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- Volume 11, Issue 1, 2018
English Text Construction - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 11, Issue 1, 2018
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Measuring emotional temperatures in Shakespeare’s drama
Author(s): Jonathan Culpeper, Alison Findlay, Beth Cortese and Mike Thelwallpp.: 10–37 (28)More LessAbstractThis paper demonstrates how the computational analysis of Shakespeare’s plays can map the emotional language used across individual plays and across the canon more broadly, affording new insights. It explains how we adapted the “sentiment analysis” tool SentiStrength for use with Early Modern English. Our analyses allow us to test out the long-held critical hypothesis that Shakespeare’s work moved from a comic to a “problem” and tragic period, and thence to a more optimistic redemptive mood in his last plays. The paper will also suggest how computational techniques can further understanding of genre, in particular the relationship between history and tragedy in Shakespeare’s work.
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Talking in asides in Shakespeare’s plays
Author(s): Roberta Mullinipp.: 38–59 (22)More LessAbstractOnly in the first Quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) and in that of Pericles (1609) can the stage direction “aside” be found. Nevertheless it is abundantly present in modern editions of Shakespearean plays, starting from Shakespeare’s first editors in the eighteenth century. Scholars have defined various categories for this particular theatrical convention (monological, ad spectatores, and dialogical), among which this article investigates the dialogical aside and the pragmatic strategies it involves, when dialogue becomes circumspect, so as not to be caught by other onstage bystanders. Following the results of a preliminary quantitative search, the plays analysed in detail are The Tempest, Henry VI, Part 3, and Antony and Cleopatra.
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Lear’s questions revisited
Author(s): Ulrich Bussepp.: 60–80 (21)More LessAbstractThis paper applies a pragmatic approach to King Lear’s questions. To this end the communicative function of different types of questions is worked out first. In a second step Lear’s questions are correlated to the dramatic development of the play. In terms of dramatic text construction, the two questions from the opening of the play – “Which of you shall we say doth love us most” (1.1.51) – and from the play’s final act – “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?” (5.3.305–6) – epitomise the complete change of the tragic hero from a more than self-assured person and instigator of his tragic downfall to a human being whose beliefs are shattered.
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‘Come what come may, Time, and the Houre, runs through the roughest Day’
Author(s): Marina Bondi and Annalisa Sezzipp.: 81–104 (24)More LessAbstractThe paper maps the lexico-grammatical resources of the representation of time in Macbeth, looking in particular at the way futurity is portrayed. The study is based on concordance analysis of the top full lexical items in frequency lists and of time-related keywords (generated using the other Shakespearian tragedies as a reference corpus). Paying particular attention to the occurrences in Macbeth and his wife’s speeches, the analysis centres on the collocations and semantic preferences of the items identified. The top full lexical items in the wordlist are shown to be related to the notion of time, especially contrasting the present and the future, hence contributing to the pace of the plot in the play. Keywords highlight the connection of the notion of time with the notion of fear and with the impossibility of predicting the future. In general, the analysis depicts a conceptual space in which time and futurity are not connected to hope but to fear, thus creating a menacing universe that has its origins in the protagonist himself, in the tension between deceitful prediction and frustrated volition.
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Taming iconicity in the Spanish and Italian translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Author(s): Francisco Gonzálvez-Garcíapp.: 105–140 (36)More LessAbstractBuilding on Tabakowska’s (1993, 2003, 2005, 2009, 2013) full-blown defense of a cognitive linguistic approach to literary translation as well as on previous research dealing with the implementations of Construction Grammar(s) for translation studies (Szymańska 2011a, 2011b; Serbina 2015), this paper critically examines the role of iconicity in selected lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnets capitalizing on the passage of Time-Death and their corresponding translations in present-day Spanish and Italian. Specifically, drawing on Cognitive Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006) and Contrastive Construction Grammar (Boas 2010a; Boas & Gonzálvez-García 2014), I focus on instances of secondary predication with verbs of sensory perception, causative constructions and aspectual constructions iconically connected with the above-mentioned motif and demonstrate that iconicity emerges as a very useful communicative ‘filter’ that can help to minimize any undesirable arbitrariness which may obscure the semantico-pragmatic interpretation of the source text and/or its rendering into the target text.
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The cognitive potential of antithesis
Author(s): Svitlana Shurma and Wei-lun Lupp.: 141–168 (28)More LessAbstractThis paper investigates the working of antithesis in Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy “To be, or not to be” and its three Ukrainian translations. In cognitive poetics, antithesis is often viewed as a verbal variety of conceptual oxymoron. However, this paper argues for distinguishing antithesis from conceptual oxymoron based on consideration of the different processes at work behind their creation and reading. Significantly, in antithesis the emergent meaning retains the dichotomy of two input spaces rather than creating a new one, as happens in conceptual oxymoron. In this context, we consider antithesis in English-Ukrainian translations against the backdrop of Kaluża’s (1984) reflection on asymmetry and irreversibility in antithesis. As will be seen, renditions into Ukrainian change the perception of the original antithesis prompted by structural and semantic changes in the translations.
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Notions of (inter)subjectivity
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A case for corpus stylistics
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