The lovers and the rebel

A series of six poems exchanged between lovers (known as the double Heroides) is normally placed at the end of the collection of Ovid’s single Heroides. Their attribution has been questioned in recent decades. Much of the argument has devolved on stylistic features, especially polysyllabic pentameter endings. This chapter briefly revisits the issue by analysing some exilic passages in the Fasti and the Metamorphoses. Rather than making grand claims based on supposed stylistic features, the focus is on reading Ovid as a rebellious poet, a trait that consistently appears across his work from the Amores to the Tristia. By comparing passages from the exilic works with the text of the double Heroides, it is argued that reading Ovid as the author of both fits with our perspective on the great poet of nequitia. The conclusion is subjective, but opens up possibilities in reading the double letters as an exilic text.

The Speed of Orthographic Processing during Lexical Decision: Electrophysiological Evidence for Independent Coding of Letter Identity and Letter Position in Visual Word Recognition

Adults can decide rapidly if a string of letters is a word or not. However, the exact time course of this discrimination is still an open question. Here we sought to track the time course of this discrimination and to determine how orthographic information—letter position and letter identity—is computed during reading. We used a go/no-go lexical decision task while recording event-related potentials (ERPs). Subjects were presented with single words (go trials) and pseudowords (no-go trials), which varied in orthographic conformation, presenting either a double consonant frequently doubled (i.e., “ss”) or never doubled (i.e., “zz”) (identity factor); and a position of the double consonant was which either legal or illegal (position factor), in a 2 × 2 factorial design. Words and pseudowords clearly differed as early as 230 msec. At this latency, ERP waveforms were modulated both by the identity and by the position of letters: The fronto-central no-go N2 was the smallest in amplitude and peaked the earliest to pseudowords presenting both an illegal double-letter position and an identity never encountered. At this stage, the two factors showed additive effects, suggesting an independent coding. The factors of identity and position of double letters interacted much later in the process, at the P3 level, around 300–400 msec on frontal and central sites, in line with the lexical decision data obtained in the behavioral study. Overall, these results show that the speed of lexical decision may depend on orthographic information coded independently by the identity and position of letters in a word.

Internal evidence for final vowel lowering in Hausa

Internal factors involving phonotactic asymmetries and irregular morphological alternations suggest that final */uu/ in Hausa historically lowered to /oo/ when the preceding syllable contained /aa/, e.g. *kwaacfoo 'frog' < *kwaacfuu. (Note: L tone is indicated by a grave accent, H tone is left unmarked. Long vowels are indicated by double letters.) The aim of this paper is to present evidence supporting this proposal and to suggest implications of the historical vowel change for one of Hausa's many plural formations, the ablaut plural. (For background studies on the history of vowels in Hausa and Chadic, see Barreteau [1987], Frajzyngier [1986], Newman [l979b], Parsons [1970], Schuh [1984], and Wolff [1983].)