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When is language considered 'impolite'? Is impolite language only used for anti-social purposes? Can impolite language be creative? What is the difference between 'impoliteness' and 'rudeness'? Grounded in naturally-occurring language data and drawing on findings from linguistic pragmatics and social psychology, Jonathan Culpeper provides a fascinating account of how impolite behaviour works. He examines not only its forms and functions but also people's understandings of it in both public and private contexts. He reveals, for example, the emotional consequences of impoliteness, how it shapes and is shaped by contexts, and how it is sometimes institutionalised. This book offers penetrating insights into a hitherto neglected and poorly understood phenomenon. It will be welcomed by students and researchers in linguistics and social psychology in particular.

This essay traces a line of connection among various historical uses of apostrophe—oratorical, poetic, and narratological. Despite appearances, these uses of apostrophe enclose a history of the knowing subject and a template for its attenuation that is relevant to twentieth- and twenty-first century thought, critiques of subjectivity, and critical theory. In this way I examine what residue of the history of subjectivity calls out to us from the figure of the apostrophe. The apostrophe, and perhaps many other figures besides, thus truly are as G. O. Hutchison describes: “like boxes waiting to be opened, full of [underinterpreted] significance.”

Theoretically, a poem can begin in any way. What does it mean that in practice, poems often begin in a particular way—that is, by returning to a fragment of some prior thing? We see this in the encore of John Milton’s opening to Lycidas (‘Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more’); differently, we see this in the widely used convention of the poetic epigraph (for instance, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ begins with six lines from Dante’s Inferno). While there is an established model for understanding the beginning as an act that invokes poetic precedent, this paper seeks to expose the beginning’s logic of return to a broader sense of language that is beyond the remit of poetic tradition as such. With a focus on the epigraph, this paper thinks about the everyday existence of poems and about how this existence relates to ordinary language, asking, how do these different modes of language function together? How does ordinary language collude in the creation of poetry? In its enactment of the passage of language from one mode of existence to another, the beginning of a poem might offer some answers to these questions.

The apostrophe was introduced into the English orthographic system by the mid sixteenth century as a printer's mark especially designed ‘for the eye rather than for the ear’ (Sklar 1976: 175; Little 1986: 15). Whereas the uses of the apostrophe today are limited to the Saxon genitive construction ( the woman's book ), to verbal contractions ( you'll ‘you will’ or you're ‘you are’) and to other formulaic expressions ( o'clock ), its early uses also included other cases of elision and some abbreviated words (Parkes 1992: 55‒6; Beal 2010a: 58). Among this plethora of uses, perhaps one of the most distinctive functions of this symbol is the indication of the genitive construction, which has no full form in Present-day English after the progressive extinction of the genitive case affix. Such a development could have also happened in the regular past morpheme, but its outcome differed, as it continues to be spelled out today. The present article is then concerned with the standardisation of the apostrophe in the English orthographic system in the period 1600–1900 and pursues the following objectives: (a) to study the use and omission of the apostrophe in the expression of the past tense, the genitive case and the nominative plural in the period; (b) to assess the relationship between the three uses and their likely connections; and (c) to evaluate the likely participation of grammarians in the adoption and the rejection of each of these phenomena in English. The source of evidence for this corpus-based study comes from A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER 3.2, Denison & Yáñez-Bouza 2013), sampling language use in different genres and text types in the historical period 1700–1900. Additionally, the Early English Books Online corpus (EEBO, Davies 2017) has also been used as material to investigate the early uses of the possessive apostrophe in the late sixteenth century. A preliminary data analysis confirms the second half of the seventeenth century as the period that saw the definite rise of the genitive apostrophe in English, refuting the early assumptions which considered it to be an eighteenth-century development (Crystal 1995: 68; Lukač 2014: 3). The results also suggest that this phenomenon was to some extent associated with the decline of the apostrophe in other environments, more particularly in the expression of the regular past tense forms. Moreover, there seems to be no indication that standardisation emerged from linguistic prescription; instead, grammars seem to have been shaped after use.

Considerable agreement has existed concerning the intertextual relations between the Apostrophe to Zion (Ap Zion) and Third Isaiah. But I propose to reread Ap Zion as a literary and theological response to the most famous lament over Zion, exemplified in the book of Lamentations. The common acrostic feature and leitmotif of Zion shared by Lamentations and Ap Zion clearly reflect the latter’s deliberate attention to the former. In this reconsideration, I argue that the much-acclaimed intertextuality between Ap Zion and Third Isaiah is the consequence of the pre-established Isaianic inner-biblical allusion (Second Isaiah) to Lamentations. To expand on this proposal, the paper will explore the multilayered intertextuality between Lam 2, Isa 49, and Ap Zion through classifying their lexical, thematic, structural, and theological associations.

“Sounding Grief in Henry Dumas’s ‘Echo Tree’” engages Dumas’s experimental short story about two youths discussing how to speak to the dead while on a Southern hillside at dusk. This article studies how this short story meditates on how grief affects our engagement with and reliance upon voiced languages to express a desire for communion that persists beyond death. “Echo Tree”, the article argues, reveals how openness to grief, and the subsequent desire for communication with the dead, improves the imaginative capacity needed for empathetic alignment among the living. In its presentation of the psychological and imaginative difficulties of performing a call-and-response with the dead, “Echo Tree” also analogizes how a reader engages in an act of call-and-response with a muted acousmatic voice from the printed page.

Abstract Apostrophe means paying attention to someone or something. It is a literary technique which has not been studied deeply despite its widespread role in fo regrounding the literary language , norm-breaking and creating a sense of defamiliarization in the audience. Its meaning is limited to the \" transferring the speaker from the absence to the audience and vice versa \". In rhetorical texts apostrophe is attributed to the three areas of semantics , eloquence and rhetoric. Such triple attribution is due to two factors : the mixing of rhetoric areas in previous periods and the extension of apostrophe 's meaning in rhetorical books. But it seems that a variety of notions which are raised in traditional rhetorical books should be examined in the field of semantics. The only type of apostrophe which can be analyzed in rhetoric is the one proposed in some contemporary books as the result of semantic extension and is used in the vertical axis of poem. Therefore , regarding semantic extension, we consider apostrophe as any change in semantic structure , narrative , texture , etc which occurs without any background and surprises the reader. The presence of different types of apostrophe in various branches of rhetoric and literature lead to the creation of many names for this literary technique. This technique was not called apostrophe in the first period of the Arab rhetoric which coincided with the rise of Islam in Ibn Motaz period. It was always called “metonymy”. Then Asmaee used apostrophe in its technical sense in the second century (A.H) and Ibn Motaz presented it in Albadi. Gradually and in later periods rhetoricians such as Qodame Ibn Jafar, Ibn Rashigh Ghiravani, Abu Halal Asgari etc. gave other names to this technique such as inflection and dissuasion, completion, objection, Estetrad, Talvin, Shojaol Arabiyat and so on. Apostrophe has the same meaning in Persian rhetorical books. The first rhetorical book is Tarjomanol Balaghat written by Radviyni which is an imitation of Mahasenol Kalam by Marghinani. After that other rhetorical books were written to imitate it. Fortunately, contemporaries present apostrophe in their books such as The Art of eloquence by Mohammad Rastgoo and the works of Poor Namdariyan such as Journey in the Mist, Missing at the Beach and It the Shadow of the Sun.   Types of apostrophe are not directly presented in rhetorical books. In the following section, some definitions of apostrophe are presented. We study each of them in terms of new meanings and add a number of new types.   1. Change of register in language: change of context and structure of a literary language to a slang language and vice versa.   2. Colloquial change : successive changes to address several audiences .   3. Grammatical change : changing pronouns, verbs and so on   4. Semantic change : it can be recognized only through semantic analysis. It includes varieties such as mentioning individual words in a speech or prayer after the speech, semantic change in poetry and hidden meanings.   5. Apostrophe   5.1. Appealing technique which means that the poet asks for an invisible power.   5.2. Rhythmical change: a sudden change in rhythm during the speech such as the poem of Jamshid, the sun and some of Molana’s sonnets.   5.3. Narrative change : ( story in story mode ): consecutive stories which are not related to each other such as Baha Valad ’s Maaref and Molana’s Masnavi. Each technique has rhetorical and literary functions which are its aesthetic criteria. Zemakhshari was the first person who presented the technical and aesthetic values of apostrophe. He considered apostrophe as the criterion for consciousness of the reader which brings him joy and happiness. Other rhetoricians followed Zemakhshari and mentioned this advantage for apostrophe . Here we mention other rhetorical functions for apostrophe which are associated with linguistic concepts:   1. Norm-breaking, defamiliarizing, foregrounding: apostrophe destroys the familiar and common processes of words and sentences and hence creates pleasure and surprises the reader . Thus, words become foregrounded and more pleasant and tasteful .   2. Art ambiguity : apostrophe creates the sense of defamiliarization a nd unexpected changes and makes the text ambiguous. it makes the reader to explore and understand the ambiguity and the result would be the reader's enjoyment .   3. Increasing text coherence : apostrophe in its broad sense is based on the collocation axis. Semantic cohesion and coherence can be achieved by the collocation of couplets and hemistiches. Although using apostrophe destroys the form and body of the language, it makes more motivation and tension in text and strengthens the vertical axis of the language and finally increases the coherence.

 Abstract Apostrophe means paying attention to someone or something. It is a literary technique which has not been studied deeply despite its widespread role in fo regrounding the literary language , norm-breaking and creating a sense of defamiliarization in the audience. Its meaning is limited to the \" transferring the speaker from the absence to the audience and vice versa \". In rhetorical texts apostrophe is attributed to the three areas of semantics , eloquence and rhetoric. Such triple attribution is due to two factors : the mixing of rhetoric areas in previous periods and the extension of apostrophe 's meaning in rhetorical books. But it seems that a variety of notions which are raised in traditional rhetorical books should be examined in the field of semantics. The only type of apostrophe which can be analyzed in rhetoric is the one proposed in some contemporary books as the result of semantic extension and is used in the vertical axis of poem. Therefore , regarding semantic extension, we consider apostrophe as any change in semantic structure , narrative , texture , etc which occurs without any background and surprises the reader. The presence of different types of apostrophe in various branches of rhetoric and literature lead to the creation of many names for this literary technique. This technique was not called apostrophe in the first period of the Arab rhetoric which coincided with the rise of Islam in Ibn Motaz period. It was always called âmetonymyâ. Then Asmaee used apostrophe in its technical sense in the second century (A.H) and Ibn Motaz presented it in Albadi. Gradually and in later periods rhetoricians such as Qodame Ibn Jafar, Ibn Rashigh Ghiravani, Abu Halal Asgari etc. gave other names to this technique such as inflection and dissuasion, completion, objection, Estetrad, Talvin, Shojaol Arabiyat and so on. Apostrophe has the same meaning in Persian rhetorical books. The first rhetorical book is Tarjomanol Balaghat written by Radviyni which is an imitation of Mahasenol Kalam by Marghinani. After that other rhetorical books were written to imitate it. Fortunately, contemporaries present apostrophe in their books such as The Art of eloquence by Mohammad Rastgoo and the works of Poor Namdariyan such as Journey in the Mist, Missing at the Beach and It the Shadow of the Sun.   Types of apostrophe are not directly presented in rhetorical books. In the following section, some definitions of apostrophe are presented. We study each of them in terms of new meanings and add a number of new types.   1. Change of register in language: change of context and structure of a literary language to a slang language and vice versa.   2. Colloquial change : successive changes to address several audiences .   3. Grammatical change : changing pronouns, verbs and so on   4. Semantic change : it can be recognized only through semantic analysis. It includes varieties such as mentioning individual words in a speech or prayer after the speech, semantic change in poetry and hidden meanings.   5. Apostrophe   5.1. Appealing technique which means that the poet asks for an invisible power.   5.2. Rhythmical change: a sudden change in rhythm during the speech such as the poem of Jamshid, the sun and some of Molanaâs sonnets.   5.3. Narrative change : ( story in story mode ): consecutive stories which are not related to each other such as Baha Valad âs Maaref and Molanaâs Masnavi. Each technique has rhetorical and literary functions which are its aesthetic criteria. Zemakhshari was the first person who presented the technical and aesthetic values of apostrophe. He considered apostrophe as the criterion for consciousness of the reader which brings him joy and happiness. Other rhetoricians followed Zemakhshari and mentioned this advantage for apostrophe . Here we mention other rhetorical functions for apostrophe which are associated with linguistic concepts:   1. Norm-breaking, defamiliarizing, foregrounding: apostrophe destroys the familiar and common processes of words and sentences and hence creates pleasure and surprises the reader . Thus, words become foregrounded and more pleasant and tasteful .   2. Art ambiguity : apostrophe creates the sense of defamiliarization a nd unexpected changes and makes the text ambiguous. it makes the reader to explore and understand the ambiguity and the result would be the reader's enjoyment .   3. Increasing text coherence : apostrophe in its broad sense is based on the collocation axis. Semantic cohesion and coherence can be achieved by the collocation of couplets and hemistiches. Although using apostrophe destroys the form and body of the language, it makes more motivation and tension in text and strengthens the vertical axis of the language and finally increases the coherence.   Â