Content word
In linguistics content words are words that name objects of reality and their qualities. They signify
actual living things (dog, cat, etc.), family members (mother, father, sister,
etc.), natural phenomena (snow, Sun, etc.), common actions (do, make, come,
eat, etc.), characteristics (young, cold, dark, etc.), etc. They consist mostly
of nouns, but certain verbs, adjectives, and adverbs can also be content words. They contrast with function
words, which are words that have very little substantive meaning and primarily denote grammatical relationships between content
words, such as prepositions (in, out, under, etc.), pronouns (I, you, he, who, etc.), conjunctions (and, but, til, as, etc.), etc.
Function
word
The
distinction between function/structure words and content/lexical words proposed by C.C. Fries in 1952 has been highly
influential in the grammar used in second language acquisition and English Language teaching. Function
words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker.
They signal the structural relationships that words have to one another and are
the glue that holds sentences together. Thus, they serve as important elements
to the structures of sentences.
She’s my toast!
Andy Williams
Howard
Andrew "Andy" Williams (December 3, 1927 – September 25, 2012)
was an American popular
music singer. He recorded 44 albums in his career, 15 of which have
been gold-certified and three of which have been platinum-certified. He was also nominated for six Grammy
Awards. He hosted The Andy Williams Show, a television variety show, from 1962 to 1971, and numerous
TV specials. The
Andy Williams Show garnered three Emmy awards. The Moon
River Theatre in Branson,
Missouri, is named after the song he is most known for singing—Johnny
Mercer and Henry
Mancini's "Moon
River". He sold over 100 million records worldwide including
10.5 million certified units in the United States.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year
Tragic flaw (hamartia)
The term hamartia derives
from the Greek ἁμαρτία, from ἁμαρτάνειν hamartánein, which means
"to miss the mark" or "to err". It is most often
associated with Greek tragedy, although it is also used in Christian theology. Hamartia as it pertains to dramatic literature was
first used by Aristotle in his Poetics. In tragedy, hamartia is commonly
understood to refer to the protagonist’s error or flaw that leads to a chain of
plot actions culminating in a reversal from their good fortune to bad. What
qualifies as the error or flaw can include an error resulting from ignorance,
an error of judgement, a flaw in character, or sin. The spectrum of meanings
has invited debate among critics and scholars, and different interpretations
among dramatists.
Catharsis
Catharsis is the purification and purgation of emotions—especially pity and fear—through art or any
extreme change in emotion that results in renewal and restoration. It is a
metaphor originally used by Aristotle in the Poetics, comparing
the effects of tragedy on the mind of a spectator to the effect of a cathartic on the body.
Mimesis
Mimesis is a critical and philosophical term that
carries a wide range of meanings, which include imitation, representation, mimicry, imitatio,
receptivity, nonsensuous similarity, the act of resembling, the act of
expression, and the presentation of the self.
Poetics (Aristotle)
Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest surviving work of dramatic
theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary
theory. This has been the traditional
view for centuries. However, recent work is now challenging whether Aristotle
focuses on literary theory per se (given that not one poem exists in the
treatise) or whether he focuses instead on dramatic musical theory that only
has language as one of the elements.
Classical unities
The classical
unities, Aristotelian unities, or three unities are
rules for drama derived
from a passage in Aristotle's Poetics. In their neoclassical form
they are as follows:
1.
unity of action: a play
should have one action that it follows, with minimal subplots.
2.
unity of time: the action
in a play should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours.
3.
unity of place: a play
should exist in a single physical space and should not attempt to compress
geography, nor should the stage represent more than one place.
Sphinx
The riddle of the sphinx
The Riddle of the
Sphinx is an element of Greek mythology.
The Sphinx is
said to have guarded the entrance to the Greek city of Thebes, and to have
asked a riddle of
travellers to allow them passage. The exact riddle asked by the Sphinx was not
specified by early tellers of the stories, and was not standardized as the one
given below until late in Greek history.
It was said in
late lore that Hera or Ares sent the Sphinx
from her Aethiopian homeland (the Greeks always remembered the
foreign origin of the Sphinx) to Thebes in
Greece where she asks all passersby the most famous riddle in history:
"Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed
and three-footed?" She strangled and devoured anyone who could not answer. Oedipus solved
the riddle by answering: Man—who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on
two feet as an adult, and then uses a walking stick in old age. By some
accounts (but
much more rarely), there was a second riddle: "There are two sisters: one
gives birth to the other and she, in turn, gives birth to the first. Who are
the two sisters?" The answer is "day and night" (both words—ἡμέρα and νύξ,
respectively—are feminine in Ancient Greek). This riddle is also found in a
Gascon version of the myth and could be very ancient.
Bested at
last, the tale continues, the Sphinx then threw herself from her high rock and
died. An alternative version tells that she devoured herself. Thus Oedipus can
be recognized as a "liminal" or threshold figure, helping effect the
transition between the old religious practices, represented by the death of the
Sphinx, and the rise of the new, Olympian gods.
In Jean Cocteau's
retelling of the Oedipus legend, The Infernal Machine, the Sphinx tells
Oedipus the answer to the riddle in order to kill herself so that she did not
have to kill anymore, and also to make him love her. He leaves without ever
thanking her for giving him the answer to the riddle. The scene ends when the
Sphinx and Anubis ascend
back to the heavens.
There are
mythic, anthropological, psychoanalytic and parodic interpretations of the
Riddle of the Sphinx, and of Oedipus's answer to it. Sigmund Freud describes
"the question of where babies come from" as a riddle of the Sphinx. Numerous
riddle books use the Sphinx in their title or illustrations.
Dramatic irony
This type of
irony is the device of giving the spectator an item of information that at
least one of the characters in the narrative is unaware of (at least
consciously), thus placing the spectator a step ahead of at least one of the
characters. It was originally pioneered by Connop Thirlwall in
his 1833 article On the Irony of Sophocles.
The OED defines
this as:
the
incongruity created when the (tragic) significance of a character's speech or
actions is revealed to the audience but unknown to the character concerned; the
literary device so used, orig. in Greek tragedy.
According to
Stanton, dramatic irony has three stages—installation, exploitation, and
resolution (often also called preparation, suspension, and resolution)
—producing dramatic conflict in what one character relies or appears to rely
upon, the contrary of which is known by observers (especially
the audience; sometimes to other characters within the drama) to be true. In
summary, it means that the reader/watcher/listener knows something that one or
more of the characters in the piece is not aware of.
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