rss_2.0Sciendo RSS Feed for Studia Anglica Posnaniensiahttps://sciendo.com/journal/STAPhttps://www.sciendo.comhttps://sciendo-parsed.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/64738cb74e662f30ba541aa2/cover-image.jpghttps://sciendo.com/journal/STAP140216https://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2024.58.08<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>The aim of this paper is to examine the concept of ‘in-betweenness’ as a potential frame of reference for Zoë Wicomb’s writing, particularly her latest novel <italic>October</italic>. Hence, my primary intent is to focus on the novelist as equipped with a faculty for crossing over separate cultural traditions and embracing different formative experiences. Interestingly enough, in this case, the notion of indeterminate identity begins from, yet is not limited to, a South African version of racial profiling. Therefore, the author’s interest in adaptable identities might be discussed apropos of skin color, but also in terms of oscillating between different geographical, cultural locations. In light of the above, a perspective accommodated here examines Wicomb’s thematization and confirmation of transitional experiences elaborated on a story of two females as becoming autonomous coloureds as well as mutable/unfixed/migrating characters. And, on top of that, this singular focus coincides with a broader pattern, filtered through the author’s aggregate account. As a person of South African descent, yet currently living in Europe, Wicomb acknowledges a specific adaptive domain, which in turn serves as a fitting backdrop for construing contemporary South African-ness from a more nuanced, in-between/cosmopolitan position.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2024.58.082025-02-05T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2024.58.09<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Studies of interpreted political discourses in multiple contexts and language combinations have shown interpreters mitigating or intensifying ideologically loaded source texts. This article employs methods of the Discourse-Historical Approach to analyse ideological shifts between source texts and target texts across the left-right political spectrum. Qualitative analysis of a set of English-language European Parliament speeches and their interpretations into Polish identifies a variety of linguistic means through which the ideological load of source text references to political actors and phenomena may be weakened or strengthened. The results of a quantitative analysis point towards verb phrases being more susceptible to ideological shift than noun phrases, while the relationship between ideological shift and political orientation of the speaker requires further study. This paper contributes to the growing body of research highlighting the ideological and discourse-constructive potential of interpreters.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2024.58.092025-02-05T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2023.58.06<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Tamora, Queen of the Goths in Shakespeare’s <italic>Titus Andronicus</italic> (1594), belongs to a relatively substantial canon of pregnant characters in English early modern drama. Her pregnant embodiment has generated less critical interest than the pregnancies and maternities of later tragic heroines. In this paper I wish to reread Tamora’s non-normative pregnancy and her maternal authority against a tenuously established consensus on reproduction and maternity in the period. Thus, my primary aim is to trace Tamora’s monstrous gestational body as a locus of the discursive triangularity of gender, race, and reproduction. Tamora is a devoted and passionate mother to her adult sons but her mothering is complicated by her pregnancy and a problematic child product, a result of her relationship with Aaron. I wish to look at Tamora’s pregnancy in conjunction with her maternal practices, albeit keeping the gestational experience as distinct and separate from her motherhood. Tamora’s pregnant embodiment is further complicated by the birthing ritual glimpsed in the play. I argue that by materializing the dreaded fruit of miscegenation in and through the reproductive body, the play demonstrates the threatening porosity of the emerging gender-race system. By circumventing maternal authority, the play also unveils the vulnerability of the supposedly sacrosanct, female-exclusive ritual to external male violations. Rather than confirming the ritual’s universality, the play problematizes maternal and paternal authority at the backdrop of deep-seated fears of racial bodily difference.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2023.58.062025-02-05T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2023.58.04<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>In language study in the West, the nineteenth century was dominated by comparative philology, and the past century by general linguistics. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, linguists introduced ideas inconsistent with traditional comparative philology that foreshadowed general linguistics. While Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is recognized as a leading founder of general linguistics, other linguists also moved the discipline in this direction. We focus on Archibald Henry Sayce’s (1845–1933) <italic>Principles of Comparative Philology</italic> (1893) because it anticipated general linguistics, and because the book and its author have been overlooked despite their relevance to the history of linguistics. However, as the author of several works on the languages, literatures, and religions of the Ancient Near East, Sayce was regarded as one of the most erudite scholars of his time. As an example of Sayce’s innovative contribution, we examine his theoretical and methodological principles, including the need for inductive generalizations based on large samples of data, the value of lesser-known languages as a window onto fundamental principles of language, and the status of linguistics vis-à-vis emerging fields of related study. Sayce’s treatment of examples from non-Indo-European languages reflects a tension between comparative philology as it was practiced in the late nineteenth century and twentieth-century comparative and typological linguistics. On the one hand, the principles mentioned above are indicative of the uniformitarian principle, the emphasis on inductive generalizations in American structuralism, and the avoidance of various types of bias in modern typology. On the other hand, his reinterpretation of examples from the languages of North America, Southern Africa, and Tasmania as evidence of the lack of abstract and generic terms not only violated his methodological assumptions but was also consistent with the common nineteenth-century practice of treating words as an index of civilizational development.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2023.58.042025-02-05T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2023.58.07<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Brexit has undoubtedly been one of the most hotly debated topics in both European and world politics, setting a precedent in the history of European integration. Despite its unquestionably serious repercussions, a considerable part of Brexit media coverage was aimed at amusing the audience. An example of this includes Brexit-related covers of <italic>The Economist</italic>.</p> <p>The following paper looks at humour through the lens of the traditional incongruity theory reaching back to Aristotle. Humorous effects are examined and elucidated from a multimodal perspective, including both the visual and verbal layer of the covers and their interplay, as well as intertextual techniques relying on echoing artefacts of the verbal and visual culture.</p> <p>The data for the study were collected over the span of approximately four years, between June 2016 (the EU referendum) and February 2020 (Brexit). The empirical section of the study seeks to distil the prevailing trends among the humorous covers focusing on Brexit, paying due attention to the specificity of the genre (magazine cover) and the political background of the topic in question. The intermodal and intertextual relationships involved in creating humour are examined and categorised into the following major types: analogy, addition/extension, antithesis, ambiguity, and allusion/appropriation.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2023.58.072025-02-05T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2023.58.02<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>The aim of this work is to lemmatise the inflectional forms of the Old English nouns beginning with the letter L. This aim entails the classification of inflectional forms by declension type. The sources of the study comprise dictionaries and corpora of Old English, including the York corpora as well as <italic>ParCorOEv2. An open access annotated parallel corpus Old English-English</italic>. The methodology relies on database software, used for gathering and classifying information, which is structured, standardised, and made available for searches and information retrieval. The data include 1,657 inflectional forms, 1,639 of which are lemmatised with this method. A total of 1,149 inflectional forms are classified by type of declension and assigned to 435 lemmas. Most of them are declined according to the <italic>as</italic>-declension and the <italic>a</italic>-declension. The main conclusion of this study is that the lemmatisation method comprising linguistic analysis with lexical databases as well as a combination of lexicographical and textual sources of Old English produces solid results. From the methodological point of view, the master lemma list of <italic>ParCorOEv2</italic> is adequate for lemmatisation, as lemmas from this list have been assigned to all inflectional forms except 17. On the descriptive side, three new lemmas must be added to the current inventories to lemmatise the nouns beginning with the letter L.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2023.58.022024-03-28T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2022.57.09<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This paper aims to analyse the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in scientific writing through the use of stance adverbs <italic>perhaps</italic> and <italic>possibly</italic>. These adverbs act as markers of the authors’ presence expressing their views, and a covert relationship between these authors and their corresponding readership. The material used for this study includes four sub-corpora of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing: CETA (Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy), CEPhiT (Corpus of English Philosophy Texts), CHET (Corpus of English History Texts), and CELiST (Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts). Two of these represent the so-called soft sciences, and the other two the hard sciences, which will allow for comparison. The results might argue against the generally-assumed tendency in the history of scientific writing that this discourse has moved from being author-centred to object-centred. Perhaps it is simply impossible for writers of science to disappear completely from their texts.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2022.57.092022-12-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2022.57.10<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This paper compares the use of anaphoric reference terms, such as <italic>le dit</italic> (and its English equivalent <italic>the said</italic>), a characteristic feature of ‘curial style’, in Anglo-Norman (hence AN) and Middle English (hence ME) personal letters. Whilst we know that this style was prevalent in the official AN letters that were used to conduct English parliamentary business until the end of the 1300s, we do not yet have a clear understanding of the extent to which it was prevalent in both AN and ME personal letters, defined here as being written to one addressee who was known to the writer. The results show that there more anaphoric reference terms in the AN epistolary material than in the ME, and that the difference is statistically significant. However, these anaphoric reference devices are very much in evidence in the ME material as well, albeit in smaller numbers, suggesting a degree of influence, or emulation, or both. It is furthermore suggested that the use of anaphoric reference devices in both the AN and ME personal letters is more similar to their use in the literary texts discussed by Burnley (1986) than to their use in their more official, administrative epistolary forebears, i.e., they are often used in a looser, relaxed way, as a kind of ‘connective convenience’ (Burnley 1986: 610). Results relating to diachronic variation demonstrate that the reference terms are most common in the latest (1380s) AN letters and earliest (pre-1431) ME letters, perhaps suggesting a period of overlap. In relation to geographic distribution, ME anaphoric reference terms appear to be used more in letters written in London and Oxfordshire than in the East Anglian or Northern letters. Finally, in the AN corpora, the anaphoric reference devices are most frequently used by writers from the gentry and professions, a finding mirrored in the ME material. Overall, the paper highlights the importance of taking different discoursal contexts, and the deliberate emulation of styles within those contexts, into account when investigating the interaction between Anglo Norman and Middle English during the medieval period.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2022.57.102022-12-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2022.57.11ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2022.57.112023-03-04T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-0002ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-00022023-03-04T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-0008<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Research on bilingual education has looked mainly at the benefits bilingual programs offer learners with regard to cognition, education, and language. Fewer studies have explored the effect of bilingualism on mobility, employability, and intercultural competence, and even fewer have centered on these three dimensions at once. Considering the wide range of skills required to be a 21st-century global citizen, it is crucial to achieve a more balanced portrait of bilingualism. This study, part of a large-scale research project, seeks to contribute to expanding the body of research that examines mobility, employability, and intercultural competence together. A total of 417 participants living in Colombia filled out an online fourteen-item questionnaire and a background questionnaire designed by the members of the research project EDU2017-84800-R. Spearman correlations were computed between the three dimensions and a strong interrelation was revealed among the three of them. Data were analysed in terms of the differences between former bilingual education learners and mainstream learners as well as across gender. Statistical analyses revealed a strong interrelation among the three dimensions and higher scores for former bilinguals in all three dimensions. No differences across gender were identified. The findings support the crucial role of bilingual education in fostering the development of these three aspects in students’ perception. The originality of the study lies in the fact that the study has former bilingual education learners as participants instead of students who were in receipt of bilingual education at the time of completing the questionnaire, which had usually been the case in previous studies.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-00082022-10-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-0001<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>The present article offers a critical reading of the Old English <italic>Exodus,</italic> a poem that is an Old English versified adaptation of an episode from the biblical story of Exodus that narrates Israelites’ passage across the Red Sea and the destruction of Pharaoh’s army. The aim of this article is to analyse the poem’s urban and exilic imagery that strongly relies on the metaphorical representation of the Israelites as a city, as they are actually in exile and on the way to Canaan, and of the metaphorical representation of the walls of the Red Sea as the walls of a hall that is destroyed along with the Egyptian army. The argument of the present article is that in <italic>Exodus</italic> the poet uses the imagery of a hall and exile, derived from heroic and secular verse, as a hermeneutic key to read the biblical exodus typologically, tropologically, and anagogically. The metaphor of the key that opens the Scripture, which the poet uses in <italic>Exodus,</italic> encourages the reader to unveil the hidden meaning of the narrative. The poet inverts the conventional imagery of the hall and exile in the poem to emphasise narrative moments that require the reader to explore the letter of the poem for additional layers or signification.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-00012022-03-03T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2022.57.12<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This article focuses on the way <italic>nitchevo</italic>, a nineteenth-century Russian borrowing, was adopted into the English language. In order to investigate the history of the word, six digital text archives were considered. The results of the research are promising: not only do they allow one to trace antedatings for both senses, which updates the treatment of <italic>nitchevo</italic> in the <italic>Oxford English Dictionary</italic> (OED), but they also shed light on its semantic development, spelling variation, and route of transmission. Tellingly, albeit unsurprisingly, the evidence suggests that the press is responsible for boosting the recognition of the word on both sides of the Atlantic. All this indicates that the potential of modern research tools, including British and American newspaper archives, remains to be fully explored.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2022.57.122023-03-04T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2022.57.13<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>In this paper we look at two seemingly unrelated historical processes: affrication of the Old English (OE) palatalized velars [k^j] &gt; [tʃ], e.g., OE <italic>cild</italic> &gt; PDE <italic>child</italic>, OE <italic>cīosan</italic> &gt; PDE <italic>choose</italic>, and the Middle English (ME) vowel unrounding [y] &gt; [i] and [ø] &gt; [e]. More specifically, it is argued that the front rounded vowels [y] and [ø], as well as the palatalized velars [k^j] and [j], are complex melodic expressions containing two antagonistic resonance elements |I| and |U|. Furthermore, it is proposed here that the phonological system of ME witnessed a drastic change as a consequence of the introduction of the ban on the |I| and |U| merger. This *|I U| constraint is responsible for the loss of the resonance element |U| from the internal structure of both segments, which leads to the unrounding of the <italic>i</italic>-umlauted vowels and the affrication of the palatalized velars. This paper provides a detailed analysis of velar palatalization and its subsequent affrication, while additionally we address the questions of the lack of affrication before both <italic>i</italic>-umlauted and unrounded vowels, the palatalization and vocalization of the voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ and the chronology of affrication in the history of English.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.14746/stap.2022.57.132023-03-04T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-0005<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This paper explores the potential of legal documents for the study of the sociology of Old English. It gives a rationale for the use of legal genres, or charters, and introduces research databases and tools that may elucidate the interconnections between practitioners of legal Old English and their linguistic practices. A series of short case studies on wills illustrates what legal genres tell us about the correlation between linguistic variation, supralocalisation, and change and such variables as archive and gender.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-00052022-07-13T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-0003<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This study investigates the lexicalization patterns of six basic constructs of emotion in English: <italic>anger</italic>, <italic>disgust</italic>, <italic>fear</italic>, <italic>joy</italic>, <italic>sadness</italic>, and <italic>surprise</italic>. These words, along with all their synonyms in noun, verb, and adjective forms were recorded and supplied with corpus frequency data. The resulting catalogue of basic emotion terms in English was analyzed. The categories of words denoting different emotions were quantified in order to determine their relative cultural significance. Word frequency patterns were analyzed in order to determine any manifestations of display rules. The results indicate that in English all emotions are preferentially lexicalized as adjectives. Negative emotions are preferentially expressed as verbs, and positive emotions – as nouns. English boasts more words for negative than positive emotions, confirming the presence of the negative differentiation effect. At the same time, the less numerous words for positive emotions were found to be more frequently used, confirming the Pollyanna effect. The study revealed the central role of <italic>fear</italic> in the English-speaking world. Uniquely, <italic>fear</italic> was found to conceptually and semantically overlap with all other basic emotions regardless of their valence; the mean frequency of all the words denoting <italic>fear</italic> made it the second most frequent overtly, verbally communicated emotion in English – after <italic>joy</italic>.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-00032022-06-27T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-0004<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>I argue that <italic>The Aspern Papers</italic> takes up the question of aesthetic chastity in terms of the unnamed narrator’s pretended courtship of Tina when he was a lodger in her home, through which she finally achieves aesthetic-ethical freedom as a single woman. Like Isabel in <italic>The Portrait of a Lady</italic>, Tina at first does not appreciate her suitor’s self-interestedness, but then manages to establish her aesthetic-ethical autonomy by rendering her virginal spirit proof against its objectification and exploitation by the lodger, in a Kantian parable of freedom. Juliana’s jealous possession of Jeffrey Aspern’s papers and her imperious guardianship of Tina prompt a sustained exploration of Kantian and Saidian notions of interest and disinterest, in which Juliana’s machinations are generally comparable to Madame Merle’s. Kant’s idea of interest refers to bias in the formulation of aesthetic judgement, lacking the disinterest of a truly dispassionate judgement of beauty. Edward Said’s notion of interest represents imperial prejudice. From these two complementary perspectives, Tina’s struggle to transform her presumed feminine interest in masculine sponsorship allows her finally to attain complete disinterestedness in relation to the sexual, familial, historical, and political forces that press on her. On the other hand, the lodger’s ardent pursuit of Aspern’s private papers, tokens of the poet’s aesthetic achievement, involves an imperial agenda to wrest control of them for his own interest as a man of letters and connoisseur of poetry.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-00042022-06-27T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-0006<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Working on the hugely successful series of novels known collectively as <italic>A Song of Ice and Fire</italic>, George R. R. Martin is known to have drawn much of his inspiration from real-life events, landmarks in the history of the Middle Ages, such as the Hundred Years’ War, the Wars of the Roses, and the Crusades. It is not known, however, to what degree he actually relies in his work on sources of genuinely medieval provenance, since he himself frequently admits that amongst those that made the biggest impact on his writing are modern works of fiction, such as Maurice Druon’s heptalogy <italic>Les Rois maudits</italic> (2019 [1955–1977]). It is not impossible, though, that at least some features of Martin’s series have more or less direct parallels in medieval literature. One such element may be so-called kennings, the highly-stylised circumlocutions found in plenty in the poetic works of early Germanic literature and whose diction appears to shine through some of the series’ titles.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-00062022-08-08T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-0007<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Drawing on recent research on aesthetic emotions and folk aesthetics, the purpose of this paper is to look into the way aesthetic pleasure and negative aesthetic experience are described and rendered in the <italic>Old English Martyrology</italic> (OEM). Using different Old English lexical tools and an edition of the OEM with a translation, this paper analyses these two aesthetic responses taking into consideration the context of the composition of the text and the possibility that it was aimed towards the emotional education of a particular religious community. It argues that, to a certain extent, the author of the OEM standardises the aesthetic experiences that they narrate, both positive and negative, and associates them with particular religious and doctrinal messages that are aimed at providing sensory inputs through which the conceptualisation of abstract and religious experiences is facilitated.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2022-00072022-09-13T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2021-0005<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Old and Early Middle English did not yet have modal sentential adverbs of low probability. Old Norse did not have such words, either. From the 13th century onwards first epistemic prepositional phrases of Anglo-Norman origin functioning as modal adverbials consisting of the preposition <italic>per/par</italic> and nouns such as <italic>adventure</italic>, <italic>case</italic>, <italic>chance</italic> were borrowed into Middle English. In the late 15th century an analogous hybrid form <italic>per-hap(s)</italic>, the combination of the Old French preposition <italic>per/par</italic> ‘by, through’ and the Old Norse noun <italic>hap(p)</italic> ‘chance’, both singular and plural, was coined according to the same pattern and was gradually grammaticalized as a univerbated modal sentence adverb in Early Modern English. The Norse root <italic>happ-</italic> was the source of some other new (Late) Middle English words which had no cognate equivalents in the source language: the adjective <italic>happy</italic> with its derivatives <italic>happily</italic>, <italic>happiness</italic>, etc. and the verb <italic>happen</italic>.</p> <p>Together with another new Late Middle English formation <italic>may-be</italic>, a calque of French <italic>peutêtre</italic>, <italic>perhaps</italic> superseded the competing forms <italic>mayhap</italic>, (modal) <italic>happily</italic>, <italic>percase</italic>, <italic>peradventure</italic>, <italic>perchance</italic>, prepositional phrases with the noun <italic>hap</italic> and, finally, <italic>per-hap</italic> itself in Early Modern English after two centuries of lexical layering or multiple synonymy. The history of <italic>perhaps</italic> is a clear example of grammaticalization, whereby a prepositional phrase became a modal adverb now also used as a discourse marker. We find here all the typical features of the process: phonetic attrition, decategorization, univerbation, and obligatorification.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/stap-2021-00052022-02-12T00:00:00.000+00:00en-us-1