Chaucer's presence in songes and sonettes

In an elegy to Wyatt published in Tottel’s Miscellany, Surrey claims that Wyatt ‘reft Chaucer the glory of his wit’. This statement, which both lauds and resists Chaucer, is a microcosm of the way Chaucer is treated throughout the Miscellany. In examining the collection’s paradoxical attitude to Chaucer, this essay focuses particularly on the Squire’s Tale, the Franklin’s Tale, Anelida and Arcite, the Legend of Good Women, and several short lyrics. In its interest in courtly love poetry and Petrarch, the Miscellany follows a trajectory in English poetry set by Chaucer. Its courtly verse is saturated with words, phrases, and tropes from his poetry. Rhyme royal, which he introduced into English poetry, is widely used. The Canterbury Tales has been fully assimilated and can be referred to allusively with the same confidence of the audience’s knowledge as is the case when referring to classical myth; in Wyatt’s ‘Myne owne Jhon Poins’, the speaker, disclaiming deceitfulness, says that he cannot ‘say that Pan/ Passeth Appollo in musike manifold:/ Praise syr Topas for a noble tale,/ And scorne the story that the knight tolde’ (lines 48-50). However, Chaucer’s poetry is also downplayed and contested in the Miscellany. ‘Truth’, the only poem of his which appears in the volume, is disingenuously placed in the ‘Uncertain Authors’ section. In addition, some of the most important elements of his work are strongly resisted in the Miscellany, either ignored, dismissed or challenged. These elements include Chaucer’s interest in variety of voice, his sympathetic engagement with women, particularly wronged women, and his interest in female speech and particularly female complaint. The Miscellany, by contrast, is dominated by male-voiced lyrics preoccupied with the pain inflicted on the lover by a lady who is frequently unfeeling, cruel, or faithless. Chaucer’s frequent focus on the cynical seduction and betrayal of female by male is reversed in the Miscellany, and the language and metaphors he uses to express male cruelty (e.g. the word ‘newfangleness’ and images of hooks, nets and traps) are usurped to describe the lady’s cruelty to the suffering lover. On occasion, poems in the Miscellany challenge specific Chaucerian texts; ‘On His Love Named White’ throws down a gauntlet to The Book of the Duchess, while two of Surrey’s poems implicitly take issue with the female falcon’s voice in the Squire’s Tale, giving the deceitful tercelet the opportunity to shout down the falcon’s charges. The essay thus shows that in many respects Tottel’s Miscellany is only superficially Chaucerian, and that it both passively and actively takes issue with Chaucer’s work.

Motion event cognition and grammatical aspect: evidence from Afrikaans

Research on the relationship between grammatical aspect and motion event construal has posited that speakers of non-aspect languages are more prone to encoding event endpoints than are speakers of aspect languages (e.g., von Stutterheim and Carroll 2011). In the present study, we test this hypothesis by extending this line of inquiry to Afrikaans, a non-aspect language which is previously unexplored in this regard. Motion endpoint behavior among Afrikaans speakers was measured by means of a linguistic retelling task and a non-linguistic similarity judgment task, and then compared with the behavior of speakers of a non-aspect language (Swedish) and speakers of an aspect language (English). Results showed the Afrikaans speakers' endpoint patterns aligned with Swedish patterns, but were significantly different from English patterns. It was also found that the variation among the Afrikaans speakers could be partially explained by taking into account their frequency of use of English, such that those who used English more frequently exhibited an endpoint behavior that was more similar to English speakers. The current study thus lends further support to the hypothesis that speakers of different languages attend differently to event endpoints as a function of the grammatical category of aspect.

Spatial economics and ecosystems: the interaction between economics and the natural environment

This collection of original research and review articles and has been designed with the joint aims of inspiring future work and of reminding environmental economists and researchers from other disciplines that looking for similarities and common features in their studies is more important than magnifying their differences. It is also suitable for use as a postgraduate text. The volume reflects the endeavour of mainstream economic thought to include, amongst its chief concerns, the study of all complex interactions between economies and natural space. It also documents efforts made by economists and other scientists to study the complex phenomenon of individual and collective decision making when faced with problems linking economic activity with the environment. Presenting a pluralistic view of approaches and methodologies, rather than an exhaustive list of topics of interest to environmental scientists, the editors have brought together innovative contributions that can be read as self-contained pieces of work.

Learning to think in a second language: effects of proficiency and length of exposure in English learners of German

The aim of the current study is to investigate motion event cognition in second language learners in a higher education learning context. Based on recent findings showing that speakers of grammatical aspect languages like English attend less to the endpoint (goal) of events than speakers of non-aspect languages like Swedish in a nonverbal categorization task involving working memory (Athanasopoulos & Bylund, 2013; Bylund & Athanasopoulos, this issue), the current study asks whether native speakers of an aspect language start paying more attention to event endpoints when learning a non-aspect language. Native English and German (a non-aspect language) speakers, and English learners of L2 German, who were pursuing studies in German language and literature at an English university, were asked to match a target scene with intermediate degree of endpoint orientation with two alternate scenes with low and high degree of endpoint orientation, respectively. Results showed that, when compared to the native English speakers, the learners of German were more prone to base their similarity judgements on endpoint saliency, rather than ongoingness, primarily as a function of increasing L2 proficiency and year of university study. Further analyses revealed a non-linear relationship between length of L2 exposure and categorization patterns, subserved by a progressive strengthening of the relationship between L2 proficiency and categorization as length of exposure increased. These findings present evidence that cognitive restructuring may occur through increasing experience with an L2, but also suggest that this relationship may be complex, and unfold over a long period of time.

Exploring the source of differences and similarities in L1 attrition and heritage speaker competence: evidence from pronominal resolution

Several studies of different bilingual groups including L2 learners, child bilinguals, heritage speakers and L1 attriters reveal similar performance on syntax-discourse interface properties such as anaphora resolution (Sorace, 2011 and references therein). Specifically, bilinguals seem to allow more optionality in the interpretation of overt subject pronouns in null subject languages, such as Greek, Italian and Spanish while the interpretation of null subject pronouns is indistinguishable from monolingual natives. Nevertheless, there is some evidence pointing to bilingualism effects on the interpretation of null subject pronouns too in heritage speakers’ grammars (Montrul, 2004) due to some form of ‘arrested’ development in this group of bilinguals. The present study seeks to investigate similarities and differences between two Greek–Swedish bilingual groups, heritage speakers and L1 attriters, in anaphora resolution of null and overt subject pronouns in Greek using a self-paced listening with a sentence-picture matching decision task at the end of each sentence. The two groups differ in crucial ways: heritage speakers were simultaneous or early bilinguals while the L1 attriters were adult learners of the second language, Swedish. Our findings reveal differences from monolingual preferences in the interpretation of the overt pronoun for both heritage and attrited speakers while the differences attested between the two groups in the interpretation of null subject pronouns affect only response times with heritage being faster than attrited speakers. We argue that our results do not support an age of onset or differential input effects on bilingual performance in pronoun resolution.