Terra Nova 2.0 - The New World of MMORPGs

This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in the journal Critical Studies in Media Communication.The dominant metaphor used to describe and situate MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role playing games (e.g. Ultima Online, EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Second Life, etc.), has been “new world” and “new frontier.” By deploying this powerful imagery, game developers, players, the popular media, and academic researchers draw explicit connections between the technology of MMORPGs and the European encounter with the Americas and the western expansion of the United States. Although providing a compelling and often recognizable explanation of the innovations and opportunities of this new technology, the use of this terminology comes with a considerable price, one that had been demonstrated and examined by scholars of the Internet, cyberspace, and virtual reality over a decade ago. This essay explores the impact and significance of the terms “new world” and “frontier” as they have been deployed to explain and describe MMORPGs

Sammelrezension: Mensch und Maschine

Andrea L. Guzman (Hg.): Human-Machine Communication: Rethinking Communication, Technology and Ourselves Jennifer Rhee: The Robotic Imaginary: The Human & the Price of Dehumanized Labo

Nominalphrasen des Typs derjenige (N) + Relativsatz in den europäischen Sprachen

Gegenstand der folgenden Überlegungen sind Strukturen, in denen Demonstrativa entweder als Antezedens eines restriktiven Relativsatzes oder als Determinativ eines solchen Antezedens auftreten. In solchen Strukturen hat das Demonstrativum weder eine deiktische noch eine anaphorische Bedeutung und damit keine der für Demonstrativa zentralen Funktionen. Aus sprachvergleichender Perspektive zeigt sich, dass manche Typen von Demonstrativa überhaupt nicht mit restriktiven Relativsätzen kombinieren können, andere wiederum den Relativsatz auf spezielle Lesarten beschränken. Ziel ist es, für die fraglichen Strukturen übereinzelsprachliche Beschränkungen aufzuzeigen und aus dem Sprachvergleich Rückschlüsse für das Deutsche zu gewinnen

Musical Evidence for Low Boundary Tones in Ancient Greek

Several scholars have suggested that in ancient Greek there was a low boundary tone at the end of a relatively small prosodic constituent such as a clitic group or maximal prosodic word. The boundary tone may phonologically motivate some puzzling pitch-accentual phenomena in the language. One is the diachronic pitch-peak retraction that led to the circumflex pitch accent (HL) on penultimate syllables (the “sōtêra rule”). Another is the intonational phrase-internal downstepping or deletion of a word-final acute accent (H); that conversion of an acute to a grave accent is known as “lulling” or “koímēsis”. If such a low boundary tone existed, its effects should still be audible in ancient Greek non-strophic vocal music, where there is a significant correlation between the pitch movement of the text and the movement of the melody to which it is set, i.e. between tone and tune. Specifically, proponents of such a low boundary tone would predict that the turning point between falling and rising melody, the “musical trough”, should center around the word-final mora or syllable. The present study provides the first full description of troughs in the Delphic Hymns and finds that they are indeed closely aligned with word-end. Furthermore, once other factors that could lead to word-final troughs are set aside, i.e. once potential confounds are controlled for, the association of the trough with word-end remains strong, suggesting that we should in fact reconstruct the low boundary tone