Linguistics

[pic]
[pic]

Linguistics
Chapter 1 Invitations to Linguistics
1.1 Why study language? 1. Language is very essential to human beings. 2. In language there are many things we should know. 3. For further understanding, we need to study language scientifically.
1.2 What is language? Language is a means of verbal communication. It is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.
1.3 Design features of language The features that define our human languages can be called design features which can distinguish human language from any animal system of communication. 1.3.1 Arbitrariness Arbitrariness refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meanings. 1.3.2 Duality Duality refers to the property of having two levels of structures, such that units of the primary level are composed of elements of the secondary level and each of the two levels has its own principles of organization. 1.3.3 Creativity Creativity means that language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness. Recursiveness refers to the rule which can be applied repeatedly without any definite limit. The recursive nature of language provides a theoretical basis for the possibility of creating endless sentences. 1.3.4 Displacement Displacement means that human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present (in time and space) at the moment of conversation.
1.4 Origin of language 1. The bow-wow theory In primitive times people imitated the sounds of the animal calls in the wild environment they lived and speech developed from that. 2. The pooh-pooh theory In the hard life of our primitive ancestors, they utter instinctive sounds of pains, anger and joy which gradually developed into language. 3. The “yo-he-ho” theory As primitive people worked together, they produced some rhythmic grunts which gradually developed into chants and then into language.
1.5 Functions of language As is proposed by Jacobson, language has six functions: 1. Referential: to convey message and information; 2. Poetic: to indulge in language for its own sake; 3. Emotive: to express attitudes, feelings and emotions; 4. Conative: to persuade and influence others through commands and entreaties; 5. Phatic: to establish communion with others; 6. Metalingual: to clear up intentions, words and meanings. Halliday (1994) proposes a theory of metafunctions of language. It means that language has three metafunctions: 1. Ideational function: to convey new information, to communicate a content that is unknown to the hearer; 2. Interpersonal function: embodying all use of language to express social and personal relationships; 3. Textual function: referring to the fact that language has mechanisms to make any stretch of spoken and written discourse into a coherent and unified text and make a living passage different from a random list of sentences. According to Hu Zhuanglin, language has at least seven functions: 1.5.1 Informative The informative function means language is the instrument of thought and people often use it to communicate new information. 1.5.2 Interpersonal function The interpersonal function means people can use language to establish and maintain their status in a society. 1.5.3 Performative The performative function of language is primarily to change the social status of persons, as in marriage ceremonies, the sentencing of criminals, the blessing of children, the naming of a ship at a launching ceremony, and the cursing of enemies. 1.5.4 Emotive function The emotive function is one of the most powerful uses of language because it is so crucial in changing the emotional status of an audience for or against someone or something. 1.5.5 Phatic communion The phatic communion means people always use some small, seemingly meaningless expressions such as Good morning, God bless you, Nice day, etc., to maintain a comfortable relationship between people without any factual content. 1.5.6 Recreational function The recreational function means people use language for the sheer joy of using it, such as a baby’s babbling or a chanter’s chanting. 1.5.7 Metalingual function The metalingual function means people can use language to talk about itself. E.g. I can use the word “book” to talk about a book, and I can also use the expression “the word book” to talk about the sign “b-o-o-k” itself.
1.6 What is linguistics? Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It studies not just one language of any one community, but the language of all human beings.
1.7 Main branches of linguistics 1.7.1 Phonetics Phonetics is the study of speech sounds, it includes three main areas: articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, and auditory phonetics. 1.7.2 Phonology Phonology studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables. 1.7.3 Morphology Morphology studies the minimal units of meaning – morphemes and word-formation processes. 1.7.4 Syntax Syntax refers to the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences in a language, or simply, the study of the formation of sentences. 1.7.5 Semantics Semantics examines how meaning is encoded in a language. 1.7.6 Pragmatics Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context.
1.8 Macrolinguistics Macrolinguistics is the study of language in all aspects, distinct from microlinguistics, which dealt solely with the formal aspect of language system. 1.8.1 Psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics investigates the interrelation of language and mind, in processing and producing utterances and in language acquisition for example. 1.8.2 Sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is a term which covers a variety of different interests in language and society, including the language and the social characteristics of its users. 1.8.3 Anthropological linguistics Anthropological linguistics studies the relationship between language and culture in a community. 1.8.4 Computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field which centers around the use of computers to process or produce human language.
1.9 Important distinctions in linguistics 1.9.1 Descriptive vs. prescriptive To say that linguistics is a descriptive science is to say that the linguist tries to discover and record the rules to which the members of a language-community actually conform and does not seek to impose upon them other rules, or norms, of correctness. Prescriptive linguistics aims to lay down rules for the correct use of language and settle the disputes over usage once and for all. For example, “Don’t say X.” is a prescriptive command; “People don’t say X.” is a descriptive statement. The distinction lies in prescribing how things ought to be and describing how things are. In the 18th century, all the main European languages were studied prescriptively. However, modern linguistics is mostly descriptive because the nature of linguistics as a science determines its preoccupation with description instead of prescription. 1.9.2 Synchronic vs. diachronic A synchronic study takes a fixed instant (usually at present) as its point of observation. Saussure’s diachronic description is the study of a language through the course of its history. E.g. a study of the features of the English used in Shakespeare’s time would be synchronic, and a study of the changes English has undergone since then would be a diachronic study. In modern linguistics, synchronic study seems to enjoy priority over diachronic study. The reason is that unless the various state of a language are successfully studied it would be difficult to describe the changes that have taken place in its historical development. 1.9.3 Langue & parole Saussure distinguished the linguistic competence of the speaker and the actual phenomena or data of linguistics as langue and parole. Langue is relative stable and systematic, parole is subject to personal and situational constraints; langue is not spoken by an individual, parole is always a naturally occurring event. What a linguist should do, according to Saussure, is to draw rules from a mass of confused facts, i.e. to discover the regularities governing all instances of parole and make them the subject of linguistics. 1.9.4 Competence and performance According to Chomsky, a language user’s underlying knowledge about the system of rules is called the linguistic competence, and the actual use of language in concrete situations is called performance. Competence enables a speaker to produce and understand and indefinite number of sentences and to recognize grammatical mistakes and ambiguities. A speaker’s competence is stable while his performance is often influenced by psychological and social factors. So a speaker’s performance does not always match his supposed competence. Chomsky believes that linguists ought to study competence, rather than performance. Chomsky’s competence-performance distinction is not exactly the same as, though similar to, Saussure’s langue-parole distinction. Langue is a social product and a set of conventions of a community, while competence is deemed as a property of mind of each individual. Saussure looks at language more from a sociological or sociolinguistic point of view than Chomsky since the latter deals with his issues psychologically or psycholinguistically. 1.9.5 Etic vs. emic Being etic means researchers’ making far too many, as well as behaviorally and inconsequential, differentiations, just as often the case with phonetics vs. phonemics analysis in linguistics proper. An emic set of speech acts and events must be one that is validated as meaningful via final resource to the native members of a speech community rather than via appeal to the investigator’s ingenuity or intuition alone. Following the suffix formations of (phon)etics vs (phon)emics, these terms were introduced into the social sciences by Kenneth Pike (1967) to denote the distinction between the material and functional study of language: phonetics studies the acoustically measurable and articulatorily definable immediate sound utterances, whereas phonemics analyzes the specific selection each language makes from that universal catalogue from a functional aspect.
Chapter 2 Speech Sounds
2.1 Speech production and perception Phonetics is the study of speech sounds. It includes three main areas: 1. Articulatory phonetics – the study of the production of speech sounds 2. Acoustic phonetics – the study of the physical properties of the sounds produced in speech 3. Auditory phonetics – the study of perception of speech sounds Most phoneticians are interested in articulatory phonetics.
2.2 Speech organs Speech organs are those parts of the human body involved in the production of speech. The speech organs can be considered as consisting of three parts: the initiator of the air stream, the producer of voice and the resonating cavities.
2.3 Segments, divergences, and phonetic transcription 2.3.1 Segments and divergences As there are more sounds in English than its letters, each letter must represent more than one sound. 2.3.2 Phonetic transcription International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA): the system of symbols for representing the pronunciation of words in any language according to the principles of the International Phonetic Association. The symbols consists of letters and diacritics. Some letters are taken from the Roman alphabet, some are special symbols.
2.4 Consonants 2.4.1 Consonants and vowels A consonant is produced by constricting or obstructing the vocal tract at some places to divert, impede, or completely shut off the flow of air in the oral cavity. A vowel is produced without obstruction so no turbulence or a total stopping of the air can be perceived. 2.4.2 Consonants The categories of consonant are established on the basis of several factors. The most important of these factors are: 1. the actual relationship between the articulators and thus the way in which the air passes through certain parts of the vocal tract (manner of articulation); 2. where in the vocal tract there is approximation, narrowing, or the obstruction of the air (place of articulation). 2.4.3 Manners of articulation 1. Stop/plosive: A speech sound which is produced by stopping the air stream from the lungs and then suddenly releasing it. In English, [π, β, τ, δ, κ, γ] are stops and [μ, ν, Ν] are nasal stops. 2. Fricative: A speech sound which is produced by allowing the air stream from the lungs to escape with friction. This is caused by bringing the two articulators, e.g. the upper teeth and the lower lip, close together but not closes enough to stop the airstreams completely. In English, [φ, ϖ, Ω, Τ, σ, ζ, Φ, ς, η] are fricatives. 3. (Median) approximant: An articulation in which one articulator is close to another, but without the vocal tract being narrowed to such an extent that a turbulent airstream is produced. In English this class of sounds includes [ω, ρ, ϕ]. 4. Lateral (approximant): A speech sound which is produced by partially blocking the airstream from the lungs, usually by the tongue, but letting it escape at one or both sides of the blockage. [λ] is the only lateral in English. Other consonantal articulations include trill, tap or flap, and affricate. 2.4.4 Places of articulation 1. Bilabial: A speech sound which is made with the two lips. 2. Labiodental: A speech sound which is made with the lower lip and the upper front teeth. 3. Dental: A speech sound which is made by the tongue tip or blade and the upper front teeth. 4. Alveolar: A speech sound which is made with the tongue tip or blade and the alveolar ridge. 5. Postalveolar: A speech sound which is made with the tongue tip and the back of the alveolar ridge. 6. Retroflex: A speech sound which is made with the tongue tip or blade curled back so that the underside of the tongue tip or blade forms a stricture with the back of the alveolar ridge or the hard palate. 7. Palatal: A speech sound which is made with the front of the tongue and the hard palate. 8. Velar: A speech sound which is made with the back of the tongue and the soft palate. 9. Uvular: A speech sound which is made with the back of the tongue and the uvula, the short projection of the soft tissue and muscle at the posterior end of the velum. 10. Pharyngeal: A speech sound which is made with the root of the tongue and the walls of the pharynx. 11. Glottal: A speech sound which is made with the two pieces of vocal folds pushed towards each other. 2.4.5 The consonants of English Received Pronunciation (RP): The type of British Standard English pronunciation which has been regarded as the prestige variety and which shows no regional variation. It has often been popularly referred to as “BBC English” or “Oxford English” because it is widely used in the private sector of the education system and spoken by most newsreaders of the BBC network.

A chart of English consonants
|Manner of |Place of articulation |
|articulation | |
| |Bilabial |Labio- |Dental |
| | |dental | |
| | | | |
| | | | |

2. Its advantages Through IC analysis, the internal structure of a sentence may be demonstrated clearly, any ambiguities, if any, will be revealed in that IC analysis emphasizes not only the linear structure of the sentence but also the hierarchical structure of the sentence. E.g. the sentence Leave the book on the shelf. is ambiguous. It has two meanings: (1) Put the book on the shelf; (2) Don’t touch the book on the shelf. These two meanings can be shown by the following tree diagrams. (Omitted. See the textbook p125~128.) 3. Its problems However, IC analysis has three disadvantages. First, at the beginning, some advocator insisted on binary divisions. Any construction, at any level, will be cut into two parts. But this is not possible. E.g. Old men and women is ambiguous in that it may mean old + men and women or old men + and women. It’s impossible to combine with only the preceding part or only the succeeding part. Second, constructions with discontinuous constituents will pose technical problems for tree diagrams in IC analysis. E.g. the phrasal verbs like make up, turn on, or give up will cause problems in that when the object is expressed by a pronoun, it will interrupt the phrasal verb as in make it up. The most serious problem is that there are structural ambiguities which cannot be revealed by IC analysis. E.g. the tree diagram and the labels can only do one analysis for the love of God. 4.2.3 Endocentric and exocentric constructions An endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent, or approaching equivalence, to one of its constituents, which serves as the center, or head, of the whole. It is also called headed construction. Typical endocentric constructions are noun phrases, verb phrases and adjective phrases. They may be further divided into two subtypes: subordinate and coordinate constructions. Those, in which there is only one head, with the head being dominant and the other constructions dependent, are subordinate constructions. In the coordinate construction, there are more than one head, e.g. boys and girls, in which the two content constituents, boys and girls, are of equal syntactic status, and no one is dependent on the other. The exocentric construction is defined negatively as a construction whose distribution is not functionally equivalent to any of its constituents. There is no noticeable center or head in it. Typical exocentric constructions are prepositional phrases, subordinate clauses, English basic sentences, and the verb plus object constructions.
4.3 The generative approach 4.3.1 Deep and surface structures In transformational generative grammar (a.k.a. T-G grammar), the deep structure may be defined as the abstract representation of the syntactic properties of a construction, i.e. the underlying level of structural relations between its different constituents, such as the relation between the underlying subject and its verb, or a verb and its object. The surfaces structure is the final stage in the syntactic derivation of a construction, which closely corresponds to the structural organization of a construction people actually produce and receive. The example for the surface structure is The newspaper was not delivered today. The deep structure of the above sentence would be something like: (negative) someone (past tense) deliver the newspaper today (passive). The items in brackets are not lexical items but grammatical concepts which shape the final form of the sentence. Rules which describe deep structure are in the first part of the grammar (base component). Rules which transform these structures into surface structures (transformational rules) are in the second part of the grammar (transformational component). 4.3.2 The standard theory and after What is the trace theory? [I think this is difficult. It is too abstract for me. – icywarmtea] After the movement of an element in a sentence there will be a trace left in the original position. This is the notion trace in T-G grammar. It’s suggested that if we have the notion trace, all the necessary information for semantic interpretation may come from the surface structure. E.g. The passive Dams are built by beavers. differs from the active Beavers built dams. in implying that all dams are built by beavers. If we add a trace element represented by the letter t after built in the passive as Dams are built t by beavers, then the deep structure information that the word dams was originally the object of built is also captured by the surface structure. Trace theory proves to be not only theoretically significant but also empirically valid. 4.3.3 Government, binding, etc. 1. Constituent command / C-command: α c-commands β if α does not dominate β and every γ that dominates α also dominates β, as shown in the diagram below:

| |γ | |
| | | |
| | | |
|α | |β |

2. Binding theory: Part of the government / binding theory. It examines connections between noun phrases in sentences and explores the way they relate and refer to each other. (1) An anaphor is bound in its governing category. (2) A pronominal is free in its governing category. (3) An r-expression is free. 3. Binding: The notion binding is borrowed from logic, which refers to the relation between a quantifier and a variable, that is a variable is bound by a quantifier. In the generative approach, binding refers to the relation between different referring word and the subject of a sentence containing it. 4. Anaphor: A process where a word or phrase refers back to another word or phrase which was used earlier in a text or conversation. In a narrow sense, it used to include only reflexives like myself and reciprocals like each other. 5. Pronominal: A pronominal refers to pronouns other than reflexives and reciprocals. 6. R-expression: A r-expression, as the abbreviation of a referential-expression, covers all the other r-expressions except anaphors and pronominals, e.g. John, Bill, the man. 7. The D-structure and the S-structure In Government / Binding theory, the D-structure is an abstract level of sentence representation where semantic roles such as an agent (the doer of an action) and patient (the entity affected by an action) are assigned to the sentence. Agent is sometimes also referred to as the logical subject and patient as the rheme of the sentence. E.g. (in simplified form) Vera shoot intruders Agent or logical subject patient or rheme The next level of sentence representation is the S-structure where syntactic / grammatical cases such as nominative / grammatical subject and accusative / grammatical object are assigned. E.g. (in simplified form) Vera (agent) shoot intruders (patient / rheme) Grammatical subject grammatical object The phonetic form (PF) component and the logical form (LF) component are then needed to turn the S-structure into a surface sentence. The PF component presents the S-structure as sound, and the LF component gives the syntactic meaning of the sentence.
4.4 The functional approach 4.4.1 Functional sentence perspective 1. Functional sentence perspective (FSP) The functional sentence perspective (FSP) is a type of linguistic analysis associated with the Prague School which describes how information is distributed in sentences. FSP deals particularly with the effect of the distribution of known information and new information in discourse. The known information (known as theme), refers to information that is not new to the reader or listener. The rheme refers to information that is new. FSP differs from the traditional grammatical analysis of sentences because the distribution between subject-predicate is not always the same as theme-rheme contrast. E.g. (1) John sat in the front seat Subject predicate Theme rheme (2) In the front seat sat John. Predicate subject Theme rheme John is the grammatical subject in both sentences, but theme in (1) and rheme in (2). 2. Communicative dynamism (CD) By CD Firbas means the extent to which the sentence element contributes to the development of the communication. 4.4.2 Systemic-functional grammar 1. The material process (a process of doing): the representation of outer experience. 2. The mental process (a process of sensing): the representation of inner experience. 3. The relational process (a process of being): the relation between one experience and another. 4. The behavioral process (a process of behavioring): physiological and psychological behavior. 5. The verbal process (a process of saying): any kinds of symbolic exchange of meaning. 6. The existential process (a process of happening): a representation of something in existence or happening/ These six processes form a circle as follows: (omitted. See textbook, p.155)

Chapter 5 Meaning
5.1 Meanings of “meaning” 1. Meaning: Meaning refers to what a language expresses about the world we live in or any possible or imaginary world. 2. Connotation: The additional meaning that a word or phrase has beyond its central meaning. 3. Denotation: That part of the meanings of a word or phrase that relates it to phenomena in the real world or in a fictional or possible word. 4. Different types of meaning (Recognized by Leech, 1974) (1) Conceptual meaning: Logical, cognitive, or denotative content. (2) Associative meaning a. Connotative meaning: What is communicated by virtue of what language refers to. b. Social meaning: What is communicated of the social circumstances of language use. c. Affective meaning: What is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker / writer. d. Reflected meaning: What is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression. e. Collocative meaning: What is communicated through association with words which tend to occur in the environment of another word. (3) Thematic meaning: What is communicated by the way in which the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis. 5. The difference between meaning, concept, connotation, and denotation Meaning refers to the association of language symbols with the real world. There are many types of meaning according to different approaches. Concept is the impression of objects in people’s mind. Connotation is the implied meaning, similar to implication. Denotation, like sense, is not directly related with objects, but makes the abstract assumption of the real world.
5.2 The referential theory 1. The referential theory: The theory of meaning which relates the meaning of a word to the thing it refers to, or stands for, is known as the referential theory. 2. The semantic triangle theory Ogden and Richards presented the classic “Semantic Triangle” as manifested in the following diagram, in which the “symbol” refers to the linguist elements (word, sentence, etc.), the “referent” refers to the object in the world of experience, and the “thought” or “reference” refers to concept or notion. Thus the symbol of a word signifies “things” by virtue of the “concept,” associated with the form of the word in the mind of the speaker of the language. The concept thus considered is the meaning of the word. The connection (represented with a dotted line) between symbol and referent is made possible only through “concept.” Concept / notion Thought / reference [pic] ---------------------- Symbol object Word stands for reality Signifier referent Code signified
5.3 Sense relations 5.3.1 Synonymy Synonymy is the technical name for the sameness relation. 5.3.2 Antonymy Antonymy is the name for oppositeness relation. There are three subtypes: gradable, complementary and converse antonymy. 1. Gradable antonymy Gradable antonymy is the commonest type of antonymy. They are mainly adjectives, e.g. good / bad, long / short, big / small, etc. 2. Complementary antonymy The members of a pair in complementary antonymy are complementary to each other. That is, they divide up the whole of a semantic filed completely. Not only the assertion of one means the denial of the other, the denial of one also means the assertion of the other, e.g. alive / dead, hit / miss, male / female, boy / girl, etc. 3. Converse antonymy Converse antonyms are also called relational opposites. This is a special type of antonymy in that the members of a pair do not constitute a positive-negative opposition. They show the reversal of a relationship between two entities, e.g. buy / sell, parent / child, above / below, etc. 5.3.3 Hyponymy Hyponymy involves us in the notion of meaning inclusion. It is a matter of class membership. That is to say, when x is a kind of y, the lower term x is the hyponym, and the upper term y is the superordinate. Two or more hyponyms of the same one superordinate are called co-hyponyms, e.g. under flower, there are peony, jasmine, tulip, violet, rose, etc., flower is the superordinate of peony, jasmine, etc., peony is the hyponym of flower, and peony, jasmine, tulip, violet, rose, etc. are co-hyponyms.
5.4 Componential analysis Componential analysis defines the meaning of a lexical element in terms of semantic components. That is, the meaning of a word is not an unanalyzable whole. It may be seen as a complex of different semantic features. There are semantic units smaller than the meaning of a word. E.g. Boy: [+human][-adult][+male] Girl: [+human][-adult][-male] Son: child (x, y) & male (x) Daughter: child (x, y) & -male (x) Take: cause (x, (have (x, y))) Give: cause (x, (-have (x, y)))
5.5 Sentence meaning 5.5.1 An integrated theory 1. Compositionality: A principle for sentence analysis, in which the meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of the constituent words and the way they are combine. 2. Selection restrictions: Restrictions on the choice of individual lexical units in construction with other units. E.g. the word breathe will typically select an animate subject (boy, man, woman, etc.) not an abstract or an inanimate (table, book, etc.). The boy was still breathing. The desk was breathing. 5.5.2 Logical semantics 1. Prepositional logic / prepositional calculus / sentential calculus: Prepositional logic is the study of the truth conditions for propositions: how the truth of a composite proposition is determined by the truth value of its constituent propositions and the connections between them. 2. Predicate logic / predicate calculus: Predicate logic studies the internal structure of simple propositions.

Chapter 6 Language Processing in Mind
6.1 Introduction 1. Language is a mirror of the mind in a deep and significant sense. 2. Language is a product of human intelligence, created a new in each individual by operation that lie far beyond the reach of will or consciousness. 3. Psycholinguistics “proper” can perhaps be glossed as the storage, comprehension, production and acquisition of language in any medium (spoken or written). 4. Psycholinguistics is concerned primarily with investigating the psychological reality of linguistic structures. 5. The differences between psycholinguistics and psychology of language. Psycholinguistics can be defined as the storage, comprehension, production and acquisition of language in any medium (spoken or written). It is concerned primarily with investigating the psychological reality of linguistic structures. On the other hand, the psychology of language deals with more general topics such as the extent to which language shapes thought, and from the psychology of communication, includes non-verbal communication such as gestures and facial expressions. 6. Cognitive psycholinguistics: Cognitive psycholinguistics is concerned above all with making inferences about the content of the human mind. 7. Experimental psycholinguistics: Experimental psycholinguistics is mainly concerned with empirical matters, such as speed of response to a particular word. 6.1.1 Evidence 1. Linguists tend to favor descriptions of spontaneous speech as their main source of evidence, whereas psychologists mostly prefer experimental studies. 2. The subjects of psycholinguistic investigation are normal adults and children on the one hand, and aphasics----people with speech disorders-----on the other. The primary assumption with regard to aphasic patient that a breakdown in some part of language could lead to an understanding of which components might be independent of others. 6.1.2 Current issues 1. Modular theory: Modular theory assumes that the mind is structured into separate modules or components, each governed by its own principles and operating independently of others. 2. Cohort theory: The cohort theory hypothesizes that auditory word recognition begins with the formation of a group of words at the perception of the initial sound and proceeds sound by sound with the cohort of words decreasing as more sounds are perceived. This theory can be expanded to deal with written materials as well. Several experiments have supported this view of word recognition. One obvious prediction of this model is that if the beginning sound or letter is missing, recognition will be much more difficult, perhaps even impossible. For example: Gray tie------ great eye; a name-----an aim; an ice man-----a nice man; I scream-----ice cream; See Mable----seem able; well fare----welfare; lookout------look out ; decade-----Deck Eight; Layman------laymen; persistent turn------persist and turn 3. Psychological reality: The reality of grammar, etc. as a purported account of structures represented in the mind of a speaker. Often opposed, in discussion of the merits of alternative grammars, to criteria of simplicity, elegance, and internal consistency. 4. The three major strands of psycholinguistic research: (1) Comprehension: How do people use their knowledge of language, and how do they understand what they hear or read? (2) Production: How do they produce messages that others can understand in turn? (3) Acquisition: How language is represented in the mind and how language is acquired?
6.2 Language comprehension 6.2.1 Word recognition 1. An initial step in understanding any message is the recognition of words. 2. One of the most important factors that effects word recognition is how frequently the word is used in a given context. 3. Frequency effect: describes the additional ease with which a word is accessed due to its more frequent usage in the language. 4. Recency effect: describe the additional ease with which a word is accessed due to its repeated occurrence in the discourse or context. 5. Another factor that is involved in word recognition is Context. 6. Semantic association network represents the relationships between various semantically related words. Word recognition is thought to be faster when other members of the association network are provided in the discourse. 6.2.2 Lexical ambiguity 1. lexical ambiguity: ambiguity explained by reference to lexical meanings: e.g. that of I saw a bat, where a bat might refer to an animal or, among others, stable tennis bat. 2. There are two main theories: (1) All the meanings associated with the word are accessed, and (2) only one meaning is accessed initially. e.g. a. After taking the right turn at the intersection…. “right” is ambiguous: correct vs. rightward b. After taking the left turn at the intersection… “left” is unambiguous 6.2.3 Syntactic processing 1. Once a word has been dentified , it is used to construct a syntactic structure. 2. As always, there are cinokucatuibs due to the ambiguity of individual words and to the different possible ways that words can be fit into phrases. Sometimes there is no way to determine which structure and meaning a sentence has. e.g. The cop saw the spy with the binoculars. “with the binoculars” is ambiguity (1) the cop employed binoculars in order to see the spy. (2) it specifies “the spy has binoculars.” 3. Some ambiguities are due to the ambiguous category of some of the words in the sentence.
e.g. the desert trains, trains (培训；列车) the desert trains man to be hardly. 沙漠使人坚韧。 The desert trains seldom run on time.沙漠列车从不准时。 4. One interesting phenomenon concerning certain ambiguous sentences is called the “garden path.” Garden path sentences are sentences that are initially interpreted with a different structure than they actually have. It typically takes quite a long time to figure out what the other structure is if the first choice turns out to be incorrect. Sometimes people never figure it out. They have been “led up the garden path”, fooled into thinking the sentence has a different structure than it has. Reduced relative clauses quite frequently cause this feeling of having been garden-pathed. e.g. “The horse raced past the barn fell.” means “the horse that was raced past the barn fell.” 5. the minimal attachment theory: It would be inefficient for people to assume all these infinite structures until they get some positive evidence for one of them. And if they arbitrarily choice one of the possibilities, they are most likely to choose the simplest. The idea is that people initially construct the simplest (or least complex) syntactic structure when interpreting the structure of sentences. This is called the minimal attachment theory. 6.2.4 Semantics and sentence memory 1. Assimilation theory: Assimilation theory refers to language (sound, word, syntax, etc.) change or process by which features of one element change to match those of another that precedes or follows. 2. Context effect: Context effect helps people recognize a word more readily when the preceding words provide an appropriate context for it. 3. Inference in context: Inference in context refers to any conclusion drawn from a set of propositions, from something someone has said, and so on. It includes things that, while not following logically, are implied in an ordinary sense. 6.2.5 Basic processes in reading 1. Perceptual span: The perceptual span is the range of letters from which useful information is extracted. The perceptual span varies depending on factors such as the size of the print, the complexity of the text, and so on. It is typically the case, however, that the perceptual span encompasses about three or four letters to the left of fixation and some fifteen letters to the right of fixation. 2. The immediacy assumption: The reader is supposed to carry out the processes required to understand each word and its relationship to previous words in the sentence as soon as that word is encountered.
6.3 Discourse / text interpretations 1. General context effects: General context effects occur when our general knowledge about the world influences language comprehension. 2. Specific context effects: Specific context effects involve information obtained from earlier parts of a discourse. 6.3.1 Schemata and inference drawing 1. Schemata refers to packets of stored knowledge. Its features are as follows: (1) Schemata can vary considerably in the information they contain, from the very simple to the very complex. (2) Schemata are frequently organized hierarchically; e.g. in addition to a rather general restaurant schema or script, we probably also have more specific restaurant schemata for different kinds of restaurant (e.g. fast-food places, up-market French restaurant, and so on.) (3) Schemata operate in a top-down or conceptually driven way to facilitate interpretation of environmental stimuli. 2. The inferences which people draw are stored in long-term memory along with information about the sentences actually presented. As a result, they will sometimes mistakenly believe on a subsequent memory test that they previously heard or saw an inference. 6.3.2 Story structure 1. Story structure refers to the way in which various parts of story are arranged or organized. 2. A macroproposition refers to the general proposition used to form an overall macrostructure of the story.
6.4 Language production 6.4.1 Speech production 1. Five different levels of representation involved in speaking a sentence: (1) The massage-level representation: this is an abstract, pre-linguistic representation of the idea or ideas that the speaker wants to communicate. (2) The functional-level representation: this is an outline of the proposed utterance having grammatical structure; in other words, the slots for nouns, adjectives, and so on are allocated, but there are no actual words to fill the slots. (3) The positional-level representation: this differs from the functional level representation in that it incorporates the words of the sentence that is to be produced. (4) The phonetic-level representation: this indicates some of the necessary information about the ways in which words in the intended sentences are pronounced. (5) The articulatory-level representation: this is the final representation, and contains a set of instructions for articulating the words in the sentence in the correct order. 2. Spoonerism / slip of the tongue: Spoonerism refers to the fact that the initial letter or letters of two words are transposed. 3. Anticipation error: An anticipation error occurs when a word is spoken earlier in the sentence than it should be. E.g. the sentence “The school is at school.” is wrong. The correct form should be “The boy is at school.” 4. Exchange error: An exchange error refers to the fact that two items within a sentence are swapped. E.g. the sentence “This is the happiest life of my day.” is wrong. The correct form should be “This is the happiest day of my life.” 5. Morpheme-exchange error: A morpheme-exchange error refers to the fact that the roots or basic forms of two words are switched leaving the grammatical structure unchanged. E.g. the sentence “He has already trunked two packs.” is wrong. The correct form should be “He has already packed two trunks.” 6.4.2 Written language 1. Writing process: According to Hayes and Flower (1986), writing consists of three interrelated processes: (1) The planning process, which involves producing ideas and arranging them into a writing plan appropriate to the writer’s goals. (2) The sentence generation process, which translates the writing plan into actual sentences that can be written down. (3) The revision process, which involves an evaluation of what has been written so far; this evaluation can encompass individual words at one extreme or the overall structure of the writing at the other extreme. 2. The strategic knowledge and the knowledge-telling theory The strategic knowledge is knowledge of the methods used in constructing a writing plan in order to make it coherent and well-organized. The knowledge-telling strategy means that children simply write down everything they can think of that is relevant to a topic without organizing the information in any way, because they often lack the strategic knowledge.

Chapter 7 Language, Culture and Society
7.1 Language and culture 1. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis What the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests is like this: our language helps mould our way of thinking and, consequently, different languages may probably express our unique ways of understanding the world. Following this argument, two important points could be captured in the theory. On the one hand, language may determine our thinking patterns; on the other hand, similarity between language is relative, the greater their structural differentiation is, the more diverse their conceptualization of the world will be. For this reason, this hypothesis has alternatively been referred to as linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. This hypothesis has two versions: a strong and a weak version. The strong version of the theory refers to the claim the original hypothesis suggests, emphasizing the decisive role of language as the shaper of our thinking patterns. The weak version, however, is a modified type of its original theory, suggesting that there is a correlation between language, culture, and thought, but the cross-cultural differences thus produced in our ways of thinking are relative, rather than categorical. 2. Context of situation (1) The relevant features of the participants: persons, personalities: a. The verbal action of the participants b. The non-verbal action of the participants (2) The relevant objects (3) The effects of the verbal action 3. Speech community: Speech community refers to a group of people who form a community, e.g. a village, a region, a nation, and who have at least one speech variety in common. 4. Gender difference: Gender difference is the difference in a speech between men and women. 5. Linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity: Linguistic determinism is one of the two points in S-W hypothesis, i.e. language determines thought. Linguistic relativity is the other point: there is no limit to the structural diversity of languages. 6. Ethnography of communication: The study of place of language in culture and society. Language is not studied in isolation but within a social or cultural setting. Ethnography of communication studies, e.g. how people in a particular group or community communicate with each other and how the social relationships between these people affect the type of language they use. 7. Cross-cultural communication: An exchange of ideas, information, etc. between persons from different cultural backgrounds. 8. What are the aims of teaching culture in language class? There are at least three objectives for us to teach culture in our class: (1) To get the students familiar with cultural differences; (2) To help the students transcend their own culture and see things as the members of the target culture will; (3) To emphasize the inseparability of understanding language and culture through various classroom practices. All this lead to a belief that a good understanding of structural things in some cases has much to do with a conscious understanding of the cultural background of the target language from language learners. In other words, a successful master of a given language has much to do with an understanding of that culture, because language and culture are correlated with each other at different levels of linguistic structure.
7.2 Language and society 1. How many social factors are believed to influence our language behaviors in a social context? The following social factors are believed to influence our language behaviors in a social context: (1) Class; (2) Gender; (3) Age; (4) Ethnic identity; (5) Education background; (6) Occupation; (7) Religious belief. 2. What are the sociolinguistic study of society and the sociolinguistic study of language> If we want to know more about a given society or community by examining the linguistic behavior of its members, we are doing a sociolinguistic study of society. That is to say, we are doing sociolinguistics at a macro level of investigation. At this level of discussion things that we are interested in include bilingualism or multilingualism, language attitude, language choice, language maintenance and shift, language planning and standardization, vernacular language education, etc. On the other hand, if we want to know more about some linguistic variations in language use by turning to potential socio-cultural factors for a description and explanation, we are doing a sociolinguistic study of language. Consequently, we are more interested in examining micro linguistic phenomena such as structural variants, address forms, gender differences, discourse analysis, Pidgin and Creole languages, and other more language-related issues. 3. What are vernacular, Pidgin and Creole? Vernacular refers to the native language of a country, not of a foreign origin or learned formation; or the indigenous language or dialect of a region. Pidgin is a mixed or blended language used by people who speak different languages for restricted purposes such as trading. Pidgins arose as a result of mixing two languages such as a Chinese dialect and English, an African dialect and French, etc. Creole is a pidgin that has become the primary language of a speech community, and is acquired by the children of that community as their native language. 4. What is discourse analysis? Discourse analysis refers to the study of how sentences in spoken and written language form larger meaningful units such as paragraphs, conversation, interviews, etc. Analysis of spoken discourse is sometimes called conversational analysis. Some linguistics use the term text linguistics for the study of written discourse. Recent analyses have been carried out on discourse in the classroom. Such analyses can be useful in finding out bout the effectiveness of teaching methods and the types of teacher-student relationships. 5. What are bilingualism, diglossia, and multilingualism? Bilingualism refers to the use of at least two languages either by an individual or by a group of speakers, such as the inhabitants of a particular region or a nation. Bilingualism is common in the province of Quebec in Canada where both English and French are spoken, and parts of Wales, where both Welsh and English are spoken. When two languages or language varieties exist side by side in a community and each one is used for different purposes, this is called diglossia. Usually, one is a more standard variety called the high variety, which is sued in government, the media, education, and for religious services. The other one is usually a non-prestige variety called the low variety, which is used in the family, with friends, when shopping, etc. Multilingualism refers to the use of three or more languages by an individual or by a group of speakers such as the inhabitants of a particular region or a nation. Multilingualism is common in Malaysia, Singapore, Israel, etc.
7.3 Summary (Omit.)
Chapter 8 Language in Use What is pragmatics? What’s the difference between pragmatics and semantics? Pragmatics is the study of the use of language in communication, particularly the relationships between sentences and the contexts and situations in which they are used. Pragmatics includes the study of (1) How the interpretation and use of utterances depends on knowledge of the real world; (2) How speakers use and understand speech acts; (3) How the structure of sentences is influenced by the relationship between the speaker and the hearer. Pragmatics is sometimes contrasted with semantics, which deals with meaning without reference to the users and communicative functions of sentences.
8.1 Speech act theory 8.1.1 Performatives and constatives 1. Performative: In speech act theory an utterance which performs an act, such as Watch out (= a warning). 2. Constative: An utterance which asserts something that is either true or force. E.g. Chicago is in the United States. 3. Felicity conditions of performatives: (1) There must be a relevant conventional procedure, and the relevant participants and circumstances must be appropriate. (2) The procedure must be executed correctly and completely. (3) Very often, the relevant people must have the requisite thoughts, feelings and intentions, and must follow it up with actions as specified. 8.1.2 A theory of the illocutionary act 1. What is a speech act? A speech act is an utterance as a functional unit in communication. In speech act theory, utterances have two kinds of meaning. Propositional meaning (locutionary meaning): This is the basic literal meaning of the utterance which is conveyed by the particular words and structures which the utterance contains. Illocutionary meaning (illocutionary force): This is the effect the utterance or written text has on the reader or listener. E.g. in I’m thirsty, the propositional meaning is what the utterance says about the speaker’s physical state. The illocutionary force is the effect the speaker wants the utterance to have on the listener. It may be intended as request for something to drink. A speech act is a sentence or utterance which has both propositional meaning and illocutionary force. A speech act which is performed indirectly is sometimes known as an indirect speech act, such as the speech act of the requesting above. Indirect speech acts are often felt to be more polite ways of performing certain kinds of speech act, such as requests and refusals. 2. Locutionary act: A distinction is made by Austin in the theory of speech acts between three different types of acts involved in or caused by the utterance of a sentence. A locutionary act is the saying of something which is meaningful and can be understood. 3. Illocutionary act: An illocutionary act is using a sentence to perform a function. 4. Perlocutionary act: A perlocutionary act is the results or effects that are produced by means of saying something.
8.2 The theory of conversational implicature 8.2.1 The cooperative principle 1. The cooperative principle (CP) Cooperative principle refers to the “co-operation” between speakers in using the maxims during the conversation. There are four conversational maxims: (1) The maxim of quantity: a. Make your contribution as informative as required. b. Don’t make your contribution more informative than is required. (2) The maxim of quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true. a. Don’t say what you believe to be false. b. Don’t say that for which you lack adequate evidence. (3) The maxim of relation: Say things that are relevant. (4) The maxim of manner: Be perspicuous. a. Avoid obscurity of expression. b. Avoid ambiguity. c. Be brief. d. Be orderly. 2. Conversational implicature: The use of conversational maxims to imply meaning during conversation is called conversational implicature. 8.2.2 Violation of the maxims [In fact this is taken from one of my essays. Only for reference. ^_^ - icywarmtea] 1. Conversational implicature υ In our daily life, speakers and listeners involved in conversation are generally cooperating with each other. In other words, when people are talking with each other, they must try to converse smoothly and successfully. In accepting speakers’ presuppositions, listeners have to assume that a speaker is not trying to mislead them. This sense of cooperation is simply one in which people having a conversation are not normally assumed to be trying to confuse, trick, or withhold relevant information from one another. However, in real communication, the intention of the speaker is often not the literal meaning of what he or she says. The real intention implied in the words is called conversational implicature. For example: [1] A: Can you tell me the time? B: Well, the milkman has come. υ In this little conversation, A is asking B about the time, but B is not answering directly. That indicates that B may also not no the accurate time, but through saying “the milkman has come”, he is in fact giving a rough time. The answer B gives is related to the literal meaning of the words, but is not merely that. That is often the case in communication. The theory of conversational implicature is for the purpose of explaining how listeners infer the speakers’ intention through the words. 2. The CP υ The study of conversational implicature starts from Grice (1967), the American philosopher. He thinks, in daily communication, people are observing a set of basic rules of cooperating with each other so as to communicate effectively through conversation. He calls this set of rules the cooperative principle (CP) elaborated in four sub-principles (maxims). That is the cooperative principle. υ We assume that people are normally going to provide an appropriate amount of information, i.e. they are telling the relevant truth clearly. The cooperative principle given by Grice is an idealized case of communication. υ However, there are more cases that speakers are not fully adhering to the principles. But the listener will assume that the speaker is observing the principles “in a deeper degree”. For example: [2] A: Where is Bill? B: There is a yellow car outside Sue’s house. υ In [2], the speaker B seems to be violating the maxims of quantity and relation, but we also assume that B is still observing the CP and think about the relationship between A’s question and the “yellow car” in B’s answer. If Bill has a yellow car, he may be in Sue’s house. υ If a speaker violate CP by the principle itself, there is no conversation at all, so there cannot be implicature. Implicature can only be caused by violating one or more maxims. 3. Violation of the CP (1) The people in conversation may violate one or more maxims secretly. In this way, he may mislead the listener. λ For this case, in the conversation [2] above, we assume that B is observing the CP and Bill has a yellow car. But if B is intentionally trying to mislead A to think that Bill is in Sue’s house, we will be misled without knowing. In this case, if one “lies” in conversation, there is no implicature in the conversation, only the misleading. (2) He may declare that he is not observing the maxims or the CP. In this kind of situation, the speaker directly declares he is not cooperating. He has made it clear that he does not want to go on with the conversation, so there is no implicature either. (3) He may fall into a dilemma. For example, for the purpose observing the first principle of the maxim of quantity (make your contribution as informative as is required), he may be violating the second principle of the maxim of quality (do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence). For this case, Grice gave an example: [3] A: Where does C live? B: Somewhere in the south of France. In [3], if B knows that A is going to visit C, his answer is violating the maxim of quantity, because he is not giving enough information about where C lives. But he has not declared that he will not observe the maxims. So we can know that B knows if he gives more information, he will violate the principle “do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence”. In other words, he has fallen into a “dilemma”. So we can infer that his implicature is that he does not know the exact address of C. In this case, there is conversational implicature. (4) He may “flout” one or more maxims. In other words, he may be obviously not observing them. The last situation is the typical case that can make conversational implicature. Once the participant in a conversation has made an implicature, he or she is making use one of the maxims. We can see that from the following examples: [4] A: Where are you going with the dog? B: To the V-E-T. In [4], the dog is known to be able to recognize the word “vet” and to hate being taken there. Therefore, A makes the word spelled out. Here he is “flouting” the maxim of manner, making the implicature that he does not want the dog to know the answer to the question just asked. [5] (In a formal get-together) A: Mrs. X is an old bag. B: The weather has been quite delightful this summer, hasn’t it? B is intentionally violating the maxim of relation in [5], implicating that what A has said is too rude and he should change a topic. 8.2.3 Characteristics of implicature 1. Calculability 2. Cancellability / defeasibility 3. Non-detachability 4. Non-conventionality
8.3 Post-Gricean developments 8.3.1 Relevance theory This theory was formally proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986. They argue that all Gricean maxims, including the CP itself, should be reduced to a single principle of relevance, which is defined as: Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance. 8.3.2 The Q- and R-principles These principles were developed by L. Horn in 1984. The Q-principle is intended to invoke the first maxim of Grice’s Quantity, and the R-principle the relation maxim, but the new principles are more extensive than the Gricean maxims. The definition of the Q-principle (hearer-based) is: (1) Make your contribution sufficient (cf. quantity); (2) Say as much as you can (given R). The definition of the R-principle (speaker-based) is: (1) Make your contribution necessary (cf. Relation, Quantity-2, Manner); (2) Say no more than you must (given Q) 8.3.3 The Q-, I- and M-principles This tripartite model was suggested by S. Levinson mainly in his 1987 paper Pragmatics and the Grammar of Anaphor: A Partial Pragmatic Reduction of Binding and Control Phenomena. The contents of these principles are: Q-principle: Speaker’s maxim: Do not provide a statement that is informationally weaker than your knowledge of the world allows, unless providing a stronger statement would contravene the I-principle. Recipient’s corollary: Take it that the speaker made the strongest statement consistent with what he knows, and therefore that: (1) If the speaker asserted A (W), and form a Horn scale, such that A (S) || (A (W)), then one can infer K ~ (A (S)), i.e. that the speaker knows that the stronger statement would be false. (2) If the speaker asserted A (W) and A (W) fails to entail an embedded sentence Q, which a stronger statement A (S) would entail, and {S, W} form a contrast set, then one can infer ~ K (Q), i.e. the speaker does not know whether Q obtains or not. I-principle Speaker’s maxim: the maxim of minimization Say as little as necessary, i.e. produce the minimal linguistic information sufficient to achieve your communicational ends. Recipient’s corollary: the enrichment rule Amplify the informational content of the speaker’s utterance, by finding the most specific interpretation, up to what you judge to be the speaker’s m-intended point. M-principle Speaker’s maxim: Do not use a prolix, obscure or marked expression without reason. Recipient’s corollary: If the speaker used a prolix or marked expression M, he did not mean the same as he would have, had he used the unmarked expression U – specifically he was trying to avoid the stereotypical associations and I-implicatures of U.

Chapter 9 Language and Literature
9.1 Theoretical background 1. Style: Style refers to variation in a person’s speech or writing or a particular person’s use of speech or writing at all times or to a way of speaking or writing at a particular period of time. 2. Stylistics: According to H. G. Widdowson, stylistics is the study of literary discourse from a linguistic orientation. He treated literature as discourse, thus adopting a linguistic approach. This brings literature and linguistics closer.
9.2 Some general features of the literary language 9.2.1 Foregrounding and grammatical form 1. Foregrounding: Foreground refers to the part of a scene nearest to the viewer, or figuratively the most noticeable position. Foregrounding means to put something or someone in the most essential part of the description or narration, other than in a background position. 2. In literary texts, the grammatical system of the language is often exploited, experimented with, or in Mukarovsky’s words, made to “deviate from other, more everyday, forms of language, and as a result creates interesting new patterns in form and in meaning. 9.2.2 Literal language and figurative language 1. Literal language: The first meaning for a word that a dictionary definition gives is usually called literal meaning. 2. Figurative language: A. k. a. trope, which refers to language used in a figurative way for a rhetorical purpose. We can use some figures of speech such as simile, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, etc. 9.2.3 The analysis of literary language (Omit. Refer to p288-290 of the textbook.)
9.3 The language in poetry
[Nothing special here in this note. Please refer to my note named “Selected Readings of American Literature, p9-10. – icywarmtea] 9.3.1 Sound patterning 9.3.2 Different forms of sound patterning 1. Rhyme (end rhyme): The last word of a line has the same final sounds as the last word of another line, sometimes immediately above or below, sometimes one or more lines away (cVC). 2. Alliteration: The initial consonants are identical in alliteration (Cvc). 3. Assonance: Assonance describes syllables with a common vowel (cVc). 4. Consonance: Syllables ending with the same consonants are described as having consonance (cvC). 5. Reverse rhyme: Reverse rhyme describes syllables sharing the vowel and initial consonant (CVc). 6. Pararhyme: Where two syllables have the same initial and final consonants, but different vowels, they pararhyme (CvC). 7. Repetition: A complete match of the syllable (CVC). 9.3.3 Stress and metrical patterning 1. Iamb: An iambic foot contains two syllables, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. 2. Trochee: A trochaic foot contains two syllables as well, but in this case, the stressed syllable comes first, followed by an unstressed syllable. 3. Anapest: An anapestic foot consists of three syllables; two unstressed syllables are followed by a stressed one. 4. Dactyl: A dactylic foot is similar to anapest, except reversed – a stressed syllable is followed by two unstressed ones. 5. Spondee: A spondaic foot consists of two stressed syllables; lines of poetry rarely consist only of spondees. 6. Pyrrhic: A pyrrhic foot consists of two unstressed syllables. 7. Metrical patterning (1) Dimeter (2) Trimeter (3) Tetrameter (4) Pentameter (5) Hexameter (6) Heptameter (7) Octameter 9.3.4 Conventional forms of meter and sound 1. Couplets: Couplets are two lines of verse, usually connected by a rhyme. 2. Quatrains: Stanzas of four lines, known as quatrains, are very common in English poetry. 3. Blank verse: Blank verse consists of lines in iambic pentameter which do not rhyme. 9.3.5 The poetic functions of sound and meter 1. For aesthetic pleasure 2. To conform to a convention / style / form 3. To express or innovate with a form 4. To demonstrate technical skill, and for intellectual pleasure 5. For emphasis or contrast 6. Onomatopoeia 9.3.6 How to analyze poetry? 1. Read a poem more than once. 2. Keep a dictionary and use it. Other reference books will also be invaluable. A good book on mythology and a Bible. 3. Read so as to hear the sounds of the words in your mind. Poetry is written to be heard: its meanings are conveyed through sound as well as through print. One should read a poem as slowly as he can. Lip reading is a good habit. 4. Always pay careful attention to what the poem is saying. One should make an effort to follow the thought continuously and to grasp the full implications and suggestions. 5. As aids to the understanding of a poem, we may ask some questions about. (1) Who is the speaker and what kind of person is he? (2) To whom is he speaking? What kind of person is he? (3) What is the occasion? (4) What is the setting in time (time of day, season, century)? (5) What is the setting in place (in doors or out, city or country, nation)? (6) What is the central purpose of the poem? (7) State the central idea or theme of the poem in a sentence. (8) Discuss the tone of the poem. How is it achieved? (9) Outline the poem so as to show its structure and development; or summarize the events of the poems. (10) Paraphrase the poem. (11) Discuss the diction of the poem. Point out words that are particularly well chosen and explain why. (12) Discuss the imagery of the poem. What kinds of imagery are used? (13) Point out examples of metaphor, simile, personification, and metonymy, etc., and explain their appropriateness. (14) Point out and explain any symbols. (15) Point out and explain examples of paradox, overstatement, understatement and irony. What is their function? (16) Point and explain any allusions. What is their function? (17) Point out significant examples of sound repetition and explain their function. (18) What is the meter of the poem? Copy the poem and mark its scansion. (19) Discuss the adaptation of sound to sense. (20) Describe the form or pattern of the poem. (21) Criticize and evaluate the poem.
9.4 The language in fiction 9.4.1 Fictional prose and point of view 1. First-person narrator (I-narrator): The person who tells the story may also be a character in the fictional world of the story, relating the story after the event. In this case, the critics call the narrator a first-person narrator or an I-narrator because when the narrator refers to himself or herself in the story the first person pronoun “I” is used. 2. Third-person narrator: If the narrator is not a character in the fictional world, he or she is usually called a third-person narrator, because reference to all the characters in the fictional world of the story will involve the use of the third-person pronouns, he, she, it or they. 3. Deixis: A term for a word or phrase which directly relates an utterance to a time, place, or a person. 9.4.2 Speech and thought presentation 1. Speech presentation (1) Direct speech (DS): A kind of speech presentation in which the character said in its fullest form. (2) Indirect speech (IS): A kind of speech presentation in which the speaker’s words are not reported as they were actually said. (3) Free indirect speech (FIS): A further category which is an amalgam of direct and indirect speech features. (4) Narrator’s representation of speech acts (NRSA): A minimalist kind of presentation in which a part of passage can be seen as a summary of a longer piece of discourse, and therefore even more back-grounded than indirect representation would be. (5) Narrator’s representation of speech (NRS): A possibility of speech presentation which is more minimalist than narrator’s representation of speech acts, namely a sentence which merely tells us the speech occurred, and which does not even specify the speech acts involved. 2. Thought presentation (1) Direct thought (DT): Direct thought tends to be used for presenting conscious, deliberative thought. E.g. “He will be late,” she thought. (2) Indirect thought (IT): A kind of categories used by novelists to represent the thoughts of their characters are exactly as that used to present indirect speech. E.g. She thought that he would be late. (3) Free indirect thought (FIS): A kind of mixture of direct and indirect features. E.g. He was bound to be late! (4) Narrator’s representation of thought acts (NRTA): A kind of categories used by novelists to represent the thoughts of their characters is exactly as that used to present speech acts. E.g. She considered his unpunctuality. (5) Narrator’s representation of speech (NRS): A possibility of speech presentation which is more minimalist than narrator’s representation of speech acts, namely a sentence which merely tells us the speech occurred, and which does not even specify the speech acts involved. (6) Stream of consciousness writing: The term stream of consciousness was originally coined by the philosopher William James in his Principle of Psychology (1890) to describe the free association of ideas and impressions in the mind. It was later applied to the writing of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and others experimenting early in the 20th century with the novelistic portrayal of the free flow of thought. 9.4.3 Prose style 1. Authorial style: When people talk of style, they usually mean authorial style. This refers to the “world view” kind of authorial style. In other words a way of writing which recognizably belongs to a particular writer, say Jane Austin or Earnest Hemingway. 2. Text style: Text style looks closely at how linguistic choices help to construct textual meaning. Just as authors can be said to have style, so can text. 9.4.4 How to analyze the language of fiction? 1. Patterns of lexis (vocabulary); 2. Patterns of grammatical organization; 3. Patterns of textual organization (how the units of textual organization, from sentences to paragraphs and beyond, are arranged); 4. Fore-grounded features, including figures of speech (rhetorical devices); 5. Whether any patterns of style variation can be discerned; 6. Discoursal patterning of various kinds, like turn-taking or patterns of inferencing; 7. Patterns of viewpoint manipulation, including speech and thought presentation.
9.5 The language in drama (Omit)
Chapter 11 Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching
11.1 The relation of linguistics to foreign language teaching 1. Both linguistics and foreign language teaching take language as their subject. Linguistics is the scientific study of language, so it is clearly related with language teaching. However, linguistics and language teaching differ in their attitudes, goals and methods towards language. 2. Linguistics regards language as a system of forms, while the field of foreign language teaching considers it as a set of skills. Linguistics research is concerned with the establishment of theories which explain the phenomena of language use, whereas foreign language teaching aims at the learners’ mastery of language. 3. Applied linguistics serves to reconcile and combine linguistics and foreign language teaching. (1) Applied linguistics extends theoretical linguistics in the direction of language learning and teaching, so that the teacher is enabled to make better decisions on the goal and content of the teaching. (2) Applied linguistics states the insights and implications that linguistic theories have on the language teaching methodology.
11.2 Various linguistic views and their significance in language learning and teaching 11.2.1 Traditional grammar Traditional grammar, as a pre-20th century language description and a pre-linguistic product of research, was based upon earlier grammars of Latin or Greek, and laid emphasis on correctness, literary excellence, the use of Latin models, and the priority of written language. Prescription was its key tone. 11.2.2 Structuralist linguistics Modern linguistics, in spite of theoretical diversities, is primarily descriptive. Structuralist linguistics describes linguistics features in terms of structures and systems. It describes the current spoken language, which people use in daily communication. Its focus, however, is still on grammatical structures. 11.2.3 Transformational-generative (TG) linguistics TG grammar sees language as a system of innate rules. A native speaker possesses a linguistic competence, or a language acquisition device. Although Chomsky does not intend to make his model a representation of performance, i.e., the language actually used in communication, applied linguistics find TG grammar useful in certain aspects. But because it is a formal and abstract grammar, it remains limited in language teaching. 11.2.4 Functional linguistics Taking a semantic-sociolinguistic approach, M. A. K. Halliday’s systemic-functional linguistics sees language as an instrument used to perform various functions in social interaction. It concerns not only with the formal system of language but also the functions of language in society, and its scope is wider than that of former theories. 11.2.5 The theory of communicative competence The concept competence originally comes from Chomsky. It refers to the grammatical knowledge of the ideal language user and has nothing to do with the actual use of language in concrete situations. This concept of linguistic competence has been criticized for being too narrow. To expand the concept of competence, D. H. Hymes (1971) proposes communicative competence, which has four components: 1. Possibility – the ability to produce grammatical sentences; 2. Feasibility – the ability to produce sentences which can be decoded by the human brain; 3. Appropriateness – the ability to use correct forms of language in a specific socio-cultural context; 4. Performance – the fact that the utterance is completed. What is the role of grammar in language teaching? Currently, the general consensus is that although language learning should be meaning-focused and communication-oriented, it is still necessary and beneficial for language learners to pay a certain degree of attention to the study of grammar. Research in second language acquisition has indicated that grammar has its due value in the process of language learning. The study of grammar facilitates the internalization of the structures of the target language. The problems unsolved are what grammar or what aspects of grammar learners should learn and how they can learn them.
11.3 Syllabus design 11.3.1 What is syllabus? Syllabus is the planning of a course of instruction. It is a description of the course content, teaching procedures and learning experiences. 11.3.2 Major factors in syllabus design 1. Selecting participants 2. Process 3. Evaluation 11.3.3 Types of syllabus 1. Structural syllabus: Influenced by structuralist linguistics, the structural syllabus is a grammar-oriented syllabus based on a selection of language items and structures. The vocabulary and grammatical rules included in the teaching materials are carefully ordered according to factors such as frequency, complexity and usefulness. The major drawback of such a syllabus is that it concentrates only on the grammatical forms and the meaning of individual words, whereas the meaning of the whole sentence is thought to be self-evident, whatever its context may be. As a result, students trained by a structural syllabus often prove to be communicatively incompetent. 2. Situational syllabus: The situational syllabus does not have a strong linguistic basis, yet it can be assumed that the situationalists accept the view that language is used for communication. The aim of this syllabus is specifying the situations in which the target language is used. The selection and organization of language items are based on situations. Because it relies on structuralist grammar, it is essentially grammatical. The situations described in a textbook cannot be truly “authentic.” Moreover, the arrangement of the situations is not systematic. 3. Notional-functional syllabus: Notional-functional syllabus is directly influenced by Halliday’s functional grammar and Hymes’s theory of communicative competence. Notion refers to the meaning one wants to convey, while function refers to what one can do with the language. Its problems are: first of all it is impossible to make an exhaustive list of notions and functions, and it is hard to order them scientifically. Secondly, there is on one-to-one relationship between notions / functions and language forms. Thirdly, the notional-functional syllabus treats language as isolated units, only they are notional rather than structural isolates. Such a syllabus cannot achieve the communicative competence which it aims at. 4. Communicative syllabus: The communicative syllabus aims at the learner’s communicative competence. Based on a notional-functional syllabus, it teaches the language needed to express and understand different kinds of functions, and emphasizes the process of communication. 5. Fully communicative syllabus: The communicative syllabus stresses that linguistic competence is only a part of communicative competence. If we focus on communicative skills, most areas of linguistic competence will be developed naturally. Therefore, what we should teach is communication through language rather than language for communication. 6. Communicative-grammatical approach (only cases, so this part is omitted.)
11.4 Language learning 11.4.1 Grammar and language learning 1. Focus on form: Although language learning should generally be meaning-focused and communication-oriented, it is still necessary and beneficial to focus on form occasionally. 2. Universal grammar: A theory which claims to account for the grammatical competence of every adult no matter what language he or she speaks. It claims that every speaker knows a set of principles which apply to all languages and also a set of parameters that can vary from one language to another, but only within certain limits. 11.4.2 Input and language learning The Input hypothesis is a theory proposed by Krashen (1985) to deal with the relationship between language input and learners’ acquiring language. According to this hypothesis, learners acquire a language as a result of comprehending input addressed to them. Krashen brought forward the concept of “i + 1” principle, i.e. the language that learners are exposed to should be just far enough beyond their current competence that they can understand most of it but still be challenged to make progress. Input should neither be so far beyond their reach that they are overwhelmed, nor so close to their current stage that they are not challenged at all. 11.4.3 Interlanguage in language learning Interlanguage is a language system between the target language and the learner’s native language. It formed when the learner attempts to learn a new language, and it has features of both the first language and the second language but is neither.
11.5 Error analysis 11.5.1 Errors, mistakes, and error analysis [In this part, there is difference between my understandings (according to the reference book I used) of errors and mistakes. According to Introducing Linguistics by Professor Yang Zhong, errors and mistakes mean differently from what they mean in Professor Hu’s book. Refer to section 9.3 “Analyzing learners’ language” on pages 122~123 of Yang’s book. – icywarmtea] 1. Error: Error is the grammatically incorrect form. 2. Mistake: Mistake appears when the language is correct grammatically but improper in a communicational context. 3. Lapse: Lapse refers to slips of the tongue or pen made by either foreign language learners or native speakers. 4. Error analysis: Error analysis is the study and analysis of error and is confined to the language learner. 11.5.2 Attitudes to errors 1. The structuralist view 2. The post-structuralist view 11.5.3 Procedure of error analysis 1. Recognition 2. Description 3. Explanation 11.5.4 Contrastive analysis and non-contrastive analysis 1. Contrastive analysis (CA): CA is the comparison of the linguistic systems of two languages. E.g. the comparison of the sound or the grammatical system. 2. Transfer: Transfer refers to the carrying over of learned behavior from one situation to another. (1) Positive transfer (facilitation): Positive transfer is learning in one situation which helps or facilitates learning in another later situation. E.g. when the structures of the two languages are similar, we can get positive transfer. (2) Negative transfer (interference): Negative transfer is learning in one situation which interferes with learning in another later situation. 3. Overgeneralization: A process common in both first and second language learning, in which a learner extends the use of a grammatical rule of linguistic item beyond its accepted uses, generally by making words or structures follow a more regular pattern. E.g. in the sentence “* He speaked English.”, “speaked” is wrong (overgeneralized). 4. Hypercorrection: Overgeneralization of a rule in language use. E.g. some learners constantly miss the articles in English, and after they are corrected, they tend to overuse them.
11.6 Testing 11.6.1 Two different approaches to testing 1. Psycholinguistic-structuralist approach 2. Psycholinguistic-sociolinguistic approach 11.6.2 Types of test 1. Aptitude test: Aptitude tests attempt to measure the learner’s aptitude or natural abilities to learn languages. This type of test usually consists of some different tests which measure respectively the ability to identify and remember sound patterns in a new language, etc. In order to assess these abilities, artificial languages are often employed. 2. Proficiency test: The purpose of proficiency tests is to discover what the testee already knows about the target language. Proficiency tests are not concerned with any particular course but the learner’s general level of language mastery. An example of proficiency tests is the American TOEFL. 3. Achievement test: Achievement tests assess how much a learner has mastered the contents of a particular course. Clearly, the items in such tests should be based on what has been taught. The midterm and final term exams held in schools and colleges are often typical tests of this kind. 4. Diagnostic test: Diagnostic tests are designed to discover mainly what the testee does not know about the language, e.g. a diagnostic English pronunciation test may be used to show which sounds a student is and is not able to pronounce. A test of such kind can help the teacher to find out what is wrong with the previous learning and what should be included in the future work. 11.6.3 Requirements of a good test Validity and reliability are the two basic requirements for a good test, as was proposed by R. Lado (1961). 1. Validity is the degree to which a test measure what is meant to. If the candidates know some items before the exam the validity will be reduced. There are four kinds of validity. (1) Content validity refers to the extent to which the test adequately covers the syllabus area to be tested. (2) Construct validity requires the test to prove the theoretical construct whereupon it is based. (3) Empirical validity demands the results of the test to correlate with some external criteria. (4) Face validity is based on the subjective judgment of an observer, unlike the other forms of validity. If the test appears to be measuring what it intends to measure, the test is considered to have face validity. 2. Reliability can be defined as consistency. If a test produces the same results when given to the same candidates twice in succession or graded by different people, it is regarded as having a high degree of reliability. There are two kinds of reliability. (1) Stability reliability is estimated by testing and retesting the same candidates and ten correlating their scores. (2) Equivalence reliability means that a measuring device is equivalent to another if they produce the same results when used on the same objects and subjects. 11.6.4 Test contents and test form 1. Structural tests 2. Communicative tests 11.6.5 Marking and interpretation of scores
11.7 Summary (Omit.)

Chapter 12 Theories and Schools of Modern Linguistics
12.0 Introduction – Ferdinand de Saussure The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857~1913) is “father of modern linguistics” and “a master of a discipline which he made modern.” His important ideas about linguistics were collected in Course in General Linguistics (1916), which was published by his students C. Bally and A. Sechehaye. Saussure argues that the linguistic unit is a sign. The linguistic sign unites, not a sign and a name, but a concept and a sound image. He called the concept signified and the sound image signifier. The linguistics sign has two characteristics. First, the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Secondly, the linguistic sign is characterized by the linear nature of the signifier. Saussure makes a distinction between langue and parole. He suggests that the task of a linguist is to study langue, since it is a coherent and analyzable object. It is this distinction that leads to the distinction of phonetics and phonology. Distinction between diachronic and synchronic studies is another great contribution Saussure makes to general linguistics.
[Warning (especially to kybao.com): This note is first posted by icywarmtea on bbs.kaoyan.com. Any unauthorized post to other websites such as bbs.kybao.com is strictly not allowed. – icywarmtea]
[Advice: The so-called website bbs.kybao.com is far from being good. There are some materials stolen from this website (bbs.kaoyan.com) there. Except for those, we can hardly find any useful materials there. Please don’t go to that website, which can only waste your time. – icywarmtea]
12.1 The Prague School 12.1.1 Introduction The Prague School has three points of special importance: (1) It stresses that the synchronic study of language is fully justified as it can draw on complete and controllable material for investigation. (2) It emphasizes the systemic character of language, arguing that no element of any language can be satisfactory analyzed or evaluated if viewed in isolation. In other words, elements are held to be in functional contrast or opposition. (3) It looks on language as a tool performing a number of essential functions or tasks for the community using it. 12.1.2 Phonology and phonological oppositions The Prague School is best known and remembered for its contribution to phonology and the distinction between phonetics and phonology, and its most important contribution to linguistics is that it sees language in terms of function. Following Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole, Trubetzkoy argued that phonetics belonged to parole whereas phonology belonged to langue. On this basis he developed the notion of “phoneme” as an abstract unit of the sound system as distinct from the sounds actually produced. In classifying distinction features, he proposed three criteria” (1) their relation to the whole contrastive system (2) relations between the opposing elements (3) their power of discrimination These oppositions can be summarized as: (1) bilateral opposition (2) multilateral opposition (3) proportional opposition (4) isolated opposition (5) privative opposition (6) gradual opposition (7) equipollent opposition (8) neutralisable opposition (9) constant opposition 12.1.3 Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) 1. Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP): It is a theory of linguistic analysis which refers to an analysis of utterances (or texts) in terms of the information they contain. The principle is that the role of each utterance part is evaluated for its semantic contribution to the whole. 2. Theme: The point of departure of a sentence is equally present to the speaker and to the hearer – it is their rallying point, the ground on which they meet. This is called the theme. 3. Rheme: The goal of discourse of a sentence presents the very information that is to be imparted to the hearer. This is called the rheme.
12.2 The London School The London School has a tradition of laying stress on the functions of language and attaching great importance to contexts of situation and the system aspect of language. It is these features that have made this school of thought known as systemic linguistics and functional linguistics. It is an important and admirable part of the London School tradition to believe that different types of linguistic description may be appropriate for different purposes. 12.2.1 Malinowski’s theories 1. The meaning of an utterance does not come from the ideas of the words comprising it but from its relation to the situational context in which the utterance occurs. His assertion is based on two kinds of observations. (1) In primitive communities there is no writing, and language has only one type of use. (2) In all societies, children learn their languages in this way. 2. The meaning of spoken utterances could always be determined by the context of situation. Malinowski distinguished three types of context of situation. (1) situations in which speech interrelates with bodily activity (2) narrative situations (3) situations in which speech is used to fill a speech vacuum – phatic communion 12.2.2 Firth’s theories 1. The meaning of any sentence consists of the following five parts: (1) the relationship of each phoneme to its phonetic context (2) the relationship of each lexical item to the others in the sentence (3) the morphological relations of each word (4) the sentence type of which the given sentence is an example (5) the relationship of the sentence to its context of situation 2. In analyzing typical context of situation, one has to carry out the analysis on the following four levels. (1) The internal relations of the text a. the syntagmatic relations between the elements in the structure b. the paradigmatic relations between units in the system and find their values (2) The internal relations of the context of situation a. the relations between text and non-linguistic elements, and their general effects b. the analytical relations between “bits” and “pieces” of the text (words, parts of words, phrases) and the special elements within the situation (items, objects, persons, personalities, events). 12.2.3 Halliday and Systemic-Functional Grammar [Taken from http://language.la.psu.edu/tifle2002/halliday.html - icywarmtea] 1. M.A.K. Halliday has sought to create an approach to linguistics that treats language as foundational for the building of human experience. His insights and publications form an approach called systemic-functional linguistics. A student of JR Firth (a British linguists who himself was influenced by Malinowsky), Halliday's work stresses that language cannot be dissassociated from meaning. Systemic-functional linguistics (SFL), as it's name suggests, considers function and semantics as the basis of human language and communicative activity. Unlike structural approaches that privilege syntax, SFL-oriented linguists begin an analysis with social context and then look at how language acts upon, and is constrained and influenced by, this social context. A key concept in Halliday's approach is the "context of situation" which obtains "through a systematic relationship between the social environment on the one hand, and the functional organization of language on the other" (Halliday, 1985:11). 2. Description and terms for analyzing spoken and written language (1) Tokens: the number of individual items/words (2) Types: the different kinds of words used, e.g., lexical (content) items and grammatical (function) items (3) Lexical Density: The ratio of lexical and grammatical items in an utterance or text; a "measure of information density within a text" (Yates, 1996:37). (4) Take-home message: Written language is lexically dense, while oral language is syntactically more complex. 3. Systemic semantics (1) Textual function: type/token ratios, vocabulary use, register (2) Interpersonal function: speech-function, exchange structure, involvement and detachment, personal reference, use of pronouns, "interactive items" showing the position of the speaker (just, whatever, basically, slightly), discourse markers (words that moderate/monitor the interaction, e.g., well, might, good, so, anyway) A spoken corpus is primarily an "I", "You" text; the world as seen by you and me. Illustrates INVOLVEMENT A written corpus often takes 3rd person and objective reporting styles (it, he, she, and passive voice).Illustrates DETACHMENT (3) Ideational function: propositional content; modality through (in English) modal auxiliaries, e.g., (in Yates, 1996:42) modals of obligation (must, need, should) modals of ability and possibility (can, could) modals of epistemic possibility (may, might) modals of volition and prediction (will, shall) hypothetical modals: (would, should) 4. The analysis of context Field: what is happening, the nature of the social interaction taking place: what is it that the participants are engaged in, in which language figures as an essential component? Tenor: who is taking part; the social roles and relationships of participant, the status and roles of the participants Mode: the symbolic organization of the text, rhetorical modes (persuasive, expository, didactic, etc); the channel of communication, such as spoken/written, monologic / dialogic, + / - visual contact, computer-mediated communication/telephone/F2F, etc.
12.3 American Structuralism American Structuralism is a branch of synchronic linguistics that developed in a very different style from that of Europe. While linguistics in Europe started more than two thousand years ago, linguistics in America started at the end of the 19th century. While traditional grammar plays a dominating role in Europe, it has little influence in America. While many European languages have their own historical traditions and cultures, English is the dominating language in America, where there is no such a tradition as in Europe. In addition, the pioneer scholars in America were faced with the urgent task of recording the rapidly perishing Native American Indian languages because there was no written record of them. However, these languages were characterized by features of vast diversity and differences which are rarely found in other parts of the world. To record and describe these exotic languages, it is probably better not to have any presuppositions about the nature of language in general. This explains why there was not much development in linguistic theory during this period but a lot of discussion on descriptive procedures. Structuralism is based on the assumption that grammatical categories should be defined not in terms of meaning but in terms of distribution, and that the structure of each language should be described without reference to the alleged universality of such categories as tense, mood and parts of speech. Firstly, structural grammar describes everything that is found in a language instead of laying down rules. However, its aim is confined to the description of languages, without explaining why language operates the way it does. Secondly, structural grammar is empirical, aiming at objectivity in the sense that all definitions and statements should be verifiable or refutable. However, it has produced almost no complete grammars comparable to any comprehensive traditional grammars. Thirdly, structural grammar examines all languages, recognizing and doing justice to the uniqueness of each language. But it does not give an adequate treatment of meaning. Lastly, structural grammar describes even the smallest contrasts that underlie any construction or use of a language, not only those discoverable in some particular use. 12.3.1 Early period: Boas and Sapir 1. Boas (1) There was no ideal type or form of languages, for human languages were endlessly diverse. (2) In the Introduction to his Handbook, Boas discussed the framework of descriptive linguistics. He held that such descriptions consist of three parts: the sound of languages, the semantic categories of linguistic expression, and the process of grammatical combination in semantic expression. 2. Sapir (1) He started from an anthropological viewpoint to describe the nature of language, with his main focus on typology. He defines language as “a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.” (2) He also compares speech with walking, saying that walking is “an inherent, biological function of men,” and it is “a general human activity that varies only in circumscribed limits as we pass from individual to individual,” and its variability is “involuntary and purposeless.” (3) In discussing between speech and meaning, Sapir holds that the association of speech and meaning is a relation that may be, but need not be, present. (4) In discussing the relation between language and thought, Sapir holds that although they are intimately related, they are not to be considered the same. Language is the means, and thought is the end product. Without language, thought is impossible. (5) He says that all human races and tribes, no matter how barbaric or underdeveloped, have their own languages. Language is the oldest human legacy, and no other aspects of any culture can be earlier than its language. Without language, there is no culture. 12.3.2 Bloomfield’s theory Structuralism, also called in different cases “structuralist linguistics school,” “structural linguistics,” and “structural grammar,” in its broad meaning, refers to the study of any language that regards language itself as an independent, phonological, grammatical and lexical system. In its narrow sense, it refers to the linguistic approach of Prague School, American Structuralism, or any other similar school, which supposes that any individual linguistic element must be associated for an analysis with other elements wherewith it occurs. L. Bloomfield is regarded as one of the founders and representative figures of American Structuralism at the beginning of the 20th century. He laid much emphasis on the objectivity and systematicity of observable data in his study of language. He was more interested in the ways items were arranged than in meaning. To him meaning was simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response, which could hardly be explained by any rigorous analytical method. It was claimed that by following some of the “discovering procedures” that he and his followers were able to arrive at an appropriate phonological and grammatical description of language under investigation. For Bloomfield, linguistics is a branch of psychology, and specifically of the positivistic branch of psychology known as behaviorism. Behaviorism is a Principal scientific method, based on the belief that human beings cannot know anything they have not experienced. Behaviorism in linguistics holds that children learn language through a chain of “stimulus-response reinforcement,” and the adult’s use of language is also a process of “stimulus-response.” When the behaviorist methodology entered linguistics via Bloomfield’s writing, the popular practice in linguistic studies was to accept what a native speaker says in his language and to discard what he says about it. This is because of the belief that a linguistic description was reliable when based on observation of unstudied utterances by speakers; it was unreliable if the analyst had resorted to asking speakers questions such as “Can you say … in your language?” 12.3.3 Post-Bloomfieldian linguistics Influenced by Bloomfield’s Language, American linguists such as Z. Harris (1909 – ), C. Hockett (1916 – 2000), G. Trager, H. L. Smithm, A. Hill, and R. Hall further developed structuralism, characterized by a strict empiricism. Harris’s Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951) is generally taken as marking the maturity of American descriptive linguistics. Hockett was both a linguist and anthropologist, remaining firmly within the structuralist paradigm and hailed as a star of post-Bloomfieldian linguistics. The most significant figure in continuing the structuralist tradition may be K. Pike (1912 – 2000), who and his followers have a special name for their technique of linguistic analysis — tagmemics.
12.4 Transformational-Generative (TG) grammar 1. Language Acquisition Device (LAD) Chomsky believes that language is somewhat innate, and that children are born with what he calls a Language Acquisition Device, which is a unique kind of knowledge that fits them for language learning. He argues the child comes into the world with specific innate endowment, not only with general tendencies or potentialities, but also with knowledge of the nature of language. According to this view, children are born with knowledge of the basic grammatical relations and categories, and this knowledge is universal. The relations and categories exist in all human languages and all human infants are born with knowledge of them. According to Chomsky, there are aspects of linguistic organization that are basic to the human brain and that make it possible for children to acquire linguistic competence in all its complexity with little instruction from family or friends. He argues that LAD probably consists of three elements: a hypothesis-maker, linguistic universal, and an evaluation procedure. 2. Development of TG grammar Chomsky’s TG grammar has seen five stages of development. (1) The Classical Theory aims to make linguistics a science. (2) The Standard Theory deals with how semantics should be studied in a linguistic theory. (3) The Extended Standard Theory focuses discussion on language universals and universal grammar. (4) The Revised Extended Standard Theory (or GB) focuses discussion on government and binding. (5) The Minimalist program is a further revision of the previous theory. The development of TG grammar can be regarded as a process of constantly minimalising theories and controlling the generative power. Although TG grammar has involved putting forward, revising, and cancelling of many specific rules, hypotheses, mechanisms, and theoretical models, its aims and purposes have been consistent, i.e. to explore the nature, origin and the uses of human knowledge or language. 3. Features of TG grammar The starting point of Chomsky’s TG grammar is his innateness hypothesis, based on his observations that some important facts can never be otherwise explained adequately. TG grammar has the following features: (1) Chomsky defines language as a set of rules or principles. (2) Chomsky believes that the aim of linguistics is to produce a generative grammar which captures the tacit knowledge of the native speaker of his language. This concerns the question of learning theory and the question of linguistic universals. (3) Chomsky and his followers are interested in any data that can reveal the native speaker’s tacit knowledge. They seldom use what native speakers actually say; they rely on their own intuition. (4) Chomsky’s methodology is hypothesis-deductive, which operates at two levels: a. the linguist formulates a hypothesis about language structure – a general linguistic theory; this is tested by grammars for particular languages b. each such grammar is a hypothesis on the general linguistic theory (5) Chomsky follows rationalism in philosophy and mentalism in psychology.
Part Ⅰintroduction
The Anglo-Saxon period盎格鲁撒克逊(449-1066)
The Anglo-Norman盎格鲁诺尔曼period (1066-1350)
The father of English poetry (1340-1400) Geoffrey Chaucer杰佛利· 乔叟the Canterbury tales
The renaissance文艺复兴16c
William Shakespeare
Francis bacon
The period of revolution and restoration17c王朝复辟和光荣革命
John Donne
John Milton
John Bunyan
The 18th c the age of Enlightenment in England

Part Ⅱ

|16 |William Shakespeare |Victorian |Charles Dickens |
| | | | |
| | | |William Makepeace Thackeray |
| | | |George Eliot |
|17 |John Donne | |Thomas Hood |
| |John Milton | | |
| | | |Charlotte Bronte and |
| | | |Emily Bronte |
| |John Bunyan | |Alfred, Lord Tennyson |
| | | |Robert Browning |
| | | |Elizabeth Barrett Browning |
|18 |Daniel Defoe | | |
| |Henry Fielding | | |
| |Jonathan Swift | | |
| |Oliver Goldsmith | | |
| |William Blake | | |
|Romantic |William Wordsworth |20 |Thomas Hardy |
| |Gorge Gordon, Lord Byron | |John Galsworthy |
| | | |Oscar Wilde |
| |Percy Bysshe Shelly | |George Bernard Shaw |
| |John Keats | |D.H. Lawrence |
| | | |Virginia Woolf |
| |Walter Scott | |James Joyce |

The Sixteenth Century

|Beginning of 16th |Thomas More |Utopia. More gave a profound and truthful picture of the people’s |
|century | |suffering and put forward his ideal of a future happy society. |
|End the century |Francis Bacon |Scientist and philosopher |
|First half of 16th |Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard |They initiated new poetical forms, borrowing freely from English |
|century | |popular songs and Italian and French poetry. Wyatt was the first to |
| | |introduce the sonnet into English literature. |
|Second half of the 16th|Philip Sidney, Thomas Campion and |Lyrical poem become widespread in England. Edmund was the author of |
|century |Edmund Spenser |the greatest epic poem of the time The Fairy Queen. |
|Court life and |John Lyly, Thomas Loge |Great popularity was won by John Lyly’s novel Ephesus which gave rise|
|gallantry novel | |to the term “euphuism”, designating an affected style of court |
| | |speech. |
|Realistic novel |Thomas Delaney, Thomas Nashe |Devoted to every day life of craftsman, merchants and other |
| | |representatives of lower class |
|Drama |Christopher Marlowe |Reformed drama that genre in English and perfected the language and |
| | |verse of dramatic works. It was Marlowe who made blank verse the |
| | |principal vehicle of expression in drama. |

William Shakespeare
The works of William Shakespeare are a great landmark in the history of world literature for he was one of the first founders of realism, a master hand at realistic portrayal of human characters and relations.
Works
First period: Romeo and Juliet
Second Period: 1. Hamlet, Prince of Demark 2. Othello, the Moor of Venice 3. King Lear 4. The Tragedy of Macbeth
The Seventeenth Century
Puritan Age
|Puritan attitude |They believed in simplicity of life, breaking up of old ideas, an age of confusion. |
|Puritan action |They disapproved of the sonnets and love poetry written in the previous period. |
| |In 1642 the theatres were close |
| |The bible become one book of the people |
|Literary Characteristics |Absence of fixed standard of literary criticism, exaggeration of “metaphysical” poets.|

Poetry took new and startling forms in Donne and Herbert, and prose became as somber as Burrton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.
The spiritual gloom sooner or later fastens upon all the writers of this age. This so called gloomy age produced some minor poems of exquisites workmanship, and one of great master of verse whose work would glorify any age or people---John Milton, in whom the indomitable Puritan spirit finds its noblest expression.

Restoration Age
|Literary Characteristics |Renounced old ideas and demanded that English poetry and dream should follow the style|
| |which they had become accustomed in the gaiety of Paris. |
| |On the whole they were immoral and cynical. |
|French influence |Rimed couplets instead of blank verse, the unities, a more regular construction, and |
| |the presentation of tryes rather than individual |
| |The comedies are coarse in language and their view of the relation between man and won|
| |is immoral and dishonest. |

John Dryden
As a critic, poet and playwright was the most distinguished literary figure of the restoration age. The most popular genre was that of comedy whose chief aim as to entertain the licentious aristocrats.

John Donne
1. Poetry

Form Part of his poetry is in such classical forms as satires, elegies, and epistles---though it style has anything but classical smoothness---and part is written in lyrical forms of extraordinary variety.
Characteristics
1. Most of it purports to deal with life, descriptive or experimentally, and the first thing to strike the reader is Donne’s extraordinary and penetrating realism. 2. The next is the cynicism which marks certain of the lighter poems and which represents a conscious reaction from the extreme idealization of woman encouraged by the Patriarchal tradition.
Love-poem
In his serious love-poems, however, Donne, while not relaxing his grasp on the realities the love experience, suffuses it with an emotional intensity and a spiritualized ardor unique in English poetry.
2. Sonnet

Contrast between conventional and Donne’s sonnet
|Conventional sonnet |Donne’s sonnet |
|The unvarying succession in form |Gives nearly every theme a verse and stanza form peculiar to |
| |itself |
|Decorating his theme by conventional comparison |Illuminates or emphasizes his thought by fantastic metaphors and|
| |extravagant hyperbole. |

Style In moments of inspiration his style becomes wonderfully poignant and direct, heart-searching in its simple human accents, with an originality and force for which we look in vain among the clear and fluent melodies of Elizabethan lyrists.
Conceit
1. Sometimes the “conceits”, as these extravagant figures are called, are so odd that we lose sight of the thing to be illustrated, in the startling nature of the illustration. 2. The fashion of conceiting writing, somewhat like euphuism in prose, appeared in Italy and Spain also. Its imaginative exuberance has its parallels in baroque architecture and painting.

Song Go and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me where all the past years are, Or who cleft the Devil’s foot, Teach me to hear mermaids singing, Or to keep off envy’s stinging, And find What wind Servers to advance an honest mind. If thou beest born to strange sights, Things invisible to see, Ride ten thousand days and nights, Till age snow white hairs on thee, Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me All strange wonders that befell thee, And answer No where Lives a woman true, and fair, If thou find’st one, let me know, Such a pilgrimage were sweet, Yet do not, I would no go Though next door we might meet, Though she were true when you met her, And last till you write your letter, Yet she Will be False, ere I come, to two, or three.

John Milton
Days in Horton

|L’ Allegro |Describing happiness |
|Il Penseroso |Describing meditation |
|Lycidas |Praising a dear friend who had been drowned |
|Comus |Presenting a masque or play |

Pamphlets

|Areopagitica, Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed|A bold attack on the censorship of the press |
|Printing | |
|Eikinoklastes |A pamphlets in which the author justified the execution of Charles I |
|Defense for the English People |A defense of the Commonwealth and Revolution |

Paradise Lost 1. It represents the author’s views in an allegorical religious form, 2. And the reader will easily discern its basic idea---the exposure of reactionary forces of this time and passionate appeal for freedom. 3. It is based on the biblical legend of the imaginary progenitors of the human race---Adam and Eve, and involves God and his eternal adversary, Satan in plot.

John Bunyan
Milton and Bunyan

| |Milton |Bunyan |
|Education |Well educated |Poorly educated |
|Inheriting |Son of Renaissance |an excess of that spiritual independence which had cause the |
| | |Puritan struggle for liberty |
|Puritan |The only epic since Beowulf |The only great allegory |

Books helpful for Bunyan significantly 1. The books from his wife The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety gave fire to his imagination, which he saw new visions and dream terrible new dreams of lost souls. 2. Without fully digestion of Bible and Scripture, he was tossed about alike a feather by all the winds of doctrine.

The Pilgrim’s Progress Bunyan’s most important work is The Pilgrim’s Progress, written in old fashioned, medieval form of allegory and dream.

The Eighteenth century
1. Enlightenment
|Nature |An expression of struggle of the then progressive class of bourgeoisie against |
| |feudalism |
|Against |Class inequality, stagnation, prejudice and other survival of feudalism |
| |Repudiate the false religious doctrines about the viciousness of human nature |
|Accept |Place all branches of science at the service of mankind by connecting them with the |
| |actual deeds and requirements of the people |
| |Accept bourgeois relationship as rightful and reasonable relations among people. |
|Compared to France |revealed to the most progressive minds of the century the contradictions of new |
| |society instead of “cleared the minds of men for the coming revolution” of France |

1.1 First representatives of Enlightenment
|Common comment |Though in their works they criticized different aspects of contemporary |
| |English, they never set themselves the task of struggling against the existing|
| |order of life, but on the contrary, attempted to smooth over social |
| |contradictions by moralizing and proclaiming, as Pope did, that “whatever is, |
| |is right”. |
|Joseph Addison & Richard Steel |Devoted not only to social problem, but also to private life and adventures, |
| |gave an impetus to the development of the 18소 century novel |
|Alexander Pope |The highest authority in matters of literary art |
| |Elaborated certain regulations for the style of poetical works and made |
| |popular the so-called heroics couplets---five foot iambic rhymed in couplet |

1.2 Founders of novel The development of industry and trade brought to the foremen of a new stamp, who had to be typified in the new literature.
|Author |Work |Description |Comment |
|Daniel Defoe |Robinson Crusoe |The image of an enterprising Englishman of the|One of the forerunners of the |
| | |18소 century was created. |English 18소 century realistic|
| | | |novel. |
|Henry Fielding | |Unfolds a spread of panorama of life in all |Real founder of the genre of |
| | |sections of English society |the bourgeois realistic novel |
| | | |in England and Europe |
| | |Exposes the depraved aristocracy, the | |
| | |avaricious bourgeoisie | |
| | |Contrasts the life of ruling classes to the | |
| | |lack of rights and misery of the people | |
|T.G.Smollet |The Adventure of Roderick |Mercilessly attacked , among others things, |Real founder of the genre of |
| |Random |the regime in the English fleet |the bourgeois realistic novel |
| | | |in England and Europe |
| |The Adventure of Peregrine|Exposed all kinds if political charlatans, | |
| |Pickle |mocked at the State system and laughed to | |
| | |scone various prejudices and conventionalities| |
| |Created an unforgettable gallery of common English people, conspicuous显 | |
| |著地 for their generosity, kind-heatedness and sense of humor | |

1.3 Innermost life Writers Along with the depiction of morals and manners and social mode of life the writers of the Enlightenment began to display interest of the inmost life of an individual.
|Author |Work |Description |Comment |
|Samuel Richardson|Pamela, or Virtue |Deals with the private life of an individual |Enriched European literature |
| |Rewarded, Clarissa, or The| |with the method of |
| |History of a Young Lady | |psychological analysis |
| |and The History of Sir | | |
| |Charles Grandson | | |
|Jonathan Swift |Gulliver’s Travels |Typified the bourgeoisie world, drew ruthless |The most outstanding |
| | |pictures of the depraved aristocracy and |personality of the epoch of |
| | |satirically portrayed the whole of the English |enlightenment in England |
| | |State system | |
|Richard |School for Scandal |False virtue and actual vices of aristocracy |A sharp criticism of |
|B.Sheridan | |society are derided |contemporary system |

2. Sentimentalism The middle of the 18소 century in England sees the inceptions 起初 of a new literary current---that of sentimentalism. The sentimentalism came into being as a result of bitter discontent on the part of certain enlighteners in social society. The representatives of sentimentalism continued to struggle against feudalism but they vaguely sensed at the same time the contradictions of bourgeois progress that brought with it enslavement and ruin to the people. The philosophy of the enlighteners, though rational and materialistic in its essence, did not exclude sense, or sentiments, as a means of perception and learning. Moreover, the cult of nature and, a cult of a “natural man” whose feelings display themselves in a most human and natural manner, contrary to the artful and hypocritical aristocratic---this cult was upheld by the majority of the enlighteners and helped them to fight against privileges of birth and descent which placed the aristocracy high above common people. But later enlighteners of England having come to the conclusion that, contrary to all reasoning, social injustices, still held strong, found the power of reason to be insufficient, and therefore, appealed to sentiment as a means of achieving happiness and social justice.

|Oliver Goldsmith |The Vicar of Wakefield |the depravity of the aristocrats and corruption of town life are|
| | |contrasted to idyll田园 of quite family happiness, patriarchal |
| | |life in the bosom of nature and peaceable manners of the village|
|Laurence Sterne |Tristan Shandy, Sentimental Journey | the style and structure of which are the very antithesis of |
| | |rationally composed novels, reveal a purely emotional approach |
| | |to life on the part of the narrator |
| |Sterne is full of pity and compassion for the poor and the afflicted. But though he scoffs at |
| |prejudices and sings praise to liberty he is inferior to Swift and Fielding in the broad and |
| |critical portrayal of contemporary life. |
|Sympathy for the |O. Goldsmith |The Deserted Village |
|peasant | | |
| |Thomas Gray |Elegy, Written in a Country Churchyard |
| |George Crabble |The Village |

3. Pre-romanticism Another conspicuous trend in the English literature of the latter half of the 18소 century was the so-called pre-romanticism. It originated among the conservatives group of men of letters as a reactions against enlightenment and found its most manifest expression in the Gothie novel”, the terms arising from the fact that the greater part of such romance were devoted to the medieval times.
|Horace Walpole |The Castle of Oranto |Evil forces reign in the world, and it is futile to struggle |
| | |against one’s fate. The mysterious element plays an enormous |
| | |role on the Gothic novel; it is so replete with bloodcurdling|
| | |scenes and unnatural feelings that it is justly called “a |
| | |novel of horrors”. |
|Ann Radcliff. |The Mysteries of Udolpho | |
|William Blake |In spite of his mysticism, wrote poems full of human feelings and sympathy for the oppressed |
| |people |

End The task of upholding revolutionary struggle of the people for their rights in the 18소 century was initiated by Robert Burns and later taken up in the 19소 century by the writers of revolutionary romanticism.

Daniel Defoe

Four facts stand out clearly, which help the reader to understand the characters of his works.
|Facts |Explanation |
|Defoe was a jack-at-all trade |His interest was largely with the working classes and notwithstanding many questionable |
| |practices, he seems to have had some continued purpose of educating and uplifting the |
| |common people |
|Defoe was a radical |The puritan zeal for reform possesses him, and he tried to do so by his pen. The seal for|
|Non-conformist in religion, and |reform marks all his numerous works, and accounts for the moralizing to be found |
|was intended by his father for |everywhere |
|the independent ministry | |
|Defoe was a journalist |A newspaper man’s instinct for making a “good story”. He wrote an immense number of |
| |pamphlets, poems, and magazine article |
|Defoe knew prison life. | |

Henry Fielding

|Fielding’s position|Henry Fielding is the greatest novelist if the eighteenth century, and one of the greatest that England |
| |ever produced. |
|Fielding’s |Passive |Aristocrats and men set in authority embody all the evils; they persecute the heroes |
|character | |and obstruct their every move and action |
| |Positive |positive characters are always people with natural, unpreserved feelings, and though |
| | |“for the sake of appearance”, and to make them acceptable to the 18소 century reader,|
| | |Joseph Andrews, the manservant, and Tome Jones, the foundling, are eventually give |
| | |parents of noble descent, still they have nothing aristocratic about them, and in |
| | |their feelings and behavior, remain closely related to the common people |
|Fielding’s satire |He hates that hypocrisy which tries to conceal itself under a mask of morality. In the evolution of the |
| |plots of his novels, he invariably puts such characters in position which tear away their mask. He |
| |displays almost savage pleasure in making them ridiculous. |
|Joseph Andrews |Comments |Fielding’s best work: Amelia is the story of a good life in contrast with an unworthy|
| | |husband |
| |Description |Joseph Andrews, was inspired by the success of Richardson’s novel Pamela, and began |
| | |as a burlesque of the false sentimentality and the conventional virtues of |
| | |Richardson’s heroine(Pamela |
| |Richardson |Richardson, who has no humor, who minces words, and moralizes, and dotes on the |
| | |sentimental woes of his heroines |
| |Fielding |Fielding is direct, vigorous, hilarious欢闹的, and coarse to the point of vulgarity. |
| | |He is full of animal spirits, and he tells the story of a vagabond life, not for the |
| | |sake of moralizing, like Defoe, but simply because it interests him and his only |
| | |concerns is “to laugh men out of their follies.” |
| | |So his story, though it abounds in unpleasant incidents, generally leaves the reader |
| | |with the strong impression of reality. |

Jonathan Swift

The eighteenth century in English literature is an age of prose, but because the poetry is very bad but because the prose is very good.
|Writer’s position |The supreme master in the first part of the century, the name of Jonathan Swift is one of |
| |the very greatest names in English literature |
|Gulliver’s Travels’ position |The book is a classic and devastating satire on the human race. |
|Gulliver’s Travels’ power |The secret of the power is that there is no visible sign of anger, nor raising the voice; |
| |the tone is cold, restrained, ironic, varied only by some flashed of fooling when Swifts |
| |sense of the ridiculous gets the better of him. |
|General description |The plot of the book comprises the extraordinary adventure of Doctor Lemuel Gulliver, |
| |description of fantastic lands visited by him, their socials systems, ways and customs of |
| |their inhabitants |
|Houhnhnms |Horse are the real people and human beings, Yahoos, are their filthy servant, has a savage |
| |power unequalled in English literature or any literature |
|Lilliputians |Gulliver is a giant among them, and with the giants among whom Gulliver is a pygmy |
|The Tale of a Tub |Satire on the various churches and religion of the day |

Oliver Goldsmith

|General comments |All his writing is pervaded by a gentle and a genuine feeling that avoids sentimentality |
| |with consummate skill. |
| |He makes the rimming couplets as natural and simple as his prose. |
|Poetry | |
| |There a few descriptive and reflective poems in the English language that have kept their |
| |freshness as has The Deserted Village. |
|Comedy |The Good-natured Man and She Stoops to Conquer met with opposition because the fashion was |
| |then for sentimental comedy. Goldsmith’s success marked a return to the comedy for manners, |
| |with wit and fun as essential ingredients. |
|With Sheridan |Sheridan’s Rivals and School for Scandal and She Stoops to Conquer are the only plays of the|
| |eighteenth century that have been kept alive upon the modern stage |

William Blake

|Comment |Of all the romantic poets of the eighteenth century, Blake is the most independent and |
| |the most original, following no man’s lead, and obeying no voice but that he heard in his|
| |own mystic soul |
|Songs of Innocence |He first showed the musical cast of his mind. Their underlying theme is the all-pervading|
| |presence of divine and sympathy, even in trouble and sorrow. |
|The Book of Thel |Similar theme with the Songs of Innocence: the maiden Thel laments the vanity and |
| |transience of life, and is answered by lily, the cloud, the worm and the clod; they |
| |explain the principle of mutual self-sacrifice and the death means a new birth. |
|The Songs of Experience |A sense of gloom and mystery, and of the power of evil. We find again a protest against |
| |restrictive codes and exaltation of the spirit of love. |

The Romantic Period
Background
Industrial Revolution and French Revolution had a strong influence in Britain literature. Fighting for “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” also becomes British national spirit.
|Edmund Burke |Reflections on the Revolution |An anti-revolutionary manifesto for all reactionaries in Europe. “He |
| |in France |pitied the plumage and forgot the dying bird.” as Thomas Paine said. |
|Thomas Paine |The Rights of Man |Politics is the business of the whole mass of common people and not |
| | |only of a governing oligarchy. People would not like a government that |
| | |failed to secure people “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” |

Age of Wordsworth

|Mark |Romanticism prevailed during the period of 1798-1832, beginning with the publication of Wordsworth’s |
| |Lyrical Ballads, ending with Walter Scott’s death. |
|Spirit |The great literary impulse of the age is the impulse of Individualism in a wonderful varied of forms. |
|Why |Its great men of genius were mostly eminent in the poetical field, distinction was more easily achieved |
| |in poetry than in prose, and the general taste was decidedly set in the poetic direction. |
| |For poetry is the highest form of literary expression, and poetry seems to have been most in harmony |
|Phenomenon |with the noblest powers of the English genius. |
| |The young enthusiasts turned as naturally to poetry as a happy man to singing. |

Literature

|Poetry |Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly,|The glory of the age is in the poetry |
| |Keats, Moore, and Southey | |
|Prose |Scott |attained a very wide reading |
|Novel |Jane Austen |slowly won for their authors a secure place in the history of English |
| | |literature |
|Essay |Charles Lamb | |
|Drama |The only great literary form that was not adequately represented |
| |During the nineteenth century, the drama seems to have been practically superseded by the novel as a medium for the |
| |portrayal of its complex forms of life and character. |

Lake Poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey.

William Wordsworth

|Structure |The majority of poems in the collection Lyrical Ballads were written by Wordsworth. Coleridge’s |
| |chief contribution was his masterpiece The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. |
|Theme |Many of Wordsworth ‘s poems in the Lyrical Ballads were devoted to the position of landless and |
| |homeless peasants |
| |Sincerely sympathizing with the poor, he at the same time severely criticized capitalism. |
|Language |In his poems Wordsworth aimed at simplicity and purity of the language, fighting against the |
| |conventional forms of the 18소 century poetry. |
| |The poet was a passionate lover of nature and his description of lakes and river, of a meadows and |
| |woods, of skies and clouds are exquisite. |
|Great poems |Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, The Prelude, The Excursion |

Gorge Gordon, Lord Byron

|Poem |English Bards and Scotch |This poem is written in the manner Pope, for whom Byron |
| |Reviewers |always professed admiration, and is not unworthy of his |
| | |school, either in mastery of the heroic couplet or in |
| | |energy of satire |
|Canto |Child Harold Pilgrimage | |
|Drama |Manfred and Cain | |
|Satiric masterpiece |Don Juan | |

Percy Bysshe Shelly

“Mad Shelly” his schoolmates called him, and in the judgment of the world he remained “mad Shelly” to the end of his life.

|The Necessity of Atheism |Pamphlets of his religious view, which made him expelled. |
|Address to the Irish People |A quixotic attempt to arouse Ireland to seek redress for her national wrongs. |
|Queen Mab |A crude poem attacking dogmatic religion, government, industrial tyranny, and war. |
|Alastor, or the Spirit of |A vaguely autobiographical account of a young poet’s unsuccessful attempt to recapture his |
|Solitude |envisional ideal. |
|The Revolt of Islam |A long narrative in Spenserian stanza, proclaiming a bloodless revolution and the regeneration|
| |of man by love. |
|The Cenci |A drama intended for the stage, and written in much more simple and everyday language than his|
| |other works. |
|Ode to the West Wind |One of wonderful poem |
|The Skylark |The best known of all Shelly’s lyrics. |

John Keats

In 1817 he published a little volume of verse, most of it crude and immature enough, but contain the magnificent sonnet, On First Looking into Chapman‘s Homer, which reveals one source of his inspiration. From the first his imagination has turned out to the old Greek work with instinctive sympathy; and he now choose as the subject for a long time narrative poem the story of Endymion, the Latmian shepherd beloved by the moon-goodness.

Endymion was published in 1818. The exordium of poem, the Hymn to Pan in the opening episode, and a myriad other lines and short passages are worthy of the Keats that was to be; but as a whole Endymion is chaotic, and cloyed with ornament. Nobody knew better than Keats himself.

Great odes including On Melancholy, On a Grecian Urn, To Psyche, and To a Nightingale had done wonders in deepening and strengthening his gift. In turning from Spenser and Ariosto the great masculine poets of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare, Webster, Milton, and Dryden, he had found the iron which was lacking in his earlier intellectual food, and had learned the lessons of artistic calmness and severity, without sacrifice of the mellow sweetness native to him; to charm, he had added strength.

Walter Scott

Walter Scott is the creator and a great master of the historical novel. Scott’s novels give a panorama of feudal society from its early stages to its downfall. The writer describes the different phases of this epoch: the Crusades, the rise of absolute monarchy, the bourgeois revolution in England, the attempts to restore feudalism in the 18소 century.

The Victorian Period

First half of Realism
|Comment |The critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the forties and in the beginning of fifties. The|
| |realists and foremost set themselves the task of criticizing capitalist society from a democratic |
| |reality |
|Typical writers |Charles Dickens |The greatest English |With a striking force and truthfulness, he creates |
| | |realist of the time |pictures of bourgeois civilization, describing the |
| | | |misery and suffers of common people. |
| |William Makepeace |critical realist |Thackeray ‘s novels mainly contain a satirical portray|
| |Thackeray | |of the upper strata of society |
| |Elizabeth Gaskell |Mary Barton |described the inhuman conditions of the life of |
| | | |English workers and birth of Chartist movement as the |
| | | |inevitable result of the monstrous exploitation |
| |Charlotte Bronte |Further adherents of the method of critical realism |
|Humanism |Profound humanism which is revealed in their sympathy for the laboring people. These writers create |
| |positive character who are quite alien to the vices of the rich and who are chiefly common people |
|Humor & satire |The world of greed and cruelty is contrasted to a world where the unwritten laws of humanism rule in |
| |defiance of all sorrow and inflictions that befall the heroes. This juxtaposition determines the |
| |character and function of humor and satire in the realistic novel of the 19th century. |
| |Humorous scenes may attend the actions of the positive characters, but this humor is tinged with |
| |lyricism and serves to stress the human quality, the sincerity and kindness of such character. At the |
| |same time, bitter satire and ever grotesque is used to expose and criticize the seamy side of reality. |

Second half of Realism
|Comment |In the fifties and sixties the realistic novel enters a stage of decline |
| |They do not rise to the realization of the necessity of changing the contemporary social system |
| |radically. They strive for no more than improving it by means of reforms, which brings them to a futile|
| |attempt to reconciling the antagonistic class forces---the bourgeois and proletariat. |
|Typical writer |George Eliot |Described the life of the laboring people and criticized the privileged |
| | |classes, expository tendencies are much weaker in her work. She raises the |
| | |problem of class contradiction more seldom and less forcibly. |
| | |The significance of G. Eliot’s work lies in the portrayal of the patties |
| | |and stagnancy of English provincial life. |

Chartist writers
|Comment |Chartist literature, for it developed among the participants of the Chartist movements before and after|
| |the revolutionary events of 1848. |
|Theme |The Chartist writers introduced a new them into English literature---the struggle of the proletariat |
| |for its rights |

Poet--- Robert Browning
|Comment |Adhering in his best work to the ideas of humanism, Brown aerated in his poems a gallery of inspired|
| |painters, musician and scientist. |
|Feature |Many of his poems are devoted to the glorification of Italy, of its people, nature and art. |
|An Italian in England |Browning portrayed an Italian revolutionary fighting for the freedom of the country. |

Charles Dickens

|Position |The three greatest Victorian novelists are Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot. The first of these to |
| |achieve fame was Dickens, |
| | who became a great portrayer of child life. |
|Comments |After success of A Tale of Two Cites, his reputation was great. His concern for the oppressed poor, his |
| |sentiment (which sometime slipped into sentimentality), his flair for narrative, often melodramatic, and |
| |above all, his invention of comic character, combined to make him more popular than any other English |
| |novelist has ever been. |
| |All Dickens’ major novels were published either in numbers, like Nicholas Nickleby, or in installments in |
| |magazine, which frequently accounts for the episodic quality of his work. |
|Pickwick |At the time of his marriage he was writing series of humorous stories to accompany illustrations of |
| |Cockney sporting life, the richly comic adventures of the Pickwick Club in the English countryside. The |
| |sales of the Pickwick papers jumped with the introduction into the story of the engaging Cockney servant, |
| |Sam Weller, and by 1837, when its publication in numbers was completed |
| |Dickens at twenty five had risen in a year from obscurity to a poison of popularity unequaled in England |
| |before or since. |
|Oliver Twist |Oliver Twist, his first true novel, had a carefully worked out plot, in contrast to the picaresque of |
| |incidents in Pickwick. |
| |Its picture of the workhouses created under the New Poor Law and the description of the criminal slum of |
| |London in which young Oliver lived brought Dickens a new class of serious reader interested in social |
| |reform. |
|Master Humphrey’s Clock |In 1840 Dickens began a weekly paper, Master Humphrey’s Clock, patterned on Spectator and Tatler. The |
| |reader’s interests were less in the familiar essays than in the stories which Dickens was providing; |
| |gradually the paper became only the framework for the publication of two novels: the Old Curiosity Shop |
| |and Barnaby Rudge. Barnaby Rudge is his first historical novel. |
|America trips |His first trip to America began with an enthusiastic and uncritical reception which slowly soured as |
| |Dickens began to speak out against slavery and the American publishers’ piracy of English books. He, in |
| |turn, was disgusted by the crudeness of life and manners in America, and in particular by his own lack of |
| |privacy there. |
| |His American Notes, published on his return to England provoked great resentment in the United State. |
| |In his next novel Martin Chuzzlewit, he once more used his observation on the trip to draw the ludicrous |
| |characters of the American episodes of the book, and again there was trans-Atlantic protest. This novel is|
| |concerned with the evils of the love of money, but Dickens embroidered the tale with the humor of some of |
| |his most comic character, such as the old nurse Sara Gamp and the hypocritical Pecksniff. |
|A Christmas Carol |His first and best Christmas book, A Christmas Carol, failed to sell as well as he expected |
|David Copperfield |David Copperfield, please everyone. Many of the events of its hero’s childhood and his romance with Dora |
| |are clearly reminiscences of Dickens’ youth. The mellow vein of memory provided a range of |
| |characterization he never surpassed, and such creations as the marvelous Micawber and the cringing Uriah |
| |Heep have made it the most perennially popular of his novels. |
|Bleak House |Bleak House, a satire on the abuses of the Court of Chancery, show Dickens at his best in handling complex|
| |narratives and interlocking plots, but the prevailing mood of somberness was new to his readers. |
|Hard Times |Hard Times is an earnest attack on the vulgarity and materialism of the rising middle class |
| |industrialists. |
|A Tale of Two Cities |The story of redemption through devotion shows his ability at handling pure narrative, and it has always |
| |been on of his most popular novels, although it lacks his characteristic humor. |
|Great Expectation |Great Expectation is told in the first person by Pip, a young man who learns through adversity to discard |
| |his won superficial snobbishness. Because of the unity of interest centered on the chief character, and |
| |the credible quality of its romantic story, many critics have called it the best of his novels. |

William Makepeace Thackeray

|Comments |By this time his popularity rivaled that of Dickens, with whom he was friendly if not intimate; their |
| |only quarrel was healed just before Thackeray’s death. |
| | The sentimentality which he shared with Dickens over scenes of suffering, and the occasionally maudlin |
| |quality of his “good” women are tempered in his work with a satirical some times cynical, view of |
| |society which perhaps has more appeal today than in his won time. |
| |Thackeray was always, gregarious, and he loved the easy life of the upper class, with whom he was |
| |friendly but who were frequently the butts of his satire. |
|Yellowplush Correspondence|To the new Fraser’s Magazine he contributed his first important success, the Yellowplush Correspondence,|
| |the fictional memoirs of pushing and self-important footman, of which the theme as one he later used |
| |frequently: the ridiculousness of pretension. Reviews, sketches, and novels follow in Fraser’s, notably |
| |Catherine, written to satirize such “Newgate Calendar” novels of crime Oliver Twist and Harrison |
| |Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, The Great Hoggarty Diamond, and Barry Lyndon. |
|The Book of Snobs |The Book of Snobs made his reputation as a social satirist. |
|Vanity Fair |His first masterpiece of long novels, Vanity Fair appeared in monthly installments. |
| |Its setting is England during and after the Napoleonic Wars, but its panoramic view of folly and vanity |
| |is universal. |
| |Becky Sharp, the unscrupulous governess of whose adventures dominate the book, is generally recognized |
| |as one of the most vividly draws characters in the English novel. |
|Henry Esmond |Henry Esmond, a historical novel for which his studies of the humorists had provided the background. |
| | |
| |It is set in the period in history he loved best, the reign of Queen Anne, but the love story of Esmond |
| |and Lady Castlewood is in part a reflection of his won feeling for Mrs. Brookfield. |
| |Perhaps it was the only one of his novels not publishes serially, Esmond has a finish and structural |
| |organization greater than any of his other works. |
|The Newcomes |His delightful fairy-tale,The central character of The Newcomes is another view of Thackeray himself as |
| |a young man of good instincts which are thwarted by his own shortcomings; |
| |Clive’s struggles to establish himself as an artist and the trials of his first marriage are reminiscent|
| |of Thackeray’s curly manhood. |
| |The real interest of the book, however, is in the characterization of Clive’s capriciously charming |
| |sweetheart, Ethel, and of the honorable and guileless old Colonel Newcomes. |
|The Virginians |The last of his great novel, The Virginians, continues the fortune of Esmond family in the persons of |
| |the American twin grandsons of Henry Esmond, in a setting divided between the fast and fashionable |
| |society of England and America of the Revolution. |
|Cornbill Magazine |As the first editor of Cornbill Magazine, Thackeray once rejected a poem by Mrs. Browning because in |
| |contained “an account of unlawful passion felt by a man for a women”. |

George Eliot

George Eliot’s real name is Mary Ann Evans.
|Comments |Her reputation was always with the serious consideration of the moral position of the individual in the |
| |universe, but her psychological insight into the development in the universe, her flair for country scenes |
| |and speech, her fine sense of fun, and the narrative interest of her novels gain her a general popularity |
| |not common to didactic novelists. |
| |After Daniel Deronda, a study of Jewish racial consciousness, she had archived a position of respect never |
| |approached by any other English woman writer. Even today, among all the Victorian woman novelists, only the |
| |Bronte sisters seem her equals; in the study of aspiration and nobility in the mind of woman she has no |
| |rival. |
|Early stories |Her early stories Amos Barton, Mr.Gilfil’s Love Story and Janet’s Repentance were collected in Scenes of |
| |Clerical Life. It was published under the masculine pseudonym of “George Eliot”. |
| |The first two works of fiction had brought her a critical reputation as one of the most powerful of |
| |contemporary writers. |
|The Mill on the Floss|The Mill on the Floss tells of the love, estrangement, and eventual reconciliation of the daughter and son |
| |of a country miller. The early sections of the book are the most clearly autobiographical of all her |
| |writing. |
|Silas Marner |Silas Marner, last and shortest of the rustic novels, is set in the period before the Industrial revolution,|
| |and has for its theme the influence of his fellow men in first crushing a poor hand-loom weaver and them |
| |restoring him to happiness. |
|Study of Provincial |Study of Provincial Life, Middlemarch sets in one of the new towns of the Industrial North. This is the book|
|Life, Middlemarch |on which her reputation rests with modern readers, and some critics have called it the greatest of Victorian|
| |novels. |

Thomas Hood

|Comments |Most of his works were humors poems, containing topical comments on contemporary events and manners. |
| |They have since lost their interest, but a few of his serious poems retain a permanent place in English|
| |literature. |
|Mis. Kilmansegg |a satirical poem holding up to ridicule |. In these works hood expressed his protest against the |
| |the worship of gold by the bourgeois |social injustice of bourgeois society. As a pretty bourgeois |
| | |humanist he went no further to lament over the fate of to the|
| | |oppressed and expresses his sympathy in their sufferings. |
| | |Though he condemned the rich, ye he would never urge that |
| | |they should be fought in a revolutionary way. |
|The Song of the Shirt |one of the best poems on the hard life of| |
| |the labors under capitalism in English | |
| |literature | |
|The Bridge of Sings |A poem on the miserable fate of the woman| |
| |of the poor | |

Charlotte Bronte and Emily Bronte

|Common |The sisters of the Brontes were independent children, devoted to each other and suspicious of |
| |outsiders. |
| |All the Brontes scribbled poetry secretly. |
| |All works were published under the sisters’ pseudonyms. |
| |Both Jane Eyre and the still greater Wuthering Heights brought to the novel introspection and an |
| |intense concentration on the inner life of emotion which before them had been the province of poetry |
| |alone. |
|Charlotte |Jane Eyre |the poetic and imaginative story of the love of a young governess for her |
| | |married employer, has undoubted connections with Charlotte’s experiences in|
| | |Brussels. |
| |All charlotte’s novels were success, and she occasionally broke her Yorkshire seclusion for a wisic to |
| |London, here she was something of a celebrity, one her real identity was known. |
|Emily |Wuthering Heights |As inspiration in her master piece, one of the great workers of genius in |
| | |English fiction, Emily drew equally on her own emotional, introverted |
| | |nature and on the wild and mysterious moorland around her for the story of |
| | |the passionate Cathy and her savage lover Heatchcliff, whose love lasts |
| | |through their lives and beyond their death and burial in the quite |
| | |churchyard on the moor. |

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

|Locksley Hall |He uttered the protest which young men like himself, of good though not noble birth, were felling|
| |in the presence of class distinctions which subordinated love to rank, and of an industrial |
| |civilization which made gold the supreme test of success. |
|The princes |It was Tennyson’s contribution to the question, then beginning to be widely discussed, of the |
| |higher education of women, |
|In Memoriam |The poetry interpenetrates the theme, on which was just then engaging the minds of men more |
| |passionately than ever before in the world’s history---the question of immortality of the soul. |
| |The poem was written in memory of the Arthur Hallam, a beloved friend and college mate of |
| |Tennyson’s, who dies in 1833. |
|The Ode on the Death of the Duke |He ministered to national pride, stroked the fires of imperialism, and brought poetry nearer to |
|of Wellington |the national life than it had been since Shakespeare. |
|Idylls of the King |He painted the character of the first English national hero, King Arthur, and gives a new meaning|
| |to the legends which had ground up in the Middle Ages about the knights of the Round Table. |
| |In no way does he illustrate more conspicuously his tendency to forsake pure romance for romantic|
| |treatment of present realities: than in these poems, which are full of suggestions of: modern |
| |moral and social problems. King Arthur’s attempt to bring civilization o his realm through the |
| |devotions of his knights fails because of ins which Tennyson felt to be the peculiar danger of |
| |this age. |

Robert Browning

|Comparison |Browning |Tennyson |
| |interest lay in individual passion |interest lay in universal law |
| |Style was highly individual, an often more |Style is eclectic and carefully elaborated |
| |intent on meaning than on form | |
| |Robert Browning, who disputes with Tennyson the first place among Victorian poets, is Tennyson’s |
| |opposite in almost every respect but fame and length of years. Both shared almost equally in the |
| |Victorian tendency toward reflection, and toward a didactic aim; but their reflection was |
| |exercised upon very different phenomena, and their teaching was widely opposed. |
|Shelly |His first stimulus to poetic creation was given by a volume of Shelly which he picked up by a |
| |chance on a London book-stall in his fourteenth year. |
| |Pauline |His first long poem, Pauline, is a half-dramatic study of the type of|
| | |spiritual life which Shelly’s own career embodied; and Shelly’s |
| | |influence is clearly traceable both in its thought and in sit style. |
| |Paracelsus |Like Pauline, Paracelsus is the “history of a soul.” In it Browning’s|
| | |wonderful endowments are already suggested: his knowledge of the |
| | |causes of spiritual growth and decay, his subtle analyses of motive |
| | |and counter motive, his eloquence in pleading a cause, the enkindled |
| | |power and beauty of his language when blown upon by noble passion. |
|The Ring and the Book |This is the crowning efforts of his genus for he vastness of its scope and its grasp of human |
| |nature, though it lacks the spontaneous grace and charm which the best of his shorter pieces |
| |share with Pippa Passes, that perfect fruit of his youthful imagination. |
|Comments |He wrote much, with a steady gain in intellectual subtlety, but with a corresponding loss of |
| |poetic beauty. |
| |He made a more and more deliberate sacrifice of form to matter, wrenching and straining the verse|
| |–fabric in order to pack into it all the secondary meanings of the theme. |
| |To the last, his genius continues to throw out burst and jets of exquisite music, color and |
| |feeling. |

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

|early poetry |One Word More |One of Browning’s most perfect short poems, One Word More, is |
| | |addressed to his wife, and is kind of counter-tribute to her most |
| | |perfect work |
| |the Sonnets from the Portuguese |which contain the record of her courtship and marriage. |
| |Comments |Her early life was shadowed by illness and affliction, and her early |
| | |poetry shows in many places the defects of unreality and of over |
| | |wrought emotion natural to work produced in the loneliness of a |
| | |sick-chamber,. |
| | | The best known of these early poems are perhaps Lady Geraldine’s |
| | |Courtship, where she works under the influences of Tennyson’s idylls,|
| | |and The Cry of the Children, where she voices the humanitarian |
| | |protest against the practice of employing child labor in mind and |
| | |factories. |
|Aurora Leigh |Her most ambitious work, Aurora Leigh, a kind a versified novel of modern English life, with a social |
| |reformer and humanitarian, of aristocratic lineage, for hero and a young poetess, in large part of a |
| |refection of Mrs. Browning’s own personality, for heroine. It shows the influence of a great |
| |novel-writing age, when the novel was becoming more and more imbued with social purpose. |
|Comments |Mr. Browning’s technique is uncertain, and she never freed herself from her characteristic faults of |
| |vagueness and unrestraint. But her sympathy with noble causes, the elevation and ardor of her moods of |
| |personal emotion, and the distinction of her utterance at its best, tempts us to over look her |
| |technical limitations. She shares her husband’s strenuousness and optimism, but she speaks always from |
| |the feminine vantage-ground. |

Twentieth Century Literature

|Comments |Imperialism |Kipling, who with drum and trumpet called upon England to “take up the White Man’s |
| | |burden” by dominating all “lesser breeds without the law.” |
| | |Dogmatic, cocksure |
| |Drama |One unexpected literary feature of the age was enthusiasm for stage plays that |
| | |rolled like a tide over the whole English-speaking world. |
| | |Provincial Theatre, “drama study group” ,“drama workshop” |
| | |Nearly all successful; novelists wrote plays also, and most of them used the stage |
| | |as an instruments of social reform. |
| |contrast between |Poets of the Victorian age, as reflected in Stedman’s Victorian Anthology, leave a |
| |Victorian and |general impression of beauty, of faith, and therefore of cheerfulness. |
| |post-Victorian | |
| |literature | |
| | |Poetry |Tennyson |Kipling |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
| | | |world-wide idealism |his intolerance of everything |
| | | | |outside the British pale |
| | |Novel |Dickens |Hardy |
| | | |a man of colossal |most “finished: novelist of the |
| | | |optimism |age following was sunk on the |
| | | | |deeps of pessimism |
|The end of 19th |Comments |The growth of anti-realistic art and literature reflected the crises of bourgeois |
| | |culture at the period of imperialism. |
| | |The end of the 19th century is a period of struggle between realistic and |
| | |anti-realistic trends in art and literature. |
| | |Contrast |George Meredith, Samuel |created a truthful picture of |
| | | |Butler, and T. Hardy and |contemporary England |
| | | |later on G. B. Shaw, | |
| | | |Herbert George Wells | |
| | | |and J. Galsworthy | |
| | | |Robert Louis Stevenson and|led the readers away from the |
| | | |Oscar Wilde |burning issues of social |
| | | | |reality |
| |R. L. Stevenson |The chief aim of R. L. Stevenson was to entertain his readers. His mastery written |
| | |stories and novels abound in interesting adventures, fantastic situations and vivid |
| | |descriptions. But even in his best books he avoided touching upon the social |
| | |contradictions of his times. |
| |Oscar Wilde |Oscar Wilde is the most conspicuous writer and poet of the English decadence. In his|
| | |critical essays O. Wilde expounded the theory of “art for art’s sake”. Though in |
| | |many of his brilliant plays and fairy tales he criticize the cynicism and bigotry of|
| | |the bourgeois-aristocratic world of his days, he, for all that, remained a septic |
| | |and pessimist. |
| |R. Kipling |In his short stories, poems and novels R. Kipling, the bard of imperialism, |
| | |glorified the colonial expansion of Great Britain. |
| | |Describing the everyday life of ordinary British official and military men in India |
| | |and other colonial and semi-colonial countries, he never raised his voice in protest|
| | |against the oppression of the natives. His picture of India, though exceedingly |
| | |vivid and fascinating, presenting a perverted view of the country and its glorious |
| | |people. |
|End of 19th and |Comments |The English realists of the end of 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries continued|
|beginning of 20th | |and developed the traditions of their predecessors, i.e. Dickens, Thackeray, Bronte, and |
| | |Gaskell. |
| | |They sought for new ways and means of revealing the truths of life. |
| | |S. Butler, G. B. |In their works criticism of the bourgeois world reached considerable |
| | |Shaw |depth and poignancy. The narrow-mindedness, hierocracy and avidly of |
| | | |the propertied classes are mercilessly scourged in the works of S. |
| | | |Butler and his followers G. B. Shaw. |
| | |G. Meredith, T. |The later realists exceeded in revealing the characters from a |
| | |Hardy and J. |psychological point of view. The novels of G. Meredith, T. Hardy and |
| | |Galsworthy |J. Galsworthy are masterpiece of satirical portrayal and psychological|
| | | |analysis. |
| |H.G. Wells |Of great interest are the works of H.G. Wells. His social and fantastic|
| | |novels also bring out the crying contradictions of bourgeois |
| | |civilization. In an attempt at solving social problems, Wells devised |
| | |number of projects, but none of them has anything in common with |
| | |scientific socialism. |
|Summary |With all their merits and achievements, however, the later realists are inferior to their great |
| |predecessors in the scope and breadth of their portrayal of social phenomena. |
| |The work of S. Butler, T. Hardy and H.G. Wells is imbued with pessimism often bordering in despair. |
| |Condemning the existing order of things, the later English realist failed to see the force at work in |
| |society which was bound to change it. |
| |The greatest books of the period were cries of suffering and protest. |

Thomas Hardy

|Comments |Thomas Hardy is the last and one of the greatest of Victorian novelists. |
| |The chief love of his life is poetry. |
|Early works |Far from the Madding Crowd |Hardy’s first masterpiece, a story of fortitude and of sufferings brought |
| | |about by the capriciousness of a country girl. |
|Victorian novel |Both novels were badly bowdlerized for serial publications, but even so, they shocked British prudery |
| |and Hardy was terribly abused for being “filthy”. |
| |Tess of the D’Urbervilles |The second part of the title of Tess is A Pure Woman, to show what Hardy |
| | |thought of his heroine, who is seduced, abandoned, and finally driven to |
| | |murder for which she is hanged. Through it all she remains his most lovable|
| | |woman character, cruelly tormented by fate and innocent of any intention to|
| | |sin. |
| |Jude the Obscure |Jude shows the horrible decline of a man and woman drawn together by sexual|
| | |desire and torn apart by the disaster it entails. |
|Post-Victorian poetry |After Jude Hardy turned with relief to the writing of vigorously intellectual and experiment lyrical |
| |poetry which many cites think is at least as great s his novels. |

John Galsworthy

|Comment |One of the most prominent of 20th century realistic English writers |
|The Man pf Property and The|In 1905 he married the devoiced wife of his cousin, their association having begun some years earlier |
|Forsyte Saga |when her first marriage proved unhappy. |
| |The Man of Property, the first novel of the Forsyte Sage, was the highest point of social criticism |
| |ever attained by Galsworthy |
|Forsytism |The specifically English type of bourgeois morality and social attitude. |
|Theme |He saw human existence in terms of the hunters and the hunted: with varying emphasis and in a variety |
| |of guise his is the theme of the majority of his novels and plays. |
| |He was moved throughout life by an acute sense of social justice, and though he aimed to hold the |
| |balance fairly between rich and poor, between the powerful and the helpless, his emotions were always |
| |engaged on the side of the underdog. |

Oscar Wilde

|Early age |Wilde was quickly established himself both as a writer and as a spokesman for the school of “Art for|
| |Art’s Sake” when he was in college with George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats. |
| |Later he became spokesman for Aestheticism. |
|The Portrait of Dorian Gray |The Portrait of Dorian Gray is a striking ingenious story of a handsome young man and his pursuit of|
| |sensual please. |
| |Until the end of the book he himself remains fresh and healthy in appearance while his portrait |
| |mysteriously changes into a horrible image of his corrupted soul. |
| |Although the Preface to the novel emphasize that art and morality are totally separate, in the novel|
| |itself, at least in its later chapters, Wilde seems to be expounding a moral lesion on the evils of |
| |self-regarding hedonism. |
|Poetry |As a poet Wilde felt overshadowed by the Victorian predecessors whom he admired: Browning, Rosette, |
| |and Swinburne, |
| |And had trouble finding his own voice. |

George Bernard Shaw

|Mrs. Warren’s Profession |Born in Dublin, a treatment of commercialized vice which was refused performance by the censor. |
|Plays Pleasant and |He reached dramatic maturity |
|Unpleasant | |
| |Preface |In the elaborate prefaces to these volumes he commented on the technical and social |
| | |qualities of the plays, and further to guide his readers, expanded the stage |
| | |directions into full description, character sketches, and analysis, thus adopting the |
| | |play to a public accustomed to the reading of novels. |
| | |By this campaign in behalf of the printed play he helped to raise prose drama again to|
| | |the status of literature. |
| |Arms and the Man |a brilliant satire on military glory |
| |Candida |a resolution of a triangular situation by Shaw’s ideal woman |
| |the Man of Destiny |a mock-heroic skit on Napoleon |
| |You Never Can Tell |a farcical treatment of the new woman |
|John Bull’s Other Island |In he invented the usual conceptions of Englishman and Irishman, depicting the former as a soft-headed |
| |sentimentalist, the later as a type of practical sense |
|Man and Superman |In he represented courtship as a war of the sexes and man as the victims of woman, who is the |
| |incarnation of natures purpose and the will to live |

D.H. Lawrence

|Comment |During his lifetime and even afterward Lawrence was a controversial figure because of his frank |
| |treatment of sex and his outspoken insistence upon a need for a readjustment in the relationship |
| |between the sexes. |
| |Lawrence is often criticized for the didactic elements in his novels and the looseness in structure.|
| |The short stories are generally considered be superior in unity of mood and artistic form. |
|Lady Chatterley’s Lovers and |His most controversial novel is Lady Chatterley’s Lovers, the best probably The Rainbow, is often |
|The Rainbow |taken to be largely biographical, its subject matter paralleling much of his early life. |
|Sons and Lovers |Sons and Lovers, against a background of paternal coarseness and vitality conflicting with maternal |
| |refinement and gentility, he set the theme of the demanding mother who has given up the prospect of |
| |achieving a true emotional life with her husband and turns to her sons with a stultifying and |
| |possessive love. |
| |The theme of Sons and Lovers is usually said to concern the effect of mother-love upon the |
| |development of a son. |

Virginia Woolf

|Bloomsbury group |Lynton Starchy |The biographer |
| |J.M. Keynes |The eminent economist |
| |Roger Fry |An art critic |
| |E.M. Forster | |
|Her suicide |Her suicide in March,1941, resulting from her fear that she was about to lost her mind and become a burden|
| |on her husband |
| |First revealed to the public that she had been subject to periods of nervous depression, particularly |
| |after finished a book and that underneath the liveness and wit so well known among the Bloomsbury group |
| |lay disturbing psychological tensions. |
|Stream of consciousness |Rebellion |She rebelled against what she called the “materialism” of such novelists as |
| | |Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, and sought a more delicate rendering of |
| | |those aspects of consciousness in which she felt that the truth of human |
| | |experience really lay. |
| |Monday or Thursday |The sketches in which she explored the possibilities of moving between action |
| | |and contemplation, between specific external events in time and delicate |
| | |tracing of the flow of conspicuousness where the mind moved between retrospect|
| | |and anticipation, were collected in Monday or Thursday. |
| |Mrs. Dalloway |The first completely successful novels in her new style. |
| |Skill |After two novels cast rather cumbersomely in traditional form, she developed |
| | |her own style, which handled the “stream of consciousness” with a carefully |
| | |modulated poetic flow and brought into prose fiction something of the rhythms |
| | |and the imagery of lyric poetry. |
| |Theme |Woolf was a skilled exponent of the “stream of consciousness” technique in her|
| | |novels, exploring with great subtly problems of personal identity and personal|
| | |relationship as well as the significance of time change, and memory of human |
| | |personality. |
| |Women |Woolf was much concerned with the position of women, especially professional |
| | |women, and the constrictions they suffered under. |

James Joyce

|Comment |From a comparably early age Joyce regards himself as a rebel against the shabbiness and Philistinism|
| |of Dublin. |
| |He wrote only and always about Dublin. He devised ways of expanding his accounts of Dublin, however,|
| |so that they become microcosm, small-scale models, of all human life, of all history and all |
| |geography. |
| |Indeed that was his life’s work: to write about Dublin in such a way that he was writing about all |
| |of human experience. |
|Dubliners |Dubliners are more than sharp realistic sketches, a book about man’s fate as well as series of |
| |sketches of Dublin. |
|A Portrait of the Artist as a |A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows how carefully Joyce reworked and compressed his |
|Young Man |material for maximum effect. |
| |The Portrait is not literally true as autobiography, though it has many autobiographical elements; |
| |but it is representatively true not only of Joyce but of the relation between the artist and society|
| |in modern world. |
|His masterpiece is Ulysses. |

American Literature
The Romantic Period: stretches from the end of 18th century to the outbreak of the civil war. “The American Renaissance”
Writings in the period emphasize upon the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature.
The most clearly defined Romantic literary movement in this period is New England Transcendentalism.
Washington Irving
华盛顿.欧文 Earn an international reputation; Father of the American short stories; perfect the best classic style that American Literature ever produced
Rip Van Winkle
瑞普.凡.温克尔 Well know for Rip’s 20-year sleep
A model of perfect English in American literature and in the English language as well
Ralph Waldo Emerson
拉尔夫.瓦尔多.爱默生 The chief spokesman of New England Transcendentalism (American Puritanism\European Romanticism); is generally known as an essayist; his last reputation began only with the publication of Essays; the American Scholar(1837) self-reliance\American scholar\the over-soul\intuitive\short\declarative\ Nature
论自然 The unofficial manifesto for the Transcendental Club
Nathaniel Hawthorne
撒尼尔.霍桑 The Scarlet letter; black vision of life and human beings; sin and evil; the wrong doing of one generation lives into the successive ones; the Puritan concept of life is condemned; a master of symbolism keen psychological analysis\ambiguity
Young Goodman Brown
年轻小伙子古德曼.布朗 Everyone possesses some evil secret
Walt Whitman
沃尔特.惠特曼 Poetry could play a vital part in the process of creating a new nation; a strong sense of mission; use the poetic “I”, speaking in the voice of “I”; the triangular relationship: "I" the poet, the subject in the poem, and "you" the reader; free verse; different thins would mean a different wave of feeling
Openness\freedom\individualism\conversational and casual\simple even crude
There Was a Child Went Forth
从前有个出门的孩子
Cavalry Crossing a Ford
涉水过河的骑兵队
Song of Myself
自我之歌 The growth of a child /a young growing American
Reminds its readers of a photo of the American Civil War
Universality, singularity and equality
Herman Melville
赫尔曼.梅尔维尔 A master of allegory and symbolism Moby Dick
白鲸 The first American prose epic;a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of truth and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man's deep reality and psychology; Moby Dick symbolizes nature; Ahab -- a tragic hero, becoming evil himself in his thirst to destroy evil.
The Realistic Period 1865-1914
1. background: the Civil War affected both the social and the value system
(1)transformed from an agricultural one to an industrialized and commercialized one
(2)stimulated technological development
(3)stepped up urbanization
(4)people became dubious about the human nature and the charity of God
The Gilded Age
2. American Realistic Period and English Realistic Period (Victorian Period) common ground
(1)a great interest in the realities of life, aim at the interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life
(2)what was brutal or filthy, the open portrayal of class struggle
(3)common people mostly depicted differences(America) (1)native trends in the realistic portrayal of the landscape and social surfaces
(2)perfect the dialect style
(3)concern about "local colorism", a unique variation of American literary realism
3. American Naturalism: influenced by Darwin's evolutionary theory
(1)accept the more negative implications of it and use it to explain the behavior of those characters in literary works
(2)inherited qualities, and habits confined by social forces are depicted
(3)theme: human "bestiality", especially the sexual desire
(4)unpolished language
(5)philosophically, the truth is always partially hidden from the eyes of the individual, or beyond his control
(6)material source from the lower ranks of society portray misery and poverty
(7)naturalism is evolved from realism. Author's tone in writing is less serious and sympathetic, more ironic and pessimistic
Mark Twain
马克.吐温 1. "The true father of our national literature"; "damned human race"
2. features:
(1)paid more attention to the "life" of the Americans
(2)preferred to have his own region and people in his stories, i.e. "local colorism"
(3)concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region and the lower-class people
(4)nostalgic in a vanishing way of life and recorders of a present that faded before their eyes
(5)skillfully used the colloquialism, the language is simple, direct ,faithful. protagnists spoke in vernacular, both realistically and symbolically
(6)his humor is remarkable, his humor is not only funny elements making people laugh, but a kind of artistic style to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn哈克贝利.费恩历险记(The Adventure of Tom Sawyar)with the eventual victory of his moral conscience over his social awareness, Huck grows(Life on the Mississippi; The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County; Innocents Abroad; The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg) From which "all modern American literature comes"; the milestone in American literature; the books are noted for their unpretentious, colloquial yet poetic style, their wide-ranging humor, and their universally shared dream of perfect innocence and freedom The climax is Huck‘s inner struggle on the Mississippi,between his affection for Jim and the laws,finally he follows his own good-hearted morality rather than the conventional village one
Huckleberry Finn: a typical American boy with "a sound heart and a deformed conscience", innocent and rebel
Henry James
亨利.詹姆斯
1. The first American writer to conceive his career in international terms
2. evaluation: influenced by Freud, pioneer of "stream-of-consciousness", founder of psychological realism; laid a greater emphasis on the “inner world” of man;
3. The Portrait of A Lady is generally considered to be his masterpiece;
4. highly refined and insightful Daisy Miller
苔瑟.米勒 Daisy Miller – the American Girl in Europe, embody the spirit of the New World narrator:Frederick Winterbourne
Daisy Miller:Freedom an individuality,innocent,a pretty American Flirt
Emily Dickinson
艾米丽.狄金森 1. works features:
(1)she uses a particular rhyme pattern,uses dashes and captical letters as a means of emphasis
(2)simplicity and plainness
(3)focus on a single image or symbol
(4)poems are personal and meditative
(5)personification
2. idea: skeptical about the relationship between man and nature, concerns religion, death, immortality, love, nature
3. She called this stream of tiny, aphoristic poems a continuous fragmented “letter to the world,” a way to bridge her private world with the public
4. her poetry despite its ostensible formal simplicity, is remarkable for its variety, subtlety and richness
This is my letter to the World
这是我给世界写的信
I heard a Fly buzz – When I died
我死时听到苍蝇的嗡嗡声
I like to see it lap the Miles
我喜欢看见它拍击许多英里
Because I could not stop for Death因为我不能停下来等待死神 Anxiety about communication with the outside world; A description of the moment of death; Animalizing train as part of nature;Personifies death and immorality, three stages of life: youth, mature period, end of life
Theodore Dreiser
西奥多.德莱塞 1. idea: naturalist
(1)heredity and environment are the forces determining man‘s destiny, under what life was ironic, even tragic
(2)human beings' life was trapped into‘a welter of inscrutable forces‘
(3)Darwin's idea of "survival of the fittest" is embodied as "kill or to be killed" in Dreiser‘s works
(4)explain the insignificance of life and attack the conventional moral standards
(5)materialism is the core. man has a meaningless, endless search for satisfaction of his desires, desires for money
(6)sex is another human desire sexual beauty symbolizes the social status
2. features: lack of concision, more inclusive and less selective Sister Carrie嘉莉妹妹
(trilogy: The Financier; The Titan; The Stoic greatest work:An American Tragedy) Project the American value – materialistic;
The Modern Period:
1.age: second half of the 19th century to early decades of the 20th century
2.background:
(1)the U.S. has become the most powerful country
(2)technological revolution
(3)a decline in moral standard, a spiritual wasteland, feelings of fear, loss, disorientation and disillusionment
3. influencing ideas:
(1)the same as English Modern period: Karl Marx, Darwin, Freud
(2)stream of consciousness:
4." John Steinbeck: "The Grapes of Wrath"
Allen Ginsberg: "Howl", the manifesto of Beat Movement
Salinger: "The Catcher in the Rye"
5. modernism's features: literature: convey a vision of social breakdown and moral decay writer: develop techniques that could represent a break with the past. modernistic works are discontinuity and fragmentation
6.The differences between Modernism America and England
(1)American writers emphasize the concrete sensory images or details as the direct conveyor of experience
(2)modern fiction employ the first narration or confine the reader to the "central consciousness" or one character‘s point of viewcommon ground: directness, compression, vividness, sparing of words
Ezra Pound
埃兹拉.庞德 a leading spokesman of the "Imagist movement:
(1)direct treatment of poetic subjects
(2)eliminate ornamental words
(3)rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of a metronome In a Station of The Metro
在地铁站
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
船商的妻子：一封信
A pact(free verse)合同
1. One-image poem; a modern adoption of the Japanese haiku
2. an adaption from the Chinese of Li Po named Rihaku in Japanese
3. Some agreement between "Whitmanesque" free verse
Robert Lee Frost
罗伯特.李.弗罗斯特 The Pulitzer Prize winner on four occasions; a serious poet idea: a momentary stay against confusion, like Wordsworth profound ideas are delivered under the disguise of the plain language and the simple form; combined traditional verse forms with a clear American local speech rhythm; semi-free or semi-conventional
After Apple-Picking
摘了苹果之后
The Road Not Taken
没有走的路
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
雪夜林边逗留 1. a man's best efforts ever satisfy God?
2. uncertainty of the speaker‘s choice between safety and unknown(meditative) took the one less travelled by and that has made all the difference
Eugene O’Neill
尤金.奥尼尔 Is unquestionably American's greatest playwright; won the Pulitzer Prize four times; the only dramatist ever to win a Nobel Prize; founder of the American drama
Characters seek meaning and purpose in their lives through love or religion or revenge. The result is disappointment or despair. Use Expressionism; Dialect, spell words indicate a particular accent or manner of speech
The Hairy Ape毛猿
F.Scott Fitzgerald
菲茨杰拉德 both an insider and outsider of the Jazz Age; a great stylist; using the scenic method; accurate detail The Great Gatsby
了不起的盖茨比
narrator: Nick Carraway symbolic of an obscenely futile world
Ernest Hamingway
欧内斯特.海明威 A Nobel Prize winner for literature
1. Hemingway hero "grace under pressure" he is with the honesty, the discipline, and the restraint. man always fights a losing battle of life,but never lose dignity. man can be physically destroyed, but never defeated spiritually
2. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water
3.colloquialism (Mark Twain)(short ,simple, conventional words)
Indian Camp(In Our Times)印第安营寨
(The Sun Also Rises-The Lost Generation)
(A Farewell to Arms-Frederick Henry)
(For Whom the Bell Tolls-Robert Jordan)
(The Old Man and the Sea-Santiago)
(The Undefeated) (1)a wounded hero confronts all the difficulties of the situation with his dignity and courage.
(2)a group of wandering, amusing and aimless people caught in the war.
(3)man suffers both physically and mentally, and is doomed to suffer, refute God‘s kindness to man.
(4)proves life's worth and there are causes worth dying for.
(5)show great respect for the struggle of mankind against unconquerable natural forces,though only a partial victoy is possible.
(6)man of courage,and masculinity and inflexible heroism.
William Faulkner
威廉.福克纳 1. ground: American South, Northern Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County
2. theme: almost all his heroes are tragic
(1)they are prisoners of the past or of the society, or of some social and moral taboos, or of their own personalities
(2)society conditions man with its laws and institutions and eliminates man‘s chance of responding naturally to the experiences of his existence
(3)man tries to explain the incomprehensible by turning away from reality, but becomes weak, cowardly and confused(Emily-coward)
3. nostalgic in The Sound and The Fury
4. works’ features:
(1)use of narrative techniques is remarkable, let the characters explain themselves, the reader experiences the work of art directly (interior monologue)
(2)breaks up chronology, juxtaposes the past with the present
(3)stream of consciousness
(4)inner musings of the narrator
(5)good at presenting multiple points of view 纪念艾米丽的一朵玫瑰花
A Rose For Emily
(The Sound and The Fury; Light in August; Absalom,Absalom!; Go Down,Moses; The Marble Faun; Soldiers‘ Pay; As I Lay Dying; Wild Palms; The Hamlet; Intruder in the Dust(Nobel Prize); The Bear; Requiem for a Nun; The Fable; The Town; The Mansion) (Gothic devices)
Emily: the symbols of the Old South, the prisoners of the past. An eccentric spinster. She refuses the inevitable changes and loss with the pass of time

-----------------------
Symbolizes

Refers to