Bøger udgivet af Gunter Narr Verlag

One of the most striking aspects of abbé d'Aubignac's fictional output is that the principal focus of his work is women. D'Aubignac's attempt to articulate his philosophy about the female sex is very much an intricate balancing act. While he is clearly interested in women, placing them on a pedestal in many of his writings, the abbé imposes limitations on their perceived innate qualities and often embraces the notion of the female as a societal scapegoat. All the Abbé's Women explores how these ideas were influenced by the socio-political conditions of d'Aubignac's time, resulting in a complex inter-relationship between the notions of power and misogyny in the author's fictional and critical works. The study also aims to contribute to the scholarship on d'Aubignac, painting a portrait of the abbé that has not been the focus of previous books. The work will appeal to students of French literature, gender studies and the cultural history of Early Modern France.

This book is a thorough investigation of the semantics of two derivational affixes in English. The semantic structure of -age and -ery derivatives is analysed synchronically, on the basis of corpus data from the British National Corpus (BNC), and diachronically, on the basis of dictionary data from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). To do this, the book introduces a new way of accounting for the semantic structure of derivational affixes: an adapted semantic map method. The study shows that the semantic structure of morphological categories can change significantly in a relatively short period of time, and that semantic maps can represent this change in a straightforward and accurate manner. They visualise the relations and interdependencies of the readings expressed by derivatives, which leads to a new understanding of the semantic complexity of these categories but also highlights recurring polysemies.

This work focuses on the comprehension of null and overt subject pronouns in intrasentential anaphora contexts in Basque, a language which employs overt referential devices that fall out of the scope of what traditionally counts as third person pronouns, namely the demonstrative hura 'that' and the quasipronoun bera '(s)he (him/herself)'. Data from native adults obtained from two experimental off-line tasks on the referential properties and the discourse features of null and overt pronouns set a baseline for comparison with a) the insights reported in descriptive grammars and with b) developmental data from 6-8-year-old child L1 and child L2.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Americans - along with their British cousins - began to include the Rhine and its famed scenery in their continental grand tour. Whereas English travelers and travel impressions are quite well remembered, the American contribution to the first century of Rhine tourism is much less documented. The present volume seeks to recover American encounters with the Rhine and bring back the voices of prominent transatlantic travelers - from Trumbull and Jefferson in the eighteenth century, to Cooper and Longfellow in the nineteenth, and on to Dreiser and Wolfe in the twentieth - through selections from their diaries, letters, and other travel accounts. However different their backgrounds and points of view, all these visitors are united in their praise of this historical region and its heritage. Their impressions are important elements in the American image of Germany in past and present.

Due to globalization, synchronic approaches in toponymy arise increasing interest among linguists. This volume takes stock of different approaches to synchronic toponymy presenting linguistic studies on toponyms - in as various fields as grammar, morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics - which describe their structure and lexical status, their semantic facets, applied to the psychological, sociological and political implications of their use and function in discourse. All these factors account for the great variety of linguistic projects related to toponyms, i.e. modelling, as well as the use and normalization of toponyms in spoken and written contexts.

The book is a clear yet challenging overview of both the theoretical and the practical aspects of doing semantic research through the use of language corpora. Via a very hands-on approach it presents the relevant semantic and corpus linguistic issues in an accessible way and aims at providing a very practical experience of doing advanced corpus-based research.

This book deals with the topic of English loanwords in the Japanese language. Anglicisms are a phenomenon in almost every language, but hardly anywhere are they as dominant as in Japanese. Due to strong American influenceafter WW II, English loans have become a monopolizing force among Western loanwords in Japan and now make up about 90% of their stock, and almost 10% of the entire Japanese vocabulary. This monograph explores, among other things, their history, creation processes, functions and exemplary integration into the language, which assimilates them completely into the Japanese phonological and morphological system, and thus enormously facilitates their popular acceptance. It analyzes reactions from politics and society, which reveal some puristic tendencies but even more a pragmatismwhich defines Anglicisms by their functions in the language rather than their origin.The issue of comprehension is also discussedand followed-up by a survey showing that even difficult Anglicisms are well understood if put into a context that supports their meaning, and that they can indeed be an enrichment to a language, even in great numbers. These findings all make the Japanese case a model case for a smooth integration of loanwords and a pragmatic approach to this language phenomenon.

Reports of his death having been greatly exaggerated, the author has made a spectacular return in English studies. This is the first book devoted to medieval and early modern authorship, exploring continuities, discontinuities, and innovations in the two periods which literary histories and institutional practices too often keep apart. Canonical authors receive sustained attention (notably Chaucer, Gower, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, and Marvell), and so do key issues in the current scholarly debate, such as authorial self-fashioning, the fictionalisation of authorship, the posthumous construction of authorship, and the nexus of authorship and authority. Other important topics whose relations to authorship are explored include adaptation, paratext, portraiture, historiography, hagiography, theology, and the sublime.

The book is the first in-depth study that aims to identify the conceptual rules and regularities underlying the (un)conventionality of figurative ways of speaking and reasoning. Using a combination of corpus-linguistic and cognitive-linguistic methods it investigates a large number of metonymies as well as metaphors, focusing on the former, less studied phenomenon. It provides an overview of their relative frequencies of occurrence in natural discourse and offers a systematic account of why some figurative expressions and/or conceptual mappings are preferred while others are less 'successful' in the speech community and thus shape our language and thought to a lesser degree. Based on a critical examination of existing theories and material from the British National Corpus, the book points out similarities and differences between metonymy and metaphor as well as between different types of the two phenomena with regard to their conventionality and moreover demonstrates the value of usage-based studies for the cognitive-linguistic enterprise.

Investigating the history of a language depends on fragmentary sources, but electronic corpora offer the possibility of alleviating the problem of 'bad data'. But they cannot overcome it totally, and questions arise of the optimal architecture for a corpus and its representativeness of actual language use, and how a historical corpus can best be annotated to maximize its usefulness. Immense strides have been made in recent years in addressing these questions, with exciting new methods and technological advances. The papers in this volume, which were presented at a conference on New Methods in Historical Corpora (Manchester 2011), exemplify the wide range of these recent developments.

Revolving around the topic of innovative translator and interpreter education, this volume covers a wide range of pedagogical issues, from curriculum design to translator competence and from classroom practice to research techniques. The authors represent a number of countries. Their proposals come mainly from an interpretivist rather than an empiricist epistemological perspective, and are sure to resonate with educators around the world. While none ofthe authors claims to have found the holy grail of how to train translators and interpreters, their contributions all serve as fine examples of just how multi-facetted and refreshing language mediation pedagogy and research on pedagogy can be.

Despite its everyday relevance, the reputation of punctuation is tarnished. Actually, modern English punctuation is often considered not more than a necessary evil. For many people, punctuation usage follows seemingly arbitrary and unmotivated rules. The present approach moves away from a static, rule-based description towards a more dynamic, context-based interpretation of punctuation. Punctuation is a highly versatile medium-dependent means of presentational choice. To accept this view is to take a significant step towards closing the gap that still exists between punctuational theory and the actual usage of punctuation. Punctuation adopts a guiding role for the reader and the present study explores this guide potential, providing a thorough analysis of both the linguistic status and the communicative value of punctuation.

Lexis was, for a long time, paid scant attention to in foreign language teaching. Over the last 20 years, however, vocabulary acquisition has become a focus of academic research. In particular, the Cognitive Linguistic perspective on foreign language learning offers a rich theoretical framework for research in this area, since it encapsulates both ease of learning and a more profound knowledge of the target language. Learning vocabulary in school contexts, however, is still strongly associated with rote learning in many parts of the world, that is, the repetition of items, usually using lists with little or no contextual information. The implications of Cognitive Linguistics form the basis of an intervention study carried out in German primary schools. This investigates whether lessons enabling learners to elaborate on words and thereby process the vocabulary more deeply lead to better long-term retention of these items. The results of this empirical study are used to evaluate the relevance and benefits of the theoretical implications of vocabulary research for primary school learners of English.

Estuary English: the first systematic Study of the south-eastern British English accentThe term "Estuary English" (EE) was coined by David Rosewarne in 1984. According to Rosewarne, EE is a phonetically and socially intermediate accent on the south-eastern accent continuum between Cockney and RP. What he considers to be new and most striking about EE is its increasing social acceptability. Rosewarne even goes so far as to describe EE as "the new RP". Since the term "Estuary English" was coined, it has been discussed with increasing frequency and unreduced controversy. Journalists and literary authors make frequent use of the term in order to label a number of different trends, such as structural convergence of the accents of the Home Counties or the situation-related use of London variants by speakers who are otherwise speakers of RP. Linguists on the other hand are very critical of the term itself and the way it is used. The continued disagreement about EE is mostly due to the absence of a systematic empirically-based socio-phonetic study of EE in the larger context of the south-eas-tern accent continuum. This book is such a systematic study, and explaining EE. It also contains a section exploring possible explanations - both socio-historical and system-internal - for the rise and shape of the sociolinguistic situation in south-eastern England today.

This collection of essays reviews the wave of costume dramas and literary adaptations that has surfaced on Anglo-American TV screens and in cinemas worldwide after the Austenmania of the mid- 1990s. Addressing keywords such as nostalgia, historicity, authenticity, adaptation, pictorialism, 'pastness', and 'imagined communities', discussions of recent classic TV serials, heritage films, and revisionist heritage films cover the very heartland of cultural studies and gender studies.