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Memoirs by women (from the Global North) who have employed a gestational host (from the Global South) to become mothers are situated in a force field of intersecting discourses about gender, race and class. The article sheds light on the characteristic dynamics of this special sub-genre of ‘mommy lit’ (Hewett), labelled ‘IP memoirs,’ with a special emphasis on memoirs featuring transnational cross-racial gestational surrogacy arrangements in India. These texts do not only present narratives of painful infertility experiences, autopathographic self-blame, and scriptotherapeutic quests towards happiness, i.e. (a) child(ren), but also speak back to knotty issues such as potential exploitation, commodification, colonisation and disenfranchisement, as well as genetic essentialism in the context of systemic inequities.
Beauty is the single most frequently and most broadly used aesthetic virtue term. The present study aimed at providing higher conceptual resolution to the broader notion of beauty by comparing it with three closely related aesthetically evaluative concepts which are likewise lexicalized across many languages: elegance, grace(fulness), and sexiness. We administered a variety of questionnaires that targeted perceptual qualia, cognitive and affective evaluations, as well as specific object properties that are associated with beauty, elegance, grace, and sexiness in personal looks, movements, objects of design, and other domains. This allowed us to reveal distinct and highly nuanced profiles of how a beautiful, elegant, graceful, and sexy appearance is subjectively perceived. As aesthetics is all about nuances, the fine-grained conceptual analysis of the four target concepts of our study provides crucial distinctions for future research.
This dissertation deals with the lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of (VP )idioms and their behavior in combination with restrictive relative clauses, raising, constituent fronting, wh-movement, VP-ellipsis, pronominalization, the progressive form, verb placement, passivization, conjunction modification, and the N-after-N construction. It provides empirical evidence towards a combinatorial analysis of both semantically non-decomposable idioms (SNDIs) and semantically decomposable idioms (SDIs) and contributes to the (formal) formulation of such an account.
The Introduction (Chapter 1) first motivates why idioms are an exciting and challenging phenomenon and then gives a definition of the term idiom, a classification of idioms, and an overview of the wide spectrum of idiom analyses found in the linguistic literature.
Chapter 2, “Idioms as evidence for the proper analysis of relative clauses”, shows that the Modification Analysis beats the other two major analyses of restrictive relative clauses (RRCs), namely Raising and Matching, as (i) the latter two lead to a loss of numerous empirical generalizations in syntax and morphology, and (ii) contrary to the assumption in the literature, idioms in RRCs can, in fact, be licensed without literal syntactic movement of the RRC-head, which makes modification fully compatible with idiom reconstruction effects.
Chapter 3, “How frozen are frozen idioms?”, presents new empirical observations on the lexical, morphological, and syntactic flexibility of kick the bucket and displays that this idiom is not completely frozen with respect to its NP complement, the progressive form, and, in some contexts, even passivization. The chapter concludes that analyses of kick the bucket as a single lexical entry should be replaced by analyses of this and other SNDIs with a syntactically regular shape as consisting of individual word-level lexical entries that combine according to the standard rules of syntax.
This idea is taken up in Chapter 4, “The syntactic flexibility of semantically non-decomposable idioms”, which – based on the differences between English and German with regard to verb placement, constituent fronting, and passivization as well as a short outlook on Estonian and French – spells out a combinatorial analysis of SNDIs and augments it with a semantic analysis formulated in Lexical Resource Semantics, according to which some idiom parts make identical semantic contributions to the overall meaning of the idiom. The analysis further suggests that the syntactic flexibility of idioms is due to the semantic and pragmatic constraints on the involved constructions, rather than the syntactic encoding of the idioms.
Chapter 5, “Modification of literal meanings in semantically non-decomposable idioms”, reviews Ernst’s (1981) classical three types of idiom modification (internal, external, and conjunction) to then closely investigate the most challenging type, namely conjunction modification, in SNDIs. Based on naturally occurring examples of four SNDIs (two English, two German), it sketches an analysis in terms of two or more conjoined independent propositions, each of which can be the result of figurative reinterpretation. One of the propositions contains the idiomatic meaning, in (one of) the other(s), the meaning of the modifier applies to the literal meaning of the idiom’s noun.
Chapter 6, “Semantically decomposable idioms in the N-after-N construction”, offers a formal syntactic and semantic account of SDIs like pull strings in the N-after-N construction, as in Kim pulled string after string to get Alex into a good college. While the idiom contributes the type of entity at stake (‘string’ in the case of pull strings), N-after-N contributes that there are several instantiations of that type of entity and that these are subject to temporal or spatial succession. The chapter first summarizes the empirical properties of N-after-N, then provides an account of N-after-N in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), presents an updated version of the account of SDIs suggested in Chapter 2 within HPSG, and combines it with the HPSG account of N-after-N.
Rebecca Walkowitz’s observation that contemporary novels tend to be “born translated” involves the notion that they equally tend to be “born in motion”; they are often already, conceptually, on the road to faraway readers during their moments of conception. A first, more narrowly defined objective of my essay is to examine the narrative strategies used in Dave Eggers’s What Is the What (2007) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) that facilitate and respond to this dimension of motion in particular travels of memory. In a broader scope, this analysis will be embedded into an appraisal of the potentials of recent theorizing both in narratology (i.e. the study of narrative) and in memory studies to understand the dynamics at play in the reception of far-travelled narrative memory media. It is a central proposition of this essay that the two research fields share an amplitude of common concerns with regard to questions of reception and should therefore be brought into a close dialogue. The present study explores how some of these intersections between narratology and memory studies can be approached through the notions of “distance” and “proximity.”
In German children’s literature around 1900, the representation of childhood in pseudo-colonial realms participates in a construction of racial identities based on transcultural play. Acts of reading and scenes of instruction intersect with material objects to convey a pedagogy of race dominated by learned whiteness. This article asks: How does German children’s fiction around 1900 reconfigure national identity as imperial experience? An analysis of a noncanonical though exemplary fictional text about a jungle adventure demonstrates strategies used to include the child in the colonial experience. Imagining this ›play world‹ replicates for the child reader a sense of agency and citizenship through encounters with an indigenous mediator, an impish primate and imaginary landscapes – each represented through the lens of European epistemologies. These tropes produce tension between historical fact and imaginative fiction, working together to map a colonial geography of German identity on to a model transatlantic German childhood. Framed by theories of material objects and toys, and supported by the work of literary scholars and cultural historians, I examine the brief story »Die kleine Urwälderin« [The Little Jungle Girl] from Auerbachs Deutscher Kinder-Kalender auf das Jahr 1902 [Auerbach’s Almanac for German Children, 1902]. In it, the Amazonian setting aspires to historically factual representation, which, however, cedes considerable territory to the realm of fantasy. The projection of a German forest adventure on to a Brazilian geography elides historical truths, such as centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, and instead inserts imperial signifiers into an established syntax of the European child at play. The resulting national ideology of childhood identity in this German language story imposes colonial order on a reimagined play world.
This thesis revolves around the development of a new critical approach to contemporary anglophone postcolonial literature in the form of a concept of ‘corporate ingression.’ This term denotes a globally recurring process of biopolitical (re)structuring of a community by corporate power and its extended cultural influence on society.
Through an analysis of contemporary engagements with similarly explored events over time and space in the form of three novels (Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland and David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), this thesis explores the relevance of the concept of corporate ingression as a new approach to such imaginative works. By reading these texts closely, with and against the grain, I enter into dialogue with their discussion of corporate power as the major structural influence in the societies they explore. I also show that a comparative analysis of these texts reveals similarities between the exploration of the period of early colonialism as acted out by the various trade corporations in existence and contemporary forms of corporate dominance. This research thus concerns various contexts and explorations of corporate power and explores the concept of recurring forms of corporate ingression as a new perspective within literary postcolonial and globalisation studies.
Oil on Water (2010) as a political novel explores the complex intricacies of communities structured around corporate power and presents a full account of the stakeholders that are influenced by or connected to the Niger Delta’s oil industry. Moxyland (2008) as a futuristic cyberpunk novel nuances the destruction implied in Oil on Water as a major factor of corporate ingression by exploring corporate power’s potential for constructive influence over a community. The Thousand Autumns (2010) as a historical novel explores an instance of corporate ingression in which the Dutch East India Company in Japan, despite its significant cultural influence, is subordinate to the host state to its activity. Corporate power is explored as a fallible construction that can be controlled by a strong regime as well as benefited from.
Despite the geographic and temporal distance between the three cases, and despite their exploration of widely differing industries, circumstances and levels of success, the common factors remain recognisable. Critical analysis shows that the contrasts between especially the constructive and destructive corporate activity in the three texts is of great interest, as it highlights the potential of corporate power both for construction and destruction of value. This research also shows how each novel actively resists a binary ethical narrative, instead presenting a set of complex power dynamics within the respective communities.
With this research I show that reading corporate ingression both significantly informs the reading of various postcolonial texts, while also showing that the analysis of these texts reveals that a conventional postcolonial binary approach is insufficient to account for what these works describe and investigate. The concept of a process of corporate ingression as a new perspective on literary explorations of historical, contemporary or futuristic forms of corporate power is thus shown to be a relevant addition to current postcolonial literary scholarship.
Editorial [2019, english]
(2019)
This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages display identical options of object realization, our main research question is whether the two HLs develop in a similar way in bilingual children. More precisely, we aim at investigating whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The results of a production experiment show that this is indeed the case and that the two groups of bilinguals do not differ from each other, although they may overgeneralize null objects or full noun phrases to some extent. We conclude that the bilingual acquisition of object realization is guided by the relevant properties in the target languages and is not influenced by the contact language, German.
This introduction outlines new developments in the field of cultural and media memory studies in the wake of the transcultural turn. It pays specific attention to the twofold dynamics of memory’s travel and locatedness. While in recent memory studies discourse there has been a tendency to see travel as the inspiration for innovative research, locatedness has become associated with old-fashioned, bounded approaches. Rather than reproduce the positive charging of travel and negative charging of locatedness, this special issue aims to emphasise the complexity of memory dynamics resulting from the interaction of the two poles and to make visible that the production, (re)mediation, and reception of the past in the present is constituted by both travel and locatedness.
Language use before and after Stonewall: a corpus-based study of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives
(2019)
This study presents a contrastive corpus linguistic analysis of language use before and after Stonewall. It uses theoretical insights on normativity from the field of language and sexuality to investigate how the shifting normativities associated with the Stonewall Riots (1969) – widely considered the central event of gay liberation in the Western world – have shaped our conceptualization of sexuality as it surfaces in language use. Drawing on two corpora of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives dating from two time periods (before and after Stonewall, called PRE and POST), the analysis combines quantitative (keyword analysis, collocation analysis) and qualitative (concordance analysis) corpus linguistic methods to examine discursive shifts as evident from narrators’ language use. The study identifies the terms homosexual and normal as central contrastive labels in PRE, and gay and straight as corresponding terms in POST. Other discursive shifts detected are from sexual desire/practices to identity (and vice versa), from an individualistic to a community-based conceptualization of sexuality, and from unquestioned heteronormativity and gender binarism to a weakening of such dominant discourses. The findings are discussed in relation to the desire-identity shift, which is traditionally assumed to have taken place at the end of the 19th century, and shed new light on Stonewall as a central event for the development of an identity-based conceptualization of sexuality as we know it today.