Donald Ringe Video Interview

Donald Ringe discusses personal history, problems at CWU, outstanding faculty and administration, salary schedule, hiring policies and practice, pre-college preparation of incoming students, faculty organization, personal contributions, committees served on, changes in the geology department, unjustified activities on campus, and military duty.https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/cwura_interviews/1228/thumbnail.jp

James Fenimore Cooper

175 p. ; 21 cm

The Pictorial Mode: Space and Time in the Art of Bryant, Irving, and Cooper

Focusing on style as a means of thematic expression, Donald A. Ringe in this study examines in detail the affinities that exist between the paintings of the Hudson River school and the works of William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper. The emphasis on physical description of nature that characterizes the work of these writers, he finds, is not simply an imitation of European models, nor is it merely nonfunctional decoration. Rather, he demonstrates that the authors’ concern with description of the physical world derives from the late eighteenth-century theory of knowledge, and specifically from the concepts of the Scottish Common Sense school of philosophy. Recognizing the differing limitations and opportunities presented by the media in which these two groups of artists worked, Ringe traces deeper parallels in their treatment of spatial and temporal relationships. Having at their disposal the suggestive powers of language, the writers succeeded in making of the pictorial mode an effective means of expressing moral and intellectual themes of fundamental concern to the nineteenth-century American. A full understanding of this characteristic mode of expression, Ringe concludes, is essential to accurate interpretation of the literary works of the first generation of American romantics. Donald A. Ringe is professor of English at the University of Kentucky.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1028/thumbnail.jp

Reconstructing the Evolutionary History of Natural Languages

In this paper we present a new methodology for determining the evolutionary history of related languages. Our methodology uses linguistic information encoded as qualitative characters, so that prospective trees can be evaluated according to various optimization criteria, much as is done in the practice of inferring evolutionary history for biological species. By contrast with biology, however, we find that the linguistic data support evolutionary trees with extremely good compatibility scores, and that for such data it is possible to find optimal trees quickly. We have applied this method to the classification of Indo-European (IE) languages; we have been able to resolve one longstanding open problem (the IndoHittite hypothesis), and have indicated exactly what needs to be established in order to resolve another longstanding open problem (the Italo-Celtic hypothesis). We have also discovered rather surprising facts about the history of Germanic within this family. Thus, this method pr..