Wednesday, August 03, 2005
The grammar of Renaissance literature
From Gert Ronberg’s A Way With Words: The Language of English Renaissance Literature:
The Renaissance verb was in its syntactic behaviour often different from ours, which may cause some bewilderment to readers not accustomed to this. As an introductory illustrative example we make take the ‘verbal noun’ or the ‘gerund’ ... Because of its noun-like behaviour, the verbal noun can be preceded by the definite article: if it is, it cannot take an object but must be followed by an of-phrase instead; if it is not, it can take an object but not an of-phrase; compare the timing of his remarks was unfortunate with timing your remarks well is very important. However, this rigid rule was not a grammatical rule at all during the Renaissance, as we can see from the following two examples:
On Language 8/3: Using cartoons to teach ESL
No joke: Comic strips aid in learning, teachers say
Chicago Tribune
August 3, 2005
By Nathan Bierma
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Comic strips have to deliver their language in clean, powerful chunks. The cartoonist doesn’t have room for long, elegant sentences to convey meaning. A cartoon’s combination of pictures, vocabulary and phrasing makes it ideal for students learning English, Dahbany-Miraglia says.
“I use the cartoons to help them learn how to phrase in English,” she says. “You don’t learn to write by writing words. You learn by writing phrases.”