'Regina v John Terry': The Discursive Construction of an Alleged Racist Event

This article explores the conformation in discourse of a verbal exchange and its subsequent mediatised and legal ramifications. The event concerns an allegedly racist insult directed by high profile English professional footballer John Terry towards another player, Anton Ferdinand, during a televised match in October 2011. The substance of Terry’s utterance, which included the noun phrase ‘fucking black cunt’, was found by a Chief Magistrate not to be a racist insult, although the fact that these actual words were framed within the utterance was not in dispute. The upshot of this ruling was that Terry was acquitted of a racially aggravated public order offence. A subsequent investigation by the regulatory commission of the English Football Association (FA) ruled, almost a year after the event, that Terry was guilty of racially abusing Ferdinand. Terry was banned for four matches and fined £220,000.

It is our contention that this event, played out in legal rulings, social media and print and broadcast media, constitutes a complex web of linguistic structures and strategies in discourse, and as such lends itself well to analysis with a broad range of tools from pragmatics, discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics. Amongst other things, such an analysis can help explain the seemingly anomalous - even contradictory - position adopted in the legal ruling with regard to the speech act status of ‘fucking black cunt’; namely, that the racist content of the utterance was not contested but that the speaker was found not to have issued a racist insult. Over its course, the article addresses this broader issue by making reference to the systemic-functional interpersonal function of language, particularly to the concepts of modality, polarity and modalisation. It also draws on models of verbal irony from linguistic pragmatics, notably from the theory of irony as echoic mention (c.f. Sperber and Wilson, 1981; Wilson and Sperber, 1992). Furthermore, the article makes use of the cognitive-linguistic framework, Text World Theory (c.f. Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999) to examine the discourse positions occupied by key actors and adapts, from cognitive poetics, the theory of mind-modelling (c.f. Stockwell, 2009) to explore the conceptual means through which these actors discursively negotiate the event.

It is argued that the pragmatic and cognitive strategies that frame the entire incident go a long way towards mitigating the impact of so ostensibly stark an act of racial abuse. Moreover, it is suggested here that the reconciliation of Terry’s action was a result of the confluence of strategies of discourse with relations of power as embodied by the media, the law and perceptions of nationhood embraced by contemporary football culture. It is further proposed that the outcome of this episode, where the FA was put in the spotlight, and where both the conflict and its key antagonists were ‘intranational’, was strongly impelled by the institution of English football and its governing body both to reproduce and maintain social, cultural and ethnic cohesion and to avoid any sense that the event featured a discernable ‘out-group’.

The Complete Works of John Milton: Volume III: The Shorter Poems (826pp.)

Stephen B. Dobranski, Milton Quarterly 49.3 (October, 2015), 181-4:

'By addressing classical and neo-Latin works with which Milton's poems appear to engage, Haan has pursued something unattempted yet. Her erudite and engaging commentary on the Poemata is the most extensive and impressive that I have encountered in any edition ... Haan's discussion of Milton's Poemata - including the Testimonia, the one Italian and four Latin encomia by the poet's acquaintances published in 1645 and 1673 - is remarkably detailed and well-researched. In these sections, readers learn, for example, how Milton's Epitaphium Damonis borrows from both classical writers (Theocritus, Moschus) and contemporary models (Castiglione, Zanchi) while transcending all of them through a pattern of resurrection motifs. Or, readers can discover affinities between Milton's lament on the death of the Bishop of Ely and a poem by the Italian humanist Hieronymo Aleander, Jr., or learn about the connections between Milton's Elegia Quinta and George Buchanan's Maiae Calendae ... The Shorter Poems is a scholarly achievement of the highest order.'

Noam Reisner, Review of English Studies 65 (2014), 744-5:
‘Haan shines with her Neo-Latinist expertise by offering a vivid separate introduction to the Latin poems, which sets up Milton’s poemata specifically within the Neo-Latin contexts of the seventeenth century, thereby dispelling any remaining view of these poems as juvenilia (a view which results from reading the poems chronologically). … The present volume will instantly establish itself as the definitive resource for any reader interested in Milton’s shorter poems, and it is scarcely imaginable that it will ever be eclipsed or be in need of replacing. Its contribution is important in all areas, especially in providing for the first time in a single volume truly valuable documents which can teach us a lot more about Milton’s poetic development than simply reading the poems in chronological sequence. But perhaps, this edition’s greatest achievement is the way in which it succeeds in giving Milton’s Latin poems the pride of place they have long deserved as fully integral to Milton’s complete poetic imagination. Haan’s specific achievement in this regard is less in updating the translations than in providing a different context through which to look at the Latin poems themselves. Haan’s detailed commentaries set the Latin poems in a completely fresh light which looks beyond the obvious classical references and allusions, noted by Carey and many other editors, to Milton’s complex engagement with the Neo-Latin literary culture of his time. It is this aspect of the volume, more than anything else, which vindicates its essentialness.'

John Birks: Pioneer in quantitative palaeoecology

We describe the career of John Birks as a pioneering scientist who has, over a career spanning five decades, transformed palaeoecology from a largely descriptive to a rigorous quantitative science relevant to contemporary questions in ecology and environmental change. We review his influence on students and colleagues not only at Cambridge and Bergen Universities, his places of primary employment, but also on individuals and research groups in Europe and North America. We also introduce the collection of papers that we have assembled in his honour. The papers are written by his former students and close colleagues and span many of the areas of palaeoecology to which John himself has made major contributions. These include the relationship between ecology and palaeoecology, late-glacial and Holocene palaeoecology, ecological succession, climate change and vegetation history, the role of palaeoecological techniques in reconstructing and understanding the impact of human activity on terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and numerical analysis of multivariate palaeoecological data.

Forensic analysis of wooden safety matches - A case study

In this case, an individual was suspected of attempting to burn materials potentially relating to a murder case. A number of spent and unspent matches were seized at the scene by police for forensic examination. Coincidentally, a police raid at the suspect's house revealed a number of matchboxes, all of the same brand, containing matches that had a visual similarity to those recovered at the scene. Stable Isotope Profiling (SIP) was used to assess whether matches could either be distinguished or shown to be indistinguishable by 13C and 2H isotopic composition. These results were then compared to those from the X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis of match heads and microscopy of the wood. SIP showed the scene matches and seized matches to be different, which was confirmed by XRD and microscopy analyses.

John Punch, Scotist Holy War, and the Irish Catholic Revolutionary Tradition in the Seventeenth Century

During the 1640s, the Irish Franciscan theologian John Punch taught his theology students in Rome that war against Protestants was made just by their religion alone. Jesuits like Luis de Molina identified the holy war tradition in which Punch stood as a Scotist one, and insisted that the Scotists had confused the natural and supernatural spheres. Among Irishmen, Punch was unusual. The main Irish Catholic revolutionary tradition employed Jesuit and Thomist theory. They argued that the Stuarts had lost the right to rule Ireland for natural reasons, not supernatural ones; because the Stuarts were tyrants, not because they were Protestants.

John Maxwell

Biography of General Sir John Maxwell

The dynamics of murid gammaherpesvirus 4 within wild, sympatric populations of bank voles and wood mice

Murid gammaherpesvirus 4 (MuHV-4) is widely used as a small animal model for understanding gammaherpesvirus infections in man. However, there have been no epidemiological studies of the virus in wild populations of small mammals. As MuHV-4 both infects cells associated with the respiratory and immune systems and attempts to evade immune control via various molecular mechanisms, infection may reduce immunocompetence with potentially serious fitness consequences for individuals. Here we report a longitudinal study of antibody to MuHV-4 in a mixed assemblage of bank voles (Clethrionomys glareolus) and wood mice (Apodemus sylvaticus) in the UK. The study was conducted between April 2001 and March 2004. Seroprevalence was higher in wood mice than bank voles, supporting earlier work that suggested wood mice were the major host even though the virus was originally isolated from a bank vole. Analyses of both the probability of having antibodies and the probability of initial seroconversion indicated no clear seasonal pattern or relationship with host density. Instead, infection risk was most closely associated with individual characteristics, with heavier males having the highest risk. This may reflect individual variation in susceptibility, potentially related to variability in the ability to mount an effective immune response.

CSI 2264: Simultaneous Optical and Infrared Light Curves of Young Disk-bearing Stars in NGC 2264 with CoRoT and Spitzer—Evidence for Multiple Origins of Variability

We present the Coordinated Synoptic Investigation of NGC 2264, a continuous 30 day multi-wavelength photometric monitoring campaign on more than 1000 young cluster members using 16 telescopes. The unprecedented combination of multi-wavelength, high-precision, high-cadence, and long-duration data opens a new window into the time domain behavior of young stellar objects. Here we provide an overview of the observations, focusing on results from Spitzer and CoRoT. The highlight of this work is detailed analysis of 162 classical T Tauri stars for which we can probe optical and mid-infrared flux variations to 1% amplitudes and sub-hour timescales. We present a morphological variability census and then use metrics of periodicity, stochasticity, and symmetry to statistically separate the light curves into seven distinct classes, which we suggest represent different physical processes and geometric effects. We provide distributions of the characteristic timescales and amplitudes and assess the fractional representation within each class. The largest category (>20%) are optical "dippers" with discrete fading events lasting ~1-5 days. The degree of correlation between the optical and infrared light curves is positive but weak; notably, the independently assigned optical and infrared morphology classes tend to be different for the same object. Assessment of flux variation behavior with respect to (circum)stellar properties reveals correlations of variability parameters with Hα emission and with effective temperature. Overall, our results point to multiple origins of young star variability, including circumstellar obscuration events, hot spots on the star and/or disk, accretion bursts, and rapid structural changes in the inner disk. Based on data from the Spitzer and CoRoT missions. The CoRoT space mission was developed and is operated by the French space agency CNES, with participation of ESA's RSSD and Science Programmes, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, and Spain.