Introdungcing English language part 24 ppt

New words for old Connect the following affixes together randomly and then try to imagine a meaning for the resulting word.. Imagine meanings for the following illegitimate back-formatio

Figure C1.1

As your next activity, you should attempt to build an archive of similar examples

of poems, cartoons or any other textual forms that you can find where the different

sounds which represent features of accent variation are represented using the

tech-nique of eye dialect Local newspapers or websites dedicated to the area where you

live are often good places to start your search, as are literary texts

The written recording of representations of different accents in texts is a

com-mon way of establishing solidarity acom-mongst individuals who share such features, as

well as simultaneously acting as a social distance mechanism for those individuals

who do not share the same pronunciation features These issues of solidarity and social

distance are crucial to the discipline of sociolinguistics, and phoneticians play a very

active role in producing sociolinguistic studies This will be explored further in D1

and throughout strand 9

WORD PLAYS

In this unit, you will be able to realise how deeply embedded are your rules of

morphology and semantics by trying out the following activities

Past and future

In Old English (AD 500 –1100), the past tense of verbs was commonly formed either

weakly by adding a dental suffix (‘-ed’ in ‘lifted’, ‘-t’ in ‘spelt’, or ‘-ed’ in writing even

where /t/ was pronounced as in ‘walked’), or strongly by an alteration in the root vowel

(‘sing – sang’, ‘run – ran’, ‘bring – brought’) In modern English, the weak form is

now standard, so new coinages are tensed with dentals: ‘accessed’, ‘hosted’, ‘sprinted’

not ‘sprount’ There are British and American variations that have diverged over

the years, reflecting the state of the dialects of American settlers at the point at which

they left regions of Britain: in the UK, meat is ‘hung’ but criminals were ‘hanged’,

a British swimmer ‘dived’ into the pool but an American swimmer ‘dove’ into the

water

Old English probably had around 300 strong past tense forms; modern English

has less than 100, so the form seems to be dying out We can imagine a

twenty-second century text as follows, that might capture for us how an Anglo-Saxon person

might regard our own English:

I runned through the woods, catched some sunshine, and goed for a paddle in the

river When I was weared out, I swimmed to the shore and eated my lunch That evening,

we lighted a fire and singed, before we all goed to bed We waked up in the morning

to find that the farmer had bringed us some eggs so we had a big breakfast before

we setted off and drived home.

Try to continue this story in twenty-second century English!

A popular anonymous rhyme exploits the comical potentials of the strong and weak

past tense systems as follows:

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Forth from his den to steal he stole His bag of chink he chunk

And many a wicked smile he smole And many a wink he wunk.

Try to write a second verse on the same principles

How would you render unusual past forms of ‘foot the bill’, ‘a bring-and-buy sale’,

‘kiss and tell’ or ‘hit and run driver’ without sounding odd?

A cautionary tale: a friend staying at her prospective parents-in-law was kept awake all night by the birds tweeting outside her window Asked in the morning by her prim host whether she had slept well, and a bit nervous, she unfortunately exclaimed, ‘Not really, the birds twat all night’

New words for old

Connect the following affixes together randomly and then try to imagine a meaning for the resulting word Then try to use the word in a sentence

intra-For example:

‘nessless’ – the desire for material things rather than abstractions;

‘nesslessness’ – the philosophy arguing for the desire for material things rather than abstractions

‘ishful’ – extreme vagueness

‘ishy’ – a bit vague

‘pre-wise’ – sometime in advance

Make up your own examples and definitions

What is semantically odd about the following words which are in fact very commonly used?

What is the difference between ‘flammable’, ‘inflammable’, ‘inflammatory’ and

‘non-flammable’? Compare your first intuitions with dictionary definitions

Imagine meanings for the following illegitimate back-formations:

‘effable’ or ‘to eff ’ (from ‘ineffable’)

‘couth’ or ‘couthy’ (from ‘uncouth’)

‘cessor’ or ‘cession’ (from ‘intercessor’)

‘monstrate’ (from ‘demonstrate’ and ‘remonstrate’)

‘turb’ (from ‘disturb’) Try to think of other similar examples Why are these illegitimate?

Why can we be ‘grateful’ but not ‘grateless’? Why can we ‘inquire’ but not ‘quire’? Why are ‘outlaws’ not the opposite of ‘in-laws’? Having been in a relationship you now have an ‘ex’: can you have a ‘pre’?

Can you think of any other oddities like these?

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How do the following break morphological rules: ‘borg’ (from ‘cyborg’ from

‘cyber-netic organism’), ‘boyf ’ (from ‘boyfriend’), ‘earfro’ (meaning excessive ear hair),

‘textrovert’ (someone who can only emote by email or text), ‘emote’ (to express

emo-tion), ‘dotcomrade’ (an online friend)?

Mean meanings

Consider the potential semantic confusions present in the following Can you explain

in each case what is going on?

The bandage was wound around the wound

The farm was used to produce produce.

The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

We must polish the Polish furniture

He could lead if he would get the lead out.

The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.

I did not object to the object

The insurance was invalid for the invalid

There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

You must bow to the woman with the bow, under the bough of the tree.

They were too close to the door to close it

The buck does funny things when the does are present.

To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.

I had to subject the subject to a series of tests

We can dispense with dispensing the punishments, as a special dispensation.

Can you think of any other similarly ambiguous phrases?

Rewriting Blake

Overleaf is a table summarising many of the common lexical semantic relationships

in English

Now take the following famous poem by William Blake, and systematically

rewrite the nouns and verbs by applying one of the lexical semantic relationships For

example, a synonymic version of the poem might be entitled ‘That Diseased Flower’,

an antonymic version might be ‘A Healthy Sink’ (you have to be quite imaginative

and lateral-thinking) Try to complete the entire poem

The Sick Rose

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm

That flies in the night

In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

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Discuss the effects of each change.

Then make a list of every occurrence in the original poem where Blake does not employ a simple philonymy (i.e every example of deviant language use) You will notice that Blake uses a lot of surprising xenonyms Note that the personification of the Rose (‘O’ and ‘thou’) is a form of semantic xenonymy Are plants usually ‘sick’, or rather

‘diseased’ (plesionym)? Is ‘worm’ the same as ‘serpent’ or ‘snake’ (and what are the semantic resonances in interpretation of this image: from the Garden of Eden myth

to a rather nasty phallic suggestiveness)? What are the interpretative effects of Blake’s actual stylistic choices?

Aside from the denotational values (the narrow definitional meanings) of Blake’s choices, what are the connotational (conventional secondary meanings), associative (more personal conventional meanings) and resonant (loose atmospheric and tonal) effects

of the style of the poem?

synonymy

antonymy

hyponymy

meronymy

polysemy/

homonymy

plesionymy

philonymy

tautonymy

xenonymy

a word is a synonym of another if its

meaning is almost exactly the same

a word is an antonym of another if its

meaning is almost exactly opposite

a word is a hyponym of another if it is

part of the general category

where an actual part–whole relationship

exists between the meanings of two words

a word is polysemous if it has developed

two distinct meanings, and a homonym

where two distinct words have converged

(often only distinguishable with a

knowledge of etymology)

a word is a plesionym if it is a

near-synonym but substitution of the word

does not leave the same truth-conditions

two words are philonyms if they collocate

in an acceptable and expected way

two words are tautonyms if they merely

repeat without adding new value,

creating a tautology

two words are xenonyms if they create

semantic dissonance

book, volume, text; letter, epistle, note, line black, white;

up, down dog, mammal;

poodle, dog hand, fingers;

car, tyres sole (shoe/fish);

seal (animal/glue)

it wasn’t misty, just foggy;

he was murdered, or rather executed the speaker can speak French;

the pregnant woman the speaker is speaking; boys will be boys

fat water;

the sadness of pencils

The prototype game

In order to demonstrate the reality of prototypicality in human categorisation, you

might like to try out some of the following

In order to discover what are the central, secondary and peripheral members of

a particular category, write down as fast as you can 30 examples of each of the

following categories:

fruit

vegetables

furniture

modes of transport

holiday resorts

things to wear for a seminar

famous artists

routes between your school/work and home

It is likely that the later items in the list of 30 are the more peripheral and marginal

ones Can you arrange each set of 30 in a radial pattern, with a central group, and less

central clusters? You are unlikely to have written them down immediately in strict

sequence

Now try to think of situations in which your three most peripheral items are treated

as more prototypical members of the category For example, a durian (a large, spiky,

oriental fruit with an indescribably bad smell – so bad it is banned on the Singapore

transit system) is a very poor example of a fruit to British minds However, in the

Singaporean context, it is a good example of a fruit – and it is a good example of an

‘exotic’ fruit – and it is an especially good example of a bad-smelling fruit

Try to play word-association by recording yourself or others saying the first

50 words that come into your head – try not to pause or hesitate Do you notice

any patterns, any clusters around certain semantic domains, and phonological or

morphological repetition – that might show the way your mind is chaining concepts

together?

DOING POLITENESS

Virtual politeness

Like several universities, Nottingham University has recently purchased its own

‘Island’ space in Second Life, the virtual world where individuals interact through

constructed personas known as ‘avatars’ Teaching and learning tools are continually

being devised for use within this virtual environment As part of the process, Colleen

McCants, a member of the University’s Information Services Team, has produced a

politeness guide for appropriate avatar ‘netiquette’ to ensure that members of the

University do not break the norms and conventions of politeness in this emergent

area of cyberspace

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