Devika Panikar
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 College Kasaragod. This website is a collection of lecture notes she prepared by referring to various sources for her students’ perusal.
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...
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, ...
The Structuralist View of Grammar
The beginning of the 20th century was marked by a new approach to grammar suggested by linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure and American linguists such as Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloo...
One-word Substitutes
One-word substitution is the process of using one word for a phrase. As the phrase indicates, they are words that replace a group of words or a complete sentence effectively without creating any ambig...
The ‘Bloomfieldians’
Linguistics in the United States has been strongly influenced by the necessity of describing as many of the hundreds of previously unrecorded languages existing in North America as possible. Since t...