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ASSIGNMENT SOLUTIONS GUIDE (2014-2015)

M.E.G.-4
Aspects of Language
Disclaimer/Special Note: These are just the sample of the Answers/Solutions to some of the Questions given in the
Assignments. These Sample Answers/Solutions are prepared by Private Teacher/Tutors/Auhtors for the help and Guidance
of the student to get an idea of how he/she can answer the Questions of the Assignments. We do not claim 100%
Accuracy of these sample Answers as these are based on the knowledge and cabability of Private Teacher/Tutor. Sample
answers may be seen as the Guide/Help Book for the reference to prepare the answers of the Question given in the
assignment. As these solutions and answers are prepared by the private teacher/tutor so the chances of error or mistake
cannot be denied. Any Omission or Error is highly regretted though every care has been taken while preparing these
Sample Answers/Solutions. Please consult your own Teacher/Tutor before you prepare a Particular Answer & for uptodate
and exact information, data and solution. Student should must read and refer the official study material provided by the
university.
Q. 1. There are contradictory viewpoints about the relationship between language and thought. Discuss both
the views. What is your point of view? Why?
Ans. Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in
innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live
our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages?
Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?
These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of
philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and
religion. Simply saying that language controls our mind, i.e. we see and think in a way that our language allows us to and
express it by the rules of our language, would lead us to cognitive view towards language. Or if we say that language is
just a means of communication, then it would be communicative approach towards language.
Let us try and understand the mystical relationship between language and thoughts from both cognitive and
communicative approach.
LanguageIndependent Thought
It is believed by many scholars and intellectuals that thoughts and ideas are quite independent of language we speak.
Pinker (1994:57) called this concept of dependence of thought on language, absurd. He acquires communicative or
functional view of language that says that language is a vehicle for the expression of functional meaning. The argument
that whether thoughts are dependent on language can lead us into very intriguing situation. Imagine when there was no
language system, the primitive man had to think to form a language, but how could he think without language? And if he
thought, considering thoughts are independent, then what actually was in his mind to shape up his thoughts. The argument
is like chicken and egg question.
Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects, says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor
of psychology at Harvard. These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later.
Speakers of different languages notice different things and so make different distinctions. For example, when Koreans
say that one object joins another, they specify whether the objects touch tightly or loosely. English speakers, in contrast,
say whether one object is in or on another. Saying I put the spoon cup is not correct in either language. The spoon has
to be in or on the cup in English, and has to be held tightly or loosely by the cup in Korean.
These differences affect how adults view the world. When Koreans and Americans see the same everyday events (an
apple in a bowl, a cap on a pen), they categorise them in accord with the distinctions of their languages. Because languages
differ this way, many scientists suspected that children must learn the relevant concepts as they learn their language.
Thats wrong, Spelke insists.
Consider that if we really could not go beyond the limitation of language, then discovery of new words would not be
possible, that we see quite often. Literary pieces such as poems are coded in language, but there are many stances that

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make us feel that there is something more than language in poem. Consider Yeats for example,
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon stick, unless
Soul clap its hand and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
(FromSailing to Byzantium)
Or consider T. S Eliot in Little Gidding II
Ash on an old mans sleeve
Is all the ash burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Coleridges Kubla Khan is yet again such example, which creates a dream like impact on the readers:
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of paradise.
And also consider what old man replies when Alice asked him who are you, aged man and how is it you live?
He said I look for butterflies
That sleep among the wheat:
I make them in button-pies,
And sell them in the street,
I sell them unto men,; he said,
who sail on my stormy seas;
And thats the way I get my breadA trifle, if you please.
The psychological pictures, which have been produced in these lines, must take more than just language.
We all are acquainted with the notion that,its hard for me to put my thoughts into words, or I cannot find words
for what I think these notions are possible only if we consider thoughts and language as independent entities. Its not that
only artists and poets cross the barriers created by language, but scientists, mathematicians, geometers, astronomers also
do. Let us get back to Pinker (1994:71) and see what he has to say:
Physical scientists are even more adamant that their thinking is geometrical, not verbal. Micheal Faraday, the originator
of our modern conception of electric and magnetic fields, had no training in mathematics, but arrived at his insights by
visualising lines of force as narrow tubers curving through space. James Clerk Maxwell formalised the concept of
electromagnetic fields in a set of mathematical equations and is considered the prime example of abstract theoretician, but
he set down the equation only after mentally with elaborate imaginary models of sheets and fluids.The most famous
self-described visual thinker Albert Einstein, who arrived at some of his insights by imagining himself riding a beam of
light and looking back at a clock.
Q. 2. Discuss how English spelling have changed from old to modern English. What are the factors which have
led to the change?
Ans. Changes in Spelling: After going through the changes made in Consonant and Vowel sounds let us see how
these changes affected the spellings of words during all these years. Before we go ahead, lets have a brief look on the
development of alphabet. The earliest forms of writing began with the expression of ideas through pictures that is now
studied under a branch called Ideography. This mode of expression enabled people of different origins to communicate
with each other. This however soon became inconvenient and time-consuming. Such impatience led to the development
of the next stage of writing, studied under the branch of Logography whereby people exchanged thoughts and ideas
through signs that stood for certain words. Instead of drawing a basket of fruits, for example, people now drew only one
sign for the basket and another for fruits. People then started following a Syllabic system in which a particular sign could
be used for any other phonetic combination that sounded like that word. This form of writing is also called Rebus writing.
The Alphabet system was finally invented in which individual signs stood for particular sounds. Most important
written languages of the world follow the alphabet system.
The earliest was the Egyptian writing, which was a sort of picture writing. Structurally, it was word and syllabic
writing. It was invented around 3000 BC. In this system of writing, several hundred signs stood for full words or syllables.
They could either represent the whole word by a single sign or with appropriate signs for each sound. These signs did not

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specify vowels though. Phoenician writing comprised of a set of 22 signs, developed about 1000 B.C. structurally similar
to the Egyptian style, these signs too only specified consonants in syllables and not vowels. Early Phoenician writing was
a mixture of borrowed pictographic forms and invented geometric signs.
The Cypriot style of writing developed by the people of the Cyprus islands was a collection of 56 signs.
The English alphabet developed from a number of early writing systems. The Romans had given most capitals their
modern form by A.D.114. But the letters J, U and W were not added to the alphabet until the Middle Ages. Linguists
today use an almost perfect alphabet, the International Phonetic Alphabet, which has more than eighty characters because
the regular English alphabet today is not suited to writing words in English. That is to say, the regular English alphabet
does not have a separate character for every distinctive sound in the language.
The alphabet used to write our Old English texts was adopted from Latin, which was introduced by Christian
missionaries. Unfortunately, for the beginning student, spelling was never fully standardised: instead the alphabet,
with continental values (sounds), was used by scribal monks to spell words phonetically with the result that each
dialect, with its different sounds, was rendered differently and inconsistently, over time, due to dialectal evolution
and/or scribal differences. King Alfred did attempt to regularise spelling in the 9th century, but by the 11th century
continued changes in pronunciation once again exerted their disruptive effects on spelling. In modern transcriptions
such as editors often add diacritics to signal vowel pronunciation, though seldom more than macrons (long marks).
Anglo-Saxon scribes added two consonants to the Latin alphabet to render the th sounds: first the runic thorn (),
and later eth (). However, there was never a consistent distinction between them as their modern IPA equivalents might
suggest: different instances of the same word might use in one place and in another. We follow the practices of our
sources in our textual transcriptions, but our dictionary forms tend to standardise on either or mostly the latter,
though it depends on the word. To help reduce confusion, we sort these letters indistinguishably, after T; the reader should
not infer any particular difference. Another added letter was the ligature ash (), used to represent the broad vowel sound
now rendered by a in, e.g., the word fast. A letter wynn was also added, to represent the English w sound, but it looks so
much like thorn that modern transcriptions replace it with the more familiar w to eliminate confusion.
The nature of non-standardised Anglo-Saxon spelling does offer compensation: no letters were silent (i.e. all were
pronounced), and phonetic spelling helps identify and track dialectal differences through time. While the latter is not
always relevant to the beginning student, it is nevertheless important to philologists and others interested in dialects and
the evolution of the early English language.
Twelfth century showed a remarkable change in spellings of English language. Soon after the Norman Conquest
children ceased to be regularly taught to read and write English, and were taught to read and write French instead.
When, therefore, the mass of the new generation tried to write English, they had no orthographical traditions to guide
them, and had to spell the words phonetically according to French rules. They used ch instead of the old c, when it was
pronounced as in cirice (church). The sound of the Old English sc in sceamu (shame), which did not exist at that time
in French, was rendered by ss, ssh, sch, or sh. The French qu took the place of cp. The f between vowels (pronounced v)
was replaced by u or v (these being still, as long afterwards, treated as forms of one and the same letter, used indifferently
for vowel and consonant). The Old English symbol $$ was dropped, its place being taken by a or e. The sound of the
Old English y, in the dialects where it survived, was expressed by u; and that of the Old English long u was written ou, as
in French.
Q. 3. Describe the vowels of English. Give at Least one word in which each of these vowels occurs.
Ans. The production of vowel sounds does not involve the creation of any definite obstacle in the airstream (breath
stream). The differences between the vowel phonemes are created by various modifications of the resonator (oral and
nasal cavities) which are brought about by changes in the position of the tongue and the lips. In order to produce the
vowel sound of English beat, we raise the tongue high towards the front of the oral cavity. The quality of English vowels
is usually determined by the following two factors:
(a) The height of the tongue in the oral cavity.
(b) The position of the tongue with regard to front and back in the oral cavity.
The tongue, moving from high to low or from front to back, can assume many positions which so modify the shape
of the oral cavity as to produce a virtually unlimited number of sounds for different vowels. Still the positions of vowels
are not as precise as those of the consonants.
Another significant characteristic of English vowel phonemes is that they act as the most prominent part of a
syllable, as against consonants which act usually as the initial or final parts of a syllable. The syllabic stress falls on the
vowel and this is known as syllabic nucleus. There are two types of syllabic nucleusa simple syllabic nucleus and a
complex syllabic nucleus. A simple syllabic nucleus contains only one phoneme which is a vowel. A complex syllabic

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nucleus consists of a vowel and a following glide. The glides are a special class of consonants which enter into
combination with a preceding vowel to form a complex nucleus. They are sometimes classified as semi-vowels and
share characteristics of both consonants and vowels. Thus, glides share the articulatory characteristics of vowels, but
the functional features of consonants. On the basis of strictly articulatory criteria, resonant consonants can be classified
as vowels, but their function in English is clearly consonantal in English. It has been observed that what most English
speakers think of as a single vowel is often a combination of two vowel like sounds (a vowel plus a glide). Such
combinations make up the complex syllabic nuclei of English.
Classification of English Vowel Phonemes: The English vowel phonemes have been classified into the following
three groups:
(A) Front Vowels: Since the front of the tongue assumes various degrees of height inside the mouth, these vowels
are termed front vowels. These are identified as below:
| i | as in beat, key, receive, people, measle.
| i | as in bit, pit, gym, mist, city.
| e | as in bait, great, play, rein, they.
| E | as in bet, get, set, tell, fell.
| ae | as in at, bat, ass, fat, man.
Out of these front vowels, /i/ and /e/ are highly diphthongal which implies that during their production the tongue
glides upward in the mouth so that they end with a much higher sound than the one with which they begin. It may also be
pointed out here that English uses various orthographic symbols to represent specially the vowels /i/ and /e/.
(B) Central Vowels: In articulating these vowels, the central part of the tongue is raised towards a point in the roof
of the mouth that lies between the hard palate and the soft palate or velum. Central vowels are identified as given below:
| | as in up, cup, submit, done, come, flood.
| | as in fir, her, sir, about, the.
| : | as in bird, church, earth, birth, courage.
These vowels occur in a fairly large variety of forms.
(C) Back Vowels: All English back vowels are articulated with the back of the tongue drawn back and raised by
degrees. Lip-rounding varies according to the position of the tongue.
There are five back vowels as identified below:
| w | as in food, root, tool, shoe, rouge.
| u | as in could, would, good, look, push.
| o | as in boat, soul, sow, slow, floe.
| | as in bought, taught, ought, law, cloth.
| a | as in car, laugh, march, calm, alarm.
With these vowels also the variety of orthographic representations are available and the phonemes | w | and | o | are
highly diphthongal. Both sounds end with the tongue in a higher position and with more lip-rounding then they begin
with.
Further Description of English Vowel Phonemes
The English vowel phonemes are usually described with reference to the following three features: (a) the tongue
height which may be high, mid or low; (b) the tongue position which may be front, central or back, and (c) the liprounding which may be spread, rounded, or neutral. The front vowels of English are usually produced with spread lips,
the back vowels with rounded lips and the central vowels in which the lip positions may be sort of neutral. The following
shows a convenient division for the vowels of English:
Front
Central
Back
High
|i :|
|^|
|w|
|i|
|u|
Mid
|e|
||
|o|
||
| : |
Low
| ae |
|a|
||
Allophones of Vowel Phonemes: The allophonic realisations of vowel phonemes in English language take place in
two ways:
(a) In terms of length, depending on the consonant that comes after it. In the following words the lengths are
conditioned by the following consonants | t | and | d | :
beat
bead

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bit
bid
hit
hid
kit
kid
Three vowel lengths are usually discernible:
(i) Short vowels which come before voiceless consonants such as, beat - bit.
(ii) Long or intermediate vowels with vowels in open syllable.
(iii) Longest vowel before voiced consonants such as bead - bid.
Furthermore, there are two types of voice qualities which may be felt in respect of vowels occurring in close
syllables (such as i, ae, v, ) and those occurring in both open as well as close syllables (such as i, e, a, o, u). The first ones
are called lax vowels and the latter are known as tense vowels. The lax vowels (i, e, ae, u, e, ) are of intermediate length
in closed syllable with voiced consonants following. The tense vowels ( i, e, a, c, o, u) are of the longest length in open
syllable. The diphthong | ai | before voiceless consonant is shorter and higher as in writing, while it is longer and lower
before a voiced consonant as in riding.
(b) Another Allophone of English vowels is given the name of a glide which means that during their productions
the tongue does not stay in the same position, but glides either up or down. The effect of this gliding of the tongue is of
course that the vowel is in fact made up of two vowel sounds produced in the same breath-stream. There are the following
three types of glides usually discerned:
(i) glide to high front region of | i |, | e |, | ai |, and | ei |, with tongue movement;
(ii) glide to high back region of | u |, | o | and | eu | with lip, closure; and
(iii) glide to mid central region of | ie | and | u | as in the words bit, bet, bed, low, pa, could, cut, cud.
The | r | pulls the vowels down as in ber, tear, fair, far. All the vowels before | l | as in peel, pool, pal, paul, glide
back to central region. It becomes strongest when it goes back to the lowest back region as in Harold where | l | is
vocalised and becomes a vowel.
Q. 4. What, in your view, are the three most important learner variables in the learning of a second language?
Discuss.
Ans. It appears that children learn the second language faster and easily than adults. There are various arguments behind
this. In 1953 Penfield said that human brain loses its flexibility after attaining puberty. Lenneberg in 1968 agreed after the critical
period, between two to puberty, of human learning, a second language can be acquired but this is done with lot of difficulty.
Another explanation of this decline in adults ability to acquire a second language is that, they do not have the same motivation
and attitude towards the new language as children have. It is bit difficult for an adult to give up his/her identity which is attached
with the first language, which children do have much to attach with their first language. In 1970 Salinger pointed out that children
acquisition of phonological system is much better than an adult.
Apart from above arguments, many researchers have shown that adults are better learners than children. Cook in 1991
referred to a research carried out by Hoefnagel-Hohle, which says that the old learners were better than children in every aspect
of second language. The only field they lacked was pronunciation. Thus we see that age is an important factor in the second
language acquisition.
SEX
Sex is an arguable topic for the ability of language acquisition. However, many researchers have shown that girls are better
at the acquisition of second languages than boys. Women tend to use more prestigious form of language than men. Trudgill
associated this with womens social and economic insecurity. He argued that women are that socially and economically more
insecure than men therefore they compensate it with standardisation of linguistic form. Many researches done in Indian context
by Indiana linguists like Agnihotri and Satyanath show that girls are better at acquiring the prestigious form of linguistic, than
boys.
INTELLIGENCE
What is Intelligence?
Intelligence is a term used to describe a property of the mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities
to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn. There are several
ways to define intelligence. In some cases, intelligence may include traits such as creativity, personality, character, knowledge, or
wisdom. However, there is no agreement on which traits define the phenomenon of intelligence agreed upon by a majority across
the various concerned disciplines.
Francis Galton, influenced by his cousin Charles Darwin, was the first to advance a theory of general intelligence. For
Galton, intelligence was a real faculty with a biological basis that could be studied by measuring reaction times to certain
cognitive tasks. Galtons research on measuring the head size of British scientists and ordinary citizens led to the conclusion that
head size had no relationship with the persons intelligence.
Intelligence Tests

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There are various intelligence tests available to test a number of human brains function. The most famous intelligence tests
are: Stanford-Binet test, Wechsler Adult intelligence scale (WAIS), and Wechsler intelligence scale for children (WAIC). These
intelligence tests may provide a fair of mental ability of language acquisition, however, these cannot be considered as a sure
prediction of success and failure in foreign language learning.

Q. 5. What is foregrounding? What are the devices used to foreground poetry? Give examples which are
different from those in the units.
Ans. The term foregrounding is borrowed from art criticism. Art critics usually distinguish the foreground of a
painting from its background. The foreground is that part of a painting which is in the centre and towards the bottom of
the canvas... ... the items which occur in the foreground of a painting will usually appear large in relation to the rest of the
objects..." (Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose, by Mick Short).
Foreground is the antonym of background. In a literary text, in order to highlight something or to put special emphasis
on something is the reason of foregrounding. To make a part perceptually prominent, and notable thereby, the authors take
help of foregrounding. Deviations, parallelism, repetition all these are created to foreground different certain parts.
According to NTCs Dictionary of Literary Terms, calling attention to something (an idea, a character, a viewpoint) to
make it stand out from ordinary by placing it to the foreground is called foregrounding.
Foregrounding is a literary concept borrowed from Russian Formalism and developed by formalist Jan Mukarovsk
who called it aktualisace, which has been translated to English as foregrounding. Foregrounding is a technique within
literary devices whereby the author creates defamiliarization through linguistic (i.e., pertaining to language) dislocation
that calls readers attention the strangeness of the world or the perception of the world portrayed or depicted in the literary
work.
In explanation, Mukarovsk posited that literature is a process of strange making whereby the world or a perspective
is presented in a manner that separates it from real life experience through literary devices that manipulate variables to set
literary experience apart from real experience, thus making it strange, as in unfamiliar. This stands in stark contrast to
classical theory stating literature reflects real life experience of the world and how it operates.
The purpose of foregrounding is to sharpen readers vision and understanding of the event, feelings, circumstance,
concept, etc. that the author wants to point out in the hope of giving readers new clarity, epiphany or motivation etc. The
favored techniques for creating foregrounding are patterns, such as repetitions; ambiguity, in which meaning is clear but
conclusions may be variable; metaphor; tone; parallelism; and diction. Structural elements may also be foregrounded,
such as character development and plot structure. Any of these devices may be used to defamiliarize the literary work
through linguistic dislocation (i.e., atypical language usage) so that the reader is struck by the authors points and aims
while submerged in a strange perspective of life and the world.
Foregrounding is used as a major stylistic device by many authors whether that is in plays, novels, short stories or
long poems. One of the most illustrative (if a little brash) examples of the use of foregrounding in the short story genre is
in the story The Scarlet Ibis. In this story, a stricken bird lands in a tree in a familys yard while the people are having
lunch. It is a hot day and gradually the bird slumps, collapses and falls through the branches to the ground in a heap. Its
gangly legs and reddish colour foreshadow the manner in which the little disabled son will die (perhaps of heart failure or
exhaustion) later on, his legs and heart similarly depicted.
The foregrounding explanation of what is most gripping and influencial in poetry has been well supported by the
results of an empirical study by van Peer of the reactions of college students to different lines of six diverse poems. The
stylistic devices by which defamiliarization is accomplished were operationally defined by van Peer and used to identify
which lines belong to the fore, middle or background of each poem The present study was undertaken to test the proposal
that the lines of poetry so identified would also differ in the emotional tone they connote. Such evidence would require an
expansion of the definition of stylistic devices employed by poets, and encourage future study of the emotional tone
patterns particular to, say, Thomas and Wordsworth. Emotional tone scores on the basic dimensions of evaluation, activity
and potency were collected for the six poems using the computer system LOGOS Means of the scores for the foreground
lines were compared to all the other lines of the poems taken as background, by a repeated measures analysis of variance.
The foreground lines were found to be higher in evaluation and in activity. In the case of potency, scores were lower in the
foreground lines of four of the poems, but higher in two while a larger sample of poems might show the middleground
lines to have moderate scores on these measures, that was not demonstrated here. The poems were very different from
each other in levels of emotional tone, while sharing the property of elevated pleasantness and arousal in foreground
lines.

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