Introduction to Wagner’s use of leitmotifs in the Ring and the discourse that accompanied and shaped the notion of this compositional technique from its beginnings. Special focus on the making of the concept (which Wagner neither initiated nor supported), on the idea of “foreboding and reminiscent melodic moments” he developed in Opera and Drama and on core motifs from the Ring that provide the material for four evenings of music drama and characterize the tetralogy as a whole (renunciation, woe, Rheingold, Ring, Valhalla, and redemption through love motifs). Aesthetic questions about Wagner’s trademark tool of composition are discussed from the listener’s perspective: Are we really supposed to learn leitmotifs like vocabulary and, if so, what did Wagner think about this? Did he anticipate that for the next 140 years nearly everyone who wanted to say something about his music would talk about leitmotifs? How can we dive into the magic web of the Ring’s leitmotifs without simply blindly memorizing dozens of melodies and their supposed meaning?

This chapter surveys the history of Scottish dictionaries from their beginnings to the present day, highlighting key historical lexicographers and their contributions to the documentation of the Scots language. Acknowledging the wide-ranging impact that Scottish dictionary-makers have had on the global stage, the discussion focuses on the perceptions of Scots over time and the impact this has had on the types of resources available for its study. Early pioneers including Thomas Ruddiman and John Jamieson are discussed and contextualised. Ruddiman’s influential glossary (1710) supported readers of Gavin Douglas’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, while Jamieson, like the Scottish poets of the eighteenth-century Vernacular Revival, sought to preserve and celebrate the language. Twentieth-century and present-day practitioners and their objectives are also considered. The editorial team at Scottish Language Dictionaries, led by Rhona Alcorn, are both educators and curators, building on the legacies of DOST and SND under the banner of the Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk) and working to maintain the status of Scots as a living language while enhancing its appreciation and acceptance.

Music is an essentially temporal experience, and the temporal structures by which music unfolds are critical to listeners’ aesthetic, emotional, and behavioral responses. Music is perceived at multiple related timescales, from notes to measures to phrases. In our usage, rhythm refers to the absolute timing of individual notes or sounds, beat refers to the perceived regular pulse that listeners tend to feel and synchronize their movements with, and meter is the repeating cycle of beats, often a pattern of variable salience (composed of stronger and weaker beats). The beat tends to be steady or theoretically isochronous (evenly spaced), although human performance of music inevitably adds temporal variability, via both musical intention (e.g., rubato, expressively stretching and compressing the beat rate) and natural performance dynamics (e.g., due to the limits of temporal precision of human movements). Importantly, beat and meter perception can differ between listeners, relating to factors such as musical context, expertise, cultural experience, or cognitive processes such as attention.

This chapter examines the process by which modern lexicographers enter words into their dictionaries. Before we can discuss how a word gets into an English dictionary, we must first understand the purpose of the modern English dictionary and contrast that purpose with the purpose of historical English dictionaries. A general understanding of early English dictionaries, including the audiences they were written for, establishes the historical methods early lexicographers used when entering words into their dictionaries. We then examine the techniques Samuel Johnson used in writing his 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language, as these methods become the basis for the modern English dictionary. There is then an in-depth discussion of the criteria lexicographers use when choosing words for entry, as well as an overview of the process itself and how the Internet has affected these centuries-old methods.

In 1852, Wagner described his text for the Ring cycle as “the greatest poem that has ever been written.” This chapter asks to what extent the musical innovations – responding to historical linguistics – were formative for a generation of writers as well as composers. To what extent did innovation in one medium engender innovative techniques in another? After contextualizing Wagner’s operatic reforms within his early writings and related moments within the history of the genre, it explores a cornucopia of modernist writers working in the shadow of the Ring cycle: from Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, and Aubrey Beardsley, to Yeats, Mann, and Beckett; from Mallarmé and Dujardin to Zola and Proust, to name but a few. It traces the profound influence on literature of leifmotivic techniques, as “carriers of feeling,” amid the shift to words as a dereferentialized system of signs. The role of alliteration, direct parody, interior monologue, and involuntary memory all contribute to the overall view that appropriation and influence of “reformist” techniques in literature and linguistics remained in the hands of authors, regardless of Wagner’s predictions for his own literary greatness.

This chapter outlines the development of English dictionaries in Canada as expressions of the national variety of Canadian English. Four stages of dictionary development in Canadian English are identified. The role of and dependency on publishing houses in the field's development is surveyed. This dependency led, ultimately, to what is called the Great Canadian Dictionary War. A handful of less widely known dictionaries that were important in Canada’s lexicographical development are discussed in some detail, and numerical methods are used to analyse developments within the Canadian dictionary market since the late 1970s.

This chapter reviews the transformative effects of technology on dictionary-making, focusing on four main areas: the use of databases for storing and organising dictionary text; the creation and exploitation of corpora for use as the dictionary’s evidence base; the enhancement of the value and usability of corpus data through the application of software tools developed in the NLP (natural language processing) community; and the migration of dictionaries from print to online media. During the last half-century, activity in all these areas has brought fundamental changes to the way dictionaries are created and made available to their users. We trace the development of corpus-based lexicography in English, from the early work of John Sinclair and his colleagues in the 1980s to the present day. Lexicographers working in English and other widely used languages now have access to resources which would scarcely have been imaginable thirty years ago: very large corpora (measured in tens of billions of words) and sophisticated corpus-querying tools are routinely available. The move from print to digital publication is a more recent development, but no less significant. The far-reaching implications of these changes – for dictionary-makers and dictionary-users alike – are explored at every stage.

This chapter explores the varying meanings and importance of form in the Canterbury Tales. Overall, the focus is on Chaucer’s understanding of form as integral to interpretation. The opening section contextualizes Chaucer’s approach to form within later medieval poetics, contrasting ideas of formal perfection and imperfection in the work of Dante and the Pearl-poet with Chaucer’s responsive and unpredictable forms. The Canterbury Tales is compared with tale-collections by Gower and Boccaccio, and with Chaucer’s other tale-collections – the ‘Monk’s Tale’ and the Legend of Good Women. The chapter explores the interplay and juxtaposition of forms both across the Tales, and within an individual tale (The Nun’s Priest’s Tale). Moving to a micro-level, it analyses one specific form – rhyme royal – by close-reading several stanzas from The Man of Law’s Tale. Finally it argues that Chaucer problematizes the conventional allegorical idea of seeing through form to reach meaning, suggesting instead that form and content cannot be divided. Meaning is inherent in Chaucer’s complex, kinetic, and, above all, multiple forms.

Rather than a possible resolution to the “Marriage Debate,” Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale is a meta-critical poem designed to challenge his readers’ critical acumen and to assist in refining their interpretative skills. One element in the Tale’s instructive program is Aurelius’s little-noticed yet symptomatic love-wound, his sursanure. Outlining and then deploying the techniques of “symptomatic” literary criticism, this essay concentrates on five symptomatic modalities in the Tale—“parataxis,” “surface,” “intention,” “radical cure,” and “dehiscence.” While many readers share an unqualified admiration for the Franklin’s romance, the approach of this study argues for the necessity of reading the Tale symptomatically and “against the grain”—that is, closely, aggressively, unsentimentally, and counter-romantically.