Analyzing Use of Thanks to You: Insights for Language Teaching and Assessment in Second and Foreign Language Contexts

This investigation of thanks to you in British and American usage was precipitated by a situation at an American university, in which a native Arabic speaker said thanks to you in isolation, making his intended meaning unclear. The study analyzes use of thanks to you in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus to gain insights for English language instruction /assessment in the American context, as well as English-as-a-lingua-franca contexts where the majority of speakers are not native speakers of English or are speakers of different varieties of English but where American or British English are for educational purposes the standard varieties. Analysis of the two corpora revealed three functions for thanks to you common to British and American usage: expressing gratitude, communicating "because of you" positively, and communicating "because of you" negatively (as in sarcasm). A fourth use of thanks to you, thanking journalists/guests for being on news programs/talk shows, occurred in the American corpus only. Analysis indicates that felicitous use of thanks to you for each of these meanings depends on the presence of a range of factors, both linguistic and material, in the context of utterance

Transformed and Transforming: What God Effects through the Presence of Christians in the World

(Excerpt) On the model of mystagogy: remember your experience last night at the vigil, please, and recall these words from the eucharistic prayer: God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us. Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this table for solace only and not for strength; for pardon only and not for renewal. Let the grace of this Holy Communion make us one body, one spirit in Christ that we may worthily serve the world in his name.\u27 And from Welcome to Christ: Dear Christian friends: Baptized into the priesthood of Christ, we are all called by the Holy Spirit to offer ourselves to the Lord of all creation in thanksgiving for all that God has done and continues to do fur us. It is our privilege to affirm those who are endeavoring to carry out their vocation as Christians in the world.

On the Table-Servers: Ministry in the Assembly

(excerpt) Christianity came into existence at table. The earliest churches — that is, the earliest assemblies — seem to have continued the meal tradition of Jesus, the meal tradition with which the gospels are filled: \u27Behold a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and of sinners,\u27 went one description of Jesus (Luke 7:34). Christian communities struggled to understand and maintain Jesus’ remarkable open commensality — his astonishing, God-signifying, religiously offensive and politically dangerous eating and drinking with the hoi polloi, his critique of the dining-room practice of the closed circle, his re-working of mealmeaning

Holiday Masterworks, December 7, 2013

This is the concert program of the Holiday Masterworks performance on Saturday, December 7, 2013 at 7:30 p.m., at Marsh Chapel, 735 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were A Ceremony of Carols, Op. 28 by Benjamin Britten, and Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian Carlo Menotti. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund