HOME





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 St ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

English Language
English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples that Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, migrated to Britain after its End of Roman rule in Britain, Roman occupiers left. English is the list of languages by total number of speakers, most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influences of the former British Empire (succeeded by the Commonwealth of Nations) and the United States. English is the list of languages by number of native speakers, third-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish language, Spanish; it is also the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second-language speakers than native speakers. English is either the official language or one of the official languages in list of countries and territories where English ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

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 taken out on behalf of his dear friend, Bassanio, and provided by a Jewish moneylender, Shylock, with seemingly inevitable fatal consequences. 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". 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 his seemingly universal plea for the rights of all people suffering discrimination. Characters * ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


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 or ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Othello
''The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice'', often shortened to ''Othello'' (), is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare around 1603. Set in Venice and Cyprus, the play depicts the Moorish military commander Othello as he is manipulated by his ensign, Iago, into suspecting his wife Desdemona of infidelity. ''Othello'' is widely considered one of Shakespeare's greatest works and is usually classified among his major tragedies alongside ''Macbeth'', ''King Lear'', and ''Hamlet''. Unpublished in the author's life, the play survives in one quarto edition from 1622 and in the First Folio. ''Othello'' has been one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, both among playgoers and literary critics, since its first performance, spawning numerous stage, screen, and operatic adaptations. Among actors, the roles of Othello, Iago, Desdemona, and Emilia (Iago's wife) are regarded as highly demanding and desirable. Critical attention has focused on the nature of the play's tragedy, ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Transformational Grammar
In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) was the earliest model of grammar proposed within the research tradition of generative grammar. Like current generative theories, it treated grammar as a system of formal rules that generate all and only grammatical sentences of a given language. What was distinctive about transformational grammar was that it posited transformation rules that mapped a sentence's deep structure to its pronounced form. For example, in many variants of transformational grammar, the English active voice sentence "Emma saw Daisy" and its passive counterpart "Daisy was seen by Emma" share a common deep structure generated by phrase structure rules, differing only in that the latter's structure is modified by a passivization transformation rule. Basic mechanisms Transformational grammar was a species of generative grammar and shared many of its goals and postulations, including the notion of linguistics as a ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Paul Kiparsky
René Paul Victor Kiparsky (born January 28, 1941) is a Finnish linguist and professor of linguistics at Stanford University. He is the son of the St. Petersburg (Russia)-born linguist and Baltist/ 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 re ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

John Donne
John Donne ( ; 1571 or 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a clergy, cleric in the Church of England. Under Royal Patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's, 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 ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




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 Prague stru ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Distinctive Feature
In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonology, phonological structure that distinguishes one Phone (phonetics), sound from another within a language. For example, the feature [+Voice (phonetics), voice] ''distinguishes'' the two bilabial plosives: [p] and [b] (i.e., it makes the two plosives ''distinct'' from one another). 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 segment (linguistics), 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 phonetics, phonetic properties of the segments in question. Since the inception of the phonological analysis of distinctive features in the 1950s, features traditionally have be ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Ben Jonson
Benjamin Jonson ( 11 June 1572 – ) was an English playwright, poet and actor. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence on English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satire, satirical plays ''Every Man in His Humour'' (1598), ''Volpone, Volpone, or The Fox'' (), ''The Alchemist (play), The Alchemist'' (1610) and ''Bartholomew Fair (play), Bartholomew Fair'' (1614) and for his Lyric poetry, lyric and epigrammatic poetry. He is regarded as "the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James VI and I, James I."The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (12 June 2024)"Ben Jonson" ''Encyclopedia Britannica''. Archived frothe originalon 12 July 2024. Jonson was a Classics, classically educated, well-read and cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite for controversy (personal and political, artistic and intellectual). His cultural influence was of unparalleled breadth ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 23 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 River Avon, Warwickshire, Avon" or simply "the Bard". His extant works, including William Shakespeare's collaborations, collaborations, consist of some Shakespeare's plays, 39 plays, Shakespeare's sonnets, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays List of translations of works by William Shakespeare, have been translated into every major modern language, living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare 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 ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


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 each line. Meter is measured in small groups of syllables called feet. "Iambic" indicates that the type of foot used is the iamb, which in English is composed of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (as in ''a-BOVE''). "Pentameter" indicates that each line has five metrical feet. Iambic pentameter is the most common meter in English poetry. It was first introduced into English by Chaucer in the 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 c ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]