Crossroads and Interfaces: Studies in Linguistics and Literature – serie

This book is a collection of papers on various aspects of the syntax and morphosyntax of Germanic and Slavic languages (English, German, Czech, Polish, and Russian), stemming from the Syntax Session of the 2006 PLM conference in Poznań (Poland). Gisbert Fanselow and Caroline Féry discuss lack of Superiority with German movement; Gereon Müller links pro-drop to non-impoverished inflectional morphology; Christopher Wilder deals with English constructions with a directional locative and imperative; Adam Biały decomposes event structure; Katarzyna Sówka analyses the semantics of German verbs of giving; Ewa Bułat takes a fresh look at null subjects; Helen Trugman presents the distribution of adnominal adjectives in Russian; Agnieszka Pysz explores the same issue in Old English; Bożena Cetnarowska employs OT to describe possessives in Polish; Katarzyna Miechowicz-Mathiasen and Paweł Scheffler compare Polish and Italian reversible verbs; Radek Šimik describes different relative pronouns in Czech; Mojmir Dočekal discusses lack of WCO effects in Czech; Michael Moss argues for a complex structure of the Polish clause, and Jacek Witkoś demonstrates that control-as-movement penetrates CPs.

This volume is a posthumous revised edition of selected papers by Andrzej Kopcewicz on intertextual transactions in classic works of American and Irish fiction, published originally between 1992 and 2005. The book opens with a theoretical essay and proceeds with individual analyses of the interrelatedness, overlappings, entanglements, and reciprocities of some of the best-known works by Paul Auster and Herman Melville – Henry Adams, Frank R. Stockton and Thomas Pynchon – Donald Barthelme and James Joyce – James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Gilbert Sorrentino. The chapters lend themselves to being read in any order, selectively, and in isolation. Given a literal perspective by incongruity, however, the Joycean premise of the book is that a commodius vicus of recirculation (type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward) may bring the reader in any case (back) to the beginning.

The book is devoted to conceptual metaphors in English according to the level of abstraction in their target domains. The findings reveal a striking difference between mappings onto concrete domains and mappings onto abstract ones. In metaphors with concrete target domains, a preexisting similarity between the source and target concepts can be revealed or highlighted. In contrast, when the target domain is abstract, the similarity between the source and target concepts is created rather than merely revealed or highlighted. To some degree, creation of similarity is possible even with concrete domains, but in abstract ones it is necessary, not optional. This is because abstract concepts have little or no schematic structure in the first place. Since abstract concepts are classified in language as kinds of physical objects, they inherit rudimentary physical properties, such as density, weight, temperature, etc. Looking at metaphors from this perspective allows us to refine the existing theories of metaphor.

This corpus-based study examines the orthographic systems in thirteen editions of the Kalender of Shepherdes (1506–1656), a comprehensive compendium of prose and verse texts of different length and on a variety of subjects, for example, astronomy, agriculture, medicine, and religion. It focuses on the variation and consistency levels in the early-modern printers’ spelling practice, and evaluates the potential importance of extra-linguistic motivation for the identified regularising changes from the language authorities of the time, including lexicographers, spelling reformers, orthoepists, grammarians, and schoolmasters. Additionally, the book provides the reader with a brief overview of the printers’ punctuation, capitalisation, and word-division conventions, as well as with selected bibliographical and textual information concerning the publication history of the Kalender of Shepherdes.

The book aims to recognize or reject English in Kenya as a new, emancipated variety of English developing in a multilingual environment of permanent language contact. It discusses in detail the sociolinguistic situation in contemporary Kenya based on Labov’s extra-linguistic parameters and the results of a customized survey carried out by the author in Kenya. Furthermore, it identifies and describes characteristic stylistic, lexical, morphological and syntactic features of English in Kenya on the basis of the International Corpus of English (ICE). The theoretical framework employs Schneider’s Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes and an effort is made to put the amount of variation found in the ICE into a wider context of other varieties of English around the world.

The author addresses key questions of foreign language teaching: How does foreign language learning take place? What is the mechanism of foreign language use and learning? What are the sources of our understanding of these processes? What significance does our understanding have for foreign language teaching? The main argument is that, in order to deal with the complexity of language learning and meet the current demands for foreign language competency, we must employ the framework of an empirical, relatively autonomous discipline of Foreign Language Didactics, constituted as a «normal» science which strives to understand foreign language learning as its subject-matter. This constructivist psycholinguistic conception targets language learning processes in the real world, i.e. as language use in the context of verbal communication, i.e. comprehension and production in speech and writing. The processes are represented as taking place in the learner’s cognitive system for information processing in communicative interaction, a universal human phenomenon. This perspective leads to systematic options and strategies for the practical teaching of foreign languages with focus on English as a world language.

Language can be seen as a therapeutic tool to the visually impaired. The author explores the psycho-linguistic therapy «Touching the World» which is rooted within two areas. The mental one pivots on emotional openness and balance, gained through the sandtray therapy, controlled breathing practice, the Brain Linkage Method, and the edu-kinaesthetic area. The linguistic layer offers a two-pathed differentiation. Lexical and grammar fields are taught through the Re-charged Direct Method, enriched with sand and water experiments, based on tactile-audible perception. The author’s suggestions to explore language as a therapy tool show how deeply the possibilities and discoveries are hidden in a language teaching-learning process.

The ubiquity of mobile devices has opened the way to extending learning environments far beyond the constraints of the traditional foreign language classroom. This book seeks to advance the knowledge about effective learning and teaching of English for Medical Purposes supported by mobile environments. The author investigates the effectiveness of the use of a mobile version of a flashcard spaced-repetition learning platform. In conclusion, she presents core principles of an educational solution that supports the ongoing and situated learning of English for Medical Purposes by designing a mobile spaced-repetition medical vocabulary tutor («Mobile Medical English Companion»).

Numeral constructions in Polish are known for their complex morpho-syntax: in particular, depending on the type, case and syntactic context, the numeral may show properties of the adjective or the noun. This volume presents a comprehensive analysis of these constructions set in the current generative-minimalist model of grammar, with elements of nano-syntax. The authors pay particular attention to a feature-based derivation of the numeral construction in its different versions, including complex multiplicative numerals, as well as its distribution in the clause. Numerals in the subject position, with their peculiar case and agreement features become a focal point of attention. Their properties receive a principled account through the use of the case projection sequence and disciplined movements within it.

This book is a collection of critical essays on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) – one of the most influential American works of fiction. The presented interpretations deal not only with the principal characters of the novel, but also with «The Custom-House», the Spanish sailors, the Book of Revelations, and the artist as adulterer. The critical tools employed include allegory, the Biedermeier, hermeneutical exposition, semiosis of the infans, and triangular desire.This publication is dedicated to the memory of Andrzej Kopcewicz (1934-2007), the first professor ordinarius of American literature in the history of English studies in Poland, on the tenth anniversary of his death.

One of the well-known properties of Slavic languages is that they show subject-oriented reflexives. This book presents this phenomenon in Polish in great empirical detail and provides its up-to-date syntactic analysis, couched in the minimalist model of grammar. The analysis accounts for the fact that not only nominative subjects but also experiencers, both dative-marked and some accusative-marked, function as antecedents for reflexive elements. On the basis of empirical studies, the book explains why dative experiencers bind both reflexive and pronominal possessives in identical local configurations, while nominatve subjects bind only reflexive possessives. The authors investigate both long-distance binding relations in infinitives and contexts internal to nominal phrases. Extensive references are made to binding in other languages and alternative models.

The study presented in this book aimed to test the argument structure of ditransitive verbs in Polish with the use of quantifier scope interpretation. Since these verbs typically allow for relatively free object order, it is not clear whether any of the object orders is basic or if they constitute separate underlying structures. The study reports the results of five experiments testing acceptability of scope interpretation of Polish quantified objects in two object orders, using variables such as coordination, to reveal which scope changing mechanism is responsible for ambiguity. The results showed that only the DO-IO order allowed for scope ambiguity, however, to a different degree depending on the semantic class of the verb. This indicates that the merge position of objects is contingent upon that factor.

This book contains a selection of papers on issues of current interest in syntax and morpho-syntax. Most topics pertain to the question of the relation between word order and syntactic structure. The discussion starts with a proposal of extending the theory of relativization to reason clauses. It continues with the analysis of the realization of focus in Basque and the discussion of current views on the syntax of cleft constructions. Next, an inquiry into the rigidity of sentence left-periphery is offered in a cross-linguistic perspective. The two final contributions discuss feature-free derivations in syntax applied to a single morpho-syntactic problem, and the question of gradient acceptability of Polish sentences featuring possessive items in the context of the competition between their reflexive and pronominal forms.

There is no record of anything Herman Melville (1819–1891) may have thought or said about «Bartleby the Scrivener. A Story of Wall-Street», his single most famous tale, published just over 150 years ago today. It is actually for a whole gamut of reasons that the text is unlikely to ever yield an interpretive consensus gentium, the insights of such magisterial figures as F.O. Matthiessen, Ralph Ellison, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, or Slavoj Žižek notwithstanding. The volume adds to the nearly global ‘Bartleby Industry’ with contributions by Andrzej Kopcewicz (Poznań), Joseph Kuhn (Poznań), Marek Paryż (Warsaw), Tadeusz Rachwał (Warsaw), Janusz Semrau (Poznań), Tadeusz Sławek (Katowice), and Marek Wilczyński (Gdańsk). Written independently over a period of time, the readings range from circumferentially intertextual to intra-textually semiotic-medical to post-psychoanalytical to post-post-modern to re-de-constructive to neo-classical-symbolic to jurisprudential-allegorical.

This publication constitutes a selection of papers presented at the 6th International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech, New Sounds 2010, held in Poznań, Poland. It consists of two volumes, presenting state-of-the-art achievements and perspectives for future research related to the acquisition of second language phonetics and phonology. The key issues include the development of explanatory frameworks of phonological SLA, the expanded scope of domains under investigation, modern methods applied in phonological research, and a new take on the causal variables related to ultimate proficiency in L2 speech. This first volume contains a selection of 27 articles that cover a wide variety of themes including L2 speech perception and production, segmental and prosodic features, as well as factors related to foreign accentedness, individual variability and ultimate achievement in the acquisition of speech.