scholarly journals Change from Above and Resistance to Change in the Early Prescriptive Pronouncing Dictionaries of English

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (s1) ◽  
pp. 315-336
Author(s):  
Nicolas Trapateau ◽  
Jean-Louis Duchet
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Systematic Investigation ◽  
Vowel Quality ◽  
Complex Combination ◽  
The Common ◽  
Upper Middle Class ◽  
Stress Placement

AbstractTo what extent is it possible to interpret the data of pronouncing dictionaries of the 18th century in sociolinguistic terms? Several answers are provided by resorting to Labov’s concepts of change from above and change from below the level of awareness. A systematic investigation of John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791, 1809), the most complete and cumulative of all such dictionaries of the time, makes it possible to show that an orthoepist like Walker often reflects the pressure in favour of change from above for vowel quality and resistance to such a change in matters of stress placement. By preferring analogy to conservative pronunciations due to his bias in favour of a rational pattern, Walker also links analogy to the “vernacular instinct”, promoting variant forms witnessing a change from below. And many other changes under way in his time, which pass unnoticed in the orthoepist’s discourse and transcriptions, properly deserve to be treated as changes from below, thus making his dictionary the common ground for pressures from above and pressures from below.Walker’s prescription is a complex combination of both promotion of, and resistance to pressures from above according to criteria that reflect the ideals of the upper middle class.

scholarly journals Suburban/Absurd: Subjects of Anxiety in the Fiction of  John Cheever and Richard Ford.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Fiona Clark
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Identity And Agency ◽  
The Common ◽  
Critical Enquiry ◽  
Richard Ford

<p>One aspect of the common ground between the work of Richard Ford and John Cheever is their careful depiction of domestic life. It was this attention to the middle class suburbs of America that led some of Cheever's contemporary critics to dismiss his work, seeing his subject matter as inappropriate to serious critical enquiry. By altering the terms on which Cheever's work is approached, and reading Cheever's and Ford's suburban fiction in light of some of the tenets of existentialism, post-structuralism, and neo-pragmatism, it is possible to affirm their works as central to contemporary concerns surrounding subjectivity, identity, and agency.</p>

scholarly journals Suburban/Absurd: Subjects of Anxiety in the Fiction of  John Cheever and Richard Ford.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Fiona Clark
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Identity And Agency ◽  
The Common ◽  
Critical Enquiry ◽  
Richard Ford

<p>One aspect of the common ground between the work of Richard Ford and John Cheever is their careful depiction of domestic life. It was this attention to the middle class suburbs of America that led some of Cheever's contemporary critics to dismiss his work, seeing his subject matter as inappropriate to serious critical enquiry. By altering the terms on which Cheever's work is approached, and reading Cheever's and Ford's suburban fiction in light of some of the tenets of existentialism, post-structuralism, and neo-pragmatism, it is possible to affirm their works as central to contemporary concerns surrounding subjectivity, identity, and agency.</p>

Textbook Popery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Public School ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Female Teachers ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
School Movement

By the 1840s, convent narratives gained more middle-class, respectable readers, moving away from descriptions of sex and sadism and focusing instead on convent schools and the education of young women. Popular works such as Protestant Girl in a French Nunnery described "tricks" used by nuns to convert female pupils and lure them into convents. Such literature warned that as neither wives nor mothers, nuns could not train the right kind of women for America. The focus on convent schools converged with the common or public school movement. At the same time, teaching became an acceptable occupation for women, prompting more women to seek opportunities for higher education. This chapter compares the approach to education among nuns and other female teachers alongside the caricatures of convent schools in anti-Catholic print culture. I seek to answer why convent schools faced such heightened animosity even as teaching became feminized.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Fischer-Lichte
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Court Culture ◽  
Common Root ◽  
New Family ◽  
The Common ◽  
German Court ◽  
The Ideal

The introduction ‘Philhellenism and Theatromania’ retraces the emergence of these two phenomena in the German middle class. The year 1755 marks a watershed in this regard: it saw the publication of J. J. Winckelmann’s treatise Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks and the premiere of G. E. Lessing’s first domestic tragedy Miß Sara Sampson. Both share the common root and motivation once and for all to banish Frenchified German court culture. While Winckelmann’s treatise praised the ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘quiet greatness’ of the Greek masterpieces, Lessing’s play advocated new family values and the ideal of ‘naturalness’ as the true virtues of the middle class. The merging of Philhellenism as the cult of beauty with theatromania as the quest for identifying in a social group and as an individual provided the basic condition for staging Greek tragedies.

The Semantics of Evidentials

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Common ◽  
Issue Content

This book gives a compositional, truth‐conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentials set in a theory of the semantics for sentential mood. Central to this semantics is a proposal about a distinction between what propositional content is at‐issue, roughly primary or proffered, and what content is not‐at‐issue. Evidentials contribute not‐at‐issue content, more specifically what I will call a not‐at‐issue restriction. In addition, evidentials can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. Building on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, the proposed semantics does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, I argue that all sentences make three contributions: at‐issue content, not‐at‐issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At‐issue content is presented, made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground. Not‐at‐issue content directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary relation uses the at‐issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type (e.g., declarative, interrogative), can trigger further updates. Empirical support for this proposal comes from Cheyenne (Algonquian, primary data from the author’s fieldwork), English, and a wide variety of languages that have been discussed in the literature on evidentials.

Can Groups Assert That P?

2019 ◽  
pp. 326-344
Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Constitutive Rule ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Declarative Statement ◽  
John Macfarlane

When a group or institution issues a declarative statement, what sort of speech act is this? Is it the assertion of a single individual (perhaps the group’s spokesperson or leader) or the assertion of all or most of the group members? Or is there a sense in which the group itself asserts that p? If assertion is a speech act, then who is the actor in the case of group assertion? These are the questions this chapter aims to address. Whether groups themselves can make assertions or whether a group of individuals can jointly assert that p depends, in part, on what sort of speech act assertion is. The literature on assertion has burgeoned over the past few years, and there is a great deal of debate regarding the nature of assertion. John MacFarlane has helpfully identified four theories of assertion. Following Sandy Goldberg, we can call these the attitudinal account, the constitutive rule account, the common-ground account, and the commitment account. I shall consider what group assertion might look like under each of these accounts and doing so will help us to examine some of the accounts of group assertion (often presented as theories of group testimony) on offer. I shall argue that, of the four accounts, the commitment account can best be extended to make sense of group assertion in all its various forms.

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