Susanne Busch – författare

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, Dresden Technical University, language: English, abstract: Usage of but in generalThe following facts and deductions are taken from the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. This book is a corpus-based grammatical study whose authors used the British National Corpus and the Longman Spoken American Corpus as their main sources. (1) I think he will have salad but he doesn t like tomatoes. (CONV) (2) A: The golden rule is if you re reversing you must look behind you! B: Yeah, but she said she did. (CONV) (3) A: If perhaps you were to spread erm a wire netting over the pond Mollie? B: Well yes I know, but I m not having that! But erm what I am going to do but I can t do it until the spring. (CONV)1 The registers in the Longman Spoken and Written Corpus are conversation (CONV), fiction (FICT), news (NEWS) and academic prose (ACAD). This selection of the above sentences supports the theory that the word but is most frequent in conversation (and fiction), and least frequent in academic prose. The high frequency of but can be explained by the high frequency of negatives in conversation. Negation and contrast are closely related topics. Moreover, conversation is interactive. The high frequency in both cases results from this interactivity. The speaker can use but to modify a statement (1), and the addressee can use it to express a contrary opinion, refute a statement by the interlocutor, reject a suggestion, etc. (2, 3) . 2The distribution of but in the other registers is more difficult to explain: One answer to the question of low frequency in academic prose may be that contrast is more often expressed by other words in that register. Forms such as although, however, nevertheless, and on the other hand are more frequent in academic prose than in the other registers. 3 Another interesting finding is that of but as a sentence/turn- initial coordinator. Although it is said that placing a coordinator at the beginning of an orthographic sentence is not right on the level of style, coordinators are quite frequent in this position in actual texts. But, for example, is very likely to be found in sentence/turn- initial position. But the frequencies are higher in fiction and news reportage than in academic writing. This probably shows that especially dialogue in fiction and quoted speech in news include more spontaneous reactions. Furthermore, in written texts, sentence-initial coordinators often occur at paragraph boundaries...

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Dresden Technical University (Fakultat fur Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: 'Sexuality in Britain from Victorian Times to the 1960s', language: English, abstract: This paper aims to analyse some aspects of sexuality in three of Vita Sackville-West's novels in close connection with the author's own attitudes towards the topics. The question was whether or not Sackville-West's ideas and experiences are reflected in her writing. By comparing biographical material about Sackville-West with the contents of her novels, it was possible to find some similarities and common ground. I chose the following three novels in order to discuss the position of women, marriage in general, sadomasochism and female relationships:All Passion Spent(1931),The Dark Island(1934) andNo Signposts in the Sea(1961). Vita did not need to write because of economic pressure, she was highly privileged and therefore did not have to write anything she did not want to, however, the restrictions social and political principles imposed on her did not allow Vita to use everything she might have imagined to write about. Although Sackville-West is not representative due to her aristocratic status, she shares the fate of having to live a married life despite being homosexual with most of the lesbians at the beginning of the 20th century. This apparent contradiction arouses the question of how she coped with this duality and whether writing did help her in dealing with the different aspects of her personality.