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Generative Metrics
Generative metrics is the collective term for three distinct theories of verse structure (focusing on the English iambic pentameter) advanced between 1966 and 1977. Inspired largely by the example of Noam Chomsky's ''Syntactic Structures'' (1957) and Chomsky and Morris Halle's '' The Sound Pattern of English'' (1968), these theories aim principally at the formulation of explicit linguistic rules that will ''generate'' all possible well-formed instances of a given meter (e.g. iambic pentameter) and exclude any that are ''not'' well-formed. T.V.F. Brogan notes that of the three theories, " l three have undergone major revision, so that each exists in two versions, the revised version being preferable to the original in every case." Halle–Keyser The earliest (and most-discussed) theory of generative metrics is that put forth by Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser — first in 1966 with respect to Chaucer's iambic pentameter, and in its full and revised form in 1971's ''English Stre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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English Language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots, and then closest related to the Low Saxon and Frisian languages, English is genealogically West Germanic. However, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by dialects of France (about 29% of Modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones. The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic ( Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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The Merchant Of Venice
''The Merchant of Venice'' is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1596 and 1598. A merchant in Venice named Antonio defaults on a large loan provided by a Jewish moneylender, Shylock. Although classified as a comedy in the First Folio and sharing certain aspects with Shakespeare's other romantic comedies, the play is most remembered for its dramatic scenes, and it is best known for the character Shylock and his famous demand for a "pound of flesh" in retribution. The play contains two famous speeches, that of Shylock, "Hath not a Jew eyes?" on the subject of humanity, and that of Portia on " the quality of mercy". Debate exists on whether the play is anti-Semitic, with Shylock's insistence on his legal right to the pound of flesh being in opposition to Shylock's seemingly universal plea for the rights of all people suffering discrimination. Characters * Antonio – a prominent merchant of Venice in a melancholic mood. * Bassanio – ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Hopwood Award
The Hopwood Awards are a major scholarship program at the University of Michigan, founded by Avery Hopwood. Under the terms of the will of Avery Hopwood, a prominent American dramatist and member of the class of 1905 of the University of Michigan, one-fifth of Mr. Hopwood's estate was given to the regents for the encouragement of creative work in writing. The first awards were made in 1931, and today, the Hopwood Program offers around $120,000 in prizes every year to aspiring writers at the University of Michigan. According to Nicholas Delbanco, UM English professor and former director of the Hopwood Awards Program, "This is the oldest and best-known series of writing prizes in the country, and it is a very good indicator of future success." Contests and prizes The Graduate and Undergraduate Hopwood Contests Awards are offered in these genres: drama/screenplay, essay, the novel, short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. These awards are classified under two categories, graduate o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Othello
''Othello'' (full title: ''The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice'') is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare, probably in 1603, set in the contemporary Ottoman–Venetian War (1570–1573) fought for the control of the Island of Cyprus, a possession of the Venetian Republic since 1489. The port city of Famagusta finally fell to the Ottomans in 1571 after a protracted siege. The story revolves around two characters, Othello and Iago. Othello is a Moorish military commander who was serving as a general of the Venetian army in defence of Cyprus against invasion by Ottoman Turks. He has recently married Desdemona, a beautiful and wealthy Venetian lady much younger than himself, against the wishes of her father. Iago is Othello's malevolent ensign, who maliciously stokes his master's jealousy until the usually stoic Moor kills his beloved wife in a fit of blind rage. Due to its enduring themes of passion, jealousy, and race, ''Othello'' is still topical and popular and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Transformational Grammar
In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations (called transformations) to produce new sentences from existing ones. The method is commonly associated with American linguist Noam Chomsky. Generative algebra was first introduced to general linguistics by the structural linguist Louis Hjelmslev although the method was described before him by Albert Sechehaye in 1908. Chomsky adopted the concept of transformations from his teacher Zellig Harris, who followed the American descriptivist separation of semantics from syntax. Hjelmslev's structuralist conception including semantics and pragmatics is incorporated into functional grammar. Historical context Transformational analys ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Paul Kiparsky
René Paul Victor Kiparsky (born January 28, 1941) is a Finnish professor of linguistics at Stanford University. He is the son of the Russian-born linguist and Slavicist Valentin Kiparsky. Kiparsky is especially known for his contributions to phonology. These include coining the terms elsewhere principle, and phonological opacity (including the types feeding, bleeding, counterfeeding, and counterbleeding), and creating the frameworks of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (LPM) and its successor, Stratal Optimality Theory. A noted Pāṇini scholar, he has also made fundamental contributions to historical linguistics and generative metrics, as well as working in morphosyntax, especially on his native Finnish. Academic life Kiparsky was born in Helsinki. He studied at Alabama College (now the University of Montevallo), the University of Helsinki and the University of Minnesota. Kiparsky was a student of Morris Halle at MIT, where he received his PhD in 1965. For two decades, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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John Donne
John Donne ( ; 22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a cleric in the Church of England. Under royal patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London (1621–1631). He is considered the preeminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His poetical works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs and satires. He is also known for his sermons. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Prague School (linguistics)
The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and a theory of the standard language and of language cultivation from 1928 to 1939. The linguistic circle was founded in the Café Derby in Prague, which is also where meetings took place during its first years. The Prague School has had a significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics. After the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, the circle was disbanded in 1952, but the Prague School continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism (distinct from the Copenhagen school or English Firthian – later Hallidean – linguistics). The American scholar Dell Hymes cites his 1962 paper, "The Ethnography of Speaking," as the formal introduction of Prague functionalism to American linguistic anthropology. The Pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Distinctive Feature
In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonological structure that distinguishes one sound from another within a language. For example, the feature oicedistinguishes the two bilabial plosives: and There are many different ways of defining and arranging features into ''feature systems'': some deal with only one language while others are developed to apply to all languages. Distinctive features are grouped into categories according to the natural classes of segments they describe: major class features, laryngeal features, manner features, and place features. These feature categories in turn are further specified on the basis of the phonetic properties of the segments in question. For phonemes to be in a particular natural class, they have to share the same distinctive features such as articulation and/or sound similar to each other. We can find distinctive features between two words by finding the minimal pair between them. The minimal pair are when tw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Ben Jonson
Benjamin "Ben" Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 16 August 1637) was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satirical plays '' Every Man in His Humour'' (1598), '' Volpone, or The Fox'' (c. 1606), '' The Alchemist'' (1610) and '' Bartholomew Fair'' (1614) and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry. "He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I." Jonson was a classically educated, well-read and cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite for controversy (personal and political, artistic and intellectual) whose cultural influence was of unparalleled breadth upon the playwrights and the poets of the Jacobean era (1603–1625) and of the Caroline era (1625–1642)."Ben Jonson", ''Grolier Encyclopedia of Knowledge'', volume 10, p. 388. His ancest ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the " Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. He remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Iambic Pentameter
Iambic pentameter () is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called " feet". "Iambic" refers to the type of foot used, here the iamb, which in English indicates an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (as in ''a-bove''). " Pentameter" indicates a line of five "feet". Iambic pentameter is the most common meter in English poetry. It was first introduced into English by Chaucer in 14th century on the basis of French and Italian models. It is used in several major English poetic forms, including blank verse, the heroic couplet, and some of the traditionally rhymed stanza forms. William Shakespeare famously used iambic pentameter in his plays and sonnets, John Milton in his '' Paradise Lost'', and William Wordsworth in '' The Prelude''. As lines in iambic pentameter usually contain ten syllables, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |