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Devika Panikar

Devika Panikar
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δάσκαλος (dáskalos) means the teacher in Greek. Devika Panikar has been teaching English Language and Literature since 2006. She is an Assistant Professor with the Directorate of Collegiate Education under the Government of Kerala and now works at the Government Law College, Thiruvananthapuram. This website is a collection of lecture notes she prepared by referencing various sources for her students’ perusal.

Idioms

Every language has its idioms and expressions. They are an integral part of the language. The English language is rich in idioms, too. Idioms are words or phrases that aren’t meant to be taken literal...

IC Analysis of Sentences

A single sentence comprises an NP (subject) and a predicate phrase. Apart from a compulsory verbal group, this predicate phrase may optionally have one or more noun phrase(s), preposition phrase(s), a...

Guidelines to Paragraph Writing

Developing an effective paragraph -a combination of cohesive sentences to further a focused topic -requires seven steps. Emily Layfield outlines these easy steps to help one write an impeccable piec...

The Gleason Method 

The Gleason Method in linguistics, developed by influential American linguist Henry Allan Gleason, is a systematic approach to analysing and understanding languages. This method includes a variety of ...

Confusing Words

Everyone knows the problem with spell-check: your word might be spelt right, but it may be wrong. It happens all the time. You're writing a paper or texting a friend and must ask yourself, "Is it affe...

Labelled IC Analysis

Immediate Constituent analysis analyses each utterance into the smallest meaningful units possible. In this model, we begin by cutting the sentence into two natural divisions, and each is again cut in...

Strategies in Paragraph Writing

Writing a paragraph means writing a series of sentences related to a single topic. In theory, finding the right topic, building sentences with substantial ideas, and connecting them effectively can so...

Homophone

Homophone is Greek for the same sound. A homophone can be defined as a word that, when pronounced, seems similar to another word but has a different spelling and meaning. The two words may be spelt th...

Immediate Constituent Analysis

The advent of generative grammar with the publication of Chomsky's monograph Syntactic Structures in 1957 was a scientific revolution. This revolution was directed almost exclusively against the taxon...

Paragraph Features

A paragraph is a collection of sentences relating to one main idea or topic. Good writing in any form has the following characteristics, which are true of well-written paragraphs: a topic sentence, ...