Bare Root Infinitives in German

The aim of this paper is to show how linguistic and literary studies can benefit from a joint work about linguistic structures in poetry. Firstly, the analysis of poetry has an important impact on linguistic theory as it leads our attention to specific structures and meanings that so far have not been considered. Secondly, a close linguistic analysis can reveal hitherto overlooked facets of meaning which have a great significance for the overall interpretation of a poem. We focus on Bare Root Infinitives (BRIs) in German. As they lack the features for tense, mood, person and number, they are more flexible in meaning than finite forms. When looking at poetry, besides the well-known deontic and bouleticmeanings (cf. Reis 1995, 2003; Gärtner 2014) a third meaning that we call reactive meaning stands out. Remarkably, this reactive meaning can also be found in everyday language. Its specific semantic properties show that a semantic analysis of BRIs in the style of Kaufmann (2012) is adequate: modality, but not non-referentiality, is a “hard-wired” semantic property of BRIs. The specific case study of the poem ‘muster fixieren’ (‘fixating patterns’) by Nico Bleutge reveals how the restricted context of the poem interacts with the different interpretations of BRIs to arrive at a complex text interpretation. Keywords: bare root infinitives, semantic-pragmatic interface, poetry, modality, pragmatic enrichment, semantics

Rapport-management strategies in conflict situations

Chuka Ononye (University of Nigeria) The (mis)management of rapport amongst groups in Niger Delta (ND) communities has become a significant issue, which Ahmed Yerima’s Hard Ground (HG) depicts as having the capacity to aid or control the conflicts in the region. Linguistic studies on Yerima’s drama from the perspective of pragmatics have tended to use pragmatic acts to identify the discourse value of proverbs and functions of characters’ utterances but have not accounted for the politeness strategies utilised for rapport management, especially in conflict situations. This article, drawing on a rapport management model of politeness and aspects of speech act discourse, identifies the face, sociality rights, and interactional goals that characterise the conflict-motivated dialogues sampled in HG, and reveals the rapport management (RM) strategies through which these are managed in the text. Three conflict situations can be observed as prompting different RM strategies: cause-effect identification (CEI), militancy support (MSP), and disagreement (DSG) situations. CEI is marked by incriminating (involving eliciting and informing acts) and exonerating (including complimenting and acknowledging acts) strategies; MSP is indexed by strategies of persuasion (realised with face-enhancing/threatening acts), whereas DSG is typified by requesting (featuring explicit head acts and alerters) and blaming strategies (including insulting and threatening, aggravating moves). Generally, the requesting, blaming, and exonerating strategies are largely used by the ND youth in HG to probe, threaten, or disagree on specific issues, while the incriminating and persuasion strategies are mainly employed by the women to indict, influence, and predict future actions. The study of RM in the conflict situations depicted in the play sheds light on the often neglected cause of conflicts in contemporary Africa.

Narrative Structures in Cross-linguistic Perspective: English, Hobongan, and Daqan

It has been noted (Perkins, 2009; Zwaan 1999; Zwaan and Radvansky, 1998) that causality, character, location, and time are the four main aspects of narrative discourse, even if not attended to in equal ways—for example, in English, character is highly ranked, and the locational/spatial components have often been underestimated. However, this is not a universal ranking. In a partial report on field work conducted in Borneo in 2012-2015, I note typological patterns in stylistic preferences within a selection of short narratives in English, Hobongan, and Daqan (the latter two are Austronesian). The strategies identified in the languages, by which the rankings of the various types of narrative information are foregrounded or backgrounded, include focus particles (Hobongan), specificity of description, or lack thereof (each), what component is most involved in driving the narrative forward (each), and frequency of information given about different components of the narrative (each). For example, English narratives center around a character or characters, and a great deal of specific information is given about such characters. In Hobongan, by contrast, the characters are backgrounded relative to the locational information provided, which is given specific description and is marked repeatedly as the focus of the narrative. In Daqan, still another pattern can be identified, that of a given duration providing the justification for and coherence throughout a narrative. It is suggested that analyses of the stylistics of information in narrative be included in typological categorizations and linguistic descriptions of languages, and that such analyses need, as much as possible, to be informed by an understanding of preferred patterns in different languages.

'You don't mind my calling you Harry?'

This paper examines the use of address terms in John Updike's Rabbit books ((Updike 1995). As will be argued, the data provide a unique, long-term perspective on how an individual is addressed in American society. The first part of the analysis provides a comprehensive overview of the great variety of address terms used towards the protagonist, Harry Angstrom, in the decades covered by the books. In a second step, the paper focuses on two important side characters to examine how their address behavior changes through the course of the series. The main aim of the paper is to demonstrate the great potential of fictional data for the study of address terms and, vice versa, how the study of address terms can contribute to a more profound understanding of a literary text.

Shared communicative acts in theatre texts in performance

This paper adopts a relevance theoretic approach to meaning making in theatrical texts and performances. Text-based theatrical performances are collaborative creative events, many of whose participants may never engage directly with an audience member, but all of whom are engaged in making and conveying meaning. Such texts communicate immediately to multiple audiences: readers, actors, directors, producers, and designers. They communicate less directly to the writer’s ultimate audience – the playgoer or spectator – through the medium of performance. But playgoers are not passive receptacles for interpretations distilled in rehearsal, enacted through performance, or developed in study and reflection. Rather, in the framework of communication postulated by relevance theory, the audience is an active participant in making meaning. I will briefly review a range of approaches to meaning making in theatre, and then outline my view of a relevance theoretic account of theatre texts and performances as related but distinct communicative acts. For Weimann (1992), discussing the German playwright, Heiner Müller, “language is first and foremost material with which the audience is expected to work so as to make and explore their own ‘experiences’” (p. 958). By contrast, T. S. Eliot characterised performances as ‘interruptions’ of the relationship between writer and audience; in ‘a true acting play’, he asserted, the actor added nothing (Eliot, 1924, p. 96). Campbell (1981) argues that “the theatre cannot gear its production to actual audiences”, as only the “finest and most appreciative of abstract audiences for that play” (p. 152) can properly grasp its meaning. For him, the disparate capacities, views, and expectations of a given audience present a profound challenge to theatre as communication. Connor (1999) addresses the same issue, pointing out that if readers can disagree about the meaning of a text, then spectators are even less likely to agree on what a given performance means (p. 417). Unlike Campbell, however, she regards this diversity as enriching, concluding that meanings “develop from co-production with spectators as subjects” (p. 426). Relevance theory provides a framework in which to begin to disentangle the overlapping and interacting, but equally vital, contributions of writer, company, and audience in making meanings.

“A style which defies convention, tradition, homogeneity, prudence, and sometimes even syntax”

Combining the methods of stylistics and literary criticism, this essay takes a fresh look at two texts that have been analysed ad nauseam: Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. I use James’s late style as a touchstone to compare and contrast the two texts. Analysing syntax by means of close textual analysis of the novels’ opening paragraphs as well as metaphorical language, employing the corpus analysis programme AntConc to survey the entire texts, I aim to show that James’s 1881 text anticipates his late style and Wharton’s 1920 text appropriates it to suit her own agenda. However, in respectively anticipating and appropriating this style, James and Wharton create different effects. James intensifies his female protagonist’s “world of thought and feeling,” creating a fictional world with literary equality for both genders, while Wharton subverts gender roles in a scathing critique of Gilded Age society, which did not allow for this other “world of thought and feeling”. In addition to positioning both novels as inherently feminist and progressive, this essay compares Wharton’s writing to James’s, but without presupposing the latter’s influence on the former. Instead, acknowledging the fluidity of style, I hope to put forward a convincing case that there are subtle differences that make these authors’ styles Jamesian and Whartonian, respectively.

‘To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life?’

Despite several decades of linguistic research and activism, neutral/inclusive language use is far from the norm in English and German. In this article I explore whether the encounter with neutral terminology in June Arnold’s novel The Cook and the Carpenter can prompt readers to question dominant practices and consider alternatives. Based on narrative research, my premise is that fiction can create familiarity with new terms and thereby support linguistic change. I frame my investigation with Wittgenstein’s notion that ‘to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life’, and put it to the test with a discourse analysis of English and German reader responses. The results of my study show that Arnold’s novel stimulates fruitful debate of the issue of gender and language. Based on my findings, I propose the text’s integration into linguistics education in order to further promote neutral/inclusive language use.

‘He just isn’t my Frost’: Television adaptation of R.D. Wingfield’s Jack Frost.

This article presents an analysis of the police television series A Touch of Frost (Yorkshire Television, 1992) and the crime novels of Rodney Wingfield upon which it is based. In analysing characterisation of the protagonist of each version, Inspector Jack Frost, data is drawn from the pilot episode of the series and Wingfield’s debut novel Frost at Christmas (1984). Wingfield was less than impressed with television’s version of Frost, stating, ‘He just isn’t my Frost’. Given that a core motivation for stylistics is to ‘support initial impressions in various extracts’ readings’ and to ‘describe the readers’ response with some precision’ (Gregoriou, 2007:19), this article offers a linguistic explanation for the response of an author to the adaptation of his own work. The famously reticent Wingfield did not elaborate in detail on why he disapproved of the television version of Frost, although several critics contended that Wingfield felt television had ‘softened’ his creation. This article will analyse each version in terms of the elements of narrative outlined by Simpson and Montgomery (1995) and will in turn suggest an elaboration of this model by integrating frameworks for the analysis of impoliteness (Culpeper, 1996; 2010), examining pragmatic elements of Frost’s dialogue. In investigating whether television’s Jack Frost is ‘softer’ than the character envisaged by Wingfield free direct speech and accompanying physical behaviour in novel and television adaptation are analysed, focussing on whether the perceived softness of the latter has been partly achieved by making the speech of Frost less impolite on television. Keywords Adaptation, characterisation, A Touch of Frost, Frost at Christmas, impoliteness, free direct speech, dialogue, television drama, crime fiction

Overlapping Speech in Caryl Churchill’s Hot Fudge

Andriy Ivanchenko (Chukyo University) The script of Caryl Churchill’s short play Hot Fudge (similarly to several other plays by this author) contains detailed directions for overlapping conversation. At certain points in the play these may be contributing to a number of effects similar to those described for the naturally occurring “collaborative floor”, such as participants’ enthusiasm and mutual support. The importance of an “interactive” approach to constructed conversation is pointed out in the article, particularly that of analysing the overlapped speaker’s response to appreciate discursive significance of the overlapping turn. For instance, acknowledging and/or reusing the other’s overlapping formulations in a non-oppositional format can show the speaker’s understanding of those contributions as collaboratively oriented. Therefore, an “interactive” interpretation of overlapping dialogue in a dramatic text will affect the reader’s understanding of the interpersonal context (e.g. dominance-seeking / mutual support / collaboration between pairs of speakers). Particularly, an “interactive” approach is taken to show how certain kinds of overlapping similar to those described for the naturally occurring conversation can be used dramatically for supportive rather than conflictive ends. Overall, it is shown how the dramatic characters’ interpersonal orientations become inferable from their use of certain dialogic options.

Fictional Creature Pronominalization – The Use of He/She/It in Reference to Zombies, Vampires, Fairies, and Trolls in Guillermo del Toro’s Literary Work

In this paper pronominalization is analyzed in reference to the fictional creatures in the literary work of Guillermo del Toro’ in order to study whether the choice of pronoun serves the function of expressing attitudes towards fictional creatures, such as zombies and vampires, in a way that makes the contexts and the characters’ subjective perceptions the dominant factors and consequently puts aside the semantic or grammatical status of the referent. The paper also investigates whether inanimate pronouns (it/its, which), are used in association with detached appraisal, callousness and dehumanization, and whether personal pronouns (he/his, she/her, and who/whom) are used with attachment, closeness and humanization. These two categories of pronouns (personal and inanimate) are normally distinct, i.e., in most contexts they cannot be used interchangeably. The study of the characteristics of fictional creature pronominalization can shed light on how we use pronouns in order to create creatures that exist only in our imagination, and how a variety of different attitudes towards them is expressed through this specific linguistic tool. In relation to del Toro’s zombies and vampires, it can be argued that the pronominalization serves a certain purpose in order to dehumanize them, differentiate the dead vampire/zombies from the living humans, and to point out the before and the after of the transition between life and death. The pronominalization in reference to fairies, although complicated and not completely consistent, shows a clear tendency towards a correlation between animal–like creatures and inanimate pronouns. In regards to del Toro’s trolls, the pronominalization follows a more consistent pattern, which clearly serves the function of expressing different kinds of attitudes towards the creatures such as detached appraisal and dehumanization, on the one hand, and friendship and alliance, on the other.