Ethnologue: Languages of the World is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It was first issued in 1951, and is now published by SIL International, an American evangelical Christian non-profit organization.
Research is "creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge". It involves the collection, organization, and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular attentiveness to controlling sources of bias and error. These activities are characterized by accounting and controlling for biases. A research project may be an expansion of past work in the field. To test the validity of instruments, procedures, or experiments, research may replicate elements of prior projects or the project as a whole.
Stylistics, a branch of applied linguistics, is the study and interpretation of texts of all types, but particularly literary texts, and/or spoken language in regard to their linguistic and tonal style, where style is the particular variety of language used by different individuals and/or in different situations or settings. For example, the vernacular, or everyday language may be used among casual friends, whereas more formal language, with respect to grammar, pronunciation or accent, and lexicon or choice of words, is often used in a cover letter and résumé and while speaking during a job interview.
Scientific literature encompasses a vast body of academic papers that spans various disciplines within the natural and social sciences. It primarily consists of academic papers that present original empirical research and theoretical contributions. These papers serve as essential sources of knowledge and are commonly referred to simply as “the literature” within specific research fields.
"The Death of the Author" is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980). Barthes' essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text. Instead, the essay emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the author, a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight. The essay's first English-language publication was in the American journal Aspen, no. 5–6 in 1967; the French debut was in the magazine Manteia, no. 5 (1968). The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes' essays, Image-Music-Text (1977), a book that also included his "From Work to Text".
Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version.
A literature review is an overview of the previously published works on a topic. The term can refer to a full scholarly paper or a section of a scholarly work such as a book, or an article. Either way, a literature review is supposed to provide the researcher/author and the audiences with a general image of the existing knowledge on the topic under question. A good literature review can ensure that a proper research question has been asked and a proper theoretical framework and/or research methodology have been chosen. To be precise, a literature review serves to situate the current study within the body of the relevant literature and to provide context for the reader. In such case, the review usually precedes the methodology and results sections of the work.
Caribbean literature is the literature of the various territories of the Caribbean region. Literature in English from the former British West Indies may be referred to as Anglo-Caribbean or, in historical contexts, as West Indian literature. Most of these territories have become independent nations since the 1960s, though some retain colonial ties to the United Kingdom. They share, apart from the English language, a number of political, cultural, and social ties which make it useful to consider their literary output in a single category. Note that other non-independent islands may include the Caribbean unincorporated territories of the United States, however literature from this region has not yet been studied as a separate category and is independent from West Indian literature. The more wide-ranging term "Caribbean literature" generally refers to the literature of all Caribbean territories regardless of language—whether written in English, Spanish, French, Hindustani, or Dutch, or one of numerous creoles.
Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than 30 books and more than 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and semantics.
Leo Spitzer was an Austrian Romanist and Hispanist, philologist, and an influential and prolific literary critic. He was known for his emphasis on stylistics. Along with Erich Auerbach, Spitzer is widely recognized as one of the foundational figures of comparative literature.
The Poetics and Linguistics Association is an international academic association which exists to promote the research, teaching and learning in the study of linguistic style and the language of literature. The Poetics and Linguistics Association is usually known by the acronym PALA. The main activities of PALA are the publication of the journal Language and Literature, and an annual conference.
Foregrounding is a concept in literary studies that concerns making a linguistic utterance stand out from the surrounding linguistic context, from given literary traditions, or from more general world knowledge. It is "the 'throwing into relief' of the linguistic sign against the background of the norms of ordinary language." There are two main types of foregrounding: parallelism and deviation. Parallelism can be described as unexpected regularity, while deviation can be seen as unexpected irregularity. As the definition of foregrounding indicates, these are relative concepts. Something can only be unexpectedly regular or irregular within a particular context. This context can be relatively narrow, such as the immediate textual surroundings, or wider such as an entire genre. Foregrounding can occur on all levels of language. It is generally used to highlight important parts of a text, aid memorability, and/or invite interpretation.
Carole Elisabeth Chaski is a forensic linguist who is considered one of the leading experts in the field. Her research has led to improvements in the methodology and reliability of stylometric analysis and inspired further research on the use of this approach for authorship identification. Her contributions have served as expert testimony in several federal and state court cases in the United States and Canada. She is president of ALIAS Technology and executive director of the Institute for Linguistic Evidence, a non-profit research organization devoted to linguistic evidence.
Language and Literature is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes articles in the field of stylistics. The journal's editor is Dan McIntyre. It has been published since 1992, first by Longman and then by SAGE Publications in association with the Poetics and Linguistics Association.
Transgender studies, also called trans studies or trans* studies, is an interdisciplinary field of academic research dedicated to the study of gender identity, gender expression, and gender embodiment, as well as to the study of various issues of relevance to transgender and gender variant populations. Interdisciplinary subfields of transgender studies include applied transgender studies, transgender history, transgender literature, transgender media studies, transgender anthropology and archaeology, transgender psychology, and transgender health. The research theories within transgender studies focus on cultural presentations, political movements, social organizations and the lived experience of various forms of gender nonconformity. The discipline emerged in the early 1990s in close connection to queer theory. Non-transgender-identified peoples are often also included under the "trans" umbrella for transgender studies, such as intersex people, crossdressers, drag artists, third gender individuals, and genderqueer people.
Scientific Study of Literature is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal published by John Benjamins Publishing Company since 2011. It covers research in literary study. The editor-in-chief is David Ian Hanauer, founding editor and editor-in-chief from 2011 to 2013 was Willie van Peer. It is the official journal of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature, with membership including a subscription. The concept of the journal is discussed, because of its programmatic title, which suggests to bridge the common antagonism between sciences and literary study.
Mediated stylistics or media stylistics is a new and still emerging approach to the analysis of media texts. It aims to take seriously two ideas: first, that media texts involve 'the construction of stories by other means'; and second, that in an age marked by digital connectivity, media texts are inherently interactive phenomena. To meet this twofold aim, mediated stylistics has brought together the analytic toolkits of discursive psychology—which is finely attuned to the contextual specificities of interaction—and stylistics—which is finely attuned to the grammatical/rhetorical/narratorial specificities of texts as texts. Recent research in which mediated stylistics has been put to work, for instance, has shown how mediated representation of issues like sexism, sexualisation, alleged rape and violence against women can differ, and differ in rhetorically consequential ways, from the original un-mediated source material.
Semantic Scholar is a research tool for scientific literature powered by artificial intelligence. It is developed at the Allen Institute for AI and was publicly released in November 2015. Semantic Scholar uses modern techniques in natural language processing to support the research process, for example by providing automatically generated summaries of scholarly papers. The Semantic Scholar team is actively researching the use of artificial intelligence in natural language processing, machine learning, human–computer interaction, and information retrieval.
Incest is an important thematic element and plot device in literature, with famous early examples such as Sophocles' classic Oedipus Rex, a tragedy in which the title character unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother. It occurs in medieval literature, both explicitly, as related by denizens of Hell in Dante's Inferno, and winkingly, as between Pandarus and Criseyde in Chaucer's Troilus. The Marquis de Sade was famously fascinated with "perverse" sex acts such as incest, which recurs frequently in his works, The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), and Juliette (1797).
Michael Henry 'Mick' Short is a British linguist. He is currently an honorary professor at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom. His research focuses on applied linguistics with a special focus on stylistics.
