Language and Literature最新文献

{"title":"Literary dialect as social deixis","authors":"P. Stockwell","doi":"10.1177/0963947020968661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947020968661","url":null,"abstract":"The representation of non-standard and regional accent and dialect in literary fiction has been framed mainly sociolinguistically and treated as an index of authenticity, within an account of characterisation. The reader’s attitude to such speakers in literary fiction is manipulated narratorially and authorially. Since readerly effects, impressions and evaluations are the key issues involved, it seems plausible that a cognitive poetic approach to the reading of dialect in literature would also be productive. In the current deictic theory, the dimension of social deixis captures a broad range of stylistic features including register and dialectal representations. Cognitive deictic theory draws on an explicitly spatial metaphor in which characters are positioned in conceptual space. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the effect of readerly positioning and dispositioning. This article revisits social deixis and its points of transition and textural variation from a theoretical perspective. It develops a new angle on the representation and significance of accented and dialectal forms in literary fiction, with some illustrative examples drawn from 19th and 20th century British novels.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"29 1","pages":"358 - 372"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0963947020968661","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44638815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Who ‘let all this happen’? Shifts of responsibilities in representing the Cultural Revolution in Jung Chang’s Wild Swans","authors":"Long Li, Xi Li","doi":"10.1177/0963947020960293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947020960293","url":null,"abstract":"A number of Chinese migrant writers have achieved success in writing in English, one of the most significant being Jung Chang, with her politically controversial Wild Swans. A key site for controversy is its attribution of historical responsibilities in describing China’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). However, to date, little scholarly attention has been paid to the Chinese translation of this book, an unusual situation where the source text author partially contributed to the translation decision-making. This article seeks to examine the shifts of responsibilities in this translation with a focus on the linguistic representation of three participants in the event: Mao, Red Guards and general students. It adopts a functional translational stylistics approach to explore the combinational foregrounding patterns in transitivity and clause status. Based on both quantitative and qualitative results, this study has found latent but considerable grammatical patterns in shifting responsibilities from Mao to the youth in the Chinese translation. This implies a weakened influence of an anti-Maoist ideology in translating the book into Chinese.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":"54 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0963947020960293","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47769553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The role of empirical methods in investigating readers’ constructions of authorial creativity in literary reading","authors":"Fabio Parente, K. Conklin, Josephine M. Guy, R. Scott","doi":"10.1177/0963947020952200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947020952200","url":null,"abstract":"The popularity of literary biographies and the importance publishers place on author publicity materials suggest the concept of an author’s creative intentions is important to readers’ appreciation of literary works. However, the question of how this kind of contextual information informs literary interpretation is contentious. One area of dispute concerns the extent to which readers’ constructions of an author’s creative intentions are text-centred and therefore can adequately be understood by linguistic evidence alone. The current study shows how the relationship between linguistic and contextual factors in readers’ constructions of an author’s creative intentions may be investigated empirically. We use eye-tracking to determine whether readers’ responses to textual features (changes to lexis and punctuation) are affected by prior, extra-textual prompts concerning information about an author’s creative intentions. We showed participants pairs of sentences from Oscar Wilde and Henry James while monitoring their eye movements. The first sentence was followed by a prompt denoting a different attribution (Authorial, Editorial/Publisher and Typographic) for the change that, if present, would appear in the second sentence. After reading the second sentence, participants were asked whether they had detected a change and, if so, to describe it. If the concept of an author’s creative intentions is implicated in literary reading this should influence participants’ reading behaviour and ability to accurately report a change based on the prompt. The findings showed that readers’ noticing of textual variants was sensitive to the prior prompt about its authorship, in the sense of producing an effect on attention and re-reading times. But they also showed that these effects did not follow the pattern predicted of them, based on prior assumptions about readers’ cultures. This last finding points to the importance, as well as the challenges, of further investigating the role of contextual information in readers’ constructions of an author’s creative intentions.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":"21 - 36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0963947020952200","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47132707","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Epistolary cognition: The family letters of Rosalie Calvert","authors":"J. Harding","doi":"10.1177/0963947020954582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947020954582","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues for the distinctive nature of cognition involved in correspondence, arguing that this cognition is highly creative and in corollary, arguing that this cognition is positioned within social and cultural conditions that must be considered in a full analysis. The author argues that letters are often written from the perspective of an “embodied epistolary present,” the letter writer’s temporal, spatial, and corporeal viewpoint depicted through the use of present tense and other markers. The author further elaborates the relationship between correspondence and common ground. The embodied epistolary present facilitates the “imagined copresence” of writer and recipient (possible through conceptual blending), which the author describes as “the fictitious conceit that a recipient is present to serve as an interlocutor during the writer’s embodied compositional present.” Like the face-to-face conversation that it simulates, epistolary discourse depicted with imagined copresence relies on the common ground shared by the writer and recipient; the author argues that the common ground also shapes other discourse modes present in correspondence including narrative episodes and reporting. The author further shows that epistolary discourse reflects cultural norms, shaping what writers include and elide. To demonstrate all these points, the author draws examples from the letter collection Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert, 1795–1821, edited by Margaret Law Callcott (1992). Calvert was a plantation mistress in postrevolutionary Maryland who corresponded with intimate relatives in Belgium; as such, Calvert’s letters demonstrate both the imaginative work that letters deploy and the common ground that shapes epistolary content.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":"37 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0963947020954582","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43873400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Afterword","authors":"David Crystal","doi":"10.1177/0963947020950229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947020950229","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"29 1","pages":"347 - 351"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0963947020950229","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43763211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Epilogues and last words in Shakespeare: Exploring patterns in a small corpus","authors":"A. Findlay","doi":"10.1177/0963947020949442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947020949442","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the linguistic features of the speeches that end Shakespeare’s plays, some of which are formally labelled as Epilogues. It introduces a play’s last words as a type of paratext using the theoretical models devised by Genette (1997), and then considers the material evidence surrounding Epilogues, a specific form of last words, using research on their ephemeral and occasional nature by Stern (2009). The difficulties of using corpus methods in the case of small, specialist subcorpora of paratexts is then considered, and the methodology adopted to extract and present the results is outlined. The demonstrates features of the Last Words corpus: how pronouns raise questions about the speaker’s stance (with reference to work by Goffman (1979) and Messerli (2017)); how these speeches deploy the language of inclusivity; how they interpellate spectators or readers to promote a specific agenda. Because last words enact the fragile liminal moment where characters, actors and audience are united by their experience of the performance, the article considers their retrospective and prospective orientation. It demonstrates how the prominence of verbs like ‘shall’ and ‘will’ can be used for marketing purposes. The problems raised by uneven dispersion of terms are discussed leading to a case study of the Epilogue of As You Like It which demonstrates how its use of language is deliberately linked to the discursive world of the play which precedes it.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"29 1","pages":"327 - 346"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0963947020949442","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48444428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mapping the links between gender, status and genre in Shakespeare’s plays","authors":"Sean Murphy, D. Archer, J. Demmen","doi":"10.1177/0963947020949438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947020949438","url":null,"abstract":"The Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language project has produced a resource allowing users to explore Shakespeare’s plays in a variety of (semi-automatic) ways, via a web-based corpus query processor interface hosted by Lancaster University. It enables users, for example, to interrogate a corpus of Shakespeare’s plays using queries restricted by dramatic genre, gender and/or social status of characters, and to target and explore the language of the plays not only at the word level but also at the grammatical and semantic levels (by querying part of speech or semantic categories). Using keyword techniques, we examine how female and male language varies in general, by social status (high or low) and by genre (comedy, history and tragedy). Among our findings, we note differences in the use of pronouns and references to male authority (female overuse of ‘I’ and ‘husband’ and male overuse of ‘we’ and ‘king’). We also observe that high-status males in comedies (as opposed to histories and tragedies) are characterised by polite requests (‘please you’) and sharp-minded ‘wit’. Despite many similarities between female and male usage of gendered forms of language (‘woman’), male characters alone use terms such as ‘womanish’ in a disparaging way.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"29 1","pages":"223 - 245"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0963947020949438","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48604054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Depictions of deception: A corpus-based analysis of five Shakespearean characters","authors":"D. Archer, Mathew Gillings","doi":"10.1177/0963947020949439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947020949439","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus: First Folio Plus and using corpus-based methods, this article explores, quantitatively and qualitatively, Shakespeare’s depictions of five deceptive characters (Aaron, Tamora, Iago, Lady Macbeth and Falstaff). Our analysis adopts three strands: firstly, statistical keywords relating to each character are examined to determine what this tells us about their natures more generally. Secondly, the wordlists produced for each of the five characters are drawn upon to determine the extent to which they make use of linguistic features that have been correlated with, or linked to, acts of deliberate deception in real-world contexts. Thirdly, we make use of the results identified during the two aforementioned strands by using them to identify particular (sequences of) turns that are worthy of more detailed analysis. Here, we are primarily interested in (a) whether these keywords/deceptive indicators cluster or co-occur and (b) whether these interactions are the same as those identified by other scholars exploring depictions of deception in Shakespeare from a literary perspective. The findings indicate that deception-related features are indeed used collectively/in close proximity, by Shakespeare, at points where a character speaks to other characters disingenuously. They also suggest that Shakespeare’s deceptive depictions do change stylistically, from character to character, in line with those characters’ different characterisations and situations, that Shakespeare draws on atypical language features – such as self-oriented references – when it comes to some of his depictions of deception and that Shakespeare uses these various stylistic features to achieve a range of dramatic effect(s).","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"29 1","pages":"246 - 274"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0963947020949439","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41864115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"National identities in the context of Shakespeare’s Henry V: Exploring contemporary understandings through collocations","authors":"Jonathan Culpeper, A. Findlay","doi":"10.1177/0963947020949437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947020949437","url":null,"abstract":"Shakespeare’s clearest use of dialect for sociolinguistic reasons can be found in the play Henry V, where we meet the Welshman Captain Fluellen, the Scotsman Captain Jamy and the Irishman Captain Macmorris. But what might contemporary audiences have made of these Celtic characters? What popular understandings of Celtic identities did Shakespeare’s characters trigger? Recent technological developments, largely in the domain of corpus linguistics, have enabled us to construct robust but nuanced answers to such questions. In this study, we use CQPweb, a corpus analysis tool developed by Andrew Hardie at Lancaster University, to explore Celtic identity terms in a corpus developed by the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language Project. This corpus contains some 380 million words spanning the 80-year period 1560–1639 and allows us to tap into the attitudes and stereotypes that would have become entrenched in the years leading up to Henry V’s appearance in 1599. We will show how the words tending to co-occur with the words Scots/Scottish, Irish and Welsh reveal contemporary understandings of these identities. Results flowing from the analyses of collocates include the fact that the Irish were considered wild and savage, but also that the word Irish had one particular positive use – when modifying the word rug. In discussing our findings, we will take note of critical discussions, both present day and early modern, on ‘nationhood’ in relation to these characters and identities. We will also conduct, partly for contrastive purposes, a brief analysis of the English identity.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"29 1","pages":"203 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0963947020949437","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45892927","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What do students find difficult when they read Shakespeare? Problems and solutions","authors":"Sean Murphy, Jonathan Culpeper, Mathew Gillings, Michael Pace-Sigge","doi":"10.1177/0963947020949441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947020949441","url":null,"abstract":"Teaching and learning Shakespeare takes place across the world. Pedagogical matters have been the subject of much discussion in the last few decades. This article begins by reviewing that discussion, showing how different approaches – textual, contextual and active (or performance) – connect with the language of the plays. No study, it is pointed out, has conducted an empirical investigation as to what exactly students find problematic when they read the language of Shakespeare’s plays, an obvious first step, one might think, in designing an approach. The main aim of this article was to describe a study designed to do exactly this. It was conducted with two groups of Shakespeare students, one with English as a first language and one with English as an additional language. Participants were asked to identify difficulties in extracts from plays, rate specific linguistic forms according to difficulty and discuss what they think of Shakespeare’s language. Common areas of difficulty included archaic words, borrowings from other languages, coinages and false friends. With these findings in mind, the article briefly reflects on pedagogical solutions that are corpus-related, arguing that these address some of the problems associated with traditional textual approaches by requiring the active involvement of learners, treating language in a contextualised fashion and focussing on the language itself.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"29 1","pages":"302 - 326"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0963947020949441","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44516375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}