Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219

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Reconciling Bloomsbury's Aesthetics of Formalism with the Politics of Anti-Imperialism
(英語學系, 2001-01-??) Hsiu-ling Lin
Resonant Noise
(英語學系, 2001-01-??) Frank W. Stevenson
Difference and Repetition in Deleuze's Proustian Sign and Time Machine
(英語學系, 2001-01-??) Ronald Bogue
The "Other" Wordsworth
(英語學系, 2001-01-??) Douglas Scott Berman
"Ego Scriptor Cantilenae"
(英語學系, 2001-01-??) Line Henriksen
The Omnipotence of Simulacra
(英語學系, 2001-01-??) Peter Morgan
The Writing of the Dionysian
(英語學系, 2001-01-??) Tsu-chung Su
Selecting Errors for Selective Error Correction
(英語學系, 2001-06-??) John Truscott
If one accepts the standard view that error correction in second language classes should be selective rather than comprehensive, the question naturally arises of how the selection process should be carried out. The paper explores this question by asking which types of errors are most likely to be eliminated or reduced by means of correction; in other words, which are most correctable. The focus is on (a) practical problems affecting the success of correction and (b) existing empirical work on the effectiveness of correction. The major conclusion is that the most correctable errors are those that involve simple problems in relatively discrete items. Least correctable are those stemming from problems in a complex system, particularly the syntactic system. Grammar errors in general are not good targets, though certain types can be identified that are more promising than others. These conclusions are developed in detail in the paper, with numerous examples.
A Comparison of the English Reading Comprehension Passages and Items in the 1999 College Entrance Examinations of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China
(英語學系, 2001-06-??) Hengsyung Jeng
This paper attempts to compare the difficulty levels of the English reading comprehension passages and items in the nine sets of English tests in the 1999 college entrance examinations of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China by applying Chall and Dale’s (1995a and 1995b) Readability Formula. It has been found that of the nine sets of English tests, Hong Kong’s English Test of the Advanced Supplementary Level is the most difficult one, its reading comprehension passage reaching level 12, comparable to the level for American high school graduates and its reading comprehension items reaching level 5-6, comparable to the level for the American 5th to 6th graders. As for Hong Kong’s Syllabus A English test, Taiwan’s English test in the Joint College Entrance Examination, and Mainland China’s Shanghai English test and English test for overseas students, the difficulty levels of their reading comprehension passages and items are the lowest among the nine English tests, reaching levels 3 to 5, comparable to those for the American 3rd to 5th graders. The other four English tests of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China are in between, ranging from levels 6 to 9.
Universal Constructions?
(英語學系, 2001-06-??) Audrey Yen-hui Li
The search for universal phrase structures leads to the question of whether specific constructions also share the same basic structures cross-linguistically --- “universal constructions.” Based on a comparative study of English and Chinese relative constructions, we argue that “universal construction” is not necessarily a valid notion. Kayne (1994)’s Antisymmetry to phrase structures forces a re-examination of relative structures: they must have a complementation structure, instead of the widely-accepted adjunction structure (Chomsky 1977). Evidence comes from important generalizations regarding the relations between the determiner heading a complex nominal and the relative clause. Kayne further argues that head-initial and head-final relatives are derived from the same basic structure, subscribing to the notion of “universal constructions.” We demonstrate, however, that head-final relatives in Chinese provide direct evidence for an adjunction structure, in contrast to English relatives, which convincingly support a complementation structure. The difference is traced to the different behavior of the determiner systems in these two types of languages.
A Constraint-Based Approach to Chinese Speakers' Acquisition of English Consonant Clusters
(英語學系, 2001-06-??) Yuh-huey Lin
This paper discusses Chinese speakers' acquisition of English word-initial consonant clusters within the constraint-based OT (Optimality Theory)framework. An experiment was conducted to elicit Chinese students' production of such clusters. Three significant findings were drawn from the results: (1) refernece for the CV structure, (2) tendency to preserve the initial consonant, and (3) preference for Cr over Cl clusters. Neither of the two existing models on EFL onset consonant clusters, the Minimal Sonority Distance Parameter-Setting Model (Broselow and Finer, 1991) and Typological Markedness (Eckman and Iverson, 1993), is adequate in accounting for the results. It is demonstrated that the OT framework provides a more explicit analysis for such EFL structures and interlanguage variations since it (1) accounts for patterns in not only learners' error rates but also their error types, (2) explains both how and why such errors emerge, and (3) explicitly captures the notion of Interlanguage and its interactions with learners' Native Language and the Target Language.
The Effect of Vowel Duration on the Perception of Postvocalic Voiced/Voiceless Consonants
(英語學系, 2001-06-??) Hsu Samuel Wang
Two experiments were administered to examine the effect vowel length has on the perception of the voicing of the following consonant. In the perceptual experiment, pairs of real words differing with each other only in the voicing of the final consonants were selected and recorded by a native speaker. The stimuli were subsequently modified by lengthening the vowels before voiceless consonants and shortening the vowels before voiced consonants. These stimuli were submitted to first and second language learners for judgment. The results showed that there existed a general tendency for the subjects to choose "voiced" answers for words ending in voiceless consonants when the preceding vowels were lengthened. The subjects were also required to read a passage in English, and were judged by two native speakers on their pronunciation. The results showed that the subjects' perceptual performances correlated with their pronunciation proficiency.
The Grammaticalization of Jiushi and Jiushishuo in Mandarin Chinese
(英語學系, 2001-06-??) Yung-o Biq
This paper takes the corpus-based approach to conduct a case study concerning the interaction between discourse and grammar and offer support from Chinese to the hypothesis that grammaticalization is a result of daily, routinized use of language. In particular, two related Chinese expressions, jiushi and jiushishuo (and their reduced form, jiushuo) are examined for their respective uses in speech as compared with in writing and their collocation with prosodic and discourse features characteristic of conversation. We argue that grammaticalization for the expression, jiushi, is currently on-going, in which the copula sense of the expression is first reduced to a connective marking textual coherence. This semantic “reduction” is developed with the help of jiushi’s collocation with the verb of saying, shuo. Then, the connective sense becomes semantically even “emptier” when jiushi and jiushishuo serve as pause fillers in interactive speech. Again, their contiguity with intonation unit boundaries, continuing intonational breaks, and other discourse markers in speech may have led to this semantic “reduction”. The case study not only shows that repeated daily language use is where early stages of grammaticalization take place, but also supports the hypothesis that linguistic contiguity is one of the important sources leading to the inception of grammaticalization.
Learners' Beliefs and Second Language Anxiety
(英語學系, 2001-06-??) Yuh-show Cheng
Many studies in second language acquisition have identified an association between self-efficacy and language anxiety, but few, if any, have explored the linkages among attributional styles, expectancy beliefs, and affect, as suggested in the literature of general motivation research (Pintrich & Schunk, 1996). An exploration of the linkages among these variables may shed light on how the cognitive-emotional dynamics work, leading to a better understanding of the nature and sources of second language anxiety. This study was therefore designed to investigate the relationships among language learning self-efficacy, belief in giftedness for language learning, and language anxiety. One hundred and sixty-two EFL students enrolled in four sections of freshman English courses at one university in Taiwan were surveyed concerning their beliefs and anxiety about English learning. Findings of this study not only supported the significance of self-efficacy in learners’ experience of language anxiety but also suggested the potential deleterious role of giftedness belief in language learning, especially among low self-efficacy learners.
Generating Applause and Laughter
(英語學系, 2001-06-??) Sai-hua Kuo
Based on video-taped data from two televised 1998 Taipei mayoral debates, this study identifies and analyzes the points at which there is applause or laughter from the audience, with a particular focus on the message content and the rhetorical devices that are used by the debaters to elicit such responses. My analysis has found that the occurrences of applause are much more likely to be influenced by what rather than how a speaker has just said, and position-taking statements, self-directed praise, and opponent-directed criticisms are types of messages that most frequently generate affiliative responses from the audience. In addition, the speaker with a more relaxed conversational style, which is characterized by direct reported speech, heart-warming anecdotes, and self-deprecating jokes, tends to elicit the highest rate of applause and laughter from the audience.
Interlanguage Tone Sandhi
(英語學系, 2001-06-??) Hui-shan Lin
A rule-based analysis is not very promising in accounting for tone sandhi in Mandarin-Min code-mixing. This paper provides a non-derivational analysis to this tone sandhi phenomenon under the Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993). A set of constraints, which includes the EquiDom constraint, the ParseR constraint, the *TMin constraint, the OCP-L constraint, and the IO-Ident constraint, are proposed. With this constraints set, tone sandhi in Mandarin-Min code-mixing is accounted for naturally.
Tapping on High School Students' Conception of English Conversation
(英語學系, 2001-06-??) Shau-Ju Chang
This study explored the conceptions and experience of a group of senior high school students in Taiwan toward English conversation. The results indicated that these high school students mostly upheld impersonal, instrumental type of motivation, were engaged more frequently in non-social, transactional talk situated as much in EFL as in ESL environment, were often deterred from and possibly interfered in their engagement in English conversation by various mental hurdles and psychological noises, and heeded and were equipped with primarily grammatical competence but overlooked and lacked the discourse and strategic competence as two other indispensable components of English conversational competence. Four important pedagogical implications were then drawn to better motivate and prepare learners of this particular age group to take part in English conversation.
Aesthetic Investigations and Foucauldian Practices
(英語學系, 2002-01-??) Douglas Scott Berman
In the years since Foucault’s death in 1984, his works have gained an ever-widening circle of adherents and, more importantly, have been the basis for innumerable critical studies in fields as far ranging as sociobiology and legal ethics. Foucault’s enormous intellectual range and ability to traverse disciplines have made him especially useful to cultural studies. Within cultural studies, concepts such as the panopticon, the episteme, and the specific intellectual have been readily adopted; however, cultural studies practitioners often fail to grasp the specificity of Foucault’s critical interventions or their internal complexity. In the following essay, I look first at how a few critics have employed Foucault in their work. I then turn to a text Foucault himself edited and taught, I Pierre Riviere, in hopes of locating a core of residual energy that cannot be readily pressed into the service of an overarching theory or method. In sum, this essay suggests that while we may readily accept Foucault’s influence and usefulness for different fields, we should not overlook the specific context in which Foucault’s own work occurs or, more generally, overlook a resistance in post-structuralism to being transformed into a systematic and coherent enterprise.
Three Women's Texts and the Healing Power of the Other Woman
(英語學系, 2002-01-??)
While language partakes in the white-male-as-norm ideology and is employed predominately as a vehicle to circulate established power relations, contemporary Third World feminists specifically credit the achievements of women writers of color. Inscribing the figure of the Other Woman, the Woman who is sexually, racially, and culturally “othered,” these non-mainstream women writers disrupt the white hegemonic representations of “the Other” to define a gender- and race-specific identity. Challenging the racism of feminist literary history, this paper foregrounds three American ethnic women’s texts to investigate the power of the Other Woman as that which sustains and renews a tribal and ethnic legacy. Pivoting around three prototypes, Pilate in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1978), Ts’eh in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), and Brave Orchid (Ying-lan) in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), this study uses the concepts of “the wild zone” and “the uncanny” to define otherness, and argues for feminist ethnic differences that can eventually become sources of tribal renewal and healing. The healing power of the Other Woman as configured in “three women’s texts” thus not only represents a significant mode of the “critique of imperialism,” but also redeems Black/Indian/Asian women’s sense of nothingness and makes their ethnic salvation possible.
The Gaze of the Other in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hitchcock's The Birds
(英語學系, 2002-01-??)
Here I first briefly review the Western metaphysical conceptualization of “self”/“other,” based on the logic of identity-and-difference, and the post-Hegelian, post-structuralist move away from this logic toward a notion of “difference” or “otherness” that cannot be contained within the hegemony of a (Eurocentric) rational “self” (mind, consciousness)—particularly as we get this move in Lacan and Levinas. Then I look at Hitchcock’s The Birds and (more substantially) Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in (the Lacanian and Levinasian) terms of intersubjectivity, the inverted “gaze,” the self-negating (or abnegating) move toward/into the “other.” If the birds attacking fromthe sky are (as on Žižek’s reading) an other which can “negatively” signify and thus absorb or replace the social conflicts among the characters—nature “above” becomes the inverted gaze of culture “below”—then in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon we are dealing with a more purely horizontal (socio-cultural) matrix of relationships in which the inverted gazes of/within the “pairs” (of warriors, friends or lovers) signify or signal inversions/reversals of identities or roles, including gender roles.