English Text Construction - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2015

In her novel Sorry (2007), Australian novelist and essayist Gail Jones engages in a reflection on the ethics of reconciliation. Written in response to her wish to acknowledge the debt to the Stolen Generations, Sorry offers new possibilities of ethical mourning, allowing the dead to return and the voiceless to speak. This article explores the ways in which Jones not only fashions a narrative that bypasses the unsayable dimension of Australia’s history and the representational difficulties inherent in trauma but also fosters the empathetic imagination through a metadiscursive discussion of the act of reading. Self-referentiality and self-reflexivity are also examined, as they allow Jones to draw attention to her novel’s writerly elaborations and offer an alternative to standard reconciliation practices.

I trace Paul Muldoon’s borrowing from Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter” along with some other intertextual references in “At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999” (Moy Sand and Gravel) with a view to demonstrating that Muldoon’s poem represents both a challenge to Yeats’s political ideas and acceptance of his aesthetics of vacillation. Subscribing to the idea that poetry may be a sort of protective charm against the evils of the world, Muldoon discovers a reassuring strength in the moments when Yeats sheds his mask of a lofty mage.

This article is devoted to Jenny Diski’s polyphonic rewriting of the biblical myth of Abraham and Sarah in Only Human: A Divine Comedy (2000). It shows how this subversive novel, through its juxtaposition of two competing narrative voices – an unidentified human narrator and God himself –, challenges the omniscience and transcendence usually attributed to God, but also the power of his creative Word, and launches a reflection on storytelling and truth, presenting thereby an “only human” Bible.

This multifactorial corpus-based study focuses on verb-complementation constructions (Marcus started to draw a picture vs. Marcus started drawing a picture) and contrasts 3,119 occurrences of gerundial and to-infinitival constructions across native and non-native (ESL) English varieties. Using logistic regression modeling, I analyze how grammatical contexts constrain the syntactic choices of American and Hong Kong English speakers. The regression model reveals a level of complexity in the uses of gerundial/to-infinitival complements that had so far remained unnoticed. Specifically, speakers make syntactic decisions based on comprehensive grammatical contexts rather than single isolated semantic parameters (as previously reported). Further, for the two types of speakers different grammatical features play an influential role in the association of a given predicate with a particular complement type. This suggests that the two speaker populations do not share the same abstract knowledge of the semantic and morpho-syntactic constraints associated with each of the investigated type of complementation. Ultimately, this study shows that combining cognitively oriented theoretical frameworks with rigorous empirical corpus approaches helps distinguish what motivates native and ESL speakers’ syntactic choices.

In this paper we address the issue of conjunction use in learner writing from a text-structuring angle, focusing on hortatory expositions by NNS learners and NS professionals. The learners are advanced Dutch-speaking students of English, while the professionals are journalists writing for British quality newspapers. We investigate how external conjunctive items (CIs), which express real-world relations between states of affairs, interact with internal CIs, which relate to the writer’s speech acts or modal positions, to construct specific rhetorical macro-structures, or conjunctive profiles. On the basis of qualitative and quantitative analysis, we identify four profiles: (1) predominance of internal CIs, (2) predominant use of external CIs, (3) spreading of external and internal CIs over the whole essay, (4) concentration of internal CIs in introduction and conclusion. The first profile is exclusive to NNS learner writing, but the other three profiles are found in both NNS and NS expositions. Gross overuse of CIs is found in the first and second learner profiles only. Overall, the advanced learner essays display emergent conjunctive macro-structuring, which teaching can build on.