It takes few seconds to realize the powerful messages this book is about to send when the reader sees its title " Language Wars" by Jeff Lewis. The subtitle even makes the messages clearer as it specifies the scope of the topic saying " The Role of Media and Culture in Global Terror and Political Violence." The writer, by mentioning the subtitle, is promising (intends) to focus his research on language wars in the media and its effects. The cover of the book has two photos: one was taken when New York authorities realized (do you mean 'released') 9/11 transcripts in August 2003, and the second photo is of journalists document a mock chemical attack in Kuwait city at December 2002. Clearly, the cover is part of the statements that are made by the author in his book. The two photos are showing the making of the news other than reporting the events. The title, subtitle and the cover are preparing the reader for an extraordinary experience in wars of the media.
COMMENTS: Very good and creative. But you forgot to mention the Preface and Table of Contents.
3 comments:
Dear Dr. Khaled,
Greetings. I wonder if there is a presentation we have to do for our books. If yes, when will that be? and how long each presentation should be?
Thank you,
Lina
Sometime in the last week of April.
In Early Syntactic Development, Melissa Bower Man chooses a type of style that is formal Aiming at explaining and defining her own ideas. When we examine the style of the book we find that the formality is clear in the development of ideas and in the way the author represents her concepts and illustrates them. The method of analysis chosen was an account for the writing of grammars for the Finnish children at two different stages of development the comparison of their speech with that of children learning other languages was carried out in connection with discussions of the features of the grammars .Different kinds of grammars make various assumptions about the nature of the knowledge which underlies linguistic performance Through out the book the ultimate goal of grammar writing has been to come to some conclusions about what features a grammar must have in order to account for the details of utterances spoken by children as well as devising rules which capture the cognitively functional concepts and categories of linguistic competence of children The author focuses on the accuracy of three kinds of grammars-the pivot grammar, transformational generative grammar and case grammar.
Through out the whole book, the author develops her own ideas by defining the grammar and representing its characteristics. This is crystal clear in chapters [3,4,5,6and7] which their main core is to connect the grammar written by the children especially Finnish children with the features of three kinds of grammar. In addition, she reveals the advantages and problems of three kinds of grammar in relation to the utterances spoken by Finnish children.
In the first part of book author defines the pivot grammar "pivots have fixed position and can occur only in combination with open class words can stand alone or combine with each other in any order in addition to combining with pivots" She represents the characteristics of the pivot class and open class. Pivot class "fixed position, high frequency, never occurring alone and never occurring with another pivot"
Op en class "a part of speech mainly in a residual sense, and consists of the entire vocabulary except for some of the pivots" [(p34), (BowerMan),(1973)].
The pivot grammar appears to be inadequate in two ways as a representation of children's linguistic knowledge. Most critically, it does not account for the observable characteristics of children's utterances. Even the individual American children upon whose speech the pivot grammar was based were found not to have had pivot grammars at all, as the concept is usually understood. It is not surprising, therefore, that the speech of other American children and of Finnish and Samoan children failed to conform to the rules of the pivot grammar as well. It proves to be impossible to make a division of the words in any one child's vocabulary such that one class contains only words which have the characteristics attributed to 'pivots' and the other class contains only words which have the characteristics attributed to 'open class' words. The characteristics of children's early two-word utterances were found to be much more complex than the two-class pivot-open model suggests. Many of the words used in constructions by the children studied had combinations of the characteristics of both the pivot and open classes. For example, some high frequency words did not have fixed position, some had fixed position but combined only with nouns and not with all the clearly non-pivot words of the child's vocabulary, and so on. Most words which occurred in many different constructions, with or without fixed position; were also among the most frequent of single word utterances.
The pivot grammar is inadequate in another respect. It is fundamentally incapable of expressing as much information about sentence structure as children appear to possess, even very early in their syntactic development. The pivot-open model of child speech arose from the attempt to discover children's syntactic classes by distributional analysis. Such an analysis takes into account only the form and arrangement of words in utterances and ignores their meanings. Many of the regularities in children's first constructions appear to be related to children's apparent intensions, however. For example, the Finnish and American children demonstrated, by their relatively consistent placement of words in initial or final position according to their syntactic or semantic functions, that they had learned the dominant word orders used in their respective languages to express relations of subject-verb-object, possessor-object possessed, and object located-location. A grammar which aims to represent children's linguistic competence must take this knowledge into account. The pivot grammar, which disregards meaning and represents most noun-noun, noun-verb, and verb-noun strings as o+o , an unordered combination of two words from the same class, cannot do so.
The author represents the pivot grammar, which takes into account only information contained in the superficial form and arrangement of words in utterances, is found both to provide an inaccurate account of the characteristics of children's utterances and to be fundamentally incapable of representing as much knowledge of linguistic structure as children's utterances and to be fundamentally incapable of representing as much knowledge of linguistic structure as children can justifiably be credited with.
According to BowerMan, Transformational Generative grammar is one approach to grammar writing which provides for the representation of information about meaning.
"In a Transformational grammar, a sentence receives two representations, a surface structure and an underlying or deep structure these are related to each other by Transformational rules. The surface structure represents the structural and physical characteristics of the sentence is spoken. The underlying structure is an abstract representation of the essential syntactic characteristics of the sentence and is never realized directly in the speech"
[(p75),(BowerMan),(1973)]
Transformational Generative linguistic theory provides a grammatical frame work which is able to represent information about certain kinds of meanings. The analysis within this frame work of the speech of two Finnish children and the comparison of their speech with that of American,Samon,and LUO children revealed that the children's utterances were semantically and syntactically very similar at two stages of development with respect to the kinds of constructions produced, the length and internal complexity of utterances, the omission of obligatory elements, and the absence of certain construction patterns and operations.
In the samples from early STAGE I, most constructions were only two morphemes long. The construction patterns which appear to have been productive for most or all of the children are subject-verb, verb-object, and modifier-noun (modifiers include both adjectives and genitive nouns, and, for some children, attributive nouns). Noun-locative, demonstrative pronoun-noun, and subject-object strings were also productive in some what fewer samples. Productive three-term construction patterns began to emerge during early stage I, but were still infrequent. Of these, subject-verb-object strings appeared in the most different samples. However, other strings with three major constituents, such as subject-verb-locative or verb-object-locative, seem to have emerged at about the same time for many children, along with still other three-term strings such as verb-modifier-object and demonstrative pronoun –modifier-noun, which consist of two major constituents, one of which is a modified noun
Syntactic interpretation construction f:type/token
Subject-verb N+V 30/44
Verb-object V+N 3/4
N+pois,'away' 3/4
Subject-object N+N 3/5
Subject-verb-object N+V+N 6/7
Noun-locative N+proloc 2/2
Proloc+N 3/3
Modifier-noun N+N 3/7
Adj+N 2/2
In late stage there were many productive three-term construction patterns. The distinction between copular and non copular sentence seem to have been constructed by a selection of two or three constituents from a main verb sentence paradigm which had the following form for most of the children (with language-appropriate word order):
Subject –verb –modifier –object- indirect object- locative.
Copular sentence patterns included noun-locative, noun-adjective, and demonstrative pronoun-(modifier)-noun strings.
Wh questions and negative constructions were rudimentary or absent in the early stage I. By late stage I, most of the children combined negative words and Wh question words with one or two other words. Yes-No questions were present in the speech of children learning languages which provide a special questioning intonation which can be superimposed on declarative sentences, but absent in the speech of the Finnish children, whose language does not offer this device.
In both early and late stage I speech, transformational operations for embedding and conjoining sentences were lacking. Obligatory functors such as inflections, conjunctions, prepositions and postpositions, articles, and copulas were also largely absent. A few functors did appear to be productive in the luo sample and in one of the Samoan samples. However, all but one of these performed semantic or syntactic functions were important in the other samples as well, but which could be expressed without fuctors in the other languages.
The author provides table for Negative construction in the Finnish children's speech, late stage I
(1) (M and R looking at a picture of fruit)
Onks siella omenia ja banaaneja ja kaikkia hedelmia siella ?
'Are there apples and bananas and all (kinds of)
Fruits here ? (ei..taalla) 'not..here'
(2)(M and R looking at a picture of Donald Duck)
Onks se Aku-Ankka ?
Is it Donald DUCK? (ei Aku-Ankka) 'not Donald Duck'
The theory of Transformational grammar was found to provide a representation of the linguistic knowledge underlying sentence production at an early stage of development which is satisfactory in certain respects. It is possible to use the formulations of this theory to write a grammar which can both generate the set of utterances in a speech sample which are judged to have resulted from productive rules for sentence construction and give these structural interpretations which presumably have some correspondence to the child's intentions. However, the use of Transformational generative grammar for child language involves making some assumptions which are to justify. In transformational grammar, a basic division is made in deep structure between subject (the noun phrase immediately dominated by S) and predicate(the verb phrase immediately dominated by S, consisting of a verb plus an optional direct object and other optional elements). This analysis of constituent structure is implicit in the subconfiguration of symbols in phrase-markers. Arguments that predicates have psychological unity for children for children have been based upon the relative frequencies with which children produce verb-object, subject-verb-object, and subject-verb strings, and upon the characteristics of their 'replacement sequences'. These arguments can be turned around to justify the unity of subject-verb as a constituent for some children. However, it was concluded that the relative frequencies of various constructions and the characteristics of replacement sequences provide little insight into the constituent structure of children's utterances. Thus, the constituent structure assigned to children's utterances by a transformational generative grammar is largely gratuitous. It seems plausible that an early stage of grammatical development, children are able to produce combinations of words without having the same implicit understanding of their constituent structure as an adult speaker has. An understanding of the hierarchical organization of sentence constituents is probably not a necessary prerequisite at all for producing simple two-and three-term constructions. It is possible that children learn about constituent structure as their grammars gradually develop rather than controlling this information from the very beginning of word combination.
In addition to imposing a certain constituent structure analysis upon utterances, transformational grammar postulates that a particular deep structure constituent functions as sentence-subject. The 'subject' is more abstract and powerful grammatical concept than is needed to represent the characteristics of children's early utterances adequately. First, the transformational characteristics of adult speech which necessitate this concept are absent in children's speech. Second, the apparent sentence-subjects of children's earliest constructions almost always identify agents, or the initiators of the actions described by the verbs. As children mature, the semantic functions of their subjects gradually become more diverse, and therefore more like those of subjects in adult speech.
Theses observations indicate that the transformational grammar account of 'chick' and 'bunny' as subjects in utterances like Seppo's 'chick sings' and 'bunny drives car' may be an inaccurate representation of the knowledge which enables children to produce such utterances. Instead, they may construct sentences from elements which, as they understand them, perform semantic functions like 'agent', 'action', 'object acted upon', and 'location'. Certain semantic notions may be more easily gasped than others for nonlinguistic, cognitive reasons. 'Agent', for example, appears to be understood earlier than, or at least is more attractive than, the concept of 'person affected' by a state or action. Thus, the early linguistic knowledge of Finnish and American children would include the information that the name for the initiator of an action precedes the name for the action, and that the name for an object receiving the force of an action follows the name for the action. As the child's grammar develops, he may gradually notice that various semantic notions are dealt with syntactically in similar ways, and only eventually come to the syntactic abstraction of 'subject'.
In the last part of the book the author represents the case grammar approach according to Fillmore point view. It is a semantic approach to grammar writing is offered by Fillmore (1968). His suggestions for a theory of case grammar were motivated purely by linguistic considerations and were not influenced by the characteristics of child speech. Nevertheless, case grammar seems well suited in several respects to represent children's linguistic knowledge. It gives formal recognition to semantic relationships which appear to be important in the early speech of children, and, unlike transformational grammar, does not postulate the presence in deep structure of the constituent structure, or sub configuration of sentence elements, which defines the basic grammatical relations.
While Fillmore's linguistic theory is similar to Chomsky's (1965) in certain respects, such as in the insistence on the centrality of syntax and on the need to give sentences underlying as well as superficial representations which are linked by transformations, their ideas of what is appropriate to deep structure differ. Fillmore considers Chomsky's deep structure 'an artificial intermediate level between the empirically discoverable "semantic deep structure" and the observationally accessible surface structure, a level the properties of which have more to do with the methodological commitments of grammarians than with the nature of human languages' (1968, p88). He regards grammatical relations like 'subject of' and 'predicate of' , which are basic to deep structure in transformational generative theory, as surface structure phenomena which occur in some but probably not all languages and which should be accounted for transformationally where needed. In Fillmore's theory, syntactically significant semantic concepts called case relations are the basic element of deep structure .The case relations 'comprise a set of universal, presumably innate, concepts which identify certain types of judgments human beings are capable of making about the events that are going on around them , judgments about such matters as who did it ,who it happened to, and what got changed ' (1968,p 24). Case relations can be marked in surface structure by a variety of devices including both overt morphological elements like inflections of the nominal system, prepositions, or postpositions, and 'configurational' markers, which are dependent on word order or the like. Languages differ in the particular devices they employ to mark given case relations. (1968, p 5)
The author considered the possibility that the rules of a case grammar approximate the form of children's linguistic knowledge better than those of a transformational grammar. Case grammar gives formal representation to semantic concepts which seem to be important in the early speech of children, and, unlike transformational grammar it introduces elements into deep structure without imposing upon them a constituent structure which specifies that the verb and the direct object are more closely related than the subject and the verb. Moreover, it avoids altogether the assumption that one constituent in deep structure must function as 'subject'. In addition to these advantages, case grammar appears to give a concise and non-language-specific account of many of the elements which are missing in children's utterances in several languages.
The speech of the Finnish, American, Samon, and Luo children for whom data are available suggests that the Agentive, Objective, Locative, and Dative cases may all occur in children's early stage I utterances regardless of language. The Essive case, used in predicate nominative constructions, occurred in the American and Luo samples, but not in the Finnish and Samon samples. Most productive construction patterns contained either nouns in two of these case relationships or one noun and a verb:V+A,V+O,A+O,L+O,D+O,E+O. By late stage I, many three-term construction patterns were productive. These consisted of three nouns in various case relations or of a verb and two nouns. Noun in the factive case began to occur more often than before, as direct objects of verbs like 'draw' and 'make'
The author represents constructions of Seppo generated by the Case grammar.
(1) V+A
Pupu leikki 'bunny plays'
Pupu korja 'bunny repairs'
(2)V+O
Kirja… pois 'book… (take) away'
Takki pois 'coat (take) off'
(3)A+O
Humma kukka 'horsie flower'
(4)D+O
Tati auto 'aunt car'
(5)L+O
Auto talli 'car garage'
The author reveals that the representations of children's early linguistic competence which are provided by the formulations of the pivot grammar, transformational generative grammar, and case grammar are all unsatisfactory, each in different respects. The pivot grammar was found to be the most inadequate, since it does not even provide an accurate account of the superficial characteristics of children's utterances. Transformational grammar and case grammar both incorporate certain features which appear to be essential to a grammar which can generate, in a cognitively revealing fashion, the kinds of utterances children produce. For example, both are capable of taking the apparent meanings of utterances into account in giving them structural interpretations. Both make a distinction between deep and surface structure, which is necessary if we are to distinguish between combinations of word classes which are superficially identical but which apparently express different structural meanings. Providing adequate structural interpretation for some utterances seems to involve postulating deep structures which are more complex than the surface structures associated with them. For example, the characteristics of noun-noun strings judged to express a subject-object (or agent-object) relationship are best accounted for in the grammars for Seppo by specifying an underlying verb which is transformationally deleted.
The points at which the formulations and basic assumptions of both transformational generative grammar and case grammar apparently fail to provide an appropriate model of children's developing linguistic competence suggest other features which an optimal grammar for child language should incorporate. It should be completely flexible in assigning constituent structure. Hierarchical relationships should be postulated only when there is evidence in the data that children understand the elements of their utterances to be hierarchically organized , rather than because a certain hierarchy of sentence constituents must be specified in an adequate adult grammar for the language. The optimal grammar should also be flexible with regard to the kinds of concepts and categories it postulates as functional in the child's competence. We have suggested that the kinds of concepts children use in generating their earliest two-and-three word construction may be primarily semantic. As the child matures linguistically, according to this view, he begins to recognize regularities in the way different semantic concepts are dealt with and to gradually reorganize his knowledge into syntactic concepts, which are abstract. At any point in time, some of the concepts which are functional in the child's competence may be primarily semantic and others primarily syntactic concepts. It must also be flexible enough to represent shifts over time to new levels of abstraction, so that, for example, a sentence constituent which at one time might be represented as an 'agent' would at a later time be represented as 'sentence-subject'.
Through the development of author's ideas she makes use of the tables which enhance the audience understanding. The tables clarify the ideas and illustrate them. The book is full of tables which are generated by different children. In the last part of the book there are appendices of utterances generated by different children. The author does not depend on maps or illustrations but her main focus is on the tables which reinforce the development of ideas.
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