You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Ireland possesses an early and exceptionally rich medieval vernacular tradition in which memory plays a key role. What attitudes to remembering and forgetting are expressed in secular early Irish texts? How do the texts conceptualise the past and what does this conceptualisation tell us about the present and future? Who mediates and validates different versions of the past and how is future remembrance guaranteed? This study approaches such questions through close readings of individual texts. It centres on three major aspects of medieval Irish memory culture: places and landscapes, the provision of information about the past by miraculously old eye-witnesses, and the personal, social and cu...
Irish saga literature represents the largest collection of vernacular narrative in existence from the early Middle Ages, using the tools of Christian literacy to retell myths and legends about the pagan past. This unique corpus remains marginal to standard histories of Western literature: its tales are widely read, but their literary artistry remains a puzzle to many even within Celtic studies. This book, the first to offer a systematic literary analysis of any single native Irish tale, aims to show how one particularly celebrated saga 'works' as a story: the Middle Irish tale Togail Bruidne Da Derga (The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel), which James Carney called 'the finest saga of the ea...
Bodies and their role in cultural discourse have been a constant focus in the humanities and social sciences in recent years, but comparatively few studies exist about Old Norse-Icelandic or early Irish literature. This study aims to redress this imbalance and presents carefully contextualised close readings of medieval texts. The chapters focus on the role of bodies in mediality discourse in various contexts: that of identity in relation to ideas about self and other, of inscribed and marked skin and of natural bodily matters such as defecation, urination and menstruation. By carefully discussing the sources in their cultural contexts, it becomes apparent that medieval Scandinavian and early Irish texts present their very own ideas about bodies and their role in structuring the narrated worlds of the texts. The study presents one of the first systematic examinations of bodies in these two literary traditions in terms of body criticism and emphasises the ingenuity and complexity of medieval texts.
This is Not a Grail Romance provides answers to some of the most important questions surrounding the medieval Welsh Arthurian tale Historia Peredur vab Efrawc, one of the few surviving medieval Welsh narrative compositions, and an important member of the ‘Grail’ family of medieval European narratives. The study demonstrates that Historia Peredur is an original Welsh composition, rather than (as previous theories have suggested) being an adaptation of the twelfth-century French grail romance. The new analysis of the structure of Historia Peredur presented here shows it to be as complex as it has always been thought – but also more formal, and the result of intentional and intricate design. The seeming inconsistencies or oddities in Historia Peredur can be understood by reading it in its medieval Welsh cultural context, allowing the modern reader a greater appreciation of both the narrative and the culture that produced it.
The focus of this volume is on the relation between synchrony and diachrony. It is examined in the light of the most recent theories of language change and linguistic variation. What has traditionally been treated as a dichotomy is now seen rather in terms of a dynamic interface. The contributions to this volume aim at exploring the most adequate tools to describe and understand the manifestations of this dynamic interface. Thorough analyses are offered on hot topics of the current linguistic debate, which are all involved in the analysis of the synchrony-diachrony interface: gradualness of change, synchronic variation and gradience, constructional approaches to grammaticalization, the role of contact-induced transfer in language change, analogy. Case studies are discussed from a variety of languages and dialects including English, Welsh, Latin, Italian and Italian dialects, Dutch, Swedish, German and German dialects, Hungarian. This volume is of great interest to a broad audience within linguistics, including historical linguistics, typology, pragmatics, and areal linguistics.
The concept of 'trigger' is a core concept of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. The idea that certain types of movement are triggered by some property of the target position is at least as old as the notion that the movement of noun phrases to the subject position is triggered by their need to receive nominative case. In more recent versions of syntactic theory, triggering mechanisms are thought to regulate all of movement. Furthermore, a quite narrow range of triggering mechanisms is permitted. As is to be expected, such a restrictive approach meets a variety of difficulties. Specifically, the question is whether all triggering elements required to cover displacement of all kinds in natural lan...
The volume collects papers from a multi-disciplinary workshop, held under the auspices of the European Science Foundation, which examined the idea of Celticism in its European contexts from the eighteenth century to the present. Linguists, historians, cultural theorists and literary critics from a range of European countries addressed for the first time in a sustained way how the idea of Celticism developed and how it affected many aspects of European culture. A primary focus of the volume is James Macpherson's Ossian, now under-going a re-estimation. Other topics which receive significant examination are Celticism as a force in cultural nationalism, Celticism in contemporary Christianity, primitivism, the image of the Celt in archaeology, historiography, political propaganda and the role of the idea of the Celtic in linguistic taxonomy. This pioneering work will be of interest to scholars and students in a wide range of subjects in which the nature, function and effect of cultural concepts and images are of central concern.
One of the basic grammatical categories in linguistics is the phonological word. But how are words made up in terms of their sounds? And how is the information on the sound structure of words used in the processing of words? The multidimensionality of the phonological word relates it to semantics, morphology, phonology and syntax. It is nevertheless a category that has only been an object of serious study since the prosodic turn in phonology and thus cannot be considered an established category of grammatical description. This volume brings together scholars interested in the complex relations of the phonological word, applying different empirical approaches.
This volume brings together a selection of papers from the eighteenth ‘Going Romance’ symposium, held at Leiden University, 9–11 December 2004. These papers cover a broad range of topics in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, and acquisition, in a variety of Romance languages.