Bringing Classroom and Society Together
Critical pedagogy is a teaching philosophy that invites educators to encourage students to critique structures of power and oppression. It is rooted in critical...
Universal Grammar
Universal Grammar Theory states that all children are born with an innate ability to acquire, develop, and understand language. While different languages may have...
Antigone, the Classic
Classic works of literature usually share a common element: a memorable main character. Classics feature central characters with vivid, distinct personalities and strong points...
Dawn at Puri
Jayanta Mahapatra is a poet of remarkable power and vision and is a near contemporary of established Indian English poets like Nissim Ezekiel and...
Types of Drama
From the earliest times drama has been divided broadly into two kinds, Tragedy and Comedy, the one dealing with the dark side of life,...
Language Games
Language learning is a hard task that can sometimes be frustrating. Constant effort is required to understand, produce and manipulate the target language. Well-chosen...
A Satire Against Racism
Telephone Conversation is a poetic satire against the widespread racism still prevalent in modern western society. As the title suggests, the poem depicts a...
Preparing a Curriculum Vitae
A curriculum vitae or CV (and sometimes called a vita) is an academic resume that highlights your scholarly accomplishments. A CV provides the employer...
Homer’s Epics
Homer, the earliest poet in Western culture, composed two major works Iliad and Odyssey. In conjunction with Hesiod, Homer acts as a great pool...
Learner Oriented Teaching
In the traditional approach to teaching, most class time is spent with the professor lecturing and the students watching and listening. The students work...
A Challenge to Fate
Belonging to the period of pre-independence, Sarojini Naidu attracted the younger generation of India through her genuine verse. Her poems tell us of her...
Homer
T S Eliot said that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. Homer is perhaps the greatest of all epic poets and his...
Shelley Calls for Action
Percy Bysshe Shelley once gave up sugar in tea. It was not because he was diabetic, but for a cause. He not only gave...
Basics in Language Learning
Language is a system of communication. A system comprises a set of signs or symbols arranged in a particular pattern and has some meaning....
Imagery
Imagery is a very common term in Modern criticism. It stands for all the objects and qualities of sense perceptions referred to in a...
The Origin of Drama
Drama is a form of literature intended to be performed by actors and written as prose or verse dialogue. In Western culture, it is...
Studying Classics
Classic literature is an expression of life, truth, and beauty. In classic literature, work is usually considered to be a representation of the period...
Psycholinguistics
Language is an integral part of our society and the way we live our lives. It is an irreplaceable aspect of every culture, and...
The Classics
Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity. It encompasses the study of the Greco-Roman world particularly of its languages and literature....
Writing Advertisements
If you're in business you know that to attract customers and get results, you have to advertise. A great ad attracts attention, generates interest...
Govinda’s Disciple
The poem Govinda’s Disciple by Rabindranath Tagore beautifully highlights the traits of a true master and his disciple who has not been able to...
Advertisements
An advertisement is a kind of public notice asking for or offering services or buying and selling property, goods etc., or providing information about...
Literature and Life
Literature is composed of those books which by their subject matter and mode of treating it are of general human interest and in which...
Essential Components of Communication
In order to better understand the communication process, we can break it down into a series of eight essential components. ...
Writing an Agenda
An effective agenda sets clear expectations for what needs to occur before and during a meeting. It helps team members prepare, allocates time wisely,...
Defining Communication
Communication is a Latin word which means ‘to share’. It is the sharing of information between different individuals. It includes the sharing of ideas,...
More About Ballads
Ballads, as stage performances, enjoyed the status of being one of the main sources of entertainment in ancient times. Legends and historical events were...
Designing an Agenda
Here are some tips for designing an effective agenda for your next meeting. You can use these tips whether a meeting lasts an hour...
Ballad Forms
A ballad is a poem that tells a story, usually (but not always) in four-line stanzas called quatrains. The ballad form is enormously diverse,...
Ballads
Ballad is a popular narrative song passed down orally. Folk (or traditional) ballads are anonymous and recount tragic, comic, or heroic stories with an...
Types of Formal Letters
Letter of Enquiry The agenda behind writing this letter is to collect information about something or someone. Here you should mention why you expect the...
Formal Letters
We live in a world of technology backed communication. E-mails, texts, etc are most of our preferred modes of communication. However, letters still have...
Usage of Adverbs
An adverb is a word that’s used to give information about a verb, adjective, or another adverb. ...
Dramatic Monologue
Monologue refers to a speech or a verbal presentation that a character gives to exhibit his ideas as well as thoughts in a loud...
Informal Letters
An informal letter also referred to as a friendly letter, is a personal letter written to friends or relatives (Informal letter to a friend)....
Levels of Aesthetic Distance
Aesthetic distance, the frame of reference that an artist creates by the use of technical devices in and around the work of art is...
Letter Writing Tips
The art of writing a letter was considered an important requirement. Here are some tips for writing a good letter. Identify the Type This obviously is...
Aesthetic Distance
Aesthetics is a word that comes from the ancient Greeks. It is used to describe the relationship between art and one's perceptions of beauty....
Letter Writing
Before the advent of modern technology made communication so easy, the art of writing a letter was considered an important requirement. Even today a...
Recent Trends in TG
There have been numerous changes in transformational grammar from the seventies onwards. Some of the important aspects of these changes are: ...
Meeting Minutes Writing
Meeting minutes, or MOM (for minutes of the meeting) can be defined as the written record of everything that's happened during a meeting. They're...
Adverbialisation
Adverbialisation is the process of forming sentences with Adverbs and Adverbial Clauses in them. In adverbial clauses there are Sentence adjuncts and Predicate Phrase...
Structuring a Report
Reports generally involve presenting your investigation and analysis of information or an issue, recommending actions and making proposals. Main Sections of a Report ...
Placement of Adverbs
Putting the adverb in the wrong spot can produce an awkward sentence at best and completely change the meaning at worst. Place adverbs as...
Complement Clause Transformations
Complement Clause The Complement clauses ( abbreviated as COMP-clauses) are commonly defined as subordinate clauses functioning as an argument of a predicate. The Complement Clause...
Types of Reports
Reports are well researched, planned and organized documents that are written for a purpose. A report is written for a specific audience; it must...
Complementation
A characteristic property of certain types of sentence embedding in English, the Sentential Complementation, is the deletion of the initial Noun Phrase of the...
Relativization in Subordination
In transformational grammar, relativization is the process of forming sentences with relative clauses in them. Relativization as a syntactic process, like complementation and coordination...
Report Writing
In academia, there is some overlap between reports and essays, and the two words are sometimes used interchangeably, but reports are more likely to...
Double Based Transformations -Subordination
In generative grammar, embedding is the process by which one clause is included (embedded) in another. This is also known as nesting. More broadly,...
British and American Expressions
There is an old saying that America and Britain are “two nations divided by a common language.” While they are essentially the same, British...
Use of Adjectives
An adjective is a word which qualifies a noun or a pronoun. An adjective can be used in two ways:
(1) Attributively: She is a...
Double Based Transformations -Coordination
Double-based Transformations A generative grammar of the type proposed by Chomsky makes use of two types of transformational rules- the singe-base or simple transformations, which...
A Blog Post in Five Easy Steps
Step 1: Plan your blog post by choosing a topic, creating an outline, conducting research, and checking facts.
...
Passivisation
In English grammar, passivisation is the transformation of a sentence from an active form to a passive form. Through the process of passivisation, the...
Adjectives
Adjectives are Noun Modifiers, as they generally describe some aspect of nouns. beautiful
good
...
Short Response and Emphasis Transformation
Short Response Transformation In spoken English and informal writing, a short answer is a response made up of a subject and an auxiliary verb or...
Types of Nouns
Recognising the different types of nouns in English grammar will help to develop one's ability to write and speak with precision. Compound Nouns Compound nouns are...
Tag Question Transformation
The standard or classical, the model of transformational generative grammar posits two levels of representation for sentences, an abstract deep structure of meaning relationships...
Writing an Effective Email
While most of us are happy to write informal emails to friends, we get jittery when asked to write to people whom we are...
Noun Classes
Nouns are described as words that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, quantity, etc. The grammatical categories associated with nouns are...
Disambiguation Using TG Grammar
TG grammar attempts to describe actual and potential sentences. It aims at generating all and only sentences of a language. It is able to...
Email Writing
Email stands for electronic mail. It is the easiest and the cheapest way of communication. It is used in formal, semi-formal as well as...
Analysis Using TG Grammar
In English, sentences are always made up of noun phrases (NP) and verb phrases (VP). A noun phrase should always contain at least a noun....
The Transformational Framework
TG grammar makes use of transformations. The transformational component helps to convert structures from one level to another. In TG analysis we start with...
Transformational Rules
Transformational Generative grammar is based on the assumption that sentences are of two types- those with the simplest structures are called the basic or...
Question Tags
A tag question is a special construction in English. It is a statement followed by a mini-question. We use tag questions to ask for...
An Introduction to TG Grammar
Transformational grammar is a theory of grammar that accounts for the constructions of a language by linguistic transformations and phrase structures. It is also...
Barriers to Reading
The major hurdles in developing efficient reading are: Lack of concentration
...
Why Transformational Generative Grammar?
In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky claims that one of the main reasons for preferring a transformational grammar to a phrase structure grammar is that the...
Wh- Question Words
In English grammar, a "wh- word" is one of the function words used to begin a wh- question: what, who, whom, whose, which, when, where, why, and how. Nouns ...
Derivation of a Sentence
A phrase structure grammar is one which consists solely of phrase structure rules, whereas a transformational grammar does not consist only of transformational rules....
Limitations of Phrase Structure Grammar
The processes that pose problems to PS grammar are: ambiguities
synonymies
...
Statement to Question
Turning a statement into a question can seem hard at first, but it will appear easier later. A statement is used to express a...
The Constituent Structure
The PS grammar is an alternative way of expressing the information found in a tree diagram employing rewrite rules. This is a method of...
Writing a Good Essay
An essay is a composition that defends a position or opinion, also called a thesis, that has been put forth by the author. Not...
Phrase Structure Grammar
The second of Chomsky's 'three models for the description of language', is Phrase Structure Grammar. Any set of sentences that can be generated by...
Phrasal Verbs
A phrasal verb is the combination of two or three words from different grammatical categories — a verb and a particle, such as an...
Generative Grammar
Generative grammar, a very formal system is the first of the three models for the description of the language discussed by linguist Noam Chomsky...
IC Analysis: Advantages and Limitations
The process of IC analysis always ends when the smallest constituents are reached, which are often words although the analysis can also be extended...
IC Analysis of Sentences
A single sentence is made up of an NP (subject) and a predicate phrase. This predicate phrase, apart from a compulsory verbal group, may...
Guidelines to Paragraph Writing
Developing an effective paragraph -a combination of sentences joined cohesively together to further a focused topic -requires seven steps. Emily Layfield outlines these easy...
The Gleason Method
The grammatical constituents in a sentence like Noun Phrase, Verb Phrase, Adverbial and Preposition Phrase can be further divided into categories such as Noun,...
Confusing Words
Everyone knows the problem with spell-check: your word might be spelt right, but it may be the wrong word. It happens all the time....
Labelled IC Analysis
Immediate Constituent analysis aims at analysing each utterance into the smallest meaningful units possible. In this model, we begin by cutting the sentence into...
Strategies in Paragraph Writing
Writing a paragraph means writing a series of sentences related to a single topic. In theory, it sounds simple enough, but finding the right...
Immediate Constituent Analysis
The advent of generative grammar with the publication of Chomsky's monograph Syntactic Structures in 1957 was a scientific revolution. From the beginning, this revolution...
Paragraph Features
A paragraph is a collection of sentences which all relate to one main idea or topic. Good writing in any form has the following...
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...
One Word Substitutes
One word substitution is the process of using one word for a phrase. As the phrase indicates, they are the words that replace a...
The ‘Bloomfieldians’
Linguistics in the United States has been very strongly influenced by the necessity of describing as many as possible of the hundreds of previously...
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...
Modern Linguisitics: Aims and Attitudes
Linguistics is commonly defined as a science of language. A scientific description is one that is carried out systematically based on objectively verifying observations...
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 is...
The Writing Process
A simple, lucid style of writing is often the product of long years of practice in using the language in the written context of...
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,...
Poem in October
Poem In October by Dylan Thomas is about a man who has turned 30, and goes out to have a walk, reflecting on life....
Syntax
Syntax is the grammar, structure, or order of the elements in a language statement. (Semantics is the meaning of these elements.) Syntax applies to...
Fundamentals of Writing
Writing may be defined as the physical manifestation of language. A process of recording information using a coded system of symbols. It is a...
Teaching Grammar
There is a strong relationship between grammar, writing instruction and student achievement. Effective grammar instruction is key to increase student achievement and learning. Grammar...
Teaching Prose
Teaching prose is mainly meant to develop the four language skills -Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing. The activities planned by the teacher must allow...
Teaching Poetry
Poetry contains the best and most sublime emotions of the human mind. It is also the most effective means for the purgation of evil...
Teaching Literature
Literature is the study of the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed. Ideas, feelings and experiences expressed through...
The Lesson Plan
Teaching is a complex task. The different steps constituting the process of teaching are called the phases of teaching. Phases of Teaching Teaching process can be...
Alice in Wonderland
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (commonly shortened to Alice in Wonderland) is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym...
Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes (often abbreviated Ecc) (Hebrew: תֶלֶה ֹק, Kohelet, variously transliterated as Qoheleth, Göhalath, Koheles, Koheleth, or Coheleth) is a book of the Hebrew Bible....
What I Believe
E.M. Forster is primarily known as a novelist, short story writer and a literary critic of a rare distinction. Though his contribution to English...
