Library: Language, Literature, and Linguistic

This study investigates the problems translators encounter when rendering features of Dickens's style in A Tale of Two Cities into Arabic. Examples of these features are singled out and analyzed. Then, they are compared with their counterparts in published translations of the novel in Arabic. The comparisons depend on back translation to give non-readers of Arabic a clear idea about the similarities and differences between the source text and target one(s). The features under focus are sound effects, figurative language, humor, repetition, and the French element. The discussion dedicated to o...

This dissertation attempts to investigate some interactional features in the conversation of women and men taking into account verbosity, turn-taking, use of standard forms, directness and assertiveness. To do so, an ethnographic method of natural conversation video-recording was utilized within a group of 2 female and 2 male Brazilian Portuguese speakers and 2 females and 2 males in a group of English speakers. This study suggests that the amount of talk uttered by women and men when they are in informal occasions may not vary so drastically. Accordingly, this investigation also shows that fe...

Much of the discussion about Peake's Titus Books has been about how to place them in the lexicon of English literature. I am proposing that these books should be read as works of postmodern existentialism. Both postmodern theory and existential theory are interested in the same issues, such as the loss of grand narratives, the rejection of totalizing world views, the subjectivity of truth, the nature of one's existence, and the search for meaning in an increasingly incomprehensible world. Societal issues, such as political upheaval, the growth of major cities, war, and advances in science and...

The turn of the nineteenth century saw a change in the perception of woman's nature. Trying to salvage a female self-identity from the distorted version of the preceding Victorian era, New Woman novelists attempted to tease out of a morass of social dictates of femininity a genuine female nature. In their novels they wrote New Woman heroines who, like themselves, faced the conundrum of discerning the truth from the fallacy of what society proposed as their identity and social role. This awareness for neither novelists nor heroines was the complete solution to their social problem. The Ne...

Language choice has become a common phenomenon in interracial encounters in which speakers are always faced with the challenge of choosing an appropriate language in various domains of communication. In multilingual and multiracial societies, language choice can sometimes be crucial because of its social, political, and economic impact on the speakers. Even in the smallest unit of a society which is the family, language choice plays an important role particularly in interactions between husbands and wives who come from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. It is therefore the objectiv...

The thesis explores the syntactic and semantic dimensions of four linguistic elements that appear in Modern Greek arguably as quantifiers and modifiers, i.e., in the form of Quantificational Modifiers (QMods) olos 'all, whole, overall' and its extension olikos 'total', merikos 'some, a few, partial', ligos 'some, few, little, insignificant' and polis 'many, great, considerable'. Such QMods are analyzed as 'measure' quantifiers of scalar semantics that appear in a syntactic position common to adjectival modifiers. The thesis explores specific sets of reading and their interpretations. Such a ph...

This thesis examines the reception of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War in US foreign policy debates since the end of the Cold War. It begins with a background survey of Thucydides' use in foreign policy debates up to and during the Cold War, primarily by the realist school of international relations, and the comparisons which were drawn between the Cold War and the Peloponnesian War. After the Cold War, these comparisons became less relevant to current debates, and critics of realism began to use Thucydides to support their own theories. The emphasis is on how the three key movemen...

Since the turn of the century the use of computer-mediated-communication (CMC) has become more widespread in educational contexts and weblogs (blogs), one of the more popular forms of CMC (Bloch, 2007), have been the focus of numerous studies. However, whilst these studies have listed the potential benefits of blog use for language learners, few studies have offered any practical tips for educators who wish to implement the use of writing blogs in the EFL classroom. Moreover, the vast majority of studies have focused on the use of blogs with relatively high-level learners in academic contexts....

In the past twenty years or so, assessment in education has become increasingly viewed as a means of guiding and improving student learning, rather than simply measuring it. The assessment for learning (AfL) movement, arising primarily from mainstream primary and secondary education in the UK, strongly advocates this formative, learning-centered view of assessment. At the level of classroom practice, AfL is comprised of a number of key procedures including: the use of effective feedback, self-and peer assessment, questioning and classroom dialogue, and the formative use of summative tests. Bas...

This work seeks to analyze the role that literature has played within the educational sphere throughout the past and recent years, the conflicts derived from the academic views, and how literature is an essential tool for the comprehensive study of a second language, as an integral part of the educational process. The principal aim of the model suggested in this thesis is the introduction of non-traditional approaches to the integration of literary texts, as a cross-curricular interdisciplinary resource for the learning of English as a second language. The literature program here proposed enha...