Pub Date : 2024-11-08DOI: 10.1177/09639470241299710
Valentina Vetri
Understanding the interaction between people and the environment is one of the issues facing contemporary society. In recent dramatic works, the reflection on sustainability and ecological preservation as a crucial necessity in contemporary society has taken center stage. A case in point is Laura Wade’s Colder Than Here (2005), in which the protagonist, Myra, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer, opts for a green burial, causing incredulity in her family members. In the play, the destruction of the environment is necessarily reflected in the crisis of human relations: discussing human disconnection from the environment necessitates examining the disruption of family and community ties. Wade’s play is preoccupied with two fundamental issues: first, it challenges the dominant framing of death, which aims at separating oneself from the physical/natural process of dying. This natural process is replaced by death management practices in which nature and physicality are denied. Second, Myra’s eco-friendly choice is presented by Wade as the sole means by which family bonds can be revived: in reality, it is only through a reconnection with the environment and nature that human relationships can thrive and become meaningful. Drawing on Conversation Analysis, this paper seeks to demonstrate how discourse on sustainability in drama can open up new avenues for investigating human existence and relationships, challenging dominant frames of death and end-of-life decisions.
了解人与环境之间的相互作用是当代社会面临的问题之一。在近期的戏剧作品中,对可持续发展和生态保护作为当代社会重要必需品的反思占据了中心位置。劳拉-韦德(Laura Wade)的《比这里更冷》(Coldder Than Here,2005 年)就是一个典型的例子,剧中主人公迈拉被诊断出癌症晚期,她选择了绿色葬礼,引起了家人的难以置信。在剧中,环境的破坏必然反映在人际关系的危机中:讨论人类与环境的脱节,就必须审视家庭和社区关系的破坏。韦德的剧本关注两个基本问题:首先,它挑战了主流的死亡框架,其目的是将自己从死亡的物理/自然过程中分离出来。这种自然过程被死亡管理实践所取代,其中的自然性和物理性被否定。其次,迈拉的环保选择被韦德说成是恢复家庭纽带的唯一途径:实际上,只有通过与环境和自然重新建立联系,人与人之间的关系才能蓬勃发展并变得有意义。本文利用会话分析法,试图说明戏剧中关于可持续发展的论述如何为研究人类的生存和关系开辟新的途径,挑战关于死亡和临终决定的主流框架。
{"title":"Language, nature, and the framing of death: An ecostylistic analysis of Laura Wade’s Colder Than Here","authors":"Valentina Vetri","doi":"10.1177/09639470241299710","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470241299710","url":null,"abstract":"Understanding the interaction between people and the environment is one of the issues facing contemporary society. In recent dramatic works, the reflection on sustainability and ecological preservation as a crucial necessity in contemporary society has taken center stage. A case in point is Laura Wade’s Colder Than Here (2005), in which the protagonist, Myra, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer, opts for a green burial, causing incredulity in her family members. In the play, the destruction of the environment is necessarily reflected in the crisis of human relations: discussing human disconnection from the environment necessitates examining the disruption of family and community ties. Wade’s play is preoccupied with two fundamental issues: first, it challenges the dominant framing of death, which aims at separating oneself from the physical/natural process of dying. This natural process is replaced by death management practices in which nature and physicality are denied. Second, Myra’s eco-friendly choice is presented by Wade as the sole means by which family bonds can be revived: in reality, it is only through a reconnection with the environment and nature that human relationships can thrive and become meaningful. Drawing on Conversation Analysis, this paper seeks to demonstrate how discourse on sustainability in drama can open up new avenues for investigating human existence and relationships, challenging dominant frames of death and end-of-life decisions.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"69 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142596754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-10-27DOI: 10.1177/09639470241288361
Yang Yue
{"title":"Book review: Fiction and pragmatics","authors":"Yang Yue","doi":"10.1177/09639470241288361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470241288361","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142519443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-10-19DOI: 10.1177/09639470241292813
Yifan Zhu
This study examines gender representation in Oscar Wilde’s comedy and satire, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), using corpus stylistic analysis. Specifically, it analyzes gender characterization patterns in the original drama and explores how these patterns shift in two Chinese translations: Shen Xingren’s translation in 1918 and Hong Shen’s translation in 1923. By analyzing keyword patterns, collocational patterns, and characterization cues, the study reveals the intricate nature of gender characterization in the source text. Subsequently, a comparison is made between the textual patterns of the source text and their manifestations in the translations. The findings indicate that while Shen Xingren’s translation quite faithfully (re)represents the gender images and relations of the source text, Hong Shen’s selective appropriation of women and men characterization in his translation not only suppresses the source text’s potential to challenge moral absolutism towards women but also undermines the voices of women present in the original text. The article suggests that the re-representation or shifts in gender characterization observed between the source and target texts can be attributed to the translator’s ideology and adherence to particular poetics.
{"title":"Gender characterization in Lady Windermere’s Fan and its Chinese translations: A corpus stylistic approach","authors":"Yifan Zhu","doi":"10.1177/09639470241292813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470241292813","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines gender representation in Oscar Wilde’s comedy and satire, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), using corpus stylistic analysis. Specifically, it analyzes gender characterization patterns in the original drama and explores how these patterns shift in two Chinese translations: Shen Xingren’s translation in 1918 and Hong Shen’s translation in 1923. By analyzing keyword patterns, collocational patterns, and characterization cues, the study reveals the intricate nature of gender characterization in the source text. Subsequently, a comparison is made between the textual patterns of the source text and their manifestations in the translations. The findings indicate that while Shen Xingren’s translation quite faithfully (re)represents the gender images and relations of the source text, Hong Shen’s selective appropriation of women and men characterization in his translation not only suppresses the source text’s potential to challenge moral absolutism towards women but also undermines the voices of women present in the original text. The article suggests that the re-representation or shifts in gender characterization observed between the source and target texts can be attributed to the translator’s ideology and adherence to particular poetics.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"64 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142451374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-10-10DOI: 10.1177/09639470241286469
Mimi Huang
With the growing prevalence of health and illness narratives on digital platforms, research examining the social psychological processes involved in these storytelling environments remains scarce. This paper addresses this research gap by conducting a mixed-methods study of digital storytelling within the UK’s healthcare context, focusing on online consumer reviews of the medical memoir, Do no harm: stories of life, death and brain surgery (Marsh, 2014). Utilising computer-assisted text analysis methods of LIWC-22 and the Sketch Engine, linguistic cues for cognitive, affective, social and perceptual processes are identified in a corpus of online consumer reviews. A subsequent qualitative analysis, based on ‘narrative modulation’ (Huang, 2024, 2020), investigates the role of these processes in constructing and developing storylines across the user reviews. Finally, the study explores how consumer reviews in the form of ‘small stories’ challenge canonical narratives in the UK’s healthcare services. This research advances the field of narrative studies by emphasising the role of social psychological processes (Chung and Pennebaker, 2019) in modulating emerging, evolving and counter narratives in digital storytelling. The findings reveal an instrumental role of social psychological processes, as signalled by linguistic cues, in shaping narrative threads in online user reviews. This study not only develops narrative modulation as a valuable concept for narrative analysis, but also underscores its effectiveness when combined with computer-assisted text analysis tools for in-depth examinations of narrative data. Furthermore, it provides critical insights into digital storytelling in healthcare contexts, promoting knowledge transfer across narrative studies, stylistics, social psychology and medical humanities.
{"title":"Weaving narrative threads with social psychological processes: Narrative modulations in online consumer reviews of a medical memoir","authors":"Mimi Huang","doi":"10.1177/09639470241286469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470241286469","url":null,"abstract":"With the growing prevalence of health and illness narratives on digital platforms, research examining the social psychological processes involved in these storytelling environments remains scarce. This paper addresses this research gap by conducting a mixed-methods study of digital storytelling within the UK’s healthcare context, focusing on online consumer reviews of the medical memoir, Do no harm: stories of life, death and brain surgery (Marsh, 2014). Utilising computer-assisted text analysis methods of LIWC-22 and the Sketch Engine, linguistic cues for cognitive, affective, social and perceptual processes are identified in a corpus of online consumer reviews. A subsequent qualitative analysis, based on ‘narrative modulation’ (Huang, 2024, 2020), investigates the role of these processes in constructing and developing storylines across the user reviews. Finally, the study explores how consumer reviews in the form of ‘small stories’ challenge canonical narratives in the UK’s healthcare services. This research advances the field of narrative studies by emphasising the role of social psychological processes (Chung and Pennebaker, 2019) in modulating emerging, evolving and counter narratives in digital storytelling. The findings reveal an instrumental role of social psychological processes, as signalled by linguistic cues, in shaping narrative threads in online user reviews. This study not only develops narrative modulation as a valuable concept for narrative analysis, but also underscores its effectiveness when combined with computer-assisted text analysis tools for in-depth examinations of narrative data. Furthermore, it provides critical insights into digital storytelling in healthcare contexts, promoting knowledge transfer across narrative studies, stylistics, social psychology and medical humanities.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"130 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142405154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-10-04DOI: 10.1177/09639470241290366
Annalisa Federici
This essay adopts a Critical Stylistic approach to disclose the linguistic mechanisms of creation of (counter-)ideological meaning in a specific type of gendered text, that is the female-targeted periodical Vogue at the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular, it investigates the linguistic construction of femininity in the fashion content of the twenty-four issues of the magazine published in 1922. In a period characterised by the gradual emergence of new identities and roles for women, Vogue chiefly employed evocative depictions of the latest trends in clothing to convey transformative notions of womanhood and defy gender categories. A Critical Stylistic analysis of Vogue’s fashion features demonstrates that this periodical favoured alluring conceptions of female assertiveness and autonomy through the use of a sensuous language of desire and feeling, describing pleasurable, multisensory encounters with fashion and modernity. Vogue’s discursive strategies show that the magazine employed linguistic form, along with visual and verbal content, to encourage women to embrace both a confident longing for personal pleasure and self-fulfilment, and the progressive gender ideology deftly woven into a periodical where female agency, physicality and modernity were favoured rather than repressed. This essay, therefore, builds on foundational research in language and gender identity that highlights the discursive construction of gender ideologies, with a view to expanding the range of scholarly interest (generally focused on content rather than linguistic form) in women’s magazines as composite cultural products which played a fundamental role in mediating new conceptions of femininity in the interwar period.
{"title":"Sensuous modernity: The linguistic construction of femininity in the fashion content of early 1920s Vogue","authors":"Annalisa Federici","doi":"10.1177/09639470241290366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470241290366","url":null,"abstract":"This essay adopts a Critical Stylistic approach to disclose the linguistic mechanisms of creation of (counter-)ideological meaning in a specific type of gendered text, that is the female-targeted periodical Vogue at the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular, it investigates the linguistic construction of femininity in the fashion content of the twenty-four issues of the magazine published in 1922. In a period characterised by the gradual emergence of new identities and roles for women, Vogue chiefly employed evocative depictions of the latest trends in clothing to convey transformative notions of womanhood and defy gender categories. A Critical Stylistic analysis of Vogue’s fashion features demonstrates that this periodical favoured alluring conceptions of female assertiveness and autonomy through the use of a sensuous language of desire and feeling, describing pleasurable, multisensory encounters with fashion and modernity. Vogue’s discursive strategies show that the magazine employed linguistic form, along with visual and verbal content, to encourage women to embrace both a confident longing for personal pleasure and self-fulfilment, and the progressive gender ideology deftly woven into a periodical where female agency, physicality and modernity were favoured rather than repressed. This essay, therefore, builds on foundational research in language and gender identity that highlights the discursive construction of gender ideologies, with a view to expanding the range of scholarly interest (generally focused on content rather than linguistic form) in women’s magazines as composite cultural products which played a fundamental role in mediating new conceptions of femininity in the interwar period.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142383898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-27DOI: 10.1177/09639470241287597
Davide Castiglione
{"title":"Book review: Experiencing Poetry. A Guidebook to Psychopoetics","authors":"Davide Castiglione","doi":"10.1177/09639470241287597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470241287597","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142328988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-24DOI: 10.1177/09639470241288360
Xinyue Chen
{"title":"Book Review: Corpus approaches to language in social media","authors":"Xinyue Chen","doi":"10.1177/09639470241288360","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470241288360","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142317568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-19DOI: 10.1177/09639470241287595
Adrian Castro
{"title":"Book Review: Stylistic approaches to pop culture (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Stylistics)","authors":"Adrian Castro","doi":"10.1177/09639470241287595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470241287595","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142306417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-04DOI: 10.1177/09639470241273555
Calvin Quick
Poetry is often described as having ‘unusual syntax’. Based on a close study of nine cywydd poems by the fourteenth century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, I identify attributive adjectives and preverbal particles as the loci of substantial departures in poetic language from the ordinary grammar of contemporary Welsh, providing an optimality theoretic analysis of the interaction between the linguistic and poetic grammars in Welsh cywyddau. I conclude that abnormally frequent noncanonical adjective ordering and omission of certain preverbal particles in poetry is a result of the domination of certain constraints on syntactic well-formedness by verse constraints.
诗歌通常被描述为具有 "不同寻常的句法"。基于对十四世纪威尔士诗人 Dafydd ap Gwilym 的九首 cywydd 诗歌的仔细研究,我发现诗歌语言中的属性形容词和前置词粒子与当代威尔士语的普通语法有很大的不同,并对威尔士 cywyddau 中语言语法和诗歌语法之间的互动进行了最优化理论分析。我得出的结论是,诗歌中异常频繁的非规范形容词排序和某些前置词粒子的省略,是诗句约束对句法完形性的某些限制所支配的结果。
{"title":"Constraints on verse form and syntactic well-formedness in the cywyddau of Dafydd ap Gwilym","authors":"Calvin Quick","doi":"10.1177/09639470241273555","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470241273555","url":null,"abstract":"Poetry is often described as having ‘unusual syntax’. Based on a close study of nine cywydd poems by the fourteenth century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, I identify attributive adjectives and preverbal particles as the loci of substantial departures in poetic language from the ordinary grammar of contemporary Welsh, providing an optimality theoretic analysis of the interaction between the linguistic and poetic grammars in Welsh cywyddau. I conclude that abnormally frequent noncanonical adjective ordering and omission of certain preverbal particles in poetry is a result of the domination of certain constraints on syntactic well-formedness by verse constraints.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142142570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-16DOI: 10.1177/09639470241273579
Reiko Ikeo, Aika Miura
This paper discusses how the concept of norms of speech and thought presentation relates to speech and thought presentation in actual texts with reference to the examination of two corpora, Semino and Short’s discourse presentation corpus, and a corpus of contemporary present-tense fiction. Through this approach, we review the meanings of the norms in each kind of discourse presentation. Leech and Short suggest that the norm of speech presentation is direct speech (DS) and the norm of thought presentation is indirect thought (IT). Examining their claim quantitatively and qualitatively, we will discuss how forms of speech and thought presentation are chosen in different socio-lingual contexts. Our examination strongly indicates that DS predominantly serves as the norm for speech presentation. However, thought presentation exhibits a higher degree of variability, influenced by genre, text type, and narrative tense and mode, and thus our investigation did not ascertain a singular category that consistently prevails quantitatively over others in thought presentation.
本文通过对 Semino 和 Short 的话语表述语料库以及当代现在时小说语料库这两个语料库的研究,讨论了话语和思想表述规范的概念与实际文本中的话语和思想表述之间的关系。通过这种方法,我们回顾了每种话语表述中规范的含义。李奇和肖特认为,言语表述的规范是直接言语(DS),而思想表述的规范是间接思想(IT)。通过对他们的观点进行定量和定性分析,我们将讨论在不同的社会语言环境中如何选择言语和思想的表达形式。我们的研究有力地表明,DS 主要作为语音表达的规范。然而,受体裁、文本类型、叙事时态和模式的影响,思想表达方式表现出更大的可变性,因此我们的调查并没有确定思想表达方式在数量上始终优于其他表达方式的单一类别。
{"title":"A review of Leech and Short’s norms of speech and thought presentation","authors":"Reiko Ikeo, Aika Miura","doi":"10.1177/09639470241273579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470241273579","url":null,"abstract":"This paper discusses how the concept of norms of speech and thought presentation relates to speech and thought presentation in actual texts with reference to the examination of two corpora, Semino and Short’s discourse presentation corpus, and a corpus of contemporary present-tense fiction. Through this approach, we review the meanings of the norms in each kind of discourse presentation. Leech and Short suggest that the norm of speech presentation is direct speech (DS) and the norm of thought presentation is indirect thought (IT). Examining their claim quantitatively and qualitatively, we will discuss how forms of speech and thought presentation are chosen in different socio-lingual contexts. Our examination strongly indicates that DS predominantly serves as the norm for speech presentation. However, thought presentation exhibits a higher degree of variability, influenced by genre, text type, and narrative tense and mode, and thus our investigation did not ascertain a singular category that consistently prevails quantitatively over others in thought presentation.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141994511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}