Das Nichts stellt eine Konstante in Leopardis Werk dar, deren Darstellung bei Weitem nicht auf die bloße Nennung des ,nulla' beschränkt ist. Es erweist sich als polyvalente Denkfigur, die unter anderem auf Mangel, Abwesenheit, Wertlosigkeit, Zersetzung und Vergehen verweist. Durch eine genaue Betrachtung der unterschiedlichen Nichts-Konzeptionen wird eine gleitende Semantik sichtbar, die im ganzen Werk dynamisch bleibt. Diese entsteht durch die wiederholte Parallelisierung von gegensätzlichen Begrifflichkeiten wie ,Vernunft und Natur', ,Antike und Moderne', ,Dichtung und Philosophie', ,Materie und Geist', ,Leben und Tod', ,Inneres und Äußeres', etc. Dies ist aber nicht die einzige Funktion, die das Nichts in Leopardis Gedankenbewegungen einnimmt: Das Nichts entpuppt sich vielerorts als Orientierungspunkt.

This edited book examines silence and silencing in and out of discourse, as viewed through a variety of contexts such as historical archives, day-to-day conversations, modern poetry, creative writing clubs, and visual novels, among others. The contributions engage with the historical shifts in how silence and silencing have been viewed, conceptualized and recorded throughout the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, then present a series of case studies from disciplines including linguistics, history, literature and culture, and geographical settings ranging from Argentina to the Philippines, Nigeria, Ireland, Morocco, Japan, South Africa, and Vietnam. Through these examples, the authors underline the thematic and methodological contact zones between different fields and traditions, providing a stimulating and truly interdisciplinary volume that will be of interest to scholars across the humanities.

Owing to the ever-increasing possibilities of communication, especially with the advent of modern communication technologies, register analysis offers a constantly widening range of research opportunities. Still, research has mainly concentrated on well-established and frequent registers such as newspaper articles, while many descriptive and theoretical issues have not yet been sufficiently investigated. This volume gives a state-of-the-art insight into register studies and points out emerging trends as well as new directions for future research. Furthermore, it provides a forum for the description and discussion of registers which have not received an appropriate amount of attention so far. In particular, it deals with specialized offline and online registers, cross-register comparison as well as regional, contrastive, and diachronic register variation. In parallel to the new discipline of variational pragmatics, this volume aims to foster the discipline of ‘variational text linguistics’ and to initiate fundamental investigations in this area. This field of research provides new insights into the concept of register, since it covers both functional and regional types of textual variation.

There is a long-standing debate over the relation of historical linguistics and classical philology, especially within the purview of the renewed interest in it during the last decades and the recent trends that characterize philological and linguistic studies. Ever since its appearance in the nineteenth century, the history of this debate testifies to a turbulent coexistence and fertile collaboration of the two disciplines, but at times also moving along centrifugal paths. The essays in this volume address this debate and cover various aspects of linguistic and philological research of Greek and Latin, moving in the middle ground where language, linguistics and philology crosscut and cross-fertilize each other highlighting the application of linguistic theory to the study of classical texts and drawing on fields such as syntactic theory and pragmatics, historical semantics and the lexicon, reconstruction and etymology, dialectology, editorial practices, the use of corpora, and other interdisciplinary approaches that function as hinges between philology and linguistics.

This book presents a synchronic and diachronic investigation of two derivational English affixes. The suffixes -age and -ery are analysed on the basis of dictionary and corpus data and an adapted semantic map method is introduced as a new way of accounting for the semantic structure of derivatives. This study shows that the semantic structure of morphological categories can change signi ficantly over time, and that semantic maps can represent this change in a straightforward manner. The semantic maps visualise the relations and interdependencies of the readings expressed by derivatives, which leads to a new understanding of the semantic complexity of these categories.

Despite its everyday relevance, the reputation of punctuation is tarnished. Actually, modern English punctuation is often considered not more than a necessary evil. For many people, punctuation usage follows seemingly arbitrary and unmotivated rules. The present approach moves away from a static, rulebased description towards a more dynamic, contextbased interpretation of punctuation. Punctuation is a highly versatile medium-dependent means of presentational choice. To accept this view is to take a significant step towards closing the gap that still exists between punctuational theory and the actual usage of punctuation. Punctuation adopts a guiding role for the reader and the present study explores this guide potential, providing a thorough analysis of both the linguistic status and the communicative value of punctuation.

We all know the basics of punctuation. Or do we? A look at most neighborhood signage tells a different story. Through sloppy usage and low standards on the internet, in email, and now text messages, we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Lynne Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, this lively history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.