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16 March 2014

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Thursday, March 20, 2008

Lingusitic and Stylistic Analysis

Phonetics -
There are many sites on received pronunciation (RP) that you could access for the chart. Een Wikipedia has one.

When given a poem you need only analyse the consonant sounds if that is what is required and only the vowel sounds if that is asked for in the question. Identify any 5 consonant or vowel (inclusdes diphthongs) sounds as the case may be.

Note that phonetic transcription means that the punctuation marks are NOT transcribed.

Your notes should make it easy to attempt this question.

Look up comon words like - the, a, an, with, in, of, - in the dictionary so that you will at leastget these right.
Note that we follow the RP system so avoid American pronunciations.



Identifying Main and Subordinate Clauses:

Clauses maybe a cluster of words or may contain just one word. They are different from phrases because they contain verbs. Phrases do not contain verbs.

Phrases are identified by round barackets ( ) and clauses by Square brackets[ ].
Angle brackets < > are used when enclosing any conjoining clauses or phrases. Angle brackets may enclose 2 or more MCls, or similar kinds of SCls or phrases.

There are two types of clauses – finite clauses and non-finite clauses. These two types are identified based on the form of verb used in the clause.

Finite clause contain verbs that state the tense and the action. For eg. eat, was eating, have eaten, will eat, ate. Each of these tells you about the action (eating) and the time period (tense) of the action.

A non-finite clause contains merely the verb stating the action and does not indicate the tense. For eg. sitting, seated, to sit. Each of these do not tell you about the tense. You may state – was sitting, is sitting, will be sitting, or was seated, is seated, will be seated, or was to sit, is to sit or will be allowed to sit. So if merely sitting, seated or to sit is used in a clause it becomes non-finite as the sense of time (tense) is missing.

Such clauses are then labeled according to the type of verb they contain. A clause containing the present participle (sitting) will be classified as Cling. Clen contains the past participle (seated) and Cli contains the infinitive verb (to sit).

Main Clauses [MCl] are always finite. Subordinate clauses [SCl] may be finite or non-finite. Thus, a non-finite verb definitely indicates an SCl. Additionally, SCls may contain other SCls.

There are different kinds of SCls:
Noun Clause - NCl
Answers questions what, who, whom posed to the main verb.
Requires a fine tuning of the question posed sometimes. As in ‘by whom’? etc.
Adverb Clause ACl
Answers questions – why, when, where, how – posed to the main verb.
Preposition Clause PCl
Announced by a preposition.
May function as an NCl, ACl, or RCl but can be safely categorized as a PCl
Relative Clause - RCl
Immediately follows a noun or pronoun.
Functions like an adjective.
Comparative Clause CCl
Immediately follows the comparative markers. Eg. – like, as, etc.

Identify each verb in the sentence first. Then mark the main verb, which generally would be the one that questions like ‘what’ and ‘why’ would be posed to.

When analyzing long chunks count the number of opening brackets of each type and balance them with the number of closing brackets.