A corpus-based study of Patterns and Uses of English Colour Terms: A case study of
the Adjectives black, white and red.
Sirintorn Duangkhot
Color terms in English have been explored in linguistics, especially in semantics and
pragmatics (e.g. Berlin and Kay 1969, Leech 1981, Wyler 1992, Allan 2009). However, these
studies rely on intuition-based data. This research applies corpus linguistics, using authentic,
naturally-occurring data drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC) to explore
lexicogrammatical patterns and uses of the three English colour term adjectives—black, white
and red. These three adjectives are found to occur within the list of 100 most frequently-used
adjectives in the BNC, representing contemporary English. It is discovered that these colour
terms, like other lexical items, tend to have distinctive lexical and grammatical patterns, as
represented by their collocational patterns with various nouns in different semantic fields.
These different patterns of the adjectives are revealed to express different semantic and
pragmatic properties. Based on the findings so far, it can be argued that the color terms in
question have pragmatic functions, i.e. discourse prosodies, and yet these are realized as a
result of their co-occurrence with other words, not quite because the color terms have their
own distinctive semantic and pragmatic properties. This will be illustrated through the
analysis of the three colour term adjectives in this study. The research will continue to
investigate further in hope to find more evidence to support this argument which hopefully
will lead to a useful conclusion for the domain of lexical studies.
Young ESL Learners’ English Strategic Competence: A Case Study of Thai Fourth Grade
Students
Chariya Prapobratanakul
This study investigated Young ESL learners’ English strategic competence which is the
ability to use communication strategies to compensate for breakdowns in communication and to
enhance effectiveness of communication by exploring the communication strategies used by
Thai fourth grade students. A new communication strategy typology was created to facilitate the
interpretation of the video-recorded data derived from a spoken corpus of 20 participants, who
were asked to describe pictures of 8 different objects to their partner. The major findings of this
study were that the participants made use of paralinguistic strategies the most, followed by
paraphrasing, code-switching and avoidance strategies. The use of paralinguistic strategies and
code-switching showed that low-proficiency learners no matter they were children or adults used
the same kinds of strategy. The results also showed that Thai fourth-grade students could not
produce the whole sentences in English. However, they had knowledge of English to some
degree that they could communicate in English through words and phrases. Moreover, since
many topic avoidance and message abandonment strategies were found, and they were also the
causes of communication failure, raising awareness of useful strategies such as approximation,
synonym, antonym, or comparison was encouraged so that the subjects can achieve more of their
communicative goals when they have to communicate in English.
Courtship and Marriage as a Form of Women’s Empowerment in Jane Austen’s
Persuasion, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and George Eliot’s Middlemarch
Ploi Phayakvchien
Early nineteenth century saw several marked changes in the society, especially those
directly affecting the middle class. It is a time known widely for its social restrictions and rigid
domestic doctrines, especially on the female gender.
However, despite unbending social
expectations, female writers of the period have portrayed one of the strictest institutions of all,
marriage, as a form of female empowerment against the dominating patriarchal world. Austen’s
Persuasion, puts into perspective the changes in the values of society during her lifetime. More
than just mirroring the society, Austen infuses her own ideals of courtship, domesticity and
marriage. By comparing with and analyzing the historical changes of the time, I will argue that,
in Persuasion, Austen disassociate women from the traditional idea of domesticity by distancing
them from the realm of the hearth and by giving women greater say and decision over their
future. She gives women qualities that were deemed to be “masculine”. Moreover, Austen
draws the men in the novel closer to the domestic sphere and feminizes their masculinity. By
doing so, Austen creates the ideal heterosexual relationship. In order for a relationship to work,
the lovers have to embrace both their masculine and feminine characteristics and failure to do so
will result in obvious and often reproachful flaws.
Fictional Biography and the Reconstruction of Gendered Identity: A Study of Liza Dalby’s
The Tale of Murasaki
Nithina Preechathaveekid
This paper explores the fictional biography The Tale of Murasaki by Liza Dalby as a
reconstruction of gendered identity through a Structuralist and Narratological approach. As
fictional biography uses imagination to fill out the gaps in the life of a historical person whose
personal evidence cannot be adequately found to render a full biography, it is frequently used to
portray the lives of marginalized people of lesser or even no importance to the historical events
in their lifetimes, including women. Viewed in this light, The Tale of Murasaki reflects the
subjugation and the (re)construction of the identity of Murasaki Shikibu, its protagonist, in
relation to her gender, as well as race and culture. Dalby employs narratological techniques that
create the illusion that the text is genuine as the protagonist’s own memoir, written in
recollection of the life she has lived, by beginning the story with the symbolic act of Murasaki’s
daughter’s passing down the memoir to her own daughter, incorporating Murasaki’s genuine,
fragmented diary into the progressing narrative, as well as adding a final chapter to Murasaki’s
work of fiction, The Tale of Genji, in the way that the state of mind of the heroine of the latter
part of The Tale parallels that of her writer, after having reconstructed her gendered identity
through the act of writing.
Narrative technique and fictional devices in Muriel Spark’s The Comforters, Memento
Mori and The Ballad of Peckham Rye
Sritrang Saisawat
This paper aims to analyze the techniques used by Muriel Spark in her three novels,
The Comforters, Memento Mori and The Ballad of Peckham Rye. It will focus on the use of
narrative voice and fictional devices that reflect some truth of life: life has got pattern and
unhappiness. The use of tense in the narrative voice telling the stories, together with
disruptive voices and characters, help to highlight the idea of a fundamental pattern to life.
The three novels all contain devices that disrupt reality. In The Comforters, there is the
sound of a typewriter and a reported voice that disrupts the life of the heroine, Caroline and
she realizes from this voice that she is a character in a novel. Exercising her freewill,
Caroline tries to resist the controlling voice but never quite succeeds. In Memento Mori,
the device is a telephone voice telling the characters who receive the phone calls and who
though they are old already, still live as if they are never going to die, “Remember you
must die”. The Ballad of Peckham Rye has the disruptive character of Dougal Douglas, an
intruder, whose arrival throws a London suburb into chaos.
In these three novels, the majority of the characters live in a phony world where
they seem incapable of noticing the reality around them. The elements that Muriel Spark
introduces to disrupt their reality help to highlight the real significance of life of which
they must be made aware. What is more, all three novels argue that the one important thing
to realize is that unhappiness is one essential part of the of the pattern of life and no one
can escape it, so it is better to recognize it and confront it. The physical pain arising from
Caroline’s car accident in The Comforters, the arthritic pain of Jean Taylor in Memento
Mori and the unhappy changes that are brought about by the character of Dougal Douglas
in The Ballad of Peckham Rye are the things that remind a selection of privileged
characters of the significance of unhappiness to a full life.
The Outsider Motif in Bernard Shaw’s
Arms and the Man, You Never Can Tell and Pygmalion
Preeyakit Buranasin
To promote his ideas, to challenge received notions, and to reveal inner truth about his
characters; Shaw brings an outsider character in several of his plays. By ‘outsiders’, I mean
characters that do not belong in that particular social group. The division is usually marked by
social class, nationality, or simply having different ideologies from the existing majority. Acting
as his mouth-piece, Shaw brings these ‘outsiders’ to challenge the existing beliefs of the
‘insiders’, resulting in a discussion of several Shavian themes. This paper discusses the ‘outsider
motif’ in three romantic comedies by Shaw: Arms and the Man, You Never Can Tell and
Pygmalion. In addition, it proposes that more research is needed in regard to the outsider motif in
order to achieve a better understanding of Shaw and his plays.