Tag Questions in English Spoken Discourse: Corpus-Based Linguistic and Pragmatic Analysis

Based on an integrative methodology that combines quantitative and qualitative methods of linguistic research, the authors consider grammatical forms, syntactic types and pragmatic functions of the tag question in British spoken discourse. The research material included samples of dialogues with tag questions taken from British contemporary fiction and the Spoken BNC2014. Drawing on the theory of linguistic metarepresentation and using corpus analysis tools the authors presented the model under study in structural-syntactic and functional-pragmatic perspectives and obtained reliable data on discourse realization of tag question models, specified their standard and common usage polarity status, distinguished bi- and monopolarity variations. An analysis of the tag question types that are distinguished as the combinations of the predicative and auxiliary parts shows that the most frequent type of tag question is the one formed with an affirmative predicative part and a negative tag. The corpus-based approach allowed obtaining quantitative data on frequencies of tag questions in British spoken discourse, retrieving the repertoire of tag questions with their grammatical representation. It is shown that in the corpus under study the most frequent form of the tag question is the form isn't it?. The least frequent forms of tag questions are the ones formed with the have verb, as well as the modal verbs will, may, can, which supports the thesis that tag questions are losing ground in British spoken discourse. Discourse-pragmatic analysis of utterance contexts with tag questions highlighted its discourse value in the British tradition of conversation, as they perform the following communicative functions: informational; etiquette; interpersonal-relation-corrective (focus-positive or focus-negative).

The Affective Dominant: Affective Crisis and Contemporary Fiction

Contemporary developments in fiction have so far primarily been interpreted as an attempt to move beyond postmodernism toward a renewed sense of realism and communication. This article suggests an alternative conceptualization and puts forward the hypothesis that contemporary fiction marks a shift toward an affective dominant. In Postmodernist Fiction (1987) Brian McHale defines the dominant as a structure that brings order and hierarchy in a diversity of techniques and motifs in a literary text. Whereas in modernism the dominant is epistemological and in postmodernism it is ontological, in contemporary literature we contend this dominant is affective. The prevailing questions are “How can I feel reality (myself, the other, the past, the present, etc.)?”; “How can I feel to belong to reality?”; and “How can I feel reality to be real?” This affective dominant manifests itself in motifs such as desire, attachment, fantasy, and identification. Formal and narrative devices that in modernist or postmodernist fiction contributed to an epistemological or ontological dominant tend to foreground questions of affectivity in contemporary fiction. Through the analysis of novels by Ben Lerner, Alejandro Zambra, and Zadie Smith this article substantiates this hypothesis. This approach allows us to study contemporary fiction both diachronically, in relation to postmodernism, and synchronically, in relation to its social and ideological context.

ENCODING REALITY INTO FICTION/ DECODING FICTION AS REALITY: POSTMODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY AS CRITICAL THEORY

This paper is intended as a brief critical review of three interrelated, fairly similar critical theories, born out the necessity of looking into cultural forms and products with a view to finding the politics at work therein. While American New Historicism is more historically oriented, British Cultural Materialism, with its more obvious influence from Marxism, Postcolonialism and other theories which place the margin at their centre, seems to be more in tune with contemporaneity, and so is the area of Cultural Studies, with its emphasis on cultural representations. It is advocated here that contemporary fiction cannot be fully separated from other textual forms, which are considered here historiographic (not historical) because of their nature of texts produced subjectively, within a certain political, social and cultural context, irrespective of their assumed scientific objectivity. Literature, it is further argued, has become a discourse-oriented endeavour with an active participation, an idea supported in the present study by making reference to several critical and polemic writings by Salman Rushdie, which, in a topsyturvy, postmodernist manner, are foregrounded before, and not after the literature review proper.

The showrunner’s skills and responsibilities in the creation and production process of fiction series in the contemporary North American television industry

Contemporary fiction TV series production in North America is characterized by the showrunner figure’s importance. This paper aims to study the concept of “showrunner” as executive-creative producer, analyze the competencies and responsibilities carried out by them during the production process of TV shows according to personal and professional factors, and examine their position within the current television market. For this purpose, a literature review on fiction TV series production and television authorship has been conducted. After this, adopting the focus of media production studies, a qualitative methodology based on in-depth personal interviews has been used, which was carried out with a selection of thirty-six significant executive producers and writers of contemporary American TV series. The findings indicate the relevance of this profile from a historical perspective, and particularly in recent years. Although there is a basic scheme of tasks developed by the showrunner in each phase of the production process, we find differences in this actuation due to personal –sex and nationality– and professional –format/gender and channel– characteristics in this industrial context. The showrunner develops an executive-creative dual profile to maintain the project’s coherence according to the established vision. Their influence over the TV series’ creative features contributes to reflection on television authorship and its attribution to this figure.

Coda

In contemporary fiction, modesty comes to reflect the limits of human and critical agency in the Anthropocene. The dilemma of the Anthropocene is, in large part, a cosmological one, for it challenges our total view of the universe and humanity’s place in it. My readings of fiction have highlighted various kinds of modest relations and the differences they make, whether it be J. M. Coetzee’s belief in the power of modesty rhetoric to disrupt the polarized logic of political life or Zadie Smith’s insistence on how readerly modesty transforms our understanding of the relation between critic and work. Entailed in each individual argument for modesty is an account of how a reorientation of attitude transforms and makes possible interventions, resistances, and projects that otherwise might have remained untaken. Each novel offers a kind of testimony to the power of temperament for dealing with the myriad of troubles that humans must confront today. To put it in these terms is to emphasize in a new way the chiasmic relationship between the specific temperament called modesty, which is the subject of the book, and power of a modest temperament as a concept for criticism....

Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction

From climate catastrophe to pandemics and economic crises, the problems facing humanity today are impossibly complicated and planetary in scale. Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction makes the surprising but compelling claim that it is precisely by culitvating a modest temperament that contemporary fiction can play an central role in conbating the despair that many of us feel in the face of such enormous and intractable problems. This new temperament of critical modesty locates the fight for freedom and human dignity within the limited and compromised conditions in which we find ourselves. Through readings of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, J. M. Coetzee, and David Mitchell, Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction shows us how contemporary works of literature model modesty as a critical temperament. Exploring modest forms of entangled human agency that represent an alternative to the novel of the large scale that have been most closely associated with the Anthropocene, Dancer builds a case that the novel has the potential to play a more important socio-cultural role than it has done. In doing so, the book offers an engaging response to the debate over post-critical and surface readings, bringing novels themselves into the conversation and arguing for a fictional mode that is both critical and modest, reminding us how much we are already engaged with the world, implicated and compromised, before we start developing theories, writing stories, or acting within it.

Introduction to Critical Modesty

The Introduction examines Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to explore how the modest and minor mode of thinking practiced in it might be broadened to an emerging set of contemporary fiction, criticism, and theory. Drawing on the work of philosophical pragmatism, the Introduction argues that modesty as a temperament in novels entails the principle that fiction holds no special position outside the world from which to speak about it, and therefore, it frames novelistic expression as a process of thinking. Crucially, recognizing the novel as a process of thinking with the world requires a reciprocal critical modesty in which we understand critical work as something that happens in collaboration with the novel rather than to it. Critical modesty is not a theory or method to be applied but a temperament sourced from the ways texts model their own relations. Thus, the Introduction offers an account of the book’s key terms that follow from the ways that novelists and critics practice critical modesty.

Tabloul prozei contemporane și valențele realismului în Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 de Mihai Iovănel

In an era in which literary histories are written by collective of academics trying to transcend the national paradigm in which these works were once wrote, The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 by Mihai Iovănel is an intellectual effort that may seem obsolete. Nevertheless, Mihai Iovănel’s book proposes new ways of understanding the contemporary Romanian literary field that were not taken into consideration by previous similar critical endeavours. This paper aims to investigate how The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature constructs an overview of the Romanian fiction wrote in the last three decades and the critical approaches deployed for this purpose. The main interest of this article will be how does Mihai Iovănel discusses Romanian contemporary fiction and how does he instrumentalizes the concept of realism. We will look more closely at the third part of the book, “The Evolution of Fiction,” but the discussion will not omit the relation of this chapter with others. The paper will concentrate on the concepts put forward by Mihai Iovănel to systematize the complex subfield of contemporary Romanian fiction, like capitalist realism, the famous term coined by Mark Fisher. Also, we will try to see how The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature relate to previous literary histories or books of literary criticism that resembles Mihai Iovănel’s work in some respects or that have similar goals but different methods.

“To be honest, I’m pretty fat. Actually, I’m very fat”. Adjective fat as a Representation of the Concept of Obesity (Based on Corpus Data) – Preliminary Remarks

The article attempts to reconstruct the concept of obesity on the example of the adjective fat as one of its lexical representation. As a material for analysis, the texts of contemporary fiction (1990s–XXI century) obtained from the National Corpus of the Polish Language are used. An overweight people are characterized in the extracted material in physical, mental, aesthetic and social aspects. In the physical aspect, the face, teeth, hairstyle, hair color and appearance, height and size, as well as the physical activity are examined. Symptomatic for the physical aspect is the use of intensifiers: very obese, unbelievably obese, indecently obese. Within the mental aspect, character traits, intellectual potential, self-esteem and drug addiction are analysed. In the social aspect, attention is paid to the reluctant attitude of the environment towards obese people, the relationship of obese people with the opposite sex, as well as the main fields of activity, mainly excessive eating. As part of the aesthetic aspect, auditory, visual and olfactory impressions are analyzed. In the course of analysis lexical units used to characterize obese people are identified. The analysis shows that obese people are repulsive, unaesthetic, they smell badly and look unattractive, they eat all the time and move with difficulty. They are usually friendly and kind, but they have complexes about their looks.