Books

Amadei-Pulice examines the conflict between Lope's dramatic formula (comedia) and the new polytechnic formula that in the hands of Calderon merged dramatic poetry with visual and auditory effects (comedia de teatro). The author places the Spanish baroque theater within the wider context of a revolution in the theory of representation, signs, and meanings that took place at the beginning of the seventeenth century and marked the appearance of a new dramatic style: the stile rappresentativo. Special attention is given to the techniques and applications of perspectival scenery, stagecraft, optics, and the creation of visual and sound effects contributed by the Florentine melodramma. The highlighting of Italian dramatic theory and practice reveals that Calderon was an innovator and creator of a new concept in theater.

Telephone helplines have become one of the most pervasive sites of expert-lay interaction in modern societies throughout the world. Yet surprisingly little is known of the in situ, language-based processes of help-seeking and help-giving behavior that occurs within them. This collection of original studies by both internationally renowned and emerging scholars seeks to improve upon this state of affairs. It does so by offering some of the first systematic investigations of naturally-occurring spoken interaction in telephone helplines. Using the methods of Conversation Analysis, each of the contributors offers a detailed investigation into the skills and competencies that callers and call-takers routinely draw upon when engaging one another within a range of helplines. Helplines in the US, the UK, Australia, Scandinavia, The Netherlands, and Ireland, dealing with the provision of healthcare, emotional support and counselling, technical assistance and consumer rights, tourism and finance, make up the studies in the volume. Collectively and individually, the research provides fascinating insight into an under-researched area of modern living and demonstrates the relevance and potential of helplines for the growing field of institutional interaction.

This book will be of interest to students of communication, applied linguistics, discourse and conversation, sociology, counselling, technology and work, social psychology and anthropology.

This volume on the Cameroonian English contains two main sections. The first section is devoted to the history of language contact in Cameroon (contact with Islam and contact with Europeans); the development of English in Cameroon; the teaching of English in Cameroon in various stages of its history; and on idiosyncratic aspects of this variety of English. The second section is the text part of the volume consisting of sixteen printed texts (mostly modern but also five extracts of historical significance), eleven written texts (essays on pedagogical subjects, personal letters, a folk history, an academic paper, and literary extracts) and 13 oral texts (interviews, radio). These texts have been selected because of their linguistic interest and because of the information they provide on Cameroonian life and culture.

This collection contains a selection of papers presented a the very First All-European Canandian Studies Conference that took place in The Hague, October 24-27, 1990. This unique meeting took place for the first time in the history of Canadian Studies. The focus of the papers is on the future rather than the past and it took place at a moment in time when Canada went through major crises that raised serious doubts about the country’s future. The papers of this volume explore the main issues and problems that Canada faces. The volume contains sections on demography, environmental problems, economic transformations, Canadian identity, political power structure, aboriginal issues and Canada’s international relations. As a whole the book takes stock where Canada stands and where it is going.

The multiplicity of parallel identities that make up our personalities is a phenomenon in which our individual identitary choices merge with diverse collective identities. The present volume is a contribution to the field of Identity Studies, but from a clearly linguistic perspective. It unites several contributions which analyze discourses centered on national or regional identities – as for instance the Catalanity of the frontier city of Lleida, the connection between the natural environment and the conceptualization of deictic space, or the dialectics between center and periphery. Other chapters try to shed light on problems arising from the particular situation of Catalan as a non-state language. The contributions thus range from aspects of Cultural Studies on identities and their constituting discourses to Catalan linguistics and sociolinguistics.

It has always been thought difficult, if not impossible, to define what the philosophy of Carlyle was. Ever since the publication of Sartor Resartus in 1833-1834, the view that Carlyle had a theistic conception of the universe has been defended as well as opposed. At a time, therefore, when Carlyle’s work as a whole is being reappraised, his philosophy should first and foremost be dealt with. Carlyle’s life-philosophy is based on the inner experience of a process of ‘conversion’, which set in with an incident that occurred to him at Leith Walk, Edinburgh. This study – which settles the old question of the date of the incident – demonstrates that the inner struggle, the dynamics of which are described most fully in Sartor, is analogous to the Jungian process of individuation. For the first time in critical literature, the basic ideas of Carlyle’s philosophy are thus linked to depth psychology and shown to be analogous to the fundamental concepts of Analytical Psychology.

In recent criticism, it has been asserted that the crisis recorded in Sartor is akin to the crisis of doubt said to underlie Jean Paul’s “Rede des todten Christus” (1796), which is probably the first poetic expression of nihilism in European literature and has become a classic. Apart from demonstrating that, in the last fifty years at least, the “Rede” has erroneously been interpreted as a dream of annihilation, this book invalidates the view of Jean Paul as victim of the skepticism of his age, and argues that, contrary to what is usually maintained, the “Rede” is not the document of a crisis, but of a belief which had become antiquated and obsolete for Carlyle.

The papers in this volume can be grouped into two broad, overlapping classes: those dealing primarily with case and those dealing primarily with grammatical relations. With regard to case, topics include descriptions of the case systems of two Caucasian languages, the problems of determining how many cases Russian has and whether Hungarian has a case system at all, the issue of case-combining, the retention of the dative in Swedish dialects, and genitive objects in the languages of Europe. With regard to grammatical relations, topics include the order of obliques in OV and VO languages, the effects of the referential hierarchy on the distribution of grammatical relations, the problem of whether the passive requires a subject category, the relation between subjecthood and definiteness, and the issue of how the loss of case and aspectual systems triggers the use of compensatory mechanisms in heritage Russian.

This volume presents an analysis of Russian case from a sign-oriented perspective. The study was inspired by William Diver’s analysis of Latin case and follows the spirit of the Columbia School of linguistics. The fundamental premise that underlies this volume is that language is a communicative tool shaped by human behavior.In this study, case is viewed as a semantic entity. Each case is assigned an invariant meaning within a larger semantic system, which is validated through numerous examples from spoken language and literary texts to illustrate that the distribution of cases is semantically motivated and defined by communicative principles that can be associated with human behavior.

Adopting the theoretical framework of the minimalist program, this study of syntactic limitations on complement configuration investigates the link between thematic external arguments and case. Using evidence from pronominal, psychological experiencer, and inalienable constructions, it argues that both accusative and dative are structural cases in French and that this duality is reflected in a parallel limit on argument projection. Larson’s single complement hypothesis, which allows a maximum of two internal arguments, provides the theoretical justification for this proposal. The testing ground for the binary hypothesis is a group of nonthematic subject constructions involving undative as well as unaccusative verbs, linking, according to Burzio’s generalization, case suspension and lack of an internal argument. The investigation of these constructions and those involving partitive case provides not only a theoretically significant contribution to our understanding of grammar, but also a motivated explanation for a number of empirical problems in French.