English Text Construction - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2010

In this essay, I argue that John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath has taken on renewed significance in the midst of the current economic downturn known in the United States as “the Great Recession.” While in the 1930s Steinbeck’s novel offered a way of understanding and responding to the economic conditions of the Depression, today the novel foregrounds the degree to which postmodernism has foreclosed the utopian possibilities of the novel’s grand narrative. I contend that the novel’s methodology can provide a flawed but potent framework for an effective literary response to the current economic crisis.

Samuel Beckett is often counted among Rebecca Brown’s literary forebears, yet critics have done little to explain exactly how this inspiration works. The present article attempts to fill part of this gap through a focus on two elements that are prominent in the writings of Brown and Beckett: representations of the mind and the body. Both authors use decaying bodies to represent a loss of identity, but Brown adds creatively to Beckett’s literary heritage by putting non-heteronormative sexuality center stage. Lesbianism causes the identity crises of Brown’s protagonists, while it also shifts the existential ignorance of Beckettian heroes to more of a social ignorance for Brown. Obviously, not all minds and bodies are confused and broken for the same reasons.

In both English and Dutch, the adjective “pure/puur” has developed subjectified meanings, denoting speaker involvement rather than lexical unmixedness, as in the reinforcing “pure madness/pure waanzin”. “Pure/puur” can also express focusing discourse-structuring functions (“That’s pure luck/Da’s puur geluk”) and submodifier-of-classifier uses (“a pure economic measure/een puur economische maatregel”), structuring local discourse along precise subclassifications.This synchronic comparative study aims at describing these uses and at finetuning the analytical apparatus on which current accounts are based. Specific research questions are: what patterns do “pure/puur” engage in and what are their lexicosyntactic properties? What parameters explain distributional similarities? And how do these findings fit in with hypotheses about the unidirectionality of subjectification and the accompanying leftward movement in the NP?

This article examines the English and Dutch imperatives of intentional visual and auditory perception and in particular their use as pragmatic markers. Look, listen, kijk ‘look’ and luister ‘listen’ are compared with respect to frequency, distribution and usage. The difference between look and kijk, on the one hand, and listen and luister, on the other, is argued to be indicative of a more general cross-linguistic tendency. This tendency is explained in terms of the imperatives’ effectiveness in and likely recruitment for what has traditionally been called attention-getting and in terms of the common view of the nature of visual and auditory perception.

Starting from the observation that meaning does not primarily reside in individual words but in the phrase, this paper focuses on the examination of recurring phrases in language. It introduces a new analytical model that leads corpus researchers to a profile of the central phraseological items in a selected text or text collection. In this paper, the model is applied to a 3.5-million word corpus of online academic book reviews that represents part of the specialized discourse of the global community of linguists. This demonstrates how the model facilitates the study of the occurrence and distribution of the central phraseological items in linguistic book reviews, and how it helps to determine the extent of the phraseological tendency of language.

Evaluation is a critical but frequently underutilized part of the (language) course development process. Instructors’ reasons for avoiding it vary, but often include the concern that conducting evaluations will draw time and attention away from course content. Using All Write, a first-year writing course at the University of Antwerp, as a case study, this article shows how mechanisms for feedback and evaluation can be incorporated into course materials with minimal impact, as well as demonstrates the benefits of evaluation as both a validation process and a guide for course revision. Moreover, it will show how the stakeholders, primarily learners, but also teachers, may be drawn into the process and potentially benefit from it.