In Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, time and money are in a juxtaposed relationship to illustrate the two main contrasting protagonists. This paper focuses on Merton Densher as a third protagonist and in his meditation towards the end of the story, we will explore how realms of “real life” and historical time are interconnected. James is famous for employing writing tools and techniques such as breath-taking moments, unreliable narrators, and limited views that are closely related to a short time or restricted space. However, in The Wings of the Dove, these elements mature into a long and productive meditation by Densher.

This study observes the reception of two theatrical productions of Sapho, an English and a Japanese version, and their different representations of gender and sexuality in New York at the turn of the 19th century will be analyzed. The first Sapho was opened on 5 February 1900, at Wallack’s Theater on Broadway, and was produced by and starred Olga Nethersole as the courtesan Fanny Le Grande. The play scandalized New York, and after a relentless campaign orchestrated by the press and other self-appointed guardians of public morality, Nethersole herself and others were arrested for corrupting public decency. Sahoko, the second (less well-known) adaptation of Sapho, was staged by the Japanese actor Kawakami Otojiro and featured his wife Sada Yacco in the Fanny role. It opened on 9 April in the same year, at the Bijou, a theater just across the street from Wallack’s. It was a limited success for Kawakami’s troupe, mainly because its presentation of female sexuality was traditional and stereotypical, quite different from that of Nethersole’s then-radical performance. The audience response to the notorious production of Sapho indicates the fear of the patriarchal anti-Sapho activists in those days, and also the change of the female sexuality itself in the age of male chauvinism.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that utilizing literary materials in the educational practice of foreign language classrooms has educational effects. When students learn a foreign language by reading literary texts as learning materials, they can significantly cultivate their thinking skills, which is also suitable for developing meta-linguistic skills necessary for language acquisition.
Currently, in foreign language education, the recommended method of teaching foreign language is the direct method, in which the language learners are advised to master the language without using their native language as a medium. This situation is due to the communicative competence development trend in the 1980s when the main objective of foreign language education was to focus on developing communicative competence. When the direct method is encouraged, literary texts are not recommended as teaching materials. Teachers use their native language to make their students understand the complicated structure of sentences with grammatical explanations. This teaching style has been excluded so far because this pedagogy does not correspond with the concept of the direct method. On the other hand, literary texts could be considered ideal teaching materials for developing thinking skills. With the worldwide rise of critical theory in the 1980s and 1990s, the value of literature and literary studies began to be reevaluated. Lessons using English literature are practical in cultivating a meta-language, and by fostering a highly accurate sense of language, they contribute to the cultivation of language operational skills that will serve as a means of international communication. Literary texts can significantly contribute to developing communicative competence in foreign language education by developing practical skills and thinking ability.

It has been observed that in contrast to Present-day English, Middle English was not sensitive to Doubly-filled COMP Filter, permitting sequences such as a wh-element followed by a complementizer that. Based on the result of the corpus research conducted by the author, this paper first presents a critical review of the analysis proposed by Nawata(1999), who treats the wh-element of Doubly-filled COMP in a uniform way; the result of the corpus research suggests that we should introduce a distinction between two different types of the wh-element for an adequate treatment of Doubly-filled COMP in Middle English: wh-words and wh-phrases. Following the hypotheses developed by Iwasaki(2021), the present paper posits a different syntactic structure for the sequences of “a wh-word--that” and “a wh-phrase--that” and claims that while earlier stages of Middle English only had the former structure, its later stages had both structures. It is shown that the proposed analysis provides a natural account for the fact that different particular types of Doubly-filled COMP in Middle English disappeared at different timing. This proposal implies that the existence of Doubly-filled COMP in Middle English is closely related to the absence of that-trace effects in English at that time.

English language learners often have difficulty in using articles with countable or uncountable nouns appropriately. For example, we can say both ‘catch a cold’ and ‘catch cold’, or we can also say both ‘influenza’ and ‘the flu’, while we cannot say ‘*appendicitises’. This paper examines how indefinite articles, definite articles or zero articles function in the names of diseases and symptoms. We will employ the theory of cognitive grammar suggested by Langacker, especially the concepts of countable nouns and mass nouns, to explore the relationships between articles and medical terms.

Bare nouns are the nouns that are generally used by themselves without a determiner or a quantifier, such as children in Children are energetic. Although the study of bare nouns, together with the issue of the presence or absence of articles, has received extensive attention in the fields of linguistics and grammatical theory, no unified view has yet been established on how bare nouns in Japanese, which does not have articles, can be interpreted as definite or indefinite, depending on the context. The purpose of this study is to reexamine the mechanism by which the basic form of Japanese noun phrases, such as hon (lit. book), through the forms of English noun phrases that appear as a book, books, the book(s), is implicitly inherent in the basic form itself. The study revisits the reason it is necessary to assume the distinct Japanese grammatical categories of plain noun phrase and non-plain noun phrase with regard to predicational copula sentences. In particular, the study examines the validity of the idea that the mechanism represents a “procedural meaning.”

A considerable amount of literature has discussed the characteristics of Japanese-accented English (JAE) from the perspectives of World Englishes and second language acquisition. However, in everyday interaction, non-experts in linguistics or TESOL may rely on a limited number of phonetic features to identify a speaker’s L1 background. This study demonstrates that Japanese users of English as a lingua franca consider the conflation of /l/ and /r/ to be the most distinctive feature of JAE, along with divergences in suprasegmental aspects. Their awareness is in line with L1 English speakers’ perception of JAE, which is revealed by reanalysing a previous study conducted in New Zealand (NZ). That is, the /l/ and /r/ conflation serves as a major yardstick for both Japanese and NZ listeners in confirming a Japanese accent in speech. Nevertheless, the conflation may also be interpreted as a stereotype of JAE among Japanese learners of English, given that they are most likely to have read or heard about it in educational environments.