This collection of essays deals primarily with the idea of ugliness as represented in a variety of literary narratives in English. Shakespeare's Caliban and his depiction in The Tempest and its contemporary film adaptations are dealt with, just as Joseph Merrick's innocence of ugliness and Swinburne's aesthetic transgressions of the late-Victorian period are discussed. Moreover, D. H. Lawrence's monstrosity of agedness is examined, as well as postcolonial discourses of ugliness in Patrick White, J. M. Coetzee and the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah. The volume also contains essays on representations of American Indian captivity narratives, on Nathaniel Hawthorne's voice in the debate on evil, and on In-yer-face theatre in the Irish context, i.e. Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan and Enda Walsh's Bedbound.

The impossibility of testing the depth hypothesis of 1960 of a connection between the complexities of grammar and a limited human temporary memory led to questioning the ancient grammatical foundations of linguistics and to developing standard hard-science foundations. This volume is the first detailed report on how to reconstitute linguistics on the new hard-science foundation laid by Victor H. Yngve in 1996. Hard-science linguistics is the scientific study of how people communicate. It studies people and also communicative energy flow and other relevant parts of the physical environment. It studies the real world, not the world of language, and it develops theories testable against real-world evidence as is standard in the hard sciences. Hard-science linguistics takes its rightful place connecting the humanities and social sciences to biology, chemistry and physics. Thus linguistics becomes a natural science and contributes to the unity of science. This unity is clearly evident in the research reported here by these fifteen pioneering authors from diverse areas as they work to reconstitute linguistics as a true hard science.

The impossibility of testing the depth hypothesis of 1960 of a connection between the complexities of grammar and a limited human temporary memory led to questioning the ancient grammatical foundations of linguistics and to developing standard hard-science foundations. This volume is the first detailed report on how to reconstitute linguistics on the new hard-science foundation laid by Victor H. Yngve in 1996. Hard-science (human) linguistics is the scientific study of how people communicate. It studies people and also communicative energy flow and other relevant parts of the physical environment. It studies the real world, not the world of language, and it develops theories testable against real-world evidence as is standard in the hard sciences. Hard-science linguistics takes its rightful place connecting the humanities and social sciences to biology, chemistry and physics. Thus linguistics becomes a natural science and contributes to the unity of science. This unity is clearly evident in the research reported here by these fifteen pioneering authors from diverse areas as they work to reconstitute linguistics as a true hard science.

The main focus of this volume is on urbanity as a discursive way of human life in the city. Discourse is specified here in terms of semiotic codes and processes that link city dwellers as communicating selves into interpersonal and intersubjective collectivities when they create and interpret similar meanings embodied in material bearers. Accordingly, the unfolding of the semiotic web is understood, firstly, as detecting and evaluating the growth and manifestation of the sphere of meaning-bearers or a sequence of meaning-bearing events, and secondly, as identifying and explaining the constituents and aspects of discourse in the light of signs and/or sign-processes that aggregate individual participants of communication into discursive linkages on a lower level and discursive communities – on a higher level of social grouping. Some contributions deal with the discursive properties of human individuals in urban environments, and some others are devoted either to the meta-discourses on the city or discourses in the city.