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"Over the last thirty years, there have been very few volumes published in the UK devoted to the study of folk song and the folk song revival, much of the research in the field appearing in the pages of the Folk Music Journal or coming from North America. This extensive collection of papers, while not comprehensive, is intended in part to fill this void and to make a contribution to the field of study. It is the unashamed product of a major conference to mark the centenary of the founding of the Folk-Song Society, held at the University of Sheffield, 10-12 July 1998, and organised jointly by the University's Department of Music and National Centre for English Cultural Tradition, together with the English Folk Dance and Song Society, the successor to the Folk-Song Society since its merger with the English Folk Dance Society in 1932."--p.1.
Is the passive a unified universal phenomenon? The claim derived from this volume is that the passive, if not universal, has become unified according to function. Language as a means of communication needs the passive, or passive-like constructions, and sooner or later develops them based on other voices (impersonal active, middle, reflexive), specific semantic meanings such as adversativity, or tense-aspect categories (stative, perfect, preterit). Certain contributors review the passives in various languages and language groups, including languages rarely discussed. Another group of contributors takes a novel theoretical approach toward passivization within a broad typological perspective. Among the languages discussed are Vedic, Irish, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, Lithuanian, Mordvin, and Nganasan, next to almost all European languages. Various theoretical frameworks such as Optimality Theory, modern structuralist approaches, Role and Reference Grammar, cognitive semantics, Distributed Morphology, and case grammar have been applied by the different authors.
In this volume of 29 papers, readers interested in language variation and historical linguistics will find interesting theoretical proposals as well as suggestions concerning ways of approaching previously unsolved empirical problems in the field. The papers deal with various aspects of historical regional dialectology, and some border on the issue of dialectology and linguistic change. Although many deal with English, a number discuss Romance languages in general as well as Norwegian, German, relic languages of the eastern Alpine region, Coptic, and Fox. Some are devoted to more general issues. The language specific contributions also often cover areas of a more general nature. The results indicate new vistas for further productive research in the area of historical dialectology.
Supported by documents, many of which were not readily available or have never been published before, this book studies images of the 'Irish traditional storyteller' offered at different periods, from several viewpoints and for various purposes. Invariables, changes, ruptures and the effect of conflicting attitudes and ideologies are identified. Contextualized in Irish history and on the wider European scene, this huge book explores the testimony of early antiquarians, accounts of meetings with storytellers by 18th- or 19th-century travelers, representations of acts of elite storytelling in ancient Irish literature or of popular ones in oral tradition itself and in fiction in English - atten...
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Ireland, from the European Nations series, is a useful reference guide for any student interested in the modern history of Ireland.