A corpus-based approach to the lemmatisation of Old English superlative adverbs

This article aims to discuss the lemmatisation process of Old English adverbs inflected for the superlative from a corpus-based perspective. This study has been conducted on the basis of a semi-automatic methodology through which the inflectional forms have been automatically extracted from The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose and The York Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry whereas the task of assigning a lemma has been completed manually. The list of adverbial lemmas amounts to 1,755 and has been provided by the lexical database of Old English Nerthus. Additionally, the resulting lemmatised list has been checked against the lemmatised forms compiled by the Dictionary of Old English and Seelig’s (1930) work on Old English comparative and superlative adjectives and adverbs. Through this comparison, it has been possible to verify doubtful forms and incorporate new ones that are unattested by the YCOE. This pilot study has implemented for the first time a methodology for the lemmatisation of a non-verbal class and can be further applied to those categories that are still unlemmatised, namely nouns and adjectives.

‘The Troubles' and the peace process in Northern Irelanda in Seamus Heaney’s "The cure at Troy"

Based on Philoctetes, the tragic play by Sophocles, the poet Seamus Heaney creates his own version in The Cure at Troy to present the political and social problems in Northern Ireland during the period that became known euphemistically as ‘the Troubles’. This paper aims to highlight the significance of Heaney’s play in the final years of the conflict. Heaney uses the classical Greek play to bring to light the plight and suffering of the Northern Irish people as a consequence of the atavistic and sectarian violence between the unionist and nationalist communities. Nevertheless, Heaney also provides possible answers that allow readers to harbour a certain degree of hope towards peace and the future in Northern Ireland.

An analysis of the pragmatic functions of hispanicisms in Hemingway’s "Death in the Afternoon"

This paper seeks to explore the pragmatic functions of the Spanish-induced loanwords, or hispanicisms, used in the novel Death in the Afternoon by Hemingway. These borrowed words have been manually extracted and through the software kit AntConc, each occurrence or word token was examined to determine the prevalent pragmatic motivation in each text string: ‘ideational’, ‘expressive’ or 'textual’. Findings suggest that unadapted borrowings are most widespread, and the vast majority of them correspond to ideationally or referentially motivated loanwords. The assimilation of new referents (i.e. nonexistent in English cultural frames), particularly those related with bullfighting jargon, is linked to the general stylistics of travelogues. Expressive and interpersonal motivations are less frequent but they might reflect the vernacularization of travel writing and the extended use of euphemisms through lexical borrowing. Alternatively, textual motivations are regularly found through the use of synomyms, co-hyponyms and paraphrases, which are intended to ensure text clarity and coherence.

The Semantic Map of Aktionart and Troponymy of Old English Strong Verbs

The aim of this article is to analyse the semantic relations that hold between Old English primitive and derived verbs in terms of troponymy and Aktionsart. The results of this analysis are presented in a semantic map, while emphasis is made on the points of contact between these phenomena. The main conclusion is that semantic maps represent a more flexible and applicable methodology than previous work suggests since they have been used to deal with one language, to explain historical languages and to refer to specific lexical items. Likewise, this analysis shows evidence of an inherent relationship between both phenomena: troponymy and Aktionsart.

Identifying metaphors in TV commercials with FILMIP: the Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure

The analysis and identification of figurative language is one of the largest research areas in cognitive linguistics, and metaphor is one of these tropes. Focusing on the genre of TV advertising, a structural method for the identification of metaphorical components used in films in a cross-modal fashion is developed in the present paper. A corpus of 11 TV commercials is analyzed under seven steps that guide analysts from the content description of the multimodal materials to the concrete identification of metaphorical elements. This research presents the Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure (FILMIP, Bort-Mir 2019) as a tool for the identification of metaphorically used filmic components in multimodal filmic materials. More concretely, the paper presents the application of the procedure to two TV commercials from different perfume brands. FILMIP offers a valuable contribution not only to metaphor scholars but also to researchers focused on other fields of study such as multimodality, discourse analysis, communication, branding, or even film theory.

The Quest for Whiteness in Willa Cather’s "My Ántonia" (1918) and Henry Roth’s "Call It Sleep" (1934)

The aim of this paper is to trace the assimilation process of European immigrants to the United States at the turn of the century in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934). Bearing in mind the historical relevance of race and whiteness in the United States, I analyse the changes performed by Cather’s and Roth’s protagonists in order to achieve the status of white. To this purpose, I provide a brief overview of the nature of whiteness in the United States and its epistemological changes to account for its importance within the novels. I then look at the transformations characters perform in terms of religious faith and gender norms, as well as their interaction with English and spaces to become integrated in the new land. In doing so, differences between the novels arise, but so does a subtext of violence common to the immigrant experience.

Posthumanist trauma: An intrasectional approach to accountable determinacy in current North American narrative

How can we deal with trauma in a posthuman world? The 9th of September 2001 will be remembered as the day the world changed. The turn of the century in the Western world was signaled by this national trauma, but also by a change in the humanist paradigm that very much conditioned the way in which such trauma was experienced and represented. This article explores this intersection in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Art Spiegelman as they struggle to account for 9/11 through two trauma narratives that signal a matching change in aesthetic approach. Its methodological innovation lies in the application of Karen Barad’s concept of “intra-action” to the humanities.

Paul Auster's transcendentalism: Shifting postmodern sensibility in the new millennium

This article traces Paul Auster’s shift in sensibility after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. While his earlier novels where paradigmatic of postmodern self-referentiality, several critics have argued that his post-9/11 production has turned towards realism. This might be interpreted as subsidiary evidence in favor of the polemic debate around the death of postmodernism. However, the aim of this article is to outline the transformation of the writer and offer explanations as to why that change in sensibility does not respond to a divestiture of postmodernism, but to an intensification of it. I trace Auster’s alternative to postmodern relativism, that is, transcendentalism, to arrive at the conclusion that his stance towards it is the same in his later novels.

Some unexpected but conspicuous shortcomings in Toni Morrison’s last novel

In the last five decades, Toni Morrison’s fiction has covered such intricate topics as the impact of the past on the present, the damage produced on bodies and minds by different types of abuses, and the power and perils of small communities. She revisits some of those themes in her last novel, God Help the Child (2015), but this time zooms in more closely on the topics of child abuse and colorism – an internal racism of blacks against those with darker skin shades. God Help the Child proves innovative because the story is set in present-day fictional California, where the rate of child molestation – especially against black children – is just overwhelming. This article intends to show that, despite Morrison’s audacious narrative form and storytelling skills, there are some evident shortcomings in the structure and characterization of the novel that are not to be found in her earlier works.

“The boundary we need”: Death and the Challenge to Postmodernity in Don DeLillo’s "White Noise"

Don DeLillo’s White Noise is often taught as an exemplar of postmodern literature because of its concern with the postmodern themes of identity and spectacular commodification. There is much in the text, however, to suggest that DeLillo’s central characters are searching for certainties, some of which are related to earlier cultural paradigms. This paper argues that Don DeLillo’s novel explores ways to overcome the persistent displacement of meaning in postmodern texts by establishing death as one concept outside the systems of signs which is irreducible, certain and universal. DeLillo’s characters are in search of a “transcendental signified” (Derrida) able to bring a halt to the potentially infinite postmodern regressions of late twentieth century American culture. Here I argue that in White Noise it is death which provides this exterior metaphysical principle.