Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2009 vol. 45.1

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    [Un]succesful "metabolization" of the Northern Irish War: The post-troubles trauma in Glenn Patterson's writing
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2009) Bartnik, Ryszard
    Northern Irish literature of the last decade illustrates an arduous effort of the Ulster men to break down the walls of political and cultural partition. Yet, even though the Northern Irish community tends to present itself in terms of a variety of images, the ultimate impression is that the recent novelistic and critical productions resonate with past antagonisms and the post-Troubles trauma. It is so since the North, as many a scholar indicates, is as if fated to continually recompose its past. This paper then, set against the background of the civil war experiences, discusses Glenn Patterson’s excavation of individual and collective memories which prove that the dead are constantly materializing in today’s Northern Irish reality. Hence, Glenn Patterson’s accumulation of voices by means of which the author ponders over the politics of memory and imparts knowledge of the characters who, on a long journey out of the darkness into the space of light, find some vestiges of the old conflicts still echoing and rather difficult to hush up.
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    Heaven, hell and "middangeard": The presentation of the universe in the Old English "Genesis A"
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2009) Olesiejko, Jacek
    Since the times of Antiquity, people have looked up to the sky and developed various conceptions of Heaven and Hell. Already in the ancient Egypt people developed the tripartite conception of universe with earth placed between the Heaven inhabited by gods above and Hell below. The Old English poetic text of Genesis (MS Junius 11; compilation dated to the 10th century) presents the earthly paradise, Hell and Middangeard (or the middle earth). Both Genesis A and B that comprise the poem indeed show a single and consistent descriptions of cosmos. The overt consistency may well seem as interesting as the tradition that the poem draws upon as well as distorts. The universe found in the poem is a fusion of the Christian religious learning as well as Germanic tradition. The idea that marries Heaven, earth and Hell in the poetic sequence of OE Genesis is the concept of hall and anti-hall, city and anti-city. The aim of the following paper is to investigate the modes of this presentation of these parts of the universe by the analysis of the clusters of meaning that are associated with hall and city.
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    "The dread of something after death" - The relationship between Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and some medieval dream visions and ghost stories
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2009) Wicher, Andrzej
    The present article tries to answer the question whether it is possible to think of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a dream vision in which the Ghost plays the role analogous to the Dreamer’s supernatural guide, which is the situation we meet with in medieval dream visions, such as Chaucer’s The book of the Duchess, or The Pearl. It seems that such an interpretation is possible, even though it should be approached cautiously because medieval ghosts and dead souls, and other supernatural phenomena, not only in dream visions, usually function as a means to solve, or at least alleviate, a crisis, whereas in Hamlet the Ghost comes rather to exacerbate it, and make it more tragical. To prove this point, the author makes comparisons not only between Hamlet and dream visions, but also some medieval ghost stories, and the thirteenth century romance Havelok the Dane, which is based on a narrative pattern not very different from that of Hamlet. Another problem examined in this article is that of the extent to which we can talk of the motif of reduplication and monstrous double as a leitmotif in Hamlet, and also in some of its analogues. Some comments and ideas by Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom are made use of in this context.
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    The pedagogic grammarian's dilemma: Modality and personality in grammatical description
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2009) Berry, Roger
    This paper investigates an issue that I call the “pedagogic grammarian’s dilemma”: the choice facing writers of pedagogic grammars between being specific about grammar and risking being wrong, or hedging and risking being vague, as formulated by Henry Widdowson (1997). Using two corpora of grammatical description, it examines how a number of exponents of modality are used to hedge and finds firstly that they are far more common than in ordinary text. More importantly there is a link between the use of such modality and the approach to personality chosen in the grammars: hedging is more common when the more friendly YOU is used to address users than when WE is used; this suggests an interpersonal (as well as epistemic) motivation for the hedging. Overall the response of the grammars studied to the pedagogic grammarian’s dilemma is to hedge, in order, it seems, to avoid being prescriptive.
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    The grammaticalization of "down"
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2009) Sądej, Kinga
    The present paper discusses the grammaticalization of down, focusing on when the process began and how it developed. The ultimate origin of down, both the adverb and the preposition, should be traced back to OE dūn ‘hill, mountain’, whose frequency of occurrence in Old English is comparable to those of beorg and munt. By means of grammaticalization the noun dūn came to function as an adverb meaning ‘in a descending direction; from above, or towards that which is below; from a higher to lower place or position’ already in Late Old English. The adverbial meaning of dūn is derived from OE of dūne ‘off the hill or height’ (glossing L de monte). The expression of dūne gave rise to the adverb adūne which was aphetized to dūn (doun, down) at the beginning of the twelfth century. By analysing the textual evidence, the present investigation is an attempt at verifying this date.
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    On adjectival connotations
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2009) Kjellmer, Gőran
    Connotations are elusive semantic elements. Although they are often specific to individual speakers, many of them are sufficiently general to serve as general communicative elements. The paper suggests a device by means of which adjectival connotations, whether of the individual or the general type, can be pinpointed. The device is simply the sequence “ADJ1 but not ADJ2”, where ADJ2 is seen to enrich the connotational semantics of ADJ1. Thus for example the use of a phrase like desirable but not essential may indicate that desirable normally contains an element of essential, though perhaps not in the situation where it is used. It is pointed out that ADJ2 often represents an intensification of the semantic content of ADJ1.
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    Lexical classes and the conative construction in Old English
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2009) Sosa Acevedo, Eulalia
    This paper is concerned with the description of the event structure and the meaning components that motivate the realization of the conative construction within some canonical Old English verb classes. In the same line as the latest proposals framed within the Lexical Constructional Model, this kind of description is intended to evidence the essential role of semantic features that are not necessarily realized in the syntax and thus help elucidate and comprehend lexical-constructional processes. Besides, this work seeks to establish adequate criteria to identify the conative construction and provides insights into the distribution of diathetic alternations associated to the conative construction in Old English.
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    "Of medicineз sedatyueз": Some notes on adjective position and oral register in Middle English medical texts
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2009) Moskowich, Isabel
    The position of adjectives in the English Noun Phrase is regarded as something quite fixed and pertaining to the level of syntax rather than to any other. In previous studies (Moskowich 2002; Moskowich – Crespo 2002; Lareo – Moskowich 2009), it has been shown, however, that there seem to be some other extra-syntactic variables at stake determining word-order patterns. This paper aims at analysing the word-order patterns of adjectives in the emerging scientific writing in the Middle Ages, particularly in medical texts written in English. To this end, several texts contained in MEMT (Middle English Medical Texts) will be analysed. As a first approach, samples belonging to the three different traditions included in the Corpus will be considered. This examination of samples from a surgical text, a specialised one and a remedy book will also help obtain some conclusions regarding the evolution in the use of the so called French type adjectives in the language.
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    Reconsidering the role of syntactic "heaviness" in Old English split coordination
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2009) Pérez Lorido, Rodrigo
    The splitting of coordinate structures in Old English has traditionally been attributed to structural size or “heaviness”, assuming that long, complex coordinate constructions required increased parsing and processing effort. In addition to this, most texts on Old English syntax take for granted that the split elements always appear in clause-final position. The conclusions in this paper – drawn from the analysis of a large corpus of Old English texts – imply a radical revision of these assumptions. They suggest that the role of syntactic heaviness should be reconsidered, and its importance minimised in favour of other considerations of a pragmatic and discoursive nature. The analysis of the position of the split elements confirms that they appear in non-final position much more often than has been assumed, producing syntactic discontinuity.
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    Stance marking and register in Middle English charms
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2009) Alonso-Almeida, Francisco
    This paper explores the expression of stance in a corpus of Middle English charms of the fifteenth century. All the charms have a healing function, and they are used whenever standard herbal remedies are ineffective. The sources from where the texts have been taken are various, all of them from edited printed material. The study of language use and the expression of personal attitude and evaluation have been studied earlier, both synchronically (Chafe 1986; Hunston 1994) and diachronically (Kytö 1991; Salager-Meyer – Defyves 1998). However, to my knowledge, the medieval English charm has not been the object of any previous account. This study of stance in charms has implications for language register, and shows both the relationship of the authors and their texts, and the authors and their audience.
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    The grammatical status of "the same"
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2009) Dixon, R. M. W.
    The same, consisting of two words (or of clinic-plus-word), functions as a single grammatical item. Basically, it belongs to the determiner slot in phrase structure (together with articles, demonstratives and possessors). Like demonstratives, it may function as a substitution anaphor. But the same also shares some properties with adjectives — it can make up a complete copula complement, it may be the first element of a reduced relative clause, it may be followed by a preposition plus NP, and it has limited function as an adverb.