This study analyzes passive sentences in English and Portuguese which result from a post-semantic transformation applied when a nound, which does not play the semantic role of actor, is chosen as syntactic subject. Choice between a passive and its non-passive or active counterpart reflects differences in the distribution of information in the sentence as regards the relative importance of the latter's constituents for communication. Such distribution is analyzed in terms of Praque school theory, especially that involving the notions of communicative dynamism and the distribution of theme and rheme.
The book concludes with a contrastive analysis of English and Portuguese passive sentence patterns which serves as the basis for observations on the teaching of Portuguese passives to native speakers of English.
Mnemonics is an age-old device for remembering names, numbers, and many other things. The Portuguese Memory Book, by William F. Harrison and Dorothy Welker, makes use of this reliable memory help in a series of mnemonic jingles that are by turns playful, sardonic, touching, and heroic to help both students and independent learners acquire and remember Portuguese vocabulary.
The mnemonic jingles present both the sound of the Portuguese word (indicated by syllables in underlined boldface type) and its English meaning (given by a word or phrase in boldface type):
noite (f.) night
Don't annoy Chihuahuas in the night.
If you ignore their bark, you'll feel their bite.
This innovative approach to vocabulary building is simple, effective, and entertaining. The authors also include a general pronunciation guide to Brazilian Portuguese, particularly to the Carioca dialect of Rio de Janeiro.
"Give me the salt" and "Please pass the salt" make the same request, but in a polite situation the first utterance may give offense, while the second may not. How and why such differences in wording and intonation, in a particular context, produce different effects is the concern of pragmatics, the area of linguistics that deals with how speech is used in interaction. In this innovative study of pragmatics in Brazilian Portuguese, Dale Koike analyzes the politeness phenomenon, specifically in the context of speech acts known as "directives."
As acts intended to get someone to do something, directives bring into play a variety of sociocultural factors, depending on the relationship between the participants. Using empirical data obtained through natural language observation and from questionnaires of over one hundred adult native speakers, Koike identifies factors—such as age, education, and gender—that influence the strategies of politeness a given speaker is likely to use in making a directive. This research clarifies the unwritten language rules and assumptions that native speakers intuitively follow in phrasing their directive utterances.
Koike also includes important material on the acquisition of strategies for politeness by children and adult second-language learners, as well as on gender differences in politeness forms. Her research proposes important additions to the theory of speech acts as conceived by Austin and Searle, particularly in the application of deictic organization to account for a hierarchy of pragmatic forms.
Language and Social Relationship in Brazilian Portuguese will be of interest to a wide audience in diverse fields, including linguistics, anthropology, interaction analysis, communications, semantics, sociology, psychology, and education.
Cartas e Cronicas contains three dozen selections form Brazilian newspapers accompanied by vocabulary lists and comprehension exercises.
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• A Scandinavian name for your baby?
• The names of Norse gods and heroes?
• The history and meaning of Scandinavian first names?
• Variations and alternate spellings for common Scandinavian names?
• Naming traditions and customs in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark?
A Handbook of Scandinavian Names includes a dictionary of more than fifteen hundred given names from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, plus some from Iceland and Finland. Each entry provides a guide to pronunciation and the origin and meaning of the name. Many entries also include variations and usage in the Scandinavian countries and famous bearers of the name.
Adding engaging context to the dictionary section is an extensive comparative guide to naming practices. The authors discuss immigration to North America from Scandinavia and the ways given names and surnames were adapted in the New World. Also included in the book is a history of Scandinavian names, information on “Name Days,” and discussion of significant names from mythology and history, including naming traditions in royal families.
Studies in Upplandic Runography is a detailed treatment of the runic inscriptions from the province of Uppland, Sweden, where runic art reached a high point in A.D. 1200 and where runic inscriptions are most numerous. Most of the runic monuments discussed are from the eleventh century, an important period when Sweden was making the transition from paganism to Christianity.
The names of nearly fifty rune-carvers (runographers), professional and amateur, are known. However, many of the inscriptions were left unsigned. Claiborne Thompson examines the major problem of how an unsigned inscription is attributed to a known carver. Since each carver had a distinctive style which must be delineated, the book contains an exhaustive survey of the norms of Upplandic runography. In order to match the inscriptions with their carvers, Thompson analyzes the entire corpus of inscriptions from Uppland, their formation, the artistic designs they bear, the shapes of the runes on them, the orthography and language on them, and the manner in which they were carved.
Thompson then establishes a set of criteria for determining the authorship of a runic monument, stressing rune forms. All of the criteria are used in an extensive discussion of the carvings of Asmund Karasun, an interesting and influential carver from the first half of the eleventh century.
In addition, Thompson’s review of research describes scholarly interest in the problems of runography beginning in the early seventeenth century. The book includes an introductory sketch of the cultural background of Uppland and relates the runic tradition to historical and cultural traditions in eleventh-century Sweden.
This teacher's guide to the intermediate anthology and workbook suggests a variety of classroom communicative activities for both pairs and small groups.
This introduction to Norwegian helps students acquire the basic units of vocabulary and structure and use that knowledge to learn about Norway and Norwegian culture.
Once students acquire the basic units of vocabulary and structure, they will use their knowledge of the language to learn about Norway. Students will learn about the cities of Oslo and Bergen, how to converse when eating in a Norwegian home or restaurant, and about Norwegian schools. Emphasis is also given to travel and communications, as well as the seasons of the year and Norwegian holidays.
The present edition of the text features a short grammar summary, a reference for review to assist in drawing together aspects of the grammar that are presented throughout the text. To aid in developing good pronunciation and intonation habits, as well as to internalize certain items of vocabulary and structure, most chapters contain a practice dialogue for students to practice repeatedly while studying the chapter.
This intermediate-level anthology offers a lively collection of writingsfor students learning Norwegian. Introductions to selected Norwegian authors, vocabulary lists, and maps promote discussions of Norwegian history, culture, geography and literature.
For more than forty years, the Haugen Norwegian–English Dictionary has been regarded as the foremost resource for both learners and professionals using English and Norwegian. With more than 60,000 entries, it is esteemed for its breadth, its copious grammatical detail, and its rich idiomatic examples. In his introduction, Einar Haugen, a revered scholar and teacher of Norwegian to English speakers, provides a concise overview of the history of the language, presents the pronunciation of contemporary Norwegian, and introduces basic grammatical structures, including the inflection of nouns and adjectives and the declension of verbs.
With a recurring focus on how his mother’s tragic weaknesses and her compelling strengths affected his development, Awkward intersperses the chronologically arranged autobiographical sections with ruminations on his own interests in literary and cultural criticism. As a male scholar who has come under fire for describing himself as a feminist critic, he reflects on such issues as identity politics and the politics of academia, affirmative action, and the Million Man March.
By connecting his personal experiences with larger political, cultural, and professional questions, Awkward uses his life as a palette on which to blend equations of race and reading, urbanity and mutilation, alcoholism, pain, gender, learning, sex, literature, and love.
On a summer day in 1980 in Niederfeulen, Luxembourg, Suzanne Bunkers pored over parish records of her maternal ancestors, immigrants to the rural American Midwest in the mid 1800s. Suddenly, chance led her to the name Simmerl and to the missing piece in the genealogical puzzle that had brought her so far: Susanna Simmerl, Bunkers' paternal great-great-grandmother, who had given birth to an illegitimate daughter in 1856 before coming to America. Finding Susanna was the catalyst for Bunkers' intensely personal book, which blends history, memory, and imagination into a drama of two women's lives within their multigenerational family.
Drawing on his own experience in the profession, veteran English professor and internationally renowned scholar Jerome Klinkowitz sorts out the wrong ways of teaching literature before devising a new, successful method. Specifically, he concludes that a historically based “story of English” is precisely the wrong narrative approach to making sense of what literature does. Instead, Klinkowitz proposes a new method focused not on the product of literary writing but on the process of writing. Long involved with the making of contemporary literature, Klinkowitz shows how his classroom approach draws on the same strengths and inspirations writers use in the creation of literature. He involves students in the literary work as production.
Despite almost universal agreement that literary studies fail both writers and students, solutions have been limited to suggestions by superstar theorists teaching cream-of-the-crop students at elite universities. Klinkowitz aims not at the elite but at the ordinary student in an introduction to literature class. His goal is to introduce teachers to a new philosophy of teaching literature and to further deepen students’ natural love for the subject. He also seeks to revive the love of fine writing in those whose joy in the subject fell victim to obtuse teaching methods. Uniquely, his is not an esoteric theory developed by the best academics for elite students but a commonsense approach that works well in the kind of schools most students attend.
Interrogating Privilege is a welcome combination of personal essays and academic research, blending theory, analysis, and narrative to explore the function and consequences of privilege in second language education.
While teachers’ focus on the learning process and class goals are quite important, there is not enough attention paid to the types of privilege—or lack thereof—that individuals bring to the classroom. Through chapters that can either stand alone or be read together, with topics such as gender, age, and colonialism (the author is the daughter of missionary parents) in second language teaching, this book seeks to address the experiences of teachers, scholars, and students as “whole persons” and to observe the workings of identity and privilege in the educational setting.
Thomas P. Miller defines college English studies as literacy studies and examines how it has evolved in tandem with broader developments in literacy and the literate. He maps out “four corners” of English departments: literature, language studies, teacher education, and writing studies. Miller identifies their development with broader changes in the technologies and economies of literacy that have redefined what students write and read, which careers they enter, and how literature represents their experiences and aspirations.
Miller locates the origins of college English studies in the colonial transition from a religious to an oratorical conception of literature. A belletristic model of literature emerged in the nineteenth century in response to the spread of the “penny” press and state-mandated schooling. Since literary studies became a common school subject, professors of literature have distanced themselves from teachers of literacy. In the Progressive era, that distinction came to structure scholarly organizations such as the MLA, while NCTE was established to develop more broadly based teacher coalitions. In the twentieth century New Criticism came to provide the operating assumptions for the rise of English departments, until those assumptions became critically overloaded with the crash of majors and jobs that began in 1970s and continues today.<br><br>
For models that will help the discipline respond to such challenges, Miller looks to comprehensive departments of English that value studies of teaching, writing, and language as well as literature. According to Miller, departments in more broadly based institutions have the potential to redress the historical alienation of English departments from their institutional base in work with literacy. Such departments have a potentially quite expansive articulation apparatus. Many are engaged with writing at work in public life, with schools and public agencies, with access issues, and with media, ethnic, and cultural studies. With the privatization of higher education, such pragmatic engagements become vital to sustaining a civic vision of English studies and the humanities generally.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, English literature, composition, and rhetoric were introduced almost simultaneously into colleges throughout the British cultural provinces. Professorships of rhetoric and belles lettres were established just as print was reaching a growing reading public and efforts were being made to standardize educated taste and usage. The provinces saw English studies as a means to upward social mobility through cultural assimilation. In the educational centers of England, however, the introduction of English represented a literacy crisis brought on by provincial institutions that had failed to maintain classical texts and learned languages.
Today, as rhetoric and composition have become reestablished in the humanities in American colleges, English studies are being broadly transformed by cultural studies, community literacies, and political controversies. Once again, English departments that are primarily departments of literature see these basic writing courses as a sign of a literacy crisis that is undermining the classics of literature. The Formation of College English reexamines the civic concerns of rhetoric and the politics that have shaped and continue to shape college English.
For nearly twenty-five years, English studies has been focused on two terms: politics and ethics. However, the institutional emergence, development, and relationship of these two concepts have yet to be examined. Between Politics and Ethics: Toward a Vocative History of English Studies traces the development of politics and ethics in contemporary English studies, questions the current political orientation of the discipline, and proposes a rethinking of the history of English studies based on a “vocative” dimension of writing—the idea that writers form a virtual community by “calling to” and listening to other writers.
In a series of interrelated discussions, James Comas examines the historical trends leading to recent confusion regarding ethics and its relation to the politics of English studies. Through close, rhetorical readings of texts by Judith Butler, Stephen Greenblatt, Edward Said, and others, Comas argues that this confusion is largely the result of a “political turn” that resists theorizing itself. In addition, he argues that work on ethics by Wayne Booth, Geoffrey Harpham, and J. Hillis Miller reflects an uneasy dialectic between the ethics and politics of reading and writing. In response to this discord, Comas turns to the theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, as well as to the examples of Georges Bataille and Kenneth Burke, and proposes a vocative approach to assessing English studies and its history. In doing so, this volume offers a thoughtful reassessment of English studies that affects our understanding of the rhetoric of disciplinary histories.Robert Bechtold Heilman is one of the last survivors of a remarkable generation of American critics that included such literary giants as Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson, men to whom literary criticism was not a profession or an academic necessity but a calling. In a distinguished career that has spanned nearly six decades, Heilman has influenced generations of scholars and critics through his exquisitely written commentaries on subjects ranging from William Shakespeare to Thomas Hardy.
In The Professor and the Profession, Heilman looks back over his life and times from his perspective as both an academic and an American. Differing in theme and subject matter, the essays included in this collection are ultimately unified by the author himself. Whether the topic is football, Robert Penn Warren, or education, Heilman's generous and intelligent voice emerges on every page. Yet this collection is more than one academic's personal reminiscences; it is a reflection upon American literary history itself.
In the first section of essays, "The Self Displayed," Heilman reveals how he developed from a small-town boy into a distinguished critic and teacher, touching upon his participation in baseball and love of football along the way. "Writers Portrayed" and "Literary Types and Problems Inspected," the following sections, offer his opinions on the past and on the current state of American literary criticism, including personal portraits of such renowned friends as Eric Voegelin, Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roethke, and Malcolm Cowley. The final section, "Education Examined," is an enlightening inquiry into the development of American universities in the twentieth century.
A fascinating chronicle of a significant academic life, The Professor and the Profession will appeal to a broad array of scholars, from young academics wanting to know where they came from to those of Heilman's generation who can appreciate this personal reminiscence into the world of letters.
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