Spoken Word In The Uk

Spoken Word in the UK is a comprehensive and in-depth introduction to spoken word performance in the UK – its origins and development, its performers and audiences, and the vast array of different styles and characteristics that make it unique. Drawing together a wide range of authors including scholars, critics, and practitioners, each chapter gives a new perspective on performance poetics. The six sections of the book cover the essential elements of understanding the form and discuss how this key aspect of contemporary performance can be analysed stylistically, how its development fits into the context of performance in the UK, the ways in which its performers reach and engage with their audiences, and its place in the education system. Each chapter is a case study of one key aspect, example, or context of spoken word performance, combining to make the most wide-ranging account of this form of performance currently available. This is a crucial and ground-breaking companion for those studying or teaching spoken word performance, as well as scholars and researchers across the fields of theatre and performance studies, literary studies, and cultural studies.

Previous studies on oral culture have traditionally emphasized the contradictions between oral and literate culture, and focussed on individual countries or regions. The essays in this fascinating collection depart from these approaches in several ways. By examining not only English, but also Scottish and Welsh oral culture, they provide the first pan-British study of the subject. The authors also emphasize the ways in which oral and literate culture continued to compliment and inform each other, rather than focusing exclusively on their incompatibility, or on the 'inevitable' triumph of the written word.

Kate Tempest is one of the most exciting and innovative performers to have emerged in spoken-word poetry in many years; her dramatic poem Brand New Ancients won the prestigious Ted Hughes Prize for innovation in poetry. Tempest’s wholly unique blend of street poetry, rap and storytelling – combined with the spellbinding delivery of an open-air revivalist – has won her legions of followers all over the UK. Her remarkable stage presence is wholly audible in this poem, a spoken story written to be told with live music. Brand New Ancients is the tale of two families and their intertwining lives, set against the background of the city and braided with classical myth. Here, Tempest shows how the old myths still live on in our everyday acts of violence, bravery, sacrifice and love – and that our lives make tales no less dramatic and powerful than those of the old gods.

Award-winning poet Pete Bearder presents the unwritten history, science, and skill of spoken word and answers some strangely under-explored questions: What is the history of performance poetry in the UK? How does emotional contagion happen in live literature? What has spoken word got to do with hypnotism and ecstatic states? This groundbreaking book explores a thriving ecology of artistry, and how it can serve us for cultural, social and political renewal. -- Publisher.

The papers in this volume all examine the nature of spoken word production in aphasia, and how this can inform current theories of language processing. It comprises 7 papers by some of the foremost researchers in the field. The first paper in the volume is an introduction by the editor (Dr Lyndsey Nickels), which reviews the 'state of the art' of the cognitive neuropsychology of spoken word production both in terms of theory and methodology. The individual papers address a range of topical issues including the levels of processing in speech production (Lambon-Ralph, Moriarty, Sage et al.; Wilshire); the nature of the interaction between levels of processing (Goldrick & Rapp);and effects of different factors on naming (word class and context: Berndt, Burton, Haendiges & Mitchum; phonemic and orthographic cues: Best, Herbert, Hickin, Osborne & Howard); lexical stress: Howard & Smith). Taken together this volume provides the reader with an insight into the cutting edge of research in spoken word production.

This volume focuses on the remediation of impairments of word production in aphasia. It is restricted to studies focusing on single word production and comprises papers by some of the researchers most active in this field worldwide. The scope of the papers is broad and includes many relatively under-researched areas and techniques. All the papers have in common a methodological rigour and the use of a single case or case-series approach. A range of treatment tasks are evaluated: 'phonological' tasks such as phonological cueing and word repetition, and judgements regarding the phonological form; 'orthographic' tasks such as orthographic cueing, word reading and writing to dictation; 'semantic' tasks such as semantic cueing; the use of gesture; computer presentation of tasks and even just repeated attempts at naming. In addition, the individuals treated using these techniques varied in the nature of their impairments and/or level of impairment that was targeted. The majority aimed to improve word retrieval generally, but one treatment was aimed specifically at verb retrieval, and another at improving accuracy of word production for an individual with a phonological encoding impairment. Each paper relates the outcome of treatment to theoretical accounts of impairment, and one explicitly uses the results of therapy to inform these theories. Taken together these papers provide a snapshot of the 'state of the art' in the rehabilitation of word production in aphasia.

This edited volume contains articles and short reports which examine Spoken Word Access Processes, the mental processes which underlie our ability to recognise spoken words.

Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English is a landmark volume in the development of vocabulary frequency studies. Whereas previous books have in general given frequency information about the written language only, this book provides information on both speech and writing. It not only gives information about the language as a whole, but also about the differences between spoken and written English, and between different spoken and written varieties of the language. The frequencies are derived from a wide ranging and up-to-date corpus of English: the British National Corpus, which was compiled from over 4,000 written texts and spoken transcriptions representing the present day language in the UK. The book is based on a new version of the corpus (available from 2001) providing more accurate grammatical information, which is essential (for example) for distinguishing words like leaves (noun) and leaves (verb) with different meanings. The book begins with a general introduction, explaining why such information is important and highlighting interesting linguistic findings that emerge from the statistical analysis of the British National Corpus vocabulary. It also contains twenty four 'interest boxes' which highlight and comment on different aspects of frequency - for example, the most common colour words in English in order of frequency, and a comparison of male words (e.g. man) and female words (e.g. woman) in terms of their frequency.