Textual Phenomena Research Articles

Ṣarfa: A Premium Kind of I‘jāz in Turāth of Al-Mu‘tazila (A Conceptual Study for An-Naẓẓām and Al-Jāḥiẓ)

Many theological based concepts of I‘jaz had come out in third century of Ḥijrah. One of the most popular and dynamic theories that got all scholars flabbergasted for long time was ‘ṣarfa’, which has been introduced by a well-known theologian leader of Al-Mu‘tazila; An-Naẓẓam for the first time. For him, i‘jaz of Qur’ān does not mean to be qualified with the quality of matchlessness and inimitability or having worth of being unique and exclusive in its textual phenomenon as incomparable with any other text. So from this point of view Qur’ān for him, becomes like all other holy texts and Qur’ānic text no longer remains superior to any of its sister texts. As the text of the According to him Qur’ān is no more matchless and unique to other texts so, he called it ‘ṣarfa’. People are not perfect, they make mistakes and do things against religion so, Allah Almighty dissuaded and distracted human being from bringing down any equal text, otherwise anyone could do this. The following study intends to figure out genetically all applicable and inapplicable aspects of ‘ṣarfa’ of Al-Mu‘tazila. How they have dealt and applied it? Do they agree with singular definition of ‘ṣarfa’ or do they have a mutable concept

Tonal Poetry, Bop Aesthetics, and Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Gerard

In the following article, I will attempt to outline a new reading methodology for Beat fiction, based on some of the principles of bop aesthetics. This reading understands fiction—especially Beat fiction—as an aural art, as opposed to merely a textual phenomenon (and so considers fiction in much the same way that poetry and music are often considered). Jack Kerouac composed his novel Visions of Gerard in 1956 (released in 1963), the same year Charles Mingus released his classic album Pithecanthropus Erectus. I contend that by reading Kerouac’s novel in terms of Mingus’s methods of composition as recorded on that album, we can more clearly hear the influence of jazz music on Kerouac’s prose; as such, we can better understand the means by which jazz music became important as a compositional method and not just as a theme for Kerouac’s novels. Further, becoming more attuned to the means by which Kerouac composed his fiction as an aural soundscape—how he was sensitive not just to the words themselves but to the sounds that comprise those words and their relationships—we can better appreciate the various ways that Kerouac imbued his novels with aural qualities that emphasized the ideas and emotions raised and/or engaged by the narratives.

Chile como paratexto: el espacio regional en los atlas literarios de los años cuarenta

espanolA partir de la equivalencia entre procesos de ecumenizacion (fenomeno territorial) y actividades descriptivas (fenomeno textual), el articulo indaga en un corpus discursivo cuyo auge habria de producirse en la decada del cuarenta, incluyendo autores como Gabriela Mistral, Antonio Roco del Campo, Eduardo Blanco-amor y Benjamin Subercaseaux. Segun se observa en este conjunto de atlas literarios, el modelo nacionalizante de espaciamiento va imponiendose a lo que es percibido como “parte” mas o menos fundamental del pais -provincias tributarias y permanentemente disponibles-, a traves de paratextos que cumplen la funcion de dar legibilidad y frenar la fragmentacion sin control, aun cuando ello no baste para suprimir la emergencia de ambiguas relaciones entre nacion y region, entre centro y periferia, entre cada texto de origen y su puesta en libro. EnglishFrom the equivalence between ecumenization processes (territorial phenomenon) and descriptive activities (textual phenomenon), the article explores a discursive corpus whose rise would occur in the decade of 1940, including authors such as Gabriela Mistral, Antonio Roco del Campo, Eduardo Blanco-Amor and Benjamin Subercaseaux. As noted in this set of literary atlases, the nationalizing spacing model starts prevailing in what is perceived as a more or less fundamental part of the country -tributary and permanently available provinces-, through paratexts that fulfill the function of giving readability and curb uncontrolled fragmentation, even when this is not sufficient to suppress the emergence of ambiguous relations between the nation and the regions, between the center and the periphery, between each source text and its publication as a book.

Der heterodiegetische Präsensroman – ein Fall von unreliable narration?

Der heterodiegetische Präsensroman – ein Fall von unreliable narration?

A Meal in the Background of John 6:51–58?

The new paradigm presented by the Society of Biblical Literature Meals in the Greco-Roman World Seminar challenges, among other things, the exegesis of John. Both the "eucharistic overtones" of selected passages in the Gospel of John and the assumption of a cultic meal on the level of the community have been called into question. The Bread of Life discourse (John 6:22–59) can be analyzed as a textual phenomenon that makes use of the imagery of eating and drinking but does not refer to a specific meal practice of early Christians. In this article, I argue that the complex metaphorical network in the Bread of Life discourse rests on conceptual imagery that we might refer to as eating/drinking is adopting teaching. The intensification of the concept of adopting teaching into the language of eating the flesh has several parallels in antiquity. Moreover, this vivid imagery in John 6:53–58 is a conscious provocation of the recipients at the level of the narrated world and part of a typical Johannine misunderstanding scene. In the narrative strategy of John 6, these strong metaphors narratively enact the separation of the believing from the unbelieving disciples. The metaphors do not, however, point directly to specific practices of the believers. The argument will focus on the motif of drinking the blood of Jesus in John 6:53–58. An analysis of the ancient reception of this motif shows that it entered the discourse on meals prior to its influence on the ritual semantics itself. This observation suggests that it was the textual reception of the Gospel of John that influenced the development of a ritual and not the ritual that gave rise to the text.

Branding in Urban Discourse Space: Region’s Identity as Attraction Factor

The research is focused on branding as a communicative process and aimed at defining the region’s identity role in provision of its tourist attraction. Linguistic analysis of the branding process is concentrated on optimization of language means and urban semiosis quality. City’s identity is viewed as a complex of exterior and other markers, building its complex image and playing an initial role in city’s branding. The aim of territory’ branding is to present the uniqueness of a certain region and its competitiveness. A city is a complicated multilayer communicative formation that creates a special type of discourse around itself – urban discourse. The space of this discourse is determined by such textual phenomena as a text-city, an urban text and a text about a city. The authors outline the role of naming in city branding and consider a great importance of a city’s identity in creating a text content aimed at increasing attraction of a city as a tourist object. City’s identity allows one to understand its uniqueness and mental representation by a representative of its “own” and “foreign” cultures and optimize branding strategies with the aim to fix positive images of a city and attractive image of a global-centred and locally original territory.

Pirates, Captives, and Conversions: Rereading British Stories of White Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean

AbstractWhile captivity narratives have long been recognized as an important field of research in American Studies, the substantial body of autobiographical tales portraying captivity in the Muslim world published in England between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth century has only recently begun to attract the attention of literary scholars. Despite a number of important pioneering works, however, British captivity narratives have not only remained at the margins of early modern studies, but even where they have received attention they have mainly been treated as historical source material. In other words, there has hardly been any interest in the genre of captivity narratives as a textual and literary phenomenon in its own right. As a consequence, most of the published stories in question lack thorough narrative analysis, although the genre is situated at the intriguing intersection of travel literature, religious writing (e. g. tales of martyrdom), and prose fiction, and arguably constitutes one of the forerunners of the early novel. This paper proposes that we need to go beyond the limits of current research by rereading British tales of captivity with a stronger interest in their narrative composition, their discursive and generic contexts, and the pragmatics of publishing. Only in this way it will be possible to both do justice and draw more sustained attention to this highly fascinating and yet still understudied genre of literary texts.

Three Forms of Neurorealism: Explaining the Persistence of the “Uncritically Real” in Popular Neuroscience News

Neuro-realism is a widely cited concept describing a textual phenomenon in popular science news wherein brain research uncritically validates or invalidates the “realness” of particular beliefs or practices. Currently, no research on neuro-realism examines the variable rhetorical roles of such statements, that is, how they support specialized arguments or enhance social functions across genres of public communication. This article details the nuances of neuro-realism, arguing that neuro-realism is much more than a singular textual phenomenon but a flexible rhetorical vehicle manifesting in at least three forms: commonsense, judicial, and rational. Each form serves a larger argumentative purpose, and each can be consistently linked to a popular news subgenre, illuminating how neuro-realism’s stunning lack of criticality proves permissible and reproducible in popular science publications.

Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London. Arthur Bahr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+285.

<i>Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London</i>. Arthur Bahr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+285.

Joel Barlow's Miltonic Epic and Western Directional Poetics

Joel Barlow's Miltonic Epic and Western Directional Poetics Edward Simon Joel Barlow's epic poem The Columbiad (1807) remains a curiosity of American literature.1 It has been unfairly maligned as derivative and jingoistic, and largely relegated to the dustbin of literary history along with various other early American works.2 No one could argue for the epic's aesthetic superiority over a text like John Milton's Paradise Lost. Yet, I would maintain that The Columbiad cleverly appropriates political, theological, and aesthetic themes from the earlier poem and refashions them in a specifically "American" manner. It does this with a heavy reliance on the classical trope of translatio studii et imperii. By emphasizing a certain geographic western orientation, the text takes part in a literary trope that I call "western directional poetics."3 That Milton had a central role in early American literature and politics has been widely commented on in scholarship.4 Barlow explicitly returned to Milton's literary sources to make a teleological argument on behalf of America's providential role in world history. Throughout The Columbiad Barlow cannily developed his own secular political theology from the Nonconformist Protestant thought of Milton. The Columbiad is an important Miltonic expression of a particular strain of American radical republicanism and American [End Page 87] exceptionality. Barlow's debt to Milton is evident in part in the descriptions of paradise that appear in The Columbiad. What is even more important, the influence of Milton on Barlow is also seen in the narrative relationship between the characters of Columbus and Hesper, who are functionally equivalent to Adam and the archangel Michael in Paradise Lost. Finally, I argue that the relationship between Columbus and Hesper takes part in the previously mentioned textual phenomenon of "directional poetics," which is something that I claim is implicit in Milton and explicit in Barlow. "Directional poetics" is the tendency of certain texts to endow a particular cardinal direction with a transcendent significance. The significance of any particular direction depends on how it is being deployed in a given text and, more broadly, across a tradition. North, south, east, and west can all signify different concepts across different texts; directional poetics offers a critical vocabulary to conceptualize more precisely the central place that directional spatiality has in literature. The west is often associated in Anglo-American literature with concepts such as manifest destiny, imperialism, progress, and even apocalypse. This "western" discourse is often assumed to originate in nineteenth century American literature, but I argue that the discourse goes back to the earliest era of New World colonialism.5 It is this early "western directional poetic" to which Milton alludes and which Barlow in his appropriation of Milton makes explicit in The Columbiad. In short, directional poetics is written throughout the text of The Columbiad, drawing from similar but more subtle evocations in Paradise Lost. The Columbiad provides an important perspective on early American radical politics, the relationship of early American literary culture to its cultural antecedents, and the appropriation of Milton to a particularly American vision during the revolutionary and early republican periods, when the United States attempted to exert itself as a particular polity whose destiny was in the greater Western Hemisphere. Christopher Kendrick writes, "Barlow's description of the American landscape at the beginning of his epic conducts in context a searching engagement with Milton's poem," [End Page 88] and in this engagement Barlow offered one vision of American political theology.6 My essay demonstrates that Barlow's literary innovation was to marshal Milton's narrative tropes in the service of an argument about the United States' teleological role based on its western directionality. In doing so, Barlow subverts Milton's distinction between the prelapsarian and postlapsarian worlds to present a paradisal America, and thus to make a nationalist, political, commercial, and religious argument about the arrival of a new world order in the form of the United States of America. Barlow's claim about American exceptionality in The Columbiad hence functions as a type of "Paradise Found." What was precisely evocative about Paradise Lost to Barlow was Milton's "Americanness," a quality I will explore at greater length below. Barlow's Columbiad...

James Montgomery’s Waterloo: War and the Poetics of History

NEIL RAMSEY James Montgomery’s Waterloo: War and the Poetics ofHistory T he battle of Waterloo has long represented a historical watershed for nineteenth-century Britain, the victory over Napoleon mark­ ing a foundational moment in the nation’s rise to global imperial power. It is hardly surprising, then, that studies of Romantic literature have reflected at some length on the cultural and symbolic meanings attached to the bat­ tle. These studies have, however, taken two quite distinct approaches. On the one hand, as Philip Shaw has argued, Waterloo was viewed as an event of unparalleled sublimity that, nonetheless, resisted representation and failed to achieve its promise of consolidating national unity after twentytwo years of conflict.1 On the other hand, the battle has also been seen to have marked the termination of what Jerome Christensen defines as the condition of eventfulness characterizing Romantic wartime and its poetry.2 A product ofmodern mass media and daily news, wartime eventfulness de­ scribes not only the affective state of watching a war, but equally a time that is unable to secure a coherent narrative of how history will unfold. However, Waterloo allowed history to resume, the battle giving rise to a post-Waterloo Romantic historicism in which historical change came to be seen as determined by the slow progress of socio-cultural forces and a determining spirit of the age rather than the result of random contin­ gencies of violent conflict.3 In effect, the sublime event of Waterloo gave rise to a view of history that has no room for sublime events, the battle si­ multaneously defining and yet failing to define the course of the nation’s history.4 i. Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 2. Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 3. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics ofLiterary Culture and the Case ofRomantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 4. On Waterloo’s doubled existence as historical event and emblem of historical process, see alsoJan Mieszkowski, Watching War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 43-44. SiR, 56 (Fall 2017) 361 362 NEIL RAMSEY For the Romantic poet James Montgomery, the mediatized eventfulness ofwartime was the very reason that the Romantic era could be understood as an “age ofpoetry.”5 In order to consider Waterloo’s relation to Roman­ tic poetry and history, this article turns to a series oflectures on poetiy that Montgomery published in the 1830s. While almost wholly forgotten today, the lectures not only provide an early effort to construct a periodized liter­ ary history ofthe era, but they also establish a relation between war and po­ etry in ways that have striking echoes in recent scholarship on Romanti­ cism and war. Montgomery proposes that war formed the historical grounds for Romantic poetry because, as he argues, war rendered ordinary life visionary. In making such a claim, however, he also poeticizes war in ways that call into question quite how war relates to its historical moment. Appearing as a markedly textual phenomenon, war in Montgomery’s ac­ count works both to shape the history of an era and to lift an era out of its historical chronology. Montgomery finds this tension embodied in Water­ loo, a sublime event that simultaneously completes and yet redirects his­ tory. Relating his views to similar reflections on war and history in the sub­ sequent thought of Michel Foucault and Reinhart Koselleck, this article argues that Montgomery’s reflections draw attention to an underlying ten­ sion in Romantic historicist understanding of the battle (or what Koselleck calls an “epistemological aporia”) between the aleatory event and the struc­ tural determination of historical necessity.6 Remembered today primarily as an author of devotional hymns and an apostate from his youthful radicalism in Sheffield at the start of the 1790s, Montgomery has been almost entirely forgotten in histories of British Ro­ manticism. It is an omission that ignores his quite remarkable prominence at the time. William St. Clair shows that Montgomery’s sales figures during the first decades of the nineteenth century approximated those of other leading poets, such as Samuel Rogers, Thomas Campbell and Robert Southey.7...

Cognitive Literary Studies: On Persistent Problems and Plausible Solutions

AbstractThe present article addresses the question whether the wide and disparate field of Cognitive Literary Studies (CLS) has met the goal set by its representatives: to provide more authentic, intelligible and meaningful work than the traditional literary scholarship against which it positions itself. When »cognition« entered literary studies in around the 1990s, this was seen to announce the dawning of a new era, characterised by a rejuvenation of the field with the aid of interdisciplinary input, which simultaneously promised a return to its fundamental interest in literary texts. These objectives were accompanied by a growing disaffection with dominant theoretical paradigms (e.g. post-structuralism) and a forthright commitment to bridging the Cartesian dualism purportedly dominating the humanities. From the outset, however, CLS was greeted with criticism both regarding the reliability of its methodological basis and the usefulness of its results. These weaknesses have on the whole not been remedied and their continuing presence is highlighted by the field’s location at the margins of literary scholarship a quarter of a century after the »cognitive turn«. My taking up the longstanding debate surrounding CLS and returning to issues that may appear dated to some is not only indicatedI begin by considering the methodological flaws that critics of CLS identified already at its inception, focusing on the one hand on the unsubstantiated foundations of its claims and on the other on its resistance to providing a precise definition of its key concept »embodiment«. As many other critics have already pointed out, the field’s most problematic assertion is that the products of the human mind, be they mental schemata or figurative language (especially metaphors), are indicative of how human cognition works generally. While this naturalisation of literary form as the structuring principle of human cognition may entail a reassuring revaluation of literary scholarship, it is based on rather simplistic and often unsupported assumptions about the nature of cognitive processes. At the same time, this conflation of literary language and cognitive structure has prevented scholars from asking questions of genuinely literary import. Instead, CLS tends to take literature as a repository of natural language to be scanned for evidence of whatever cognitive phenomena are at stake.Furthermore, CLS’s attention to the text is also indicative of insufficient attention within the field to all that literature doesThe unease surrounding biological matters in CLS persists in recent reconceptualisations of its premises developed with the aim of responding to these criticisms, to which I then turn. Rather than resolving its questionable claims, CLS has branched out into ever new areas, for instance by contextualising cognitive processes, investigating larger, more complex textual phenomena (blends) and studying social or extended cognition rather than individual minds. These reconceptualisations, productive though they may have been within the field of CLS, have merely replicated its fundamental problems and are thus subject to the same charges as earlier forms of cognitive literary scholarship.In conclusion, I argue that to comprehend the embodied responses that CLS currently mainly assumes as givens these would have to be identified and pried apart from the multifarious manifestations by which literary art appeals to the human mind. For that, however, scholars would have to accept the existence of a certain cognitive »norm«, i.e. a »human nature«, without which the most radical theory of embodiment leads to the very impressionism against which CLS initially positioned itself. This would require, above all, that cognitive literary scholars establish clarity about their key term »embodiment« and, in order to do so, embrace research from disciplines they typically eschew: notably the »hard« neurosciences and psychology (both cognitive and evolutionary); furthermore, it would require them to limit their expectations about the explanatory scope of CLS and its innovative force within traditional scholarship.

Sentiment analysis leveraging emotions and word embeddings

Sentiment analysis and opinion mining are valuable for extraction of useful subjective information out of text documents. These tasks have become of great importance, especially for business and marketing professionals, since online posted products and services reviews impact markets and consumers shifts. This work is motivated by the fact that automating retrieval and detection of sentiments expressed for certain products and services embeds complex processes and pose research challenges, due to the textual phenomena and the language specific expression variations. This paper proposes a fast, flexible, generic methodology for sentiment detection out of textual snippets which express people’s opinions in different languages. The proposed methodology adopts a machine learning approach with which textual documents are represented by vectors and are used for training a polarity classification model. Several documents’ vector representation approaches have been studied, including lexicon-based, word embedding-based and hybrid vectorizations. The competence of these feature representations for the sentiment classification task is assessed through experiments on four datasets containing online user reviews in both Greek and English languages, in order to represent high and weak inflection language groups. The proposed methodology requires minimal computational resources, thus, it might have impact in real world scenarios where limited resources is the case.

Genre Characteristics of the 18th Century Military Charters (With Reference to the Mikhailovsky Stanitsa Ataman Archive)

The military charter is defined in the article as a major type of administration document in the Don Host Province (Rus. Oblast’ Voyska Donskogo) and is claimed to be an exceptional genre of administrative documentation of the 18th century. The study is conducted with reference to documents (dated between 1735 and 1755) from the Mikhailovsky Stanitsa Ataman Archive (State Archive of Volgograd Region). Applying a complex approach to linguistic phenomena analysis and taking into account the achievements of the modern text theory through the prism of documentation linguistics, the authors determine the following characteristics of any genre of a documentary text: functions, subjects of communication (addresser, addressee), specificity of the message delivered, composition structure, prevailing modality, time and space localization. The authors illustrate their multi-vector and heterogeneous interaction and coordination with the specific features and general text categories and properties of the text. The notion of genre that was first introduced in linguistics with reference to fiction is specified for documentation linguistics; conceptual information in official and administrative documents is considered as a cultural and historical background that helps to provide an accurate interpretation of factual information. The authors characterise the peculiarities of the aforementioned parameters in the speech structure of military charters that are expressed by different level means of language, emphasising the cases that allow for variability. The article demonstrates that though it is an isolated textual phenomenon, the military charter reflects the peculiarities of records management typical of a certain area of Russia. Keeping some old instructive traditions, the text, however, demonstrates some features of the new office style of the 18th century.

WHAT CAN THE RESEARCH ON JAPANESE ANAPHORIC DEMONSTRATIVES CONTRIBUTE TO GENERAL LINGUISTICS

In this paper, the anaphoric usage of the Japanese determiners kono and sono are investigated. Their usages can be categorized as siteisizi (designated usage) or daikousizi (representative usage). In siteisizi, kono functions as a denotational determiner and sono as a connotational one. This paper also shows that siteisizi is a textual phenomenon while daikousizi is a syntactic one. These differences can be explained by applying Halliday & Hasanʼs concepts of “reference” and “substitution” . The findings of this paper also illustrate that Leechʼs “Grammar” can be considered at super-sentential levels.

Aspects of Arbitration Discourse: an Insight into China’s Arbitration Law

The formulation of legal norms is greatly conditioned not only by different juridical systems and drafting traditions, but also by specific linguistic features and socio-cultural aspects. The paper investigates this issue by taking into consideration provisions concerning commercial arbitration in an Asian country. The text selected for our analysis is The People’s Republic of China Arbitration Law 1994 (PRCAL, for short). This law can be considered a highly important step in the development of Chinese legislation in this field as it has had a great impact on international arbitration carried out by Chinese companies. International business exchanges with China have increased enormously over the last few years and even the recent economic recession has not slowed down this growth, making China the biggest Asian market in terms of import-export trade. As a natural consequence, this increase in business deals and contracts has brought about a rise in the number of trade disputes, with a consequent increase in arbitration proceedings. The aim of this paper is to examine the English version of PRCAL in order to highlight some of the linguistic and legal features present that betray specific cultural values. In some cases, the PRCAL text is compared to the United Nations Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, with the aim of offering a more detailed understanding of textual phenomena closely linked to differing legal and cultural traditions.

Vergleich als Methode? Zur Empirisierung eines philologischen Verfahrens im Zeitalter der Digital Humanities

Vergleich als Methode? Zur Empirisierung eines philologischen Verfahrens im Zeitalter der Digital Humanities

Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text

In A. C. Spearing develops a new engagement of narrative theory with medieval English first-person writing, focusing on roles functions of I as a shifting textual phenomenon, not to be defined either as autobiographical or as label of a fictional speaker or narrator. Spearing identifies explores a previously unrecognized category of medieval English poetry, calling it autography. He describes this form as emerging in mid-fourteenth century consisting of extended nonlyrical writings in first person, embracing prologues, authorial interventions in commentaries on third-person narratives, descendants of a genre of French medieval He argues that autography arose as a means of liberation from requirement to tell stories with preordained conclusions as a way of achieving a closer relation to lived experience, with all its unpredictability inconsistencies. Autographies, he claims, are marked by a cluster of characteristics including a correspondence to texture of life as it is experienced, a montage-like unpredictability of structure, a concern with writing textuality. Beginning with what may be earliest extended first-person narrative in Middle English, Winner Waster, book examines instances of the dit as discussed by French scholars, analyzes Chaucer s Wife of Bath s Prologue as a textual performance, devotes separate chapters to detailed readings of Hoccleve s Regement of Princes prologue, his Complaint Dialogue, witty first-person elements in Osbern Bokenham s legends of saints. An afterword suggests possible further applications of concept of autography, including discussion of intermittent autographic commentaries on narrative in Troilus Criseyde and Capgrave s Life of Saint Katherine. A deeply challenging engaging book, Autographies: The I of Text be required reading in every graduate course in medieval English literature. In wonderfully nuanced close readings of various late medieval texts, A. C. Spearing extends further theorizes his earlier groundbreaking work in Textual Subjectivity. His proposal of autography as a new way of conceptualizing medieval first-person writing should have profound bearing on how future scholars conceptualize, designate, discuss character, intent, voice. Peter W. Travis, Henry Winkley of Anglo-Saxon English Language Literature, Dartmouth College A.C. Spearing dares us to think without anachronistic notions, teaches us, by impressive example, how to become better readers of medieval French English poetry. Ad Putter, University of Bristol Professor Spearing proposes in this new study a nuanced persuasive theoretical framework for interpreting late medieval first-person narratives without anachronistic dependency on autobiography modern preoccupations with narrative coherency. Drawing on postmodern theory French scholarship on dit, Autographies promises to spark conversation that extends beyond Medieval English circle to include French medievalists who will find a worthy cross-disciplinary discussion initiated literary theorists who will discover a sorely understudied corpus whose relevance is made manifest. Deborah McGrady, University of Virginia

Bilingwizm w tekście zapisany

Bilingualism in text. Part 2. Transcodic markers. Genres.&#x0D; The second part of this paper is a description of bilingual speech recorded in three aspects, the formal, the functional, and the one relating to genre studies. As a textual phenomenon, bilingual speech is characterized by transcodic markers, the traces of encounters between two languages: the matrix language L1 and the embedded language L2. The author introduces into the text linguistic correlates of his or her bilingual competence. These can take the shape of code switching, code mixing, or interference between L1 and L2. Coherence mechanisms, adequate to the various forms of transcodic markers, weld transcodic markers with the text in the matrix language formally and with regard to the content. These mechanisms are: grammatical rules of code switching, the matrix language frame, the local grammatical, syntactic, and semantic congruence of the two linguistic systems in contact, and also the local convergence between the elements and rules of L1 and L2. Transcodic markers are created by bilingual authors to fulfil specific roles in texts, most importantly, to enhance the referential potential and to (de)nominate the text by opening up the access to the universe of reference of L2. Other functions are the deictic function, the metacommunicative function, the function of rendering utterances that have originally arisen in L2, the polyphonic function, and also the function of transmitting strong emotions which are intimate to the sender. Transcodic markers are a transgression of the monolingual norm which is typically considered the standard in the creation of written texts. However, the analysis of recorded bilingual speech has shown that there exist genres which not only accept the introduction of transcodic markers into the text, but even actually sanction them. On the one hand, it is the literature of personal document with such genres as letter, journal, memoirs (autobiography), and on the other, linguistic mediation. In the former case, transcodic markers verbalize genre-specific features, the documentary quality and the personal element, as they are a linguistic – and thus authentic – testimony of the experience that the author has had in his or her L2, and has formed in that language. Being an inalienable part of the experience that is being related, the second language warrants an assertion of truth, documented and narrated through the given text with bilingual speech. Transcodic markers introduce senses and content that is complementary to the text in the matrix language, which is why, for a bilingual author, they are a factor that enriches his or her linguistic repertoire in the text that they are creating.

Relational data modelling of textual corpora: The Skaldic Project and its extensions

Skaldic poetry is a highly complex textual phenomenon both in terms of the intricacy of the poetry and its contextual environment. Extensible Markup Language (XML) applications such as that of the Text Encoding Initiative provide a means of semantic representation of some of these complexities. XML, however, has limitations in representing semantic relationships that do not conform to the tree model. This article presents the relational data model as a way of representing the structure of skaldic texts and their contextual environment. The relational data model raises both problems and possibilities for this type of project. The main problem addressed here is the representation of the syntagmatic structures of texts in a data model that is not intrinsically ordered. The advantages are also explored, including networked data editing and management, quantitative linguistic analysis, dynamic representation of the data, and the ability to extend the structure and reuse data for related projects without creating redundancy.