scholarly journals Comparative variationism for the study of language change: five centuries of competition amongst Spanish deontic periphrases

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Luis Blas Arroyo

AbstractBased on a corpus composed entirely of texts close to the pole of communicative immediacy, mainly private letters from the sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries (c. 1960), this paper analyses the results of a variationist study on the historical evolution undergone by the Spanish modal periphrases with three distinct auxiliary verbs (haber, tener, deber). Using the heuristic tools of the comparative method, the data show that variation has been constrained by a handful of common factor groups over almost five centuries. Nonetheless, with the odd exception, these factors have conditioned each verb in a different way. Moreover, the sense of this variation changes as time goes by, with especially relevant reorganisation in the first part of the twentieth century. Furthermore, there is a notable association between these constraints and the degree of markedness and the frequency of the conditioning contexts, giving support to a usage-based approach to language change in which cognitive processes such as entrenchment play a decisive role. These data also allow a particular profile to be traced for each modal verb in the history of Spanish, in which tener and haber finally undergo a complementary distribution, whereas deber follows a different pattern. After several centuries of stagnation, tener becomes the star in the deontic firmament of spontaneous communication, diffusing abruptly as a change from below in the twentieth century, and replacing haber, which had been the unmarked variant for centuries.


Author(s):  
Rachel Harris

This chapter examines the changes in Sibe folk music during modern times in China. It traces the brief history of musical reforms and the use of music in social reforms in Çabçal in the twentieth century from the restrictions of the Cultural Revolution to the contemporary soundscape. The chapter considers Sibe shamanic ritual music on the national stage and the state of contemporary shamanic ritual in Çabçal. It argues that although a great deal of energy has been devoted to the reform and control of Sibe folk music in the twentieth century, wider issues of social change brought about by the Chinese Community Party (CCP) have played the decisive role in the changing patterns of musical behaviour and the impoverishment of Sibe folk music over the past few decades.



2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Arceneaux

AbstractIntuitions guide decision-making, and looking to the evolutionary history of humans illuminates why some behavioral responses are more intuitive than others. Yet a place remains for cognitive processes to second-guess intuitive responses – that is, to be reflective – and individual differences abound in automatic, intuitive processing as well.



2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.



1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.



2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-118
Author(s):  
Kristin M. Franseen

Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.



2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-77
Author(s):  
Philip D. Foster
Keyword(s):  

Review of David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliot, eds., The History of Scottish Theology, Volume 3: The Long Twentieth Century (Oxford: OUP, 2019), pp. xii+373, ISBN 978-0198759355. £95.00



2018 ◽  
pp. 1274-1279
Author(s):  
Elena V. Olimpieva ◽  

The article reviews O. A. Shashkova’s ‘... Call the Mute Artifacts to Speech.’ Essays on the History of Archaeography of the 15th - Early 20th Century. Wide array of sources and broad geographical frameworks allow Shashkova to present emergence and development of Russian and European archaeography from the 15th to early 20th century intelligibly enough for educational purposes. A whole chapter is devoted to the manuscript tradition and publishing of sources before Gutenberg. When considering the formation of archaeographical tradition, the author uses comparative method. O. A. Shashkova offers a historical overview and analyzes theoretical and practical issues of archaeography. The reviewer notes the significance of the chosen topic due to a need to reconsider the development of publishing in light of modern views on archaeography and to make it accessible to students and non-professionals. She notes traditional academic approach of O. A. Shashkova to presentation of the development publication practices. The review considers the possibility of using the ‘Essays...’ in studying the history of archaeography and offers possible directions for a broader consideration of historical experience, in particular, of Novikov’s publication projects. The review notes the controversial nature of the author’s approach to systematization of her large historical material in order to consider issues concerning the study of archaeographical practices. It stresses that coverage of issues of development of methods of preparation of publications separately from its historical and practical aspects hinders successful mastering of the material by an untrained reader. It concludes that the publication has high practical value for specialists in archaeography and students.



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