G.H. von Wright, G.E. Moore's and Wittgenstein's successor, and John Wisdom's predecessor as a Professor of Philosophy in Cambridge, wrote in 1993: «The history of the "analytical" movement has not yet been written in full. With its increased diversification, it becomes pertinent to try to identify its most essential features and distinguish them from later additions which are alien to its origins.» In the same year A.J. Ayer's successor as a Wykeham Professor of Logic in Oxford, M. Dummett noted: «I (...) hope that such a history will be written: it would be fascinating.» The task of this book is to fulfill these hopes. (shrink)

Dewey Wallace tells the story of several prominent English Calvinist actors and thinkers in the first generations after the beginning of the Restoration, illuminating the religious and intellectual history of the era between the Reformation and modernity.

v. 1. Introduction. Cambridge analytical philosophy -- v. 2. Oxford analytical philosophy.

This paper discusses three potential varieties of update: updates to the common ground, structuring updates, and updates that introduce discourse referents. These different types of update are used to model different aspects of natural language phenomena. Not-at-issue information directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary mood of a sentence structures the context. Other updates introduce discourse referents of various types, including propositional discourse referents for at-issue information. Distinguishing these types of update allows a unified treatment of a broad range (...) of phenomena, including the grammatical evidentials found in Cheyenne (Algonquian) as well as English evidential parentheticals, appositives, and mood marking. An update semantics that can formalize all of these varieties of update is given, integrating the different kinds of semantic contributions into a single representation of meaning. (shrink)

This extended investigation of the semantics of event (and state) sentences in their various forms is a major contribution to the semantics of natural language, simultaneously encompassing important issues in linguistics, philosophy, and logic. It develops the view that the logical forms of simple English sentences typically contain quantification over events or states and shows how this view can account for a wide variety of semantic phenomena. Focusing on the structure of meaning in English sentences at a &"subatomic&" (...) level&-that is, a level below the one most theories accept as basic or &"atomic&"&-Parsons asserts that the semantics of simple English sentences require logical forms somewhat more complex than is normally assumed in natural language semantics. His articulation of underlying event theory explains a wide variety of apparently diverse semantic characteristics of natural language, and his development of the theory shows the importance of seeing the distinction between events and states. Parsons demonstrates that verbs, also, indicate kinds of actions rather than specific, individual actions. Verb phrases, too, he argues, depend on modifiers to make their function and meaning in a sentence specific. An appendix gives many of the details needed to formalize the theory discussed in the body of the text and provides a series of templates that permit the generation of atomic formulas of English. (shrink)

The main purpose of this book is to introduce a broader audience to emergence by illustrating how discoveries in the physical sciences have informed the ways we think about it. In a nutshell, emergence asserts that non-reductive behavior arises at higher levels of organization and complexity. As physicist Philip Anderson put it, "more is different." Along the text's conversational tour through the terrain of quantum physics, phase transitions, nonlinear and statistical physics, networks and complexity, the author highlights the various philosophical (...) nuances that arise in encounters with emergence. The final part of the book zooms out to reflect on some larger lessons that emergence affords us. One of those larger lessons is the realization that the great diversity of theories and models, and the great variety of independent explanatory frameworks, will always be with us in the sciences and beyond. There is no "Theory of Everything" just around the corner waiting to be discovered. One of the main benefits of this book is that it will make a number of exciting scientific concepts that are not normally covered at this level accessible to a broader audience. The overall presentation, including the use of examples, analogies, metaphors, and biographical interludes, is geared for the educated non-specialist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (1350–1550) by Bernard McGinnDennis J. Billy C.Ss.R.The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (1350–1550). By Bernard McGinn. New York: Crossroad, 2012. Pp. xiv + 721. $70.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-8245-9901-0.This fifth volume of McGinn’s Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism covers the Dutch, Italian, and English vernacular mystics of the late Middle Ages. In previous volumes, the author treated the (...) Foundations (vol. 1), Growth (vol. 2), Flowering (vol. 3), and Harvest (vol. 4) of Western Christian mysticism from its roots in the Jewish matrix and the Greek ideal to its fruition in the German vernacular writings of Meister Eckhart and his students. In this latest volume, he continues his history of Western Christian mysticism by focusing on varieties of vernacular mysticism in the Low Countries, Italy, and England from 1350 to 1550.Conscious of the dangers of historical periodization and regional classification, as well as the relationship of mysticism to the greater ecclesiastical world, McGinn takes pains to show the distinctive character of each mystic under consideration, while at the same time pointing out appropriate parallels with Western and Eastern Christian mystics from past historical epochs and those contemporary voices from both within and [End Page 476] without each mystic’s linguistic region. In his preface, he apologizes to his readers for the long gestation of the present volume and offers a brief account of how his original plan of writing a three-volume history of Western Christian mysticism evolved into a series of seven, due in large part to the sheer wealth of sources and his desire to give them a thorough treatment. Rather than following his original intention of including other vernacular traditions in his previous volume on German mysticism, he wisely chose to devote an entire volume to these other important strands (ix–x).Instead of writing a general introduction to the volume, McGinn decides to give a brief introduction to each of the three major parts. He divides his work into thirteen chapters constructed along the following lines: (1) “Late Medieval Mysticism in the Low Countries” (chaps. 1–5), (2) “Mysticism in Late Medieval Italy” (chaps. 6–9), and (3) “Mysticism in Late Medieval England” (chaps. 10–13). The volume closes with a brief conclusion (491–94), extended annotations (495–661), an extensive bibliography (662–704), and indices for Scripture references (705–6), names (707–12), and subjects (713–21). The book’s organization reflects the theme of diversity highlighted in its title. Although each part has its own internal structure and stands on its own as a survey of the material at hand, it also fits well into the volume’s overall plan of pointing out the distinctiveness and great variety of the vernacular mysticisms produced during this period. Taken individually, each part can be considered a probing monograph on the vernacular mysticism in each region. Taken together, the parts offer a unique glimpse into the mystic and literary creativity that sets this period apart as one of the most fertile periods in the history of Christian mysticism.In part 1, “Late Medieval Mysticism in the Low Countries,” McGinn notes that “the period ca. 1350 to ca. 1550 is the central era for Dutch mysticism” and “witnessed a florescence of mystical authors writing in the Dutch-Flemish language” (1). Although he hesitates to refer to a Dutch “school” of mysticism and thinks that “Ruusbroec should not be made the yardstick by which all later Dutch mystics are measured,” he has no reservations about considering him “a gravitational center in the history of Dutch mysticism” (2). This section of the book begins with an in-depth look at the mystical writings of Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381) (chap. 1) and continues with a study of Goenendaal mysticism after Ruusbroec (chap. 2). It then turns to a treatment of the mystical aspects of the Devotio Moderna, with a special emphasis on The Imitation of Christ and some vernacular mystics numbered among the Devout, such as Hendrik Mande (ca. 1360–1431, Gerlach Peters (ca. 1375–1411), and Alijt Bake (1415–55), and adds a brief note on the nominalistic... (shrink)

Languages that have determiners often have a rich inventory of them. In English, indefinite determiners include a(n), some, a certain, this, one, another, cardinals, partitives, the zero determiner of bare plurals (in some analyses), and, according to Horn 1999 and Giannakidou 2001, any. Despite the attention indefinites have received in the literature, characterizing what is common to all of them and what is specific to each is still an elusive task. This paper investigates the first three determiners in this (...) list, attempting to provide a semantic characterization that accounts for their distribution. (For pertinent discussion of issues that overlap to some extent with those taken up below, see Kamp and Bende-Farkas 2002, and for a discussion of the French versions of some and a certain, see Jayez and Tovena (this volume).) The Ds that concern us here share two characteristics: (i) they are indefinite, and (ii) they are existential when not in the scope of any operator or quantifier. As seen in [1], they may occur as pivots in existential there constructions, and therefore all three form weak DPs. (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001712242; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 430-452.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 451-452.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

Basic syntactic analysis refers to sentence-level syntactic analysis. In the process of developing the Mat Link English–Chinese machine translation system, the Generalized Maximum Likelihood Ratio algorithm was improved, and a basic English syntax analyzer for English–Chinese translation was designed and implemented. The analyzer approves the structure of the analysis table with a variety of export products, introduces the character mapping function to realize the automatic recognition of the sentence boundary, uses the children of the same level to (...) describe the grammatical structure of the sentence, and realizes the proverb from the original sentence to the target sentence stage conversion. Finally, through the analysis of example sentences, the design concept and working process of the basic grammar are explained. (shrink)

Situated within the framework of the conceptual metaphor theory, this article examines universal versus language-specific patterns in metaphorical motion event descriptions, comparing English and Turkish. The analysis focused on the crosslinguistic similarities and differences in the target domains and the types of metaphorical mappings that are structured by spatial motion. The data included written texts in English and Turkish. Results indicated strong crosslinguistic similarity in the target domains and the types of metaphorical mappings. Crosslinguistic variation, on the other (...) hand, became evident in the specification of the source domain structure, particularly in describing the manner component of a metaphorical motion event. English writers paid greater linguistic attention to the way one moves from point A to point B metaphorically, using a greater amount and variety of motion verbs that encoded manner. Overall, the analysis revealed the source domain structure to be the best candidate for systematic language-based variation in a metaphorical event. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Guibert of Tournai's Letter to Lady Isabelle:An Introduction and English TranslationLarry F. Field, Jacques Dalarun, Sean L. Field, and Guibert of TournaiIntroductionGuibert, from the noble family of As-Piès, was born near Tournai around 1200. From his hometown he traveled to Paris for his art degree, and completed the curriculum in theology there before entering the Franciscan Order around 1240. He may have participated in Louis IX's crusade of (...) 1248, but, if so, was surely back in Paris by 1254 at the latest, since he preached a cycle of sermons de dominicis et de sanctis to the university community before summer 1255.1 His regency as Franciscan master of theology at Paris was probably around 1259–1261,2 about the time he [End Page 31] completed his Eruditio regum et principum for Louis IX,3 and began his most substantial work, the Erudimentum doctrinae.4 Other significant treatises include his De pace et animi tranquillitate (ca. 1275)5 written for Marie de Dampierre, and the Collectio de scandalis ecclesiae, prepared for the Second Council of Lyon.6 Guibert died in Tournai on 7 October 1284.7Sometime around 1254, Guibert wrote a long letter of spiritual advice to Isabelle (1225–70), the sister of King Louis IX.8 Isabelle was herself a remarkable figure. She had rejected several proposals of marriage, including that with Conrad, the heir to Emperor Frederick II, in 1243, in spite of pressure from her family and Pope Innocent IV. But following a bout of serious illness at about that time,9 her family accepted her [End Page 32] decision to remain unwed. There is no evidence, however, that Isabelle ever pronounced a formal vow of virginity. Through the 1250s she simply remained at the Capetian court as a virgin princess with an increasing reputation for piety and indeed holiness, praised in lavish terms by Innocent IV in 1253 and Alexander IV in 1256.10 This piety took a distinctly Franciscan turn by 1254, when Pope Innocent IV granted her request for Franciscan confessors,11 which would ultimately result in her foundation of Longchamp, a house of Sorores minores just west of Paris, by 1260.12 Guibert's letter shows no awareness of such a project, indicating that it must have been written before spring 1255, by which time the land for Longchamp was being purchased on Isabelle's behalf.13 Guibert thus wrote at the moment when Isabelle was forming her first ties to the Franciscans, but well before her move to Longchamp, where she lived out the 1260s as resident lay patron (but never a nun).Guibert's Letter is really a short treatise of spiritual and moral advice, tailored to a celibate princess. It is organized around Psalm 44:14–15, All the glory of the king's daughter is within in golden fringes, clothed around with varieties. In a five-part structure, the king's daughter stands for a heavenly inheritance; glory within represents internal purity; gold indicates virginity; the fringes are a sign of humility; and clothed around with varieties points to honest comportment. The resulting "royal garment," however, is rather unequally woven together, with section one on the "heavenly inheritance" and the intertwined sections three and four on virginity and humility receiving by far the most space. In fact, section one forms a sort of treatise-within-a-treatise, organized as a ten-step ascent to the heavenly inheritance awaiting the daughter of the king. [End Page 33]The Letter to Lady Isabelle was first edited by Alphonse de Poorter in 1931, from a manuscript which contained only part of the text.14 The full text was brought into print by Sean Field in 2003,15 and translated into French by Jacques Dalarun in 2014.16 Yet in spite of these advances, the Letter has remained little noticed by scholars. Anne-Hélène Allirot offered several perceptive pages in 2010, stressing the way Guibert's treatment of hereditas implies that female members of the royal family might be particularly able to embody Capetian claims to holiness.17 That same year, in the only recent article dedicated specifically to this Letter, Rina Lahav... (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the subjective impression of English speech would change when pause duration at punctuation marks was varied. Two listening experiments were performed in which written English speech segments were rated on a variety of evaluation items by both native-English speakers and non-native speakers. The ratings were then subjected to factor analysis. In the first experiment, the pauses in three segments were made into the same durations, from 0.075 to 4.8 (...) s. Participants rated the segments on 23 evaluation items on a rating scale from 1 to 10. A varimax rotation after PCA led to two factors that were related to speech style. These two factors could be interpreted as representing speech naturalness and speech rate. Speech segments with a pause duration of 0.6 s received the highest naturalness evaluation, while perceived speech rate decreased as the physical pause duration increased, without any changes in utterance segments. In the second experiment, a full-factorial design of pause durations within and between sentences, i.e., for commas and for periods, was implemented in two speech segments. The original speech segments and speech segments without any pauses were also included as control conditions. From ratings on 12 evaluation items, similar to Experiment 1, two factors representing speech naturalness and speech rate were obtained. The results showed again that the perceived speech rate decreased with an increase only in pause duration. As for speech naturalness, the highest evaluations occurred when pause durations were 0.6 s within sentences, and either 0.6 or 1.2 s between sentences. This recommends fixing all pause durations to 0.6 s as a practical way to train non-native speakers to make their spoken English appear more natural. (shrink)

This review explored the investigations on the role of teacher immediacy in English as a Foreign Language learners’ foreign language enjoyment. Earlier investigations have proved that teacher immediacy, such as posture, body language, vocal variety, gestures, and smile, can significantly affect learners’ positive emotions like foreign language enjoyment. It means that teachers should try both to control the feelings of their learners and manage their feelings to enhance enjoyment among learners. Moreover, studies have shown that teacher immediacy is significantly (...) related to learner motivation which is a basis for increasing foreign language enjoyment among learners. However, specific strategies can be employed to increase learner motivation, which in return increases learner foreign language enjoyment. Furthermore, the study presented the implications and future directions of this line of research for different people, such as EFL teachers, teacher educators, and foreign language scholars. The ideas can improve their awareness of teacher-student relationships, in particular, teacher immediacy and its role in learners’ foreign language enjoyment. (shrink)

In English medical law, it is something of an axiom that adult competent patients have an absolute right to refuse all and any medical treatment, including potentially life-saving and life-sustaining treatment. This legal proposition, which is embedded in the doctrine of consent, has for the last few decades been regarded as the expression of the philosophical principle of personal autonomy and ethical right of self-determination. The Western ethical and legal traditions places heavy emphasis on notions of personal sovereignty reflected (...) in the strong rhetorical entrenchment of patient autonomy in judicial determinations of treatment refusal cases. In a spate of legal cases in the 1980s and 1990s judicial rhetoric .. (shrink)

Publication date: 2 May 2019 Source: Author: Oleg Tarnopolsky The article discusses an innovative course taught to students majoring in English at Ukrainian universities. The course called “Specific Features of the English Language and English-Speaking Nations’ Cultures in the Context of International Communication” was designed to eliminate the lack of a number of issues that must be included in the curriculum of English language and culture studies to be learned by such students but which are ordinarily (...) not included there because each of them cannot make the subject matter of a separate university course and does not fit into the traditionally taught courses. The issues in question embrace: the specific role of English among other languages of international communication; World Englishes, International English and English as a lingua franca and how to choose the variety of English to be taught as a foreign language; the specifics of business negotiations in English in intercultural contexts, business presentations in English, and business telephoning in English in such contexts; communicative behavioral etiquette in intercultural communication in English; lifestyle communicative behavioral patterns of the English-speaking nations. The paper shows how teaching these issues enriches and improves the English language and culture education of English major students expanding that education and relevant practical training to fit much better the international and intercultural contexts of communication in English. (shrink)

A programme in translation confronts a student with at least two problems. The first is a mixture of theoretical and practical courses in which the link between the two is not always clear. In fact, the justification for suggesting that students take courses in linguistics or linguistic descriptions of particular languages is often expressed in terms of possible needs : some students may become interested in machine translation, for example. The second problem arises when students are asked to trans-late a (...) variety of material from a second language into their mother tongue ; they've never had to write much at all in their mother tongue, especially if they've majored in languages, and what they have written and are still writing, presumably, is academic French or academic English. Now they need to write business letters, advertisements, even poetry. The solution to the second problem is easy. The training of translators has to include the teaching of writing and editing skills. This need has been recognized by the International Federation of Translators' and it also crops up in articles written by teachers of translation2. Member States should recognize in principle that translation is an independent discipline requiring an education distinct from exclusive language teaching and that this discipline re-quires special training. Member States should encourage the establishment of writing programs for translators, especially in connection with translators' professional organizations or associations, universities or other educational institutions, and the organization of seminars or workshops. What I would like to suggest in this paper is that a particular kind of teaching of writing skills can also help solve the first problem, namely the gap between theoretical knowledge about language and the practical manipulation of the grammar of a particular language. (shrink)

Based on recordings of spontaneous speech of ethnically Chinese Singaporeans who have received an English-medium education, this is a study of the indigenized Singaporean variety of English.

English modal enclitics are typically conceived of as colloquial pronunciation variants that are semantically identical to their respective full forms. Although this conception has already been challenged by Nesselhauf, Nadja. 2014. From contraction to construction? The recent life of ’ll. In Marianne Hundt, Late modern English syntax, 77–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Daugs, Robert. 2021. Contractions, constructions and constructional change: Investigating the constructionhood of English modal contractions from a diachronic perspective. In Martin Hilpert, Bert Cappelle & (...) Ilse Depraetere, Modality and diachronic construction grammar, 12–52. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, who argue for the constructional status of both enclitics, the present study proposes a refinement according to which the differences between enclitics and full forms can be pinpointed to specific co-occurrence patterns. Rather than rashly postulating a general ’d-construction or an ’ll-construction, the data indicate that lower-level instances, like I’d V, we’ll V, or it would V, are very much capable of capturing the meaning differences between enclitics and full forms without recourse to higher, more abstract level. This is achieved by assessing the changes in the associative links these patterns entertain in a data-driven, bottom-up fashion. By utilizing the COHA and a variety of quantitative methods, it can be shown that, although enclitic patterns become more frequent and more varied, they remain overall still more restricted than the full forms, which promotes the emergence of ‘new’ symbolic associations. The results are integrated into current research in Diachronic Construction Grammar and dynamic, network-oriented models of language. (shrink)

The study aims to explore the roles of Massive Open Online Courses based on deep learning in college students’ English grammar teaching. The data are collected using a survey. After the experimental data are analyzed, it is found that students have a low sense of happiness and satisfaction and are unwilling to practice oral English and learn language points in English learning. They think that college English learning only meets the needs of CET-4 and CET-6 and (...) does not take it as the ultimate learning goal. After the necessity and problems in English grammar teaching are discussed, the advantages of flipped classrooms of MOOCs are discussed in English grammar teaching. A teaching platform is constructed to study the foreign language teaching mode under MOOCs, and classroom teaching is combined with the advantages of MOOCs following the principle of “teaching students according to their personalities” to improve the listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translation skills of foreign language majors. The results show that high-quality online teaching resources and the deep learning-based teaching environment can provide a variety of interactive tools, by which students can communicate with their peers and teachers online. Sharing open online communication, classroom discussion, and situational simulation can enhance teachers’ deep learning ability, like the ability to communication and transfer thoughts. Constructivism with interaction as the core can help students grasp new knowledge easily. Extensive communication and interaction are important ways for learning and thinking. The new model provides students with profound learning experience, expands the teaching resources of MOOCs around the world, and maximizes the interaction between online and offline teachers and students, making knowledge widely rooted in the campus and realizing the combination of online resources and campus classroom teaching. Students can learn the knowledge through autonomous learning and discussion before class, which greatly broadens the learning time and space. In the classroom and after class, the internalization and sublimation of knowledge are completed through group cooperation, inquiry learning, scenario simulation, display, and evaluation, promoting students to know about new knowledge and highlighting the dominant position of students. (shrink)

Van Parijs’s Linguistic Justice for Europe and the World furthers a nascent examination of multilingualism within political philosophy, drawing on continental European contexts where multilingualism is the norm. Van Parijs argues, in effect for linguistic cosmopolitanism via English as the current world language, and this seems ostensibly to be a considerable improvement on ‘the untrammeled public monolingualism’ of Anglo-American political theory. However, Van Parijs’s account is flawed in four key respects. First, there is the fundamental problem of his reductionist (...) account of language – by which language is viewed only in terms of its communicative uses and reach and not in relation to its symbolic and identity functions. Second is his simplistic advocacy of English as a global lingua franca, which ignores issues of power and inequality, along with related delimited access to high-status English language varieties. Third are the inherent limitations associated with his advocacy of linguistic territoriality, which recognizes state-sanctioned languages but little else, thus failing to mitigate existing linguistic hierarchies. Finally, the wider argument for English as a global lingua franca is inevitably underpinned by a monolithic/hegemonic view of English itself. This monolithic conception of English stands in contradistinction, not only to the actual plethora of Englishes in the world today, but also, more importantly, to their widely varying status and use in furthering cross-communication and related notions of social and economic mobility. The latter thus fatally undermines Van Parijs’s central argument linking social and economic mobility ineluctably to access to English. (shrink)

This volume, a translation of book 1 of Philo of Alexandria's De vita Mosis, with introduction and commentary, aims to introduce new readers, both students and scholars, to Philo of Alexandria through what is widely considered to be one of his most accessible works and one that Philo himself may have intended for readers unfamiliar with Judaism. The introduction provides historical, intellectual, and religious context for Philo, discusses major issues of scholarly interest, considers the relation of De vita Mosis to (...) the Septuagint, and explores the immediate Nachleben of Philo's works. The author's translation is paired with Cohn's edition of the Greek text, thereby providing not only a rendering of the Greek but also the Greek itself for those who wish to read Philo's own words. The English rendering of the Greek aims at clarity and accuracy while retaining as many of Philo's unique stylistic features as possible. Finally, the notes are designed to elucidate the text, especially for new readers, on a variety of levels: extrapolating on points more fully discussed elsewhere in the Philonic corpus, observing specific divergences from the Septuagint, and suggesting aspects of contemporary historical influence on Philo's retelling of the biblical narrative. The volume serves as a succinct entry into the basics of Philo while also preparing the reader for some of Philo's more challenging works. (shrink)

Ever since the start of the twentieth century, a growing interest and importance of studying fatwas can be noted, with a focus on Arabic printed fatwas (Wokoeck 2009). The scholarly study of end-of-life ethics in these fatwas is a very recent feature, taking a first start in the 1980s (Anees 1984; Rispler-Chaim 1993). Since the past two decades, we have witnessed the emergence of a multitude of English fatwas that can easily be consulted through the Internet (‘e-fatwas’), providing Muslims (...) worldwide with a form of Islamic normative guidance on a huge variety of topics. Although English online fatwas do provide guidance for Muslims and Muslim minorities worldwide on a myriad of topics including end-of-life issues, they have hardly been studied. This study analyses Islamic views on (non-)voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide as expressed in English Sunni fatwas published on independent—i.e. not created by established organisations—Islamic websites. We use Tyan’s definition of a fatwa to distinguish between fatwas and other types of texts offering Islamic guidance through the Internet. The study of e-fatwas is framed in the context of Bunt’s typology of Cyber Islamic Environments (Bunt 2009) and in the framework of Roy’s view on the virtual umma (Roy 2002). ‘(Non-)voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide’ are defined using Broeckaert’s conceptual framework on treatment decisions at the end of life (Broeckaert 2008). We analysed 32 English Sunni e-fatwas. All of the e-fatwas discussed here firmly speak out against every form of active termination of life. They often bear the same structure, basing themselves solely on Quranic verses and prophetic traditions, leaving aside classical jurisprudential discussions on the subject. In this respect they share the characteristics central in Roy’s typology of the fatwa in the virtual umma. On the level of content, they are in line with the international literature on Islamic end-of-life ethics. English Sunni e-fatwas make up an influential and therefore important developing body of Islamic orthodox normative authority on end-of-life ethics that is still open for further research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:English Classical: The Reform of Poetry in Elizabethan England STEPHEN ORGEL Roger ascham, writing in the 1560s, in the course of a treatise on education, urged the reform of English poetry on classical models: “Our English tongue, in avoiding barbarous rhyming, may as well receive right quantity of syllables, and true order of versifying... as either Greek or Latin....”1 He cites as an example of right (...) quantity of syllables and true order of versifying this translation by the scholar and poet William Watson of a verse from the Odyssey: All travelers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses. For that he knew many men’s manners, and saw many cities. This does not sound much like English poetry, but if we count it out we can see that it does, more or less, follow the quantitative rules. The trouble is that the rules have little to do with English pronunciation. Vowels are long by position (followed by two consonants) regardless of how they are pronounced ; moreover, Watson makes vowels long if they are stressed (such as the a in “travelers” and “manners” and the i in “cities”), again regardless of how they are pronounced. For the Elizabethans, this was a problem not with the rules, but with English, both in its dissimilarity from the classical tongues and in the variety of spelling and pronunciation at the time—proponents of quantitative verse in English observe that a necessary first step would be to stabilize the language, as Gabriel Harvey wrote to Edmund Spenser, “there is no one more regular and justifiable direction, either for the assured and infallible certainty of our English artificial prosody particularly, or generally to bring our language into art and to arion 27.2 fall 2019 frame a grammar or rhetoric thereof, than first of all universally to agree upon one and the same orthography.”2 But even with a stable orthography, the application of quantitative rules to English is problematic. To begin with, it is not clear in what sense an English vowel can be said to be long or short—to consider the vowels in stressed syllables invariably long, as Watson does, is entirely arbitrary. There is obviously a difference between the a sound in “rat” and in “rate”; such vowels are now described as short and long, but in pronunciation, they may or may not be of equal extension : thus, the a in “rate” is not, in speaking, longer than the a in “rat,” it is simply pronounced differently; whereas the i in “rise” is certainly longer than the i in “rid.” If quantity means length, English vowels are too erratic to serve—Harvey observed to Spenser that in some quantitative hexameters Spenser had sent him, “the,” “ye” and “he” were treated as short, but “me” was long.3 The issue is especially vexed in the case of vowels that are long by position. The most common examples in English are the -ing endings of participles, which are invariably unaccented and stubbornly short when spoken. In fact, Thomas Campion confronted precisely this problem; and his way of dealing with it gives a clear sense of how willed the whole quantitative system in English necessarily was: For though we accent the second [syllable] of Trumpington short, yet is it naturally long, and so of necessity must be held of every composer.4 What can “naturally” mean here? Are the rules of Latin prosody laws of nature? Harvey had a clear sense of the practical problems, writing to Spenser, “in short, this is the very short and long: position neither maketh short nor long in our tongue,” and concludes that some other rule must be found for English “that should as universally and canonically hold amongst us as position doth with the Latins and Greeks.”5 The larger assumption behind Ascham’s and Harvey’s proposals for a new poetry was that the “barbarous” England 44 english classical of the time could be rectified by the application of classical rules. A return to the classics held out the promise of culture and civility—not only in poetry, of course, but poetry seemed a particularly clear example. Nobody thought the transformation would be easy; a hectoring... (shrink)

Literate Experience argues for the existence of certain shared patterns of intellectual association in the English seventeenth century, patterns that follow the outlines of Bacon’s project of epistemological reform. Bacon’s project offered a theory of how knowing as a private act could be transformed into a public one, an act related to the creation and maintenance of public authority. The question thus becomes, how did thinkers in the period reimagine civil society as a polity of knowledge? This study traces (...) out a variety of answers to that question, ranging from the Royal Society’s communal rhetoric to the work of four literary writers who, in a variety of ways, problematize the notion that political society exists as a community of shared knowledge. (shrink)

Using critical discourse analysis this study analyzes how ideologies and national identities are discursively constructed through editorial and opinion commentaries in two English-language newspapers from China and Japan on an international incident involving the two countries. The first four editorials/opinions on the East China Sea trawler collision incident from the China Daily and Daily Yomiuri are analyzed. Findings show that a variety of discursive strategies are adopted by the newspapers to construct national identity and intergroup relations, including: 1) the (...) discursive categorization of group identity, 2) the discursive re-categorization of intergroup relations, and 3) the discursive re-categorization of intragroup relations. Even though both newspapers are products of globalization, and purport to target international and cosmopolitan audiences, the reporting of the East China Sea incident closely adheres to official narratives and discourses of the respective governments. (shrink)

Pidgin languages are generally languages which are more or less rudimentary languages developing in situations of contacts between two different cultures, one of them dominant in the contact situation, with the use of such languages restricted to certain limited contacts such as trading, plantation work involving the employment of indigenous labour, master-servant relationships, and similar types of contact situations. Much of the vocabulary of a pidgin language consists of elements of the language of the dominant culture in a more or (...) less distorted, and often semantically changed, form with elements from the language of the non-dominant culture playing a less important part in its vocabulary. Its structural features do not as a rule reflect structural characteristics of the language of the dominant culture, unless the languages of both the dominant and the non-dominant culture are closely related and structurally very similar, though even in such situations quite significant deviations from the structural set-up of the language of the dominant culture can be observed in the pidgin language. Some to many of the structural features of a pidgin language may reflect features of the language of the non-dominant culture but, in pidgin languages, a number of unique structural and grammatical features can be observed which appear to reflect some basic simplifications in language use in contact situations between speakers of different languages. In any event, in the usual type of pidgin language, the overall vocabulary is small and limited in its usefulness to the specific types of contact situations in which the language is used and its grammatical complexity is greatly reduced when compared with both the language of the dominant culture and the nondominant culture. Also, as a rule, the sound system of a pidgin language constitutes a considerable simplification when compared with the sound system of both these languages. (shrink)

This book offers the first English translation of the _Quodlibetal Questions _of William of Ockham —reflections on a variety of topics in logic, ontology, natural philosophy, philosophical psychology, moral theory, and theology by one of the preeminent thinkers of the Middle Ages. It is based on the recent critical edition of Ockham’s theological and philosophical works.

Earlier work on literal motion has shown that English and Turkish belong to typologically distinct classes of languages, with English speakers paying greater linguistic attention to the manner dimension of motion events (e.g., Özçalişkan and Slobin 1999a, 2003). As a further step, this article investigates whether typological differences hold true for the metaphorical extensions of motion events. Thus, the article compares two types of languages with regard to their lexicalization patterns in encoding metaphorical motion events: (1) verb-framed languages (...) (or V-languages, represented by Turkish), in which the preferred pattern for framing motion events is the use of a path verb with an optional manner adjunct (e.g., enter running), and (2) satellite-framed languages (S-languages, represented by English), in which path is lexicalized in an element associated with the verb, leaving the verb free to encode manner (e.g., run in). The analysis of written texts and elicited responses in the two languages shows clear typological contrast, with English speakers encoding manner of motion in their metaphorical descriptions more frequently and extensively than Turkish speakers, using a variety of linguistic devices (e.g., verbs, adverbials). Overall, the results indicate that the degree of codability of a semantic dimension in a lexical item (i.e., motion verb) has a spillover effect on the choice of other lexical items in a sentence, suggesting the conceptual salience of this dimension for its speakers. This effect is observable in both the literal and the metaphorical uses of the lexicon. (shrink)

This small-scale research paper analyses both teachers’ and students’ perceptions and their roles towards the use of Project Based Learning in a research context in the Republic of Kosovo. The study was completed by sixty students of three lower-secondary private schools in Kosovo and eight English language teachers who work there. The aim of this study was to investigate teachers’ perspectives on using PBL in their classes, the challenges they face while applying PBL, the most common benefits PBL implementation, (...) the materials used with this method, and the impact of PBL on students’ motivation to learn English as a Foreign Language. The data obtained from interviews with teachers highlight that teachers use PBL to a certain extent, though it works much effectively with lower-secondary and upper-secondary education. Teachers preferred to use Project Based Learning in their classrooms in general, although there appears to be some uncertainty between doing projects and Project Based Learning as a strategy. English language instructors have only seen themselves as facilitators of initiatives carried out in the classroom, resulting in a student-centered environment. In contrast to the past, it appears that teachers make extensive use of technology and involve students in a variety of activities to boost their learning and keep them engaged in PBL. Students on the other hand, through a very small number, highlighted that PBL is a better teaching approach in comparison to the traditional textbook teaching and learning. (shrink)

From 1538 the new Protestant church of Henry VIII provided a system of registration of baptisms, marriages, and burials in all parishes of England and Wales. This chapter re-examines the original motives behind the creation of this system, and explores the reasons for its effectiveness and persistence over the ensuing three centuries in Britain by surveying the comparative history of identity registration systems among the British overseas in the early modern period. A review of the variety of measures for registration (...) set up in the North American and Caribbean colonies during the course of the seventeenth century confirms the importance of the security of property-holding in an increasingly commercial world as a motive for creating such systems. However, this review also indicates the importance of whether or not effective social security systems, giving entitlements to relief, accompanied these early identity registration schemes. (shrink)

This paper describes ongoing work towards a rich analysis of the social contexts of neologism use in historical corpora, in particular the Corpora of Early English Correspondence, with research questions concerning the innovators, meanings and diffusion of neologisms. To enable this kind of study, we are developing new processes, tools and ways of combining data from different sources, including the Oxford English Dictionary, the Historical Thesaurus, and contemporary published texts. Comparing neologism candidates across these sources is complicated by (...) the large amount of spelling variation. To make the issues tractable, we start from case studies of individual suffixes and people. By developing tools aiding these studies, we build toward more general analyses. Our aim is to develop an open-source environment where information on neologism candidates is gathered from a variety of algorithms and sources, pooled, and presented to a human evaluator for verification and exploration. (shrink)

This experimental study sets out to determine whether people detect click sounds in American English. Recent research has documented the use of non-phonemic clicks in a variety of languages to fulfill a range of functions such as sequence management or signaling searches and different types of attitudinal stance. While these clicks are acoustically salient and have been reported to occur with a frequency of up to 14 per minute in British English, they have not been widely investigated until (...) relatively recently. For this experiment, we designed video stimuli consisting of A and B pairs of approximately 10 seconds of speech, one with a click and the other with the click edited out. We gave 118 participants a questionnaire and asked if they could detect a difference between the pairs of videos. The results indicate that the majority of participants, between 79% and 86%, do not detect click sounds. (shrink)

In this article I provide an account of the way in which the domain of spoken communication is metaphorically constructed in English, on the basis of the analysis of over 450 metaphorical references to speech activity in a corpus of contemporary written British English. I show how spoken communication is mainly structured via a set of source domains that conventionally apply to a wide variety of target domains, such as the source domains of MOTION, PHYSICAL TRANSFER, PHYSICAL CONSTRUCTION, (...) and PHYSICAL SUPPORT. Each of these source domains structures a particular aspect of speech activity, such as the achievement of communicative goals, the expression of meanings and ideas, the performance of speech acts, the negotiation of mutual relationships, and so on. I suggest that the particular conceptual mappings that underlie the main patterns in my data are best seen in terms of Grady's (1997) notion of primary metaphors, that is, as simple, basic mappings that have a firm experiential basis and that apply to a wide range of different areas of experience (e.g., "HELP/ASSISTANCE IS SUPPORT"). However, I also show that the main primary metaphors involved in structuring the domain of speech activity can be combined into a single overall physical scenario in which interactants can move in different directions, place themselves in different positions in relation to each other, come into contact with each other in different ways, physically produce texts/utterances/speech acts, physically pass texts/utterances/speech acts to each other, and make meanings visible to each other in different ways. Finally, I argue that a corpus-based methodology has much to offer to metaphor research, particularly in the extrapolation of conceptual metaphors from linguistic data. (shrink)

According to the regulations of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, university graduates should have to know a foreign language at B2 level, as described in The Common European Framework of Reference, and they should know its specialized variety. These are the only recommendations concerning general language courses and their specialized varieties. It is up to schools of foreign languages or other institutions providing language courses for institutions of higher education to determine requirements concerning language for specific (...) purposes. However, students are rarely asked to contribute to the development of curricula and syllabi. This article presents the results of a survey conducted among students of Economics and Management at the University of Białystok. The survey was devoted to students’ perceptions of Business English in English courses conducted by the School of Foreign Languages at the University of Białystok. The aim of the survey was to answer the following questions: - what do students of Economics and Management at the University of Białystok believe to be the appropriate proportion of general English to Business English? - when would they like to start learning Business English? - what Business English topics do students find interesting? - how do Economics and Management students use the knowledge and skills gained in Business English classes? The article also presents possible implications of the survey for ESP course designers, and stresses the importance of needs analysis for developing ESP syllabi in the context of Polish tertiary education. (shrink)

We have been studying Middle English alliterative verse for over a century, but so far we lack an authoritative description of the rhythmic constraints that governed the poets who wrote alliterative verse. Though some scholars have tried to show the survival of Sievers's five types, few editors have dared, in the absence of a comprehensive and authoritative account of the meter, to emend or choose between the variants in the manuscripts on metrical grounds. Two factors largely account for this (...) state of affairs: the apparent variety of the verse form itself and the failure of students of the meter to distinguish the practices of poets from those of the scribes. (shrink)

Le présent article prend pour point de départ de sa réflexion sur les enjeux épistémologiques et méthodologiques des petits corpus un constat simple, à savoir que ceux-ci ont survécu à l’heure où l’essor de la linguistique de corpus et le développement du big data ont multiplié les ressources. Cette survie est, selon nous, la preuve d’une nécessité à la fois matérielle et logistique et d’une pertinence scientifique des petits corpus que nous explorons sous l’angle particulier de la langue orale et (...) du domaine spécifique de la phonologie. Nous montrons en quoi cette discipline entretient un rapport unique à l’objet langue et donc privilégié aux corpus et repensons la validité des corpus non pas en termes de taille, mais en termes de finalité. Nous défendons alors la méthodologie et les ambitions du programme PAC dont la base de données sur l’anglais oral contemporain repose exclusivement sur de petits corpus spécialisés constitués dans les différentes aires géographiques anglophones. Nous démontrons non seulement la pertinence individuelle de ces petits corpus pour l’étude quantitative et qualitative de phénomènes précis, comme le nivellement de la variété mancunienne dans le nord de l’Angleterre ; mais également l’apport concret de la comparabilité et de la jonction possible des analyses faites à partir de ces petits corpus pour la modélisation théorique des phénomènes de rhoticité et de r de sandhi dans les variétés d’anglais parlées à travers le monde. Ainsi, nous illustrons la manière dont les résultats obtenus grâce à l’étude en profondeur des petits corpus PAC permettent de penser la dynamique des systèmes de l’anglais ainsi que le poids sociolinguistique des identités, notamment nord-sud, dans la description et la compréhension de leurs caractéristiques phonético-phonologiques. Aussi, en défendant les petits corpus, nous défendons en creux la phonologie de corpus, et nous remettons en cause la supériorité automatique des grands corpus pour ce qui est de l’analyse en profondeur de la langue orale et de l’évolution des variétés d’anglais parlées à travers le monde. (shrink)

Asia is now home to some 800 million multilingual speakers of English, more than the total number of native English speakers, and how they use English is continuously evolving and changing to reflect their cultural backgrounds and everyday experiences. Can English, therefore, be considered an Asian language? Drawing upon the Asian Corpus of English, this book will be the first comprehensive account of the roles, uses and features of English in Asia, encompassing several different (...) varieties of Asian English. Chapters cover the distinctive linguistic features of English in different settings, such as in law, religion and popular culture, as well as the use of local rhetorical, pragmatic and cultural styles and its use as a lingua franca among Asian multilinguals. It will also examine the role of English in education - from primary through to higher education - and consider the implications of this for other languages of Asia. (shrink)

The study of how languages differ in their portrayal of motion events has received much attention since Talmy provided the first detailed account of the phenomenon. Interest has extended from real, or factive motion, to imagined or fictive motion, and from there to metaphorical motion, in which experience in one sensory domain is understood in terms of motion. Studies of metaphorical motion have, however, concentrated so far on a limited number of sensory domains, principally vision, and drawn data from a (...) limited number of textual genres. The aim of this study is to identify the extent to which motion expressions are employed to express organoleptic sensory experiences, that is experiences of taste and smell. Drawing on analytical categories put forward by Talmy in his treatment of Satellite- and Verb-framed languages and on treatments based on Cognitive Metaphor Theory, and particularly the concept of ‘embodiment’, we investigate the variety and complexity of organoleptic Paths evidenced in two self-built corpora of craft beer reviews, one in Spanish, the other in English. We also compare the level of complexity evident in these sensory Path types with those of another, closely related, sensory domain: vision. The study finds, in line with related studies, that English has greater variety and complexity of sensory Paths than Spanish. A more unexpected result is the finding that organoleptic Paths are more varied and complex than visual Paths. This finding, then, may encourage us to reconsider Path complexity differences in sensory domains as a multifactorial issue and not simply as a cognitive-linguistic phenomenon. It is proposed here that external factors such as genre, or specifically, its communicative functions and linguistic constraints, coupled with the unique ‘perceptual landscapes’ created by each sensory modality, may transcend perceived physical boundaries of a Figure’s trajectory. (shrink)

From the Anglo-Saxons to the end of the Tudor era, many English glossaries and dictionaries were arranged topically rather than alphabetically and thus reflected the prevailing concerns of theology, philosophy, and natural history. These works are a fascinating part of the topical or onomasiological lexicographical tradition in England. In this book Werner Hüllen presents a learned and readable account of the topical tradition's principles and origins. He considers early glossaries, treatises for the learning of foreign languages, and didactic dialogues, (...) and provides in-depth examinations of later, more comprehensive works. He shows that the English tradition is embedded in a rich European tradition whose important representatives, such as Junius and Comenius, had a marked influence on the English methods. The book makes an important contribution to the history of the English lexicon and English semantics, and to the study of English lexicography. It also reveals a great deal about the history of English ideas over nine centuries. "This is a work of enormously broad scholarship, which brings together a range of quite diverse elements into a coherent narrative which makes for absorbing and often surprisingly entertaining reading..... This is a rich and multifaceted book, and one which will appeal to a variety of audiences." International Journal of Lexicography"Hüllen brings to life relatively dry and difficult material by applying modern techniques to remote frameworks, setting new standards for research in dictionary history." Anglistik. Mitteilungen des deutschen Anglistenverbandes. (shrink)

Part-of-speech tagging, like any supervised statistical NLP task, is more difficult when test sets are very different from training sets, for example when tagging across genres or language varieties. We examined the problem of POS tagging of different varieties of Mandarin Chinese. An analytic study first showed that unknown words were a major source of difficulty in cross-variety tagging. Unknown words in English tend to be proper nouns. By contrast, we found that Mandarin unknown words were mostly (...) common nouns and verbs. We showed these results are caused by the high frequency of morphological compounding in Mandarin; in this sense Mandarin is more like German than English. Based on this analysis, we propose a variety of new morphological unknown-word features for POS tagging, extending earlier work by others on unknown-word tagging in English and German. Our features were implemented in a maximum entropy Markov model. Our system achieves state-of-the-art performance in Mandarin tagging, including improving unknown-word tagging performance on unseen varieties in Chinese Treebank 5.0 from 61% to 80% correct. (shrink)

Coining Compounds and Derivations - A Crosslinguistic Elicitation Study of Word-Formation Abilities of Preschool Children and Adults in Polish and English This paper examines word-formation abilities in coining compounds and derivatives in preschool children and adult speakers of two languages differing in overall word-formation productivity and in favoring of particular word-formation patterns. An elicitation picture naming task was designed to assess these abilities across a range of word-formation categories. Adult speakers demonstrated well-developed word-formation skills in patterns both typical and (...) non-typical for their native language. In contrast with adult results, preschool children predominantly coined innovations conforming to the general pattern of their language: Polish children favoring derivation and American children favoring compounding. The results show that although children are improving their wordformation skills during the preschool years, they need much more experience to come to the mature proficiency in using the variety of word-formation patterns available in their language. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis and discussion of the opinions of two generations of Asian parents with regard to their young children's education. A large number of parents were interviewed during 1970-1974 and a smaller number during 1995 to ascertain their views on a variety of topics relating to their children's early education. The findings are discussed in a qualitative way and reveal the increasing satisfaction of Asian parents with their children's education. A higher proportion of the mothers of the (...) 1990s help their children with homework, read them stories and are generally more participatory in their children's education compared with the 1970s group. The second generations are concerned with the lack of facilities for the teaching of mother tongues in schools. These and other findings are discussed within the changing lifestyles of second-generation Asians. (shrink)

1) What should be understood by "liberal Catholicism "? Lord Acton is not easy to define as a historical figure. This is not only due to the rich variety of ...