Critics of contemporary culture have argued that critical theory must keep pace with technological change and, in the process, have instituted a theoretical model that restricts consideration of technology's impact on human experience to those dimensions that can be captured in language. In this wide-ranging critical study of poststructuralism's legacy to contemporary cultural studies, Mark Hansen challenges the hegemony of this model, contending that technologies fundamentally alter our sensory experience and drastically affect what it means to live as embodied human agents.
Blending insights from linguistic and social theories of speech, ritual and narrative with music-analytic and historical criticism,Britten's Musical Language offers fresh perspectives on the composer's fusion of verbal and musical utterance in opera and song. It provides close interpretative studies of the major scores (including Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, War Requiem, Curlew River and Death in Venice) and explores Britten's ability to fashion complex and mysterious symbolic dramas from the interplay of texted song and wordless discourse of motives and themes.
In this book, Michela Ippolito proposes a compositional semantics for subjunctive (or would) conditionals in English that accounts for their felicity conditions and the constraints on the satisfaction of their presuppositions by capitalizing on the occurrence of past tense morphology in both antecedent and consequent clauses. Very little of the extensive literature on subjunctive conditionals tries to account for the meaning of these sentences compositionally or to relate this meaning to their linguistic form; this book fills that gap, connecting the different lines of research on conditionals.
Structural Ambiguity in English is a major new scholarly work that provides an innovative and accessible linguistic description of those features of the language that can be exploited to generate structural ambiguities. Most ambiguity scholarship is concerned with disambiguation - the process of making what is ambiguous clear. This book takes the opposite approach as it focuses on describing the features in the English language that may contribute towards the creation of structural ambiguities, which form the core of some of the best word-plays found in advertising, comedy and marketing.
Anguished English is the impossibly funny anthology of accidental assaults upon our language. From bloopers and blunders to Signs of the Times to Mixed Up Metaphors...from Two-Headed Headlines to Mangling Modifiers, here is an outrageous treasury of assaults upon our common language that will leave you roaring with delight and laughter.