Synchrony and diachrony in the evolution of English : evidence from Scotland.

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A Corpus Stylistic Investigation of the Language Style of Shakespeare's Plays in the Context of Other Contemporaneous Plays.

Shakespeare's plays occupy a uniquely prominent position in English language and literature. Shakespeare was, however, one among a number of other successful and popular playwrights of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and, when examined on an empirical basis, his language style has much in common with that of his peers. In this corpus stylistic study, I investigate similarities and differences between the language in Shakespeare's plays and in a range of plays by a selection of other contemporaneous dramatists. My quantitative data is extracted from an existing corpus containing Shakespeare's First Folio, and a new, specialised parallel corpus of plays from similar dates and genres written by other contemporaneous dramatists. This new corpus was constructed during the study. The corpus linguistic methods I use are simple frequency, keyness (Scott e.g. 1999, 2000) and Baker's (2011) new concept of "lockwords". Simple frequency and keyness (linguistic items occurring with comparatively low or high statistical frequency) are established corpus linguistic methods for investigating language styles in literary texts. However, as Baker (2004:349) argues, keywords highlight only the differences between texts. Similarities are also important, to contextualise differences and avoid overstating their stylistic implications. Moreover, as I show in this study, empirical evidence of similarities is of stylistic interest. It reveals preferences for language style features which Shakespeare and other contemporaneous dramatists shared, and which constitute features of the register of Early Modern English drama. I examine three types of language units in each corpus: single words, word clusters and semantic domains. I extract word and word cluster data using Scott's (1999) WordSmith Tools and semantic domain data using Rayson's (2009) Wmatrix software tools. My findings have implications for (a) the distinctiveness of Shakespeare's style, (b) the register of EModE drama and (c) methods for investigating language similarities using corpus linguistic methodology

An apostrophe to Scots: the invention and diffusion of the Scots apostrophe in eighteenth-century Scottish verse

The intention of this thesis is to challenge three fundamental assumptions about the function of the ‘apologetic apostrophe’ – described henceforth as the ‘Scots apostrophe’ – which have, until now, exclusively characterised the scholarly understanding of this linguistic form in Scots literary history: 1. The function of apostrophised spelling forms in Scots is to indicate elision. 2. The use of apostrophised forms undermines perceptions of Scots as a language independent from English and is solely for the benefit of accessibility for an English readership. 3. Scots is intrinsically linked with Scottishness: as an agent of anglicisation, the use of apostrophised forms therefore contributes to the erosion of Scottish cultural identity. Situated within historical pragmatics – and combining corpus and philological analysis – this study investigates the origin and diffusion of the Scots apostrophe in eighteenth-century Scottish literary verse, with particular attention paid to the influential poetic miscellanies of James Watson, Allan Ramsay, Robert Burns, and Walter Scott. First and foremost, this thesis establishes a theoretical framework with which to understand the function of the Scots apostrophe in literary Scots that simultaneously contests unscholarly myth-making with regards to linguistic practices. In broader terms, the research therein demonstrates the value of non-lexical markers, like the apostrophe, as a capacious avenue for future historical pragmatic research

Image Processing Using FPGAs

This book presents a selection of papers representing current research on using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for realising image processing algorithms. These papers are reprints of papers selected for a Special Issue of the Journal of Imaging on image processing using FPGAs. A diverse range of topics is covered, including parallel soft processors, memory management, image filters, segmentation, clustering, image analysis, and image compression. Applications include traffic sign recognition for autonomous driving, cell detection for histopathology, and video compression. Collectively, they represent the current state-of-the-art on image processing using FPGAs

"A little more than kin" - Quotations as a linguistic phenomenon : a study based on quotations from Shakespeare's Hamlet

Quotations "oscillate between the occasional and the conventional" as Burger/Buhofer/Sialm (1982) once succinctly formulated. Developed from a PhD thesis, this book explores precisely this "oscillating" character of quotations: It discusses the nature of quotations and the relationship between common quotations and phraseology from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. Shakespeare's Hamlet was chosen as a canonical text whose frequently quoted traces can be followed across centuries. Scholarly work from various disciplines leads to an understanding of quotations as moving in a space created by the two dimensions of reference and repetition: Quotations are definable by a horizontal communicative axis (reference) and a vertical, intertextual axis of manifest lineages of use (repetition). Empirically, the data led to a categorisation of quotations as verbal, thematic and onomastic, based on the question "what has been repeated: words, themes or names?" Case studies further corroborate the proposition that verbal quotations may become (almost) ordinary multi-word units if the following conditions are met: a) they lose their referential dimension, b) they develop formal and/or semantic usage patterns and/or c) they are no longer limited to their original, literary discourse

How local is urban governance in fragile states? Theory and practice of capital city politics in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan.

Historically capital cities in less developed countries such as Sierra Leone and Afghanistan have served as sites of deliberate attempts to bring about change in both local and national political systems. Ranging from modernist agendas to contemporary donor-driven 'reconstruction' efforts, strategies to build effective state structures, including local governance institutions, have been at the core of such politics. Drawing on a multidisciplinary methodology that combines historical analysis with micro- and meso-level field research, the thesis explores the dynamics of agency and structure in an investigation of the function of capital cities as political arenas. It reviews key strands of urban political theory for their applicability to developing country contexts and situations of state fragility. The thesis finds existing approaches to be insufficiently suited to explaining political processes operating in and on war-affected capital cities. Current theoretical treatments present cities as distinct or contained political spaces, which in these contexts they are not. They also fail to account for radical changes in the polities in which they are embedded and underestimate the degree of coercion exercised towards local stakeholders by supra-local actors, highlighting the need for a revised interpretative framework. The study juxtaposes policies and programmes targeted at urban and national level institutional change with urban political trajectories in war-affected Freetown and Kabul. The thesis examines how external resources and lines of control create political axes that intersect and transcend urban spaces. The research finds that these axes work to the detriment of local political deliberation and explains why institutional reforms aimed at strengthening local political agency have given rise to the opposite outcome. The research thus illustrates the importance of political economy factors related to international intervention and shows how these have served to influence the nature of capital city politics in least developed countries. Empirically the study establishes why the two capital cities function as linchpins of international assistance yet fail to benefit from local political empowerment and equitable urban recovery. It is concluded that local politics in these two cities are overdetermined by national and international interests and agendas. Theoretically the thesis offers the concept of 'tri-axial urban governance,' which combines historically informed political economy analysis with an explicitly spatial framework for analysing politics in and on war- affected cities. This reconfigured conceptual scaffolding exposes power relations operative in city politics in fragile states and explains their impact on dynamics of structure and agency

Morphosyntactic Variation in Medieval Celtic Languages

This book showcases the state of the art in corpus-based linguistic analysis of Celtic languages (specifically, Old/Middle Irish, Middle Welsh, and Cornish). It explores corpus approaches to morphosyntactic variation in the medieval Celtic languages and, for the first time, situates them in the broader field of computational and corpus linguistics by providing descriptions of tools for processing the data to create electronic corpora

Park spaces: leisure, culture and modernity - a Glasgow case study

The importance of a critical understanding of space in contemporary social scientific enquiry is increasingly recognised as fundamental for the analysis of the development, enlargement and experience of modern capitalism. In particular, the concentration of forces and relations of production, circulation and consumption, of people, commodities and services, is progressively appreciated as achieved through the creation and exploitation of urban space. The thesis presents a critical examination of a variety of theories of space and spatial theories as a foundation for the analysis of urban modernity. These include the works of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Georg Simmel. The syncretic adaptation of these formative theoretical analyses provides a conceptual framework for the subsequent substantive analysis of a case study of specific forms of modern urban social space. That is, an exploration of the processes by which the origins and development of what came to be integral features of the landscape of the modern city were produced, namely, the creation of the social spaces of public parks. The growth and increasing importance of the city in the 19th century had important social as well as economic and political consequences for the development and administration of the infrastructure and experience of the urban environment. The physical and mental, medical as well as moral consequences of city development led to campaigns to improve the condition of the urban population that provoked a response by the local state. One prominent aspect of this municipal commitment was the development of urban public parks as an ameliorative response. Glasgow’s experience of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in the 19th century and the particular conditions that arose led to a specific form of municipal government that produced a network of public parks that was unrivalled by any other city. The investigation and analysis of the production of municipal public parks in the city of Glasgow in the period from the early 1850s to the late 1970s gives detailed consideration to a large number and variety of empirical sources to deliver an historical, sociological and geographic account of the complexity involved in the analysis of such commonplace everyday spaces as public parks. As such, the investigation of parks as social spaces constructed, depicted and used for leisure and recreation contributes to the understanding of the development and experience of urban modernity, as well as to contemporary socio-spatial analysis

Key terms of the Qur'an: a critical dictionary

This book provides detailed and multidisciplinary coverage of a wealth of key Qur’anic terms, with incisive entries on crucial expressions ranging from the divine names allāh (“God”) and al-raḥmān (“the Merciful”) to the Qur’anic understanding of belief and self-surrender to God. It examines what the terms mean in Qur’anic usage, discusses how to translate them into English, and delineates the role they play in expressing the Qur’an’s distinctive understanding of God, humans, and the cosmos. It offers a comprehensive but nonreductionist investigation of the relationship of Qur’anic terms to earlier traditions such as Jewish and Christian literature, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and Arabian epigraphy. While the dictionary is primarily engaged in ascertaining what the Qur’an would have meant to its original recipients in late antique Arabia, it makes selective and critical use of later Muslim scholarship alongside an extensive body of secondary research in English, German, and French from the nineteenth century to today