Books in the Europaeische Hochschulschriften / European University Studies / Publications Universitaires Europeennes series

Investigating cultural tendencies and literary practices, the author examines an impressive range of sources, revealing some of the reasons why the animal question, apparently a marginal one, emerged during the eighteenth century as a public and much-debated concern.

Grounded in the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM), a usage-based meaning construction model of language of recent design, this research argues that illocutionary meaning either results from filling in constructional variables such as X in the Can You XVP? construction or from affording access to abstract situational cognitive models through the metonymic activation of relevant elements of their structure. One such model is the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model, which is incorporated into the description of pragmatic meaning and presented as lying at the core of the conventionalization process of illocutionary constructions. The inferential path based on the instantiation of the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model determines the activation of speech act values that may become conventionalized within a linguistic community. The study determines the applicability of the analytical tools developed by the LCM for illocutionary description. The illocutionary acts selected are those proposed by the Cost-Benefit Cognitive Model as exploiting cultural principles of interaction.

This book focuses on the theme of foreignness and its representation in literature and cognate discourses. The volume brings together essays in English, Spanish and Catalan that consider from original and informed perspectives both the conceptualization of the foreign and foreignness in its human, geographical/spatial, historical and cultural guises, not only as contemplated but also as a lens in the act of contemplation. This multi- and inter-disciplinary collection of essays is the result of an inspired and timely collaboration between specialists in comparative literature from across the world. Dealing with fundamental questions relating to the trans- and intercultural, otherness, migration, cosmopolitanism and the global, it will be of interest to researchers and students in comparative literature, modern languages and area studies, travel writing, intercultural studies, sociolinguistics and social anthropology.

What are adverbial clauses in Chinese? Do they all have subjects as their counterparts do in English? How do the semantic domains of adverbial clauses interact with the distribution of subjects? How do Chinese corpora help us explore these intriguing questions? The aim of this study is to demonstrate the usefulness of corpus linguistics as a methodology in grammar studies. A problem-oriented tagging approach has been used to enable the exploration of adverbial clauses in the corpus and to identify eleven semantically based classes of adverbial clauses. While it is a well-known fact that Chinese adverbial clauses (CACs) are overtly marked by a subordinating conjunction, their subjects can be left unexpressed and recovered in the prior discourse. By analysing naturally occurring spoken and written samples from various corpora, the author examines this intriguing phenomenon of overt and non-overt subjects in adverbial clauses.

Lands of Desire and Loss develops an interdisciplinary approach connecting the literary and geographical imagination which shape British perception and representation of colonial and postcolonial spaces. Through her readings of literary works belonging to the dawn of colonial enterprises (Walter Raleigh's The Discoverie of Guiana and Shakespeare's The Tempest), the heyday of the British Empire (H. Rider Haggard's She and W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions) and the postcolonial consciousness refashioning old myths and cultural tropes (V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World), the author highlights the crucial role of ideology in narrative plots and literary metaphors concerning space. The imaginative focus of the book is El Dorado, a geographical and literary construction created and recreated at different times, shaped and reshaped in British colonial and postcolonial writing.

This book makes an intensive study of James Phelan's rhetorical theory of narrative. Apart from illustrating six basic principles in doing rhetorical theory of narrative, the author examines six major issues which are central to Phelan's rhetorical poetics, namely, focalization, character narration, unreliable narration, narrative progression, narrative judgments, and narrative ethics. For each narratological concept, the author minutely conducts a genealogical study to make the review work complete. The book not only compares Phelan's rhetorical narratology with classical narratology but also with other strands of postclassical narratology. A detailed bibliography makes this book a compendium of narrative theory which is of relevance for scholars and students of all literary disciplines.

This monograph investigates final vowel elision in spoken Italian. Specifically, the book sheds light on the functioning and the constraining factors of final vowel elision in sequences of vowel-final determiners followed by vowel-initial nouns and in sequences of vowel-final proclitics followed by vowel-initial lexical verbs. The analysis is based on real language, that is on corpus and elicited data as well as on their pooled results. The quantitative data are analyzed statistically in order to identify the factors which constrain final vowel elision (i.e. function word class, the morphological category of number realized by the final elidable vowel, and speech style). The representation of final vowel elision in determiners and proclitics proposed in this monograph relies on four theoretical constructs and on their interaction, i.e pre-compiled phrasal allomorphy, dominant allomorphs, lexically encoded selectional preferences among allomorphs, and prosodic rules.

Not many cardinals get to be declared saints, and even rarer is one who is known for his controversial ideas and interpretation of doctrinal faith both within and outside the church. John Henry Newman (1801-1890), however, beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in September 2010, was no ordinary churchman. Raised an Anglican and a leading member of the Oxford Movement in his younger days, he converted to Catholicism and, through prolific writing and polemics, established an intellectual and spiritual influence far beyond the placid, pastoral domain of the papacy. This book seeks to settle the historical question of Newman as anti-liberal or liberal, and to shed theological light on his liberal spirit and anti-liberal discourse, in order to provide fresh insights into the issue of religious pluralism. In particular, the author examines Newman's perception of the danger of the liberal spirit of his time and his possession of another kind of liberal spirit that made him so original, bold and prophetic.

This monograph constitutes an example of a meaning-based approach to English morphology, which has far-reaching implications on lexicographical, sociolinguistic, and contrastive studies. Collateral adjectives are Latinate relational adjectives, typically meaning 'of' or 'pertaining to ...', such as paternal (base noun: father), vernal (base noun: spring), etc. The existence of these adjectives poses serious problems to form-based approaches to morphology because of their apparent derivational status, they provide us with extreme cases where these adjectives and base nouns are formally unconnected. The author shows that the meaning-based approach has real benefits not only in the theoretical analysis of them but also in their lexicographical treatment and in the description of the sociolinguistics of their use. In addition, after comparing English and Japanese, the author explains how, in English, the knowledge of these adjectives is not acquired automatically with literacy and hence has come to matter in sociolinguistics terms.

Research into varieties of Englishes around the world has received much attention from scholars. This book offers a new perspective from a cognitive inter and intra lexemic analysis of prepositional variations in Malaysian English and contrasts them with similar prepositions in New Zealand and British English. Based on corpora data from the three varieties, the author provides usage types analysis of the prepositions at, in and on. The analysis exploits cognitive approaches to prepositional polysemy and gives a motivated account of prepositional variations across varieties. The book offers a wealth of corpus based linguistic data and explanation to our understanding of variations in prepositional usage in different varieties of English. The distributional frequencies of various usage types are provided to illustrate the variation.

Phonological processing abilities specifically include three distinct but related components: phonological awareness, phonological memory, and rapid naming. The knowledge of interrelationships between phonological processing abilities and reading development has led to an improved understanding of the nature of the reading process. However, numerous studies have produced inconsistent results regarding the independence of rapid naming in predicting L1 and L2 word reading. There is also controversy over the conceptualization of rapid naming. This book aims to rethink theoretically the nature of phonological processing abilities and their link to reading and examine empirically the relationship of phonological processing abilities to component skills of reading competence, with a focus on the relation of rapid naming and reading skills. The Lexical Quality Hypothesis and Model of Information Processing are introduced as the theoretical frameworks for analysis first, and then both the cross-sectional approach and the quasi-experimental approach are adopted to address the key research questions. The book concludes by discussing theoretical implications of the findings, contributions and limitations of the study, and suggestions for further research.

How does American culture deal with its memories of the Vietnam War and what role does literature play in this process? Remembering Viet Nam is a fascinating exploration of the ways in which authors of Vietnam War literature represent American cultural memory in their writings. The analysis is based on a wide array of sources including historical, political, cultural and literary studies as well as works on trauma. It begins with an examination of American foundation myths - their normative, formative and, most of all, their bonding nature - and the role institutions such as the military and the media play in upholding these myths. The study then considers the soldiers' and war veterans' minds and bodies and the stories they tell as key sites in the debates over the war's place in American cultural memory. The multilayered approach of Remembering Viet Nam allows the investigation of Vietnam War literature in its whole breadth including the debates instigated by the works examined and the influence these narratives themselves have on American cultural memory. Most importantly, the analysis uncovers why American foundation myths - despite their being thoroughly questioned and even exposed as cultural inventions by authors and reviewers of Vietnam War literature - can still retain their power within American society.

This study explores a number of early modern comedias that deal with historical siege or military episodes in the history of the Iberian peoples. Cervantes's La Numancia, Lope de Vega's El asalto de Mastrique and his lesser known La nueva victoria de don Gonzalo de Cordoba, Calderon de la Barca's El sitio de Breda, and Velez de Guevara's El Hercules de Ocana are key texts examined here. Taking the distinction between history and fiction in Neo-Aristotelian literary theory as a point of departure, this book considers the intellectual and historical conditions that affect the ways in which early modern dramatists interpret historical events according to their own literary and ideological purposes. The interplay of history and fiction demonstrates uses and discontents of legitimizing fiction in the early modern period. Parallel themes of epic and siege intermingled with romance and carnivalesque humour, provide alternative perspectives to early modern representations of empire and war on the Spanish stage.

This book investigates the coming-to-be, principal features and theological outcomes of interreligious dialogue as an activity of the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the Roman Catholic Church (Vatican). The embrace of dialogical engagement represents a dramatic departure from almost two millennia of hostile Christian regard toward other faiths. The development of this phenomenon is outlined and explored, with research focussed on the work of relevant offices of the WCC and the Vatican during the final four decades of the 20th century. A principal task has been to construct a comparative narrative that provides the basis for a close analysis and assessment of policy and practice, together with theological reflection and critique. A hypothesis of three dimensions, or theological 'moments', that constitute a theology of dialogue has both informed and been tested by the undergirding research. The conclusion suggests that the more inclusive term 'interfaith engagement' today better encapsulates the ongoing field of concern, action, and theological reflection with respect to Christian relations to other religions, and that a model of transcendental dialogue is now requisite for the future of this engagement.

G. E. M. Anscombe was one of the important philosophers of the twentieth century. Her most famous works are Intention and Modern Moral Philosophy and have given origin to the new branch called Philosophy of Action and have been an impetus for the revival of Virtue Ethics. This book studies G. E. M. Anscombe's evaluation of moral theories and moral actions based on her findings in Philosophical Psychology. The author argues that a moral evaluation solely from the point of view of intention is insufficient and looks for a way in which this insufficiency can be overcome. Taking inspiration from Martin Rhonheimer, he finds a way to overcome this insufficiency through concepts such as the moral object, the anthropological truth of man and the practical reason, which are other essential elements to be considered in moral evaluation in addition to intention.