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

As a key traditional trait of Serbian Gypsies, storytelling, conveyed along kin generations, influences the behavior of all who listen. This book discusses narrative as an adaptive cultural mechanism among Gypsies in Serbia.

Based on naturally occurring speech recorded in Tuscany, this book provides phonetic information on what happens when RS occurs as well as its interactions with other phenomena in natural speech such as lenition and pausing. It relates this phonetic detail to existing phonological models of RS, vowel length and syllable structure in Italian.

Tells the story of Musaylima - his claim of prophethood, qur'an (reading), religious activities, followers, opponents, and defeat - is reconstructed. This study reveals that the remaining fragments of Musaylima's qur'an bear substantial similarities to the early Meccan verses of the Qur'an - in terms of diction, style, and pattern.

What are the social functions of China Daily editorials? How are these functions realized in the editorial texts? This book offers a critical review of three different approaches to Editorial Discourse Analysis (EDA).

How do Canadian graduate students experience institutional funding? This book answers this question by offering an examination into the nature of institutional funding arrangements from graduate students' standpoint. It explores the students' perspectives on access to funding, and the impact on their learning experience.

Diversification to a degree

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By analyzing exterior and interior city representations in Wharton's and Yezierska's New York literature, the author shows how urban space greatly affects, influences and alters questions of identity, assimilation, acculturation, and alienation in protagonists who cannot escape their respective settings.

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.

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.

Aims to understand the core of Calvin's Theodicy and to demonstrate that one of the important reasons that prompted Calvin to preach for almost 2 years 159 Sermons on the "Book of Job" was to vindicate God's justice by demonstrating the meaningfulness of God's activity in human life.

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.

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.

Magical realism was one of the most significant literary developments in the last century. It has become synonymous with the seductive fictions of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Jeanette Winterson and Peter Carey. However, the genre has also become known for its theoretical indeterminacy. In fact, exoticist speculation, inspired by the links between magical realist literature and the world¿s cultural or political margins, has thrown the category into critical disrepute. This book rescues magical realism from misreadings and misdemeanours, tracing the historical development of the literary genre and analysing an original spectrum of magical realist texts from Latin America, Africa, India, Canada, the US, the UK and Australia. It asks such questions as: How did magical realism come to take over the world? What is the nature of its allure? Also, how does the marginal status of its authors inform the genre? Does magical realism have a political agenda? This book uses postcolonial theory to investigate notions of cultural identity and post-structural theory to examine the narrative strategies of magical realism, presenting a comprehensive historical and theoretical overview of the genre and a politically urgent argument about its subversive potentialities.

In contrast to the other synoptic evangelists the author of Matthew proceeded differently in many respects. Why did he modify the text so much and arrange ten miracle narratives one after the other at one stretch with minor interruptions? Why did he place the so-called «miracle chapters» immediately after the Sermon on the Mount. Why did he enclose them between two summary statements on either side? These are only some of the unanswered questions about chapters 8 and 9 of Matthew¿s Gospel. Beginning with Aristotle¿s theory of the drama or tragedy, the author suggests that the way the evangelist has reworked and reorganized the miracle narratives is similar to the structure of the classic drama. By discovering the narrative strategies and the discourse aspect, we are able to demonstrate how each episode corresponds to the different moments of a plot such as the initial situation, inciting moment, complication, climax with suspense and finally resolution and denouement.