In a talk he gave in 1995 at a conference at Georgetown University, “Cultural Frictions: Medieval Cultural Studies in Post-Modern Contexts,” Paul Strohm asserted that “postmodernism is preoccupied with history, endlessly obsessed with history, and with the nature of the claims the past exerts upon us; it might almost be called a way of thinking…[Read more]

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that, when certain medieval and contemporary cultural texts are placed alongside each other — such as a fourteenth-century penitential handbook and the reality television show “Survivor,” or early fifteenth-century Lancastrian statecraft (Henry IV) and the stagecraft of George W. Bush’s presidential…[Read more]

This essay offers a consideration of Levinas’s philosophy of hospitality in relation to the terroristic figure of Grendel in the Old English poem “Beowulf,” in order to raise some questions about the vexed connections between ethics, violence and sovereignty, as well as between ethics and politics, both in the early Middle Ages and in our own t…[Read more]

“Liquid Beowulf” serves as the Introduction to “The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook” (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2006), and makes an argument for the Old English poem as a richly inter- and cross-temporal cultural response to historical traumas that still haunt our present moment and which also poses always important (and…[Read more]

The essays, manifestos, rants, screeds, pleas, soliloquies, telegrams, broadsides, eulogies, songs, harangues, confessions, laments, and acts of poetic terrorism in these two volumes — which collectively form an academic “rave” — were culled, with some later additions, from roundtable sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies…[Read more]

The work of L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, especially her psychoanalytic criticism of Chaucer, and her formulations of discontinuist historical approaches to the Middle Ages, has been extremely influential within medieval studies for several decades. More recently she has been focusing on more broad defenses of the humanities, especially with regard to…[Read more]

This study investigates the distribution of resumptive pronouns in subject-headed relative clauses in Colonial Valley Zapotec..

(Revised version) Submitted to B. Elan Dresher and Harry van der Hulst (eds.), The Oxford History of Phonology

Analizamos en este artículo las maneras en que la escritura experimental de Beckett subvierte el uso estándar de la persona pronominal, transformando al pronombre de primera persona y sus avatares en el protagonista de una línea argumental. Se expone así de modo gráfico cómo el valor estándar de un elemento lingüístico a nivel de sistema gramatic…[Read more]

Notes on the book Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer—a book by Richard E. Palmer (Evanston: Nortwestern UP, 1969). Part I: On the Definition, Scope, and Significance of Hermeneutics; Part II: Four Major Theorists (Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer); Part III: A Hermeneutical M…[Read more]

‘Narrative Theory’ is an online introduction to classical structuralist narratological analysis. The sixth section deals with the structural positioning of narrators with respect to the narrative act and the fictional world(s) contained by the narrative. Contents: 1. Author, narrator, and narrative person; 2. Kinds of narrative positions; 3.…[Read more]

The German sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) occupies an interesting place at the intersection of several streams of linguistic scholarship at the end of the nineteenth century. As Professor of East-Asian languages at the University of Leipzig from 1878 to 1889 and then Professor for Sinology and General L…[Read more]

On the phonological adaption of Armenian loanwords starting with plosives or fricatives in the Turkish dialects of the province Erzurum.

On conditional forms in the dialects of Erzumrum province, conditional constructions and temporal clauses.

The present article investigates a type of complex sentence in Turkish where the predicate
of the embedded clause is based on a conditional form followed by the particle de or
sometimes bile. The syntactic and semantic peculiarities of this construction in Turkish
are outlined according to the exhaustive description of concessive conditionals…[Read more]

There is a rich corpus of texts written in Zapotec during the Mexican colonial period that remains relatively understudied. The nature of the corpus poses significant challenges to would-be readers; for example, the texts were written using the Roman alphabet with few standardized spelling conventions, resulting in a large number of homographs and…[Read more]

Towards the end of his career, August Schleicher (1821–1868), the great consolidator of Indo-European historical-comparative linguistics in the mid-19th century, famously drew explicit parallels between linguistics and the new evolutionary theory of Darwinism. Based on this, it has become customary in linguistic historiography to refer to S…[Read more]

‘Narrative Theory’ is an online introduction to classical structuralist narratological analysis. This preliminary section provides an introduction to the notion of level of analysis in narrative, and examines a number of theories bearing on the structure of the fabula (Aristotle, Tomashevsky, Bal) and of the story (Genette), with attention to the…[Read more]

Document contains a preliminary partially annotated bibliography of key works on Ancient Greek dialectology, originally compiled in 2015.

From the early nineteenth century up until the first half of the twentieth century, many leading scholars in the emerging field of linguistics were occupied with what would today be considered a kind of linguistic typology. The various classifications of languages they proposed were generally intertwined with speculation about the “racial” tra…[Read more]