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101326 results in Language and Linguistics

Page 623 of 5067

  • Language-Particular Syntactic Rules and Constraints: English Locative Inversion and Do-Support

  • Benjamin Bruening
  • Journal:
    Language / Volume 86 / Issue 1 / March 2010
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 February 2026, pp. 43-84

  • Locative inversion in English (under the bridge lived a troll) is ungrammatical in all of the contexts where Jo-support applies: subject-auxiliary inversion, sentential negation, emphasis or verum focus, VP ellipsis, and VP displacement. Importantly, it is ungrammatical in these contexts whether do-support applies or not: it is ungrammatical with other auxiliaries, and it is also ungrammatical in nonfinite clauses of these types, where do-support never actually applies. This indicates that all of these contexts have something in common, and that cannot be disruption of adjacency between tense/agreement and the verb because there is no such disruption with other auxiliaries or in nonfinite contexts. These facts therefore argue against the standard last-resort theory of do-support, which holds that it is inserted to save a stranded tense/agreement affix, and for a theory like that of Baker 1991. In this theory, VPs have corresponding SPECIAL PURPOSE ([SP]) VPs, and do heads a [SP] VP. All of the contexts for do-support have in common the featural specification [SP]. Locative inversion involves a null expletive subject, the licensing of which is blocked by a non-[SP] context. All of this argues for a view of syntax with language-particular licensing constraints, features, and rules, within a range of variation proscribed by universal grammar.

  • 5 - The fiction of every- era/ no- era: Gods Without Men as ‘translit’ as ‘translit’

  • Edited by Kristian Shaw, Sara Upstone
  • Book:
    Hari Kunzru
    Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    19 February 2026, pp 103-124

  • Summary

    Kunzru’s ironic engagement with the traditions of the ‘Great American Novel’ resonates with what Douglas Coupland has, in his own discussion of Kunzru, called ‘translit’: a contemporary literature defined by an atemporality that pulls together multiple timelines and geographies in a simultaneous present. For Bran Nicol, this tendency – encapsulated in the multiple substories within Gods Without Men – not only captures the volatility of contemporary culture, it also redefines the novel form. Concerned to distinguish ‘translit’ from an earlier postmodern fiction, emphasising the loss of the postmodern celebration of heterogeneity in favour of a much more ambivalent, and tense, relationship to questions of chaos and multiplicity, Nicol argues that multiple subjectivities, unreliability and slippage are not for Kunzru the ’party tricks’ that Coupland associates with postmodernism, but instead are symptoms of a deeply rooted concern for the impact of hyper-globalisation on contemporary life. Drawing attention to the novel’s dominant pessimism, what emerges is an entropic cosmopolitanism and a narrative aesthetic that works against the novel’s echoing structure of connectivity, proximity and cross-cultural engagement. For Nicol, this simultaneous indulgence in and concern for the breakdown of traditional meaning produces fiction that modifies rather than rejects the features of postmodern historiographic metafiction: ‘an alternative to postmodernism within postmodernism’.

  • 3 - Turning the tide, or turning around in My Revolutions

  • Edited by Kristian Shaw, Sara Upstone
  • Book:
    Hari Kunzru
    Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    19 February 2026, pp 62-80

  • Summary

    Relatively overlooked in Kunzru criticism to date and his first book without any explicit discussion of India, My Revolutions (2007) can be seen as a vital testing ground for many of the ideas of selfhood and consciousness that Kunzru would later bring to fruition, and also the concern for terrorist collectives seen in his most recent novel; its terrorist protagonist, ‘Chris’, assumes a new identity as a devoted family man called ‘Mike’, uncovering a relation to the individual that is missing in his terrorist past, which renders its victims inhuman and without substance. Maëlle Jeanniard du Dot takes critical readings of the novel in a new direction by considering how these concerns are shaped by a ‘poetics of turning and returning in/to time and place’. Reading the novel both as archival and contemporary fiction, psychogeographic motifs of drift forge connections between Kunzru’s writing and novelists such as Iain Sinclair and J.G. Ballard, evoking both a literal and figurative use of spatiality. This critical reading does much to reposition My Revolutions in Kunzru’s literary chronology, offering new connections between My Revolutions and other Kunzru works, such as Twice Upon a Time: Listening to New York.

Page 623 of 5067