HELP WITH ENGLISH CLASS

Part A

Take the following passage (from David Crystal’s The Story of English in 100 Words) and subject it to an analysis similar to the analyses found on the bottom of pages 396-397 in your Crystal textbook. (You may use the text analysis webtools introduced in Module 6 to help with the analysis.)

Count up the number of words and sentences, and calculate the mean or average number of words per sentence. What are the maximum and minimum sentence lengths? Work out the lexical density in the passage (the number of words with full lexical meaning compared to the number of grammatical words such as prepositions and articles). What are the ten most common fully lexical words in the passage? What are the ten most common words over all (including grammatical words)? Diagram out the first five sentences according to the model given in blue at the bottom of page 397 of your Crystal textbook with connectives, subjects, and predicates. Make any other comments you see fit about the grammar, discourse or sentence structure. How does this compare to the passage you analyzed from the textbook in the module learning activities?

Twittersphere: future directions? (21st century)

It's remarkable how a single sound can be taken to heart and used as a source of fresh word formation. In 2010, around 600 new words were listed in Twittonary, one of the online dictionaries collecting terms invented in connection with Twitter. That's an amazing total, given that this web site had then been in existence for only five years.

Most of the words are the result of people exploiting the playful possibilities in the name, especially those suggested by the unusual (in English) phonetic properties of the initial consonant cluster tw-. Two-thirds of the entries play with that cluster. Some replace an initial consonant, as in twictionary and tweologism. Some pretend to be a speech defect, replacing a tr- word, as in twendy and twaffic. Some add the cluster to the beginning of another word, as in twidentity theft and twaddiction. Blends are also very common, as in twitterhea, twitterati, twitterholic, celebritweet – and, summarising its entire world, twittersphere.

Most of these creations are likely to have a short linguistic life. Just a few will be long-term additions to the language – or, at least, for as long as Twitter exists. We can see this from what happened to an earlier internet phenomenon – blogging. In the early 2000s, the word blog (an abbreviation of web log, an individual's online diary or commentary) also generated a great deal of wordplay, but some of the coinages that were popular then are hardly ever seen these days.

Part B

Analyze the following two versions of a press report on the federal budget. They are both taken from the same wire service report from the Canadian Press, and published in the Sudbury Star and the Ottawa Business Journal.

· Sudbury Star: Budget 2017: EI premiums, sin taxes, tax cheat crackdown to finance Liberal vision

· Ottawa Business Journal: Budget 2017: Liberals try to ease anxiety and get Canada ready for the future

First of all, what elements of “journalese” (see page 408 of your Crystal textbook) can you find in these reports? What else does textual analysis (using the various online textual analysis tools introduced above) reveal about these reports?

Next, compare the two different versions of the report. How do the headlines differ? What changes to the wording has each news source decided to make? What material has been left out of one or the other version? Do a Google search to look for other versions of the same story. If you find any, provide the link and comment on whether they have any significant differences worth noting?