Nottingham Advantage Award: Students Become Teachers!
17/02/2014
During the Autumn Semester 2013-14, and fresh from their year abroad as British Council Language Assistants, three CLAS final-year undergraduate students – Olivia Gowie and Matthew York from the Department of German Studies, and Melissa Watson from the Department of French & Francophone Studies – undertook a language-teaching project at Greenfields Primary School, Nottingham, as …
A Most Curious Case: The Trials and Tribulations of the Genitive in Dutch and German
03/01/2014
In the 19th century, the Dutch genitive case was referred to as the ‘holy case’ by the poet and novelist Jacob van Lennep (1802-1868) because, like certain sacred names in Judaism, it was written but not spoken. By this, he meant that the genitive occurred still in careful written language but that it had all …
On subtitles and subtitling software
26/04/2013
As the notion of accessibility has become one of the dominant shibboleths of a growing tribe of media specialists, film subtitles – whose single primary function is to provide access to what would otherwise be inaccessible – are still often facing criticism coming from all corners. And it’s true, subtitles really are a funny old …
Anyone for grammar in the Easter vacation?
22/04/2013
As part of the CLAS Widening Participation programme, specialist tutors from the University’s Language Centre delivered in-house French, German and Spanish intensive study sessions for local 16-19 school language learners between March 25 and 27. The sessions catered for GCSE, AS, A2 level and International Baccalaureate and included the essential skills necessary for succeeding in …
Possession marking: ’s and beyond
14/03/2013
One of the most widely studied elements of the Germanic languages is the ’s which attaches to a noun phrase to indicate possession in English. The analysis of this element, the possessive ’s, has been the object of much debate in linguistics on account of its unusual behaviour, which makes its categorisation problematic. It can …
The Year Abroad experience
01/03/2013
I was recently reading an interview with the French philosopher Michel Foucault in which he talked about a period spent working in Sweden at the University of Uppsala in the 1950s. Foucault clearly remembered this experience of exposure to another language and another culture as being highly significant in terms of his personal and intellectual …
Language and technology – a new research project
28/02/2013
For the CLAS blog’s inaugural post, Professor Christopher Johnson tells us about his new research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I have recently been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to write a book on the French prehistorian and ethnologist André Leroi-Gourhan (1911-86). Unlike the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, my previous subject of research, Leroi-Gourhan …
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