Aquinas College

Abstract In recent years, literary criticism has witnessed a flourishing of what Paula Blank presciently called ‘etymological moments’: playful tracings of the roots of words that unearth unexpected links between the past and the present, and in so doing unsettle our certainties about both. Many of these moments have occurred under the rubric of queer philology, which has particularly called into question scholarly assumptions about the historical transmission of discourses on gender, sexuality, and embodiment. However, this impulse to reclaim the discursive history of the sexed and sexual body is not new. Between 1814 and 1820, the Yorkshire gentlewoman Anne Lister—now famous for her diary’s candid accounts of her love affairs with women—pored through English, Latin, and Greek dictionaries, looking up terms for sexual acts and anatomies and collating what she found into a personal glossary. Lister’s citing and rewriting of these definitions illuminate the protean forms that a dictionary can take for its writers and users: a source of knowledge, a moral guide, and even an erotic aid. Through lexicography, Lister found new ways of reading the body and reimagining its borders, the better to fit the contours of her own desires.

Discovering and quantifying the drivers of language change is a major challenge. Hypotheses about causal factors proliferate, but are difficult to rigorously test. Here we ask a simple question: can 20th century changes in English be explained as a consequence of spatial diffusion, or have other processes created bias in favour of certain linguistic forms? Using two of the most comprehensive spatial datasets available, which measure the state of English at the beginning and end of the 20th century, we calibrate a simple spatial model so that, initialised with the early state, it evolves into the later. Our calibrations reveal that while some changes can be explained by diffusion alone, others are clearly the result of substantial asymmetries between variants. We discuss the origins of these asymmetries and, as a by-product, we generate a full spatio–temporal prediction for the spatial evolution of English features over the 20th century, and a prediction of the future.

Blended Basic Language Courses: Design, Pedagogy, and Implementation By Hope M. Anderson New York, NY: Routledge US $82 ISBN 9781138571914 (Hardback) 190 pages 2018

It is imperative to utilize Young Adult (YA) literature themes to transfer deeper ideologies. This article layers I am Alfonso Jones, a YA graphic novel, by Tony Medina to frame the exploration of privilege during a literature unit in a secondary ELA classroom. Teachers can facilitate understanding of such an often overused, yet misunderstood phrase, through multiple means (e.g., conversation protocols, performance assessment). The topics examined in this article supports a praxis model of moving critical pedagogy and equity literacy theories to the forefront of one’s teaching by including student voice, incorporating relationship building, and building important conversation skills to increase identity and action.

Consider finite sequences $X_{[1,n]}=X_{1},\ldots,X_{n}$ and $Y_{[1,n]}=Y_{1},\ldots,Y_{n}$ of length $n$, consisting of i.i.d. samples of random letters from a finite alphabet, and let $S$ and $T$ be chosen i.i.d. randomly from the unit ball in the space of symmetric scoring functions over this alphabet augmented by a gap symbol. We prove a probabilistic upper bound of linear order in $(\ln(n))^{1/4}n^{3/4}$ for the deviation of the score relative to $T$ of optimal alignments with gaps of $X_{[1,n]}$ and $Y_{[1,n]}$ relative to $S$. It remains an open problem to prove a lower bound. Our result contributes to the understanding of the microstructure of optimal alignments relative to one given scoring function, extending a theory begun in (J. Stat. Phys. 153 (2013) 512–529).

The best justification of time-discounting is roughly that it is rational to care less about your more distant future because there is less of you around to have it. I argue that the standard version of this argument, which treats both psychological continuity and psychological connectedness as reasons to care about your future, can only rationalize an irrational—because exploitable—form of future discounting.

Most measures of nonverbal receiving ability use posed expressions as stimuli. As empathy measures, such stimuli lack ecological validity, as the participant is not actually experiencing emotion. An alternative approach uses natural and dynamic displays of spontaneous expressions. The Communication of Affect Receiving Ability Test (CARAT) uses as stimuli spontaneous facial expressions and gestures filmed by an unobtrusive camera of solitary participants responding to emotional images. This article reports the development and initial validation of the CARAT-Spontaneous, Posed, Regulated (CARAT-SPR), which measures both abilities to detect emotion from spontaneous displays (emotion communication accuracy) and to differentiate spontaneous, posed, and regulated displays (expression categorization ability). Although spontaneous displays are natural responses to emotional images, posed displays involve asking the sender to display "as if" responding to a particular sort of image when no image is in fact present (simulation), while Regulated displays involve asking the sender to display "as if" responding to a particular sort of image when an image of opposite valence is in fact present (masking). Expression categorization ability involves judging deception-simulation and masking-and conceptually involves a kind of perspective-taking or cognitive empathy. Emotion communication using spontaneous clips achieved a high level of accuracy and was strongly correlated with ratings of sender expressivity. Expression categorization ability was not significantly correlated with expressivity ratings and was modestly negatively correlated with emotion communication accuracy. In a brief version of the CARAT-SPR, women showed evidence of greater emotion signal detection, whereas men reported greater confidence in expression categorization. (PsycINFO Database Record

This essay considers the teaching of Italian in early modern England by looking at the texts, methods, and individuals involved. It considers some ways in which audiences not conforming to the traditional stereotype of the ‘Italianate gentleman’ shaped Italian pedagogies across the period, and analyses little-known print and manuscript texts that shed light on these audiences. It asks how, if at all, English students of Italian might have encountered the debates of the questione della lingua, moving from the evidence provided by pedagogical texts to the experiences of travel and Anglo-Italian personal relationships. Both were crucial to shaping English readings of the questione and, in at least one case, to the formulation of an Italian-inflected contribution to debates on the English language. Lastly, it looks at how ideas of ‘correct’ or prestigious written and spoken Italian were constructed for English learners of the language, both in pedagogical texts and in individual encounters with the Italian pe...

Nicolas Philibert’s Nenette (2010), a documentary about an orang-utan living in the menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, places the laughter of visitors at the centre of its reflections on the zoo, while also attending to the lived time of captivity, and to the orang-utan as something more than merely an object of fun. Nenette is often seen as a companion piece to Philibert’s Un animal, des animaux (1996), which documents the renovation of the Natural History Museum’s zoology gallery, principally comprising a vast taxidermy collection, located next door to the menagerie in which Nenette is housed. But it is not only the spatial proximity between animal specimens living and dead that prompts my pairing of the two films here. Un animal ’s wry investment in incongruities and visual gags finds continuation in the uneasy humour at work in Nenette . Drawing on Bergson’s theory of laughter as a negotiation of boundaries between the human and the animal, and between the animate and the inanimate, I read the zoo animal in Nenette as inextricably bound up with the taxidermied animal in Un animal . Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) acts as an intriguing urtext here, with one of its scenes set in the same zoology gallery at the Natural History Museum, thirty years before Philibert filmed there. Like La Jetee , Nenette and Un animal suggest cinema as a privileged space of reflection on life, death and temporality — and as in Marker’s museum scene, Philibert organises these questions around the animal. But, with the silent laughter of the couple during the museum visit in La Jetee in mind, I want to suggest that humour in Philibert’s two films marks a series of moments in which boundaries between the living and the dead, and the human and the animal, become especially fragile.