UCD Humanities Institute Research Collection
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The Humanities Institute showcases UCD’s expertise and scholarship in the humanities to develop international distinction that enhances the vitality and richness of Ireland’s cultural and intellectual experience.
The institute aims to develop the critical mass and international visibility of interdisciplinary research in the humanities at UCD by acting as a laboratory for the study of culture and the human experience. It complements research undertaken within related UCD Schools and research institutes while concurrently providing a neutral space for the delivery of interdisciplinary or postdisciplinary research that transcends the intellectual boundaries of a particular subject or discipline. The HI will develop as a driving force for knowledge creation and transfer within UCD and in the context of the humanities and social sciences in Ireland and Europe.
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- PublicationSex and Nation Women in Irish Culture and PoliticsThe aim of this pamphlet is to challenge the assumptions made by and about the women's movement in Ireland. It is to some extent a retrospective exercise, an attempt to analyse and respond to some of the ideas put forward in previous pamphlets in this series. It is, more importantly, an attempt to suggest directions in which Irish feminism can move in the future, an attempt to learn from the reverses and successes of the 1980s and to identify opportunities which will be available to Irish feminism in the 1990s.
11600 - PublicationHistory Gasps: Myth in Contemporary Irish Women's PoetryRecent years have seen a very rapid development in women's poetry in Ireland, a development which is part of a much wider one in women's writing and culture. The prevalence of poetry and the relative scarcity of prose in this movement is specific to Ireland and a significant departure from the pattern elsewhere. The strength of the tradition of women's fiction and the fragmentary nature of the tradition in poetry have tended to produce first an increasingly self-conscious feminist fiction, then an upsurge of women's poetry which attempts to re-define the poetic tradition and women's relation to it.
597 - PublicationPlural mass nouns and the compositionality of numberIt is true that, as is well known since Allan (1980), mass and count are best seen as preferences rather than absolute values for lexical items; for instance, clothes cannot be governed by a numeral, but it tolerates the count quantifier a few. Even so, the existence of plurals that, at the very least, share some properties with mass nouns, raises questions about the chain of reasoning I have sketched out above. In fact, the assumption that plural nouns must refer to collections of individuals is simply wrong, even in languages where the number category would appear to correlate straightforwardly with the contrast between one and more than one. My first goal here will be to substantiate this empirical claim (section 2). Secondly, I will address in section 3 a theoretical question that cannot even be posed, let alone answered, without realizing that plural nouns can be non-count: the relation between semantic and morphological structure in mass plurals, whose interpretation does not seem to accord with the interpretation of the plural affix. How can a noun modified by this affix fail to denote non-singleton sets and still retain a compositional interpretation? The answer is that mass plurals are indeed semantically plural, but they refer to manifold complexes of non-individual parts. The familiar onemany contrast of book vs. books is not a primitive, defining trait of plurality, but a consequence of the semantics of the noun and of the way plurality combines with it. Variation along either of these two dimensions can bring about different readings—which are the empirical concern of this paper.
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1538 - PublicationThe relationship between the group and the individual and the acquisition of native speaker variation patterns: a preliminary studyThe relationship between group and individual has been explored within the variationist paradigm. In L1, group patterns of variation are replicated by the individual. Second language acquisition research is concerned with the individual learner, but second language acquisition variationist researchers tend to group learners. Little empirical evidence exists that such grouping is valid, given the importance of individual variation. This article investigates whether it is meaningful to group learners. This is a longitudinal, quantitative study of the acquisition of variation by Irish speakers of French L2 over three years, of which one is a year abroad experience. Participants are five advanced learners, twenty years old, with five years of French classes at secondary school and two at university. A computer (Varbrul) analysis shows similar patterns in group and individual, in the deletion of ne. Theoretical implications are that it is legitimate to apply group standards to individual speakers and that native speaker variation acquisition is linked to a prolonged stay in the native speaker community.
637Scopus© Citations 38 - PublicationLong Day's Journey into Night: Modernism, Post-Modernism and Maternal LossLong Day's journey into Night may seem a strange starting place for a feminist analysis of modernism and post-modernism. Yet even the most conservative criticism reads this play as an enactment and embodiment of loss, specifically loss of the mother. That loss is rarely seen in the context of a more general "loss", a cultural loss of legitimacy and authenticity, endemic in and enabling modernism, articulated as "disinheritance" by an Other "coded as feminine."
7733 - PublicationRoots, categories, and nominal conceptsThis paper investigates what is specifically nominal in lexical semantics and how it relates to nouns as morphosyntactic objects. Nouns are argued to refer primarily to kind-level sorts, which define categories of entities in the speakers' conceptualization. This notion is characterized in semantic, ontological, and cognitive terms. Not all nominalized properties are concepts; in particular, not transparent deverbal nominalizations. Concepts thus provide a substantive notion of nominality not coextensive with the morphosyntactic one. Evidence is presented for the explanatory value of nominal concepts, as the semantic contribution of noun stems in word formation and in non-standard modification patterns like "plastic flower". Concepts also express semantic restrictions on affixation ("ornamental", but "employmental"). Finally, concepts are the value of nouns as whole complexes, not of their roots. This accords with the view that lexical categories have content, but roots are category-free.
875Scopus© Citations 3 - PublicationWaking the Dead: Antigone, Ismene and Anne Enright's Narrators in MourningReflecting in 2008 on the link between her groundbreaking work on gender and her more recent work on war, Judith Butler proposed a relationship between liveable and grievable lives: 'it is very often a struggle to make certain kinds of lost life publicly grievable'. This essay takes Butler's exploration of the 'politics of mourning' as its starting place for a reading of The Gathering and of the short story, 'My Little Sister' from Taking Pictures.
1033 - PublicationBritish Military Recruitment in Ireland during the Crimean War, 1854-56Ireland has a diverse military historiography, principally within the confines of the British Army. Much has been written to date in relation to Ireland’s relationship with that service, particularly in recent years and with a focus upon the Great War. Yet significant gaps still remain in relation to the nineteenth century. By analysing the relationship between Irish society and the British Armed Forces, through the lens of recruitment, this article illustrates how and why the Crimean War years represent the positive pinnacle of Ireland’s relationship with the empire and the British Army and Royal Navy.
315 - PublicationPreface: The Crimean War and Irish SocietyThe purpose of this book is to produce what is essentially a ‘home front’ study of Ireland during the Crimean War, or more specifically Irish society’s responses to that conflict. This will principally complement the existing research on Irish servicemen’s experiences during and after the campaign, but will also substantially develop the limited work already undertaken on Irish society and the conflict. This book primarily encompasses the years of the conflict, from its origins in the 1853 dispute between Russia and the Ottoman Empire over the Holy Places, through the French and British political and later military interventions in 1854-5, to the victory, peace and homecoming celebrations in 1856. Additionally, it will extend into the preceding and succeeding decades in order to contextualise the events and actors of the wartime years and to present and analyse the commemoration and memorialisation processes. The approach of the study is systematic, with the content being correlated under six convenient and coherent themes, which will be analysed through a chronological process. The book covers all of the major aspects of society and life in Ireland during the period, so as to give the most complete analysis of the various impacts of and people’s responses to the war. This study is also conducted, within the broader contexts not only of the responses of the United Kingdom and broader British Empire but also Ireland’s relationship with those political entities, and within Ireland’s post-famine or mid-Victorian and even wider nineteenth-century history.
215 - PublicationOs Pintores de W. G. Sebald: a função das belas artes na sua obra em prosa W.G. Sebald’s Painters: the function of Fine Arts in His Prose Works(Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2016)
; ; Há uma literatura crescente acerca do uso da fotografia por Sebald, que aborda uma certa ambiguidade ontológica que abrange a maior parte das fotos contidas em sua obra. Em Sebald, fotografias tendem a exceder o código simbólico das narrativas; elas frequentemente desestabilizam as relações que se estabelecem entre texto e imagem, vida e morte, trauma e história, lembrança e esquecimento. Nesse contexto, o presente artigo enfoca o tratamento que Sebald deu às Belas Artes em seus escritos, argumentando que na prosa sebaldiana a distinção entre arte e fotografia é significativa tanto em termos estéticos como epistemológicos, e deve, consequentemente, receber uma análise mais detalhada. Enquanto a fotografia tende a explorar as relações entre história e trauma por meio do convite à averiguação do seu próprio estatuto representacional, as obras de arte erudita que figuram na prosa de Sebald se oferecem como um porto seguro para a contemplação terapêutica, um contraponto que manifesta momentos de transcendência. O argumento se desenvolve fazendo referência ao importante ensaio de Sebald sobre o pintor Jan Peter Tripp, e as releituras das obras primas que figuram em Schwindel.Gefühle., Die Ausgewanderten, Die Ringe des Saturn e Austerlitz.81 - PublicationDiscovering Structure in Social Networks of 19th Century Fiction(ACM, 2016-05-25)
; ; ; ; ; Inspired by the increasing availability of large text corpora online, digital humanities scholars are adopting computational approaches to explore questions in the field of literature from new perspectives. In this paper, we examine detailed social networks of characters, extracted from several works of 19th century fiction by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. This allows us to apply methodologies from social network analysis, such as community detection, to explore the structure of these networks. By evaluating the results in collaboration with literary scholars, we find that the structure of the character networks can reveal underlying structural aspects within a novel, particularly in relation to plot and characterisation.592Scopus© Citations 10 - PublicationNovel2Vec: Characterising 19th Century Fiction via Word Embeddings(2016-09-21)
; ; ; ; Recently, considerable attention has been paid to word embedding algorithms inspired by neural network models. Given a large textual corpus, these algorithms attempt to derive a set of vectors which represent the corpus vocabulary in a new embedded space. This representation can provide a useful means of measuring the underlying similarity between words. Here we investigate this property in the context of annotated texts of 19th-century fiction by the authors Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Arthur Conan Doyle. We demonstrate that building word embeddings on these texts can provide us with an insight into how characters group differently under different conditions, allowing us to make comparisons across different novels and authors. These results suggest that word embeddings can potentially provide a useful tool in supporting quantitative literary analysis.1166