Sounds in Language
Words are made up of units of sound. English can be very distinct from other languages by the way the mouth is used to articulate a word. A speaker of English can distinguish between a B and T in words such as ‘den’ and ‘ten’. They can also hear the vowels in words such as ‘pat’ or ‘pen’. These two previous words would be examples of using vowels in English, but English has words like ‘dead’ or ‘dared’ which include vowels sounds but not in the general sense of the vowel sound rules AEIO and U. The units of sound are now put into categories as short vowels or long vowels.
The words sounds and slices can be used to describe how a word such as ‘pat’ includes three sounds; the ‘P’ sound then ‘A’ and ‘T’. This word is then a slice of a sentence. The main factor is that a phrase with the words ‘those three oranges’ highlights where successive vowels and consonants can be heard with some with higher stresses on them.
Moreover, attention can be drawn to the use of the mouth and tongue when enunciating any word. English speakers have a distinct use of the mouth that enables them to say their vowels and consonants in words. There are sound differences even within English, but there are further differences if a native speaker wanted to learn Italian. Using an Italian word such as ‘babbo’ for daddy, the English person would say it in a normal English speaking way, but as with the Italian language, the vocal cords begin to vibrate before the mouth is opened. The crossover of languages shows the use of the same letter sounds which can be easily heard as other letters by other speakers of another language.
One final aspect of language is the movement of the lips and the posture of the tongue. Phrases like ‘three cleans’ or ‘two clues’ draw attention to the use of the lips and tongue. There is certain timing for both which is in the mouth position when carrying over from word to word or syllable to syllable. This shows the main crux of language when talking about sound units; we are looking at the way the speaker constructs a voice utterance.
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Syntax – a Reflective Essay
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I see syntax as an important part of language study and reading books like The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker has inspired me to take a closer look at how we use our language and how a sentence is formed. I hope with this essay I can give a little insight into how syntax is used.
It is clear to see that the sentence ‘Man hits animal’ is not the same as ‘Animal hits man’. We know this because we use a code, or set of rules, to translate between orders of words and combinations of thoughts. Generally speaking, this set of rules is called a generative grammar. Syntax works on a prescriptive use of grammar although spoken English is not as formal as we think and works along the lines of a more descriptive method. Descriptive syntax is about understanding the rules that a speech community employs by examining the way that the members of that community actually do talk.
English language holds rules that can create larger more complex structures. It is by learning phrase and clause structures that gives us a clearer picture of syntax. These structures are what make the syntax rules. We find that it is possible to create an infinite number of sentences, all of which can express meaningful thought. Thus it is possible to construct sentences that the speaker has never used before. It can be said that English has a finite number of rules which facilitate an infinite number of sentences. Syntax shows that sentences and the relationship of their component parts works in English. To understand a sentence one cannot merely pay attention to the order of words. For example, in the class we learnt about complex, compound and simple sentences and components in them.
1. They were the boys who arrived to see and I knew all of them who came.
And = FANBOYS (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So)
Independent Clause (x2) = They were the boys / I know all of them
Dependent Clause (x2) = who arrived to see / who came
Who arrived = the WHO is subjective case
Infinitive phrase = to see
Sentence type = compound complex
As above, syntax is the system that speakers and writers use when they combine words into phrases and clauses, ultimately creating meaning in their structures.
To conclude I have noticed that all sentences have basic patterns. I can now say that in many respects there is a mechanical basis in the brain, and all thought has a syntax, or code. So, we see that our utterances represent this internal coding by way of our common syntax.
On what basis can or should we treat a text a canonical? Discuss with reference to two texts
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The treatment of a text considered canonical can take many individual forms, particularly when it is appraised as life-enhancing. A canonical text reaches thoughts and ideas that the reader might never have imagined. It should possess a value that makes it meaningful to our understanding of what it means to be human, while remaining accessible to the modern reader. For a contemporary reader, Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost are two works of immense structural and narrative complexity that take the reader on a journey into another world. They rank as canonical texts and can be treated as such.
A canonical story must possess structure, contrasts, and literary devices that help to develop and inform its major themes and motifs. One of Dante’s major concerns was political conflict. He lived through the political turmoil of Italy, and the reader can see how he uses these circumstances in his epic poem to condemn political figures by placing them throughout the circles of Hell. He gives them what he considers to be their just retribution. The poem speaks for Dante, allowing him to transform contemporary political events into poetic subject matter. His belief that Church and state should exist as separate powers on Earth is expressed through a courageous and highly personal political vision. For good measure, he also incorporates ancient literary figures, referring to classical writers and poets such as Homer, Ovid, and Virgil.
Dante’s poem is an overarching allegory. It explores its themes through dozens, even hundreds, of symbols, with one of its most important ideas being the punishment of sinners. Inferno is canonical because of the quality and scope of the poem, which creates and explores something far more substantial than the particular characters and places it describes. We find in Dante a fundamental idea: the creation of an imaginative correspondence between a soul’s sin on Earth and the punishment it receives in the afterlife. Dante’s complexity creates an entire universe.
This new universe is a crucial characteristic of Dante’s imagery. Dante took some of his ideas from another epic, The Odyssey, and established a relationship with Homer’s famous travel narrative. To put the matter simply, Dante thrusts before us a worldview and a sense of cultural completeness. As we move through the work, we find the universe arranged from the presence of God down to Earth and then into increasingly confined circles, stage by stage, towards the depths of sin.
Dante makes us experience the exploration of complex questions about individual and social purpose. The poem concerns a system of belief, the relationship between past traditions and future prospects, and the major events that help define a culture and its path towards Christian understanding. Dante presents a remarkable complexity of ideas. The aesthetic unity and breadth of the epic bring before us a comprehensive picture of an entire culture in a way that an ordinary narrative, no matter how exciting, cannot.
Dante’s subject matter makes the reader recognise the moral implications of abandoning an understanding of the world and the heavens that is loaded with spiritual meaning. The enormous scale of the poem is coupled with the clarity and variety of its immediate details. The dramatic quality of human conversation is placed alongside sections of theological doctrine, while the emotional tone constantly shifts between humour, terror, disgust, anger, and fear. There is also a constant sense of movement, up and down and around, all coordinated by the developing awareness of the pilgrim narrator, who must make emotional and conceptual sense of everything he encounters. Inferno is therefore a truly canonical work.
Milton was a rebel because he identified with the revolutionary cause, and his masterpiece, also of epic proportions, is concerned with rebellion and its consequences. As a Puritan, Milton’s political and religious convictions were often opposed to royal authority. Paradise Lost explains an entire theology. It is concerned with the coming of sin into the world through the temptation of Adam and Eve by Satan after his defeat in Heaven. If Milton has attempted to “justify the ways of God to men,” then our questions about humanity’s relationship with God are addressed through the poem’s theological framework.
The success of Milton’s explanation, of course, depends on whether the reader accepts the Christian worldview, and even whether the reader accepts Milton’s particular form of Christian individualism. Like Dante, Milton creates his own universe. The world is not simply the Earth; it is the entire universe within Milton’s imagined cosmos.
Milton’s achievement and the poem’s canonical status must also be considered in relation to its subject matter and its position within the epic tradition. Milton introduces the central theme of the entire poem and presents us with Satan and the fallen angels. He also makes it clear that the reader is encountering an epic poem. In order to place himself within the canonical epic tradition of The Odyssey and The Aeneid, Milton employs devices such as the invocation, epic similes, and catalogues. These are used heavily in the first two books to establish the credentials of Paradise Lost as an epic.
Paradise Lost begins with Milton’s prose summary, “The Argument.” He uses the word “argument” in the sense of “subject matter” rather than the modern meaning of a verbal clash. The prose summary tells the reader the story and can therefore be used as a reference point. In the poem, the reader encounters one of its central characters, Satan. Milton encourages the reader to consider whether Satan is a hero or a villain.
It is obvious from the first book that Satan possesses qualities that many readers admire. He is a fearless leader, eloquent, inspiring, resourceful, and even sympathetic to the suffering of his followers. Is he portrayed with these virtues because Milton wants to demonstrate how easily we can be deceived by heroic qualities? Has the reader ever found themselves attracted to people who ultimately proved harmful to them? It is unfortunately easy to identify with Satan when the reader first encounters him in the imaginary landscape of Hell.
Milton makes this experience accessible to the modern reader. All readers have experienced anger, bitterness, and a desire for revenge after a confrontation with authority. These may be small-scale personal grievances, but the emotions can still be intense. Satan’s grievances, however, result from his conflict with God and therefore have universal consequences. He wants to strike back at God for casting him into a dark and desolate place, and he intends to do so by bringing others down with him.
Like Dante, Milton was trained within the strictest academic education that his age could provide. The sources of Paradise Lost reflect Milton’s enormous range of reading. The story of Adam and Eve and the temptation comes from the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis. The vast majority of the poem’s allusions and references are to the Bible and to Greek and Latin classics. There are also references to Arthurian legend, Italian epics, and earlier English literature, especially the work of Spenser, the author of the moral epic The Faerie Queene. This immense catalogue of literary, religious, and cultural references contributes to the depth and complexity expected of a canonical text.
The reader could argue that Milton and Dante emerged from similar intellectual traditions. Milton drew some ideas from Dante, but each poet created a powerful epic that responded to the political, religious, and cultural circumstances of his own time. Their poems remain relevant because they continue to raise questions about politics, morality, religion, rebellion, sin, human nature, and our relationship with the divine. Their continuing ability to challenge and engage readers helps to establish them as enduring canonical texts.
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Explain Gagne’s Events of Instruction
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It was during the 1960s which saw a flurry of activity in the study of instructional design that Gagne’s book the ‘condition of learning’ came out. In 1965 Robert Gagne published his book entitled The Conditions of Learning. In his book, Gagne (1965) described the analysis of learning objectives, and how these different classes of learning objectives relate to the appropriate instructional designs. Gagne famously tried to explain the methods of learning of students. His theory centered on the acquisition of language and how students do this through the process of learning and the different stages that are done. He exposed the stimulation that the students get or have to move onto the next stage of learning.
- Gaining attention (reception)
- Informing learners of the objective (expectancy)
- Stimulating recall of prior learning (retrieval)
- Presenting the stimulus (selective perception)
- Providing learning guidance (semantic encoding)
- Eliciting performance (responding)
- Providing feedback (reinforcement)
- Assessing performance (retrieval)
- Enhancing retention and transfer (generalization)
These changes that the students’ experience can move them onto further learning. Of course, all this was meant for the students to learn to their full potential. Internal and external factors were taken into consideration. In this piece of writing, I will explain the methods and how they work in the classroom.
Political and Philosophical theories place too heavy a burden upon a writer. The inevitable result seems to be texts that are didactic and polemical, rather than imaginative and creative. Discuss any one text, which you believe disproves this assertion.
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Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe can be said to be a didactic text that details the death of the main character; the time leading up to that point and what becomes of his soul. It teaches us about his condemnation, not his salvation. However, contrary to this to disprove this assertion, Dr. Faustus is not just a didactic play. It is a play about Man pushing himself further, trying to have an intoxicating time and dream. He is a man that has been given three wishes and could be said to have found a genie in a bottle. What would the reader do with the wishes/genie? How would the reader strive for more than what they have got? Having the desire to have three wishes or to find a genie in a bottle is found in any person that allows not only them to be imaginative and creative but also the author.
Dr. Faustus wishes for many things and finds his genie in Mephistopheles. Dr. Faustus makes use of his newfound chances. He is a man who is a knowledge seeker. He wants to find out more than is good for him to know. This can not be wrong as a man who wants more than he has been offered. He does not want to plod along in life. He wants to eat, drink, and be merry. It is no accident that he compares himself to Colossus (IV, VII). Faustus is a scholar, books are his trade, philosophy his strength. Dr. Faustus begins by reading about the Greeks, Aristotle and ends up desiring Helen of Troy. His reading also contains maps that show Faustus exotic lands with their promise of new sensations. His study of classical authors has to be commendable as they are immense stories of biblical status.
The reader can, of course, decide to view Faustus through more modern eyes; he strives to better himself, his covetousness is soaring. This is particularly shown through the eyes of those who, in the eighteenth century, used him as an example of a positive thirst for knowledge, as a ‘striver’, as someone who anticipates the Age of Reason and tries to stand on his own two feet and work out his own salvation and try to better himself. He is motivated largely, but perhaps not entirely, by a desire for pleasure. The reader can assume that during most parts of the play, Faustus is a popular character, a great source of fun. Faustus hears renaissance voices who tell him to extend the boundaries of human knowledge, seek wealth and power, live this life because tomorrow you will be dead, such a popular theme is known as ‘carpe diem’ or ‘seize the day’.
In his superhuman aspirations, he mixes a desire for knowledge with no less strong desire for pleasure, power, and rape of overseas provinces, which were beginning to be colonized and exploited at the time. There is something of a rude soldier of fortune of him: ‘As Indian Moors obey their Spanish lords’ 1:121, draws a specific analogy between the quest for hidden knowledge and the brutal activities of their colonial powers. He acts as if he were king, he commands, dictates terms. He wants to be some sort of superhero and why not? Life for him is for living.
Faustus decides to live bravely for his time on earth, a strong man who challenges life, he goes and explores, he does not wait for life to come to him. The play mentions that he does grand things that are useful to his countrymen, but he only feels at peace when he is playing practical jokes. His last two words are ‘Ah Mephastophilis’, he dies in the arms of his deceitful friend with immense relief, also gratitude, surprise, love, forgiveness, and exhaustion. It is the happiest death in drama.
Christopher Marlowe‘s assertion to a modern reader can be very different from those at the time; this is where you can think of Faustus not only as an explorer but also as someone who wants to extend the boundaries of life. This could be a lesson for all which is relayed to the reader from Marlowe’s imaginative and creative text.
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