102,042 research outputs found
ESP TEACHING IN UNIVERSITY SETTINGS. THE CASE OF CAGLIARI’S FACULTY OF ECONOMICS
No full textThe present paper discusses a case of ESP teaching in an Italian University. Specifically, we will describe how the teaching of English for Business and Economics students at the Faculty of Economics, University of Cagliari has evolved in the last 15 years, following two legislative reforms which have deeply changed, or at best influenced, the teaching of foreign languages in university settings, especially in those faculties where such topics do not represent the core subject matter of their curriculum – Economics, Political Sciences, Medicine, Physics, Biology, and, to a certain extent, even Pedagogy.
After presenting some of the most prominent results of research analysis on ESP, the present paper will concentrate on some peculiar issues connected with ESP teaching, and will finally illustrate how the teaching of English to B1-B2 students of the University of Cagliari has been carried out at the Faculty of Economics
The Underground Pride: A Road Map to the Grammar of Freedom
No full textOur proposal aims to illustrate how two apparently different novels – with regards to their historical time of publication, content and scope – can instead show similarities in the rendition of their female protagonists, their treatment of women’s condition, rebellion against social constraints and human bondage.
The two novels in question, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), present similarities and obvious differences. They will be analysed from the angle of two intertextual exemplifications and through the analytical framework of Simpson’s point of view in narrative texts.
The two intertextual exemplifications we aim to use for our analysis are social conventions and the exit/return dichotomy.
With regards to the former intertext, social conventions, we refer to those constraints the two protagonists, Elisabeth and Cora, try to rebel against. The 19th-century Elisabeth Bennet is constantly portrayed as questioning the pressures society imposes upon a young intelligent woman with an uncommon independence of mind. The 19th-century slave girl Cora is in constant search for freedom against all odds. In her journey she nonetheless appeals to her wit to question the violence and predominance of both white men and black men – be them slaves or freemen.
The second intertext, exit and return, is drawn somehow from the ‘salidas’ Don Quixote takes to begin each of his trips/viajes (1605) and which lead the way to the pivotal moments in both our novels. Elisabeth’s leaving her home on foot to check on her sister’s health at Longbourn is one example, Cora’s many attempts to flee the plantation is another.
As mentioned, both intertexts will be analysed within the framework of Paul Simpson’s illustration of point of view in English narratives (1993). Point of view will be studied in particular with reference to the characters’ perspectives in moments of doubts, when and how society is viewed, judged and questioned. We will refer to Simpson’s narratorial and reflector mode in the third person, depending on “whether the narrative is related from a position outside the consciousness of any character, or whether it is mediated through the consciousness of a particular character” (Simpson: 1993, p. 62). Where the narrator is only apparently taking an objective stance, and where deontic and epistemic modality take turns between what is socially right and what is personally desirable.
The analysis of the two intertexts through the lenses of Simpson’s grammar of point of view will hopefully help to clarify our intent to show the reaction of two women against the social imposition of two contemporary and only apparently distant worlds.
Essential Bibliography:
• Allen, G. Intertextuality, Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2011 (Second Edition).
• Austen, J. Pride and Prejudice, London: Penguin 2008 (1813).
• Bachtin, M. Estetica e Romanzo, Torino: Einaudi, 2001.
• Baron, S. The Birth of Intertextuality, Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2020.
• Simpson, P. Language, Ideology and Point of View, London: Routledge, 1993.
• Whitehead, C. The Underground Railroad, New York: Doubleday, 2016
Ethnic Dialects and Mainstream English in the U.S.A.: An analysis of socio-linguistic rites of passage”
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Evaluation of Statistical Features for Medical Image Retrieval
No full textIn this paper we present a complete system allowing the classification of medical images in order to detect possible diseases present in them. The proposed method is developed in two distinct stages: calculation of descriptors and their classification. In the first stage we compute a vector of thirty-three statistical features: seven are related to statistics
of the first level order, fifteen to that of second level where thirteen are calculated by means of co-occurrence matrices and two with absolute gradient; the last thirteen finally are calculated using run-length matrices. In the second phase, using the descriptors already calculated, there is the actual image classification. Naive Bayes, RBF, Support VectorMa-
chine, K-Nearest Neighbor, Random Forest and Random Tree classifiers are used. The results obtained from the proposed system show that the analysis carried out both on textured and on medical images lead to have a high accuracy
"Economical, Anti-Economical and Parasitic Features in Advertising English"
No full textPromotional discourse, another way of denoting advertising language, is a very interesting subject fora reflection on linguistic economy. The purpose of this paper to not only to show how language is deployed in traditional advertising discourse to save space or words, but more interestingly to study all strategies used in this type of discourse which add or distract form the denotative meaning of language
American English and the politics of place: new and old dilemmas, ambiguities and directions
No full textFrom a socio-linguistic point of view, spatial descriptions, like most discourse, occur in a social context, with real addressees or implicit ones. The way people shape the places they live in or the places they encounter in their social interactions, in private and public settings, acquires great relevance in socio-linguistic research. This type of research becomes interesting from a multi-ethnic point of view especially when such shaping and construction is carried out through discourses of identity. Members of all communities, of all national and ethnic backgrounds use language to “negotiate conflicting ethnic and gender perspectives, class alignments, and hopes and fears for their neighbourhood” (Modan G.G. 2007: 6). This is one of the many reasons why the language of space, even in a socio-linguistic analysis, becomes a way of describing society not only from a socio-linguistic perspective, but also from a political one. One way of observing such an analysis could be through “the politics of place”, through how members of a set community define the place they live and are familiar with through discourses of identity. And we cannot but stress once more how the common definition of discourse never detaches language from context
The Affective Quality of Some Effective Particles: the Tense-Aspect System in African-American Vernacular English
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