English Grammar

Goodbye!

2009-08-15T17:21:00.006+02:00

Dear friends, as I announced in my previous entry, I will discontinue the three blogs I dedicated to my university courses to concentrate on: My English Journal: http://ejvb-myjournal.blogspot.com/ starting this week.

You are welcome to my new blog. of course. I will keep on uploading compositions and comments on aspects of my daily teaching.

English Grammar.... On a Theme that is timeless!

Thank you, YouTube robot, for recommending me this very nice video by dennisfisher59 today.

A repeated bad experience once more at the end of the academic year 2008-09

2009-06-29T22:02:00.005+02:00

Today's strip.

Manager has got the spare part Easy Rider needs for tonight's All Stars' Special and Chocolate Pie on the Beach Competition. First rate stuff, from Old Crazy Prof. Pot, who will raise hell with his students first and then will get depressed, sullen and resented, as usual. Manager wants five more, Easy Rider bargains for two more and some smoke.

How many victims of petty crime, harassment, molestation, mobbing, blackmail and related concepts at University? In what way can these “problems” affect life on campus.

This year, like last year, like on a number of other occasions in the recent past my garage has been burglarized and somebody has stolen some of the most important and expensive pieces from my scooter. During these years I have spent almost the same amount of money to repair my motorbike as its original price. These actions usually take place when there is a big "scooter and beer" party or event –end of school and university, beginning of summer and so on- in the city and, therefore, trading stolen parts can be highly profitable for those in the business. I must confess that these repeated assaults against my property affect me deeply in different ways. I feel humiliated and threatened.I must be alert. If these thieves know about my property and visit my scooter periodically this means that they know me about me and my hereabouts and they can try some other criminal course of action if profitable or they can "sell the information" about me to other gangs. Monipodio, Divinas Palabras, Oliver Twist, Viridiana are some of the references I keep in mind when I think of this sort of people. Of course drugs and thrillers are also there, but I'd say that the procedure here seems to be quite classical. Thinking about my scooter being quartered by thieves I always think of the Middle Ages and also of pimps exploiting their victims. You should consent to these periodical "molestations" and consider the expense cheap. Ah! And accept it as the normal course of life. I wonder how many people at university can be the object of prey of thieves, pimps, dealers and similar. Also to what an extent this can affect teaching, research and personal relations on campus. Do "they" also control the students?

Why me? Am I that weak? I suppose that this is an unavoidable question in all cases. I am deeply concened for those people who may have his health affected or can be the object of easy violence.

I won't be able to have my scooter fixed in the near future because a big union strike is taking place these days and all the works are closed. Political strife and social crime should not be confused. Something specially worrying is that in this kind of exceptional circumstances social abuse and crime can increase and be even more pernicious.

Today I should be writing my final comments on how the year did in Grammar, but, frankly, I’m not much in the mood to talk about communicative patterns. Well, in a way I’m talking about definitions and vocabulary. I have also done a cartoon. I was thinking of Dashiell Hammett and Jean Gabin. Social violence and political violence is not the same, not even in a dictatorship. To what an extent is this kind of social petty crime affecting many of us both consciously and unconsciously? In moments of economic hardship and strong political controversy we must always remember that social crime must be not confused. It must prevented and controlled strictly according to the rules of Justice.

I have done some preliminar homework on some basic definitions and concepts.

On Repeated burglary
and victimization.

By most definitions, repeat victimization, or revictimization, occurs when the same type of crime incident is experienced by the same—or virtually the same—victim or target within a specific period of time such as a year. Repeat victimization refers to the total number of offenses experienced by a victim or target including the initial and subsequent offenses. A person's house may be burglarized twice in a year or 10 times, and both examples are considered repeats.

The term "victimization" usually refers to people, such as a person who has been victimized by domestic violence. But repeat victimization can best be understood as repeat targets since a victim may be an individual, a dwelling unit, a business at a specific address, or even a business chain with multiple locations. Even motor vehicles may be repeat victims. Later in this guide, we discuss how to distinguish repeat victims in police data by address, victim's name, and other identifiers.

Source: U.S. Department of Justice

Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services

http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/files/ric/Publications/e07055803.pdf

P.S. It seems evident that the need of be precise language to describe negative experiences and critical situations cannot be questioned or relativized. I acknowledge that I should work on my vocabulary a little bit more on this area.

I've selected one of the most representative musical scenes from Oliver. A classic, but easy to be updated to the present trade conditions.

A couple of free hours... I need a bath (etic) story!

2009-05-01T19:48:00.004+02:00

Some free time to do some creative composition, at last! It's Labour Day, a good occasion to remember that in many areas of activity the number of working hours per day has increased, not decreased in the computer age. We now work faster, of course, but we need to check the messages in the internet and prepare materials during the weekend and, as we work in small supervised groups when teaching, we need to prepare more activities on line, not to mention research and personal and professional contacts. In the past the number of working hours was set in 40 per week. I know that now, both directly and indirectly -at home or in my office- I spend about 12 hours a day, not to mention the weekends. 60-70 hours, is it possible? Only in my case? Am I wrong?
I have spent three hours this afternoon-evening writing a short composition on some contemporary issues. Bathetic, satiric, ironic? I cannot tell. To me my compositions are a catharsis, a way to express some of my feelings and ideas about what is going on. Of course both the ideas and the humour are my responsibility, even though I think that I never reach the point of being either abusive or overconfident when stating my opinions. Of course, a joke always involves some risks....
I must confess that I miss the good old days in which some friends and me met to have dinner and talk about the way of the world during the weekend. Unfortunately Time never forgives and we all live very busy lives now. Besides, of course, there are different ways of socializing.
I have not uploaded anything in this blog for almost a month; unfortunately not much time, not even for bathetic humour! I should write something to refresh some old notions such as proposition, propositional attitude, irony, humour, effect, double meaning, pamphlet and so on. Grammar dry and boring? Impossible if you know how to apply it. It's a question of style! A touch of "class?"

Labour Day 1st May 2009

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Main errata:
2.- "She was in charge...." Rewrite. Obscure.
on/in
3.- "Beating round the bush."
began/begin
6.- you/your

My Easter Contribution.

2009-04-05T12:29:00.004+02:00

Yesterday I had some free time to walk downtown, to write and compose. I was thinking of how Easter -same as Christmas same as....- may be used as an excuse for confrotation and violence. I had in mind also a true proposition: There's is at least one human being who has gone through crucifixion due to a mixture of religious, political, social and ethnic reasons in a country occupied by a foreign Imperial power. This had led me to compose a presentation in which I debate what is serious and what may be taken as offensive in using the language of wit. I hope you find it of any interest. In a way, I recreated the long conversations I had in the past with good friends when the times seemed less depressing. Unfortunately, no more conversations with friends for many years now. Times have changed and work piled up! I had many references in mind. Blanco White, of course, was one of them!

Going On Vacation Now Me April F No You

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Realistic enough?

2009-03-22T20:02:00.008+01:00

Imagine I want to write a melodrama either because I like this kind of literature or because I want to exploit it bathetically. A first rendezvous between a couple of passionate lovers. What will happen, will Cupid triumph? Big disappointment: No Renaissance garden any more! No Arabian nights! No weekend in the country cottage! No hasty marriage organized by the families! Only two standard computers and a good DSL connection! Does this affect the way language has been used in deep and moving human relationships until now? Are the changes superficial or substantial? How do they affect the way we should teach, exemplify and study grammar and conversation? I was thinking of David Lodge -Also Mario Vargas Llosa- when writing this new post. The change is much bigger with respect to the XIXth century sentimental novels. Who cares about writing love letters any more? Can you imagine waiting one whole month for a love letter?
Utile dulce. I think that there is something worthy of discussion here, in terms of language and communication, in terms of human relations and psychology, in terms of new life conditions.

Bathos:

–noun

1.	a ludicrous descent from the exalted or lofty to the commonplace; anticlimax.

2.	insincere pathos; sentimentality; mawkishness.

3.	triteness or triviality in style.

http://dictionary.reference.com/
bathos

Colourless crystal clear! I was right! It was green!

2009-03-16T21:21:00.005+01:00

The second assignment for my grammar course this year was based on an old cartoon from New Yorker in which two industrial managers look at the grey smoke produced by their factory from their office. One of them says: Can't we just dye the smoke green? In class some students did not seem to be completely convinced that you can dye smoke green even though I defended that it was something quite easy to do.
Poetic justice! Today I've found in the news what they have decided to do in Chicago to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. I jubilate now and upload a collage and the video. I hope you like it.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News,

Another (bad) joke on language?

2009-03-14T18:26:00.003+01:00

As usual, The New Yorker cartoon contest provides me with the possibility of creating a cartoon. I wouldn't have a chance in the regular contest, but I've decided to use the picture to make a pun on a point in grammar for my blog. Words have literal and specialised meanings. This is what my joke is about. I could use my cartoon to talk briefly in class about some syntactic operations in derived structures. I could also mention concepts such as connotation, image and irony. A discussion on the role of context, icons, and cultural assumptions in human communication would be tempting as well. My crime is obvious; I've used the cue provided by New Yorker to deal with grammar and linguistics! Bad joke and bad intentionality, I'm guilty of both charges!

What I need is some free time to study. Looking back, not in anger but with some concern.

2009-03-08T11:18:00.006+01:00

I started this blog -together with some others- one year ago. I've worked a lot to learn the basics of blog editing and I am quite proud of what I've been able to achieve. Apart from my personal comments on aspects of grammar language and communication, I've experimented quite intensely with comic strip design. I'm convinced that comics are quite useful to explore language not only in terms of reception, but also of production if one feels creative enough. For many years now, one of my main goals has been to be able to use English as if it were my first language. In my view this does not mean prejudice toward my native and near native languages, even though the adoption of a foreign language as main way of expression -as a way to protest about the injustice and oppression lived in one's motherland- is something attested once and again in history. I wrote my thesis on Joseph Blanco White; this means that I am well acquainted with this kind of intellectual revolt. However, this is not my case. I rather see English as a scholar could see Latin and Greek in the Middle Ages or, rather in the Renaissance, when the humanists all over Europe tended to combine both the vernacular and the classical languages as legitimate ways of expression. I like using difrent languages in my daily conversation. If you're not pressed by need, the possibility of testing their expressive power -as if they were musical instruments for instance- is a very rewarding intellectual and personal experience. If only I had some more free time! Unfortunately, the present circumstances make me work on my courses and related activities about twelve hours a day if not more, and I know that my case is not unique. Paradoxically, the introduction of the new technologies has made us teachers work more hours to get trained in computer programs and to incorporate and apply the new methods and activities. Besides, in many cases, the results are not yet completely satisfactory. You cannot start a completely new system out of scratch and expect to get positive results the first year. Students, people in general, do not change that fast when used to previous study habits. Unfortunately, some teahers can be affected in terms of their reputation, professional projection and even health. This is why the intellectual move of searching for personal gratification in literature and in humour -Cervantes among many others, for instance- is that important.

Yesterday, I decided to create a "strip generator strip" again, after I stopped using it some months now to have a rest and get new ideas. I hope you like it. I could use it to start a discussion on clefts and pseudo-clefts in a grammar class.

Così fan tutte.

2009-02-28T19:27:00.003+01:00

http://webs.uvigo.es/contactos

May I become your lover? This world has become too big to get people to talk.

Really, the new cultural initiative taken by the academic authorities of my university has stimulated my fancy and imagination quite highly! I was used to the idea of being "a lover of words," but the idea of looking for a native lover in order to become proficient in the target language has made me somewhat delirious for a while! I praise my university for this good humoured and well-intended initiative, hoping that many prosperous and fruitful academic liaisons of all sorts will produce the positive results in learning and research we all dare expect! I hope my strip contribution make you smile. You may also have a look at the Euphoria classics, by David Lodge!

Now, being serious for a moment, it is an undeniable fact that an open, friendly and constructive attitude aiming at actual communication and interaction with the members of one linguistic community is the best way to become proficient in their language. A learning process based only on utility or convenience is always defective, as the specialised literature has noted once and again. Good humour should help in the process of breaking the linguistic barriers and spreading culture and tolerance. Learning languages is fun. It is also a symptom of social maturity, something we must look after very tenderly in moments of social and economic instability. Let's wish everybody plenty of love and conversational practice then!

Uni Intercourse 2.0. Day 0. by dada20087

Sensible or insensitive? Perhaps too complex.

2009-02-23T10:34:00.006+01:00

First day of Carnival. No Red Masque in the vicinity and orange juice, no amontillado. I use one idle first hour to upload something easy, not perfected, but that could give rise to an advanced, participative class in which the linguistic concepts mentioned in the cartoon would be elaborated and exemplified. As usual, not only the meaning of concepts per se, but also the associations they may raise and the ambiguities they may lead to in the personal world of a person who does some grammar, some pragmatics and some creative work. Time of class over! Next activity! The term "patient subject" and Safo's example have been taken from Talmy Givón. 1993. English Grammar I. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, Benjamins, 110-1.

When I first saw this New Yorker contest cartoon this morning I immediately thought of multiple relations in a tree node. Am I not complex! Iconic resemblance and specialized knowledge could make my witticism difficult to understand to many. It would not be popular as a joke. However, it can be used as an illustration to account for some systemic complexities.

Beginning of the second semester.

2009-02-14T12:55:00.004+01:00

First week of intense work in which new materials have been discussed in class. Yesterday I had to take a break for some hours. Three subjects, one new, require a lot of energy, especially at the beinning. I decided to design a personal composition: a poem in which I expressed some associative ideas with respect to the wok an significance of Ezra Pound. Yesterday, following a subconscious drive I felt the need to read some of is poems and about his life. To what an extent was Pound a convinced Fascist and anti-Semite to what an extent was he insane? One thing is clear he was a very good -philological- poet. I have used an adjective -philological- that I will need to precise and justify one of these days when I find some free time in my imitation brick ivory tower. Too deep a concern. I should think of something lighter, for instance the felicity conditions of Speech Acts (joke). I have also composed a new Blue Cheese strip. My homework is over for the week then.

Pastiche

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I've decided to upload a short video on red robins I found in the web. I think that it is a way of describing what an ivory tower may be in the good days.

the link: www.birdcinema.com an interesting site on all kinds of birds.

Saturday morning in the free world.

2009-01-31T17:27:00.005+01:00

Saturday morning in the free world.

This morning I decided to pay a visit to the old Pero Botero's exhibition (well-intended joke) before tomorrow's "closing day", not "closing down day" a joke that in the past could have had some success in the old grammar school, but perhaps not too popular in these recessive times! Impressive, outstanding quality and a painting that I have to trace: the one of the cub lion. Where were you before, in what circle? Cancerbero was the star no doubt. Sunny cool winter day. A walk, an exhibition, a couple of well-intended photos, coffee and cake and some inspiration. No infringements today, at least apparently. I miss these old cosmopolitan peaceful and productive days in which one could enjoy some hours in peace and in silent work all over the free world. Hopefully, the gradient of evil will not succeed!

I want a hero, an uncommon want!

Lord Byron.

- ¡Ni pensarlo -- contestó rápido el jefe. -- Una Biblia, con una hoja cortada, tiene tanto valor como un libro de canciones y para nada sirve jurar sobre ella.

R.L.Stevenson. La Isla del Tesoro. Ediciones Cantín, Barcelona 1943.

Saturday. Some Sunlight.

I walked today

To fulfill a duty
Not compulsory,
But, in a way, obliged.

Achilles was weak,
Same as Ulysses
And all the others.
Not me: a hero, I mean!

Yes, it was a disparate,
A Barbie disparate
What I witnessed today,
Safely protected, not alone.

I feel sentimental now.
Almost generous, free.
A coin for the old Nick!
He knows of modern cruelty!

I want to be back, though.
I feel the urgent need
To caress my pet parrot,
To feed it, and play.

We've made up games
For both of us alone.
We utter words and sounds
To exchange the ancient wisdom.

"Words of love,
Games of affection.
What has happened
In gay Barbie land?"

[Eduardo José Varela Bravo

Vigo, 31st January 2009]

Vigo, Casa das Artes

On the term "infracción." 30th 0109

2009-01-30T10:14:00.006+01:00

This is something to skip unless somebody wants to examine a first draft of what could be a legal document. I don't consider this issue trivial at all, but it is only a minor problem. One video I've used has been made private because of abusive use. My abusive use?

The publisher of this blog wishes to make public the following statement about the use of video materials in his works.

1.- This blog deals with topics of language, grammar and thought. The materials published in it are personal reflections, cultural illustrations, comments that may provide some complementary information about what is discussed in the course but they are not part of the course contents, and the students and readers are not asked to share the views and ideas there. The blog is full responsibility of the person who subscribes this declaration and no other.

2.- The materials uploaded in this blog, are taken from legal sites in which I'm registered. They are taken as illustrations about a point or to provide some background information or both. They are used as if they were parts of a course on civilization and debate, and I take pride in incorporating materials from all ideas, creeds and races without any intended discrimination or prejudice in my view.

3.- The procedure to upload these materials are the standard in the 2.0. I've never made any attempt at manipulation with respect either to the material or to the publisher. In case of any disagreement, the blog leaves the possibility to express comments openly. Of course, my tastes are my tastes and my ideas are my ideas. Hopefully, my ideas are expressed coherently.

4.- With respect to one particular recent case in which a video take that I've used have been withdrawn because of illicit use, I feel the need, both ethical and legal to describe my procedure and strict intentionality to dispel any doubt or suspicion about a possible "infracción" in my use of the Platform.

5.-The video where the "infracción" has taken place deals with the film "The lost battalion," a copy of which I own and that I used to write a comment.

6.- Something that I do when I want to illustrate one point -a conversational one- is to find some visual material I can use. I embed materials from the web, according to one possible standard practice.

7.-I entered the video platform and used the searcher. I wrote. “The last battalion.”

8.- I found different videos on the film. I went straightforwardly to the take I needed. I watched some, but I needed the last take, where the incident I was examining was clarified in linguistic terms.

9.- I did not go beyond the video to find out who had uploaded it or under what intentionality. I use this and other platforms in different ways: the most immediate one is to find materials I need for my blog. I watch the materials, and I think that I respect what I see. In some other cases, out of curiosity or interest I see more details. In some cases there's a blog, circle of people and so on. In some other cases nobody. I think that I'm entitled to embed a document that is free without any intentionality beyond. Evidently, the same happens with the materials that I personally upload in the web. It is clear that somebody can restrict or change his/her mind when somebody uses a material for a different purpose that he/she originally had devised. However I don't consider that I have committed "any infracción" or has "insulted anybody's ideas." I repeat that I did not go in the “more” question and that I did not examine the name of the provider. I missed that information. Myblog provides the possibility of writing a comment about the possible offensive use of somebody else's material.

10.- Apparently, this film is subject to a very big controversy. I did not do any research on names or symbols. I don’t know anything about the director, actors and circumstances. I wanted to explore the film in terms of communication, to draw some conclusions on language, deceit, half lie and gambit in military terms. I didn’t go beyond this goal. The conclusions I drew had to do with the “breach or infringement” of language not only in conversational but in legal terms, also about the legitimacy of some war strategies. I made some historical allusions –very shallow- about the recurrence of certain kind of similar stories in history. I mentioned three historical names, apart from General Alexander. This film is one in a series that I’m watching dealing with language manipulation. This means that I have to watch or read many things that I don’t necessarily like.

11.-Of course I have done something wrong. If I had explored who had uploaded the materials and the reasons why these videos had been uploaded I would not have embedded it to avoid any kind of misunderstanding. I repeat that I bought a copy of the movie myself. Nobody had talked to me about the film either in positive or
negative terms.

12.- I cannot dedicate more time to this controversy. I have a lot of work to do. This weekend, as I always do, I will try to rest for a while, and think about what I’ve done and about my possible mistakes or “infracciones.” I think that I’ve got sound criteria to know when I have to feel guilty and about what and I know how much I respect human life. I think that I am able to tell and distinguish between matters, concepts, topics, ideas and degrees of criminality. My aim was to study language, deceit, propaganda, manipulation and totalitarianism. My “infracción,” paradoxically, seems to reward me with some kind of extra logical truth, but I’m not going to play any circular games.

I do declare that what I’ve written here is true in all respects, in terms of intentionality, procedure and facts.

[What I've needed to write here makes me feel quite worried about certain channels of expression and about the way in which materials are broadcasted and used. It can lead to abuse very easily. I would never use a social site for that. When I have to say something I express it openly and without any hidden purpose. Something very positive I've learned today. I need to trace the sources of all the materials I may publish in the web just in case. I don't want to be misinterpreted or tainted.]

Vigo,
30^th January 2009

Brunch Sunday Homework.

2009-01-25T11:31:00.000+01:00

I use some breakfast time this stormy Sunday to refresh and apply something I learned in the web 2.0 course I did last year. The slideshare viewer is much more functional to upload texts in the blogger, and I can share the document with the groupof colleagues Pedro organized.

I will repeat now one of my strongest convictions here. Learning about software, sites and resources is something fast and entertaining either if you have good teachers and/or if you have the knack for self study. However, to acquire a working familiarity with all this knowledge, that is, how to apply and relate different resources takes time and initiative. If I were now a student in a course on the web 2.0 I could present now another evidence of my work. I've exploited an inititiative that was latent,but not explored in the course, due to time reasons, of course. This is very important in the present debate about the new university degrees, about the organization of the courses, about the responsibility of teachers and students.... This is our responsibility in the present economic and social situation.

One Class On Pragmatics 240109

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Third Self-Examination. I'll have to live with that.

2009-01-24T13:15:00.001+01:00

It's been quite an intense morning. I've designed another, very serious class, that I'd like to teach even though not for the regular courses. However, I'm convinced that if one shows both one's ideas and method something very positive is achieved. At least, people can understand some pecularities of language, reasoning and behaviour in a person dedicated to the study of logic, truthful information, communication, learning, justice. Today I will upload a possible class, and also a brief comment about the film that I decided to watch yesterday for the third time: The lost batallion featuring Rick Schroeder. 2005

I bought this film when I was doing some personal research on the First World War and I used it, as usual in my case, to do some personal discourse analysis.

Curiously, it is a film in which no woman appears in any scene whatsoever. Not many allusions to love, romaticism, girlfriends. About porn, only one reference about a whoring incident properly punished. A serious film, therefore in which, I think, the main actions and sufferings of that war have been reproduced almost archeologically. I felt the impression from time to time that I was in a museum of military art, and I could identify the different figures. A good taste film in which wounds and blood are present but not highlighted unless it is unavoidable. The enemy is the enemy, but the language in the battle is almost polite, and the insults justifiable, not uncessary cruelty, good economy of effort. Almost a heroic war, but for some weapons: gas, fire. We are in 1917. That is base soldiers are heroes, about the others, it seems to depend on the colour of the coffee. No weapons of mass destruction yet, at least in our present terms.

I'd like to explore two terms today: "gambit," and "half-lie,"in communicative terms.

Of course, I can exploit one strategic movement based on deception, half lies, or false promises and achieve a victory. For instance, I can assure you that I know that in one country or building there are weapons and people that we need to elliminate by all means, and then find out that it was a misinterpretation. However, that country was destroyed and humiliated, many innocent people died and so on and we got plenty of benefit and booty in the deal. It has proved quite a good strategy in general terms in the past all too often. However, it erodes the reputation of countries, military men, religious authorities and people that claim to defend democracy, freedom, justice. Besides, half-lies can lead to totaliarian regimes very easily.

Something positive, there is heroism and fair warfare even when interrogating war prisoners. A soldier can hold different political and stategic views from his superior officers, be a good soldier and know how to speak. Not a terrorist, not a faggot, not a liberal and so on. Food for thought, about ideals, heroism even personality disorders and so on.

Some soldiers need to take and hold a position in the Argonne at no matter the cost. They'd been promised help in their flanks. General Alexander made a promise in which the preliminary conditions of the speech act did not meet. He acknowledges that in the last take of the movie. He defends his gambit based on a half-lie in strategic terms: victory. He has created many unknown heroes, the problem is, of course, that this system can be extended and applied to all circumstances. Why did he promise something that he knew he was not able to fulfil, same as well-know king David from the Christian Bible after some hot busy nights in the well-known story? Sorry, but I'm tired of mentioning, Nero and Hitler all the time. Maybe the Bible is corrupted, but this is not my emmity.

General Alexander: These are acceptable losses to me. I understand you are feeling....

I'll have to live with that.

What I like best in the film is Cher Ami, the pigeon: an animal that knows how to transmit an accurate message and obey orders.

I consider that I have written and published a comment based on the language of the film and that my point has been made without using prejudice, insult, or half-lies. That is, I've written a comment that I could publish in any free nation without the fear of being considered a radical, a liberal, a militarist and so on. That is a first pragmatic comment on a text that is essentially pragmatic. I do no consider this remark trivial taking into account certain ideological developments -and actions- that I have witnessed in the last ten years or so. The subtle change from democracy to totalitarianism in one country may depend on a gradient of half-lies.

Second self- examination

2009-01-19T23:02:00.001+01:00

This weekend I was in a peculiar mood. Very oppressive news. I am not such a big fan of Woody Allen as I was when I watched Annie Hall for the first time. Normally on Saturdays I prefer to watch or read or write something lighter, not to brood all the time on the same topics. However, last Saturday I decided to follow the cultural ritual depicted in that film, and I watched ,for the fourth time, Kenneth Branagh's et alii Conspiracy, a vey good film not only on the facts of history but on the pragmatics of discourse, universal and particular. I hope of course that the dialogues follow closely what was trascribed in Eichmann's dossier of which only one copy -like Beowulf- is kept- and that belonging to Martin Luther's! I don't mean to be humorous here, but coincidences are coincidences. I cannot watch this film often because I get excited and I begin to start working on the language and establishing some comparisons. I have to say that this film on the final Jewish solution -after successful preliminary tests on the mentally deficient and other defective people- is something that I hope will never be applied to any race, group of people, nation on the basis of religion, history, capacity, politics or genetics, of course. My reasoning is this one: if language and thought are universal and all humans have to follow the same conventions to communicate, this also applies to all realms of human activity positive or negative, such as work, social life and, of course, war. Any crime, abuse, act of violence, cruelty has to be prosecuted. If not whom are we to trust? There are conventions, tribunals, agreements and treaties. Let's respect them! It would be monstrous to think that nowadays some countries have adopted supranational legislations that jeopardize the free world. I tend to remember all too often nowadays, the gradual glide towards totalitarism in Europe between the first and second world war always under the pretext of the foreign threat (communism) and the weaknesses of the liberals. It's not that difficult to mystify democratic laws by apparently legal means based on exceptionality, new international conditions and so on. Secret services as multinationals independent of the control of the national securities? Legitimacy to act everywhere in the world? All this is very serious, of course. If you believe in democracy you know that you're limited and controlled by the law, but this is the apparent weakness that establishes the difference between freedom and totalitarism. A war abuse, once proved is a war abuse, in all possible worlds! I repeat, whom are we to trust?

I'd like to transcribe two brief passages of this superb, moving film. Nowadays, year 2009 -and I know that each case is different and that the Holocaust is different from other attempts of segregation and elimination- I was not thinking of the Jews only, but of humankind, and I dread that this kind of meetings -ideas, vocabulary and policies- may have actually taken place to approve "final solutions" not only in the Wansee House, but in some other Houses of different colours and ideologies. In my case, I'm much more concerned about Health and Medical Classifications -categories of people-rather than about the race or the colour, but it worries me to dilapidate the ideals of democracy like this.

The two brief passages -incomplete and a very brief- that I'd like to comment:

....They are sublimely clever, and they are intelligent as well. My indictment... They are arrogant, and self-obsessed and calculating.... they reject the Christ....

An Inquisitor? A Medieval authority? Meaning precisely what and about whom? ClassificationS based on the purity of blood. Slaves in the times of the Spaniards, Portuguese, British and French: "mulato," "cuarterón" "mestizo," "zambo...." ? Blood, religion, ideals, typology. What about Africa, Asia? What about nowadays typologies?

.... Death is the most reliable form of sterilization....

Absolute truth, and scientific, but not strategic in my view!

Why all this today? Because I believe in language to analyze and solve problems, to denounce cases of injustice and abuse in its proper terms, to heal if possible, to transmit love and affection. We're living moments of uncertainty and, hopefully the beginning of a period of regeneration. Maybe I have not expressed myself very clearly or convincingly. However as Miguel de Unamuno said once -approximate idea out of memory from something I read when I was 16: I am sincere even when I contradict myself.

Let's hope the best for the US and for us all starting tomorrow. Freedom equality, pursuit of happiness.... peace and new prosperity!

The Linguist's corner. Saturday morning homework..

2009-01-17T11:57:00.000+01:00

I've dedicated a couple of hours this morning to organise my ideas after yesterday's catharsis. That is, Stuart Bentham was doing his homework. Many ideas and feelings, both abstract and concrete. Language being used in self examination.

Disparate!

2009-01-16T22:26:00.001+01:00

It's been quite a busy an intense week; quite rewarding in terms of ideas, even though most of the main news have been quite depressive. My usual reaction in moments of crisis is to increase my alertness and readiness and intensify my intellectual activity. I suppose that I try to compensate for the negative feelings outside. I know of many colleagues that react basically in the same way. I have not uploaded anything from about three weeks, so it's time to catch up. I've created a strip and composed a "Disparate" thinking about the absurdities of both life and language reflecting harsh reality. The comic strip could be used to exploit double meaning, "phoney language" "confusions" and the like. About the "Disparate," it reflects my mixed feelings at what's going on in Gaza. As I've written in one of my newsletters, some of the intellectuals, thinkers, writers and artists I like best are Jewish. I'm quite universalist and -hopefully- tolerant in my interests though, and I also know where to find models, better than me, in other cultures that also bloomed here in this land centuries ago when, they say, Toledo symbolized harmony and fruitful and pacific coexistence. I'm not an expert in the history of that period, but the image depicted in the books I read in the past recreating this golden age impressed me deeply and made me dream of an ideal situation. I read the first book by Franz Kafka when I was 15 -under Franco-. I still keep the book in my shelf. I was impressed by the way in which he transmuted language to produce a a sense of amazement at the oddities of life in his images and expressions. I always think of the word "strangeness" when I think of his works. I mention Kafka here, not others, because of my "disparates" of course, a way of alleviating tension by combining images and language in a surreal way -if Goya or Valdés Leal can be considered "surreal." To entertain the Toledo ideal and read about Gaza nowadays is discouraging, especially in a profound economic crisis that is the result of a failed -and interested in my view- "neoliberal" economy and a fierce militarism, not to mention propaganda and the mediatic war. Even in Franco's times, we learned in the History classes that when the economy of an empire goes wrong, to get obsessed with winning battles abroad makes thing much worse. Cervantes was quite clear about that, in my view! This is 101 logic to me! At that time, I mean under Franco, we also had to translate the Catilinarias by Cicero fom Latin into Spanish, but let's concentrate on synchronic linguistics. Is this quotation by Noam Chomsky relevant only to me -personally relevant, relation established that I need to clarify- or could it be used as the starting point for a debate about language and communication nowadays, about how language has been abused to obstruct pacific coexistence?

Theories of grammatical and pragmatic competence must find a place in a theory of performance that takes into account the structure of memory, our mode of organizing experience, and so on. Actual investigation of language necessarily deals with performance, with what someone does in specific circumstances. We often attempt to devise modes of enquiry that will reduce to a minimum factors that appear irrelevant to intrinsic competence, so that the data of performance will bear directly on competence, as the object of our enquiry. To the extent that we have an explicit theory of competence, we can attempt to devise performance models to show how this knowledge is put to use.If we knew only that language consists of words, our performance models would necessarily be very primitive and of restricted interest; we could study the sequence of linguistic signs and their formal and semantic properties, but nothing else. Chomsky, Noam. 1982. Rules and Representations. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 225-26.

A little bit interested, perhaps, but's let's explore the way in which language has been used during these years what actions have taken place and what were both the intentionality and the in-communicative strategy. What's the role of language nowadays, what do we want, peace or war? Do we really want, peace, prosperity, tolerance and pursuit of happiness?

Apart from my two cards, I will upload a song that has been in my head all day, Leonard Cohen's "Who by fire?" My relevance....? I will also upload "The Partisan." These two songs give shape to the feelings of frustration I experiment today when I think about my ideals and the present harsh situation

The Linguist's corner. 30th December 2008.

2008-12-30T23:41:00.000+01:00

Stuart Behtam reviews some basic Pragmatic criteria when reading the news. A basic problem in pragmatics and philosophy of language is to draw the right conclusions of each statement in a given context. It goes without saying that the grammatical structure is essential in the process. Natural logic leads me to the concept "common sense" so skilfully used by Thomas Paine in the first days of the American Democracy: freedom, equality, pursuit of happiness. I remember the thorough manuals of logic I used in the 80s and 90s to study logic. I am sure that more than one scholar is applying these old methods to what the politicians have been saying in the last years. My strip is only a first sketch on what one of this basic logic exercises could be.

First self-examination

2008-12-23T14:27:00.003+01:00

Yesterday's meditations.

At the end of the year, during Christmas, I normally start a meditation process about those aspects of external and personal life that worry me. Of course, it is not a rigid or systematic process in which I have to feel compelled to write down an explicit document. It is rather an emotional and intellectual process that I shape in creative compositions of different nature: poems, short stories, narratives, journal entries and, especially collage drawing. This last heterogeneous class of composition in which, at the end, some kind of conducting thread and argument has to be imposed in order to convey some explicit meaning, allows me to express the paradox of both rational process and intuition with respect to the different aspects of the reality of experience. Any time I finish one composition I feel relieved: not only have I been able to provide an account of what I was thinking about before the creative process but I have also explored -with images and words- my subconscious. I have characterized my train of thought in an associative, open way that calls for subsequent interpretation. After I finish one, I always learn more about myself, my world of ideas and about the historical, social, cultural facts I was referring to. Surreal experience? Perhaps, in a way, but inasmuch as Surrealism as a movement incorporates previous phantasmagorias and imaginary journeys together with a recourse to the logical absurdity to account for what cannot be properly expressed.
What about language, what about grammar then? Same as logic and icon, the grammatical structure and the vocabulary help both to unveil aspects of the global truth that are normally dissociated and to construct the message of the composition. Grammar becomes a liberating force. Syntactic regularity delimits that realm of the imaginary that is hinted at by means of associations. It allows the exploration of the artistic -heavily emotional- message without mystifying it. Language helps to describe the artistic effort, does not intend to replace it. Both language and the subconscious win in this way.

EX ILLIS SUNT. (22nd Dec 2008).

First day of vacation. Christmas 2008.

2008-12-21T17:27:00.000+01:00

I've spent some time today on both creative work and homework. I wanted not only to do a strip but to refresh how to embed documents and images in a blog. Unfortunately, nowadays, at the present state of Education we quite often forget that one thing is getting acquainted with a principle or technique and another different thing is to learn it, that is, to be able to use it appropriately with some ease and no doubts for one's personal or professional purposes. In the present debate about the new courses and degrees, we tend to forget that some time must be dedicated to grey, perfunctory classes in which a subject or discipline is actually mastered. Can you imagine getting a degree on ironing shirts, for instance, after a brief course in which only one or two shirts have actually been starched? I could extend this analogy to very abstract, deep and delicate matters not only in the realm of Humanities but also in the realm of Science and Technology. Some of the fundamental curricular subjects in many courses of studies at University are still to be replaced once that the new European degrees start in 2010. Granted that the old courses are superseded according to the new methodologies, but these courses in the past secured the transmission of the fundamental knowledge and skills in each area, and this transmission must be perfected, not abandoned in the new university curricula. No need for superfluous knowledge, that's true, but to learn skills and competences we need to repeat and practice, and we run the risk of labelling as superfluous any learning process that requires some abstract thinking and some routine effort. To be able to handle databases, to learn about processes, to apply and redefine techniques and to create personal works we need some grey, hard, boring practice from time to time!
2010 has become a challenge in economic, social, educational terms. What have I proposed myself to do today?
1.- To select and justify the embedding of a cartoon on the present global situation. This could be the starting point of a debate, a practical class or a grammar class as well.
2.- To create a cartoon in which I expressed my ideas on the same issue... in a way. What do I learn -and practice- by doing this? A lot. I hope you like both the embedded cartoon and my creation!
The strip is by Bill Schorr. I've embedded it from http://comics.com, a site that I recommend.
About my creation -clipart cartoon- is a collage in which the text is mine and the images are from
http://www.pdclipart.org/ and from http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/index.htm.
I must acknowledge that the hassle of tracing all the sources consumes some extra time. However, it is part of the learning effort and produces the satisfaction of having rounded up one's work. It always may happen that you may miss a quotation or a reference, but it is always easy to see when it is something accidental or not. In the present moments of haste and confusion I don't consider my final remark trivial.

[P.S. Yesterday I met one of the basic difficulties when embedding visual materials I learned how to solve on my own at the beginning of my activity in this blogs the problem of the resulting size of the image embedded. There is no universal solution to this problem. One needs to examine the characteristics of the original to accommodate it to the blog in some possible way -usually there's more than one solution-. I didn't realize that I had made the mistake again when I finished yesterday. It was today, after the morning working session that I realized about it. Now I've corrected the article. I have refreshed dearly acquired personal knowledge, I've gained practice and I've improved the technique. All this is another proof of what I wrote in this article. It is, therefore, another source of satisfaction. It is true that some people could have evaluated negatively the original mistake with an absolute, negative digit, for instance in a course evaluation. It goes without saying that, however, I consider the mistake and subsequent correction as positive in the gradual personal process of learning a technique, especially in an area where there is a lot of fluctuation (different formats). However, this precision and fairness in reasoning and evaluating new initiatives is something very difficult to find, at least in my case. As I say when I mean something: "I don't consider this remark trivial."22nd, December 16:23]

The linguist's corner.

2008-12-13T22:59:00.000+01:00

Stuart Bentham meditates on euphemisms, half truths, distortions, manipulations. In the present circumstances. Language can get tainted by manipulation and interest and lead to injustice and abuse. As intellectuals we must care for the proper use of concepts, terms and definitions as a essential part of our activity.
We may use euphemisms in moments of latent conflict, but not to deny reality or avoid responsibility, especially when there are violations of the basic human rights and dishonesty.

Language and thought. Creativity and Information transmission.

2008-12-10T14:24:00.000+01:00

If I say that this morning I started a new book: A portrait by the linguist as an ordinary citizen... how many people would get at my ultimate -conscious- communicative goal: an intertextual allusion to the title of one of the most popular literary works by James Joyce? To what an extent have I been clear enough? How much background information have I presupposed from a potential reader? Language is transmitting information, describing reality and also expressing one's feelings.
This morning I played the role of ordinary citizen in Vigo downtown, did some pastime work, went to an exhibition and managed not to get stranded when the bus arrived. I like drawing rudimentary sketches combined with words to organize my ideas. I've drawn one today. Now a short exercise with the scanner and a couple of software programs and see the result. After one day or so I will see the sketch in the blog and then I wil ask myself.... what was I thinking about on Wednesday 10th. How did I feel?
This afternoon-evening back to normality An ordinary scholar again.

Language and thought. Articulating reality

2008-12-09T12:12:00.000+01:00

Christmas is approaching. In the second point of the grammar syllabus we've studied the relation between language and thought. The Parts of Speech on the one hand refer to the external reality and the categories of thought in the Western Tradition on the other hand articulate meaning in sequences according to the rules of grammar. Can we think of articulating thought without human language? Can we postulate deep or abstract or logical rules that map onto syntactic structures? To what an extent are the different linguistic approaches in grammar justified in psychological terms? All this leads to philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, ontology, philosophy of science and so on. We cannot dedicate much time to this kind of topics in our course both because we are not experts, that is we are not authoritative, and -Occam's razor- because we are only interested in them as complementary information for our grammatical description of English.
I use language combined with images and colours to exorcise our contemporary social ghosts. Language is not only used to transmit information. It also expresses feelings. It also explores the external reality to work out meaning and sense of what's going or either in an artistic way or in an therapeutic way or -in most cases- both! I hope you like my collage.

Ben Bethelem 2

2008-11-30T14:33:00.000+01:00

Last week I had the pleasure to attend the lectures Prof. Heinz Giegerich (University of Edinburgh) delivered here in Vigo. I reviewed some all concepts, I learned about new ideas and approaches and I welcomed the organized and consistent way in which the different topics were gradually exposed and exemplified in each session. Prof. Giegerich’s attitude was always open, friendly and cooperative when questions were asked or objections were raised. In short, at the end of those two days I had the feeling of “having achieved something,”of having used my time productively to learn something new.” For those of us who cannot travel frequently due to different reasons, the possibility of meeting and being updated by those visiting scholars who lecture us in Vigo becomes very important. It provides us with some useful feedback we need for our teaching and research. Thanks prof. Giegerich.

Today’s strip reflects, in a way, one of the ideas I recall from the first lecture. Heinz Giegerich when dealing with the divide between stratum 1 (the difficult, one by one, fossilized words) and stratum 2 (regular paradigms) mentioned the need of an “intermediate,” “undecided” “fuzzy” area where morphological processes can appear both on level 1 and level 2 due to either “creative” or “productive (analogical?) reasons”. That is, in terms of expression or in terms of syntactic regularity. Now I miss the actual examples. I left the handout and my notes in my office. Tomorrow I’ll have a look at them first time in the morning. This idea is related to some interesting hints at the need to combine morphological, syntactic and semantic criteria when dealing with a modular approach to grammar in which the syntax and the lexicon are components and in which the lexical component is sharply divided into the two subcomponents –or layers- already mentioned.

Remarks on nominalization revisited in the year 2008! Nowadays we don’t have much time left to study morphological processes. Quite often vocabulary items become” opaque”. I praise Prof. Giegerich for having used this term with precision, but I dread what this term may mean in our learning environment nowadays!

In my strip I disrupt a lexical term “checkmate” in order to produce an artistic and communicative effect. “Checkmate,” “check, my mate.” That is, I’ve been productive “backwards” to create new meaning in the context provided. This of course accounts for the conscious manipulation, not about the possible subconscious manoeuvre.

Productive Sunday. Learning how to.

2008-11-23T20:38:00.000+01:00

This Sunday has been quite fruitful. I upload now a different kind of strip that offers more technical possibilities. Learning is always a trial-and error process that takes some time and dedication, something we tend to forget nowadys when we ask for "facts, facts and facts" everytime we open our mouths. The strip is not worth a shilling, but I'm quite proud of it!

The Linguist's Corner: on being reflective.

2008-11-23T20:08:00.000+01:00

gocomics

REFLECTIVE SUNDAY.

War and economy are two terms -nouns- that can be used independently or conjoined.

The present war and the weak economy are the two main areas of conflict for the Obama-Clinton team.

We can create an interesting compound: "war economy", but we must say "economic warfare." (Anticipating prog. Giegerich's series of lectures.

I've dedicated this Sunday to combining what I read about the world and my personal and academic pastimes. Jim Morin's strip has helped me to relate editorial cartooning and grammar studies.

The Linguist's Corner: "On being liberal."

2008-11-16T19:26:00.000+01:00

Stuart Bentham writes some preliminary reflections on the different uses of the term "liberal" in the context of the present debate on American politics. A draft on the Pragmatics of Political Discourse that could lead to an advanced, interesting grammar class.

The pragmatics of distortion

2008-11-13T14:22:00.000+01:00

I use some spare time to upload today a very sketchy and incomplete draf on a topic I've bee dedicating some time lately. In Language and communication, we must fight against prejudice, distortion, rumour, manipulation and ambiguity as a principle. Grammar aims at transmitting right information, Pragmatics aims at drawing the right conclusions. In moments of anomy and uncertainty this need becomes more pressing. This draft will lead sooner or later to a longish paper. When I wrirte it I must acknowledge, tye article by Louis de Saussure. 2005 on manipulation and cognitive pragmatics. We must always acknowledge intellectual debt, and this is not a trivial remark.

The linguist's corner.

2008-11-08T00:01:00.000+01:00

Frame. A preexisting knowledge structure with a fixed static pattern. George Yule.1996. Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.

I've spent some time this evening on my Blue Cheese strip on grammatical matters. I took some inspiration from an article in Newsweek I read in www.msn.com. My grammar homework is therefore already done. I'm not that sharp, but I think that some relation can be established between the quotation I've included here and the strip and comment in my grammatical homework.

Language philosophizing. 1

2008-11-05T08:39:00.000+01:00

A little bit more work on the "Blue Cheese alternative" -lighter diet. A good occasion to design a new script on language and meaning. Stuart Bentham and Owl read the news and comment on concepts, words and meanings.

Sirloan steak, mash & gravy today, please.

2008-11-01T10:05:00.000+01:00

Cold Saturday. Beginning of winter. Some more production.

Some extra free time on a Friday.

2008-10-31T21:45:00.000+01:00

Time to write a strip and my grammatical comment. Rainy day. Quite cold!

From Grammar to textual analysis, culture and more.

2008-10-29T23:31:00.000+01:00

Here's the draft of a class I'd like to give using grammatical and textual analysis to discuss the news of the plot to kill Obama and a symbolic number of black people that appeared in the press a couple of days ago. Very serious business not only in terms of the plot itself but in terms of the use of language, acronyms and symbols. It can be seen as a way to apply what we study in class. to daily concerns I also mention Norman Mailer in my notes with respect to the Majorca Aedean Congress this month. This item of news seems to reflect the kind of culture Mailer describes in some of his best novels. The one I have in mind is Harlot's ghost.

Grammar and institutionalized knowledge.

2008-10-25T18:53:00.000+02:00

Morph keeps thinking about specialized grammatical jargon. He always is a little bit anguished about what some technical expressions may connote.

[Here you have the pages for: Course in General Linguistics and Compiler. Somethinh went wrong in the page.]

Phatic communion.

2008-10-18T18:31:00.000+02:00

Here we have Morph again concerned about some aspects of academic life. Productive Saturday therefore. Now, on the street, appropiate linguistic behaviour becomes a must!

The dullest day of the week!

2008-10-12T19:11:00.000+02:00

There's an old expression: "as dull as an English Sunday," that it's worth looking up in a dictionary of proverbial expressions. Anyway. I upload my latest grammatical cartoon on some of my main concerns about what we've already seen in class.
I also include the referene of the site I've used. One of the first things I was taught in U.S.A. when I was an exchange student there was to respect the intellectual property and always mention one's references in a paper or work. This principle of intellectual honesty, same as respect for people's opinions and private life, right to self esteem and so on should always be kept. Can you imagine that we could "opinionate" about everybody just because we fancy it? This is something that I associate to vested interests, dictatorial regimes and intolerance. Of course, something I don't like at all. This is one of the reasons why I always favour abstract, verbal humour based on archetypical characters, apart from my personal taste and my teaching goals, of course. "Hope you like it."

My commix page: Eduardo Varela

First week of proper class.

2008-10-03T22:51:00.000+02:00

"Proper class, proper meal, regular meal, regular class. Gramar and the appropriate use of words to convey meaning."

Grammar and communication in a given context, reflecting universal and particular knowledge, culture, rituals and conventions. The study of the formal aspects of grammar cannot be boring or routinary in this way. Each new sentence, each new attemp to use language creatively or effectively raises new questions. Grammar to me is a liberating force. Not only in the extreme situations of prison, war, illness, loneliness and desperation, but also in those sad moments we all fear when we are tired or when we feel dismay and frustration.

I hope to have conveyed the right impression in the second Grammar presentation about the main course objectives. I hope to have justified the use of cartoons as pedagogical language tool. References are, of course, available.

If I had had the chance to attend the XX Selim Congress in Oviedo, finishing tomorrow, I think, I would have proposed an abstruse paper on "Boetius and Grammar." This is, of course, an extreme case. Somebody writing in his cell waiting to be executed. I should reread De Consolatione Philosophia. When I read it, many years ago, I was impressed by something in that treaty I cannot recall now. I'm sure that the congress was a success. My colleagues deserve this and much more.

Characters for two possible grammatical dialogues: G. Napoleon and its Orwellian farm, and Morph, our anonymous character from Com-mix who is concerned about anomy, communication and the use of language. [I must include the reference of the original artist in the next caption, It is not present in the drawings].

Thinking about impersonality, anomy, miscommunication... I've decided to upload a classic. Eleanor Rigby, by the Beatles:

About Grammar nowadays.

2008-09-28T18:40:00.000+02:00

Morph, our anonymous Grammar Scholar, is becoming confident. It dominates its strip and expresses well. I upload another story today, Sunday 29th.

[Sorry for the misprints: Stephen Hawking the most relevant one.]

About ergativity

2008-09-26T10:13:00.000+02:00

An exampleI used in class led me to dedicate some time to the preliminary work I'd have to do if I wanted to write my course paper, for instace, on the ergative verbs in English. This paper would be interesting in terms of:

1.- Language learning.

2.- Syntax (object as grammatical subject)

3.- Semantics (inherent processes)

4.- Voice: Active, passive, midpassive.

5.- Use of the construction. Frequency, restrictions.

6.- Literal and figurative meaning.

Some basic preliminary reading:

1.- Wikipedia. Ergativity. Link to the entry: English ergative verbs.
2.- Wiktionary. A list of 287 ergative verbs.
3.- What is ergative case. Glossary of linguistic terms.
4.- Ideas to teach The ergative verb in class

Morpho-logic.

2008-09-24T09:04:00.000+02:00

First day of class tomorrow. I insert here an imperfect stringthat expresses some common concerns.

From next week on.

2008-09-20T15:48:00.000+02:00

The 2008-09 grammar course will start next thursday. I keep on withg my reflections on what is old and what is new in some grammar approaches. Perhaps some notions such as setting, context-of-situation, co-operative principle and maxims and so on should be reconsidered in my notes, not only the relevant examples. "From next week on," "starting next week," time to refresh some set expressions as well.

Manuscript found by chance

2008-09-19T12:36:00.001+02:00

I came across today when tidying up one of my computers, something that I wrote about one of the grammar questions in June's selectivity. I've decide to upload it now first to keep it as a preliminary sketch, second to provide more clues about why some grammar classes are not very popular nowadays. I know, of course, that one's grammar knowledge is best shown when actually being successful in communication. However, when a common difficulty or an ambiguity arises, then some discriminatory and analytical study must be done. When doing that, one's previous grammatical knowledge must be refreshed and perfected. Now, unfortunately all this takes time and it may be hard work.

I'd need to try to find examples similar to the ones I have marked with a (?) to see whether my proposals on the use of the rules are acceptable. If this is the case then both rules can be used alternatively. It can also be the case that there is some difference or constraint either in meaning in collocation or in syntax. For instance: Like:
I really like my teacher and I like my class. I like being in year five.
I like home-made soup. I like to makea panful and then it lasts me a couple of days.
(Cambridge Grammar of English. 2006, p. 515)

[Note. Those "nuances of meaning, semantic processes, etc. seem to bother the students quite a bit, but they are one of the most exciting aspects of grammatical analysis). This kind of cases are very useful to make precisions on the grammar rules, levels of acceptability, collocations and so on]

About the September exam.

2008-09-17T20:47:00.000+02:00

Doing some more research on strip sites. Old Prof. and Young Lear(ner) hold a debate about classes. Poor Old-Prof is heartbroken when Young Lear expresses her point of view. A good occasion to study the use -grammatical structure- and the conventional meaning of the conjunction "but." Also to explore the meaning of conversation in a given contex: Pragmatics! I am planning on writing something about the right answers to the September exam now. About how to prepare this kind of external final exams later.

ICELTL-1. First sentence. First problem.

2008-09-13T18:11:00.000+02:00

OUR POOR G. NAPOLEON DEFENDS ITS PAPER!

If I write these three sentences and then I try to correct their grammar and spelling:
1.- Alarming news have arrived at Headquarters.
2.- Alarming Ects new et Alia news have arrived at Headquarters.
3.- Alarming Ects et Alia news have arrived at Headquarters.

The words in bold would be considered "wrong word" (in red) [Ects], and "wrong agreement" (in green) [have in the first sentence]. ET in capitals is short for Ethyl. The expression "et. al." is also in the dictionary. In a preliminary comment somebody could also question about the inappropriate use of "rendez-vous" instead of "appointment,""encounter," "meeting" and so on. Somebody could also suggest to replace "arrive at" for "reach." I'm talking about the first sentence, after the heading "Introduction," that I wrote as part of the content of my first slide presentation for ICLTL-1, "Ignacio's congress" (sorry, Paloma et alii). I stop now for one second to scan this first slide to try to explore not only grammar, but to articulate new technology and teaching. One second, please....

Sorry, about ten minutes! Unexpected problem. Procedure. Exercise on English composition.

-----Emergency report-----

I was working with the Vista computer when I decided to scan the document. Unfortunately, as my Vista computer was not connected to my "almost free" Lexmark scanner (one of my sister's presents) I had to open the blogger in my XP computer, scan and edit the text, compress it and upload it.

-----End of report-----

[One more minute to change from XP comp-lab to Vista Central Point] Now!

In my cartoon, G .Napoleon, our G. professor, defended its paper, precisely on the same grounds as I would have done to anticipate a similar comment in the plausible world of Realia. The joke is based on the vocabulary used to try to express the notion of "plural sense agreement" (not only one item of news, but some items of news). As if it were one of Aelfric's disciples, he used tentative, inexact vocabulary in its: "disagreement" instead of "multiple" for instance, and "global" instead of "plural," or similar label. In this way, using this cartoon, I could introduce a lecture class on "Agreement and Concord" in English, and I could use the possible objections and problems raised to illustrate the main rule. I have to confess that, in careful English, I would have rewritten the sentence. I'd try to improve it stylistically and grammatically (...and I could have searched for an appropriate quotation from one of Prof. Crystal's works on grammar and language, for instance. I think that, in fact, I'd find more than one!

The simplification rule not to repeat the same lexical item and the inherent difficult that the word "news" presents not only in terms of the -s inflection but in terms of meaning (not one item of news, but some items of news)is well known in all grammars and the "plural meaning agreement" has always been bargained in papers and exams. Incidentally, replacing "news"for "messages," for instance would solve the problem straight away.

For many years, this way of introducing a practical problem, an ordinary problem in expressing one's ideas was one of my favourite strategies to start a class. In fact, for many years as well, some (or many) students liked the system if and only if -of course- at the end, the rule was clarified and we decided on what was right and wrong. Anyway, I have to confess that in some cases they complained of too much subtlety or too much abstraction. The "class-cape"! ("landscape," "linguascape," "classcape" -thanks EddyWilliams-: lexical productivity), that is, the situation has changed drastically -and very painfully to me- in the last decade or so. I still don't consider this system either arbitrary or digressive or old-fashioned or crazy. In fact, raising doubts about one's expression, about one's grammar is one of the main reasons to study languages and to try to incorporate new technologies in the classroom. In my case, I cannot use this system in class any more. This is the sad truth...and I still don't find enough academic reasons to see why. If it worked with Aelfric and with Dr.Spock I don't understand why it should fail now! However, in my case, I'd better try to find other"sources of consolation" and watch my health and academic future.

From here, then, to self-study, humor and irony and the search for new channels of expressions and new "correspondents." The use of the cartoon inserted in the blog as accessory class material should be effective. The main classes are not dedicated to this discussion. The cartoon becomes either an introductory example for an activity or -by means of comments and exchange of ideas- the beginning of an interesting and fruitful debate on some grammatical topics. It can also stimulate some others to be creative about grammar!

After the talk and some examples, a first year English Class could use an intermediate-advanced book of exercises and go to "determiners," "nouns" "agreement." The analytical, grammatical, semantic, lexical difficulties could be accounted for in superior courses.

---------

Afterthoughts.

Why do I always have in mind names such as Aelfric, Boetius or Gramsci or Blanco White when I write down about this way of "doing grammar?" Anyway, time to start thinking about dinner and change subjects.

I must write something on Selim's 20th International Congress. Absolute Deointic necessity!

[First correction today, 15th September 2008]

The New Animal Farm. Course 2008-09.

2008-08-31T19:19:00.001+02:00

Old BarnGram
or
The New Animal Farm

Last evening before the beginning of the course 2008-09. Tomorrow, 1st September 2008 we will hold the first exam -English Grammar reseating- as duly noted in the blog calendar.
I've decided to use the Scholastic strip to introduce a Grammar utopia. Year 2008, at the end of the Second Milenium, Orwell's Napoleon died after a long existence. After its cruel years it finally went through proper education -not re-education, mind you-, lived in peace, married and fathered G. Napoleon, our hero. G.N. is a peaceful, smart and keen pig. It is doing a University degree in English, and is convinced that language is essential to guarantee life in peace. I hope you like the strip!
Wish you a nice beginning of the year to everybody!

Animation. First difficulty: Synchronization.

2008-08-16T12:38:00.000+02:00

After breakfast I decided to explore animation again. The first difficulty has been finally overcome: the need to accommodate the script in the span of time provided by the sequence.
First conversational practice. Orders, requests, denials, rejections.

Coming across animation.

2008-08-15T23:05:00.000+02:00

I came across an animation cartoon page, and I could not resist cracking a (bad) joke. About Old Anguish and important mythical names. Quite imperfect, but it was the first day.

How dare you do this strip?

2008-07-08T21:02:00.000+02:00

Peaceful evening, and about an hour to meditate about equivocal language and, therefore about the language of humour. An idea that I should contrast somewhere. What are the main factors in the exploitation of equivocal language... leaving aside intentionality at present? Of course, wit and some skill to associate meanings and forms -not necessarily echolalia- but also an extensive and profound knowledge of cultural conventions and social habits. The equivocal effect is made manifest once the expressions are placed in a context. One context is present, the other main potential context necessary to understand the pun is not. The contrast +/- present actualizes one interpretation and, paradoxically, enhances what was left underlying. Contrast potentiality/actuality? Perhaps humour springs out of the recognition of the impotence of language to account for both meanings at a single stake. The principle of reality makes us distinguish what we may imagine or conceive from what we may actually do in each case.
Dit I take many risks in drawing this strip? Hopefully not!

About gradability.

2008-07-04T11:01:00.000+02:00

One of the most popular notions in this year's papers was Gradability with respect to adjectives, to adverbs or as a notion related with some other topics, such as adjectival complementation and the like. One of the big problems in Selectividad this year was the use of comparative structures. I suppose that all this was relevant in my last strip where I combined grammar concepts, literary references and some ideas of my own. Opus nigrum is a fascinating novel. If you are thinking of a good book to read during summer, this is a good choice if you like topics such as absolutism, free thinking, religion and political power and so on. I hope you like the strip.

Where black is the colour....

2008-06-24T22:52:00.000+02:00

None or nought? Not "nut" that for sure. What I wrote before about language and propaganda made me remember this famous song by Bob Dylan. It's Saint John today and Bob Dylan will be in Vigo on Friday. I like rain, and fire and earth and wind when they reflect life and nature, when they stand for seasonal life and death. Beginning of summer then. Let's think of sweet rain and gentle flowers!

I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow!
[Afterthough: None or Nam?]

About Grammar and Pragmatics

2008-06-24T20:31:00.000+02:00

The course is over, however some significant details remain to be done, processed, even filtered. I mean the final official transcripts, of course. On the fourth of July: deadline, signifying [not[dead end]! I must confess that I love Logic even though logical nightmares are dreadful and oppressive. Matching well-formed sentences and coherent meaning even though in a seemingly arbitrary way according to the rules of language (signifier//signified) makes me think of the big accomplishments and big miseries of humankind. It also raises questions about the history and symbolic uses of words, the creation of cultural destructive artifacts and, in my case, -keeping always The Catcher in the Rye in mind- all phony distortions of reality. No matter whether you are an idealist or a materialist a nominalist or a realist, everybody knows that -unfortunately- intellectual constructions transmitted by means of the language categories (meaning of words, connotations, specialized vocabulary, descriptions, cultural values) can lead to insane ideologies, argumentations, mystifications of reality. One of the big tasks of each intellectual dedicated to Humanities is to teach the necessary methodological distance to study language and perfect its specialized knowledge. Who is the kind of character, the human archetype that worries me most in political regimes? The minister of Propaganda, of course. Maybe, his/her/their power is not that strong or that immediate as those areas of decision specialized in the actual use of force and violence, but words permeate and remain for a long time. In "Hard Times", I always keep in mind those periods of intolerance that led to systematized violence based on apparent reasoning: Valdés Leal, Goya, Bosch and so on. I've always been fascinated by the Baroque, almost as much as by some Medieval productions. This is why I always"preach" a little bit about exact and precise meaning, equivalence of words and structures and so on in my classes. Hopefully not that much! This is why my jokes become phantasmagoric when I do not want anybody to feel depressed! That's why today's joke. Celebration day! A technical problem has been solved in "EMBEDDING.!" Lately I had found some problems to embed the strips.
Too many people died, die and unfortunately will die because of the bad use of words. That's why I mention indexicals and names in my jokes. I should re-read Roman Jakobson's key article on indexicals. Of course deictics cannot have truth values as such.... unless instantiated (actualized?) Of course indexicals and decitics are not properly the same, but this is another story!

Craze Grammar.

2008-06-13T22:45:00.000+02:00

A joke that is easy to understand. Of course, you remember the classical linguistic verdict:

Old linguists never die, they are obligatorily deleted!

I`ve played here with some generative metaphors: "pruning," "deleting," "filtering," "surface," "superfluous elements." Of course "nominal subject" (of the kingdom of Grammar) rounds up the ambiguity.

End of course: Balance?

2008-06-13T20:23:00.000+02:00

The course 2007-08 is practically over. Congratulations to all those who got positive results. Sympathy and cheers for those who are still on their way. I'd like to upload today one of my favourite songs. It reflects some of those ideas about peace, harmony, equilibrium and the "healing power of words," that I have always cherished. I think that I bought the record in Madrid, in "El Rastro" when I was young, wild and experimental. Later on, when I stayed in Nebraska for a couple of years I attended a concert by The Moody Blues in the Bob Devaney Sports Center in Lincoln, Nebraska (1981-82). I play this song in my moments of "sound and fury," because I do not consider myself a violent man: simply imperfect.

A joke on grammar novelties.

2008-06-05T13:30:00.000+02:00

Grammar, that is, the institutionalized body of language conventions of a community has often been associated with the routinary transmission of dated concepts, maxims and remarks about the language that cannot stand an objective, scientific exam. Professor Pullum provided us with some examples with respect to this point taken from the work of different American grammarians in nhis Santiago lecture two weeks ago. The truth is that repetition is unavoidable when attending different courses on Grammar from basic to more advanced. This is what the joke is about. However, being positive, this can be seen as the "distictive features" of a kind of specialized knowledge. A little bit like a pasta dish. You are going to find noodles or ravioli or spaghetti, but what really matters is the sauce and the kind of cheese!

Course almost over!

From correct grammar to correct inference.

2008-06-02T22:41:00.000+02:00

A classical joke on "the power of modals," while I experimented with a new strip - new to me. I was thinking about the last lesson of this course: correct grammar does not always grant appropriate reception. Big problem in studies about communication. I should write a little bit more on this!
To see the three vignettes, just press!

Wrapping up the course

2008-05-23T06:28:00.000+02:00

[Sorry about the mistake. I was working a little bit in haste, and I cannot correct the strip after having published it, that I know. ]

This course is almost over. It is time to write a summary of what has been achieved and what has been left out in these nine months. That is, we must reach some conclusions about what we've learnt in terms of concepts and criteria, in terms of method, in terms of new knowledge and in terms of practical application. We should also learn by means of our mistakes and doubts. Negative results and exceptions are also pedagogical.
This means coming back to the course syllabus and examine in what way we've followed what was written there since the beginning of the course and what we've changed in the classes. What have we done, what have we learned?
Hopefully, we still keep a positive attitude to grammar. The compulsory study of institutionalized language kinowledge in a society at a given time, that is Grammar (Saussure) may be little attractive if we see it in terms of obligation and correctness. However grammar can be useful and entertaining if we use it to acquire a wealth of structures and expressions, and as a method to know about language, language varieties and human communication. If language is the specific human ability and if grammar is the study of that ability in social terms then... You can draw the inference yourselves.
Besides, a sound knowledge of the standard varieties of a language provides you with the tool to study other varieties that are considered substandard in the system, also with the criteria to challenge and redefine the notion of standard itself.
Two weeks ago at the end of Prof. Pullum's lecture -apart from the urgent need I felt to review prepositional adverbs and some adverbial uses- I wrote down this thought on my pad: "Grammar does not constrain you, grammar is a liberating force."This is something I should reformulate in some detail.

Professor Enrique Alcaraz Varó

2008-05-16T14:25:00.001+02:00

Professor Enrique Alcaraz Varó. University of Alicante.
Obituary.

Professor Alcaraz passed away last week. He was a solid linguist and an expert in legal language. He was a nice, friendly colleague.I first met him when I had to defend my Ph. D thesis in Seville, he was a member of the tribunal. I still remember some of the comments and suggestions he made me. Later on I met him in Alicante, Seville and here in Vigo. I'd like to mention the doctoral course he gave to our students in 1998-99. I may be wrong about the exact year, not about the good experience.
El inglés jurídico. Textos y documentos. Barcelona Ariel, 1998 and Diccionario de lingüística moderna. Barcelona, Ariel, 1997 (together with María Antonia Martínez Linares) are two olf his main publications . Today I'd like to quote from them to pay homage to Professor Enrique Alcaraz Varó. I've chosen two passages that are relevant to our grammatical discussion.

1.- About Terminology and Concepts.

Prof. Alcaraz’s dictionary is very useful in two ways: 1) the concepts that are defined, 2) the concepts that are translated. To find appropriate terminological equivalences between languages is crucial in terms of precision and equivalence. You know that in class I’ve stressed quite often the term “collocation” because of its importance both with respect to the grammar rules (selections) and with respect to the expression (appropriateness).

COLOCACIÓN. 1.En la tradición SEMÁNTICA inglesa (Halliday, 1973: 32) se emplea el término ‘colocación’ para aludir a la CONCURRENCIA, o tendencia que tienen nombres y verbos, y determinados nombres y adjetivos a “co-aparecer” en construcciones sintácticas como ladrar y perro, relinchary caballo, talar y árbol etc. Estas estructuras forman conjuntos de palabras que Halliday llamó CONJUNTOS LÉXICOS.

2.- Sentences we live by.

In class I’ve mentioned –when dealing with Pragmatics- the concepts “Communicative Act” and “Speech Act.” You know that performative verbs are quite often associated to legal language. In a practical class, I could dedicate some time to use El inglés jurídico to study the language of sentences and to discuss the felicity conditions of performatives. I would also mention the term “modulation” with respect to what Alcaraz calls “verbos especulativos.”

LOS VERBOS DE SIGNIFICACIÓN EMPÍRICA.

Otra característica es el uso de verbos empíricos en vez de los especulativos, como anticipamos en el punto 5 del capítulo tres, en especial en la nota 28. Por ejemplo, los jueces para condenar a alguien dicen We find the case proved, We find you guilty, etc. Y lo mismo se puede decir de “pensar,estimar, sugerir, etc.” Que son verbos especulativos; nadie se puede dirigir a un juez y decirle I think o I believe; en su lugar debe decir I submit:

- We submit that the case has not been proved to the high level required.
- I submit you’re going to come up with just what I said. (76)

Professor Enrique Alcaraz Varo’s has helped me in my daily teaching once more.

Vigo, 16 May 2008

In our last month of Class.

2008-05-09T08:23:00.000+02:00

We have three weeks to finish the course. It's about time to finish the description of the most important basic patterns of the language in terms of theoretical and practical difficulty and to discuss the role of grammar in actual language use, both in speech and in textual production. First an introductory joke on language and communication. In this course we've dealt with both communicative competence and grammatical competence. Two terms that we have to keep separated and well delimited, but that we need to combine in actual production. If we had some more time we could talk about global skills ans specific skills such as language... and an autonomous set of rules that accounts for its structure. That is, we should deal with a description of discourse and human interaction. We should start dealing with factors such as the extraction of meaning and the role and influence of external factors such as emotions, clichés, cultural values and so on. Finally, we should keep into account one commonsensical truth: you need to develop and perfect your mastery of the language -not only in its potential ability or in underlying competence- to be able to use its expressive resources in an appropriate way. Language is usually associated to cognition, and it is evident that if you're not able to account for what you say or hear in terms of precise meaning, in terms of structure, then the study of language becomes useless.
Prof. Sánchez-Corugedo, (University of Oviedo) mentioned yesterday the term "literacy" in his interesting talk about the American, British and Spanish University systems of education (Vigo, B-3, 8th May 2008). We need to strengthen both our communicative and grammatical competences. How? How can the study of grammar help us? In what way can it help us to survive?
I will finish this comment with two quotations from the class book, and an example.

We apply the term "text" to a stretch of language which makes coherent sense in the context of its use. It may be spoken and written; it may be as long as a book or as short as a cry for help. Linguistic form is important but it is not of itself suffcient to give a stretch of language the status of a text. For example, a road-sign reading
Dangerous corner
is an adequate text though comprising only a short noun phrase. It is understood as an existential statement (18:30) 'There is a dangerous corner nearby' with such block language features (11.22) as zero article that are expected in notices of this kind. By contrast, a sign at the roadside with the same grammatical structure but reading
Critical remark
is not an adequate text, because although we recognize the structure and understand the words, the phrase can communicate nothing to us as we drive by, and is thus meaningless.
In earliest chapters, as is normal in grammars, we have exemplified our statement by way of printed sentences which have made an implicit double demand on readers. First we have assumed that the examples would be read as if they were heard, meantally given by each reader appropriate features of stress and intonation. Second, we have assumed that readers would imagine for each example an appropriate context in which it could have a plausible textual role. [R. Quirk et alii. 1985, 434]

In Huckleberrian:
I need to be able to use language effieciently even though not properly grammatical all the time, Sir, in al sorts of activities, speaking interacting, writing texts, papers and books, not being native speaker with the rules and the lexicon I learned in your course and in some others, so that if perchance I am not successful and accomplish my goals I can explain my extremes and get away and well and survive until next time... and in case of total defeat, at least, no further question. [Chapter 6 of the class book, 2]

I'd like to discuss the notions of "full sentence," "grammatical meaning," conventional meaning" and "conversational meaning with respect to this conversational passage taken from Greenbaum and Quirk.

A: Hullo I was wondering whether you were intending to go to Popper's talk this afternoon.
B: Not today I'm afraid I can't really make it to this one.
A. Ah okay.
B. You wanted me to record it didn't you eh?
B: Yeah, heheh.
B: Heheh no. I'm sorry about that.

I'd like to talk about the role of grammar in a preliminary conversational analysis. 9th May 2008

Last week 's merry symposium on James Joyce.

2008-04-15T13:46:00.000+02:00

Last Friday and Saturday the annual meeting of the Spanish James Joyce Society took place in downtown Vigo (CaixaGalicia) organized by teachers and students of our Department. I had the chance to listen to some interesting papers and greet some old friends. James Joyce's literary expression is the result of a conscious personal technique based on multiple associations (pronunciation, concepts, vocabulary, culture, history) that calls for standar grammar knowledge to account for his intended aesthetic deviation. This is what my cartoon is about. Congratulations to the organizers, my colleague Teresa Caneda et alii.

A first year contribution.

2008-04-09T18:54:00.000+02:00

A contribution from my First year blog specially dedicated to those who are writing their papers on morphological processes, derived meanings and so on.

Scanning experiment

2008-04-04T11:40:00.001+02:00

I have designed this composition as a result of the intellectual process triggered yesterday by Prof. Piotr Cap (University of Lodz, Poland) here at the University of Vigo. His axiological frame to see the process of legitimization of the Iraq's war by US as represented by a corpus of recorded speches show very solid pragmatic work. Of course, this frame could be applied to other instances of legitimization. That is , it was no not an "ad hoc" lecture on one political item but an argumentative linguistic study that provides new ideas on how to study athe rhetoric of legitimization. If I had time I would try a more detailed pragma-linguistic analysis, but, unfortunately, on my own terms.
[First experiment with HP scanner document]

The pragmatics of war.

2008-04-04T09:00:00.000+02:00

Today´s cartoon was inspired by Prof. Cap's lecture. Faulty reasoning?

Some preliminary work after today's discussion.

2008-04-03T17:21:00.000+02:00

Quirk's 1985 example, and my own example in today's bulletin led me to do some more work on the semantic value of 'but' as a coordinator with respect to 'and' and to 'or.' I wanted to refresh some terminology and some basic notions about conventional grammatical value.
Adversative. Usually of a form or construction marking an antithesis: e.g. but is an adversative conjunction.
I'll try but it may not work.
(P.H. Matthews. 2005. Oxford concise dictionary of linguistics. Oxford University Press.
Antithesis.... The exact opposite.... He is the exact antithesis of what I find attractive in men. (Cambridge Advanced Learner's.)

The use of but
13.32 But expresses a contrast which could usually be alternatively expressed by and followed by yet. The contrast may be in the unexpectedness of what is said in the second conjoin in view of the content of the first conjoin:
John is poor, but he is happy. [`...and yet he is happy`]
The sentence implies that this happiness is unexpected in view of his poverty. The unexpectedness depends on our presuppositions and our experiences of the world. It would be reasonable to say:
John is rich, but he is happy.
if we considered wealth a source of misery. (935)
Can we label more conversational values in 'but.' Where do these labels come from?
The second clause seems to be the key interpretive element in the compound sentence. Is it always the case? Is this first impression cancellable?

My example:

I love ice cream but it has a lot of sugar.

My question:

Shall I have ice cream in the end or not?

5 examples from the Cambridge advanced:

1.- She's very hard-working but not very imaginative.
2.- This is not caused by evil, but by simple ignorance.
3.- The play's good, but not that good. I've seen better.
4.- I'm sorry, but I think you're wrong when you say she did it deliberately.
5.- I can understand his unhappiness. But to attempt suicide!

What can we say about these five cases in terms of:
a) Content of message.
b) Syntactic units
c) Value
d) Inferred meaning, conventional.

*I don't object to Friday classes, but it is not the most exciting day of the week.
[Pronoun of laziness?]

(?) I don't object to Friday classes, [but usually] a Friday is not the most exciting day of the week.
I don´t object to Friday classes, but Fridays are not usually very exciting.

Purely grammatical factors in my self-correction?

Some more problems not to be discussed in the next session.

Eating "chunks" and analyzing sentences.

2008-04-03T08:41:00.000+02:00

That quotation we commented in class from the Cambridge grammar questioning the reality of 'Sentence' in discourse, in actual conversation led me this early morning to come back to late John's Sinclair and Anna Mauranen Linear Grammar. 2006. John Benjamins, 55-6. There was one notion there I wanted to refresh. The notion of 'chunk' of discourse.

From Step 1: Provisional Unit Boundaries.

The first step of the analysis is to divide the incoming text, whether spoken or written, into chunks that reflect natural breaks in the stream of text. A chunk is rarely smaller than a word, and while there is no specific limit on how many words in legth it may be, it seems that most chunks are just a few words long, not often more than four or five....

(1) I HAVENT I DIDNT SEE ANYTHING BECAUSE IT WAS DURING
THE NIGHTBUT IT WE WECROSSED TO DENMARK IN THE
MORNING

There are no explicit rules for placing the divisions; the ability to "chunk" a text is an intuitive skill; the divisions offered below are only one solution. These were argued in great detail in the Introduction so it is only necessary to present them briefly here:

(1) b. I HAVEN'T
I DIDNT*SEE ANYTHING

BECAUSE

IT WAS*DURING THE NIGHT
BUT
IT
WE
WE CROSSED*TO DENMARK
IN THE MORNING

Two questions are raised: 1) Can I teach grammatical analysis like this in a course like ours?, 2) What about this intuitive skill that allows me to distinguish "chunks" in a sequence?
One final preliminary comment. I would segment the sequence trying to 1) make sense, 2) identify grammatical categories. See chapter 1 of this course.

The first advantage of this approach is stressing linearity and language procesing in search of information. Grammatical categories and abstractions will be justified in case that that they are the logical outcome of this basic operation. As I see it, the move is: first language and information then theory that accounts for the phenomenon, not the other way round. Coming back to another truism the risk we run when doing grammatical analysis is identify those patterns we already know and label them according to the linguistic schools we are acquainted with and consider that we have done research and learned more about language. The main problem that I find, as usual, is that they seem to be a little bit ad hoc and too flexible. I would not like to replace linguistic preconceptions for cognitive or conversational preconstructions, frames, schemata and so on without any real basis.
This first preliminary comment must be made more precise and completed with a thorough reading of this work, but it is illuminating in a chapter on grammar in which is dedicated to compounding in terms of meaning, conjoining in terms of syntactic units of the same rank and conventional grammatical meaning both with and without specialised words, being these words etiher pure coordinators or connectors formed by either a conjunctive adverb or a conjunctive expression.

On the concept "opacity." Why 1984 really matters.

2008-03-26T10:56:00.000+01:00

You know well that am used to being witty with respect to "Newspeak." Newspeak is the product of the systematic manipulation of language in the gloomy utpian world depicted by George Orwell in 1984. All references to the Past must be depurated so that they cannot hinder the achivements of the masses conducted by the Party according to the true principles of the Ingsoc. George Orwell is concerned about how totalitarian language can disfigure reality and produce monstruosities -physical and mental- while claiming to defend human progress and perfection. Orwell was making direct reference to the purges and abuses that took place in Stalin's times. However, I don't see that much difference with the other totalitarisms.

In all purges -not only in the Stalinist model- there seems to be a basic requirement: The person who is being tried has to accept the wrong deeds he or she did in exactly the same terms of the accusation. But this acknowledgement must be the result of his/her own mental process so that the verdict is seen as the logical consequence. A tacit acceptance of the sentence is not enough. The ending of Orwell's 1984 represents this truth with precision.

Totalitarism can be political, of course, but it can also be based on religious, mental, social, grounds. Education and re-education are two different issues. In search of what is ethically right I must be sincere and acknowledge my defects, vices of though, weakenesses, of course. It is my responsibility and duty. Being re-educated, however, means that you've been manipulated and that your free will, categories of thought and natural insticts have been re-conducted with or without torture. This goes against the fundamental principles of teaching and free society.

I don't want to fall in the facile criticism of some kind of political regimes or in the convenient defence of all kinds of "liberties." I know that a person with some influence, some substances and with the possibility of psychological and physical coercion on some other person can be more effective than a blind torturer in many cases, in an urban ghetto for example. I also know well what propaganda can accomplish in war scenarios, for instance.

When I refer to "Newspeak" is to hint at the possibility of people manipulating and distorting language to achieve illegitimate ends. What I defend, therefore, is the use of precise language to fulfill its comunicative function. Unfortunately, language can become opaque in the course of its historical evolution. If we are not able to relate the conventional meaning of a lexical item and the form of this word any more (signified-signified) this words may acquire a new meaning and can disfigure the historical truth completely. In fact, we could create a new history for the past. History and Historical Linguistics have always had the opposite aim as one of their main priorities: To present an accurate view of the facts of history... and of what people meant when they spoke and wrote at that time. Take an item of normal everyday life -you don't need an abstract or complex term- take "son," "daughter," "family," "property," "money," "house," "wine," "cheese," "rice." Can we apply these terms indiscriminately? I would not dare. Ockam's razor.

"Unfortunately, language can become opaque in its evolution. "I burned your video" does not mean now what it meant to me a couple of years ago. Could we think of more examples like this? This would be an interesting practical class on new expressions.

The proper use of words -not necessarily in terms of etiquette or formality- is a priority in Grammar: Wrong use of words, malapropisms, neologisms, collocations, false friends. This is simply bad grammar unless somebody uses it intentionally to do illegal business. Prejudice and intolerance are also big enemies. Being acurate in our expression is a good way to fight them. Keep in mind as well that many changes are unintentional. They are the result of language evolution, as studied in Grammar and Linguistics.

I found Orwell's reading of the last paragraphs of 1984 in You Tube. I reproduce it here because I consider it a valuable piece of propaganda in both the noble and despicable senses of this term, pages 302-04 of the Heinemann Edition of Nineteen eighty-four. London, 1975, edited by Stephen Spender.

THIS COURSE HUMOROUS STRIP

2008-03-16T15:55:00.000+01:00

I introduce Proctor and Student to you -The two characters I've designed for the course. Press the image to see it in a separate window.

SOME work on COMPOUNDING and related terms.

2008-03-14T12:43:00.000+01:00

I've started my methodological discussion on topic 4 of the course: Compound sentences by examining two concepts that present the problem from two different and complementary perspectives, stressing new meaning in one case and new structure in the other: Compounding and Conjoining. I've also made mention to other two key concepts in linguistics: Construction and Structure. My plan to study the Compound Sentences in some detail is very simple, and similar to my approach with respect to the Simple Sentence:

Expression of Ideas. I need to construct a message with a degree of elaboration that goes beyond what I can convey by means of a simple structure. I want the complexity in the discourse, not in the syntactic structure of a simple sentence -something I could achieve by means of embedding- In order to combine and relate independent clauses in a sequence I need some grammatical words because contiguity in the sequence -Juxtaposition- is not enough. I want the sentences to be conjoined. This means that I need to know about these grammatical words (functions and values) and about the structural possibilities and contraints in conjoining sentences. I want to be able to distinguish between coordinators and other conjunctions, and between coordinators and coordinative expressions. I'd also like to contrast coordination and embedding in terms of equivalence of meaning, syntactic interchangeability and expressiveness. I know as well, that I combine and conjoin simpler elements , not only full clauses and that ellipsis and mixed forms are also possible.

I know that I could study this phenomenon first as an operation that affects Morphology and Word-Formation and that extends to higher units. I could even discuss if both cases or compounding belong to the same cause. I commented briefly on this in my notes -chapter 4 in the class book-.

I will reproduce some definitions about compounding, conjoining, coordinating from relevant bibliography:

1.- (See bulletin nr. 4):
Compounding is a word-formation process which refers to two or more words linking together to produce a form which creates a new, single unit of meaning. Compounds are found in all word classes.
Compound sentences are sentences with two or more main clauses: He should have been here at five and he is not here yet, but he'll come.
[Cambridge Grammar of English.2006.]

I will use this quotation to talk about meaning, evidently.

2.- (See bulletin nr. 4):
Recursion occurs in two different contexts. We can always add one structure to another by conjoining two or more elements with a conjunction... Crystal washed the car and Art mowed the lawn.
Elvira exercised, Mike slept, and the kids read comic books.
Recursion can also be accomplished by embedding. While coordination involves placing structures side by side embedding is accomplished by placing one structure inside another.
[Lynn M. Berk. 1999. English Syntax from Word to Discourse. OUP, 218-19-226.]

I will use this comment to deal with syntax.

3.- Coordination.
The linking of groups of words of the same grammatical type, or the linking of clauses of equal importance.
[Collins Cobuild English Grammar. 1990, xix.]

My comments will deal with the structural properties of the linking of clauses, constraints and also ellipsis and cases of mixed combination.

4.- Coordination and coordinators.
Coordination. A construction with two or more constituents of equal status, prototypically linked by a coordinator (and, or, but): It rained and it snowed (coordination of clauses); Sue or her son (coordination of NPs); some rice and beans (ccordination of nouns).
Coordinator. A small lexeme category (part of speech) whose members serve to mark one element as coordinate with another: Kim and Pat; today or tomorrow; poor but happy.
[Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2005. Student's Introduction to English Grammar. Cambridge University Press, 297-98.]

Discussion on the uses of the coordinators in English.

5.- Syndetic, asyndetic and polysyndetic coordination.
We distinguish between syndetic (or linked) coordination and asyndetic (or unlinked) coordination. In syndetic coordination, the more usual form, the units are linked by a COORDINATING CONJUNCTION (or, more simply, COORDINATOR) -- and, or, but:

Slowly and stealthily, he crept towards his victim.

In asyndetic coordination, coordinators sare not present, but could be inserted:

Slowly, stealthily, he crept towards hiws victim.

When more than two units are linked by and or or, it is usual to insert the coordinator once only -between the last two units:

The wind roared, the lightning flashed, and the clouds raced across the sky.

In polysyndetic coordination, however, the coordinator is repeated between each pair of units:

The wind roared, and the lightning flashed, and the clouds raced across the sky.

[Sidney Greenbaum and Randolph Quirk. 1990. A Student's Grammar of the English Language. London, Longman, 262.

This fifth defitinion is useful to comment on sentences in a sequence with and without explicit coordinators.

140308

John Sinclair's contribution to English Grammar and Lexicography.

2008-03-05T17:58:00.000+01:00

I've received today my printed copy of Aedean's Nexus -in remembrance of John Sinclair- edited by a good friend of mine, Ignacio Palacios (usc). This issue is "In remembrance of John Sinclair and Richard Hogg." I will reproduce a passage of what Prof. Aquilino Sánchez (um) wrote about John Sinclair. Hopefully, one day, when we come across some dialectal difficulty I will have the chance to mention Richard Hogg in some detail.

You know that, during this course I mentioned John Sinclair - the Cobuild grammar and some other works by him- quite often when we were discussing the guiding principles in a scientific and descriptive grammar. You remember: Linearity, collocations, lexicon. That's why I consider the passage I reproduce here relevant both in its colloquial and in its specialised pragmatic sense.

El profesor Sinclair ha sido fundamental y quizás decisivo en la creación y consolidación de un método de trabajo al que los estudios lingüísticos no estaban habituados: la perspectiva empírica. Si la teoría generativista de Chomsky había centrado la atención en la formulación de una teoría de base cognitiva e hipotético-deductiva, cuya finalidad es explicar racionalmente cómo la mente humana genera y procesa el lenguaje, la perspectiva empírica se centra en la observación del output lingüístico para determinar lo que es normal en la lengua....
Estudiar el lenguaje implica estudiar las relaciones entre forma y significado. Puede concluirse, pues, que el estudio de las formas conducirá a una mejor comprensión de cómo se conforma, se codifica y se transmite el significado. La gran ventaja de los corpus es que hacen posible que el lingüista no reduzca su trabajo investigador a la introspección o a lo observado en la producción lingüística de unos pocos hablantes.... (114 and 115).
[Prof. Aquilino Sánchez (um) in Nexus. 2008.1 Aedean]

WARMING UP METHODICALLY.

2008-03-05T12:56:00.000+01:00

Last week's discussion made to look for some lighter material about the essentials of scientific method. Finaly I came across something short you're welcome to see. It's a short presentation entitled: THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD.

COMPREHENSIVE HUMOUR.

2008-02-27T19:58:00.000+01:00

That night Adso was intellectually cruising. In the library he had found a jewel hidden in the middle of a dry treaty on herbal potions by Nicodemus Proctor from Ely: some ingenious illuminations on Grammar by a Latinized barbarian that seemed to defy convention! He checked the book out and took it to his cell. He told the Head Librarian that he needed it for a medical report he was compiling. At dinner he was not able to eat much, he was too excited.
Once in his cell he performed the usual trick. By placing by the door the huge manuscript on the colonization of the Apenines by Claudio Agricola he would gain some extra seconds if, by any chance, the Acting Warden decided to enter his cell to find out what he was doing so late at night. The excuse was obvious, such a big book!
"Not bad, not bad at all," he said after the first perusal. His eyes were glinting. "Now, where can I hide..."

Grammar can be fun. Here you have one of several videos on grammar I found in You Tube. They made me smile. I hope you like it.

Please, could you be a little bit more precise? (1)

2008-02-27T11:22:00.000+01:00

If somebody asks you to be a little bit more precise about something (grammatical theory, course requirements, models of analysis, pieces of information)....what do you need to improve? By the way is this conditional sentence well constructed?

Commonsensical approaches and methodological approaches seem to coincide with respect to one basic pre-requirement: You have to delimit the problem you are studying. Apparently, it was William of Ockam (see the database) the thinker who first defended this principle as fundamental in any serious debate about something. We have not time to deal with the Ockam's razor principle, but I'm sure you will find references to it in any work criticizing a theory about language, about a natural phenomenon and so on, for being too ambitious. Why don't you wiki the term up in your computer? - My unfortunate barbarism.

Last week I was delimiting some problems about English Sentences. Once we've studied these preliminary problems in some depth, we will be able to start examining the chapters on the basics of the English Sentence in the grammar of the course and, from there, we can specialize in our aspect -either communicative or linguistic or historical or dialectal, for instance- and narrow our search.

I confess that, in my case, I would go for concepts such as: Sentence type, Enrichment, Derived use, Marked forms, Incomplete structures and so on. That is, those cases that point at the relation between the formal structures of grammar and the use of language in conversation or in other ways of using language to transmit information. However, a principle that I always keep in mind -commonsensical as well- is that in order to account for derived uses, apparent irregularities, contextual effects and so on, first I need to be aware of the native rules and the standar variety of a language... even if somebody could raise the objection that, unfortunately, standard grammar rules may be tainted with conventionalism and artificiality.

The problems I'd like to delimit are:

1.- Sentences and Meaning. Expressions of complete thoughts.

2.- Sentences and Conversation. Conveying messages.

3.- Sentences as Maximal Structural Units. Combining forms.

4.- Sentences as the combination of the essential syntactic functions. Combining basic

categories.

5.- Sentences as primary units of discourse. Discourse, Text.

These five points would lead me to study in Grammar:

a.- The Semantics of the Sentence in propositional terms.

b.- The Semantics of the Sentence in terms of communicative functions.

c.- The Syntax of the Sentence in terms of linguistic forms.

d.- The Syntax of the Sentence in functional terms.

e.- The Use and Combination of Sentences in Language, Speech and Text.

f.- The use of unmarked and marked structures, basic and derived with respect to the original
message (proposition?) conveyed.

g.- Phenomena such as Elision, Reformulation, Tags, Clitics and so on.

h.- Not to mention the figurative uses of language, Metaphors, Metonymies, other.

i.- Not to mention Pragmatics proper (Implied meaning, Inference, Conventional language).

These nine headings stress the need to review my actual grammatical knowledge of English (non native in my case). I'd have to study the rules and discuss suitable examples in each case to achieve an adequate comprehensive and descriptive knowledge of the grammar of the language.

Now that I have provided a sketch of the class, I will continue with some definitions of "Sentence" taken from specialised literature. I hope that the quotations I present will illustrate -and qualify-my ideas:

1.- From Nigel Fabb. 2002. Sentence Structure. Routledge, 40:

A sentence represents an Eventuality. An eventuality is an action, or an event, or a state of affairs: something that happens or something that is. The sentence represents an eventuality by separating out the type of eventuality from the abstract and or concrete things which are involved in the eventuality. The type of the eventuality is typically represented by the verb, and the abstract or concrete things involved in the eventuality are prototypically represented by noun phrases. 'Prototypically' here implies that this is the usual case, but other word and phrase clauses can do the same job.

[1] The man in the hat casually gave a slimy fish to Toby.

Key words in this "cognitive" definition:

Event
Action
State of afairs
Abstract / concrete.
Noun /verb/ Prototypes.

I'd use this definition to draw on the notion of "Sentence conveying a message." From the point of view of grammatical rules it points at the different sentential processes as represented by the verb and the obligatory and optional elements in each kind of process, affecting phenomena such as transitivity, passivization, case, collocations, restrictions, other. "Prototypes" would lead me to a mention of the X' convention and, of course, to the cognitive approaches to Prototype Theory.

2.- From Yan Huang.2007. Pragmatics. Oxford University Press, 10-11.

... A sentence is a well-formed string of words put together according to the grammatical rules of the language. As a unit of the language system, it is an abstract entity or construct defined within a theory of grammar....

Sentence meaning, then, refers to those aspects of meaning that are ascribed to a sentence in the abstract, that is, a sentence independent of its realization in any concrete form. The study of sentence meaning normally belongs to semantics.

By contrast an utterance is the use of a particular piece of language -be it a word, a phrase, a sentence, or a sequence of sentences -by a particular speaker on a particular occasion....

Finally there is the notion of a proposition. A proposition is what is expressed by a sentence when that sentence is used to make a statement, that is, to say something, true or false, about some state of affairs in the external world.

Key terms in this definition:

Sentence/ utterance/ proposition.
Construct
Sentence realization

Statement/ truth values/ state of affairs

I'd use this definition to talk about sentences as expressions of full thoughts. Also to study the use of sentences in Discourse and in textual constructions. The notion of "Construct" is essential to study word or higher units combinations and the basic and derived uses of sentences with respect to the meaning conveyed.

3.- From the Cambridge Grammar of English. 2006, 922.

Sentence. The largest independent unit of grammar. It consists of at least one main clause. In writing, sentence boundaries are defined by an initial capital letter and a full stop, an exclamation mark or a question mark at the end.

Sentences are composed of clauses.

Key terms in this definition:

Independent Units
Clause. Main/Subordinate
Punctuation

I'd use this quotation to start the grammatical description based on the terms "unit" and "clause."

4.- From MAK Halliday. 1978. Language as social semiotic. Edward Arnold, 129.... Complexes are univariative (recursive) structures formed by paratactic or hypotactic combinations -coordination, apposition, modification and the like- at the rank in question; a clause complex may be formed for example by two clauses in coordination. All other structures are multivariate (non recursive). A 'sentence' is defined as a clause complex. See Huddleston 1965, Hudson 1971, and Sinclair 1972.

Key terms in this definition:

Clause Complex
Parataxis/ Hypotaxis/ Coordination/ Apposition/ Modification
Rank

I'd use this definition, and some comments on the Informative Structure of Sentences on the same page to discuss Functions.

I'll finish here with my definition of "Sentence/Clause" on page 4 of chapter 3 of my class notes:

Clause (Sentence): Verbal Form plus other possible forms [Obligatory, Optional, Grammatical, Other] what did I have in mind apart from linearity?

write, must write, a little bit more, must write a little bit more, I, I must write a little bit more, on this, I must write a little bit more on this, then, then I must write a little bit more on this, I'm afraid, then I must write a little bit more about this, I'm afraid, ah!, Ah! I must write a little bit more on this. I am afraid.

Ah! I must write a little more about this, I'm afraid, and then a little bit about constructed examples.

Vigo, 27th February 2008.

A SHORT VIDEO

2008-02-20T18:58:00.001+01:00

Something to think about grammar, grammar rules, varieties of English,standard and substandard.

NOAM CHOMSKY interviewed by ali g:

THE ROLE OF GRAMMAR in Language Teaching.

2008-02-20T17:22:00.000+01:00

You know well that one of my concerns in this course has to do do with the role of grammar in English studies. You've heard me repeat quite often that in a descriptive course like this both theoretical insight and utility should be pursued. English is our first non-native language. You know as well that in class I always spend some time trying to find expressions equivalent to the examples we find in the notes and in the books. Grammar should provide us with more than one way to express something.

I will quote now from one of the books on grammar I borrowed from the School library. These ideas could be my own. However, I have to make an important precision. Once the situation is described the author of the comment mentions functional grammars. I sympathise with this approach in the sense that grammar deals both with structure and message, but I'm not qualified here to evaluate or accept the book's global conclusions.

Conclusion.

Whenever a teacher tries to help a student select among grammatical alternatives, she must access knowledge about the conditions which call for the use of one form rather than another. In many cases the teacher can depend on her intuitions and experience as a writer and teacher to do this, but two kinds of problems ultimately persist: (1) the teacher may not be able to be certain that her intuitions are correct and thus may want or need academic support for those beliefs; (2) some teachers,in particular nonnative speakers, may not have reliable intuitions about use, making more explicit descriptions necessary.

Functional approaches to syntax and discourse provide their descriptive basis...

[Russell S. Tomlin. Functional grammars, pedagogical grammars, in Terence Odlin.1994. Perspectives on pedagogical grammar. Cambridge Applied Linguistics, 173]

The notions of what's correct and what's appropriate and the possible shortcomings of nonnative speakers are central in a discussion about grammar.

PRESENTATION

2008-02-13T17:17:00.000+01:00

[Creative Commons, by niznoz in Flckr Photo Sharing]

Welcome to the second semester of the fourth year subject: English Grammar 2007-08. You know that one of my aims since the beginning of the course has been to enable as much comunication as possible between you, Rosalía and me. This is one of the main reasons why I have posted the materials of the course in the Faitic Tema Platform and I have used the system of newsletters sent by the course list to keep in touch. I have also decided to dedicate a blog to comment on aspects, ideas, biblography, news related to the subject. The main advantages of the blog are: 1) They are always available in the website, 2) They welcome participation and the exchange of ideas. Therefore you are all invited to use it. The blog is named English Grammar (englishgrammarfourth) for obvious reasons.

You should have started with your paper by now. I hope that this blog can help youin some way, and that it encourage you to combine personal effort and Internet resources to get the most of this course.

English Grammar

Goodbye!

A repeated bad experience once more at the end of the academic year 2008-09

A couple of free hours... I need a bath (etic) story!

My Easter Contribution.

Realistic enough?

Colourless crystal clear! I was right! It was green!

Another (bad) joke on language?

What I need is some free time to study. Looking back, not in anger but with some concern.

Così fan tutte.

Uni Intercourse 2.0. Day 0.

Sensible or insensitive? Perhaps too complex.

Beginning of the second semester.

Saturday morning in the free world.

On the term "infracción." 30th 0109

Brunch Sunday Homework.

Third Self-Examination. I'll have to live with that.

Second self- examination

The Linguist's corner. Saturday morning homework..

Disparate!

The Linguist's corner. 30th December 2008.

First self-examination

First day of vacation. Christmas 2008.

The linguist's corner.

Language and thought. Creativity and Information transmission.

Language and thought. Articulating reality

Ben Bethelem 2

Productive Sunday. Learning how to.

The Linguist's Corner: on being reflective.

The Linguist's Corner: "On being liberal."

The pragmatics of distortion

The linguist's corner.

Language philosophizing. 1

Sirloan steak, mash & gravy today, please.

Some extra free time on a Friday.

From Grammar to textual analysis, culture and more.

Grammar and institutionalized knowledge.

Phatic communion.

The dullest day of the week!

First week of proper class.

About Grammar nowadays.

About ergativity

Morpho-logic.

From next week on.

Manuscript found by chance

About the September exam.

ICELTL-1. First sentence. First problem.

The New Animal Farm. Course 2008-09.

Animation. First difficulty: Synchronization.

Coming across animation.

How dare you do this strip?

About gradability.

Where black is the colour....

About Grammar and Pragmatics

Craze Grammar.

End of course: Balance?

A joke on grammar novelties.

From correct grammar to correct inference.

Wrapping up the course

Professor Enrique Alcaraz Varó

In our last month of Class.

Last week 's merry symposium on James Joyce.

A first year contribution.

Scanning experiment

The pragmatics of war.

Some preliminary work after today's discussion.

Eating "chunks" and analyzing sentences.

On the concept "opacity." Why 1984 really matters.

THIS COURSE HUMOROUS STRIP

SOME work on COMPOUNDING and related terms.

John Sinclair's contribution to English Grammar and Lexicography.

WARMING UP METHODICALLY.

COMPREHENSIVE HUMOUR.

Please, could you be a little bit more precise? (1)

A SHORT VIDEO

THE ROLE OF GRAMMAR in Language Teaching.

PRESENTATION