I Like This Analysis, but I Don’t Think Every Linguist Will: Syntactic NOT-Transportation, VP Ellipsis and VP Pronominalisation

In this article I consider some recent objections raised against the syntactic treatment of negation in English multiclausal structures, in particular what has been called NEG-raising. I argue that the objections based on pronominalisation and ellipsis presented in the recent literature do pose a problem for syntactic accounts of the mechanisms of so-called NOT-transportation that rely on a rule of leftwards movement, as is customary in generative grammar. However, there is an alternative syntactic treatment that assumes that negation originates as a higher predicate and is subject to a rule of lowering. I show that a syntactic theory of NOT-transportation is tenable and accounts for the problematic data if NEG-raising is replaced, in the analysis of the cases considered here, by a rule of NEG-lowering.

From X to Y: Anatomy of a Constructional Pattern

Compositionality is undoubtedly one of the hardest problems in linguistics. In decoding theories, the speaker occupies a leading role, having to carefully choose the form that better encodes the meaning to be communicated. In contrast, in inferential theories, the burden is shifted from speaker to hearer: linguistic information typically underspecifies meaning and the hearer must make a number of inferences to bridge the gap between what is said and what is meant. In this article, I argue that constructional meaning can aid the process of sentence meaning formation by providing a scaffold that can help the hearer with the construal operations. Constructions, by providing an additional layer of meaning, constrain the range of possible meanings activated by words thereby reducing the combinatorial explosion when several words are joined together. This process is examined here by analysing the meanings associated with the grammatical construction [from X to Y], which is connected to a polysemy network of related senses, using examples extracted from a multimodal corpus. A preliminary analysis of the gesturing behaviour associated with the different senses proposed is also included, which can be seen to contribute to the characterisation of the different senses of the polysemy network.

Embracing Darkness and Silence: A Cognitive Reading of Trauma in A Small Silence, by Jumoke Verissimo

The purpose of the present article is to discuss how A Small Silence (2019), by the Nigerian author Jumoke Verissimo, conjures up a provocative approach to traumatic memories. The tropes of silence and darkness—closely bound to the Nigerian context where power outages are frequent—are sensuously explored in evocative prose. Darkness is offered as a refuge against the blinding effect of light, and silence is oftentimes preferred to healing through narrativisation. Desire and Prof, the two main fictional characters, devise a peculiar dialogue of half-uttered and unspoken words—and reminiscences—that are arguably in tune with cognitive literary approaches to individual trauma. In addition, in this article an Oriental aesthetics is deployed to delineate the novel’s use of shadows and isolation. In contrast to classical trauma fiction, A Small Silence presents a less experimental literary narrative of individual trauma. At the same time, the novel rejects simplistic binaries such as trauma-health, dark-light, forgetfulness-memory and mind-body. Rather, it lingers in a space between individual healing and Nigeria’s intricate neocolonial circumstances.

Mapping the Self: Leonora Carrington’s Journey through the Mad Mind in Down Below

This article examines the Map of Down Below as a central element for understanding Leonora Carrington’s Down Below (1944). Carrington’s Surrealist memoir about madness, first dictated in French and then translated into and published in English, recounts her experience of being interned in a mental asylum during the early Francoist dictatorship in Spain while trying to flee from the Nazis in France. The text has often been read as a Surrealist autobiography contesting André Breton’s Nadja (1928). However, and without disavowing this reading, I argue that the way in which Carrington narrates her experience of madness is a means to gather knowledge about the world and the Self beyond the literary and institutional conventions of the time, namely, autobiography and eugenic psychiatry as part of the authoritarian state. Thus, I explore how Down Below, as life writing, illuminates a form of truth that deviates from the autobiographical tradition of the unitarian Self. Carrington’s found truth sheds light on other possibilities of experiencing—or creating—the Self, while she also challenges both the normative Francoist psychiatry and traditional life writing.

Family Secrets and Narrative Structure in Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You (2014) has been said to combine some stock ingredients of literary thrillers with other less customary features that complicate its classification in that genre. Although we learn from page one that the protagonist of the novel, sixteen-year-old Lydia Lee, is dead, discovering who is behind the possible murder of this Chinese American girl proves to be one of the lesser mysteries in the story. While the reader remains intrigued by the forces/people that may have driven Lydia to her demise, other enigmas—related to the other members of the Lee family—keep cropping up and turn out to be closely linked to the protagonist’s fate. This article explores the secret-saturated structure of the novel, which moves back and forth between the Lees’ speculations about Lydia’s death, the impact that the event has on their lives and the protagonist’s own version of the story. Ng delves deep into the issues of gender, race and other types of otherness that spawn most of the secrets driving the story. Assisted by theories expounded by Frank Kermode, Derek Attridge and other scholars, the article highlights the centrality of family secrets as a structuring principle in Ng’s novel.

Syllable Structure Effects in Word Recognition by Spanish- and German-Speaking Second Language Learners of English

Previous findings in the literature point to the influence that speech perception has on word recognition. However, which specific aspects of the first (L1) and second language (L2) mapping play the most important role is still not fully understood. This study explores whether, and if so, how, L1-L2 syllable-structure differences affect word recognition. Spanish- and German-speaking English learners completed an AXB and a word-monitoring task in English that manipulated the presence of a vowel in words with /s/-initial consonant clusters—e.g., especially versus specially. The results show a clear effect of L1 on L2 learners’ perception and word recognition, with the German group outperforming the Spanish one. These results indicate that the similarity in the syllable structure between English and German fosters positive transfer in both perception and word recognition despite the inexact segmental mapping.

A Comparison of Two Genres: Lexical Bundles in the Discourse of Applied Linguistics

The present article is a corpus-based descriptive/comparative study of lexical bundles (LBs) in two university genres: textbooks (TBs) and research articles (RAs) on applied linguistics. It aims to identify the LBs used in the two genres, compare them on the basis of their functional type and frequency and explore how they are related to genre. To this end, four-word LBs were identified in two corpora drawn from applied linguistics TBs and RAs. The comparative analysis revealed that there are interesting differences between the two genres in terms of discourse functions: the occurrence of LBs in the TBs was lower than in the RAs; attitudinal/modality LBs occurred more frequently in the TBs than in the RAs; epistemic LBs occurred more frequently in the RAs than in the TBs; discourse organizers occurred more frequently in the RAs than in the TBs; and time, place and text reference LBs occurred almost twice as frequently in the RAs. The findings build on research into the variations of genres in terms of the use and functions of LBs in discipline-specific corpora.

"You": A Girl amidst Images and Sounds of Adult Violence in Joyce Carol Oates’s Rape: A Love Story

Teena Maguire and her child, Bethie, are brutally attacked and beaten by a mob of violent young men in a park at night. While the mother is gang raped and nearly killed, the daughter is both the witness and the victim of physical and psychological violence. Through its innovative second-person narration, Joyce Carol Oates’s novella Rape: A Love Story (2004) contributes to her sustained interest in family relationships, violence, crime and justice. However, rather than focusing on the victim of the rape, Oates writes a coming-of-age story that explores the daughter’s trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder and fight for survival, a struggle that coincides with the girl’s critical passage from childhood to adulthood. During the months after the assault, Bethie’s innocence is also repeatedly violated by the aggressors’ intrusion into her life and the hostility of the community in the town of Niagara Falls and its social institutions, such as police, school, media, healthcare and the judicial system. Unable to cling to girlhood or to find maternal protection, her forced witnessing of her mother’s gang rape compels Bethie to mature too early while experiencing her first love for a man.

The Double-Headed Arrow of Trauma: The Morally Traumatised Perpetrator in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow

Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) gave rise to much controversy when it came out, for this novella revolves around a traumatised Nazi doctor exiled in the US whose life is narrated in a disorienting reverse chronology by what would seem to be his own dissociated conscience. Despite the abundant academic publications on this experimental narrative, such as those that read it as a posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) piece of fiction, the origin of the protagonist’s damaged psyche and the diverse symptoms he suffers from have not yet been explored from the viewpoint of perpetrator trauma, a moral-related syndrome distinct from PTSD that affects victimisers haunted by remorse. Drawing on trauma theory and the recently developed concepts of perpetration-induced traumatic stress (PITS) and moral injury, this article aims to contribute to the scholarly conversation on Amis’s novella by arguing that its narrative voice, backwards temporality, intertextuality and recurrent motifs perform the perpetrator/protagonist’s moral-based trauma provoked by an acute sense of shameful guilt and the fear of being discovered. The article concludes by suggesting that, through this staggering work, Amis gives readers not only an opportunity to actively remember and reflect on the Nazi genocide but also an insight into trauma from an unusual but necessary perspective.