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Topics in Linguistics (Syntax)

Martin Drápela

Masarykova univerzita

Brno 2013

Dílo bylo vytvořeno v rámci projektu Filozofická fakulta jako pracoviště excelentního vzdělávání: Komplexní inovace studijních oborů a programů na FF MU s ohledem na požadavky znalostní ekonomiky (FIFA), reg. č. CZ.1.07/2.2.00/28.0228 Operační program Vzdělávání pro konkurenceschopnost.

© 2013 Masarykova univerzita

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Table of Contents

ÚVODEM

Korpusová část LEFNAC

F1

F2

F3

F4

F5

F6

N1x

N1y

N2x

N2y

N3x

N3y

N4x

N4y

N5x

N5y

N6x

N6y

A1

A2

A3

A4

A5

A6

Pracovní listy

WORKSHEET 1

WORKSHEET 2

WORKSHEET 3

WORKSHEET 4

WORKSHEET 5

WORKSHEET 6

WORKSHEET 7

WORKSHEET 8

WORKSHEET 9

WORKSHEET 10

WORKSHEET 11

WORKSHEET 12

ZDROJE KORPUSOVÉ ČÁSTI

ÚVODEM

Tato sbírka textů je pomocným učebním materiálem pro předmět AJ52013 Témata z lingvistiky: syntax, v němž si studenti opakují a prohlubují své znalosti o syntaxi anglického jazyka a dovednosti v syntaktické analýze.

Sbírka je rozčleněna do dvou hlavních částí: korpusová část a pracovní listy. První korpusová část, na kterou je v pracovních listech odkazováno pomocí pojmenování LEFNAC (Little English Fiction-News-Academic Corpus), je třísložkovým souborem textů, které reprezentují tři základní funkční styly psané angličtiny: styl beletristický (Fiction), styl publicistický (News) a styl odborný (Academic Prose). Jednotlivé texty mají rozsah cca 1000 slov, v případě složky publicistické je nutno uvažovat vždy dvojici textů Nx a Ny, neboť samostatné texty zpráv obvykle takovýto rozsah nemívají. Informace o zdrojích textů korpusové části jsou uvedeny na konci této publikace. Texty jsou záměrně vysázeny s většími řádkovými rozestupy, aby si studenti mohli dělat různé poznámky přímo do této publikace. Druhá část s celkem dvanácti pracovními listy je tvořena úkoly k syntaktickému rozboru textů LEFNAC. Pracovní listy tematicky pokrývají oddíl D (Section D – More Complex Structures) anglické gramatiky Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English autorského kolektivu Douglas Biber, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, Edward Finegan (Harlow: Pearson Education, 1999), která je podkladovým učebním materiálem pro práci s touto sbírkou resp. právě pro práci s pracovními listy, v nichž je na tuto gramatiku hojně odkazováno. Druhá strana každého pracovního listu dává studentům prostor pro osvěžení si resp. doplnění definic vždy šesti termínů z okruhu anglické syntaxe. K tomuto doporučuji použít výtečný glosář anglické gramatiky A Glossary of English Grammar, jehož autorem je Geoffrey Leech (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) a v němž je na stranách 130 až 133 doporučena další studijní literatura.

Ačkoliv byly texty v korpusové části LEFNAC vybrány primárně pro úkoly v pracovních listech, je možné je použít i pro analýzu jiných syntaktických jevů než těch, které jsou probírány v této sbírce. Podobně je možné k syntaktickým analýzám využít odlišných seskupení textů LEFNAC od těch, které jsou uvedeny v pracovních listech.

Autor

Korpusová část LEFNAC

Korpusová část
LEFNAC

F1

There had been a war fought and won and the great city of the conquering people was crossed with triumphal arches and vivid with thrown flowers of white, red, and rose. All through the long spring days the returning soldiers marched up the chief highway behind the strump of drums and the joyous, resonant wind of the brasses, while merchants and clerks left their bickerings and figurings and, crowding to the windows, turned their white-bunched faces gravely upon the passing battalions.

Never had there been such splendor in the great city, for the victorious war had brought plenty in its train, and the merchants had flocked thither from the South and West with their households to taste of all the luscious feasts and witness the lavish entertainments prepared—and to buy for their women furs against the next winter and bags of golden mesh and varicolored slippers of silk and silver and rose satin and cloth of gold.

So gaily and noisily were the peace and prosperity impending hymned by the scribes and poets of the conquering people that more and more spenders had gathered from the provinces to drink the wine of excitement, and faster and faster did the merchants dispose of their trinkets and slippers until they sent up a mighty cry for more trinkets and more slippers in order that they might give in barter what was demanded of them. Some even of them flung up their hands helplessly, shouting:

“Alas! I have no more slippers! and alas! I have no more trinkets! May heaven help me for I know not what I shall do!”

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But no one listened to their great outcry, for the throngs were far too busy—day by day, the foot-soldiers trod jauntily the highway and all exulted because the young men returning were pure and brave, sound of tooth and pink of cheek, and the young women of the land were virgins and comely both of face and of figure.

So during all this time there were many adventures that happened in the great city, and, of these, several—or perhaps one—are here set down.

I

At nine o’clock on the morning of the first of May, 1919, a young man spoke to the room clerk at the Biltmore Hotel, asking if Mr. Philip Dean were registered there, and if so, could he be connected with Mr. Dean’s rooms. The inquirer was dressed in a well-cut, shabby suit. He was small, slender, and darkly handsome; his eyes were framed above with unusually long eyelashes and below with the blue semicircle of ill health, this latter effect heightened by an unnatural glow which colored his face like a low, incessant fever.

Mr. Dean was staying there. The young man was directed to a telephone at the side.

After a second his connection was made; a sleepy voice hello’d from somewhere above.

“Mr. Dean?”—this very eagerly—”it’s Gordon, Phil. It’s Gordon Sterrett. I’m down-stairs. I heard you were in New York and I had a hunch you’d be here.”

The sleepy voice became gradually enthusiastic. Well, how was Gordy, old boy! Well, he certainly was surprised and tickled! Would Gordy come right up, for Pete’s sake!

A few minutes later Philip Dean, dressed in blue silk pajamas, opened his door and the two young men greeted each other with a half-embarrassed exuberance. They were both about twenty-four, Yale graduates of the year before the war; but there the resemblance stopped abruptly. Dean was blond, ruddy, and rugged under his thin pajamas. Everything about him radiated fitness and bodily comfort. He smiled frequently, showing large and prominent teeth.

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“I was going to look you up,” he cried enthusiastically. “I’m taking a couple of weeks off. If you’ll sit down a sec I’ll be right with you. Going to take a shower.”

As he vanished into the bathroom his visitor’s dark eyes roved nervously around the room, resting for a moment on a great English travelling bag in the corner and on a family of thick silk shirts littered on the chairs amid impressive neckties and soft woollen socks.

Gordon rose and, picking up one of the shirts, gave it a minute examination. It was of very heavy silk, yellow, with a pale blue stripe—and there were nearly a dozen of them. He stared involuntarily at his own shirt-cuffs—they were ragged and linty at the edges and soiled to a faint gray. Dropping the silk shirt, he held his coat-sleeves down and worked the frayed shirt-cuffs up till they were out of sight. Then he went to the mirror and looked at himself with listless, unhappy interest. His tie, of former glory, was faded and thumb-creased—it served no longer to hide the jagged buttonholes of his collar. He thought, quite without amusement, that only three years before he had received a scattering vote in the senior elections at college for being the best-dressed man in his class.

Dean emerged from the bathroom polishing his body.

“Saw an old friend of yours last night,” he remarked. “Passed her in the lobby and couldn’t think of her name to save my neck. That girl you brought up to New Haven senior year.”

Gordon started.

“Edith Bradin? That whom you mean?”

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“’At’s the one. Damn good looking. She’s still sort of a pretty doll—you know what I mean: as if you touched her she’d smear.”

He surveyed his shining self complacently in the mirror, smiled faintly, exposing a section of teeth.

“She must be twenty-three anyway,” he continued.

“Twenty-two last month,” said Gordon absently.

“What? Oh, last month. Well, I imagine she’s down for the Gamma Psi dance. Did you know we’re having a Yale Gamma Psi dance to-night at Delmonico’s? You better come up, Gordy. Half of New Haven’ll probably be there. I can get you an invitation.”

Draping himself reluctantly in fresh underwear, Dean lit a cigarette and sat down by the open window, inspecting his calves and knees under the morning sunshine which poured into the room.

F2

1

John T. Unger came from a family that had been well known in Hades—a small town on the Mississippi River—for several generations. John’s father had held the amateur golf championship through many a heated contest; Mrs. Unger was known “from hot-box to hot-bed,” as the local phrase went, for her political addresses; and young John T. Unger, who had just turned sixteen, had danced all the latest dances from New York before he put on long trousers. And now, for a certain time, he was to be away from home. That respect for a New England education which is the bane of all provincial places, which drains them yearly of their most promising young men, had seized upon his parents. Nothing would suit them but that he should go to St. Midas’s School near Boston—Hades was too small to hold their darling and gifted son.

Now in Hades—as you know if you ever have been there—the names of the more fashionable preparatory schools and colleges mean very little. The inhabitants have been so long out of the world that, though they make a show of keeping up-to-date in dress and manners and literature, they depend to a great extent on hearsay, and a function that in Hades would be considered elaborate would doubtless be hailed by a Chicago beef-princess as “perhaps a little tacky.”

John T. Unger was on the eve of departure. Mrs. Unger, with maternal fatuity, packed his trunks full of linen suits and electric fans, and Mr. Unger presented his son with an asbestos pocket-book stuffed with money.

“Remember, you are always welcome here,” he said. “You can be sure, boy, that we’ll keep the home fires burning.”

“I know,” answered John huskily.

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“Don’t forget who you are and where you come from,” continued his father proudly, “and you can do nothing to harm you. You are an Unger—from Hades.”

So the old man and the young shook hands, and John walked away with tears streaming from his eyes. Ten minutes later he had passed outside the city limits and he stopped to glance back for the last time. Over the gates the old-fashioned Victorian motto seemed strangely attractive to him. His father had tried time and time again to have it changed to something with a little more push and verve about it, such as “Hades—Your Opportunity,” or else a plain “Welcome” sign set over a hearty handshake pricked out in electric lights. The old motto was a little depressing, Mr. Unger had thought—but now ….

So John took his look and then set his face resolutely toward his destination. And, as he turned away, the lights of Hades against the sky seemed full of a warm and passionate beauty.

* * * * *

St. Midas’s School is half an hour from Boston in a Rolls-Pierce motor-car. The actual distance will never be known, for no one, except John T. Unger, had ever arrived there save in a Rolls-Pierce and probably no one ever will again. St. Midas’s is the most expensive and the most exclusive boys’ preparatory school in the world.

John’s first two years there passed pleasantly. The fathers of all the boys were money-kings, and John spent his summer visiting at fashionable resorts. While he was very fond of all the boys he visited, their fathers struck him as being much of a piece, and in his boyish way he often wondered at their exceeding sameness. When he told them where his home was they would ask jovially, “Pretty hot down there?” and John would muster a faint smile and answer, “It certainly is.” His response would have been heartier had they not all made this joke—at best varying it with, “Is it hot enough for you down there?” which he hated just as much.

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In the middle of his second year at school, a quiet, handsome boy named Percy Washington had been put in John’s form. The new-comer was pleasant in his manner and exceedingly well dressed even for St. Midas’s, but for some reason he kept aloof from the other boys. The only person with whom he was intimate was John T. Unger, but even to John he was entirely uncommunicative concerning his home or his family. That he was wealthy went without saying, but beyond a few such deductions John knew little of his friend, so it promised rich confectionery for his curiosity when Percy invited him to spend the summer at his home “in the West.” He accepted, without hesitation.

It was only when they were in the train that Percy became, for the first time, rather communicative. One day while they were eating lunch in the dining-car and discussing the imperfect characters of several of the boys at school, Percy suddenly changed his tone and made an abrupt remark.

“My father,” he said, “is by far the richest man in the world.”

“Oh,” said John politely. He could think of no answer to make to this confidence. He considered “That’s very nice,” but it sounded hollow and was on the point of saying, “Really?” but refrained since it would seem to question Percy’s statement. And such an astounding statement could scarcely be questioned.

“By far the richest,” repeated Percy.

“I was reading in the World Almanac,” began John, “that there was one man in America with an income of over five million a years and four men with incomes of over three million a year, and—”

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“Oh, they’re nothing.” Percy’s mouth was a half-moon of scorn. “Catch-penny capitalists, financial small-fry, petty merchants and money-lenders. My father could buy them out and not know he’d done it.”

“But how does he—”

“Why haven’t they put down his income-tax? Because he doesn’t pay any. At least he pays a little one—but he doesn’t pay any on his real income.”

“He must be very rich,” said John simply, “I’m glad. I like very rich people.

F3

I

As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anaesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known.

I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.

The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both social and financial, in ante-bellum Baltimore. They were related to the This Family and the That Family, which, as every Southerner knew, entitled them to membership in that enormous peerage which largely populated the Confederacy. This was their first experience with the charming old custom of having babies—Mr. Button was naturally nervous. He hoped it would be a boy so that he could be sent to Yale College in Connecticut, at which institution Mr. Button himself had been known for four years by the somewhat obvious nickname of “Cuff.”

On the September morning consecrated to the enormous event he arose nervously at six o’clock dressed himself, adjusted an impeccable stock, and hurried forth through the streets of Baltimore to the hospital, to determine whether the darkness of the night had borne in new life upon its bosom.

When he was approximately a hundred yards from the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen he saw Doctor Keene, the family physician, descending the front steps, rubbing his hands together with a washing movement—as all doctors are required to do by the unwritten ethics of their profession.

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Mr. Roger Button, the president of Roger Button & Co., Wholesale
Hardware, began to run toward Doctor Keene with much less dignity than
was expected from a Southern gentleman of that picturesque period.
“Doctor Keene!” he called. “Oh, Doctor Keene!”

The doctor heard him, faced around, and stood waiting, a curious expression settling on his harsh, medicinal face as Mr. Button drew near.

“What happened?” demanded Mr. Button, as he came up in a gasping rush.
“What was it? How is she? A boy? Who is it? What—”

“Talk sense!” said Doctor Keene sharply, He appeared somewhat irritated.

“Is the child born?” begged Mr. Button.

Doctor Keene frowned. “Why, yes, I suppose so—after a fashion.” Again he threw a curious glance at Mr. Button.

“Is my wife all right?”

“Yes.”

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

“Here now!” cried Doctor Keene in a perfect passion of irritation,
“I’ll ask you to go and see for yourself. Outrageous!” He snapped the
last word out in almost one syllable, then he turned away muttering:
“Do you imagine a case like this will help my professional reputation?
One more would ruin me—ruin anybody.”

“What’s the matter?” demanded Mr. Button appalled. “Triplets?”

“No, not triplets!” answered the doctor cuttingly. “What’s more, you can go and see for yourself. And get another doctor. I brought you into the world, young man, and I’ve been physician to your family for forty years, but I’m through with you! I don’t want to see you or any of your relatives ever again! Good-bye!”

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Then he turned sharply, and without another word climbed into his phaeton, which was waiting at the curbstone, and drove severely away.

Mr. Button stood there upon the sidewalk, stupefied and trembling from head to foot. What horrible mishap had occurred? He had suddenly lost all desire to go into the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen—it was with the greatest difficulty that, a moment later, he forced himself to mount the steps and enter the front door.

A nurse was sitting behind a desk in the opaque gloom of the hall.
Swallowing his shame, Mr. Button approached her.

“Good-morning,” she remarked, looking up at him pleasantly.

“Good-morning. I—I am Mr. Button.”

At this a look of utter terror spread itself over girl’s face. She rose to her feet and seemed about to fly from the hall, restraining herself only with the most apparent difficulty.

“I want to see my child,” said Mr. Button.

The nurse gave a little scream. “Oh—of course!” she cried hysterically. “Upstairs. Right upstairs. Go—up!”

She pointed the direction, and Mr. Button, bathed in cool perspiration, turned falteringly, and began to mount to the second floor. In the upper hall he addressed another nurse who approached him, basin in hand. “I’m Mr. Button,” he managed to articulate. “I want to see my——”

Clank! The basin clattered to the floor and rolled in the direction of the stairs. Clank! Clank! It began a methodical descent as if sharing in the general terror which this gentleman provoked.

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“I want to see my child!” Mr. Button almost shrieked. He was on the verge of collapse.

Clank! The basin reached the first floor. The nurse regained control of herself, and threw Mr. Button a look of hearty contempt.

“All right, Mr. Button,” she agreed in a hushed voice. “Very well! But if you knew what a state it’s put us all in this morning! It’s perfectly outrageous! The hospital will never have a ghost of a reputation after——”

“Hurry!” he cried hoarsely. “I can’t stand this!”

“Come this way, then, Mr. Button.”

He dragged himself after her. At the end of a long hall they reached a room from which proceeded a variety of howls—indeed, a room which, in later parlance, would have been known as the “crying-room.” They entered.

“Well,” gasped Mr. Button, “which is mine?”

“There!” said the nurse.

Mr. Button’s eyes followed her pointing finger, and this is what he saw. Wrapped in a voluminous white blanket, and partly crammed into one of the cribs, there sat an old man apparently about seventy years of age. His sparse hair was almost white, and from his chin dripped a long smoke-coloured beard, which waved absurdly back and forth, fanned by the breeze coming in at the window. He looked up at Mr. Button with dim, faded eyes in which lurked a puzzled question.

F4

Running footsteps—light, soft-soled shoes made of curious leathery cloth brought from Ceylon setting the pace; thick flowing boots, two pairs, dark blue and gilt, reflecting the moonlight in blunt gleams and splotches, following a stone’s throw behind.

Soft Shoes flashes through a patch of moonlight, then darts into a blind labyrinth of alleys and becomes only an intermittent scuffle ahead somewhere in the enfolding darkness. In go Flowing Boots, with short swords lurching and long plumes awry, finding a breath to curse God and the black lanes of London.

Soft Shoes leaps a shadowy gate and crackles through a hedgerow. Flowing Boots leap the gate and crackles through the hedgerow—and there, startlingly, is the watch ahead—two murderous pikemen of ferocious cast of mouth acquired in Holland and the Spanish marches.

But there is no cry for help. The pursued does not fall panting at the feet of the watch, clutching a purse; neither do the pursuers raise a hue and cry. Soft Shoes goes by in a rush of swift air. The watch curse and hesitate, glance after the fugitive, and then spread their pikes grimly across the road and wait for Flowing Boots. Darkness, like a great hand, cuts off the even flow the moon.

The hand moves off the moon whose pale caress finds again the eaves and lintels, and the watch, wounded and tumbled in the dust. Up the street one of Flowing Boots leaves a black trail of spots until he binds himself, clumsily as he runs, with fine lace caught from his throat.

It was no affair for the watch: Satan was at large tonight and Satan seemed to be he who appeared dimly in front, heel over gate, knee over fence. Moreover, the adversary was obviously travelling near home or at least in that section of London consecrated to his coarser whims, for the street narrowed like a road in a picture and the houses bent over further and further, cooping in natural ambushes suitable for murder and its histrionic sister, sudden death.

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Down long and sinuous lanes twisted the hunted and the harriers, always in and out of the moon in a perpetual queen’s move over a checker-board of glints and patches. Ahead, the quarry, minus his leather jerkin now and half blinded by drips of sweat, had taken to scanning his ground desperately on both sides. As a result he suddenly slowed short, and retracing his steps a bit scooted up an alley so dark that it seemed that here sun and moon had been in eclipse since the last glacier slipped roaring over the earth. Two hundred yards down he stopped and crammed himself into a niche in the wall where he huddled and panted silently, a grotesque god without bulk or outline in the gloom.

Flowing Boots, two pairs, drew near, came up, went by, halted twenty yards beyond him, and spoke in deep-lunged, scanty whispers:

“I was attune to that scuffle; it stopped.”

“Within twenty paces.”

“He’s hid.”

“Stay together now and we’ll cut him up.”

The voice faded into a low crunch of a boot, nor did Soft Shoes wait to hear more—he sprang in three leaps across the alley, where he bounded up, flapped for a moment on the top of the wall like a huge bird, and disappeared, gulped down by the hungry night at a mouthful.

II

“He read at wine, he read in bed,
He read aloud, had he the breath,
His every thought was with the dead,
And so he read himself to death.”

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Any visitor to the old James the First graveyard near Peat’s Hill may spell out this bit of doggerel, undoubtedly one of the worst recorded of an Elizabethan, on the tomb of Wessel Caster.

This death of his, says the antiquary, occurred when he was thirty-seven, but as this story is concerned with the night of a certain chase through darkness, we find him still alive, still reading. His eyes were somewhat dim, his stomach somewhat obvious-he was a mis-built man and indolent—oh, Heavens! But an era is an era, and in the reign of Elizabeth, by the grace of Luther, Queen of England, no man could help but catch the spirit of enthusiasm. Every loft in Cheapside published its Magnum Folium (or magazine)—of its new blank verse; the Cheapside Players would produce anything on sight as long as it “got away from those reactionary miracle plays,” and the English Bible had run through seven “very large” printings in, as many months.

So Wessel Caxter (who in his youth had gone to sea) was now a reader of all on which he could lay his hands—he read manuscripts In holy friendship; he dined rotten poets; he loitered about the shops where the Magna Folia were printed, and he listened tolerantly while the young playwrights wrangled and bickered among them-selves, and behind each other’s backs made bitter and malicious charges of plagiarism or anything else they could think of.

To-night he had a book, a piece of work which, though inordinately versed, contained, he thought, some rather excellent political satire. “The Faerie Queene” by Edmund Spenser lay before him under the tremulous candle-light. He had ploughed through a canto; he was beginning another:

THE LEGEND OF BRITOMARTIS OR OF CHASTITY

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It falls me here to write of Chastity. The fayrest vertue, far above the rest….

A sudden rush of feet on the stairs, a rusty swing-open of the thin door, and a man thrust himself into the room, a man without a jerkin, panting, sobbing, on the verge of collapse.

“Wessel,” words choked him, “stick me away somewhere, love of Our
Lady!”

Caxter rose, carefully closing his book, and bolted the door in some concern.

“I’m pursued,” cried out Soft Shoes. “I vow there’s two short-witted blades trying to make me into mincemeat and near succeeding. They saw me hop the back wall!”

“It would need,” said Wessel, looking at him curiously, “several battalions armed with blunderbusses, and two or three Armadas, to keep you reasonably secure from the revenges of the world.”

Soft Shoes smiled with satisfaction. His sobbing gasps were giving way to quick, precise breathing; his hunted air had faded to a faintly perturbed irony.

F5

Merlin Grainger was employed by the Moonlight Quill Bookshop, which you may have visited, just around the corner from the Ritz-Carlton on Forty-seventh Street. The Moonlight Quill is, or rather was, a very romantic little store, considered radical and admitted dark. It was spotted interiorly with red and orange posters of breathless exotic intent, and lit no less by the shiny reflecting bindings of special editions than by the great squat lamp of crimson satin that, lighted through all the day, swung overhead. It was truly a mellow bookshop. The words “Moonlight Quill” were worked over the door in a sort of serpentine embroidery. The windows seemed always full of something that had passed the literary censors with little to spare; volumes with covers of deep orange which offer their titles on little white paper squares. And over all there was the smell of the musk, which the clever, inscrutable Mr. Moonlight Quill ordered to be sprinkled about-the smell half of a curiosity shop in Dickens’ London and half of a coffee-house on the warm shores of the Bosphorus.

From nine until five-thirty Merlin Grainger asked bored old ladies in black and young men with dark circles under their eyes if they “cared for this fellow” or were interested in first editions. Did they buy novels with Arabs on the cover, or books which gave Shakespeare’s newest sonnets as dictated psychically to Miss Sutton of South Dakota? he sniffed. As a matter of fact, his own taste ran to these latter, but as an employee at the Moonlight Quill he assumed for the working day the attitude of a disillusioned connoisseur.

After he had crawled over the window display to pull down the front shade at five-thirty every afternoon, and said good-bye to the mysterious Mr. Moonlight Quill and the lady clerk, Miss McCracken, and the lady stenographer, Miss Masters, he went home to the girl, Caroline. He did not eat supper with Caroline. It is unbelievable that Caroline would have considered eating off his bureau with the collar buttons dangerously near the cottage cheese, and the ends of Merlin’s necktie just missing his glass of milk—he had never asked her to eat with him. He ate alone. He went into Braegdort’s delicatessen on Sixth Avenue and bought a box of crackers, a tube of anchovy paste, and some oranges, or else a little jar of sausages and some potato salad and a bottled soft drink, and with these in a brown package he went to his room at Fifty-something West Fifty-eighth Street and ate his supper and saw Caroline.

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Caroline was a very young and gay person who lived with some older lady and was possibly nineteen. She was like a ghost in that she never existed until evening. She sprang into life when the lights went on in her apartment at about six, and she disappeared, at the latest, about midnight. Her apartment was a nice one, in a nice building with a white stone front, opposite the south side of Central Park. The back of her apartment faced the single window of the single room occupied by the single Mr. Grainger.

He called her Caroline because there was a picture that looked like her on the jacket of a book of that name down at the Moonlight Quill.

Now, Merlin Grainger was a thin young man of twenty-five, with dark hair and no mustache or beard or anything like that, but Caroline was dazzling and light, with a shimmering morass of russet waves to take the place of hair, and the sort of features that remind you of kisses—the sort of features you thought belonged to your first love, but know, when you come across an old picture, didn’t. She dressed in pink or blue usually, but of late she had sometimes put on a slender black gown that was evidently her especial pride, for whenever she wore it she would stand regarding a certain place on the wall, which Merlin thought most be a mirror. She sat usually in the profile chair near the window, but sometimes honored the chaise longue by the lamp, and often she leaned ‘way back and smoked a cigarette with posturings of her arms and hands that Merlin considered very graceful.

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At another time she had come to the window and stood in it magnificently, and looked out because the moon had lost its way and was dripping the strangest and most transforming brilliance into the areaway between, turning the motif of ash-cans and clothes-lines into a vivid impressionism of silver casks and gigantic gossamer cobwebs. Merlin was sitting in plain sight, eating cottage cheese with sugar and milk on it; and so quickly did he reach out for the window cord that he tipped the cottage cheese into his lap with his free hand—and the milk was cold and the sugar made spots on his trousers, and he was sure that she had seen him after all.

Sometimes there were callers—men in dinner coats, who stood and bowed, hat in hand and coat on arm, as they talked to Caroline; then bowed some more and followed her out of the light, obviously bound for a play or for a dance. Other young men came and sat and smoked cigarettes, and seemed trying to tell Caroline something—she sitting either in the profile chair and watching them with eager intentness or else in the chaise longue by the lamp, looking very lovely and youthfully inscrutable indeed.

Merlin enjoyed these calls. Of some of the men he approved. Others won only his grudging toleration, one or two he loathed—especially the most frequent caller, a man with black hair and a black goatee and a pitch-dark soul, who seemed to Merlin vaguely familiar, but whom he was never quite able to recognize.

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Now, Merlin’s whole life was not “bound up with this romance he had constructed”; it was not “the happiest hour of his day.” He never arrived in time to rescue Caroline from “clutches”; nor did he even marry her. A much stranger thing happened than any of these, and it is this strange thing that will presently be set down here. It began one October afternoon when she walked briskly into the mellow interior of the Moonlight Quill.

F6

Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an appealing character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily all during Jelly-bean season, which is every season, down in the land of the Jelly-beans well below the Mason-Dixon line.

Now if you call a Memphis man a Jelly-bean he will quite possibly pull a long sinewy rope from his hip pocket and hang you to a convenient telegraph-pole. If you Call a New Orleans man a Jelly-bean he will probably grin and ask you who is taking your girl to the Mardi Gras ball. The particular Jelly-bean patch which produced the protagonist of this history lies somewhere between the two—a little city of forty thousand that has dozed sleepily for forty thousand years in southern Georgia occasionally stirring in its slumbers and muttering something about a war that took place sometime, somewhere, and that everyone else has forgotten long ago.

Jim was a Jelly-bean. I write that again because it has such a pleasant sound—rather like the beginning of a fairy story—as if Jim were nice. It somehow gives me a picture of him with a round, appetizing face and all sort of leaves and vegetables growing out of his cap. But Jim was long and thin and bent at the waist from stooping over pool-tables, and he was what might have been known in the indiscriminating North as a corner loafer. “Jelly-bean” is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular—I am idling, I have idled, I will idle.

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Jim was born in a white house on a green corner, It had four weather-beaten pillars in front and a great amount of lattice-work in the rear that made a cheerful criss-cross background for a flowery sun-drenched lawn. Originally the dwellers in the white house had owned the ground next door and next door to that and next door to that, but this had been so long ago that even Jim’s father, scarcely remembered it. He had, in fact, thought it a matter of so little moment that when he was dying from a pistol wound got in a brawl he neglected even to tell little Jim, who was five years old and miserably frightened. The white house became a boarding-house run by a tight-lipped lady from Macon, whom Jim called Aunt Mamie and detested with all his soul.

He became fifteen, went to high school, wore his hair in black snarls, and was afraid of girls. He hated his home where four women and one old man prolonged an interminable chatter from summer to summer about what lots the Powell place had originally included and what sorts of flowers would be out next. Sometimes the parents of little girls in town, remembering Jim’s mother and fancying a resemblance in the dark eyes and hair, invited him to parties, but parties made him shy and he much preferred sitting on a disconnected axle in Tilly’s Garage, rolling the bones or exploring his mouth endlessly with a long straw. For pocket money, he picked up odd jobs, and it was due to this that he stopped going to parties. At his third party little Marjorie Haight had whispered indiscreetly and within hearing distance that he was a boy who brought the groceries sometimes. So instead of the two-step and polka, Jim had learned to throw, any number he desired on the dice and had listened to spicy tales of all the shootings that had occurred in the surrounding country during the past fifty years.

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He became eighteen. The war broke out and he enlisted as a gob and polished brass in the Charleston Navy-yard for a year. Then, by way of variety, he went North and polished brass in the Brooklyn Navy-yard for a year.

When the war was over he came home, He was twenty-one, has trousers were too short and too tight. His buttoned shoes were long and narrow. His tie was an alarming conspiracy of purple and pink marvellously scrolled, and over it were two blue eyes faded like a piece of very good old cloth, long exposed to the sun.

In the twilight of one April evening when a soft gray had drifted down along the cottonfields and over the sultry town, he was a vague figure leaning against a board fence, whistling and gazing at the moon’s rim above the lights of Jackson Street. His mind was working persistently on a problem that had held his attention for an hour. The Jelly-bean had been invited to a party.

Back in the days when all the boys had detested all the girls, Clark Darrow and Jim had sat side by side in school. But, while Jim’s social aspirations had died in the oily air of the garage, Clark had alternately fallen in and out of love, gone to college, taken to drink, given it up, and, in short, become one of the best beaux of the town. Nevertheless Clark and Jim had retained a friendship that, though casual, was perfectly definite. That afternoon Clark’s ancient Ford had slowed up beside Jim, who was on the sidewalk and, out of a clear sky, Clark invited him to a party at the country club. The impulse that made him do this was no stranger than the impulse which made Jim accept. The latter was probably an unconscious ennui, a half-frightened sense of adventure. And now Jim was soberly thinking it over.

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He began to sing, drumming his long foot idly on a stone block in the sidewalk till it wobbled up and down in time to the low throaty tune:

“One smile from Home in Jelly-bean town,

Lives Jeanne, the Jelly-bean Queen.

She loves her dice and treats ‘em nice;

No dice would treat her mean.”

He broke off and agitated the sidewalk to a bumpy gallop.

N1x

Continuing anti-government activity in Bahrain has shown that the nation’s unrest is far from over, and some analysts say its most violent days are yet to come.

Bahrain has been grappling with an anti-government backlash for 21 months, and clashes between protesters and security forces have become near-nightly occurrences.

In a move heavily criticized by rights groups, the government banned public gatherings after a policeman was killed during a mid-October protest. Less than a week later, five homemade bombs exploded in the capital Manama, killing two foreign workers and seriously wounding another.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Bahraini authorities linked them to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and said several suspects have been arrested.

While homemade explosives have routinely been used against police by opposition extremists, Michael Stephens, a researcher at RUSI Qatar, said targeting the public is new to the conflict.

“What we’re seeing is a sustained pattern of increasing desperation and violence within the Bahraini community, particularly on the Shi’ite side and that’s coming off the back of a completely stalled and failed reconciliation process,” said Stephens.

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Bahrain’s majority Shi’ite Muslims took to the streets in February 2011 demanding more rights and political reform from the Sunni monarchy.

Troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were eventually called in to help quell the uprisings and King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa declared a three-month state of emergency in March 2011.

An independent inquiry later confirmed the government was guilty of a number of human rights violations including torture.

Authorities have since made limited reforms, but not enough to pacify the opposition, the majority of which promotes peaceful protesting.

According to Stephens, as the stalemate drags on, hardliners are gaining ground. He said, “What you’re going to see, I’m afraid to say, is a worsening of the political situation and I would say that you’ll see some more terrorism as a result of that.”

Christian Koch, director of the Gulf Research Center Foundation, said regional concerns have added complexity to the reconciliation process inside Bahrain.

“There is this real fear within the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] states that if one makes too many concessions and allows the Shi’ites to gain real power that ultimately all one is doing is opening a door for Iran into the rest of the region,” said Koch.

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The Bahraini government has accused Shi’ite powerhouse Iran of orchestrating unrest inside the kingdom. Iran and the opposition reject the claims.

Bahrain’s strategic significance is highlighted by the fact that it is home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, a bulwark against Iran and any threats to Gulf oil shipments.

As part of its ongoing crackdown on dissent the government last week revoked the citizenships of 31 activists, a move critics say will likely deepen divisions in the county.

Fiona O’Brian, editor of the Gulf States Newsletter, said it is unlikely Bahrain will be able to solve its crisis alone. She said serious engagement by the international community is needed, and this has been lacking until now.

“There has been quite a lot of international criticism of the government, but it has to be said that the criticism hasn’t tended to ever extend beyond the rhetoric,” said O’Brian.

Despite expressing concern over the situation in Bahrain, Britain last month signed a defense pact with Manama. In May, the United States agreed to an arms deal with the Bahrainis.

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Over the weekend, Bahrain National Guard forces were deployed to different parts of the country to patrol “strategic locations” where anti-government rallies are common.

According to the International Federation for Human Rights, about 80 people have been killed in Bahrain since the anti-government uprising began.

N1y

The Syrian Arab Red Crescent estimates 2.5 million people inside Syria have fled their homes and are in need of humanitarian assistance. The United Nations says the number of displaced could rise to four million people.

The Syrian Arab Red Crescent is able to move around Syria more freely than other aid organizations, gaining greater access to people caught in areas of combat.

United Nations refugee spokeswoman Melissa Fleming says the Red Crescent believes its estimate of 2.5 million Syrians who have fled their homes is conservative and that the number of people in need of assistance is probably higher.

Fleming says five percent of them are living in schools and other public places. The rest are living with families.

“When they are absorbed in families, it is much more difficult to count and specifically in the Syrian situation,” she said. “We have so many accounts from refugees who have come across borders who were previously internally displaced. They were internally displaced several times before they became refugees So, the people are moving. The people are really on the run, hiding and difficult to count and difficult to access.”

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The United Nations refugee agency has some 350 staff in Syria, working in Damascus, Aleppo and Hassakeh. Fleming says the UNHCR is trying to provide aid to up to one-half million people inside Syria by the end of the year.

She says recent disruptions to operations due to insecurity are hampering these efforts. Over the past few weeks, she says the agency has lost aid supplies due to shelling and other problems. In addition, a truck carrying 600 blankets was hijacked on its way to Adra, outside Damascus.

She says staff working in Aleppo also has experienced difficulties. And, she says the UNHCR has been forced to temporarily withdraw staff from northeastern Hassakeh governorate because of a worsening security situation.

“We have temporarily withdrawn five staff and seven staff remain,” said Fleming. “Hopefully, we can bring them back very soon and hopefully we can continue our operations. We work also very closely there with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent who continues to serve the people extremely well and to help us aid organizations who have goods and cannot access Syrians in some places. It really steps in to serve as our delivery mechanism.”

Despite these setbacks, Fleming says progress is being made. On Monday, she says the UNHCR was able to deliver thousands of mattresses and hundreds of hygiene kits to Aleppo, Hassakeh and Adra.

N2x

The research arm of Doctors Without Borders reports vaccines created for industrialized countries are not being adapted for use in the developing world, meaning that millions of children born each year could be receiving less-effective vaccines, or missing out on the basic vaccination package.

The results of a new study by Epicentre, the research division of Doctors Without Borders, have added to what the group calls a “growing body of evidence” that vaccines may not be one-size-fits-all.

Rebecca Grais, director of Epidemiology and Population Health at Epicentre, says vaccines against life-threatening diseases must be modified for use in Africa if they are to protect children.

“We want to make sure that the living vaccine and the vaccines that we do have are both adapted to the population where we are working, in presentation and composition, and we want them to be as easy to use as possible for both the mother and for the health infrastructure,” she said.

Many areas in Africa don’t have access to adequate refrigeration or electricity to keep vaccines stored at proper temperatures. Bad roads and other logistical issues make getting the vaccines out to communities a challenge. And the vaccines are not always easy to use or administer in proper doses.

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Grais said these factors must all be taken into consideration during the development and testing phases of a vaccine.

She and her team spent two years looking at the incidence of diarrhea among more than 10,000 children under the age of five in Niger. Diarrhea is one of the leading causes of child mortality in Africa and is often caused by an infection known as rotavirus.

Epicentre says the two available vaccines for rotavirus were developed and tested in industrialized countries where they have been found to be 90 percent effective. However, those same vaccines are estimated to be only 50 to 60 percent effective when used in Africa and Asia.

“There’s been great success in the U.S. and Europe with, in particular, two currently available rotavirus vaccines,” said Grais. “We’ve seen a great decline in the incidence of rotavirus and of course subsequently severe rotavirus gastroenteritis, which may lead to death, and so this has been a success. So the question is: how can we use these vaccines in the best way in the areas of the world with the highest diarrheal burden, which is sub-Saharan Africa?”

Grais said that while their study focused on the rotavirus vaccine, its findings are relevant to vaccinations in general.

Epicentre has launched two additional studies looking at alternative methods to deliver tetanus vaccine in Chad and the vaccine for pneumococcal disease in Uganda.

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Researchers hope the findings will further convince pharmaceutical companies that they need to tailor vaccines to the challenges of the developing world.

N2y

The U.S. Congress returned to work Tuesday after a long election-season recess, and immediately resumed debate on America’s fiscal woes. The election has not erased sharp partisan differences on how best to reduce America’s trillion-dollar federal deficit, nor boost a still-fragile economic recovery.

Last week, Americans re-elected President Barack Obama, widened a Democratic majority in the Senate, and trimmed a Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

Democratic Senator Dick Durbin hailed the election results.

“And when it was all over - thank the Lord - it was decisive. The president won a majority of the popular vote, as well as a strong majority of electoral votes. The outcome was not in doubt when it was all over,” said Durbin.

Democrats argue the American people endorsed the president’s fiscal prescription: higher taxes for the wealthy, combined with spending restraint that does not hurt the poor and vulnerable.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:

“It is within our power to forge an agreement that will ask the richest of the rich, the most fortunate among us, to pay a little extra to reduce the deficit and secure our economic future,” he said.

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Republicans have a different view. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued the election simply reaffirmed the current balance of power in Washington: a Democratic president who must work with a politically-divided Congress.

“Look out across the heartland [of America], and you will see vast regions of the country wary of the president’s vision for the future,” he said.

McConnell said Republicans in Congress will continue to give voice to that wariness, especially on fiscal matters, and will champion spending cuts and government program reforms as the best way forward.

“Half the Congress opposes tax hikes. Not because we are selfish, not because we are stubborn, but [because] we know it is the wrong thing to do. We know it will hurt the economy, and we know it will destroy jobs,” said McConnell.

Unless the U.S. Congress acts by year’s end, federal taxes will rise for all income groups, and across-the-board spending cuts will go into effect. Economists say the combination of tax hikes and budget cuts - commonly known as the fiscal cliff - could send the U.S. economy back into recession.

But the automatic raising of taxes far in excess of what Democrats seek has led some of the party’s most-liberal members to suggest that plunging off the fiscal cliff would be preferable to a compromise deal with Republicans - if, indeed, one can be forged at all.

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That thinking is rejected by the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

“I want you to be disabused of any notion that there is any widespread thought that it would be a good thing for our country to go over the cliff. We want an agreement,” said Pelosi.

In the week since the election, President Obama and congressional leaders of both parties have urged bipartisanship and pledged to work with political opponents for the common good. That will be put to the test later this week, when they meet with President Obama for the first post-election round of fiscal negotiations.

N3x

U.S. lawmakers have received the first post-election briefings on the deadly September attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Senators are not revealing specific information provided to them by administration officials at the closed-door encounters, but several Republicans say they are far from satisfied with what they have learned so far.

On Congress’s first day of work since the elections, State Department and intelligence officials provided classified briefings to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Emerging from the Foreign Relations Committee briefing, Republican Senator James Risch of Idaho said he wants to know more about the Benghazi attack and the Obama administration’s actions before and after the incident.

“There are still questions. We are hearing explanations. But there are a lot of us that want clearer explanations than what we are getting,” Rish said.

Lawmakers are duty-bound not to divulge details from classified briefings, and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois honored that tradition. But he did speak in general terms about what he learned about the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

“We just went through a detailed chronology in terms of what happened on September 11. And there were some genuine acts of heroism that were performed there by Americans trying to save those who were in danger and lost their lives,” Durbin said.

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Lawmakers are being given access to intelligence reports and classified communications pertaining to events in Libya. National Intelligence Director James Clapper and acting Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Morell are expected to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee later this week.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida says another top official should testify: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“I think, ultimately, we need to hear from Secretary Clinton. I am sure she is willing to come in and talk about it. I know she is traveling, but hopefully she will be back soon and we can get some answers from her,” Rubio said.

Rubio said he wants to know more about security assessments at the consulate prior to the attack, and why some administration officials insisted in the days after September 11 that available information pointed to a spontaneous demonstration rather than a pre-planned assault.

“I do not think there is any reasonable doubt now that this was not a protest gone violent. This was an attack,” said Rubio.

Senator Durbin said there is a reason it has taken weeks for the Obama administration to collect and provide information about the incident.

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“It was a chaotic situation [in Benghazi], and it sprung up in a matter of hours. And there was a limited access to even videotapes [of the attack] afterwards. And we are trying to put it all together. But it was a chaotic scene, and we were not able to have people on the ground to inspect that scene for a long period of time,” Durbin said.

Complicating matters further is the sudden resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus. Several senators say that if Petraeus has information to share about events in Benghazi, he should testify on Capitol Hill.

N3y

U.S. officials are calling for more international aid to Syria’s population, with nearly half a million Syrians now refugees from the 20-month-long uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford says the United States will press others in the international community to provide increased humanitarian aid for Syrians at next month’s high-level diplomatic meeting of the so-called “Friends of the Syrian People.”

Speaking at a conference in Washington Thursday, the ambassador also suggested that the U.S. government could eventually recognize Syria’s newly-formed opposition council as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.

“We would like to see them continue to develop as an organization, as a coalition. They are making real progress, and I expect that our position with them will evolve as they themselves develop,” said Ford.

Any formal recognition from Washington would put the United States in line with several of its European and Arab allies. It also would open the door for more U.S. assistance for Syrians.

So far, the United States is the biggest bilateral donor of humanitarian aid to the country with nearly $200 million already provided.

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Since February, the number of Syrian refugees has increased from 15,000 to nearly half a million, while the number of civilians displaced inside the country has increased 25-fold to almost one million.

The State Department’s Kelly Clements, who helps oversee U.S. aid for Syria, says these growing numbers will increase the Syrian people’s calls for aid.

“The needs will likely double going forward in terms of the first half of 2013,” she said.

However, the current response plans - which expire at the end of the year - still are barely halfway funded. Clements attributes this to donor fatigue.

“Syria is one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world today, but it is not the only one. We have the Sahel obviously, Sudan and other humanitarian emergencies around the world, and I think what we are seeing is donors trying to balance to the extent possible these competing needs, which continue to rise,” she said.

Clements says another problem is that it is difficult to get accurate information out of Syria on what the people there need.

Thursday’s news that the Syrian government had cut the country’s Internet access and phone service promised to further complicate the issue.

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Ambassador Ford says it is clear that the Syrian military is weakening. But he insists that U.S. aid should not, at this time, extend to arming the opposition, which continues to ask for weapons.

“Arms are not a strategy. Arms are a tactic. Efforts to win this by conquering one side or the other will simply prolong the violence, and frankly, aggravate an already terrible humanitarian situation. Syria needs a political solution,” he said.

But Ford says there is no sign yet of any political deal between the opposition and the government, so the fighting that has claimed tens of thousands of lives will continue.

N4x

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee will hold a closed hearing Thursday to review the events surrounding the fatal attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. Lawmakers say they want to review intelligence capabilities in the region, as well as the level of security at U.S. compounds.

Four Americans were killed in the assault: U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and military veterans Tyrone Woods, Glen Doherty and Sean Smith.

“The United States condemns in the strongest terms this outrageous and shocking attack,” said President Barack Obama in a televised address the following morning. “We’re working with the government of Libya to secure our diplomats.”

Militants staged the assault on the 11th anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack the United States has ever known.

Spontaneous or Planned?

A few days later, Libya’s interim president, Mohamed Magariaf, suggested al-Qaida was responsible.

Mr. Magariaf said the attack yielded “concrete evidence” about “who the attackers are, the way they attack, what kind of weapons they used.” He added that “all this indicates clearly that the attackers are well trained and well prepared and have planned this in advance.”

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That description contrasted sharply with comments made the same day by Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She appeared on a number of talk shows and described the attack as “a spontaneous reaction” to a protest hours earlier outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo. The protest in Cairo was apparently in response to an obscure anti-Islamic video on the Internet.

“We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people came to the embassy, or to the consulate rather, to replicate this sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo,” said Rice on ABC television’s This Week program. “And then as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists.”

Ambassador Rice says the intelligence community provided her with that now-discredited explanation.

Suggestions of Spin

But some Republicans suggested political maneuvering ahead of the presidential election.

“The Mideast is falling apart and they’re trying to spin what happened in Libya because the truth of the matter is al-Qaida is alive and well and counterattacking,” said Senator Lindsey Graham when he appeared on the CBS television program, Face the Nation.

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Mitt Romney, who ran for president against President Obama, raised the issue in one of his debates with the president.

“And there was no demonstration involved. It was a terrorist attack, and it took a long time for that to be told to the American people,” said Romney, as he debated Mr. Obama. “Whether there was some misleading or instead whether we just didn’t know what happened, I think you have to ask yourself why didn’t we know five days later when the ambassador to the United Nations went on TV to say that this was a demonstration. How could we have not known?”

In late October, the Reuters news agency reported that an official email showed that the White House and State Department were advised hours after the assault that an Islamic militant group had claimed credit on Facebook.

“Posting something on Facebook is not in and of itself evidence, and I think it just underscores how fluid the reporting was at the time and continued for some time to be,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters the following day.

Security

The level of security at the Benghazi mission is another contentious issue.

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Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood, who worked with embassy security in Libya earlier this year, testified before lawmakers last month about the worsening security situation.

“Militias appeared to be disintegrating into organizations resembling freelance criminal operations. Targeted attacks against Westerners were on the increase,” Wood described. “In June, the ambassador received a threat on Facebook with a public announcement that he liked to run around the embassy compound in Tripoli.”

Wood said the regional security officer tried to obtain additional personnel, but diplomatic security remained weak. The State Department rebuffed requests to extend the missions of security teams that had been protecting diplomats in the country.

The U.S. Department of Defense released a timeline last week that indicates Pentagon leaders knew of the attack in Benghazi an hour after it began, but they were unable to mobilize reinforcements based in Europe in time to prevent the killings.

The State Department says an independent Accountability Review Board is now examining the circumstances surrounding the Benghazi attack and its report might be ready by mid-December.

N4y

Kenyan police have launched an operation to capture and punish the gunmen who killed at least 32 police officers over the weekend, according to a department spokesman.

“We have now laid out another operation plan to ensure that those criminals are apprehended, the livestock they stole is recovered, and the illicit firearms, which they used, are recovered and surrendered to the government,” said police spokesman Eric Kiraithe. “The most important thing is for us to take the kind of action, which would send a very clear message that this one cannot be allowed and it would not be repeated.”

Kiraithe also rejected demands by civil society groups, including the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), that senior police officers should step aside for an independent investigation into the murder of the officers.

The groups say Police Commissioner Matthew Iteere, the Provincial Police chief and the commander in Baragoi where the police officers were killed should resign immediately.

“Our stance is that this was a professional operation, which was properly executed, and you cannot really ask a physician to resign simply because the patient died,” said Kiraithe. “We have an independent police oversight authority, which does not need the permission of anybody, and which does not need the commissioner of police to resign so that they can execute their responsibility.”

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Gunmen in northern Kenya are accused of killing police officers who were hunting for cattle rustlers, one of the worst attacks on police in the country’s history.

“This was a law enforcement operation and the criminals, who had murdered 12 members of the public, aggravated their offense,” Kiraithe said.

Kenyan police say the officers were ambushed Saturday as their truck drove through the remote northern Baragoi district. Officials say nine survivors of the attack have been hospitalized.

Kiraithe says the police have taken corrective measures to prevent any future ambush of police officers.

“We have been able to make an analysis of the operation plan, which they used on that day and we have found out that the operation plan was alright,” said Kiraithe.

“The intention of the operation,” he continued, “was also quite legal, [but] unfortunately, the officers got into an ambush because of a tactical miscalculation, which could not have been avoided.”

N5x

The autonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq is witnessing an economic boom, drawing back many exiled Kurds who had fled oppression and now dream of helping to create an independent homeland.

In Erbil’s ancient bazaar, in a city inhabited for 8,000 years, many Kurds now feel more hopeful than ever for the future of their people amid economic gains.

Maam Khalil, who has been making tea in the heart of Erbil’s bazaar since 1948, has witnessed seven decades of the Kurdish struggle.

“God willing, we will be independent. There are many Kurds, 40 million of us, and God willing we will make our own government and have our own state.”

Khalil’s tea shop has hundreds of photos on the walls that show famous visitors - movie stars, politicians, Kurdish heroes.

They tell a history of failed Kurdish alliances in Iraq, of uprisings brutally suppressed, of chemical warfare under Saddam Hussein.

In all, an estimated 182,000 Kurds were killed. Finally, after the U.S.-led intervention that ousted Hussein in 2003, Khalil said Kurds are free.

No breakaway

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Still, the Kurdistan Regional Government - KRG - does not have plans to break away from Iraq, said Hemin Hawrami of the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party.

“If Kurds will be regarded as true partners within this democratic constitutional federal Iraq, the Kurdistan region will be part of this Iraq,” he said. “But definitely Kurdistan is not going to be part of any dictatorial Iraq that is not ruled by democracy.”

The KRG estimates GDP growth of more than nine percent this year.

It has signed exploration deals with foreign oil giants like ExxonMobil, while building a new million-barrel-per-day pipeline to export the oil via Turkey - angering the Iraqi federal government in Baghdad.

“This is our constitutional right and we want to practice our right, we haven’t asked for anything else,” Hawrami said. “When we are administrating our own oil sector, the revenue is not only for us, the revenue is for all Iraqis.”

Young return

As Kurds are increasingly taking an assertive line, their history of oppression is giving way to the optimism of youth.

Fifty-nine percent of the population is under age 25.

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Among them is Sazan Mandalawi. After living overseas, Mandalawi returned to Erbil this year. She works at a youth program and writes a popular blog.

„There’s this feeling that we need to permanently return,“ she said. „We have no reason to be living abroad. We escaped because we were scared of our lives. Now back home it’s safe, we should go back.”

N5y

Inside this sprawling desert-like compound on the outskirts of Kabul, some 11,000 soldiers, non-commissioned officers and officers are training to join the Afghan army - an army that independent and U.S. government analysts are warning is not yet ready to take over the country’s fragile security structure.

According to NATO estimates, more than a quarter of Afghanistan’s army will leave this year due to attrition, and almost 3,000 will have been killed or wounded. That means the military will have to boost its recruitment efforts just to maintain its numbers. An overwhelming majority of those who join are functionally illiterate.

The latest Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction report also finds that the Afghan government is likely to be incapable of sustaining its military facilities. These are harsh judgments for a military that soon will have to function on its own.

Reading, writing, weapons

The military is working hard to dispel those perceptions and strengthen its capabilities before international combat forces finally leave in 2014. At the Kabul Military Training Center, soldiers are taught to read and write, are trained on NATO weapons, and learn about guerrilla warfare.

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Brig. General Aminullah Patyani, head of the Training Center, said right now the country is facing “a war against terrorism, insurgents, and the people they are trying to attack.” He said the training here is preparing his soldiers for an intelligence-led guerrilla war.

Patyani added that there is significant coordination between the Ministry of Defense and the Afghan National Directorate of Security. One official told VOA that in addition to military intelligence, some 40 to 50 officers from Afghanistan’s intelligence services are training with the four battalions of soldiers here, totaling more than 5,000.

Dotted around the dusty KMTC compound on the outskirts of the city, hidden behind shale-rock mountains, groups of soldiers in green camouflage are grabbing their M16s and lying on the ground shooting at paper targets. Off in the distance, special forces units can be seen training in re-creations of walled areas.

Meeting challenges

There are also coalition soldiers and commanders here, in what they call a “mentoring” role, as well as private U.S. contractors, like Dyncorp. They say they are needed less and less as Afghan forces become more independent.

But others are concerned. Former Ghazni governor Shir Khosti is not convinced that the Afghan military is ready for the challenges ahead. He said weak vetting procedures have led to insider attacks, and he cited serious truancy problems. Khosti also claimed that so far, the army has not won the confidence of the people.

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“Asking the Afghan government of course they are always saying ‘we are ready to take over,’” Khosti said. “But asking any ordinary Afghan are they ready to protect, and the answer is no.”

Preparing for handover

Former military and intelligence officer Jawed Kohistani said the Defense Ministry simply does not have a comprehensive and targeted plan.

“We don’t have any strategy on dealing with the Taliban or against the intelligence service of neighboring countries,” he said. “All training of soldiers and security forces must be based on a specific strategy, which will give them the morale to fight.”

Brig. General Patyani is confident that his troops are up to the task.

“The way our security forces are right now, with the high morale that they have, they will be able to operate and defend from that threat,” he said.

These soldiers training today will have two years to prove their commander right.

N6x

The Syrian government imposed a wholescale Internet blackout Thursday along with severing phone service, leaving Syrians largely cut off from contact with the outside world.

The Internet outage was confirmed by two U.S.-based companies that monitor online connectivity and is unprecedented in the 20-month-long uprising against Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.

Authorities often cut phone lines and Internet access in areas where government forces are conducting major military operations.

Internet experts tracked the outage to government-controlled tracer routes. But a pro-government television station quoted Syria’s minister of information as saying “terrorists” - the government’s term for the opposition - were responsible.

World notices

Social media websites started buzzing Thursday morning as most of Syria appeared to be offline.

Jim Cowie, the chief technology officer and co-founder at U.S.-based Renesys, a firm that monitors Internet connectivity, said the blackout is extensive.

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“It’s a somewhat unambiguous situation,” Cowie said. “The Internet has simply turned off.”

Cowie told VOA that the data show a clear and sudden drop-off.

“Almost everything that is owned by Syria - almost all of the IP addresses that they have registered to them - you can’t get to,” he said. “This morning they went off the air. They were literally removed from the global table and can’t be reached.”

Other Internet monitoring sites, including U.S.-based Akamai, confirm the findings.

U.S. outrage

In Washington, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland condemned what she called a desperate move by a desperate regime.

“The regime does appear to be resorting to cutting off all kinds of communications - cellular networks, land lines as well as Internet service across the country, notably in Damascus and the suburbs as well as in Hama, Homs and Tartus,” she said.

Nuland said that despite the blackout, opposition groups should be able to communicate with the outside world thanks to U.S.-provided communication kits that allow contact through outside proxys.

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U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford said in a Washington appearance that the Internet blackout is not entirely surprising. He said Syria’s government has long been using Iranian expertise to monitor the web to “track opposition activists, to arrest and kill them.”

Ford said he fears the shutdown is an attempt by the Syrian government to further its brutal crackdown of dissent and keep the world from finding out.

“In 1982, Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez shut down all communications and the world never got a clear picture of what happened in [a massacre in] Hama,” Ford said. “We do not want a repeat of that. A lot of the pictures that you see on the nightly news are from communications equipment that we supply to very brave and to very dedicated opposition activists inside Syria.”

Internet expert Cowie said such a widespread shutdown is very unusual, although not too hard to engineer given Syria’s infrastructure.

“Syria has very few Internet service providers,” he said. “Almost all of Syria’s telecommunications are handled by the Syrian telecommunications establishment. There’s probably a handful of buildings in the entire country, maybe as few as one or two, where telecommunications really passes through in a critical way.

“And so by shutting off power or by turning off service at those points, it’s actually fairly easy to turn a country like Syria off,” Cowie said.

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The last time the world has seen something close to this was last year, Cowie said, when the Egyptian government shut down the Internet in an attempt to dampen enthusiasm for Egypt‘s uprising.

N6y

A U.N. tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has cleared Kosovo’s former prime minister, Ramush Haradinaj, of war crimes, following a second trial in The Hague.

“Mr. Haradinaj, will you please stand? The chamber finds you not guilty on all counts in the indictment. The chamber orders you be released from the United Nations detention unit,” Presiding judge Bakone Moloto said as he read the verdict.

Haradinaj was first acquitted by the U.N. court in 2008, but appeal judges ordered a partial retrial because of witness intimidation.

Former guerilla fighter Haradinaj was accused of war crimes allegedly committed during the Kosovo conflict in 1998 and 1999, and was charged with murdering and torturing ethnic Serbs.

But the judge said although the evidence showed Serbs and their supporters had been attacked, there was no evidence that Haradinaj had taken part. Two other defendants, Idriz Balaj and Lahi Brahimaj, were also cleared of the charges.

“This verdict, this judgment, coming after the longest and most exhausting criminal process ever undertaken in the history of the international criminal law, is a complete vindication of Mr. Haradinaj’s innocence,” Defense lawyer Ben Emmerson said. “It proves beyond the slightest doubt that he was a war hero and not a war criminal.”

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Haradinaj was a fighter in the Kosova Liberation Army. He became Kosovo’s prime minister for a few months in 2005, but stepped down when charges were first brought against him.

Emmerson said Haradinaj wants to restart his political career.

In Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, crowds watched the announcement of the verdict on a giant screen and celebrated with cheers and fireworks.

“This is definitely a very historic decision,” Besnik Tahiri, a senior official in the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, said. “International justice has confirmed that our liberation efforts were the right ones, we defended our homes, our people, and we are very happy that Mr. Haradinaj, Mr. Brahimaj and Mr. Balaj have been acquitted, and they are soon coming home.”

But in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, the verdict was not welcome. Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic said the not-guilty verdict shows the U.N. tribunal is aimed only at trying Serbian people for the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s.

He said the decision would “annul” what progress has been made in talks between Serbia and Kosovo, which are backed by the European Union.

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Milivoje Mihajlovic, a Serbian government spokesperson, said the verdict is a heavy blow to international law and justice in the case of Kosovo and a serious obstacle in the process of reconciliation.

Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in 2008, an independence that has been recognized by about 90 nations, but which Serbia rejects.

A1

We can finally discard the dichotomies between ‘langue’ versus ‘parole’ or ‘competence’ versus ‘performance’ and reassess the ‘relationship between the potential of language and its instantiation’ (Francis and Sinclair 1994: 194). Here we must be wary lest we be criticized for equating the entire language with any one corpus, however large. A corpus can never offer a final report of all things the native speakers of the language can say in principle; but, as the corpus increases in size and degree of detail, it can offer a steadily closer approximation of many things the native speakers are likely to say in typical contexts. Undeniably, speakers can and do say many unlikely things, such as ‘square-cut simplicity’ back in [116] (how can you cut simplicity?) but typically with an intuitive sense that these are unlikely and are thus suitable for creative variations against the background of the more likely things. Such is a leading strategy in the discourse of consumerism and advertising, which regales us with an endless parade of new descriptions for high-priced commodities, even when these are ostensibly ‘simple’.

A large corpus powerfully refutes the old anxieties about a ‘heterogeneous mass of speech facts’ rife with ‘fragments and deviant expressions’, as we saw expressed by linguists like Saussure and Chomsky. Large corpora display strikingly delicate dialectical balances between heterogeneity and homogeneity, or between diversity and uniformity. A bit paradoxically, large-corpus data manifest both fine-tuned regularity and fine-tuned creativity; indeed, speakers can be most effectively creative when they have a delicate sense of the normal or typical.

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Still, the regularities are not just due to ‘rules’ of the types postulated in conventional linguistics at the level of the overall system. Instead, we encounter complex arrays of data displaying the selections and combinations performed by a huge population of discourse participants. The lexical regularities can be aptly designated with Firth’s terms ‘colligation’ for a ‘syntagmatic relation’ and ‘mutual expectancy’ among ‘elements’ of ‘grammatical’ ‘structure’; and ‘collocation’ for lexical items ‘presented in the company they usually keep’ (cf. Firth 1968: 186, 111, 182f, 106ff, 113). Determining when selections and combinations might qualify as colligations and collocations is scarcely feasible without large corpus data; intuition is not detailed or delicate enough, though it vitally help us interpret and evaluate the data in the corpus. Even so, we will always have some borderline cases where the evidence is insufficient at the current size of the corpus, e.g., whether ‘classic simplicity’ in [112-13] might be a collocation.

The creativity revealed by corpus data is even further outside the purview of conventional linguistics. The data show that creativity is a continual factor in discourse precisely because many regularities of a language are only decided on the plane of the actual discourse. Speakers typically perform an array of choices which is, as a whole, highly improbable or even unique in a statistical sense, e.g., to produce a combination like ‘wonderful sets of blocklike simplicity, exquisitely lit’ in sample [119], yet which is readily produced and comprehended by speakers of the language. So corpus data animate us to reinterpret the concept of statistical probability in language: although the probability of a whole array may indeed be very low in respect to the whole language — or at least to the whole corpus, which is all we would compute — some choices can make others significantly more or less probable (cf. Halliday 1991, 1992). For example, the COBUILD data examined above show how some contextual cues such as ‘politics’ make the choice of ‘instability’ far more probable than ‘fluctuation’, whereas other cues such as ‘currency’ do just the opposite. ‘Instability’ has been chosen to be a cover term for any major social change which might disrupt the status quo of power and inequality, whereas ‘fluctuation’ designates the leeway for the rich to get even richer on the money markets without real work.

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For a very large corpus, the raw frequency of an item is much less significant than collocability, its potential to be a collocate of other expressions, as contrasted with collocation to designate ‘frequent co-occurrence’ in an actual corpus (cf. Greenbaum 1974: 80). A sequence would be more creative when our intuitions based on collocability not fulfilled. For example, ‘indeterminate’ would be more ‘collocative’ with ‘haze’ [225], ‘blank space’ [217], and ‘period’ [215] than with ‘Gallic blue’ [223] and ‘date’ [216], since these two last logically seem rather well-defined; strictly speaking, nobody can be ‘born on an indeterminate date’ [216], because being born cannot extend over days, months, or years, though some doubt may arise later on about just when it was. Also, I would intuitively not expect ‘jealousy’ to be combined with ‘complexity’, but I can see where we might revise our expectations in view of ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘irrationality’ in sample [11]. Evidently, otherwise improbable combinations can be integrated on the plane of the discourse, and unfamiliarity does not hinder comprehension.

Paradoxically perhaps, collocability itself can be both precise and non-deterministic, due to the enormous range of possible combinations. Even if we compiled and interpreted all the positions of an item, our results could not be equivalent to its total collocability for the same reason that no corpus, however large, can be equivalent to the entire language, as I remarked. Since collocability can evolve and change, a monitor corpus that is continually updated like the COBUILD ‘Bank of English’ can help us keep track, e.g., when governments and banks have established the term ‘fluctuation band’, a collocation I would not have predicted from my intuition. By showing how the place of an item within the language system is non-deterministic and evolutionary, corpus research also shows why no set of deterministic ‘semantic features’ or similar constructs could definitively represent the whole system of ‘possible meanings’ in a natural language, nor, strictly speaking, even the ‘meaning’ of a single word. If meanings are always evolving, none can be impossible. At most, special and technical cases like ‘deterministic nonperiodic flow’ in the work of Edward N. Lorenz and others, which occurred 3 times in my COBUILD data, could attain a high stability and probability; but such cases are not representative and cannot promote coverage and consensus in a semantics of real language.

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A2

For reasons we have already seen, the issue of size is far from easy to resolve in either theory or practice. In theory, as Halliday (1997) has suggested, a language is an infinitely large system, whereas the set of discourses in the language is always finite. In practice, every corpus has some cut-off range where — even if we can make an inventory of all the ‘words’ — we can never make an inventory of all the combinations that the language might allow. Corpus research confronts us with constant decisions about which regularities might encourage or discourage certain combinations, even when the data might look quite diverse, e.g., when the pejorative contextual cues of ‘political instability’ span ‘enemy’, ‘foreign power’, ‘chaos’, and ‘anarchy’, but also ‘poverty’ and ‘reforms’.

As a corpus gets larger, we see that size improves the not just the quantity but the quality of the information we can get from the data. In his reports on COBUILD at 20 million, then 200 million, and most recently (as of June 1996) 323 million words, Sinclair has taken pains to refute the simple assumption that increases in size by no means merely follow a direct proportionality with the same data multiplied out, so that if an item appears once in a 1 million word corpus, it would appear 20 times in a 20 million word corpus and 200 times in a 200 million word corpus. Instead, we find numerous items that did not appear at all in smaller ones; we can make more informed judgements about relative frequency, e.g., when a small corpus shows two items appear only once each, whereas a larger corpus shows the one still only once and the other fifteen times; and an item which appeared only once in a small corpus may appear in several distinctive variants in a large one, e.g., ‘indeterminate age’ versus ‘indeterminate years’ in [212-14]. The proportionality assumption is no doubt derived from the further assumption, attractive to formalist but not to functionalist linguistics, that a ‘language’ is ‘homogeneous in its linguistic characteristics’ — just what corpus data soundly refute: ‘there are important and systematic differences among text varieties at all linguistic levels’, and ‘global characterisations of “General English” should be regarded with caution’ (Biber, Conrad, and Reppen 1994: 170, 179).

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If very large corpora can reveal the ‘heterogeneity’ that prompted Saussurian formalist linguists to marginalise discourse data, the corpora can also offer us some means of defining it and determining how discourse participants normally manage it with fairly little time and energy. We can also explore the tendencies in various subdomains of a corpus or in specific sub-corpora. The major options pursued so far for sorting the domains or sub-corpora have been to apply either linguistic criteria, e.g., as ‘text types’ or ‘language varieties’, or else situational criteria, e.g., as ‘registers’ or ‘professions’; not surprisingly, these two sets of criteria can produce quite divergent subdivisions and do not justify tidy borders separating them (cf. Biber 1989, 1994). Also, further differences keep emerging at greater degrees of detail, such as the subdivision of scientific or medical journal articles into ‘methods’ versus ‘results and discussion’ (cf. Biber and Finegan 1994).

My own proposal for sorting would be to co-ordinate the three dimensions of linguistic, cognitive, and social in order to construct multi-dimensional profiles of text types or discourse domains. We might begin with ones which, like medical journal articles, appear to be regulated by standardised conventions and move toward ones that appear less so, like family dinner conversations. How specific or general our criteria should be is a question to be tackled empirically as the research progresses, and to be co-ordinated with the applications we intend to support. Particularly if our findings are to be tapped in programmes for teaching English for Special (or Academic) Purposes, as Biber et al. (1994) in fact suggest, we could also inquire how far the prevailing conventions and strategies of the discourse serve purposes of inclusion or exclusion, and whether the degrees of specialisation are either necessary or productive (cf. Beaugrande 1997a, 1997b).

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As we have seen, even a very large corpus of general English like the COBUILD can generate frequency statistics vulnerable to the periodic ‘ballooning’ effects caused by the shorter-range or longer-range preoccupations of public discourse with specific or fashionable topics. In July of 1994, when COBUILD’s Bank of English contained about 200 million words of running text, I found some striking ‘skews for news’: ‘revolutionary’ collocating 87 times with ‘Ethiopian’; ‘sex’ collocating 707 times with ‘Pistols’ and 63 times with ‘Madonna’, whose name occurred by itself some 2,516 times. Against these shorter-range preoccupations we can contrast some longer-range ones reflecting the voyeuristic if not indeed sadistic views our mass media seem to hold about what’s worth taking about: ‘death’ (31,013 occurrences), ‘dead’ (21,323), ‘died’ (22,467), ‘kill’ (51,746), ‘murder’ (18,383), ‘violence’ (19,226), ‘rape’ (5,890), ‘assault’ (4,055), ‘robbery’ (2,230), and ‘theft’ (1,970), as against a measly 661 occurrences of ‘kindness’ and just 10 of ‘human kindness’. The pet word of the modern age, ‘sex’, weighed in at 20,569 occurrences and collocated (aside from ‘Pistols’ and ‘Madonna’) predictably with ‘appeal’ (762) and ‘partner’ (120); ominously with ‘offenders’ (247), ‘aids’ (117), ‘oral’ (203), ‘anal’ (108), ‘drugs’ (226), ‘violence’ (209), and ‘discrimination’ (209); and (perhaps?) benignly with ‘love’ (339) and ‘marriage’ (108) (I was in no mood to check out whether the ‘sex’ occurred with or without these last two collocates).

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The shorter-range ballooning effects, provided they are distinctly lexical — the prospect of grammatical ones will be examined in just a moment — are fairly easy to spot; in 1997, who would suspect ‘Ethiopian’ as the principal collocate for ‘revolutionary’? And they could be offset by contrasting corpuses for different periods, e.g., subsequent decades, or by gradually accumulating one corpus over several decades. The longer-range ones, even if they are lexical, are more problematic and could be offset by shifting the bulk of the corpus away from mass media obsessed with violence and sex over toward everyday conversations in the home, the workplace, the evening party, and so on. Such is plainly desirable in theory; in practice, the labour and cost of putting them into a corpus are disheartening, and spoken data are still a small fraction of the total in, say, the COBUILD Bank of English or the British National Corpus. And of course we must wait and see how many everyday conversations are about ‘sex’ and ‘violence’ too.

A3

The separation between grammar and lexicon is a paradigm case of accommodating vested interests: of formalist linguists who want to equate all of linguistics with ‘grammar’ or ‘syntax’; of teachers who prepare one tidy lesson on ‘grammar’ and another on ‘vocabulary’; and of authors and publishers who produce and market ‘grammars’ and ‘dictionaries’ as separate enterprises. The interests have been most complex and subtle in linguistics, where the lexicon has gotten blamed for defying the methods of formalist description. Already for Sweet (1964 [1899]: 73), grammar consisted of ‘general laws’, and the lexicon of ‘isolated facts’; for Saussure (1966 [1916]: 133) ‘grammatical’ languages have the highest ‘motivation’ whereas ‘lexicological’ languages are the most ‘arbitrary’; for Chomsky (1965: 86f), an ‘advantage’ of ‘the lexical entries’ should absorb all the ‘idiosyncrasies’ and ‘irregularities of the language’. Such views indicate why ‘linguistic theory’ has shown so little interest in lexicology as compared to ‘grammar’. If accepted the lexicon might just be made into a handy limbo to place any ‘irregularities’ that didn’t fit properly into your ‘grammar’.

The major counterpoint has been the unified concept of the lexicogrammar regarred in systemic functional linguistics as ‘the inner core of language’ (Halliday 1994a: 15). Evidence for the functional unity of its two sides can be found in several sources The same or similar meanings or functions may be ‘lexicalised’ in one language and ‘grammaticalised’ in another; many lexical items entail grammatical constraints, while many grammatical patterns prefer certain types of lexical items, as large-corpus work has made obvious And when infants shift from spontaneously designed sounds over to real lexical items, their grammar soon begins assimilating to the mother language (Painter 1984). Still, the two sides clearly differ in their evolution; the lexicon changes faster, accepts more deliberate innovations, and forms less systematic classes than does the grammar; and the lexicon has a far more diverse and multiple range of functional orders, reflecting the normally improvised ways in which cultures use vocabulary to express and classify particular objects, events, actions, and so forth. A vital and still very open question is whether ballooning effects might occur similar to those noted above at the lexical end but more toward the grammatical end, where they could be much harder to identify and compensate. The unity of lexicogrammar as a principle of functionalist linguistics predicts they would, especially when a corpus has heavy proportions of mass media discourse, which, among other things, likes to grammaticalise female gender, as we shall soon see. Only very large queries for colligation types can enlighten us here.

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Ironically, English — the very language for which the most formal grammars have been devised — lexicalises far more functions than do many languages. This trend is still under way as the language evolves over historical time, e.g., to take over former functions of forming diminutives with ‘-let’, which is hardly productive except for coinages by analogy to ‘bracelet’ such as ‘anklet’, and feminines with ‘-ess’, which is politically questionable but still found in a few items dear to mass media discourse, such as ‘heiress’, ‘millionairess’, ‘adventuress’, ‘temptress’, ‘enchantress’, ‘seductress’, and of course ‘murderess’.3 So a unified functional lexicogrammar should be particularly useful for English; and putting a large corpus ‘into’ or ‘behind’ it may well be the major prospect for significant progress in linguistics toward coverage, convergence, and consensus in the coming decades. We can expect to find many delicate and supportive interactions between ‘grammaticalising’ and ‘lexicalising’, yielding a characteristic profile for each language, language variety, register, discourse domain, and so on.

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Fitting the corpus to the lexicogrammar will be a daunting challenge. Theory-driven access would proceed from an already formulated lexicogrammar like Halliday’s (1994a) and flesh it out with the data; practice-driven access would proceed from the corpus and gradually build up the lexicogrammar that the data seem to recommend or require. The most plausible prospect is a convergence of these two strategies, whereby a Hallidayan lexicogrammar will be both applied and revised for large sets of corpus data (Beaugrande 1997d), with human analysts operating upon supports from steadily more sophisticated ‘functional’ software. The main advantage is that a Hallidayan lexicogrammar is linguistic, cognitive, and social all at once, whence its three ‘meta-functions’: the ‘textual’ being what language gets used and why, the ‘ideational’ being what gets talked about and how, and the ‘interpersonal’ being who talks to whom (cf. Halliday 1967-68, 1985a, 1985b, 1994a). Also, systemic functional linguistics has long been seeking to build the criteria of selection and combination directly into the description of the repertories of options by means of ‘networks’ that can be used for computational implementations as well (e.g. Matthiessen and Bateman 1991).

The Hallidayan lexicogrammar is also emphatically ‘semantic’ and ‘functional’ in its categorisation of ‘processes’, such as ‘mental’ versus ‘behavioural’, now graphically assembled in a circular multicoloured disk on the cover of Halliday’s revised Introduction of 1994. Based on my own practical analyses of data, I have suggested several changes in the design and terminology — e.g., enriching the ‘aspect’ system’, or having the more general term ‘semiotic processes’ in place of his ‘verbal’; or ‘cognitive’ and enactive processes’ in place of his ‘mental and ‘behavioural’, which might carry overtones of Cartesian dualism. But the ‘semantic’ grounding is surely fundamental to any functionalist lexicogrammar that could be powerfully interfaced with large-corpus data.

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How ‘semantic’ and how ‘grammatical’ it needs to be are open questions for which corpus research might finally provide some data-driven answers. Halliday has cautioned that ‘all categories employed must be clearly “there” in the grammar of the language’, ‘not set up simply to label differences in meaning’; without some ‘lexicogrammatical reflex’, such ‘differences’ are not ‘systemically distinct in the grammar’ (1985a: xx). The toughest problem I see there is that in some languages, notably English, numerous ‘reflexes’ are formally systematic or distinctive only in certain sectors. In the English verb system, for example, the differences among process-types are most formally distinctive in the unmarked imperatives, presumably following the cognitive and social constraint that you normally only command an action for a genuine intentional agent capable of exerting the effort to perform and control it, e.g., for Enactive Processes like ‘sit down!’ or ‘don’t go away!’ more than for Cognitive ones like ‘?know the answer!’ or ‘?don’t understand this message!’ (see Beaugrande 1997a: ch. IV for the whole system). We need to work out from extensive corpus data how far such formal distinctions are in fact reliable or how far they can be offset by specific lexical counter-constraints, e.g., for a Cognitive like ‘think about the answer!’ or ‘don’t misunderstand this message!’

A4

My two final issues are eminently practical ones that have already given rise to notable controversies, probably because vested interests feel more directly involved and disturbed than they would in respect to the more theoretical issues explored so far in this section. Yet these controversies have been unproductive insofar as the spokespersons of the vested interests do not adequately address or respect the theoretical aspects but either ignore them or else enlist them defensively against the impulses coming from corpus work. These would-be defenders may resort to arguing, perhaps against their own better judgement, that the state of the art in producing reference works and in teaching languages is satisfactory already without any help from the corpora.

One important concern has been the production of dictionaries in the field of ‘lexicography’, as opposed to ‘lexicology’ in linguistics. As far as I can see, modern linguistics has not manifested much interest in the field. I would surmise that the main deterrent has been the prominent differences in methods and goals. Lexicographers must produce and publish a reasonably complete and final description, whereas linguists can occupy themselves indefinitely with elaborate theoretical disquisitions and ‘prolegomena’ (like Hjelmslev’s in the English title) which ratiocinate about how a description should be done but which are not obliged to provide concrete products (Hjelmslev’s book does not give single demonstration of an analysis). In consequence, lexicographers always work directly with the ‘speech facts’ modern linguists since Saussure have symptomatically marginalised, and project a picture of ‘language’ differing sharply from theirs. Above all, lexicographers must commit themselves in print to formulations of all the grainy details about the size and contents of the ‘vocabulary’ of the language and of the ‘meanings’, and have no use for making the ‘lexicon’ into a limbo for ‘idiosyncrasies’ and ‘irregularities’ you can safely ignore — a tactic I diagnosed for linguistics in section C(E).

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In return, lexicographers have understandably not been much devoted to the exposition of ambitious theories. Most dictionaries contain brief prefaces dealing chiefly with practical matters: how to use the dictionary and how to interpret its symbols and abbreviations, or how the dictionary got compiled. The publishers doubtless expect that the general public would have little interest in the actually quite complex and difficult theoretical issues and problems of lexicography, and would not bother to read extensive prefaces which explore them. At least implicitly, lexicographers hold functionalist and pragmatic theory of language through their method of determining the meanings of words from their usage.

But several other criteria that are somewhat inconsistent with this method have been favoured by the peculiar situation of having to find and publish great quantities of ‘meanings’. One conventional criterion is to look for the word’s ‘original’ or ‘basic’ meaning, whether or not this would be the most common or useful one. Typically, clues were derived from the historical derivation or etymology of the word, issues which would seldom be relevant from the standpoint of the ordinary speaker, e.g., when the first meaning given for ‘flamboyant’ in Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (1963) was ‘characterised by waving curves suggesting flames’, as in ‘flamboyant curtains’ (p. 316) — a use I have never encountered. The preface of the same book justified the practice whereby ‘the earliest ascertainable meaning is placed first’ on the grounds that ‘the historical order is of especial value to those interested in the development of meaning, and offers no difficulty to the user who is merely looking for a particular meaning’ (p. 5a); most users look up an item when they don’t know its meaning, particular or otherwise, and they are far less ‘interested in the development of meaning’ than lexicographers are; besides, the earliest meaning is also the most likely one to be out of date.

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A corpus-driven dictionary like the Collins COBUILD (1987 edition based on the 20 million word corpus, as are all other quotes) can instead ‘take the point of view of a user who encounters’ the item and ‘does not know much about English etymology’ (Sinclair 1988: 13), e.g., giving as the first meaning ‘someone who is flamboyant behaves in a very noticeable, confident, and exaggerated way’ (COBUILD, p. 546) — a use so up-to-date I have heard it applied to myself.

Another conventional criterion inconsistent with usage has been to treat the single word as the unit to list and define unless a longer unit unmistakably constituted an ‘idiom’. Collocations were thus represented far less than their importance in the language would merit, e.g., when the same Webster’s listed the erudite ‘sotto voce’ (p. 834) but not the very common ‘so to speak’.

A third conventional criterion might be called ‘noticeability’, resulting from the standard practice of lexicographers to collect ‘citations’, each being ‘a short quotation, usually only a few words long, that has caught the attention of a reader’ (Sinclair 1988: 3). Lexicographers could justify this tendency on the grounds that such words are quite likely to send ordinary speakers to a dictionary. Yet several problematic side-effects impend. One of these is that most citations represent written discourse rather than spoken; and often written discourse that is considered prestigious as well. The result has been a powerful bias toward erudite discourse, as produced by writers who would enjoy displaying their vocabularies and intended for readers who would appreciate the display. Words appear and persist which you might never encounter outside of dictionaries unless you encounter finicky people who, for instance, do not ‘belch’ and ‘sneeze’ but emit ‘eructations’ and ‘starnutations’ (both in the same Webster’s, pp. 282 860, with no warning of being rare).

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This side-effect can lead to a relentlessly antiquarian and acquisitive posture of accepting as a legitimate word every item proposed by the authors of your sources, including such detritus as ‘indwell’ meaning ‘to exist as an inner active spirit’, ‘imbrute’ meaning ‘to sink to the level of a brute’, and ‘discalced’ meaning ‘unshod, barefooted’, all given by Webster’s Seventh (430, 416, 237), again with no warnings. Clive Holes (1994: 174) has reported an entry in an English-Arabic dictionary published in 1987 (and much used by my students here at the United Arab Emirates University) for the verb ‘disembosom’ ‘not marked by the compiler as in any way unusual or rare’ and, to judge from the Arabic gloss, meaning ‘get it off your chest’, an expression which the same dictionary disdains as ‘slang’. ‘On checking the Oxford English Dictionary’, Holes ‘found it with three literary attestations dated between 1742 and 1836’. The embarrassment awaiting the hapless Arab student of English who uses this verb in conversations with native speakers can be vividly imagined.

A5

The theoretical importance of evolution in describing and explaining language and discourse and their interactions can hardly be overestimated, but has been officially discounted by ‘static’ or ‘synchronic linguistics’. Evolution is essential for assessing manifestations or trends in a language which do not seem plausibly accountable as instantiations of ‘rules’ but which determine the conditions for further developments and which I have proposed to call ‘frozen accidents’ (Beaugrande 1997a; cf. Gell-Mann 1994). One fairly global case of evolution concerns the gradual expansion of the Ergative in English grammar for determining whether a ‘process brought about from within or from outside’, e.g. ‘the glass broke’ versus ‘the cat broke the glass’ (Halliday 1985a: 150, 145, 147). Halliday (1985a: 150; 1967–68: 3/203) ascribes these ‘pairs’ to ‘the majority of verbs of high frequency in the language’, in contrast to the much less common ‘active’ and ‘passive’ many grammar-books still highlight in the staid tradition of Latin. He attributes this ‘predominance’ in ‘modern English’ to ‘a far-reaching complex process of semantic change’ in the ‘language over the past five hundred years or more’ (1985a: 146). The ‘waves of change’ indicate that ‘the transitivity system is particularly unstable in contemporary language’, due to ‘great pressure’ ‘for the language to adapt to a rapidly changing environment’ (1985a: 146). Such an evolution may have been encouraged by factors in the discourses of science and technology and in the commodification of objects that act as agents in the service of consumers, as in ‘this trailer sleeps three people’ (Random House Webster’s, p. 1259). Several usages in my own writing have been detected and amended by watchful editors like the redoubtable Jacob Mey, in collocations like ‘these occurrences have proliferated in recent years’. Perhaps I have seen similar usages in the writings of non-native speakers of English; and time is probably on my side.

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One fairly local case of evolution would be the ‘Verbalising’ of Nouns for special senses, e.g., to ‘network’ (to share information, especially via computer), to ‘outreach’ (to extend community services), and ‘to conference’ (to hold a conference’). These coinages suggest a trendy updating of labels for activities supported by the controlling functions of bureaucracy and technology yet purported to be motivated by humane concerns for other people.

On a deeper and broader plane, evolutionary accounts for the origin of language in the human species might lead to key insights about how the language is organised and sustained within and among the discourse participants we now find. For example, Edelman’s research has sought to demonstrate how language is indispensable to the rise of ‘higher-order consciousness’ and the ‘socially constructed self’ (1992: 124). ‘The acquisition of true speech leads to an enormous increase in conceptual power’; and ‘the evolutionary acquisition of the capacity for language’ has enabled ‘the evolution of new forms of symbolic memory and new systems serving social communication and transmission’ (1992: 130, 125). Edelman proposes to bridge the ‘gulf between linguistic theory and biology’ and to ‘abandon any notion of a genetically programmed language acquisition device’ (1992: 126). For this project, he favours an evolutionary ‘theory of speech acquisition’ following ‘a definite order’.

First, phonological capabilities were linked by learning with concepts and gestures, which allowed for the development of semantics. This development permitted the accumulation of a lexicon: words and phrases with meaning. Syntax then emerged by connecting pre-existing conceptual learning to lexical learning […] Thus, to build syntax or the bases for grammar, the brain must have re-entrant structures that allow semantics to emerge first (prior to syntax) by relating phonological symbols to concepts; […] the brain recursively relates semantic to phonological sequences and then generates syntactic correspondences, not from pre-existing rules, but by treating rules developing in memory as objects for conceptual manipulation. (1992: 129f, his emphases)

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This theory tallies with accounts in systemic functional linguistics of how children acquire their native language (see now Halliday 1997). What remains to be worked out is what this view of evolution might suggest about the evolution of the discourse participant’s current version of the language. In Edelmanian terms, the total knowledge of the language would be sustained by multiple interactive ‘neural maps’ that supply the standing constraints of the language, e.g., the mutual position of noun and article in English, whilst the ongoing neural reverberations that strengthen or inhibit connections supply the emergent constraints. This mode of operation would enable the continual resetting of the collocability and colligability of the selections and combinations and thus maximise efficiency without impeding creativity. A computational analogy might be the ‘Waltz effect’ first described for vision and more recently for language (Waltz 1975; Waltz and Pollack 1985): most of the computationally possible choices, e.g., how to interpret of convergence of lines as a vertex of a geometric object, are eliminated by the interaction of local constraints, e.g., upon internally coherent and externally closed physical shapes.

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Edelman’s evolutionary perspective has led him to firmly reject the widespread notion of language being represented and processed by means of ‘internal codes or syntactic systems’, or by any ‘exhaustive and determinate semantics’ wherein ‘meaning arises from the mapping of rule-governed syntactical structures onto defined and fixed world objects or relations’ (1992: 234, 236). He asks ‘how could anyone accept so abstract a notion of human knowledge reason, and mental activity’ (1992: 230). My answer, as you could guess, is the marvellous fit of this ‘notion’ with the idealisations confidently propounded in linguistics and philosophy throughout this century. To explain how humans could acquire such a system, such linguists can casually postulate ‘a highly determinate, very definite structure of concepts and of meaning that is intrinsic to our nature, and as we acquire language or other cognitive systems these things just kind of grow in our minds, the same way we grow arms and legs’ (Chomsky 1991: 66). A neurologist like Edelman might well feel irritated by such hand-waving explanations.

But how then should we account for the capacity of humans to sustain language and meaning upon a physiological and neurological basis that is not yet language and meaning just as the human cortex is not yet a grammar-book plus a dictionary? Plausibly, the ‘meaning’ of language and discourse is a system property distributed for multiple modes of processing across the levels in a steep gradation between richer toward the communicative end over to sparser toward the physiological end (Fig. 3).

A6

Perhaps applied linguists like Widdowson would be content if a specially selected corpus of appropriate data could be compiled to fit the levels of simplicity they would recommend. In a recent discussion (January 1997) at least, he did approve of my proposal (elaborated in Beaugrande 1997b) to offer both teachers and learners access to browse through strategically selected and sorted ‘model corpora’, guided by user-friendly walk-throughs. They could explore for themselves not just contemporary English and other languages, but specific social and regional varieties or registers of a language, including ones being spoken as other than first or native languages in relevant social, pedagogical, or professional contexts of situation. Learners could also be given user-friendly rough-and-ready training for working together in formulating the regularities they can find in the data, rather like ‘junior functional linguists’.

In pedagogic contexts, I would warmly advocate replacing the traditional term and concept of rules, still used in a special sense by Sinclair (1991: 493) for ‘hundreds if not thousands’ of ‘productive rules’. I would use ‘constraints’ in technical descriptions of language (e.g. Beaugrande 1997a); ‘guidelines’ in pedagogical materials (e.g. Beaugrande 2000c); and ‘reasons’ in our explanations of why people say things one way rather than another. Over the years, the term ‘rules’ has accumulated far too much prescriptive and authoritarian baggage, and we should not risk misunderstandings. From the standpoint of theory, speakers certainly do not follow ‘rules’ in the sense of either traditional or formalist ‘grammar’ for every choice they make but nearly always have ‘reasons’. From the standpoint of practice, ‘rules’ is an exclusive and formal concept carrying disempowering connotations of authorities, compulsions, violations, and punishments, and suggesting that learners are basically ‘unruly’ and need to be ‘ruled over’ (perhaps by getting whacked with a ‘ruler’?); ‘reasons’ is an inclusive and functional concept, carrying the empowering suggestion that learners are basically ‘reasonable’ and deserve to know the ‘reasons’ why they should do or say things, and to have their own ‘reasons’ respected. Moreover, shifting from ‘rules’ to ‘reasons’ would help to rebalance creativity with conformity, since appropriate contexts supply good reasons to choose creatively on the basis of a steadily more ‘delicate’ sensitivity toward the typical interactions among sets of choices offered by the lexicogrammar of the target language or language variety. And learners would be strongly encouraged to approach issues of language in general from a realistic functional perspective in their later lives.

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Browsing through a learner-oriented corpus on one’s own pacing and initiative should eliminate much of the stress, anxiety, and indifference fostered by conventional education with its formalist focus on ‘accuracy’ and ‘correctness’. The learners could actively invest their creativity in the discovery of ‘reasons’ and could thus gain substantial initiative and authority during the overall process of learning, with a matching rise in interest and motivation. Indeed, a more delicate sense of the constraints and collocations would profit both the teachers who can check them against their own intuitions about the language or register, and the learners who can gain a more secure and productive basis for their creativity than can be had from the passive, alienating, and mechanical application of ‘rules’ laid down by teachers or textbooks. The learners will finally be able to tell which aspects of language are the exemplary ones, an ability conventional schooling has long demanded but not provided.

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A fascinating prospect would be to make the enterprise cumulative. Advanced learners could guide the more elementary ones though the browsing procedures and share their own results. Also, the total results could be accumulated in a data base which could eventually serve to formulate the first learner-generated grammar and lexicon in the history of language education. Such a work would be an impressive implementation of the principle of learners taking charge of their own learning processes, already advocated with enthusiasm by educators like Paulo Freire (1985 [orig. 1970]) and Bereiter and Scardamalia (1994), and with caution by Widdowson himself, e.g., in his measured comments on ‘learner initiative’ and ‘learner autonomy’ (1990: 4f, 189ff).

I would further predict that co-operative browsing would be an excellent way to dispel the misunderstandings and anxieties language teachers may harbour respecting large-corpus data. For my part, the misunderstandings I would wish to lay to rest here concerns the assertions attributed to John Sinclair. He absolutely does not assert that any corpus, however large, equals the total or ‘real English’; or that the ‘performed’ equals the ‘possible’. What he does assert is that the differences between those data and regularities which are found in a very large corpus versus those which are not ought to be significant for people who want to make authoritative statements in textbooks or reference works about what ‘real English’ is like, especially when addressing learners of English who will try to put the statements into practice. Sinclair also asserts that there is a significant relation between that same difference and the competence of the adult native speaker, who is likely to say combinations that are frequent in the corpus and is unlikely to say ones that are infrequent or have not occurred so far, although you certainly can say them in appropriate contexts. Such a speaker has an intuitive sense of which combinations are common, sensible, useful, and so on, without implying that others are ‘just not possible’ or ‘not real English’.

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Furthermore, Sinclair asserts that the data and regularities which do appear frequently in a large corpus should be relevant and interesting for teachers and learners of English as a native language and even more as a non-native language. And finally, he asserts that taking corpus data into account could improve the quality of English world-wide because non-native learners would have much more detailed models and targets to aim for (Sinclair 1996). I in turn would assert that large corpus data can shed vital new light on issues in language teaching as part of the larger process of providing a richer and more delicate basis for a functionalist lexicogrammar than has ever been feasible before.

Pracovní listy

WORKSHEET 1

PHRASES, NOUN PHRASES: A REVIEW

Study the parts Phrases and their characteristics (pp. 94–96),
Types of phrase (pp. 96–113), Embedding of phrases (p. 113)
and complete the following tasks:

1) Using examples from LGSWE and LEFNAC, explain what is meant by

constituency, and
syntactic form vs syntactic role

of phrases.

2) What types of phrase can we distinguish in English?
Give their structural representation and provide examples from both LGSWE and LEFNAC. In what syntactic roles can a noun phrase function (pp. 98–99)? Use examples from LEFNAC.

3) Explain what is meant by embedding.
Use tree representation of a noun phrase from LEFNAC to present a more complex NP structure similar to those shown on page 114 in LGSWE.

4) Browse to page 578 in LGSWE. Present register distribution of noun phrases with pre- and post modifiers as shown in the grammar. Choose at least two texts from LEFNAC and provide comparable data.

5) It is suggested in LGSWE on p. 586 that in academic texts there is a general tendency for the following structural progression:
N + postmodifier > premodifier + N > simple noun > pronoun
Find out whether this tendency can be documented by the academic text from LEFNAC.

Texts: F1, N1x, N1y, A1

Find definitions of the following terms, use example sentences whenever possible:

adjective phrase

adverb phrase

adverbial

agent

agreement

alternative question

WORKSHEET 2

COMPLEX NOUN PHRASES: PREMODIFICATION

Study the part Overview (pp. 574–587) of complex noun phrases. Afterwards, move to subchapter Structural types of premodification (p. 588).

1) Describe the four major structural types of premodification and give examples from LGSWE.
Give some examples from LEFNAC.
Provide frequencies of the four premodifier types across the registers according to LGSWE.

2) Provide frequencies of premodifier types as occurring in LEFNAC. Consider only NPs with a single premodifier. Compare these frequencies with those given in LGSWE.

3) Choose five premodifying nouns that are extremely or relatively frequent in the news register according to LGSWE (p. 592) and check the occurrence of these nouns against LEFNAC.
Do the same with five relatively frequent nouns in the register of academic prose (p. 593). Do these words occur also in the fiction text?
Give examples of complex noun phrases with the premodifiers you have chosen.

4) Look at the distribution of premodification by length (p. 597). Present the statistics as provided in Figure 8.9 and give examples from both, LGSWE and LEFNAC. Characterize the distribution of premodification for at least two types in LEFNAC:
the 1-word premodification and the 2-word premodification.
Additionally, can a 4-word premodifier be found in the texts?

5) Present the occurrence of coordinated premodifiers according to LGSWE (p. 601). Analyze LEFNAC with respect to the occurrence of the Adj AND Adj + N pattern.

Texts: F2, N2x, N2y, A2

Find definitions of the following terms, use example sentences whenever possible:

antecedent

apposition

asyndeton

attributive adjective

auxiliary verb

bare infinitive

WORKSHEET 3

COMPLEX NOUN PHRASES: POSTMODIFICATION (I)

Study the part Overview (pp. 574–587) of complex noun phrases. Afterwards, move to subchapter Major structural types of postmodification (p. 604).

1) Describe the major structural types of postmodification (pp. 604–605) and give examples from both LGSWE and LEFNAC.

2) Prepositional phrases are said to be by far the most common type of postmodification. Present their occurrence in relation to other postmodifiers as shown by LGSWE (p. 606) and by at least two register types in LEFNAC.

3) Describe the ratios of occurrence of non-prepositional postmodifier types across the registers in LGSWE and in at least two registers in LEFNAC. Provide examples for each non-prepositional type.

4) Present LGSWE‘s characteristics on the use of relativizer choices in finite relative clauses (p. 608–611). Compile similar frequency statistics for relativizers in LEFNAC texts.
Can the texts in LEFNAC support the tendency for a relative clause with human head to use who rather than which or that (p. 613)?
Compare the frequency of occurrence of relativizers whose and of which in the academic text. Does it follow the same pattern as shown in figure 8.18 on page 618?

5) Explain the notion of ʻʻgapˮ in regard to the relative clauses. Compare the frequency of subject and non-subject gaps in LEFNAC with registers in LGSWE (p. 621).

Texts: F3, N3x, N3y, A3

Find definitions of the following terms, use example sentences whenever possible:

base form

canonical

clause

clause type

cleft construction

command

WORKSHEET 4

COMPLEX NOUN PHRASES: POSTMODIFICATION (II)

Study the part Overview (pp. 574–587) of complex noun phrases. Afterwards, continue from subchapter Postmodification by non-finite clause (p. 630).

1) Describe the major structural types of postmodifying non-finite clauses and also explain their function in relation to the so-called ʻʻgapˮ. Provide examples from both LGSWE and LEFNAC.

2) Discuss the rates of occurrence for each type of postmodifying non-finite clause in LGSWE and in LEFNAC. Try to find examples of to-clauses with overt subject marked with for in LEFNAC.

3) Get familiar with the subchapter dealing with postmodifying prepositional phrases. Present the most common prepositions used in postmodifying prepositional phrases according to LGSWE. Take the prepositions of, in, and for and characterize their occurrence as heads of postmodifying prepositional phrases in LEFNAC. Compare your results with those in LGSWE.

4) Explain the substance of appositive noun phrases (p. 638) and present their occurrence rates in news and academic prose according to LGSWE. Provide some examples of appositive noun phrases. Can some examples be found also in LEFNAC?

5) Appositive noun phrases are said to have specific uses in academic prose (p. 639–640). Using a LEFNAC academic text try to identify at least one such use of appositive noun phrases in it. Provide some examples of this use.

Texts: F4, N4x, N4y, A4

Find definitions of the following terms, use example sentences whenever possible:

comparative clause

complement

complex sentence

compound sentence

concord

constituent

WORKSHEET 5

COMPLEMENT CLAUSES: THAT-CLAUSES

Study the part Overview (pp. 658–660) of complement clauses. Afterwards, move to subchapter That-clauses (p. 660).

1) Present the main structural types of complement clause and their grammatical positions. Use examples from LGSWE to document these types and positions.

2) Describe the main characteristics of that-clauses as explained in LGSWE. Present the three structural patterns for verbs taking a that-clause together with examples from LGSWE and LEFNAC.

3) According to LGSWE, there are nine verbs that are notably common taking that-clauses (p. 662–663). Check the texts in LEFNAC for these verbs and provide their occurrence rates example sentences. Compare their rates of occurrence against the figures on page 668.

4) Check the texts in LEFNAC for the occurrence of adjectival predicates taking post-predicate that-clauses that are listed on page 672 in LGSWE. Present your results.

5) Look at the types and frequencies of that-clauses in the four registers as illustrated in Figure 9.6 on page 674 in LGSWE. Provide a similar enumeration of these clause types for the texts in LEFNAC.

Texts: F5, N5x, N5y, A5

Find definitions of the following terms, use example sentences whenever possible:

coordination

copular verb

declarative

determiner (determinative)

direct object

ditransitive verb

WORKSHEET 6

COMPLEMENT CLAUSES: WH-CLAUSES

Study the part Overview (pp. 658–660) of complement clauses. Afterwards, move to subchapter Wh-clauses (p. 683).

1) Present the main two types of wh-complement clauses using examples from LGSWE and if possible also from LEFNAC.

2) Describe the main structural patterns for wh-complement clauses in post-predicate position (p. 685). Again, accompany these patterns with examples from both LGSWE and LEFNAC.

3) According to LGSWE, there are six controlling verbs in English that are notably common with wh-clauses. Check the texts in LEFNAC for these verbs and provide their occurrence rates and example sentences. Compare their rates of occurrence against the figures on page 686.

4) Check the texts in LEFNAC for the occurrence of other controlling verbs and compare your results with the figures shown on page 689 in LGSWE.

5) Briefly introduce wh-clauses with complementizers whether and if (pp. 690–691) together with examples. Describe the text in LEFNAC in terms of the occurrence of whether- and if-clauses and compare the occurrence of common controlling verbs of these clauses in LEFNAC and in LGSWE (pp. 692–693).

Texts: F6, N6x, N6y, A6

Find definitions of the following terms, use example sentences whenever possible:

-ed clause

ellipsis

embedding; nesting

exclamation

existential construction

extraposition; extraposed

WORKSHEET 7

COMPLEMENT CLAUSES: INFINITIVE CLAUSES

Study the part Overview (pp. 658–660) of complement clauses. Afterwards, move to subchapter Infinitive clauses (p. 693).

1) Present the main grammatical patterns of infinitive clauses using examples from LGSWE and if possible also from LEFNAC. Does the distribution of these patterns in LEFNAC follow in some way the one shown in LGSWE (p. 698) in Figure 9.11?

2) Summarize the overall frequencies of the most common verbs controlling to-clauses in LEFNAC and compare your results with the relevant data in figure 9.12 in LGSWE (p. 699) and Figures 9.13–16 (p. 711).

3) Look at the occurrence of the common aspectual verbs and verbs of probability listed at the end of Table 9.7 on pages 704 and 705. Search LEFNAC for the occurrence of the very same verbs and compare the two distributions.

4) The verb want appears to be the most frequently occurring controlling verb in the registers of fiction and news, while the verb seem has this status in the register of academic prose. Compare the occurrence of these two verbs in LEFNAC and provide some examples of their use.

5) Study the information about the pattern to help + INFINITIVE as described on page 737. Check all three LEFNAC registers for the occurrence of the two variants of this pattern and compare your results with the figures on the same page.

Texts: F1, N1x, N1y, A1

Find definitions of the following terms, use example sentences whenever possible:

finite clause

gerund

imperative

independent clause

indirect object

-ing clause

WORKSHEET 8

COMPLEMENT CLAUSES: ING-CLAUSES

Study the part Overview (pp. 658–660) of complement clauses and then browse to subchapter dealing with Ing-clauses (p. 739).

1) Present the two main grammatical patterns of ing-clauses (p. 740) using examples from LGSWE and also from LEFNAC. Characterize the distribution of these patterns in LEFNAC.

2) Summarize the overall frequencies of the most common verbs controlling ing-clauses in LEFNAC and compare your results with the relevant data in Figure 9.24 in LGSWE (p. 741).

3) Look at the occurrence of the verbs of aspect and manner in table 9.13 on page 742. Search the LEFNAC texts for the occurrence of the verbs in this category and compare your results with the occurrence patterns presented in LGSWE.

4) Study in detail also the other semantic domains of verbs controlling a post-predicate ing-clause in Table 9.13. Present examples of these semantic categories according to LGSWE and try to determine the semantic domain for any verb in the LEFNAC texts. Compare your results with the figures given on page 747.

5) According to LGSWE (p. 749), the most common adjectival predicate with an ing-clause in post-predicate position is capable of. Can this be confirmed by the texts in LEFNAC? Find examples of other adjectival predicates. Finally, find out whether the data in Figure 9.29 on the same page are valid also for the LEFNAC texts.

Texts: F2, N2x, N2y, A2

Find definitions of the following terms, use example sentences whenever possible:

interrogative

intransitive verb

inversion

main clause; matrix clause

modifier (premodifier, postmodifier)

negation; negative

WORKSHEET 9

ADVERBIALS: CIRCUMSTANCE ADVERBIALS (I)

Study the part Overview (pp. 762–776) of Adverbials. Continue with subchapter Circumstance adverbials and complete the following tasks, focusing only on the following semantic categories: place and time.

1) Present these two semantic categories of circumstance adverbials using examples from LGSWE and also from LEFNAC. Characterize the distribution of these semantic categories in LGSWE (pp. 783–786) and LEFNAC.

2) Present an overview of syntactic realizations of these two semantic categories according to LGSWE (pp. 787–795). Choose one semantic category and compare the syntactic realizations in LEFNAC with data from LGSWE.

3) Look at the Table 10.4 showing a list of most common circumstance adverbials across registers (pp. 796–798). Provide a similar table for the adverbials in LEFNAC.

4) Study the section on the position of circumstance adverbials (p. 801). Give a brief overview of the associations between position and semantic category for non-clausal adverbials as reported by LGSWE. Characterize the position of circumstance adverbials in LEFNAC by comparing your data with the LGSWE data shown in Table 10.5.

5) Read through the section 10.2.8 discussing clauses as circumstance adverbials. Characterize LEFNAC in terms of the distribution of clausal syntactic forms of the two semantic categories of circumstance adverbials. Compare your results with the LGSWE data, namely Figure 10.20.

Texts: F3, N3x, N3y, A3

Find definitions of the following terms, use example sentences whenever possible:

nominal clause; noun clause

nominal relative clause

non-finite clause

notional concord; notional agreement

noun phrase

object

WORKSHEET 10

ADVERBIALS: CIRCUMSTANCE ADVERBIALS (II)

Study the part Overview (pp. 762–776) of Adverbials. Continue with subchapter Circumstance adverbials and complete the following tasks, focusing only on the following semantic categories: process (manner) and contingency

1) Present these two semantic categories of circumstance adverbials using examples from LGSWE and also from LEFNAC. Characterize the distribution of these semantic categories in LGSWE (pp. 783–786) and LEFNAC.

2) Present an overview of syntactic realizations of these two semantic categories according to LGSWE (pp. 787–795). Choose one semantic category and compare the syntactic realizations in LEFNAC with data from LGSWE.

3) Look at the Table 10.4 showing a list of most common circumstance adverbials across registers (pp. 796–798). Provide a similar table for the adverbials in LEFNAC.

4) Study the section on the position of circumstance adverbials (p. 801). Give a brief overview of the associations between position and semantic category for non-clausal adverbials as reported by LGSWE. Characterize the position of circumstance adverbials in LEFNAC by comparing your data to the LGSWE data shown in Table 10.5.

5) Read through section 10.2.8 discussing clauses as circumstance adverbials. Characterize LEFNAC in terms of the distribution of clausal syntactic forms of the two semantic categories of circumstance adverbials. Compare your results with the LGSWE data, namely Figure 10.20.

Texts: F4, N4x, N4y, A4

Find definitions of the following terms, use example sentences whenever possible:

operator

passive; passive voice

phrase

predicate

prepositional phrase

relative clause

WORKSHEET 11

ADVERBIALS: STANCE ADVERBIALS

Study the part Overview (pp. 762–776) of Adverbials. Continue with subchapter Stance adverbials (p. 853) and complete the following tasks.

1) Present the three main semantic categories of stance adverbials using examples from LGSWE and also from LEFNAC. Characterize the distribution of these semantic categories in LGSWE (pp. 859–861) and LEFNAC.

2) Present an overview of syntactic realizations of stance adverbials according to LGSWE (pp. 862–867). Choose one semantic category and compare the syntactic realizations in LEFNAC with data from LGSWE.

3) Provide a list of the most common stance adverbials across LEFNAC and compare your results with LGSWE data (pp. 867–871).

4) Study the section on the position of stance adverbials (p. 872). Give an overview of the position of stance adverbials according to LGSWE and LEFNAC.

5) Read section 10.3.1.4 discussing some ambiguities with other adverbial classes. Explain these ambiguities and document them with examples from LGSWE and also possibly from LEFNAC texts.

Texts: F5, N5x, N5y, A5

Find definitions of the following terms, use example sentences whenever possible:

reported speech; indirect speech

sentence

statement

subject

subordinate clause; sub-clause

transitive verb

WORKSHEET 12

ADVERBIALS: LINKING ADVERBIALS

Study the part Overview (pp. 762–776) of Adverbials. Continue with subchapter Linking adverbials (p. 875) and complete the following tasks.

1) Present the main semantic categories of linking adverbials using examples from LGSWE and also from LEFNAC. Characterize the distribution of these semantic categories in LGSWE (pp. 880–883) and LEFNAC.

2) Present an overview of syntactic realizations of linking adverbials according to LGSWE (pp. 884–886). Focus on the most occurring syntactic type in academic prose (single adverb) and present an overview of distribution of this type in LEFNAC texts.

3) Provide a list of the most common linking adverbials in the two remaining LEFNAC registers together with examples.

4) Study the section on the position of linking adverbials (p. 890). Give an overview of the position of linking adverbials according to LGSWE and LEFNAC.

5) Prepare and present a brief closing overview of all adverbial types (circumstance, stance, linking) with information on frequencies of adverbial classes in LGSWE (p. 766), syntactic realizations (p. 769), and position (p. 772). Use example sentences whenever possible.

Texts: F6, N6x, N6y, A6

Find definitions of the following terms, use example sentences whenever possible:

valency

verb pattern; clause pattern

verb phrase

verbless clause / verbless construction

wh-question

yes-no question

ZDROJE KORPUSOVÉ ČÁSTI

Texty F1 až F6

F. Scott Fitzgerald: TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE, Project Gutenberg, 2010,
<http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6695/pg6695.html>

F1: MAY DAY

F2: THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ

F3: THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

F4: TARQUIN OF CHEAPSIDE

F5: O RUSSET WITCH!

F6: THE JELLY-BEAN

Texty N1x až N6y

<http://www.voanews.com/articleprintview/x.html>

N1x: Phillip Walter Wellman: «Bahrain Unable to Silence Unrest», voanews.com,
2012-11-13, <x = 1544735>

N1y: Lisa Schlein: «Millions in Syria Have Fled Homes», voanews.com,
2012-11-13, <x =1544810>

N2x: Jennifer Lazuta: «Study Reveals Need to Tailor Vaccines to Developing World», voanews.com, 2012-11-13, <x = 1544803>

N2y: Michael Bowman: «As US Congress Reconvenes, Budget Challenges Loom», voanews.com, 2012-11-13, <x = 1544548>

N3x: Michael Bowman: «US Lawmakers Seek Information on Benghazi Attack», voanews.com, 2012-11-13, <x = 1545134>

N3y: Sean Maroney: «US Urges Increased Humanitarian Aid to Syria», voanews.com, 2012-11-29, <x = 1555605>

N4x: Suzanne Presto: «Lawmakers to Probe Attack on US Compound in Benghazi», voanews.com, 2012-11-13, <x = 1545123>

N4y: Peter Clottey: «Kenya Vows to Apprehend, Punish Murdered Police Suspects», voanews.com, 2012-11-13, <x = 1545120>

N5x: Henry Ridgwell: «Iraq’s Kurdish Region Sees Economic Boom», voanews.com, 2012-11-13, <x = 1544905>

N5y: Sharon Behn: «Afghan Recruits Train for Guerrilla War», voanews.com,
2012-11-13, <x = 1545099>

N6x: Jeff Seldin: «Government Cuts Internet Access Across Syria», voanews.com,
2012-11-29, <x = 1555492>

N6y: Selah Hennessy: «UN Tribunal Clears Kosovo’s ex-PM of War Crimes»,
voanews.com, 2012-11-29, <x = 1555335>

Texty A1 až A6

Robert de Beaugrande: Functionalism and Corpus Linguistics in the ‘Next Generation’,
<http://www.beaugrande.com/Functionalism and Corpus Linguistics.htm>

Sbírka textů k předmětu
Topics in Linguistics (Syntax)

Martin Drápela

Vydala Masarykova univerzita v roce 2013

1. vydání, 2013

Sazba: Ing. Vladislav Pokorný – LITERA, Tábor 43a, 612 00 Brno

ISBN 978-80-210-6564-2