Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2015 vol. 50.4

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    Wading through black jade in Marianne Moore’s sunken cathedral: The modernist sea poem as a Deleuzian fold
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2015) Ambroży, Paulina
    The study is a close reading of Moore’s poem “The Fish” (1918) through the conceptual lens of Gilles Deleuze’s trope of the fold, as explained in his influential 1988 study of Leibniz, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. The purpose is to explore Moore’s (neo)baroque sensibility and her peculiar penchant for Baroque tropes, images and forms. The Deleuzian concept of the fold, with its rich epistemological implications and broad cultural applicability as the universal trope of crisis, change, unrest and transience, helps to comprehend Moore’s own philosophical and aes-thetic concerns. The study, in accord with the interdiscursive character of the contemporary stud-ies of modernism draws from art history, philosophy, theory, literature, and visual arts, to uncover a strong Baroque undercurrent in the poet’s polyphonic imagination. Seen in the light of Deleuze’s fold, Moore’s poem emerges as a quasi-Baroque ruin, a sunken cathedral-cum-graveyard, with a theatrical chiaroscuro lighting and folding and unfolding of sense, which both shelters and entombs the severely wounded modernist soul.
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    “… the ruins of Europe in back of me.” Jan Klata’s Shakespeare and the European condition
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2015) Cieślak, Magdalena
    Jan Klata’s Shakespearean productions are famous for his liberal attitude to the text, innovative sets and locations, and a strong contemporary context. His 2004 H., a Teatr Wybrzeże production performed in the Gdańsk Shipyard, reaches to the Polish history of the eighties (the importance of Solidarity and the fall of communism) to comment on the state of the democratic Poland twenty years later. The 2012 Titus Andronicus, a coproduction of Teatr Polski in Wrocław and Staatsschauspiel Dresden, explores the impact of historical traumas on national prejudice and relations within the new Europe. The 2013 Hamlet with Schauspielhaus Bochum again tries to diagnose the contemporary condition and is again deeply rooted in a specific geopolitical context. Discussing both Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, I would like to explore Klata’s formula of working with Shakespeare. Primarily, he takes advantage of the fact that Shakespeare’s texts are not simply source texts but hypertexts with multiple layers of meanings accumulated over the centuries of circulation, production and adaptation. Perhaps similarly to Heiner Müller, whose plays he willingly incorporates in his productions, Klata anatomizes the plays and then radically reconstructs them using other texts, literary and paraliterary. What Klata eventually puts on stage is a hybrid that is rooted in the Shakespearean hypertexts but also heavily draws from historical, cultural and political contexts, and that is relevant to him as the director and to the particular specificities of the venues, theatres and companies he works with. The hybridized and contextualized Shakespeare becomes for Klata a way to comment on current issues that he sees as vital, like dealing with the burden of the past, confronting the reality of the present, or understanding and expressing national identity, problems that are at once universal and specific for a person living in the EU in the twenty first century.
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    On Specification Predication and the derivation of copular to-clauses in Polish
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2015) Tajsner, Przemysław
    The paper offers a consistently derivational account of Polish predicational and specificational copular clauses with the occurrence of a particle to instead of a verbal copula być (‘be’). The particle to is given the status of a predicative head with the potential of designating a phrase in its c-command domain as a specification predicate. Such a phrase is then interpreted as the focus at the C-I interface. Thus, a view is promoted in which the focus, a category of information structure, is not directly coded in narrow syntax, but is rather an interpretive outcome of a more general syntactic relation, referred to as Specification Predication. This view has been inspired by Kiss’s (2006, 2010) idea that focusing is predication but it substantially differs from her approach. The analysis is limited to copular-to clauses, but it is suggested to have a potential for the account of two more syntactic types with the occurrence of the particle to, namely, so-called to-clefts, and topic-to sentences. The proposal advanced in the paper is confronted with three earlier accounts dealing with copular-to clauses, and is shown to avoid some empirical and conceptual problems they have posed. It is shown how the derivation of copular-to clauses proceeds through a sequence of minimal and well-defined steps starting from the formation of an array of two nominal phrases, through a Small Clause stage to a Specification Predicative Phrase. Couched in the recent minimalist framework, the analysis specifically dwells on the theoretical advancements determining the nature of syntactic derivations, such as Hornstein’s (2009) distinctions between operations Concatenate, Merge and Label, Moro’s (2000, 2008) idea of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking or Chomsky’s (2013) view of Labeling.
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    Anglo-Scandinavian code-mixing in English place-names
    (Adam Mickiewicz University, 2015) Fekete, Tamás
    With this paper I wish to investigate the nature of code-mixing found in English place names chiefly, though not exclusively, from the Danelaw area. The paper analyses this code-mixing in the frame-work of contact linguistics in the light of the contact situation between Old English and Old Norse, as described by Townend (2002) and Lutz (2013), that existed from the 8th century onwards, bearing in mind, however, that the Scandinavian place names may not necessarily be direct indicators of the nature and extent of the Scandinavian settlement itself. Historical code-switching usually and gener-ally focuses on describing intersentential and intrasentential code-switching, and this paper aims at broadening the overall scope of the investigation through the inclusion of onomastics. The analysis will be chiefly based on a corpus of 1,915 relevant place-names, with the data drawn from the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names (Mills 1998), and Fellows-Jensen’s regional studies on Scandinavian place-names in England (Fellows-Jensen 1972, 1978, 1985). The primary focus of the investigation will be those place names which (i) contain both Scandinavian and English elements, (ii) used to contain at least one Scandinavian or English element which was replaced by an element from the other language, (iii) contain at least one element which underwent a transformation to accommodate to the phonological system of the other language and (iv) contain elements which could belong to either of the languages but cannot be decided with absolute certainty. In this paper I also argue that names (specifically the above mentioned place-names) can conform to Muysken’s (2000) category of congruent lexicalization and that word-internal code-switching, and CS in general, is in fact a phenomenon that can occur in the case of hybrid place-names.