scholarly journals Pronominal anaphoric strategies in the West Saxon dialect of Old English

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARCELLE COLE

Building on previous studies that have discussed pronominal referencing in Old English (Traugott 1992; van Gelderen 2013; van Kemenade & Los 2017), the present study analyses the pronominal anaphoric strategies of the West Saxon dialect of Old English based on a quantitative and qualitative study of personal and demonstrative pronoun usage across a selection of late (postc. AD 900) Old English prose text types. The historical data discussed in the present study provide important additional support for modern cognitive and psycholinguistic theory. In line with the cognitive/psycholinguistic literature on the distribution of pronouns in Modern German (Bosch & Umbach 2007), the information-structural properties of referents rather than the grammatical role of the pronoun's antecedent most accurately explain the personal pronoun vs demonstrative pronoun contrast in the West Saxon dialect of Old English. The findings also highlight how issues pertaining to style, such as the author–writer relationship, text type, subject matter and the conventionalism propagated by text tradition, influence anaphoric strategies in Old English.

2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-122
Author(s):  
Brita Wårvik

Givón’s (1995) quantity principle about the diagrammatic iconicity of coding forms has mostly been investigated for topic continuity and nominal elements. The present paper considers its applicability both to participant continuity and the continuity of time, focussing on their interaction in the organisation of narrative discourse. As an additional test of the hypothesis, the paper studies historical data, examining the structuring roles of signals of participant and temporal continuities in Old English narrative prose. The findings indicate that the choice of signals of the continuities of time and participants follows the iconic quantity principle of longer and informationally-heavier forms encoding greater degrees of discontinuity. The paper also underlines the importance of text type and genre-specific factors in investigations of discourse-structural signals. Specifically for the Old English narrative data, the study provides further support for the discourse marker role of þa ‘then’ as distinct from other temporal expressions.


Author(s):  
Ming-yueh Shen

Abstract This study aimed to determine as to whether or not the text type and strategy usage affect the EFL learners’ lexical inferencing performance. The participants were comprised of 87 first-year English majors at a technical university. Data were collected from (1) a lexical inferencing test with excerpts of narrative and expository texts, for which both multiple-choice and definition tasks were designed, respectively, and then (2) the responses from the learners’ self-reported strategy usage. The quantitative analyses demonstrated that the text types significantly affected the EFL learners’ lexical inferencing performance, in which the EFL learners performed better for the narrative excerpt than for the expository texts. However, significant coefficients between the strategy use and the lexical inferencing performance were not found in this study. The results further implied that the text structure and the lexical inferencing strategies should be explicitly taught to the EFL learners.


1996 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 11-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally-Ann Ashton

AbstractThis is a short report on a selection of the small finds from the excavations of a Roman house which lies to the west of the theatre at Lepcis Magna. The pottery and coins from the current levels of excavation have been dated to the late 5th and early 6th centuries AD; however, many of the objects seem to be residual. One of the most interesting finds was a solid bronze ring, decorated with two female figures. The object seems to have been functional, with the ring and the bars on which the woman are seated being attached to a soft material such as leather. These characteristics, which can be found on parallel examples, along with other bronze artefacts from the site suggest that the former was part of the decoration of a horse drawn carriage. Several pieces of jewellery were found including two gemstones which were once part of a finger ring, dating from the 2nd century AD. The first is a garnet and shows the goddess Artemis/Diane in her role of huntress, holding a bow and arrow. The second, which is a cornelian, is decorated with a portrait of a youth and may well be a local copy of a type circulating at the time. Many pieces of locally crafted bone and ivory were also found, including a bone plaque with a floral decoration which was originally intended as a decorative inlay for a small object such as a box. A similar piece from Egypt has been dated to around the 3rd or 4th centuries AD.


ReCALL ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Martínez Lirola ◽  
María Tabuenca Cuevas

AbstractThe use of computer programs that can be used to correct and assess students' written work in the EFL classroom has become more commonplace within the last decade. This paper discusses the role of CALL in the process of data collection, standardisation of assessment criteria and compilation of the number of errors in the areas of grammar learning and its application to L2 writing. Students benefited from the correction process and showed increased grammatical awareness through the corrected feedback. However, the analysis of the results after the first correction phase demonstrated that the students had improved less than expected. For this reason, in the second year, Genre Theory was adopted as a theoretical framework so that students would become aware of the relationship between the structure and shape of texts in order to be effective in a particular context, and to achieve the goals of a particular culture. As proponents of the genre approach, we argue that making the genres explicit and showing how to write them will help students to be aware of how knowledge is structured in different written genres. A careful selection of text types was made at the beginning of the year so that improvement in the students' writing not only depended on the CALL system being used, but also on the different genres or text types used as class material. In this study, we intend to demonstrate that the combination of new technologies in the classroom and Genre Theory helped students to increase their writing competency. Our research highlights the relationship between literacy, new technologies, and effective writing with an emphasis on the educational application.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 569-589
Author(s):  
Vladimir I. Karpov ◽  
◽  
Tatiana V. Toporova ◽  

The article presents a critical analysis of both domestic and foreign works on text linguistics where researchers try to reveal a minimum classification unit. More specifically, the article focuses on the term “Textsorte”. While it is widely employed in German linguistics, its content is not clearly defined in the works of Russian and foreign scholars. Here, it is shown how the term is approached in different fields of research — in information aesthetics, semiotics, text theory, and historical linguistics. The article is aimed at assessing the potential certain text types, recorded in various periods of the life of language, have for an extended description of language history. The authors analyze texts of oral folklore, and namely charms. Therefore, works on the history and typology of folklore genres are taken into account and thoroughly reviewed. These are mainly linguistic genre studies and scrutinizing them provides an opportunity to touch upon problems pertinent to the research of text genres, to consider the discussion around “text genre” and “text type” in foreign and domestic linguistics, to define the place and role of given text types in historical linguistic and cultural studies, and to reveal both trends in researching folklore texts and the relationship of folklore with text linguistics. The authors come to the conclusion that a comprehensive description of a given text type allows one to formulate general principles of diachronically oriented research and make a significant contribution to the development of historical linguistics.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Yanfeng Yang

Previous studies have shown that lexical bundles are important building blocks of discourse and a significant component of fluent linguistic production. However, little research was found to investigate lexical bundles in narrative writings, a basic text type on which the other text types (discourses) build upon. The present study tries to fill the gap and investigates lexical bundles in argumentative and narrative writings by Chinese EFL learners. The lexical bundles were retrieved by kfNgram and then manually refined and classified into structural and functional categories respectively based on Biber et al.’s (1999) and Biber et al.’s (2003) frameworks. The findings show that (1) students used much more four-word bundles in argumentative writings than those in narrative writings; (2) no big difference was found in the structural patterns of the four-word lexical bundles used by the students across the two text types; (3) students relied much more on stance bundles than the other functional types of bundles in their argumentative writings, while they turned to referential expressions other than stance bundles or discourse organizers in their narrative writings. The functional purposes of various discourses explain the students’ selection of different functional patterns across the text type.


2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aja Taitano ◽  
Bradley Smith ◽  
Cade Hulbert ◽  
Kristin Batten ◽  
Lalania Woodstrom ◽  
...  

2016 ◽  
Vol 04 (01) ◽  
pp. 4-10

AbstractImmunosuppression permits graft survival after transplantation and consequently a longer and better life. On the other hand, it increases the risk of infection, for instance with cytomegalovirus (CMV). However, the various available immunosuppressive therapies differ in this regard. One of the first clinical trials using de novo everolimus after kidney transplantation [1] already revealed a considerably lower incidence of CMV infection in the everolimus arms than in the mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) arm. This result was repeatedly confirmed in later studies [2–4]. Everolimus is now considered a substance with antiviral properties. This article is based on the expert meeting “Posttransplant CMV infection and the role of immunosuppression”. The expert panel called for a paradigm shift: In a CMV prevention strategy the targeted selection of the immunosuppressive therapy is also a key element. For patients with elevated risk of CMV, mTOR inhibitor-based immunosuppression is advantageous as it is associated with a significantly lower incidence of CMV events.


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