bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Force Of Poetry
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

Christopher Ricks is one of the best-known living critics of English, and was described by W. H. Auden as `the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding'. Though published indepenently over many years, each of the essays in this collection of his writings asks how a poets words reveal the `force of poetry', that force - in Dr Johnson's words - `which calls new power into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter'. The poets covered range from John Gower, Marvell, and Milton to Wordsworth, Empson, Stevie Smith, Lowell, and Larkin, and the book contains four wider essays on clichés, lies, misquotations, and American English.
John Milton: Sound And Sense In Paradise Lost
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

Comparison and analysis, as T. S. Eliot said, are the chief tools of the critic; and we can gain a sense of the particular nature of Milton’s achievement by looking first of all at the relations of sound and sense in some poetry other than his. First, Dr. Johnson. How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure. Qohnson, contributed to Goldsmith’s The Traveller) The network of sounds is delicate and various. ‘Endure’ rhymes with ‘cure’, and yet their senses face in opposite directions; ‘small’ rhymes internally with ‘all’, narrowing down with ‘small’ as against widening out with ‘all’; ‘hearts’ rhymes with ‘part’, and ‘laws’ with ‘cause’; ‘or’ is repeated as ‘or’ (and rhymes with ‘laws’ and ‘cause’); ‘that’ is repeated as ‘that’, but with a different sense; the alliteration within the first line—’how’, ‘human’ —plays its story against that within the second line: ‘kings’, ‘can’, ‘cause’, ‘cure’. Ifwe set aside the three humble words ‘How’, ‘of’, and ‘which’, the only two words which do not rhyme with anything are ‘human’ in the first line and ‘kings’ in the second, and those two words present the plot of this stoical couplet. Yet the salience, the prominence, of ‘human’ and ‘kings’ does not lift them aloofly above the couplet’s auspices, since each alliterates with the word that follows it. Johnson’s achievement here is that these interlacings of sound—which create and enforce nuances of meaning and of feeling—never harden into a diagram. The suppleness of the rhythm sees to that.
William Wordsworth 1: ‘a pure organic pleasure from the lines’
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

There is reason to think that Wordsworth was aware of a discussion about the difference between poetry and prose in Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants; aware, too, ‘almost certainly’, of an article in The Monthly Magazine for July 1796 on ‘Is Verse Essential to Poetry?’ Such arguments are ancient, and usually yield only to fatigue. Robert Lowell said, ‘I no longer know the difference between prose and verse’.2 T. S. Eliot towards the end of his life declared: ‘the moment the inter mediate term verse is suppressed, I do not believe that any distinction between prose and poetry is meaningful’. That was in 1958; but thirty years earlier, when the usual arguments were being rehearsed in The Times Literary Supplement, Eliot had come up with a very suggestive formulation: ‘Verse, whatever else it may or may not be, is itself a system of punctuation; the usual marks of punctuation themselves are differently employed’ (TLS, 27 September 1928).
Robert Lowell: ‘The War Of Words’
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

Robert Lowell died at sixty. Ten years earlier, his autumnal fame at fifty had been itchy on his shoulders: I, fifty, humbled with the years’ gold garbage, dead laurel grizzling my back like spines of hay. (‘Mexico’) That was prickly; ‘humbled’ was proud, and ‘gold garbage’ and ‘dead laurel’ impatiently writhed at the poetical trappings, the laurels and gold garb. ‘Grizzling’ was not a snivel but the threat of an ageing bear—hug. Nothing violent happens in the lines, but you feel the pressure of the possibility. The poem’s first line, leading into those two, was ‘The difficulties, the impossibilities ... ‘; the sonnet went on to imagine the Aztecs and human sacrifice; and its last line saw a clock with ‘the hand a knife—edge pressed against the future’. Violence, yet not quite or not yet.
Geoffrey Hill 1: ‘The Tongue’s Atrocities’
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

A principled distrust of the imagination is nothing new. One triumph of the imagination is that it can be aware of the perils of the imagination, the aggrandisements, covert indulgences, and specious claims which it may incite. Great art is often about the limits of what we should hope for even from the greatest of art, and among the many things which the imagination can realize on our behalf, one such is the limits of the sympathetic imagination. A poem by Geoffrey Hill speaks of ‘The tongue’s atrocities’ (‘History as Poetry’), compacting or colluding the atrocities of which the tongue must speak, with the atrocities which—unless it is graced with unusually creative vigilance—it is all too likely to commit when it speaks of atrocities.
Clich é s
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

The only way to speak of a clichê is with a cliché. So even the best writers against clichês are awkwardly placed. When Eric Partridge amassed his Dictionary of Clichês in 1940 (1978 saw its fifth edition), his introduction had no choice but to use the usual clichês for clichés. Yet what, as a metaphor, could be more hackneyed than hackneyed, more outworn than outworn, more tattered than tattered? Is there any point left to—or in or on—saying of a clichê that its ‘original point has been blunted’? Hasn’t this too become blunted? A clichê is ‘a phrase “on tap” as it were’—but, as it is, is Partridge’s ‘as it were’ anything more than a cool pretence that when, for his purposes, he uses the clichê on tap it’s oh so different from the usual bad habit of having those two words on tap? His indictment of ‘fly—blown phrases’ has no buzz of insect wings, no weight of carrion.
American English And The Inherently Transitory
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

American English is often disparaged, not least by Anglophile Americans. But disapproval of how people use language—as of everything that people do—ought at least to ask whether there is anything which a particular suspected act may be able to effect which a more proper one might miss. Not that it need then be six of one and half a dozen of the other; simply that it may be salutary to grant that, with these choices of language as with other choices, it will not very often turn out to be none of one and a dozen of the other. The greatest novelist who was both American and English (and both nineteenth and twentieth century), Henry James—’Novelist. Citizen of two countries. Interpreter of his generation on both sides of the sea’, in the per fect words of his gravestone, in Cambridge, Massachusetts: even James did not always ask himself whether there was any thing that demotic American speech could honourably effect which was not possible to the proprieties. Addressing the graduating class at Bryn Mawr College in 1905 on ‘The Question of Our Speech’, James was right to insist that even the most minute decisions about pronunciation, for instance, are up to something; but he was narrow in supposing that the something up to which they were must be no good.
Hoccleve and the Middle French Poets
Authors: Burrow John
Published: November 2023

Consideration of Thomas Hoccleve’s relationships with the vernacular poetry of his time has concerned itself largely with Geoffrey Chaucer-understandably so, given his allusions to his ‘maister deere and fadir reverent’. There has accordingly been little study of Hoccleve’s relationship to the French poetry current when he wrote, especially the writings of such Middle French poets as Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Oton de Granson, Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, and Alain Chartier. Although the circulation of manuscripts of these poets in England remains to be studied, several English writers in the time of Chaucer and beyond show knowledge of them, Hoccleve included. I hope at least to suggest some lines of enquiry which may profitably be pursued further in his case.
The Ballad and the Middle Ages
Authors: Green Richard Firth
Published: November 2023

In the mid-I98os, when John Fyler undertook to update the explanatory notes to the House of Fame for the new Riverside Chaucer, not only could he find nothing new to add to Robinson’s forty-year-old comments on ‘The Bret Glascurion’ (III. I208)-a figure usually identified with the traditional ballad hero Glasgerion (Child 67)-but he even felt it necessary to abridge them slightly. This recent example of a prominent medievalist’s indifference to earlier ballad scholarship is a sign of the times.
Other World
Authors: Easting Robert
Published: November 2023

In 1492 Columbus found another world if not the other world. He had sailed partly in the wake of St Brendan’s search for the ‘Land of Promise’, and on his third voyage, in May 1498, he believed that the waters flowing from the mouths of the Orinoco descended from the Earthly Paradise. With God’s grace, the Earthly Paradise was still potentially accessible in the flesh, as it had been for Alexander, who had supposedly approached its mossy walls.
Sentimental Grounds: Schiller, Wordsworth, Bernardin, Shelley, Keats
Authors: Mcgann Jerome
Published: November 2023

‘Rosebud’ —the characters ignite and shrivel in the last fiery frames of Citizen Kane. A child’s sled holds a key for understanding the history of a Great Man, and of the King’s Treasury he accumulated. The film tells the story of the search for that key, of the failure to find it, and—not least of all—the irony in the final revelation of its loss.
Revolution, Television, Subsidy
Authors: Stevenson Randall
Published: November 2023

‘Art never expresses anything but itself’ (I), a playwright—clearly modelled on Tom Stoppard—suggests in Peter Nichols’s A Piece of My Mind (1987). Theatrical art, at any rate, has always been interested in itself, plays-within-plays and other forms of metatheatre appearing regularly on English stages ever since Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or indeed much earlier. Yet in the later twentieth century—consistently with some of the postmodernist influences of the time—drama was more widely and diversely self- interested than in most earlier ages. Relations between theatre, art, and life were explored extensively by Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, and David Pownall, as well as by Peter Nichols himself.
Tony Harrison and the Guardian
Authors: Rusbridger Alan
Published: November 2023

Modern wars do not often inspire great journalism. In the post-infantry age much war reporting takes place from the safety of the briefing room, where five-star generals provide jokey commentaries to video clips of smart bombs popping down chimney stacks.
The Rhetorical Feminine (I): Women And Muslims In The Literary Imagination
Authors: Colvin Sarah
Published: November 2023

The idea of woman need not be negative. In literature, women are as often portrayed as heroic Amazons or paragons of constancy as they are as witches and whores. The idea of the femme forte or heroic woman, for example, popularized especially in France in the early to mid-seventeenth century, is a construction of woman as ideally virtuous, and is specifically designed to refute established pre judices. This might suggest that there is no obviously identifiable pattern in the traditional literary imagination. But it becomes apparent that this is an unsatisfactory mode of reading as soon as we stop reading the sex of the idea and instead look analytically at its gender. The female is not necessarily portrayed as feminine, the male not necessarily as masculine: nonetheless, those linguistic or rhetorical categories are important, and femininity is inevitably linked to female just as masculinity is to male in the writing imagination.
Reading The Signs: Rhetorical Loci And Stage Semiotics
Authors: Colvin Sarah
Published: November 2023

Depictions of the Turk or Muslim as feminine (in the face of a real fear of the Ottomans ‘masculine’ military prowess), or of personally ambitious women as dangerous Venus fly-traps, represent—as we have observed—the rhetorical arrangement of ideas into recognizable categories, or loci. The structure of the process imitates proof by precedent; we know (for example) that Helen is associated with the fall of Troy, there fore any woman associated with Helen is also automatically associated with the fall of civilizations. As such ideas gain familiarity they acquire the deictic authority of the emblem: just a fleeting reference will guide the audience or reader towards an intended meaning. Within the compressed form of the drama, this can constitute a useful kind of shorthand.
‘Books Do Furnish a Room’: Readers and Reading
Authors: Humble Nicola
Published: November 2023

This episode of a man scrutinizing a woman’s reading habits takes place just before Paul, a small-time publisher, begins an adulterous affair with Judy, his wife’s oldest friend. Norman Denny’s novel wholeheartedly approves of this affair, as Paul’s wife, the coolly competent Cicely, has never loved him. Judy and Paul are among the very few emotionally literate characters in Sweet Confusion, which is set in 1938 and depicts a world of middle-class comfort and certainties turned inside out by the pressures of the imminent war.
Imagining the Home
Authors: Humble Nicola
Published: November 2023

Suzanne fails the test ignominiously, declaring obtusely that she sees nothing but the book itself; but the question of the ways in which the home is imagined is a crucial one for the middlebrow women’s novel of this period. Repeatedly, in such novels from the 192os to the 1950s, domestic space is described in obsessive, coded detail. Essentially, the feminine middlebrow constructs the home as a text to be read for its ideological import.
The Eccentric Family
Authors: Humble Nicola
Published: November 2023

The feminine middlebrow encountered elsewhere in this study concerns itself with redefining the significance of the home and of reading for the middle-class woman and in actively revising conceptions of class politics, gender roles, and sexuality. All of these concerns coalesce in what seems to me both the oddest and the most characteristic preoccupation of the women’s middlebrow novel in this period: its sense of the family as a profoundly eccentric organization.
Sales and Prices of First Folios: A History from 1623 to the Present
Authors: West Anthony James
Published: November 2023

The Shakespeare First Folio appeared in November 1623. The plays were gathered together for publication by John Heminges and Henry Condell, fellow players of Shakespeare’s in the company of the King’s Men. It was printed in London near St Paul’s by William Jaggard and his son Isaac; the principal publishers were Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount. It has 454 leaves, including nine preliminaries; the sheets are gathered (with some exceptions) into six- leaf quires. The text is printed on handmade paper in pica roman type, in two columns, on both sides of the leaves. The volume contains thirty-six plays (eighteen printed for the first time), all of the traditionally accepted dramatic canon except Pericles.
Listings of the First Folio Since the Early Nineteenth Century
Authors: West Anthony James
Published: November 2023

The survey of facsimiles of the First Folio in the previous chapter showed one facet of the Folio’s history since the early nineteenth century. The survey of listings of copies of the Folio in this chapter shows another. The word ‘listing’ is used to embrace the various lists in the nineteenth century, Sidney Lee’s Census in 1902, more lists since then, and Otness’s Census of American institutional copies in 1990. Perhaps the best way to view this succession of lists is ‘Before and After Lee’, because his Census (for all its faults, which we will note) stands out from the rest. It is a uniquely valuable record. The structure of this chapter reflects this.
Linguistic Provenance: What are the Languages Palsgrave is Describing?
Authors: Stein Gabriele
Published: November 2023

Having outlined the compilation, the production, and the overall structure of Lesclarcissement de la langue jrancoyse, we shall now look at the kind of English and French which Palsgrave describes in his grammar and his dictionary. At the time when he was compiling Lesclarcissement, English and French, like other European vernaculars, were still in the process of establishing themselves on a par with the classical languages, Latin and Greek. Supraregional prestige norms, in the spoken as well as the written vernacular, were gradually emerging, and the printing press played a considerable role in the development and spread of a particular social and regional form of the language. There is a concurrent crucial factor for the period which we have to bring back to our minds: there were no agreed rules for spelling and there was wide variation. Apart from having no existing word lists to hand from which to compile their own word lists, the early vernacular lexicographers were thus faced with the further burden of selecting the spellings for words. The users of these early vernacular dictionaries, on the other hand, had to be imaginative and flexible enough to check in different places of the dictionary (still only imperfectly alphabetical) when the spelling which they had assumed for a word did not coincide with that chosen by the lexicographer.
Theoretical Perspectives in Irish Research
Authors: Riagáin Pádraigó
Published: November 2023

In Reversing Language Shift, Fishman (1991) is critical of the ‘rather gross and undifferentiated’ distinctions made in the literature between the various kinds of counter-trend or what he calls ‘reverse language shift (RLS)’ policies. While Fishman’s general strictures about the unhelpful distinctions often made between different types of language policies are valid, his eight-stage reverse language shift model has more than a passing similarity to the well-known five-stage model of economic growth proposed by Rostow (1960) thirty years earlier. In place of Rostow’s goal of self-sustaining economic growth, Fishman offers the goal of ‘self-priming intergenerational transmission’ of the target language. Furthermore, the three critical stages of Rostow’s economic growth model, ‘the preconditions for take-off’, ‘take-off’, and ‘the drive towards maturity’, have clear and obvious parallels with the more important of Fishman’s stages of reverse language shift. This exposes the model to the kind of criticisms to which Rostow’s theory and, indeed, most kinds of evolutionary models of development have been subjected (Bernstein 1971, Mouzelis 1988). It is not easy to distinguish either the analytical or prescriptive logic of many ‘stages’, their essential characteristics, or the mechanisms which might be seen to link them to each other. Furthermore, many minority language groups are so heterogeneous in their structure that fitting them into Fishman’s eight-stage model is difficult.
Irish-Speaking Areas 1926-1986: An Overview
Authors: Riagáin Pádraigó
Published: November 2023

The ‘Gaeltacht’ has come to signify several related, but different, realities for Irish people. For some it is exactly what the word literally means, that is, an area in which Irish is spoken. For others, it is an area of economic underdevelopment, depopulation, and backwardness. For yet others it is an area of outstanding natural beauty. Finally, in the domain of state management, the Gaeltacht is a distinct regional unit, with separate policies and institutional structures. All of these perspectives interact with each other in complex ways that have changed over time. This chapter will focus primarily on changes in language patterns since 1926 as revealed by census data. Changes in linguistic, socio-economic, and administrative structures, and the many ways these processes interact with each other, will be discussed in the following chapter.
Public Attitudes towards Irish and Irish Language Policies
Authors: Riagáin Pádraigó
Published: November 2023

The study of language attitudes has a large and well-developed tradition which is to be found across a range of disciplines. While noting that there is thus no single definition of ‘attitude’ that would carry universal approval, the definition offered by Sarnoff (1970, quoted by Cargile et al. 1994) provides a start-’a disposition to react favourably or unfavourably to a class of objects’. Attitudes, so defined, are seen to be cognitive (entail beliefs about the world), affective (involve feelings towards an object), and behavioural (encourage or promote certain actions). It is, of course, this last dimension which is both of most interest in the study of lesser used langages and at the same time the most problematical.
Irish Language Production and Reproduction in English-Speaking Areas
Authors: Riagáin Pádraigó
Published: November 2023

abstract

Currently the community acts as a source for the transmission of Irish only in the Gaeltacht areas where, along with the home, its role in reproducing primary bilingualism remains a crucial factor in ensuring the future vitality of the language. While census evidence would suggest some continuity across the generations of Irish-speaking homes, the analyses contained in Chapters 3 and 4 show clearly that these areas have both been losing population and that, within the residual population, a progressive language shift to English has continued. Irish is not being maintained in its traditional core area although in 1981 these areas still contained 45 per cent of Irish-speaking homes.
Irish-Speaking Networks 1n Urban Areas
Authors: Riagáin Pádraigó
Published: November 2023

The CILAR research was initially based on the premise that social use of Irish would be found to have a ‘domain’ pattern. This hypothesis implied that ‘the choice of one language in preference to another equally accessible language is made more or less consciously and consistently with reference to situations or topics, these being possibly centred around institutional settings (or domains) such as home, work, or public administration’ (CILAR 1975: 230). However, following analysis of its survey findings, it suggested that ‘social control over language use is ... operating through networks of friends or acquaintances whose personal knowledge of each other is the guiding factor in explaining preferences of one language over another’ (CILAR 1975: 231). The Committee went on to hypothesize ‘that variation in language use is “person” or “group” related, whereas domain theory postulates that such variation is related to areas of “activity”‘.
The Formation of National Identity
Authors: Smith Anthony D
Published: November 2023

There is nothing peculiarly modern about the problem of identity. It is almost as old as recorded history. Certainly, the Bible contains many instances of concern with ethnic and social identity, individual and collective. Jacob’s simulation of his brother Esau’s identity, Ruth’s determination to exchange her Moabite for an Israelite identity and Jonah’s assertion of his Hebrew identity despite his refusal to accept his prophetic mission, are among the better-known examples. Ancient Greek mythology, too, reveals a strong interest in problems of social identity; Ion, Theseus, and, in more tragic vein, Orestes all suffer from self-doubt or internal conflicts. Perhaps the most celebrated of these cases was Oedipus, who in the course of Sophocles’ play, runs through several wouldbe identities, only to stand revealed as a parricide, husband of his mother, brother of his sons and daughters, and a Theban after all.
Natural Law and the Ethics of Traditions
Authors: Boyle Joseph
Published: November 2023

A major theme in contemporary discussions of moral philosophy is dissatisfaction with the condition of ethical theory. Ethical theory can be characterized as the effort to develop general criteria for distinguishing correct from incorrect moral judgements, within an overall account of moral life and experience. Currently, the chief representatives of ethical theory are utilitarianism, Kantianism, and various forms of contractualism. These theories are found wanting both because they are believed to be excessively abstract and rationalistic, and because they are held incapable of providing a plausible account of the rich diversity of moral life. The objections to these theories are generalized so as to apply to ethical theory as such. Thus, ethical theory must be replaced and several alternatives to ethical theory have been ventured.
That ‘Nature Herself Has Placed in our Ears a Power of Judging’: Some Reflections on the ‘Naturalism’ of Cicero
Authors: Arkes Hadley
Published: November 2023

Those of us who grew up with the legends of Franklin Roosevelt were impressed with a series of visual images that came along with the hagiography: they were scenes from the Depression and the Second World War, which offered the dramatic setting for the special mission and story of Roosevelt. Among the pictures from the Depression, we remember the scene of bitter farmers, banding together to resist the sheriff, who was charged to act as an agent of a bank in foreclosing on a family farm. A companion scene was drawn from the run on the banks in the first days of the Roosevelt Administration: a crowd of desperate depositors was massed outside the doors of the bank, hoping to get in and retrieve what they could of their savings before the bank went under.
Introduction
Authors: Loveday Leo J
Published: November 2023

The Japanese are often stereotyped as a nation possessing a unique culture, having hardly any linguistic connections with other language-groups, a characterization which some Japanese admittedly also promote for ideological purposes. However, on closer examination of their linguistic and cultural history, a very different picture emerges, of a people avidly looking beyond themselves for inspiration and external contact-political environment permitting. It is the story of this surprisingly enduring, 2,000-year-long influence of other cultures and languages on Japan which constitutes the focus of this book.The picture that will emerge provides important clues to the causes and patterns of language change in general and will be valuable for comparative purposes, especially to those searching for data to help them formulate cross-cultural universals in language-contact behaviour. Furthermore, it is now necessary to pay attention to language-contact processes in the long-neglected setting of a monolingual speech-community. Significant insights into the contemporary modifications undergone by the English language in a non-native, Asian context fundamentally different from one, such as India, with a colonial, British heritage, can also be gleaned here. In addition, it is hoped that some readers will be stimulated by the application of interdisciplinary theory and methodology in this case-study.
Introducing Language Contact
Authors: Loveday Leo J
Published: November 2023

This chapter will offer a brief introduction to the field of language contact and propose a universal typology for relating types of language contact to social settings which will be applied to the Japanese scenario throughout this book. Those readers already familiar with the theoretical background or wishing to proceed straight to the descriptive episodes concerning Japanese contact may dispense with it. However, it may be worth consulting the typology presented in Table 1.1 as the presentation proceeds.Language contact is observable in almost every country of the contemporary world and is evident in the recorded history of nearly all languages. The term ‘language contact’ as employed here, covers an extremely broad range of phenomena, all of which relate to the direct and indirect influences of languages on each other. These reciprocal influences of one language or more on another may occur on any or every linguistic level and may also extend beyond these, to discourse and interaction. The words ‘language contact’ or ‘language transfer’ are employed here because they do not imply any normative judgements concerning the purity or legitimacy of the consequences of contact, nor suggest any degree of integration into a language during or after contact. Furthermore, the term ‘language contact’ indicates no particular source or type of influence and ascribes no volition on the part of speakers, which other terms such as ‘mixing’ or ‘borrowing’ might.
Japanese Contact with Asian Languages
Authors: Loveday Leo J
Published: November 2023

Japanese society has been involved in the processes of language contact since its earliest emergence. As was mentioned in the introduction to the Japanese language, the mixed linguistic heritage of Japanese points to the strong likelihood of it having gradually evolved through pidgin and creole stages of communication between Austronesian- and Altaic-speaking groups who migrated to the islands in prehistoric time (see Aikiba-Reynolds, 1983; Doi, 1984). Furthermore, the Chinese language has played a pre-eminent role in both linguistic and cultural development in Japan since the beginning of recorded history, but it is now being eclipsed by English-speaking cultures.Table 2.1offers a bird’s-eye view of the evolution of Japanese linguistic contact with exogenous sources and of how this relates to historical periods and motivational forces. However, the cause for contact has been reduced to a very general, perhaps even over-simplified, notion. This chapter and the following two aim to provide substance and depth to this outline.
Plato’s Discovery of Metaphysics
Authors: Bolton Robert
Published: November 2023

Did Plato take his Forms to be causes, as we understand causes? This is a question which has long occupied students of the Phaedo, Republic, and Timaeus, and students of Plato’s attitude to natural science in general. 1 The answer to this question depends first of all, of course, on how we do understand causes. Writers on Plato typically decline to be very specific about this, and perhaps wisely so. Contemporary philosophical discussion of causation, not to speak of earlier discussion, can easily lead one to doubt that we have any coherent general conception of a cause or of causal efficacy at all. Still, we have paradigms: the heat of the sun causes the ice on the pond to melt; the awareness of an insult causes anger; the moistening of a seed in the earth causes a plant to begin to grow; the medication prescribed by the doctor causes the patient to get well. So, even if we cannot start from any clear and uncontroversial general notion of a cause which we share, we can start from our uncontroversial paradigms. We can then coherently ask: did Plato think of his Forms as causes on a par with these paradigms? For convenience, I will label these paradigms ‘productive causes’.
Introduction
Authors: Lanza Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

Attempts to describe and explain the feat of language acquisition have preoccupied scholars over time. More recent years have witnessed an increased interest in crosslinguistic studies of how children in different parts of the world exposed to different languages acquire their first language. Although there are many children who acquire one language at a time, children’s exposure to more than one language in their primary language acquisition has for centuries been the norm in many parts of the world.
Some Basic Notions of Cognitive Grammar
Authors: Taylor John R
Published: November 2023

In this chapter I introduce some basic concepts of cognitive grammar. For a fuller presentation of the theory, the reader is referred to Langacker (1987a, 1990a, 1991). A succinct overview may be found in the four chapters that Langacker contributed to Rudzka-Ostyn (1988), i.e. Langacker (1988a,b,c,d).
Ing-nominalizations
Authors: Taylor John R
Published: November 2023

In this chapter I address the use of the possessive morpheme in association with deverba1 V-ing forms, as exemplified in (I).
Possessive Compounds
Authors: Taylor John R
Published: November 2023

There are good reasons why we should want to regard the expressions in (I) as ambiguous. both structurally and semantically.I)a. the woman’s magazine.b. the girls’ school.c. the man’s shirt.d. the driver’s licence. On one reading, these expressions instantiate the prenominal possessive construction that has been our main focus of attention so far. On this reading, the woman’s magazine denotes a specific magazine, identified from the reference point of ‘the woman’.
Turing’s Test and Conscious Thought
Authors: Michie Donald
Published: November 2023

Although its text is now available, there is little awareness of a remarkable lecture delivered to the London Mathematical Society on 20 February I947 The lecturer was Alan Turing. His topic was the nature of programmable digital computers, taking as his exemplar the ‘Automatic Computing Engine’ (ACE) then under construction at the National Physical Laboratory. At that time no stored-program machine was yet operational anywhere in the world. So each one of his deeply considered points blazes a trail-logical equivalence to the Universal Turing machine of hardware constructions such as the ACE, the uses of variable-length precision, the need for large paged memories, the nature of ‘while’ loops, the idea of the subroutine, the possibility of remote access, the automation of 1/0, and the concept of the operating system. Turing then considers the eventual possibility of automating the craft of programming, itself scarcely yet invented.
Beyond Turing Equivalence
Authors: Sloman Aaron
Published: November 2023

Artificial intelligence has revolutionized the study of mind by introducing computational theories of mental processes. Many people believe that computational concepts and theories suffice to explain the nature of perception, learning, creativity, motivation, emotions, feelings, consciousness, etc. because all these are thought to be computational states, events, or processes. Indeed, I once put forward such a view (Sloman, 1978). But this presupposes that we know what computations are. Do we? Do analog computers do computations? The concept has become less clear with the growth of interest in ‘neural computations’.
Lingua Francas
Authors: Calvet Louis-Jean
Published: November 2023

I have already referred to the widespread illusion that views the world as divided, in isomorphic fashion, into countries and languages, with linguis tic frontiers corresponding to state and national frontiers. It is an illusion, for there is practically not one monolingual country and, conversely, languages are rarely confined to one country. We have seen (Chapter 3) that human beings were confronted by a multilingual world and the research into markets described in the preceding chapter has shown how people dealt with this multilingualism in their social practice. Through examples as different as Canton and Brazzaville, we found two general factors: the emergence of a lingua franca as a solution to the problems of communication; and, a fairly close parallel between markets and the wider sociological changes of society.
Language Policy and Planning: First Approach
Authors: Calvet Louis-Jean
Published: November 2023

The five preceding chapters all, from different angles, touched on the same subject, that is, how speakers experience and manage multilingualism. We treated different topics (the family, markets, lingua francas) and we used different approaches (research by questionnaire or observation, description of languages, reconstruction of the history of languages through the study of documents). But, whatever the topic or approach, in every case the lesson of our analysis and research was the same: social relationships lie behind language relationships, and the linguistic phenomena we have described are the evidence for this. We are now going to leave the battlefield, the in vivo management of multilingualism and the relationships between languages to turn to the in vitro management of these problems, that is, the direct and deliberate intervention by those with political power into the domain of language.
Case Studies: The Management of Multilingualism
Authors: Calvet Louis-Jean
Published: November 2023

In this chapter and those that follow, we shall describe a number of actual language policies, which will then provide us with a basis for discussion. We shall begin with language policies that had to deal with a substantial amount of multilingualism but which had no intention of reducing it to monolingualism. In the People’s Republic of China there are said to be about fifty different languages that can, for ease of exposition, be divided into two groups: Han languages and minority languages.
The War of Writing
Authors: Calvet Louis-Jean
Published: November 2023

Writing is the graphic representation of language, a means of preserving speech, and thus an instrument of second-degree communication. Surely, then, establishing an orthography is simply a technical matter? Given a language that is not transcribed, linguists can study its phonology and devise an alphabet which is as consistent as possible and best adapted to the language’s sounds. They then propose this alphabet to those who decide who, as they should, decide; next, manuals of literacy and pamphlets are printed. In short, we have the classic scenario of language planning as it might be imagined in theory. From this we might conclude that establishing an alphabet is something that is both technical and neutral. But this is not really the case and we shall see that the form taken by the graphic notation of a language can be an ideological and political issue.
Trench Warfare: The Case of French
Authors: Calvet Louis-Jean
Published: November 2023

The history of the international growth of the French language is already a long one, and if, following tradition, we admit that French has been spoken since the ninth century (the Strasbourg Oaths being the first written trace of the language), it is also well known that three or four centuries later French had spread widely through Europe and outside it. The Crusades certainly played an important role in the spread of the language both into other Romance countries and into the East (Armenia, Greece). The victory of William the Conqueror at Hastings in 1066 and the occupation of England that followed established French across the Channel.
The Inadequacy of English
Authors: McConchie R W
Published: November 2023

It is an easy assumption to make that languages progress, that their progress is steadily evolutionary, and that there are always increases in sophistication, flexibility, and subtlety. What is less readily grasped is that this evolution reflects the requirements of their nurturant societies. A changing society will have a changing language, but a static one would have a static language. Progress is, however, not always steady and predictable; thus it is not necessarily the case that this development may be detected equally at all stages of a language’s history.
Language and Authority
Authors: McConchie R W
Published: November 2023

This chapter will discuss two aspects of authority in medical writings. The term, ‘authority’ may refer either to those linguistic standards upheld and appealed to in medical practice or terminology, or to a person or work whose status is regarded as for the most part beyond question. The two are obviously interlinked inasmuch as the authority of the ancients is also the authority of Latin, Greek, and, though to a decreasing extent in the postmedieval period, Arabic.
The Early Lexicographers: Elyot to Bullokar
Authors: McConchie R W
Published: November 2023

Thus far we have examined the users of this terminology and some of their actual practices. Although this study concentrates on the actual contextual use of the medical lexis, our understanding of where medical terminology fitted into the language of the sixteenth century may be furthered by looking at the dictionaries of the period, since it is the lexicographers who are the first-level codifiers and interpreters of the contemporary lexicon. Their prescriptive judgements and editorial decisions have affected what was recorded in their works and exactly how it was registered. It is not to be presumed that they were on the whole comprehensively descriptive, but, since medical terminology incorporates a significant peripheral element of the English lexicon, it makes an interesting test case for the practices of these lexicographers. It is frequently the case that we must learn from their omissions rather than from their inclusions.
Constructing Space in Kwaio (Solomon Islands)
Authors: Keesing Roger M
Published: November 2023

In examining the linguistic construction of space in Kwaio, an Oceanic Austronesian language spoken on Malaita, Solomon Islands (Keesing 1975; 1985), I begin with a cautionary tale. A few years ago Charles Frake, a pioneer in linguistically sophisticated ethnography, told me about a paper that never got finished. Frake had been invited to contribute an essay to a Festschrift for Claude Levi-Strauss. He intended to write a structural analysis of spatial orientation among the Subanun of Mindanao. Having begun the analysis, Frake realized that the Subanun orientational system was basically the same as those of European languages-so he never finished the paper.
A Discourse Perspective: Understanding Full, Real Texts
Authors: Emmott Catherine
Published: November 2023

We are interested in the strategies people use when they read a text—a book chapter for an exam, or a story for their entertainment ... [In the laboratory] the usual redundancies on which these strategies rely have been removed from the text. Hence, the subject falls back on general problem-solving strategies and devises on the spot some procedure that works. The trouble is that this procedure may be entirely task specific and of no general interest as far as normal discourse processing is concerned ... We might be left with quite the wrong conclusions from such experiments (and give quite the wrong advice to educators, textbook writers, etc.) Studying sentences in isolation may tell us something, but it is also possible that it will mislead us.
Summary
Authors: Emmott Catherine
Published: November 2023

The interpreter’s experience always has a clear dynamic aspect, to which our work has to pay close attention. We need to show, for example, that a text can create expectations in the reader’s mind at one point which it then satisfies or subverts at a later point ... In order to present the dynamic aspect ofa reader’s experience with a text, we have developed a method of text analysis which takes the text one segment at a time, asking ourselves at each point in this unrolling of the text something like, ‘Having read this far, what would [the reader] have figured out, or be puzzled by, or be expecting?’
Coming to Terms with the Past: Language and Nationalism in Russia and its Neighbours
Authors: Carmichael Cathie
Published: November 2023

A comprehensive account of the role of language in national identity in the former Soviet Union would require another book of comparable dimensions to this one. The territory is vast, and is home to a large number of ethnic groups, many distinguished from others at least in part by the use of distinct languages. It might be argued that, apart from the majority populations of the former Union republics, not many of these groups can be described as nations, at least in the sense which that term may have further to the west; the group may be very small, there may be little aspiration to autonomy or independence, the extent of a putative national territory might be highly debatable. An adequate treatment would nevertheless have to outline the characteristics of each group, and the circumstances of each group, which vary greatly, would have to be discussed.
On the ‘Art’ of Explanation
Authors: Berg Thomas
Published: November 2023

This work largely grew out of a dissatisfaction with the way the term ‘explanation’ has been used in linguistics. The standard practice of scientific inquiry is the four-step procedure of identification, description, explanation and prediction. A particular phenomenon is first identified, then described, and then explained within a theoretical model which serves to derive predictions about other, hitherto unexplained phenomena. Scientific progress involves the formulation, testing, and reformulation of theoretical accounts. In generative linguistics, which may be regarded as one of the most, if not the most influential school of thought, the distinction between description and explanation is not generally respected. While generative linguists do not shy away from the term’explanation: they often use it either as a mere paraphrase of description or in a rather superficial sense. Let us take an example from a recent textbook on phonology. In a discussion of onset and coda structures in various languages, Goldsmith (1990) states that a greater number of phonological contrasts are usually accommodated in onset than in coda positions. For instance, many languages allow a contrast between voiced and voiceless consonants in prevocalic though not in postvocalic loci. Goldsmith accounts for this asymmetry by introducing the concept of’licensing’. He asserts that onset and coda segments are licensed by different ‘licensing agencies’, the former by a primary licenser (the syllable) and the latter by a secondary licenser (the coda itself). The greater restrictions on codas are’explained’ by their being less freely licensed. This is either a (tautological) restatement of the basic observation or the invocation of hard-to-justify assumptions whose ad hoc nature severely curtails their explanatory value.
Explanation from a Macrolinguistic Perspective
Authors: Berg Thomas
Published: November 2023

Most of the studies that will be reviewed below share a conviction that is more often tacitly assumed than overtly stated. This view is made explicit by Menn and Obler (1982: 3),who reason that the’explanation of linguistic phenomena must ultimately lie outside linguistics’ (emphasis mine). Similar opinions have been voiced by Bybee and Moder {1983), Hall (1992), Comrie (1993), and others. The fundamental insight implicit in this view is that nothing is self-explanatory. We cannot understand plants unless we acknowledge their ecological functions such as providing nutrition to animals and giving rise to photosynthesis, that is, unless we establish a link between trees and the sun for instance. What are the links that should be set up in the case of language? Ohala (1983) sees three and only three linkages which we may conveniently abbreviate as ‘the three m’s’—mind, matter, and manners. The first refers to the abstract psychological dimension, the second to the concrete dimension including anatomy and the neurosciences, and the third to the social and cultural dimension. This tripartite distinction is a very useful point of departure, even though it might be rather too coarse-grained. For example, neurophysiological processes need not impose the same constraints on language as anatomical traits. It is expedient therefore to look at a maximum of approaches individually so as to be in a better position to assess the relative contribution of each. In view of a certain overlap that exists between these approaches, it will not be possible to keep all of their effects neatly apart.