Plurality and cross-linguistic variation: An experimental investigation of the Turkish plural

In English and many other languages, the interpretation of the plural is associated with an ‘exclusive’ reading in positive sentences and an ‘inclusive’ reading in negative ones. For example, the plural noun tulips in a sentence such as Chicken planted tulips suggests that Chicken planted more than one tulip (i.e., a reading which ‘excludes’ atomic individual tulips). At the same time, however, the corresponding negative sentence Chicken didn’t plant tulips doesn’t merely convey that he didn’t plant more than one tulip, but rather that he didn’t plant any tulip (i.e., ‘including’ atomic individual tulips). Different approaches to the meaning contribution of the English plural vary in how they account for this alternation across the polarities, but converge on assuming that (at least one of) the denotation(s) of the plural should include atomic individuals. Turkish, on the other hand, is cited as one of the few known languages in which the plural only receives an exclusive interpretation (e.g., Bale et al. Cross-linguistic representations of numerals and number marking. in: Li, Lutz (eds) Semantics and linguistic theory (SALT) 20, CLC Publications, Ithaca, pp 582–598, 2010). More recent proposals have, however, argued that the Turkish plural should in fact be analysed more like the English plural (e.g., Sag˘, The semantics of number marking: reference to kinds, counting, and optional classifiers, PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 2019). We report two experiments investigating Turkish-speaking adults’ and preschool-aged children’s interpretation of positive and negative sentences containing plural nouns. The results provide clear evidence for inclusive interpretations of the plural in Turkish, supporting accounts that treat the Turkish and English plurals alike. We briefly discuss how an inclusive meaning of the Turkish plural can be integrated within a theory of the Turkish number system which captures some idiosyncratic properties of the singular and the agreement between number and number numerals

The Perfectly Unadjusted Woman: Reading Adaptation in “Tulips” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Sylvia Plath and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s openness on the restraints of the domestic sphere appear in their autobiographical and creative texts. Both authors employ the figure of an unadjusted woman as their narrator, a figure forced into docility and obedience; she denies her passions and forgoes isolation at the hands of patriarchal figures. Deemed ‘mad’ and ‘unnatural,’ the transplanting of this woman into seclusion intersects the work of the nineteenth-century gothic writers with twentieth-century feminist poetry. In “Tulips,” intrusion appears as the uncanny presence of a gift – red flowers. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the walls, grotesquely yellow and fungal, disturb the narrator. In advancing the perfectly unadjusted woman, Plath reframes the domestic gothic in the twentieth-century while consciously utilizing classic gothic tropes, images, and themes. She redefines isolation as an escape from not only motherhood but also from her career as a writer. Oppression, isolation, and flight link Gilman and Plath’s domestic gothic texts, and the parallels found in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Tulips” demonstrate the advancement of the unadjusted woman into the twentieth-century imagination. This advancement complicates and redefines the oppressed woman’s adaptation from patriarchal confines, subverting the expectations of motherhood for imaginative thought

Images Big and Soft: The Digital Archive Rendered Cinematic

 In his recent immersive media art project titled Machine Hallucinations, artist Refik Anadol collected over 100 million images of New York City from social media and, using machine learning, created a 30-minute immersive experimental cinema experience that visualized the database. On his website, Anadol explains that computation allows “a novel form of synesthetic storytelling through its multilayered manipulation of a vast visual archive beyond the conventional limits of the camera and the existing cinematographic techniques.” With this project, Anadol demonstrates a tendency shared by a group of contemporary media artists who work at the intersection of cinema and the digital archive and who use machine learning and generative adversarial networks to render specific somatic experiences in relation to thousands of images. This essay discusses this shared focus by examining projects by three artists who use computational processes to assemble, manipulate, and then exhibit an archive of images as a part of their practice and output, translating the archival into the cinematic. The projects are significant in their evocation of what has been named by Ingrid Hoelzl the “soft-image” or “post-image,” shifting from the single image as a solid, stable representation within a collection of similarly single images, to that of the distributed, in-process experiential image. Further, each example approaches the creation of the collection with varied intentions; and each presents the material in disparate modalities that, while deeply connected to the cinematic, produce very different sensory experiences. Together, the examples offer a perspective on the archive in our current moment’s transition from representation to computation

Revulsion, Restlessness, and Rage Through the Body in Pain: Radical Affects and Political Consciousness in the Ariel Poems

The affective path to radicalism unfolds in Plath\u27s Ariel in three stages. Revulsion identifies a shared source of conflict with a clear patriarchal enemy. Restlessness mimics the context and pace of rebellion, including the acute crises that give way to a societal awakening. Rage connotes incipient action and a commitment to upheaval as an act of restorative justice. The associated “ugly feelings” that facilitate such affects are a reflection of how, historically, progress has come at the cost of suffering. Plath’s language and its capacity for commanding this perverse sense of the sublime – particularly its ability to control the reader’s emotional and physical experience of vicarious suffering – culminates in radical cabal across three affected bodies at any given time. From Plath’s syntax to the speakers’ narratives to the readers’ resultant perspectives on time, pain, and desire, political consciousness becomes inseparable from the poetics of the body

And I / Am the Arrow : The Narrative, Personae Construction, and Language Ideology of Confessional Poets\u27 Identity Performance

This thesis argues for consideration of linguistic features in service of raising the postmodern confessionalist poet identity as an utterance and an act of loyalty to performance. The embodiment of the confessionalist identity, attributed to the features used to adhere to the confessional mode, is realized through the invention of confessional personae. These confessional personae merge the responsibilities of the speaker and the narrator to convey a pseudo-autobiographical utterance to a designated audience. In this thesis, I analyze a sequence of poems that either possess taboo subjects or utilize linguistic functions, like indexicality and audience design, that mark its mode. I apply discourse analysis to selected poems of W. D. Snodgrass, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton to sense how prolific confessionalists designed the intersubjectivity of lyric poetry and public speech to achieve two goals: seek recognition and validation from general audiences and revitalize poetic expression to reflect a new era. The incorporation of narrative, personae construction, and language ideology into the confessional mode suggests that the mode is merely a path poets took to achieve literary success and celebrity, not an idealization of poetic functions that categorize a class of poets