English Text Construction - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2023

Resistance to postcolonial oppressive ideologies assumes significance within Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987), portraying predicaments of a post-independence fictional African state of Kangan. Drawing on the Deleuze-Guattarian “ontology of becoming”, “rhizome”, “nomad thought”, distinction of “striated” and “smooth” spaces, their account of the “State Apparatus” and the “war machine”, and “assemblage”, the study demonstrates how Achebe entertains possibilities of convergence with their philosophy. It displays how the Kangan people, while engaging in “ontology of becoming”, strive to deterritorialise themselves from Sam’s State that attempts to define their subjectivity. Concurrently, Sam’s State implements varieties of schemes to re-subjugate its subjects under its territorial authority. The study concludes how the war machine’s menacing force eventually destabilises the whole “State Apparatus”.

The paper seeks to provide a cognitive-linguistic re-interpretation of the centuries-old notion of whole-text structure. The investigation presented here draws on 317 data sources selected through a scoping literature review. The paper demonstrates how text structure, narrative structure, rhetorical structure, etc. all represent metonymically one and the same multi-faceted underlying concept. That concept is argued to result from the amalgamated operation of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy combined with the simultaneous and dynamic operation of (what are known in gestalt psychology as) profiling shifts. The paper further demonstrates how such shifts in profiling operate on text-worlds and discourse-worlds to bring about perceptions of a text’s ‘progression’ and of whole-text structure.

Information security policies are particularly important when it comes to maintaining information security within an organization. As a result, creating an information security policy is an invaluable process that cannot be undermined. This study aims at investigating how these information security policies are created, specifically in banks, from a linguistic perspective. The study employed the use of corpora and analyzed ten information security policies of banks randomly collected online. The analyses were categorized under five levels of linguistic analysis which included: the mode, lexis, grammar, speech acts, and discourse. Some statistical analyses which involved clustering were also performed at the level of discourse in order to find similar patterns in the information security policies. The results show that banks use the same linguistic features when writing their information security policies. The results also reveal how these linguistic features are used to develop a comprehensive and effective information security policy.

C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien are two key figures in the Modern Alliterative Revival, and each sought to revive Old English poetics with close to absolute metrical fidelity. While scholarship on Tolkien’s alliterative verse has seen an uptick in recent years, though, Lewis remains the odd poet out. Nominally, this article attempts to assign a composition date for Lewis’s poem “Sweet Desire.” My dating to early 1930 associates this text with Lewis’s famous conversion to theism. More broadly, this article tracks one revivalist’s painstaking adaptation of the alliterative meter into Modern English, outlining the technical challenges faced by Lewis and which other contemporary revivalists must overcome as well.