Category: Guest Voices

Molly Best Tinsley ~ Guest Writer © All Rights Reserved. Molly Best Tinsley.  Thirty years ago, I was finally following my passion.  Completing a Ph. D. dissertation in literature had taught me a surprise lesson:  I did not want to spend my life writing literary criticism.  I wanted to write literary fiction.  Two National Endowment of the Arts fellowships and a bunch of awards later, it seemed I’d made the right choice.  Then my first novel, My Life with Darwin, came out to positive reviews but modest sales, and from the point of view of mainstream publishing, my writing career was over.  Houghton Mifflin, the publisher, passed on my story collection and a second novel.  So did the other big publishing houses.  In the late eighties and early nineties, when all this was happening, I was too busy wrestling the pain of rejection into creative defiance to grasp the larger picture. Older and cooler now, I tend to view my problematic literary debut as an accident of history.  It happened to coincide with a cataclysmic change in the publishing landscape.  Pardon the drama, but it’s as if the devolution of contemporary publishing has been tattooed on my heart.  Of course, I wasn’t the only casualty.  I had friends in the same boat, and they had friends.  The ranks of outcast writers were swelling.  They still are.  For those of us...

Guest Writer Frank Araujo gives his linguistic take on the adverb. © 2013 All Rights Reserved. Frank P. Araujo. Why do we dislike adverbs so much?  I know, I’ve heard all the arguments about how they slow down the action, the beauty of the language is in its raw simplicity, we should use action verbs instead of generic, and so on. However, one could argue these observations are merely matters of style and as such, these august pronouncements are just opinions. However, I think there’s a deeper reason for this that goes beyond mere stylistic choices. The simple linguistic question that creeps up every time is how do words function syntactically?  If we’ve been able to glean anything out of the convoluted rules of optimality theory, it’s that generic is basic and marked is specific.  Marked structures are tighter, more emotion-packed and carry a finer degree of information.  Hence, in the sentence, ‘I see a dog,’ little more than the basic information is provided for the listener, so when we say, ‘I see the dog,’ the object is marked and the listener locates this mutt that has already been encountered in the discourse. For languages like English, Spanish, German and French, this is an important contrast. Some languages like the Slavic, Chinese and Japanese don’t have this distinction. X-bar theorists note that the components of a phrase are a...