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Melville’s linguistic style is well known for its ungrammatical, or solecistic, sentences, which have long been attributed to his lack of education or inadvertent oversights. Against this conventional view, John Bryant (2001) and Michael S. Kearns (1983) regard grammatical errors in Melville’s full-length novels as rhetorical devices, which urges a broader reconsideration of solecisms in Melville’s short pieces. The metrical aspect of his short story “The Piazza” suggests the author’s acute awareness of rhetorical usage in the story’s construction, and so if solecism is to be regarded as a consciously rhetorical feature of Melville’s style, then his deployment of the device in the story may be taken as evidence of its broader use in his short pieces as well as novels. This article focuses on solecisms in Melville’s “The Piazza,” and argues that their usage is intentional and rhetorical.

From the moment a child in ancient Rome began to speak Latin, the surrounding world became populated with objects possessing grammatical gender-masculine eyes (oculi), feminine trees (arbores), neuter bodies (corpora).Sexing the Worldsurveys the many ways in which grammatical gender enabled Latin speakers to organize aspects of their society into sexual categories, and how this identification of grammatical gender with biological sex affected Roman perceptions of Latin poetry, divine power, and the human hermaphrodite. Beginning with the ancient grammarians, Anthony Corbeill examines how these scholars used the gender of nouns to identify the sex of the object being signified, regardless of whether that object was animate or inanimate. This informed the Roman poets who, for a time, changed at whim the grammatical gender for words as seemingly lifeless as \"dust\" (pulvis) or \"tree bark\" (cortex). Corbeill then applies the idea of fluid grammatical gender to the basic tenets of Roman religion and state politics. He looks at how the ancients tended to construct Rome's earliest divinities as related male and female pairs, a tendency that waned in later periods. An analogous change characterized the dual-sexed hermaphrodite, whose sacred and political significance declined as the republican government became an autocracy. Throughout, Corbeill shows that the fluid boundaries of sex and gender became increasingly fixed into opposing and exclusive categories. Sexing the Worldcontributes to our understanding of the power of language to shape human perception.

Abstract Scholars have proposed as many as 232 solecisms (morpho-syntactical errors) within the Greek of the Apocalypse. One of the great paradoxes of the book is its astonishing complexity expressed in such irregular Greek. While numerous scholars have sought to account for and explain the solecisms in Revelation, few have explored the aural dimension. Since the book was designed to be read aloud to early churches in Asia, it is important to investigate how irregular grammar would have affected the first hearers. This paper attempts to fill this lacuna by examining how solecisms were viewed in the ancient world and how ancients responded when lectors made mistakes in reading. This paper will then draw on the insights of ancient rhetorical handbooks to provide new insight into the irregular grammar of Revelation.

Throughout the history of the Latin grammatical tradition barbarism is regularly described according to the system of the four categories of change known as , whereas the description of solecism is more controversial. In the grammatical chapters of his first book, Quintilian attests to the application of the fourfold system to solecism in his age, but he also knows a second tradition, which ends up becoming the predominant theory in Latin grammar and regards solecism as the fault by substitution ( ). Quintilian attributes this tradition to some anonymous grammarians ( ) who have not been identified yet. After considering Quintilian’s testimony in light of the Greek sources and especially Apollonius Dyscolus’ , we have concluded that Quintilian and Apollonius may rely on a common source, probably of Alexandrine descent, which separated solecism from the first three categories of change of the fourfold system (addition, subtraction and inversion of the regular word order).

In the mid-nineteenth century, physicians observed numerous cases in which individuals lost the ability to form spoken words, even as they remained sane and healthy in most other ways. By studying this condition, which came to be known as \"aphasia,\" neurologists were able to show that functions of mind were rooted in localized areas of the brain. Here L. S. Jacyna analyzes medical writings on aphasia to illuminate modern scientific discourse on the relations between language and the brain, from the very beginnings of this discussion through World War I. Viewing these texts as literature--complete with guiding metaphors and rhetorical strategies--Jacyna reveals the power they exerted on the ways in which the human subject was constructed in medicine. Jacyna submits the medical texts to various critical readings and provides a review of the pictorial representation involved with the creation of aphasiology. He considers the scientific, experimental, and clinical aspects of this new field, together with the cultural, professional, and political dimensions of what would become the authoritative discourse about language and the brain. At the core of the study is an inquiry into the processes whereby men and women suffering from language loss were transformed into the \"aphasic,\" an entity amenable to scientific scrutiny and capable of yielding insights about the fundamental workings of the brain. But what became of the subject's human identity?Lost Wordsexplores the links among language, humanity, and mental presence that make the aphasiological project one of continuing fascination.