Institute of English Studies

Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured, and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? These are long-standing questions that have proven difficult to answer. To test between competing hypotheses, we constructed a massive repository of historical and archaeological information known as "Seshat: Global History Databank." We systematically coded data on 414 societies from 30 regions around the world spanning the last 10,000 years. We were able to capture information on 51 variables reflecting nine characteristics of human societies, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems. Our analyses revealed that these different characteristics show strong relationships with each other and that a single principal component captures around three-quarters of the observed variation. Furthermore, we found that different characteristics of social complexity are highly predictable across different world regions. These results suggest that key aspects of social organization are functionally related and do indeed coevolve in predictable ways. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history.

In the discourse of political interviews, references to coparticipants can be expressed explicitly by proper nouns and forms of address, and they can be expressed implicitly by personal pronouns and other indexical expressions. The meaning of personal pronouns is context dependent and retrievable only by inference, and therefore is less determinate. Furthermore, it can shift as the status of the participants shifts in interaction. This may occur both in terms of social roles and in terms of roles in talk and footing. In this context, an analysis was conducted of televised political interviews broadcast during the 1997 and 2001 British general elections and just before the war with Iraq in 2003. Question–response sequences were identified in which politicians made use of pronominal shifts as a form of equivocation. These sequences were analyzed in the context of Bavelas et al.'s (1990) theory of equivocation and Goman's (1981) concept of footing. In all but one of the questions, the interviewers sought to establish the politicians' authorship, whereas the politician typically responds in terms of the principal; in the other instance, the questioner sought to establish the position of the principal and the politician responds in terms of his own authorship. Possible strategic advantages of these forms of equivocation are discussed.

The multifaceted and heterogeneous category of common ground is central to theories of pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse and context. This book addresses current approaches to common ground from the novel perspective of lexical markers. The edited volume falls in two parts. The first part addresses the relationship between mechanisms of grounding and reference to common ground. The second part examines different types of common ground. It is shown that the investigation of lexical markers provides a novel perspective for investigating the relationship between grounding, common ground and common grounds. Contributions are by Sherri L. Condon and Claude G. Cech, Anita Fetzer, Kerstin Fischer, Francois Nemo, Thanh Nyan, Moeko Okada, Carlos Rodriguez Penagos, Karin Pittner and Thora Tenbrink. It reviews current approaches to common ground from the perspective of lexical markers. It is organized into two parts that discuss the relationship between mechanisms of grounding. It is a reference to common ground and the different types of common ground. It reflects current trends in the field that cross methodological boundaries and integrate cognition, context, genre, negotiation of meaning, and dialogue.

Abstract The Thesaurus of Old English (TOE), first published in 1995, had its origins in a body of slips derived from standard dictionaries, principally the Clark Hall and Merritt Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary and the Bosworth-Toller volumes. These slips were made to supply the Glasgow Historical Thesaurus (HT) project (1965–2009) with a firmer idea of the range and totality of Old English vocabulary than available in the OED. In 1976 the decision was taken to deploy the Old English materials as a pilot thesaurus for the HT. With compilation of the slips completed in 1982, researchers were able to begin sorting the slips into groupings based on meaning and to see areas of the HT classification take shape in miniature. The TOE data, absorbed into the larger structure of its parent project, allow us to view English words that disappeared by 1150 alongside those that continued in use.

By the end of the nineteenth century, evolution through natural selection had been widely accepted, but the means by which innate or acquired characteristics were transmitted from parent to offspring remained hotly contested. As the literary career of Vernon Lee makes evident, discussion of the validity of newly espoused theories was not limited to science. This essay explores Lee's lifelong engagement with emerging and often unproven ideas in heredity and evolutionary science by arguing, first, that rather than a unidirectional flow of ideas from experimental science to literature and the social sciences, there was instead a productive and creative trafficking between these fields; and, second, that despite Lee's early rejection of Lamarckism, she continued to utilize superseded paradigms to inform her writing in a number of fields outside evolutionary biology.

Why is semantic change in grammaticalization typically unidirectional? It is a well-established finding that in grammaticalizing constructions, more concrete meanings tend to evolve into more schematic meanings. Jäger & Rosenbach (2008) appeal to the psychological phenomenon of asymmetric priming in order to explain this tendency. This article aims to evaluate their proposal on the basis of experimental psycholinguistic evidence. Asymmetric priming is a pattern of cognitive association in which one idea strongly evokes another (i.e.paddlestrongly evokeswater), while that second idea does not evoke the first one with the same force (wateronly weakly evokespaddle). Asymmetric priming would elegantly explain why semantic change in grammaticalization tends to be unidirectional, as in the case of Englishbe going to, which has evolved out of the lexical verbgo. As yet, empirical engagement with Jäger & Rosenbach's hypothesis has been limited. We present experimental evidence from a maze task (Forsteret al.2009), in which we test whether asymmetric priming obtains between lexical forms (such asgo) and their grammaticalized counterparts (be going to). On the asymmetric priming hypothesis, the former should prime the latter, but not vice versa. Contrary to the hypothesis, we observe a negative priming effect: speakers who have recently been exposed to a lexical element are significantly slower to process its grammaticalized variant. We interpret this observation as a horror aequi phenomenon (Rohdenburg & Mondorf 2003).

Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late Victorian England addresses the late Victorian cultural crisis and aesthetic revolt in urban life, politics, literature and art, b

As its point of departure, this essay makes a clear distinction between genetic criticism and genetic editing. For both, the material as well as visual referent is the manuscript, specifically the draft manuscript. An argument is developed in detail that the draft manuscript is a document sui generis, is essentially “autographic” and thus ontologically distinct from all other forms and modes of “manuscript”. This brings into specific focus the editing of manuscripts. Defining manuscript editing (Handschriftenedition) as a distinct editorial mode leads to conceiving of the ”manuscript edition” anew under premises of the “autographic” singularity of draft manuscript writing. The editorial way to realize manuscript editing is to transform both the document (materiality-and-writing) dimension and the text dimension of the draft manuscript into editorial presentation and representation. This is also a way to bring manuscript editing into partnership with genetic criticism. Realization and use of the manuscript edition is conceivable in the digital medium only.

The court of Common Pleas was one of the most important courts in the English legal system for more than 600 years, until its abolition by Act of Parliament in 1873. The cases heard before this royal court were civil disputes between the king’s subjects, often relating to land, inheritance and debts. The purpose of this paper is to introduce readers to the ornament and imagery that appeared on the headings of the main records of the court of Common Pleas between 1422 and 1509 and to explore the origins and contemporary context of the images and representations employed by the clerk-artists who wrote and decorated these headings. The decoration they chose ranged from simple ornament to representations of plants, birds, animals and people. Great emphasis was placed on the role of the sovereign as the fount of justice, and this emphasis was reinforced by the incorporation of words and phrases, acclamations and verses from the Psalms chosen to underline the majesty and power of successive monarchs. The illustrations provide an important insight into the art, history and politics of late fifteenth-century England.

The evolution of basic color terms in language is claimed to be stimulated by technological development, involving technological control of color or exposure to artificially colored objects. Accordingly, technologically "simple" non-industrialized societies are expected to have poor lexicalization of color, i.e., only rudimentary lexica of 2, 3 or 4 basic color terms, with unnamed gaps in the color space. While it may indeed be the case that technology stimulates lexical growth of color terms, it is sometimes considered a sine qua non for color salience and lexicalization. We provide novel evidence that this overlooks the role of the natural environment, and people's engagement with the environment, in the evolution of color vocabulary. We introduce the Maniq-nomadic hunter-gatherers with no color technology, but who have a basic color lexicon of 6 or 7 terms, thus of the same order as large languages like Vietnamese and Hausa, and who routinely talk about color. We examine color language in Maniq and compare it to available data in other languages to demonstrate it has remarkably high consensual color term usage, on a par with English, and high coding efficiency. This shows colors can matter even for non-industrialized societies, suggesting technology is not necessary for color language. Instead, factors such as perceptual prominence of color in natural environments, its practical usefulness across communicative contexts, and symbolic importance can all stimulate elaboration of color language.

The Irish Women’s Franchise League was formed in 1908 by Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Margaret Cousins to act as a new and radical voice in the campaign for Irish women’s suffrage. As part of this ...

The Reading Experience Database 1450—1945 contains more than 25,000 pieces of evidence about reading habits and practices over five centuries, and of these, more than 1500 directly discuss the literary style of the works read, while others make indirect comments on style. This evidence shows literary critics and common readers alike commenting on issues of ‘good’ or ‘imitable’ style; describing how easy the work is to read aloud, recording their impressions of the ‘morality’ of the style; identifying anonymous authors by their style; and making literary judgements on the basis of style. By tracing these remarks over a long historical period (1450 to 1945), we can reconstruct the prevailing stylistic concerns of individual readers and communities of readers, and test grand historical or literary narratives against the everyday experiences of common readers. This article focuses on the period 1800—1945, and considers the ways in which the historicist and evidence-based methods of the new sub-discipline of the history of reading might be used to complement traditional stylistic analyses and methods.

Native and non-native discourse can never be 100% explicit, but rather is characterized by a high degree of implicitness, which is not only true for ordinary talk but also for media discourse. This is of particular relevance for the communicative act of a challenge, which represents a face-threatening act par excellence. This study examines the linguistic realization of challenges in British and German political interviews from the general elections in Britain (1997) and Germany (1998). It demonstrates language- and culture-specific preferences for communicating, interpreting and contextualizing challenges. Particular attention is given to different sociocultural practices in the context of media communication, in which coparticipants with different cultural backgrounds communicate and in which the media interview is watched by an audience with heterogeneous cultural backgrounds.

This article looks at the 1543 and 1555 copies of Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica in the British Library and University College London. The texts were examined for provenance information, looking at copy-specific evidence to investigate the ownership history from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. A wide range of provenance methods were explored to extract relevant information on use, readership, and ownership, considering how far these texts were used as practical medical textbooks, especially after the rise of book collecting in the eighteenth century. The collection habits of notable figures such as Sir Hans Sloane and Joseph Smith are considered through their ownership of medical texts. A previously unrecorded book stamp is also identified. This case study supports recent census research on Vesalius texts, suggesting that its readership was varied, and was not limited to an elite audience merely for display purposes.

This article argues that the emotional journey that Macbeth undergoes, culminating in extreme weariness, both physical and spiritual, can be illuminated with reference to early modern theories of mind–body relations as derived from Aristotle via Galen. Shakespeare's use of the language of humoral theory contributes significantly to his development of Macbeth as a character with an abnormal susceptibility to feeling. However, a materialistic account of his cognitive disorder coexists with a metaphysical one. The combination helps to create a figure whose passionate suffering, and constant analysis of his feelings, command audience sympathy.

This article traces chronologically the English reception of Dante's treatise on language and poetics De vulgari eloquentia. It focuses on the way such writers as Thomas Gray, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ezra Pound, W. P. Ker, I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce have engaged with the issues addressed in Dante's tract, in order to open up new avenues of research for scholars interested in the relations between English and Italian literature.

James Olney’s essay, ‘“I Was Born”: Slave Narratives, their Status as Autobiography and as Literature’, identifies a paradox and a problem for contemporary readers. Referring to African American texts, Olney points out that although slave narratives do not necessarily ‘qualify’ as either autobiography or literature, the African American literary tradition may be traced back to slave narratives, in theme, content, and form. 1 Olney’s observations raise the question of where and how slave narratives should be reprinted, anthologized, and criticized almost two centuries after the eras of abolition and emancipation and whether it is useful to regard them as ‘inaugural’ in some sense. 2 Following the recent flurry of editorial and critical activity in this area, it seems important to reflect on current critical approaches to early black writing, particularly with regard to a text such as The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by Herself (1831), published, as it was, at a specific historical juncture for a specific political purpose. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This volume presents the state of the art in digital scholarly editing. Drawing together the work of established and emerging researchers, it gives pause at a crucial moment in the history of technology in order to offer a sustained reflection on the practices involved in producing, editing and reading digital scholarly editions—and the theories that underpin them. The unrelenting progress of computer technology has changed the nature of textual scholarship at the most fundamental level: the way editors and scholars work, the tools they use to do such work and the research questions they attempt to answer have all been affected.

IntroductionThe objective of this paper is to offer some answers to two questions about the period 1550-1685 - a period which begins, more or less, with the reign of Elizabeth (1558) and also the defeat of the Spanish fleet by the Ottoman Navy near Tripoli (1560), and ends with the death of Charles II (1685), and also the failure of the Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683) that led to the signing of the peace treaty at Carlovitz (1699). Within this period, what did English readers know about the complex worlds that were lumped together under the catch-all term, 'Barbary', and by which means did they acquire that knowledge? In the attempt to seek to demonstrate some of the ways in which encounters in that narrow and contested space were read by, and impacted upon, the politics of culture in the whole island of Great Britain in a period marked by Civil War as well problems with revolting 'domestic foreigners' (Irish, Scots, Welsh) at home and conflicts with European competitors (Spanish, Dutch, French) in the lands of Ottoman hegemony, it will also focus upon critical readings of those texts by scholars in subsequent times. While reference will be made to forms such as travel tales and accounts by diplomats, stress will be placed on two sets of related sources: (a) because of their popularity, accounts of piracy and narratives of captivity; (b) conversely, because they seem to have escaped consideration, a body texts referred to as Articles of Peace and associated documents.Any attempt at making sense, in the present, of that body of texts read in their own time and re-constituted in times since must constantly bear in mind that it was not only that the Ottoman Empire had triumphed over the Hapsburg rival, but that within that Empire power had been devolved to regencies in Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli. Those operated side-by-side with the near neighbour, Morocco, which had defeated the former conqueror, Portugal (1578), but which was, for most commentators, part of 'Barbary'. In this it was unlike Tangier, which had been transferred to English control as part of the marriage settlement of Catherine of Braganza to Charles II (1662), though abandoned to Morocco (1684); which development, in its turn, ushered in a brief yet remarkably singular set of responses.Andrew Hess, in his appositely entitled volume The Forgotten Frontier,1 propounded the view that it was the shift in European (including English) interest to the New World that accounted for the relative marginalisation of European interest in this Mediterranean world: 'One reason for the near absence of interest in the history of the Ibero-African frontier during almost two hundred years is that it ceased to play a distinctive part in the evolution of either Muslim or European history'. This paper will suggest an alternative view: that what took place was not so much a marginalisation of encounters in the Mediterranean, but a re-fashioning of early modern tales that are being read by present-day scholars through the lenses of discourses fashioned in the subsequent periods of English colonial and imperial domination. The endeavours that celebrated that transformation might be summarised by two terms: misreadings; amnesia.The first of these, misreadings, can be illustrated by two examples of the kind of commentary that not only flourished in the period of British imperial dominance and whose afterglow continues in the present, particularly in a form wholly unencumbered by supporting evidence, but also marked by tendentious rhetoric. An 1816 account, part of whose title proclaims that it includes 'an account of the various attacks made upon them by several states of Europe', compares Tunis with Algiers to the advantage of the first-named:The inhabitants of Tunis are justly considered [it is not said by whom] greatly superior to the Algerines, on account of their civilization and politeness; they have had much more of commerce among them than the former, have made some progress in manufactures, and are in their manners friendly and obliging. …

The idea of any link between spiritualism and detective fiction seems totally contradictory. Classic detective fiction is a literature of logic in which everything has a scientific explanation. It is concerned with hard facts and encourages scepticism. The reader must learn to doubt everything he or she is told about events and characters and must automatically disbelieve such things as alibis. Spiritualism, on the other hand, involves suspension of logical faculties to believe in events and phenomena which cannot be explained in scientific or logical terms. However, it is interesting to note that the rise of the fictional detective coincided with the rise of spiritualism. Both began in the mid-nineteenth century and were widely popular in Britain from the turn of the century until the 1930s. Both attempt to explain mysteries. The medium’s rôle can be seen as being similar to that of a detective in a murder case. Both are trying to make the dead speak in order to reveal a truth. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.