scholarly journals Reading the intentions of be going to. On the subjectification of future markers

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Budts ◽  
Peter Petré

Abstract This paper provides a detailed corpus-based account of the formal and functional changes that be going to underwent in Late Modern English. Despite be going to’s popularity, such studies remain rare for this period, in which the construction’s grammaticalization went through a second phase. Our analysis shows that the first half of the eighteenth century witnessed a shift from intention to prediction, which originated in contexts with third person subjects. Reporting the intention of others generally involves a certain amount of guesswork, which eventually resulted in the creation of an additional, epistemic layer of prediction, reinforced by the gradual extension of be going to to express non-imminent future situations. It is argued that this shift involves an increase in subjectivity, as the emphasis gradually moved away from the grammatical subject to the speaker: what mattered was no longer the intentions of the subject, but the knowledge of the speaker about them. Attention is also drawn to parallel developments in other future markers, particularly will. Interestingly, and in spite of significant differences, each of these went through an intermediary stage that involved past tense uses with reference to a future in the past, which was already known to the speaker.

Author(s):  
Quintin Colville ◽  
James Davey

This introduction gives on overview of the sub-discipline of naval history since its emergence in the early eighteenth-century. It outlines the various social, cultural and political influences that have shaped the subject over the past three centuries, and discusses its relationship with the wider historical profession. The second half of the introduction sums up the current state of naval history, describing the many historiographies that now have a bearing on how the subject is conducted. Each contribution to the volume is introduced in this context, offering a precis of the chapters that follow.


Legal Studies ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 513-532
Author(s):  
Warren Swain

Writing in the introduction to his new treatise on contract in 1826, Joseph Chitty observed that ‘Perhaps no branch of the jurisprudence of this country has of late years been more subject of judicial inquiry and decision than the Law of Contracts’. It is generally accepted that the so-called classical model of contract law, which remains influential into the present day, was created at this time. Ever since the subject first attracted sustained attention from legal historians in the 1970s, the driving forces of these developments have been contested. Some saw legal change as a product of economic and social factors. For others the reception of new ways of thinking and legal literature provided a more convincing explanation. What is not usually disputed is that there was a fundamental revolution in contract doctrine and literature in the nineteenth century. This assumption is open to challenge. It fails to give proper weight to the past. In fact these changes were deeply rooted in the eighteenth century and even earlier.


2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Varwig

Narratives of music and modernity have been prominent in musicological writings of the past decade, and the place of Johann Sebastian Bach within these narratives has formed the subject of stimulating debates. Recent studies by Karol Berger and John Butt have aimed to integrate Bach's Passion compositions into broadly conceived philosophical frameworks, in Berger's case focusing specifically on changing perceptions of time from a premodern sense of circular stasis to a modern linear idea of progress. This article proposes an alternative model of historical inquiry into these issues by presenting a detailed look at attitudes to time in early eighteenth-century Protestant Leipzig. My approach reveals a complex constellation of conflicting ideas and metaphors that encompass notions of time as both circular and linear and evince a particular concern for the question of how to fill the time of one's earthly existence productively. In this light, pieces like Bach's St. Matthew Passion and Georg Philipp Telemann's Brockes Passion can be understood to have offered a range of different temporal experiences, which depended on individual listening attitudes, performance decisions, and surrounding social conventions. I argue that only through paying close attention to these fluid and often incongruous discourses can we gain a sufficiently nuanced picture of how music may have reflected and shaped early eighteenth-century conceptions of time, history, and eternity.


Author(s):  
Ewa Deptuchowa
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  

An analysis of examples of the past perfect tense composed of a singular and plural past tense participle and an aorist form of the ‘to be’ verb in the singular third person form used as an auxiliary word is given in the article. The author, referring to the research of W.R. Rzepka, presents three consecutive examples from the mediaeval court oaths, where the aorist by has the meaning of ‘był’ (past form of the to be verb in Polish).


Author(s):  
Liene Markus-Narvila

Virga subdialect is one of the subdialects of Southwestern Kurzeme, which belongs to Semigallian subdialects of the Middle Latvian dialect. The characteristics of Virga subdialect can be traced by using mostly three sources: materials of Latvian folklore, the compiled answers to the questions of the Dialectal Atlas of Latvian collection programme, and collected texts of the subdialects, including the materials of expeditions in Virga subdialect collected in the 21st century. These three sources are the primary material for the article. The phonetic and morphological features of Virga subdialect are generally consistent with the phonetical and morphological features typical throughout the Southwestern Kurzeme region. The sections of the article focus on the typical and most representative features in phonetics and morphology of Virga subdialect and reveal their relationship with the typical features of the subdialects used in the whole area. Phonetics of Virga subdialect is characterised by the use of broad e, ē in infinitives, palatal consonant ŗ, assimilation of ln to ll, the loss of sounds in different positions, anaptyxis, and vowel extension before the consonant r. Morphology of Virga subdialect is characterised by the abbreviation of verbs (ne)būt, (ne)iet in the past tense, the third person; ē-stem substantives; āio-stem verbs; the use of suffix ūz-. In the future, further research of Virga subdialect is important in order to determine the stability of the use of the registered features and register other features of the subdialect. Studies of the nearest neighbouring subdialects should also be carried out to allow a wider scientific in-depth analysis of the subdialects used in the area.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 91-99
Author(s):  
Zhengyi MO

Lamentations and lament of capital Ying are models of city lament in ancient Hebrew-and Chinese classical literary traditions respectively. A comparative study shows that there are significant subject difference between lamentations and lament of capital Ying . Lamentations is the collective works, and its compilation and inheritance function as emotional expression of sufferings of the past, present and future of the Jewish people, reflecting their infinite belief of transcendent God . In contrast, lament of capital Ying is the creation of Qu Yuan, and under the influence of the sage's commitment to the mandate of heaven by his individual virtue. The poetry expresses Qu Yuan’s personal grief through a special literary technique and its succession and experience in later generations are mainly individual. The subject difference of two poetry is a reflection of different development trajectories of the humans-transcendent relationship in Hebrew- and the Chinese civilizations of the Axial Age.


Rural History ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Kent

A middle class ‘did not begin to discover itself (except perhaps in London) until the last three decades of the [eighteenth] century’. So wrote E. P. Thompson in the 1970s in a now-famous analysis which divided English society into patricians and plebeians, and which, along with J. H. Hexter's ‘The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England’, largely eliminated ‘middle class’ from the vocabulary of early modern English historians. During the past decade, however, there has been renewed focus on the middle ranks in early modern England, now commonly labelled ‘the middling sort’, and such studies explicitly or implicitly call into question Thompson's polarized portrayal of English society. A number of earlier works analyzed the middling in the countryside, particularly in the period 1540 to 1640; but recent discussions focus largely on townsmen, and most are concerned with a later period, the second half of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Even in a volume such asThe Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550–1800, a collection of essays presenting recent scholarship on the subject, the rural middling sort receive very little attention (a fact acknowledged by one of the editors). This essay will draw upon detailed evidence from several parishes to consider characteristics of the middling in the countryside during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.


The scientific treatment of this question may be said to date from the researches of Count Rumford who, at the end of the eighteenth century, devised the first apparatus by which explosive pressures could be estimated with some degree of approximation. During the past century the natural fascination of the subject, and the importance of the problems involved, attracted many of the ablest scientific minds. Several have made the study of explosions the object of their life work.


1988 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 431-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law

The kingdom of Dahomey (or Fon) was probably founded during the first half of the seventheenth century, but emerged clearly as a major power only in the early eighteenth century when its king Agaja (ca. 1716–40) conquered its southern neighbours Allada (1724) and Whydah (1727), thereby establishing direct contact with the European slave-traders at the coast. Dahomey then remained the dominant power in the area until it was itself conquered by the French in the 1892–94. The kingdom ceased to exist as a political entity when its last king was deposed by the French in 1900, but a degree of institutional continuity has been maintained through the performance of rituals at the royal palace (now a museum) in the capital city Abomey. The history of Dahomey from the 1720s onwards is relatively well documented from contemporary European sources, enjoying in particular the unique distinction of being made the subject already in the eighteenth century of a published book—Archibald Dalzel's History of Dahomy (1793). There is also a rich and coherent corpus of narrative traditions relating to the kingdom's history, best known in the classic recension published in 1911 by the French colonial official Le Herissé, which is in fact merely a translation (and in some measure an abridgement, omitting some detailed material) of the account given to him by a single Dahomian informant, Agbidinukun, the chef de canton of the cercle of Abomey under French colonial rule and a brother of the last independent king of Dahomey, Behanzin (1889–94).


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