Hello.
As you may have guessed, your question was a difficult one to answer,
partly because of the arcane nature of the topic, but also because
researchers were not sure what it was you wanted by way of an answer.
I have read through your question and comments several times, and
think I understand something of what you need. Since you seem to have
an urgent need for information, I have done my best to provide an
appropriate and timely answer to your question.
But if I have missed the mark in any way, or if you feel you would
like additional information, just let me know by posting a follow-up
comment. I will certainly do my best to meet your needs.
The following documents are highly relevant to your topic. They are a
combination of very technical approaches to the topics, along with
some "plain English" descriptions of the fields. I have included some
papers in computational linguistics as well, since this is a
burgeoning area of research, and I thought it might be of interest to
you.
Best of luck with your course.
pafalafa-ga
-------------------
people.freenet.de/Stefan_Th_Gries/ Teaching/SDU/LinguisticsEB.pdf
[ This article offers a very comprehensive overview of linguistics and
related language studies, and may be your best starting point.
However, I could not cut and paste any sampel text due to its format]
--------------------
[another good overview]
http://www.geocities.com/writing_site/thesis/chapter2.html
Issues in Corpus Linguistics: A Review of the Literature
With so much cross-institutional interest and work devoted to
individual projects, it was not long before researchers began pursuing
the possibilities of identifying a research agenda for even more
ambitious aims: to collect a corpus that would represent national and
regional varieties of English. The International Corpus of English
(ICE) is such an undertaking, which allows for checking evidence for
comparative phonetic, phonological, syntactic, morphological, lexical
and discourse analysis. Sociolinguists and language educators are also
seen as beneficiaries of this corpus development drive. With Meyer
coordinating the project based on Greenbaum's set of sampling
procedures, the ICE represents the written and spoken language
varieties of twenty countries and regions: Australia, Cameroon,
Canada, the Caribbean, Fiji, Ghana, Great Britain, Hong Kong, India,
Ireland, Kenya, Malawi, New Zealand, Nigeria, the Philippines, Sierra
Leone, Singapore, South Africa, Tanzania, and the USA. When complete,
each subcorpus will be modeled on the Brown Corpus initiative: each of
the 5,000 samples in a subcorpus containing 2,000 words. (Updates on
the project are posted at the ICE website,
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/ice.htm.) Already, work done on the
ICE has informed such descriptive studies as the Oxford English
Grammar by Greenbaum, with many more under development. A component of
the ICE, the International Corpus of Learner English, will be reviewed
in a later section (2.5).
--------------------
www.personal.psu.edu/cxw329/Faust.pdf
Using Discourse Analytic Tools in the Second Language Classroom:
Textual Analysis and Pedagogical Application of Goethe's Faust
This paper attempts to demonstrate how discourse analytic principles
can be used to teach literary texts in the second language classroom.
Through a textual analysis of an excerpt from Goethe's Faust,
linguistic features such as deixis, lexicalization and cohesive ties
are examined in relation to Halliday's discourse dimensions of field,
tenor and mode. Halliday's theory of language variation is used as a
framework for a language-based pedagogical application of the text.
-------------------
http://llt.msu.edu/vol5num3/thompson/
LOOKING AT CITATIONS:
USING CORPORA IN ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES
Analysis of academic text corpora has the potential to inform our
knowledge about the different forms and functions of citations in
academic writing. Pickard (1995) used a small corpus of applied
linguistics articles to investigate the citation practices of "expert"
writers. On the premise that novice writers tend to overuse
particular items in their references, such as "say," she investigated
citation practices in the corpus to find out what expert writers do.
Using concordancing software, she was able to produce statistical
information to identify preferences among her writers for integral or
for non-integral citation forms, and to identify the different
grammatical forms of integral citations (subject, agent, genitive noun
phrase, etc.). This was a useful preliminary study. The limitations
were that the corpus was small, and there was little discussion of the
reasons why writers choose one form rather than any other; the
categories are based on syntactic distinctions rather than functional.
More importantly, however, it is not clear whether her discoveries
about the practices of a small number of applied linguistics writers
can be generalized to "expert" writers across all the disciplines. It
seems likely that writers in different disciplines follow different
rhetorical conventions and have different preferences.
-------------------
http://jac.gsu.edu/jac/13.2/Articles/8.htm
Discourse Analysis and Literary Theory: Closing the Gap
The notion of style as choice in linguistic stylistics is enriched by
the notion of style as a mode of discursivity with concrete social
consequences. The strategic use of one style over another offers an
important means for pursuing goals and providing or denying access to
knowledge. Clearly, style can no longer be treated as a matter of
language alone, but as a relation between language options and their
characteristic motivations and effects.
The non-evaluative stance linguistics had adopted to dissociate itself
from the prescriptive and proscriptive stance of traditional grammars
is revised to be evaluative, but by interactional criteria rather than
vague attitudes about "good" and "bad" or "correct" and "incorrect."
These criteria must be demonstrably relevant to the success of
communicative events. A textual usage counts as efficient if it is
easy to handle, effective if it helps toward achieving a goal, and
appropriate if it suits the occasion. "Good usage" and "correct
grammar" may not qualify by such criteria, for example, if they
encourage complicated syntax or flowery diction that only makes the
audience confused and irritable.
-------------------
exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol40/no2/p8.pdf
The Case for Stylistics
[detailed discussion of stylistics and its role in education...I was
not able to cut and paste any sample text]
-------------------
http://www-gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at/ed/project/corpus.html
Corpus Linguistics
On the Role of Context in Syntax and Semantics
There has been a certain tendency to neglect the role of context in
syntax and semantics in linguistic teaching and descriptive practice
over the past 30 years. Now, the time seems right for a re-assessment,
because of the growing awareness that syntax and the lexicon cannot be
adequately described without reference to each other, and because
British contextualism is getting increasing support from the results
of corpus analysis. The aim of this paper is to show that the role of
context is important. It is important because the semantics of a word
and its syntax are closely related to the choice of other words in its
context. In syntax the context selects the particular grammatical form
and in semantics the context selects the particular meaning of a
specific word. This means that for me there is a close relationship
between syntax and semantics, and syntax is not as autonomous as has
been assumed so far, especially by members of the generative school,
but is limited by lexical choice. But on the other hand, syntax also
constrains lexical choice.
-------------------
http://www.language-archives.org/REC/field.html
Linguistic Subject Vocabulary
[this page appears to be an excellent dictionary of linguistic terms.
e.g:]
Syntax
Definition 'The study of grammatical relations between words and other
units within a sentence' (Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics).
To be distinguished from morphology, which applies to units smaller
than the word.
Comments: The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress
subject heading of the same name.
Examples: A syntactic description of a language, using a particular
syntactic theory. A paper using language data to criticize a syntactic
theory.
-------------------
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/Linguistics_and_literary_theory.html
[see other links at this site as well for additional detail on your
topics]
Linguistics and literary theory
The revolution in modern linguistics consists in regarding language
synchronically rather than diachronically. Classical philology
undertakes to construct a historical evolution of a system of
language, focusing on the study of linguistic change over a period of
time (diachrony), whereas modern linguistics studies the system as a
functioning totality, a signifying structure (synchrony). According to
Ferdinand de Saussure, the pivotal distinction is between langue ("the
whole set of linguistic habits which allow an individual to understand
and to be understood") -- which Noam Chomsky calls competence ("what
the speaker of a language knows implicitly") -- and parole (the
individual speech act itself) -- which Chomsky calls performance (what
the speaker does).
-------------------
www.qaa.ac.uk/crntwork/benchmark/ phase2/linguistics.pdf
Linguistics
Linguistics is concerned with language in all its forms, spoken,
written and signed. Because language appears to be a uniquely human
attribute, the questions of what language is, how human beings come to
have it, and how they use it, have been pursued for over 2,000 years.
Inquiry into language has raised fundamental questions about human
cognition and behaviour ever since. Perhaps the key insight of
linguistics is just that language and linguistic behaviour are highly
structured, and the guiding principle of modern linguistics is that
the nature of these structures can be elucidated by systematic study
through a range of theoretical and empirical methodologies.
-------------------
www.arts.gla.ac.uk/French/honours/ stylisticspreboiled.rtf
STYLISTICS PREBOILED IN A BAG
This document contains explanations and definitions of for some of the
topics we cover on the Stylistics course which Single Honours students
take in their Junior Honours year. The topics are given in roughly the
order in which they are presented during the course.
-------------------
assets.cambridge.org/0521977371/ full_version/0521977371_pub.pdf
[This might be a very useful site. It is a list of books on
linguistics and language, but each book is described in enough detail
to offer a mini-lesson in some of the main topic areas of interest to
you...for instance...]
New Horizons in the Study ofLanguage and Mind
Noam Chomsky
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This book is an outstanding contribution to the philosophical study of
language and mind, by one of the most influential thinkers of our
time. In a series of penetrating essays, Chomsky cuts through the
confusion and prejudice which has infected the study of language and
mind, bringing new solutions to traditional philosophical puzzles and
fresh perspectives on issues of general interest, ranging from the
mind-body problem to the unification of science. Using a range of
imaginative and deceptively simple linguistic analyses, Chomsky
defends the view that knowledge of language is internal to the human
mind.
He argues that a proper study of language must deal with this mental
construct.
-------------------
http://www.gazzaro.it/g/files/Stilistics.html
STYLE IN FICTION: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose
DOMAIN OF STYLE. Style refers to the way in which language is used in
a context, by a person, for a purpose. Implies selection from a
system. Parole. Style of: writer, genre, period, school; = DOMAIN of
style, corpus of lang. in which the characteristics of a part. style
are to be found. Narrow the domain appropriately = TEXT.
1.2. STYLISTICS. Style relation between language and artistic
function; not WHAT? but HOW? and WHY? is certain effect obtained.
Spitzer's 'philological circle': linguistic and literary insight are
mutually supportive, circularly; cyclic motion from linguistic
description to literary appreciation back to linguistic description
etc... (13).
-------------------
crl.nmsu.edu/Research/Pubs/MCCS/ Postscript/mccs-96-295.ps
Morpho-semantics and Constructive Derivational Morphology
In this report, we present the automatic acquisition of a lexicon
involving the use of morphosemantic lexical rules on a core lexicon
which was acquired semi-automatically. The process of large-scale
dictionary making, as we defined it to build Spanlex, a Spanish
lexicon, for Mikrokosmos, a machine translation (MT) system based on
semantics, is at the centre of this report. Our aim in this one-year
project has been to acquire a lexicon of about 35,000 word meanings
within a computational semantics approach. This implied to automate
the task of acquisition as much as possible by developing and
implementing tools to help and guide acquisition. Using this approach,
we acquired one-fifth of Spanlex. The other four-fifths were acquired
entirely automatically. This paper focuses on the way we acquired this
large-scale high quality lexicon by using derivational morpho-semantic
rules. In particular, we deal with the discovery, representation, and
use of morphosemantic lexical rules (MSLRs) for the automatic
acquisition of a large-scale computational lexicon. The analysis is
based on a set of MSLRs implemented and tested on the basis of Spanish
businessand finance-related corpora. First, we provide the reader with
the methodology to build a computational lexicon in the Ecology of
Acquisition; second, we present the MSLRs which helped automate the
process of acquisition in From Submit to Submitted via Submission: On
Lexical Rules in Large-Scale Lexicon Acquisition...
-------------------
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~smw/icehl/abstracts.html
Historical Pragmatics and the Diachronic Study of Pragmatic Markers: a
Reassessment
Study of the development of discourse markers, or pragmatic markers,
would seem to fall centrally within the field of historical
pragmatics, particularly within the branch recognized as diachronic
pragmatics; this branch focuses on the linguistic inventory and its
communicative use across different historical stages of the same
language (Jacobs and Jucker 1995: 13). In a somewhat different
context, I have referred to this branch as diachronically oriented
discourse analysis, the branch which examines the evolution of
discourse marking over time, whether focusing on the development of
individual discourse markers or on changes in systems of discourse
marking (2001: 142). Despite the centrality of this concern, almost
all diachronic studies of pragmatic markers in English (dating back 20
years) have been carried out within the context of another subfield of
diachronic linguistics, namely, grammaticalization theory (e.g.
Traugott 1982; Brinton 1996, Traugott 1995). It is perhaps timely to
reassess whether grammaticalization is indeed the process that
underlies the development of pragmatic markers, especially in light of
the fact that, on a empirical level, pragmatic markers are often
deemed agrammatical, and on a theoretical level, grammaticalization as
a distinct process is currently being questioned (see, e.g., Campbell
2000). Some alternative processes suggested as underlying the
development of pragmatic markers include pragmaticalization (e.g.,
Erman and Kotsinas 1993), lexicalization (e.g., Wischer 2000), as
well as idiomaticization . However, none of these alternatives has
been pursued in any detail.
-------------------
http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET/ideolanguage1.html
Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking:
an Inquiry into the Language of Soviet Ideology
Language is the most honest witness of ideological contradictions,
which in Soviet Marxism were painstakingly concealed from the
consciousness of the population in order to mold more successfully its
collective subconscious. Ideological language became the decisive tool
of the Soviet regime's systematic construction of such "ideal"
phenomena as the "Soviet man" and "Soviet mentality." Yet, despite its
crucial influence on Soviet society, ideological language--or
"ideolanguage"--has not been properly investigated in the Soviet Union
as a single, comprehensive phenomenon. Until now, only individual
aspects of Soviet Marxist ideolanguage have come under consideration:
in the 1920s, ideolanguage was investigated as "the language of
revolution," in the 1930s, as "social dialect" or "class language,"
and in the 1960s and 1970s, as the publitsistika style. But the
essential overall patterns of ideological language have thus far been
neglected, and the analytical framework reduced to one historical
epoch, one social stratum, or one functional style...
-------------------
http://www.engl.niu.edu/style/archives/vol30n1.html
[see other citations on this page as well]
Martha Dana Rust. "Stop the World I Want to Get Off! Identity and
Circularity in Gertrude Stein's The World is Round."
A linguistic analysis of Gertrude Stein's 1939 children's story The
World is Round reveals that Stein's play with syntax, with semantics,
and with various strategies of narrative discourse work together to
demonstrate the inevitable instability of identity. The World is Round
chronicles the struggle of nine-year-old Rose to establish a stable
sense of self in a fluctuating, round world; the story's stylistics
mirror her personal drama. Stein's multiple lists of nouns, coupled
with the linear discourse of narrative itself, form a wedge against
the story's overwhelmingly circular syntax and create the fleeting
impression that stability is possible in a round world. Eventually,
though, circularity has the "last" word in the story. The lists of
nouns that seemed to interrupt the story's spinning syntax give way to
a play of repetition and rhyme that only enhances its circularity, and
even the stable identities represented by the linear narrative mode
are eventually proven subject to flux. Stein thus gives her playful
tale a subversive message: in a round world, we may never know exactly
"who" we are.
-------------------
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/compling/Publications/Abstracts/Theses/DiMarco-thabs.html
Computational stylistics for natural language translation.
PhD thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto,
April 1990. Published as technical report CSRI-239.
The problem of style is highly relevant to machine translation, but
current systems deal only superficially, if at all, with the
preservation of stylistic effects. At best, MT output is syntactically
correct but aims no higher than a strict uniformity in style. The
expressive effects contained in the source text, together with their
associated meaning, are lost. I have developed an approach to the
computational treatment of style that incorporates three selected
components --- lexical, syntactic, and semantic --- and focuses on
certain aspects of syntactic style...
-------------------
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/homes/mark/Signs.html
Signs, Symbols and Discourses: A New Direction
for Computer-aided Literature Studies.
The dominant theoretical models underlying much of this
research is based on stylistics and a modified kind of
reader response, both of which have as an assumption that
there are structures that are not immediately apparent to
the reader which are vital elements of the literary effect
of a text. The most frequent method typically involves
plotting the distribution of textual elements -- ranging
from simple words to any variety of features tagged by a
human or a machine -- across a text... |
