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As Bakhtin noted, chronotopes arise from the density and fusion of temporal and spatial indicators. In prose narrative, the density of temporal and spatial indicators arises as a natural consequence of setting scenes and explaining action, and those indicators are fused by the centripetal forces of plot, character and so on that encourage us to read the various elements of the text as aspects of a coherent story and world. In non-narrative poetry, however, there is no story to drive the setting of scene or generation of character; there may not even be scene or character. As a result, temporal and spatial indicators can be quite sparse, and there may be little centripetal force to encourage their fusion. In a textual environment bereft of character, plot, scene, in which even the centripetal forces of syntax are frayed by linebreaks and other poetic devices, how can chronotopes form and function? [...] In the centripetal environment afforded by most prose narratives, the stable chronotopes and the relationships among them define consciousness, world and values. In the centrifugal environment of non-narrative poetry, chronotopes flicker and flow in a series of hints, glimpses, dissolves, defining consciousness, world and values via evanescence rather than stability. However, as I hope to show below, the evanescence of chronotopes in non-narrative poetry can be as central to the vitality and meaning of those texts as the stability of chronotopes is to the vitality and meaning of prose narratives.
In this contribution I shall be interested, among other things, in finding a place for the European phenomenon of the ›Speculum humanae salvationis‹ within German literary history, which will inescapably involve revisiting the unfashionable discussion of date and origins. I also intend to ask about the place of this text in the ‘didactic’ literature of the Middle Ages. Is a religious text structured according to sacred history didactic? Much didactic poetry is in the vernacular: What does it mean that the ›Speculum‹ was composed in Latin? And what place should be accorded to its vernacular reception? The ›Speculum‹ is inscribed within a set of oppositions that would appear to be recurrent in the didactic literature of the later Middle Ages: Latin and vernacular, verse and prose, words and pictures, religious and profane, moral
teaching and devotion, clerical and lay. In view of its exceptionally broad transmission in the German lands, both in Latin and in vernacular reworkings, is it possible to describe this text so that it takes a place within a larger picture? In some respects it may stand at a threshold in the history of European didacticism.
We propose a compositional analysis for sentences of the kind "You only have to go to the North End to get good cheese", referred to as the Sufficiency Modal Construction in the recent literature. We argue that the SMC is ambiguous depending on the kind of ordering induced by only. So is the exceptive construction – its cross-linguistic counterpart. Only is treated as inducing either a 'comparative possibility' scale or an 'implication-based' partial order on propositions. The properties of the 'comparative possibility' scale explain the absence of the prejacent presupposition that is usually associated with only. By integrating the scalarity into the semantics of the SMC, we explain the polarity facts observed in both variants of the construction. The sufficiency meaning component is argued to be due to a pragmatic inference.
This article discusses some syntactic peculiarities of Chinese yes/no questions. Starting from the observation that Standard Mandarin shares significant typological features with prototypical SOV languages, Chinese is treated as an underlyingly verb-final language. Based on this heuristic principle, A-not-AB, AB-not-A and AB-not questions are uniformly derived by means of one simple raising rule that operates within the sentence constituent V'. This novel idea is elaborated on in great detail in the first part of the article. In contrast to the prevailing trend, it is argued that the question operator contained in A-not-A and A-not sentences CANNOT be raised to "Comp". In consequence, A-not-A and A-not questions are "typed" in the head position of a sentence-internal functional phrase that we call Force2 Phrase (F2P) in the present paper. This position is not to be confused with Drubig's (1994) Polarity 1 Phrase (PollP), in the head position of which assertive negations and an abstract affirmative element are located. The existence of a head position F2° other than Poll° is supported by the fact that F2° can be occupied by certain overt question operators, such as assertive shi-bu-shi, which are compatible with negations. In contrast to the assertive question operator shi-bu-shi which is obligatorily associated with information focus, non-assertive shi-bu-shi serves as a compound focus and question operator whose focus feature is complex insofar as it is composed of two subfeatures: a contrastivity and an exhaustivity subfeature. Non-assertive shi-bu-shi is obligatorily associated with identificational focus in the sense of Kiss (1998). In accordance with some basic ideas of Chomsky's checking theory, the two subfeatures of the complex focus feature carried by the non-assertive shi-bu-shi operator check a correlating subfeature in the head position of a corresponding functional phrase (Contrastive Phrase and Focus Phrase, respectively). The question feature contained in the non-assertive shi-bu-shi operator is attracted by the head of Force1 Phrase (F1') at the level of LF. Due to the fact that F1° is sentence-final, the question feature of non-assertive shi-bu-shi must be Chomsky-adjoined to F1'. Unlike identificational focus phrases which are inherently contrastive, topics are non-contrastive in the default case. As separate speech acts, they are located in a c-commanding position outside the sentence structure. Semantically, there is a difference between Frame-Setting Topics and Aboutness Topics. As shown in the article, both A-not-A and A-not questions on the one hand and yes/no questions ending with ma on the other can be used in neutral and non-neutral contexts. The decisive advantage of mu questions, however, is that their question operator has scope over the whole sentence.
This essay identifies in the materialist strand of world literature theory, especially Pascale Casanova and the Warwick Research Collective, a reliance upon a priori structures (the worldsystem) and prioritisation of the literary registration of inequality. By contrast, I contend, world-literary critics who wish to maintain the dissident spirit of postcolonialism ought to demonstrate a shared equality. By reference to the philosophies of Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, this essay sets out the case for an alternative to world-systems critique: one that maintains literature's potential for creating new forms of resistance, dissent, and, crucially, equality.
The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) consists of Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT), Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN), and a database. There is also an online manual which includes the CHILDES bibliography, the database, and the CHAT conventions as well as the CLAN instructions. The first three parts of this paper concern the CHAT format of transcription, grammatical coding, and analyzing transcripts by using the CLAN programs. The fourth part shows examples of transcribed and coded data.
To what extent does cultural distance interfere with or limit literary experience? What kind of intimacy is needed to make a text into a work? This essay seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the writings of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. In doing so, it suggests that the challenges of cultural distance may be most acute when dealing with texts from homo-linguistic literary environments, and that we might overcome these challenges by undertaking a world literary criticism that attends to localized fields and materials without forgetting the charge of particular works.
This article deals with the Tashlhiyt dialect of Berber (henceforth TB) spoken in the southern part of Morocco. In TB, words may consist entirely of consonants without vowels and sometimes of only voiceless obstruents, e.g. tft#tstt "you rolled it (fem)". In this study we have carried out acoustic, video-endoscopic and phonological analyses to answer the following question: is schwa, which may function as syllabic, a segment at the level of phonetic representations in TB? Video-endoscopic films were made of one male native speaker of TB, producing a list of forms consisting entirely of voiceless obstruents. The same list was produced by 7 male native speakers of TB for the acoustic analysis. The phonological analysis is based on the behaviour of vowels with respect to the phonological rule of assibilation. This study shows the absence of schwa vowels in forms consisting of voiceless obstruents.
The German causal preposition durch ('by', 'through') poses a challenge to formal-semantic analyses applying strict compositionality. To deal with this challenge, a formalism which builds on recent important developments in Discourse Representation Theory is developed, including a more elaborate analysis of presuppositional phenomena as well as the integration into the theory of unification as a mode of composition. It is argued that that the observed unificational phenomena belong in the realm of pragmatics, providing an argument for presuppositional phenomena at a sentence- and word-internal level.
In this paper I investigate a change in the word order patterns of Greek nominalizations that took place from the Classical Greek (CG) period to the Modem Greek (MG) one. Specifically, in CG both the patterns in (A), with its two subtypes, and (B) were possible; the MG system, on the other hand, exhibits only the (B) pattern. The difference between the two systems is that agents can only be introduced in the form of prepositional phrase in MG nominals in a position following the head noun, while they could appear in a prenominal position bearing genitive case in CG. Moreover, the theme genitive, i.e. the objective genitive, could precede the head nominal in CG; this is no longer the case in MG, where the theme genitive follows the head noun obligatorily:
(A) i) Det-(Genagent)-Nprocess-Gentheme 1 ii) Det-Gentheme-Nprocess
(B)Det-Nprocess-Gentheme (Ppagent)
I argue that the unavailability of (A) in MG is linked to the nature and the properties associated with a nominal functional projection contained within process non~inals and to other related changes in the nominal system of Greek.
In this brief excursion into the poetry of Dante and Montale, Rebecca West suggests some approaches to only a few issues that emerge out of the creation of both the primary beloveds of Dante and Montale and of those feminine figures that have been characterized as ostensibly 'antitranscendental' and more secondary in their roles and meanings. As regards Montale's primary feminine figure, Clizia, West argues that she is, to use Teodolinda Barolini's term for Beatrice, a 'hybrid' poetic character, and ultimately exceeds the limits of the poetic beloved as traditionally conceived and read, not only in the courtly tradition upon which she is modelled but well beyond it. In the case of the so-called secondary 'other women' in Dante's and Montale's poetry, West seeks to show that they are much less separable from the primary feminine figures than such binaries as major/minor, transcendent/erotic, soul/body, and traditional/experimental may lead us to believe. Lastly, West considers specifically the wife-figure, in her conspicuous absence from Dante's corpus and in her late appearance in Montale's. For both poets, there are complex intertwinings, interferences, and non-dualistic patterns that form a densely textured poetic weave, in which both the primary and the secondary feminine figures provide "fili rossi" as well as not so easily graspable dangling threads of meaning. These threads have to do with the preoccupation of both poets with the possible integration of immanence and transcendence, embodiment and abstraction, and with the very limits of poetic language. West's topic is also motivated by a feminist-oriented search for modes of deciphering the figure of the feminine beloved in lyric poetry that are not conditioned exclusively by the traditional emphasis on the male poet-creator, but which allow for a shift in focus onto the female figure who is, of course, the creature of the poet's imagination and skill, but who also often takes him into regions in which the excesses (commonly associated with the female) of non-binary thought and the mysteries of alterity - the feminine symbolic sphere, in short - do not so much allow the emergence of neatly squared-off meanings as the evolution of more oblique, circular conduits of potential significance. As a specialist of modern literature, Rebecca West concentrates on Montale more than on Dante, mainly noting the Dantesque aspects of the former's poetry.
While both Japanese and English have a grammatic al form denoting the progressive, the two forms (te-iru & be+ing) interact differently with the inherent semantics of the verb to which they attach (Kindaichi, 1950; McClure, 1995; Shirai, 2000). Japanese change of state verbs are incompatible with a progressive interpretation, allowing only a resultative interpretation of V+ te-iru, while a progressive interpretation is preferred for activity predicates. English be+ing denotes a progressive interpretation regardless of the lexical semantics of the verb. The question that arises is how we can account for the fact that change of state verbs like dying can denote a progressive interpretation in English, but not in Japanese. While researchers such as Kageyama (1996) and Ogihara (1998, 1999) propose that the difference lies in the lexical semantics of the verbs themselves, others such as McClure (1995) have argued that the difference lies in the semantics of the grammatical forms, be+ing and te-iru. We present results from an experimental study of Japanese learners’ interpretation of the English progressive which provide support for McClure’s proposal. Results indicate that independent of verb type, learners had significantly more difficulty with the past progressive. We argue that knowledge of L2 semantics-syntax correspondences proceeds not on the basis of L1 lexical semantic knowledge, but on the basis of grammatical forms.
Sperber and Wilson (1996) and Wilson and Sperber (1993) have argued that communication involves two processes, ostension and inference, but they also assume there is a coding-decoding stage of communication and a functional distinction between lexical items and grammatical marking (what they call 'conceptual' vs. 'procedural' information). Sperber and Wilson have accepted a basically Chomskyan view of the innateness of language structure and Universal Grammar.
The expressions few and a few are typically considered to be separate quantifiers. I challenge this assumption, showing that with the appropriate definition of few, a few can be derived compositionally as a + few. The core of the analysis is a proposal that few has a denotation as a one-place predicate which incorporates a negation operator. From this, argument interpretations can be derived for expressions such as few students and a few students, differing only in the scope of negation. I show that this approach adequately captures the interpretive differences between few and a few. I further show that other such pairs are blocked by a constraint against the vacuous application of a.
Who's afraid of ideology?
(2023)
Artist Marwa Arsanios shares textual fragments from research she conducted for the first and second parts of a video trilogy titled "Who's Afraid of Ideology?" Meditating on the voiding effects of war, and the ecological and affective texture of communal resistance and eco-feminist praxis as they emerge in Iraqi Kurdistan, Lebanon, and northern Syria, the text takes us to ecological milieux made of wild medicinal plants, fig trees, Kurdish guerrillas, and farmers in a women-only commune.
This short essay offers thoughts on bell hooks's use of the list form in the phrase 'white supremacist capitalist patriarchy'. While this list suggests that the social forces it contains work together in one unified direction, we can also look to instances in which they pull in opposing directions. However, the function of the list may not be to faithfully map the complexities of social life, but, rather, in its reduction and simplicity, to enable us to believe that social transformation is possible.
In this paper I would like to show that the principles which have been proposed so far to account for the relationship between the informational level and the syntactic level in a Chinese utterance are unable to predict some interesting and regular facts of that language.
To my mind, the form and the position of the question operator in an interrogative utterance provide two distributional tests which univocally indicate where the new information lies. Hence, the pairing of affirmative and interrogative sentences might be a better approach to locate where the new information lies in a Chinese utterance.
When we pay close attention to the prosody of Wh-questions in Japanese, we discover many novel and interesting empirical puzzles that would require us to devise a much finer syntactic component of grammar. This paper addresses the issues that pose some problems to such an elaborated grammar, and offers solutions, making an appeal to the information structure and sentence processing involved in the interpretation of interrogative and focus constructions.
This paper demonstrates that there are no empirical and theoretical motivations for regarding verbal predicate focus constructions as (diachronically) derived from cleft constructions. Instead, it is argued that predicate fronting for the purpose of focus or topic is comparable to verb (phrase) fronting structures in other languages (e.g., Germanic). The proposed analysis further indicates that related doubling strategies observed in certain languages are the consequences of parallel chains that license the fronted verb (phrase) in the left periphery, and the Agree-tense-aspect features inside the proposition.
This paper revisits the question of whether propositions in situation semantics must be persistent (Kratzer (1989)). It shows that ignoring persistence causes empirical problems to theories which use quantification over minimal situations as a solution for donkey anaphora (Elbourne (2005)), while at the same time modifying these theories to incorporate persistence makes them incompatible with the use of situations for contextual restriction (Kratzer (2004)).
In this paper I investigate the properties of the copula-like verb 'ficar' in Brazilian Portuguese using Pustejovsky's generative lexicon (GL). The verb 'ficar' can be translated as 'stay' or 'become', depending on its complement. With locatives, only the STAY reading is possible. With adjectival complements, both BECOME and STAY readings are possible. I propose that 'ficar' takes an eventuality as its complement and I argue that there is no need to create multiple lexical entries for it, since the readings are the result of the possible combinations between the transition denoted by 'ficar' and the properties of the stative complements.
I argue that the BECOME reading with adjectival predicates is the result of combining part of the qualia of the adjectival predicate with the TRANSITION of 'ficar'. The STAY readings of 'ficar'+adjective are the result of shadowing the transition. In the case of 'ficar'+locative, the BECOME reading is unavailable. Departing from the hypothesis that subevents have to be linked to arguments in order to be able to be modified by certain types of modifiers or be selected by certain types of heads, I argue that the transition, in the case of locative complements, is not associated to any argument because nothing in the qualia of the locative complement is compatible with a transition, given that there is not motion component in either 'ficar' or the locative. Unlinked to any argument, the TRANSITION can only be part of the 'constant' meaning of the verb, which explains why it is not available for modification.
This chapter examines the meaning of the term 'aperire' ('to open') in the schools of the twelfth century and within early scholastic thought. It argues for a shift from a traditional understanding of opening as a revelation received from God, towards a more technical definition of opening as applying dialectical logic to a text. The act of opening was employed polemically, both in debates between scholastic masters and to distinguish Christian from Jewish exegetical practices.
In this paper I show that the different case marking possibilities on predicate adjectives in depictive secondary predicates in Russian constitute the uninterpretable counterpart of the interpretable tense and aspect features of the adjective. Case agreement entails that the predicate adjective is non-eventive, i.e., it occurs when the event time of the secondary predicate is identical to the event time of the primary predicate. The instrumental case, however, entails that the secondary predicate is eventive: some change of state or transition occurred prior to or during the event time of the primary predicate. I claim that case agreement occurs in conjoined tense phrases in Russian, while the instrumental case occurs in adjoined aspectual phrases. In English, secondary predication is sensitive both to the structural location of its antecedent and to the event structure of the primary predicate. I suggest that depictives with subject antecedents in English are true adjunction structures, while those with direct object antecedents occur in a conjoined aspectual phrase. This hypothesis finds support in the different movement and semantic constraints in conjunction versus adjunction phrases in both English and Russian.
The current study investigates the relation between aspect and particle verbs in the acquisition of English. Its purpose is to determine whether children associate telicity, as argued in previous studies, or rather perfectivity, which entails completion of a telic situation, with their early particle verb use. The study analyzes naturalistic data of four monolingual children between 1;6 and 3;8 from CHILDES acquiring English as their first language. On the one hand, it finds that children use both –ed and irregular perfective morphology with simplex verbs before particle verbs. They further use imperfective before perfective morphology with particle verbs. These findings suggest that there is no correlation between telic particle verbs and perfective morphology, as would have been predicted on an account which claims that lexical aspect of predicates guides the acquisition of grammatical aspect (Olsen & Weinberg 1999). On the other hand, the study finds that the children’s particle verbs denote telic situations from early on, but not half of them were used to refer to situations that are also completed. This finding questions analyses which claim that, at an initial stage, children will only interpret predicates as telic if they refer to situations that are at the same time completed. Completion information is not necessary for children in order to use particle verbs correctly for telic situations, as would have been predicted on an extended account along the lines of Wagner (2001). As a conclusion, it is suggested that the divergent findings result from a difference in methodology. While restrictions of perfective and imperfective morphology to particular classes of lexical aspect pertain to the production of grammatical aspect morphology, perfective and imperfective viewpoints on situations pertain to the level of interpretation of telic and atelic situations.
What is abductive inference?
(2002)
Abductive reasoning: constitutes according to Peirce the "first stage" of scientific inquiries (CP 6.469) and of any interpretive processes. "Abduction" is the process of adopting an explanatory hypothesis (CP 5.145) and covers two operations: the selection and the formation of plausible hypotheses. As process of finding premisses, it is the basis of interpretive reconstruction of causes and intentions, as well as of inventive construction of theories.
According to standard Binding Theory, pronouns and reflexives are in (nearly) complementary distribution. However, representational NPs (e.g. 'picture of her/herself') allow both. It has been suggested that in English, reflexives in representational NPs (RNPs) have a preference for 'sources of information' and that pronouns prefer 'perceivers of information.' We conducted two experiments investigating the effects of structural and non-structural (source/perceiver) factors on the interpretation of two kinds of RNP structures in a typologically different language, namely Finnish. Our results reveal source/perceiver effects for postnominal but not for prenominal RNPs in Finnish, with a difference in the degree of sensitivity that pronouns and reflexives exhibit to the source/perceiver manipulation, and our results also suggest that morphological differences in Finnish reflexives correspond to interpretation differences. As a whole, these results support a multiple-factor model of reference resolution, which assumes that multiple factors can play a role in reference resolution and that the relative contributions of these factors can be different for different anaphoric forms (Kaiser 2003b, Kaiser & Trueswell in press).
What are incremental themes?
(2001)
In this paper I examine the approach to incremental themes developed in Krifka 1992,1998, Dowty 1991 and others, which argues that the extent of a telic event is determined by the extent of its incrementally affected theme. This approach identifies the defining property of an accomplishment event as being the fact that the theme relation is a homomorphism from parts of the event to parts of the (incremental) theme. I show that there are a large number of accomplishments, both lexical and derived via resultative predication, which cannot be characterised in this way. I then show that it is more insightful to characterise accomplishments in terms of their internally complex structure: an accomplishment event consists of a non-incremental activity event and an incrementally structured 'BECOME' event, which are related by a contextually available one-one function in such a way that the incremental structure of the latter is imposed on the activity.
The goal of this paper is to survey the accent systems of the indigenous languages of Africa. Although roughly one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, this continent has tended to be underrepresented in earlier stress and accent typology surveys, like Hyman (1977). This one aims to fill that gap. Two main contributions to the typology of accent are made by this study of African languages. First, it confirms Hyman's (1977) earlier finding that (stem-)initial and penult are the most common positions, cross-linguistically, to be assigned main stress. Further, it shows that not only stress but also tone and segment distribution can define prominence asymmetries which are best analyzed in terms of accent.
Wh-questions in Malagasy
(2004)
Wh-questions in Malagasy consist of a clause-initial wh-phrase followed by an invariant particle and then the remainder of the clause. This paper considers the structural analysis of Malagasy wh-questions and argues for a biclausal cleft analysis in which the initial wh-phrase is a predicate and the remaining material is a headless relative in subject position. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces some basic facts about Malagasy clause structure and wh-questions. Section 3 lays out two competing structural analyses of wh-questions: the cleft analysis and a fronting analysis in which Malagasy wh-questions are derived by wh-movement. Section 4 introduces various evidence in favor of the pseudocleft analysis and against the fronting analysis. Section 5 concludes.
This paper presents a preliminary survey of the positions and prosodies associated with Wh-questions in two Bantu languages spoken in Malawi. The paper shows that the two languages are similar in requiring focused subjects to be clefted. Both also require 'which' questions and 'because of what' questions to be clefted or fronted. However, for other non-subjects Tumbuka rather uniformly imposes an IAV (immediately after the verb) requirement, while Chewa does not. In both languages, we found a strong tendency for there to be a prosodic phrase break following the Wh-word. In Tumbuka, this break follows from the general phrasing algorithm of the language, while in Chewa, I propose that the break can be best understood as following from the inherent prominence of Wh-words.
Structural biology and life sciences in general, and NMR in particular, have always been associated with advanced computing. The current challenges in the post-genomic era call for virtual research platforms that provide the worldwide research community with both user-friendly tools, platforms for data analysis and exchange, and an underlying e-Infrastructure. WeNMR, a three-year European Commission co-funded project started in November 2010, groups different research teams into a worldwide virtual research community. It builds on the established eNMR e-Infrastructure and its steadily growing virtual organisation, which is currently the second largest VO in the area of life sciences. WeNMR provides an e-Infrastructure platform and Science Gateway for structural biology. It involves researchers from around the world and will build bridges to other areas of structural biology.
This chapter argues that paying attention to the weather and its associated processes of geological, biological, and social weathering can destabilize knowledge traditions that insist on dichotomies. Looking to specific histories and current conditions in Guyana and Suriname, this chapter shows how notions of weathering can accommodate a wide range of referents, ranging from the weathering of rock to socio-political and historical afterlives of violent colonial displacements.
The essay investigates the meteorological phenomena represented in Dante Alighieri's Commedia and their interrelation with the subjectivity of the dead in Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Examining how the dead weather the afterlife and how the elements affect them, in turn, the essay takes the complex enantiosemy of the word 'weathering' as a conceptual guiding thread for the exploration of dynamics of exposure ('Inferno'), vulnerability ('Purgatorio'), and receptivity ('Paradiso').
The chapter engages the nature-culture divide with the generative ambivalences of weathering in both language and physics. Taking the different uses of the enantiosemic and ambitransitive verb as indicative of the human's fraught relationship with its environment and itself, it analyses multiple ways in which 'weathering' can involve subject-object relations, objectless subject-predicate relations, or even subjectless processes, and proposes to think them with mechanics, thermodynamics, and chaos theory.
I argue in this study that consonantal strength shifts can be explained through positional bans on features, expressed over positions marked as weak at a given level of prosodic structure, usually the metrical foo!. This approach might be characterized as "templatic" in the sense it seeks to explain positional restrictions and distributional patterns relative to independently motivated, fixed prosodic elements. In this sense, it follows Dresher & Lahiri's (1991) idea of metrical coherence in phonological systems, namely, "[T]hat grammars adhere to syllabic templates and metrical patterns of limited types, and that these patterns persist across derivations and are available to a number of different processes ... " (251). [...] The study is structured as follows: section 1 presents a typology of distributional asymmetries based on data from unrelated languages, demonstrating that the stress foot of each of these languages determines the contexts of neutralization and weakening of stops. Section 2 elaborates the notion of a template, exploring some of its formal properties, while section 3 presents templatic analyses of data from English and German. Section 4 explores the properties of weak positions, especially weak onsets, in more detail, including discussion of templates in phonological acquisition. Section 5 summarizes and concludes the study.
Filippo Trentin's essay 'Warburg's Ghost: On Literary Atlases and the "Anatopic" Shift of a Cartographic Object' analyses the atlas as a method of assemblage in literary theory. It takes issue with the use of cartography advocated by proponents of a 'spatial turn' within literary studies, including Malcolm Bradbury's "Atlas of Literature", Franco Moretti's "Atlas of European Literature", and Sergio Luzzatto and Gabriele Pedullà's "Atlante della letteratura italiana". While these atlases claim to dismantle the normative canon of historicism and to offer a different way of gathering knowledge, Trentin argues that they often risk reproducing analogous positivistic, hierarchical, and colonizing assumptions. Showing a totalizing attitude embedded in modern atlases and in the 'cartographic reason' emerging from the sixteenth century onwards, the essay proposes a speculative and heuristic use of the term 'anatopy' that aims to capture the disorienting potentialities that are intrinsic to non-cartographic explorations of space. In particular, it interprets Aby Warburg's "Bilderatlas Mnemosyne" as an 'anatopic' object that keeps troubling any purely cartographic use of the atlas. In Trentin's reading, by theorizing an anti-foundational (and anti-identitarian) method of knowledge organization based on the morphological affect between disparate images and objects, Warburg's project leads to the profanation of the atlas as a topographical machine and, with its recurrences, intervals, and voids, destitutes its traditional apparatus of power. This disparate and anti-holistic aesthetic disposition challenges the solid foundations of the constructions of historicism and cartographic reason. It breaks up the technical explanation of cause and effect and substitutes it with a 'danced causality', which Trentin relates to Leo Bersani's idea of 'aesthetic subject' and the possibility of moving beyond an immobile and filial principle of identity formation towards a virtual and impersonal one that is located beyond the 'ego', as well as beyond the rigid borders of cartographic reason and the linearity of positivistic historicism.
"War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East" identifies a conceptual intersection between war, affect, and ecology from the Middle East. It creates a counter archive of texts by ethnographers and artists, and enables divergent worlds to share a conversation through the crevices of mass violence across species. Delving into vital encounters with mulberry trees, wild medicinal plants, jinns, and goats, as well as bleaker experiences with toxic war materials like landmines, this volume expands an ecological sensorium that works through displacement, memory, endurance, and praxis.
Umut Yıldırım's introduction combines the genres of literature review and commentary. It re-examines contemporary works on posthuman life to articulate ecological life-and-death politics within the context of colonial, imperial, and genocidal mass violence, and their entangled environmental legacies and actualities. A dissident repertoire of anthropological and artistic research is offered, which examines the ecological impact of war through the perspectives of human and more-than-human actors whose racialized and geographically regimented lives endure and counter ongoing environmental destruction.
Wang Li (1900-1986)
(2006)
In this paper, I will address the issue of translation as a critique of autochthony that emerges in the context of Fritz Mauthner's linguistic scepticism. Translation, for Mauthner, becomes a privileged prism through which to consider identity and belonging, as well as a way of understanding uprootedness, since language is a continuous product of borrowing, bastardization, stratification, and contingency. According to Mauthner, languages are not possession, but borrowing; not purity, but contagion; not an abstract crystallization, but transit. Therefore, love of the mother tongue - the only way to conceive patriotism - is not a physical connection with the land, roots, or nation, but a refuge, an always precarious 'Heimat' (home).
Aumiller writes lists to externalize what overwhelms her. To be in control. To master and move on. Yet, her lists circle back to her. The process of writing the same list every day or the same act of writing the list is a looping. She returns to herself, to the parts she can remember and to the parts she can't remember, but also can't leave behind.
Fronting of an infinite VP across a finite main verb - akin to German "VP-topicalization" - can be found also in Czech and Polish. The paper discusses evidence from large corpora for this process and some of its properties, both syntactic and information-structural. Based on this case, criteria for more user-friedly searching and retrieval of corpus data in syntactic research are being developed.
Vowel dispersion in Truku
(2004)
This study investigates the dispersion of vowel space in Truku, an endangered Austronesian language in Taiwan. Adaptive Dispersion (Liljencrants and Lindblom, 1972; Lindblom, 1986, 1990) proposes that the distinctive sounds of a language tend to be positioned in phonetic space in a way that maximizes perceptual contrast. For example, languages with large vowel inventories tend to expand the overall acoustic vowel space. Adaptive Dispersion predicts that the distance between the point vowels will increase with the size of a language's vowel inventory. Thus, the available acoustic vowel space is utilized in a way that maintains maximal auditory contrast.
The contribution of von Kempelen's "Mechanism of Speech" to the 'phonetic sciences' will be analyzed with respect to his theoretical reasoning on speech and speech production on the one hand and on the other in connection with his practical insights during his struggle in constructing a speaking machine. Whereas in his theoretical considerations von Kempelen's view is focussed on the natural functioning of the speech organs – cf. his membraneous glottis model – in constructing his speaking machine he clearly orientates himself towards the auditory result – cf. the bag pipe model for the sound generator used for the speaking machine instead. Concerning vowel production his theoretical description remains questionable, but his practical insight that vowels and speech sounds in general are only perceived correctly in connection with their surrounding sounds – i.e. the discovery of coarticulation – is clearly a milestone in the development of the phonetic sciences: He therefore dispenses with the Kratzenstein tubes, although they might have been based on more thorough acoustic modelling.
Finally, von Kempelen's model of speech production will be discussed in relation to the discussion of the acoustic nature of vowels afterwards [Willis and Wheatstone as well as von Helmholtz and Hermann in the 19th century and Stumpf, Chiba & Kajiyama as well as Fant and Ungeheuer in the 20th century].
[V]oice in Malagasy is less like voice in English and more like wh-agreement, of the sort which Chung (1998) documents for Chamorro. In A' -extraction contexts in Chamorro, regular subject agreement […] is replaced by special morphology indicating whether the extracted element is a subject, object, or oblique […]. In Pearson (to appear) I suggested that Malagasy voice marking is a 'generalized' version of this type of marking: While in Chamorro wh-agreement is confined to questions, relative clauses, and the like, in Malagasy it appears in all clause types due to a requirement that the specifier of WhP be filled in every clause. [...]
In this paper I focus on the voice affixes themselves and propose an account of their distribution. Specifically, I argue that they are realizations of light verbs and Case-checking heads, which combine with the root through head-to-head movement. The distribution of the affixes is determined by the positions from which, and through which, the null operator […] moves on its way to the specifier of WhP. For example, the actor-topic prefix m- is treated as a nominative Casechecking head, which gets spelled out just in case the operator raises through its specifier. (My analysis is thus in the spirit of Guilfoyle, Hung, & Travis (1992), who also associate voice morphemes with Case licensing.)
Whereas in traditional models of literary narrative we had to deal with typologies mainly (for instance, of "narrative situations"; see Stanzel 1971, 1984; Fludernik and Margolin 2004; Genette 1980), we now possess a systematic description of the imagination evoked by a text, which takes into account the quasi-ontological (see Bortolussi and Dixon 2003) status of its constituents. In this chapter I search for the cognitive functions that correlate with the text features of "voice" and "perception" and for how they bring about such a "layered" imagination in the reader. The aim is to explain how and why literary narratives can run properly in the human mind-which is another way of asking how humans could develop narrative discourse as a way of communication at all.
This article pinpoints the double being and doing of weapons, warriors and warrior fraternities as quite possibly a characterising trait from the onset of the Corded Ware period well into the mature Bronze Age and beyond. Exquisitely crafted weapons of bronze – many spirited with a life-energy of their own – were used to wage war and sometimes to hack victims into pieces with strong indications that the beautiful warrior with his trained well-groomed body was capable of extreme violence. The companionship of warrior peers in the fraternity was a social construct enabling effective waging of war as well as fulfilling other roles in Bronze Age society, contributing to rituals and social interaction.
In this article, I provide a description and analysis of the morphemes čiɫ 'do to', ḥta 'do towards' and cḥin 'do for' in the Southern Wakashan language Nuuchahnulth (nuučaan̓uɫ). I argue that these morphemes are verbal applicatives that add a non-core argument to the thematic structure of a verb.
Verbal applicatives in Nuuchahnulth are interesting to investigate because they exhibit typologically unique behaviour that has never been studied before. Applicatives are traditionally considered functional elements whose only purpose is to add an indirect object to the argument structure of the verb (Pylkkanen 2002:17). Nuuchahnulth is the only known language that productively uses independent verbs for this purpose.
Nuuchahnulth is an indigenous language of Canada spoken in the province of British Columbia. It consists of 14 major dialects, most of which have never been studied. All of these dialects are now highly endangered and urgently need to be documented.
Verb agreement and epistemic marking : a typological journey from the Himalayas to the Caucasus
(2008)
Studies of the epistemic categories expressed in Tibetan auxiliaries and copulas have mostly compared the phenomena with mirativity marking, and this is no doubt the correct comparandum in diachronic research. However, synchronic descriptions are also often tempted to compare the relevant categories with agreement systems or similar reference-related structures, at least for expository purposes when explaining how the system works (e. g. Denwood 1999, Tournadre 1996, Goldstein et al. 1991).
The present study argues that variation across listeners in the perception of a non-native contrast is due to two factors: the listener-specic weighting of auditory dimensions and the listener-specic construction of new segmental representations. The interaction of both factors is shown to take place in the perception grammar, which can be modelled within an OT framework. These points are illustrated with the acquisition of the Dutch three-member labiodental contrast [V v f] by German learners of Dutch, focussing on four types of learners from the perception study by Hamann and Sennema (2005a).
Dulong/Rawang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken on both sides of the China/Myanmar (Burma) border just south and cast of Tibet. [...] In this chapter, I will be using data of the Mvtwang (Mvt River) dialect, which is considered the most central of those dialects in Myanmar and so has become something of a standard for writing and intergroup communication, though most of the phenomena we will be discussing are general to dialects in both China and Myanrnar. I will use the short form 'Rawang' in referring to this dialect.
In this paper, I revisit the arguments against the use of fuzzy logic in linguistics (or more generally, against a truth-functional account of vagueness). In part, this is an exercise to explain to fuzzy logicians why linguists have shown little interest in their research paradigm. But, the paper contains more than this interdisciplinary service effort that I started out on: In fact, this seems an opportune time for revisiting the arguments against fuzzy logic in linguistics since three recent developments affect the argument. First, the formal apparatus of fuzzy logic has been made more general since the 1970s, specifically by Hajek [6], and this may make it possible to define operators in a way to make fuzzy logic more suitable for linguistic purposes. Secondly, recent research in philosophy has examined variations of fuzzy logic ([18, 19]). Since the goals of linguistic semantics seem sometimes closer to those of some branches of philosophy of language than they are to the goals of mathematical logic, fuzzy logic work in philosophy may mark the right time to reexamine fuzzy logic from a linguistic perspective as well. Finally, the reasoning used to exclude fuzzy logic in linguistics has been tied to the intuition that p and not p is a contradiction. However, this intuition seems dubious especially when p contains a vague predicate. For instance, one can easily think of circumstances where 'What I did was smart and not smart.' or 'Bea is both tall and not tall.' don’t sound like senseless contradictions. In fact, some recent experimental work that I describe below has shown that contradictions of classical logic aren’t always felt to be contradictory by speakers. So, it is important to see to what extent the argument against fuzzy logic depends on a specific stance on the semantics of contradictions. In sum then, there are three good reasons to take another look at fuzzy logic for linguistic purposes.
Using MAIN in South Africa
(2020)
South Africa is a country marked by cultural and linguistic diversity with 11 official languages. The majority of school children do not receive their formal schooling in their home language. There is a need for language assessment tools in education and rehabilitation contexts to distinguish between children with language learning problems and/or SLI, and language delay as a result of limited exposure to the language of learning. The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) provides clinicians and researchers with an appropriate and culturally relevant tool to assess bilingual children in both languages. So far MAIN has been widely used in Afrikaans-English bilingual children. However, translating and adapting MAIN to our other nine official languages to achieve functional and cultural equivalence is more challenging.
This paper describes the experience of using the Norwegian and Russian versions of LITMUS-MAIN to elicit narrative data from bilingual Norwegian-Russian children as well as from Norwegian- and Russian-speaking monolinguals (Rodina 2017, 2018). The paper reports on the slight adaptations to the standardized design, procedure and analysis that were done to make the tasks more suitable for this specific population. It highlights the advantages, challenges, and potential associated with the task against a backdrop of the research conducted with Norwegian-Russian bilinguals in Norway.
There are many tools available that are used to evaluate a radiotherapy treatment plan, such as isodose distribution charts, dose volume histograms (DVH), maximum, minimum and mean doses of the dose distributions as well as DVH point dose constraints. All the already mentioned evaluation tools are dosimetric only without taking into account the radiobiological characteristics of tumors or OARs. It has been demonstrated that although competing treatment plans might have similar mean, maximum or minimum doses they may have significantly different clinical outcomes (Mavroidis et al. 2001). For performing a more complete treatment plan evaluation and comparison the complication-free tumor control probability (P+) and the biologically effective uniform dose (D ) have been proposed (Källman et al. 1992a, Mavroidis et al. 2000). The D concept denotes that any two dose distributions within a target or OAR are equivalent if they produce the same probability for tumor control or normal tissue complication, respectively (Mavroidis et al. 2001)...
"Untying the Mother Tongue" explores what it might mean today to speak of someone's attachment to a particular, primary language. Traditional conceptions of mother tongue are often seen as an expression of the ideology of a European nation-state. Yet, current celebrations of multilingualism reflect the recent demands of global capitalism, raising other challenges. The contributions from international scholars on literature, philosophy, and culture, analyze and problematize the concept of 'mother tongue', rethinking affective and cognitive attachments to language while deconstructing its metaphysical, capitalist, and colonialist presuppositions.
What are called 'natural languages' are artificial, often politically instituted and regulated, phenomena; a more accurate picture of speech practices around the globe is of a multidimensional continuum. This essay asks what the implications of this understanding of language are for translation, and focuses on the variety of Afrikaans known as Kaaps, which has traditionally been treated as a dialect rather than a language in its own right. An analysis of a poem in Kaaps by Nathan Trantraal reveals the challenges such a use of language constitutes for translation. A revised understanding of translation is proposed, relying less on the notion of transfer of meaning from one language to another and more on an active engagement with the experience of the reader.
In "The Book of Margery Kempe", the protagonist shifts between identities and geographies as a nomadic subject, dispersed across compassionate responses to violence that unusually include a recognition of animal suffering. The "Life" of Christina the Astonishing also seizes on the nonhuman aspects of extreme affective experience as her bodily transformations participate in a process of becoming animal. Both texts reflect a medieval fascination with the devotional body as a zone of closure and opening where transhuman and interspecies associations can be safely explored.
This paper describes the creation and preparation of TUSNELDA, a collection of corpus data built for linguistic research. This collection contains a number of linguistically annotated corpora which differ in various aspects such as language, text sorts / data types, encoded annotation levels, and linguistic theories underlying the annotation. The paper focuses on this variation on the one hand and the way how these heterogeneous data are integrated into one resource on the other hand.
What is the relationship between reenactment and repetition compulsion? By shedding light upon the different levels of reenactment at stake in "Yella" by Christian Petzold, I analyse the 'transitional spaces' where the German filmmaker places his wandering characters who have 'slipped out of history'. In "Yella" Petzold mixes up past, present, future, and oneiric re-elaboration to question the memory of the past of GDR, which in his view has never really been constituted as history. The characters that populate this movie move in a setting constructed at the crossroad between a protected environment where the reenacted events are sheltered by the time and the space of the plot and a place weathered by the unpredictable atmospheric agents of the present. How and to which extent can the clash between different temporalities produce a minimal variation?
To support the practice of preservation and mediation of video works in the LIMA Collection (Amsterdam), the authors explore the possibilities of reinterpretation as a rather common practice in the performing arts. As a choreographer and a dramaturge, they establish a correlation between reinterpretation and dramaturgy - as a way to deal with non-objective or transitory aspects of the works - and describe their method in relation to the video and performance artist Nan Hoover.
UNFOLD : the strategic importance of reinterpretation for media art mediation and conservation
(2022)
UNFOLD: Mediation by Reinterpretation is a research project and interdisciplinary network initiated by LIMA, Platform for Media Art in Amsterdam, that examines reinterpretation as an emerging practice for artistic production, presentation, and preservation of media works. New elements stretch the boundaries of traditional preservation methods and require insights from both the artist and the curator to decide how pieces can be restaged. This essay investigates how to deal with the changes of digital/media artworks over time, and how to preserve and mediate their performative aspects.
The diagnosis that we are living in a world risk society formulated by Ulrich Beck 20 years ago (Beck, Kölner Z Soziol Sozialpsychol 36:119–147, 1996) has lost nothing of its power, especially against the background of the Anthropocene debate. “Global risks” have been identified which are caused by human activities, technology, and modernization processes. Microplastics are a by-product of exactly these modernization processes, being distributed globally by physical processes like ocean currents, and causing effects far from their place of origin. In recent years, the topic has gained great prominence, as microplastics have been discovered nearly everywhere in the environment, raising questions about the impacts on food for human consumption. But are microplastics really a new phenomenon or rather a symptom of an old problem? And exactly what risks are involved? It seems that the phenomenon has accelerated political action—the USA has passed the Microbead-Free Waters Act 2015—and industries have pledged to fade out the use of microbeads in their cosmetic products. At first sight, is it a success for environmentalists and the protection of our planet?
This chapter deals with these questions by adopting a social-ecological perspective, discussing microplastics as a global risk. Taking four main characteristics of global risks, we develop four arguments to discuss (a) the everyday production of risk by societies, (b) scientific risk evaluation of microplastics, (c) social responses, and (d) problems of risk management. To illustrate these four issues, we draw on different aspects of the current scientific and public debate. In doing so, we contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the social-ecological implications of microplastics.
The verb ‘rise’ can be used both with property-denoting nouns like ‘temperature’ but also with NPs like ‘a Titan’ or ‘China’. Whereas in the former case the change triggered by a rising event is directly related to the subject (its current value increases), this does not hold for ‘a titan’ or ‘China’. In this case it is a property of these objects, say their height or their political power, which increases in value. Furthermore, ‘rise’ does not target a particular property as the examples above show. This data has led Cooper (2010) to the conclusion that it is presumably not possible (i) “to extract a single general meaning of words which covers all the particular meanings of the word in context”, and (ii) “to determine once and for all the set of particular contextually determined meanings of a word”. In this article we present a solution to the two problems raised by ‘rise’ in a frame theory. ‘Rise’ is analyzed as a scalar verb which does not lexicalize a complete scale in its meaning. Rather, it shows underspecification relative to the dimension (property) parameter of a scale. The set of admissible properties is determined by a constraint on the value ranges of properties. If the property is not uniquely determined by the subject, the comprehender uses probabilistic reasoning based on world knowledge and discourse information to defeasibly infer the most likely candidates from this set (2nd problem).
The first problem is solved not by simply introducing objects into the representation of a discourse but instead by pairs consisting of an object and an associated frame component which collects the object information contributed by the discourse. Changes triggered by events like the one denoted by ‘rise’ are modelled as update operations on the frame component while the object component is left unchanged.
The present study, based on a typological survey of ca. 70 languages, offers a systematization of consonantal insertions by classifying them into three main types: grammatical, phonetic, and prosodic insertions. The three epenthesis types essentially differ from each other in terms of preferred sounds, domains of application, the role of segmental context, their occurrence cross-linguistically, the extent of variation and phonetic explication.
The present investigation is significantly different from other analyses of consonantal epentheses in the sense that it neither invokes markedness nor diachronic state of the processes under discussion. Instead, it considers the different nature of the epenthetic segments by referring to the representational levels and/or domains which are relevant for their appearance.
Typology and complexity
(2005)
For the Workshop I was asked to talk about complexity in language from a typological perspective. My way of approaching this topic was to ask myself some questions, and then see where the answers led. The first one was of course, "What sort of system are we looking at complexity in - what kind of system is language?"
A wall-sized canvas by Twombly hanging in a purpose-built pavilion by Renzo Piano, commissioned by the Menil Collection in Houston, bears the scrawled inscription »Anatomy of Melancholy.« Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) is the culminating statement of the artist’s maturity: begun in 1972, it was first exhibited in 1994. In this monumental cenotaph, Twombly’s painting displays phrases from Archilochos, Catullus, Keats and Rilke, as well as the title of Burton’s famous tome, worked into the fabric of the composition, integral to the iconic content. It is the aching heart of the select permanent exhibition of his oeuvre at the pavilion, known as the Twombly Gallery (www.menil.org/twombly.html). The austerity of Piano’s architectural setting, as well as the cunningly filtered Texas sunlight, makes this a site of cult, like the chapel containing the dark, final canvases of Mark Rothko, situated around the corner in the same urban grove of old oak. The setting is a modern Dodona, remote seat of the oaken oracle of Zeus, and it makes an evocative home for Twombly’s enigmatic constructions. These disarm conventional vocabularies of aesthetic response, drawing attention to words and snatches of verse as points of association and recognition. Looking at them involves siting a phrase such as »Anatomy of Melancholy« in other dimensions – in lines, patches, figures, colors.
The goal of this paper is to investigate cases of apparent noun-incorporation in Malagasy, a western Austronesian language spoken in Madagascar. Looking at examples [...], one may ask whether or not Malagasy has nounincorporation. [...] The organization of this paper is as follows: I begin with a general discussion of the distribution of nominals in Malagasy - with and without determiners. In section 3 I turn to […] two constructions […] and compare and contrast them. Section 4 details the analyses of the two constructions and I conclude the paper in section 5.
In the wake of Kayne's Antisymmetry Hypothesis and Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA), there has been much fruitful research attempting to adjust syntactic analyses to those permitted by Kayne's restrictive system. In doing so, analyses which at first seem counter-intuitive may tum out to provide solutions to old problems. Two cases in point are the analysis of Malagasy involving extensive Remnant Movement [henceforth RM1 described in Rackowski & Travis (2000), Pearson (2001), and elsewhere; on the one hand, and the analysis of Hungarian and Dutch verbal clusters in Koopman & Szabolcsi (2000) [henceforth R&T, Pearson, and K&Sz].
The original motivation (in part) for examining L&Sz and subsequently R&T was that it is the extensive use of iterated RM which increases the computational complexity of languages generatable in Stabler's "Strict Minimalist Grammar" formalism over that of context-free grammars. It has also been noted that allowing extraction from complex specifiers created by Merge (as opposed to Move) increases the level of complexity even further (lens Michaelis, p.e.). Both R&T and K&Sz make extensive use of RM; R&T allow extraction from complex specifiers, while K&Sz do not. Although the specifiers in both cases are created by Move, not Merge, we nevertheless feel that there is enough intrinsic linguistic interest in trying to limit extraction possibilities to pursue the comparison of these two systems with regard to this point.
It has been hypothesized that sounds which are less perceptible are more likely to be altered than more salient sounds, the rationale being that the loss of information resulting from a change in a sound which is difficult to perceive is not as great as the loss resulting from a change in a more salient sound. Kohler (1990) suggested that the tendency to reduce articulatory movements is countered by perceptual and social constraints, finding that fricatives are relatively resistant to reduction in colloquial German. Kohler hypothesized that this is due to the perceptual salience of fricatives, a hypothesis which was supported by the results of a perception experiment by Hura, Lindblom, and Diehl (1992). These studies showed that the relative salience of speech sounds is relevant to explaining phonological behavior. An additional factor is the impact of different acoustic environments on the perceptibility of speech sounds. Steriade (1997) found that voicing contrasts are more common in positions where more cues to voicing are available. The P-map, proposed by Steriade (2001a, b), allows the representation of varying salience of segments in different contexts. Many researchers have posited a relationship between speech perception and phonology. The purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence for this relationship, drawing on the case of Turkish /h/ deletion.
This article compares two similar yet never compared cases of intra-European othering: Spain and the South Slavic region. Their common denominator is what I call the Periphery Problem: a hierarchical cultural difference between Europe's symbolic centre (Western Europe) and its exotic peripheries. Using paradigmatic examples intertextually linked to Prosper Mérimée, this article focuses both on the centre (exemplified by Mérimée), and the peripheries' recent responses to Mérimée through meta-images (your image of others' image of you). The structural commonalities in characterization and the entanglements of internal and external images show that national characterization in Europe is profoundly a transnational phenomenon.
Des critiques et écrivains de nouvelles ont défendu l'idée que la brieveté et un unique moment de clarté sont les éléments essentiels du format court typique de la nouvelle. Cependant, la nouvelle postcoloniale est plurielle, polyphonique et versatile, et elle a tendance à s'appuyer sur le désaccord culturel, social, et linguistique. Ce chapitre examine la traduction et l'échec de celle-ci dans l'oeuvre de deux nouvellistes prolifiques qui viennent des deux différentes traditions postcoloniales : Nadine Gordimer et Anita Desai. La prémisse de mon argument est que les nouvelles de ces écrivains ont pour la plupart lieu dans des espaces périphériques, par exemple des villages et des avant-postes. Elles dramatisent une forme de processus postcolonial de désengagement des centres de pouvoir en explorant et en remettant en question des hiérarchies discursives. Cette renégociation implique la présence de perspectives multiples et de subjectivités plurielles, de même qu'elle insiste sur des traductions problématiques et des malentendus surgissant en leur sein. Par l'étude de textes de Gordimer et Desai, ce chapitre considère plusieurs formes de malentendus – fausses représentations, mécompréhension, traductions erronées et obstructions linguistiques – qui ses présentent dans deux nouvelles. Il ressort de cette analyse que les malentendus sont susceptibles de devenir les instruments de l'expression d'une résistance dans les sites hégémoniques de la langue et du pouvoir.
It is no longer possible to ignore how crucial processes of cultural translation and their analysis have become, whether for cultural contact or interreligious relations and conflicts, for integration strategies in multicultural societies or for the exploration of productive interfaces between the humanities and the natural sciences. The globalisation of world society, in particular, demands increased attention to mediation processes and problems of transfer, in terms of both the circulation of global representations and 'travelling concepts' and of the interactions that make up cultural encounters. Here, translation becomes, on the one hand, a condition for global relations of exchange ('global translatability') and, on the other, a medium especially liable to reveal cultural differences, power imbalances and the scope for action. An explicit focus on translation processes— something increasingly prevalent across the humanities—may thus enable us to scrutinise more closely current and historical situations of cultural encounter as complex processes of cultural translation. Translation is opened up to a transnational cultural practice that in no way remains restricted to binary relationships between national languages, national literatures or national cultures.
In December 1960 the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York displayed a series of thirty-four illustrations of the "Inferno" by the avant-garde artist Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg had developed this project over the previous two years, working on it almost exclusively, first in New York City, and then in an isolated storage room in Treasure Island, Florida, where he retreated to concentrate on the last half of the cycle. [...] Whatever the spark that set the project in motion, we find Rauschenberg's reply to his detractors here: the refuse that crowded his "Combines" was no joke, nor was it there to undermine or deride high art in the spirit of Dada. With his collection of things, he was composing a new language, turning fragments - the ruins of his environment and culture - into emblems. And what is an emblem if not a composite figure, an assemblage of diverse fragments into a new unity and order? As such, it is an elusive visual allegory whose pictorial image tends to lose its consistency and become a sign open to interpretations; in it, the different narratives springing from its multiple nature come together and give birth to a polysemic language. It is with this language, abstract and referential at the same time, that Rauschenberg translates Dante's poem and makes it new by linking it to something in existence, present in the viewer’s reality of mechanically reproduced images. By choosing 'to ennoble the ordinary', he, perhaps unconsciously, became the hermeneutist of his age and gave durability to what was trivial and precarious.
What if one thinks not in terms of shared meanings or contents, but rather in terms of iterable gestures available for reenactment in different times and places in order to conceive of a cross-cultural world of literature? This essay sets out to explore, within the discursive mode of the lyric, whether the notion of gesture could be more helpful than meaning-based translation to account for the transferability of literary texts and for envisioning a form of community based on the shareability of certain gestures. To do so, it will look at how the act-event of reading described by Derek Attridge is processed in two cases in which poems are transferred from an earlier authoritative tradition into a new one.
Traces
(2007)
This paper summarizes our research efforts in functional modelling of the relationship between the acoustic properties of vowels and perceived vowel quality. Our model is trained on 164 short steady-state stimuli. We measured F1, F2, and additionally F0 since the effect of F0 on perceptual vowel height is evident. 40 phonetically skilled subjects judged vowel quality using the Cardinal Vowel diagram. The main focus is on refining the model and describing its transformation properties between the F1/F2 formant chart and the Cardinal Vowel diagram. An evaluation of the model based on 48 additional vowels showed the generalizability of the model and confirmed that it predicts perceived vowel quality with sufficient accuracy.
This paper deals with a series of semantic contrasts between the copula "be" and the preposition "as", two functional elements that both head elementary predication structures. It will be argued that the meaning of "as" is a type lowering device shifting the meaning of its complement NP from generalized quantifier type to property type (where properties are conceived as relations between individuals and situations), while the copula "be" induces a type coercion from (partial) situations to (total) possible worlds. Paired with van der Sandt's 1992 theory of presupposition accommodation, these assumptions will account for the observed contrasts between "as" and "be".
In this article we propose that there are two universal properties for phonological stop assibilations, namely (i) assibilations cannot be triggered by /i/ unless they are also triggered by /j/, and (ii) voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. The article presents typological evidence from assibilations in 45 languages supporting both (i) and (ii). It is argued that assibilations are to be captured in the Optimality Theoretic framework by ranking markedness constraints grounded in perception which penalize sequences like [ti] ahead of a faith constraint which militates against the change from /t/ to some sibilant sound. The occurring language types predicted by (i) and (ii) will be shown to involve permutations of the rankings between several different markedness constraints and the one faith constraint. The article demonstrates that there exist several logically possible assibilation types which are ruled out because they would involve illicit rankings.
It is the aim of this paper to evaluate the various types of sentential complementation available in terms of complement control cross-linguistically. I will propose a lexical classification of control classes on the basis of the instantiated subordination patterns. I want to focus on an important distinction, namely that of structural vs. inherent control. Structural control is found with predicates that select a clausal complement whose structure requires argument identification and thus 'induces' control. Infinitival complements are prototypical cases for this kind of control because in most languages infinitival complements can only 'survive' in structures of control or raising. The interesting question is which predicates license structural control and which cross-linguistic differences emerge between potential licensors. Inherent control is found with predicates that require control readings independent of the instantiated structure of sentential complementation (e.g. a directive predicate such as zwingen 'force'). In addition, I will recapitulate and add arguments for the dual lexical-syntactic nature of complement control.
In the area of the Modern Greek verb, phenomena which consistently appear are headmarking, many potential slots before and/or after the verb root, noun and adverb incorporation, addition of adverbial elements by means of affixes, a large inventory of bound morphemes, verbal words as minimal sentences, etc. These features relate Modern Greek to polysynthesis. The main bulk of this paper is dedicated to the comparison of affixal and incorporation patterns between Modern Greek and the polysynthetic languages Abkhaz, Cayuga, Chukchi, Mohawk, and Nahuatl. Ultimately, a typological outlook for Modern Greek is proposed.
This paper presents the adaptation of MAIN to Gondi (Dantewada), Halbi and Hindi for Gondi-Hindi and Halbi-Hindi bilinguals. The Gondi and Halbi communities and the context in which Gondi-Hindi and Halbi-Hindi bilingual children are growing up are described, and the adaptation process is outlined together with its theoretical underpinnings. Finally, results from a study of 54 Halbi-Hindi bilinguals from Grade 3 (Mean age = 8.5 years), Grade 5 (Mean age = 10.9 years) and Grade 7 (Mean age = 12.9 years) are presented. The results showed that, for the macrostructure of Grade 3 and Grade 5, L1 retelling was significantly better than L2 retelling, though this pattern was not found in Grade 7 where the performance was at the same level across languages for retelling. Narrative macrostructure was consistently higher in tellings than in the retellings regardless of languages and grades.
This paper describes the processing of MRI and CT images needed for developing a 3D linear articulatory model of velum. The 3D surface that defines each organ constitutive of the vocal and nasal tracts is extracted from MRI and CT images recorded on a subject uttering a corpus of artificially sustained French vowels and consonants. First, the 2D contours of the organs have been manually extracted from the corresponding images, expanded into 3D contours, and aligned in a common 3D coordinate system. Then, for each organ, a generic mesh has been chosen and fitted by elastic deformation to each of the 46 3D shapes of the corpus. This has finally resulted in a set of organ surfaces sampled with the same number of 3D vertices for each articulation, which is appropriate for Principal Component Analysis or linear decomposition. The analysis of these data has uncovered two main uncorrelated articulatory degrees of freedom for the velum's movement. The associated parameters are used to control the model. We have in particular investigated the question of a possible correlation between jaw / tongue and velum's movement and have not find more correlation than the one found in the corpus.
This article outlines a production-oriented imagology and equips the imagological toolkit with concepts and terminology from cultural memory studies, reception aesthetics, narratology, rhetoric, and text linguistics. It thereby presents the theoretical framework which makes it possible to analyse generic elements without a national connotation with regard to their function in generating a national image. Using as examples genres from English Romanticism and how they evoke Englishness, the article highlights the aesthetic complexity of national images and their range of variation. Simultaneously it paves the way for a more nuanced deconstruction of these images.
In this paper I argue that there are three distinct constructions in Modern German in which a 'topic constituent' is detached to the left: (left-)dislocated topic ('left dislocation'), (left-)attached topic ('mixed left dislocation'), and (left-)hanging topic ('hanging topic'). Presupposing the framework of Integrational Linguistics, I provide syntactic and semantic analyses for them. In particular, I propose that these constructions involve the syntactic function (syntactic) topic, which relates the topic constituent to the remaining part of the sentence. Dislocated and attached topic constituents function in addition as a strong or weak (syntactic) antecedent of some resumptive 'd-pronoun' form.
Dislocated topic, attached topic, and hanging topic are in turn contrasted with 'free topics'. Being sentential units of their own, the latter are syntactically unconnected to the following sentence. In particular, they are not topic constituents.
Starting from a consideration of the internal make-up of adverbial clauses this paper shows that the widespread assumption that fronted arguments in English and CLLD constituents in Romance occupy the same position leads to a number of problems. I will conclude that the position occupied by English topicalized arguments differs from that of the CLLD topics in Romance. In particular, English topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery. The final part of the paper compares three proposals for the lower topic position in Romance.
Current analyses of specificity are unable to provide an explanatory account for why specific and nonspecific uses of indefinites are available. While Abusch (1994), Reinhart (1997), and Kratzer (1998) provide successful mechanisms for deriving specific readings, they do not provide a fundamental explanation for the availability of this mechanism. This is due to the fact that specific indefinites are treated as involving an interpretive component or procedure unique to themselves: storage (Abusch) or choice function (Reinhart and Kratzer), for example. It would be preferable if specific indefinites could be understood as deriving from the use of independently motivated meaning components and interpretive mechanisms.
Here I will pursue the idea, building on Portner & Yabushita (1998), that specificity has to do with the indefinite's interaction with a topical domain (note similarities with the proposals of Enç 1991, Cresti 1995, and Schwarzschild 2000). In this conception, specificity is a matter of degree: the narrower the topical domain, the more specific the indefinite. More precisely, sentences containing specific indefinites will be understood as involving ordinary existential quantification in combination with a topical domain function.
The complexity of human languages has always inspired research for some human faculty that makes language learning possible. The system that generates the complexity of human languages, ideally, is simple and effective. Recent developments of the generative grammatical theory explore deeper into the issue of simplicity or economy. The Minimalist Program developed in Chomsky (1991, 1993, 1995) tries to provide contents to such notions. What does it mean to be more economic or least effort? An important instantiation of such notions is the proposal that movement is the last resort assuming that movement is more costly than non-movement. Processes occur only because they are necessary. The definition of necessity generally is cast in morphological terms. Moreover, the notion of "economy" or "least effort" is deterministic of the appropriate derivations for sentences: a shorter derivation is better than a longer one. In this work, we show that the notion of "least effort," - do minimally if possible - is manifested not only in derivations but also in other aspects of the grammar. We take Chinese as an example and show that this language exhibits the properties manifesting some "least effort" guidelines in the area of movement and reconstruction, and in the projection of syntactic positions: when there is a choice, non-application of moyement/reconstruction and non-projection of a position are adopted. These phenomena essentially are attested in topic structures. The question arises as to why topic structures exhibit such minimal effort effects. We suggest that this is due to the fact that topic structures can be derived by movement or base-generation. When there are morpho-syntactic clues that reconstruction is necessary, the structure is a movement structure. Otherwise, the less costly non-movement structure is assumed. Moreover, because of the possibility of assuming a topic NP to be base-generated, bearing a predication (or aboutness) relation with the comment clause, the argument position which otherwise would be related to the topic (conveniently termed the trace position) is not projected when there is a choice of projecting or not projecting it.
In this paper topic and focus effects at both left and right periphery are argued to be epiphenomena of general properties of tree growth. We incorporate Korean into this account as a prototypical verb-final language, and show how long- and short-distance scrambling form part of this general picture. Multiple long-distance scrambling effects emerge as a consequence of the feeding relationship between different forms of structural under-specification. We also show how the array of effects at the right periphery, in both verb-final and other language-types, can also be explained with the same concepts of tree growth. In particular the Right Roof Constraint, a well-known but little understood constraint, is an immediate consequence of compositionality constraints as articulated in this system.
The paper explicates the notions of topic, contrastive topic, and focus as used in the analysis of Hungarian. Based on distributional criteria, topic and focus are claimed to represent distinct structural positions in the left periphery of the Hungarian sentence, associated with logical rather than discourse functions. The topic is interpreted as the logical subject of predication. The focus is analyzed as a derived main predicate, specifying the referential content of the set denoted by the backgrounded post-focus section of the sentence. The exhaustivity associated with the focus and the existential presupposition associated with the background are shown to be properties following from their specificational predication relation.
"The documentation of... descriptive generalizations is sometimes clearer and more accessible when expressed in terms of a detailed formal reconstruction, but only in the rare and happy case that the formalism fits the data so well that the resulting account is clearer and easier to understand than the list of categories of facts that it encodes.... [If not], subsequent scholars must often struggle to decode a description in an out-of-date formal framework so as to work back to... the facts.... which they can re-formalize in a new way. Having experienced this struggle often ourselves, we have decided to accommodate our successors by providing them directly with a plainer account." (Akinlabi & Liberman 2000:24)
It is traditionally assumed that lexical causative verbs (e.g. kill) express direct causation only, while periphrastic (bi-clausal) causatives (e.g. cause to die) may also express indirect causation. In favour of this constraint, Fodor famously observed that the (change of) state introduced by lexical causative verbs is not accessible for separate adverbial modification by temporal (or manner) adverbials. In this paper, I present old and new arguments against the direct causation constraint under the definitions of directness of Fodor and Wolff. I then propose a new definition of directness in terms of ab-initio causal sufficiency framed in Kvart’s probabilistic account of singular causation. I argue that directness so redefined is an implicature rather than an entailment of lexical causative verbs, which enables me to account for old and new data. Furthermore, I account for why the constraint on separate modification by temporal adverbials can be relaxed with eventuality-denoting subjects.
Ruth Preser's essay 'Things I Learned from the "Book of Ruth": Diasporic Reading of Queer Conversions' performs a queer appropriation of history. The "Book of Ruth" is a biblical narrative that opens with two women, Naomi the Israelite, a bereaved woman who wishes to return from Moab to Judea, and her no-longer-daughter-in-law Ruth the Moabite, who pledges to follow Naomi, turning away from her gods and people. This laconic tale of nomadic intimacies and speech-acts of pledges and conversions has become an iconic narrative and a seminal text in Judaism, and it has also been appropriated by contemporary feminist and lesbian readings. Indeed, since it is not fully narrated but rather full of gaps, voids, and 'ghostly matters', the "Book of Ruth" provides apt ground and a malleable vessel for contemporary appropriation by stories seeking incarnation beyond linear or teleological constraints. In Preser's 'palimpsest reading', the biblical tale continues to communicate a story of successful assimilation of the poor and the foreign, and of a 'home-coming', but it is troubled by displacement, unresolved diasporic longing, and an acute and continuous sense of vulnerability. Thinking with Avery Gordon's modality of haunting, Preser's reading aims to understand contemporary forms of dispossession and their impact, especially when their oppressive nature is denied. It reflects on what kind of theory might emerge by remobilizing the category of 'home' through its de-constitution, through movement rather than destination, through disintegration rather than determination. Troubled by questions of race, nomadism, gender, and sexuality, in an era when (some) bodies may traverse national, sexual, and class borders, Preser's investigation asks what happens to bodies that continuously signify precarity and loss.
Thematic Roles (or Theta-Roles) are theoretical constructs that account for a variety of well known empirical facts, which are more or less clearly delimited. In other words, Theta-Roles are not directly observable, but they do have empirical content that is open to empirical observation. The objective of the present paper is to sketch the nature and content of Theta-Roles, distinguishing their universal foundation as part of the language faculty, their language particular realization, which depends on the conditions of individual languages, and idiosyncratic properties, determined by specific information of individual lexical items.
Zulu shows an alternation of conjoint and disjoint (conjunctive/disjunctive, short/long) verb forms. Certain contexts suggest that the distribution of these forms is related to focus. For example, certain adverbial expressions receive a focal interpretation when preceded by a conjoint form but not when preceded by a disjoint form. Similarly, a wh-phrase must be preceded by a conjoint form. This has led some researchers to argue or suggest that the alternation encodes focus directly. This paper examines two different focal hypotheses, one in which a disjoint form encodes focus on the verb and another in which the conjoint form encodes focus on the element following the verb. It is shown that both of these hypotheses are inadequate because certain contexts requiring the conjoint form do not display the predicted focal interpretation. Relativization morphology is argued to also support an analysis independent of focus. It is proposed that the alternation is regulated entirely by the position of the verb within the surface constituencies first proposed in Van der Spuy (1993) and that the associated focal interpretations are the result of a range of interpretations permitted within the different constituencies. Elements remaining within the relevant constituent are nontopical, and focus is one of a range of interpretations they can receive.