Sociocultural and Linguistic Change in Late Modern English

2021 ◽  
pp. 11-41
2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Seoane

This paper seeks to explain the radical decrease in the use of the passive voice in Present-day English scientific discourse. A number of different linguistic factors having been discounted in previous research, it is hypothesised here that passives are being omitted for two reasons. Firstly, they became conventionalised in scientific discourse and subsequently lost the pragmatic function which originally justified their high frequency in scientific texts. Secondly, over the course of the twentieth century two sociocultural circumstances converge that exert pressure on conventionalised passives to disappear, namely (i) the increasing competitiveness in the scientific community, and (ii) the democratisation of discourse. This hypothesis is tested in the present paper by analysing the function of passives in scientific discourse before the drop in frequency began, that is, in Late Modern English (1700–1900). With data from ARCHER and other sources I will try to show that passives in Late Modern scientific English exemplify the conventionalisation and loss of contextual function of pragmatic strategies, a scenario that, given the right sociohistorical conditions, leads to linguistic change.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Mackinnon

This article employs a new approach to studying internal colonialism in northern Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. A common approach to examining internal colonial situations within modern state territories is to compare characteristics of the internal colonial situation with attested attributes of external colonial relations. Although this article does not reject the comparative approach, it seeks to avoid criticisms that this approach can be misleading by demonstrating that promoters and managers of projects involving land use change, territorial dispossession and industrial development in the late modern Gàidhealtachd consistently conceived of their work as projects of colonization. It further argues that the new social, cultural and political structures these projects imposed on the area's indigenous population correspond to those found in other colonial situations, and that racist and racialist attitudes towards Gaels of the time are typical of those in colonial situations during the period. The article concludes that the late modern Gàidhealtachd has been a site of internal colonization where the relationship of domination between colonizer and colonized is complex, longstanding and occurring within the imperial state. In doing so it demonstrates that the history and present of the Gaels of Scotland belongs within the ambit of an emerging indigenous research paradigm.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Zaidan Ali Jassem

This paper traces the Arabic origins or cognates of the “definite articles” in English and Indo-European languages from a radical linguistic (or lexical root) theory perspective. The data comprises the definite articles in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Latin, Greek, Macedonian, Russian, Polish, Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Persian, and Arabic. The results clearly indicate that five different types of such articles emerged in the data, all of which have true Arabic cognates with the same or similar forms and meanings, whose differences are due to natural and plausible causes and different routes of linguistic change, especially lexical, semantic, or morphological shift. Therefore, the results support the adequacy of the radical linguistic theory according to which, unlike the Family Tree Model or Comparative Method, Arabic, English, German, French, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit not only belong to the same language family, renamed Eurabian or Urban family, but also are dialects of the same language, with Arabic being their origin all because only it shares the whole cognates with them all and because it has a huge phonetic, morphological, grammatical, and lexical variety. They also manifest fundamental flaws and grave drawbacks which plague English and Indo-European lexicography for ignoring Arabic as an ultimate ancestor and progenitor not only in the treatment of the topic at hand but in all others in general. On a more general level, they also show that there is a radical language from which all human languages stemmed and which has been preserved almost intact in Arabic, thus being the most conservative and productive language


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Nowak
Keyword(s):  

This volume contains articles written by eighteen representatives of the philosophical continental Europe, that bear witness to the fact that the concepts that made Professor Siemek famous worldwide – especially the epistemico-epistemological difference and late-modern socialization – are now more relevant than ever. Without referring to these concepts it is impossible to determine, where to find reason presently and what it should be concerned with.


Vamping the Stage is the first book-length historical and comparative examination of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia. This book documents the many ways that women performers have supported, challenged, and undermined representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The case studies in this volume address colonial, post-colonial, as well as late modern conditions of culture as they relate to women’s musical practices and their changing social and cultural identities throughout Asia. Female entertainers were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior and morals. Their voices, mediated through new technologies of film, radio, and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the authors critically analyze salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music of the 20th century to the present day.


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