The English Miscellany

Have you heard of corpus linguistics ?  Corpus linguistics proposes that reliable language analysis is more feasible with corpora (samples) collected in the field, in their natural contexts, and with minimal experimental-interference. How did it all start? A landmark in modern corpus linguistics was Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis's Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English (1967). This work was based on the analysis of the Brown Corpus, a carefully compiled selection of about a million words, drawn from a wide variety of sources in current  American English How did technology help? The first computerized corpus of one million words of transcribed spoken language was constructed in 1971 by the Montreal French Project. This effort inspired Shana Poplack's much larger corpus of spoken French in the Ottawa-Hull area The analysis of academic writing shows that there are many  frequently used words and phrases : a form of...

An Examination of the role of CHARACTER in literary texts Superficially ... “A person in a story, someone we can relate to, or identify with ...” But Note: Caricature – 2-dimensinal, simple, represents one value, e.g. the angry man, jealousy = related to allegory and satire = distortion for effect of one quality, or exaggeration of certain features; stereotypes Narrative functions – hero/villain, trickster, false hero, magician, father/son, mother/daughter, outcast, rebel. In real life people that we come to know well are seldom just functions or caricatures. Real living people in the media, or celebrities, often have an assumed character or role that might be quite different from how they are in their personal life. In texts, an assumed role is called a persona , in the media we even talk about ‘personalities’ to express the public projection of a role. Perceptions of role or character can also be manipulated e.g. spin doctors and propagandists ma...

The witty banter and rivalry that we encounter in the plays of William Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde, or the novels of Jane Austen, often presents difficulties for students who are unsure how to write about it. It's not enough just to say that a speech is funny or humorous. Even 'witty' is at times quite vague given the complexity of rhetoric and style that characters had available to them. First, there are the professed attitudes to love and relationships. Typical roles taken up by characters include the scorner of love, and the woman who rejects her suitors. Whether the underlying motivation is authentic, realistic, or psychologically coherent and credible often matters less than the sheer pleasure to be had from the verbal battles that ensue. Second, audiences are expected to enjoy the 'badinage' of witty courtiers. This is an opportunity for malicious sentiments to be expressed with wit. Communication shifts in mood and tone from shrewdness and wisdom to ext...

You have probably come across the SMARTER model as a way of organising a project.  It works like this S          Specific              Significant, Stretching, Simple M         Measurable              Meaningful, Motivational, Manageable A         Attainable Appropriate, Achievable, Agreed, Assignable, Actionable, Ambitious, Aligned, Aspirational, Acceptable, Action-focused R          Relevant           Result-Based, Results-oriented, Resourced, Resonant, Realistic T          Timely Time-oriented, -framed, -based, -bound, -Specific, -tabled, -limited, Trackable, Tangible E      ...