Dan Shen

Bio: Dan Shen is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Computer technology & Reading (process). The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 112 citations.

Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students

Abstract: Paul Simpson. Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students. Routledge English Language Introductions. New York: Routledge, 2004. xiv + 247 pp. $99.95 cloth; $29.95 paper. Paul Simpson is a productive researcher in and an experienced teacher of stylistics. His third book for Routledge, Stylistics, provides a comprehensive overview of the subject in a clear, entertaining, insightful, and innovative way. Like other books in the Routledge English Language Introduction series, edited by Peter Stockwell, Simpson's Stylistics has a flexible "two-dimensional" structure, built horizontally around four self-contained sections centering on one topic-A introduction, B development, C exploration, and D extension-as well as vertically progressing from one topic to another. The book has twelve topics or strands: 1) What is stylistics? 2) Stylistics and levels of language, 3) Grammar and style, 4) Rhythm and metre, 5) Narrative stylistics, 6) Style as choice, 7) Style and point of view, 8) Represented speech and thought, 9) Dialogue and discourse, 10) Cognitive stylistics, 11) Metaphor and metonymy, and 12) Stylistics and verbal humour. The topics develop from section A to section D, giving rise to altogether 46 selfcontained units (topic or strand 12 does not have sections B or C). The A units are comprehensive and concise introductions to the topics concerned; B units are either illustrative expansions of the model introduced in A, or surveys of important research developments in the relevant area; C units are practical activities for students to try out and apply what they have learned from A and B; and finally, D units offer a wide-ranging selection of relevant readings by other famous stylisticians. In accordance with the "two-dimensional" structure, the book has two tables of contents, with "Contents" followed by "Contents Cross-Referenced." The former goes along the vertical dimension, progressing from section A (1-12) to section D (1-12), and the latter is primarily concerned with the horizontal dimension, progressing from Al-Bl-Cl-Dl to A 12-Dl 2. The reader can follow either table of contents. Or, for an alternative, the reader can go directly to a certain topic and read horizontally, for instance, starting from A10 ("Cognitive stylistics") to BlO ("Developments in cognitive stylistics"), to ClO ("Cognitive stylistics at work"), and then to DlO ("Cognitive stylistics" [by Margaret Freeman]). While the vertical reading takes the reader comprehensively through the broad field of study, the horizontal reading across the four stages enables the reader to build gradually on the knowledge gained in a specific area. The coexistence of and interaction between the vertical and horizontal dimensions make the book more dynamic, leave the reader more freedom of choice, hence helping bring the reader's initiative into fuller play. This flexible structure and the freedom it offers to readers seem to be partly influenced by computer technology, by the more flexible reading possible on screen. It shows that the limitations associated with the linearity of printed words may be to a certain extent overcome by a structuring that has more than one dimension. This two-dimensional structure has, however, one drawback. As we all know, "style as choice" is a key concept in stylistics and naturally Simpson makes it the subject of strand 6. But as each strand has to be more or less self-contained, this strand focuses on the system of transitivity, an area that "emphasises the concept of style as choice" (22). …

The cinematic mode in twentieth-century fiction a comparative approach

Abstract: This study deals with the influence of film form in fiction in terms of narrative discourse, focusing on issues of genre, narration, temporality, and the imitation of cinematic techniques. It provides a theoretical analysis of different methodologies (intermediality theory, semiotics, narratology, genre theory) which are useful to assess how a cinematic dimension has found a place in literary writing. This research, in particular, puts forth the idea of a 'para-cinematic narrator', a 'flattening of the narrative relief', and a 'para-cinematic narrative contract' as constitutive items of strongly cinematised fiction. These three theoretical items are subsumed in the concept of 'cinematic mode in fiction', which describes a distillation of characteristics of the film form on the written page. This research therefore represents a theoretical attempt to demonstrate how the cinematic component integrates the stylistic and generic traits of novels and short stories relating to different periods, styles and genres of the twentieth century. The proposed theoretical model is tested on a corpus of American, French, and, especially, Italian case studies. The remediation of film that emerges from these texts points to a complex interconnection between cinema and literature which still requires full acknowledgment in literary history.

The british association for applied linguistics

Abstract: s 50 50 41 41 13 13 18 14 8 8 12 12 SIGs 27 22 29 17 47 24 47 17 72 52 50 30 Posters 27 19 11 21 11 22 14 10 21 21 35 30 TOTAL 210 160 227 171 303 200 352 141 298 208 343 186 Table 1: Submitted (Sub.) and accepted (Acc.) papers from 2004 to 2009 Linguistics’, ‘Language Learning and Teaching’, ‘Gender and Language’, ‘Psycholinguistics’, and ‘UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum’. BAAL gives two international scholarships (one of which is the Chris Brumfit award) and ten UK student scholarships. This year there were 46 international scholarship applications and 30 UK applications. A scholar from Serbia, Ksenija Bogetic, received the International Scholarship, and one from Egypt, Muhammad Abdel Latif, was selected for the Chris Brumfit award. Routledge sponsored a drinks reception before dinner on Thursday night at which the new journal Classroom Discourse, 13 edited by Steve Walsh, was launched. Palgrave sponsored a reception on Friday night at which the BAAL book prize was announced. The 2009 BAAL book prize was awarded to: Wei, L. and M.G. Moyer (eds) (2008): The Blackwell Guide to Research Methods in Bilingualism and Multilingualism. Blackwell. The BAAL Gala dinner was held at Newcastle’s Civic Centre on Friday night. It was accompanied – not by the usual ceilidh – but a disco band from Macclesfield. The conference closed the following day with a tribute to Peter Martin and Johannes Eckerth, the last of the three plenaries, and closing remarks by several representatives of BAAL and Newcastle University. Figure 1: Submitted and accepted papers from 2004 to 2009 As in previous years, the 2009 meeting in Newcastle will result in a CD-ROM with extended abstracts (ca. 1,000 words) of accepted papers and other impressions from the conference. Please send contributions to Steve Walsh (steve.walsh@newcastle.ac.uk) by 18/12/2009. BAAL 2010 Aberdeen (9th–11th September) BAAL 2010 will be held at Aberdeen University. The conference theme is “Applied Linguistics: Global and Local”. Plenary speakers are Wilson McLeod (University of Edinburgh), Bonny Norton (The University of British Columbia), Alastair Pennycook (University of Technology, Sidney), and Tove SkutnabbKangas (University of Roskilde). The conference will be organised by the School of Language and Literature and the Centre for Linguistic Research. Robert McColl Millar is the local organiser. Further members of the LOC include Rob Dunbar, Mercedes Durham, Barbara Fennell, Mark Garner, and Michael Hornsby. The University campus is located close to the city centre in the historic Village of Old Aberdeen and within easy reach of railway and bus stations. Aberdeen airport is served by regular flights from cities across Britain and Europe, including Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Southampton, and Dublin. Aberdeen, Scotland’s third city, is known by many names: the granite city, the oil capital of Europe, and the silver city by the golden sands, all of these encapsulating various aspects of the city. Aberdeen has two universities, a 5 star Maritime Museum, a variety of restaurants, coffee shops, tea rooms, and a wide range of cultural, entertainment, and shopping attractions. The Aberdeen14 Grampian area boasts dozens of castles, coastal roads, golf courses and plenty of cultural attractions. We are confident that it will provide an inspiring conference experience too.

Methodologies for Stylistic Analysis: practices and pedagogies

Abstract: This chapter explores a selected range of methodologies used in stylistic analysis with a particular focus on applications to stylistics in the classroom. Methodology is very important in any form of text analysis and analysts themselves also have a responsibility to say what they are doing and how they are doing it. This makes the analysis transparent to others and enables readers to retrieve how analysts have reached their interpretive decisions. Necessarily, too, the introduction discusses stylistics itself as a methodology. The chapter begins with some theoretical background to issues of curriculum design and development and then illustrates the different pedagogic possibilities that different methodologies for stylistic analysis entail.

The singular case of SARS : medical microbiology and the vanishing of multifactorality

Abstract: This thesis is about the politics and the possibilities of aetiology. Firstly, the possibilities. Does an infectious disease have one, single pathogenic cause or many, interacting causes? In the medical microbiological sciences, there is no definitive answer, one way or another, to this question: there, the conditions of aetiological possibility exist in a curious tension. Ever since the birth of the 'germ theory of disease' and the concomitant birth of the singular aetiological object, these conditions have allowed for the co-existence of a very different, and far less well understood kind of object: the multifactorial object. That SARS was caused by one, singular viral agent, a coronavirus (CoV), is now entrenched as microbiological fact. And yet, the curious thing about SARS is that the history of the 2003 outbreak is littered with moments at which the possibility of the multifactorial object presented itself to, and was actively considered by, medical microbiologists. So how did we get here - to SARS-CoV, an infectious disease that could be understood and storied in this, the most singular of ways? And what happened along the way to deny the multifactorial aetiological object any kind of existence at all? In an attempt to grapple with these questions, the thesis seeks to recover the possibility of the multifactorial object through a deep, ethnomethodological reading of the moments at which it flared up precise/y as a possibility for medical microbiologists investigating the outbreak. What emerges from that recovery operation is a sense that the multifactorial object was never actually ruled out or disproved in any way, but rather, was vanished. Put another way, the suggestion is that various medical microbiological practices and interventions, whilst establishing singularity, were serving, at the same time, to create an illusion of multifactorality's non-existence; an illusion behind which the issue of multifactorality, its possibility, could be discarded without ever having to be resolved, one way or the other. In the closing sections of this thesis a move is made towards suggesting that SARS-Co V, the singular disease, was the product of a choice-, a choice that was made to explore one aetiological possibility at the expense of another. And that is where the politics comes in. For if politics, the realm of the political, can be taken to arise in situations where various possibilities exist but not all possibilities can be chosen, then it follows that what this thesis provides is an opportunity to foreground the politics bound up with the practical doing of aetiology. As a result, and based on the experience of attempting to recover the vanished multifactorial object from the 2003 SARS outbreak, the thesis concludes with an attempt to inhabit the present in such a way as to make it possible to think, in a little more detail, about where aetiology, as understood by medical microbiologists, might be heading in the future: might recent shifts in practical, everyday, seemingly innocuous microbiological technique, have begun to make it easier to coax the multifactorial object out into a space of visibility? Might those shifts actually herald the crossing of an epistemological threshold in the medical sciences? And might the conditions of aetiological possibility be changing, and changing in ways that would drastically alter what it meant to speak of a 'disease', an 'infection' and a 'pathogen'?

A survey of studies in systemic functional language description and typology

Abstract: Systemic functional theory embodies a multilingual perspective to language from its earliest formulation. However, it was not until the last two decades that descriptions of languages other than English, particularly in the light of language typology, garnered much interest among scholars working with systemic theory. The objective of the present study is to survey the growing literature in this field. The survey consists of two main parts. The first part discusses theoretical developments in relation to language description and typology. The second part presents a meta-analysis of empirical studies in the field. The meta-analysis examines the historical progress in systemic typology and description of non-Anglo languages, the coverage of descriptions in terms of areal and genetic language families, mode of publication and, finally, methodological procedures employed by the studies. Challenges arising from these analytical decisions are also examined. The motivation for the study is to provide a state of the art review of the field in order to guide new descriptions and draw implications for further research in functional language typology, in general, and systemic typology, in particular.