Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2008 vol. 44
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Item A (crooked) mirror for knights – the case of Dinadan(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Witalisz, WładysławThe picture of chivalry in medieval romance was primarily an idealised vision of knightly custom. The world of King Arthur and Camelot codified moral and courtly standards which were presented in literature as patterns for emulation. The writings of Sir Thomas Malory, the last medieval bearerup of Camelot, was understood and received by medieval readers as a traditional praise of chivalry. It is therefore especially intriguing to find in the Morte Darthur the irreverent figure of Dinadan, a knight more ready for a jest rather than a joust, a clown whose words and deeds ridicule chivalric customs. His light treatment of chivalric norm and of courtly love sets him apart from the otherwise traditionally-minded Camelot. On the one hand, Dinadan may be viewed as Malory’s touch of comedy and common-sense in his late medieval treatment of the old, quaint world. On the other hand, Dinadan’s irreverence may be seen as a serious breach in the otherwise didactically idealised image of Arthur’s Britain. The presence of Dinadan complicates the moral appeal of Malory’s Camelot and brings a dose of ambivalence and a lack of clear didactic closure into the text.Item Chinese loanwords in the OED(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) de la Cruz Cabanillas, IsabelIt was traditionally assumed that Chinese had contributed few borrowings into English until Cannon (1987, 1988, 1990) carried out his research based on different English desk-dictionaries. His studies were supplemented by Moody (1996) who reviewed Cannon’s list focusing on the information provided by the Oxford English dictionary (henceforth OED) and Webster’s third new international dictionary of the English language. Nonetheless, Moody’s analysis did not explore all the possibilities the OED offered at the time. This articles aims at revising those previous pieces of work on the topic to find out whether there are significant changes in view of the latest data supplied by the OED, to determine whether there is an increase in the number of items borrowed, which are the transmission and source languages and to see whether any predictions for the near future can be made. Finally, some comments on the transliteration of the terms are also included.Item “Cold pastoral”: Irony and the eclogue in the poetry of the Southern Fugitives(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Kuhn, JosephThis article attempts to analyze a shift in the ancient genre of pastoral in the poetry of the Southern modernists, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, a shift that seeks to account for the historical penetration of nature and that is often aestheticized as the ironical counter-text of the “cold” pastoral. Drawing upon the models of pastoral found in Lewis P. Simpson and William Empson, the article argues that the essential trick of the old pastoral – the implication, as Empson calls it, of a beautiful relation between rich and poor – does not work within nineteenth-century Southern literature because the black resists being turned into a gardener in the garden. The article then examines Tate’s “The swimmers”, a poem that narrates Tate’s discovery as a young child of the aftermath of a lynching, as an expression of this unworkability in an idiom of what Tate called “pastoral terror”.Item Contact with Scandinavian and late Middle English negative concord(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Ingham, RichardEarly Modern English saw negative concord disappear from the mainstream textual record (Nevalainen 1998; Kallel 2005), which may embody natural language change rather than prescriptivist pressure (Mazzon 1994). This study examines whether there is evidence that the change began in some Northern varieties of English, and if so whether it is attributable to Scandinavian influence. Data from 14th century verse show some weakening of NC in Northern verse, but not in corresponding southern variety texts, supporting the findings of Ingham (2006a) for late Middle English prose, contra Iyeiri (2002). Early Scandinavian verse data are shown to present a similar weakening of NC. These results are interpreted in terns of Jespersen’s (1917) negation cycle, to the effect that Scandinavian varieties were in advance of early English on the negation cycle, were losing NC at the time of the Scandinavian ingressions into England, and that their influence on Northern Middle English contributed to the weakening of NC earlier in the North than in the rest of England.Item Disintegration of the nominal inflection in Anglian: The case of i-stems(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Adamczyk, ElżbietaAn evident tendency which can be observed in the behaviour of the Old English nouns belonging originally to the i-stem type is that they reveal a marked fluctuation between the inherited and the innovative (productive) paradigm, manifested in their adopting the inflectional endings of both. The apparent hesitation between the two types of inflection can be seen, for instance, in forms of the nominative and accusative plural of masculine paradigm, where alongside the expected OE -e ending, forms in -as, extended from the productive a-stems paradigm, are attested (e.g. OE wine ~ winas ‘friends’). It is believed that through various phonological processes actively operating within the paradigm and leading to a generalisation of a single ending (-e), this declensional type very early lost its communicative function and was ready to appropriate endings from the stronger, more influential paradigms, i.e. a-stems and ō-stems. The present analysis is a qualitative and quantitative study of the i-declension in the Anglian dialects, known for displaying considerable confusion in the inflectional system. Aimed at presenting a systematic account of the steady disintegration of the nominal paradigm in this dialect, the investigation seeks to determine the exact pattern of dissemination of the productive inflectional endings in nouns belonging to the historical i-stem type.Item English family names(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Viereck, WolfgangThe English of the British Isles has already been put on the map in a number of national and regional atlases. In contrast, atlases of English family names are rather few in number and there are only a very limited number of distributional maps, often without any historical dimension. A team working at my Chair of English Linguistics and Medieval Studies at the University of Bamberg have remedied this situation. Since 2004, a number of publications have appeared, or will appear shortly, that will ultimately lead to a rather comprehensive atlas of English family names. These are: Viereck 2004 (reprinted in an abridged version in 2005a), 2005b, 2005c, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2007/2008, 2008a, 2008b and Barker et al. 2007. English surnames, of course, have come down to us in such enormous numbers that only a selection of them can be dealt with. This contribution is the final paper in the series. It deals with one example each of the main categories mentioned below, namely a – female – personal name, a local surname, a nickname and an occupational surname. Some comments on further research desiderata are made at the end of the paper.Item Evaluative meaning and its cultural significance(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Drazdauskiene, Maria LiudvikaIn the framework of traditional descriptive semantics, evaluative meaning is defined as an aspect of affective meaning. By virtue of its general positive and negative evaluation, evaluative meaning finds its place in the compartment of interpersonal meaning in functional linguistics. The concept of evaluative meaning is also in agreement with the categorisation of meaning in contemporary stylistics. Having stated its spread and disagreement with logic, the cultural significance of evaluative meaning is analysed in this article. Employing the contextual and binary methods of analysis, it has been shown that much of cultural significance in fiction and the image of culture in general owes much to evaluative meaning. It is both plain evaluation and its emotive component that increase the potential of evaluative meaning in fiction and render most delicate senses in it. In fiction, evaluative meaning ranges from rude and moderate name calling to metaphor and irony at the other extreme. The chosen methods appear sufficient in the analysis of evaluative meaning, while its expressiveness is shown to gain much because of its logical inconsistency.Item Finiteness, subjunctives, and negation in English(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Anderson, John M.This paper pursues the analysis of finiteness and subjunctives in English proposed in Anderson (2001b), in the context of the approach to finiteness adopted in Anderson (1997, 2001a, 2006b, 2007). Thus it defends the position that the Present-day English subjunctive is non-finite, if finiteness is equated with the capacity to license independent sentencehood. In particular, I present here some further evidence for such an analysis deriving from the syntax of negation. Specifically, the position of the negative with the “present” subjunctive is the position associated with the negating of a non-finite form. And positional behaviour under negation is also in accord with the idea that the subjunctive “periphrasis” with should, as well as the “past subjunctive” is also non-finite. The phenomena addressed are incompatible, however, with definitions of finiteness based on the presence of particular morphological categories.Item General attitudinal meanings in RP intonation(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Hlebec, BorisThe article takes a cognitive view of the attitudinal meanings of RP intonation. A summary statement is included about previous authors’ views on attitudes conveyed by pitch direction. Data on intonation patterns concentrating on pitch level are followed by the labels of emotional attitudes from phonetic literature. These descriptive labels are brought into correlation with a large number of metaphoric phrases and fixed collocations and expressions which give a clue to structural metaphors for emotional attitudes. In this way, strict regularities in correspondences have been found between the triangle made up of nucleus + head variations, emotions as labelled in phonetic literature, and EMOTION IS TEMPERATURE metaphors. Metonymy also plays a part: emotion stands for a bodily sensation felt during the emotion. These regularities are believed to underlie and govern the use of intonation tunes. Expressing one’s general emotional attitude by means of varying pitch level is seen as a conjunction of two interrelated principal analogies: EMOTION = TEMPERATURE (metaphorically and metonymically) and VOICE PITCH = TEMPERATURE (in terms of the effect of vibrations of air molecules), which produces the expression of EMOTION by means of VOICE PITCH. Specifically, attitudes associated with a pleasant high temperature (warm) are conveyed by means of a combination of a high head and a high nucleus. The combination of the high head and the low nucleus emanates coolness (typically pleasant low temperature, untypically unpleasant low temperature). Attitudes associated with unpleasant low temperature (cold) are produced by a joint effect of a low head and a low nucleus, while associations with unpleasant high temperature (hot) are expressed as a unity of a low head and a high nucleus.Item Inverse binding and the status of the Spec. TP position in Polish(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Tajsner, PrzemysławIf the object DP in “inverted” OVS orders in Polish is anaphoric, then there is a question of the satisfaction of anaphoric A-binding in this new position. One type of examples suggests that there is no reconstruction at LF, hence the movement is to an A-position. Other cases seem to indicate the extension of the binding domain. Nonetheless, more facts from Polish point to contrary assumptions. First, object DPs with anaphoric possessives seem to be reconstructed at LF in base positions and there are examples suggesting no extension of the binding domain. The paper offers an account of these perplexingly contradictory facts in terms of the Thematic Hierarchy (Grimshaw 1990) and the specific First Merge properties of “quirky” subjects for some object experiencer verbs (e.g. podobać się) and psych-causative (frightentype) verbs (irytować). Such subjects do enter the derivation in Spec.vP but rather in Spec.VP positions. In conclusion, it is argued that the OVS configurations in Polish do not differ in principle from so-called Dislocation structures, featuring the OSV order (contrary to Baylin 2003 and Witkoś 2007).Item Investigating dialectal variation in the English of Nigerian university graduates: Methodology and pilot study(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Akande, Akinmade TimothyThis paper describes the methodological procedures that will be used in the collection of data for a dialectal study of the English of Nigerian university graduates. It also reports on a pilot study carried out on this topic. The major elicitation instrument will be a Labovian sociolinguistic interview which will be supplemented by reading materials (Labov 1966). The study will also draw heavily on the current SuRE methodology by Upton and Llamas (1999). The theoretical framework that will be used in the analysis of data will be a diglossia model as this approach enables one to view Nigerian English (NE) and Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) as two languages operating in an extended diglossic situation.Item Karl Luick’s "Historische Grammatik" and Medieval English consonant changes(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Wełna, JerzyThe fragments of Karl Luick’s Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache published during his lifetime which contained an account of the development of English vowels and diphthongs have long served as a theoretical source successfully exploited by a host of historical phonologists. Much less known is the final part of the grammar dealing with consonants, edited and published a few years after Luick’s death by Friedrich Wild and Herbert Koziol (1940). The acceptance by linguists of the part of the grammar devoted to the history of English consonants was not immediate. The article describes the circumstances which determined such an undeservedly lukewarm reception of this important study.Item Names, derivational morphology, and Old English gender(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Colman, FranThe paper argues that names constitute a primary linguistic category: they do not constitute a subclass of nouns. What have been regarded as formal devices for signalling “name-hood”, “properness”, and so on, are part of a language’s derivational morphology. In this context, it argues that apparent “changes of gender” of Old English nouns are the product of a type of derivational (word-class changing) morphology.Item Natural syntax: English reported speech(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Orešnik, JanezNatural Syntax is a developing deductive theory, a branch of Naturalness Theory. The naturalness judgements are couched in naturalness scales, which proceed from the basic parameters (or “axioms”) listed at the beginning of this paper. The predictions of the theory are calculated in the deductions, whose chief components are a pair of naturalness scales and the rules governing the alignment of corresponding naturalness values. Parallel and chiastic alignments are distinguished, in complementary distribution. Chiastic alignment is mandatory in deductions limited to unnatural environments. This paper exemplifies Natural Syntax using language data associated with reported speech in Standard English. Some of the deductions compare direct and indirect speech, and some operate within direct speech or within indirect speech. Special attention is directed toward the verbal nucleus of the reporting clause and on frequency phenomena as defined under 1 below in criteria (d) and (e).Item On the correlation between A-type scrambling and lack of Weak Crossover effects(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Witkoś, JacekThis paper explores certain properties of word orders in Polish clauses with monotransitive verbs where the object is moved to the clause initial position across the subject. We briefly present two current accounts of such word orders in Russian (Baylin 2003 and Slioussar 2005, 2006) and conclude that both seem to capture certain properties of inverted constructions, though the genuine picture, at least for Polish, is still more complex. Most importantly, while OVS constructions unambiguously show that the movement of the object forms an A-type chain, OSV constructions are less straightforward, as the chain formed by the object can show both A-type and A-bar type properties. We propose a derivational account of this ambiguity and subsequently attempt to find a positive correlation between A-type properties of the fronting of the object and lack, or at least a strong suppression, of WCO effects in Polish.Item Periphrastic renderings and their element order in Old English versions of the Gospels(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Ogura, MichikoInterlinear glosses are expected to show one-to-one correspondence of Anglo-Saxon renderings to the Latin original, while free translation is allowed to use words, phrases and clauses of ordinary usage, even though Latin can affect Old English in the choice of words, expressions and style. This paper aims at a comparative study of Old English versions of the Gospels, i.e. Northumbrian Lindisfarne and Rushworth 2, Mercian Rushworth 1, and West Saxon versions in two manuscripts – MSS CCCC 140 and CUL Ii. 2.11 – in order to show a variety of renderings found in interlinear glosses as well as free translation, especially on simple/periphrastic correspondence and element order.Item Peter Ackroyd’s London as the backdrop to esoteric corners of the past and present(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Bartnik, RyszardThis article concerns Peter Ackroyd’s depiction of London as an arcane labyrinth within which demarcation of the borderline between what is rationally, historically acknowledgeable and what is not is not only highly problematic but in fact undesirable. London, with its echoes of the past, with its people and mysteries, is envisaged as metapolis which exposes, through both its architecture and textual topography, hidden tropes leading to knowledge which spills beyond the knowable. Listening intently to the voices of various rationalists and scientists, as well as occultists and visionaries, the author removes layer after layer of the city’s substance in order to define its spirit and “consolidate its origins” (Ackroyd 2000a: 229). The paradox is that Ackroyd, though a literary historian, defies the use of mechanical rationality placing the occluded knowledge in the foreground so as to allow that cultural and intellectual tradition which sank into oblivion to resurface. It is the past, often complex and mysterious, which foreshadows the present, he seems to be saying, hence his acknowledgement of London’s ignored and forgotten forefathers who, in the eyes of the author, must be rescued from oblivion otherwise the vision of London and Londoners is to remain incomplete.Item Prepositional entries in English-Polish dictionaries(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Adamska-Sałaciak, ArletaThe present paper examines the microstructure of entries devoted to prepositions in bilingual English-Polish dictionaries. Given the problems inherent in the lexicographic treatment of function words, it seems worthwhile to ask: – what are the strategies employed in cases of lack of interlingual equivalence? – what is the preferred type of sense-structure (i.e. source-language based, target-language based or mixed)? – does the entry highlight links between related senses? – how much phraseology is deemed necessary to present the properties of the preposition in question? – how does the choice of entry organisation affect its usefulness and user-friendliness? – what possible improvements could be introduced? Answers to the above questions are believed to have implications for lexicography in general, not merely bilingual lexicography in the English-Polish context.Item Secret passage through Poe: The transatlantic affinities of H. P. Lovecraft and Stefan Grabiński(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Wilczyński, MarekThe paper focuses on intertextual relations between selected horror stories by H. P. Lovecraft and Polish writer Stefan Grabiński. Using a triadic concept of intertextuality derived by Michael Riffaterre from Peircean semiotics, this is to demonstrate that the interpretant connecting Lovecraft and Grabiński is “The tell-tale heart” by Edgar Allan Poe.Item Shipping news(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2008) Fries, UdoReports on the movement of shipping vessels in and out of English harbours have appeared as newsworthy items among English news reports from the very beginning of English newspaper publication. The earliest examples in the ZEN Corpus, which was used for this study, date from 1671. As shipping news grew in importance they acquired the status of a separate text class and were printed with specific headlines, such as SHIP NEWS, PORT NEWS, or HOME PORTS. This paper describes the beginnings of the text class as colourful reports, its growth during the 18th century, and its apparent decline towards the end of the century, when it became more and more formulaic and telegraphic in style and moved away from news reports to the advertisement section.