Special issue on English intensifiers

2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
BELÉN MÉNDEZ-NAYA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Semantic Change ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Grammatical Change ◽  
Degree Modifiers ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Degree modifiers, degree words or intensifiers are linguistic elements which convey the degree or the exact value of the quality expressed by the item they modify. They are typically adverbs, as in very hot, really interesting, greatly appreciate or completely absurd, but adjectives may also fulfil this function, as in utter nonsense. As noted by Bolinger (1972: 18), degree words offer a picture of ‘fevered invention’, and without any doubt constitute one of the major areas of grammatical change and renewal in English (Brinton & Arnovik 2006: 441), especially from the Early Modern English period onwards (Peters 1993). It is therefore no surprise that degree modifiers have attracted so much scholarly attention from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. Pioneering studies, such as those by Stoffel (1901), Borst (1902) and Fettig (1934), provide comprehensive inventories of intensifying adverbs in both modern and earlier English, as well as valuable insights into how they originated. In the last decade, however, intensifiers have become the object of renewed interest; this can be attributed in part to the development of computerized corpora, and also to advances in theoretical linguistics, more specifically in the study of semantic change and of grammaticalization processes. This renewed interest has focused, for example, on the individual histories of particular degree items as seen from the perspective of grammaticalization, on the competition of different intensifiers within a given period and across time, and on their distribution across different social groups, varieties or registers.

scholarly journals Zemskii Sobor: Historiographies and Mythologies of a Russian “Parliament”

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Sablin ◽  
Kuzma Kukushkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Constituent Assembly ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Modern Russian

Focusing on the term zemskii sobor, this study explored the historiographies of the early modern Russian assemblies, which the term denoted, as well as the autocratic and democratic mythologies connected to it. Historians have discussed whether the individual assemblies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century could be seen as a consistent institution, what constituencies were represented there, what role they played in the relations of the Tsar with his subjects, and if they were similar to the early modern assemblies elsewhere. The growing historiographic consensus does not see the early modern Russian assemblies as an institution. In the nineteenth–early twentieth century, history writing and myth-making integrated the zemskii sobor into the argumentations of both the opponents and the proponents of parliamentarism in Russia. The autocratic mythology, perpetuated by the Slavophiles in the second half of the nineteenth century, proved more coherent yet did not achieve the recognition from the Tsars. The democratic mythology was more heterogeneous and, despite occasionally fading to the background of the debates, lasted for some hundred years between the 1820s and the 1920s. Initially, the autocratic approach to the zemskii sobor was idealistic, but it became more practical at the summit of its popularity during the Revolution of 1905–1907, when the zemskii sobor was discussed by the government as a way to avoid bigger concessions. Regionalist approaches to Russia’s past and future became formative for the democratic mythology of the zemskii sobor, which persisted as part of the romantic nationalist imagery well into the Russian Civil War of 1918–1922. The zemskii sobor came to represent a Russian constituent assembly, destined to mend the post-imperial crisis. The two mythologies converged in the Priamur Zemskii Sobor, which assembled in Vladivostok in 1922 and became the first assembly to include the term into its official name.

Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Charisma’

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
Maren Freudenberg ◽  
Tim Weitzel
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Social ◽  
Conceptual Debate ◽  
The Individual

The introduction to the special issue on ‘charisma’ offers a very brief overview of the development of the concept in the social sciences and various critiques and intersecting debates. It casts a close look at Max Weber’s sometimes contradictory use of the concept and the different ways he conceptualized it in his sociology of religion and his sociology of domination. It then examines alternative theoretical approaches to ‘charisma’ that emerge in the course of the twentieth century before outlining this special issue’s contribution to the conceptual debate and the individual articles’ operationalization of the term by viewing charisma as relational, communicative, procedural, as well as related to ideas, practices, and objects.

Preposition stranding with wh-relatives: a historical survey

2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunnar Bergh ◽  
Aimo Seppänen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Middle English ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Preposition Stranding ◽  
Grammatical Change

In the course of their history, English wh-relatives are known to have undergone a syntactic change in their prepositional usage: having originally occurred only with pied-piped prepositions, they came to admit preposition stranding as an alternative pattern. The present article presents an overview of this process, showing a modest beginning of stranding in Late Middle English, an increase in Early Modern English, and then a clear decrease in the written language of today, against a more liberal use in spoken English, standard as well as nonstandard. The drop in the incidence of stranding is thus not an expression of a genuine grammatical change but due to notions of correctness derived from the grammar of Latin and affecting written usage. The general trend of the development outlined is mirrored by relative that, with which the pied piping attested in Middle English completely disappeared from the language.

scholarly journals Social Psychiatry in Germany in the Twentieth Century: Ideas and Models

2004 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach ◽  
Stefan Priebe
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Psychiatric Care ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Economic Effects ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual

In the first decades of the twentieth century, German-language papers were published which included the term “soziale Psychiatrie” in their titles. At the same time modern concepts of extramural psychiatric care were being developed. Yet, the meaning of “sozial” (“social” in English) varied widely. This was partly due to its ambiguity. “Social” can be used in the sense of small communities or the wider public; it refers to interpersonal relationships, or to relationships between individuals and social groups or other communities. According to this latter meaning, “social” can emphasize the interests of social groups rather than those of the individual. This is how the term was used at the end of the 1920s and during the National Socialist era. On the other hand, “social” may indicate a friendly and humane intention, a philanthropic approach. It was in this sense that the term was widely used in the 1970s when philanthropic psychiatrists and others called for psychiatric reform and the closure or downsizing of asylums for the mentally ill. Moreover, in association with psychiatry, it can mean both the social dimension of mental illness (including the aetiology) that is assumed to lie in human relationships and in social circumstances, and the social and economic effects of mental illness. In parallel with these shifting meanings of the term “social”, the established models of twentieth-century ambulant psychiatric care also showed a variety of structural characteristics.

scholarly journals Digital editing of Early Modern English medical manuscripts: scribal errors and corrections

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Esteban-Segura ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Writing ◽  
Sociocultural Context ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Specialized Texts ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
University Of Manchester

An important philological question is how to edit texts. An edition always entails interpretation of the text and also of the sociocultural context in which the manuscript was created and used. In new philological theory, and contrary to more traditional approaches, the individual manuscript versions, i.e., the textual witnesses, are regarded as valuable in their own right, as every textual witness tells us something about the culture of manuscripts (Carlquist, 2004: 112). This is the approach followed for the digital editing of Early Modern English scientific writing in The Malaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose. In this paper, we discuss the challenges that producing such type of edition pose. We will particularly focus on the issue of scribal errors and corrections and how the editor can treat and capture them in the edition. MS Wellcome 213, one of the texts included in the above-mentioned corpus, will be analysed for the purpose. The corpus consists of manuscripts from the Hunterian Collection (Glasgow University Library), the Wellcome Collection (London Wellcome Library) and the Rylands Collection (University of Manchester Library). With regard to text types, these manuscripts hold specialized texts, surgical and anatomical treatises, as well as recipe collections and materia medica

'Stray[ing] lower where the pleasant fountains lie'

2016 ◽  
pp. 332-346
Author(s):  
Will Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Medical Writing ◽  
Oral Sex ◽  
Women's Sexuality ◽  
Women’S Sexuality ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Individual ◽  
English Culture

This article examines the passage in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis where Venus invites Adonis to perform cunnilingus on her, situating it in relation to other representations of this act from ballads, pornography, medical writing, and moralizing literature. Viewed together, these representations qualify two oft-repeated generalizations about oral sex in early modern English culture: (1) that the act was virtually unknown, and (2) that it was consistently viewed with disgust or disapprobation. By contrast, the texts assembled here demonstrate that cunnilingus was frequently portrayed as being quite pleasurable, and not only for the woman who received the gesture, but also for the individual who performed it. Moreover, these texts suggest that there may have been more cultural room for the acceptance of women’s sexuality—and of acts that were ‘serviceable to the ladies’—than has previously been acknowledged.

scholarly journals Genitives and the creolization question

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia L. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Early Modern English

In a recent squib published in this journal, Juhani Klemola notes that there is ample and well-documented evidence for the loss of the genitive inflection in twentieth-century Northern dialect data as well as in early Modern English and Middle English documents representing Northern dialects.

Servants in the Hetmanate Cities

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 369-380
Author(s):  
Yuriy Voloshyn
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Geographical Origin ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Wage System ◽  
Social Affiliations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Age Structures

Despite the advancements in the study of early modern Ukraine during the last decade, social history of the Cossack Hetmanate still remains scarcely explored. In particular, the study of cities in the Cossack’s autonomy and of social groups specific to city areas still remains outside scholarly attention. This article addresses one of these social groups—servants who constituted the largest group in the Hetmanate cities, such as in Poltava city located in Central Ukraine. This article provides an account on sex and age structures, social affiliations, geographical origin, and wage system of this social group in Poltava. The sources comprise of the data from Rumyantsev Register (1765–1769) and confession records (1775).

A corpus-based study of composite predicates in Early Modern English dialogues

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-50
Author(s):  
Ying Wang
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Complex Predicate ◽  
Light Verb ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Trace Language ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Abstract Composite predicates (CPs), that is, complex predicate structures comprising a light verb and an eventive noun (e.g., make a move or give a speech) are common in Present-day English and are particularly characteristic of spoken language. The aim of the paper is to trace language changes involving CPs from 1560 to 1760, a period in which the use of CPs has not yet received adequate scholarly attention. Specifically, the study examines the frequencies, lexical productivity and syntactic patterns of CPs in two types of Early Modern English (EModE) dialogues, drawn from Trial Proceedings and Drama Comedy sampled in A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 – a 1.2-million word computerized corpus of EModE speech-related texts. The results reveal significant differences between the two types of dialogue and shed light on the development of CPs in association with grammaticalization and lexicalization.

Rethinking Digital Media and Citizenship: Conditions, Contexts, and Consequences

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (8) ◽  
pp. 1019-1021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seungahn Nah ◽  
Masahiro Yamamoto
Keyword(s):  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Entire Collection ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This special issue presents a total of seven articles concerning digital media and citizenship in various political, civic, and cultural contexts. Specifically, the entire collection investigates how digital media use and civic engagement can be conceptualized, operationalized, and theorized in the current digital media environment. The seven studies further examine how the use of traditional and newer forms of media influences civic engagement across communities of places, interests, and practices as well as different social groups at the local and global levels. With an interest in social conditions and contexts surrounding the civic utility of digital media, this special issue brings a unique perspective to the existing scholarship and provides new venues for continued scholarly attention to this important subject.

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