Mandarin nominals may appear bare or non-bare in various positions with different interpretations. Questions arise as to how Mandarin-speaking children interpret bare nominals, given that bare nominals can have various interpretations. On the other hand, how do they interpret non-bare nominals, such as demonstrative nominals? This experimental…[Read more]

Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s attenuation of language, the French Nobel Prize laureate Gao Xingjian has conducted various language experiments in his literary creations in the past two decades. Gao’s literary works, as Diaspora literature, have received extensive attention from European readers due to their Western modernist literary style, the aut…[Read more]

In 2003, David Mitchell’s editorial contact at the US branch of Random House moved from the publisher, leaving the American edition of Cloud Atlas (2004) without an editor for approximately three months. Meanwhile, the UK edition of the manuscript was undergoing a series of editorial changes and rewrites that were never synchronised back into t…[Read more]

Peter Pan helps Rita solve the mystery of a stray puzzle piece. Aldo looks at the clouds and decides to quit. A little girl insists on making everything in her coloring book orange. Eve defies darkness turning past dreams into future memories.

12 Random Words / 12 Palabras al Azar is a bilingual collection of interior vignettes told in both…[Read more]

A book review of Jerome McGann’s A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

Code switching is a practice exercised by multilingual speakers. Linguists define the term as the simultaneous use of more than one language. Code switching is prevalent in postcolonial countries in which the colonial language has continued to exist alongside the native language. In the past, code switching in the Arab world has been confined to…[Read more]

I used to share with my classes that ebooks are outselling books, and like the music industry, the book market is now digital. While the record business has shifted in profound ways with the rise of digital technology, the book press is still in flux. Digital book sales over the past couple of years have been fluctuating around book sales. As a…[Read more]

Read 8 January 2016 in Austin, TX, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, session number 218, “Quantity in English Verse: Linguistic and Neuroscience-Based Challenges to the Accentual Paradigm.” This short historiographical paper was the half-time show in our roundtable—an interlude between the session’s more substantive linguis…[Read more]