Grammar notes

Emphasizing as a means of being more expressive

Inversion	Never will I do that again! Hardly ever does he come here on time There goes the last participant! Here’s your document. Only then did I realize how to write this paper. So clever was his thesis we had no questions to ask. However busy he is, he never refuses to help us.
Structure It is … that (who)	It is this new experiment that gave the best results. It is the post-graduate who writes this kind of paper.

Read the following sentences and translate them into Russian, paying attention to emphatic structures:

1. Thus will be secured the right to nonconformity as the hallmark of a free society.

2. Thus will old freedoms and civic rights be added to the fund of new freedom generated by the leisure and security that industrial society offers to all.

3. .In vain did socialists promise a realm of freedom, for means determine ends: the U.S.S.R., which used planning, regulation and control as its instruments, has not yet put the liberties promised in her Constitution into practice, and, probably, the critics add, never will.

4. Nowhere did the liberals in fact succeed in re-establishing free enterprise, which was doomed to fail for intrinsic reasons.

5. It is they who in a large measure made the earth such as it is, and men such as they are.

6. Since no one has presented them in a more systematic form than Max Miller, it is upon his work that we shall base the description which follows.

7. It is almost entirely by considerations of a psychological sort that he justifies these inferences.

8. According to him, it is language which has brought about this metamorphosis, by the action which it exercises upon thought.

9. He does believe that institutions and values can be functional for society as a whole.

10. Merton states that only by recognizing the dysfunctional aspects of institutions, can we explain the development and persistence of alternatives.

UNIT 10

Reading and speaking

Pre-reading task

1. Comment on the following: “Discussion is a method of confirming others in their errors”.

2. Do you think cross-cultural analysis is important in sociology? Why? Why not?

3. What should this kind of analysis include?

4. Read the text.

Cross-cultural analysis

Cross-cultural research has a long history in sociology. It most generally involves social research across societies or ethnic and subcultural groups within a society. Cross-cultural analysis of social psychological processes include communicative and interactive processes within social institutions and more generally the relation between the individual and society and its institutions.

Although all sociological research is seen as comparative in nature, comparisons across subcultural or cultural groups have distinct advantages for generating and testing sociological theory. Specifically, cross-cultural research can help ''distinguish between those regularities in social behavior that are system specific and those that are universal''. In this way, sociologists can distinguish between generalizations that are true of all cultural groups and those that apply for one group at one point in time. The lack of cross-cultural research has often led to the inappropriate universal application of sociological concepts that imply an intermediate (one cultural group at one point in time) level.

In addition to documenting universal and system-specific patterns in social behavior, cross-cultural analysis can provide researchers with experimental treatments (independent variables) unavailable in their own culture. Thus, specific propositions can be investigated experimentally that would be impossible to establish in a laboratory in the researcher's own country. Finally, cross-cultural analysis is beneficial for theory building in at least two respects. First, the documentation of differences in processes across cultures is often the first step in the refinement of existing theory and the generation of novel theoretical models. Second, cross-cultural analysis can lead to the discovery of unknown facts (behavioral patterns or interactive processes) that suggest new research problems that are the basis for theory refinement and construction.

Answer the following questions

1. What does cross-cultural research involve?

2. What are the advantages of cross-cultural research for sociological theory?

3. Name two respects in which cross-cultural analysis is beneficial for theory building.

4. Comment on the following: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”