Kathryn Allan

The multilingual context of medieval Britain has been a focus of historical linguistic scholarship for some time, but Middle English has often been examined in isolation. This book analyzes a large dataset of English vocabulary from the late Middle Ages, a time when the language was gaining new importance, with attention paid to parallel lexical developments in French and Latin. It explores lexical and semantic innovations and losses, and its findings challenge the notion that native and borrowed words were in competition during the period. The book presents a new picture of ongoing bilingualism in the late medieval period and a growth in vocabulary that heralded the beginnings of standardization in English.

The fifteen authors and nine artists in this volume bring us beautiful, speculative stories of disability and mental illness in the future. Teeming with space pirates, battle robots, interstellar travel and genetically engineered creatures, every story and image is a quality, crafted work of science fiction in its own right, as thrilling and fascinating as it is worthy and important. These are stories about people with disabilities in all of their complexity and diversity, that scream with passion and intensity. These are stories that refuse to go gently.

The way in which we understand the concept of intelligence is rooted in metaphor and metonymy; for example, it is common to describe people as ‘bright’ or ‘thick’. This book explores the motivation for some of the lexemes in this semantic field across the history of the English language, considering the range of cognitive mechanisms and cultural factors that can inform metaphorical and metonymical mappings. Provides a much-needed diachronic approach to theories of metaphor and metonymy within cognitive semantics, building on the work of scholars such as Geeraerts and Sweetser Argues that a diachronic approach offers a fresh perspective which can both complement and challenge current theories of metaphor and metonymy Explores both cognitive and cultural issues relating to motivation, and takes account of established theories of semantic change alongside recent work in cognitive linguistics Considers three of the concepts that have been important in the way intelligence is conceptualized diachronically: the senses, density, and animals Includes a detailed case study of these source concepts which provides a starting point for a wider discussion about the nature of mapping processes