Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2012 vol. 47.1
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Item Vertiginous pull of negative rhetoric: The American “No! In Thunder”(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Semrau, JanuszThe paper presents a sample historical-literary survey of a specific popular idea of the gist of ‘Americanness’ in the guise of condensed observations in broad cultural circulation. This is to provoke the question about the degree to which this kind of discourse may reflect the so-called habits of the heart (de Tocqueville [1835-1840] 1966: 264), as against how at a certain point it may explode – to borrow from Paul de Man (1979: 10) – into “vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration”.Item Needles, china cups, books, and the construction of the Victorian feminine ideal in Rhoda Broughton’s "Not Wisely, But Too Well" and Elizabeth Gaskell’s "North and South"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Setecka, AgnieszkaConsidering Victorian presentation of women as angelic, that is, spiritual, beings, it is rather surprising how much their presence was manifested by material objects. Baskets of needlework, tea equipage and novels lying around in a parlour were an unmistakable sign of the house being occupied by women. Indeed, my contention is, the objects did not clutter Victorian interiors, either real or imagined, merely for practical reasons or to produce the “reality effect.” They are a material representation of the immaterial and function as metaphors for angelic women’s spiritual qualities. Rather than functioning merely as details to enhance the illusion of the real (and thus as elements of style) or simply reflecting the Victorian world (and thus as empty forms), material objects are essential in constructing a middle-class (feminine) identity. My paper concentrates on Rhoda Broughton’s Not wisely, but too well and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South with an attempt to show how objects help construct a feminine ideal and, simultaneously, reveal the ideal to be just a construction. Broughton’s Kate Chester and Gaskell’s Margaret Hale find themselves in situations where their middle-class status might be compromised. Still, they both manage to reassert their position through effectively manipulating the signs of middle-class respectability. The “flimsy and useless” things they surround themselves with point to their “essentially feminine” qualities. Yet, the very superfluity of the objects reveals their relation to the characters’ economic status. They are, then, the site where the material and immaterial meet, where the borders between the economic world and the domestic world blur.Item An integrated approach to conventionality and its implications for the semantics of emotion terms(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Strugielska, AriadnaThe aim of this article is to demonstrate that an integrated methodology can shed a new light on the understanding of notions inherent in contemporary conceptual approaches to linguistic analysis. One of the key ideas around which the cognitive paradigm is built is conventionality. It is assumed, however, that various strands of the cognitive enterprise view conventionality in dissimilar ways. Consequently, by extrapolating diverse interpretations of the notion, we are going to argue that certain conceptual approaches are more cognitive than others. As a result, it will be argued that a conceptual metaphor methodology, an apparently dominant approach to the semantics of emotion terms, is too coarse-grained to account for the richness of cognitive processes observable in real data. Providing a corpus-assisted verification of selected instantiations of the attributive construction, we are going to argue that a conceptual metaphor approach cannot be successfully applied within a usage-based model.Item Arab EFL learners’ acquisition of verbs of senses(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Saeed, Aziz Thabit; Fareh, ShehdehThis study attempts to explore the difficulties that Arab EFL learners of English encounter in the use of five verbs of senses when used as copulas, main verbs, main verbs with a metaphorical use, and as parts of idioms. A questionnaire consisting of three parts was specially designed to elicit the necessary data for this study at the levels of recognition and production. The subjects of the study were 30 randomly selected senior English major university students. The results of the study show that the students encountered tangible difficulties in using the five target verbs. A hierarchy of difficulty was established and the main causes of the problem were identified.