Search

This article explores the posts with ecological concerns published by the community organization speakGreen on its website and Facebook page. The analysis falls within the aims and scope of ecostylistics, and is undertaken by applying Lesley Jeffries’ stylistic model of opposition. The main research purpose of this article is to identify the stylistic strategies promoting beneficial stories and those controverting destructive stories, in Arran Stibbe’s terminology. A broader research purpose is to assess whether the stylistic model of opposition can fruitfully be utilized to examine ecologically-oriented short texts and the non-literary text type of the speakGreen post. This ecostylistic study firstly demonstrates that unconventional opposites are more effective than conventional opposites in conveying beneficial stories, since their unexpected contrasts surprise the speakGreen website and Facebook users. Secondly, the study proves that two structural triggers of opposition, namely negation and especially parallel structure, are the most frequent in the sample of posts under investigation, due to the stylistic and discursive characteristics of the speakGreen post text type. The sample was also found to feature: (1) The visual trigger of green and red color-coding, which indicates contrast between beneficial stories and destructive stories; (2) Such stylistic devices as foregrounded end-focus and phonological parallelism. All these stylistic traits contribute to making the posts articulate texts relaying refined ecological messages in very few words.

Willie, one of the recurring characters in the American animated TV series The Simpsons (Twentieth Century Fox, 1989-present), is the head groundskeeper at the elementary school in the Actional town of Springfield, and a Scottish immigrant, fiery-tempered and almost feral in appearance and behaviour. In this article, I study the Scottish national-ethnic stereotypes in a corpus of Willie's utterances, and I investigate his conversational style with the people living in Springfield, using a pragmatic approach and Searle's (1976) taxonomy of illocutionary acts. My research objective is to analyse whether his conversational style in the hyperbolic discourse of the comic series contributes to conveying a stereotypical perception of the Scottish national identity; I thereby attempt to distinguish and reveal the linguistic and interactional characteristics which construct the dramatis persona of Willie as conventionally Scottish and non-American. This pragmatic scrutiny has disclosed that the Scottish immigrant is attributed with such value-laden characteristics as friendliness, aggressiveness and coarseness, which can be directly connected with his Scottish national identity. Nevertheless, the conversations he participates in and the activities he undertakes characterise him as a grotesque and ludicrous victim of both adults and children in the American town of Springfield. Accordingly, on the one hand, the groundskeeper's Scottishness is, as Gray (2006, p. 64) points out, depicted as hyper-stereotypical and, thus, as axiomatically parodistic, while this character's main discursive role in the TV series is, according to Rodaway (2003, p. 163), to act as a foil to the American people in Springfield. However, on the other hand, the equation of a victim, repeatedly outwitted by children, with an immigrant, constructed as a verbal and visual other from American culture and identity, can actually be, in Gray's (2006, p. 64) words again, 'a rather high risk strategy', even within the humorous discourse of this hyperbolic TV series. Keywords Groundskeeper Willie; national-ethnic stereotypes; pragmatics; Scottish stereotypes; Searle's taxonomy of illocutionary acts; The Simpsons, Groundskeeper Willie and the Discursive Function of Stereotypes Among the recurring characters in the American animated TV series The Simpsons (Twentieth Century Fox, 1989-present), and among the people in the [...]

This article explores the Scottish character of Groundskeeper Willie in the American animated sitcom The Simpsons with a pragmatic and social-psychological approach. It firstly introduces Willie's linguistic and visual features, the sample of three episodes the analysis is based on, Scottish stereotypes in Lindsay's (1997) sociological research, and Searle's (1976) taxonomy of illocutionary acts (representatives or assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations). Secondly, the turns uttered by the groundskeeper in the sample are classified by applying Searle's taxonomy, and his illocutionary acts are examined in their contexts and compared with the list of national-ethnic Scottish stereotypes compiled by Lindsay. This study demonstrates that Willie's illocutionary acts and the stereotypes they convey depict him as a figure characterised by positive traits; nevertheless, the responses his illocutionary acts are met with not only counter his pleasant aspects, but also ultimately represent the Scottish groundskeeper as a ludicrous victim of his American fellow townspeople. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the linguistic practices utilised by W. Wordsworth in the "Preface" to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) in order to construct his own identity as an innovative writer and his interaction with his reader. Within the aims and scope of the new discipline of historical pragmatics, the "Preface" is examined as a dialogic text and several interactive strategies it features are identified and investigated. This historical pragmatic scrutiny demonstrates that these dialogic devices represent the figure of the writer as authoritative and persuasive. Moreover, they also lead his addressee to share the writer's viewpoint on Romantic poetry and language by means of positive politeness building a common context directly involving the reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins with an outline of the characteristics of verbatim theatre. Section 2 then compares the normal non-fluencies of spontaneous speech with the contrived non-fluences of fictional discourse. In Section 3 we analyze the non-fluencies evident in five extracts from a specific work of the genre: Alecky Blythe's Cruising. While interpretation of the planned non-fluencies of scripted dialogue is usually straightforward, the authentic non-fluencies of verbatim theatre are difficult to interpret since they are indicative of complex emotional states. It emerges that normal non-fluencies are often not "normal" at all in that they are not the product of genuine inarticulacy. Sometimes they are verbal signals that a speaker consciously employs; on other occasions they are unconscious, but in these cases they seldom comply with the rather formulaic link between verbal stumble and emotional state frequently adopted in created dialogue. In the hands of a skilled verbatim playwright, these simulated or genuine non-fluencies can have great dramatic efficacy. Indeed, the naturally occurring speech of authentic communicative events has the potential to be as dramatically dynamic, as psychologically complex and as linguistically inventive as any script crafted by the most skilled of playwrights. In short, real or apparent inarticulacy becomes art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

( Headache 2012;52:792-807) Objective.- Our aim was to investigate CO2 laser-evoked potential (LEP) habituation to experimental pain in a group of patients affected by medication-overuse headache, with a history of episodic migraine becoming chronic, before and after treatment, consisting in acute medication withdrawal and a preventive treatment cycle. Background.- One of the main features of LEPs in migraineurs is a lower habituation to repetitive noxious stimuli during the interictal phase. Methods.- LEPs were recorded to stimulation of both the right hand and the right perioral region in 14 patients and in 14 healthy subjects. The habituation of both the N1 and the vertex N2/P2 components was assessed by measuring the LEP amplitude changes across 3 consecutive repetitions of 30 trials each. Results.- In the 8 patients who had clinically improved after treatment, the N2/P2 amplitude habituation was significantly higher after treatment than before treatment following both hand ( F = 43.2, P < .0001) and face stimulation ( F = 6.9, P = .01). In these patients, the N2/P2 amplitude habituation after treatment was not different from that obtained in healthy controls ( P = .18 and P = .73 for hand and face stimulation, respectively). On the contrary, in the patients who did not improve, the N2/P2 amplitude still showed reduced habituation after both hand ( F = 3.1, P = .08) and face ( F = 0.7, P = .4) stimulation. Conclusion.- The deficient habituation of the vertex N2/P2 complex was partly restored after successful treatment of medication-overuse headache, reflecting a modification in pain-processing pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores erotic limericks which appeared in the first issue of the magazine "The Pearl, A Journal of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading." It examines the language of sexuality and of eroticism in the nursery rhymes in the magazine and how it is used to describe the bodies and actions of the characters portrayed in the texts. It shows how the models of femininity and of masculinity represented in the poems are regulated by hegemonic masculinity and dominant heterosexuality.

Background: Habituation deficit, suggesting a deregulation of cortical excitability, represents a typical hallmark of interictalstages of migraine. We previously demonstrated that several neurophysiological markers of altered cortical excitabilityare significantly correlated to spontaneous clinical fluctuations of migraine. We therefore aimed at verifying whetherclinical fluctuations are correlated to specific patterns of somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) habituation.Methods: We analyzed habituation after median nerve stimulation of both high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) and N20SEP in 25 migraine patients and 18 healthy volunteers. Subjects underwent six consecutive series of 500 stimuli.Results: Migraine patients as a whole showed a significant habituation deficit of the N20 response. Moreover, spontaneouslyworsening patients show a clear potentiation of this wave in the last block of stimuli, whereas in spontaneouslyimproving patients the N20 amplitude remained stable. Presynaptic HFOs were smaller in worsening patients and largerin improving ones, but they did not undergo habituation in patients as well as in healthy subjects.Conclusions: Potentiation of the N20 response in spontaneously worsening migraineurs confirms that the reduction of thethalamocortical drive plays a major role in migraine pathogenesis. Moreover, the stable pattern we observed in spontaneouslyimproving patients suggests that compensatory mechanisms can also play an important role. The normalresponse to repeated stimuli of HFOs in migraineurs might indicate that, although its initial amount depends on clinicalconditions, high-frequency thalamocortical drive remains stable during the stimulation and probably reflects the activityof a buffer mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Restless legs syndrome (RLS) is characterized by unpleasant sensations generally localized to legs, associated with an urge to move. A likely pathogenetic mechanism is a central dopaminergic dysfunction. The exact role of pain system is unclear. The purpose of the study was to investigate the nociceptive pathways in idiopathic RLS patients. We enrolled 11 patients (mean age 53.2 ± 19.7 years; 7 men) suffering from severe, primary RLS. We recorded scalp laser-evoked potentials (LEPs) to stimulation of different sites (hands and feet) and during two different time conditions (daytime and nighttime). Finally, we compared the results with a matched control group of healthy subjects. The A δ responses obtained from patients did not differ from those recorded from control subjects. However, the N1 and the N2-P2 amplitudes' night/day ratios after foot stimulation were increased in patients, as compared to controls (N1: patients: 133.91 ± 50.42%; controls: 83.74 ± 34.45%; p = 0.016; A δ -N2-P2: patients: 119.15 ± 15.56%; controls: 88.42 ± 23.41%; p = 0.003). These results suggest that RLS patients present circadian modifications in the pain system, which are not present in healthy controls. Both sensory-discriminative and affective-emotional components of pain experience show parallel changes. This study confirms the structural integrity of A δ nociceptive system in idiopathic RLS, but it also suggests that RLS patients present circadian modifications in the pain system. These findings could potentially help clinicians and contribute to identify new therapeutic approaches., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2019 Catello Vollono et al.)