Modem Language Research Articles

Обзор по функциональному синтаксису в мировой лингвистике

This article reflects the innovations in the functional syntax of scholars who have contributed to the history of linguistics around the world. Noam Chomsky’s philosophical and psychological views on the innate nature of language in the human mind are included in the article. The various primitive ideas of the ancient Greeks about the origin of speech were the basis of logical, morphological, and lexical approaches in modern linguistics. According to book Syntax of the Russian Language by A. Shakhmatov, people first created sentences and then determined their composition. The research of ancient Arabic linguists played an important role in the development of such modem languages. The original research brought to the structural syntax by a number of Azerbaijani linguists are of great importance in the linguistics of the Turkic-speaking peoples. From the data obtained, it can be concluded that syntax is the most interesting and complex discussion of linguistics.

Arthur Miller: Self and Tragedy

Editor's Note: At the 2014 Modem Language Association Annual Convention in Chicago, the Miller Society organized a special round table session, Arthur Miller: Self and Tragedy, that discussed cognitive approaches to Miller's work. Presided by David Palmer, the session brought together the cognitive literary scholars, Patrick Colm Hogan and Bruce McConachie and the Miller scholars: Stephen A. Marino and Matthew C. Roudane. The following is an edited transcript of the session.Palmer: Welcome. This session is the beginning of events leading up to the Society's celebration of the centennial of Miller's birth in October 2015. The core idea for our round-table discussion this evening is quite simple: bring together two scholars who specialize in cognitive approaches to literature and two scholars who specialize in the works of Miller and let them discuss how cognitive approaches provide insights into Miller's vision of tragedy and how Miller's plays reveal the workings of the human mind, in particular how a person develops a sense of self.Miller's plays seem especially well-adapted to this discussion because of the way Miller structured his tragedies. As Ben Brantley, the theater critic of The New York Times, noted in a recent issue of The Miller Journal (Vol. VII, 1 & 2, Fall 2012, 2), Every one of Miller's plays is steeped in a sense of guilt that taints each of its characters; they all take place 'after the fall.' The crisis that prompts the collapse of the narrative that constitutes a person's self generally takes place in Miller's plays before the action begins. Miller approaches tragedy not as a depiction of the moment a character confronts his flawed self-narrative but as a depiction of his characters' floundering to find a new psychological equilibrium the confrontation has occurred, after the fall. This certainly is true of the Keller family in All My Sons (1947), of Willy Loman in Death of a (1949), of John Proctor in The Crucible (1953), and of Quentin in After the Fall (1964). The same pattern is seen in many others of Miller's plays and is what makes these plays such suitable subjects for a cognitive approach to literary interpretation, in particular our understanding of crises in a person's sense of self. This is the general theme our panelists will discuss.We'll begin the round table with brief opening statements from the two cognitive scholars and follow these with statements from the Miller scholars. There then will be a discussion among the panelists, and we hope to have 25 minutes at the end of the session for an open discussion with the audience.McConachie: I've entitled my opening remarks Salesman and Literary to indicate my general endorsement of this approach to literary criticism and my application of it to Miller's Death of a Salesman. I would modify literary Darwinism in a couple of ways, however, which I hope we can talk about during the discussion.In Graphing Jane Austin: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning (2012), authors Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall, plus their two co-authors, summarize the results of their web-based survey questioning hundreds of readers about their response to nineteenth-century British novels. The four literary Darwinists draw several conclusions, three of which are particularly relevant to our purposes today. First, following the work of others, they state that story-telling and listening helped small bands of our evolutionary predecessors to survive. Second, these stories endorsed egalitarian norms through an agonistic structure that favored such values over the norms that promoted individual success. Third, the literary Darwinists demonstrate that we are still telling these kinds of stories, which continue to communicate the biocultural norms we learned in our hunter-gatherer past.Let's look more closely at these conclusions before moving to Salesman. The authors make a strong case that our ancestors adopted altruistic norms around 100,000 years ago to ensure the social cohesion and survivability of their bands. …

Monkey-girls of Old Regime France: Babiole and Ourika

In her introduction to a 1994 edition of the 1823 novel Ourika, Joan Dejean explains the text's origins in this way: 'It was in her salon that [Claire de Duras] first told the true story of a black child brought back from Senegal shortly before the Revolution by the chevalier de Boufflers (who had served as governor of the colony), whose aunt, the princess of Beauvau, raised the child along with the princess's two orphaned grandsons,' 1 In the rest of her introductory remarks, Dejean concentrates less on the text's inception than on its reception, placing Ourika in the context of the racist legislation of the Code Noir and analyzing the story's success in the current of abolitionist efforts in the early years of the nineteenth century. If Dejean attributes much ofthe novel's initial popularity to its topicality at the time of its publication, the success of her re-edition of this text may owe much to its own context as well. Preparing Ourika for the press of the Modem Language Association, Dejean and her co-editor Margaret Waller respond to academe's increasing demand for texts that address the concerns of twenty-firstcentury readers, as Carla Peterson's comment explains: 'The MLA edition of Ourika is exciting news not only for scholars who teach nineteenth-century French literature but also for comparatists, feminist critics, and those interested in the intersecting representations of gender, race, and class in literary texts. '2 Duras's novel has thus been appreciated for its pertinence in its own time and also its prescience in relation to the problem of identity politics almost two centuries later. In reexamining Ourika, however, I am less interested in the novel's relationship to our present than in how it relates to texts that preceded it. Although most readers identify Ourika as a highly original work (Dejean affirms that '[Ourika is] the first black heroine in a novel set in Europe and the first black female narrator in French literature'J), I will show that Duras belongs to a long literary tradition. While some scholars have seen sources for Ourika in other fictional figures, specifically Galatea and Cinderella,s I will examine the striking resemblances between the

Notes on Contributors

Agnes Atia Apusigah is a senior lecturer in the Department of African and General Studies, University for Development Studies, Navrongo Campus, Tamale, Ghana. Alexina Arthur is a senior lecturer in the Department of Modem Languages, University of Ghana, Legon. Sara Berry is a professor of

Vraies et fausses polysémies: quelques leçons du travail de traduction

SummaryThis paper intends to show that, when a Latin word is provided with a great number of translations, distributed in several sections of an article in a bilingual dictionary, the real meanings of the word are far less numerous, and it often occurs that there is only one meaning. The Latin word receives various translations in modem languages because, from a language to another, the semantic features which compose the meaning of the word are differently distributed in the vocabulary. Our study is based upon the survey of iubeo, probo, arguo, uel, conscius, fides as examples. Some notions, like latent semantic features, or the organization of the numerous translations around one semantic feature as a common centre of the comprehension of the word (that centre being associated with various other semantic features in each particular translation), are used to provide difficult Latin words with a genuine unity of meaning.

Essential Encounters by Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury (review)

1 38Women in French Studies with the novel from 1879 on, and has been reproduced in this edition as well. It stresses the morality of the story, which could be expected coming from the author oíThe ExperimentalNovel who considered novelists as "moralistes expérimentateurs." Christopher Rivers' translation is superb: the text is easy to read, agreeable , captivating, and, at times, amusing. As he notes, he has tried to keep the theatrical tone ofthe original French and the page-turning nature ofthe novel. Therefore he has made it his priority to render its freshness and liveliness to the detriment of some stylistic anachronism or contemporary flair. As a result , his translation is different from previous ones as it is more modern. Besides the one published in Chicago by Laird and Lee in 1891, which he cites, another anonymous but less literal English translation does exist (Mdlle. Giraud, My Wife, by Adolphe Belot, London, Privately Printed for the Trade, n.d. - probably 1900-1909). A concise introduction by Christopher Rivers precedes the novel. It gives background information on the author's life, work and literary relationship with Zola. Rivers shows how the novel follows, but also differentiates itself from, the existing French literary tradition of representing lesbian love. He interprets the novel as less about homo-erotic love and more about the husband's discovery that his wife is lesbian, and shows how ironically the male/male intense but safe friendship prevails as embodying heterosexuality vis-à-vis a lesbian threat. It would be interesting, however, also to consider the ways in which power functions within the female/female relation. Finally, he explains the sociopolitical debate concerning religious versus secular education for young girls that took place when the novel first appeared. This re-edition and translation is most welcome. It can be used in courses focusing on 19th century history, and especially social history as Belot was known as a literary speculator who gave the public exactly what it wanted. Rivers' introduction gives the necessary and general background that will please any reader and its bibliography will satisfy the more erudite. Thérèse De RaedtUniversity of Utah Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury. Essential Encounters. Trans, and Introd., Cheryl Toman. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2002. Pp. 60 and 58. ISBN: 0-87352-794-1 and 0-87352-793-3. $6.95 for each volume. Recently published in the Modem Language Association's Texts and Translations Series, Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury's Rencontres essentielles and its translation in English, Essential Encounters, offers an interesting perspective on a woman's struggle with her role in life. Published in 1969 and set mainly in Cameroon, this ground-breaking novel tells of Flo's infertility, failed marriage , desire for love and approach to questions ofpolygamy. Kuoh-Moukoury's short novel, the first published by a woman from sub-Saharan francophone Africa, and translated here in English for the first time, has influenced a Book Reviews139 myriad ofCameroonian women writers. The author wrote the text to "inspire other women to write." Next to Calixthe Beyala's highly provocative C 'est Ie Soleil qui m 'a brûlée, published nearly twenty years after Kuoh-Moukoury's text, this novel pales in its social agenda. Nevertheless, its main character embodies an important transitional moment in the metamorphosis of the modem-day Cameroonian woman. Furthermore, remembering that Rencontres essentielles inspired Beyala's controversial text -to list one novel in a long list ofinfluences - attests to a profound evolution in the attitudes ofCameroonian women writers as espoused in their writings throughout three short decades. Kuoh-Moukoury's novel thus plays an important pioneering role. The beginning of the novel presents Flo's childhood, courting, marriage and the fateful day when she discovers she is infertile. The bliss ofher marriage quickly dissipates and Flo turns to a sorcerer and a herbal specialist to help her reproduce. When this does not yield the result she seeks, Flo stops considering a child as a solution to her marital woes. Once she asks her husband about his indifference towards her, he recognizes their troubles and proposes divorce. Flo is no less than overjoyed when a childhood friend reconnects...

Klasikinių ir moderniųjų kalbų mokymo(si) teorijų metodologinės sąsajos

straipsnyje gvildenamos klasikinių kalbų mokymo(si) metodologinės problemos: apžvelgiama lotynų ir senosios graikų kalbų dėstymo patirtis, vertinamos Krasheno monitoriaus, lnterlanguage, kognityvioji svetimosios kalbos mokymosi teorijos, analizuojami šiuolaikinių mokslininkų darbai, akcentuojantys racionalų sąmoningo kalbų mokymosi ir dėstymo aktyvinimą. Keičiantis požiūriui į ugdymą ir ugdymąsi, siektina, kad tiek klasikinė lotynų, tiek senoji graikų kalbos taptų artimesnės jaunam žmogui, nes jos teikia specifinių asmenybės sklaidos galimybių. Racionalus šių kalbų mokymo(si) aktyvinimas sietinas su pozityviais svetimų kalbų mokymosi teorijų principais ir šiuolaikinėmis moderniųjų kalbų dėstymo tendencijomis.

An Experimental Study of Compression Methods for Dynamic Tries

We study an order-preserving general purpose data structure for binary data, the LPC-trie. The structure is a compressed trie, using both level and path compression. The memory usage is similar to that of a balanced binary search tree, but the expected average depth is smaller. The LPC-trie is well suited to modem language environments with efficient memory allocation and garbage collection. We present an implementation in the Java programming language and show that the structure compares favorably with a balanced binary search tree.

On Reading Meister Eckhart

Like many in this hall, I feel I have a long history of reading Meister Eckhart. For me that history began, if I remember correctly, when I plucked a copy of the old Clark and Skinner translation of the German works from my mother's shelves. I was a quite young teenager then and keen to discover something of what I thought of then as 'mysticism'. Five or six years later, when I was a student of Modem Languages at Oxford and was spending my year abroad, in Germany, I bought a copy of Quint's modern German translation of the sermons. My particular memory of this purchase was that when I asked about the book in the shop where I had ordered the copy, the exact cost of the purchase was something like 78 marks and 75 pf. Not expecting the book to have arrived yet, I had not brought my wallet, and I had to scrabble in my pockets for the money. Notes appeared from here and there, and coins, until finally I was only 5 Pf. short. Mercifully a hard object at the bottom of my last tom pocket turned out to be a 5 Pf. piece. It seemed that 78 marks and 75 Pf. was the exact sum of money I had on me, and I remember wondering if this meant anything. I leave you to judge that, but quite soon after my return to Oxford I became friendly with Cheslyn Jones, then Principal of Pusey House, who invited me to contribute to a volume on Christian Spirituality which he was editing for SPCK. For the first time I engaged professionally with Rhineland mystics (writing mainly on Tauler, Seuse and Ruusbroec). From that there followed God Within, a study of the Rhineland tradition which included at least a section on Meister Eckhart. Very soon after, I wrote Meister Eckhart: Mystical Theologian, a fulllength study of his life and work. Apart from one fortuitous discovery with regard to documentation concerning the background to his condemnation, one of the chief questions I pursued in that book was the disjunction between the ways we read Eckhart today, or at least over the last one hundred and fifty years or so, and the ways in which his contemporaries either did read him or would have been likely to read him in his own day. I was particularly struck by the way in which recent German scholarship on what has come to be known as the German Dominican School was laying bare a Meister Eckhart who was very much more a creature of his own tunes than had hitherto been understood. This was an Eckhart steeped in neoPlatonic sources but whose intention, rather like that of his celebrated confrere Thomas Aquinas, was to construct a synthesis between classical philosophy and Christian doctrine. Whether we approve of that synthesis or not, it seemed imperative to me,

Enumerated data types

The origins of many language features are hard to pin down. Not so with enumerated data types. These were invented by Niklans Wirth in the design of the Pascal programming language [1]. They permit convenience and greater safety in performing tasks that had to handled by mapping concepts to a subrange of the integers in previous languages. The feature is useful enough and easy enough to define and implement that no really modem language is without some form of it.The feature is still missing from Fortran. The proposed new standard for Fortran adds a version of the feature to the language [2]. However, it is present as part of a C-interoperability mechanism only. Unfortunately, it leaves out most of the aspects of the idea that make it useful to a programmer. And it is not even necessary for interoperation with C.This article describes the concept of enumerated data types and the properties the feature should include. It then describes the proposed version of the feature in Fortran. Some suggestions will be made about future directions.

Turning Professional: Content‐Based Communication and the Evolution of a Cross‐Cultural Language Curriculum

Abstract: The fact that nine out of ten students drop out of language classes between the elementary and advanced levels demonstrates the need for addressing the traditional division of language and content courses prevailing in most modem language departments. Furthermore, the increasing demand for professional language classes makes it necessary to adjust the overall undergraduate program so that these courses fit meaningfully into the mainly humanities‐oriented curriculum. If students are to bridge the gap between form and meaning, courses need to move from communicative training at the elementary level through an intermediate stage that combines communicative and content‐based instruction. Finally, training students successfully for future careers in a global economy means that courses cannot focus only on content and form, but also must include a thorough development of cultural awareness. Applying ethnographic intercultural training methods to the language classroom ensures that the students attain not only linguistic but also cultural proficiency. The course structure presented in this paper demonstrates that professional school students can be trained alongside humanities majors by making minor but far‐reaching adjustments to the elementary and intermediate language program, and without placing undue constraints on departmental resources.

Mere Illustrations: Maurice Sendak and Melville

JOHN TAGGART Mere Illustrations: Maurice Sendak and Melville Hershel Parker's Kraken Edition of Herman Melville's Pierre: Or, the Ambiguities. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak. HarperCollins, 1995. For to me it seems more the excellently illustrated re-statement of a problem , than the solution of the problem itself. But as such mere illustrations ate almost universally taken for solutions (and perhaps they are the only possible human solutions), thetefote it may help to the tempotary quiet of some inquiring mind; and so not be wholly without use. Melville, Pierre The most significant recent study of visual art in relation to literary texts is J. Hillis Miller's Iiiustration (Harvard 1992). Among several perceptions to be found in this study, perhaps the most fundamental concerns doubleness. After noting that a picture and a text in juxtaposition will always have different meanings, will always conflict irreconcilably, Miller goes on to claim that each separate picture or text is dialogical within itself and, therefore, double in meaning. "The warfare between media is doubled by an internal warfare intrinsic to each medium in itself" (95). This leads to an even larger claim: "the difficult, perhaps impossible, task of reading works in eithet medium consists, in part, of identifying in each case this othet by way of tracks it has left within the work" (96). What can be more attracting than that which has been designated as difficult, pethaps impossible? Accordingly, I shall attempt this task with specific application to Maurice Sendak's pictures as reproduced in Hershel Parker's Kraken edition of Melville's Pierre: Or The Ambiguities Arizona Quarterly Volume 56, Number 2, Summer 2000 Copyright © 2000 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 112John Taggart (HarperCollins, 1995). My reading will concentrate on one pictute in particular, the embrace of two nude figures, which appears both on the dust cover and within the text (Book XlI) of this edition. Let us begin with what is seen first and, considering its tendency to become worn and thus eventually discarded, perhaps never seen again: the dust cover picture. The two most prominent elements of the cover design are the picture itself and the first half of the text's title. Their prominence is one of scale. Easily the two largest elements of the design , their shared prominence suggests that the moment illustrated by the picture is the single key moment of the book, that the picture is the single, essential key to the book as a whole. This suggestion is amplified by the appearance of the names of Melville (top) and Sendak (bottom), along with that of Hershel Parker (in between), in the same, much smaller typeface. Author, editor, and illustrator are thus made equivalent , co-producers of this key to the key of the book. Many readers, however, will very probably never know about the existence of this key picture. Published only in a relatively expensive hardbound format, the Kraken edition has obviously been marketed for institutional libraries. Who else would be interested in what is, after all, a consciously partial version of the author's complete and final manuscript ? Only institutional libraries already possessing the 1971 version of Pierre—i.e., the Northwestern-Newberry edition in the Writings of Herman Melville series, an edition which has been designated "an approved text" by the Center for Editions of American Authors and the Modem Language Association of America—could be expected to purchase this edition.1 It is customary for such libraries to remove dust covers before cataloging and placing books on their shelves. What institutional readers will first see is not Sendak's dust cover picture but a gold-stamped design on a maroon "hard cover." This design shows a single-masted ship, a cross on its flag, afloat on an orientalized serpentine sea. Under the design is THE KRAKEN EDITION in the same all caps typeface as appears under the dust cover picture. An elaborated verticalization of this serpentine sea is placed on the spine ofthe book under author, title, and publisher. The provenance of this design and its relevance to the text are unclear. Sendak, who has copyrighted the pictures, may have done it; or it may be the work of...

Edward W. Said's Presidency

There are times when even decision about whether to renew membership in large professional organization turns into question of conscience. With the scheduled accession of Edward W. Said to the presidency of the Modem Language Association on 1 January 1999, regret that must resign from the association as of 31 December 1998. The president of the MLA publicly and officially represents the organization. believe that such representative should have displayed regularly only distinction in critical scholarship but also dignity in the public treatment of others. Edward professional work has extensively influenced several fields of literary study. But his public assaults against individuals whose views reasonably differ from his own deeply violate fundamental values repeatedly professed by the MLA. At times such assaults have passed beyond the forms of disparagement that often compromise contemporary academic disputes. They have passed into acts of aggressive contempt and blatant dehumanization. The variety of disturbing cases includes an exchange many years ago with several members of the MLA (An Exchange on Edward Said and Difference, Critical Inquirv 15 [1989]: 611-46). In detailed article, one scholar argued that greater accuracy and breadth of information would noticeably revise claims about the Middle East (Robert J. Griffin, Ideology and Misrepresentation: A Response to Edward Said). In his reply (Response), Said tried to discredit alternately the author's sanity, his scholarship, and his humanity. His solemn idiocies, cried Said, inhabit semideranged world entirely his own. This scholar-if that is what he is, scoffed Saidis only, to the best of my knowledge, the author of two (or is it three?) below-average articles on Dr. Johnson. I surmise, Said postured, that is actually 'Griffin,' an ideological simulacrum; it could be asked he is being. Perhaps even more than the original critique, reaction exposed some of the stark deficiencies of his own claims, including his profession to speak for the cause of humane behavior. In the same exchange, when two other members of the MLA appealed for dialogue (Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, Toward Dialogue with Edward Said), Said replied with modified form of derision. When another scholar (Geoffrey Hartman) later protested effort to dehumanize the original critic, Said referred again to his doubt about whether Robert Griffin was human being. As for Hartman's perspective, Said sought to degrade it as patronizing and hypocritical self-congratulation that was tasteless and jejune but not surprising (Editorial Note, Critical Inquiry 16 [1989]: 199-200). Such assaults of course are no less offensive when applied to individuals outside the MLA, such as prominent intellectual (Michael Walzer) whom Said tried to demean as small frightened man (Walzer and Said, Exchange: 'Exodus and Revolution,' Grand Street 5 [1986]: 246-59). The attacks repeatedly flaunt the twists of mind that underlie them. Unlike the serious opponent he had made him up to be, Said sneered, the 'real' was good deal worse than the fiction created. But Said concealed the fact that he himself fabricated this supposedly 'real' Walzer. He clearly venerates nasty wave of Ayatollahs, exploded Said, who accused him of supporting several attitudes toward Israel opposed by Walzer himself. A figure of characteristic idiocy, concluded Said. It should be stressed that Edward Said does confine his insults to Jewish intellectuals with whom he disagrees. He has scorned Fouad Ajami as a mediocre scholar; Samir al-Khalil broadly seems quite incapable of argument, scholarship, or rational exchange; Afsaneh Najmabadi expresses wacky or puerile views (Najmabadi, Said's War on the Intellectuals, with reply, Middle East Report Nov.-Dec. 1991: 2+). Still, he reserves special aspersions for individuals he attempts to discredit by association with Israel. He has concocted the accusation that renowned scholar (Bernard Lewis) seems to advocate expelling Palestinian Arabs (Said and Lewis, in Orientalism: An Exchange, New York Review of Books 12 Aug. 1982: 44-48). The more reflective the critique of his views, the more enraged his reaction. When confronted with his insults (like those quoted in this letter), he cries that his own integrity is being impugned. The repugnant language of the incoming spokesman of the Modem Language Association cannot be excused by the claim that the cause for which he speaks grants him special license for abuse. Others with urgent causes of their own have persisted in seeking language of civil exchange under severely trying conditions. Nor is the need for such language merely point of etiquette; it is principle of ethics, the obligation to engage even adversaries as beings with capacity for understanding. Yet to my knowledge Edward Said has never repudiated the derogatory expressions to which have referred. Will he inform his colleagues in the MLA if he still endorses those expressions? To choose to remain in professional organization, of course, does necessarily imply agreeing with every position taken by its members or its president. In this case,

“Dreadful thoughts”: The tenth anniversary of the Levin petition

I n 1988, Richard Levin, Professor of English at State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote an essay for Publications of Modem Language Association (PMI-4) explaining his objections to feminist literary criticism. The react ion f rom feminist literary critics that ensued revealed how politicized literary scholarship had become dur ing 1970s and 1980s and how literary theory was transforming into political activism. It has been ten years since feminist literary critics launched their assault on Professor Levin, and it would be enl ightening to revisit tactics in tended to int imidate literary scholars who failed to acknowledge political goals of radical academics. It is hard to measure what success, if any, feminist literary critics were able to realize f rom their attack on Professor Levin, but it surely must have been more than apparent ten years ago to n o n t e n u r e d literature teachers, graduate students, and depar tment cha i rmen that scholars risked oppor tuni ty to publish if they dared, like Professor Levin, to find fault with feminist literary criticism. In his essay, titled Feminist Thematics and Shakespearian Tragedy, Levin argued that feminist literary criticism, since it emerged dur ing mid-1970s, suffered from an overreliance on thematics, reduct ion of complex works of literature to a handful of simple and persistent themes.1 (Such an objection was consistent with Professor Levin's similar complaints in his 1979 New Readings vs. Old Plays that thematic studies deprive Shakespeare's plays of their complexity and originality. For thematic critic, Professor Levin argued, significance of Shakespeare's plays always resides e lsewhere-in contemporary documents , religious controversies, or topical events -but no t in words that Shakespeare wrote.) In his PMIA essay, Professor Levin similarly observed that the themes employed in [feminist] interpretat ions are basically same. Although terminology may vary, these criticisms all f ind that [Shakespeare's] plays are about role of gender in individual and society (125). Insisting that Shakespeare's plays are really about gender themes not only obscures o ther and richer interpretations, Professor Levin argued, but feminist literary critics too often ignore facts of plays. For example, Professor Levin cited one feminist literary critic who wrote that King Lear's rejection of his daughter in first act of King Lear is a social n o r m for patriarchal father-daughter relationship. Yet, observed Levin, the witnesses to this relat ionship--Kent, Gloucester, Burgundy, France, even Goneril and

Howells in The Heath

SINCE it was launched in a blaze of glory at the 1989 convention of the Modem Language Association (MLA), The Heath Anthology ofAmerican Literature has drawn kudos from ritually progressive academics, ever in quest of the cutting edge, as well as brickbats from programmatically conservative critics, ever on alert for the iniquities of tenured radicals. In a statement proudly broadcast by the publisher, the newly appointed associate editor of American Literature, Cathy N. Davidson, averred in 1989 that The Heath (as it is familiarly known) renders as pedagogy a movement in criticism and scholarship, to my mind, that has been the most significant development since World War II. As such it is a symbol, a symbol of both product and process in the remaking of American literature for present and future generations.' In contrast, William D. Schaefer, a former executive director of the MLA, puzzled over some of the authors listed in The Heath's table of contents: Who the hell are they?2 The clash of opinions, which the media reported as yet another salvo in the Culture Wars, was obligingly reduced to a sound bite by an unnamed spokesman for the Association of Departments of English: one extreme is a very conservative group saying we have a canon of great literature that shouldn't be altered. On the other side are people who say the canon has to be updated constantly as part of the ongoing expansion of knowledge. And the sides are doing battle.3 Any publisher would welcome such battle, for controversy is, by

Autolexical theory: Ideas and methods ed. by Eric Schiller, Elisa Steinberg, and Barbara Need (review)

REVIEWS629 differentiation. This can potentially confuse the student, who cannot at this early stage differentiate between the two varieties. For this and other reasons, Y's program relies more on the teacher. When compared with B et al.'s program, Y's program also has the disadvantage of not exploiting the engaging and pedagogically compelling visual medium (video) in this otherwise well presented program. One slight disadvantage that both works share when compared with many recent pedagogical textbooks is the absence of color. The layout of the books' pages entirely in black and white is somewhat ofa disappointment to those students who have come to expect lively colorful segments in modem language textbooks. This minor imperfection notwithstanding, these two works offer state-of-the-art attempts at teaching Arabic in an interactive communicative approach. Both programs are commendable for using authentic materials and texts, thereby creating coherent contexts in the learning process. Both programs are also meritorious for not shrinking away from die challenging and worthwhile task of integrating the colloquial and Fusha. The two programs, which are not designed for self-instruction, will be embraced by earnest learners and teachers of Arabic. Department of Linguistics, CB 295 University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309 [maher.awad@colorado.edu] Autolexical theory: Ideas and methods. Ed. by Eric Schiller, Elisa Steinberg, and Barbara Need. (Trends in linguistics, studies and monographs, 85.) Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995. Pp. 375. Reviewed by Willem J. de Reuse, University ofNorth Texas This is the first book-length collection of articles entirely devoted to autolexical theory (also called autolexical syntax, henceforth ALS), a modular theory of grammar originally developed and formulated by Sadock (1985, 1991). This collection has its origins in a workshop on autolexical syntax organized by the book's editors, at the Chicago Linguistic Society meetings in 1989. Since the workshop was more or less contemporary with Sadock's teaching and writing of his most extensive formulation (Sadock 1991), this collection should not be considered representative of what has evolved in the theory between 1989 and 1995, the publication date. In the introduction, Schiller provides a fairly nontechnical summary of ALS along with a concise and useful summary of the contribution of each paper, and he traces the development of the theory up to January 1995. ALS is a nonderivational theory which employs parallel grammatical representations; each grammatical representation receives its information from a module which consists of an autonomous set of rules. There are separate (morpho)phonological, morphological, syntactic, logicosemantic modules, and presumably others. The representations of each module are checked in the interface, the point where the grammatical representations come together, and interface principles constrain the extent to which the representations are allowed to mismatch. The lexical items or formatives that representations operate with are stored in the lexicon, where lexical entries list the properties (or lack thereof) that each element has regarding a particular module. Thus every lexical item or morphological formative in a particular language is listed in the lexicon with its syntactic properties, its morphological properties, its logico-semantic properties, etc. Within ALS, the primary theoretical concern has been to formulate sufficiently constrained and precise interface principles; secondary concerns have included the proper specification of the information in the lexicon and the determination of the number of modules needed. Because of the healmy multiplicity of viewpoints and formalisms in the collection, I recommend that readers unfamiliar with ALS have a close look at Sadock 1991 before tackling it. 630LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 3 (1998) First, I discuss papers by students of Sadock or by scholars who attended his classes. While the framework is assumed, they nevertheless make important and original modifications to ALS. Shobhana L. Chelliah's paper is an account of voicing assimilation in Manipuri (or Meithei), an agglutinative Tibeto-Burman language of Northeastern India. In this language, level-ordering within lexical phonology can account for the facts of voicing assimilation but cannot account for bracketing paradoxes. Chelliah shows that a phonological module that includes levels similar to those of lexical phonology can solve the problem and extends her analysis to well-known English examples of bracketing paradoxes such as ungrammaticality. Robinson H. Schneider proposes an original trimodular...

Coping with the National Curriculum in Modern Foreign Languages: An equal opportunities issue? (Part Two of Two)

In the concluding half of her article on access by visually impaired children to modem language teaching (continued from BJVI 15.1 pp. 10-14) Carol Gray explores data from the questionnaire dealing with staff qualifications, levels of in-class support for integrated pupils, attitudes to language teaching and learning, information technology and opportunities for travel before questioning whether or not there are equal opportunities.

Feminism without tears

PLURALISTS 'DANCE'; THEORISTS 'STORM' OR 'MARCH,' WRITES NINA Baym in her 1984 essay The Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I Don't Do Feminist Literary Theory. Setting the pragmatism and diversity of American academic feminism in the 1970s in opposition to the Francocentric, legalistic, and increasingly misogynist work of feminist theorists in the 1980s, the article and its provocation are characteristic of Baym's witty, no nonsense, and avowedly liberal feminist approach to American literature and culture in Feminism and American Literary History. In this collection of previously published essays, which range from her influential 1981 essay Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors to more recent work on women's historical writings, Baym locates herself at the very center of past and ongoing debates about the very meanings we bring to such terms as feminism, American, literary, and history. At the time Baym began teaching and writing within the institutional spaces of the American academy in the mid-1960s, literary study meant the close reading of a selection of white male canonical texts as a source of universal meaning and self-evident aesthetic value. It was in this context that Adrienne Rich, at a 1971 session of the Modem Language Association, issued her now famous call for a revisionary feminist criticism:

Language Variation in North American English: Research and Teaching. Edited by A. Wayne Glowka and Donald M. Lance. New York: Modem Language Association of America, 1993

Language Variation in North American English: Research and Teaching. Edited by A. Wayne Glowka and Donald M. Lance. New York: Modem Language Association of America, 1993

On Efficiency and Optimization of C++ Programs

SUMMARY The efficiency of object-oriented programs has become a point of great interest. One necessary factor for program efficiency is the optimization techniques involved. This paper presents the performance of several variations of a given Ctt program and compares them with a version that uses no object- oriented features. Our result indicates that some object-oriented features in Ctt are not well optim- ized in current Ctt compilers. We thus discuss some code optimization techniques that can improve the efficiency based on the given Ctt program. The Ci-t language' is one of the most efficient object-oriented programming languages. A recent comparison2 using a simple 'database' program showed that the Ctt version is faster than those in the other four modem languages: Oberon-2, Modula-3, Sather, and Self. The designers of Ci-t have carefully considered the efficiency issue. For example, dynamic dispatch is not by default for the invocation of a member function in Ctt. In addition, C++ is strongly typed: it is easier to provide efficient (constant time) dynamic dispatch when the type information is available. The C3 programs are thought to be efficient and compact. Do Ctt programs inherit this property? Can we write Ctt programs without concern for the underlying implementation of object-ori- ented constructs, even when the efficiency of programs is concerned? Answering the above questions depends on the applications and compiler techno- logies of Ci-t. It may be very difficult. This paper presents a case study to show several efficiency and optimization problems specific to Ctt. It measures the efficiency of some variations of a given Ctt example program (quick sort) and compares them with a version using no object-oriented features. These variations include a class without inheritance, a class whose base class is empty, and a class whose base class is abstract. The experiment uses four compilers on PC and workstation platforms. Our results indi- cate that many current C-H compilers still do not produce well optimized codes for