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This study examines how modern works challenge the mythical image of William Shakespeare and recast him as a historically grounded human being. Although Shakespeare is celebrated as one of the greatest writers in literary history, little is known about his personal life, a gap that has fueled authorship controversies and encouraged his elevation into a near-superhuman cultural icon. Focusing on Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous, and Edward Bond’s Bingo, this paper explores how each work demystifies Shakespeare in a different way. Greenblatt presents him as an ordinary yet disciplined and observant man; Anonymous reduces him to an illiterate opportunist, exposing elitist assumptions about class and authorship; and Bingo depicts him as a morally compromised figure who chooses financial security over artistic and familial responsibility. Through these comparisons, the study argues that demystifying Shakespeare does not diminish his genius but rather deepens our understanding of his life and works within the social and economic realities of Renaissance England. By separating artistic achievement from moral perfection, these reinterpretations enable a more nuanced appreciation of Shakespeare and raise broader questions about the ethical responsibilities of artists.

Ezra Pound contributed to the reformation of versification and the development of poetry in the twentieth century by founding a movement in verse, Imagism. Pound attempted to compose, or to be more exact, invent “great poetry.” Pound thought that the “great poetry” should follow three principles of the Imagist poetics: to treat the thing directly; to avoid unnecessary words or adjectives; and to use non-rigid metrical rhythm. Pound’s Imagism stressed its departure from the traditional poetic form, or Romanticism to foreground its originality, novelty and modernity. This paper examines and reconsiders the limitation of the proclamatory break from the literary style of the Romantics. In order to differentiate the tenets of Imagism from the traditions of Romanticism, Pound cited and criticized the Romantic features in Walt Whitman’s poetry. According to Pound, Whitman’s poems went against the core principles advocated by the Imagist movement: Whitman did not treat the subject and object in a direct manner; he used many words and long sentences; he did not adopt proper metrical patterns either. The harsh criticism, however, was transformed into a recognition of the common ground on which Pound and Whitman had the same root. Pound’s Imagism is both a critique and an appropriation of Whitman’s Romanticism.

Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy critically examines female genital circumcision as a cultural practice that functions as a mechanism of female oppression, inflicting harm on women under the guise of tradition and serving as a means of controlling women. Centering on Tashi, a victim of this oppressive practice, the narrative traces her journey toward self-recognition, self-love, and eventual empowerment, while foregrounding the solidarity that emerges around her. This solidarity is embodied by characters from diverse racial and gender backgrounds, who support Tashi in understanding and coming to terms with her experiences, thereby contributing to the restoration of her wholeness. Thus, this study reads Walker’s womanism as a framework of inclusive solidarity within the broader community and examines how solidarity is theorized within womanism, as well as how it is enacted and expanded among the characters surrounding Tashi, contributing to her healing and transformation. To this end, it analyzes the roles of the characters surrounding Tashi and illustrates how Walker portrays healing and growth as processes made possible through communal empathy and solidarity.

This paper investigates pronominal definites in Korean in comparison with English. Since Postal (1966), pronominal definites such as we linguists in English has been viewed as being similar to definite noun phrases such as the linguists. The core insight has been that pronominals in such definite descriptions behave like a definite article such as the. In the analysis of personal pronouns in Déchaine and Wilstchko (2002), different personal pronouns in English are analyzed into different categories (pro-DP vs. pro-φP) which accounts for the availability of 1st and 2nd person pronominal definites and for the unavailability of 3rd person pronominal definites (*they linguists) This paper shows that different personal pronominal definites in Korean can be analyzed in a similar manner to English proposed in Déchaine and Wilstchko (2002). This analysis is then re-considered under recent analyses on pronominal definites in English in which they share a core structure, idxP(indexP), with definite descriptions such as a definite noun phrase. An idxP approach is also previously suggested for demonstrative ku and pronoun ku in Korean. Building on these studies, Korean case is reanalyzed in terms of idxP. Under the proposed account, prominal definites in the language share idxP with demonstrative nominal phrases.

Conditional clauses in both English and Korean exhibit a similar distribution in that they license weak NPIs but not strong NPIs. Negative idiomatic NPI-even expressions such as han chi-uy ocha-lado ‘one inch-GEN error-CNC’ are compatible with downward-entailing scalar change predicates in the main clause that yield negation or adverse outcomes such as blocking, exclusion, or sanction. Unlike in English, the non-veridical conditional marker -myen ‘-if’ in Korean does not independently license NPI-even; rather, licensing arises from the interaction between the conditional clause and negation or adverse outcome predicates in the main clause. Expressions such as etten pili-to ‘any corruption-EVEN’ and etten tokkukmwul-to ‘any poison-EVEN’ in conditional clauses often receive an NPI-even interpretation when licensed by negation or adverse outcome predicates in the main clause. Unlike amwu ‘any’, etten allows a specificity-based minimal concessive interpretation, enabling etten-N-to ‘any-N-EVEN’ to be licensed across conditional clause boundaries. This also explains why, in English conditional clauses, the NPI any corresponds not to Korean amwu-N-(i)-lato but rather to etten-N-(i)-lato; both, together with the nouns they modify, function as weak NPIs.

The purpose of this study is to examine how Korean EFL learners perceive foreigner-directed speech (FDS) and whether institutional background and text difficulty influence such perceptions. Although previous studies have often documented the acoustic characteristics of FDS, fewer studies have explored how learners evaluate FDS across multiple perceptual dimensions or how other factors may moderate these evaluations. To address this issue, sixty undergraduate students from 2- and 4-year institutions completed a rating task in which they evaluated casual speech and FDS produced from two texts differing in difficulty, The North Wind and the Sun and Please Call Stella. Participants rated each stimulus in terms of friendliness, confidence, naturalness, and politeness, and the data were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models. The results indicate that FDS was perceived as friendlier and more polite, but less confident and less natural than casual speech. Significant interaction effects revealed that the impact of speaking style was greater for higher cognitive demand and among 2-year students. These findings suggest that perceptions of FDS are shaped not only by speaking style but also by institutional background and text difficulty.

This study reexamines affrication data, triggered by a more refined environment than palatalization in English, and provides a new account explaining coronal stop affrication. Unlike previous analyses, we argue that coronal stop affrication is not motivated by the sole palatal glide. The process is triggered by the collaboration of a palatal glide and a following high vowel. A collaboration of two segments maximizes the height of the affricates, which is slightly higher than that of alveopalatal fricatives. The difference in tongue height between affricates and fricatives comes from the position of the tongue. The tongue touches the roof of the mouth for affricates, whereas the active articulator approaches the roof of the mouth without contacting it in producing fricatives. To explain, we use specified constraint for affrication, *Cor+yhiV, which calls for the maximum height of tongue for the coronal stops. The affrication-triggering suffix -ual is prone to undergo reduction. However, the neutralization fails to occur in the suffix due to the high-ranked OCP-ə. The other suffix -ure undergoes neutralization after it simultaneously induces affrication with the palatal glide. Because affrication is a step-by-step process, we adopt the HS to properly account for the procedural nature of coronal stop affrication in English with relevant constraint ranking.

This study examines Web of Science-indexed Jane Austen-related publications from 1995 to 2025. Based on 602 English-language records from the Web of Science Core Collection, it analyzes annual publication growth, country-level citation visibility, source productivity, and keyword-based thematic change. The study does not claim to represent the whole of global Austen scholarship. Rather, it maps patterns of indexed visibility within a defined WoS corpus. The results show that Austen-related publications increased over the period, with an annual growth rate of 10.68%, although the 2025 records reflect indexing up to September 7, 2025. Citation visibility is concentrated mainly in the United States and the United Kingdom, while international co-authorship remains limited. Keyword-based analyses suggest a shift from author-centered and narratological terms toward broader themes, including history, feminism, adaptation, fiction, gothic, language, and comparative literary reference. These findings indicate expansion and diversification rather than the replacement of earlier concerns. By tracing publication trends and thematic change, the study offers a reproducible overview of how Jane Austen-related research has appeared within the WoS-indexed record.

This study aims to investigate how the three criteria—frequency threshold, dispersion, and bundle length—interact with and affect the results of bundle analysis in relation to disciplinary variation and the specificity-generality continuum. Drawing on a corpus of academic journal articles across eight disciplines, lexical bundles were extracted across eight disciplines using multiple combinations of frequency, dispersion, and bundle length criteria, and disciplinary differences were analyzed using Log-likelihood tests. The analysis reveals overall statistically significant differences in bundle use across major domains, despite lower significance in some cross- and within-domain comparisons. The findings indicate a clear tendency toward disciplinary specificity. Importantly, methodological choices, particularly bundle length and dispersion, substantially affect results among certain disciplines within the same domain, especially in relation to specificity-generality. These findings corroborate the presence of disciplinary variation and provide valuable insights into the specificity-generality debate and ESP instruction. Further study should employ more balanced and data-driven corpus designs that incorporate a wider range of genres.

The purpose of this study is to suggest future directions for ESP (English for Specific Purposes) education in the era of artificial intelligence by developing and applying a specialized English for Firefighting teaching model. To achieve this, a three-stage ESP model was designed, integrating Generative AI to bridge the gap between academic theory and vocational practice: input, content-based language instruction, and task-based projects. The workbook features five core themes—Firefighter, Fire Escape, Fire Drill, Fire Suppression, and Fire Dynamics—structured into vocabulary, content, and group activities. To evaluate the pedagogical impact of the proposed model, a survey was administered to a total of forty-four university students enrolled in the English for Firefighting course. The results of the questionnaire showed that the participants expressed high satisfaction with the teaching materials, particularly in the balanced integration of major-related content and G-TELP preparation (M=4.23) and its effectiveness for test-taking (M=4.2). These findings empirically support the validity of the textbook design, which integrates job-based English learning with standardized test preparation. In conclusion, integrating Generative AI for material reconstruction and blended learning is vital for learner-centered ESP education in the digital era.