English Text Construction - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2011

The reevaluation of the past in Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Cosmopolis can be seen as a valuable counterargument to Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalistic claim that contemporary society heralds the end of history. The sublime multiplicity of history in both novels illustrates how time eventually collapses in the eternal present of capital and technology. Consequently, it appears that postindustrial society draws in the individual to create a system with no outside. DeLillo’s historiographic metafiction nonetheless shows how rewriting the past can prevent history from being conclusive and teleological. Narrative therefore provides an alternative to established History — in which all events connect in light of the inevitable — but it also resists the solipsistic void of speculation and hearsay.

Adaptations, currently the best-known example of intersemiotic translation, more often than not are addressed in the disingenuous terms of ‘fidelity,’ ‘parasitism,’ or ‘solipsism.’ Although it seems a truism that adaptations adapt a ‘text’ from one discursive field to another, such a straightforward causality conflicts with the notion of ‘discursive field’ in which it is wont to occur. Moreover, the adaptation presented as adaptation loses its referential effect when the receiver is unacquainted with the material transposed. Together both issues — i.e. linearity and referentiality — in fact account for most of the misconceptions about the paradoxical phenomenon that is adaptation. This essay therefore proposes a semiological argument aimed at providing a better understanding of the discursive mechanisms at work in adaptational practice.

It has been claimed that the last constituent of the clause, the N-rheme, is the part of the message which the writer wants the reader to remember and which is most likely to correlate with the goals of the text (Fries 2002). This study investigates the N-rhemes in two samples of problem–solution texts written by advanced Swedish learners of English and British university students, respectively. It was found that the majority of the N-rhemes in both samples are concerned with the chief elements of problem–solution texts, i.e. with the description of the problem, different means of solving it and the evaluation of both. It was also found that a small proportion of the N-rhemes formed progressions from their preceding theme or rheme. Five broad types of semantic connections were distinguished, Continuation, Expansion, Contrast, Summation, and Enhancement, each of which contributes to the unfolding discourse in different ways. Continuation and Expansion N-rheme progressions are used, for instance, to emphasise and elaborate on the writer’s point, Contrast and Summation N-rheme progressions to organise the content, and Enhancement N-rheme progressions to develop aspects of circumstantial meaning. The texts by advanced Swedish learners, which are written in a somewhat subjective and emphatic style, contain a greater number of Expansion and Continuation N-rheme progressions than the texts written by the British students, whose style of writing is expository and less personal.

This article describes differences in the frequency of words/n-grams in television dialogue as compared with a variety of other corpora. It explores frequent lexico-grammatical patterns in the television series Gilmore Girls, in other fictional programmes, and in unscripted spoken and written English. Using ranked frequency lists, the ‘dramedy’ Gilmore Girls is compared both to unscripted language and to a corpus containing dialogue from ten other television series. The results allow us to describe both the specifics of the dialogue of this particular dramedy and the general characteristics of scripted television dialogue as compared to unscripted spoken and written language. The findings also confirm previous assumptions made on the basis of different data that television dialogue is more emotional, but less narrative and vague than naturally occurring conversation.

This article examines the media representations of gender and leadership discourse in the debut season of the American reality TV show The Apprentice. By drawing upon the method of discourse analysis, I analyse the leadership styles that two male and two female project managers employ in ‘doing leadership’. The analysis shows that two of the managers display discourse styles of leadership which largely conform to traditional gendered expectations, and that two other managers employ a ‘mixed’ leadership style by making use of some discourse features that are indirectly indexed for the other gender. It is revealed that a masculine discourse style is still represented as the preferred, default way of doing leadership, and that the combination of discourse strategies which are stereotypically coded as masculine and feminine in ‘doing leadership’ is represented most favourably in the reality TV show. Based on the data analysis, it is also argued that female managers may be under more constraints in using ‘mixed’ gendered strategies and in violating stereotypically gendered speech norms when enacting leadership at work.

This paper assesses the relationship between EFL proficiency, lexical competence, and collocational competence (cf. Meara 1996; Pawley & Syder 1983; Read 1993, 1997, 2000; Bonk 2001). Two paper-based tests, a proficiency test and a vocabulary test, were presented to English majors at the University of Burundi. Scores on both tests significantly correlate and distinguish between levels. This confirms that lexical competence is a reliable predictor of L2 proficiency, which strengthens and extends earlier findings (Meara 1996; Bonk 2001; Gyllstad 2005, 2007; Zareva et al. 2005). Furthermore, mastery of collocations is found to be related to frequency and to predict lexical competence. Thus, the findings of this study underline earlier indications that proficiency testing may be simplified.