Library: Language, Literature, and Linguistic

Joseph Conrad's novella "Heart of Darkness" (1899) is taught and read all over the world. Everywhere, novelists and travel writers respond to it in their own creative work. I discuss 30 responses, or rewritings, from Africa, India, the Caribbean, Australia, Europe and the US. Their perspectives include those of groups who identify with Conrad's Europeans and groups who feel close to his Africans, and increasingly those of groups who situate themselves between these two extremes in various ways. I identify world-wide developments as well as themes, strategies and paradigm shifts that co...

(Note: Dissertation is written in Spanish.) The principal aim of this thesis is to discover the origin, formulation and effect of what is known as a “strategic behaviour”. A very well-known type of strategic behaviour is the persuasive behaviour, the purpose of which is to produce changes in the ideas, behaviour or feelings of a person. The corpus chosen for analysis has been one made up of five parliamentary sessions which preceded and followed the 1988 Education Reform Act. This acts represents the most important governmental initiative in the education service of England and Wales si...

This thesis dissertation, written in Spanish, presents a new model for the linguistic specification and the computational management of man-machine dialogues following commands issued in spoken natural language. Our aim is to design and implement a conversational system for the automatic telephone task scenario, namely Delfos. Voice dialing represents a current trend in research, the purpose of which is to provide functional systems for products ranging from domestic appliances such as a video or a washing machine to more sophisticated environments such as a complete house, with an interface i...

This study attempts to re-evaluate Lawrence's poetry, which has often been read as a set of biographical documents or supplementary notes to his novels, as fully independent literary work in the light of post-modern critical theory. The author carefully examines how Lawrence needed to misread his precursors, the nineteenth-century Romantics, to establish himself as one of the modern poets. What separates his poetry from his precursors' is his self-consciousness as a modern poet. His search for radical freedom in language and his meta-poetic exploration of a new poetic expression make him a tr...

James Hogg, a Scottish writer, was the founder of the psychological novel. He perfectly understood the notions of dream and reality, the danger of the voyage in “Nancy Chilshom”, the world of the illusions, the lure, madness and strangeness towards the reality of the tragedy, the kingdom of the fairies, death, the finality of art, the supernatural, the Devil and sorcery in Scotland, the Scotland-England couple : the female nation and the male devastator, the carnival of the masks and the reality of his Masonic initiation at the end of his life.

Modality is a grammatical, or semantic-grammatical, category. It is an important component of human languages. This is at least the case in most European languages. To what extent is it a near-universal? This thesis is to contribute to the question. It focuses on modal verbs in English and Chinese, two genetically and geographically unrelated languages, and analyzes what these two languages have in common and how they differ in their systems of modality. To achieve the aim, the thesis adopts the theoretical framework proposed by van der Auwera (1996, 1998 with Plungian, 2001) for the typol...

(Complete work in Spanish) This study proposes a new genre: La novela de las transnacionales, which is derived from regrouping several types of novels within the category of the Novela Social of “tendencia antiimperialista”. The key element of this work is to identify the basic characteristics of form and content that allow the definition of this new classification. Acknowledging the fact that there are a great number of novels that address -to varying degrees- the topic of the transnational companies (TNCs), this work is based on three representative novels that comprise the ...

This work elaborates R. W. Emerson s modification of S. T. Coleridge s central philosophical-aesthetic notions, such as imagination, reason, genius and symbol. Although Kant s and Schelling s idealistic philosophy, various pantheistic theories and Neoplatonism are identified as Coleridge s and Emerson s congenial intellectual and spiritual background, the author draws yet more attention to subtle differences between the English Romantic Coleridge and the American transcendentalist Emerson, which allow us to recognize that we deal with two distinct philosophical and poetic ...

When J. Henry Shorthouse (1834-1903) published John Inglesant in 1881, he contributed a unique synthesis of Anglo-Catholic sensibilities to the enduring legacy of the Oxford Movement. Although his "philosophical romance" has been acclaimed "the greatest Anglo-Catholic novel in English literature" and "the one English novel that speaks immediately to human intuition without regard to the reader's own faith or philosophy", his most enduring contributions are the "religion of John Inglesant", an Anglo-Catholic synthesis of obedience and freedom, faith and reason, and the sacramental vision of "t...

This dissertation provides a coherent, synchronic, broad-coverage, generative phonology of Russian. I test the grammar empirically in a number of ways to determine its goodness of fit to Russian. In taking this approach, I aim to avoid making untested (or even incoherent) generalizations based on only a handful of examples. In most cases, the tests show that there are exceptions to the theory, but at least we know what the exceptions are, a baseline is set against which future theories can be measured, and in most ca...