{"title":"Two Disciplines in Search of Love","authors":"W. Benzon","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2335932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2335932","url":null,"abstract":"Though computational linguistics (CL) dates back to the first efforts in machine translation in the mid 1950s, it is only in the last decade or so that it has had a substantial impact on literary studies through the statistical techniques of corpus linguistics and data mining (know as natural language processing, NLP). In this essay I briefly review the history of computational linguistics from its early days involving symbolic computing to current developments in NLP and set that in relationship to academic literary study. In particular, I discuss the deeply problematic struggle that literary study has had with the question of evaluation: What makes good literature? I argue that literary studies should own up to this tension and recognize a distinction between ethical criticism, which is explicitly concerned with values, and naturalist criticism, which sidesteps questions of value in favor of understanding how literature works in the mind and in culture. I then argue that the primary relationship between CL and NLP and literary studies should be through naturalist criticism. I conclude by discussing the relative roles of CL and NLP in a large-scale and long-term investigation of romantic love.","PeriodicalId":339853,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Anthropology eJournal","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127612784","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Challenges of Teaching English in India","authors":"John Sekar Jeyaraj","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3486395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3486395","url":null,"abstract":"Teaching English in India is not without challenges. But challenges are neither frustrating nor insurmountable. Teaching without challenges is dull and unproductive. Challenges encourage teachers to undertake action research. Results of action research can be applied to overcome challenges. The challenges range from the position of English in India, materials consumption and production, methods of teaching, blending, testing and evaluation, continuous professional development and training, learning styles, learner motivation, diverse socio-economic-linguistic backgrounds of learners, medium of instruction in schools, different school boards backgrounds, amount of exposure to English, the influence of L1, ill- trained English teachers in schools, English teachers with rich literature background in their degree programmes but without knowledge of applied linguistic areas, such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, contrastive analysis and error analysis, and to theoretical linguistics branches, such as phonetics and phonology, semantics, and syntax. There is a general tendency among important stakeholders of English language education to play the blame game neatly without anyone of them owning responsibility for the dismal performance of students in acquiring communicative competency. The present study is intended to be a reflective, inductive research on the basis of inputs from the teaching fraternity and aims at making it analytical and descriptive.","PeriodicalId":339853,"journal":{"name":"Linguistic Anthropology eJournal","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133565616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}