👉🏻👉🏻What is criticism...

👉🏻👉🏻Criticism is the practice of judging the merits and faults of something. The judger is called a critic. To engage in criticism is to criticise One specific item of criticism is called a criticism or critique.

👉🏻👉🏻The judger is called a critic.
To engage in criticism is to criticise (in British English – see American and British English spelling differences.)
One specific item of criticism is called a criticism or critique.
Criticism is an evaluative or corrective exercise that can occur in any area of human life. Criticism can therefore take many different forms (see below). How exactly people go about criticizing, can vary a great deal. In specific areas of human endeavour, the form of criticism can be highly specialized and technical; it often requires professional knowledge to understand the criticism.

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹Another meaning of criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature, artwork, film, and social trends  The goal of this type of criticism is to understand the possible meanings of cultural phenomena, and the context in which they take shape. In so doing, the attempt is often made to evaluate how cultural productions relate to other cultural productions, and what their place is within a particular genre, or a particular cultural tradition.


👉🏻👉🏻🌹Early English meaning
The English word criticism is derived from the French critique, which dates back to at least the 14th century.
The words "critic" and "critical" existed in the English language from the mid-16th century, and the word "criticism" first made its appearance in English in the early 17th century

👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼In turn, the French expression critique has roots in Latin ("criticus" – a judger, decider, or critic), and, even earlier, classical Greek language ("krites" means judge, and "kritikos" means able to make judgements, or the critic). Related Greek terms are krinein (separating out, deciding), krei- (to sieve, discriminate, or distinguish) and krisis (literally, the judgement, the result of a trial, or a selection resulting from a choice or decision). Crito is also the name of a pupil and friend of the Greek philosopher Socrates, as well as the name of an imaginary dialogue about justice written by the philosopher Plato in the context of the execution of Socrates.

👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼The early English meaning of criticism was primarily literary criticism, that of judging and interpreting literature. Samuel Johnson is often held as the prime example of criticism in the English language, and his contemporary Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism is a significant landmark. In the course of the 17th century, it acquired the more general sense of censure, as well as the more specialized meaning of the "discernment of taste", i.e. the art of estimating the qualities and character of literary or artistic works, implicitly from the point of view of a consumer.

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼In the 19th century, criticism also gained the philosophical meaning of "a critical examination of the faculty of knowledge", particularly in the sense used by Immanuel Kant. Such criticism was carried out mainly by academic authorities, businessmen and men of property with the leisure to devote themselves to the pursuit of knowledge.


👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼20th century
In the 20th century, all these meanings continued, but criticism acquired the more general connotation of voicing an objection, or of appraising the pros and cons of something.

The shape and meanings of criticism were influenced considerably by wars (including two world wars) occurring almost continuously somewhere in the world.


👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼criticism have started to evolve more strongly toward "having an objection", "expressing dissent", "stating a dislike", "wanting to dissociate from something", or "rejecting something" ("If you liked it, you would not be criticizing it"). In the contemporary sense, criticism is often more the expression of an attitude, whe

#HOW_TO_ANALYZE_A_POEM
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👉1. ⭐#TO_BEGIN

Read the poem all the way through at least twice. Read it aloud. Listen to it. Poetry is related to music, so the sound is important. You listen to your favourite CDs many times; the principle is the same. It takes time to fully appreciate and understand a work of art. Make a note of your first impressions or immediate responses, both positive and negative. You may change your mind about the poem later, but these first ideas are worth recording.

👉2. ⭐#LITERAL_MEANING_AND_THEME

Before you can understand the poem as a whole, you have to start with an understanding of the individual words.

Get a good dictionary. Look up, and write down, the meanings of:

👉• words you don’t know

👉• words you “sort of know”

👉• any important words, even if you do know them.

 May be they have more than one meaning (ex. “bar”), or maybe they can function as different parts of speech (ex. “bar” can be a noun or a verb). If the poem was written a long time ago, maybe the history of the word matters, or maybe the meaning of the word has changed over the years (“jet” did not mean an airplane in the 16th century). An etymological dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary can help you find out more about the history of a particular word.

Use an encyclopaedia or the Internet to look up people and places mentioned in the poem. These allusions may be a key to the poet’s attitudes and ideas.

As you pay attention to the literal meanings of the words of the poem, you may see some patterns emerging. These patterns may relate to the diction of the poem: does the poet use “street talk” or slang, formal English, foreign language phrases, or jargon?

Your goal, now that you’ve understood the literal meanings, is to try to determine the theme of the poem – the purpose the poet has in writing this poem, the idea he wants to express. In order to discover the theme, however, you need to look at the poem as a whole and the ways the different parts of the poem interact.

👉3. ⭐#TITLE

Start your search for the theme by looking at the title of the poem. It was probably carefully chosen. What information does it give you? What expectations does it create? (For example, a poem called “The Garden of Love” should cause a different response from the one called “The Poison Tree.”) Does the title tell you the subject of the poem (ex. “The Groundhog”)? Does the title label the poem as a specific literary type? (ex. “Ode to Melancholy”; “Sonnets at Christmas) If so, you should check what characteristics such forms have and discuss how the poet uses the “rules.” Is the title an object or event that becomes a key symbol? (see Language and Imagery)

👉4. ⭐#TONE

Next you might consider the tone. Who is peaking? Listen to the voice. ? Is it a man or a woman? Someone young or old? Is any particular race, nationality, religion, etc.

suggested? Does the voice sound like the direct voice of the poet speaking to you, expressing thoughts and feelings? Is a separate character being created, someone who is not necessarily like the poet at all (a persona)? Is the speaker addressing someone in particular? Who or what? Is the poem trying to make a point, win an argument, move someone to action? Or is it just expressing something without requiring an answer (ex. A poem about spring may just want to express joy about the end of winter, or it may attempt to seduce someone, or it may encourage someone to go plough in a field. What is the speaker’s mood? Is the speaker angry, sad, happy, cynical? How do you know?

This is all closely related to the subject of the poem (what is the speaker talking about?) and the theme (why is the speaker talking about this? What is the speaker trying to say about this subject?).

👉5. ⭐#STRUCTURE

How is the poem organized? How is it divided up? Are there individual stanzas or numbered sections? What does each section or stanza discuss? How are the sections or stanzas related to each other?

👉🏻👉🏻What is the definition of Language?..

In the view of some experts..

👉🏻Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.” The American linguists Bernard Bloch and George L. Trager formulated the following definition: “A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates...


👉🏻Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so; and a language is any specific example of such a system. The scientific study of language is called linguistics.

👉🏻👉🏻Languages can differ in many ways. ... Dialects of a language may vary in terms of accents, the words people use, the way people structure their speech. This can be because of geographical distance or because of social factors. Often people who speak the same dialect will live in the same place.

👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼What is the definition of language diversity?
Language is a tool used by people to communicate with one another. As a part of culture, language helps people to stick together and do things that they could not have done as individuals. Linguistic diversity  is a way to talk about varied types of traits including language family, grammar, and vocabulary.
👉🏻👉🏻

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻The ESL ACADEMY..


SIRRANA..

👉🏻👉🏻🌹Aristotle’s view about Hamartia, Anagnorisis, Peripeteia and Catharsis according to Poetics

Aristotle’s Theory of Tragedy:
According to Aristotle Tragedy could be defined as:
“A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable acces­sories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with in­cidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.”
Following are some important terms explained by Aristotle relating tragedy in his Poetics.
Hamartia:                                                                    
Aristotle discusses hamartia in Poetics not as an aspect of character but rather as an incident in the plot. What Aristotle means by hamartia might better be translated as "tragic error". Caught in a crisis situation, the protagonist makes an error in judgment or action, "missing the mark," and disaster results.
Hamartia can be further explained as the fall of a noble man caused by some excess or mistake in behavior, not because of a willful violation of the gods' laws. Hamartia is related to hubris, which was also more an action than attitude. The "mistake" of the hero has an integral place in the plot of the tragedy. The logic of the hero's descent into misfortune is determined by the nature of his or her particular kind of hamartia.
Aristotle claimed that the hamartia must bring about the reversal of fortune for the tragic hero, and that this hero must be neither completely good nor completely bad so that the audience can identify with the character’s plight. Therefore, the audience members experience a feeling of pity for the character, as well as a sense of fear that the same downfall might afflict them someday.
Hamartia, in most ancient tragedies, causes the protagonist, or main character, to break a divine or moral law, which leads to disastrous consequences. Despite the horrible events befalling the tragic hero, tragedies celebrate the human spirit, in the confrontation of difficult situations and the accountability of a character for his or her own actions.
Examples:
In The King Oedipus, a tragic situation possible was the unwitting murder of one family member by another. Mistaken identity allows Oedipus to kill his father Laius on the road to Thebes and subsequently to marry Jocasta, his mother; only later does he recognize his tragic error. However, because he commits the crime in ignorance and pays for it with remorse, self-mutilation, and exile, the plot reaches resolution or catharsis, and we pity him as a victim of ironic fate instead of accusing him of blood guilt.
Hamlet, for example, suffers from the tragic flaw of indecision. He hesitates to kill his cruel and villainous uncle, which leads to the ultimate tragedy of the play. By struggling with an inherent moral flaw, Hamlet brings about his own destruction. His hesitation, therefore, is the action to which the term hamartia is applied.
Anagnorisis:
Anagnorisis, also known as discovery, originally meant recognition in its Greek context, not only of a person but also of what that person stood for, what he or she represented; it was the hero's suddenly becoming aware of a real situation and therefore the realization of things as they stood; and finally it was a perception that resulted in an insight the hero had into his relationship with often antagonistic characters within Aristotelian tragedy.
            In Aristotelian definition of tragedy it was the discovery of one's own identity or true character or of someone else's identity or true nature by the tragic hero. In his Poetics, Aristotle defined anagnorisis as "a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune".
Examples:
Aristotle was the first writer to discuss the uses of anagnorisis, w

Theory Of Tragedy

Classical theories
As the great period of Athenian drama drew to an end at the beginning of the 4th century BCE, Athenian philosophers began to analyze its content and formulate its structure. In the thought of Plato (c.  427–347 BCE), the history of the criticism of tragedy began with speculation on the role of censorship. To Plato (in the dialogue on the Laws) the state was the noblest work of art, a representation (mimēsis) of the fairest and best life. He feared the tragedians’ command of the expressive resources of language, which might be used to the detriment of worthwhile institutions. He feared, too, the emotive effect of poetry, the Dionysian element that is at the very basis of tragedy. Therefore, he recommended that the tragedians submit their works to the rulers, for approval, without which they could not be performed. It is clear that tragedy, by nature exploratory, critical, independent, could not live under such a regimen.

Plato is answered, in effect and perhaps intentionally, by Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle defends the purgative power of tragedy and, in direct contradiction to Plato, makes moral ambiguity the essence of tragedy. The tragic hero must be neither a villain nor a virtuous man but a “character between these two extremes,…a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty [hamartia].” The effect on the audience will be similarly ambiguous. A perfect tragedy, he says, should imitate actions that excite “pity and fear.” He uses Sophocles’ Oedipus the King as a paradigm. Near the beginning of the play, Oedipus asks how his stricken city (the counterpart of Plato’s state) may cleanse itself, and the word he uses for the purifying action is a form of the word catharsis. The concept of catharsis provides Aristotle with his reconciliation with Plato, a means by which to satisfy the claims of both ethics and art. “Tragedy,” says Aristotle, “is an imitation [mimēsis] of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions.” Ambiguous means may be employed, Aristotle maintains in contrast to Plato, to a virtuous and purifying end.

To establish the basis for a reconciliation between ethical and artistic demands, Aristotle insists that the principal element in the structure of tragedy is not character but plot. Since the erring protagonist  is always in at least partial opposition to the state, the importance of tragedy lies not in the character but in the enlightening event. “Most important of all,” Aristotle said, “is the structure of the incidents. For tragedy is an imitation not of men but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.” Aristotle considered the plot to be the soul of a tragedy, with character  in second place. The goal of tragedy is not suffering but the knowledge that issues from it, as the denouement issues from a plot. The most powerful elements of emotional interest in tragedy, according to Aristotle, are reversal of intention or situation (peripeteia) and recognition scenes (anagnōrisis), and each is most effective when it is coincident with the other. In Oedipus, for example, the messenger who brings Oedipus news of his real parentage, intending to allay his fears, brings about a sudden reversal of his fortune, from happiness to misery, by compelling him to recognize that his wife is also his mother.

Later critics found justification for their own predilections in the authority of Greek drama and Aristotle. For example, the Roman poet Horace, in his Ars poetica (Art of Poetry), elaborated the Greek tradition of extensively narrating offstage events into a dictum on decorum forbidding events such as Medea’s butchering of her sons from being performed on stage. And where Aristotle had discussed tragedy as a separate genre, superior

Punjab university PART2

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The ESL ACADEMY

👉🏻👉🏻Phonetics deals with the production of speech sounds by humans, often without prior knowledge of the language being spoken. Phonology is about patterns of sounds, especially different patterns of sounds in different languages, or within each language, different patterns of sounds in different positions in words etc.

👉🏻👉🏻🌹Phonetics is the study of sound in speech; phonology is the study (and use) of sound patterns to create meaning. Phonetics  focuses on how speech is physically created and received, including study of the human vocal and auditory tracts, acoustics, and neurology.

👉🏻👉🏻1. Phonetics vs. phonology
Phonetics deals with the production of speech sounds by humans, often without prior knowledge of the language being spoken. Phonology is about patterns of sounds, especially different patterns of sounds in different languages, or within each language, different patterns of sounds in different positions in words etc.
2. Phonology as grammar of phonetic patterns
The consonant cluster /st/ is OK at the beginning, middle or end of words in English.
At beginnings of words, /str/ is OK in English, but /ftr/ or /tr/ are not (they are ungrammatical).
/tr/ is OK in the middle of words, however, e.g. in "ashtray".
/tr/ is OK at the beginnings of words in German, though, and /ftr/ is OK word-initially in Russian, but not in English or German.
3. A given sound have a different function or status in the sound patterns of different languages
For example, the glottal stop [] occurs in both English and Arabic BUT ...
In English, at the beginning of a word, [] is a just way of beginning vowels, and does not occur with consonants. In the middle or at the end of a word, [] is one possible pronunciation of /t/ in e.g. "pat" [pa].
In Arabic, // is a consonant sound like any other (/k/, /t/ or whatever): [íktib] "write!", [daíia] "minute (time)", [a] "right".
4. Phonemes and allophones, or sounds and their variants
The vowels in the English words "cool", "whose" and "moon" are all similar but slightly different. They are three variants or allophones of the /u/ phoneme. The different variants are dependent on the different contexts in which they occur. Likewise, the consonant phoneme /k/ has different variant pronunciations in different contexts. Compare:

keep
/kip/
The place of articulation is fronter in the mouth
[k+h]
cart
/kt/
The place of articulation is not so front in the mouth
[kh]
coot
/kut/
The place of articulation is backer, and the lips are rounded
[khw]
seek
/sik/
There is less aspiration than in initial position
[k`]
scoop
/skup/
There is no aspiration after /s/
[k]
These are all examples of variants according to position (contextual variants). There are also variants between speakers and dialects. For example, "toad" may be pronounced [tëUd] in high-register RP, [toUd] or [tod] in the North. All of them are different pronunciations of the same sequence of phonemes. But these differences can lead to confusion: [toUd] is "toad" in one dialect, but may be "told" in another.

5. Phonological systems
Phonology is not just (or even mainly) concerned with categories or objects (such as consonants, vowels, phonemes, allophones, etc.) but is also crucially about relations. For example, the English stops and fricatives can be grouped into related pairs which differ in voicing and (for the stops) aspiration:

Voiceless/aspirated
ph
th
kh
f
s


h
Voiced/unaspirated
b
d

v
z
ð

(unpaired)
Patterns lead to expectations: we expect the voiceless fricative [h] to be paired with a voiced [], but we do not find this sound as a distinctive phoneme in English. And in fact /h/ functions differently from the other voiceless fricatives (it has a different distribution in words etc.) So even though [h] is phonetically classed as a voiceless fricative, it is phonologically quite different from /f/, /s/, // and //.

Different patterns are found in other languages. In Classical Greek a three-wa

👉🏻👉🏻Aristotle Six Elements of Tragedy...

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👉🏻According to Aristotle, tragedy has six main elements: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle (scenic effect), and song (music), of which the first two are primary.

Plot character thought music spectacle diction..

👉🏻Components of Tragedy in Aristotle's Poetics
Aristotle's theory of tragedy is completely based on induction. The ample examples or citations that Aristotle uses in his text from the tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, make the idea clear that his theory of this literary genre comes from his extensive reading of their tragedies, and the ideas are mere generalizations of the commonalities in their tragedies.

Aristotle (384-322 BC)




Thus, it is interesting to see a theory that followed the genre for which it is actually theorized. But in modern times this theory has lost its importance with the development of different sorts of tragic plots ending with a catastrophe. Now its significance is limited to the level of differentiating Aristotelian mode of tragedy from non-Aristotelian mode.

Aristotle defines tragedy as "the imitation of an action that is serious and having magnitude, complete in itself" in the medium of poetic language and the manner of dramatic presentation which incorporates "incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish catharsis of such emotions". An undeniable fact associated with this cathartic effect is that tragic representation of suffering and terrific defeat leaves an audience, not depressed, but relieved or even exalted. This distinctive effect on the reader, "the pleasure of pity and fear", is a basic way to distinguish it from comic and other forms of dramatic representation. Moreover, Aristotle makes the pleasure of pity and fear a rule that governs the organization of the tragic plot and choice of tragic hero and sees that a dramatist's aim should always be how to achieve this end in his drama.

👉🏻🌹There are six major components in tragedy according to Aristotle. They are:
👉🏻(a) Plot

(b) Character

(c) Thought

(d) Diction

(e) Song

(f) Spectacle

(a) Plot: Aristotle defines plot as the soul of tragedy and emphasizes much on its unity. He treats it as a unified artistic whole directed toward the intended effect, that is, pleasure of pity and fear and catharsis of such human emotions. Being a unified whole, a plot should have a proper beginning, a middle and an end in which every part supports the whole and none of the parts are non-functional. And being an imitation of an action, the plot should imitate single action. The inclusion of a series of actions simply because they happen to a single character does not make an artistic whole.

In the plot, the events develop through complication to catastrophe. The "hamartia" or a severe tragic flaw of the protagonist leads to the complication and a sudden revelation, or "anagnorisis", of this flaw intensifies the complication and it in turn anticipates the tragic end of the character, or catastrophe after a sudden reversal in the fortune of the character, that is, "peripeteia". In this way, the plot moves from hamartia through anagnorisis and peripetiea to catastrophe. This shows that Aristotle favors the complex plot as opposed to the simple plot in which reversal of the situation is almost impossible.

(b) Character: It has a secondary place after the plot. By character, Aristotle means the tragic hero who is always a noble man who in turn is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly evil but a mixture of both. He is always higher than the ordinary moral worth. If, according to Aristotle, the character is better-than-we-are, the tragic effect will be stronger. The tragic and unfortunate end of such a character moves in us pity and fear. He moves in us to pity because his misfortune is greater than what he actually deserves from his hamartia. Likewise, he moves us to fear, for we think of what will happen to our l

👉🏻👉🏻What is criticism...

👉🏻👉🏻Criticism is the practice of judging the merits and faults of something. The judger is called a critic. To engage in criticism is to criticise One specific item of criticism is called a criticism or critique.

👉🏻👉🏻The judger is called a critic.
To engage in criticism is to criticise (in British English – see American and British English spelling differences.)
One specific item of criticism is called a criticism or critique.
Criticism is an evaluative or corrective exercise that can occur in any area of human life. Criticism can therefore take many different forms (see below). How exactly people go about criticizing, can vary a great deal. In specific areas of human endeavour, the form of criticism can be highly specialized and technical; it often requires professional knowledge to understand the criticism.

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹Another meaning of criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature, artwork, film, and social trends  The goal of this type of criticism is to understand the possible meanings of cultural phenomena, and the context in which they take shape. In so doing, the attempt is often made to evaluate how cultural productions relate to other cultural productions, and what their place is within a particular genre, or a particular cultural tradition.


👉🏻👉🏻🌹Early English meaning
The English word criticism is derived from the French critique, which dates back to at least the 14th century.
The words "critic" and "critical" existed in the English language from the mid-16th century, and the word "criticism" first made its appearance in English in the early 17th century

👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼In turn, the French expression critique has roots in Latin ("criticus" – a judger, decider, or critic), and, even earlier, classical Greek language ("krites" means judge, and "kritikos" means able to make judgements, or the critic). Related Greek terms are krinein (separating out, deciding), krei- (to sieve, discriminate, or distinguish) and krisis (literally, the judgement, the result of a trial, or a selection resulting from a choice or decision). Crito is also the name of a pupil and friend of the Greek philosopher Socrates, as well as the name of an imaginary dialogue about justice written by the philosopher Plato in the context of the execution of Socrates.

👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼The early English meaning of criticism was primarily literary criticism, that of judging and interpreting literature. Samuel Johnson is often held as the prime example of criticism in the English language, and his contemporary Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism is a significant landmark. In the course of the 17th century, it acquired the more general sense of censure, as well as the more specialized meaning of the "discernment of taste", i.e. the art of estimating the qualities and character of literary or artistic works, implicitly from the point of view of a consumer.

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼In the 19th century, criticism also gained the philosophical meaning of "a critical examination of the faculty of knowledge", particularly in the sense used by Immanuel Kant. Such criticism was carried out mainly by academic authorities, businessmen and men of property with the leisure to devote themselves to the pursuit of knowledge.


👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼20th century
In the 20th century, all these meanings continued, but criticism acquired the more general connotation of voicing an objection, or of appraising the pros and cons of something.

The shape and meanings of criticism were influenced considerably by wars (including two world wars) occurring almost continuously somewhere in the world.


👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼criticism have started to evolve more strongly toward "having an objection", "expressing dissent", "stating a dislike", "wanting to dissociate from something", or "rejecting something" ("If you liked it, you would not be criticizing it"). In the contemporary sense, criticism is often more the expression of an attitude, whe

What is Language & linguistics?...


👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼Linguistics is the study of language, and involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context.

👉🏻👉🏻🌹What is Linguistics in English language?
Linguistics is a major that gives you insight into one of the most intriguing aspects of human knowledge and behavior. Majoring in linguistics means that you will learn about many aspects of human language, including sounds (phonetics, phonology), words (morphology), sentences (syntax), and meaning (semantics).

👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼What is linguistics and why study it?
Have you ever wondered why we say "feet" rather than "foots"? Or what we do with our mouths to make a b sound different from a p? Or why we rarely say what we actually mean? It's questions like these that intrigue the linguist!

Many people think that a linguist is someone who speaks many languages and works as a language teacher or as an interpreter at the United Nations. In fact, these people are more accurately called "Polyglots". While many linguists are polyglots, the focus of linguistics is about the structure, use and psychology of language in general.

Linguistics is concerned with the nature of language and communication. It deals both with the study of particular languages, and the search for general properties common to all languages or large groups of languages. It includes the following subareas :

phonetics (the study of the production, acoustics and hearing of speech sounds)
phonology (the patterning of sounds)
morphology (the structure of words)
syntax (the structure of sentences)
semantics (meaning)
pragmatics (language in context)
It also includes explorations into the nature of language variation (i. e., dialects), language change over time, how language is processed and stored in the brain, and how it is acquired by young children. All of these topics are examined in the coursework offered by the University of Arizona's Department of Linguistics.

Although linguistics is still largely unfamiliar to the educated public, it is a growing and exciting field, with an increasingly important impact on other fields as diverse as psychology, philosophy, education, language teaching, sociology, anthropology, computer science, and artificial intelligence.


👉🏻👉🏻What is language??

👉🏻The method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way.
"a study of the way children learn language"
2.
A system of communication used by a particular country or community.


👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so; and a language is any specific example of such a system.




👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Questions concerning the philosophy of language, such as whether words can represent experience, have been debated at least since Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greece. Thinkers such as Rousseau  have argued that language originated from emotions while others like Kant have held that it originated from rational and logical thought. 20th-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein argued that philosophy is really the study of language. Major figures in linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky.



👉🏻Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. However, any precise estimate depends on a partly arbitrary distinction between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken or signed, but any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, in whistling, signed, or braille. This is because human language is modality-independent. Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, "language" may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and u

#Henry_Fielding_as_Father_of_English_Novel...

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹✋🏼✋🏼

➡Richardson, Fielding, Smollet and Stern are known as the four wheels of the novel. Among them Fielding's contribution to English novel is noteworthy. It is true that even before Fielding, Bunyan, Defoe and Richardson had written novels. But none deserve to be called the father of English novel. It is Fielding who gave a definite form and proper shape to the English novel. He formulated the theory of novel writing. He made invaluable contributions to the development of plot construction and the art of characterisation. He made the novel an effective weapon of social criticism. He tried to advocate a healthy philosophy of life. He imbued his writings with a very solemn purpose. On these grounds Sir Walter Scott rightly calls him the father of English novel.


            ⏩#Plot :- Plot before Fielding did not hold much importance. But Fielding revolutionised the concept of plot construction. He employs very coherent and organic plots. He conducts them with utmost skill. The plot of 'Tom Jones' is one of the three best plots ever planned. It is a closely-knit organic plot. In short, his plots are thoroughly architectonic. Thus a well organised plot is one of the main contributions of Fielding.
            ⏩#Comic_Epic_in_Prose :- Another contribution of Fielding is his concept of novel as a comic epic in prose. He formulated the theory of novel in his prefaces of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. He introduced characters of great variety. He depicted their lives in all its authenticity.
            #⏩Characterisation :- Fielding is the creator of the novel of character. He breathed life into his characters. He peopled the novel with a great crowd of lively and interesting characters. They are compounded of both good and evil elements. Like Shakespeare he portrays all kind of human characters as real human beings.


            #⏩Realism :- Fielding is the first realist of the English novel. Common life is the material of his novels. He brings the whole world, as we see it. He reproduced reality faithfully and accurately. He presents a complete and comprehensive picture of the contemporary society. His realism is epical in its range. Thus Fielding is the founder of modern realistic novel.
            ⏩#Humour :- Fielding employed all types of humour in his novels. In Joseph Andrews it is farcical, in Tom Jones ironical and in Jonathan Wild satirical. His humour is exuberant, spontaneous, tolerant and genial. He lashes out his satire at affectation, vanity, pedantry, hypocrisy and vice. But he is always human and humane. Irony is a great weapon of his satire. All the great humorists are influenced by Fielding.
            ⏩#Other__Reasons :- Fielding is champion in so many other respects. His another great contribution is the localisation of the scene. He gives graphic details of Tom's journey to London on the highways. His novels are thoroughly English. His dialogues are lively as well as natural. He was superb craftsman. His art of narration is praiseworthy. He brought a healthy moral vision. He is tolerant of natural human weaknesses but he does not tolerate hypocrisy. He advances a very sound moral philosophy.


            ➡Thus Fielding's contribution is noteworthy. He gave to the novel a great scope. Due to his great contributions, Scott called him 'the father of English novel'. About Fielding's contribution Allen says, 'The form the novel took in England for more than a hundred years had its origin in Fielding, and in this respect, Smollett, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray and Meredith all wrote in his shadow'.


Prepared by English literature..

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👉🏻Language Acquisition


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Second language acquisition and learning defined as learning a language, which is different from your native language. Second Language acquisition is a long process, which includes several stages.

✋🏼👉🏻Second Language Acquisition



Language is the method of expressing ideas and emotions in the form of signs and symbols. These signs and symbols are used to encode and decode the information. There are many languages spoken in the world. The first language learned by a baby is his or her mother tongue. It is the language, which he or she listens to from his or her birth. Any other language learned or acquired is known as the second language.

👉🏻Definition of Second Language Acquisition
The definition of second language acquisition and learning is learning and acquisition of a second language once the mother tongue or first language acquisition is established. Second language acquisition or SLA is the process of learning other languages in addition to the native language. For instance, a child who speaks Urdu as the mother tongue starts learning English when he starts going to school. English is learned by the process of second language acquisition. In fact, a young child can learn a second language faster than an adult can learn the same language.

👉🏻👉🏻Second Language Acquisition and Learning
Though most scholars use the terms “language learning" and “language acquisition" interchangeably, actually these terms differ. Language learning refers to the formal learning of a language in the classroom. On the other hand, language acquisition means acquiring the language with little or no formal training or learning.


👉🏻👉🏻🌹If you go to a foreign land where people speak a different language from your native language, you need to acquire that foreign language. It can be done with little formal learning of the language through your every day interaction with the native peoples in the market place, work place, parks or anywhere else. This is true for learning spoken language.

Ways to introduce the second language
A second language can be acquired at any time after a child has developed language skills. A second language is often called the target language while the native language is known as "L1."

👉🏻The second language can be introduced in following ways -

introduced by speakers of the second language
introduced as a second language that is part of the curriculum at school
Teaching Second Language



There are several things to consideration when teaching a second language. These factors may include the language spoken at home, the willingness of the learner, the reason to learn the second language (i.e., learning at school, for work, to talk to friends or others).

👉🏻👉🏻Though all the students of second language acquisition go through the same stages of learning, the period of learning varies. Students can learn better by responding to pictures and visuals. Attention to listening comprehension and building a receptive and active vocabulary is essential.

🌹More about Second Language Acquisition


The definition of second language acquisition and learning describes the process of understanding, speaking and writing another language fluently. The ability to communicate in a second language is becoming an essential skill in today's world

👉🏻👉🏻🌹Chomsky vs Skinner learning theories..


👉🏻👉🏻🌹Theory of Behaviorism says we need feedback to be successful, even in learning a language. Noam Chomsky was developing his own ideas while Skinner was working on his Theory of Behaviorism. Chomsky developed the theory of Universal Grammar. ... His proof was the fact that there are some universal elements in all languages...

👉🏻🌹Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition is one of the quintessential human traits, because non-humans do not communicate by using language.
👉🏻👉🏻🌹✋🏼Chomsky's linguistic theory states that we are born with an innate ability to learn language, and with little guidance, children will naturally learn language. Chomsky argues we must be born with a language acquisition device, an area in our brains that makes learning language a natural event.

👉🏻👉🏻🌹✋🏼B. F. Skinner was one of the most influential of American psychologists. A behaviorist, he developed the theory of operant conditioning -- the idea that behavior is determined by its consequences, be they reinforcements or punishments, which make it more or less likely that the behavior will occur again.

👉🏻🌹🌹🌹What is the two word stage?
Two Word Stage. Within a few months of producing one word utterances children will begin to produce two-word phrases. The two-word stage often occurs from 18-24 months, consisting of utterances generally two nouns or a noun and a verb.

👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼What did Albert Bandura do?
Albert Bandura. Albert Bandura is a contemporary psychologist specializing in developmental psychology and educational psychology. Much of his work centers around social learning theory. He is one of the most widely-cited psychologists of all time.


👉🏻👉🏻Albert Bandura is an influential social cognitive psychologist who is perhaps best-known for his social learning theory, the concept of self-efficacy, and his famous Bobo doll experiments. He is a Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and is widely regarded as one of the greatest living psychologists.

👉🏻👉🏻🌹🌹Conclusion..

👉🏻The Search for a Unified Theory of Language Learning
Language. It’s all around us. It’s vital for our everyday existence.

And yet many of us find it challenging to pick up a new one.

The problem, we tell ourselves, is that we’re thinking too hard.

The solution, we say, is to be more like those kids that we once were when we learned our first language. Simply absorbing things the way kids do without really thinking about the language must surely be our best bet, we convince ourselves.

But here’s the thing. We’re not kids anymore and we never will be again.

We’re not going to have the same opportunities as we did in our native language where we were in constant contact with mothers, fathers and siblings who corrected our every mistake (though a girlfriend or boyfriend might compensate). Nor do most of us want to spend 18 years of our lives studying a language just to achieve high school level fluency.

We don’t need to abandon the lessons we’ve taken from childhood language learning, but we must surely temper them with something else. And that thing is theory.

Theory, that most highly condensed form of thought based on principles and evidence, can help us as adults to excel in language learning in ways that would otherwise not be possible.

Of course, learning about language learning theory in no way needs to occupy the bulk of your time. By devoting just a fraction of your time to theory right now, you’ll reap benefits far beyond getting in an extra 10 minutes of studying. So without further ado, let’s start at the beginning.

👉🏻👉🏻🌹Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in corpora (samples) of "real world" text. ... Corpus linguistics proposes that reliable language analysis is more feasible with corpora collected in the field in its natural context ("realia"), and with minimal experimental-interference...

👉🏻👉🏻🌹What is a corpus in language?
In linguistics, a corpus (plural corpora) or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts (nowadays usually electronically stored and processed). They are used to do statistical analysis and hypothesis testing, checking occurrences or validating linguistic rules within a specific language territory.

👉🏻👉🏻🌹Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in corpora (samples) of "real world" text. The text-corpus method is a digestive approach that derives a set of abstract rules that govern a natural language from texts in that language, and explores how that language relates to other languages.

👉🏻👉🏻🌹🌹Corpus linguistics is the use of digitalized text (corpus) or texts, usually naturally occurring material, in the analysis of language (linguistics). Techniques used include generating frequency word lists, concordance  lines (keyword in context or KWIC), collocate, cluster and keyness lists.

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹The text-corpus method is a digestive approach that derives a set of abstract rules that govern a natural language from texts in that language, and explores how that language relates to other languages. Originally derived manually, corpora now are automatically derived from source texts. Corpus linguistics proposes that reliable language analysis is more feasible with corpora collected in the field in its natural context ("realia"), and with minimal experimental-interference.




👉🏻👉🏻🌹The field of corpus linguistics features divergent views about the value of corpus annotation. These views range from John McHardy Sinclair, who advocates minimal annotation so texts speak for themselves, to the Survey of English Usage team (University College, London), who advocate annotation as allowing greater linguistic understanding through rigorous recording..

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹The first computerized corpus of transcribed spoken language was constructed in 1971 by the Montreal French Project, containing one million words, which inspired Shana Poplack's much larger corpus of spoken French in the Ottawa-Hull area.


👉🏻👉🏻🌹🌹Besides these corpora of living languages, computerized corpora have also been made of collections of texts in ancient languages. An example is the Andersen-Forbes database of the Hebrew Bible, developed since the 1970s, in which every clause is parsed using graphs representing up to seven levels of syntax, and every segment tagged with seven fields of information.


The Quranic Arabic Corpus is an annotated corpus for the Classical Arabic language of the Quran. This is a recent project with multiple layers of annotation including morphological segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic analysis using dependency grammar.



👉🏻Besides pure linguistic inquiry, researchers had begun to apply corpus linguistics to other academic and professional fields, such as the emerging sub-discipline of law and corpus linguistics, which seeks to understand legal texts using corpus data and tools.


👉🏻🌹Methods

Corpus linguistics has generated a number of research methods, which attempt to trace a path from data to theory.

👉🏻👉🏻🌹Wallis and Nelson (2001) first introduced what they called the 3A

👉🏻perspective:

👉🏻 Annotation,

👉🏻Abstraction and Analysis.




👉🏻Annotation consists of the application of a scheme to texts. Annotations may include structural markup, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, and numerous other representations.
👉🏻👉🏻Abstraction consists of the translation (mapping) of terms in the scheme to terms in a theoretically motivated model or dataset. Abstraction typically includes linguist-directed search but may include e.g

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👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹


👉🏻World literature


World literature is sometimes used to refer to the sum total of the world's national literatures, but usually it refers to the circulation of works into the wider world beyond their country of origin. Often used in the past primarily for masterpieces of Western European literature, world literature today is increasingly seen in global context.



👉🏻Readers today have access to an unprecedented range of works from around the world in excellent translations, and since the mid-1990s a lively debate has grown up concerning both the aesthetic and the political values and limitations of an emphasis on global processes over national traditions.

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹Johann Wolfgang von Goethe used the concept of Weltliteratur in several of his essays in the early decades of the nineteenth century to describe the international circulation and reception of literary works in Europe, including works of non-Western origin. The concept achieved wide currency after his disciple Johann Peter Eckermann published a collection of conversations with Goethe in 1835.


👉🏻 Goethe spoke with Eckermann about the excitement of reading Chinese novels and Persian and Serbian poetry as well as of his fascination with seeing how his own works were translated and discussed abroad, especially in France.

 In a famous statement in January 1827, Goethe predicted to Eckermann that in the coming years world literature would supplant the national literatures as the major mode of literary creativity:



👉🏻👉🏻🌹I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men
 therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.



👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹Reflecting a fundamentally economic understanding of world literature as a process of trade and exchange, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the term in their Communist Manifesto (1848) to describe the "cosmopolitan character" of bourgeois literary production, asserting that

In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climates. ... And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹Martin Puchner has argued that Goethe had a keen sense of world literature as driven by a new world market in literature. It was this market-based approach that Marx and Engels pick up in 1848. But while the two authors admire the world literature created by bourgeois capitalism, they also seek to exceed it. They hoped to create a new type of world literature, one exemplified by the Manifesto, which was to be published simultaneously in many languages and several locations. This text was supposed to inaugurate a new type of world literature and in fact partially succeeded, becoming one of the most influential texts of the twentieth century


👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹Whereas Marx and Engels followed Goethe in seeing world literature as a modern or even future phenomenon, in 1886 the Irish scholar H. M. Posnett argued that world literature first arose in ancient empires such as the Roman Empire, long before the rise of the modern national literatures.


👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼 Certainly today, world literature is understood as including classical works from all periods, as well as contemporary literature written for a global audience. By the turn of the twentieth century, intellectuals in various parts of the globe were thinking actively

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The ESL ACADEMY...

🌹What Is “Literature”?

A first challenge in reading world literature is that the very idea of literature has meant many different things over the centuries and around the world. Beyond the varied norms associated with individual literary genres, different cultures have often had distinctive patterns of belief concerning the nature of literature and its role in society. If different cultures have different understandings of the world that a literary text engages, they also diverge in their conception of the ways in which texts are created to begin with. In the western tradition going back to Plato and Aristotle, literature is something a poet or a writer makes up ‐ an assumption built into our very terms poetry and fiction. Beyond the level of individual works, the relations among genres vary in different cultures literary ecosystems. Western readers, for example, have long been accustomed to think of poetry and prose as clearly distinct modes of writing.


👉🏻🌹What is taught in world literature?


Medieval Literature. Students explore major works of literature, usually European, penned between the 8th century and the 14th century, in this elective class. Coursework focuses on common themes, genres and writing styles. Students study primary texts like Beowulf and writers like Chaucer and Dante.

👉🏻👉🏻🌹What is the meaning of the world literature?
World literature is sometimes used to refer to the sum total of the world's national literatures, but usually it refers to the circulation of works into the wider world  beyond their country of origin.

👉🏻👉🏻🌹Who coined the term world literature?
Although the term "world literature" was coined by Goethe in 1827 in the small duchy of Weimar, it was developed in Istanbul during World War II by German Jews such as Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer who were seeking refuge from Hitler.

👉🏻👉🏻🌹World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, What Is World Literature? probes the uses and abuses of world literature in a rapidly changing world.

In case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs and from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction, David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process.


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TGG VS TG


THE ESL ACADEMY BY SIRRANA

Transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is, in the study of linguistics, part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of naturally evolved languages, that considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words which form grammatical .
👉🏻🌹Transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is, in the study of linguistics, part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of naturally evolved languages, that considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words which form grammatical sentences in a given language. TG involves the use of defined operations called transformations to produce new sentences from existing ones.

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👉🏻👉🏻🌹✍🏿What is Chomsky theory of universal grammar?
Noam Chomsky's Theory Of Universal Grammar Is Right; It's Hardwired Into Our Brains. In the 1960s, linguist Noam Chomsky proposed a revolutionary idea: We are all born with an innate knowledge of grammar that serves as the basis for all language acquisition. In other words, for humans, language is a basic instinct.

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻✍🏿Universal grammar (UG) in linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. ... With more linguistic stimuli received in the course of psychological  development, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG.

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼First proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is a component of the nativist theory of language. This theory asserts that humans are born with the instinct or "innate facility" for acquiring language.

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹What is Chomsky's model of language acquisition?
The language acquisition device is a hypothetical tool in the brain that helps children quickly learn and understand language. Noam Chomsky theorized the LAD to account for the rapid speed at which children seem to learn language and its rules. LAD later evolved into Chomsky's greater theory of universal grammar.

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻✍🏿Stages of Second Language Acquisition
Stage I: Pre-production. This is the silent period. ...
Stage II: Early production. This stage may last up to six months and students will develop a receptive and active vocabulary of about 1000 words. ...
Stage III: Speech emergence. ...
Stage IV: Intermediate fluency. ...
Stage V: Advanced Fluency.
👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹Universal grammar (UG) in linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that a certain set of structural rules are innate to humans, independent of sensory experience.




With more linguistic stimuli received in the course of psychological development, children then adopt specific syntactic rules  that conform to UG.It is sometimes known  "mental grammar", and stands contrasted with other "grammars", e.g. prescriptive, descriptive and pedagogical. The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus  (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages.


However, the latter has not been firmly established, as some linguists have argued languages are so diverse that such universality is rare It is a matter of empirical investigation to determine precisely what properties are universal and what linguistic capacities are innate.


👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹Chomsky argued that the human brain  contains a limited set of constraints for organizing language. This implies in turn that all languages have a common structural basis: the set of rules known as "universal grammar".

Speakers proficient in a language know which expressions are acceptable in their language and which are unacceptable. The key puzzle is how speakers come to know these restrictions of their language, since expressions that violate those restrictions are not present in the input, indicated as such. Chomsky argued that this poverty of stimulus  means that Skinner's behaviourist perspective cannot explain language acquisition. The absence of negative evidence—evidence that an expression is part of a class of ungrammatical sentences in a given language—is the core of his argument.[11] For example, in English, an interrogative pronoun like what  cannot be related to a predicate within a relative clause:

*"What did John meet a man who sold?"
Such expressions are not available to language learners: they are, by hypothesis, ungrammatical. Speakers of the local language do not use them, nor note them as unacceptable to language le

M.Phil linguistics Part1

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👉🏻🌹Saussure’s concept of Langue and Parole and compare
it with that of Noam Chomsky’s Competence and Performance

The word 'language' has been used in various senses, especially the 'spoken' form or speech and the written form of expression. This causes some confusion. Hence the French-Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure introduced three terms, viz. language, langue and parole, to distinguish between different senses. He regarded 'language' as the faculty of speech or ability to speak, which all human beings possess hereditarily. There are two aspects of this faculty: 'langue' and parole', the first implying the language system and the second the act of speaking. Langue comprises all aspects and features of a language taken as a whole, that could be found out through an examination of the memories of all the users of language, or 'the sum of word-images stored in the minds of individuals.' The term parole implies the actual, concrete act of speaking on the part of an individual—-a dynamic social activity in a particular time and place. Saussure gave the name 'parole' to the speech-utterances we actually observe whereas he interpreted 'Langue' as something supra-individual, the common possession of all the people who supposed themselves to be 'speaking the same language", and stored in the collective consciousness of all the members of the community.  La langue is a repository of signs which each speaker has received from the other speakers of the community.  Wilkins says:

“If one took away what was idiosyncratic or innovational, langue would remain.
Langue, by definition, is stable and systematic; society conveys the
regularities of langue to the child so that he becomes able to function as a member of the speech community”

The famous American linguist Noam Chomsky first used these terms to specifically refer to a person’s intuitive knowledge of the rules and structure of his language as a native speaker (he called it competence), and his actual use of these (which he termed performance). Scholars of the earlier period were aware of this basic distinction but Chomsky pointed out the inherent ability or knowledge in a native speaker of the structure of his language. It refers to the ability of the native speaker to:

“Understand and produce utterances which he may never find the opportunity either to understand or to produce”

Competence is the tacit knowledge of the language, performance the use of the language in concrete situations. ‘Sentence’ is a concept that belongs to the theory of competence, while ‘utterance’ to performance. The native speaker of a language possesses an ‘internalised set of rules’ which is at the base of his ability to understand and speak. The actual utterances are only evidence of this competence. While reading a new book he sees right from the start new sentences which he had never read before; but he doesn’t find any difficulty in understanding them...

👉🏻👉🏻🌹✍🏿His competence also makes him reject the ungrammatical constructions,
consider the sentence ‘flying planes can be dangerous’ ambiguous, and ‘I, well,
has seen the captain’ wrong. Competence also makes him recognize an expression as command, request etc. Performance is what actually a speaker says. It is the substance, the actual manifestation of his competence. One can understand a speaker’s competence by studying his performance. In learning a new language also it is wiser to develop the basic competence rather than memorise pieces of phrases, as the latter is not a true language behaviour. As Ronald Wardaugh says:

“The ability the reader has to understand novel sentences derives from his competence in English”

Competence vs. Performance given by Chomsky closely resembles the langue/parole dichotomy given by Saussure. But it differs in that while langue is the same with every language user, competence may differ from person to person. Saussure’s understanding of langue em

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M.Phil Linguistics course

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👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼transformational (generative) grammar
LINGUIS.
a system of linguistic analysis consisting of a set of rules that generate basic syntactic structures, in the form of simple independent clauses, and a set of transformational rules that operate on those structures so as to produce questions, complex sentences, etc. and thus to account for every possible sentence of a language

👉🏻👉🏻🌹Transformational grammar, also called Transformational-generative Grammar, a system of language analysis that recognizes the relationship among the various elements of a sentence and among the possible sentences of a language and uses processes or rules (some of which are called transformations) to express these .

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹✍🏿Deep structure and surface structure

Noam Chomsky’s 1965 book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax developed the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation — a deep structure and a surface structure.


 The deep structure represents the core semantic relations of a sentence, and is mapped onto the surface structure (which follows the phonological  form of the sentence very closely) via transformations. Chomsky believed there are considerable similarities between languages' deep structures and that these reveal properties, common to all languages, that surface structures conceal. However, this may not have been the central motivation for introducing deep structure; transformations had been proposed prior to the development of deep structure as a means of increasing the mathematical and descriptive power of context-free grammars.



Similarly, deep structure was devised largely for technical reasons relating to early semantic theory. Chomsky emphasizes the importance of modern formal mathematical devices in the development of grammatical theory.


👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼Innate linguistic knowledge

Terms such as "transformation" can give the impression that theories of transformational generative grammar are intended as a model for the processes through which the human mind constructs and understands sentences.


Chomsky is clear that this is not in fact the case: a generative grammar models only the knowledge that underlies the human ability to speak and understand. One of the most important of Chomsky's ideas is that most of this knowledge is innate, with the result that a baby can have a large body of prior knowledge about the structure of language in general, and need only actually learn the idiosyncratic features of the language(s) it is exposed to.




Chomsky was not the first person to suggest that all languages had certain fundamental things in common (he quotes philosophers writing several centuries ago who had the same basic idea), but he helped to make the innateness theory respectable after a period dominated by more behaviorist  attitudes towards language. Perhaps more significantly, he made concrete and technically sophisticated proposals about the structure of language, and made important proposals regarding how the success of grammatical theories should be evaluated.


👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼✍🏿Transformations

The usual usage of the term 'transformation' in linguistics refers to a rule that takes an input typically called the Deep Structure (in the Standard Theory) or D-structure (in the extended standard theory or government and binding theory) and changes it in some restricted way to result in a Surface Structure (or S-structure). In TGG, Deep structures were generated by a set of phrase structure rules.



For example, a typical transformation in TG is the operation of subject-auxiliary inversion  (SAI). This rule takes as its input a declarative sentence with an auxiliary: "John has eaten all the heirloom tomatoes." and transforms it into "Has John eaten all the heirloom tomatoes?" In their original formulation (Chomsky 1957), these rules were stated as rules that held over strings o

Transformations

The usual usage of the term 'transformation' in linguistics refers to a rule that takes an input typically called the Deep Structure (in the Standard Theory) or D-structure (in the extended standard theory or government and binding theory) and changes it in some restricted way to result in a Surface Structure (or S-structure). In TGG, Deep structures were generated by a set of phrase structure rules.

For example, a typical transformation in TG is the operation of subject-auxiliary inversion  (SAI). This rule takes as its input a declarative sentence with an auxiliary: "John has eaten all the heirloom tomatoes." and transforms it into "Has John eaten all the heirloom tomatoes?" In their original formulation (Chomsky 1957), these rules were stated as rules that held over strings of either terminals or constituent symbols or both.

X NP AUX Y {\displaystyle \Rightarrow } X AUX NP Y
(where NP = Noun Phrase and AUX = Auxiliary)

In the 1970s, by the time of the Extended Standard Theory, following the work of Joseph Emonds on structure preservation, transformations came to be viewed as holding over trees. By the end of government and binding theory in the late 1980s, transformations are no longer structure changing operations at all; instead they add information to already existing trees by copying constituents.

The earliest conceptions of transformations were that they were construction-specific devices. For example, there was a transformation that turned active sentences into passive ones. A different transformation raised embedded subjects into main clause subject position in sentences such as "John seems to have gone"; and yet a third reordered arguments in the dative alternation. With the shift from rules to principles and constraints that was found in the 1970s, these construction-specific transformations morphed into general rules (all the examples just mentioned being instances of NP movement), which eventually changed into the single general rule of move alpha or Move.

Transformations actually come in two types: (i) the post-Deep structure kind mentioned above, which are string or structure changing, and (ii) Generalized Transformations (GTs). Generalized transformations were originally proposed in the earliest forms of generative grammar (e.g., Chomsky 1957). They take small structures, either atomic or generated by other rules, and combine them. For example, the generalized transformation of embedding would take the kernel "Dave said X" and the kernel "Dan likes smoking" and combine them into "Dave said Dan likes smoking." GTs are thus structure building rather than structure changing. In the Extended Standard Theory and government and binding theory, GTs were abandoned in favor of recursive phrase structure rules. However, they are still present in tree-adjoining grammar as the Substitution and Adjunction operations, and they have recently re-emerged in mainstream generative grammar in Minimalism, as the operations Merge and Move.

In generative phonology, another form of transformation is the phonological rule, which describes a mapping between an underlying representation (the phoneme) and the surface form that is articulated during natural speech.

M.Phil linguistics Part 1


✍🏿✍🏿👉🏻Linguistics,Linguists,Language,Branches of linguistics,sub discipline and interdiciplinary fields,misconception about Linguistics...


👉🏻🌹A linguist is someone who studies language. Linguists study every aspect of language, including vocabulary, grammar, the sound of language, and how words evolve over time. The study of language is called linguistics, and people who study linguistics are linguists.

✍🏿✍🏿🌹A linguist is someone who studies language. Linguists study every aspect of language, including vocabulary, grammar, the sound of language, and how words evolve over time.
The study of language is called linguistics, and people who study linguistics are linguists. Being a linguist isn't easy; you usually have to go to graduate school and conduct research about a specific aspect of language. There are computational linguists, forensic linguists, comparative linguists, and many other specialties. If you love language, you'd probably enjoy a career as a linguist.

✍🏿✍🏿✍🏿🌹✋🏼A traditional grammar is a framework for the description of the structure of a language. ... Traditional grammars generally classify words into parts of speech. They describe the patterns for word inflection, and the rules of syntax by which those words are combined into sentences.

✍🏿✍🏿✍🏿✋🏼🌹Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that regards grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language.

✍🏿✍🏿✍🏿✋🏼Transformational grammar, also called Transformational-generative Grammar, a system of language analysis that recognizes the relationship among the various elements of a sentence and among the possible sentences of a language and uses processes or rules (some of which are called transformations) to express these ...

✍🏿✍🏿✍🏿✋🏼Transformational grammar, also called Transformational-generative Grammar, a system of language  analysis that recognizes the relationship among the various elements of a sentence and among the possible sentences of a language and uses processes or rules (some of which are called transformations) to express these relationships. For example, transformational grammar  relates the active sentence “John read the book” with its corresponding passive, “The book was read by John.” The statement “George saw Mary” is related to the corresponding questions, “Whom [or who] did George see?” and “Who saw Mary?” Although sets such as these active and passive sentences appear to be very different on the surface (i.e., in such things as word order), a transformational grammar tries to show that in the “underlying structure” (i.e., in their deeper relations to one another), the sentences are very similar. Transformational grammar assigns a “deep structure” and a “surface structure” to show the relationship of such sentences. Thus, “I know a man who flies planes” can be considered the surface form of a deep structure approximately like “I know a man. The man flies airplanes.” The notion of deep structure can be especially helpful in explaining ambiguous utterances; e.g., “Flying airplanes can be dangerous” may have a deep structure, or meaning, like “Airplanes can be dangerous when they fly” or “To fly airplanes can be dangerous.”

✍🏿👉🏻The most widely discussed theory of transformational grammar was proposed by U.S. linguist Noam Chomsky in 1957. His work contradicted earlier tenets of structuralism by rejecting the notion that every language is unique. The use of transformational grammar in language analysis assumes a certain number of formal and substantive universals.
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What is the benefit of studying linguistics?

✍🏿Linguistics in Everyday Life
Whether it’s telling a joke, naming a baby, using voice recognition software, or helping a relative who’s had a stroke, you’ll find the study of language reflected in almost everything you do.

Studying Linguistics
When you study linguistics at any level, you gain insight into one of the

M.PHIL LINGUISTICS..PARTI1

THE ESL ACADEMY BY SIRRANA..

Course M.Phil Linguistics...

The ESL Academy by SirRana..

👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼Linguistics and its relation with interdisciplinary Fields...

👉🏻👉🏻✋🏼Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. The earliest activities in the documentation and description of language have been attributed to the 6th century BC Indian grammarian Pāṇini, who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī.



✍🏿✍🏿👉🏻Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning.Phonetics is the study of speech and non-speech sounds, and delves into their acoustic and articulatory properties. The study of language meaning, on the other hand, deals with how languages encode relations between entities, properties, and other aspects of the world to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as manage and resolve ambiguity. While the study of semantics typically concerns itself with truth conditions, pragmatics deals with how situational context influences the production of meaning

✍🏿✍🏿👉🏻Grammar is a system of rules which governs the production and use of utterances in a given language. These rules apply to sound as well as meaning, and include componential subsets of rules, such as those pertaining to phonology (the organisation of phonetic sound systems), morphology (the formation and composition of words), and syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences) Modern theories that deal with the principles of grammar are largely based within Noam Chomsky's framework of generative linguistics.





✍🏿✍🏿👉🏻In the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between the notions of langue and parole in his formulation of structural linguistics. According to him, parole  is the specific utterance of speech, whereas langue refers to an abstract phenomenon that theoretically defines the principles and system of rules that govern a language. This distinction resembles the one made by Noam Chomsky between competence and performance in his theory of transformative or generative grammar. According to Chomsky, competence is an individual's innate capacity and potential for language (like in Saussure's langue), while performance is the specific way in which it is used by individuals, groups, and communities (i.e., parole, in Saussurean terms).


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✍🏿✍🏿The study of parole (which manifests through cultural discourses and dialects) is the domain of sociolinguistics, the sub-discipline that comprises the study of a complex system of linguistic facets within a certain speech community (governed by its own set of grammatical rules and laws). Discourse analysis further examines the structure of texts and conversations emerging out of a speech community's usage of language.This is done through the collection of linguistic data, or through the formal discipline of corpus linguistics, which takes naturally occurring texts and studies the variation of grammatical and other features based on such corpora (or corpus data).

👉🏻Stylistics also involves the study of written, signed, or spoken discourse through varying speech communities, genres, and editorial or narrative formats in the mass media in the 1960s, Jacques Derrida, for instance, further distinguished between speech and writing, by proposing that written language be studied as a linguistic medium of communication in itself.


✍🏿✍🏿Palaeography is therefore the discipline that studies the evolution of written scripts (as signs and symbols) in language.The formal study of language also led to the growth of fields like psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which studies language processing in the brain; biolinguistics, which studies the biology and evolution of language; and language acquisition, which investigates how children and adults acquire the kno

#Topic: - “#An_Analysis_of_Stream_of_consciousness #Technique_in ‘#To_the_Lighthouse’
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 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

◽#Introduction◾

◽ #Biography◾

🔳Virginia Woolf was a popular British author born on January 25, 1882 and died on March 28, 1941. She is considered to be one of the primary figures of both Modernism and Feminism in the twentieth century. Woolf is considered one of the most psychological of all the Modernists; Many of her later novels take place entirely within her characters' heads, focusing solely on the literary technique, stream of consciousness.

🔲Virginia Woolf, one of the prominent representatives of modernist novelist in England, has contributed significantly to the development of modern novel in both theory and practice. She abandoned traditional fictional devices and formulated her own distinctive techniques. The novels of Woolf tend to be less concerned with outward reality than with the inner life. She also takes the readers to the high glory of perception thinking. The sense of liveliness her is depicted in this novel that how the thinking and our root of observation is defers. Her masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, serves as an excellent sample in analyzing Woolf’s literary theory and her experimental techniques. There is a mythical pattern in this novel and how it is shown here and it is symbolize that makes a kind of reading of this novel. This paper is to attempt every aspect and depict to her novel “To the Lighthouse” and to deal with her idea about stream of consciousness literary techniques: indirect interior monologue and free association. And also it is good to see how Language, Subject, Self: Reading the Style of the novel.

🔳Keywords: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Stream of Consciousness technique,Mythical pattern, ( An Analysis of Stream of consciousness Technique in To the Lighthouse)

🔲It does not present objective narration, but attempts to replicate the thoughts.Which shape the character's mind. She wrote a novel called “To the Lighthouse” that explored the minds of the characters using the stream of consciousness technique. This made the characters thoughts and feelings mix into one another while the outer actions and dialogue come second to the inner emotions and cogitations.To the Lighthouse,have generated the most critical attention and are the most widely studied of Woolf's novels.

◽ #What_is_Stream_of_Consciousness?◾

🔳In literature, stream of consciousness writing is a literary device which seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in Connection to his or her sensory reactions to external occurrences. Stream of consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement. Its introduction in the literary context, transferred from psychology.

👉•      🔲Stream of Consciousness is a literary technique which was pioneered by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.
👉•      🔳‘Stream of consciousness’ is characterized by a flow of thoughts and images, which may not always appear to have a coherent structure or cohesion. The plot line may weave in and out of time and place, carrying the reader through the life span of a character or further along a timeline to incorporate the lives (and thoughts) of characters from other time periods.

◽#Interior_Monologue◾

👉•      🔳The related phrase ‘Interior Monologue’ is used to describe in inner movement of Consciousness in a character’s mind. A stylized way of thinking out loud.Unlike stream-of-consciousness, an interior monologue can be integrated into a third-person narrative. The points of view of character’s thoughts are woven into authorial description, using their own language. This is the essential difference between interior monologue and straight  narrative  :

◽#Two_types_of_interior_monologues◾

👉a.     Indirect Interior Monologue
👉b.     Direct Interior Monologue

Stream 

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻SIRRana....

👉🏻✍🏿THE ESL ACADEMY...


A PASSAGE TO INDIA AND BIOGRAPHY OF EM FOSTER...1924

👉🏻👉🏻🌹E.M. Forster, in full Edward Morgan Forster, (born January 1, 1879, London, England—died June 7, 1970, Coventry, Warwickshire), British novelist, essayist, and social and literary critic. His fame rests largely on his novels Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924) and on a large body of criticism.

👉🏻👉🏻✍🏿A Passage to India (1924) is a novel by English author E. M. Forster set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s.

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻The novel is based on Forster's experiences in India, deriving the title from Walt Whitman's 1870 poem "Passage to India" in Leaves of Grass.

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻✍🏿The novel is based on Forster's experiences regarding colonial states.



👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻✍🏿The story revolves around four characters: Dr. Aziz, his British friend Mr. Cyril Fielding, Mrs. Moore, and Miss Adela Quested. During a trip to the fictitious Marabar Caves (modeled on the Barabar Caves of Bihar),Adela thinks she finds herself alone with Dr. Aziz in one of the caves (when in fact he is in an entirely different cave), and subsequently panics and flees; it is assumed that



Dr. Aziz has attempted to assault her. Aziz's trial, and its run-up and aftermath, bring to a boil the common racial tensions and prejudices between Indians and the British who rule India.


👉🏻✍🏿Plot summary

👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻🌹Arrival


👉🏻A young British schoolmistress, Adela Quested, and her elderly friend, Mrs. Moore, visit the fictional city of Chandrapore, British India. Adela is to decide if she wants to marry Mrs. Moore's son, Ronny Heaslop, the city magistrate.

👉🏻Meanwhile, Dr. Aziz, a young Indian Muslim  physician, is dining with two of his Indian friends and conversing about whether it is possible to be a friend of an Englishman. During the meal, a summons arrives from Major Callendar, Aziz's unpleasant superior at the hospital. Aziz hastens to Callendar's bungalow as ordered but is delayed by a flat tyre and difficulty in finding a tonga and the major has already left in a huff.



Disconsolate, Aziz walks down the road toward the railway station. When he sees his favourite mosque, he enters on impulse. He sees a strange Englishwoman there and yells at her not to profane this sacred place. The woman, Mrs Moore, has respect for native customs. This disarms Aziz, and the two chat and part as friends.



Mrs. Moore returns to the British club down the road and relates her experience at the mosque. Ronny Heaslop, her son, initially thinks she is talking about an Englishman and becomes indignant when he learns the facts. Adela, however, is intrigued.



👉🏻Bridge-party
Because the newcomers had expressed a desire to see Indians, Mr. Turton, the city tax collector, invites numerous Indian gentlemen to a party at his house. The party turns out to be an awkward business, thanks to the Indians' timidity and the Britons' bigotry, but Adela meets Cyril Fielding, principal of Chandrapore's government-run college for Indians. Fielding invites Adela and Mrs. Moore to a tea party with him and a Hindu-Brahmin  professor named Narayan Godbole. At Adela's request, he extends his invitation to Dr. Aziz.

Fielding's tea party
At Fielding's tea party, everyone has a good time conversing about India, and Fielding and Aziz become friends. Aziz promises to take Mrs. Moore and Adela to see the Marabar Caves, a distant cave complex. Ronny Heaslop arrives and rudely breaks up the party.

Aziz mistakenly believes that the women are offended that he has not followed through on his promise and arranges an outing to the caves at great expense to himself. Fielding and Godbole were supposed to accompany the expedition, but they miss the train.
👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻✍🏿SirRana....

✍🏿🌹Adela's illusion
As Aziz helps Adela up the hill, she asks whether he has more than one wife. Disconcerted by the bluntness of the rem

Hard Times by Charles Dickens.

Hard Times is the tenth novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. The book surveys English society and satirises the social and economic conditions of the era.

Summary :

Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy, retired merchant in the industrial city of Coketown, England, devotes his life to a philosophy of rationalism, self-interest, and fact. He raises his oldest children, Louisa and Tom, according to this philosophy and never allows them to engage in fanciful or imaginative pursuits. He founds a school and charitably takes in one of the students, the kindly and imaginative Sissy Jupe, after the disappearance of her father, a circus entertainer.

As the Gradgrind children grow older, Tom becomes a dissipated, self-interested hedonist, and Louisa struggles with deep inner confusion, feeling as though she is missing something important in her life. Eventually Louisa marries Gradgrind’s friend Josiah Bounderby, a wealthy factory owner and banker more than twice her age. Bounderby continually trumpets his role as a self-made man who was abandoned in the gutter by his mother as an infant. Tom is apprenticed at the Bounderby bank, and Sissy remains at the Gradgrind home to care for the younger children.

In the meantime, an impoverished “Hand”—Dickens’s term for the lowest laborers in Coketown’s factories—named Stephen Blackpool struggles with his love for Rachael, another poor factory worker. He is unable to marry her because he is already married to a horrible, drunken woman who disappears for months and even years at a time. Stephen visits Bounderby to ask about a divorce but learns that only the wealthy can obtain them. Outside Bounderby’s home, he meets Mrs. Pegler, a strange old woman with an inexplicable devotion to Bounderby.

James Harthouse, a wealthy young sophisticate from London, arrives in Coketown to begin a political career as a disciple of Gradgrind, who is now a Member of Parliament. He immediately takes an interest in Louisa and decides to try to seduce her. With the unspoken aid of Mrs. Sparsit, a former aristocrat who has fallen on hard times and now works for Bounderby, he sets about trying to corrupt Louisa.

The Hands, exhorted by a crooked union spokesman named Slackbridge, try to form a union. Only Stephen refuses to join because he feels that a union strike would only increase tensions between employers and employees. He is cast out by the other Hands and fired by Bounderby when he refuses to spy on them. Louisa, impressed with Stephen’s integrity, visits him before he leaves Coketown and helps him with some money. Tom accompanies her and tells Stephen that if he waits outside the bank for several consecutive nights, help will come to him. Stephen does so, but no help arrives. Eventually he packs up and leaves Coketown, hoping to find agricultural work in the country. Not long after that, the bank is robbed, and the lone suspect is Stephen, the vanished Hand who was seen loitering outside the bank for several nights just before disappearing from the city.

Mrs. Sparsit witnesses Harthouse declaring his love for Louisa, and Louisa agrees to meet him in Coketown later that night. However, Louisa instead flees to her father’s house, where she miserably confides to Gradgrind that her upbringing has left her married to a man she does not love, disconnected from her feelings, deeply unhappy, and possibly in love with Harthouse. She collapses to the floor, and Gradgrind, struck dumb with self-reproach, begins to realize the imperfections in his philosophy of rational self-interest.

Sissy, who loves Louisa deeply, visits Harthouse and convinces him to leave Coketown forever. Bounderby, furious that his wife has left him, redoubles his efforts to capture Stephen. When Stephen tries to return to clear his good name, he falls into a mining pit called Old Hell Shaft. Rachael and Louisa discover him, but he dies soon after an emotional farewell to Rachael. Gradgrind and Louisa realize 

Episode -1:

        (Renaissance or Elizabethan or      Shakespeare period )
.
The most important period

The Renaissance Period in English literature is also called the Elizabethan Period or the Age of Shakespeare. The middle Ages in Europe were followed by the Renaissance. Renaissance means the Revival of Learning, and it denotes in its broadest sense the gradual enlightenment of the human mind after the darkness of the Middle Ages.
With the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A.D. by the invasion of the Turks, the Greek scholars who were residing there, spread all over Europe, and brought with them invaluable Greek manuscripts. The discovery of these classical models resulted in the Revival of Learning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The essence of this movement was that “man discovered himself and the universe”, and that “man, so long blinded had suddenly opened his eyes and seen”. The flood of Greek literature which the new art of printing carried swiftly to every school in Europe revealed a new world of poetry and philosophy. Along with the Revival of Learning, new discoveries took place in several other fields. Vascoda Gama circumnavigated the earth; Columbus discovered America; Copernicus discovered the Solar System and prepared the way for Galileo. Books were printed, and philosophy, science, and art were systematised. The Middle Ages were past, and the old world had become new. Scholars flocked to the universities, as adventurers to the new world of America, and there the old authority received a death blow. Truth only was authority; to search for truth everywhere, as men sought for new lands and gold and the Fountain of Youth—that was the new spirit, which awoke in Europe with the Revival of Learning.
The chief characteristic of the Renaissance was its emphasis on Humanism, which means man’s concern with himself as an object of contemplation. This movement was started in Italy by Dante, Petrarch and Baccaccio in the fourteenth century, and from there it spread to other countries of Europe. In England it became popular during the Elizabethan period. This movement which focused its interest on ‘the proper study of mankind’ had a number of subordinate trends. The first in importance was the rediscovery of classical antiquity, and particularly of ancient Greece. During the medieval period, the tradition-bound Europe had forgotten the liberal tone of old Greek world and its spirit of democracy and human dignity. With the revival of interest in Greek Classical Antiquity, the new spirit of Humanism made its impact on the Western world. The first Englishman who wrote under the influence of Greek studies was Sir Thomas More. His Utopia, written in Latin, was suggested by Plato’s Republic. Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesie accepted and advocated the critical rules of the ancient Greeks.
The second important aspect of Humanism was the discovery of the external universe, and its significance for man. But more important than this was that the writers directed their gaze inward, and became deeply interested in the problems of human personality. In the medieval morality plays, the characters are mostly personifications: Friendship, Charity, Sloth, Wickedness and the like. But now during the Elizabethan period, under the influence of Humanism, the emphasis was laid on the qualities which distinguish one human being from another, and give an individuality and uniqueness. Moreover, the revealing of the writer’s own mind became full of interest. This tendency led to the rise of a new literary form—the Essay, which was used successfully by Bacon. In drama Marlowe probed down into the deep recesses of the human passion. His heroes, Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus and Barabas, the Jew of Malta, are possessed of uncontrolled ambitions. Shakespeare, a more consummate artist, carried Humanism to perfection. His genius, fed by the spirit of the Renaissance, enabled him to see life whole, and to present it in all its aspects.
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