Gender Representation and the Curation of Chicano Visions
Essay - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
The Chicano Art Movement began in part as an effort on the part of Chicanos to take agency in their own representation. Before the Movement, most available representation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans cast them in a negative light — often as servile or violent (Davalos 3). It is...
The Making of an Official Language : Chaofen Sun
Essay - 6 pages - Linguistics & languages
The foundation for the unification of Chinese has already come into being. It is none other than the standard form of Modern Chinese with the Beijing phonological system as its norm of pronunciation, Northern dialects as its base dialects, and looking to exemplary modern works in vernacular...
A Common Tongue: A Bit About Dialects in a Language
Essay - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
Dialect is a variety of language used by people from a particular geographic area. This language is a complete system of verbal communication with its own vocabulary and grammar (“Dialect”).In America today, the common language is English. But what does English mean? While Standard...
The Humanity of the Greek Gods
Essay - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
If you lived in Athens, Greece around the time when the great poet Homer lived, you probably would be acquainted with the many Greek gods. Homer's written compilation of the epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, which were formerly only told through oral tradition, would be easy for you to...
Are Theories Incommensurable Due to the Untranslatability of One Scientific Language to Another?
Essay - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
The most famous exponent of the theory of incommensurability is Thomas Kuhn. To state his theory in the simplest form, incommensurability is simply the idea that theories within science are not compatible, and that the languages they use are, at least in part, mutually untranslatable. This is...
Does the Argument from the Systematicity of Thought to the Language of Thought Hypothesis Work?
Essay - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
One of the main arguments to support the language of thought hypothesis (LOTH), as proposed by Fodor (1975), is that of the systematicity of thought. This argument consists of the idea that the ability to entertain certain thoughts is linked to the ability to entertain certain other thoughts....
Surf's Up, Dude: Cowabunga
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
The mission lies before us: how are we, the American people, going to come together so that “cowabunga” is reinvigorated into mainstream conversation. It was not too terribly long ago, maybe 15 years, that this delightfully lighthearted interjection tickled the ears of various...
A Systematic Method for Interpreting Novel Compounds
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
A novel word is one that is not found in the lexicon of the general population; in other words, it is a word that people have not heard or seen previously. A novel compound is a compound word formed out of two or more individual known words where the combination of these words has not previously...
Syntactic Movement and Locative Incorporation in Exocentric Compounds
Tutorials/exercises - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
Most people will agree that there are two main types of compound words, endocentric and exocentric. Endocentric compounds are those where the rightmost constituent, called the grammatical head, is what defines the category of speech and the semantic interpretation of the word. Exocentric...
The Prominence of "ANIMAL for HUMAN" Metaphor
Essay - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
The role metaphor plays in language is viewed differently by scholars in different fields. The extremes are the classical view based on Aristotle's writings about metaphor and the Romantic view. Those that follow the classical view see metaphor as a purely literary device used to decorate...
The Morpho-Semantics of English Compound Words: Formation, Meaning and Productivity
Essay - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
The ability to compound words in the English language has always been a very productive method of adding new words to the lexicon. Compound words are generally formed in one of two ways, as root compounds or synthetically. Whichever way they are formed, the rightmost constituent is always the...
Dialect as a Form of Identity
Tutorials/exercises - 7 pages - Linguistics & languages
Every time a person opens his or her mouth to speak that person is speaking not only a language but a dialect of that language as well. It is a common misconception that only certain people whose pronunciations vary from what is considered Standard American English, speak a dialect. In fact,...
Similarities and Differences in Men's and Women's Cooperative Speaking Styles: An Analysis of Book Club Discussions
Tutorials/exercises - 11 pages - Linguistics & languages
Some of the most frequently referred to but potentially erroneous stereotypes regarding gendered speaking style differences involve dichotomies. Men are competitive - women are cooperative. Men focus on impersonal topics - women focus on personal topics. Men's speech is to report - women's...
Michigan's Upper Peninsula Variety of English and its Usage
Thesis - 7 pages - Linguistics & languages
Every time a person opens his or her mouth to speak that person is speaking not only a language but a dialect of that language as well. It is a common misconception that only certain people whose pronunciations vary from what is considered Standard American English, speak a dialect. In fact,...
The Connection between Crossword Puzzles and Semantics
Tutorials/exercises - 9 pages - Linguistics & languages
When a person sits down to work on a crossword puzzle the thought probably does not cross their mind that they are calling on various forms of linguistic knowledge in solving the crossword clues. The majority of basic language knowledge and usage is an unconscious phenomenon. It has been said...
The Trip Turns Dark: From Abbey Road to Paranoid
Essay - 2 pages - Linguistics & languages
From the summer of 1967 through 1969, rock-and-roll floated on a cloud of acid and love. The formerly mop-topped teen idols the Beatles did not miss the magic bus, first dabbling in psychedelia on 1965's Rubber Soul. The Fab Four continued to experiment throughout the decade, culminating in the...
Parfit's View of Personal Identity and Human Behavior
Essay - 2 pages - Linguistics & languages
I intend to explicate Derek Parfit's view regarding personal identity as nothing more than non-branching psychological continuity. I will be brief in my discussion to avoid redundancy, as I have more deeply explicated Parfit's infamous view in my previous paper, “Parfit's View of Personal...
Parfit's View of Personal Identity
Essay - 2 pages - Linguistics & languages
I intend to explicate Derek Parfit's view regarding personal identity as non-branching psychological continuity as well as some of its ethical and emotional implications. In addition, I will present Parfit's split-brain transplant thought experiment as evidence for his view that psychological...
Tarleton, GA: Dead or Alive?
Essay - 2 pages - Linguistics & languages
For those caught up in the Southern Myth, antebellum southernmost Georgia is a lot like Heaven. F. Scott Fitzgerald follows a Confederate dreamer to the North and back home to Tarleton, Georgia, in his short story “The Ice Palace.” The Southern girl, Sally Carrol Happer, finds herself...
The Church's Grasp: Captivity in Joyce's Dubliners
Essay - 2 pages - Linguistics & languages
It is easy to recognize when one is held captive by the unfamiliar, but the crippling effect of familiar forces is not so easily realized. Throughout American captivity narratives, typically female Anglo-Americans are ensnared by Native Americans, the “other” of early Anglo-American...
Masking the Profound: Yeats and Nietzsche's Masks
Essay - 3 pages - Linguistics & languages
Though it is impossible to measure the degree of influence that the work of Friedrich Nietzsche had upon William Butler Yeats, a definite change in Yeats' poetry occurred soon after the point in which the Irishman received a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra in 1902. The “masks” that...
Music, emotion and Zipf's law
Essay - 59 pages - Linguistics & languages
The hypothesis of Zipf concerning a universal Principle of Least Effort, manifesting itself in Zipf 's law and modeled by Ferrer i Cancho and Sol´e in a signal-object reference matrix, gave rise to the idea that maybe the elements in music that elicit our emotional responses...
