Structural linguistics was developed by Ferdinand de Saussure between 1913 and 1915, although his work wasn’t translated into English and popularized until the late 1950s. Before Saussure, language was studied in terms of the history of changes in individual words… Read More ›
Ferdinand de Saussure has been described as the ‘father’ of modern linguistics through his influential Cours de Linguistique Générale (1916). There are three reasons for a belief that linguistics is of very recent origin: Linguistics is a human science, and… Read More ›
UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT V SEMESTER OPEN COURSE APPLIED LANGUAGE SKILLS (EN5D03) OPENPDF OPEN DOC
English is descended from an ancient parent language now called Proto-Indo-European, spoken about 5,000 years ago. There are no written records of this ancient language, but we know that it existed because of the many related languages descended from it…. Read More ›
Throughout his career as a fiction writer, William Dean Howells worked against the sentimentality and idealization that pervaded popular American literature in the nineteenth century. He pleaded for characters, situations, behavior, values, settings, and even speech patterns that were true… Read More ›
Among Frederick Grove’s (February 14, 1879 – September 9, 1948) primary themes, the foremost is the issue of free will. Through his characters, Grove asks how much freedom anyone has in the face of often accidental but usually overwhelming pressures… Read More ›
For a writer with a full-time professional career, Louis Auchincloss (1917-2010) proved astoundingly prolific, producing nearly one book of fiction or nonfiction each year from the 1950’s into the early twenty-first century. Like that of many highly prolific writers, the… Read More ›
Roland Barthes was born at Cherbourg in 1915. Barely a year later, his father died in naval combat in the North Sea, so that the son was brought up by the mother and, periodically, by his grandparents. Before completing his… Read More ›
The Danish linguist and semiotician, Louis Hjelmslev, was born in 1899 and died on 30 May 1965. Hjelmslev, who founded the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle, attempted to render more rigorous and clear Saussure’s general theory of language and semiotics. In particular, Hjelmslev… Read More ›
Before 1960, few people in academic circles or outside had heard the name of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). But after 1968, European intellectual life was a-buzz with references to the father of both linguistics and structuralism. That Saussure was as… Read More ›
In his book on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (Derrida 19871) Jacques Derrida relates how James Joyce (1882–1941) was present in his very first book, the Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (1962), and present again in a key essay, Plato’s Pharmacy,… Read More ›
Born in Aleppo in 1902, Emile Benveniste was professor of linguistics at the Colle’ge de France from 1937 to 1969, when he was forced to retire due to ill-health, tragically caused by aphasia. He died in 1976. After being educated… Read More ›
Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975) is increasingly being recognized as one of the major literary theorists of the twentieth century. He is perhaps best known for his radical philosophy of language, as well as his theory of the novel, underpinned by… Read More ›
Psycholinguistics is concerned with the relationship between language and the mind. This distinguishes it from sociolinguistics, on the one hand, where the focus is on the social dimension of language, and stylistics, on the other, where it is on the… Read More ›
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the publication of Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967) and Margins of Philosophy (1972). Derrida’s name is inextricably linked with the term ‘deconstruction‘. Largely because… Read More ›
American linguist, whose work was fundamental to the development of modern approaches to the study of language. In addition to his research in linguistics he has a sustained role in political activism and reflection, and has written copiously from an… Read More ›
Modern Narrative Theory begins with Russian Formalism in the 1920s, specifically with the work of Roman Jakobson, Yury Tynyanov, and Viktor Shklovsky. Tynyanov combined his skills as a historical novelist with Formalism to produce, with Jakobson, Theses on Language (1928),… Read More ›
In her works like Speculum of the Other Woman (translated 1985) and This Sex Which is Not One (1987), Luce Irigaray has argued that the woman has been constructed as the specular Other of man in all Western discourses. Combining Psychoanalysis,… Read More ›
A.J. Greimas‘ work has been an effort to analyse all forms of discourse. Greimas emphasizes the idea that language is an “assemblage of structures of signification” which implies that the language system cannot be “given” in advance but must be… Read More ›
C.S. Peirce worked on logic and semiotics (this latter term he translated from the Greek), frequently linking the two. He argued that signs are the vehicles for thought as well as the articulation of logical forms. Peirce differs from Saussure… Read More ›