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English Language and Literature: Cross Cultural Currents is a collection of essays that interrogate the precarious positions of English and African languages in an era in which English is increasingly becoming the dominant language in Africa while at the same time there is a growing resistance against it. Though many Africans take pride in their own cultural heritage that is expressed by their African languages, they require the economic and social benefits of English. The book presents a language dilemma in which both African languages and English enhance, inhibit, and influence each other.The data used by the authors spans a broad spectrum of sources including: fiction, courts, parliamentary Hansards, House of Chiefs, classrooms, internet, roads and bus ranks. Thus, it is reflective of the most and least educated, the most and least influential Africans. The presentations provide broad insights about African symbols, metaphors, imagery and folklores representing undocumented literature that challenge scientific imperialism and deficit theories. The diversity and freshness of the ideas in the book stem from the unique blend of the background of the contributors: English language and literature teachers, teachers of African languages, educationalists, sociologists, historians and politicians. Thus the book is a valuable asset to scholars in linguistics, anthropology and language policy makers.

This study aims to explore the culture of reading literary texts in higher education and the strategies that can enhance the acquisition and learning of the content knowledge for both English Language and Literature in English. The study adopted an interpretivist paradigm and qualitative research design. The study is qualitative in nature. Language in/for/with content and schema theories form the basis for the study. The former holds that language cannot be acquired outside content whilst schemata are stored mental structures that determine the acquisition of new knowledge; thus, literary content knowledge may not be acquired/learned outside linguistic and communicative competencies and vice versa. Data were collected from the relevant literature from the past six years. It was interpreted and analysed thematically. The results showed that students' habit of reading is poor which affects their academic performance. In addition, new technological devices make learning easier and more accessible, but it negatively affects students' ability to read authentic texts for information and entertainment. The study therefore concludes that university students do not read literary texts because of the bad use of information and communication technology. However, the use of digital libraries could improve the situation. The findings suggest that institutions of higher learning should have strategies to engage linguists and literary scholars in the habit of reading literary texts. University libraries should be equipped with relevant and updated digital reading materials.

The phenomenon of negation is part of perception and a universal property of all human languages. The focus of this study lies on morphological, syntactic and lexical negation, with the main goal to determine how they are perceived in terms of the degree of negativity by English language and literature students (N=91). The main administered instrument was the Polarity scale, comprising utterances with the three broad types of negation. The obtained results were analysed via IBM SPSS 21. Overall, the sample evaluated the affixal–syntactic negation pairs fairly equally, as negative or mildly negative. On the aggregate scores, though, the affixal negation (Neg. pref. + Adj) was evaluated more negatively than the syntactic one (not + Adj). The participants evaluated the absolute negative never more positively than its semantics implies (as negative only), and semi-negatives, and negated frequency and quantity adverbs were rated quite evenly. In future studies, we propose the use of utterances with inanimate subjects in addition, as well as replication in different cultural settings to check whether there are culturally induced differences or else cognitive similarity.

Exploring Framework Bias: The Case of Minimalism Vs Parallel Architecture in Studies on Language Evolution. The present paper explores the issue of framework bias through the analysis of two lines of study concerning language evolution, one framed by the Minimalist program and one by the proposal of Parallel Architecture of language. Framework bias, as proposed in this study, raises the question of the degree to which the theoretical framework chosen for a certain line of research will influence the design of an experiment, the selection of data, and therefore the analysis and final results. The studies presented in this paper tackle the same topic (language evolution) using the same parameters for research (gradual versus saltational evolution; continuation versus exaptation; and unique versus shared property) but reach significantly different conclusions because of their respective theoretical framework.
Keywords: framework bias, Minimalism, Parallel Architecture, language evolution

"Până-PPs and Complex Event Constructions in Romanian. This paper examines the syntactic and semantic status of Romanian PPs headed by the morphologically complex prepositions până în/la ʻuntil/as far as/up to in/at' in VPs of change of location (a pluti până în peșteră ʻfloat up to the cave') and change of state (a munci până la epuizare ʻwork to the point of exhaustion'). Contrary to the claims made in the literature (Barbu 2015), the approach taken here argues that these – and other similar – VPs cannot be considered complex event constructions such as goal-of-motion structures and strong resultative constructions, respectively. The discussion revolves around the interpretation of the entire VP, the lack of any type of restriction on the syntactic and semantic classification of the verb, the violation of the Direct Object Restriction, as well as the borderline between these PPs and temporal adjuncts. These properties highlight the fact that the availability of such VPs does not turn Romanian into a satellite-framed language as they are not real counterexamples to the Talmian generalization according to which verb-framed Romanian disallows these two complex event constructions. Keywords: goal-of-motion structure, resultative construction, VP, până-PP, Romanian "

The development of English literature in the eighteenth century was strongly influenced by France and French writers. Lately there has been an attempt to belittle the French influences. It is true that in the past the Gallic influence has been exaggerated, but it really cannot be overlooked. Historically it is true to treat England and France as one country in respect to their literary activity between the middle of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Roughly, there were about 100 years, between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the execution of Louis XIV in 1793, during which there was a solid block of Franco-British or Anglo-French literary achievement. The Civil War in England gave the English political exiles in Paris a chance to acquire French taste, but this Entente Litteraire was ended when the French Revolution through Trafalgar and Waterloo caused a revulsion from the French example.

(Re)constructing the Self in Women's Autofiction: The Case of Sașa Zare's Dezrădăcinare. This paper aims to examine the (re)construction of the female subject in contemporary autobiographical fiction by looking into Sașa Zare's debut novel, Dezrădăcinare.