Hellboy II: The Golden Army follows on from Guillermo del Toro's first feature in a number of ways. In this film, del Toro develops his role as a director of monsters; he continues to cross genre and cultural boundaries, bringing elements from high art and art cinema into this commercial venture. In this chapter, the author engages in discourse analysis to see that the presented paratexts reveal about the new ways in which auteurism can be cultivated through new media forms. She examines the ways that del Toro takes pains to insist on his creative power and authority through paratextual means. She provides an analysis of the text and consider its position within del Toro's filmic universe, and assess its relationship with El laberinto del fauno. This film appears to be diametrically opposed in terms of genre and niche markets, but it shares many visual and narrative traits.

The “information system” should provide understanding, which is needed for the practice of good citizenship. But it is not working well. This started with the rise of advertising in the late 19th century, when industrial output rose so dramatically that consumers had to be persuaded – on the basis of impulses and sentiments – to buy what they wanted rather than what they needed. When this sort of talk became obviously effective, public relations emerged to make businessmen, like Rockefeller, look good, and then, during World War I, propaganda was used to make the government look less warlike than the nasty “Huns.” Thus a powerful language of selling was introduced into American life, preferring efficacy rather than Enlightenment standards of truth, veracity, and reason. Scholarly explanations for how this all worked started with Marshall McCluhan who said that each “medium” – such as books or the telegraph – controls what kind of messages we can transmit. Then Neil Postman pointed out that the medium of commercial television will “amuse us to death” by ignoring our real needs in favor of peddling profitable wants. Thus Postman alerted us to how, since he wrote, getting our attention via slippery language has become the dominant business model for corporations today and has corrupted the marketplace for ideas.

This chapter deals with Scotland’s Northern Isles, Orkney and Shetland, which are home to two of the most conservative and distinctive local dialects in Scotland and Britain. An overview is provided of the local histories that led to the emergence of the present-day dialects and speech communities. Linguistic features are summarised and the linguistic situation discussed with regard to Scots and Scottish Standard English (SSE). To illustrate the local Scots–SSE speech range, a model of vowel variation along with text passages for the two poles is provided for Shetland. A corpus-based study of the lesser-known feature of pulmonic ingressive speech in Orkney and Shetland is presented. The chapter concludes with a discussion of ongoing societal and demographic changes and their potential effects on the linguistic situation and local dialects.

The purpose of this coursebook is to establish inter-linkage among three different features of social wellbeing – namely equality, depolarization, and tax progressivity – all based on society's income distributions. Low equality is socially dispreferred since it refers to the accumulation of a highly significant part of the total income of the society in the possession of a few. Depolarization is concerned with the improvement in the level of wellbeing of the middle-income group of the society. The existence of a rich middle class in a society is always desirable, since a wealthy middle-income group contributes highly to the society's economic growth and development in many ways. Tax progressivity investigates the extent to which equality is raised through taxation.

Chapter 1 presents an introductory outline of the materials analyzed in the remaining chapters. Chapter 2 formally defines and analyzes the notion of equality. Chapter 3 provides a rigorous treatment of the concept of depolarization.

In Chapter 4 we discuss different structural or local indicators of tax progressivity that look at the extent of progression at each income point. We look particularly at the redistributive and departure from the proportionality effects of taxation. We also investigate the implication of structural measures with respect to depolarization. One section of the chapter examines the impacts of equal proportionate income growths on revenue and redistributive effects of taxation. Given the before-tax income distribution, the impacts of equal proportionate increase in taxes on structural measures are investigated as well.

Alfonso Cuarón's filmmaking career has many parallels to that of Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu. All have made a first film in Mexico, before consolidating their careers in the USA. Cuarón's first film, Sólo con tu pareja (Love in the Time of Hysteria, 1991), was a national hit, but did not have the necessary ingredients or support to be a global success. Four years after making Sólo con tu pareja, Cuarón began his Hollywood career with A Little Princess. With this and Great Expectations, made three years later, the director attempted to carve out a name for himself by forging a personal style, with the help of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Through a focus on Great Expectations, this chapter explores Cuarón's distinctive use of colour and mise-en-scene, and examines the purposes they serve in pursuing auteurist ambitions.

Created by Paul Abbott and produced by the independent production company, Red, the Television and Radio Industries Club award-winning drama series Linda Green was broadcast in 2001-2002 by the BBC. Televisual pacing is utilised to communicate the emotional subtext of Linda in Linda Green. Liza Tarbuck, the female star at the heart of Linda Green, was inspired casting in terms of situating Linda as a believable, sassy, naive and yet wholly convincing character. Tapping into the zeitgeist of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century 'ladette' culture, Linda Green presents an interesting cultural shift in its representation and subversion of gender norms. This construction of Linda is important not only in its display of gendered difference, but as a political gesture in that Linda can be read as the epitome of the real working-class white modern woman.

This chapter offers a new outlook on the history of Scots, a minority language related to English, up to 1700. Scots and its history have been a subject of pioneering work in historical linguistics, especially in historical dialectology and digital approaches to language change. The chapter takes stock of previous scholarship and the extra-linguistic events which shaped the linguistic situation in Scotland from the medieval period till the early eighteenth century. It then highlights problematic areas and questions related to constructing a narrative for a history of an unstandardised minority language, with special focus on defining Scots as a language of written communication, its family tree, periodisation and status, as well as metalinguistic perspectives. The discussion finishes with an overview of the most recent research on various aspects of structure and language use, and a summary of available resources for the study of historical Scots.

This chapter examines how the Franco government used traditional (agrarian) forms of popular entertainment – including bullfighting, football and copla (a form of popular song) – to attract viewers to television and to develop a distinctively national sense of culture and identity. In this way, popular television entertainment, marked by a nationalistic, television-generated ‘star system’, became a vehicle for the dictatorship to promote an image of Spain as a centralised, unified and patriotic nation of strong men. The chapter gives an account of the rise and popularity of televised football and bullfighting, and of the resulting elevation of Real Madrid and El Cordobés to star status. It concludes by arguing that these escapist television entertainment forms represented a type of ‘low-cost manipulation’ designed to make the dictatorship socially acceptable and pacify political dissent.

This chapter begins the central second part of the book, which focuses on methods for semantic data gathering and analysis. To start us off, the present chapter surveys the phenomena of linguistic behavior that form the principal sources of evidence empirical semantic research can draw on and the types of data it can bring to bear on the study of these phenomena. In principle, five sources of evidence can be distinguished in empirical semantic research: (i) Referential evidence (Section 4.1); (ii) syntagmatic evidence (Section 4.2); (iii) pragmatic evidence (Section 4.3); (iv) evidence from categorization (Section 4.4); psycholinguistic evidence (Section 4.5).

Will Self has emerged as one of the most important and indeed most industrious of British authors of recent times, having written several novels, novellas and collections of short stories, to say nothing of the many volumes of collected journalism. Self 's first book, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, was published to general acclaim in 1991, winning the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His multifaceted career has included appearances on a television game show, book reviewing and working as the restaurant critic for The Observer. Self shares his description of the 'gallimaufry of grotesques' of William Burroughs's Junky with Ian Wharton's description of his friends in My Idea of Fun. Self 's comments in an article entitled 'New Crack City' make clear his debt to Burroughs in his approach to writing about drug use.