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Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon either material published previously in the journal or issues deemed of importance to the field. The editor reserves the right to edit letters as needed. Brief replies from relevant parties are included as warranted.
Embracing Kunzru’s own early love of French theory and reading these works through a detailed engagement with Henri Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis, Upstone reveals the capacity of Kunzru’s multimodal literature to engage with a materiality of both the literary and non-literary object. In the second part of the essay, the implications of this form for Kunzru’s ongoing concern for globalised identities and the pursuit of social justice are examined, identifying a discourse of ‘resistant rhythms’ which question racial, capitalist and ableist norms. For Upstone, the pursuit of these features simultaneously through both form and content defines Kunzru as what can be referred to as a transglossic author, a term drawn from work undertaken with Shaw (2021) that aims to evolve a new critical framework for the trends of twenty-first-century fiction. Broader than Coupland’s notion of translit, Shaw and Upstone’s transglossic takes as its foundation six core literary features - deep simultaneity, planetary consciousness, intersectional transversality, artistic responsibility, productive authenticity and trans-formalism – the conjunction of which typifies a work of contemporary literature. Kunzru’s writing provides a model of how such features concretely manifest in contemporary fiction. Despite their differences, each of his works represents a globalised political commitment, simultaneous presence of intersectional identity categories and a renegotiation of concepts of reality. As these are realised through both theme and content, and are driven by an authorial responsibility evidenced in Kunzru’s media activity and political activism, they come to encompass transglossic literature’s defining characteristics.
This article argues for a particular understanding of feature class behavior—the recurrent patterning together of certain phonological features, such as place of articulation and laryngeal features. The proposals build on the well-known work of feature geometry in assuming the importance of feature classes in phonology, but differ in that features of a class are targeted directly and individually by constraints (or rules), even when a feature class such as Place is mentioned. Further, constraints mentioning feature classes are gradiently violable. Evidence for this view of feature classes comes from two sources. First, assimilation involving feature classes is sometimes only partially successful; an adequate understanding of such cases requires the proposed view of feature classes. Second, there are broad categories of feature class generalization that require it, including dissimilatory effects usually handled by the obligatory contour principle. Overall, the proposals broaden the explanatory potential of the feature class idea due to feature geometry. At a more general level, the results here suggest that linguistic representations sometimes need to be reconsidered in the context of optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993), since they can effectively function as inviolable constraints and so hinder our understanding of the more subtle kind of phenomena revealed by analyses employing gradiently violable constraints.
William Gamwell Moulton, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Germanic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, passed away on June 2, 2000, in Exeter, New Hampshire, at the age of eighty-six. Professor Moulton served as a member of the executive committee of the Linguistic Society of America, as well as its vice president, and, in 1967, its president.