In her article ‘Connecting the past and the present’, Meike Pentrel examines the order of main clause and adverbial clause introduced by before or after in Samuel Pepys's diary from the point of view of the cognitive literature on processing constraints. The thread that is shared by all contributions of this special issue is that of the hypothesis of uniformitarianism, which states that cognitive processes have remained constant in the documented history of humanity. Pentrel aims at corroborating this hypothesis by testing if the processing constraints found at work in this seventeenth-century ego-document examined by her are similar to those that have been observed in contemporary language.

This brief response to Elizabeth Closs Traugott's contribution ‘“Insubordination” in the light of the Uniformitarian Principle’ could begin with John Lennon: ‘Imagine there is no. . . sentence.’

The present article studies the linear order of main and temporal adverbial clauses in the Diary of Samuel Pepys (1660–1669). In the development of a framework that combines cognitive and historical data, processing principles identified for Present-day English (e.g. Prideaux 1989; Diessel 2008) are tested for this ego-document from the seventeenth century. The factors investigated are the iconic temporal order of both clauses, the length of the adverbial clause and the implied meaning of the clauses. Moreover, the discourse function of the respective clauses will be discussed. On the basis of the Uniformitarian Principle, the present study assumes that processing principles that are valid for Present-day English predict the position of the clause in past language stages to a similar extent.

Plainly, the effort to apply to historical language study the insights to be derived from synchronic linguistic analysis is fraught with difficulties. The problem is usually conceptualized – as it is by several of the contributors to the present collection of studies – as a difficult marriage of disciplined methods to obstreperous data, a mismatched union somehow to be mediated by the Uniformitarian Principle. To understand the issues properly, then, it would seem a prerequisite to be able to identify what, exactly, the Uniformitarian Principle is. Yet that question itself has no simple answer, in part because the question can be interpreted in at least two ways, both of them bearing directly upon the aims of this collection.

What do we know about the past? For at least some languages, we have textual (or archaeological) evidence from various periods – beyond that, there is only reconstruction. But even when we have some textual evidence, what does it tell us? The answer to this question crucially depends on the way we approach the question: we can treat texts as decontextualized, linguistic evidence, as Neogrammarian or Structuralist studies have done (see McMahon 1994: 17–32). Such an approach already allows us to discover important generalizations about the linguistic state of affairs of a particular language or historical period. Using decontextualized historical evidence, for example, we can already ascertain with a high degree of certainty that in Old English voiced and voiceless fricatives were allophones, rather than phonemes, that there was no do-periphrasis in Middle English, and that in Early Modern English there was some variability between third-person singular present tense {-s} and {-th} – just as we know that present-day Japanese and Korean use postpositions, rather than prepositions.

Marcelle Cole presents an interesting study of pronominal reference in Old English, nicely supplementing work available in the literature which shows, in brief, that in contexts with more than one possible referent, clause-initial nominative personal pronouns dominantly continue the topic (subject) of the previous clause, whereas clause-initial se-demonstratives dominantly switch the topic to a new referent of the previous clause. Cole adds to this with a study of the overall use of clause-initial pronouns in five Old English texts, which shows more variation than expected on the basis of this literature. Her conclusion is that se-forms by and large pick up discourse-new referents from the previous context. She further claims that her findings highlight how issues pertaining to style, such as the author–writer relationship, text type, subject matter and the conventionalism propagated by text tradition, influence anaphoric strategies in Old English. In this response article. I wish to counterbalance Cole's argument on two points, and make some suggestions for further research, based on recent psycholinguistic work.

This article investigates alliteration in Old and Middle English poetry as a particular type of discourse-structuring device. It explores the use of this device in the context of a mainly anonymous and oral-formulaic tradition, and – in Construction Grammar terms – as a type of fragment chunker for both local conceptualization at the phrasal level and also one that permits (even encourages) a counterpoint conceptualization across syntactic structures, with an impact on literary meaning. The discussion will encompass the metrical aspects of this device, its role in the proliferation of poetic-only terms for key concepts that recur in extant verse texts, and implications for our understanding of medieval mental grammars.

This article combines methodologies from corpus linguistics with an experimental-like setup more affiliated to psycholinguistic research. The resulting methodology allows us to gain more insight into cognitive motivations of language use in speakers from the past, and consequently to better assess their similarity to present-day speakers (the Uniformitarian Principle). One such cognitive motivation thought to be relevant in the early stages of grammatical constructionalization (grammaticalization) is covered by the evasive concept of ‘extravagance’ (i.e. the desire to talk in such a way that one is noticed). The methodology is tested on the Early Modern English extension of the [be Ving]-construction to progressive uses in present-tense main clauses. It is argued, on the basis of recurrent contextual clues, that [be Ving] in this novel use is motivated by extravagance. Interestingly, a comparison of two speaker/writer generations that are among the earliest to use this innovation with some frequency suggests that the encoding of extravagance shifted between them. At first, extravagance was signalled by coercion of the still stative semantics of [be Ving] into a progressive reading. In the second generation it had become an entrenched characteristic of the construction itself.

In their contribution to this special issue, De Smet & Van de Velde suggest that the analysability of a morphologically complex word is an indicator of how easily that word is primed by elements that are formed by the same word formation process. To illustrate, hearing or reading the words roughly, equally and luckily within a short span of time should activate the word formation process of ly-suffixation in the listener's mind, so that the subsequent production of fully compositional ly-adverbs, as for instance permanently or comfortably, should become relatively more likely.

This essay on genres acknowledges the constructed nature of the fluid classifications that form around recognized and recognizable types of creative work. Some systems of classification owe their recognition to powerful cultural intermediaries. Others, often located in the realm of popular culture, emerge without input from cultural intermediaries. As constructed groupings of works, genres matter for their ability to generate distinct circuits of transmission that allow for a specific type of encounter with the work and a type of response to the work.

Twenty-first-century African literary production has generated a number of conundrums for scholars invested in African literary studies as one recognizable field of study. Some of these conundrums drive Tejumola Olaniyan’s declaration of a post-global condition in African literary studies in “African Literature in the Post-Global Age.” Understanding that essay demands a detour through an intellectual history of African literary studies from about 1990 to 2010.

This article discusses Tejumola Olaniyan’s submissions in his essay “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense” by problematizing some of his submissions on the temporalities, especially the global and the post-global, that have inflected the field of African literary discourse since the second half of the twentieth century. In doing this, the essay queries the idea that the category of the nation-state has been exhausted or overwhelmed by the global and the post-global. The essay suggests instead that the nation-state has been retooled and rearmed by a nascent temporality, the post-truth, in ways that have significant consequences for African literatures.

Africa, and the specificities of its individual countries’ colonial experiences, poses important questions concerning genre and popular culture. Specifically, it is difficult to situate something like, for example, “crime fiction,” using the “culture industries” model proposed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Although helpful, Stuart Hall’s major rehabilitation of the popular removed Adorno and Horkheimer’s cultural elitism but nevertheless continued to tie the popular to a mode of production concomitant with late capitalism. What, this essay asks, should then be done with the “popular” productions of an African continent that has been systematically underdeveloped? Likewise, how should we categorize the work of Francophone African writers of noir whose books are principally sold in France? These cases further destabilize the already precarious concept of the popular, not only in its application to Africa, but globally.

In this introduction to this special issue, “Genre and Africa,” Jaji and Saint theorize genre from the perspective of the African continent to explore how such an orientation necessarily interrogates and transforms previous understandings of genre. After a brief review of pivotal work in genre studies, the authors turn to Africa’s particular colonial and postcolonial predicaments to theorize the specific interventions to genre theory that such a vantage point affords. Interwoven are summaries and commentary upon the six essays included in the issue. The introduction then concludes by highlighting several new directions of genre study occasioned by this issue’s contents, including the rise of new media and renewed interest in the intersections of popular forms and affect studies.

A response to my interlocutors and a reaffirmation, through a consideration of the place of Africa in the modern world, of the post-global as a productive reading frame.

Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Untouchable (1935) offers opportunities to introduce and explore a variety of theoretical, historical, and ethical issues in the classroom. A canonical text of Indian writing in English, the novel presents a day in the fictionalized life of a Dalit (“untouchable”) boy in colonial India. As such, it is situated aesthetically in the triangular tension between colonial modernity, Gandhian nationalism, and Ambedkarite anti-caste radicalism. Untouchable enables rich discussions in relationship to these aspects through contextualization and comparison. Especially fruitful is re-evaluating the novel in the light of new work in relationship to caste.