English for Academic and Professional Purposes, Slides of Creative writing

Download English for Academic and Professional Purposes and more Slides Creative writing in PDF only on Docsity! English for Academic and Professional Purposes (EAPP) Prepared by: EDLYN L. JOVEN English Teacher From Hand to Mouth Michael C. Corballis (1) Imagine trying to teach a child to talk without using your hands or any other means of pointing of gesturing. The task would surely be impossible. There can be little doubt that bodily gestures are involved in the development of language, both in the individual and in the species. Yet, once the system is up and running, it can function entirely on vocalizations, as when two friends chat over the phone and create in each other's minds a world of events far removed from the actual sounds that emerge from their jc: ccc st ln speech as we Know it foday would have faken some me to evolve, and may not have been complete ntl some 170,000 years ago, or even later, when Homo sapiens emerged fo grace, but more often disgrace, the planet. These adjustments may have been incomplete even in our close relatives the Neanderthals; arguably, was this falure that contnbuted to ther demise (3) The question now is what were the selective pressures that led to the eventual dominance of speech? On the face of it, an acoustic medium seems a poor way to convey information about the world: not for nothing is it said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Moreover, signed language has all the lexical and grammatical complexity of spoken language. Primate evolution is itself a testimony to the primacy of the visual world. We share with monkeys a highly sophisticated visual system, giving us three- dimension information in colour about us, and an intricate system for exploring that world through movement and manipulation. Further, in a hunter gatherer eflvironment, where predators and prey are major concern, there are surely advantages in silent communication since sound acts as a general alert. And yet we came to communicate about the world in a medium that in all primates except ourselves is primitive and stereotyped- and noisy, (5) What, then, are the advantages of a language that can operate autonomously through voice and ear, rather than hand and eye? Why speech? Advantages of Arbitrary Symbols (6) One possible advantage of vocal language is its arbitrariness. Except in rare cases of onomatopoeia, spoken words cannot be iconic, and they therefore offer scope for creating symbols that distinguish between object or actions that look alike or might otherwise be confusable. The names of similar animals, such as cats, lions, tigers, cheetahs, lynxes, and leopards, are rather different. We may be confused as to which animals is which, bur at least it is clear which one we are talking about. The shortening of words overtime also makes communication more efficient, and some of us have been around long enough to see this happen: television has become TV or telly, microphone has been reduced to mike (or mic), and so on. The fact that more frequent words tends to be shorter than less frequent ones was noted by the American philologist George Kingsley Zipf, who related it to a principle of “least effort.” So long as signs are based on iconic resemblance, the signer has little scope for these kinds of calibration. (7) It may well have been very important for hunter-gatherers to identify and name a great many similar fruits, plants, trees, animals, birds, and so on, and atfempts at iconic representation would eventually only confuse. Jared Diamond observes that the people living largely traditional lifestyle in New Guinea can name hundreds of birds, animals, and plants, along with details about each of them. These people are illiterate, relying on word of mouth fo pass on information, not only about potential foods, but also about how to survive dangers, such as crop failures, droughts, cyclones, and (9) | would be on dangerous ground, however, f| were to insist too strongly that speech is linguistically superior to signed language. After al students at Gallaudet University seem pretty unrestricted in what they can learn; signed language apparently functions well right through to university level- and stil requires students to learn lots of vocabulary from their suitably = professor. It is nevertheless true that many signs remain Iconic, or a least partially so and are therefore somewhat tethered with respect to modifications that might enhance clarity or efficiency of expression. But there may well be a trade- off here. Signed language may easier to learn than spoken ones. Especially in initial stages of acquisition, in which the child comes fo understand the linking of objects and the action with their linguistic representations. But spoken languages, ones acquired, may relay messages more accurately, since spoken words are better calibrated to minimize confusion. Even so, the iconic component is often important, and as | look the quadrangles outside my office | see how freely the students there are ij embellishing their conversations with manual gestures. In The Dark (10) Another advantage of speech over gesture is obvious: we can use it in the dark! This enables us to communicate at night, which not only extends the time available for meaningful communications but may also have proven decisive in the competition for space and resources. We of the gentle species Homo sapiens have a legacy of invasion, having migrated out of Africa into territories inhabited by other hominins who migrated earlier. Perhaps it was the newfound ability to communicate vocally, without the need for a visual component that enabled our fore-bearers to plan, and even carry / out, invasion at night, and so vanquish the earlier migrants. Listen to Me! (12) Speech does have one disadvantage, though: it is generally accessible to those around you and is therefore less convenient for sending confidential or secret messages or for planning an attack on enemies within earshot. To some extent, we can overcome this impediment by whispering. And sometimes, people resort to signing. But the general alerting function of sounds also has its advantages. When Mark Anthony cried, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me ears.” he was trying to attract attention as well a* deliver a message. (13) In the evolution of speech, the alerting component of language might have consisted at first simply of grunt that accompany gestures to give emphasis t0 specific actions or encourage reluctant offspring fo attend while a parent lays down the law. It is also possible that non-Vocal sounds accompanied gestural communication. Russell Gray has suggested to me that clicking one's fingers as children offen do when putting their hands up in "class to answer a question, may be a sort of “missing link” between gestural and vocal lanquage. | know of no evidence that chimpanzees or other nonhuman primates are able to clck their fingers as humans can, although lip smacking, a$ observed in chimpanzees, may have played a similar role. Sounds may therefore have played a similar and largely alerting role in early evolution of language, gradually assuming more prominence in conveying the message isel (15) Speech has another, and subtler, attentional advantage. Manual gesture is much more demanding of attention, since you must keep your eyes fixed on gesturer in order to extract her meaning, whereas speech can be understood regardless of where you are looking. There are a number of advantages in being able to communicate with people without having to look at them. You can effectively divide attention, using speech to communicate with a companion while visual attention is deployed elsewhere, perhaps to watch a football game or to engage in some joint activity, like building a boat. Indeed, the separation of visual and auditory attention may ll have been critical in the development of pedagogy. Three Hands Better than Two (16) Another reason why vocal language may have arisen is that it proves an extra medium. We have already seen that most people gesture with their hands, and indeed their faces, while they talk. One might argue then, that the addition of vocal channel provides additional texture and richness to the message. (17) But perhaps it is not a simply a matter of being better. Susan Golden-Meadow and David McNeill suggest that speech may have evolved because it allows the vocal and manual components to serve different and complimentary purposes. Speech is perfectly adequate to convey syntax, which has no iconic or mimetic aspect, and can relieve the hands and arms of this chore. The hands and arms, of course, well adapted to providing the mimetic aspect of language, indicating in analogue fashion the shapes and sizes of things, or the direction of movements, as in the gesture that might accompany any statement “he went that a-way." By allowing the voice to take over the grammatical component, the hands are given free rein, as it were, to i provide the mimetic component. (20) Thus, it was not the emergence of the language itself that gave rise to the evolutionary explosion that has made our lives so different from our near relatives, the great apes. Rather, it was the invention of autonomous speech, freeing the hands for more sophisticated manufacture and allowing language to disengage from other manual activities, so that people could communicate while changing the baby’s diapers, and even explain to a novice what they were doing. The idea that language may have evolved relatively slow, seems much more in accord with biological reality than the notion of linguistic “big bang" within the past 200,000 years. Language and manufacture also allowed cultural transmission to become the dominant mode of inheritance in human life. That ungainly bird, the jumbo jet, could not have been created without hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years of cultural evolution, and the brains that created it were not biologically superior to the brains that existed in 100,000 years ago in Africa. The invention of speech may have merely been the first of many developments that have put us not only on the map, but all over it. Picture with Caption Layout Click icon to add picture Caption Add a Slide Title - 1 https://www.scribd.com/presentation/368007664/ English-for-Academic-and-Professional-Purposes- Ppt https://www.slideshare.net/auroracslk/english-for- professional-and-academic-purposes https://learnersniche.wordpress.com/2017/08/06/ english-for-academic-purposes-ppt-presentation- for-1st-quarter/ Add a Slide Title - 4