We present an overview of constructional approaches to signed languages, beginning with a brief history and the pioneering work of William C. Stokoe. We then discuss construction morphology as an alternative to prior analyses of sign structure that posited a set of non-compositional lexical signs and a distinct set of classifier signs. Instead, signs are seen as composed of morphological schemas containing both specific and schematic aspects of form and meaning. Grammatical construction approaches are reviewed next, including the marking of argument structure on verbs in American Sign Language (ASL). Constructional approaches have been applied to the issue of the relation between sign and gesture across a variety of expressions. This work often concludes that signs and gesture interact in complex ways. In the final section, we present an extended discussion of several grammatical and discourse phenomena using a constructional analysis based on Cognitive Grammar. The data come from Argentine Sign Language (LSA) and includes pointing constructions, agreement constructions, antecedent-anaphor relations, and constructions presenting point of view in reported narrative.

Gabel’s chapter takes a look at Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) in Kreol Seselwa (KS), a creole language spoken on the Seychelles. It argues that SVCs are part of KS grammar and that they can best be captured by a continuum approach since they show prototypical and non-prototypical semantic and syntactic properties. Furthermore, SVCs in KS have different distributions depending on spoken and written language as well as production and perception. Finally, she shows that SVCs in KS are subject to age variation thereby exhibiting a potential development in the syntax of KS.

The vivisection debates are an undervalued nexus for nineteenth-century beliefs about pain. Close readings of the Report of the 1876 Royal Commission on Vivisection reveal how conceptualisations of animal physiology, anaesthetic action, reflex responses, and pithing undermined direct correspondences between injury, pain, and expressions of suffering. The chapter then examines representations of graphic registration and recording technologies in laboratory handbooks. These devices seemed to offer a new, universal, wordless language, yet frequently conjured precisely those images of inscription, symbolism, and transliteration that many scientists were anxious to avoid. The chapter then presents animalographies and antivivisection poetry ‘spoken’ by animals. By purporting to access a more complete and individual non-human consciousness, these texts presented themselves as rivals to mechanical laboratory devices. Nevertheless, despite efforts to ‘listen’ to animals, antivivisectionists and experimental scientists encountered the same vexatious problem: Language, like pain, seemed equally troubled by the distance between signifier and signified.

Interaction in Poetic Imagery was my first book. It was based on my doctoral researches at Cambridge in the mid-1960s. I set out to formulate a theory of a significant, but previously untheorised, aspect or potentiality of poetic imagery – indeed an aspect or potentiality not previously demarcated, either under the name I gave it, ‘interaction’, or any other name. With ‘imagery’ understood as ‘metaphor, simile and the various forms of comparatio’, I identified interaction as ‘any local cross-terminological relation between the tenor and vehicle of an image’, explicitly adapting ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’ from I. A. Richards’ The Philosophy of Rhetoric. I then categorised the modes of interaction into four groups (with subsequent subdivisions). The cross-terminological relation might be effected aurally or extra-grammatically or by intrusion or (most commonly) by neutral terminology. All this was established on the basis of a corpus of Greek poetry – early lyric and dramatic poetry, from Archilochus to Aeschylus – with additional examples from English poetry, from Shakespeare to the twentieth century.

This chapter argues that what Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the “rural scene” provided a focal point in the 1870s for profound changes in the Victorian understanding, valuation, and transformation of the natural world. British writing at this time demonstrates a shift from viewing the rural scene as picturesque landscape, as evidenced in provincial novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to conceiving of it as an environment encompassing human and nonhuman nature, notably in Richard Jefferies’ nature writings and Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novels. Grasping the full scope of Victorian responses to the rural scene in the 1870s also requires looking to the expanding pastoral industries of the settler empire. Writing in and about the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, by Lady Barker, Rolf Boldrewood, and Anthony Trollope, highlights how a perceived absence of rural aesthetic values helped render colonial nature available for transformation and subsequent economic exploitation.

While the traditional vertical understanding of rights remains rooted in an older liberalism, the horizontal model possesses affinities with republican thought. This chapter makes these connections between constitutional practice and some of the core texts in the history of political thought. In addition to different understandings of the relationship between spheres, or the individual and community, liberal and republican thought generally conceive of liberty differently, a distinction that also maps onto the vertical and horizontal models in important ways. Rights in a horizontal understanding take on a new significance as more than mere rights, but ends as well, that potentially implicate the polity as a whole. Thus, horizontal application gives rise to new calls for parity between public and private spaces, which, in turn, amounts to a new source for understanding the duties of private actors. Such concepts as the common good and duty, integral to republican thought, come to the fore and offer a baseline for conceptualizing the parity and duties to which horizontal application gives rise. The chapter illustrates how these republican concepts occur in the context of actual cases and larger constitutional discourses, drawing examples from Germany, India, and South Africa.

I have reserved for discussion here certain passages containing more than a single interaction. Not all combinations are significant, though. The significant combinations in the Greek corpus are of several kinds, of which the best attested and conceptually simplest comprises those instances with a broadly or cumulatively preparatory effect in favour of the vehicle.

In February 1903, Professors William Bayliss and Ernest Starling vivisected a terrier at UCL’s Institute of Physiology. Unbeknownst to them, two of the attendees were joint secretaries of the Anti-Vivisection Society of Sweden (see Fig. C.1). Lizzy Lind-af-Hageby and Leisa Katherina Schartau claimed that the dog was not anaesthetised, and hence the experiment breached the 1876 Act. The pair reported their findings to the Hon Stephen Coleridge, Secretary of the NAVS who publicised their eye-witness statements in an inflammatory speech at a public antivivisection meeting on 1 May 1903. First, however, he vividly set the scene of the crime: Gower Street was transformed into the Via Dolorosa and UCL’s physiological laboratory became ‘a pit of Tophet’ into which ‘passes a never-ending procession of helpless dumb creatures’.