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.
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...
Paragraph Writing
Originating from the ancient Greek term paragraphe meaning 'marked passage', a paragraph is a group of sentences that introduces, presents, develops and winds up one main idea on a topic. The idea ...
Modern Linguisitics: Aims and Attitudes
Linguistics is commonly defined as a science of language. A scientific description is carried out systematically based on objectively verifying observations and within the framework of some general...
Basic Sentence Patterns
A Basic or a Kernel sentence is the simplest form of sentence, which is simple (not complex or compound), declarative and affirmative, and in the active voice. Such sentences can be broadly classi...
The Writing Process
A simple, lucid writing style is often the product of long years of practice in using the language of various kinds in the written context. The writing process involves a series of stages. A writte...
Strong and Weak Forms
Words are mainly divided into form-class words and function-class words. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs belong to the form class, whereas articles, determiners, Auxiliary, and modals belong to ...