DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

This special issue of Cognitive Linguistic Studies explores the use and variation of metaphors in different Englishes around the world. The contributions are grounded in the theoretical framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and address various aspects of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. The articles draw on different types of data including elicitation and experiments, interviews, large electronic corpora, literary works, and multimodal texts such as films in order to study the conceptual and linguistic variability of metaphors across the English-speaking world.

Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative explores our emotional engagement with environmental narrative. Focusing on the American cultural context, Alexa Weik von Mossner develops an ecocritical approach that draws on the insights of affective science and cognitive narratology. This approach helps to clarify how we interact with environmental narratives in ways that are both biologically universal and culturally specific. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the thesis that our minds are both embodied (in a physical body) and embedded (in a physical environment), not only when we interact with the real world but also in our engagement with imaginary worlds.

Digitale Spiele sind seit der Jahrtausendwende zur wirtschaftlich bedeutendsten Kulturindustrie im westlichen Kulturraum aufgestiegen, indem sie sowohl die Film- als auch die Musikindustrie mit ihren Umsätzen und Einnahmen abgehängt hat. Durch das multimediale Wesen digitaler Spiele motiviert, bringen Forscherinnen und Forscher aus den unterschiedlichsten Fachrichtungen ihre Perspektiven und Kompetenzen bei deren kritischer Reflexion ein und spannen damit einen weiten Bogen von den technischen und Computerwissenschaften über die Medienwissenschaften bis hin zu den Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften. Ausgehend von einer Problematisierung der Grundlagen des Mediums und seiner soziokulturellen Verortung, soll eine Annäherung an mögliche Textualitäten und Kontextualisierungen erfahrbar gemacht werden.

Was ein Kultfilm ist, zumal ein Science-Fiction-Kultfilm, darüber ist eine verbindliche Einigung schwer herzustellen. Viele Faktoren können einen Film zum Kultfilm machen, erstaunlicherweise auch eher negative Dinge, billige Produktion, schlechte Qualität, lächerliche Spezialeffekte, trashige Anmutung oder kommerzieller Misserfolg. Aber natürlich spielen auch noch andere Eigenschaften eine Rolle, nämlich, ob ein Film als bahnbrechend und stilprägend empfunden wird, ob er ästhetisch innovativ ist, ob er die Epoche seiner Entstehungszeit beispielhaft widerspiegelt oder ob er selbstreflexiv mit den Genrekonventionen spielt. In diesem Buch werden erwartbare und weniger erwartbare Filme als Science-Fiction-Kultfilme vorgestellt, aber immer als Anregung auf eine (Re-)Vison des besprochenen Films.

Wordplay involving several linguistic codes represents an important modality of ludic language. It is attested in different epochs, communicative situations, genres, and contexts of use. The translation of wordplay, which is generally seen as a challenging enterprise, illustrates another dimension of crossing linguistic borders in wordplay. The third volume of the series The Dynamics of Wordplay unites contributions from different disciplines which study the creative and playful use of elements from different languages and the transfer of ludic language into other linguistic systems. It sheds light on the multi-dimensionality, special linguistic make-up, and specific interactive potential of wordplay at the interface of different languages and cultures.

This study aims to contribute to research on whether bilinguals show increased creativity in a verbal task when compared to monolinguals. In line with previous research, creativity is linked to divergent thinking, and a particular focus is laid on figurative associations among the monolingual and bilingual speakers. To investigate potential differences in figurative associations, participants completed a meaning interpretation task of novel English compounds. Read more at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367006914566081

Contributions to this special issue focus on the nexus of language contact and world Englishes. Language contact has continued to play a role in world Englishes research, but its potential for analyzing Englishes and for mapping their diversity has not yet been applied in a comprehensive manner. The articles in this issue address different facets of the connection between language contact and world Englishes, emphasizing the importance of taking a contact linguistic approach to understanding world Englishes both from a theoretical and an empirical point of view.

Alle Filme mit, von, über und als Reminiszenz an die Beatles – insgesamt mehr als 200 Filme von Across the Universe über Let It Be bis hin zu The Zombeatles: All You Need Is Brains. Seit den 1960er Jahren drückten die Beatles nahezu allen kulturellen Bereichen ihren Stempel auf. Kaum hatten sie damit begonnen, die Popmusik zu revolutionieren, waren sie in der Presse allgegenwärtig, traten in Fernsehshows auf, setzten neue Akzente in der Mode und in der Sprache und wurden zum Gegenstand von Literatur, Theaterstücken und Musicals. John Lennon veröffentlichte eigene Bücher und Grafiken, und Paul McCartney fand Anerkennung als Maler und Komponist klassischer Musik. «Nothing is Beatle-proof» meinte daher folgerichtig John Lennon in dem Animationsfilm Yellow Submarine.

Cosmopolitan Minds offers a new perspective on the affective underpinnings of critical and reflexive cosmopolitanism by drawing on theories of emotion and literary imagination from cognitive psychology, philosophy, and cognitive literary studies. It focuses on a core of transnational writers—Kay Boyle, Pearl S. Buck, William Gardner Smith, Richard Wright, and Paul Bowles—who found themselves prompted to seek experiences outside of their home country, experiences that profoundly changed their self-understanding and creative imagination. The study shows how, in their literary texts, these writers employed strategic empathy to provoke emotions such as love, sympathy, compassion, fear, anger, guilt, shame, and disgust in their readers in order to challenge their parochial worldviews and practices.

In Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, international scholars investigate how films portray human emotional relationships with the more-than-human world and how such films act upon their viewers’ emotions. Emotion and affect are the basic mechanisms that connect us to our environment, shape our knowledge, and motivate our actions. Contributors explore how film represents and shapes human emotion in relation to different environments and what role time, place, and genre play in these affective processes. Individual essays resituate well-researched environmental films such as An Inconvenient Truth and March of the Penguins by paying close attention to their emotionalizing strategies, and bring to our attention the affective qualities of films that have so far received little attention from ecocritics, such as Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man.

Since the 1980s, “risk” has been one of the most productively employed categories of analysis in the social sciences. Risk theory and risk research in these disciplines have shown that pervasive risk awareness has increasingly reconfigured societies, politics, and cultures in our period of late modernity. The essays assembled in this volume extend risk research in the humanities to literary and cultural studies and analyze a wide range of literary and audiovisual texts that imagine human encounters with environmental risk in North America. The first section focuses on representations of the risk of global climate change in several climate change novels; the second section concentrates on the representation of the nuclear risk in non-fictional and fictional texts as well as in film; the third section draws particular attention to the relevance of genre in the representation of a variety of environmental risks, genres ranging from poetry to posthuman fiction to Hollywood disaster movies and video games.

This collection presents a range of linguistic studies on the Māori language and pays tribute to the work of Ray Harlow, linguist and scholar, who has contributed significantly to research into the development and grammar of the Māori language. Starting with an overview on the history of linguistic description of te reo Māori, the volume discusses a variety of issues, such as sound changes in Māori, the influence of the Bible translation on the language, a historical account of a lost Māori dialect, traditional Māori chants and the oral tradition, Māori discourse features, Māori rugby commentary, and differences in meaning associations between Māori bilingual and Pākehā monolingual speakers.