Evaluation is central to literary studies and has led to an impressive list of publications on the status and history of the canon. Yet it is remarkable how little attention has been given to the role of textual properties in evaluative processes. Most of the chapters in The Quality of Literature redress this issue by dealing with texts or genres ranging from classical antiquity, via Renaissance to twentieth century.
The volume explores how a concept of discourse can be usefully applied to the analysis of visual as well as verbal texts. Drawing on case studies from American and British media, it re-examines the relationship between discourse and ideology, demonstrating how both interrelate and contribute to media analysis.
This book is devoted to various explorations of how linguistics and pragmatics together can shed light on the contrasts between languages in their discourse-cultural settings. It arises from presentations and discussions held at the Fourth International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC4), which took place in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain from 20 to 23 September 2005.1 The twelve chapters analyse linguistic phenomena across different languages, taking into account their co-texts as well as the socio-cultural contexts in which they arise. The first two sections consider various questions of information structure, discourse analysis and lexis; each chapter is concerned in some way with the interplay between, on the one hand, grammatical and lexical organization and, on the other, the contexts in which utterances are used and texts emerge. The final chapters of the book consider how new techniques of contrastive linguistics and pragmatics are contributing to the primary field of application for contrastive analysis, language teaching and learning.
This book is a collection of articles from my writings over the years on teaching English. Except for the introductory encyclopaedia article, the chapters are arranged in chronological order. They all share some basic features. The primary influence on my thinking about language learning and teaching is the empirically observed problems and difficulties students experience in learning a second language, and the articles all reflect this concern. Theoretical speculations are interesting but they serve a very minor part of this volume.
Creolization of Language and Culture is the first English edition of Robert Chaudenson’s landmark reference Des оles, des hommes, des langues, which has also been fully revised. Focusing on major French Creoles of the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, Chaudenson argues against traditional accounts of creole genesis and for a more sophisticated alternative that takes full account of the peculiar linguistic and social factors at play in the European settlement colonies.
