English Text Construction - Current Issue

This study investigates how the content of consumer safety instructions is organized in Themes and N-Rhemes and connected by thematic progressions. The Themes are chiefly directives or representations of the product and its usage. The goal of safety instructions, on the other hand, i.e. avoiding dangers and their negative outcomes, is mainly represented in the N-Rhemes. Thematic progressions are frequently linear, which reflects the expert/non-expert relationship between the writers and readers, or derived, which reflects the somewhat disjointedness of this text type. There are also many Rheme iterations connecting imperative clauses. In this respect the thematic organization of procedural texts differs significantly from texts where declarative clauses are predominant.

This mixed-methods study evaluated the evolution of thematic development in descriptive report writing among 12 first-year English for Academic Purposes (EAP) university students in Japan over the course of a 15-week program. The program employed a genre-based approach within a Systemic Functional Linguistic framework. Four consecutive information report essays (two pre-essays, a post-essay, and a delayed test essay) were analyzed to assess the student’s writing progress. The results revealed a general progression, starting with limited Theme development in the first pre-essay, to some students exhibiting a growing familiarity with coherence and cohesion in terms of the generic structure of descriptive reports.

The paper focuses on the contemporary Irish poet Alan Gillis’s latest collection, The Readiness, with special attention paid to “Metropolis” and “Vespers,” two long poems that come in the latter part of the volume. In them, the pressures of late modernity, which are thematised throughout The Readiness, are given sustained attention, revealing loneliness and dereliction as the most excruciating aspects of an individual’s life. While the bleak perspective on late modern existence is characteristic of Gillis work to date, I show that the poems included in this collection, each in its own distinct way, discover relief from the alienation in the establishment of meaningful relationships with other people.

According to the social psychologists R. D. Laing, H. Phillipson and A. R. Lee, we human beings are constantly speculating about the view that others have upon us, thereby forming a metaperspective (Laing et al. 1966). Yet despite the fact that literature is grounded in some of the most fundamental and general structures of human cognitive experience (Gavins and Steen 2003: 2), proving a rich seam to mine for metaperspectives, the concept has not yet been explored in a literary context. Accordingly, this paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach to investigate metaperspectives within fiction for the first time. Introduced is my coinage of the racialised metaperspective, denoting a sub-type concerned with colour, culture, and/or ethnicity. Taking as my literary case study Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), I demonstrate that the racialised metaperspective both contributes to the depiction of a specific social milieu within a text, and serves a characterising function.

Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1 depicts Joan of Arc in contradictory terms. This paper discusses the narrative and literary techniques that are used to develop Joan of Arc’s characterisation, particularly the alternation of location between the Anglo-Burgundian and the French-Armagnac camp, the antagonistic staging of Joan of Arc compared to Lord Talbot and Margaret of Anjou, and the contrastive use of epithets, including the shifting positive, neutral or negative dictionary meanings and context-dependent meanings, as per Ray Jackendoff’s theory of Conceptual Semantics. This results in questioning the apparent meaning of words and concepts and thereby also the apparent judgment on the characters themselves, thus ambiguating, questioning, and ridiculing apparent certainties.