Linguistic Research Essay Example for Free

Linguistic Research Essay When does language begin? In the middle 1960s, under the influence of Chomsky’s vision of linguistics, the first child language researchers assumed that language begins when words (or morphemes) are combined. (The reading by Halliday has some illustrative citations concerning this narrow focus on â€Å"structure. †) So our story begins with what is colloquially known as the â€Å"two-word stage. † The transition to 2-word utterances has been called â€Å"perhaps, the single most disputed issue in the study of language development† (Bloom, 1998). A few descriptive points: Typically children start to combine words when they are between 18 and 24 months of age. Around 30 months their utterances become more complex, as they add additional words and also affixes and other grammatical morphemes. These first word-combinations show a number of characteristics. First, they are systematically simpler than adult speech. For instance, function words are generally not used. Notice that the omission of inflections, such as -s, -ing, -ed, shows that the child is being systematic rather than copying. If they were simply imitating what they heard, there is no particular reason why these grammatical elements would be omitted. Conjunctions (and), articles (the, a), and prepositions (with) are omitted too. But is this because they require extra processing, which the child is not yet capable of? Or do they as yet convey nothing to the child—can she find no use for them? Second, as utterances become more complex and inflections are added, we find the famous â€Å"over-regularization†Ã¢â‚¬â€which again shows, of course, that children are systematic, not simply copying what they here. Chomsky’s Influence Research on child language was behavioristic in the years that preceded Chomsky’s critique of Skinner, and his publication of Syntactic Structures: â€Å"though there had been precedents for setting problems in the study of child language acquisition at a more abstract, cognitive level by continental scholarsmost notably, Roman Jacobson (e. g. , 1941/1968)much of the research on child language acquisition at midcentury was influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the highly concrete, behaviorist orientation of B. F. Skinner and others. Two events were of major important in the change from behaviorist to cognitive thinking in research on child language. The first was Chomsky’s classic review (1959) of Verbal Behavior, Skinner’s major book-length work on the learning and use of language; the second Handout for Psy 598-02, summer 2001 Packer Two-Word Utterances 2 was the detailed longitudinal study of the acquisition of English by three young children conducted over a 17-month period by Roger Brown and others in the early 1960s (Brown, 1973). † Ritchie, W. C. , Bhatia, T. K. (1999). Child language acquisition: Introduction, foundations, and overview. In W. C. Ritchie T. K. Bhatia (Eds. ), Handbook of child language acquisition, (pp. 3-30). San Diego: Academic Press, p. 3-4 note 2. â€Å"A child who has learned a language has developed an internal representation of a system of rules† (Chomsky, 1965, p. 25). The psychologist’s task, it follows, is to determine what the child’s rules are. â€Å"The linguist constructing a grammar for a language is in effect proposing a hypothesis concerning the internalized system† (Chomsky, 1968, p.23). Up to the 1950s, people simply counted characteristics such as sentence complexity, proportion of grammatical utterances, etc. After Chomsky, the search was on for child grammars, assumed to be universal. Roger Brown’s Research In 1956 Roger Brown heard Chomsky for the first time, speaking at Yale. In 1962 he began a five-year research project on children’s language at Harvard University. The historical significance of Brown’s laboratory at Harvard can hardly be exaggerated. The names of students and colleagues who worked with Brown pop up all the time, to this day, in psycholinguistic research: the list includes Jean Berko Gleason, Ursula Bellugi, David McNeill, Dan Slobin, Courtney Cazden, Richard Cromer, Jill de Villiers, Michael Maratsos, Melissa Bowerman, Eleanor Rosche, Sue Ervin (now Ervin-Tripp), Steven Pinker. Brown set out to write grammars for each of the stages of language development, by looking at the distribution of forms and construction patterns in spontaneous speech. In most cases the data allow for more than one  grammatical description. â€Å"The description to be preferred, of course, is the one that corresponds to the way the speaker’s linguistic knowledge is structured, the one that determines the kinds of novel utterance he can produce or understand, how he constructs their meanings, and what his intuitions are about grammatical well-formedness† (Bowerman, 1988, p. 28) â€Å"Every child processes the speech to which he is exposed so as to induce from it a latent structure. This latent rule structure is so general that a child can spin out its implications all his life long. The discovery of latent structure is the greatest of the processes involved in language acquisition, and the most difficult to understand† (Brown Bellugi, 1964, p. 314) Brown collected samples of spontaneous speech from three children, given the pseudonyms Adam, Eve, and Sarah. The corpus of collected data can be found in the Packer Two-Word Utterances 3 CHILDES archive. Eve was visited from age 18m to 26m, Adam from 27m to 42m, Sarah from 27m to 48m. Dan Slobin described the project: â€Å"We paid close attention to the auxiliary system and to word-order patterns, because these had played a central role in Syntactic Structures. We kept track of sentence types—affirmative, negative, and questions—in which use of auxiliaries and word order would vary. Linguistic growth was assessed in terms of things to be added to childish sentences to make them adult-like: the additions of omitted functors (inflections, prepositions, articles, and the like) and transformational operations. We did not categorize utterances in terms of communicative intent—that is, in terms of semantics or speech acts or extended discourse skills—and so we did not look for growth in terms of additions or enrichment of such abilities. Our central concern was with syntax and morphology, with some later interest in prosody. We worried about such questions as whether child grammar was finite state or transformational, and whether syntactic ‘kernels’ were the first sentence forms to appear in child speech† (Slobin, 1988, p. 11). Mean Length of Utterance This simple measure of syntactic complexity was introduced by Roger Brown. Table 7. Rules for calculating mean length of utterance and upper bound (Brown, 1973, p. 54) 1. Start with the second page of the transcription unless that page involves a recitation of some kind. In this latter case start with the first recitation-free stretch. Count the first100 utterances satisfying the following rules. 2. Only fully transcribed utterances are used; none with blanks. Portions of utterances, entered in parentheses to indicate doubtful transcription, are used. 3. Include all exact utterance repetitions (marked with a plus sign in records). Stuttering is marked as repeated efforts at a single word; count the word once in the most complete form produced. In the few cases where a word is produced for emphasis or the like (no, no, no) count each occurrence. 4. Do not count such fillers as mm or oh, but do count no, yeah, and hi. 5. All compound words (two or more free morphemes), proper names, and ritualized reduplications count as single words. Examples: birthday, rackety-boom, choo-choo, quack-quack, night-night, pocketbook, see saw. Justification is that no evidence that the constituent morphemes function as such for these children. 6. Count as one morpheme all irregular pasts of the verb (got, did, went, saw). Justification is that there is no evidence that the child relates these to present forms. 7.  Count as one morpheme all diminutives (doggie, mommie) because these children at least do not seem to use the suffix productively. Diminutives are the standard forms used by the child. 8. Count as separate morphemes all auxiliaries (is, have, will, can, must, would). Also all catenatives: gonna, wanna, hafta. These latter counted as single morphemes rather than as going to or want to because evidence is that they function so for the children. Count as separate morphemes all inflections, for example, possessive {s}, plural {s}, third person singular {s}, regular past {d}, progressive {ing}. 9. The range count follows the above rules but is always calculated for the total Packer Two-Word Utterances 4 transcription rather than for 100 utterances. The title of Brown’s 1973 book, summarizing of a decade of research (his own and other people’s), was A First Language: The Early Stages. A follow-up was planned, describing the â€Å"later† stages, but never written. What is this book about? â€Å"It is about knowledge; knowledge concerning grammar and the meanings coded by grammar. The book primarily presents evidence that knowledge of the kind described develops in an approximately invariant form in all children, through at different rates. There is also evidence that the primary determinants of the order are the relative semantical and grammatical complexity† (58) Here is an early attempt to write a â€Å"syntactic† grammar of two-word speech, first describing only 89 observed utterances (Table 4), then going â€Å"beyond the obtained sentences to the syntactic classes they suggest (Table 5) (Brown Fraser, 1964, pp. 59, 61): Packer Two-Word Utterances 5 Brown’s Two Main Findings Two main findings are described in A First Language. 1. The â€Å"Semantic Look† of Stage I Speech First, that the organization of early word-combinations cannot be described in purely syntactic terms. Brown and his coworkers quickly had to change direction. Syntactic descriptions didn’t suffice. That’s to say, Stage I constructions couldn’t be satisfactorily explained either as â€Å"telegraphic† speech, or in terms of â€Å"pivot-open† grammar. Telegraphic Speech One of the first ways of characterizing 2-word utterances was to say that they omitted â€Å"function words,† such as articles, auxiliary verbs, inflexions, prepositions, and the copula (is). The words that are spoken tend to be nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and their order tends to resemble the order in what one presumes the adult sentence would be. These characteristics make early utterances sound like telegrams. But inflections are omitted too, and these are free in telegrams. And a few functors such as more, no, you and off are found. More important problems are that this description uses adult categories. And it doesn’t explain the productive character of children’s two-word utterances. Pivot-Open grammars Martin Braine suggested that children have simple rules they use to generate two-word utterances. Each pair of words selects one from a small set of words—called â€Å"pivots†Ã¢â‚¬â€that occur in many utterances, and always in a fixed position (either the first word, or the second). For example, â€Å"Allgone† is a first-position pivot: allgone egg, allgone shoe, but not shoe allgone. A second-position pivot â€Å"off†: shirt off, water off, etc. The choice of the second word is more â€Å"open. † Packer Two-Word Utterances 6 But â€Å"the rules simply do not fit the evidence; pivot words do occur in isolation, pivots occur in combination with one another, sentences longer than two-words are fairly common in I, and there is distributional evidence which indicates that more than two word-classes exist† (Brown, 1973, p. 110). Brown and his colleagues noted that adults â€Å"expand† children’s utterances. These expansions don’t seem effective in teaching the child anything new (Cazden, 1965). But they do provide important clues to the researcher. If one assumes that adult expansions are generally accurate interpretations of the child’s utterance, then pivot-open grammars are inadequate because they underestimate the child’s knowledge. (Both would simply be described as O + O. ) For example, Lois Bloom showed that when one attended to context the utterance mommy sock was used by her child in two different ways. The first could be glossed as â€Å"It’s mommy’s sock,† while the second could be glossed â€Å"Mommy is putting on your sock. † A pivot-open grammar would not be able to distinguish these two. From Non-Semantic (Lean) Grammars to Semantic (Rich) Grammars So Brown and his co-workers started instead to describe two-word utterances in semantic terms. They employed a process that Lois Bloom called â€Å"rich interpretation†: using all the contextual information available to infer what the child meant by an utterance. As Lois Bloom said, â€Å"evaluation of the children’s language began with the basic assumption that it was possible to reach the semantics of children’s sentences by considering nonlinguistic information from context and behavior in relation to linguistic performance. This is not to say that the inherent ‘meaning’ or the child’s actual semantic intent was obtainable for any given utterance. The semantic interpretation inherent in an utterance is part of the intuition of the child and cannot be ‘known’ with authority. The only claim that could be made was the evaluation of an utterance in relation to the context in which it occurred provided more information for analyzing intrinsic structure than would a simple distributional analysis of the recorded corpus† (Bloom, 1970, p. 10). The result was the identification of a small set of basic semantic relations that the children’s utterances seems to be expressing. The eight most common of these are summarized in the following table (cf. Brown, p.193-197): â€Å"Major Meanings at Stage I† Two-Word Utterance mommy come; daddy sit drive car; eat grape mommy sock; baby book go park; sit chair cup table; toy floor my teddy; mommy dress Semantic relation expressed agent + action action + object agent + object action + location entity + location possessor + possession Packer Two-Word Utterances 7 box shiny; crayon big dat money; dis telephone entity + attribute demonstrative + entity It seems that children when they first combine words talk about objects: pointing them out, naming them, indicating their location, what they are  like, who owns them, and who is doing things to them. They also talk about actions performed by people, and the objects and locations of these actions. Brown suggested that these are the concepts the child has just finished differentiating in the sensorimotor stage. This kind of semantic characterization of children’s speech continues in current research. For example, the following table is redrawn from Golinkoff Hirsh-Pasek, (1999, p. 151. ) The terminology differs a little, and Recurrence and Disappearance have been added (or at least were not in Brown’s â€Å"top eight†), but other than this the picture is the same. Two-Word Utterance Mommy sock Probable meaning expressed Possessor-possessed or Agent (acting on) an object Recurrence Disappearance or Nonexistence Action on object Agent doing an action Object at location Object and property Naming Possible gloss â€Å"That’s Mommy’s sock† or â€Å"Mommy, put on my sock† â€Å"I want more juice† â€Å"The outside is allgone† (said after front door is closed) â€Å"(Dad) is throwing the toy chicken† â€Å"The car is going† â€Å"The sweater is on the chair† â€Å"The dog is little† â€Å"That is Susan† or â€Å"Her name is Susan†. More juice! Allgone outside Throw chicken Car go Sweater chair Little dog That Susan What Grammar to Write? How to represent the knowledge that underlies children’s utterances viewed in these semantic terms? What kind of grammar can one write? Brown (1973) reviewed several possibilities are concluded that â€Å"No fully explicit grammar proves to be possible† (p. 244). Bloom wrote essentially syntactic grammars, which however included information necessary to give an appropriate semantic interpretation. Schlesinger (assigned reading) wrote a semantic grammar. Antinucci Paresi (optional reading) wrote a grammar that included some pragmatic information too. The following is a grammar for one of the three children Bloom studied: it â€Å"consists of (1) the phrase structure, (2) lexico feature rules, and (3) transformations (Bloom, 1970, pp. 67-68): Packer Two-Word Utterances 8 Packer Two-Word Utterances 9 Criticism of Interpretive Analysis An interesting criticism of these semantic analyses was made by Howe in 1976. Howe noticed a lack of consistency across semantic categorization of two-word utterances by Bloom, Slobin, Schlesinger and Brown, and suggested that the identification of semantic relations actually tells us more about adult interpretation of children’s speech that is does about what the child has in mind. â€Å"Overall, the existence of contradictions between the categories presented in Table 1, the fact that some of the categories are not always mutually exclusive and the fact that it is hard to demonstrate that some of the so-called ‘semantic’ distinctions are more than syntactic alternatives for expressing the same meaning, make it unlikely that Bloom, Brown, Schlesinger and Slobin have produced an adequate categorization of the meanings common to the speech of children at the beginnings of word combination or indeed of adults. [A]ll four writers tacitly assumed that the two-word utterances of young children always express a meaning adults might express using these words and hence their aim was to specify which of the meanings adults might express occur in the first word combinations† (Howe, 1976, p. 34). Howe asserted that (as she later put it) â€Å"there was no evidence that children at the beginning of word combination recognize a world containing agents, locations, and so on† (Howe, 1981, p. 443). It is interesting to read the next rounds of this debate: Bloom, Capatides, Tackeff (1981), Golinkoff (1981), and Howe’s reply (1981). Bloom is witheringly derisive (and seems to miss the point of Howe’s article), Golinkoff is more constructive. Howe accepts Golinkoff’s suggestion that non-linguistic data will show us how a child understands their situation, and she concludes that so far the research shows â€Å"that children do not discover that language encodes roles [played in actions and states of affairs, as distinct from entities involved in actions and states of affairs], until some time after their first word combinations† (451). But I  think there’s a larger point here that I’ll explore in class. Brown’s conclusions about Stage I Brown drew the following conclusions about Stage I: â€Å"The Stage I child operates as if all major sentence constituents were optional, and this does not seem to be because of some absolute ceiling on sentence complexity. In Stage II and after we shall see that he operates, often for long periods, as if grammatical morphemes were optional. Furthermore, the child’s omissions are by no means limited to the relatively lawful omissions which also occur in adult speech. He often leaves out what is linguistically obligatory. This suggests to me that the child expects always to be understood if he produces any appropriate words at all. And in fact we find that he would usually be right in this expectation as long as he speaks at home, in familiar surroundings, and to family members who know his history and inclinations. Stage I speech may then be said to be well adapted to its communicative purpose, well adapted but narrowly adapted. In new surroundings and with less familiar addresses it would  Packer Two-Word Utterances 10 often fail. This suggests that a major dimension of linguistic development is learning to express always and automatically certain things (agent, action, number, tense, and so on) even though these meanings may be in many particular contexts quite redundant. The child who is going to move out into the world, as children do, must learn to make his speech broadly and flexible adaptive† (Brown, 1973, p. 244-245). 2. The Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes in Stage II  The second major finding that Brown reported in A First Language was that â€Å"a set of little words and inflections begins to appear: a few prepositions, especially in and on, an occasional article, an occasional copula am, is, or are, the plural and possessive inflections on the noun, the progressive, past, and third person present indicative inflections on the verb. All these, like an intricate sort of ivy, begin to grow up between and upon the major construction blocks, the nouns and the verbs, to which Stage I is largely limited† (Brown, 1973, p.  249). Brown found that the 14 of these grammatical morphemes of English that he selected for detailed study were acquired in a fixed and universal order. These are the grammatical morphemes we discussed in an earlier class: affixes like –s, -ed, {PAST}, and small function words like on, in, the. We’ve already noted that these morphemes are omitted from the first word-combinations. Brown studied the way they are gradually added to a child’s speech. This takes place in what he called Stage II. The child begins to explicitly mark notions such as number, specificity, tense, aspect, mood, using the inflections or unbound morphemes. Of course, Brown was studying only three children, but the finding of invariant order has stood up when larger numbers of children have been studied. For example, de Villiers and de Villiers (1973) replicated his finding with a sample of twenty-one children. Brown offered evidence that the order of their acquisition was determined by their linguistic complexity. (That’s to say, the number of features each of them encoded.) (Though he noted too that children differ greatly in their rate of acquisition of these morphemes. ) Order 1. 2/3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Morpheme present progressive prepositions plural irregular past tense possessive copula uncontractible articles regular past tense third-person present tense regular Example singing; playing in the cup; on the floor books; dolls broke; went Mommy’s chair; Susie’s teddy This is my book The teddy; A table walked; played he climbs; Mommy cooks Packer Two-Word Utterances 11 11. 12. 13. 14.  third-person present tense irregular auxiliary uncontractible copula contractible auxiliary contractible John has three cookies She was going to school; Do you like me? I’m happy; you are special Mommy’s going shopping Brown examined each utterance is see whether it required any of these morphemes to make it fully grammatical by adult standards, attending to both linguistic and nonlinguistic context. E. g. , when the child points to a book and says that book, Brown inferred that there should have been a copula (‘s or is) and an article (a). Then he checked how many of these obligatory positions for each morpheme were actually filled with the appropriate morphemes at each age. Acquisition—defined as the age at which a morpheme is supplied in 90 percent of its obligatory positions—was remarkably constant across Brown’s three subjects. Why did Brown study these morphemes? Presumably because they are at first omitted. But more importantly, he was trying to test the hypothesis that children are taught grammar by adults. And Brown found that frequency of exposure (in adult speech) was not a predictor. For example, adults used articles more frequently than prepositions, but children acquired these in the opposite order. Brown suggested that linguistic complexity does predict acquisition. The morphemes differ in both semantic complexity (the number of semantic features encoded) and syntactic complexity (the number of rules each requires). For example, the copula verb encodes both number and temporality. These two types of complexity are highly correlated, so they cannot be teased apart, but in either case they predict order of acquisition. The other important change that occurs in Stage II is that, as utterances grow in complexity, the child begins to combine two or more of the basic semantic relations from Stage I: Adam hit ball = agent + action + object = agent + action, plus action + object The Other Stages of Language Acquisition Each of the five stages that Brown distinguished is named for the linguistic process that is the major new development occurring in that stage (â€Å"or for an exceptionally elaborate development of a process at that stage† p. 59). Thus we have: Packer Two-Word Utterances 12. Stage I. Semantic Roles Syntactic Relations. MLU: 1. 0 – 2. 0 agent, patient, instrument, locative etc. expressed (in simple sentences) by linear order, syntactic relations, prepositions or postpositions. Stage II. Grammatical Morphemes the Modulation of Meaning. MLU: 2. 0 – 2. 5 Stage III. Modalities of the Simple Sentence. MLU: 2. 5 Next the child forms transformations of simple declarative sentences: yes-no interrogatives, question request, negation, imperative. During the earlier stages children use intonation to mark different sentence modalities. Now they begin to use morphosemantic devices to mark negatives, questions, and imperatives. Stage IV. Embedding of Sentences One simple sentence will now become used as a grammatical constituent or in a semantic role within another sentence. Stage V. Coordination of Simple Sentences Propositional Relations Sentences are linked together with connector words. Individual Differences Brown also noted some individual differences among Adam, Eve, and Sarah. Two of the children combined V with N, and also used N for possession: eat meat, throw ball, mommy sock. But the child third combined V (or objects of possession) with pronouns: eat it, do this one, my teddy. These two strategies were found by other researchers too. Catherine Nelson called them pronominal nominal strategies (they have also been called â€Å"holistic analytic†; â€Å"expressive referential†), and noted that they could be seen in one-word utterances also: some children tend to produce single-word utterances that are nouns, other children tend to use social or personal words such as hi, bye, and please. Subsequent research has explored the connections between these strategies and later development, cognitive style, and input differences (cf. Shore, 1995. Individual differences in language development, Sage). However, these strategies converge over time. By MLU=2. 5, sentence subjects (agents) are typically pronominal, and predicate objects (patients) are typically nominal. Packer Two-Word Utterances 13 Directions After Brown By the mid-1970s grammar-writing was dying out. Incorrect predictions had discouraged researchers, as had the problem of indeterminacy: the fact that more than one grammar could be written. Interest was growing in other considerations: in the role of semantics; in cognitive precursors to syntax, and to language in general; in mother-child interaction; and in the pragmatic uses to which early speech is put. In the view of some people, linguistic structures and operations became neglected. 1. How Does the Child go from Semantics to Syntax? We’ve seen that Brown’s research found that the grammar of children’s early word combinations was better described in semantic than in syntactic terms. If this is so, how does a child make the transition from a semantic grammar to the adult grammar? Researchers continue to argue about this. Steven Pinker (1984, 1987) suggests that children use semantics to enter the syntactic system of their language. In simple â€Å"basic sentences† the correspondence between things and names maps onto the syntactic category of nouns. Words for physical attributes and changes of state map onto verbs. Semantic agents are almost always the grammatical subjects of sentences. This semantic-syntactic correspondence in early utterances provides a key to abstract syntactic categories of grammar. Paul Bloom has argued that children actually are using syntactic categories from the start, and he cites as evidence for this the fact that children will they place adjectives before nouns but not pronouns: big dog but not: * small she Some linguists have offered a syntactic description of Stage I utterances. They argue that at this stage children merely have a lexicon and a limited set of phrase structure rules in deep-structure. They lack functional categories such as INFL (inflectionals) and COMP (complementizers). No transformations exist at this stage: instead, elements of the deep structure are assigned thematic (i. e. semantic) roles to yield the surfacestructure. And they have proposed that the lack of grammatical subjects in Stage I utterances reflects the default setting of a â€Å"null-subject parameter. † (Since in languages like Italian and Spanish a subject is optional. ) Lois Bloom (1990b) has suggested that children simply have a more limited processing capacity at this age. Sentence subjects are often provided by context, and so can be safely omitted. Dan Slobin has proposed that â€Å"children create grammars in which clearly identifiable surface forms map onto basic semantic categories† (1988, p. 15). Packer Two-Word Utterances 14 For example, locative prepositions—in, on, under—are omitted in early child speech. They are used earlier in languages when they are encoded more saliently—as noun suffixes or as postpositions following nouns. At the same time, there is a common order of emergence across languages: simple topological notions of proximity, containment and support (in, on, under, next to), with locative relations embodying notions of perspective (back, front) always later. Slobin infers that â€Å"conceptual development provides the content for linguistic expression, while linguistic discovery procedures are necessary for working out the mapping of content according to conventions of particular languages† (p. 15). Slobin has looked carefully at the English grammatical morphemes—and their equivalents in other languages—to see how they are used before they are completely acquired (by Brown’s 90% criterion). He finds that children generally use the morphemes systematically, though their use is still â€Å"incomplete† by adult standards. For example, a Russian child applied the accusative inflection only to nouns that â€Å"were objects of direct, physical manipulation, such as ‘give,’ ‘carry,’ ‘put,’ and ‘throw,’ omitting the accusative for less manipulative verbs such as ‘read’ and ‘see. ’† Children will â€Å"organize systems of pronouns and case inflections; but, to begin with, children will organize these various forms to express particular, child-oriented speech functions† (p. 18). They are using the resources of the adult language to mark distinctions that are salient to them. Slobin has also proposed some â€Å"universal language-learning principles. † These are an attempt to explain observed cross-language regularities in order of acquisition. â€Å"According to Slobin, the child has certain concepts, based on cognitive growth, that are expressed through the language system. Using certain principles of acquisition, the child scans the language code to discover the means of comprehension and production† (Owens, 2001, p. 214-215). 1. Pay attention to the ends of words 2. Phonological forms of words can be systematically modified 3. Pay attention to the order of words and morphemes 4. Avoid interruption and rearrangement of linguistic units 5. Underlying semantic relations should be marked overtly and clearly 6. Avoid exceptions 7. The use of grammatical markers should make semantic sense Knowledge of Verb syntax Lois Bloom asserts that learning the argument structure of verbs, and the syntactic differences for different thematic relations is the foundation for acquiring a grammar. Verbs play a central role in further multiword utterances. Opinions differ, however, on how knowledge of verb syntax is acquired. Bloom suggests that the first verbs are those that name actions (do, make, push, eat). Nouns and pronouns take thematic roles (agent, object) in relation to these actions. Bloom says that this implies that children’s â€Å"theories† of objects, space, and causation are important here. Packer Two-Word Utterances 15 A few all-purpose verbs—â€Å"pro-verbs†Ã¢â‚¬â€are used for most early sentences. E. g. , do, go. With these, verb argument structures, verb inflections, and Wh-questions are learned. Subsequently, the child adds the syntax for negation, noun- and verb-inflection, and questions. And then moves on to embedded verb phrases (â€Å"drink [Mommy juice]†) 2. From Semantics to Semantics Language involves a great deal of categorization. â€Å"The forms of language are themselves categories, and these forms are linked to a vast network of categorical distinctions in meaning and discourse function† (Bowerman, 1988, p. 28-29).

The South Park Research Paper Film Studies Essay

The South Park Research Paper Film Studies Essay Two gentlemen, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, created the television-hit series South Park. Trey and Matt started their journey in two completely separate ways that eventually brought them together.. In this paper I am going to give a brief biography of both men, provide a brief history about South Park, provide information on copyright and fair use, talk about different copyright infringement cases against South Park and talk about some of the animosity that exists towards the creators of South Park. Randolph Severn Parker III also known as Trey Parker, was born on October 19, 1969 in Conifer, Colorado. Parker is the younger of two children of Randy II and Sharon Parker. Growing up Parker attended West Jefferson Junior High and Evergreen High School. It was there that he learned that he had a funny side to him because he was voted the class clown. According to treyparker.info/biography, in high school he made an album with pal David Goodman titled Immature: A Collection of Love Ballads for the 80s Man which showcased his humor as well as his musical talent (Shpadoinkle, 2011). After graduation Parker attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He transfered to the University of Colorado at Boulder where he majored in music but also took classes to learn more about the film process(Shpadoinkle, 2011). It was here at the University of Colorado where he met Matt Stone (Shpadoinkle, 2011; Comedy Central, 2012). Unfortunately Parker was kicked out of school because he was missing too many classes due to a film he began shooting over spring break in 1993 called Alfred Packer, the Musical. In 1996 the musical changed names to Cannibal! The Musical due to the desires of Troma, a company that picked the film up for distribution. Parker created many animated shorts before he moved to LA to pursue a career with South Park, which helped him get to where he is today After being expelled Parker decided to move to Los Angeles, California to pursue his career with the show South Park where he and Stone are now working on the 16th season of the show. At this time Parker still resided in Los Angeles (Shpadoinkle, 2011; Comedy Central, 2012). Matthew Richard Stone, was born on May 26, 1971 in Houston, Texas. Stone and his family moved to a town in Colorado called Littleton. It was here in Littleton where he attended Heritage High School. After high school Stone attended the University of Colorado at Boulder where he majored in math. Math wasnt his only interest; he also had an interest in filmmaking, which is how he met Parker. Stone and Parker hit it off right away and put their minds together to create a series of crudely animated cartoons. After Stone completed college he moved to Venice, California to pursue his career with the show South Park (Fandango, 2012; Starpulse, 2012; Comedy Central, 2012). Parker and Stone immediately hit if off in college because of their love of film. While there they created two animated shorts together called American History which won a student academy award and The Spirit of Christmas: Frosty vs. Jesus which is where some of the characters from South Park originated. Parker and Stone contacted Comedy Central about creating a show based off of the animated characters they created together in college. Comedy Central decided to pick the show South Park up. South Park made its debut on August 13, 1997 and even though it did not do well with the viewers, Comedy Central decided to air six episodes. The town of South Park is based off of a mountain town of Fairplay, Colorado close to where Stone lived during his childhood. In the summer of 1999 Parker and Stone released a feature length film called South Park: Bigger, Longer Uncut, which was a musical. One of the songs in the musical was called Blame Canada, which was nominated for best song at the Academy Awards (Fandango, 2012; Starpulse, 2012; Comedy Central, 2012). In 2000, Comedy Central negotiated a new contract that allowed South Park to air three more seasons. Then again in 2003 there was a negotiation for a 9th and possible 10th season depending on ratings. This process just kept repeating every year until 2012 where South Park was given their 16th season contract. They got this far because the show grew to be the highest rated original series in the networks history (Shpadoinkle, 2011; Comedy Central, 2012). South Park is a comedy-animated series created by Stone and Parker. Distributed by and airing on Comedy Central and its current owner, Viacom, since 1997, South Park follows the surreal adventures of four young boys who live in the small town of South Park, Colorado. South Park satirizes many aspects of American culture and current events, and challenges deep-set convictions and taboos, usually using parody and black humor (Jingle Bell Lyrics, 2020). South Park got its start in 1991 when Parker and Stone, then film students at the University of Colorado, created their animated short called Jesus vs. Frosty (also known as The Spirit of Christmas). The crudely made film featured prototypical versions of the kids of South Park, including a character resembling Cartman but called Kenny, bringing a murderous snowman to life with a magic hat. The baby Jesus then saves the day by decapitating the monster with a halo (Jingle Bell Lyrics, 2020). The characters and backgrounds of South Park ar e made to appear deliberately crude, as if they are simply made of cut out pieces of paper. Paper cutouts were indeed used in the original pilot Parker/Stone animation and in the very first Comedy Central episode, but every subsequent episode aired on TV has been produced by computer animation that provides the same crude look (Jingle Bell Lyrics, 2020). Now in its 16th season, South Park continues to surprise even its most devoted fans each and every week. Known for its unbelievably immediate and ruthless responses to world events, South Parks new episodes bring up-to-the-minute news and pop culture icons (including Al Gore, J. Lo, Oprah, Sir Elton John, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and P. Diddy) to the town of South Park for social commentary and good old-fashioned ridicule (Comedy Central, 2012). Since I am going to be talking about two different copyright cases against the creators of South Park, I thought it would be a good idea to give a little bit of background information about the current copyright and fair use laws. Copyright is contained in Article One, Section 8 of the Unites States Constitution. Our current copyright law is called the Copyright Act of 1976. Even though it was written in 1976 the law did not go into effect until January 1, 1978 (Bieber Notes Copyright Basics, 2012). Copyright provides exclusive rights to copyright owners for a limited period of time. Our current copyright law provides ownership for works by individuals for as long as the person lives and then 70 years after their passing (Bieber Notes Copyright Basics, 2012). The copyright law also provides ownership for works created in a work for hire situation, which is when something is created by an employee of a company for their employer. This ownership is for 95 years after publication or 120 years after the creation (Bieber Notes Copyright Basics, 2012). Not everything can be can be copyrighted! Some types of things that cannot be copyrighted are: works not original works of authorship or not fixed in a tangible medium of expression, ideas, facts, titles, names, phrases, slogans, and works in public domain (Bieber Notes Copyright Basics, 2012). One thing to always remember about copyright is that copyright is a property right, meaning that it can be willed, sold or transferred to someone else just like a car (Bieber Notes Copyright Basics, 2012). One final thing to remember about copyright is that, you dont have to register your work but, if you do it will protect you in case there is an infringement lawsuit brought against you or if you need to bring one on against someone else (Bieber Notes Copyright Basics, 2012). Fair Use is contained in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 (Bieber Notes Fair Use, 2012). The definition states The fair use of a copyrighted workfor purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use) scholarship or research is not an infringement on copyright (Bieber Notes Fair Use, 2012). One thing that must always be remembered is that even if a use may fall into one of these six categories there are other criteria that must be considered as well. The four things that must be considered are the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantially of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole and the effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work (Bieber Notes Fair Use, 2012). When looking at a copyright infringement case, copyright and fair use are the biggest topics that they look at. Stone and Parker have been in trouble many times when it comes to copyright infringement. Their most recent case has to do with a character call the Lollipop King. Exavier Wardlaw claims that they stole his ideas from his creation, the Lollipop Forest (Orfanides, 2012). On October 15, 2012 when Wardlaw made this claim, TMZ reported that his show was ripped off by the South Park guys and that his wholesome family show was completely ruined and that neither Parker nor Stone asked for his permission to use the character (Orfanides, 2012). TMZ reported that, according to the suit, filed in federal court in Philadelphia, Exavier is suing for copyright infringement and is demanding that South Park remove all traces of the Lollipop King from the Imagination land trilogy (Orfanides, 2012). Wardlaw is taking this matter very seriously. The creators of South Park should know that this is not a laughing matter. This case is still currently in process and the trial hasnt happened yet so I cant s ay what the outcome is yet. The Lollipop King lawsuit isnt the only lawsuit against Parker and Stone recently. This next case involves the episode called Canada On Strike that aired on Comedy Central in 2008. According to eef.org, the episode deals with strike, viral videos, and internet fame. In the episode, the nation of Canada goes on strike, demanding a share of the internet money they believe is being generated by viral videos and other online content (Brownmark Films v. Comedy Partners, 2012). The boys Stan, Kyle, Carman, and Butters come up with an idea to create a viral video to see if they could raise enough internet money to get the Canadians to stop striking. The boys create a video, What What (In The Butt), (WWITB) in which Butters sings a paean to anal sex (Brownmark Films v. Comedy Partners, 2012). The video was taken from an actual video that Brownmark Films owns the copyright to of an adult male singing and dancing in tight pants(Brownmark Films v. Comedy Partners, 2012). The South Park version recreates a large portion of the original version, using the same angles, framing, dance moves and visual elements (Brownmark Films v. Comedy Partners, 2012). The biggest difference is that the video is starring Butters who is nine years old and at different points in the video is dressed up in 3 different costumes. Brownmark Films, the copyright right holder, is suing South Park Digital Studio (SPDS) for copyright infringement under the Copyright Act of 1976. Brownmark Films did in fact reference both videos but did not attach either work to the complaint (Brownmark Films v. Comedy Partners, 2012). SPDS responded back right away claiming that the South Park version of the video was clearly fair use under section 107. SPDS attached the works of both videos and moved for dismissal. Brownmark Films response was that the court could not consider this to be fair use. After Brownmark Films and SPDS went back and forth a couple of times the district court finally came to a ruling. The district court concluded that one only needs to take a fleeting glance at the South Park episode to determine that its use of the WWITB video is meant to lampoon the recent craze in our society of watching video clips on the internetof rather low artistic sophistication and quality in other words fair use (Brownmark Films v. Comedy Partners, 2012). The court granted SPDSs motion to dismiss based on the fair use affirmative defense. The ruling was affirmed. Things like this have happened to Parker and Stone multiple times and so far they have been able to get out of trouble. They just take their chances and deal with whatever comes their way. There is also a lot of hatred toward the South Park creators, Parker and Stone. The hatred started because in the 200th episode of South Park, which was broadcast in April 2010, a proposal to bring the Prophet Mohamed to town is met with short shrift at a community meeting. Are you nuts? one character says. If Mohamed appears in South Park we get bombed! We dont know that, another replies. Maybe enough time has passed that now its OK to show Mohamed(The Independent, 2012). South Park is a show that is very cruel and doesnt care about what some people are going to think or who is going to take offence to what they say or show. In February, Zachary Adam Chesser, 21, who admitted to posting online threats, was sentenced to 25 years in prison (CNN, 2011). Chesser who converted over to Muslim, encouraged violent jihadists to attack the South Park writers for an episode that depicted the Prophet Mohammed in a bear suit (CNN, 2011). The warning was posted on the New York-based website Revolution Muslim. In an article that suggested that Parker and Stone would probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show, a writer calling himself Abu Talhah al-Amrikee (The Independent, 2012). Theo van Gogh, who was a Dutch filmmaker, was stabbed to death on a street in Amsterdam, Netherlands, by an Islamic extremist in 2004. He became the target of radical Muslims after releasing a short film about oppression of Islamic women in Europe (CNN, 2011). Chesser took this attack one step further and going as far as posting messages online with the addresses of where Parker and Stone lived and urged the readers to pay them a visit (CNN, 2011). Not only was Chesser charged but Jesse Curtis Morton who is a resident of Brooklyn, New York, is the second person charged in the South Park Case. Morton also was not Muslim but, decided to convert to Islam. Morton is one of the co-founders of the Revolution Muslims 2008, which is where Chesser posted these threatening messages (CNN, 2011). This ultimately is how Morton and Chesser met each other and become friends and grew hatred toward Parker and Stone. In conclusion, after doing this paper I have learned so much more about the show South Park as well as the creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. There are many things, like the two most recent court cases including the What What (In The Butt) video, as well as the Lollipop King case that I didnt know even existed. I love watching the show but I truly had no clue that the creators had this much trouble every time they aired a show. The two cases are not the only cases that were brought against the creators. There are other cases as well that I did not mention in my paper. I think that the creators should probable ask different people before using them in their show, or in the Muslim case, maybe they should of asked the commander of Islam if they could make a show about the Prophet Mohammed. Copyright is a big issue, not just with South Park, but with a bunch of television shows out there. Remember, if you dont know what you are signing or you dont understand something in your contract , or even if you want to use something and you are not sure if you can, hire a layer!

How Does Golding Make This Passage Tense And Powerful? :: English Literature:

How Does Golding Make This Passage Tense And Powerful? Golding uses many techniques to make this passage tense and powerful by using language and the content of the passage. He uses many types of imagery and dramatic language throughout the passage as well as changes in pace and many different sorts of sound effects. The most conspicuous means Golding has used to make this passage very powerful is the content. He implies that someone has died in this passage, which evokes many feelings among readers because death is such a disastrous occurrence: "That little 'un had a mark on his -face -where is -he now?" The way Golding has portrayed the death is particularly effective because it is not definite that the boy has died and not knowing something is more tense than knowing something. Also the boy didn't die in the book, meaning all we have is the reactions from the boys and what they say, instead of knowing exactly what happened we are left to think about it on our own, using our own imagination. The imagery that Golding uses in the passage is very descriptive and unsettling. He uses personification, similes and metaphors: "Tall swathes of creepers rose for a moment into view, agonized, and went down again." Here Golding has used personification to depict the plants. This shows how the boys are starting to see things and get very paranoid of their surroundings. The plants seem to be coming to life, which is very unnatural and disconcerting. "One patch touched a tree trunk and scrambled up like a bright squirrel." This is a simile, describing the fire to be like a squirrel, which seems really strange but also very subtle and powerful. Golding has portrayed to very different things: an innocent squirrel and a lethal fire. This makes the fire appear quite harmless; therefore highlighting its danger even more when we find out it has killed someone. "The drum-roll of the fire" --------------------------- The metaphor Golding has used here is repeated several times in the passage. Later he just says, "drum-roll" instead of fire. This is effective because a drum roll is a powerful and steady sound, very distinctive and of importance. Although it doesn't sound like a fire it is very significant like the fire is in this passage. Also the thought of a growing drum-roll going on during this passage builds up much tension. In this passage Golding doesn't just use the boy's speech to convey

The Cultural Roots of Technology Essay -- Environment Environmental Po

â€Å"A technology evolves within a culture and its particular demands and preoccupations, intertwined with that society’s particular environment (Teresi, 356)†. As the human race and daily life becomes more advanced, there are times when it becomes necessary to consider the variables that influence our society. These variables-religion, tradition, environment, etc. - make up the culture of a society. New technologies are created when the people living in a particular society feel that one of these variables needs to be expanded upon or changed (Discovery Channel, Feb. 11). A particularly relevant example is the United States Space program. The space program grew out of the Cold War in the 1960’s. The technological needs of this effort, specifically small computers, heat resistant ceramics, radio communication, and power cells lead to the products and devices that we enjoy today. Societies, with their specific cultural needs, influenced the development of their own technology. For example, the Chinese in ninth century A.D. were fascinated with perfumes, noxious bombs, explosions, gases, and smoke. They burned incense and fumigated their houses for health as well as spiritual reasons. In the Chinese culture, smoke and loud explosions were connected to the spiritual and supernatural world. Chinese priests invented gunpowder by combining charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur. Their military-centered society saw the advantages gunpowder gave them in battle situations as well. The Chinese were the first to invent land mines, fire lances, and grenades. When Europeans learned about gunpowder, they began experimenting (Teresi, 355-56). Before long, cannons and guns were invented and warfare would never be the same aga... ... purposes, would the history of war have changed? It is probable that gunpowder would have eventually been invented, but who would have discovered it and when? What was their culture like; would the smoke and fumes make them feel connected to supernatural beings or would gunpowder strictly be used for war? Just like the space program created cultural needs and wants over fifty years ago, culture continues to be the driving force for technological developments. Sources Chant, Colin, "Chapter 2: Greece" in Pre-industrial Cities and Technology, Routledge Press, 1999, pp. 48-80. Ehrlich, Paul R., "Ch.11: Gods, Dive-Bombers, and Bureaucracy" in Human Natures: Genes Cultures, and the Human Prospect, Island Press, 2000, pp. 253-279. Teresi, Dick, Lost Discoveries: The ancient roots of modern science, Simon and Schuster, 2002, ISBN 0-684-83718-8, pp. 325-367.

cliques :: essays research papers

The purpose of my speech is to persuade that schools do not do enough to prevent harassment of other students. I.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In the movies you always see the big jock shoving the little dorky kid into a locker or pushing his head into a toilet. This doesn’t just happen in the movies, it can be a reality. A.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  From recent statistics shown, 1 out of 4 kids have been or are being bullied, yet 1 out of 5 kids have said they have been a bully to someone. 1.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  It’s hard to believe but 100,000 students carry a gun to school. I think that’s so disappointing for today’s youth that they have to carry a gun to feel safe. 2.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  It’s not always students getting bullied; teachers are also assaulted, robbed, and etc. B.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  People who are bullies know right away who to pick on. 1.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  They are usually kids with not many friends also known as loners. 2.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Many people who are handicapped, mentally or physically are chosen to be harassed. C.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Teenage girls belonging to cliques can be very cruel if your appearance isn’t as stylish or trendy as they see fit. The girls will use insults, gossiping, rejection, or even spreading rumors. 1.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The self-esteem of the victims declines decreasingly low, making them think they are inferior. II.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ronald Stephens, from the National School Safety Center says, â€Å"A lot of administrators don’t want a paper trail, it’s a fear of litigation and a reluctance to look bad.† A.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Some schools just ignore the fact that bullying is going on in the school. B.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Many parents have taken legal action because of the administrators who have done nothing about their harassment issues. III.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In Export Pennsylvania, Christina, a 7th grader was riding the bus home from school when two girls tried to light her hair on fire. A.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The school officials were contacted by Christina’s mother who reported the attack, yet the girls continued to harass Christina and her classmate Jessica. 1. They would shove and hit the girls in the halls, while the school still refused to do anything about the situation. 2.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The advice Christina and Jessica got from their Vice Principal was to keep a low profile until the bullies moved on to someone new. 3.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  I think the Vice Principal has underestimated the magnititude of the situation. B.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  It didn’t stop there though. The two girls had to be sent home because the school said they couldn’t guarantee their safety. 1.  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The school board eventually got the girls a school aide to escort them to their classes.

A Remarkable Person Out of Class

A Remarkable Person Out of Class Mr. Lo is a remarkable person because of his engaging personality and his dedication to his job. Mr. Lo is the best supervisor I have ever had. He really cares about students in the cram school not just for the money. Lo is not only a supervisor but also a combination of teacher and friend for students. He always encourages students to study hard not only in class but by sending text messages. Although his cell phone is too old to send messages to everyone at one time he still sends all greeting messages to every student in holidays one by one.Mr. Lo has worked in education institution for decades therefore he knows the common problems that high school students may have. Moreover, he is a wise and reliable man so students are willing to share their personal problems with him. He always gives students useful advice and helps them solve the problems they encounter. One thing that impresses me the most is that Lo gets along with students well no matter h ow good or how poor their grades are. I think he treats some so-called â€Å"bad students† as his own son.He asks some students to live with him on weekends six months before the entering exam for university in order to make them study and motivate them. Besides, he even makes midnight snacks for the students for example fried rice, noodles†¦and so on. To sum up, Mr. Lo is a remarkable person because he does his best to help students with their school work and personal life. Moreover; he cares about all his students and treats them equally. That is to say, he is the best supervisor I have ever had.

Cybercrime in Today’s World Essay

I have been asked to write a paper concerning cybercrime in the world today. I will go over what cybercrime is, how much it is affecting the United States, possible ways of enforcement and why or why not enforcement would be effective. What is a cybercrime, in your own words? Cybercrime is using computers or technology in order to steal information or to create fake identities over the World Wide Web. It is a growing problem in the world today, especially in countries like China, Japan and the United States where populations are high. Phone scams are another type of cybercrime as people will try to glean vital information from another by pretending to be a grandchild or a salesman. Cyberspace allows people to invade another person’s or company’s computer and download sensitive materials such as social security numbers, birth certificates and tax information. What is the extent of cybercrime in the United States? Computerescape. om says that â€Å"Cybercrime is widespread throughout the United States with 73% of American internet users being victims of cybercrime, either through viruses, online credit card or identity theft†*. With over 300 million Americans in the US, that comes out to 219 million Americans that have been or are currently victims of a cybercriminal. Most of the victims of identity theft are infants and the elderly. My own infant cousin had his social security number stolen shortly after his death. It took several months to recover it. How do you think we should control / enforce cybercrime? I personally believe that the only way to control cybercrime is to attach a major virus to sensitive files, so that when an unauthorized person tries to access it, it attaches itself to that person’s computer, downloads any information regarding the owner of the computer, sends that information to the authorities, and finally scrambles all data on the computer. The authorities will then be able to make an arrest and unscramble the computer so that evidence can be obtained. The offender should then have an appendage cut from their body on national television, so that others thinking of committing the same crime will hopefully be deterred. If the person should offend again, then they should be stoned until dead by the people that they have stolen from. Do you think enforcement can be effective? Why or why not? I don’t think that any type of enforcement would be effective as tracking anything in cyberspace is time consuming and if the person was determined enough, they would find a way around the enforcement. Security cameras are an excellent point. You can have the main points of a store being watched by cameras, but the only places you have issues with theft is in the cameras blind spots. A security system will alert you if someone comes in through a door or window, but isn’t programmed to respond if a person decides to cut a hole in the wall or ceiling and enter the premises without ever tripping the system. If someone wanted to commit a robbery and they knew that a police patrol car passed by every 45 minutes, they would wait until 10 minutes after the patrol car had passed and then rob the business, knowing that it would be at least another 10 minutes before police could respond. Criminals will always find a way to circumvent the enforcers of the law.