To put it briefly, a bioregional approach to literature is an attempt to figure out how nature influences human community and how human culture and politics are related to nature. Although they are not contemporaries and the term 'bioregionalism' did not exist in the early 20th century, Mary Austin and Gary Snyder share some principles of bioregionalism. They hold that understanding of the self and community begins with understanding of nature and its systems. This belief leads to some central elements of bioregionalism: nature as a community and anarchy. Bioregionalists including Austin and Snyder see nature as a community of self-reliance and interconnectedness which are present on the order of ecosystem. Anarchy does not mean a chaotic state. It seeks a state which is out of control of centralized power and must be operated with its members' rules. Thus, nature embodies a community of decentralization and self-determination. Observing human cultures predicated upon the bioregional elements, Austin and Snyder find the elements fully practiced in a small-scale town in the wilderness. With the town as a bioregional model, they try to overcome the anthropocentric pride and to deconstruct systems which are covertly operated by centralized powers.

This study focuses on how food can contribute to various immigrants' life and their food stories. In this work, food is used as a literary device to explain various characters' lives with ways of survival, violence and death, and communication and sharing etc. Food can not only influence people's survival and identity, but also reveal social stratification and the differences. The work shows that Ántonia shapes her own identity as an immigrant through the process of cooking her own food in the harsh settlement. A variety of foods, food cultures, and eating actions and so on can cause people's life to be reinforced or to lead to catastrophe. Ántonia's cooking, however, ultimately becomes a means to change her hard life into a rich one and at the same time proves what the generational integration of the food culture is. Furthermore, it also proves homogeneity through food, the importance of family eating, and a sense of community. It means that she established her healthy identity through trial and error in the end. Hence, she ultimately suggests her vision of both the sustainability of human life and future generation, having successfully replaced her constant labor in Nebraska with her own food.

Pygmalion (1912), a shavian story, not only illustrates the correlation of language and class but also suggests alleviating a linguistic gap between classes and pursuing social equality by virtue of education. This article is aimed to illuminate refreshingly the relation of language, class and social structure, which Shaw intended to represent, by analyzing a variety of linguistic phenomena uttered in Pygmalion. A lot of lines of Pygmalion are appropriate to exemplify the semiology of Saussure dealing with langue, parole, signifier (signifiant), signified (signifie) and arbitrariness of a sign. The aphasia theory of Roman Jakobson, referring to contiguity disorder and similarity disorder, is exemplified in the speeches of Eliza and her father. Kate Fox, William Labov and Peter Trudgill regard pronunciation as the most important linguistic indicator to distinguish classes. The audience can confirm vivid examples by listening to Cockney of Eliza and a Bystander on the street. This drama also illustrates elaborated codes and restricted codes of Basil Bernstein through the speeches of characters of the middle and upper class and those of the lower class. It is highly remarkable that Pygmalion proposed the social correlation of language and class on the stage earlier than the great attainments of linguistic trailblazers.

This article investigates how Matthew Arnold's early poem “Resignation” investigates the speaker's perceptions of the power of unanticipated adversity, irresistible undertaking, and a vigorous pursuit of human resolution. Reworking an ode form into his work, devoted to his sister suffering from her precipitous affliction, Arnold ponders over the problem of man's adverse fortune, his graceful-mindedness to forbear such occurrences, and to simultaneously pursue an unswerving power inherent within his willpower. Among his initial poems, this poem is remarkable in foreshadowing one of the writer's recurrent thematic concerns with the dilemma of human choice under the ineluctable force of its bizarre and repugnant counterpart. In reference to his various poems and prose works, “Resignation” certainly establishes the germ of the territory of one's resilient and free choice, which leads to his later portrayal of Empedocles's defiant spirit, whose characterization has been regarded as one of Arnold's great literary distinctions. Arnold's poetic purpose is not to reveal the characters' resigned stance, but discover an Empedocles-like dynamic and vibrant spirit of man in response to the present predicament.

The primary goals of this paper are to find out how the discourse marker I mean as used in American talk shows functions in turn-initial position and how frequently turn-initial I mean appears as a marker for explicating what the previous speaker has mentioned. Among the previous studies about I mean in talk shows, Kang (2018) points out the counter-accounting function of utterance-initial I mean, and Kang (2019) notes that not only this function but also the addition of more information about the previous speaker's comments are features that exclusively appear in talk shows. Drawing upon these two works, the current study explores the usages of turn-initial I mean in talk shows and compares the frequencies of each usage, focusing on the unique function of commenting about the previous speaker's utterance. According to the analysis, it is found that turn-initial I mean has three distinct functions in talk shows, which are further explication of the previous utterance, counter-explication of the previous utterance, and stalling. Also, these two explicating functions are found to appear more often than other well-known functions of I mean such as repair and summarization. These results show that the functions and the frequencies of the discourse marker I mean are related to the institutional characteristics of talk shows as well as to the settings and goals of the participants, including both interviewers and interviewees.

The coexistence of the symmetries and asymmetries of coordinate structures has long been a challenge in the tradition of generative grammar. In most coordinate constructions, it is argued, symmetric coordination is maintained through feature mapping algorithms across all syntactic levels, which are first proposed in Velde (2005). In particular, the apparent asymmetric phenomenon like CSC is in fact the result of both symmetric feature mapping at lexical selection and Remerge in narrow syntax. In the approach to coordinate structures proposed here, which is based on the assumptions and principles of the Survive-minimalism (cf. Putnam and Stroik (2008) and Stroik and Putnam (2013)), the second conjunct, to which a coordinating conjunction has already adjoined due to its defectiveness instead of projecting its phrase, is right-adjoined to the last member of the first conjunct. The resulting structure implies that any elements in the first conjunct c-command those in the second conjunct, accounting for coordinate asymmetries structurally. Moreover, in a derivational way, we can account for the surprising Principle A symmetry in coordinate constructions, following Lebeaux's (2009) suggestion about the domain of binding principles and Velde's (2009) list-adjunction.

English place-names ending in -wich and -wick (henceforth EPNWh and EPNWk, respectively) sometimes exhibit /w/-deletion, which is idiosyncratic in English phonology. For example, the suffix-initial /w/ is deleted after certain root-final consonants like /r/, /l/, /n/, and /m/: e.g. Norwich [nɔrɪʧ], Greenwich [grɪnɪʧ], Woolwich [wひlɪʧ], Bromwich [brɔmɪʧ], Warwick [wɔrɪk], Alnwick [ænɪk]. After other segments, on the other hand, the suffix-initial /w/ is pronounced, as in Ipswich [ɪpswɪʧ], Northwich [nɔɵwɪʧ], Gatwick [gætwɪk]. Pickwick [pɪkwɪk], etc. This study conducted an online survey experiment using written forms to identify native speaker's knowledge of morpheme-specific phonology involved in EPNWh and EPNWk. Total 42 actual and nonce words are tested by 43 respondents. The result is that morpheme-specific phonology in EPNWh and EPNWk was not equally productive to native speakers of British English. The suffix -wich was more likely to trigger /w/-deletion than -wick. The -wich was much more likely to delete /w/ than hypothetical -wid. However, the difference between -wick and -wid was not statistically significant. In addition, derivational rule-ordering in EPNWh and EPNWh was not sensitive to suffixes. Nevertheless, some native speakers equally reflected derivation in pronouncing the place-names.

The present study aims to show the diachronic change of the English present perfect progressive from the simple present tense (SP). I assert that SP is the psychological present tense describing the imperfective (unfinished) present process of the speaker's/writer's brain/mind. In accord with this, as the mind or psychology of the native speaker/writer changes, the usage of SP changes, and one example of this is the present perfect progressive in Present-Day English (PE). In Old English (OE), Middle English and Early Modern English, SP is used instead of the present perfect progressive, whereas the present perfect progressive is used in PE as a result of the change of the psychology of SP and the gradual change and completion of the English auxiliary phrase. In addition to the change of psychology of the speaker, English has adopted the present perfect progressive since ME as a result of the gradual change and completion of the auxiliary phrase. It is proposed that the gradual change and completion of the English auxiliary phrase from OE to PE has caused the motivation for the change of the psychology of the speaker of English in cooperation to employ the present perfect and then the present perfect progressive instead of the SP.

This study explores Koreans' production of the English alveopalatal fricative, which is not found in the Korean phonemic inventory and hence known to be a difficult sound to pronounce. Both Korean male and female college students produced the English /ʒ/ before and after the correction by an English professor. Some acoustical properties were analyzed including frication noise durations and spectral peak locations as well as spectral moments such as center of gravity, dispersion, skewness, and kurtosis. Statistical results showed that gender effects were found in all of the acoustical properties, and correction effects were found in frication noise durations, spectral peak locations, dispersion, and kurtosis. The center of gravity and skewness appeared to be changed after correction. However, they were not significantly different. The interactions of the two effects were not found in all of the acoustical properties. Some researchers reported that Korean did not have alveopalatal consonants and hence Korean consonants like /ʧ/ were pronounced with alveolar place of articulation. According to the results from the acoustical properties, the Koreans produced the English /ʒ/ as an alveopalatal fricative, not as an alveolar fricative. Thus the L1 transfer due to the lack of /ʒ/ in the Korean phonemic inventory was not found in the current study.

By conducting a production experiment, this study investigates whether speech melody in English is categorical or gradient, whereby the melody of speech indicates a categorical function. Test stimuli consisted of two data sets. In the first set, neutral conditions were directly compared to uncertainty conditions. In the other set, speakers produced both neutral-focus and contrastive-focus conditions to test one of the communicative functions. The results of the production experiment revealed that focused areas are realized with increased duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity compared to non-focused areas. Also, significant differences can be found between neutral and uncertainty conditions. In contrast to the neutral condition, the latter exhibits a sharp rising F0 curve following the release [m] in millionaire. On the other hand, the neutral condition is defined by a continuous declining F0 contour after [m]. While this distinction seems to support the categorical differences between the two data sets, the conditions are certainly attributed to different communicative functions. More importantly, the distributions of the uncertainty conditions turn out to be broad, which implies that each speaker delivers a different tonal pattern.