EDITORIAL

Literator USAN edition editorial

Louise Viljoen; Amanda Lourens

Department of Afrikaans and Dutch Literature, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Correspondence

Introductory remarks

The second USAN Conference for young researchers, organised by the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch at Stellenbosch University, took place from 19 to 21 January 2016. Young researchers from all over South Africa, as well as a few from Belgium, the Netherlands, the United States and Sweden, attended the conference. The aim of the bi-annual USAN Conference, which took place for the first time in 2014, is to create an opportunity for young researchers to share their research results with their academic peers. Postgraduate students (Master's and PhD students as well as Honours graduates), as well as young researchers (who have graduated in the previous five years) in the fields of literature, linguistics and applied linguistics, are invited to take part. For the 2016 conference, there were no thematic restrictions. The only requirement was that papers should be read in either Afrikaans or English. An interpreting service, provided by the staff and postgraduate students of the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, saw to it that all could take part in the discussions. After the conference, those who read papers were invited to submit articles, based on their conference papers, for publication in the accredited journal Literator, a further step in their entry into the world of academic research. This special edition of Literator contains a selection of the articles presented for publication. The articles cover a wide range of theories and disciplines with articles about literary topics alongside articles on linguistics and applied linguistics.

Asante Lucy Mtenje's article, '"Taming untamed pests": Representing female sexualities in Tiyambe Zeleza's Smouldering Charcoal and James Ng'ombe's Sugarcane with Salt', explores the way in which two novels from Malawi reproduce accepted norms with regards to female sexuality while at the same time questioning those norms. Mariëtte van Graan's article 'Die spook van Afrikaneridentiteit in Toorberg, Die stoetmeester en Die swye van Mario Salviati (Etienne van Heerden)' [The ghost of Afrikaner identity in Toorberg/Ancestral Voices, Die stoetmeester and Die swye van Mario Salviati/The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (Etienne van Heerden)] investigates the nature and function of ghost characters in Etienne van Heerden's novels and discusses the way in which these characters serve as a constantly evolving depiction of Afrikaner identity. This is followed by an article on linguistics by Dario Rens, 'The semantics of the aan-construction in sixteenth-century Dutch: A semasiological and onomasiological approach', in which he uses a self-compiled corpus of 16th-century Dutch to find the evidence needed to prove Timothy Colleman's hypothesis that the first instances of the ditransitive use of the aan-construction are concrete physical movements of the direct object from the subject to the indirect object.

André Henny du Plessis's article, 'Die rol van die bruikbaarheidsbenadering binne die e-leksikografie' ['The role of usability in e-lexicography'] aims to show how usability theories and standards can be advantageous for metalexicography and comes to the conclusion that future electronic metalexicographic endeavours should not be undertaken without considering usability as part of the theoretical framework. Susann Marais investigates the shifting portrayal of women in Huisgenoot between respectively 1963 and 2013, making use of the methods and principles of multimodal discourse analysis in her article with the title 'Die uitbeelding van die vrou in Huisgenoot (1963 en 2013): 'n Multimodale diskoersanalise' ['The representation of women in Huisgenoot in 1963 and 2013: A multimodal discourse analysis']. Lastly, Alan Murdoch's article, 'Strategies used in the translation of fixed expressions in magazines: A comparison of selected texts with Afrikaans as source language and South African English as target language' investigates the translation of idioms and other types of fixed expressions from Afrikaans (the source language) into South African English (the target language) in selected texts in Huisgenoot and You magazines.

Correspondence:
Louise Viljoen
lv@sun.ac.za