. . . Traditional Scottish Rants . . . Well . . . I did warn you with 'barriers'.
------------------------------------------------ DEFENSIVE SECTION FOLLOWS ------------------------------------------------ I am not trying to rant about the inadequacies of educational establishments as a way of Thanking Jacque for her help: Her point about paragraphs was well taken. Also, as far as I am aware Jacque is not on either the Linguistics or English faculty at SIUC. What I did point out was that in Southern Illinois (even if nowhere else) there was a rather narrow definition of what constitutes good English. My experience of Professors, Readers, Senior Lecturers and Lecturers elsewhere is that they tend to have a broad, expansive, inclusive view of things. Certainly when I worked at the University of St Andrews the members of the Foreign Languages Department (with who I had considerable contact as my wife did her PhD with them) did not upset by different types of spelling and syntax (let alone grammar) within English. Of course one could point out that St Andrews is a top-class University, while SIUC is not quite "up there". Having said that, Richard Rorty (NOT in the Linguistics or the English Dept) is there !!!!!!! --------------------------------------------------- END OF DEFENSIVE SECTION --------------------------------------------------- HOWEVER; if one is to introduce a PARAGRAPHS term into Runtime Revolution, surely, one first has to decide what constitutes a paragraph. There seem to be 2 types of ways of marking paragraphs prevalent in English: whether they are English, 'British', North American, or Ruritanian is, really, beside the point. Are we to detect paragraph breaks merely on the basis of TabKeyDowns or something else. Certainly TABS will only detect the indented type of paragraph. Of course, one could be pedantic and insist on paragraphs being only of one type. However, that would be useless if one wanted to write a general text analysis tool that could cope with whatever text was fed into it. --------------------------------------------------- WEAKLY HUMOUROUS SECTION STARTS --------------------------------------------------- Some people might realise, if they stopped and thought for a moment that anybody who sections his/her use-list postings with odd lines like this ---------------------- might be making gentle fun of him/her/itself. And references to terms that mean different things in different dialects of English (vacuum cleaners - geddit ?) might act as a further signal to anybody but the most blinkered among the native speakers. --------------------------------------------------- END OF WEAKLY HUMOUROUS SECTION --------------------------------------------------- I, for one, am gently unwinding at the end of an extremely heavy and stressful year. I hope that everybody who reads this is doing likewise. I hope that everyone has a peaceful, relaxing and reflective end to the year, regardless of their religious affiliation or lack thereof. sincerely, Richmond Mathewson. ____________________________________________________________ A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle. ____________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
