Semantic memory

Have you ever thought about how often you have heard or used the word retarded? I bet you could come up with a few examples, but then again maybe you can’t. Maybe the word retarded has just become a normal part of our culture and therefore a normal part of our daily lives. You may have heard someone telling a story about how they did something that you considered to be really stupid and by the end of the story it only seemed fitting to respond with…”man you’re so retarded” and move on in the…

Arguably one of the important decisions people have to make upon becoming parents is picking a name for their newborn child, a handle he can proudly use for the rest of his life. As the naming paradigm seems to be shifting towards more variety and creativity1, the artisans of new names have to pay attention to the thin line between unique and odd, culturally representative and obscure and powerful and offensive. If the impact of their choice was limited to themselves, the state would have no…

In Timothy D. O’Brien’s criticism of Ernest Hemmingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” he concentrates mainly on how allusion and word play contribute to the central conflict of the short story. The story mainly consists of the dialogue between the American and Jig. The choice of the nickname Jig, along with the repetition of certain words such as “know” and “fine” stood out to me while reading the story. In addition to the word choice, the train never comes at the end of the story, leaving it…

Independant: free from outside control; not depending on another 's authority - not depending on another for livelihood or subsistence. In my life experience independance was always a desirable quality to strive for and also one that I would consider myself to possess. Parents praise their children for learning to be independent, teachers praise their students for thinking independently, and men generally find independence as being an attractive quality in women. This word has always had a…

When the dust had settled following the grisly Civil War, Americans realized just how uncivil the war actually was. Significant loss of life was never the intention, but it was the result of this bloody war. The fate of a fractured America grieving the loss of hundreds of thousands of men was a cause of concern for all citizens. One of those people pondering America and its future was the poet, Walt Whitman. Through the careful usage of figurative, denotative and connotative language, Walt…

The second subsystem of appraisal, graduation, deals with the gradability of the attitudinal meanings and evaluative expressions. The degree of the evaluation can be increased or decreased according to intensity or force (e.g., I’m slightly worried), and prototypicality or focus (e.g., A genuine apology). The third subsystem, engagement, is concerned with intersubjectivity and dialogism through expressing the perspectives and relationships of alignment and rapport between speakers/writers and…

It is impossible to get through a single day, without encountering language, whether it be written or spoken. Therefore, it is crucial to possess a comprehensive knowledge of how language works. It is important to not only know what words mean, it is also necessary to understand how words and phrases are strung together to make coherent sentences. This helps in comprehending the meaning of a text overall. Hence the study of linguistics is vital for understanding the ins and outs of the English…

If you look a word up online there is a possibility that you could wind up finding about three different versions of the word, and that doesn’t even include the slang versions of a word. Imagine we found another world with similar substances as there are on Earth, but they all had different names. This could potentially create a barrier in communication. Hilary Putnam thought he could solve an issue like this by creating what he called natural kind terms. Even if you can buy into Putnam’s theory…

The Taijitu symbol, more commonly known as “yin and yang” represents more than meets the eye. The symbol was partially derived from an ancient manual known as the I-Ching, or Book of Changes (Issitt and Main 251). Like many other symbols, this one was created by combining other symbols together to make a more present and relatable symbol. This symbol represents opposite forces and how they work together in the world. The “Yin and Yang” are a way for citizens to explain nature and how it balances…

Evaluation of the Speech Theory The speech act is the basic unit of language used to express meaning, an utterance that expresses an intention. (University of Twente, 2017). Generally, the speech act is usually referenced as a sentence, but it can be a word or phrase, if it follows the rules required to accomplish the intention. When we speak, we perform an act. Speech is not just used to designate something, it does something. So, having said this, the Speech Act Theory basically stresses the…