This paper will focus on women whose identities are unclear from the perspectives of gender, sexism, racism, friendship, and post-colonialism. Morrison turns to Emilia, Sa’ran, M. Brabantio, and Soun because these four women reveal many truths that Shakespeare’s Othello did not. Of these, the dialogue between Desdemona and Barbary / Sa’ran is the most intense. Morrison even seems to place Sa’ran at the center of Desdemona. The reason behind this idea is, in my opinion, because she is black.
In her book of criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison argues that to understand American literature, we must place black people at its center and not literarily marginalize them. By looking at blackness in detail, she tries to examine the true nature of literary whiteness and to give a proper understanding of American literature. Morrison created Desdemona from a post-colonial perspective that fundamentally rethinks the history written by the victors, arguing that the representation of black people has been falsely “reproduced” in the world’s literary works.
In Othello, Morrison criticized that there was no friendship between women (Desdemona and Emilia, Desdemona and Barbary /Sa’ran), and in Vogel’s Desdemona, Emilia claimed saying “there’s no such thing as friendship between women.” However, in Morrison’s Desdemona, female friendships develop between Desdemona and Emilia, Desdemona and Sa’ran, and M. Brabantio and Soun. Morrison revised and ideally reconstructed Othello from the point of view of these enigmatic women. Sellars once explained to Morrison that he found Shakespeare’s Othello “a thin play” with stereotypical principal characters. Morrison convinced Sellars that there was more textual depth to Desdemona than productions had typically extrapolated, but she conceded that even Shakespeare had not allowed Desdemona to tell her full story. Morrison created a unique musical, a sequel to Othello, so to speak, based on his discussions with Sellars.

There are deep-rooted differences of opinion between multiculturalism and language planning and policy in the United States. It is also true that various discussions and opinions are held and provided over these two issues among proponents and opponents who have been a long debate about them for many years, and it is a controversial issue among minority people and immigrants from abroad, including Asian immigrants. The arguments held by advocates of multiculturalism and language planning and policy are fivefold: 1) multiculturalism promotes acculturation; 2) multiculturalism help promote mutual understanding; 3) well-planned language planning and policy have the immigrants narrow the gap which they are trying to get involved with Americans as soon as possible; 4) multiculturalism and language planning and policy help protect immigrants’ cultures and their languages; 5) a huge variety of culture-centered education and language planning and policy awaken their cultures and languages, which also lead to synergistic effects to acquire the English language. In an increasingly globalized America, English-Plus movement as new language planning and policy plays an important role in resolving the problems facing. Bilingual education and English-only are not enough for comforting the immigrants struggling with poverty and educational inequality.

This paper is primarily concerned with inquiring into how early syntactic analyses in English grammar was affected by Carl Ferdinand Becker’s work on German grammar and syntax, and how three English grammarians improved Becker’s system to adjust it to the English language. The system proposed by Becker (1830) hinged on the logical analyses of the predicate, which caused problems when adapted to English grammar. For example, Becker analyzed the Be verb as Copula, the predicate adjective or noun as Predicate. He also analyzed the Objective Complement as Object, which stood in the Factitive relation with the verb in the predicate.
Arnold (1848) was the first grammarian to improve on Becker’s system when he proposed the novel grammatical term Complement, which works as an Objective Complement in the present pedagogical English grammar. However, Arnold took over the Copula analysis of Becker’s and regarded the Be verb as Copula, thereby Subjective Complement and Objective Complement were analyzed independently without regard to the notion of incompleteness of the predication.
Next, Morell (1852) treated the Be verb as a verb, which required a noun or an adjective to complete the predicate. However, Morell overgeneralized Becker’s analysis of Completion and analyzed Subjective Complement as an Object, thereby no syntactic distinction was made between the elements required by a transitive verb, and an intransitive verb of incomplete predication.
Finally, it was Mason (1858) that first proposed Complement used in the present pedagogical English grammar, which covered both Subject and Object Complement. Mason made a distinction between an objective relation and an adverbial relation, which had been uniformly classified into objective relation in Becker’s system. By proposing the notion of Intransitive and Transitive Verb of Incomplete Predication separately, Mason analyzed Subjective Complement and Objective Complement respectively.

The idea of English as an international language (EIL) has gained a renewed momentum in the context of Japanese education since the turn of the century, when the Prime Minister’s Commission (2000) highlighted the need for skills in English as an international lingua franca. Despite applied linguists’ strenuous efforts to enhance public awareness of World Englishes, however, an adherence to Inner Circle English still lingers in TESOL practices, through which learners may feel frustrated or discouraged by the pursuit of the ideal, yet unattainable goal, of acquiring a native-like accent. Given that a majority of late learners in Japan aim at plurilingualism in order to function in increasingly globalised environments, a role model for EIL users in the Expanding Circle should be fluent L2 English speakers, rather than monolingual L1 speakers. The author argues that the use of English in Scandinavia (i.e., Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) would serve as a reference for this purpose from three perspectives: (1) the high compatibility of Scandinavian-accented English with the Lingua Franca Core, (2) the plurilingualism encouraged by the Council of Europe and its bottom-up implementation in the region, and (3) local learners’ tolerance towards a hybrid accent, which is not restricted to a single variety of English, neither GA or SSBE. The probability of this model being accepted in Japan can be predicted by preliminary research, which indicates that advanced learners have a positive attitude towards ‘European English’ by L2 English speakers in mainland Europe.

This paper investigates what kind of semantic and pragmatic constraints are imposed on the relationship between the English pro-form one and its antecedent in inter-sentences or inside sentences. A pro-form, which lacks its own semantic content, is a kind of anaphoric expression whose interpretation can be obtained only by having an anaphoric relationship with the antecedent (Huddleston & Pullum 2002). A traditional way of representing the relationship between a pro-form and its antecedent is by using referential indices (usually numerical subscripts) as shown in “What is a dugong_{i, j} like? I have never seen one_i,, so I cannot tell what it_j is like.” NPs with the same subscript are interpreted as coreferential in the sense that they refer to the same entity. The study argues against this view on the following basis: (i) a pro-form is a semantic free variable or a slot which requires filling by pragmatic inference called ‘saturation’; (ii) the semantic function that a pro-form carries out in a sentence is independent of whether it is referential or not; and (iii) when the pro-form one occurs as an N’, the interpretation would be based on the preceding elements of the entire noun phrase including the pro-form concerned as its head.