The Primitive Vocabulary
The items included in a primitive vocabulary [,,,] fall naturally into a number of distinct categories; the list can be structured in various ways. Most obviously, the words are divided between those referring to shapes and things, movements and actions and qualities and relations. More broadly, one might say that the items in the list divide into those which are specifiable in spatial terms and those which are specifiable in terms of time, and that relational words, as well as words relating to objects or movements, can be referred primarily to space or time relations. Another basis of structure of items in this list is the sensory modality with which a word is primarily associated: things seen, heard, felt, tasted, smelled, felt internally, and so on. Another basis of arrangement of items in the list is in terms of the specific physical structures of which the items normally form part or in which they are experienced, for example, parts of the body are naturally grouped together as are movements of those body-parts, objects found in a room or a house can be grouped together as can be objects in the external landscape, whether the smaller-scale landscape of street and neighborhood or the larger landscape of field, wood, lake, sea and sky. Objects can be classified in terms of their size or use as instruments, as parts of sequences of activity or types of occupation, furniture, clothing, utensils. Against this wide variety of possibilities of classification of the items to which the verbs in the Primitive Vocabulary relate one can set the traditional groupings of grammar, the analysis into parts of speech, nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, adverbs, pronouns; the traditional classification has a rather arid and academic air compared with the groupings and structuring the words in the Primitive Vocabulary given by experience. Though MOUTH can be classified as noun, DRINK as verb and SWEET as adjective, the real experiential grouping of the items is as part of one process for
the child, for example, drinking a glass of milk or a cup of tea, and this sort of analysis is closer to that suggested by C. Fillmore in his case grammar, to the concept of selection restrictions used in transformational grammar and […] Roger Shank’s approach in terms of ‘scripts’ […].
(Allott R. “The Natural Origin of Language: The Structural Inter-Relation of Language, Visual Perception and Action)
Exercise 4.
The following text is an excerpt from a manual on English grammar. The italicized words and expressions are connectives and parenthetical phrases which provide cohesive links in the text and organize the textual material in a logical manner. Comment on the meaning and function of each particular italicized item.
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Words and lexemes
Syntax deals with combinations of words, we have said, morphology with the form of words. The term ‘word’, however, is used in a variety of senses, so that it will be helpful to begin with some clarification of how it will be used here. Consider then the sentences ‘This tooth needs attention’ and ‘These teeth need attention’. Are ‘tooth’ and ‘teeth’ instances of the same word or of different words? In one sense they are clearly different: they differ in pronunciation, spelling, meaning and in their grammatical behavior. In another sense, however, they are manifestations of a single element, and indeed they are traditionally said to be ‘forms of the same word’. We thus have two distinct concepts here, the second more abstract than the first: I will use ‘word’ in the less abstract sense and introduce the term ‘lexeme’ for the more abstract one. Thus I will say that ‘tooth’ and ‘teeth’ are different words, but the forms of the same lexeme. […] ‘Tooth’ is the singular form of the lexeme ‘tooth’, while ‘teeth’ is the plural form.
More precisely, we will say that ‘tooth’ and ‘teeth’ are different inflectional forms of ‘tooth’, and will speak of ‘singular’ and ‘plural’ here as inflectional properties. Similarly with verbs: ‘sang’ and ‘sung’, for example, are respectively the past tense and past participle forms of the lexeme ‘sing’. The set of inflectional forms of a lexeme constitutes an inflectional paradigm: the paradigm for tooth contains the two forms ‘tooth’ and ‘teeth’, while that for ‘sing’ contains ‘sang’, ‘sung’, ‘sing’ and various others: verb inflection is a good deal more complex than noun inflection and we will be looking at it in detail in Ch. 3 – at this point it is sufficient to be aware of the concept of inflection.
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The distinction we have made between word and lexeme makes our concept of word more precise, but there remains one further point to be clarified. Consider the pairs ‘[The window was] clean’ vs ‘[I’ll] clean [the window]’ and ‘[She drew some cash from the] bank [by the post office]’ vs ‘[She lay on the] bank [of the river]’. The two ‘clean’s’ are forms of different lexemes: the first is a form of the adjective ‘clean’, which has ‘cleaner’ and ‘cleanest’ as its other forms, whereas the second is a form of the verb ‘clean’, which has ‘cleaned’, ‘cleans’, etc. as its other forms. The difference between the two ‘bank’s’ is lexical rather than grammatical: they are different lexical items – i.e. different items of the vocabulary.
(Huddleston R. “English Grammar: An Outline”)
Exercise 5.
The following text presents the author’s preliminary remarks on the organization of his study of linguistic data. However, the manner of narration is strictly impersonal. Analyze the italicized expressions, with the verbs used both in the active and passive voices, from the point of view of the expression of impersonality in academic writing. Suggest Russian equivalents to the given expressions.
Point of view in narrative fiction: preliminaries
Following the principle of scholars like Boris Uspensky and Roger Fowler, whose work will be discussed later, four important categories of point of view are identified here. The first two are spatial and temporal point of view, terms which, in addition to being fairly self-explanatory, will be developed in detail quite soon. The third category, by far the most important as far as this and the following chapter are concerned, is point of view on the psychological plane. Psychological point of view refers to the ways in which narrative events are mediated through the consciousness of the teller of the story. It will encompass the means by which a fictional world is slanted in a particular way or the means by which narrators construct, in linguistic terms, their own view of the story they tell. Psychological point of view extends from authorial omniscience to a single character’s perhaps restricted version of ‘reality’. […] By the end of this chapter, a clearer picture of what is meant by psychological point of view and why it should be prioritized in the context of literary communication will, I hope, have emerged.
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The fourth category of point of view, point of view on the ideological plane, has already received some attention in chapter 1. For the reasons explained there, discussion of this plane will be withheld until the analysis has been widened in scope to include discourse types other than narrative fiction.
Keeping in mind these general aims, this chapter will be structured as follows. The next section will introduce the concepts of spatial and temporal point of view and will suggest ways in which they may be studied from a linguistic perspective. Section 2.3. outlines the techniques which writers employ for the representation of speech and thought in narrative. This will be important generally to the issues covered in chapter 3, but it will also introduce terms which will feature in the more theoretical discussion undertaken in the section which immediately follows in this chapter. This discussion considers three broad bands of research which have influenced the study of point of view in narrative. For convenience, these three bands are labelled ‘structuralist’, ‘generative’ and ‘interpersonal’, the last of these providing the point of entry to the more detailed, analytic focus of the next chapter.
(Simpson P. “Language, Ideology and Point of View”)
Exercise 6.
Identify lexical and syntactic expressive means and stylistic devices in the given extracts from scientific prose.
A large part of industrial America is rushing to get on the nuclear bandwagon.
Branched chain paraffins will be the fair-haired boys in our future gasolines.
Calcium cyanamide has been getting a big play in Germany recently.
Buick has stolen a march on the rest of industry with a cast-iron V-6 engine.
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The amount of energy that has to be dissipated is clearly enormous.
The energy loss has markedly reduced.
This system is conducive to high volumetric efficiency.
This type of mixing is often incidental to other stages of the industrial process, e.g. size reduction.
These filters adapt easily to automatic processing of many materials.
The steel forges well.
The spectral lines provide one dramatic example of the discreteness in nature.
Modern technology is growing at a very rapid rate, and new devices are appearing on the horizon much more frequently.
The limitations of existing theories must be adequately understood if they are not to be used in places where they are invalid.
This condition, however, changes at certain critical energies of the electrons. At these critical energies the gas atoms do absorb energy, and a sudden drop in the electron current is simultaneously observed.
The success of Einstein’s theory again required thinking of light as “quantified”. The indivisible quantum of light is called the photon, and it has the energy hv. This success served to give further support to Planck’s quantum hypothesis for black body radiation.
Classically, we should expect the stopping voltage to be different for different intensities. Furthermore we should not expect any simple direct dependence of the stopping voltage on the frequency of the light used.
Exercise 7.
The extract given below is a ‘gapped’ text. Parts of the paragraphs have been taken out, and you have to decide where they fit. To do this task, it is necessary to understand the logical development of the given text. The following procedure could prove useful: (a) read the main parts of the text first; they are designated by figures [1] – [5]; (b) highlight words that refer to particular theories and scholars; (c) make sure you understand the order of presenting ideas and facts; (c) read the parts that have been removed; they are designated by letters [A] – [E]; (d) look for grammatical and lexical links between the parts of the paragraphs.
‘Meaning is use’
[1]
As we saw in part 1, linguists who define language in terms of communication argue that to describe language it is necessary to describe how people use it in actual, individual contexts. For these linguists, the relationship between context and meaning is of paramount importance. Many would argue that it does not even make sense to try to discuss ‘meaning’ as a feature independent of context. […]
[2]
The basis for this view of meaning can be found in various philosophical approaches, particularly some that were developed in the middle part of the twentieth century. In many cases the philosophers who developed the view that meaning should be explained in terms of use were reacting against extreme ‘truth’ theories of meaning. For them the problems that theories such as verificationism ran into were just too big. […]
[3]
A name that you will probably come across when you are reading about accounts of meaning based on use is that of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who spent much of his working at Cambridge University during the early and middle part of the twentieth century. He is credited with coining the phrase ‘Meaning is use’, and therefore with inspiring this whole approach to language. If you read his early work, however, you would not be able to predict that this would happen. […]
[4]
Wittgenstein was not the only philosopher prompted by the problems with truth-conditional accounts of language to look for another way of explaining meaning. At much the same time as he was developing his ideas in Cambridge, a group of philosophers in Oxford were thinking along similar lines. We will consider some of their ideas here because they are part of the reaction within philosophy against truth-conditional accounts of meaning. However, as we will see, they did not necessarily conclude that it was possible or desirable to equate meaning with use. This group became known as the ‘ordinary language philosophers’. […]
[5]
Austin put his ideas into practice and looked into the use of various areas of vocabulary. This involved a process that he described as ‘linguistic botanising’. Comparing the study of language to that of an empirical science, such as the study of plant life, he argued that it was possible to collect examples of words and their usages and draw up a general picture of how the language explained a certain area of experience. Sometimes in collaboration with some of his Oxford colleagues, Austin would compile lists of related words, drawing on his own knowledge of the language as well as on dictionaries and other books. […]
(Chapman S. “Thinking about Language: Theories of English”)
[A]
[…] In fact at the start of his career his approach to meaning was very definitely in terms of truth, correspondence and logic. But later in life he became aware of some of the problems with this, and he suggested instead that the meaning of words could be understood only in relation to how they were used in everyday interactions. […] He not only defined meaning in terms of use, he also saw it as having no independent existence apart from individual instances of use.
[B]
[…] As this title suggests, they were convinced that ordinary language, the language that people used in their everyday interactions, deserved serious study in its own right. Any account of meaning would have to explain how it worked in ordinary language, not just in the technical languages of philosophy and logic. One of the most influential philosophers of this group was J.L. Austin. In many of his writings he attacked other philosophers for their reliance on specialized philosophical terminology, and for ignoring ‘our common stock of words’, or the resources available in ordinary language for describing experience.
[C]
[…] Then he would think about the possible contexts in which these words could appear, and the different meanings they would have in those contexts. This part was done through intuition, relying on his and other’s own knowledge as speakers of the language. Austin argued that this process showed up the many inaccurate and counterintuitive ways in which philosophers tended to use language: ways that immediately cast doubt on the validity of their theories. He also discovered some particular ways in which people frequently used language that just could not be explained in a traditional truth-conditional account of meaning.
[D]
[…] They wanted to find an entirely different way of explaining how language works. This decision was necessarily based on a belief that natural language, far from being too messy and imprecise to be of any use to philosophers, was a valid focus of study in its own right and needed its own type of description and explanation.
[E]
[…] The meaning of a word is entirely defined by how speakers use it in context; to suggest that meaning has some unseen, independent existence is to allow unjustifiable mentalist elements to creep into an account of language. In other words, these linguists reject the distinction between semantics and pragmatics as an unnecessary imposition on human communication.
Exercise 8.
The texts below (drawn from O. Meshkov and M. Lambert “Learn to Translate by Translating”, Moscow, 2000) present an extract from a Russian popular science article and its translation into English. Comment on stylistic aspects of the given translation including the following linguistic units into your analysis: (a) grammatical forms and structures; (b) lexical items; (c) phraseological units; (d) attributive groups; (e) expressive means and/or stylistic devices.
Случай плюс кое-что еще…
Известно, что атомное ядро состоит из положительно заряженных тяжелых ядерных частиц – протонов и не имеющих заряда аналогичных по массе нейтронов, открытых Джеймсом Чедвигом за два года до опытов Ферми. Количество протонов в ядре определяет его заряд, а следовательно, количество и расположение орбитальных электронов, компенсирующих положительный заряд ядра, и атом в целом остается нейтральным. Количество и расположение электронов на орбитах полностью определяют все химические свойства атома, все бесчисленные комбинации элементов, все химические реакции, которые лежат в основе бесконечного разнообразия живого и неживого мира. Эти электроны и определяют место химического элемента в периодической системе Менделеева. Периодическая система перестала быть эмпирическим законом химии. Получив надежную основу в теории строения атомов, она приобрела простой, но весьма существенный физический смысл и стала основным законом атомной физики. На основе известных сегодня науке данных, пожалуй, не будет преувеличением утверждать, что это единственный универсальный и достаточно простой, чтобы быть всеобщим, закон строения вещества, открытый человеком.
Даже грибы надо искать, руководствуясь каким-то правилом, - шутил создатель периодического закона Д.И. Менделеев. Найденные им принципы строения вещества открыли людям десятки путей для поисков и создания по своему желанию новых строительных материалов Вселенной, открыли дверь в волшебную кухню природы.
Chance plus…
The atomic nucleus is known to consist of heavy, positively charged particles, or protons, and of neutrons, which are identical with them in mass but have no charge (and which had been discovered by James Chadwick two years before Fermi’s experiments). The number of protons in a nucleus determines its charge, and consequently the number and arrangement of the orbital electrons balancing its positive charge. Thus an atom as a whole is neutral. The number of its electrons and their arrangement in orbits determine all the chemical properties of an atom, all the countless combinations of elements, and all the chemical reactions that underlie the infinite variety of the world of living and non-living matter. Electrons also determine the positions of the elements in Mendeleev’s Periodic System. The Periodic System is no longer an empirical law of chemistry. Having become firmly grounded in the theory of atomic structure, it has acquired a simple but crucial physical sense and become a basic law of atomic physics. Proceeding from the data currently known to science, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it is the only universal law of the structure of matter discovered by man, as well as the only one sufficiently simple to be universal.
D.I. Mendeleev, the creator of the Periodic Law, used to joke that one must be guided by certain rules even when picking up mushrooms. The principles underlying the structure of matter discovered by the scholar opened up dozens of ways for people to look for, and produce (when a need arises), new building materials of the Universe. These principles also opened the door to Nature’s magic kitchen.
Exercise 9.
The following text presents an excerpt from the introduction to the book of Steven Pinker “The Language Instinct”. Read the given text and answer the questions that follow.
The Language Instinct: Introduction
1. Language is so tightly woven into human experience that it is scarcely possible to imagine life without it. Chances are that if you find two or more people together anywhere on earth, they will soon be exchanging words. When there is no one to talk with, people talk to themselves, to their dogs, even to their plants. In our social relations, the race is not to the swift but to the verbal – the spellbinding orator, the silver-tongued seducer, the persuasive child who wins the battle of wills against a brawnier parent. Aphasia, the loss of language following brain injury, is devastating, and in severe cases family members may feel that the whole person is lost forever.
2. This book is about human language. Unlike most books with “language” in the title, it will not chide you about proper usage, trace the origins of idioms and slang, or divert you with palindromes, anagrams, eponyms, or those precious names for groups of animals like “exaltation of larks”. For I will be writing not about the English language or any other language, but about something much more basic: the instinct to learn, speak, and understand language. For the first time in history, there is something to write about. Some thirty-five years ago a new science was born. Now called “cognitive science”, it combines tools from psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy and neurobiology to explain the workings of human intelligence. The science of language, in particular, has seen spectacular advances in the years since. There are many phenomena of language that we are coming to understand nearly as well as we understand how a camera works or what the spleen is for. I hope to communicate these exciting discoveries, some of them as elegant as anything in modern science, but I have another agenda as well.
3. The recent illumination of linguistic abilities has revolutionary implications for our understanding of language and its role in human affairs, and for our view of humanity itself. Most educated people already have opinions about language. They know that it is man’s most important cultural invention, the quintessential example of his capacity to use symbols, and a biologically unprecedented event irrevocably separating him from other animals. They know that language pervades thought, with different languages causing their speakers to construe reality in different ways. They know that children learn to talk from role models and caregivers. They know that grammatical sophistication used to be nurtured in the schools, but sagging educational standards and the debasements of popular culture have led to a frightening decline in the ability of the average person to construct a grammatical sentence. They also know that English is a zany, logic-defying tongue, in which one drives on a parkway and parks in a driveway, plays at a recital, and recites at a play. They know that English spelling takes such wackiness to even greater heights – George Bernard Shaw complained that fish could just as sensibly spelled ghoti (gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in nation) – and that only institutional inertia prevents the adoption of a more rational, spell-it-like-sounds system.
4. In the pages that follow, I will try to convince you that every one of these common opinions is wrong! And they are all wrong for a single reason. Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. For these reasons some cognitive scientists have described language as a psychological faculty, a mental organ, a neural system, and a computational module. But I prefer the admittedly quaint term “instinct”. It conveys the idea that people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs. Web-spinning was not invented by some unsung spider genius and does not depend on having had the right education or on having an aptitude for architecture or the construction trades. Rather, spiders spin spider webs because they have spider brains, which give them the urge to spin and the competence to succeed. Although there are differences between webs and words, I will encourage you to see language in this way, for it helps to make sense of the phenomena we will explore.
5. Thinking of language as an instinct inverts the popular wisdom, especially as it has been passed down in the canon of the humanities and social sciences. Language is no more a cultural invention than is an upright posture. It is not a manifestation of a general capacity to use symbols: a three-year-old, we shall see, is a grammatical genius, but is quite incompetent at the visual arts, religious iconography, traffic signs, and the other staples of the semiotics curriculum. Though language is a magnificent ability unique to Homo sapiens among living species, it does not call for sequestering the study of humans from the domain of biology, for a magnificent ability unique to a particular human species is far from unique in the animal kingdom. Some kinds of bats home in on flying insects using Doppler sonar. Some kinds of migratory birds navigate thousands of miles by calibrating the positions of the constellations against the time of day and year. In nature’s talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale.
6. Once you begin to look at language not as the ineffable essence of human uniqueness but as a biological adaptation to communicate information, it is no longer as tempting to see language as an insidious shaper of thought, and, we shall see, it is not. Moreover, seeing language as one of nature’s engineering marvels – an organ with “that perfection of structure and co-adaptation which justly excites our admiration,” in Darwin’s words – gives us a new respect for your ordinary Joe and the much-maligned English language (or any language). The complexity of language, from the scientist’s point of view, is part of our biological birthright; it is not something that parents teach their children or something that must elaborated in school – as Oscar Wilde said, “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” A preschooler’s tacit knowledge of grammar is more sophisticated than the thickest style manual or the most state-of-the-art computer language system, and the same applies to all healthy human beings. Finally, since language is the product of a well-engineered biological instinct, we shall see that it is not the nutty barrel of monkeys that entertainer-columnists make it out to be. I will try to restore some dignity to the English vernacular, and will even have some nice things to say about its spelling system…
Questions on the text in general
1. What is the theme of the text?
2. What is the author’s main claim? How does he prove it?
Questions on style
1. How could the style and the substyle of the text be defined?
2. Make a list of features of this type of text in English (You may use other texts of the same kind). Give examples from the text to substantiate your ideas.
3. In what respect are texts of this substyle in English different from those in Russian?
4. Choose a paragraph and translate it to show the difference in the conventional ways of writing texts of this kind in Russian – make necessary changes to adapt it and to make it sound natural in Russian.
Questions for text analysis
1. Where does the author explicitly formulates his thesis statement? Does he repeat or paraphrase it anywhere in the text? Substantiate your answer with references to the text.
2. Define the communicative function of the text. How is it linked to the theme of the text?
3. Try to find out what other aims (besides the main aim) are being pursued in the text. What explicit and implicit means are used to convey these aims?
4. What is the difference between the communicative function and pragmatic aim of a text? Formulate this difference with reference to the analyzed text.
5. Analyze the author’s use of expressive means and stylistic devices. Comment on the effect achieved through the use of figurative language.
6. Does the author use emotional or rational appeal to support his claims? Substantiate your answer with examples from the text.
7. What features of writing prevail: those of argumentative or persuasive writing? Give instances from the text to prove your opinion.
8. Sum up your ideas about the ways the aims of the text are achieved.
Unit 4
Newspaper Style
The English newspaper style may be defined as a system of interrelated lexical, phraseological and grammatical means which is perceived by the community speaking the language as a separate unity that basically serves the purpose of informing and instructing the reader.
Newspaper style can also be defined as a purposeful and thematic arrangement of language means in order to bring up-to-date, accurate and convincing information on current affairs. However, this concerns only news, commentaries, articles, reports, and the like. On the pages of a newspaper one can also find stories and poems, crossword puzzles, chess problems, sports results, TV or radio program listings and many other similar kinds of printed material which can hardly be characterized as representing newspaper style. Nor can articles in special fields, such as science and technology, art, literature, etc. be classed as belonging to newspaper style.
Since the primary function of newspaper style is to impart information, only printed serving this purpose comes under newspaper style proper. The basic genres of newspaper style are as follows:
- headlines;
- brief news items and communiqués;
- articles purely informational in character;
- press reports;
- advertisements and announcements.
The listed genres of newspaper style have their own style- and genre-forming features. One feature which is common to all the genres is the choice of lexical items and set expressions. The bulk of the vocabulary used in newspaper style is neutral and common literary. But apart from this, newspaper style has its specific vocabulary items which include the following:
- Special political and economic terms, e.g. apartheid, by-election, per capita production.
- Non-term political vocabulary, e.g. public, people, progressive, nation-wide unity.
- Newspaper clichés, i.e. stereotyped expressions, commonplace phrases familiar to the reader, e.g. vital issue, well-informed sources, overwhelming majority, amid stormy applause.
- Bookish clichés which more than anything else reflect the traditional manner of expression in newspaper writing. They are commonly looked upon as a defect of style (e.g. captains of industry, pillars of society). But nevertheless clichés are indispensable in newspaper style: the prompt the necessary associations and prevent ambiguity and misunderstanding.
- Abbreviations. News items, press reports and headlines abound in abbreviations of various kinds as it helps to save space and time. Among the types of abbreviations used in newspapers are the following:
(a) abbreviations read as individual letters: WHO (read as W-H-O) – World Health Organization; BBC – British Broadcasting Corporation; UN – United Nations; PM – Prime Minister; MP – Member of Parliament;
(b) abbreviations read as words that are called acronyms: NATO [neitou] – North Atlantic Treaty Organization; OPEC [oupek] Organization of Petroleum Exploring Countries; AIDS [eidz] – Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome;
(c) commonly accepted abbreviations used in titles: Mr, Ms, Mrs, Dr, Rev, etc.
Part 1
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