The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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Indigenous Australia in the Anthropocene
No full textRevivalistics is a new comparative, global, trans-disciplinary field of enquiry studying comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one
hand, and particularistic peculiarities and cultural relativist idiosyncrasies on the other, apparent in linguistic reclamation, revitalization and reinvigoration across various sociological backgrounds, all over the globe. This article introduces revivalistics, and postulates heritage language as core to people’s wellbeing, spirituality and happiness. Hallett, Chandler and Lalonde reported a clear correlation between lack of conversational knowledge in the native tongue and youth suicide. However, so far there has been no systematic study of a correlation in the other direction, i.e. the impact of language revival on empowered wellbeing, improved mental health and reduction in suicide. This is partly because language reclamation is still rare. This article hypothesizes that just as language loss increases suicide rate, language gain reduces suicide rate, improves wellbeing and increases spirituality. The article focuses on the Barngarla Aboriginal language of Eyre Peninsula, South Australia. Barngarla became a Dreaming, Sleeping Beauty tongue in the 1960s. It belongs to the Thura-Yura language group, which is part of the Pama-Nyungan language family, which includes 306 out of 400 Aboriginal languages in Australia, and whose name is a merism derived from the two end-points of the range: the Pama languages of northeast Australia (where the word for ‘man’ is ‘pama’) and the Nyungan languages of southwest Australia (where the word for ‘man’ is ‘nyunga’). The author of this article has been facilitating the Barngarla reclamation since 14 September 2011
Australian Seascapes
No full textThis paper will consider the relationship between Australian Literature and World Literature through the figures of the antipodes and the planet. It will suggest that a planetary configuration – two-thirds water, one-third land – changes the relationship between human constructions and natural entities. This introduces into discourse a kind of apophasis, a variant of negative theology, in which social meaning is always liable to be transposed or inverted. The ocean, in other words, enters into the dynamic of Australian literature and culture within form and language as well as through more overt environmental themes. This paper will consider how this complex aesthetic plays out in the representation of seascapes across a range of Australian painters (e.g. Tom Roberts) and writers, from Ada Cambridge in the late-19th century through to Kenneth Slessor in the modernist period along with Alexis Wright and Les Murray in the contemporary era
A Commentary on “(Why) Are Open Research Practices the Future for the Study of Language Learning?”
No full textA Usage-Based, Constructional Analysis of Pleonastic Conditionals in English
No full textThis paper investigates so-called pleonastic conditionals (PCs) in Present Day English, e.g. If you have to, you have to or When duty calls, duty calls. PCs are rhetorical statements in which the antecedent and the consequent are formally and semantically identical. The construction is characterized by stylistic reduplication and semantic redundancy. It is exactly this tautological nature which has a considerable effect on the discourse-pragmatic functions of the construction. The paper analyzes the construction’s frequency, form and functions by looking at data from three BYU corpora: the Movie Corpus (Davies, 2019), the TV Corpus (Davies, 2019), the Corpus of American Soap Operas (Davies, 2011). 2151 examples of if - and when -PCs are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. It is argued that PCs are functionally too different to be classified as default conditionals in the strict sense simply because they do not express a condition or inference. PCs are constructions used to express acceptance, indifference or certainty of the proposition. On top of that, they also code prototypicality which is a function completely overlooked in the literature so far. A Logistic Regression Model is fitted to predict the choice of the connector if or when . The statistical analysis confirms that the two types have different constructional profiles. With regards to theoretical modeling, the paper analyzes PCs from a usage-based, cognitive, construction grammar point of view and sketches the constructions’ form-meaning parings as well as their horizontal and vertical connections in the constructicon.Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg im Breisgau (1016
MacLeish/Oppenheimer, Trump, and the Conquest of America
No full textArchibald MacLeish (Pulitzer prize-winning poet/playwright) published his highly acclaimed essay "The Conquest of America" in the August 1949 Atlantic Monthly. His essay focused on an American crisis of national purpose, and central to his account is the importance of a national image for America. In particular, he called for a redeclaration of American purpose by appealing to a Jeffersonian "Revolution of the Individual." MacLeish’s friend Robert Oppenheimer responded to his essay with high praise but also criticism. In this article, we use the MacLeish/ Oppenheimer exchange as a springboard for a discussion of the crisis of American democracy today exemplified by the election of Donald Trump. We take a synthetic approach, relying not simply on MacLeish/Oppenheimer but more importantly on contemporary scholars. We attempt to construct an American image with a realistic meaning for today. The image includes three interweaving political components—Liberal Democracy, Liberal Nationalism, Liberal Internationalism—complemented by America’s historical role as Democracy’s Vital Center. After sketching this national image, we discuss each component, touching on several contemporary issues as well as the general nature of the image in light of Trump and the current crisis of American democracy
