Modern English Texts Research Articles

Punctuation in Early Modern Texts: The English Translation of Rembert Dodoens’ Herbal in Handwriting and Printing

The present paper analyses the punctuation of a handwritten and a printed version of a distinguished herbal from the Early Modern period—that is—the English translation of Rembert Dodoens’ A Niewe Herball or Historie of Plants. The paper aims to contribute to the dissemination of knowledge on the use and distribution of punctuation in Early Modern English texts of a diverse typology, as well as to provide fresh observations as regards the historical linguistic comparison between scribes and printers’ writing practices. All this considered, it pursues the following objectives: to undertake (i) a quantitative survey of the various punctuation marks occurring in the texts; (ii) a qualitative examination of these at macro- and micro-textual levels; and (iii) an evaluation of the similarities and differences between the manuscript and the printed versions.

Semantic prosody, semantic transfer and semantic change

Abstract This article investigates semantic prosody in a diachronic perspective. Although prosodies have been shown to change over time, there is no consensus regarding the source of such changes. The present study explores this further through a corpus study of the development of the lemmas fabric, fabricate and fabrication from the late 15th century to the late 20th century, drawing on material from Early English Books Online, the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts and the British National Corpus. The results of the study show that prosodic changes coincide with the emergence of new senses and indicate that these processes are related to and possibly caused by semantic transfer induced by persistent prosodies over time.

Measuring internal spelling variation of an Early Modern English text

Measuring internal spelling variation of an Early Modern English text

Гиперболизация в современных английских художественных текстах

The aim of the paper is to identify in a systematized manner various means and ways of expressing hyperbolization in the speech of characters in modern English literary texts. The research is novel in that it is the first to systematize a variety of hyperbolic means in English-language fiction that allow achieving a certain emotional impact on the addressee. The paper analyzes the contexts of the use of exaggeration in the speech of 25 characters in the works of modern English writers: India Knight’s “Comfort and Joy” (2010), Sophie Kinsella’s “Finding Audrey” (2015) and “Love Your Life” (2020), and for the first time summarizes hyperbolic ways of expression in the maxims of modern English society. The study examines such hyperbolic means as hyperbole, hyperbolic metaphor, metonymy, irony, antihyperbole, meiosis and litotes. The results of the study showed that the hyperbolic ways contribute to the creation of a colorful image, comic effect, as well as an emotional and manipulative impact on the reader. The analyzed material revealed the existence of lexical, grammatical and stylistic ways of expressing hyperbolization, which are actively used in the speech of modern native speakers.

The use of adjectives as a means of changing the time continuum within a literary text

The subject of the study is the exaggeration and understatement of time in modern English literary text through the use of adjectives. The object of the study are adjectives, which are presented as a means of depicting an exaggerated and understated time continuum. The author examines in detail the semantics of such lexemes as brief, quick, fleeting, ancient and slow. Particular attention is paid to their changes within the framework of combinations with other lexical units, during which time periods are stretched or narrowed. In this work, the author implemented the following methods: the method of component analysis, the method of contextual analysis, the method of linguostylistic analysis. The main conclusion of the study is the identification of the lexemes brief, quick, fleeting, ancient and slow as indicators of exaggeration and understatement of time within the English literary text of the fantastic genre. The use of the analyzed lexemes in different forms of degree of comparison of adjectives, as well as as part of comparative phrases, is noted. The above lexemes can express the speed of actions performed, and the time spent by the heroes is either deliberately drawn out or passes instantly. Also, hyperbolic time can be a way of reflecting the authenticity of the existence of peoples and the world as a whole. It is worth noting that some author's neologisms were identified.

Special issue on speech representation in Late Modern English text types: introduction

Special issue on speech representation in Late Modern English text types: introduction

Lexical indicators of exaggeration and understatement of the time of the English language (based on the material of literary texts)

The subject of the study is the exaggeration and understatement of the phenomenon in the modern English art text. The object of the study are nouns that act as a means of depicting an exaggerated and understated time continuum. The author examines in detail the semantics of such lexemes as second, minute, moment, year, hour, day, age and their changes within the framework of combinations with other lexical units, during which time intervals are stretched or narrowed. Special attention is paid to the presence of dictionary and author's phrases in the fiction text of the fiction genre, their quantitative calculation and analysis of the frequency of use. The novelty of the research lies in the search for new non-dictionary and author's phrases that are able to reflect time in terms of its exaggeration and understatement. Such an image of time affects the description of the hero, their actions, the characteristics of not only places, but also specific characters. A special flow of time in the context of a fiction genre literary text is caused by a different flow of the time continuum. The main conclusions of the study are the identification of a high frequency of the use of non-dictionary phrases for exaggeration and understatement of time, as well as a change in the meaning of dictionary phrases that are enclosed in the context of a dicteme that allows to expand the semantics of the proposed vocabulary combination of lexemes.

Representation of the Green Color in Journalistic Texts by English and German Nouns and Verbs

The purpose of the proposed work is to identify similarities and differences in the manifestation of green symbolism in English and German journalistic texts, the sources of which were online media. The subject of the study is the semantics of English and German nouns and verbs representing the green color in the compared languages. The symbolism of this color designation was chosen due to its insufficient study in the framework of comparative linguistics. In this article, based on the material of lexicographic sources, the dictionary meanings of these lexemes are determined, which can display the symbolism of the studied color in journalistic texts in English and German. The scientific novelty of this study is that for the first time it establishes similarities and differences in the transmission of green symbolism through nouns and verbs on the material of modern English and German journalistic texts. It was found that in English texts, in comparison with German texts, a greater number of nouns denoting green are used. In the course of the study, the comparative method, the method of semantic analysis, the modeling method, the quantitative method and the method of component analysis were used. As a result of the conducted research, it was revealed that in English journalistic texts, the symbolism of the green color, represented by nouns and verbs, is used to neutralize the green color of objects of material reality. In addition, the green color is able to display the positive symbolism of the permission of the requested action, environmental protection. In German journalistic texts, the symbolism of the green color can be both positive and negative. Basically, there is a positive symbolism of green when it comes to environmental protection. The symbolism can also be negative when the political activity of the Green Party in Germany is sharply criticized.

Dreams in the Bible and in Modern English Discourse: A Shift in Perspective

This paper investigates the linguistic aspect of the phenomenon of secularisation, using as example the English word “dream.” Comparative analysis of the linguistic structure of the dream narratives in the Bible and in modern English texts allowed us to discern two major secularisation trends—humanizing the divine and mystifying the human. In the Bible, entering into contact with the divine while asleep is always evaluated ambivalently: one is fascinated by the great favour and fears for one’s life. In modern religious discourse, the growing number of dream narratives manifest the positive evaluation of the contact with the divine as comforting. The second tendency consists in the transfer of transcendental experiences from the religious sphere into the sphere of narratives describing human mind and emotions. Here, the ambivalent experience springs up from the mysterious depths of the subconscious. At the lexical level, both tendencies result in new senses of the word “dream” as well as in important changes in the narrative structure of texts relating dream experiences. In the end, we provide a dictionary entry for the English noun “dream”.

ТИПОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ПАРАМЕТРЫ МАЛОФОРМАТНЫХ ТЕКСТОВ СОВРЕМЕННОГО АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА

The article focuses on the study of modern English small-format texts, namely it aims to determine a set of their typological features. The interest in the topic stems from the fact that in present-day English there is a distinct tendency towards minimization of textual volume; as a result, various types of short texts circulate in great quantities in all the spheres of communication, including science, media, education, business, literature, personal interaction, etc. The sheer quantity of such texts yields an assumption about the emergence of a qualitatively new phenomenon, a special type of texts – small-format texts. They possess a specific set of common mechanisms by means of which they successfully perform their pragmatic function with the help of a limited number of language means; these mechanisms need to be elicited and analyzed. This aim is addressed in the article through the analysis of a significant scope of the scattered linguistic data from the current researches on the relevant topic; also an empirical base of approximately 5000 textual samples belonging to different types of discourse is analyzed. As a result, a set of typological features of small-format texts is determined. One of the key features is the visual integrity of small-format texts, which plays a consolidating role in the process of forming the overall semantics of the texts. Apart from that, the typological parameters include the minimization of the exponential plane; a specific type of the surface structure compression consisting in its multi-layer organization; asymmetry of the exterior and interior (semantic) planes; hierarchization of the functional paradigm; rigidity in the choice of structural and/or content elements within one concrete genre; polycode character, as well as lability of the language norm.

Systematically Detecting Patterns of Social, Historical and Linguistic Change: The Framing of Poverty in Times of Poverty

AbstractThe linguistic DNA project seeks to understand the evolution of philosophy, society and language during the Modern English period. Corpora like Early English Books Online (EEBO), Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMET) and Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) allow us to apply statistical data‐driven models extracting patterns to confirm our expectations. As systems biology has revolutionised biology by systematically searching for all patterns, we detect patterns in our data systematically with contextual and distributional semantic approaches, an approach that could be called systems history. We uncover semantic patterns with methods from text mining, computational linguistics and digital humanities. We normalise the spelling automatically to present‐day variants and use bottom‐up analyses to step from words to concepts: collocations, topic modelling and distributional semantics. We illustrate the approaches with two case studies: associations of poverty changing across time, and Charles Dickens social criticism, his vision of helping to improve the situation of the poor. As no gold standard for our task exists, our approaches are exploratory, which entails considerable manual intervention, e.g. sifting candidate lists, reading excerpts and interpreting topic models. A fully automatic approach is currently neither feasible nor envisaged: semi‐automatic approaches give researchers the inspiring opportunity to interact with the texts in a constant move between distant and close reading. The different characteristics of the various statistical methods offer complementary perspectives.

Computing Book Parts with EEBO-TCP

This article begins by considering the difference between two kinds of bibliographical study: quantitative bibliography, which treats books as data, and 'anatomical' bibliography, which considers the paratextual and modular components of a book. Because of their methodological differences, it is difficult to reconcile the two approaches, so anatomical bibliography is rarely practiced on a computational scale. We propose a method of doing so using the markup added to early modern English texts by the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP). Keyers have not only transcribed texts, but described them too, adding XML tags that replicate the structure of the book. Among other things, these tags mark 'divisions' in the text, all of which have been assigned 'types' that describe parts of the book with terms such as 'preface,' or 'errata'. The article assesses this dataset by enumerating the division types and evaluating their consistency and scope. It reviews their previous applications, but argues that their full potential has not yet been realised, and offer suggestions for doing so. These suggestions are based on our work on early printed addresses to the reader, and we finish by describing our own method of studying division types with computational methods.

Functional Transposition of ‘ON’ from a Diachronic Perspective

The paper represents a distinctive attempt to trace the development of the preposition and the adverb ‘on’ as the initial and transposed categories. The study focuses on their evolution throughout 16 historical time spans – since 850 and up to the present time. The research is based on 7 954 Old English, 2 368 Middle English, 4 251 Early Modern English examples, which have been obtained from the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and analyzed without applying any corpus software; 174 581 examples of Late Modern English from the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, which have been processed by means of the Lancsbox software tool; and the statistical data on 7 118 454 examples of Present-Day English retrieved from the Corpus of Historical American English and the British National Corpus. The paper attests that ‘on’ is formed at the first stage (before 850) of the Old English period as the preposition and at the next stage (850–950) is transposed into the category of the adverb, which is characterized by a further slight increase in the statistics and stabilization of its correlation with the preposition ‘on’. Correlation between the categories had remained stable up to the Early Modern English period, when the category of the adverb has started its sustainable growth, which is currently being observed in the English language. The paper proves that in Early Modern English the process of functional transposition is superseded by an utterly new stage of lexicalization which leads to formation of phrasal verbs.

The origins of catatonia – Systematic review of historical texts between 1800 and 1900

Since January 1st 2022, catatonia is (again) recognized as an independent diagnostic entity in the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). This is a relevant time to systematically review how the concept of catatonia has evolved within the 19th century and how this concept changed under the influence of a wide variety of events in the history of psychiatry. Here, we systematically reviewed historical and modern German and English texts focusing on catatonic phenomena, published from 1800 to 1900. We searched five different electronical databases (https://archive.org, www.hathitrust.org, www.books.google.de, https://link.springer.com and PubMed) and closely reviewed 60 historical texts on catatonic symptoms. Three main findings emerged: First, catatonic phenomena and their underlying mechanisms were studied decades before Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum's catatonia concept of 1874. Second, Kahlbaum not only introduced catatonia, but, more generally, also called for a new classification of psychiatric disorders based on a comprehensive analysis of the entire clinical picture, including the dynamic course and cross-sectional symptomatology. Third, the literature review shows that between 1800 and 1900 catatonic phenomena were viewed to be ‘located’ right at the interface of motor and psychological symptoms with the respective pathophysiological mechanisms being discussed. In conclusion, catatonia can truly be considered one of the most exciting and controversial entity in both past and present psychiatry and neurology, as it occupies a unique position in the border territory between organic, psychotic and psychogenic illnesses.

Satire, What Is It Good For?

Abstract Satire and war have a longstanding literal and metaphoric relationship. Satire has long been the medium to criticize war, while also being figured itself as literary ‘warfare.’ This essay examines the interplay between war and satire in two early modern English prose texts, Thomas Nashe’s The vnfortunate trauller (1594) and Thomas Dekker’s Worke for armorours (1609). Both writers contributed satirical works to literary ‘wars’ of the period, but this essay moves away from their literary feuds and argues that Nashe and Dekker’s prose employ sites of war as settings for social satire and to explore how war, like satire, functions a force that disrupts as a means to correct social abuses.

MODERN ENGLISH BLOGS AS A HELPFUL TOOL TO ENHANCE STUDENTS’ READING SKILLS

The article is devoted to the problem of using modern English text blogs for educational purposes to improve language skills of high school students. Being a special communicative genre within the framework of Internet discourse, a blog attracts modern high school students who spend much time communicating online, so it seems relevant to refer to the use of text blogs in English language teaching to enhance students’ foreign language skills. The classroom research, aimed to be described in the article, has been conducted in order to identify how the use of the Internet blogs influences the development of students’ reading skills in English. The methods used include context analysis of modern authentic Internet text blogs, observation, tests, experimental studying, etc. The results prove different educational possibilities of modern English text blogs. Various blog types, their educational functions and typical linguistic features of a blog, grammatical and lexical ones, are demonstrated in detail as well. It is stated that text blogs not only develop different reading skills and strategies, but also help students to extend their vocabulary and to prepare for exams in English. Students become participants of a real foreign language communication in a virtual communicative environment created with the help of blogs.

Practically impossible: the development of an English approximator

ABSTRACT Considerable attention has been paid in the literature to –ly adverbs, from an array of different perspectives, both synchronic and diachronic (e.g. Lorenz 2002; Paradis 2003; Paradis & Bergmark 2003; Tao 2007; Aijmer 2011; Defour 2012; Núñez-Pertejo 2013; Núñez-Pertejo & Palacios-Martínez 2014; Vandenbergen & Taverniers 2014). However, to date the adverb practically has not been the object of a great deal of discussion. Here we will show how this adverb has followed a line of development similar to that of other –ly adverbs, and hence emerges as a manner adverb with the meaning ‘in a practical manner’, ‘in practice’ (frequently opposed to ‘theoretically’ or ‘speculatively’), before evolving into a degree modifier of the approximating type with the meaning ‘almost’, ‘in effect’, ‘nearly’. This paper seeks to contribute to the history of practically by examining its process of subjectification (cf. Traugott 1995; Swan 1997), using a corpus–based methodology. To this end, the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0 (De Smet, Diller & Tyrkkö 2013) has been used, supplemented with additional evidence from the Old Bailey Corpus, version 2.0 (Huber, Nissel & Puga 2016a; 2016b).

Элементы фикциональности в медиатекстах: столкновение реального и вымышленного

The current article is dedicated to the analysis of fictionality in modern English media texts. Fictionality is a term applied in narrative theory, and traditionally associated with the belles-lettres style (i.e. fictional narrative). In brief, fictionality is an intentional use of invented stories, which is opposed to factuality. We found that, being a fiction-specific narratological category, fictionality may appear in some kinds of media texts in the shape of separate pieces of text of different length - fictional inclusions. In our study we relied on the works by W. Schmid, J. Jenette, R. Walsh, Paul Dawson, H. S. Nielsen, J. Phelan etc. The main aim of the work is to prove that narratological analysis may be applied not only to the belles-lettres style, but also to media texts, along with other types of analysis. Also, we focused on the types, features and functions of the phenomenon under study. Investigation showed that opinion articles are more prone to contain fictional inclusions than others, which accounts for the fact that this type of articles possesses many features of the belles-lettres style. The application of stylistic and narratological analysis to fictional inclusions led us to the following conclusions. Functions of fictionality in media texts may be numerous, including attracting attention, setting up a contact with the addressee, avoiding judgment, sharing opinion, discrediting of an opponent etc. Fictional inclusions may help in creating such stylistic devices as metaphor, irony, hyperbole, implication. Altogether, the devices and functions mentioned above contribute to language manipulation of the recipient. Also, textual markers of fictionality in media texts were found, among which there were such language means as the change of narrative modes, along with modal constructions, conditional mood, negation, change of register and hyperbolization. The given means help the reader identify fictional inclusions in media texts. The results of the research support the idea voiced by modern narratologists about blurring boundaries between fiction and other cultural spheres.

Is postgraduate English academic writing more clausal or phrasal? Syntactic complexification at the crossroads of genre, proficiency, and statistical modelling

This study uses a novel approach to describe modern English academic texts in terms of the amount and distribution of syntactic subordination, coordination and phrasal structures. Inconsistent results have been reported in previous scholarship regarding the trajectory of syntactic complexification based on English language backgrounds and linguistic proficiency of writers. For the first time, a combination of two predictive statistical modelling methods of mixed-effects modelling and supervised machine learning modelling with random forest is used to examine the extent to which the type, amount, and distribution of these syntactic structures can be attributed to a text-intrinsic feature (sub-genres or rhetorical sections of academic register) and a text-extrinsic factor (English language background based on academic context) in a corpus of master’s dissertations. To revisit the theories of English L1 vs. L2 texts, strong predictors of syntactic complexity across academic writings of EFL, ESL, and English L1 postgraduate students were identified. The findings show that EFL texts are dominantly subordinate in nature, English L1’s dominantly phrasal, and the ESL dissertations exhibited similar amounts of subordination and phrasal structures. Distinct syntactic structures also characterise rhetorical sections: abstracts are predominantly phrasal, literature reviews distinctly subordinate, and conclusion sections have noticeable amounts of verb phrases.

Special issue on studies in Late Modern English historical phonology using the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP): introduction

Since Charles Jones referred to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the ‘Cinderellas of English historical linguistic study’ (1989: 279), there has been a great deal of progress in research on this period, but, as Beal (2012: 22) points out, much of this has been in the fields of syntax, morphology, lexis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and the normative tradition. Beal argues that the availability of corpora of Late Modern English texts has greatly facilitated research in these areas, but, since creating phonological corpora for periods antedating the invention of sound recording is a challenging proposition, the historical phonology of Late Modern English has benefited much less from the corpus revolution. To redress this imbalance, the editors of this issue, with technical support from the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, created the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP), which is freely available at www.dhi.ac.uk/projects/ecep/