|
Geoffrey Leech
Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA (16 January 1936 – 19 August 2014) was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than 30 books and more than 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and semantics. Life and career Leech was born in Gloucester, England on 16 January 1936. He was educated at Tewkesbury Grammar School, Gloucestershire, and at University College London (UCL), where he was awarded a BA (1959) and PhD (1968). He began his teaching career at UCL, where he was influenced by Randolph Quirk and Michael Halliday as senior colleagues. He spent 1964-5 as a Harkness Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA. In 1969 Leech moved to Lancaster University, UK, where he was Professor of English Linguistics from 1974 to 2001. In 2002 he became Emeritus Professor in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster Univers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gloucester
Gloucester ( ) is a cathedral city, non-metropolitan district and the county town of Gloucestershire in the South West England, South West of England. Gloucester lies on the River Severn, between the Cotswolds to the east and the Forest of Dean to the west; it is sited from Monmouth, from Bristol, and east of the England and Wales border, border with Wales. Gloucester has a population of around 132,000, including suburban areas. It is a port, linked via the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal to the Severn Estuary. Gloucester was founded by the Roman Empire, Romans and became an important city and ''Colonia (Roman), colony'' in AD 97, under Nerva, Emperor Nerva as ''Glevum, Colonia Glevum Nervensis''. It was granted its first charter in 1155 by Henry II of England, Henry II. In 1216, Henry III of England, Henry III, aged only nine years, was crowned with a gilded iron ring in the Chapter House of Gloucester Cathedral. Gloucester's significance in the Middle Ages is unde ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
British Academy
The British Academy for the Promotion of Historical, Philosophical and Philological Studies is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars spanning all disciplines across the humanities and social sciences and a funding body for research projects across the United Kingdom. The academy is a self-governing and independent registered charity, based at 10–11 Carlton House Terrace in London. The British Academy is primarily funded with annual government grants. In 2022, £49.3m of its £51.7m of charitable income came from the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy – in the same year it took in around £2.0m in trading income and £0.56m in other income. This funding is expected to continue under the new Department for Business and Trade. Purposes The academy states that it has five fundam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cooperative Principle
In social science generally and linguistics specifically, the cooperative principle describes how people achieve effective conversational communication in common social situations—that is, how listeners and speakers act cooperatively and mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way. The philosopher of language Paul Grice introduced the concept in his pragmatic theory: In other words: say what you need to say, when you need to say it, and how it should be said. These are Grice's four maxims of conversation or Gricean maxims: quantity, quality, relation, and manner. They describe the rules followed by people in conversation. Applying the Gricean maxims is a way to explain the link between utterances and what is understood from them. Though phrased as a prescriptive command, the principle is intended as a description of how people normally behave in conversation. Lesley Jeffries and Daniel McIntyre (2010) describe Grice's maxims as "encapsulating the assumpt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (, ; 18 July 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist. A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzkoy, he developed revolutionary new techniques for the analysis of linguistic sound systems, in effect founding the modern discipline of phonology. Jakobson went on to extend similar principles and techniques to the study of other aspects of language such as syntax, morphology and semantics. He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian verb. Drawing on insights from C. S. Peirce's semiotics, as well as from communication theory and cybernetics, he proposed methods for the investigation of poetry, music, and the visual arts including cinema. Through his decisive influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, among others, Jakobson b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Othello
''The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice'', often shortened to ''Othello'' (), is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare around 1603. Set in Venice and Cyprus, the play depicts the Moorish military commander Othello as he is manipulated by his ensign, Iago, into suspecting his wife Desdemona of infidelity. ''Othello'' is widely considered one of Shakespeare's greatest works and is usually classified among his major tragedies alongside ''Macbeth'', ''King Lear'', and ''Hamlet''. Unpublished in the author's life, the play survives in one quarto edition from 1622 and in the First Folio. ''Othello'' has been one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, both among playgoers and literary critics, since its first performance, spawning numerous stage, screen, and operatic adaptations. Among actors, the roles of Othello, Iago, Desdemona, and Emilia (Iago's wife) are regarded as highly demanding and desirable. Critical attention has focused on the nature of the play's tragedy, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer, whose works include the poems " Do not go gentle into that good night" and " And death shall have no dominion", as well as the "play for voices" ''Under Milk Wood''. He also wrote stories and radio broadcasts such as '' A Child's Christmas in Wales'' and '' Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog''. He became widely popular in his lifetime, and remained so after his death at the age of 39 in New York City. By then, he had acquired a reputation, which he had encouraged, as a "roistering, drunken and doomed poet". Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea in 1914, leaving school in 1932 to become a reporter for the '' South Wales Daily Post''. Many of his works appeared in print while he was still a teenager. In 1934, the publication of "Light breaks where no sun shines" caught the attention of the literary world. While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara; they married in 1937 and had t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Foregrounding
Foregrounding is a concept in literary studies that concerns making a linguistic utterance (word, clause, phrase, phoneme, etc.) stand out from the surrounding linguistic context, from given literary traditions, or from more urban knowledge. It is "the 'throwing into relief' of the linguistic sign against the background of the norms of ordinary language." There are two main types of foregrounding: parallelism and deviation. Parallelism can be described as unexpected regularity, while deviation can be seen as unexpected irregularity. As the definition of foregrounding indicates, these are relative concepts. Something can only be unexpectedly regular or irregular within a particular context. This context can be relatively narrow, such as the immediate textual surroundings (referred to as a 'secondary norm'), or wider such as an entire genre (referred to as a 'primary norm'). Foregrounding can occur on all levels of language (phonology, graphology, morphology, lexis, syntax, semantics ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Treebank
In linguistics, a treebank is a parsed text corpus that annotates syntactic or semantic sentence structure. The construction of parsed corpora in the early 1990s revolutionized computational linguistics, which benefitted from large-scale empirical data. Etymology The term ''treebank'' was coined by linguist Geoffrey Leech in the 1980s, by analogy to other repositories such as a seedbank or bloodbank. This is because both syntactic and semantic structure are commonly represented compositionally as a tree structure. The term ''parsed corpus'' is often used interchangeably with the term treebank, with the emphasis on the primacy of sentences rather than trees. Construction Treebanks are often created on top of a corpus that has already been annotated with part-of-speech tags. In turn, treebanks are sometimes enhanced with semantic or other linguistic information. Treebanks can be created completely manually, where linguists annotate each sentence with syntactic structur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
British National Corpus
The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. The corpus covers British English of the late 20th century from a wide variety of genres, with the intention that it be a representative sample of spoken and written British English of that time. It is used in corpus linguistics for analysis of corpora. History The project to create the BNC involved the collaboration of three publishers (with the Oxford University Press as the lead collaborator, Longman and W. & R. Chambers), two universities (the University of Oxford and Lancaster University), and the British Library. The creation of the BNC started in 1991 under the management of the BNC consortium, and the project was finished by 1994. There have been no additions of new samples after 1994, but the BNC underwent slight revisions before the release of the second edition BNC World (2001) and the third edition BNC XML Edition (2007). [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Survey Of English Usage
The Survey of English Usage was the first research centre in Europe to carry out research with corpora. The Survey is based in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London. History The Survey of English Usage was founded as the Survey of Spoken English at Durham University in 1959 by Randolph Quirk, moving with him to University College London in 1960. Many well-known linguists have spent time doing research at the Survey, including Bas Aarts, Valerie Adams, John Algeo, Dwight Bolinger, Noël Burton-Roberts, David Crystal, Derek Davy, Jan Firbas, Sidney Greenbaum, Liliane Haegeman, Robert Ilson, Ruth Kempson, Geoffrey Leech, Jan Rusiecki, Jan Svartvik, and Joe Taglicht. The current director is Bas Aarts. It was originally deposited in huge metal fireproof cabinets in two or three rooms in the Foster Court of UCL. The original Survey Corpus predated modern computing. It was recorded on reel-to-reel tapes, transcribed on paper, filed in filing ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stig Johansson (linguist)
Stig Johansson (21 February 1939 – 22 April 2010) was a Swedish-Norwegian linguist. He was born in Traryd in Småland, Sweden. He received his PhD in linguistics from Indiana University in 1968 and then worked at the universities of Lund and Gothenburg in Sweden before being hired as an associate professor at the University of Oslo in 1976. He remained there until his retirement in 2008, serving as a full professor from 1982. He was inducted into the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 1991, and received an honorary degree from Lund University in 1999. Stig Johansson's research interests included English grammar, contrastive analysis and learner language analysis. He made a lasting contribution to the field of corpus linguistics, both monolingual and mulitilingual. In addition to his many scholarly publications, he also co-authored several textbooks within English phonetics and grammar. Stig Johansson was one of the founders of ICAME, the International Computer Ar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Comprehensive Grammar Of The English Language
''A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language'' is a descriptive grammar of English written by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. It was first published by Longman in 1985. In 1991, it was called "The greatest of contemporary grammars, because it is the most thorough and detailed we have," and "It is a grammar that transcends national boundaries." The book relies on elicitation experiments as well as three corpora: a corpus from the Survey of English Usage, the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus (UK English), and the Brown Corpus (US English). Reviews In 1988, Rodney Huddleston published a very critical review. He wrote: ere are some respects in which it is seriously flawed and disappointing. A number of quite basic categories and concepts do not seem to have been thought through with sufficient care; this results in a remarkable amount of unclarity and inconsistency in the analysis, and in the organization of the grammar. * See also * ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
