Linguae & Litterae – serie

In recent years, the study of unnatural narratives has become an exciting new but still disparate research program in narrative theory. For the first time, this collection of essays presents and discusses the new analytical tools that have so far been developed on the basis of unnatural novels, short stories, and plays and extends these findings through analyses of testimonies, comics, graphic novels, films, and oral narratives.Many narratives do not only mimetically reproduce the world as we know it but confront us with strange narrative worlds which rely on principles that have very little to do with the actual world around us. The essays in this collection develop new narratological tools and modeling systems which are designed to capture the strangeness and extravagance of such anti-realist narratives. Taken together, the essays offer a systematic investigation of anti-mimetic techniques and strategies that relate to different narrative parameters, different media, and different periods within literary history.

This volume embarks on an exploration of the processual and dynamic character of grammatical constructions in emergence, both from an ‘emergent’ and an ‘emerging’ perspective. ‘Emerging’ constructions develop out of their discourse contexts. Talking of emerging constructions is compatible with a view of grammar as a stable system of rules and structures which may ‘emerge’ (i.e., come into existence) out of a pool of previously unordered elements. ‘Emergent’ constructions on the contrary are due to the on-line production of grammar in time. The term ‘emergent’ emphasises the fact that a grammatical structure is always temporary and ephemeral. In both senses, grammar is modelled as a highly adaptive resource for interaction. On the basis of empirical studies on spoken English, German, Hebrew, Swedish and French, the volume addresses the following questions: How can what initially appears to be construction x end up being construction y in on-line syntax? What are the local interactional needs which such processes respond to in the process of their emergence? Does the on-line (re-)modelling of a construction concern its syntactic or semantic side ‑ or both? And finally: Should emergent grammatical structures as they unfold in real time be seen as stages in the emerging of grammar?

In variational linguistics, the concept of space has always been a central issue. However, different research traditions considering space coexisted for a long time separately. Traditional dialectology focused primarily on the diatopic dimension of linguistic variation, whereas in sociolinguistic studies diastratic and diaphasic dimensions were considered. For a long time only very few linguistic investigations tried to combine both research traditions in a two-dimensional design – a desideratum which is meant to be compensated by the contributions of this volume. The articles present findings from empirical studies which take on these different concepts and examine how they relate to one another. Besides dialectological and sociolinguistic concepts also a lay perspective of linguistic space is considered, a paradigm that is often referred to as “folk dialectology”. Many of the studies in this volume make use of new computational possibilities of processing and cartographically representing large corpora of linguistic data. The empirical studies incorporate findings from different linguistic communities in Europe and pursue the objective to shed light on the inter-relationship between the different concepts of space and their relevance to variational linguistics.

Linguistic complexity is one of the currently most hotly debated notions in linguistics. The essays in this volume reflect the intricacies of thinking about the complexity of languages and language varieties (here: of English) in three major contact-related fields of (and schools in) linguistics: creolistics, indigenization and nativization studies (i.e. in the realm of English linguistics, the “World Englishes” community), and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research: How can we adequately assess linguistic complexity? Should we be interested in absolute complexity or rather relative complexity? What is the extent to which language contact and/or (adult) language learning might lead to morphosyntactic simplification? The authors in this volume are all leading linguists in different areas of specialization, and they were asked to elaborate on those facets of linguistic complexity which are most relevant in their area of specialization, and/or which strike them as being most intriguing. The result is a collection of papers that is unique in bringing together leading representatives of three often disjunct fields of linguistic scholarship in which linguistic complexity is seen as a dynamic and inherently variable parameter.

Counterfactuality is currently a hotly debated topic. While for some disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive science, or psychology counterfactual scenarios have been an important object of study for quite a while, counterfactual thinking has in recent years emerged as a method of study for other disciplines, most notably the social sciences. This volume provides an overview of the current definitions and uses of the concept of counterfactuality in philosophy, historiography, political sciences, psychology, linguistics, physics, and literary studies. The individual contributions not only engage the controversies that the deployment of counterfactual thinking as a method still generates, they also highlight the concept’s potential to promote interdisciplinary exchange without neglecting the limitations and pitfalls of such a project. Moreover, the essays from literary studies, which make up about half of the volume, provide both a historical and a systematic perspective on the manifold ways in which counterfactual scenarios can be incorporated into and deployed in literary texts.

How do people interact when they are on the move? How do people interact in order to be mobile? How do people coordinate the mobility of others? How does mobility feature in social interaction? ‘Multimodal interaction’ and ‘mobility’ are of increasing interest to scholars across disciplines. Interaction and mobility is the first book to study these aspects comprehensively. It provides cutting-edge research by international scholars who use video-recordings of real-life everyday interactions for studying in close detail human social interaction in such diverse multimodal settings as airplanes, cars, traffic control centres, dance schools, museums and other public places, and as part of such activities as instructing, navigating, identifying an enemy on the battlefield, organising a meeting, playing videogames, shopping, performing and dancing. Together, these studies highlight features of social interaction, including language, embodied conduct, and spatial and material orientation, for being mobile, for interacting on the move, so that mobility becomes a ubiquitous feature of our lives. This book is a valuable resource to anyone interested in multimodal interaction and mobility.

Studies in Interactional Linguistics have provided impressive evidence of the systematic use of vocal, verbal, and visual resources in social interaction. While members of the field have discussed what role these resources play in a grammar of social interaction, they have focused primarily on lexico-syntactic structures. The contributions to the present volume, however, focus on prosody and embodiment, exploring the role prosody plays in interactional meaning-making and how visual-spatial resources such as gesture and gaze relate to the use of verbal and vocal resources. This volume includes contributions on Danish, English, French, German, and Swedish interaction, with a primary focus on Interactional Linguistics and additional work from multimodal corpora. This volume will be of theoretical and methodological interest to readers with a background in Linguistics, Conversation Analysis, and multimodal corpora.

‘Realism’ is a pervasive term in discussions of contemporary developments in the cultural sphere. By drawing on different theories of realism, the authors explore how the term may be used as a helpful concept in order to analyse and evaluate current trends in cultural production and, in turn, how cultural production changes our understanding of what counts as ‘realism’. The contributions deal with realism in narrative fiction, drama and audiovisual media (film, television news) within the context of national traditions: examples drawn on in the case studies range from Africa, Britain, Germany, Iceland, Russia, Turkey to the United States. While the authors take their cues from media-specific ‘realisms’, focusing especially on narrative fiction, the volume also highlights continuities and intersections between notions of realism in different genres and media. With its original essays, this collection invigorates the transdisciplinary engagement with forms and socio-political functions of realism in contemporary culture.

This volume explores the interface between linguistics and literary studies. Theoretical and textual analyses help illustrate the common features between everyday discourse and literature, and show the potentials for a collaborative approach between literary scholars and linguists in understanding speech acts and reference; inference, cognitive and cultural background; rhetoric, styles of speaking and writing; as well as perspectives and genres.

Plots, Designs, and Schemes is the first study that investigates the long history of American conspiracy theories from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. Since research in these fields has so far almost exclusively focused on the contemporary period, the book concentrates on the time before 1960. Four detailed case studies offer close readings of the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, fears of Catholic invasion during the 1830s to 1850s, antebellum conspiracy theories about slavery, and anxieties about Communist subversion during the 1950s. The study primarily engages with factual texts, such as sermons, pamphlets, political speeches, and confessional narratives, but it also analyzes how fears of conspiracy were dramatized and negotiated in fictional texts, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown (1835) or Hermann Melville's Benito Cereno (1855). The book offers three central insights: 1. The American predilection for conspiracy theorizing can be traced back to the co-presence and persistence of a specific epistemological paradigm that relates all effects to intentional human action, the ideology of republicanism, and the Puritan heritage. 2. Until far into the twentieth century, conspiracy theories were considered a perfectly legitimate form of knowledge. As such, they shaped how many Americans, elites as well as “common” people, understood and reacted to historical events. The Revolutionary War and the Civil War would not have occurred without widespread conspiracy theories. 3. Although most extant research claims the opposite, conspiracy theories have never been as marginal and unimportant as in the past decades. Their disqualification as stigmatized knowledge only occurred around 1960, and coincided with a shift from theories that detect conspiracies directed against the government to conspiracies by the government.

Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East is the first book to approach conspiracy theorizing from a decidedly comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. Whereas previous studies have engaged with conspiracy theories within national frameworks only, this collection of essays draws attention to the fact that conspiracist visions are transnational narratives that travel between and connect different cultures. It focuses on the United States and the Middle East because these two regions of the world are entangled in manifold ways and conspiracy theories are currently extremely prominent in both. The contributors to the volume are scholars of Middle Eastern Studies, Anthropology, History, Political Science, Cultural Studies, and American Studies, who approach the subject from a variety of different theories and methodologies. However, all of them share the fundamental assumption that conspiracy theories must not be dismissed out of hand or ridiculed. Usually wrong and frequently dangerous, they are nevertheless articulations of and distorted responses to needs and anxieties that must be taken seriously. Focusing on individual case studies and displaying a high sensitivity for local conditions and the cultural environment, the essays offer a nuanced image of the workings of conspiracy theories in the United States and the Middle East.