Earticle

It is well established that David Foster Wallace, the contemporary American writer known for his short stories and essays but probably best known for his 1996 magnum opus, Infinite Jest (1996), had serious and abiding interests in academic philosophy. To date, The Broom of the System (1987) remains one of the less examined works in Wallace’s oeuvre. The novel experiments with form and narrative, both showcasing Wallace’s heteroglossic skill and explorin non-traditional narrative techniques. As post-postmodernist writer, many critics point out that The Broom of the System is influenced by the Ludwig Wittgensteinian theories of language and communication. This essay will analyze The Broom of the System, in terms of the postmodern aesthetic, especially its concern for, and crisis about language, reality and self towards Wallace’s engagement with Wittgenstein’s theory to consider the relationship between functionality and identity. This essay will delineate not only how the distinction and tension between self and other pervades The Broom of the System and but also how (unsuccessful) attempts to construct a stable self rather displays the state of constant anxiety about language, self, and functionality in The Broom of the System.

The objective of this study is to investigate how the use of ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence, in a university English literature class affects students’ perceptions of this technology. Specifically, the study focuses on the students’ experiences with ChatGPT during an English poem writing activity, in which two approaches were employed. The first approach involved students creating their own English poems using an English dictionary, while the second approach required students to use ChatGPT to rephrase their self-translated poems and edit the resulting output. The results indicated that students found the structured English poem writing activity at a basic level to be easy, but they preferred ChatGPT’s faster and more convenient process and its use of natural and sophisticated vocabulary, grammar, and poetic expression with poetic license. Students also reported that post-editing with ChatGPT resulted in more seamless and higher quality outputs than direct translation. They noted that ChatGPT helped improve their English writing and translation skills, sentence structure and grammar checking, appropriate vocabulary selection and usage, natural sentence expression, and colloquial conversation.

The purpose of this article is to make a close study of Milton’s “Elegia septima” and “Retraction” which was attached to the roman elegy in his first collection of works, Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). As this “Retraction” is positioned just below the elegy, it is commonly said to retract only one poem, the seventh elegy. But this kind of understanding appears to disregard the poet’s intent to select and order some early works for publication and to put ‘a thin rule’ between the two poems. When publishing the collection, Milton means to sincerely show a portrait of the artist as a young man who would be a great Christian epic poet in English. “Elegia septima” is one of the seven numbered elegies in this collection, where Milton practices Latin elegies in order to overcome the great roman elegiac poets by reinterpreting and recreating their poetry for his own particular needs. When we think of “Retraction” as a postscript just to “Elegia septima”, it seems to be an honest regret for the poet’s foolish sentiment. As a revocation of the whole elegies, however, it proves to be a poem in which, after boasting paradoxically about his mastering conventional elegiac poems, the poet proclaims not only farewell to the classic genre but flight to a new epic world in the future.

In this paper, we investigate the role of wh-so-ever (i.e. whatsoever) in English. Traditionally, the function of whatsoever has been defined as manifesting emphasis used after a negative phrase. However, it does not explain the following puzzle properly: First, the occurrence of whatsoever is quite similar to the NPI any in that its occurrence is not limited negative context, but it can occur in downward entailing and nonveridical context. Second, unlike any, whatsoever can give rise to emphatic effect in both negative and non-negative system. Given this phenomenon, we raise our research questions as follows. First, how can we capture the proper licensing conditions of whatsoever? Second, how can we account for the core properties of the polarity sensitive item whatsoever for emphasis? To answer these questions, we examined an empirical and theoretical link between any and whatsoever. First, we conducted Word2Vec analysis (a floating-point real-valued vector representation) between each NPI and a set of NPI licensors. The result was that any and whatsoever exhibit the strikingly similar NPI licensing environments. We further showed that whatsoever has a distinct characteristic of exhaustivity, which captures the different behaviors in the emphatic effect. Our novel finding provides us with a perspective that more detailed distinction in polarity item system should be called for.

This paper investigates the insensitivity of propositional surprise ‘how’ in English to the so-called Inner Island Constraint. We first characterize this type of ‘how’ as distinct from other familiar types of manner, method, and degree ‘how’. It is supposed to prosodically bear nuclear accent, syntactically trigger Subject-Auxiliary Inversion, and semantico-pragmatically reconcile the post-‘how’ proposition with the rest of the speaker’s beliefs. On its syntactic and interpretational parallelism, we propose that this type of ‘how’ is generated in [Spec,CP] like ‘how come’ reanalyzed in the Comp position and identically to ‘why’ generated in [Spec,CP]. We also examine what Pesetsky (1987) dubbs as aggressively-non-D-linked elements like ‘the hell’, which is accompanied by propositional surprise ‘how’. Since the use of ‘the hell’ presupposes a possible lack of a definite answer to the wh-question, and if the answer exists, it’s not known to the speaker, ‘the hell’ is most appropriate to propositional surprise ‘how’ questions. By exploring the formal properties of this construction, this paper seeks to make significant contributions to our understanding of the intricate interplay between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in the English language.

This paper examines the theory of quantum mechanics and relativity, displaying that poetic language revealed in literature has a place in cognitive metaphor study. Metaphor is a matter of all kinds of thought: thought about human character, about society, about emotion, and about the nature of death and life. Also metaphor in the theory of quantum mechanics and relativity brought many changes to concepts about substance and provide many methods to the research of consciousness. Classical science had limits in the methods of observation and describing, but theory of relativity and quantum mechanics overcomes these limitations and describes substance consciousness and substance as two aspects of one thing. On the contrary, these philosophic of science shook the cognitive structure of human beings. This study examines the relationship between theory of quantum mechanics and relativity as described by metaphor. I try to examine the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics in “Spring Pools”. Organic material world we find in the relations of nature and man can be converted into the sources of energy to make our world a living one. This paper claims that integrated thinking ability in consilience raised questions as to our essential principles and gave them new theories.

This study examines the effectiveness and challenges of an English-medium instruction (EMI) global program at a private regional college in Korea. The data for this study was primarily collected from semi-structured interviews of graduate and undergraduate students at the Linton Global School (LGS) at Hannam University. The interviews revealed overall student satisfaction with the effectiveness of the global program in improving student fluency in English. However, student interviews also revealed challenges to the LGS global program related to four major themes including: one, students admitted into the global program with low English proficiency; two, professors using Korean in class; three, student dissatisfaction with general education elective courses; and four, student noncompliance with the English Only Policy (EOP). The study recommends providing additional academic support and resources for students with low English proficiency, professors abiding by the EOP policy, the assignment of qualified faculty for general education courses, and the hiring of a bilingual dormitory manager. The study also advocates the creation of a new “culture” that encourages and promotes the EOP policy. Additional suggestions for further research on the EMI global program at LGS are included.

This study aims to investigate the differences in learners’ English grammar achievement by an online asynchronous class group and face-to-face class group, preferred teaching method for English grammar items in the post-COVID era, and the learners’ perception of online asynchronous classes. To this end, 64 students from the online asynchronous class group and 46 students from the face-to-face class group, totaling 110 students were evaluated and surveyed. The results are as follows: First, the online asynchronous class group showed higher achievement than the face-to-face class group in most grammar items except for the type of verb, but there was no statistically significant difference. Secondly, about half of the respondents did not care about online and face-to-face teaching, but the grammar items of the respondents who chose more online asynchronous lectures were subject-verb agreement/tense/voice, noun/pronoun, and adjective/adverb. The appropriate number of online asynchronous classes for English grammar items was 3-5 times a semester, with 20 minutes being selected the most. This research has significance in that the findings can be used as a basic reference for the design and operation of hybrid online and offline English grammar learning.

This study is conducted to find the relationship between CQ and English proficiency, academic year and gender. To achieve the aims research questions are established; 1) What relation exists between CQ and English proficiency among Korean college students?, 2) What relation exists between CQ and academic year among Korean college students?, 3) What relation exists between CQ and gender among Korean college students? For the research, a total of 105 college students participate. To find the relationship between CQ, English proficiency, academic year and gender among Korean college students, CQS is adapted as a measurement tool in the survey. The data analysis for this study is conducted using R program version 4.2.2. After assessing the reliability among items for each sub-factors of CQ, the English proficiency, academic year, and gender of the study participants and the situation of each sub-factors of CQ are presented in frequencies and percentages. The research findings indicate significant correlations between English proficiency and the sub-factors of metacognitive CQ, cognitive CQ, and behavioral CQ. Additionally, correlations were found between motivational CQ and academic year. However, no significant relationships were observed between gender and the four sub-factors of CQ.

The purpose of this study is to explore the possibility of expanding the implementation and utilization of the national English Listening Ability Test (hereafter ELAT). To this end, a survey of teachers’ perception of the test was conducted targeting secondary English teachers of the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education. Six hundred sixteen English teachers participated in the survey with questionnaires and in-depth interviews. The results of the analysis showed that the teachers had little experience in using national ELAT items, and there were difficulties in regard to the environment and support from the English Education Research Group while setting up the Seoul English Listening Ability Test (Seoul ELAT). However, the teachers recognized the connection between the national ELAT and the national curriculum, the validity of the test, etc. The teachers also explained that expanding the national ELAT would help improve students’ communication skills and English listening skills. They responded that it is appropriate to develop an English listening test at a professional institution. The educators also reported their awareness of the cloud-based evaluation system and the sample test item bank that will be introduced in the future.