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Stylistics , a branch of applied linguistics , is the study and interpretation of texts of all types, but particularly literary texts, and spoken language with regard to their linguistic and tonal style , where style is the particular variety of language used by different individuals in different situations and 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.

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74-672: As a discipline, stylistics links literary criticism to linguistics . It does not function as an autonomous domain on its own, and it can be applied to an understanding of literature and journalism as well as linguistics. Sources of study in stylistics may range from canonical works of writing to popular texts, and from advertising copy to news , non-fiction, and popular culture , as well as to political and religious discourse . Indeed, as recent work in critical stylistics, multimodal stylistics and mediated stylistics has made clear, non-literary texts may be of just as much interest to stylisticians as literary ones. Literariness, in other words,

148-438: A child's thoughts become more reliant on their ability to self-express without relying on gestures or babbling. Once the reading and writing vocabularies start to develop, through questions and education , the child starts to discover the anomalies and irregularities of language. In first grade , a child who can read learns about twice as many words as one who cannot. Generally, this gap does not narrow later. This results in

222-525: A form of hermeneutics : knowledge via interpretation to understand the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions – including the interpretation of texts which themselves interpret other texts. In the British and American literary establishment, the New Criticism was more or less dominant until the late 1960s. Around that time Anglo-American university literature departments began to witness

296-431: A limited vocabulary for rapid language proficiency or for effective communication. These include Basic English (850 words), Special English (1,500 words), General Service List (2,000 words), and Academic Word List . Some learner's dictionaries have developed defining vocabularies which contain only most common and basic words. As a result, word definitions in such dictionaries can be understood even by learners with

370-529: A limited vocabulary. Some publishers produce dictionaries based on word frequency or thematic groups. The Swadesh list was made for investigation in linguistics . Focal vocabulary is a specialized set of terms and distinctions that is particularly important to a certain group: those with a particular focus of experience or activity. A lexicon, or vocabulary, is a language's dictionary: its set of names for things, events, and ideas. Some linguists believe that lexicon influences people's perception of things,

444-522: A measure of language processing and cognitive development. It can serve as an indicator of intellectual ability or cognitive status, with vocabulary tests often forming part of intelligence and neuropsychological assessments . Word has a variety of meanings, and our understand of ideas such as vocabulary size differ depending on the definition used. The most common definition equates words with lemmas (the inflected or dictionary form; this includes walk , but not walks, walked or walking ). Most of

518-405: A mental image, or when discriminating between false friends, rote memorization is the method to use. A neural network model of novel word learning across orthographies, accounting for L1-specific memorization abilities of L2-learners has recently been introduced (Hadzibeganovic and Cannas, 2009). One way of learning vocabulary is to use mnemonic devices or to create associations between words, this

592-424: A person's "final vocabulary". Those words are as far as he can go with language; beyond them is only helpless passivity or a resort to force. ( Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p. 73) During its infancy, a child instinctively builds a vocabulary. Infants imitate words that they hear and then associate those words with objects and actions. This is the listening vocabulary . The speaking vocabulary follows, as

666-617: A rise of a more explicitly philosophical literary theory , influenced by structuralism , then post-structuralism , and other kinds of Continental philosophy . It continued until the mid-1980s, when interest in "theory" peaked. Many later critics, though undoubtedly still influenced by theoretical work, have been comfortable simply interpreting literature rather than writing explicitly about methodology and philosophical presumptions. Today, approaches based in literary theory and continental philosophy largely coexist in university literature departments, while conventional methods, some informed by

740-423: A roughly equivalent term for 'style', which is a more specific alternative used by linguists to avoid ambiguity (Crystal. 1985, 292). Halliday's third category, mode , is what he refers to as the symbolic organisation of the situation. Downes recognises two distinct aspects within the category of mode and suggests that not only does it describe the relation to the medium: written, spoken, and so on, but also describes

814-702: A wide range of vocabulary by age five or six, when an English-speaking child will have learned about 1500 words. Vocabulary grows throughout one's life. Between the ages of 20 and 60, people learn about 6,000 more lemmas, or one every other day. An average 20-year-old knows 42,000 lemmas coming from 11,100 word families. People expand their vocabularies by e.g. reading, playing word games , and participating in vocabulary-related programs. Exposure to traditional print media teaches correct spelling and vocabulary, while exposure to text messaging leads to more relaxed word acceptability constraints. Estimating average vocabulary size poses various difficulties and limitations due to

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888-436: A word, some of which are not hierarchical so their acquisition does not necessarily follow a linear progression suggested by degree of knowledge . Several frameworks of word knowledge have been proposed to better operationalise this concept. One such framework includes nine facets: Listed in order of most ample to most limited: A person's reading vocabulary is all the words recognized when reading. This class of vocabulary

962-579: A writer may prefer one synonym over another, and they will be unlikely to use technical vocabulary relating to a subject in which they have no interest or knowledge. The American philosopher Richard Rorty characterized a person's "final vocabulary" as follows: All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes... I shall call these words

1036-471: Is a matter of some controversy. For example, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism draws no distinction between literary theory and literary criticism, and almost always uses the terms together to describe the same concept. Some critics consider literary criticism a practical application of literary theory, because criticism always deals directly with particular literary works, while theory may be more general or abstract. Literary criticism

1110-401: Is a significant focus of study across various disciplines, like linguistics , education , psychology , and artificial intelligence . Vocabulary is not limited to single words; it also encompasses multi-word units known as collocations , idioms , and other types of phraseology. Acquiring an adequate vocabulary is one of the largest challenges in learning a second language . A vocabulary is

1184-441: Is an established method for memorization, particularly used for vocabulary acquisition in computer-assisted language learning . Other methods typically require more time and longer to recall. Some words cannot be easily linked through association or other methods. When a word in the second language is phonologically or visually similar to a word in the native language, one often assumes they also share similar meanings . Though this

1258-494: Is frequently the case, it is not always true. When faced with a false friend , memorization and repetition are the keys to mastery. If a second language learner relies solely on word associations to learn new vocabulary, that person will have a very difficult time mastering false friends. When large amounts of vocabulary must be acquired in a limited amount of time, when the learner needs to recall information quickly, when words represent abstract concepts or are difficult to picture in

1332-440: Is generally a subset of the listening vocabulary. Due to the spontaneous nature of speech, words are often misused slightly and unintentionally, but facial expressions and tone of voice can compensate for this misuse. The written word appears in registers as different as formal essays and social media feeds. While many written words rarely appear in speech, a person's written vocabulary is generally limited by preference and context:

1406-427: Is generally the most ample, as new words are more commonly encountered when reading than when listening. A person's listening vocabulary comprises the words recognized when listening to speech. Cues such as the speaker's tone and gestures, the topic of discussion, and the conversation's social context may convey the meaning of an unfamiliar word. A person's speaking vocabulary comprises the words used in speech and

1480-747: Is here conceived as 'a point on a cline rather than as an absolute'. Stylistics as a conceptual discipline may attempt to establish principles capable of explaining particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as in the literary production and reception of genre , the study of folk art , in the study of spoken dialects and registers , and can be applied to areas such as discourse analysis as well as literary criticism . Plain language has different features. Common stylistic features are using dialogue , regional accents and individual idioms (or idiolects ). Stylistically, also sentence length prevalence and language register use. The analysis of literary style goes back to

1554-532: Is known as the "keyword method" (Sagarra and Alba, 2006). It also takes a long time to implement — and takes a long time to recollect — but because it makes a few new strange ideas connect it may help in learning. Also it presumably does not conflict with Paivio's dual coding system because it uses visual and verbal mental faculties. However, this is still best used for words that represent concrete things, as abstract concepts are more difficult to remember. Several word lists have been developed to provide people with

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1628-414: Is more likely to reveal the secrets of its construction to the stylistician than is the language of plays and novels (Crystal. 1987, 71). As well as conventional styles of language there are the unconventional – the most obvious of which is poetry . In Practical Stylistics , HG Widdowson examines the traditional form of the epitaph , as found on headstones in a cemetery. For example: Widdowson makes

1702-545: Is no clear cut-off point between assumptions which the speaker certainly endorses and assumptions derived purely on the hearer's responsibility.' (Pilkington. 1991, 53) In addition, the stylistic qualities of poetry can be seen as an accompaniment to Pilkington's poetic effects in understanding a poem's meaning. Widdowson points out that in Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's poem " The Rime of the Ancient Mariner " (1798),

1776-553: Is not so much in the formulaic phraseology but in where it appears. The verse may be given undue reverence precisely because of the sombre situation in which it is placed. Widdowson suggests that, unlike words set in stone in a graveyard, poetry is unorthodox language that vibrates with inter-textual implications (Widdowson. 1992, 4). Two problems with a stylistic analysis of poetry are noted by PM Wetherill in Literary Text: An Examination of Critical Methods . The first

1850-424: Is often credited with being the first coherent formulation of stylistics, and his argument was that the study of poetic language should be a sub-branch of linguistics. The poetic function was one of six general functions of language he described in the lecture. Michael Halliday is an important figure in the development of British stylistics. His 1971 study Linguistic Function and Literary Style: An Inquiry into

1924-580: Is often published in essay or book form. Academic literary critics teach in literature departments and publish in academic journals , and more popular critics publish their reviews in broadly circulating periodicals such as The Times Literary Supplement , The New York Times Book Review , The New York Review of Books , the London Review of Books , the Dublin Review of Books , The Nation , Bookforum , and The New Yorker . Literary criticism

1998-418: Is one of the first steps in learning a second language, but a learner never finishes vocabulary acquisition. Whether in one's native language or a second language, the acquisition of new vocabulary is an ongoing process. There are many techniques that help one acquire new vocabulary. Although memorization can be seen as tedious or boring, associating one word in the native language with the corresponding word in

2072-438: Is that there may be an over-preoccupation with one particular feature that may well minimise the significance of others that are equally important (Wetherill. 1974, 133). The second is that any attempt to see a text as simply a collection of stylistic elements will tend to ignore other ways whereby meaning is produced (Wetherill. 1974, 133). In ' Poetic Effects ' from Literary Pragmatics , the linguist Adrian Pilkington analyses

2146-428: Is the study, evaluation , and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory , which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists. Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory

2220-681: Is thought to have existed as far back as the classical period. In the 4th century BC Aristotle wrote the Poetics , a typology and description of literary forms with many specific criticisms of contemporary works of art. Poetics developed for the first time the concepts of mimesis and catharsis , which are still crucial in literary studies. Plato 's attacks on poetry as imitative, secondary, and false were formative as well. The Sanskrit Natya Shastra includes literary criticism on ancient Indian literature and Sanskrit drama. Later classical and medieval criticism often focused on religious texts, and

2294-417: Is usually the larger of the two. For example, although a young child may not yet be able to speak, write, or sign, they may be able to follow simple commands and appear to understand a good portion of the language to which they are exposed. In this case, the child's receptive vocabulary is likely tens, if not hundreds of words, but their active vocabulary is zero. When that child learns to speak or sign, however,

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2368-738: The New Critics , also remain active. Disagreements over the goals and methods of literary criticism, which characterized both sides taken by critics during the "rise" of theory, have declined. Some critics work largely with theoretical texts, while others read traditional literature; interest in the literary canon is still great, but many critics are also interested in nontraditional texts and women's literature , as elaborated on by certain academic journals such as Contemporary Women's Writing , while some critics influenced by cultural studies read popular texts like comic books or pulp / genre fiction . Ecocritics have drawn connections between literature and

2442-572: The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis . For example, the Nuer of Sudan have an elaborate vocabulary to describe cattle. The Nuer have dozens of names for cattle because of the cattle's particular histories, economies, and environments . This kind of comparison has elicited some linguistic controversy, as with the number of " Eskimo words for snow ". English speakers with relevant specialised knowledge can also display elaborate and precise vocabularies for snow and cattle when

2516-529: The genre of the text (Downes. 1998, 316). Halliday refers to genre as pre-coded language, language that has not simply been used before, but that predetermines the selection of textual meanings. The linguist William Downes makes the point that the principal characteristic of register, no matter how peculiar or diverse, is that it is obvious and immediately recognisable (Downes. 1998, 309). In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language , Crystal observes that, in practice, most stylistic analysis has attempted to deal with

2590-462: The history of the book is a field of interdisciplinary inquiry drawing on the methods of bibliography , cultural history , history of literature , and media theory . Principally concerned with the production, circulation, and reception of texts and their material forms, book history seeks to connect forms of textuality with their material aspects. Among the issues within the history of literature with which book history can be seen to intersect are:

2664-449: The 3000 most frequent English word families or the 5000 most frequent words provides 95% vocabulary coverage of spoken discourse. For minimal reading comprehension a threshold of 3,000 word families (5,000 lexical items) was suggested and for reading for pleasure 5,000 word families (8,000 lexical items) are required. An "optimal" threshold of 8,000 word families yields the coverage of 98% (including proper nouns). Learning vocabulary

2738-494: The 9th century, notably by Al-Jahiz in his al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan , and by Abdullah ibn al-Mu'tazz in his Kitab al-Badi . The literary criticism of the Renaissance developed classical ideas of unity of form and content into literary neoclassicism , proclaiming literature as central to culture, entrusting the poet and the author with preservation of a long literary tradition. The birth of Renaissance criticism

2812-459: The Enlightenment theoreticians so that the business of Enlightenment became a business with the Enlightenment. This development – particularly of emergence of entertainment literature – was addressed through an intensification of criticism. Many works of Jonathan Swift , for instance, were criticized including his book Gulliver's Travels , which one critic described as "the detestable story of

2886-513: The Language of William Golding's The Inheritors is a key essay. One of Halliday's contributions has been the use of the term register to explain the connections between language and its context. For Halliday register is distinct from dialect . Dialect refers to the habitual language of a particular user in a specific geographical or social context. Register describes the choices made by the user, choices which depend on three variables: field ("what

2960-544: The Yahoos". The British Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century introduced new aesthetic ideas to literary studies, including the idea that the object of literature need not always be beautiful, noble, or perfect, but that literature itself could elevate a common subject to the level of the sublime . German Romanticism , which followed closely after the late development of German classicism , emphasized an aesthetic of fragmentation that can appear startlingly modern to

3034-540: The aims of the Prague School. Taking forward the ideas of the Russian Formalists, the Prague School built on the concept of foregrounding , where it is assumed that poetic language is considered to stand apart from non-literary background language, by means of deviation (from the norms of everyday language) or parallelism . According to the Prague School, however, this background language isn't constant, and

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3108-514: The author's psychology or biography, which became almost taboo subjects) or reader response : together known as Wimsatt and Beardsley's intentional fallacy and affective fallacy . This emphasis on form and precise attention to "the words themselves" has persisted, after the decline of these critical doctrines themselves. In 1957 Northrop Frye published the influential Anatomy of Criticism . In his works Frye noted that some critics tend to embrace an ideology, and to judge literary pieces on

3182-516: The basis of their adherence to such ideology. This has been a highly influential viewpoint among modern conservative thinkers. E. Michael Jones, for example, argues in his Degenerate Moderns that Stanley Fish was influenced by his own adulterous affairs to reject classic literature that condemned adultery. Jürgen Habermas , in Erkenntnis und Interesse [1968] ( Knowledge and Human Interests ), described literary critical theory in literary studies as

3256-440: The child's active vocabulary begins to increase. It is also possible for the productive vocabulary to be larger than the receptive vocabulary, for example in a second-language learner who has learned words through study rather than exposure, and can produce them, but has difficulty recognizing them in conversation. Productive vocabulary, therefore, generally refers to words that can be produced within an appropriate context and match

3330-405: The complete set of symbols and signs in a sign system or a text, extending the definition beyond purely verbal communication to encompass other forms of symbolic communication. Vocabulary acquisition is a central aspect of language education, as it directly impacts reading comprehension, expressive and receptive language skills, and academic achievement. Vocabulary is examined in psychology as

3404-399: The complex and 'valued' language within literature, i.e. 'literary stylistics'. He goes on to say that in such examination the scope is sometimes narrowed to concentrate on the more striking features of literary language , for instance, its 'deviant' and abnormal features, rather than the broader structures that are found in whole texts or discourses. For example, the compact language of poetry

3478-457: The content of poetry is summarised, it often refers to very general and unimpressive observations, such as 'nature is beautiful; love is great; life is lonely; time passes', and so on (Widdowson. 1992, 9). But to say: Or, indeed: This language gives the reader a new perspective on familiar themes and allows us to look at them without the personal or social conditioning that we unconsciously associate with them (Widdowson. 1992, 9). So, although

3552-529: The definition used. The first major change distinction that must be made when evaluating word knowledge is whether the knowledge is productive (also called achieve or active) or receptive (also called receive or passive); even within those opposing categories, there is often no clear distinction. Words that are generally understood when heard or read or seen constitute a person's receptive vocabulary. These words may range from well known to barely known (see degree of knowledge below). A person's receptive vocabulary

3626-1039: The development of authorship as a profession, the formation of reading audiences, the constraints of censorship and copyright, and the economics of literary form. Vocabulary A vocabulary (also known as a lexicon ) is a set of words , typically the set in a language or the set known to an individual. The word vocabulary originated from the Latin vocabulum , meaning "a word, name". It forms an essential component of language and communication , helping convey thoughts, ideas, emotions, and information. Vocabulary can be oral , written , or signed and can be categorized into two main types: active vocabulary (words one uses regularly) and passive vocabulary (words one recognizes but does not use often). An individual's vocabulary continually evolves through various methods, including direct instruction , independent reading , and natural language exposure, but it can also shrink due to forgetting , trauma , or disease . Furthermore, vocabulary

3700-574: The different definitions and methods employed such as what is the word, what is to know a word, what sample dictionaries were used, how tests were conducted, and so on. Native speakers' vocabularies also vary widely within a language, and are dependent on the level of the speaker's education. As a result, estimates vary from 10,000 to 17,000 word families or 17,000-42,000 dictionary words for young adult native speakers of English. A 2016 study shows that 20-year-old English native speakers recognize on average 42,000 lemmas , ranging from 27,100 for

3774-406: The first full-fledged crisis in modernity of the core critical-aesthetic principles inherited from classical antiquity , such as proportion, harmony, unity, decorum , that had long governed, guaranteed, and stabilized Western thinking about artworks. Although Classicism was very far from spent as a cultural force, it was to be gradually challenged by a rival movement, namely Baroque, that favoured

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3848-417: The hearer or reader may conclude. Pilkington's ' poetic effects ', as he terms the concept, are those that achieve most relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures and not those meanings that are simply 'read in' by the hearer or reader. Yet the distinguishing instant at which weak implicatures and the hearer or reader's conjecture of meaning diverge remains highly subjective. As Pilkington says: 'there

3922-409: The idea of ' implicature ', as instigated in the previous work of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson . Implicature may be divided into two categories: 'strong' and 'weak' implicature, yet between the two extremes there are a variety of other alternatives. The strongest implicature is what is emphatically implied by the speaker or writer, while weaker implicatures are the wider possibilities of meaning that

3996-416: The intended meaning of the speaker or signer. As with receptive vocabulary, however, there are many degrees at which a particular word may be considered part of an active vocabulary. Knowing how to pronounce, sign, or write a word does not necessarily mean that the word that has been used correctly or accurately reflects the intended message; but it does reflect a minimal amount of productive knowledge. Within

4070-645: The lowest 5% of the population to 51,700 lemmas for the highest 5%. These lemmas come from 6,100 word families in the lowest 5% of the population and 14,900 word families in the highest 5%. 60-year-olds know on average 6,000 lemmas more. According to another, earlier 1995 study junior-high students would be able to recognize the meanings of about 10,000–12,000 words, whereas for college students this number grows up to about 12,000–17,000 and for elderly adults up to about 17,000 or more. For native speakers of German, average absolute vocabulary sizes range from 5,900 lemmas in first grade to 73,000 for adults. The knowledge of

4144-406: The more controversial criteria of the author's religious beliefs. These critical reviews were published in many magazines, newspapers, and journals. The commercialization of literature and its mass production had its downside. The emergent literary market, which was expected to educate the public and keep them away from superstition and prejudice, increasingly diverged from the idealistic control of

4218-457: The mystery of the Mariner's abrupt appearance is sustained by an idiosyncratic use of tense. (Widdowson. 1992, 40) For instance, the Mariner 'holds' the wedding-guest with his 'skinny hand' in the present tense , but releases it in the past tense ('...his hands dropt he.'); only to hold him again, this time with his 'glittering eye', in the present (Widdowson. 1992, 41). Widdowson notices that when

4292-399: The natural sciences. Darwinian literary studies studies literature in the context of evolutionary influences on human nature. And postcritique has sought to develop new ways of reading and responding to literary texts that go beyond the interpretive methods of critique . Many literary critics also work in film criticism or media studies . Related to other forms of literary criticism,

4366-630: The new direction taken in the early twentieth century. Early in the century the school of criticism known as Russian Formalism , and slightly later the New Criticism in Britain and in the United States, came to dominate the study and discussion of literature in the English-speaking world. Both schools emphasized the close reading of texts, elevating it far above generalizing discussion and speculation about either authorial intention (to say nothing of

4440-416: The participants... are actually engaged in doing", for instance, discussing a specific subject or topic), tenor (who is taking part in the exchange) and mode (the use to which the language is being put). Fowler comments that different fields produce different language, most obviously at the level of vocabulary (Fowler. 1996, 192) The linguist David Crystal points out that Halliday's 'tenor' stands as

4514-413: The point that such sentiments are usually not very interesting and suggests that they may even be dismissed as 'crude verbal carvings' and crude verbal disturbance (Widdowson, 3). Nevertheless, Widdowson recognises that they are a very real attempt to convey feelings of human loss and preserve affectionate recollections of a beloved friend or family member. However, what may be seen as poetic in this language

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4588-471: The reader may still use the same exhausted words and vague terms like 'love', 'heart' and 'soul' to refer to human experience, to place these words in a new and refreshing context allows the poet the ability to represent humanity and communicate honestly. This, in part, is stylistics, and this, according to Widdowson, is the point of poetry (Widdowson. 1992, 76). Literary criticism A genre of arts criticism , literary criticism or literary studies

4662-447: The reader of English literature, and valued Witz – that is, "wit" or "humor" of a certain sort – more highly than the serious Anglophone Romanticism. The late nineteenth century brought renown to authors known more for their literary criticism than for their own literary work, such as Matthew Arnold . However important all of these aesthetic movements were as antecedents, current ideas about literary criticism derive almost entirely from

4736-457: The receptive–productive distinction lies a range of abilities that are often referred to as degree of knowledge . This simply indicates that a word gradually enters a person's vocabulary over a period of time as more aspects of word knowledge are learnt. Roughly, these stages could be described as: The differing degrees of word knowledge imply a greater depth of knowledge , but the process is more complex than that. There are many facets to knowing

4810-444: The relationship between poetic and everyday language is therefore always shifting. Roman Jakobson had been an active member of the Russian Formalists and the Prague School, before emigrating to America in the 1940s. He brought together Russian Formalism and American New Criticism in his Closing Statement at a conference on stylistics at Indiana University in 1958. Published as Linguistics and Poetics in 1960, Jakobson's lecture

4884-461: The second language until memorized is considered one of the best methods of vocabulary acquisition. By the time students reach adulthood, they generally have gathered a number of personalized memorization methods. Although many argue that memorization does not typically require the complex cognitive processing that increases retention (Sagarra and Alba, 2006), it does typically require a large amount of repetition, and spaced repetition with flashcards

4958-578: The set of words in a given language that an individual knows and uses. In the context of linguistics , a vocabulary may refer more broadly to any set of words. Types of vocabularies have been further defined: a lexis is a vocabulary comprising all words used in a language or other linguistic context or in a person's lexical repertoire. An individual person's vocabulary includes an passive vocabulary of words they can recognize or understand, as well as an active vocabulary of words they regularly use in speech and writing. In semiotics , vocabulary refers to

5032-416: The several long religious traditions of hermeneutics and textual exegesis have had a profound influence on the study of secular texts. This was particularly the case for the literary traditions of the three Abrahamic religions : Jewish literature , Christian literature and Islamic literature . Literary criticism was also employed in other forms of medieval Arabic literature and Arabic poetry from

5106-478: The study of classical rhetoric , though modern stylistics has its roots in Russian Formalism and the related Prague School of the early twentieth century. In 1909, Charles Bally proposed stylistics as a distinct academic discipline to complement Saussurean linguistics. For Bally, Saussure's linguistics by itself couldn't fully describe the language of personal expression. Bally's programme fits well with

5180-451: The time lemmas do not include proper nouns (names of people, places, companies, etc.). Another definition often used in research of vocabulary size is that of word family . These are all the words that can be derived from a ground word (e.g., the words effortless, effortlessly, effortful, effortfully are all part of the word family effort ). Estimates of vocabulary size range from as high as 200 thousand to as low as 10 thousand, depending on

5254-608: The transgressive and the extreme, without laying claim to the unity, harmony, or decorum that supposedly distinguished both nature and its greatest imitator, namely ancient art. The key concepts of the Baroque aesthetic, such as " conceit ' ( concetto ), " wit " ( acutezza , ingegno ), and " wonder " ( meraviglia ), were not fully developed in literary theory until the publication of Emanuele Tesauro 's Il Cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope) in 1654. This seminal treatise – inspired by Giambattista Marino 's epic Adone and

5328-521: The work of the Spanish Jesuit philosopher Baltasar Gracián – developed a theory of metaphor as a universal language of images and as a supreme intellectual act, at once an artifice and an epistemologically privileged mode of access to truth. In the Enlightenment period (1700s–1800s), literary criticism became more popular. During this time literacy rates started to rise in the public; no longer

5402-434: Was in 1498, with the recovery of classic texts, most notably, Giorgio Valla 's Latin translation of Aristotle 's Poetics . The work of Aristotle, especially Poetics , was the most important influence upon literary criticism until the late eighteenth century. Lodovico Castelvetro was one of the most influential Renaissance critics who wrote commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics in 1570. The seventeenth-century witnessed

5476-407: Was reading exclusive for the wealthy or scholarly. With the rise of the literate public, the swiftness of printing and commercialization of literature, criticism arose too. Reading was no longer viewed solely as educational or as a sacred source of religion; it was a form of entertainment. Literary criticism was influenced by the values and stylistic writing, including clear, bold, precise writing and

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