EL1102 Studying English in Context (Semester 2, 00/01)
Tutorial No. 1 (week beginning 15 January 01)
1. Here is the transcript
of the two recordings. Normal spelling has been used as far as possible. Two
dots indicate a pause. Listen for a general impression the first time; the
second time underline any bits of the pronunciation that you find striking
(bearing in mind some of the terms raised in the lecture: rhoticity, glottal
stop, intonation). (You might also find bits of the grammar
interesting, although we won’t focus on this in this tutorial.)
Erm .. in the days
before husbands and children, erm I did quite a lot of travelling and erm ..
one of the th … places I went to was to the Amazon and erm I hadn’t really as
why I .. I knew my husband and erm .. then but .. just as a friend really and
so we erm decided that we, or he decided that we would go to Brazil and er I’d
been travelling anyway .. came back for Christmas, two days to wash my rucksack
and off we went to Rio .. and erm I hadn’t given it any thought at all and the
next thing I knew we went up to Manaus, which is a free port up on the Amazon
where we met some chap who’d got a boat erm which was rather like the African
Queen erm .. and I felt like Katharine Hepburn .. and we then erm we went
in this boat up the Amazon and then off up one of the tributaries
I’ve got something humorous happened to me, one thing
I’ll never forget.
— What’s that?
Eh? We .. well th .. this is, this is when I first met
my husband .. cos I generally .. you know, my daughter always laugh about that,
we went and had a drink .. erm .. one night. I don’t know if you know the Blue
Room? near the erm .. do you know the .. erm .. Yeah.
Well we went in there one night to have a drink. There
was erm .. two girl friends and me .. this was before I married, see and, well
this was the night, see, when I met my husband and erm you know they was like b
.. the fellows was buying us drinks and that, see, and er my friend and her sister,
oh, she say, we don’t want to go with them, she said, let’s give them the slip
.. right .. well we ran up er Prince of Wales Road and opposite the, well,
that’s .. that was the Regent then, that’s the ABC now, there’s a fruiterers,
Empire Fruit Stores, I don’t know if it’s still there, is it? Well there was
this here fruits .. er .. fruitstore and that and they had a passage way at the
side of it, see.
(a) Do you
recognise the accents of the speakers, or do they sound like anyone you
know? What kind of variation are we concerned about here: regional
(geographical), temporal (historical) or social? Why do you think
the speakers have different accents? Is one better than the other, or can they
be improved upon?
(b) Can you
describe the accents? What are some differences (eg the way the speakers
say the ‘oh’ sound as in ‘Rio’ (S1) and ‘Prince of Wales Road’ (S2))? Make use
of some of the terms introduced in the module: rhoticity, glottal stop,
rhythm, intonation. You might want to discuss how these speakers talk
differently to how you talk, as well as how each is different to the other.
(c) What is your
impression of both speakers? Can any of these labels (or their antonyms) be
used: warm, approachable, proud, earthy, jovial, has a sense of humour,
sexy, old-fashioned, vulgar? Would you ever make a judgement on the kind of
person somebody is based on the accent they adopt?
2. The following passages deal with the same subject matter, namely ‘the
“fouling up” of the environment’, but they choose different kinds of words for
their purposes.
(a) Industrialism is the systematic exploitation of
wasting assets. Progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that
exploitation. Such prosperity as we have known up to the present is the
consequence of rapidly spending the planet’s irreplaceable capital. (Aldous Huxley, Themes and Variations)
(b) Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to
create, so that he can add to what he’s been given. But up to now he hasn’t been
a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild
life’s become extinct, the climate’s ruined and the land grows poorer and
uglier every day. (Anton
Chekov, Uncle Vanya)
(c) It goes so heavily with my disposition that this
goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent
canopy the air, look you this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof
fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and
pestilent congregation of vapours. (William Shakespeare, Hamlet)
(i) How would you ‘place’ the words used within the core /
periphery figure introduced in Lecture 2. Say why you place them as you do.
(ii) Why do you think the three writers have chosen and combined
these words as they have done? (Bear in mind, among other things, the notions
of ‘appropriateness’ and ‘precision of meaning’ etc. introduced to you in the
lecture as well as the notion of ‘praxis’, ie doing things with
language.)
(iii) Rewrite (portions of) the passages replacing the words they
have chosen with alternative words expressing more or less the same meanings
but drawn from somewhere else within the core/periphery figure. (Often your
rewriting will involve alternative phrases not just single words.) What would
the result of your rewriting be from the point of view of what you have stated
under (ii) above?
3. The following passage is from a Chapter on ‘Advertising’, in which
the author, Geoffrey Hughes, discusses how language is (mis)used by big time
advertisers today, along with powerful audio-visual images, as just another
resource in the capital market. In making his point, he imagines how the highly
erudite Dr Johnson would have reacted to modern day advertisements had he been
living in our times. Read the passage carefully and answer the questions given
below:
Perhaps the coda of
the chapter should be given to Dr Johnson, whose insight into the language of
advertising was so clear. We can imagine the bewilderment of the doughty prescriptivist
as he ventured into a modern US supermarket intending to purchase viands for
his pet cat, Hodge. Promises, large promises, would greet his astonished eyes.
Substances claiming to be nectar and ambrosia would seem to be commonly
available, with feline sustenance equally rarefied:
Every bite-sized clover of Little
Friskies is drenched with a digest of real ocean fish by- products for a taste
and an aroma your cat will love. All Little Friskies flavours are tested with
and approved by a taste test panel of over 500 pampered cats like yours at the
Friskies Cat health Centre, Carnation Farms, Washington.
Witnessing the
kaleidoscopic cacophony of imperatives, hedonistic, sexual, salutary, dyspeptic
and apocalyptic, Dr Johnson would assuredly recall his own pronouncements on
advertising. Affronted by some of the more primitive manifestations of
articulation, the cave-men grunts, infantile gurgles and juvenile ejaculations,
he would surely feel vindicated by the statement he made in the Preface to his Dictionary:
‘Commerce, however necessary, however lucrative, as it depraves the morals, so
it corrupts the language.’
(i) Are the words used in the advertisement of
the same kind as those used in the author’s comments on advertisements? Discuss
the differences between then along the lines indicated in the earlier
questions.
(ii) How do the different choices of words and
their combinations, as they appear in the advertisement and in the author’s
comments on it, help achieve the communicative purposes of each genre?
(iii) Assume that you are in a friendly argument,
during which you strongly criticise the aggressive strategies used by modern
advertising.
(a) Compose such a
conversation or argument and compare the words you have used with those used by
Geoffrey Hughes in his comments.
(b) Discuss the
differences in the words used in terms of the notions of appropriateness,
precision of meaning, etc.
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lecture/tutorial schedule