A glossary of rhetorical terms with examples
http://www.uky.edu/AS/Classics/rhetoric.html
This online resource provides an alphabetical quick reference guide of rhetorical terms, indexed alphabetically from alliteration to zeugma. Descriptions are succinct and are complemented well by the examples given. In many instances links are provided from the examples given to an electronic version of the text cited at the Perseus Digital Library website. These links usefully take the visitor to the precise point in the text from which the examples is given. The examples are predominantly from classical texts, but others are from modern and early modern sources. The resource is provided by Ross Scaife of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Kentucky.
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ABELL : annual bibliography for English language and literature
http://collections.chadwyck.com/home/home_abell.jsp?template=basic.htx&cont
ABELL (Annual Bibliography for English Language and Literature), produced by the Modern Humanities Research Association, has existed as a print bibliography for over seventy years. Now available online (to subscribers) and on CD-ROM, ABELL contains approximately 860,000 records of scholarly articles, doctoral dissertations, books and reviews published anywhere in the world. ABELL covers English language and literature, literary theory, bibliographic studies and studies of traditional folk cultures of the English-speaking world. The search functions allow users to construct detailed specialist bibliographies for teaching and research purposes, as ABELL can be searched by title keyword, subject, author or reviewer, publication details, journal keyword and publication year, or any combination of these terms. The CD-ROM contains ABELL records from 1920 onwards, whilst the Web version is available in two editions: 1920 onwards and 1980 onwards. The Web editions are subscribed to as part of Chadwyck-Healey's Literature Online service. The database is available to subscribing academic institutions only on the basis of a site licence agreement.
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Able writer, the : a rhetoric and handbook
http://www.odu.edu/al/jpbroder/ablewriter.html
This website contains the text of a book by John P. Broderick entitled The Able Writer : A Rhetoric and Handbook, first published in 1982. The book was intended to be used in college composition courses or as a reference guide for writers. It explains how to organise ideas and express them clearly and persuasively in correct scholarly English. The text is available in PDF format chapter by chapter. The site includes summaries of important sections of the book, with illustrative exercises. There are paragraphs on audience, coherence, the placement of modifiers, and figurative language. An instructor's manual is also provided for those teaching classes using the book. The resource should prove useful to students requiring help with their written style, particularly at A-Level and undergraduate level.
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Accents of English from around the world
http://www.soundcomparisons.com/
Accents of English from around the world is a webpage that allows the user to compare the pronunciation of words between different dialects and varieties of English and some other Germanic languages. Equipped with a sound plug-in the user may listen to words in the many different forms available. Hovering over the IPA transcription of the word (or clicking it) returns the sound of the word in that particular variety. The site can be browsed by region, or by word, thus allowing different kinds of comparisons. The project is hosted the University of Edinburgh and is funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). This is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the dialects of English and comparison to other Germanic languages.
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American rhetoric : power of oratory in the United States
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/
The American Rhetoric website contains an extensive database of speeches, sermons, lectures, legal proceedings, and other such recorded materials, which illustrate and exemplify the principles of rhetoric. Users will need audio and video plug-ins to view many parts of this online resource. The site includes a page of classical and modern definitions of rhetoric, and excerpts from Plato and Aristotle. The bulk of the content consists of texts (and audio and video recordings) of great American speeches and political addresses. There is also a section on the movies, featuring classic fictionalised speeches. The best-known American speeches, such as Martin Luther Kings I have a dream, and President Lincolns Gettysburg Address, are all included, alongside over 5,000 others. There are special sections on Christian rhetoric, and on the rhetoric of 9/11. This latter page contains over 100 speeches responding to the terrorist attacks against New York and Washington in 2001. The site contains several interactive exercises such as a rhetoric quiz, and tests based on the evaluation of rhetorical arguments. Links are provided to journals and societies devoted to communication studies, while a news and information index offers links to other external websites.
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American speech
http://www.jstor.org/journals/00031283.html/
This is the website of American Speech, a scholarly journal published by Duke University Press in 1925, which is made available in electronic form only to subscribing institutions via JSTOR. Not even abstracts and contents are available without subscription. The journal publishes papers related to English in the Western Hemisphere as well as articles dealing with English in the other parts of the world with which it has reciprocal influence. It covers a range of topics such as: current usage; dialectology; and the history and structure of English. Individuals can only access the electronic version through their institutional library or if they become members of the American Dialect Society (ADS). In addition to articles, users can access book reviews and brief essays. This site is of value to anyone interested in languages and linguistics.
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Anglistik guide
http://www.AnglistikGuide.de
This is the website of the Anglistik Guide (English Studies) at the Goettingen State and University Library. The project is a gateway to Internet resources concerned with English literature and language. There are five main categories for searching: British Language and Literature (including General Commonwealth); New Literatures in English; American Language and Literature; Celtic Languages and Literature; and Gender Studies. However, these large categories are broken down into a number of sub-categories, such as: anthologies, literary criticism, and individual authors and works. Search can be performed by typing in simple or advanced search terms, or just by browsing the index.
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Anglo-Norman online hub
http://www.anglo-norman.net/
The Anglo-Norman Online Hub website provides information about the ongoing revision and expansion of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND). It also provides online access to the dictionary. The project website enables searches to be made of the English translations and glosses in the dictionary. Full bibliographic details are provided for each of the texts used in its compilation. A section of the site has been put aside to host the concordance of entries. Additional features of the site include several articles relating to Anglo-Norman topics, and a number of primary texts. These source texts include: the Oxford Psalter; Thomas Rymer's edition of Foedera; and 'La Vie de Saint Thomas Becket' amongst others. This is an essential resource for Anglo-Norman scholars.
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Applied semiotics
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/as-sa/
Applied Semiotics (Sémiotique appliquée), published by the Department of French Studies at the University of Toronto, is a freely-available, peer-reviewed, electronic journal that publishes the results of literary semiotic research. The journal aims to promote research in semiotics that focuses on a specific text (or scenario). However, it does not rule out the publication of purely theoretical investigations. As a result, Applied Semiotics is of interest to critics as well as to theorists. The home page offers access to an archive of previously published issues in full text. Further pages include: calls for papers; an outline of the journal's mandate; a style guide; details about the advisory board; information about the print edition of the journal which is also available; a links page listing websites of interest to those working in the field of Semiotics; and a news page with up-to-date bulletins. The journal is available in French and English, and many of the articles are bi-lingual.
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ARIES - assisted revision in English style
http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/STELLA/ARIES/
The online version of ARIES ('Assisted Revision in English Style') is designed to help improve the user's written English. It includes four modules covering the basics of punctuation, the apostrophe, spelling guidelines, and a reference unit. Each module explains usage rules and exceptions. Interactive exercises are included, enabling users to test themselves. ARIES was originally provided only as subscription software, but this version is freely available.
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ASPNS : Anglo-Saxon plant-name survey
http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/EngLang/ihsl/projects/plants.htm
The website "ASPNS: Anglo-Saxon Plant-Name Survey" is the homepage of this project at the Institute for the Historical Study of Language, University of Glasgow. The Anglo-Saxon Plant-Names Survey (ASPNS) aims to produce a comprehensive database of these names and interpret this linguistic information within an interdisciplinary context of other humanities and sciences. Plant-names of Anglo-Saxon England survive in a variety of media, such as manuscripts and inscriptions, and are of more than linguistic interest, shedding light on a wide variety of social matters such as dialect, land-use and economy, diet, medical treatment, clothing and the wider perception of the landscape. The site provides the ASPNS annual report from 2000 onwards, downloadable in RTF format, details of the personnel working on the project and a list of plant names arranged in tabular form. These include: bushes and trees; ferns; fungi; lichen; moss; grasses and reeds; fruits and nuts; edible roots; various types of grains; spices and herbs; medicinal plants and plants yielding fibres for cloth making. Also included is the database of Latin plant-names in all their variant forms which were current in Anglo-Saxon England. The website also includes the ASPNS bibliography as well as a select but wide-ranging bibliography of general Anglo-Saxon studies (such as language and palaeography, history and archaeology but also fiction and children's literature) as well as page of weblinks. Although largely a specialist resource aimed at researchers in the historical development of the English language, the bibliographies and weblinks will also benefit students and the general public.
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Barefoot press
http://www.pix.co.za/barefoot.press/
The barefoot press website was a companion to a regular pamphlet going by the same name which was distributed for free with the intention of increasing the circulation of and interest in South African poetry. The website features works by some significant South African poets, as well as submissions by up-and-coming writers and members of the public. All poems on the site are reviewed, however, so a certain standard is maintained - there is a light-hearted section for the absolute amateur to contribute to called 'put your foot in it', where visitors are encouraged to write about feet, where this standard is most definitely dropped. The website has led to a few print publications, most notably a posthumous one featuring the works of Lionel Abrahams, its most famous contributor. It now seems to be out of date, unfortunately, but it still retains a very useful and interesting collection of original poetry by some of South Africa's most promising young writers and is well worth a visit.
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BBC Radio 4 Science : With reference to
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/withreferenceto.shtml
The website With Reference To accompanies of the BBC Radio 4 programme with the same name aired in 2002. Each programme in the series features a visit to a 'unique or definitive collection of some sort (e.g. teeth, plants, ice, recordings of English dialects)'. The most recent programme follows presenter Quentin Cooper to Stirling where he explores the archive of the spirits manufacturer, Diageo. Not simply an enquiry into the science of spirits, the programme also considers the history of the products - for example the replacement of brandy with gin as the most popular drink in the nineteenth century. The site includes links to other BBC science programmes, many of which can be heard on line.
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BBC voices
http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/
The BBC Voices website records the findings of journalists who undertook the largest ever popular survey of regional English in the UK and provides a valuable resource for language and cultural studies at all levels. There are 300 hundred recorded conversations, involving over 1,200 people discussing accent; dialogue; vocabulary; and attitudes towards spoken language. The website includes a background to the project, as well as an accent map of the British Isles, which can be used as a search vehicle for the recordings. Some of the clips contain offensive language, but these are clearly marked. Much of the site is aimed at the general public, with features involving testing the ear for accent recognition and audience feedback to the project. However, this material in itself may be of as much interest to language researchers as the recordings. There are also journalist features and debates about language change, dedicated explorations of languages such as Manx and Esperanto and downloads from the Open University on language study. The site is presented in a newspaper format and is straightforward to use.
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Bibliography and methods in medieval studies
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/cdwright/www/medsyll.html
The Bibliography and Methods in Medieval Studies website is an online course outline with detailed bibliographies and links to resources for bibliographic research in medieval studies. The site is divided into sub-sections, representing the topics covered each week in the course, including: general bibliographies and Internet sources; medieval history sources; ecclesiastical sources; Latin authors and texts; interpretations of the Bible; the liturgy; hagiography; iconography; manuscript research; science; and popular culture and folklore. Each section is linked to a bibliography, covering "the major reference guides, encyclopaedias, bibliographies and electronic databases". Some of the links to electronic resources are only available to students and staff of the University of Illinois, but those that are freely available are worth looking at. There are also eight library exercises designed to train the undergraduate medievalist in the scholarly tools which make the discipline possible.
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Bibliomania
http://www.bibliomania.com/
Bibliomania.com is a commercial website that provides the full-texts of over 2,000 out-of-copyright English and American novels. Every text that one might reasonably expect to find in a paperback classic edition at a bookshop is available here. The site's contents include several 'study guide' texts mainly written by Oxford University graduates for those books frequently taught in schools, such as Huxley's "Brave New World". More than just plot summaries closely examining characters, themes and structure, the guides are designed to be of particular interest to students and their teachers or tutors. The site also has a homework/revision/query help section where you can email any English literature questions to the team. There is also a short history of the novel, divided by period and genre.For each featured author the site provides a short biography and links to electronic texts of their most widely read works. The electronic texts themselves are divided into chapters, ensuring download times are acceptable even over slow connections. Each text has its own message board. New books are added every month, along with new articles and interviews. The "research" area houses a library of reference books, biographies, and religious texts. It contains fully searchable copies of language reference books, including dictionaries, books of quotations and a thesaurus. Also included are non-fiction books with subjects ranging from history, to economics, to psychology, with major religious texts area in embryo. Erotic fiction includes The Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden. A free electronic concordance to each text on the site is provided. A search engine is provided with the site. Via the Search Engine one can look for individual words or whole phrases, search across either an individual text, the entire works of a specific author, or even groups of authors, enabling a comparison of the presence of specific words or phrases, across, for example, the Victorian period. The concordances provide you, within seconds, with a list of hyperlinked locations where the relevant search term can be found.
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Branching out
http://www.openingthebook.com/archive/branching-out/frontpage.asp
Branching Out is a website aimed at anyone working in reader development. It offers information and resources for a range of research areas across English and Cultural Studies, include writing and education. The site is divided into strategies, research findings, projects and resources, all aimed at the furthering of reading as enjoyable, educational and social. A regular news update on current issues in reader development is included, as well as advice on using the resources available, a Talking Shop query service, the invitation to share personal experience with others, and a list of Independent Presses. Research findings included in full cover an evaluation of Branching Out from 1999-2001, Reader Observation at Warrington Libraries, responses to reading and writing promotions, and findings from the Reading Agency's research. Also included is a searchable database of project ideas for reader development that have already been successful in practice. This includes a list of UK suppliers of reading promotions to libraries and a calendar of events to help in the preparation of topical reading promotions. This site is full of practical information on the encouragement of reading, the pros and cons of online material, and the future of reading from a number of perspectives. It is well designed and straightforward to use.
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Breaking news English
http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/
'Breaking News English' is a website which uses current affairs as a resource for students learning English as a second language. It is aimed at teachers primarily but would also be a useful resource for education undergraduates and language researchers. It may well also be useful as self-help for English learners, as it is very easy to follow and use. The site's author, Sean Banville, is British but based in Japan, with a background in EFL and ESL education and research. His site provides differentiated lesson plans for students at basic and advanced levels, based on the news of the day. Each lesson plan contains the full article upon which it is based, an MP3 listening file, communication exercises and activities for individual and pair work, discussion topics, reading and vocabulary exercises. Also available are handouts for classroom use in Word and PDF formats. All the material on the site is freely downloadable with a month-by-month archive available. The news material covered includes political and social content and is suitable for secondary school students upwards. The only possible reservation teachers based in England may have is the potential confusion caused by the site's use of American English spelling. This is an inventive and generous resource, whose daily updating must involve considerable commitment from the author. It is straightforward to use and well-presented.
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British academic spoken English (BASE) corpus
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/base/
The BASE website offers information about and access to the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. The corpus consists of recordings made in a variety of university departments, grouped into four broad disciplinary groups with 40 lectures and 10 seminars in each: Arts and Humanities; Social Sciences; Physical Sciences; and Life Sciences. The recordings, together making up around 1.6 million word tokens, have been transcribed and tagged, and the transcriptions can be downloaded from the website in XML format. The lecture portion of the corpus can also be accessed through the Sketch Engine corpus analysis interface (subscrition-based with free 30-day trial). The BASE corpus is a valuable resource for investigation of language use in academic context and the website contains a list of publications and conference papers which refer to BASE data. In addition to the BASE manual, the site also provides access to an Excel spreadsheet with information about the individual lectures and seminars, such as: title; department; audience; date of recording; speakers; duration. A link is provided to a selection of interviews with academic staff made in relation to the BASE corpus. The corpus can also be ordered via the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) website (formerly part of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS)), on completion of a request access form.
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British council
http://www.britishcouncil.org/
The Web Site of the British Council is of immeasurable use for those wishing to find out about the United Kingdom, learn or teach English, or to find out about the work done by the charity in promoting British culture abroad. The British Council works as a showcase for British culture, arts and science in many countries. The site is easy to navigate and provides information on a wide variety of subjects including: teaching and learning English; education and training; the arts and culture; science; society; and governance. Indeed this site is very useful for UK users as well. The intercultural work done by the British Council, which works in over 110 countries all over the world, is one of its key successes. For example the Counterpoint (described on the site as a cultural think tank) section brings many people from all over the world together to exchange views in a number of different contexts and projects. It also promotes the magazine "Thresholds", previously known as "British Studies Now". The site lists the addresses and contact details for its offices around the UK and the world and forthcoming job opportunities.
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British Library, Archival sound recordings : English accents and dialects
http://sounds.bl.uk/BrowseCategory.aspx?category=Accents-and-dialects
British Library, Archival sound recordings: English accents and dialects is an online database of twentieth century regional accents. Users can listen to over 600 recordings of people talking from all over England, between 1950 and 1999. The files have been taken from two British Library oral history collections: the Survey of English Dialects and the Millennium Memory Bank. Each file is accompanied by catalogue information, an explanation of unusual words, and notable phonology and grammar. There are also introductions to the collections explaining the background of the extracts and their usefulness to English social history.
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British national corpus (BNC)
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
The British National Corpus (BNC) website offers information about and access to the BNC, a 100-million word corpus of written and spoken English. The BNC was compiled according to carefully designed criteria and contains a wide variety of written and spoken language. The written texts (100 million words) were taken from a range of fiction and non-fiction domains usually dating back not earlier than 1975. The spoken samples (10 million words) include material from different contexts and regions produced by speakers of different ages and social backgrounds. The corpus is a key resource used for research and teaching in a number of areas, such as: lexicography; natural language processing; applied and theoretical linguistics.
The BNC website describes how the corpus was created and offers comprehensive information about its content and structure. Information on how to use the customised search software (Xaira or SARA) is also available, in the form of step-by-step guides and sample queries. The Simple Search function on the site allows users to see how often a word or phrase occurs in the corpus, and to retrieve up to 50 examples. Links are provided to other sites which offer access to the corpus or to resources created on the basis of it, such as word lists.
Unrestricted access to the corpus requires a user licence, which can be obtained by purchasing a copy of the corpus on DVD or by registering for the Subscription Service. A 30-day free trial is available to those who register and download a copy of the search software.
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BYU corpus of American English
http://www.americancorpus.org/
The BYU Corpus of American English is a very large collection of texts which is being made freely available online via a dedicated search interface. The interface allows the user to search the corpus for words and phrases and display the search result as a concordance with limited context. In addition to searching for exact words or phrases, users can exploit wildcards in their searches, search for lemma and part-of-speech information, look for collocates, and make semantically-based queries, amongst other things. The corpus initially consists of around 360 million words, equal amounts from each year from 1990 to 2007. New material will added at least twice a year. The texts are drawn from a variety of sources and are divided into five genres of equal size: spoken; fiction; popular magazines; newspapers; and academic journals. The search interface is simple to use, and offers functions that are not generally found in corpus search tools, such as the ability to find synonyms and compare similar words. A help file is available and information about how to use this very powerful tool is also provided in the form of a five minute guided tour. The BYU Corpus of American English is a valuable resource for anyone interested in looking at how English, especially American English, is used today. The composition of the corpus makes it particularly suitable for comparisons across time period or genre.
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C. Meyers' introduction to language is the dress of thought
http://prometheus.cc.emory.edu/cfm/academic/Intro.html
This website contains Carole Meyers' (Emory University) introductory chapter to her dissertation: Language is the Dress of Thought - Style and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. The text concerns the politics of eighteenth-century British aesthetics - the relationship between political debate and notions such as taste, style, decorum and manners. Drawing on Jurgen Habermas' influential book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Meyers surveys recent work on eighteenth-century political discourse (including that of Nancy Armstrong, Terry Eagleton and Lawrence Klein) whilst prosecuting an argument about the role of literary style in public discourse.A purely text document, the site is loads rapidly.
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Cambridge English renaissance electronic service
http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/
The Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service (CERES) is a project at the University of Cambridge which aims to explore the possibilities of electronic media for literary research. The home page provides links to a number of virtual workshops. These include the Aeneas and Isabella Project, a collaborative project which allows scholars to contribute to a database of comments on selected texts; Sidneiana, a multimedia archive of material relating to Sir Philip Sidney and his circle; and Haphazard, an online manuscript resource for students and scholars working on Edmund Spenser. CERES also publishes an online newsletter called Harvest which reviews and recommends sites for scholars working on the Renaissance period. The site is very attractively designed and illustrated, as well as easily navigable. Links to other resources have been carefully selected on the basis of academic and scholarly merit.
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