LINGUISTICA APLICADA
GRADE TEST CONTENTS 2019
Defining Literature
Literature, in its broadest sense, is any written work. Etymologically, the term derives
from Latin litaritura/litteratura “writing formed with letters,” although some definitions
include spoken or sung texts. More restrictively, it is writing that possesses literary
merit. Literature can be classified according to whether it is fiction or non-fiction and
whether it is poetry or prose.
It can be further distinguished according to major forms such as the novel, short story
or drama, and works are often categorized according to historical periods or their
adherence to certain aesthetic features or expectations (genre).
Taken to mean only written works, literature was first produced by some of the world’s
earliest civilizations—those of Ancient Egypt and Sumeria—as early as the 4th
millennium BC; taken to include spoken or sung texts, it originated even earlier, and
some of the first written works may have been based on a pre-existing oral tradition. As
urban cultures and societies developed, there was a proliferation in the forms of
literature. Developments in print technology allowed for literature to be distributed and
experienced on an unprecedented scale, which has culminated in the twenty-first
century in electronic literature.
Definitions of literature have varied over time. In Western Europe prior to the
eighteenth century, literature as a term indicated all books and writing. A more
restricted sense of the term emerged during the Romantic period, in which it began to
demarcate “imaginative” literature.
Contemporary debates over what constitutes literature can be seen as returning to the
older, more inclusive notion of what constitutes literature. Cultural studies, for instance,
takes as its subject of analysis both popular and minority genres, in addition to
canonical works
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language to
evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, prosaic ostensible meaning (ordinary
intended meaning). Poetry has traditionally been distinguished from prose by its being
set in verse prose is cast in sentences, poetry in lines; the syntax of prose is dictated
by meaning, whereas that of poetry is held across metre or the visual aspects of the
poem
Prior to the nineteenth century, poetry was commonly understood to be something set
in metrical lines; accordingly, in 1658 a definition of poetry is “any kind of subject
consisting of Rythm or Verses Possibly as a result of Aristotle’s influence (his Poetics),
“poetry” before the nineteenth century was usually less a technical designation for
verse than a normative category of fictive or rhetorical art As a form it may pre-date
literacy, with the earliest works being composed within and sustained by an oral
tradition hence it constitutes the earliest example of literature.
Prose
Prose is a form of language that possesses ordinary syntax and natural speech rather
than rhythmic structure; in which regard, along with its measurement in sentences
rather than lines, it differs from poetry On the historical development of prose, Richard
Graff notes that”
Novel: a long fictional prose narrative.
Novella: The novella exists between the novel and short story; the
publisher Melville House classifies it as “too short to be a novel, too long to be a
short story.
Short story: a dilemma in defining the “short story” as a literary form is how to,
or whether one should, distinguish it from any short narrative. Apart from its
distinct size, various theorists have suggested that the short story has a
characteristic subject matter or structure these discussions often position the
form in some relation to the novel
DENOTATIVE AND CONNOTATIVE LANGUAGE. -
Denotation refers to the literal meaning of a word, the "dictionary definition."¨ For
example, if you look up the word snake in a dictionary, you will discover that one of
its denotative meanings is "any of numerous scaly, legless, sometimes venomous
reptiles¡ having a long, tapering, cylindrical body and found in most tropical and
temperate regions."
Connotation, on the other hand, refers to the associations that are connected to a
certain word or the emotional suggestions related to that word.
The connotative meanings of a word exist together with the denotative meanings. The
connotations for the word snake could include evil or danger
Drama. - Drama is literature intended for performance.
American literature
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States and
its preceding colonies Before the founding of the United States, the British colonies on
the eastern coast of the present-day United States were heavily influenced by English
literature. The American literary tradition thus began as part of the broader tradition
of English literature.
The First American NovelIn the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the first American novels were published.
These fictions were too lengthy to be printed as manuscript or public reading.
Publishers took a chance on these works in hopes they would become steady sellers
and need to be reprinted. This scheme was ultimately successful because male and
female literacy rates were increasing at the time. Among the first American novels
are Thomas Attwood Digges' "Adventures of Alonso", published in London in 1775
and William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy published in 1791. Brown's novel
depicts a tragic love story between siblings who fell in love without knowing they were
related.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 -1864)
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a novelist and short story writer. Hawthorne’s works have
been labeled ‘dark romanticism,’ dominated as they are by cautionary tales that
suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humankind.
His novels and stories, set in a past New England, are versions of historical fiction used
as a vehicle to express themes of ancestral sin, guilt and retribution.
Although his natural inclination was to express himself through the short story form, he
is best known for his novels, and particularly his most famous, The Scarlet Letter, a
romance in an historical setting – puritan Boston, Massachusetts, in the 17th century.
It is the story of the unfortunate Hester Prynne, who gives birth to a child as a result of
an affair with a preacher, and struggles to create a new life of repentance. The novel
explores the themes of sin, guilt and legalism. D.H. Lawrence wrote that there could
be no more perfect work of the American imagination.
Hawthorne is ranked among the top American writers. He is admired by other writers,
particularly, as a skilful craftsman with an admirable sense of form, which is highly
architectural. The structure of his novels, The Scarlet Letter being a striking example, is
so tightly integrated that it would be impossible to omit any paragraph without doing
damage to the whole. The book’s four characters are inextricably bound together in a
complex situation that seems to be insoluble, and the tightly woven plot has a unity of
action that rises slowly but inexorably to a highly dramatic climactic scene. In the short
stories, too, there is that tight construction. Hawthorne is admired, too for the
directness of his writing, and its clarity
Hawthorne’s greatness is due partly to his moral insight. He was deeply concerned with
original sin and guilt and the claims of law and conscience. He delved deeply and
honestly into life, in which he saw much suffering and conflict but also the redeeming
power of love. He is uncompromising in his presentation of those things, firmly and
resolutely scrutinizing the psychological and moral facts of the human condition. His
greatest short stories and The Scarlet Letter are characterized by a depth of
psychological and moral insight unequalled by any other American writer.
Hawthorne is also admired for his mastery of allegory and symbolism. His characters’
dilemmas and their response to them express larger generalizations about the
problems of human existence. The power and gravity with which he deals with that
results in true tragedy.
And now, in the 21st century Hawthorne holds a pre-eminent place in American letters.
He was a major influence in the artistic development of such writers as Herman Melville, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mary Jane Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor – members of the so-called
Hawthorne School. His focus on the past of the nation, especially the Puritan era, his
delving into the social and psychological forces underlying human behavior, his
reliance on symbols to convey rich and ambivalent value to his stories and romances,
his insistence on finding and understanding the sources of humanity ‘s darker side, and
his exploration of such themes as isolation, guilt, concealment, social reform, and
redemption not only created a following among aspiring writers but also brought him
into the nation’s classrooms, where The Scarlet Letter still holds a firm place.
In 1837, the young Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) collected some of his stories
as Twice-Told Tales, a volume rich in symbolism and occult incidents. Hawthorne went
on to write full-length "romances", quasi-allegorical novels that explore the themes of
guilt, pride, and emotional repression in New England. His masterpiece, The Scarlet
Letter, is a drama about a woman cast out of her community for committing adultery.
Hawthorne's fiction had a profound impact on his friend Herman Melville (1819–1891),
who first made a name for himself by turning material from his seafaring days into
exotic sea narrative novels. Inspired by Hawthorne's focus on allegories and
psychology, Melville went on to write romances replete with philosophical speculation.
In Moby-Dick, an adventurous whaling voyage becomes the vehicle for examining such
themes as obsession, the nature of evil, and human struggle against the elements.
In the short novel Billy Budd, Melville dramatizes the conflicting claims of duty and
compassion on board a ship in time of war. His more profound books sold poorly, and
he had been long forgotten by the time of his death. He was rediscovered in the early
20th century.
Anti-transcendental works from Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe all comprise the Dark
Romanticism sub-genre of popular literature at this time.
American dramatic literature, by contrast, remained dependent on European models,
although many playwrights did attempt to apply these forms to American topics and
themes, such as immigrants, westward expansion, temperance, etc. At the same time,
American playwrights created several long-lasting American character types, especially
the "Yankee", the "Negro" and the "Indian", exemplified by the characters
of Jonathan, Sambo and Metamora. In addition, new dramatic forms were created in
the Tom Shows, the showboat theater and the minstrel show. Among the best plays of
the period are James Nelson Barker's Superstition; or, the Fanatic Father, Anna Cora
Mowatt's Fashion; or, Life in New York, Nathaniel Bannister's Putnam, the Iron Son of
'76, Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana, and Cornelius
Mathews's Witchcraft; or, the Martyrs of Salem.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 –1849)Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. He is best known for
his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and suspense. He is
generally considered the inventor of detective fiction.
Poe’s work as an editor, a poet, and a critic had a profound impact on American and
international literature. In addition to his detective stories he is one of the originators of
horror and science fiction. He is often credited as the architect of the modern short
story. He also focused on the effect of style and structure in a literary work: as such, he
has been seen. French Symbolists such as Mallarmé and Rimbaud claimed him as
their literary model. Baudelaire translated is works into French. Today, Poe is regarded
as one of the first American writers to become a major figure in world literature. He was
unusual in that he strived to earn his living through writing alone, which resulted in a life
of financial hardship and near poverty.
The work that catapulted Poe onto the New York literary scene in January 1845
was The Raven, a poem that was immediately copied, parodied, and anthologized. He
is now one of the most widely read American writers of the 19th century. His appeal
extends from young readers who enjoy being terrified by the macabre tales of mystery
and imagination, such as The Tell-Tale Heart, to literary critics who appreciate his
pioneering analysis in The Philosophy of Composition of how poetry creates its effect
on the reader. Poe’s poems, notably The Raven and The Bells, are among the most
memorable in the English language, and his stories, among them The Pit and the
Pendulum and The Masque of the Red Death, still terrify readers. Poe lives on, not only
in American culture but European as well, in drama, film and television, and music.
Adaptations of Poe’s works for film began from the time when films first appeared. And
when television emerged that accelerated, so that generations of viewers have
watched his stories on screen, and continue to do so. Actors Bela Lugosi and Boris
Karloff became typecast as a result of their association with Poe adaptations and those
actors can’t be thought of in any other context than horror films. The 2004 release of
Hellboy on DVD contained a special 10-minute adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart. More
recently, The Cask of Amontillado starring David JM Bielewicz and Frank Tirio, Jr.
Directed by Thad Ciechanowski, won an Emmy Award in 2013 and The Raven starring
David JM Bielewicz, Dave Pettit and Nicole Beattie won one in 2015. Adaptations of
particularly the more macabre stories appear regularly on television.
Music of the 20th century is infused with the works of Poe
Herman Melville (1819 – 1891)Herman Melville was an American writer of novels, short stories and poems. He is best
known for the novel Moby-Dick and a romantic account of his experiences in
Polynesian life, Type. His whaling novel, Moby-Dick is often spoken of as ‘the great
American novel’ ’vying with Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Mark
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn for that title.
Melville was the master of dense and complex prose, rich in mystical imagery and
packed with allusions to philosophy, myth, scripture, visual arts and other literary
works. His themes go deep into the human condition: he explores such things as the
impossibility of finding enough common ground for human communication. His
characters are all preoccupied with the quest for that; his plots describe that pursuit
and all his themes and ideas are related to it.
His preoccupation with the limits of knowledge led him to the question of God’s
existence in his writing, to the indifference of nature and the problem of evil. It is
in Moby-Dick that all his thematic obsessions meet, resulting in a great book that goes
to the very heart of all those preoccupations. An emerging field of American legal
scholarship known as ‘law and literature’ uses Melville’s novel Billy Budd as one of its
central texts. In the novel the popular young sailor, Billy, accused of spurious crimes,
including mutiny, accidentally kills the ship’s master-at-arms and the Captain, Edward
Vere, convenes a court martial. He urges the court to convict and sentence Billy to
death. That fictional court martial has become the focus of scholarly controversy. What
kind of man was Captain Vere? Was he a good man caught up in bad law or did he
deliberately distort and misrepresent the law to bring about Billy’s death? There is no
answer to that and so the novel has become a clear example of Melville’s quest for the
impossible, which we see in all his work.
Melville spent twice as many years devoting himself to writing poetry as he did to
writing prose and although he wasn’t highly rated as a poet during his lifetime he is
now. Some critics now regard him as the first American modernist poet. Robert Penn
Warren championed Melville as a ‘great American poet.’ The critic, Helen Vendler,
writing about the poem, Clarel, commented: ‘What it cost Melville to write this poem
makes us pause, reading it. Alone, it is enough to win him, as a poet, what he called
“the belated funeral flower of fame”.
In 2010 a species of extinct giant sperm whale, Livyatan Melville, was named in honor
of Melville. The paleontologists who discovered the fossil were fans of Moby-Dick and
dedicated their discovery to its author.
Beginning of the 20th century
Ernest Hemmingway (1899 – 1961)
Ernest Hemingway was a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. He published
seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works, and won the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1954. More works, including three novels, four short story
collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously. Several of his
works are now classics of American literature. In 1961, like his father, a brother and a
sister, Hemingway committed suicide. A niece, Margaux Hemingway, the Holywood
star, also committed suicide.
What places Hemingway among the twenty top American writers is the style he
developed, that set the benchmark for 20th century prose writing in the whole of the
English speaking world. He changed the nature of American writing by reacting against
the elaborate style of 19th century writers and by creating a style, in the words of
literary critic, Henry Louis Gates, of Harvard, ‘in which meaning is established through
dialogue, through action, and silences—a fiction in which nothing crucial—or at least
very little—is stated explicitly.’
When Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize, the citation commented that it was for
his ‘mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the
Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.’ His first
novel, The Sun Also Rises is written in the minimal, lean, muscular, stripped-down
prose for which he became famous and which influenced the writers who came after
him.
Perhaps most famous for his war novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, he began his fiction
writing with short stories, in which he taught himself how to edit his prose, stripping it to
the bone and creating a greater intensity by the omission rather than the inclusion of
detail. The result is to create significant connections and meaning beneath the surface
of a sparse, apparently simple, almost monosyllabic narrative, using the simple
sentences that a child might use. He also employs cinematic techniques such as
cutting quickly from one scene to the next and of splicing one scene into another.
Intentional scene omissions allow the reader to fill in the gap, creating for herself a
three dimensional prose. As a result of that example it became almost impossible for
20th Century fiction writers to revert to the kind of prose that preceded Hemingway’s.
It wasn’t just writers and critics that showed enthusiasm for Hemingway’s works: he
had a huge following among general fiction readers. His universal themes of love,
death, war and loss permeate his writings in the same way that they did that of
Shakespeare and many other great writers, as well as being recurring themes in
American literature. The critic, Susan Beegel, in spite of an objection to what she sees
as an anti-semitic, homophobic thread in his works, sums it up thus: ‘Throughout his
remarkable body of fiction, he tells the truth about human fear, guilt, betrayal, violence,
cruelty, drunkenness, hunger, greed, apathy, ecstasy, tenderness, love and lust.’
The extent of Hemingway’s presence in the popular culture is testament to his
significance as a 20th century literary figure. There are several bars named ‘Harry’s
Bar’ around the world, in recognition of the bar in the novel Across the River and Into
the Trees. There are also many restaurants’ called ‘Hemingway’s.’ A line of furniture
includes ‘the Kilimanjaro bedside table’ and a ‘Catherine’ sofa; a line of
Hemingway safari clothes has been created and there is an expensive Hemingway
fountain pen. His novels have been made into films, sometimes more than once, and
several short stories have been adapted for film and television.
John Steinbeck (1902-1968), born in Salinas, California, came from a family
of moderate means. He worked his way through college at Stanford University but
never graduated. In 1925 he went to New York, where he tried for a few years to
establish himself as a free-lance writer, but he failed and returned to California. After
publishing some novels and short stories, Steinbeck first became widely known
with Tortilla Flat (1935), a series of humorous stories about Monterey paisanos.
Steinbeck’s novels can all be classified as social novels dealing with the economic
problems of rural labour, but there is also a streak of worship of the soil in his books,
which does not always agree with his matter-of-fact sociological approach. After the
rough and earthy humour of Tortilla Flat, he moved on to more serious fiction, often
aggressive in its social criticism, to In Dubious Battle (1936), which deals with the
strikes of the migratory fruit pickers on California plantations. This was followed by Of
Mice and Men (1937), the story of the imbecile giant Lennie, and a series of admirable
short stories collected in the volume The Long Valley(1938). In 1939 he published what
is considered his best work, The Grapes of Wrath, the story of Oklahoma tenant
farmers who, unable to earn a living from the land, moved to California where they
became migratory workers.
Among his later works should be mentioned East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Our
Discontent(1961), and Travels with Charley (1962), a travelogue in which Steinbeck
wrote about his impressions during a three-month tour in a truck that led him through
forty American states. He died in New York City in 1968. John Steinbeck died on
December 20, 1968
LYTERARY ANALISIS.-
Literary analysis is a practice of looking closely at small parts to understand how they
affect the whole, as well as examining and sometimes evaluating a piece of literature. It
focuses on how the author uses characters, plot and structure, setting and a lot of other
techniques to create a meaning. You have to remember that the point of literary
analysis is not about getting to the end of the essay quickly, but rather about the
process that makes you understand the work of art as a whole and appreciate it more.
How to write a Literary Analysis?
Before you start writing, take a few moments to read the task very carefully. Usually,
teachers will point out certain aspects that you have to pay attention to, like specific
characters, figurative speech and a subject of discussion. While reading a text, take a
pen and make small annotations to analyze what you are reading right away. This will
help you to remember everything you think about while reading so you don’t have to
read the text once again. Make bullet points of the most important events, place of
action, characters, antagonist, protagonist, subject, figurative language and system of
images. Also, you can add the number of pages to find your annotations fast.
How to start a Literary Analysis?
Look through your notes once again before you finish working with the material.
Make sure you know what you have to write about. Sometimes, a teacher can ask you to analyze the text in general form, sometimes – make an analysis of the certain aspect of the text.
Decide on the topics that you want to discuss in the analysis.
1. Analyze the narrative and style of writing. If you analyze a scientific essay, you can analyze the author’s style.
2. Discuss the setting. Determine the time and place of the event, the geographical location and other details that are given to the reader for the better understanding of the work.
3. Discuss the author’s writing style. You can refer to the same audience as the author did himself. It will be more reliable.
4. Discuss the characters of the work; the presence of a protagonist and antagonist. Think about whether they are imitating other literary characters, how stereotyped they are and their dynamics along the way.
5. Select several topics or a thesis statement for discussion. Pick some quotes to insert into your analysis.
6. Add counter-arguments. Discuss the controversial aspects of the work.
7. Determine the relationship between the work and the readership.
Formulate a thesis statement. This sentence (or sentences) reveal the main ideas of your essay and answers the question or questions posed in your work. To write the correct thesis, think about these things:
1. What am I trying to prove?
2. What arguments do I have?
3. How to arrange my arguments/evidence?
Literary Analysis Outline.
Introduction:
1. Hook,or attention-catcher. A question, quote or statement that will grab reader’s attention.
2. Include the name of the author, title of the book/text you are analyzing, and any other information that you think is important.
3. Background information. Tell why the prompts are relevant or important.
4. Context. Here you need to write about how the essay prompt relates to the piece of literature you are reading.
5. Claim. This is the answer to the question that is being asked in your essay.
Body Paragraphs (usually at least 2):
1. Topic Sentence. In each paragraph identify reasons why your claim is true.
2. Support it with two or three quotes that will be presented as evidence from the text.
3. Add your own commentary to each quote, which will explain how the text supports your topic sentence.
4. Each paragraph should have a conclusion, which will sum up your argument and explain how it connects back to the thesis.
CONCLUSION:
1. Restate your thesis using different words. It must convey all the main statements you made in the previous parts of your literary analysis, but also touch on the implied provisions of your arguments.
2. Do not repeat what you have already said.
3. Suggest the next step.
4. Draw parallels between genre and context. Why do you think what you’ve read is important today?
GENERAL RECOMMENDATIONS.
Choose a catchy, interesting name. You should not do this in the beginning of your writing. You can wait until your essay is fully written and the argument is formed and clear.
Write in the present tense. Even if the text is written in different time.
Write in the third person. Avoid pronouns “I” or “you”. Although, sometimes teachers
allow students the use of the first or second person. In this case, you can discuss the
characteristics of the text that most impressed you, or the reasons why the actions of
the main characters seem plausible to you or not.
Use literary terms. With their help, your work will look well-prepared, balanced and
thoughtful. Here are some examples: allusion – indirect or superficial references to
famous characters or events; irony – a contradiction in a person, a situation or
circumstances that are not really what they seem; metaphor – a kind of figurative
language that states that a certain thing is something else, something that, in fact, is
not.
Use secondary sources. But keep in mind that they are called secondary for a reason.
This is your work and it should not consist of some other person’s thoughts. Just use
them as a support for your arguments. Some of them you can find here: MLA
International Bibliography, Dictionary of Literary Biography, or ask your teacher.
WHAT NOT TO DO.
Do not summarize. Your work should be an analysis, not a summary of the text.
Do not confuse the words of the characters with the author’s position. These are two
mutually exclusive things – your statements should concern only one of them.
Stay away from plagiarism .Plagiarizing somebody else’s work will be a complete fail of
the task. Use your own head.
Tips
1. Be concise and make sure you have connected all your arguments and everything you
have written with a thesis proposal.
2. Make sure you understand the essay correctly before you start writing the analysis.
Your first priority is to follow the instructions and recommendations of your teacher.
3. Before submitting your essay you’d better carefully and slowly review your work to
make sure that you do not inadvertently use other people’s thoughts. In other words,
check for plagiarism.
4. Stay away from using the same words and statements over and over again. Because it
will seem like you do not have much to say and your argument will seem weak.
Literary Analysis FAQ
o What should my paper’s title be?
It depends on what you are writing about, but it is definitely not supposed to be a title of
the book you are writing about or “English Paper”. It should represent the idea of your
essay to the reader.
o How much plot should I include?
Almost none. Imagine that everyone knows what the book is about but does not know
its meaning.
How many quotations should I use in my paper?
Use one or two quotations in each body paragraph.
INTRODUCTION TO FICTION
Literary fiction is a term used in the book-trade to distinguish fiction that is regarded as
having literary merit from most commercial or "genre" fiction. All the same, a number of
major literary figures have also written genre fiction, for example, John
Banville publishes crime novels as Benjamin Black, and both Doris Lessing and Margaret
Atwood have written science fiction. Furthermore, Nobel laureate André Gide stated
that Georges Simenon, best known as the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret,
was "the most novelistic of novelists in French literature"
Definition
Neal Stephenson has suggested that, while any definition will be simplistic, there is
today a general cultural difference between literary and genre fiction. On the one hand,
literary authors are frequently supported by patronage, with employment at a university
or a similar institution, and with the continuation of such positions determined not by
book sales but by critical acclaim by other established literary authors and critics. On
the other hand, Stephenson suggests, genre fiction writers tend to support themselves
by book sales
However, the distinction is becoming blurred with major writers of literary fiction, like
Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, as well as Margaret Atwood, writing science fiction. Doris
Lessing described science fiction as "some of the best social fiction of our time", and
called Greg Bear, author of Blood Music, "a great writer". Also Georges Simenon, the
creator of the Maigret detective novels, has been described by American composer
and writer Ned Rorem as "one of the five greatest French writers of our century".
Rorem placed Simenon in the company of Proust, Gide, Cocteau, and Sartre.
In an interview, John Updike lamented that "the category of 'literary fiction' has sprung
up recently to torment people like me who just set out to write books, and if anybody
wanted to read them, terrific, the more the merrier. ... I'm a genre writer of a sort. I write
literary fiction, which is like spy fiction or chick lit". Likewise, on The Charlie Rose Show,
Updike argued that this term, when applied to his work, greatly limited him and his
expectations of what might come of his writing, so he does not really like it. He
suggested that all his works are literary, simply because "they are written in words".
CHARACTERISTICS.-Characteristics of literary fiction generally include one or more of
the following:A concern with social commentary, political criticism, or reflection on
the human condition.
A focus on "introspective, in-depth character studies" of "interesting, complex and
developed" characters, whose "inner stories" drive the plot, with detailed motivations to
elicit "emotional involvement" in the reader.
A slower pace than popular fiction. As Terrence Rafferty notes, "literary fiction, by its
nature, allows itself to dawdle, to linger on stray beauties even at the risk of losing its
way".
A concern with the style and complexity of the writing: Saricks describes literary fiction as "elegantly written, lyrical, and ... layered".
Unlike genre fiction plot is not the central concern.
The tone of literary fiction can be darker than genre fiction.
TYPES OF LITERATURE
Literature is a broad term that encompasses almost everything we read, see, and hear.
It helps to be able to break it down into categories, for ease of understanding and
analysis. Here are 5 genres of literature commonly taught in the classroom, with
explanations and examples.
Categorizing Literature
Back in ancient Greece, literature was divided into two main categories:
tragedy and comedy. Nowadays the list of possible types and genres of literature can
seem endless. But it is still possible to narrow down the vast amount of literature
available into a few basic groups.
The five genres of literature students should be familiar with are Poetry, Drama, Prose, Nonfiction, and Media—each of which is explained in more detail below. You’ll
see some overlap between genres; for example prose is a broader term that includes
both drama and non-fiction. At the end of this article we’ll also touch on a couple of
narrower but still important literary categories.
PoetryThis is often considered the oldest form of literature. Before writing was invented, oral
stories were commonly put into some sort of poetic form to make them easier to
remember and recite. Poetry today is usually written down, but is still sometimes
performed.
A lot of people think of rhymes and counting syllables and lines when they think of
poetry, and some poems certainly follow strict forms. But other types of poetry are so
free-form that they lack any rhymes or common patterns. There are even kinds of
poetry that cross genre lines, such as prose poetry. In general, though, a text is a poem
when it has some sort of meter or rhythm, and when it focuses on the way the
syllables, words, and phrases sound when put together. Poems are heavy in imagery
and metaphor, and are often made up of fragments and phrases rather than complete,
grammatically correct sentences. And poetry is nearly always written in stanzas and
lines, creating a unique look on the page.
Poetry as experienced in the classroom is usually one of three types. There are the
shorter, more modern poems, spanning anything from a few lines to a few pages. Often
these are collected in books of poems by a single author or by a variety of writers.
Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven," is one of the most commonly taught poems of this
type. Then there are the classical, formulaic poems of Shakespeare’s time, such as the
blank verse and the sonnet. And finally there are the ancient, epic poems transcribed
from oral stories. These long, complex poems resemble novels, such as Homer’s The
Iliad and The Odyssey.
PROSEOnce you know what poetry is, it’s easy to define prose. Prose can be defined as any
kind of written text that isn’t poetry (which means drama, discussed below, is
technically a type of prose). The most typical varieties of prose are novels and short
stories, while other types include letters, diaries, journals, and non-fiction (also
discussed below). Prose is written in complete sentences and organized in paragraphs.
Instead of focusing on sound, which is what poetry does, prose tends to focus on plot
and characters.
Prose is the type of literature read most often in English classrooms. Any novel or short
story falls into this category, from Jane Eyre to Twilight and from “A Sound of Thunder"
to “The Crucible." Like poetry, prose is broken down into a large number of other sub-
genres. Some of these genres revolve around the structure of the text, such as
novellas, biographies, and memoirs, and others are based on the subject matter, like
romances, fantasies, and mysteries.
DRAMAAny text meant to be performed rather than read can be considered drama (unless it’s
a poem meant to be performed, of course). In layman’s terms, dramas are usually
called plays. When written down the bulk of a drama is dialogue, with periodic stage
directions such as “he looks away angrily." Of all the genres of literature discussed in
this article, drama is the one given the least time in most classrooms. And often
when drama is taught, it’s only read the same way you might read a novel. Since
dramas are meant to be acted out in front of an audience, it’s hard to fully appreciate
them when looking only at pages of text. Students respond best to dramas, and grasp
their mechanics more fully, when exposed to film or theater versions or encouraged to
read aloud or act out scenes during class.
The dramas most commonly taught in classrooms are definitely those written by the
bard. Shakespeare’s plays are challenging, but rewarding when approached with a little
effort and a critical mindset. Popular choices from his repertoire
include Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew, and Romeo and Juliet, among others. Older
Greek plays are also taught fairly often, especially Sophocles’ Antigone. And any good
drama unit should include more modern plays for comparison, such as Arthur
Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
NON-FICTION
Poetry and drama both belong to the broader category of fiction—texts that feature
events and characters that have been made up. Then there is non-fiction, a vast
category that is a type of prose and includes many different sub-genres. Non-fiction
can be creative, such as the personal essay, or factual, such as the scientific paper.
Sometimes the purpose of non-fiction is to tell a story (hence the autobiography), but
most of the time the purpose is to pass on information and educate the reader about
certain facts, ideas, and/or issues.
Some genres of non-fiction include histories, textbooks, travel books, newspapers, self-
help books, and literary criticism. A full list of non-fiction types would be at least as long
as this entire article. But the varieties most often used in the classroom are textbooks,
literary criticism, and essays of various sorts. Most of what students practice writing in
the classroom is the non-fiction essay, from factual to personal to persuasive. And non-
fiction is often used to support and expand students’ understanding of fiction texts—
after reading Hamlet students might read critical articles about the play and historical
information about the time period and/or the life of Shakespeare.
MEDIAThe newest type of literature that has been defined as a distinct genre is media. This
categorization was created to encompass the many new and important kinds of texts in
our society today, such as movies and films, websites, commercials, billboards, and
radio programs. Any work that doesn’t exist primarily as a written text can probably be
considered media, particularly if it relies on recently developed technologies. Media
literature can serve a wide variety of purposes—among other things it can educate,
entertain, advertise, and/or persuade.
More and more educators are coming to recognize the importance of teaching media in
the classroom. Students are likely to be exposed to far more of this type of literature
than anything else throughout their lives, so it makes sense to teach them how to be
critical and active consumers of media. Internet literacy is a growing field, for example,
since the skills required to understand and use online information differ in important
ways from the skills required to analyze printed information. Teaching media literacy is
also a great way for educators to help students become participants in their own
culture, through lessons on creating their own websites or home movies or
commercials.
OTHER TYPES OF LITERATUREThese are far from the only important genres of literature. Here are a few more that are
sometimes used in classrooms:
Oral Literature: The oldest type of literature, and the foundation on which culture was
built. Now most oral texts have been written down, of course, and are usually taught in
the form of epic poems or plays or folk tales.
Folklore/Folk Tales/Fables: A distinction is often made between regular prose and
folklore. Most folk tales were originally oral literature, and are short stories meant to
pass on a particular lesson or moral. They often have a timeless quality, dealing with
common human concerns that are just as relevant to us today, while still being
products of a very specific culture and time period.
Graphic Novels and Comic Books: It used to be that most educators saw comic
books as the lowest form of literature, not suitable or valuable for children. But times
have changed, and many teachers have come to realize that comic books and the
more modern graphic novels are both appealing to kids and are a valid form of
literature in their own right
NARRATIVE ELEMENTS.-A narrative is a literary work that involves the retelling of a story. To develop an
effective narrative essay, paper, poem or book, you need to include several common
narrative elements. These elements include a main theme of the story, characters, a
plot and the setting.
NARRATIVE ELEMENT EXAMPLESA theme is the central premise in the story. A main character's coming of age is a
common theme, for instance. Characters include main characters, subordinate or
supporting characters and minor characters. The plot is the way in which the story
develops and includes goals of the characters, obstacles they face and significant
turning points. The setting includes geographical location and other facets about where
the story occurs, such as in the forest or in a small town.
ENGLISH SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society,
including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and
society's effect on language. It differs from sociology of language, which focuses on the
effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics. It
is historically closely related to linguistic anthropology, and the distinction between the
two fields has been questioned.
It also studies how language varieties differ between groups separated by certain
social variables (e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc.)
and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals
in social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to
place, language usage also varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that
sociolinguistics studies.
The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and
Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also by Louis Gauchat in Switzerland in the early
1900s, but none received much attention in the West until much later. The study of the
social motivation of language change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave
model of the late 19th century. The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics was
by Thomas Callan Hodson in the title of his 1939 article "Sociolinguistics in India"
published in Man in India. Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the 1960s and
was pioneered by linguists such as William Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the
UK. In the 1960s, William Stewart[4] and Heinz Kloss introduced the basic concepts for
the sociolinguistic theory of pluricentric languages, which describes how standard
language varieties differ between nations
Sociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between language and society.
Sociolinguistics is concerned with how language use interacts with, or is affected by,
social factors such as gender, ethnicity, age or social class, for instance. As Coulmas
defines, it is the study of choice and “the principal task of Sociolinguistics is to uncover,
describe and interpret the socially motivated” choices an individual makes.
Sociolinguists are interested in how we speak differently in varying social contexts, and
how we may also use specific functions of language to convey social meaning or
aspects of our identity. Sociolinguistics teaches us about real-life attitudes and social
situations.
LANGUAJE VARIATION AND CHANGE.-
Language Variation
Everyone speaks at least one language, and probably most people in the world speak
more than one. Even Americans, most of whom speak only English, usually know more
than one dialect. Certainly no one talks exactly the same way at all times: You are
unlikely to speak to your boss in the style (or vocabulary) that you'd use in talking to the
idiot who just rammed your car from behind. All dialects start with the same system,
and their partly independent histories leave different parts of the parent system intact.
This gives rise to some of the most persistent myths about language, such as the claim
that the people of Appalachia speak pure Elizabethan English. Non-Appalachians
notice features of Shakespeare's English that have been preserved in Appalachia but
lost in (for instance) Standard English, but only Appalachian fans of Shakespeare
would be likely to notice the features of Shakespeare's English that have been
preserved in Standard English but lost in the Appalachian dialect.
Types of Language Change
What kinds of language change are there? First, there's vocabulary change. Slang
terms, in particular, come and go every few years. In a 1990 Beetle Bailey cartoon, for
instance, Sarge chews Beetle out with a string of symbols ending in #!!, and Beetle
laughs, "#?? Nobody says # anymore!" Sarge, deflated, sighs, "Gee, I always thought #
was all-time classic cussing." Sarge is embarrassed because with a very few
exceptions—notably the genuinely classic four-letter English words, at least one of
which has a pedigree that includes a Latin obscenity written on the walls of ancient
Pompeii—using last year's slang spells social disaster. Meanings of words change, too.
English and German both inherited a word that refers to a person of high rank in
English ('knight') but to a servant or even a slave in German ('Knecht'). (Thanks to
evidence from other Germanic languages, we know that the German meaning is closer
to the original.)
Grammatical constructions also change. A passage in the Old English Lord's Prayer
reads, in literal translation, 'not lead thou us into temptation', in sharp contrast to
Modern English 'don't lead us into temptation'. Nowadays, 'not' must follow an auxiliary
verb 'do' (often contracted to 'don't'), there is no pronoun subject in the sentence, and if
there were one it would be 'you'--'thou' has entirely disappeared from the modern
language.
Last but not least, sounds change. Everyone realizes this, in a way, when dialect
variation causes communication breakdown. If you go into a Chicago store and ask for
'sacks' in an East Coast accent you may get socks instead, and Bostonians sometimes
have trouble understanding Alabamans even when both are using Standard English
grammar. People are usually surprised, though, to discover that sound change is highly
regular: if a sound 'x' changes to a sound 'y' in one word, 'x' will change to 'y' in
comparable contexts in every word it appears in. As a result, the form of a word often
reveals part of its history. Consider French 'coup' and English 'coup': They look alike,
sound alike, and have similar meanings, but they can't both have been inherited
independently from the same Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word, because the sound [k]
doesn't come from the same PIE source in French and English. PIE (and, later, Latin)
[k] did give rise to French [k], but original PIE [k] ended up as [h] in English. So there
are pairs of words inherited from PIE in which French [k] corresponds to English [h],
e.g. French 'coeur' and English 'heart', or French 'canevas' and English 'hemp'; but the
reason the English words 'coup' and 'canvas' look like their French counterparts is that
they were borrowed into English from French.
Change and Language Values
Language change inevitably leads to variation, and variation within a speech
community often leads to social valuation of particular features as 'good' or 'bad'.
'Good' variants are typically believed to be characterized by logical superiority or
venerability, or both; 'bad' variants must then be illogical and/or recent inventions by
the vulgar.
But neither logic nor great age plays a significant role in the labeling of variants.
Consider 'ain't', which may be the English word most despised by schoolteachers and
pundits. Far from being illogical or recent, 'ain't' is a legitimate phonological descendant
of 'amn't', which was the original contraction of 'am not'. It isn't clear how 'ain't' fell into
disrepute, but once there, it left an awkward gap in the system of negative contractions:
We have "You're going, aren't you?", "She's going, isn't she?", and so on, but surely no
real person actually says "I'm going, am I not?". Instead, people say "I'm going, aren't
I?", in part because they have been taught to avoid 'ain't' like the plague; and here logic
shudders, because while "You are going, She is going," etc., are fine, "I are going" is
impossible for native speakers of English. The point of this example is not to urge
rehabilitation of ain't'—legislating language change is generally a losing proposition—
but to illustrate the linguistically arbitrary nature of social valuation of the results of
language change
LANGUAJE VARIATIES.-
In sociolinguistics, language variety—also called lect—is a general term for any
distinctive form of a language or linguistic expression. Linguists commonly
use language variety (or simply variety) as a cover term for any of the overlapping
subcategories of a language, including dialect, register, jargon, and idiolect.
Background
To understand the meaning of language varieties, it's important to consider how lects
differ from standard English. Even what constitutes standard English is a topic of hot
debate among linguists.
Standard English is a controversial term for a form of the English language that is
written and spoken by educated users. For some linguists, standard English is a
synonym for good or correct English usage. Others use the term to refer to a specific
geographical dialect of English or a dialect favored by the most powerful and
prestigious social group.
Varieties of language develop for a number of reasons: differences can come about for
geographical reasons; people who live in different geographic areas often develop
distinct dialects—variations of standard English. Those who belong to a specific group,
often academic or professional, tend to adopt jargon that is known to and understood
by only members of that select group. Even individuals develop idiolects, their own
specific ways of speaking.
Dialect
The word dialect—which contains "lect" within the term—derives from the Greek
words dia- meaning “across, between" and legein "speak." A dialect is a regional or
social variety of a language distinguished by pronunciation, grammar,
and/or vocabulary.
The term dialect is often used to characterize a way of speaking that differs from
the standard variety of the language. Sarah Thomason of the Linguistic Society of
America notes:
"All dialects start with the same system, and their partly independent histories leave
different parts of the parent system intact. This gives rise to some of the most
persistent myths about language, such as the claim that the people of Appalachia
speak pure Elizabethan English."
Certain dialects have gained negative connotations in the U.S. as well as in other
countries. Indeed, the term dialect prejudice refers to discrimination based on a
person's dialect or way of speaking. Dialect prejudice is a type of linguicism—
discrimination based on dialect. In their article "Applied Social Dialectology," published
in "Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and
Society," Carolyn Temple and Donna Christian observe:
"...dialect prejudice is endemic in public life, widely tolerated, and institutionalized in
social enterprises that affect almost everyone, such as education and the media. There
is limited knowledge about and little regard for linguistic study showing that all varieties
of a language display systematicity and that the elevated social position of standard
varieties has no scientific linguistic basis."
REGISTER
Register is defined as the way a speaker uses language differently in different
circumstances. Think about the words you choose, your tone of voice, even your body
language.
You probably behave very differently chatting with a friend than you would at a formal
dinner party or during a job interview. These variations in formality, also called stylistic
variation, are known as registers in linguistics.
They are determined by such factors as social occasion, context, purpose,
and audience. Registers are marked by a variety of specialized vocabulary and turns of
phrases, colloquialisms, the use of jargon, and a difference in intonation and pace.
Registers are used in all forms of communication, including written, spoken, and
signed. Depending on grammar, syntax, and tone, the register may be extremely rigid
or very intimate. You don't even need to use an actual word to communicate
effectively. A huff of exasperation during a debate or a grin while signing "hello" speaks
volumes.
JARGON
Jargon refers to the specialized language of a professional or occupational group. Such
language is often meaningless to outsiders. American poet David Lehman has
described jargon as "the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly
fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated
directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false."
In other words, jargon is a faux method of creating a sort of dialect that only those on
this inside group can understand. Jargon has social implications similar to
dialect prejudice but in reverse: It is a way of making those who understand this
particular variety of language more erudite and learned; those who are members of the
group that understands the particular jargon are considered smart, while those on the
outside are simply not bright enough to comprehend this kind of language.
Types of Lects
In addition to the distinctions discussed previously, different types of lects also echo the
types of language varieties:
Regional dialect: A variety spoken in a particular region.
Sociolect: Also known as a social dialect, a variety of language (or register)
used by a socioeconomic class, a profession, an age group, or any other social
group.
Ethnolect: A lect spoken by a specific ethnic group. For example, Ebonics, the
vernacular spoken by some African-Americans, is a type of ethnolect, notes a
language-translation firm.
Idiolect: According to e2f, the language or languages spoken by each
individual. For example, if you are multilingual and can speak in different
registers and styles, your idiolect comprises several languages, each with
multiple registers and styles.
In the end, language varieties come down to judgments, often "illogical," that are,
according to Edward Finegan in "Language: Its Structure and Use":
".imported from outside the realm of language and represent attitudes to particular
varieties or to forms of expression within particular varieties."
The language varieties, or lects, that people speak often serve as the basis for
judgment, and even exclusion, from certain social groups, professions, and business
organizations. As you study language varieties, keep in mind that they are often based
on judgments one group is making in regard
THE STORY OF OUR LANGUAJE
English is a West Germanic language that originated from Anglo-Frisian dialects
brought to Britain in the mid 5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon settlers from what
is now northwest Germany, west Denmark and the Netherlands, displacing the Celtic
languages that previously predominated.
The Old English of the Anglo-Saxon era developed into Middle English, which was
spoken from the Norman Conquestera to the late 15th century. A significant influence
on the shaping of Middle English came from contact with the North Germanic
languages spoken by the Scandinavians who conquered and colonized parts of Britain
during the 8th and 9th centuries; this contact led to much lexical borrowing and
grammatical simplification. Another important influence came from the conquering
Normans, who spoke a Romance langue d'oïl called Old Norman, which in Britain
developed into Anglo-Norman. Many Norman and French loanwords entered the
language in this period, especially in vocabulary related to the church, the court system
and the government. The system of orthography that was established during the Middle
English period is largely still in use today – later changes in pronunciation, however,
combined with the adoption of various foreign spellings, mean that the spelling of
modern English words appears highly irregular.
Early Modern English – the language used by Shakespeare – is dated from around
1500. It incorporated many Renaissance-era loans from Latin and Ancient Greek, as
well as borrowings from other European languages, including
French, German and Dutch. Significant pronunciation changes in this period included
the ongoing Great Vowel Shift, which affected the qualities of most long
vowels. Modern English proper, similar in most respects to that spoken today, was in
place by the late 17th century. The English language came to be exported to other
parts of the world through British colonisation, and is now the dominant language in
Britain and Ireland, the United States and Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many
smaller former colonies, as well as being widely spoken in India, parts of Africa, and
elsewhere. Partially due to United States influence, English gradually took on the status
of a global lingua franca in the second half of the 20th century. This is especially true in
Europe, where English has largely taken over the former roles of French and (much
earlier) Latin as a common language used to conduct business and diplomacy, share
scientific and technological information, and otherwise communicate across national
boundaries. The efforts of English-speaking Christian missionaries have resulted in
English becoming a second language for many other groups.
Old English consisted of a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of
the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms established in different parts of Britain. The Late West
Saxon dialect eventually became dominant; however, a greater input to Middle English
came from the Anglian dialects. Global variation among different English dialects
and accents remains significant today. Scots, a form of English traditionally spoken in
parts of Scotland and the north of Ireland, is sometimes treated as a separate
language.
HOW NEW WORDS ARE ADDED TO OUR LANGUAJE
• Completely new words?• Compounding• Blends• Old words, new uses• Abbreviations and acronyms• Affixation• Borrowing• Survival of the fittest• In the next issue
Language is a dynamic phenomenon. Although English has a basic core of words
which are fundamental to sentence construction and have remained consistent over
centuries, there are also a great number of words which both enter and leave the
language as the years go by, a direct reflection of the preoccupations of society in any
particular era. Some new words are ephemeral, tied to cultural or technical concepts
which fade in significance. Others stay the course, usually because they represent
concepts which have become permanent features of society.
But just where do all these new words that pass through or infiltrate the English
language come from? In this article we take a closer look at the processes by which
new words are formed, showing that new words and expressions are far more about
reinvention than actual creation.
COMPLETELY NEW WORDS
Surprisingly perhaps, very few new words in the English language are actually
completely 'new'. In fact, completely new words account for less than 1% of all English
neologisms.
Those completely new words which do appear are often based on proper nouns. One
of the most famous historical examples is the noun sandwich, taken from the name of
the 18th-century Earl of Sandwich (who devised a convenient way of eating bread and
meat which would allow him to continue sitting at a gaming table!). Brand names in
particular, have led to the formation of completely new words, and continue to do so.
The verb/noun hoover, used as a generic term for (the action of using) an electric
vacuum cleaner, was based on the name of the 19th-century American
industrialist William Henry Hoover. With increased evidence of forms
like dysoning and dysoned following the same model, lexicographers today are
debating formal recognition of a verb/noun dyson, based on the famous vacuum
cleaner designed by the 20th-century British designer James Dyson. In the online
world, a new verb google, based on the trademarked name of the popular Internet
search engine, is now used as a generic reference to the action of 'doing a search on
the Internet'.
Completely new words like dyson and google are, however, more unusual. The vast
majority of new words and expressions in English usually include at least one lexical
component which is already familiar to us. If we look carefully at the new words that
have entered the English language during the last few decades, we can identify several
linguistic processes which are regularly involved in the creation of new words and
expressions.
COMPOUNDING
New words and phrases emerge as a direct response to the need to refer to new
concepts, and one of the most straightforward ways of doing this is to simply combine
existing words, which together make a sensible representation of a new idea. Many
neologisms are therefore compound nouns. For example, it's strange to think that in
the 1970s, the concept of a phone which could be carried or used anywhere without
the need for wires or cables was an amazing prospect, but by the late 80s the
word mobile phone was part of everyday language, even if not everybody could afford
one! By the 1990s, we weren't just using mobile phones to communicate orally, but
also to send text messages. New compound nouns are not always confined to the
domain of new technology. For instance, in the noughties, those searching for romance
might consider speed-dating, someone who was struggling to remember something
might confess to having had a senior moment, and those of us with a sweet tooth might
be worried about the prospect of a fat tax. Creative combinations of words like these
stick when they fill lexical gaps for new concepts, spread into popular usage, and
thereby gradually push their way into the dictionary.
New compound nouns are not always open compounds. Examples of recently coined
solid compounds include furkid (a pet which is a substitute child) and health span (the
period of life during which a person is healthy). New compounds are however often
based on existing patterns of structure and meaning. Health span, for instance, follows
the model of its earlier counterpart lifespan. In the latter part of the 20th century, a face-
lift became a fashionable operation in cosmetic surgery designed to remove the effects
of facial aging. In the 21st century, people can have a more complete makeover in the
form of a body lift, and those concerned about how they sound rather than how they
look can consider a voice lift. In the 1980s there was a revolution in the market for fast
food. In the noughties, by contrast, amid growing concern about dietary health and a
stressful pace of life, slow food is taking a stand. Like established compounds, new
compounds sometimes also occur in productive patterns, so for instance as well
as spinach cinema, a term coined in the nineties to refer to films that are not very
exciting but informative or educational (i.e.: a play on the idea of spinach being 'good
for you'), we also now have spinach television and spinach books.
BLENDS
As well as combinations of existing words to form new compounds, the combination
of parts of existing words is another common process in the formation of neologisms.
This phenomenon, often referred to by linguists as blending, is an established word
formation process which has been in evidence in English throughout the centuries. For
instance the word brunch, referring to a large mid-morning meal, is a combination of
parts of the words breakfast and lunch which was coined in the late 19th century. In
2003, the same word formation process gave birth to a term which was voted most
useful new word of the year by the American Dialect Society: flexitarian, a combination
of the words flexible and vegetarian used to refer to a vegetarian who occasionally eats
meat.
Though blending has been evident over many decades, it has been particularly
prominent as a source of neologisms over the last few years, with a growing tendency
towards cannibalising chunks of existing words with increasing ingenuity and
inventiveness. There are no regular strategies for blending, the only consistent criterion
is that at least one of the words involved in the fusion has something chopped off it. In
practice, the formation of blends is moulded by such factors as ease of pronunciation
and catchiness. Among the many recent examples are movieoke (a blend
of movie and karaoke) referring to a karaoke-style activity involving acting in front of a
movie screen, nouse (a blend of nose and mouse), a computer mouse which is
controlled by the nose, edutainment (a blend of educational and entertainment), used
to refer to forms of entertainment i.e.: TV programmes, games software, which are
educational, globesity (a blend of global and obesity) describing the worldwide
epidemic of obesity, and freegan (a blend of free and vegan) referring to a person who
consumes food that has been thrown away.
OLD WORDS, NEW USES
Of course even easier than combining or blending existing words is simply to find new
ways of using words that already exist. The widespread use of computers and the
Internet has been a major breeding ground for this process, with new senses for words
such as window, mouse, bug, virus, surf, net and web now being part of everyday
English. Some words can continue to accumulate new senses over a long period of
time, especially if their meaning particularly lends itself to figurative extension. For
instance, the word zombie started life in the late 19th century as a description of a dead
person revived by voodoo witchcraft. By the 1940s, the word was being used with its
familiar sense of a lifeless, apathetic person, (the idea being that such an individual
resembled a revived corpse). Since the advent of the World Wide Web, the same word
has appeared as a reference to an insecure web server, an out-of-date website, and
more recently a PC which has unwittingly been affected by a virus causing it to send
out large amounts of spam. By analogy with the original sense (the actions of a zombie
were said to be under the control of the person who had performed the resurrection)
this recent use of zombie conveys the idea of control of someone else's computer.
Sometimes the new use of the word involves not just a change in meaning but a shift in
word class, a process technically referred to as conversion. An obvious example is the
word text, which quite clearly started its life in English as a noun but now occurs as a
verb in relation to the sending of text messages, e.g.: I've texted him but got no
reply. Conversions from verb to noun sometimes also occur. A prominent example in
2003 was the verb embed, which in the context of the Gulf War acquired a topical
sense referring to the placing of journalists in military units. The hundreds of journalists,
reporters and photographers involved were subsequently described as embeds,
journalists who join military forces in a conflict and report from the front line. Adjectives
too, can be adopted into a new word class. A recent example is vague, which, largely
due to the cult TV programme 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer', has now morphed into the
phrasal verb vague up, meaning 'to make something less clear or detailed', as
in I vagued up certain parts of the story.
Using an existing word to describe a new concept can sometimes be tied up with
euphemism. Unpleasant concepts can often seem more palatable if they are wrapped
up in a familiar word. An example from 2005 was the word rendition, which, a long way
from its familiar sense relating to performance of music or drama, came to represent
the practice of extradition of suspected terrorists, also converting to a related verb
to rendition.
ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
Abbreviations are another area which over the years has been a rich source of new
lexical items. Often abbreviations enter the dictionary as new 'words' in their own right,
words which we understand and associate with particular concepts without necessarily
knowing what the initial letters represent. For instance, we all now know what a DVD is,
but would the average man on the street definitely be able to tell you that this stands
for digital videodisc? Gadget lovers may be interested in mobile phones which are
equipped withWAP, but would they necessarily know that this is short
for wireless application protocol? The point is that they don't need to know, because
such abbreviations function perfectly well on their own as representations of particular
concepts. New abbreviations are often associated with new technology and devices, as
illustrated by recent examples such as IM (instant messaging)
and PSP (playstation portable).
This is not their only domain however. For instance, WMD has frequently occurred
over the last couple of years in place of the full term Weapons of Mass Destruction,
and DWY, standing for driving while yakking, refers to the now illegal practice of driving
while talking on a mobile phone.
Those abbreviations which really thrive as new words are often the ones which roll off
the tongue easily, or in other words, function as acronyms, abbreviations consisting of
letters that combine as a plausible sequence of phonemes to form a word. One area
that has been a particularly fruitful source of acronyms over the last few decades is
popular demographics, from 1980s DINKY (young, upwardly mobile professionals,
standing for double income no kids yet) through to noughties SKI-er's (older folks who
enjoy their retirement by spending their savings, standing for spend
the kids' inheritance).
Acronyms are even more likely than other abbreviations to be understood as
meaningful lexical units in their own right, so much so that they are frequently
decapitalised. Take the word tardis/TARDIS for example, which started life in the cult
series 'Dr Who' as the name of a time-travel machine (an acronym
of Time and Relative Dimensions in Space) and over the last three decades has
entered mainstream use in the UK as a description of an 'unexpectedly large space'.
Some more recent examples are asbo, (from ASBO: anti-social behaviour order), the
civil order introduced by the British government in 1999, and bogof,
(from BOGOF: buy one get one free), regularly seen in the context of supermarket
shopping. Sometimes acronyms combine with inflectional processes to produce other
new verbs, nouns and adjectives. A recent example is the acronym RIF, standing
for reduction inforce and used as a euphemism for termination of employment (usually
due to the financial concerns of the employer). RIF now occurs as a transitive verb as
in 365 workers were RIFed …, and also as a participle adjective as
in RIFed employees.
The 21st century has witnessed an explosion of abbreviated forms in English due to
the enormous influence of chat rooms, interactive message boards, text messaging,
and e-mail, underlying all of which is the need to communicate effectively but
economically. These forms of communication often try to simulate real time
conversation, so speed and ease of typing is of the essence. There may be other
considerations too, such as the fact that providers of mobile phone networks usually
restrict users to about 160 characters per message. These factors make abbreviated
forms an integral part of electronic communication, but often these forms creep into
general use. For instance, informal abbreviations such as LOL (lots of love), TTFN ('ta
ta' for now), FYI (for your information) and BTW (by the way) are now generally
understood in all forms of written communication. In the business world, abbreviations
such as B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) are now
universally recognised.
AFFIXATION
We've already shown that new words are often formed by cannibalising existing words
in inventive ways. A related approach is to find new ways of using recognised affixes,
creatively attaching them to established words as a means of expressing a new idea. A
recent example is use of the prefix re- in the new verb regift, which refers to the action
of giving something as a gift that you yourself originally received as a gift. Re- of course
means 'again', as occurring in verbs such as rewrite or reinvent. The prefix de- is often
used to mean 'opposite' or 'reverse'. The new noun deshopper therefore refers to the
opposite of a shopper, describing a person who buys something, uses it, but then
returns it to the shop for a full refund. Established suffixes too, are often used
creatively. For instance the suffix -ology refers to the scientific study of a particular
subject. In the late 90s the term trolleyology was coined by American anthropologists to
refer to the study of how the contents of a person's shopping trolley show something
about that person's behavior or personality.
Occasionally, the processes of affixation and blending overlap. Sometimes a
component of a word used in a blend starts to behave productively, applying itself to
other words and looking like a new kind of productive affix. For example, earlier in this
article we talked about the new blend edutainment, a combination of the
words educational and entertainment used to describe TV programmes and games
software that are educational. In fact, the suffix -tainment has recently appeared in a
whole range of coinages, including irritainment, referring to broadcasting which is
annoying but at the same time rather compulsive, advertainment, which is advertising
that entertains, and militainment, referring to news coverage of war. Similarly the
prefix franken-, which started life in the term frankenfood (a blend
of Frankenstein and food used to refer to genetically modified products), has become
associated with the idea of being freakish and unnatural, subsequently appearing in
words such as frankenfruit, frankenpet and even, appropriately enough, frankenword, a
tongue in cheek expression coined in the mid-nineties as it was observed that a
growing number of neologisms were being formed from creative combination of
existing words.
BORROWING
Of course more straightforward than any of the processes outlined above is simply to
grab words from other languages, process linguists refer to as borrowing. Borrowing
has been a feature of English vocabulary development for centuries. French, Latin and
Greek are obvious influences, but also Asian languages such as Hindi, which for
instance in the 18th century gave us shampoo (from the Hindi word
c mpo, meaning 'massage') and is a popular influence in the 21st century. For
example, when the Essex-born celebrity chef Jamie Oliver uses the catchy
expression pukka to describe one of his culinary creations, he is in fact speaking Hindi.
Examples of popular loanwords in the 21st century include Sudoku, referring to the
famous number puzzle (from the Japanese words su, "number"
and doku "single"), latte, an espresso coffee with frothy steamed milk (from the Italian
word for milk), Ostalgie, nostalgia for former East Germany (from the German blend
of Ost, "East" and Nostalgie, "nostalgia"), chuddies, slang for underpants (from
Hindi), wiki, a website which can be modified by its users (from Hawaiian wiki wiki,
"quick") and tsunami, a huge destructive wave (from Japanese tsu, "harbour"
and nami, "waves").
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
Thousands of new words are coined every year, the majority of which will fall into the
patterns of word formation which we have outlined above. There are occasional wild
cards, such as the recent term bling-bling (which refers to large pieces of expensive,
eye-catching jewellery, and is thought to have originated from the Jamaican slang for
the imaginary "sound" in cartoons when light reflects off a diamond), but the majority of
new words are based on creative manipulation of the lexical building blocks already
present in English.
The key to survival for all these new words is usage. With the advent of the World Wide
Web, language has a bigger platform for usage and propagation than ever before.
21st-century English vocabulary therefore has the potential to expand at a faster rate
than in previous generations. Real longevity however is not just based on usage -
words stay in our language only if they represent concepts which continue to exist over
the passage of time. It remains to be seen whether a hundred years on people will
still google for information, go speed-dating, become flexitarians, get RIFed, regift their
unwanted presents, and spend time doing a sudoku.
BUILDING YOUR VOCABULARY
1. Read, read, and read. The more you read -- especially novels and literary works,
but also magazines and newspapers -- the more words you'll be exposed to. As you
read and uncover new words, use a combination of attempting to derive meaning from
the context of the sentence as well as from looking up the definition in a dictionary.
2. Keep a dictionary and thesaurus handy. Use whatever versions you prefer -- in
print, software, or online. When you uncover a new word, look it up in the dictionary to
get both its pronunciation and its meaning(s). Next, go to the thesaurus and find similar
words and phrases -- and their opposites (synonyms and antonyms, respectively) --
and learn the nuances among the words.
3. Use a journal. It's a good idea to keep a running list of the new words you discover
so that you can refer back to the list and slowly build them into your everyday
vocabulary. Plus, keeping a journal of all your new words can provide positive
reinforcement for learning even more words -- especially when you can see how many
new words you've already learned.
4. Learn a word a day. Using a word-a-day calendar or Website -- or developing your
own list of words to learn -- is a great technique many people use to learn new words.
This approach may be too rigid for some, so even if you do use this method, don't feel
you must learn a new word every day. (Find some word-a-day Websites at the end of
this article.)
5. Go back to your roots. One of the most powerful tools for learning new words --
and for deciphering the meaning of other new words -- is studying Latin and Greek
roots. Latin and Greek elements (prefixes, roots, and suffixes) are a significant part of
the English language and a great tool for learning new words. (Follow these links for
the sections of this site that provide English Vocabulary Derived from Latin and English
Vocabulary Derived from Greek.)
6. Play some games. Word games that challenge you and help you discover new
meanings and new words are a great and fun tool in your quest for expanding your
vocabulary. Examples include crossword puzzles, anagrams, word jumble, Scrabble,
and Boggle. (Find some word-game Websites at the end of this article.)
7. Engage in conversations. Simply talking with other people can help you learn
discover new words. As with reading, once you hear a new word, remember to jot it
down so that you can study it later -- and then slowly add the new word to your
vocabulary.
IMPORTANT ADD
Read the work ANIMAL FARM from JAMES ORWELL