Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2010 vol. 46.3
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Item Locus amoenus or locus horridus: The Forest of Arden as a setting in "As You Like It"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2010) Wojciechowska, SylwiaAs you like it stands out from the rest of Shakespeare’s plays as a comedy of conspicuously unusual dramaturgy. Critics have vindicated its idiosyncratic form claiming that As you like it’s uneventful plot is due to the pastoral character of the play. Along with such typically pastoral elements as song contests or lover’s woes they have listed its setting as an example of an idyllic locus amoenus. This article examines the actual character of the Forest of Arden and turns readers’ attention towards the equivocal image of the place.Item Living in the face of menacing ‘unreason’ - Martin Amis's "The Second Plane" as a response to ideological fundamentalisms(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2010) Bartnik, RyszardThis work touches upon Martin Amis’s diagnosis of the Western world and its cultural foundations which seem to have been threatened, as maintained by the author, by a specific form of “de- Enlightenment” (2008). Amis, a repository of Western intellectual ethos, steps to the fore to defend reason. In view of the world’s unrests, he fosters a thorough investigation of public beliefs, either of a religious or political nature, highlighting how deeply individual freedom has been censored and imperiled by various fundamentalisms. In his highly controversial, often blasphemous, collection of essays and short stories titled The second plane Amis renounces in an uncompromising way religious militancy, intellectual insularity, and political dogmatism. Politically incorrect and willfully offensive, the novelist appears unsparing in his criticism of Islamic integrity and right-wing ‘theological’ intransigence. My intention, thus, is to discuss Amis’s overall standpoint referring both to the short story “The last days of Muhammad Atta” and a number of his articles written between 2002-2007.Item Error-based evidence for interference from Polish gliding rules on English pronunciation(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2010) Dziczek-Karlikowska, HannaThis paper examines pronunciation errors made by Polish learners of English. The focus is on the phonology of glides in Polish and English. The purpose of the presented evaluation of errors is to demonstrate that phonological interference finds its source in the phonological rules of the native language having no correspondents in the target language or in the differences in the treatment of diphthongs by both languages.Item The value of "may" as an evidential and epistemic marker in English medical abstracts(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2010) Alonso-Almeida, Francisco; Cruz-García, LauraOur article addresses the issue of the relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality. Earlier works such as Lazard (2001) claim that English does not hold grammatical markers for the source of knowledge in contrast to other languages, e.g. Quechua, that seem to do so. Dendale and Tasmowski (2001), however, think that grammatical evidentials are possible in English, and Aikhenvald (2004) admits that modal verbs in English are a borderline case. In our article, we seek to explore the use of may and might in a corpus of medical abstracts to demonstrate (i) their value as grammatical evidential markers, and (ii) their value as epistemic markers that show the author’s attitude to the proposition manifested. In doing so, we follow Cornillie (2009), who defines these two concepts as independent categories. The results of our analyses indicate that these modals may be used as grammatical markers of evidentiality, regardless of other semantic and pragmatic meanings.Item "Moten" in "Canterbury Tales": The speaker's expression of the self(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2010) Stadnik, KatarzynaIn the paper, we posit the centrality of the speaker in language. In so doing, we refer to the fact that language users may select particular linguistic expressions to encode their understanding of a given situation. This observation alludes to the concept of subjectivity in linguistics, and evokes the notion of modality, concerned, broadly speaking, with the speaker’s attitude to the proposition. In English, linguistic devices used to signal the varying degrees of the speaker’s commitment towards the proposition include modal verbs. Historically, they can be claimed to have developed from less to more subjective meanings, as in the case of the modal verb must. Its epistemic meaning is believed to have evolved from its deontic sense in the Middle English (ME) period. While some authors argue that, at this stage of its development, epistemic must was less, rather than more subjective, we test a different supposition. In our view, epistemic must occurring in generalized necessity statements might acquire a more subjective reading. Specifically, it seems possible to argue that, by personalizing generalized truths, the speaker tinges them with more subjective overtones. We exemplify the claim using the occurrences of ME *moten ‘must’ in Canterbury Tales.Item The breakup of Old English to-infinitive: Causes and consequences(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2010) Jarad, Najib IsmailThe main goal of this paper is to account for the recategorisation of the Old English to-infinitive and the consequent rise of for before the Middle English to-infinitive. We argue that the loss of D feature has two consequences. The first consequence is that V+Inf-to-D movement was lost resulting in the break-up of the (morphological and) syntactic unity of the to-infinitive. The second consequence, a consequence of the first consequence, concerns the appearance of the so-called split infinitive, i.e. the development of a preverbal adverb, negation and object position. This crucial evidence marks the drift of the infinitive towards VP behaviour. Given that D was lost in early Middle English (i.e. 1150-1200) and the split infinitive appeared in the 13th century, the paper concludes that the change from a PP to a TP status was gradual and not simultaneous with other changes.Item From the manuscript to the screen: Implementing electronic editions of mediaeval handwritten material(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2010) Calle-Martín, Javier; Miranda-García, AntonioThis paper describes the electronic editing of the Middle English material housed in the Hunterian Collection at Glasgow University Library (GUL), a joint project undertaken by the universities of Málaga, Glasgow, Oviedo, Murcia and Jaén which pursues the compilation of an electronic corpus of mediaeval Fachprosa in the vernacular (http://hunter.filosofia.uma.es/manuscripts). The paper therefore addresses the concept of electronic editing as applied to The corpus of Late Middle English scientific prose with the following objectives: (a) to describe the editorial principles and the theoretical implications adopted; and (b) to present the digital layout and the tool implemented for data retrieval. A diplomatic approach is then proposed wherein the editorial intervention is kept to a minimum. Accordingly, features such as lineation, punctuation and emendations are every now and then accurately reproduced as by the scribe’s hand whilst abbreviations are yet expanded in italics. GUL MS Hunter 497, holding a 15th-century English version of Aemilius Macer’s De viribus herbarum, will be used as a sample demonstration (Calle-Martín – Miranda-García, forthcoming).