HG8011: Detecting Meaning with Sherlock Holmes 
Course designed with help from:
Jane
Time and Place: Tue 16:30–19:30 on-line, see NTUlearn for the link.
In this elective we will detect how language conveys meaning, using examples taken from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. The course considers meaning from the smallest levels of words and morphemes, up through sentences to the stories as a whole. Finally, we consider how Sherlock Holmes stories have entered into popular culture, both through translation into other languages and into other media, such as films and TV.
In the first half of the course, we will look at how words convey meanings and how they can be combined to express richer meaning (semantics). We will show that meaning does not only come from the words themselves, but also from our own understanding of them, and that words can convey much more than simple truth-conditional meanings (pragmatics).
In the second half of the course, we will show how the stories (and other works adapted from them) convey meaning to the reader, as well as how the meaning becomes part of our cultural heritage.
Course Content
This course introduces basic skills in semantic and literary analysis, such as:
- Distinguishing word senses
- Understanding how meaning is built up compositionally
- Understanding how words can convey feelings
- Understanding how meaning can be conveyed indirectly
- Identify characteristics of modern detective fiction
- Understanding how to approach a text in a critical manner
- Understanding how to appreciate the historical and cultural context of a text
- Understanding how stories are transformed in different media
- Understanding how cinematic elements affect our understanding
- Understanding how meaning changes as it is transmitted in different languages and cultures
Course Page: https://bond-lab.github.io/Detecting-Meaning/.
There is no set text-book, all the material is covered in the lectures. As a result, you need to actually come to the lectures. General guidelines to the course are given in lecture one. You must read at least four of the Sherlock Holmes' short stories, and will carry out detailed analysis of the meaning at various levels — this course has homework. However, it is designed to be as interesting as possible, and the stories are some of the most popular in the world.
Course Outline
Required Reading
- Doyle, Arthur Conan (1892) The Adventure of the Speckled Band (SPEC) (Another version; and another; and another; simplified English)
- Doyle, Arthur Conan (1903) The Adventure of the Dancing Men (DANC) (Another version; yet another)
- Doyle, Arthur Conan (1893) The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter (GREE) (Another version)
- Doyle, Arthur Conan (1891) The Red-Headed League (REDH) (Another version)
- This year's story:
- Doyle, Arthur Conan (1893) The Adventure of the Final Problem (FINA) (Another Version)
Suggested Reading
- Doyle, Arthur Conan (1901) The Hound of the Baskervilles (HOUN) (Another Version)
Other Resources
- Sherlock Studies and Detective Fiction
- Baring-Gould, William (1967). The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. New York: Clarkson N. Potter. ISBN 0-517-50291-7.
- Drake, David (2009) Crime Fiction at the Time of the Exhibition: the Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin Synergies Royaume-Uni et Irlande (Gerflint)
- Jay Finley Christ (1947) An Irregular Guide to Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street Argus Books (Canonical Abbreviations)
- Doyle, Arthur Conan (1982) How I Made My List Strand Magazine (August)
- Klinger, Leslie (2005). The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-05916-2.
- Ronald A. Knox (1929) The Best English Detective Stories of 1928, 1929, Introduction. Horace Liveright
- McCaw, Neil (2016) Who IS Sherlock Holmes? TEDEd Animation
- Donald A. Redmond (1990) Sherlock Holmes among the Pirates : copyright and Conan Doyle in America 1890–1930 Greenwood Press.
- Dorothy L. Sayers (1947) Unpopular Opinions: Twenty-One Essays. Harcourt, Brace and Company (New York).
- John Scaggs (2005) Crime Fiction (The New Critical Idiom) Routledge,
- Tzvetan Todorov (1971) The Typology of Detective Fiction in The Poetics of Prose Translated by Richard Howard pp 42–52
- Semantics and Lexicography
- Christiane Fellbaum, ed. (1998) Wordnet: An Electronic Lexical Database. MIT Press
- Sidney I. Landau (1989) Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
- Lyons, John (1977) Semantics. Cambridge University Press
- Saeed, John (2009). Semantics. 3rd Edition. Wiley-Blackwell.
- Simple Writer
- Stylistics
- Geoffrey Leech and Michael H. Short (2007) Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose 2nd Edition. (London: Longman)
- Ling 131 Language & Style: a Stylistics course within the Department of Linguistics and English Language (LAEL) at Lancaster University.
- Holmes in Translation
- Cheung, Martha P.Y. (2006) An anthology of Chinese discourse on translation/edited with annotations and commentary Brookland (Vol 1 From earliest times to the Buddhist project.; pages 42-48)
- Hao, Ruijuan (2012) Transnational Negotiations and the Interplay Between Chinese and Western Detective Fiction at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, PhD UC Riverside
- Hung, Eva (1998) Giving Texts a Context: Chinese Translations of Classical English Detective Stories 1896-1916 in David E. Pollard (ed.) Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China John Benjamin's
- Seago, Karen and Lei, Victoria (2014) ‘Looking East and Looking West’: Crime Genre Conventions and Tropes in Comparative Critical Studies, 11(2-3) 315-335
- Şehnaz Tahir-Gürçağlar (2008) Sherlock Holmes in the interculture: Pseudotranslation and anonymity in Turkish literature. In Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger, and Daniel Simeoni, editors, Beyond descriptive translation studies : investigations in homage to Gideon Toury, chapter 10, pages 133–151. John Benjamins.
- Ping, Zhang (2005) SHERLOCK HOLMES IN CHINA Perspectives 13(2), 106-114 (full text available through the proxy)
- 钟文苓 (1934) 《关於福尔摩斯二三事》 万象(1934年) 1942年第2年第4期
- 程 小情 [Cheng Xiaoqing] (1946) 論探偵小説
- 范 伯群 [Fan Boqun] (1985) 论程 小青的 《霍桑探案》
- Wikis and more
- Courses on Sherlock Holmes and Detective Fiction
- Sherlock Holmes: Teaching English Through Detective Fiction, by Pamela J. Greene (Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute)
- GEH1005/GEK1021: Crime Fiction in English and Chinese by Dr Zhao Zhen Xing (NUS)
- Student Reviews
- Leonard The Lemon (2019) End of Freshman Year: Module Review (again!) (Internet Archive)
Assessment
My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work! The Sign of Four
At the start of the semester you will be given a short passage from one of the stories that will be used by you throughout the course to study meaning. In the three projects you will examine and annotate different levels of meaning using on-line tools provided. This may be slightly harder if you are not a native speaker of English, but we will try to link to translations of the stories in as many languages as possible.
Project 1: Disambiguation (20%: individual work)
Identify and annotate word meaning for your own passage of one of the stories using wordnet as the sense inventory.
Project 2: Comparison (20%: group work)
Compare and contrast your annotations with other annotators; re-annotate based on your discussion and leave comments for at least five words.
Project 3: Non-compositional meaning (20%: individual work)
- Identify interpretations that are not strictly compositional: idioms and metaphors
Quiz (40%: 40 MCQ)
Demonstrate a general understanding of the material, including not limited to:
- Identifying characteristics of modern detective fiction
- Identifying and analyzing key passages and characters from the assigned texts and videos (the required readings and the videos we saw in class).
- Demonstrate an understanding of how narrative (and literary) devices function in Sherlock Holmes’ short stories
- Consider how cultural and historical contexts shape and influence the stories
- Understand how popular culture takes, reshapes and extends
- Demonstrate an understanding of how video differs from text in how stories are structured
This quiz is mainly based on materials from the lectures on Sherlock Holmes (but will have a few questions on from the earlier materials on Semantics). If you miss the quiz for some reason, please follow the standard procedures.
Sample questions (correct answer in bold)
- What did Irene Adler do when she thought her house was on
fire?
[From SCAN]
- Got the picture from its hiding place
- Put out the fire
- Ran out of the house
- Rushed for her jewelry box
- What is the relation the word chair has to the
word leg?
- Synonymy
- Hypernymy
- Meronymy
- Antonymy
I would like to use the results of your analysis in projects 1–3 to help further in research on meaning. If you would like me not to use your input, you may email me at any time up to one week after you get your results for this semester. If you do so, I will discard your input. Otherwise, I will use it to find out more about meaning, and you will be credited as 'students of HG8011'. I will also make it available for others to use under the same license as the materials I create (CC BY 4.0).
Course
materials created by us are licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and are
available
at https://github.com/bond-lab/Detecting-Meaning/.