English publications (MU)
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This collection contains the published works of the faculty, staff, and students of MU's Department of English. Items may contain more than one file type.
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Item Hyperactivity and Hyperagreement in Bantu(2011) Carstens, VickiMany Bantu languages exhibit A-movements and patterns of iterating agreement that are disallowed in Indo-European languages. In Minimalist theory, both agreement and movement are constrained by an Activity requirement stipulating that goals in Agree relations must have an unchecked uninterpretable feature. For Indo-European DPs the sole Activity feature in A-relations is Case; but I argue here that grammatical gender, a component of Bantu noun class, is uninterpretable too. Case and nominal gender differ in that the latter enters the syntax already valued. Assuming goal deactivation is a consequence of syntactic valuation, we derive the result that gender is an infinitely reusable Activity feature. Adjunction of Bantu N to D makes gender visible to all clause-level probes, and Bantu DPs are therefore able to A-move more freely than their Indo-European counterparts and to value iterating agreement. The proposals provide a unitary explanation for the existence in Bantu of Subject Object Reversal, locative inversion controlling subject agreement, Hyper-raising, concord, left-edge agreement with operators, and multiple subject agreement. The syntax of gender argues that uninterpretable features need not be deleted from a syntactic object bound for the Conceptual-Intentional interface.Item Parameterizing Case and Activity: Hyper-raising in Bantu(2009) Carstens, Vicki; Diercks, MichaelCase theory has long played a crucial role in explaining the distribution of nominal expressions. Raising constructions are a well-established case in point (Chomsky 1981, George & Kornfilt 1981, Chomsky 2000, Chomsky 2001, among others). A raising verb may have an expletive subject and take as complement a finite clause containing a thematic subject. Many Bantu languages exhibit apparent raising out of a finite clause in a construction known as HYPER-RAISING (cf. Harford Perez 1985; and Tanaka 2002, Martin & Nunes 2005, Nunes 2008, Ura 1998, Zeller 2006 for similar problems in various languages). This paper explores HYPER-RAISING in Lubukusu and Lusaamia, two members of the Luyia subgroup of Bantu spoken in Kenya.Item Situated Writing Workshops: Putting Writing Advice in Context(The Writing Instructor, 2004) Patton, Martha Davis,1952-Even the most brilliant of college teachers can absorb only so much writing theory in a two- or three-day writing-in-the-disciplines workshop. The faculty who register for our writing workshops are typically committed to good teaching and believe in the importance of good writing, but they might maintain a polite skepticism about or impatience with current writing theory. Engineers, mathematicians, journalists, even fellow English professors may be less interested in what composition theory suggests than what Dr. Smith down the hall does or what Dr. Black across the table just said. Our challenge, then, is to balance workshop participants' initial desire for practical, clear-cut advice about “good writing” with our professional responsibility to stimulate a critical understanding of any such advice. What is particularly lacking even among seasoned, award-winning faculty in other disciplines is a rhetorical view of writing: an understanding that writing is not one set of generalizable skills and that most criteria for “good writing” are constrained by the occasion, the audience, purpose, and context.Item The Circulation of Poetry in the Eighteenth Century: The Case of Charles Plumptre's Manuscript Volume(Folger Shakespeare Library, 2005) Justice, GeorgeOn September 7, 1728 Charles Plumptre began a manuscript miscellany book of poetry, A Collection of Poems by Several Hands (Folger MS M.a.104). Much of what Plumptre carefully copies is light verse of the kind that might appeal to a schoolboy, but Plumptre also records poems by some of the great poets of the day.Item Lazy Susan(University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee, 2008) Lewis, Trudy (Trudy L.)