Calmness Conquers Anxiety: What Language Tells Us about Mind and Body Control

This chapter is fully based on linguistic data representing Early Modern and Present-day English, including early English printed books and contemporary online texts. The main bulk of the data was collected with the search term calmness. The data indicates that it is important for people to experience control of their emotions and behavior and that they understand emotional calmness in terms of the kinds of tranquility that they see in nature, for example, when the sea is still. The connection between people and nature seems therefore to be strong. However, the data also suggest that calmness does not just naturally occur in people but has to be achieved through active work and that ideas concerning the nature of such work differ from one context, period, and location to another

Williams, Graham: Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. [Book review]

Book review. Reviewed work: Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature / By Graham Williams. - London : Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. 256. ISBN: 978-1-137-54069-0 (eBook).Non peer reviewe

Explicating a virtue : On the eighteenth-century concept of "chastity"

Peer reviewe

Baicchi, Annalisa: Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language. John Benjamins, 2020. [Book review]

Non peer reviewe

Bolognesi, Marianna: Where Words Get their Meaning: Cognitive processing and distributional modelling of word meaning in first and second language. John Benjamins, 2020. [Book review]

Non peer reviewe

J.S. Robles and A. Weatherall: How Emotions Are Made in Talk [Book review]

This is a review of an interesting new book on emotions, How Emotions Are Made in Talk, edited by Jessica S. Robles and Ann Weatherall in 2021. It was published on Linguist List on 18 May 2022.Non peer reviewe

Explicating a Virtue : On the Eighteenth-Century Concept of "Chastity"

This article explicates the eighteenth-century English concept of “chastity” through analyzing the noun chastity, the adjective chaste and the adverb chastely in the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts 3.1. Nine prominent characteristics of “chastity” are examined to arrive at an explication of “sexual chastity”. Firstly, chastity was considered (1) a virtue. Secondly, it often meant (2) virginity or complete abstinence from sex. However, it also referred to (3) marital love. Eighteenth-century authors were more prone to discuss (4) women’s than men’s chastity. Metaphorically, chastity was considered a (5) valuable commodity, and it was discussed in terms of (6) attack and defence, and of (7) purity. Chastity was supposed to characterize a person’s (8) acts, behaviour, and comportment. The understanding of these characteristics had (9) religious underpinnings

Explicating a virtue : On the eighteenth-century concept of "chastity"

Peer reviewe

Intensifier-Verb Collocations in Academic English by Chinese Learners Compared to Native-Speaker Students

It is difficult for L2 English learners in general, and especially Chinese learners of English, to form idiomatic collocations. This article presents a comparison of the use of intensifier-verb collocations in English by native speaker students and Chinese ESL learners, paying particular attention to verbs which collocate with intensifiers. The data consisted of written production from three corpora: two of these are native English corpora: the British Academic Written English (BAWE) Corpus and Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The third one is a recently created Chinese Learner English corpus, Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners (TECCL). Findings suggest that Chinese learners of English produce significantly more intensifier-verb collocations than native speaker students, but that their English attests a smaller variety of intensifier-verb collocations compared with the native speakers. Moreover, Chinese learners of English use the intensifier-verb collocation types just-verb, only-verb and really-verb very frequently compared with native speaker students. As regards verb collocates, the intensifiers hardly, clearly, well, strongly and deeply collocate with semantically different verbs in native and Chinese learner English. Compared with the patterns in Chinese learner English, the intensifiers in native speaker English collocate with a more stable and restricted set of verb collocates.Peer reviewe