EL102 Examination: October/November 1996 (3 hours)

EL102 Examination
October/November 1996
(3 hours)

1. There are three sections (A, B and C) in this question paper. Answer four (4) questions, choosing at least one question from each section.
2. All questions are equally weighted and each is worth 25 marks. Try to spend roughly an equal amount of time for each question, about 45 minutes.

SECTION A (SHORT ANSWERS)

1. (Compulsory) Provide short definitions of the following terms, and discuss their usefulness. You should devote about 50 words to each term. Please use complete sentences.

(a) political correctness
(b) communicative competence
(c) centripetal force
(d) pidgins
(e) parataxis
(f) standard language
(g) external history of a language
(h) nominalisation

SECTION B (REWRITING AND ANALYSIS)

2. Examine the following map from an encyclopaedia which outlines the Viking raids on Britain and the reign of Alfred the Great.

(a) Rewrite the information into a form appropriate to a novel, omitting or filling in the details as necessary. (You may, for example, make up names of characters.) Do not write more than one page.

(b) Discuss how the language of the different versions (ie the original and your own) is appropriate. You should give details about how the structures are different (eg sentence structure, tense, aspect, use of determiners).

3. The boxed passage set down below comes from the opening sections of Saki’s short story, The Lumber Room. In that story, Saki deals, among other things, with the theme of how the child’s imaginative world cannot be curbed by the uncomprehending actions of adults.

Read the passage and answer the questions (a) and (b) set down below it. (The lines of the passage are numbered for convenience of discussion. In answering the questions, limit yourself to lines 3-11.)

The children were to be driven, as a special treat, to the sands at Jagborough. Nicholas was not to be of the party; he was in disgrace. Only that morning he had refused to eat his wholesome bread-and-milk on the seemingly frivolous ground that there was a frog in it. Older and wiser and better people had told him that there could not possibly be a frog in his bread-and-milk and that he was not to talk nonsense: he continued, nevertheless, to talk what seemed the veriest nonsense, and described with much detail the colouration and markings of the alleged frog. The dramatic part of the incident was that there really was a frog in Nicholas’ basin of bread-and-milk; he had put it there himself, so he felt entitled to know something about it.…

So his boy-cousin and girl-cousin and his quite uninteresting younger brother were to be taken to Jagborough sands that afternoon and he was to stay at home.

(a) Making use of the core-periphery distinction introduced in the lectures, discuss the ways in which the choices and combinations of words in the passage help the writer achieve exactly the effects he appears to be aiming at.

(b) To support your discussion, rewrite appropriate portions of the passage substituting core words with matching non-core words and vice versa, and show how such rewriting interferes with the achievement of the effects aimed at.

4. Examine the following extract from a conversation. Carol and Kath are good friends in their 30s, with children in primary school. Their children attend different schools, and Carol talks about the school Christmas play, when Mr Thrussell made a little speech in support of the school’s new head. Kath responds by discussing Mr Porter, the new head in her children’s school.

(a) Rewrite the descriptions of Mr Thrussell and Mr Porter into more elegant language, appropriate for say a novel. You may reorder the information, omit details, or make up details as necessary. Do not write more than one page.

(b) Discuss how the field, tenor and mode might differ in the two versions (ie the original and your own), and suggest how this might affect the language (eg lexical choice, sentence structures, etc.).

Carol: Mr Thrussell made a little speech but he – he’s ever such a nice man he’s never sort of flash or anything he didn’t stand at the front he just sort of got up in his seat which was half way down the hall and he just sort of said - oh - you know back up the new head like you - did I’m sure it’ll all be lovely and

Kath: mm

Carol: he just introduced the thing to start with and said this play’s gonna be a bit of a riot so look out and sat down

Kath: mm

Carol: you know he’s ever so sort of - modest really he didn’t

Kath: mm that’s nice

Carol: sort of - show off or anything he’s ever such a nice man – he’s a lovely man --- I hope we don’t get any sort of disappointments with the new bloke

Kath: well I’ve y - you can’t - [sigh] I mean moan about Mr Porter particularly in the last sort of twelve months but - you just don’t know what’s coming to you

Carol: no

Kath: I mean I *[inaudible]*

Carol: *it’s quite* alarming really when you **think that**

Kath: **I mean we** know he’s a crabby old sod and he’s a miserable bugger and everything - but better the devil you know [laughing] than the one you don’t *sometimes*

Carol: *that’s right*

Kath: I mean he is crabby but as long as you give him what - as good as he gives you we don’t really have any - big problems

5. The boxed passage below is taken from Clifford Prator’s paper The British Heresy in TESL (TESL = The Teaching of English as a Second Language). In that paper, Prator argues against local varieties of English (like Indian English and Singapore English) and particularly against using them as models for TESL.

Read the passage and answer the questions (a) and (b) set down below it. (The lines of the passage are numbered for convenience of discussion.)

The limitation of objectives implied in the doctrine of establishing local models for TESL seems to lead inevitably to a deliberate lowering of instructional standards. In the minds of many students, it becomes a convenient, officially sanctioned justification for avoiding the strenuous effort entailed in upgrading their own pronunciation.

(a) Provide a rewritten version of the passage which attempts to express what it says in the everyday, conversational English you might use with friends in places like the canteen.

(b) Discuss the differences between the lexical, grammatical and other devices used by the two versions you now have of the passage. In doing so, show how the devices of the original passage help to present its writer’s viewpoint as neutral and objective, while the devices of your rewritten version help to reveal it clearly as just another opinion.

What does all of this tell you about how academic writing typically works?

SECTION C (ESSAYS)

6. Either (a) Discuss how either the Viking invasion or the Norman conquest affected society in Britain, and how this in turn affected the English language.

Or (b) Old English (OE, c. 450-1100) has been described as being rather basic in terms of its lexis, highly inflexional in terms of its morphology, highly paratactic in terms of its sentence structure and highly implicit in the way meaning is communicated. Discuss its features in these terms and suggest how this might be appropriate or inappropriate for OE speakers.

7. The following extract from a letter was published in The Straits Times: ‘I wish to inform you that I have ceased listening to 90.5 FM. The last straw was one of your announcers reporting a traffic jam at Care-lang. If you have difficulty, sir, guessing where Care-lang is, you will understand my fury. (Care-lang is what you and I have known all our lives as Kallang.)’

What do we mean by accents? Why is accent such a contentious issue? What might tempt people to change their accents?

8. We know that the words on and around the periphery of the English word stock have exactly the qualities which fit them for academic and formal purposes, while those within and around the core have qualities which often make them unsuitable for such purposes. For example, a psychology text will probably use maternal affection rather than motherly love.

Providing convincing examples of both kinds of words, discuss the historical circumstances which help account for this fact.

9. Discuss the social, historical, ideological and other matters that might account for the fact that standard American English is not as different from standard British English as we might expect it to be.

10. Citing plenty of examples and examining salient social, historical and other facts, argue for or against the view that Singapore English is just an unsystematic collection of mistakes.

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