English 370

Fall, 2023

Assignments and Updates

See also: Blackboard

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Office Hours: Monday and Tuesday from 2-4pm

If something goes wrong, send me an email at cicero@uw.edu

Monday:

Reading: The Speaker in the Text

As we talked of all of this in class we will have made a significant jump forward in terms of understanding WHAT style is, HOW to recognize different styles, and WHY it is important to learn how to understand style's importance in understanding the effects of writing. The Speaker in the Text explains the role style makes in our speaking, our writing, and our reading. It is one more of those dimensions of your linguistic competencies that suffuse your language skills but are invisible to your conscious mind until you learn how to perceive them.

In today's class we started looking more fully at what style is, how to describe it, and how an understanding of how to read and/or write with a consciousness of a text's style will strengthen your own writing.

We have two weeks left to develop more clarity about style, what it does, and how any language user can both recognize and put into practice what is a very important dimension of their writing and reading selves. Today's focus on a set of different styles was Step 1 (last week's introduction of style didn't get us very far--but we are on track now!), and in the next two weeks we will be integrating different dimensions of language you've been exploring this quarter into a significantly more effective use of all that language knowledge that you have collected over the past 20 years of your life and which you actually use in many ways already but often do so without yet developing conscious awareness of how its effects can be harnessed for more effective writing as well as more sophisticated reading.

The major reading you will encounter in reading The Speaker in the Text is Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address"--and I include a student paper analysing his style in this text. It is worth careful reading of that paper--it offers a strong introduction into stylistic analysis.

Writing: Look around for paragraphs you have encountered recently, and reread them with style in mind. We will be looking at more such paragraphs and I would like from each of you a paragraph that you analyse for style. Don't worry about being the best at this ever--it is a new idea for many of you. But I guarantee that most of you will find a text that has a recognizable style. It doesn't have to be literary; any kind of writing that you think interesting is best. Bring it to class to hand in--I'll use them when it comes time for your Final (and more on that next time...).

Wednesday,

Writing: We need some more time with passives and relative clauses so we will include those in the sentences below. The asterisked sentence is a step harder.

1. My paper had been graded by the teacher.

2. That Sandra awoke before her family surprised everyone. (ambig!)

3. Everyone was surprised that Sandra woke before dawn. pass. &

4. That Sandra's book had been found in the street by a passerby saved her day.

5. While travelling in Europe Ramona was offered a job in Rome.

6. Sandra's finishing her book enabled her to do her calculus assignment.

7. *After he had run his car into the wall, Alex walked to school while the car was being repaired.

Wednesday,

I'm posting late, but I'll post anyway. We are going to engage Passive Constructions today. Here are four sentences if you want to work ahead (I know a lot of you are still up!!!!)

You can read the final section at http://faculty.washington.edu/cicero/370syntax.htm

1. The ticket was paid by a credit card.

2. The paper was finished before the deadline.

3. The coffee was brewed by my partner.

4. Alex was selected by a high-quality team.

Monday,

We will work a bit with the exercises for Chapter 8, but we will move on on Monday with an intro toMetaphor.

Reading:

For literally centuries most literature teachers/professors have taught about metaphor as a poetic phenomenon, and to be sure, metaphor truely is a big part of almost any literary effort. But Literary Metaphor turns out to be a subset of a larger linguistic phenomenon that subsumes Literary Metaphor along with Conceptual Metaphor.

For Monday read about Metaphor--it is everywhere, and in places even more complex than many a literary Metaphor. Let's start with Conceptual Metaphor , about which the link below offers an intro to both what it is and why we need to be conscious of where and how it is used.

We will go on with 8a. Literary Metaphor next week. We will also be engaging more fully with style now that we have a clearer view of syntax and its effects.

 

Wednesday, : We didn't spend time with Chapter 8 on Monday; instead we worked on sentence diagramming and working with the Mid-Term. So the Reading is: Chapter 8 again. Chapter 8, is a particularly challenging read. It puts discussions of Speech Acts, Conversational Implicature, and Grice's Cooperative Principle all in the same chapter. All are important ways of thinking about how human being's interact with language. 

So for next time we will also read about Politeness and Face pp.249ff, along with the final parts of the chapter on language and gender. We will look as well at exercises 8.1; 8.2; and 8.3 in class. After all of that we will move on next week to issues of dialect.

Writing: Here are some sentences to diagram. Try to do them, but if they are confusing, don't worry--that's why we are here....  We will be looking at some of the rules we all follow in the sentences we speak, and we'll explain and show you how to include the rules we will be following. We talked on Monday about the ways in which we can turn whole sentences into an NP. And don't forget you can get help from: Ye Newe Mini-Grammar

1. My having caught a cold ruined my weekend.

2. That you should help me with my homework was a kind act.

3. Terri's having parked the car in the garage meant that I parked on the street.

4. For Henry to apologize surprised the whole class.

Monday, :We are now working with more complex syntax for part of our time, and we'll then launch into the first part of Chapter 8, pp. 236-249

Reading: Chapter 8, pp. 236-249

This chapter introduces you to philosophical linguistics, beginning with "Speech Acts."

(For the sentences below, the date we will do them is not yet established)

Writing: Here are some sentences to create diagrams . Try to do them, but if they are confusing, don't worry--that's why we are here.... 

1. The bus left the station at noon.

2. The passengers stayed on the bus after the bus reached the station,.

3. Before school, I eat a good breakfast.

4.The children ran down the hill because they saw an ice cream truck.

Wednesday, October 25:

Reading:Sections 4 and 5 in The Basics of Consituent Structure

Writing: analyzing a new style TBA: More sentences for practice.

Monday, October 23:

Reading: Sections 2 and 3 in The Basics of Constituent Structure--These are on the same page as the reading for last Wednesday:

http://faculty.washington.edu/cicero/370syntax.htm

Writing: These will be done in class to make sure everyone is given a chance to follow along. We have already looked at some styles, but we will do more to build your ability to recognize and to use in your own writing.

What we are doing here is allied to style as we began to talk about it last Monday. So let's start doing some of that, too! To "do" this is to read the paragraph below carefully and then find two to four adjectives/adverbs to describe the voice projected here.

As you read, ask yourselves whether the voice is "angry"? or "scornful"? or "self-satisfied"? or "educated"? or "amused" or "condescending"? Once you have decided on whether any of those adjectives applies here, add, if you can, one or two adjectives of your own.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

Monday, October 23:

Reading: We are now moving on to English syntax and The Basics of Constituent Structure. On Monday, today, we will cover most of parts 1, 2 and 3 of the reading. In class we will be describing new dimensions of what you and I do when we so easily create and understand the English language, often without conscious awareness of how our syntactic knowledge works, just as most of us knew little about how our phonetic abilities actually work.

This reading is available at: http://faculty.washington.edu/cicero/370syntax.htm

We will also be beginning work on stylistics. We looked at the opening to the Declaration of Independence last time as a way to begin developing ways to recognize and work with Stylistics.

Writing: We have now gone through Chapter 3 and my shorter discussion featuring morphology.

Wednesday, October 18

Quiz on morphology and phonology

Monday, October 9

Reading: HEW, Review Chapter 3 pp 68-p.80; we will have a quiz on Wednesday on phonology.

Linguistic Self-Profile: Step 1

You will be working over the next 10 weeks through a series of ways of thinking about how people use the English language. Technically, we'll survey phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, and then we'll go on to look at language in use particularly the ways in which utterances can be meaningful in extra-literal ways.

Through all of this I hope it becomes very, very clear that being a speaker of a language is always a balancing act between what the language speaking community” defines as appropriate sounds/words/modes of expression (the constraints on us as speakers), on one hand, and what any given individual’s own language experience and/or creativity enables him or her to bring to any given speech situation, on the other. We will talk about how that means that variation—or diversity—is always at the center of our language practices.

Thus each of us has our own idiolect, which is the sum of our ability to participate in the set of discourse communities and stylistic registers that we ourselves know. All of us in this classroom share some ways of speaking-- that's how we can make sense to each other. But in fact NO two of us will, or even could have, identical language experience. The differences between us may not always be large, but they are nevertheless there. Some of you have multi-language backgrounds, some have different regional or national English dialects, and others will have essentially shared Northwest American English. But even if you only share the local northwest dialect, you will still have different discourse communities to which you belong, and that fact will affect in some degree how you perform English. Thus if you belong to a special business or trade, you are likely to have a set of words in your idiolect that no one else here has. Or you may have made some habitual choices about how you greet people, or how you swear (!). The point is, as much standardization as there is in language, there is also a lot of variation.

In the old days, traditional guardians of language worried about variation.

But now, we do everything we can to standardize English in every respect, other folks felt, the whole language would take on more and more variety and difference until the whole thing collapsed! Few linguists would now accept that possibility; indeed, most would think it not just impossible, but deeply injurious to our culture’s future if it were so. For if language is to be able to make room for new and more powerful modes of expression and for new and differently educated speakers, we’d better be able to innovate. Linguistic variation is thus not just possible; it is also a very great asset.

In that context, perhaps you will believe that I'm really interested in what you actually do when you speak English. I don't care whether the differences you find between the way you speak and others speak are huge or small, but I do want you to sort through what you do as a speaker and writer of English and locate a set of identifying characteristics of YOUR idiolect.

The Assignment.

This assignment asks you to reflect upon your experience with language and to construct a 2-3 page essay about you as a language user. You will be taking yourself as a case study for this project and therefore you are the best authority there is on which aspects of your history to focus upon. Here are some ideas and questions to consider (though please do not go through and address these as a list!):

In Short: Think of yourself in your role as speaker of English, and describe and illustrate your own particular idiolect.

(This assignment is based on an assignment designed by Professor Colette Moore.)