English Language and Literature Studies

English Language and Literature Studies

Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education

Online ISSN: 1925-4776

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Print ISSN: 1925-4768

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Top-read articles

1,338 reads in the past 30 days

The Impact of Using Technology in Teaching English as a Second Language

December 2024

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25,492 Reads

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197 Citations

Basheer Nomass Bassma

This paper aims to highlight the role of using modern technology in teaching English as a second language. It discusses different approaches and techniques which can assist English language students to improve their learning skills by using technology. Among these techniques are online English language learning web sites, computer assisted language learning programs, presentation software, electronic dictionaries, chatting and email messaging programs, listening CD-players, and learning video-clips. A case study has been done to appreciate the response of typical English language classroom students for using technology in the learning process. Upon this practical study, the paper diagnoses the drawbacks and limitations of the current conventional English language learning tools, and concludes with certain suggestions and recommendations.

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369 reads in the past 30 days

A Thematic Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

December 2024

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3,480 Reads

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4 Citations

Shakespeare’s sonnets are a summit in terms of their thematic profundity as well as their rhetorical beauty and emotional exquisiteness. This paper attempts to make an exploration of the thematic uniqueness of Shakespeare’s sonnets through analyzing the themes of time, beauty, and love in the cultural context of the Renaissance. These sonnets show that men should conquer time through offspring, poetry and true love to procure eternal beauty and life, and thus reflect Shakespeare’s humanistic consciousness and his philosophical thoughts.

Aims and scope


English Language and Literature Studies is striving to provide the best platform for researchers and scholars worldwide to exchange their latest findings. The scopes of the journal include, but are not limited to, the following topics: literature written in the English language, English linguistics, translation studies and related areas.

Recent articles


Confined Spirits’ Struggle: Housewife-mother Figures in Arthur Miller’s Early Plays
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December 2024

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139 Reads

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1 Citation

Mainly based on textual analysis, the present article attempts to offer a relatively comprehensive and detailed look into Miller’s depiction of dramatic housewife-mother figures in a gendered world in his early plays especially in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman and elaborate his female awareness from a feminist point of view and via employing the historical-biographical approach. In his early plays, by depicting his major housewife-mother figures—Kate Keller and Linda Loman as both wives and mothers according to the social condition and dominant cultural value, Miller is still possible to expose their bitterness and frustration in the traditional gender world by depicting them as both victims and victimizers under the patriarchal society. And he also endows them with courage and strength to express their resentment against the male-dominance and release their confined consciousness. So, the portrayal of these housewife-mother images has demonstrated that Miller can represent confined housewife-mothers sympathetically, authentically and admirably in his early plays.


Saving Souls or Saving Money: A Bargain of Conversion in G. B. Shaw’s Major Barbara

December 2024

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64 Reads

George Bernard Shaw, as a secular writer, in Major Barbara tries to bring about an ethical balance between power and morals. As a matter of fact, life is governed by power factors while morals are masks those taken off in case of emergency. The paper, however, examines the struggle between fanaticism and secularism and the misconception of the exact meaning of bribery and charity.The conflict is based on a bargain between Barbara as a Major in the Salvation Army and Undershaft as ammunitions magnate. The challenge builds on a bet between the two competitors. Either Barbara saves the soul of a capitalist tradesman or the Major accepts saving money. The bargain takes two rounds. The fatal blow is dealt when the Army commissioner accepts, so to speak, ‘tainted’ money.The paper gives a lesson to the in charges not to behave foolishly. They should realistically think to avoid harming a third party. On one hand, Major Barbara rejects the monetary support that is given to the Salvation Army to keep on its reputation while the commissioner, Mrs. Baines, accepts the money to keep on its shelters open. Who is bribed and who is loyal? On the other hand, Undershaft, a secular realist, believes in doing everything to avoid poverty but Barbara, a fanatic idealist, does everything she can to avoid a real disrepute. Who is right and who is wrong?


Syntactic Aspects of Poetry: A Pragmatic Perspective

December 2024

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854 Reads

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17 Citations

The language of poetry is different from the language of other literary genres. That is to say, the grammar of poetry is different. This refers to the fact that the rules of grammars will have to be modified so as to permit certain "liberties" or "licenses" on the one hand, and to account for the novel kinds of restrictions that are imposed on linguistic units in poetry both within and beyond the sentence, on the other. Such grammar would reveal, in comparison with the grammar of the ordinary language, many differences between poetic language and the ordinary language and any literary genre. Therefore, literature particularly poetry can not be examined apart from language. Accordingly, poetry can not be grasped without a thorough knowledge of grammar.


Table 1 . List of institutions and departments searched
Corpus Linguistics and Corpus-Based Research in Hong Kong: A State-of-Art Review

December 2024

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3,311 Reads

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2 Citations

This article reports a state-of-art review of recent development on corpus linguistics and corpus-based research in Hong Kong. A top-down, multi-layer, stratified review identified 29 on-going research projects from the eight research-active universities in Hong Kong. These projects make use of corpus technology to address a wide range of research questions related to issues in language teaching and learning, linguistic studies, cultural studies, information technology, and sign language. Such diversified applications of corpus technology clearly indicate the great potential and opportunities that corpus linguistics can afford for researchers, language educators and learners to explore and collaborate.


Jay Gatsby’s Trauma and Psychological Loss

December 2024

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1,139 Reads

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1 Citation

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is regarded as a great twentieth-century American novelist. In many ways Fitzgerald’s legendary life has had a huge impact on critics and readers in overshadowing his great work. The 1920s can be seen as a transition time with a great change in American history from the Victorian period to modern times and with the huge impact of World War I on people’s lives. It is only recently that critics have moved away from studying Fitzgerald’s work as that of a merely superficial and historical writer and examined his works in various other perspectives. In addition to historical and biographical studies, Freudian theory is an important approach to bring a new depth to our understanding of his work. In one of his great novels, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald depicts the traumatic losses of a self-made man, Jay Gatsby, who tries to win his idealized girl again. In this paper, the author aimed to examine the losses of Jay Gatsby in the light of Freudian theory to bring a new perspective on the protagonist’s trauma and psychological loss and the reasons why he never escapes from his illusive world.


Gertrude’s Transformations: Against Patriarchal Authority

December 2024

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1,884 Reads

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3 Citations

Gertrude’s characterization in Hamlet is extensively analyzed with regard to her infidelity, promiscuity, and ostensibly virtuous nature. Further, much criticism on Gertrude is based on the content of Hamlet and the Ghost’s parlance which is male-oriented in perspective. Within the domain of revisioning literature, Gertrude and the characters who have assumed a role resembling that of Gertrude have been subject to a variety of transformations. The present article intends to explore these transformations in two twenty-first century novels: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski (2009) and The Dead Fathers Club by Matt Haig (2006). Gertrude’s new characterization is analyzed with regard to three features: ecstasy, motherhood, and agency. Whereas Gertrude’s agency in Hamlet is conjectural and though her soundness of mind and her personality as a responsible mother are questioned in the play, the two female characters in these two novels reveal new dimensions which starkly distinguish them from Gertrude’s Shaksepearean characterization. Further, it is argued that these new revisionings of Hamlet should not be construed as mere responses to the original text, but also to the idea that Shakespeare has provided the ultimate representations of humanity. As such, the new characterization of Gertrude is subversive of both the patriarchal voice within the Shakespearean text and some portion of the contemporary social text which believes in the superiority of Shakespeare’s thought.


Table 1 . Distribution of open class words
Table 2 . Distribution of open class words
Table 4 . Distribution of nouns within 2 basic semantic classes
A Snapshot at the Poetry of Edward Estlin Cummings: A Linguistic Exploration

December 2024

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2,111 Reads

This paper deals with an exploration of the poetry world of E. E. Cummings’ (Edward Estlin Cummings, October 14, 1894- September 3, 1962) from a linguistic perspective. For limitations of time and space, a couple of his representative poems are selected with the purpose of conducting a stylistic analysis of his poetry in the light of discourse analysis with particular reference to lexical and syntactic features that help make Cummings’ style a peculiar example of style as deviation from the norm.


Intercultural Communicative Competence

December 2024

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1,382 Reads

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32 Citations

This paper reports on a survey conducted at a university in Beijing, China into students’ intercultural knowledge. Surveys with both close-ended and open-ended questions were distributed to the students and questionnaires with open-ended questions were also sent to the international teachers. By means of quantitative and qualitative research methods, this paper (a) analyzes the problems the surveyed students have with their intercultural communicative competence (b) examines the reasons for the students’ failures in intercultural communication and (c) explores what intercultural knowledge should be taught in class.


Femininity in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

December 2024

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9,647 Reads

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1 Citation

This paper, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s life and social experience, explores the femininity in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Critical moments of feminine quality in this male- centered story are identified through the roles that female charactres play as (1) humble counterpart to males in socio-cultural context, (2) feminine energy in sex and sexuality in the gender context and (3) object of the Oedipus complex in the familial context. It is pointed that Stevenson designed femininity in male characters and interchangeability between two genders. The novel can therefore be seen as a story offering readers a panoramic view in which Stevenson’s Victorian female world, his concerns about gender issues, and his standpoints of human nature are all well presented.


Research into Our College English Teaching Team Construction

December 2024

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20 Reads

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1 Citation

Teaching team and the construction of high-level teachers team is a key construction project in the college undergraduate teaching quality engineering, and it is an important guarantee to strengthen the teaching team construction, which will enhance the reform of higher education and improve the quality of undergraduate education. College English teaching team construction is conducive to promote college English teaching reform and improve the quality of teaching. Our college English teaching team is aimed at building up the team construction model “two centers, three teaching sections for support, exquisite course construction as the platform, second classrooms for practice bases” so as to achieve such goals as “first-class teachers team, first-class teaching contents, first-class teaching methods, first-class textbooks, first-class teaching management, first-class autonomous learning experimental base for students”. College English teaching team construction will contribute to make the goal of college English as national elaborate course, enhance students’ comprehensive English language abilities, and promote school college English teaching reform.


Gender is Performative in Illusive Beliefs

December 2024

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70 Reads

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1 Citation

This paper will focus on Judith Butler's work on gender and performativity. It will use Butler's notion of gender as performativity and the example of drag queen as a way to understand the reality of female gender from unreal one. It will explore that the reality of gender is not fixed as we generally assume it to be and it will expose the weakness of gender reality to create a true model of gender. This essay examines the works of Angela Carter. The novel under the study is The Passion of New Eve (1977). Understood through the lens of Butler’s theory of gender performativity, Evelyn, manifests the idea that gender identity is not fixed in nature but it relies on culturally constructed signification. He will emphasize that gender is something that is attached into the body through socialization, and not something that is ?xed at birth. It will be manifest how Evelyn as female gender constructs a new subjective performativity. Evelyn does this with his queer appearance and his transformation opens up some paths for the Third gender.


The Emotionality and Complexity of Public Political Language in Canada’s Question Period

December 2024

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5 Reads

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2 Citations

Purpose: In order to better understand the impression conveyed by the language of public political discourse occurring in highly regulated settings, it was decided to study words used by politicians from four parties in a random sample of 10 Question Periods from Canada’s 39th Parliament. Data were downloaded from the Hansard Report. In a quantitative textual approach, the language used by speakers was analyzed in terms of its emotional content and linguistic complexity. Findings: In comparison to everyday English, the language of Question Period was complex and emotionally negative. Members of opposition parties asking questions used more negative and arousing words than government members answering them. Women spoke in more pleasant language than men, and addressed different topics. There were also differences among the opposition parties.


Logophoricity, Highlighting and Contrasting: A Pragmatic Study of Third-person Reflexives in Chinese Discourse

December 2024

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74 Reads

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1 Citation

This paper, in light of the notion of ‘minimal discourse-internal protagonist’, sets out to formulate as its analytic framework a pragmatic principle governing anaphora patterns and then explores the functions of third-person reflexives in Chinese discourse. The findings are in order. First, in Chinese, simplex reflexives are basically logophoric, whereas complex reflexives serve primarily to highlight and contrast discourse entities. Secondly, there are two types of constructions in Chinese in terms of anaphoric production: one is known as single-fold anaphora and the other as dual or multifold anaphora. And thirdly, our proposed pragmatic principle can very well capture the uses of reflexives in Chinese discourse.


The Tragic Hero of the Classical Period

December 2024

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3,068 Reads

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8 Citations

Just as tragic heroes and heroines have been identified with different eras and cultures, the classical ideal of the tragic hero will be incomplete if the concept of tragedy is not focalized. This paper, therefore, looks at how the classical period defined and delineated its tragic hero based on the action and the plot of the play. The paper provides extracts from Sophocles’ King Oedipus as the main text and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris as a supporting text to present Oedipus as the tragic hero. Textual analysis shows that the delineation of the tragic hero lies in the source or context of the tragic situation. Sophocles and Euripides’ views on the tragic hero are similar to Aristotle’s concept of “hamartia” of the classical period.


Design, Application, and Factor Structure of a Cultural Capital Questionnaire: Predicting Foreign Language Attributions and Achievement

December 2024

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57 Reads

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5 Citations

Culture, as a variable which explains a great part of individual differences, has proved to be effective in defining the factors to which individuals ascribe their success or failure. This study introduced a completely new perspective to the relationship between culture and foreign language attributions by making reference to Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital. To this aim, a questionnaire for measuring cultural capital was designed, applied, and validated. The Factorability of the intercorrelation matrix was measured by two tests, namely, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin test of Sampling Adequacy (KMO) and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity the results of which indicated that the factor model was appropriate (0.65, p < .05). Moreover, the results of Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) based on the performance of 476 undergraduate university students yielded a two-factor solution of Textual literacy and Musical literacy. Moreover, the survey explored the relationship between the new factors and learners’ foreign language attributions as measured by the Language Achievement Attribution Scale (LAAS) and the Causal Dimension Scale (CDS-II). Results from Pearson product-moment correlation revealed that the total score for cultural capital was significantly related to learners’ ability, effort, and personal attributions. In order to investigate the role of cultural capital in predicting learners’ foreign language achievement, Multiple Linear Regression Analysis was conducted. Results revealed that musical literacy was the best predictor of the listening and speaking skills, whereas reading, writing, and grammar were mostly predicted by learners’ textual literacy. At the end, statistical results were discussed, and implications for English language teaching were provided.


Meaning Perpetually Deferred: A Derridaean Study of Sam Shepard’s True West

December 2024

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52 Reads

This article aims at reading Sam Shepard’s True West from deconstructive point of view. Derrida with coining the word “Differance”, consisting of the words to “defer” and to “differ”, disturbs the presence of meaning, contending that no stable meaning exists. Meaning is forever fallen into the trap of “differance”, causing the meaning to defer, that is, the signified is always deferred and we are just dealing with play of signifiers. Moreover, he believes that in each set of binary oppositions, the two sides of opposition not only add to each other but also take the place of each other and thus supplement each other. This is in fact what happens in True West. Characters’ identities have unstable nature. Each character changes their identity from one type of personality to another one, thus plunging themselves into finding floating identities. In addition, the characters supplement each other; they need each other to be completed, as two sides of opposition, without having priority over each other. Therefore, what fills the space of the play is the indeterminacy regarding Derrida’s ideas of supplement and “differance” propelling the characters into having unstable and changing identity.


Seeking for a Sense of Belonging: An Interpretation of Song of Solomon

December 2024

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124 Reads

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1 Citation

Toni Morrison’s works usually show deep concern not only for the existence and development of the black but also that of human beings. By presenting the story of Dead family in Song of Solomon, Morrison tries to find a way out for black people as well as the whole mankind in this pluralistic modern world. The black’s loss in the novel represents modern men’s loss in a world full of material desires. The protagonist Milkman’s unwitting search for his root enlightens the puzzled modern human beings. The thesis attempts to interpret Morrison’s view of sense of belonging by analyzing the loss of three Macons, the experience of Pilate and the return journey of Milkman. On the whole, it aims at exploring Morison’s proposition that it is essential for one to return to pure traditional culture, nature and one’s true self, thereby owning a sense of belonging.


On Appreciation of American Humor

December 2024

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77 Reads

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3 Citations

American humor is a mirror that reflects American culture to a certain extent. To help enhance readers’ understanding, corresponding methods are introduced as shown in the detailed analysis of writing skills and characteristics that involve pun, anticlimax, incongruous juxtaposition, comic simile and comic metaphor, comic definition, trick, understatement, antithesis, irony, malapropism, hyperbole. As for appreciation of American humor, three aspects discussed are appropriate psychological distance, perceiving incongruity, and commanding reading rhythm.


Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Style of Moral Narration

December 2024

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304 Reads

A turning point in American literature appeared with the emergence of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s narrative method as a literary phenomenon. American Revolution brought a freedom from Puritan social and religious traditions. Later, American Romanticism, through praising the individuality of the writer, doubled the distance. Hawthorne tried to reflect those social, economical, and political changes he observed during his life span in his works. Interestingly, his stories were good reflections of these religious and political changing concepts. In order to show their structural defects, he attempted to break away from the past dogmatic religious traditions. The method of narration he employed limited the range of meaning and had no reference to the reasons of events. What was in his mind was a different look at the world surrounding him. This article tries to introduce Hawthorne as a writer aware of his contemporary art. Some different parts of his stories will be mentioned which give way to this emphasis that Hawthorne had no objection to different interpretation of his texts; which is symbolically a demonstration of his attempt to get rid of the limits of his society.


Native Culture and Literature under Colonialism: Fanon’s Theory of Native Resistance and Development

December 2024

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78 Reads

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7 Citations

This article provides a critique of Fanon’s three-stage narrative of native literary and cultural development. Fanon envisions a “stage-ist” narrative of native culture and literature moving teleologically from a moment of total identification with the colonizers to a moment of total freedom, through an ambivalent stage of nativist resistance. The main question this article addresses is: can we take this narrative, with its explicit and implicit theoretical assumptions, as a paradigm of native cultural and literary anti-colonialism? My argument is that such a narrative does indeed provide indispensable insights in illuminating specific moments or in critically explaining certain themes in the native culture of opposition. Fanon shows acute understanding of the salient issues relating to nationalism and nativism, their constructions of identity and of the past, and their relationship to the West in general. I have nevertheless found that this narrative cannot be upheld as paradigmatic of the colonial experience as such. For it is implicitly premised on the Caribbean colonial experience which is particular enough not to be generalized. The limitations of Fanon’s views, which underestimate the vitality and power of native culture, stem from his conception of colonial power as absolute, at least at the early stage of the colonial relationship. This conception of colonial power as total does not, however, take into account the various ways in which this power has been exercised and resisted at different times and in different places.


An Innovative Way of Finding Best or Least Matching Pairs and Groups

December 2024

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31 Reads

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1 Citation

The procedure introduced in this article is an innovative way for finding the best and least matching pairs. The method can also be extended to find the most converging or diverging groups if the objectives of studies necessitate so. The procedure employs three pieces of information to find out which pairs or groups of subjects make the most or least converging pairs or groups. These three pieces of information are the total differences between pairs of subjects’ responses to the questions in a questionnaire, their place on the continuum defined for the variable under study, and the correlations between pairs of students’ scores. A rank is assigned to each pair with regard to each source of information. These values are then added and the subjects are ranked from the most converging to the most diverging pairs with small and big numbers representing converging and diverging pairs, respectively. After pairing subjects, it is easy to find the most converging or diverging groups by dividing the arranged pairs vertically or horizontally. The procedure is felt to be applicable to many quantitative non-experimental and qualitative studies.


The Equivalence and Shift in the Persian Translation of English Complex Sentences with wh-Subordinate Clauses

December 2024

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127 Reads

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16 Citations

The main purpose of this research is to find the types of equivalence and shifts in the Persian translation of English complex sentences with wh-subordinate clauses. This study uses a qualitative descriptive method. The English fictions and their Persian translations considered as source of the data. The researcher classifies the data into two main categories: the equivalence and shift. The equivalence is subcategorized into formal and dynamic equivalence based on Nida's theory. In this research, four categories of shift, based on Catford's classification, which involve structure shifts, unit shifts, rank shifts and intra-system shifts, have been found. Based on 160 data, the results of this research indicated that in the Persian translation of these sentences, the shifts occur more than the equivalence, with the percentage of 86.25% and the equivalence with the percentage of 13.75%.


Toward a Problematics of Postcolonialism: The Gay/Minor Science in Bhabha and Deleuze

December 2024

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91 Reads

This paper aims to survey from a postcolonial perspective the construction of subject(ivity) in literary narratives through an analogical study of some related theories of Homi Bhabha and Deleuze, regardless of some of their foundational differences in deconstructing the discursive hierarchies. On the one hand, echoing Said, who is considered a foundational text in postcolonial theory, both Bhabha and Deleuze try to deconstruct the common assumptions of cultural/discursive (e.g. race, gender, class) hierarchies, although it is clear that both of them may reject this label (postcolonialism). On the other hand, departing from Said and many other key postcolonial theorists, Bhabha and Deleuze explore the constructive aspects of minor/minoritarian literature that may serve as a counter-discourse (resistance literature) against the majoritarian/colonial discourse.


Table 4 .1 Results of one-way ANOVA for the overall rating of the four accents
A Quantitative Survey on Iranian English Learners' Attitudes toward Varieties of English: World English or World Englishes?

December 2024

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1,256 Reads

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27 Citations

This empirical study seeks to investigate Iranian English learners' attitudes toward different varieties of English in relation to the perspective of the theory of "World Englishes". Making use of a modification of matched guise technique, 165 English learners were asked to listen to a text read by native speakers of the following accent groups: British, Persian, American, and Arabic. Subjects, then, recorded their attitudes toward each of the readers using a semantic differential scale. Based on the results, the learners considered American accent to be quite superior to the others. They, also, considered people with American accent to be better teachers. These findings reveal the fact that Iranian English learners still believe in the existence of a World English rather than World Englishes.


On the Embodiment of Economy Principle in the English Language

December 2024

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346 Reads

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12 Citations

Economy principle is also called that of the least effort, which is pursued by human being in various activities due to the innate indolence. It aims at the maximum effect with the least input. It displays itself in each language in different ways. It is reflected in both static and dynamic respects of languages. This paper mainly focuses on the embodiment of economy principle in the English language from four aspects: phonetics/phonology, lexis, syntax and semantics.


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