department of English
- noun
- /dɪˈpɑrtmənt əv ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/
:
departamento de inglés
- Shakespeare's plays will still be performed, even if largely unsponsored by departments of English.
Examples
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Over there is the department of English where students study literature and writing.
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Over there is the department of English.
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But this is not happening in any dramatic way in the departments of English.
Academic text (1990) -
I doubt if any department of English on earth boasts a single class or a single doctoral thesis on such a subject.
Academic text (2011) -
But I do want to acknowledge the Chairman of the Department of English, Ramon Saldivar, stand up.
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Asian and other non-Western literatures are not commonly taught in departments of English, many of which adhere to traditional models that honor accepted classics of English and American literature.
Academic text (1990) -
There is much evidence to show that it is the departments of English and literature that have been most heavily saturated with the adversarial ethos or political correctness in recent times.
Academic text (1997) -
In Malawi, oral literature is taught to undergraduates who are in their second and fourth years of university education in the departments of English, Chichewa, and Linguistics at Chancellor College, Zomba.
Academic text (1995) -
She is an associate professor in the department of English at Western Michigan University.
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The department of English offers a range of courses on Shakespeare and contemporary authors.
Synonyms
6
2.8
A part of a college or university that teaches English language and literature
How Big
Surface Forms
Morphology
department + of + English
The phrase is fully compositional: 'department' (an organizational division) + 'of' (linking/possessive/partitive marker) + 'English' (the subject area) yields the meaning 'the division responsible for English'. This is a common, cross-linguistically transparent syntactic pattern, so a B1 learner who knows the parts will readily infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Department of English comes from the idea of a department as a separate 'part' of a school that focuses on English. Imagine a group of teachers, classes, and books in one place; that's why the phrase means the school division that teaches and studies English.