Linguistics Essays

Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is a lyric poem, couched entirely in the form of an argument, in which the male speaker tries to persuade his reluctant mistress to accept his proposal of physical love. This essay will demonstrate that historical-biographical is a valid approach to a critical analysis …

The seminal work on discourse analysis was carried out in classrooms, and it is from this that an understanding of structure of the exchanges that make up spoken discourse is drawn. Sinclair and Couithaerd (1975) identified three levels of discourse: the exchange, a turn-taking interactional sequence; the move, or contribution …

1. Introduction In this paper I will discuss communicative language teaching and its aim: communicative competence. I will also reflect on the aspects of communicative competence, criteria for its assessment and, finally, some ways communicative competence can be developed through classroom interaction. 2. Communicative competence Communicative competence is the ability …

This poem, “Reindeer and Engine” is by Josephine Jacobsen. It is set in a ‘Finnish forest track’ where a reindeer is being chassed by a train. It flees from the light of the train as it ‘runs’ forward trying to escape. This is a narrative poem because it tells a …

Ivan Ilych’s death was like Gregor’s Metamorphosis; in that, they were both powerful introductions to the stories. In both stories the character’s Gregor and Ivan Ilych are introduced in a state in which it wouldn’t be possible to know their character. Therefore the novellas both look back to the past …

While reading The Poisonwood Bible, I was fascinated by Kingsolver’s extensive use of Lingala, the language used in the region of the Congo where the Price family lives. Lingala is a language in which each word has several meanings, and Kingsolver has the characters in the story use language to …

Nowadays, when the market of education at technology is full of suggestions how to teach English, a very actual issue has arisen: “what methods of teaching do you use?” A thoughtful student or a businessman often stops in front of bookshelves, full of linguistic literature or books on media and …

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) Lay me on an anvil, O God Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. Let me pry loose old walls. Let me lift and loosen old foundations Lay me on an anvil, Oh God. Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike. Drive me into …

When linguists claim that their discipline is the scientific study of language, they have in mind certain principles which distinguish between a scientific and a non-scientific study of language. First, linguistics is objective, that is, it considers all languages to be equal. For a linguist, there are no ‘primitive’, ‘pure’, …

Annotation’s made from David Abram Animism and the Alphabet In Animism and the Alphabet, David Abram, founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics, goes in depth about how writing and the alphabet developed over the years by various groups of people. After annotating the text, I was …