Dictionary of English” (2022)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article analyzes manifestations of multilingualism, focusing on their aesthetic and thematic functions in Akvilina Cicėnaitė’s autofictional novel Anglų kalbos žodynas [ A Dictionary of English ] (2022), which employs numerous languages, most frequently English, in a predominantly Lithuanian text to explore the migrant experience. The novel follows a Lithuanian writer and her French-Canadian husband on a road trip across Australia, in which both currently reside, and constantly find themselves in a state of translation between languages, different realities, and cultures. Each chapter of the novel is titled with an English word, forming a dictionary-like structure which frames the narrator’s meditative reflections. The research problem of the article is how multilingualism is made evident in Cicėnaitė’s text and what literary functions it performs in the novel. The analysis draws on theoretical propositions about literary multilingualism by Rainier Grutman (2006, 2024), Till Dembeck (2020), Werner Helmich (2016), Marianna Deganutti (2022), and others, as well as about the functions of multilingualism in fiction by Till Dembeck and Anne Uhrmacher (2016), András Horn (1981), Markus Huss (2021) and others. Central to the analysis is their emphasis on the constructedness of multilingual configurations in literary texts and the two functions, aesthetic and thematic (“experienced” multilingualism), literary multilingualism performs. First, the analysis explores how the novel’s narrative structure is supplemented with multilingual structures, which transform the text into a carefully organized multilingual textual space and enhance the exploration of the migrant’s condition. Then the analysis discusses the instances of “experienced” multilingualism, which root the narrative in specific social and cultural realia of multicultural and multilingual Australia. The article links the analysis of multilingual manifestations in Cicėnaitė’s text to the writer’s exploration of the experience of displacement, the condition of the migrant figure, and her efforts to find a relevant artistic expression for it.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".