English Research Seminar: Judy Kendall and Jack Wilson
Wednesday 9 March 2021 2-4pm on Teams
Please write to S.Thurston@salford.ac.uk if you would like to join us!
Judy Kendall
‘Extralingual Translation: the Paratextual, the Visual and the Thing’: Making the most of the sabbatical
This paper will give a brief overview of my monograph Where Language Thickens which I am writing for the Edinburgh University Press series, Critical Studies in Literary Translation. The paper will also include a taster of my fifth chapter, ‘Extralingual Translation: the Paratextual, the Visual and the Thing’, which draws on Caroline Bergvall’s approach in Drift, Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity, the Overton window, shifts in reading strategies, publishing constraints, overfitting tendencies and the importance of making a mess.
Dr Judy Kendall is Reader in English and Creative Writing at the University of Salford. She is an academic, a poet, a maker of visual text and a collaborative translator. She has published widely in the areas of poetic composition, translation and visual text as an academic (2 monographs, 2 edited books and numerous articles) and as a creative practitioner (4 poetry collections, and poetic pieces and visual text in a variety of venues). Her main interests now are in working creatively within the academic arena, and working academically within the creative arena – with creative practice articulating and developing processes of thought enquiry, not just as illustration or supplementary aside but as an integral part of the unfolding and developing an academic argument.
Jack Wilson
Describing something that is reeeeaaaly far away: Iconic Phonology in Modern South Arabian
The concept of duality of patterning is a fundamental principle of contemporary linguistics. Duality of patterning refers to the fact that languages comprise a small number of meaningless elements (e.g., sounds or words) which can be combined into a much greater number of meaningful constitutes (e.g., words). These meaningful constituents can then be combined into a theoretically infinite number of meaningful structures (e.g., sentences).
Many communication systems (e.g., gesture) do not possess duality of patterning because the smallest units have meaning and the meaning of complex communicative behaviours are derived from this meaning. Using video recorded examples, this talk argues that for speakers of the endangered South Arabian Languages (Mehri and Shehret) the sounds of the languages are not meaningless. In several situations (particularly when describing intensity or duration) sound patterns reflect meaning. For example an elongated vowel in a word may be used to describe high intensity or long duration. This finding places doubt on the fundamental concept of the duality of patterning, suggesting that the origins of meaning in language were likely multimodal.
Jack Wilson is a lecturer in English Language at the University of Salford. His research focusses on semantics, pragmatics and gesture. He is particularly interested in the inferential approaches to communication which involve predictive models of the mind. His recent and ongoing research interests involve dementia, gesture use by speakers of endangered Modern South Arabian Language, and aphantasia. He is currently writing a Cambridge Element on Pragmatics and Gesture.
Recent and upcoming publications include:
Wilson, Watson, Boom, and al-Qumairi (in press) ‘Language, Gesture and Ecology’ in Modern South Arabian Languages. In Watson and Lovett (Eds.) Language and Ecology in Southern and Eastern Arabia. Bloomsbury.
Morris, L. E., A. Innes, S. K. Smith, J. J. Wilson, S. Bushell, and M. E. Wyatt. (2021). ‘A qualitative evaluation of the impact of a Good Life Club on people living with dementia and care partners.’ Dementia: The International Journal of Social Research and Practice
Price, H. and Wilson, J. J. (2019) ‘Relevance Theory and Metaphor: An analysis of Tom Waits’ “Emotional Weather Report”’ Language and Literature, 28 (1)