The Oxford English Dictionary is the focus of this chapter, which combines an examination of the printed dictionary with an exploration of the draft materials that went into making it. From 1884 to the appearance of its first Supplement in 1933, the OED’s documentation of same-sex lexis far outstripped that of any earlier dictionary. Yet the editors’ commitment to objectivity did not prevent them from reproducing many of the traditional biases of their precursors. At the same time, the rise of sexology in Britain led to the emergence of new taxonomies of erotic desire, ushering into public discourse terms such as homosexuality, bisexuality, inversion, and uranism. While much of the scientific literature cast same-sex attraction as a psychological disturbance, other discourses soon emerged in the writing of apologists and activists who rejected pathologization, whether by reclaiming taxonomic terms, coining new, affirmative identity labels, or refusing to be classified altogether. The chapter inspects how the OED’s compilers grappled with representing these dominant and dissident usages, pulled as they were between the demands of scientific principles and social scruples.

There’s an incoherence in our thinking about the intersections of gender and sexuality in the 1890s that is conditioned by an overemphasis on the Oscar Wilde trials. 1895 saw the coalescing of diffuse components (aestheticism, dandyism, effeminacy) that would establish a modern definition of male homosexuality. Yet we recognize that Wilde had little interest in the sexological notion of inversion, advocating instead for the pederastic model that depended on the repudiation of cross-gender expression. This chapter reconsiders the legacies of the 1890s by shifting focus from Wilde to two figures who differently adjudicated the merits of pederasty and inversion: John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter. Analyzing the revisions Carpenter made to his pamphlets in preparation for the publication of Love’s Coming-of-Age – delayed by Wilde’s trials – the chapter shows the influence of Continental thinkers such as Ulrichs and Hirschfeld, as well as New Woman writers of the 1890s, in defusing the antagonism between pederasty and inversion.

Chapter 2 considers the problem of ‘atheism’ in the period before the Civil War, emphasising the extent to which the concept represented an amalgam of the imaginary and the real, to which justice needs to be done. In many ways the discourse of ‘atheism’ was exaggerated, even fantastic. Yet it overlapped with actual instances of irreligion in ways that are teased out in the course of the chapter. The concept of ‘atheism’ made was possible to express disquiet about tendencies in contemporary thought and mores, such as secularism, naturalism and an undue reliance on ‘wit’ and sarcasm. The supposed overlap between atheism and immorality also provided an opportunity for preachers to draw attention to the spiritual shortcomings of the godly to whom they preached.

Negative systems have historically undergone several major changes that were caused by the overall properties of the grammatical system in particular periods. The functions of negatives in any period had to be consonant with the predicate structure, especially the structure of verbal predicates. This chapter addresses the developments of negatives that are most relevant to the establishment of the negative system of Contemporary Chinese rather than exhaustively surveying all negatives in history.

Chapter 2 begins by examining the correspondence between lovers Toxilus and Lemniselenis, using it to further investigate the metatheatrical dynamics of written correspondence on the Plautine stage and to consider the love letter qua category of epistolary writing. Next, it considers the ruse enacted via forgery. Relying on the same letter-as-script and letter-as-scheme metaphor active in Bacchides, Persa establishes an association between writing and belief to meditate on the nature of theatrical illusion. This chapter continues, then, to unpack the synergy between performance and text in Plautus but it focuses on the other end of the epistolary and dramatic processes via analysis of Persa’s onstage reading scene, which generates a simultaneously theatrical and anti-theatrical vision of an actor reading his lines on stage. Finally, I concentrate on Persa’s deception which replicates the content of the larger play it inhabits, delving deeper into the mechanics of mise-en-abymes to show how Plautus employs embedded text and internal dramaturgy to address the problem of creative originality, prompting us to question whose play we are watching.

Chapter 3 of Discourse Syntax (Non-Canonical Beginnings) introduces students to sentences with non-canonical beginnings, which we define as the non-canonical placement of a core element of the clause to the left of the subject. Students learn to differentiate between topicalization, left-dislocation, and sentence-initial adjuncts, as well as different types of inversion, including locative inversion, and are introduced to how these syntactic patterns are used to structure the discourse – establishing topics, packaging information, providing signposts – and under which discourse conditions they occur. Woven into these explanations are data from current research in the text-linguistic and variationist approach and attestations from freely available corpora.

This chapter examines the role of three kinds of narratives in producing knowledge about the rupture process of the Tohoku earthquake of 2011. I show that each of the three kinds of narratives appears in one of three stages on the way from data recorded of the earthquake to a reconstruction of the rupture process. In the first stage, rupture narratives are produced by computational tools called source models. In the second stage, a set of details that is taken accurately to represent features of the actual rupture process is distilled out of these conflicting rupture narratives through the use of a ‘research narrative’. In the third stage, these distilled details are strung together into an integrating narrative. This integrating narrative is used as a research tool for formulating questions, the pursuit of which has led to the production of further evidence about the rupture process.

This chapter deals with the analyses of the grammatical phenomena that have been related to information structure in the Romance languages, and that have played a central role in the general research on the encoding of information-structure notions in the grammar and at the interfaces. An overview is presented of this work, which has offered a great contribution to our current understanding of both empirical and theoretical issues. Highly debated questions are addressed, such as the relationship between focus and newness and between topic and givenness, the grammatical and interpretive correlates of different types of focus and topics, and the ‘aboutness’ nature of topics in contrast with subjects.

Chapter four traces the nebulous narrative of degeneration theory in Zola’s La curée, (The Kill) from its origins in medicine to its influence in fiction, and then back to case studies of hermaphrodism. This trajectory reveals how the degeneration diagnosis fundamentally shifted doctor-patient relationships. The French fin-de-siècle natality crisis elevated the stakes of hermaphrodism and non-reproductive sexuality, illustrating how social anxiety can fundamentally alter scientific findings, and how science can, in turn, influence lived experience in fundamental ways. Zola’s obsession with androgyny is merely a partial reflection of what became widespread cultural terror inflected in the writings of numerous authors and doctors, from the well-known Rachilde and Huysmans to the more obscure Armand Dubarry and Dr. Laupts. In La curée, hermaphrodism becomes a scary confluence of scientific, moral, and social anxiety that prefigures its treatment in later nineteenth and early twentieth-century sexology. At the same time, however, Zola’s use of androgyny in La curée unexpectedly subverts his normalizing use of science. By portraying unstable gender identities, La curée undermines the seemingly inexorable calculus of degenerate heredity inherited from medicine and recasts literary naturalism in a new light—less as a derivative of science than as a critic of it.

We here establish basic inversion framework in a Bayesian context, with introduction of measures of data fit and model suitability. We introduce Bayes’ theorem and identify the conditional probability with posterior probability distribution for model parameters through a composite misfit combining the match between observations and simulations and assumptions about the nature of acceptable models. We discuss Monte Carlo techniques and the assessment of model resolution, leading into the formulation of the non-linear inversion process in terms of optimisation of a measure of misfit.

This chapter aims to address four key issues in the study of the English auxiliary system. The issues involve the properties that distinguish auxiliary verbs from main verbs, ordering restrictions among auxiliary verbs, combinatorial restrictions on the syntactic complements of auxiliary verbs, and auxiliary-sensitive phenomena like negation. The chapter first focuses on the morphosyntactic properties of English auxiliary verbs. We show that their distributional, ordering, and combinatorial properties all follow from their lexical groupings: modals, have/be, do, and to. The second part of this chapter concerns the so-called NICE phenomena, each of which is sensitive to the presence of an auxiliary verb and has been extensively analyzed in generative grammar. The chapter shows us that a construction-based analysis can offer a straightforward analysis of these phenomena, without reliance on movement operations or functional projections.

Unbounded Dependency Constructions in Germanic are a particular fruitful area for the exploration of the nature of A’-movement because this language family shows an intriguing array of options to form such dependencies. In this survey, I will first introduce the major functions of canonical unbounded dependencies involving a filler-gap dependency (wh-movement, topicalization, relativization), focusing on their shared properties (sensitivity to locality, successive-cyclic movement) and differences (shape of the left periphery, presence/absence of subject-verb inversion, nature of the landing site) both within individual languages and cross-linguistically. After addressing asymmetries between local and long-distance dependencies, I discuss alternatives to canonical long-distance movement such as extraction from verb second clauses (which is sometimes treated as involving a parenthetical), scope marking / partial movement, wh-copying and A’-dependencies that terminate in a pronoun rather than a gap (resumption, prolepsis). In the last part I provide an overview of locality-related issues that are particularly striking in this language family such as the clause-boundedness of A’-movement in German, the variable strength of topic and wh-islands, the (putative) absence of strong island effects in Scandinavian, and variation in that-trace effects.