Search Results

This chapter reports on the construction of a new resource, the Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (PLAEME). Prose is underrepresented in the period 1250-1350, which is why this period is also underrepresented in the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (PPCHE). This data gap is unfortunate, as we know that the period is important for morphosyntactic change. PLAEME addresses that data gap by transforming material from the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) into the same format as the PPCHE. The chapter present a detailed account of its construction, as well as three case studies replicating three recent studies of Middle English syntax: the establishment of not as the expression of sentential negation (Ecay and Tamminga 2017), the fixing of the syntax of the dative alternation (Bacovcin 2017), and the introduction of argumental headed wh-relative clauses (Gisborne and Truswell 2017). These case studies show that PLAEME allows these changes to be charted in much greater detail, and hence demonstrates how PLAEME fills an important data gap.

We can learn much from independently explaining the absence of citizen control. Where programmes have failed to empower there are at least two sufficient explanations. One is the absence of participatory leadership alone, which resonates with the idea that participatory leadership is a necessary condition for success. The other is the combined absence of bureaucratic support, autonomous civil society, and financial freedoms. Designers/adopters of participatory programmes are reminded that the otherwise beneficial features of political leadership can be immaterial where civil society and organisational staff participation is desultory, and funds are lacking. A key remaining puzzle is what distinguishes citizen control from its absence in cases where participatory leadership is present. The answers to this question remain inconclusive. Future research may need to investigate more closely whether the presence of some conditions are beneficial in the early stages of development of a PB but less so later and vice versa.

This chapter develops an acute sense of the contingency that necessarily unfolds in the wake of Hegel’s account of personhood, specifically in terms of the structure of contract. In the pursuit of one’s own interests in terms of property, Hegel’s analysis leads to the inevitability of exchange amongst persons (contract). The chapter aims to demonstrate that because contracts are contingent upon persons’ self-interests they are prone to violation: one may just as well respect their contract as violate it. Right, framed in terms of contract, dialectically mutates into wrong and crime. The chapter that the natural dimension of the individual, understood as immediate drive etc., is crucial to criminal violations of right. Subsequently, the chapter develops a sustained critical reading of Hegel on this speculative rendering of the structure of crime. Drawing from key theorists in postcolonial and critical race studies, the chapter accentuates the problematic colonial impulse permeating Hegel’s position, exposes the ways in which it grounds criminality in the ‘natural’, ‘metaphysical’ depth of the juridical subject.

This chapter re-reads the work of Alain Badiou as a probing of the problem of negativity. Tracing the history of Badiou’s political involvement in the radical Maoist formations of the 1970s suggests how he tries to articulate a politics of destruction and subtraction. Turning to Badiou’s more recent work on formalising the logic of negation the chapter traces inconsistency in the attempt to subordinate negation to affirmation. Probing Badiou’s dismissal of certain radical forms of politics as forms of nihilism the chapter closes with a consideration, prompted by Badiou, of the Western as an aesthetic form able to convey a sense of political courage. Against his explicit intentions, Badiou’s work gives a sense of what it might mean to depart from the ‘affirmationist consensus’, and the possibilities of an alternative form of political negativity.

This chapter further draws on strands of scholarship both within and outside of Chinese studies. It engages poststructuralist theories of gender, sociological theories of masculinities, and postcolonial theories of uneven transcultural exchange between the East and the West. More importantly, this chapter advances a new series of theoretical conceptualizations including “differentiation” (strategic positioning and gender performance), “negation” and “affirmation” (two indispensable mechanisms in the appropriation of Others in pursuit of global recognition), and “feminine space” and “brutalization of scholars” (two complex parameters to examine the reformulation of intellectual masculinities).

Critical realism attempted to ground dialectics in realism.Roy Bhaskar insisted on presenting the epistemological validity of mechanisms which, as he maintains, encompass both perception and the laws that guide science towards predictability. Bhaskar’s conception of dialectics is already apparent in his A Realist Theory of Science, and it governs all his work until his Dialectic, which is probably one of his final contributions to the issue of science and epistemology. In the present chapter I argue that his idea of predictability in science through mechanisms is of a pre-critical character and that he fails to acknowledge that norms generate rationality.Although Bhaskar claims to place dialectics within reality, he fails to grasp that his claim is not enough for an ‘other’ epistemology over which he also claims jurisdiction. He grounds an epistemological ontology that renders dialectics testable but not accountable, which leads him to form more an epistemological methodology and less an ontology of science, as he initially wished. My critique focuses on the issue that while his dialectics might generate a methodological testability, it neither signifies a commitment for science to theorize and act rationally, nor renders it accountable to the consequences of science within social conditions.

This chapter examines the thesis that the salient feature of modern Jewish thought is the dialogical imagination, an act of theopoiesis centered on the figural iconization of the invisible deity in anthropomorphic and anthropopathic terms. The emphasis on the dialogical, which proceeds from Hermann Cohen's logical principle of correlation, bears the risk that what should not be subject to imaginary representation invariably will be so represented, even in the guise of the nonrepresentable. Transcendence, which is a property of the uniqueness (Einzigkeit) as opposed to the unity (Einheit) of God, signifies the utter dissimilarity and incommensurability of the divine; inescapably, however, the transcendent becomes immanent to thinking insofar as there is no way to think the unthinkable that does not encroach on its unthinkability. The infinitude of transcendence is unknowable, not because there is some hidden essence that cannot be known, but because transcendence is expressive of the continuous manifestations of finitude by which the unlimited is delimited. The chasm between infinite and finite is narrowed to the extent that the transcendent is immanent, which is necessitated by the fact that God serves as an ethical ideal that imposes a mutual obligation on divine and human through the mediation of the world. Moreover, to generate the personification of transcendence, which is required by Cohen's own notion of divine forgiveness and goodness, the archetype, the originary-image whence all images originate, would have to be conceived itself imagistically. Like Cohen, Rosenzweig and Buber promote a dialogical thinking that is rooted in the principle of correlation that preserves the separate identities of God, human, and world. But they, too, acquiesce inevitably to the anthropocentric personification of transcendence.

This chapter investigates the apophatic by turning to the role of immanence and transcendence in the thought of Edith Wyschogrod. More specifically, my analysis charts the ways in which Wyschogrod offers a deconstructive Jewish philosophy that may be called call, borrowing her own taxonomy, an immanent a/theology. What drives her post-phenomenological and post-structural analyses is her philosophical grappling with her Jewishness. This is not to parochialize her thought; on the contrary, it seems to me that, in the spirit of Levinas, she saw the particular as the only feasible way to implement the universal without reducing the other to the identity of the same. Contra Levinas, however, she did not seek a synthesis of Jewish revelation and Greek thought. On balance, I would proffer that her approach is characterized better by Derrida's appropriation of Joyce's hybrid expressions “Jewgreek” or “Greekjew.” By her own admission, Wyschogrod notes that her thinking sways between efforts to overcome manifestations of the negative and claims about its irrevocability, and that an especially important influence haunting her project is Hegel's struggle with the negative. Hegel's dialectic is such that every presence becomes what it is by negating what it is not, and hence every negation brings some presence in its wake. What is unthinkable for Hegel is the dialectical overcoming of the dialectic that results in the negation of the Absolute, a negation so profound that it generates an absolute difference—the Derridean différance—in which all difference is annihilated, the pure void, neither something nor nothing, in which all presence is eradicated. The undoing of undoing occasions a negative that is no longer subject to negation, since its own negativity would have been positively negated, whence it follows that the binary opposition of being and nonbeing is dismantled and primacy no longer given to the positive or to the negative. Wyschogrod thus distinguishes her understanding of transcendence from that of Levinas: the otherwise than being becomes the totality of beings that can never be conceptualized as a knowable plenum. At best, then, Wyschogrod, like Deleuze, can affirm an immanent theory of ethics and desire.

This chapter establishes God, the Word, as the genesis of linguistic reality for a subject. This genesis of linguistic reality happens in the middle of experience, in a borrowed tongue, in a historical materiality. A theology of language is thus a secular theology and, invoking Kierkegaard, faith is a leap, but into this linguistic reality which has a historical materiality. God, as per Tillich’s formulation, becomes a non-symbolic symbol that participates in ultimate reality, or, invoking Nietzsche, God is dead, is nothing but a word. Oscillating between the wounded or impossible narcissism apparent in Kristeva’s analysis of desire through her interpretation of primary repression, denial, and the act negation essential for the symbolic, and a narcissism that, by way of Deleuze’s reading of Hume, could be construed as satisfied in the sociolinguistic institution of the self, the chapter articulates the difficulty of speaking authentically when desire and the self are constituted in language, and when words-as the word God--can conjure up meaning, but do not always.

How does reason create objects of knowledge and ideas that imagine a relationship with the objective world? In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant attributes this role to the synthetic activity of the imagination and the understanding, whereas reason produces ideas of things that cannot be experienced, only thought. This chapter explores reason's attempt to create the idea of the world, an object unavailable to experience, precisely where it fails: in the mathematical antinomy. Through a study of the productivity of negation inspired in David-Ménard's La folie dans la raison pure, it examines reason's failure to form all-encompassing, self-contained totalities. There is only one type of negative idea Kant considers legitimate, negative noumenon. By opening an empty space beyond experience, negative noumena bound the realm of objectivity and provide thinking with a sense of completion. The most productive instance of these boundary concepts is freedom.

Alison Gibbons attends to the remarkable opening to House of Leaves using a unique and distinctive cognitive approach, arguing that the opening five words have a dramatic impact on how readers enter into their reading experience of the novel. She demonstrates the effects of the use of the second-person pronoun, negation, and visual presentation, introducing two cognitive psychological concepts which are a vital part of the reader’s experiential journey: cognitive dissonance and reactance. These, she argues, contribute to a sense of discomfort for the reader which is a key feature of the novel. Gibbons thus shows that Danielewski’s precise opening is crucial in initially unsettling readers as they enter the House of Leaves.

This chapter is a study of Latin indefinites in direct-negation contexts. These indefinites are interesting from a theoretical point of view because of their extreme dependence on the surrounding structural conditions, and because of the variety of their instantiations in different linguistic systems. Two phenomena of Latin grammar with wide-ranging implications for the development of Romance indefinites are discussed: the syntax of negation and the diachronic pathways followed by indefinites interacting with it. Latin is a Double Negation language, whereas Early Romance exhibits Negative Concord. The study proposes that this typological shift is linked to another major change from Latin to Romance, namely the change from OV to VO. Late Latin is analyzed as a ‘concealed’ nonstrict Negative Concord language, in which restrictions in the use of the ‘old’ negative indefinites emerge, as well as new patterns with (new) negative-polarity items.

This chapter is one of three that draws out the consequences of Radical Interpretation for how concepts represent the world. The focus in this chapter is on logical concepts: conjunction, negation, and universal generalization. This connects Radical Interpretation as a foundational theory of mental content to inferentialism, where commitment to certain kinds of rules of inference or coherence is cited to explain why our connectives mean what they do. Radical Interpretation, together with auxiliary assumptions about cognitive architecture and epistemology, predicts these patterns. One of the upshots is an explanation of how quantification over absolutely everything is possible, rebutting long-standing skolemite underdetermination puzzles.