RSSsigns of human activity near lake albert, SA
Jan 04
context, epistemology, general observations indexical, signs No Comments
i’m just a creature of my semiosis
sub-continental conference announcement
Jan 04
announcements conferences No Comments
[see also the sidebar links to conferences]
just posting the whole CFP here – looks as if it would be a great opportunity for scholars and students alike – i’m looking at the fact that it is not so expensive for a start.
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERARY
STUDIES (9TH-10TH MARCH, 2012)
http://www.hrmmv.org/events.html
ORGANIZED BY:
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, HANS RAJ MAHILA MAHA VIDYALAYA
JALANDHAR
PUNJAB, INDIA.
INTRODUCTION
Hans Raj Mahila Maha Vidyalaya ( Affiliated to GNDU, Amritsar) , is a premier
institution of North India, committed to the cause of women education since
1927. The college has been granted the status of a College with Potential for
Excellence by the UGC, and A+ grade by NAAC. The college is imparting education
to more than 5000 students in various faculties. The Post Graduate Department
of English announces the first International Conference on English Language and
Literary Studies.
The conference aims to promote English Language and literary studies in this era
of globalization. English language is the language of communication for a large
portion of world population and it has evolved over the years. The emergence of
English language as a means of communication has also lead to the production of
various literatures in English language. The English literary tradition, translations
of world literatures into English and world wide acceptance of English language
has enriched the English language and literary studies to a large extent. There is a
need to ponder over various aspects of the English language and literary studies.
The International Conference aims to serve as a common platform for the
scholars and academics from world wide to exchange ideas by participating in
academic discussions and seminars.
Call for papers:
We welcome papers on the following themes:
Language.
* Language Change and Variation
* Language, identity and culture
* Language and technology
* Teaching of English as a second language
* Discourse Analyses
* Sociolinguistics
2. Literary Studies
* Literature written in English. (Includes all genres)
* Literature translated into English.(Includes all genres)
* Literary theory and criticism
* Inter Disciplinary approaches to literature
LAST DATE FOR ACCEPTANCE OF ABSTRACT (Not more than 300 words):
FEBRUARY 08, 2012.
Once the paper is selected for presentation, the candidate will be informed.
LAST DATE FOR ACCEPTANCE OF COMPLETE PAPERS:
FEBRUARY 28, 2012.
Last Date for registration: February 15, 2012.
REGISTRATION FEE: Rs2000/- INR (Includes boarding and lodging)
$100 (For foreign participants, includes boarding and lodging)
Rs 400/-INR (for students)
Notes on a uniform
Nov 29
education and academia, general observations, parody, stylistics anthroplogy, conferences, description, identity, style No Comments
The anthropological bent has dogged me, one might say, for a goodly period of my life. Occasioned, no doubt, by most of my early and formative years being spent on the sub-continent where many ethnic identities and language groups made themselves apparent to each other by the laying on of identity signifiers, many of which took the form of clothing – as well as an array of related adornment of a less practical motivation. My later adolescence on the Antipodean continent-cum-island can also be considered formative, at least in this regard, in that the teenaged Sydney-sider, even in the far-off decades of the 60’s and 70’s, was regularly required to focus their attention on the outward signifiers of dress that identified the wearer as in alignment (or not) with the local power structure. This self-scrutiny and the accompanying scrutiny of others on the part of teenaged female high-school students at the time, was enhanced and given direction in 1970 by the first appearance in the media-scape of the highly colourful and yet not very bright DOLLY magazine. I well recall my first perusal of that initial edition, to the extent that I remember to where and with whom I was travelling, and by what means. My reaction at the time may have included scoffing, I may even have suggested throwing the publication from a window of the top deck of the double decker bus in which we were being transported away from rather than in the direction of our secondary school on a weekday.
At the end of the following year, for the school farewell ball, I brought, in lieu of a beau, my adoptive older brother, a person I had adopted to fill the space that a genetically-related brother might have occupied should I have had one – which indeed I should have had. The point of this short anecdote is that my adoptive brother, as my escort, had refused to follow the ruling set down by the school rule-makers, to wit, that escorts (interlopers, you must admire, into the all-female domain of our high school cohort) needed to be sporting a tie, worn in the appropriate fashion around the neck and collar. Instead, our rebellion was realised in a resistance of the local power structure through non-compliance with the dress-code, whereby he attended the event in a polo-necked jumper. We were rewarded for our efforts with a series of counter-resistant entry-level embarrassments in the form of discussions between my teachers and my escort. Since it was no longer the sixties at that juncture, I still wonder whether the polo was a good move to make.
In terms of formativeness too, I have not even mentioned the Mater’s influence on my later psychological make-up. Suffice to say that we (my sister and I) were subject to constant admonitions regarding the attire of exemplary others. And by ‘exemplary’, I do not necessarily wish the reader to imagine I refer to its regular positive connotation, but that attention was regularly drawn to those exemplars of style and taste which might advise us, in the words of those very clever mass media mavens Trinny and Susannah, what not to wear. With apologies for being less than precise here, we can summarise some of these instances of clothing error through the use of broader labels encompassing the main idea entailed. Certainly, for example, girls with fat legs should not wear mini-skirts. I personally could not agree more, and not primarily because I would hope to restrict anyone’s freedom to wear what they wanted – this would no doubt redound on myself in some way (I was born in India after all you see) – but because I am afflicted by a very nasty turn at the sight of visual arrangements which are not aesthetically-pleasing, which by the by has always been a great burden to both myself and to any companions, on occasions of traversing any locale where, for example, a McDonald’s has set up shop. Other combinations that one should avoid included that of dirty hair and a white collar, a stiletto and a bare leg, green and blue in the same outfit, a scarf tied about the rollers on the head, garish jewellery, and so on – these all administered by the Mater with a small disapproving grimace.
These notes that I offer here have been occasioned by a recent excursion stateside, where I attended a conference in NYC (a pretext, one might observe) in which context I was alerted once again to a phenomenon I am aware I have been subconsciously registering for some time, but have not systematically described as yet. My attention in this instance was arrested, or motivated perhaps, by the outward appearance of one of the presenters, whose self-satisfied but dull readings of the writings of some favoured performance artists while standing before blurry blown-up images of the same artists – all of course having lead intense and thwarted lives until their activities as performance artists meant that their subjugated and hitherto unappreciated inner selves had been released – caused me to interrogate in an extended fashion the basis for my sudden wave of displeasure at her delivery. On that score, I could uncover no satisfaction, but in the process I became aware of her vestimentary attributes, collocations of clothing items I have in the past remarked repeated in a variety of ways such that they can be considered variations on a theme, instantiations in fact of a genre, a conventional combination, an iconic reference to a potential state of identity rather than, say, indexical of an object.
/……to be continued
Our Chomsky Who Art In Boston
Nov 20
language development No Comments
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychlangsci/research/linguistics/news-events/latest-news/n_chomsky
is that the war, or the war on?
Nov 15
general observations, lexico-grammar meaning 3 Comments
series of tweets advertising a discussion, the exact meaning of which was unclear to me:
Tune in to Crikey Live at 12.30pm today. @BernardKeane, @BarrettBrownLOL & @mpesce will discuss the War on the Internet http://bit.ly/sNoP34
i want to know whether that is the war ON the internet (in which case i’d be interested), or
the War [on the internet] (in which case i’d not).
so, maybe they should see if a Circumstance can be moved.
like, “On the internet, live at 12.30 pm today,@BernardKeane, @BarrettBrownLOL & @mpesce will discuss the War.”
but of course, even without grammar, we can use our brains, right?
i mean, which ‘war’ are we talking about here?
when someone uses presuming reference, then there must only be one item being referred to that we are all aware of.
so, as this is not the case wrt wars all over the place these days, it must not be one of those geographically-located wars with people getting killed and so on.
also, why say they’d be discussing anything on the internet? when it is clear where they’d be discussing it anyway. nobody says ‘on the internet’ in a tweet to remind people that the discussion will not take place, say, on the radio, or on t.v. or in a newspaper.
so, i’ve answered my question, and i should tune in.
except, i was not aware there was a war on the internet.
is there? who is waging it? why?
clearly, i am in need of information.
What Happened To The Sys-Func Email List?
Oct 26
announcements, education and academia 5 Comments
On 25/10/11 2:53 PM, “UTS ServiceDesk” <ServiceDesk.Reply@uts.edu.au> wrote:
Comment by Analyst: Listserv sys-func was approved for deletion. It was deleted on 24th October 2011.
it’s like shooting fish in a barrel
Oct 23
language development, parody humour, language learning No Comments
learning english can be fun!
Sample Theme Analysis
Oct 12
One year [[after they got married]] they found their car keys.
Marked Theme: circumstance of temporal Location realised by a nominal group with an embedded clause as Qualifier.
Note: The reason one year after is not a conjunction group, with one year as a Premodifier of after is as follows:
(1) conjunctions form a word class within the primary word class of adverbials [Halliday & Matthiessen 2004: 358];
(2) Premodifiers in adverbial groups are grammatical items — there is no lexical premodification in the adverbial group [op cit: 356];
(3) items serving as Premodifiers in adverbial groups are adverbs of polarity, comparison or intensification [ibid];
(4) all the examples given of Premodifiers in conjunction groups are grammatical items (even, just, not, only), not lexical items [op cit: 358].
—
The utter ludicrousness of regarding preceding lexical words as Premodifiers within a conjunction group can be seen in the following, with the would-be conjunction group highlighted in bold:
One excruciatingly painful and somewhat hazardous, and not to say chaotic year after they got married… etc
Sensing Proportionalities
Oct 04
general observations, semantics 1 Comment
emotion is to desire
as
perception is to cognition
—∞—
perception is to emotion
as
cognition is to desire
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