Earticle

Characters in Samuel Beckett’s works are absorbed in speaking of numerous objects and are always keen to develop their stories into an inventory even in his late works where possessions are reduced to an unnameable voice. Among Beckett’s oeuvre, Happy Days, written in 1961, is the work that epitomizes the passionate obsession of objects and the narrative as an inventory of possessions. In this play, middle-aged Winnie brings out a series of objects from a black bag that she holds dear. She goes on to talk about each object purely to pass the dreadful present time. What is central to the play is the relationship between props and the hysterized female protagonist. The thesis shall approach the issue by reflecting on the simultaneous dialectic of object/thing manifested by the props. This dialectic summons the irreducible excess of the feminine body and discloses the failure of semiotic saturization. The sharp tension between the intelligible and the unknowable reveals the feminine at the limit which is neither here nor elsewhere.

In his preface of Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche expressed his famous motto that “Ja, das Leben is ein Weib”(Yes, life is a woman). When he adopted a ludicrous Baubo who showed her genitalia before the public, he could insidiously reveal his antipathy of woman and truth, deep as well as superficial. One can also trace Nietzsche’s misogynistic tendency in his “vita femina” section of 339. Considering that if “vita femina” should be considered an exhilarating version of woman as life or truth, Nietzsche should have put it as “vitae femina” or “vita feminina.” The recent argument that Nietzsche was actually a proto-feminist loses its ground when we know that Baubo, a persona of Demeter, degenerated into a figure of vita femina, a sly identical version of mors femina, woman of death.

Nowadays, with the development of natural language processing, emotional messages encoded in spoken or written texts can be explored with technology. While digital humanity (DH) is regarded as the crisis of the humanities, it can, on the other hand, empower and enhance humanity studies. Numerous studies about Jane Austen have been conducted, but few of them engage with the sentiments of her novels. To detect the sentimental changes in Austen's novels and relations between the novels and Austen's cultural background, this research combines several open-source tools (R packages) with custom scripts and modifications to produce sentimental trajectories of Austen's early and late novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. The findings of this research are fourfold. Firstly, in both novels, Austen subverts the conventional image of “beautiful heroine” and emphasizes the capabilities of normal girls in solving problems so as to encourage them stand on the center of their own life stage. Secondly, Persuasion, though written when Austen was sick, has a higher sentiment value than Northanger Abbey. Thirdly, in expressing negative emotions in Northanger Abbey, Austen uses “linguistic negations” to satirize the conventional Gothic narratives. Fourthly, the depressed emotions in Persuasion always stimulate introspection of the characters and help them become more mature.

This study aims to discuss a macro perspective classification system for categorizing the varieties of French used in various regions, situations, and contexts worldwide. To achieve this, the entire range of French varieties used around globally is examined, and preliminary work is conducted to analyze the relationships between these varieties and their contributions to the composition of World Frenches from multiple angles. In Chapter 2, the term World Frenches is defined as a collection of all possible national varieties existing under the name of French, and six previous studies on World Englishes are discussed to determine the research focus. In Chapter 3, based on the analysis of previous studies in Chapter 2, World Frenches is classified from four perspectives: historical, geographical, educational, and sociolinguistic. Additionally, the limitations of applying Anglophone research to the French-speaking context are highlighted, and additional considerations are examined. This study reveals the world language characteristics of French in a way that challenges the France-centric mindset, and it can be perceived as having academic significance as a starting point for research on understanding the French language beyond national and regional boundaries.

The aim of this study was to investigate the concept and scope of Korean conditional imperatives and provide a comprehensive examination of the category. In Chapter 2, I argued for the usefulness of explaining conditional imperatives through a prototype theoretical approach. Conditional imperatives were defined as a broad concept of 'Imperatives interpreted in the sense of a condition or assumption.' Chapter 3 delved into a meticulous exploration of the process through which conditional imperatives acquired the meaning of a condition. We have shown that the 'then' implication arises from the relationship between the conditional and the subsequent sentence, and that the high frequency of this construction has led to the conventionality of the implication and the regularization of the interpretation of the condition. Furthermore, it was revealed that conditional sentences represent the "background circumstances that enable the speaker's subsequent actions or judgments contained in the subsequent sentence." By uttering a conditional imperatives, the speaker prompts the hearer to assume the content of the proposition, which has the effect of strongly expressing the speaker's conviction or commitment. This research sheds light on the specific features of Korean conditional imperatives as a linguistic phenomenon wherein the form of a command conveys the meaning of a condition. Although this study focused solely on Korean, further meticulous investigations are warranted to examine the commonalities and divergences between conditional imperatives in other languages, with the goal of uncovering universal principles underlying conditional imperatives worldwide.

This article aims to demonstrate that Hangul was created using scientific principles based on Ancient Indian phonetic theories. There is no denying that King Sejong referred to Classical Chinese phonology and the Mongolian Phags-pa script at an early stage of the invention process. At a later stage, however, Hangul began to be more refined with reference to Ancient Indian phonetics; Shinmi, the Buddhist monk, aided this process. Incorporating those theories eventually led to the invention of a writing system that finely reflects the Korean sounds' place and manner of articulation. It is stressed that the creation of Hangul was not achieved out of thin air solely from Sejong's ingenuity. Rather, as argued by Chung (2015), Hangul is the fruitful outcome of a series of laborious tasks of examining and analyzing other scripts used in Asian languages, coupled with meticulous analyses of extant linguistic theories developed in China and India. This article provides several pieces of evidence to support the aforementioned claims by highlighting the role of the phonetic theories adopted from Ancient India for the invention of Hangul, thereby strengthening Chung's (2015) arguments.