The Future of Flesh examines ways in which “flesh” has been re-conceptualized in late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. Its twelve essays analyze contemporary attitudes to corporeal change resulting from pain, death, artistic experimentation or technological intervention, and highlight current transformations in the very definition of “flesh.” Cross-disciplinary in their approach, the essays in this collection investigate the limits, the politics and the ethics surrounding corporeal change, and address topics that range from classical heroic bodies, and breast cancer photography to cyberfiction.

This unique account of the "uneasy special relationship" between Britain and South Africa surveys all political, economic, cultural, and geostrategic aspects. Starting from the bruising experience of the South African Boer War, Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw trace the countries' deteriorating relationship through a series of crises to South Africa's departure from the Commonwealth in 1961 and subsequent return, post-apartheid, in 1994.

The architectures and mechanisms underlying language processing form one important part of the general structure of cognition. This book, written by leading experts in the field, brings together linguistic, psychological, and computational perspectives on some of the fundamental issues. Several general introductory chapters offer overviews on important psycholinguistic research frameworks and highlight both shared assumptions and controversial issues. Subsequent chapters explore syntactic and lexical mechanisms, the interaction of syntax and semantics in language understanding, and the implications for cognitive architecture.

Die Wahl der Kapitalstruktur und die Auswirkungen von Finanzierungsentscheidungen auf den Unternehmenswert sind die grundlegenden Fragestellungen von Corporate-Finance. Hilmar Schneider erläutert chronologisch die Entwicklung der modernen Kapitalstrukturtheorie und der empirischen Determinantenforschung. Im Rahmen einer Meta-Analyse wertet er die auf internationaler Ebene publizierten Forschungsergebnisse über die acht bedeutendsten Kapitalstruktur-Determinanten aus. Diese Vorgehensweise erlaubt die Identifikation empirischer Forschungslücken, die studienübergreifende Untersuchung von Moderatoreffekten sowie nicht zuletzt den Rückschluss auf die Gültigkeit zentraler kapitalstrukturtheoretischer Hypothesen.

Language is a means we use to communicate feelings; we also reflect emotionally on the language we and others use. James Wilce analyses the signals people use to express emotion, looking at the social, cultural and political functions of emotional language around the world. The book demonstrates that speaking, feeling, reflecting, and identifying are interrelated processes and shows how desire or shame are attached to language. Drawing on nearly one hundred ethnographic case studies, it demonstrates the cultural diversity, historical emergence, and political significance of emotional language. Wilce brings together insights from linguistics and anthropology to survey an extremely broad range of genres, cultural concepts, and social functions of emotional expression.

This volume sets out a new paradigm that increases our understanding of African culture and the forces that led to its transformation during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and beyond, putting long due emphasis on the importance of Central African culture to the cultures of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Focusing on the Kongo/Angola culture zone, the book illustrates how African peoples re-shaped their cultural institutions as they interacted with Portuguese slave traders up to 1800, then follows Central Africans through all the regions where they were taken as slaves and captives.

The Vezo are fishing people of western Madagascar. The identity of the Vezo is not fixed by descent; rather, it is established by what they do. They are people of the sea, distinguished from the farmers around them by their economic specialism. Ethnicity is usually thought to be a consequence of inborn qualities acquired by descent, and Astuti explores the consequences of ascribing ethnic identity with reference to economic activity. Her analysis reveals that only in the cult of the dead does descent become critical, and her argument in this innovative analysis of Vezo kinship is that the people distinguish two models of the person: one determined by the past, and the other defined contextually, in the present.

For sixty years, from 1260-1323, the Mamluk state in Egypt and Syria was at war with the Ilkhanid Mongols based in Persia. This is the first comprehensive study of the political and military aspects of the early years of the war, from the battle of Ayn Jalut in 1260 to the battle of Homs in 1281. Between these campaigns, both sides were engaged in various types of psychological warfare. Here, as in the major battles, the Mamluks usually gained the upper hand, establishing themselves as the most important Muslim power at the time.

This groundbreaking undergraduate textbook on modern Standard English grammar is the first to be based on the revolutionary advances of the authors' previous work, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002). The text is intended for students in colleges or universities who have little or no previous background in grammar, and presupposes no linguistics. It contains exercises, and will provide a basis for introductions to grammar and courses on the structure of English, not only in linguistics departments but also in English language and literature departments and schools of education.

Apposition in Contemporary English is the first full-length treatment of apposition. It provides detailed discussion of its linguistic characteristics and of its usage in various kinds of speech and writing, derived from the data of British and American computer corpora. Charles Meyer demonstrates the inadequacies of previous studies and argues that apposition is a grammatical relation realized by constructions having particular syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics, of which certain are dominant. The language of press reportage, fiction, learned writing and spontaneous conversation is analyzed.

The essays in this volume are all analyses of prosody--primarily intonation and rhythm--and the role it plays in everyday conversation. Prosody emerges as a strategy deployed by interactants in the management of turn-taking and floor-holding; in the negotiation of conversational activities such as repair, assessments, announcements, reproaches and news receipts; and in the keying of the tone or modality of interactional sequences. The material studied is taken not from constructed laboratory data but from genuine English, German and Italian conversations.

Using an innovative theoretical framework, Dr. Ritt describes the phenomenon of the change in vowel length in early Middle English, and sets out to account for its occurrence. He shows that the changes stem from universal principles that govern the way in which humans use speech sounds to communicate. He examines why these principles only sometimes lead to widespread changes, as in Middle English, and goes on to suggest that language is a complex system in which conflicting tendencies are constantly renegotiating their spheres of influence.

Using data from Sissala, a previously unanalyzed language, this book shows that the analysis of text and discourse is best approached from a cognitive rather than a strictly linguistic point of view.

Leading researchers examine the Celtic languages in comparative perspective, making reference to European and Arabic languages; they use the insights of principles-and-parameters theory. A substantial introduction makes the volume accessible to theoreticians unfamiliar with the Celtic languages and to specialists. The book makes a strong contribution to linguistic theory and to our understanding of the Celtic languages.

Drawing on numerous interactional settings (the workplace; medical interviews; education), in a variety of genres (narrative; conversation; interviews), and amongst different communities (immigrants; patients; adolescents; teachers), this revealing volume sheds new light on how our social practices can help to shape our identities.