andreeva_tia_nauchnyi_angliiskii_iazyk_vypusk_5_slovarminimu
.pdfA large percentage of the human race still lives in very small self-sufficient peasant communities. These people experience great poverty, but they can provide, on an indi vidual basis, for their own survival. They have a degree of economic independence.
T e x t 15
Syntactic Categories
A syntactic category — or part of speech, to use an older terminology — is a family of words that can all be used as the same constituent of a sentence. In the sentence
Wealthy people instinctively fear revolution, a variety of words can be used in place o f wealthy:poor, fat, little, for eign, and so forth. The words that are acceptable in that po sition all belong to the same syntactic category — adjec tives, in this case. Substitutions change the meaning of the sentence, of course, but the sentence remains grammatical; its syntactic structure remains unchanged. Similarly, all the words that can be used in place of people— women, in somniacs, turkeys, whatever — belong to another syntactic category, nouns. And so on through the sentence — and all other sentences. Linguists call this the distributional ap proach: Words that have the same distribution (that are us able in the same grammatical slots) belong to the same syntactic category. The advantage of having syntactic cate gories is that rules for forming grammatical sentences can then be stated in terms of these categories, rather than in terms of specific words. There is no syntactic rule, for ex ample, that makes explicit mention of the word wealthy or the word people; rather, the classes adjective and noun are invoked. Syntactic categories, not individual words, pro
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vide the atoms for building grammatical molecules. Traditional grammars typically recognize eight parts of
speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, and inteijection. These are the parts of speech that children still study in the early grades, where they still memorize the definitions: "A noun is die name of a person, place, or thing," "A verb is the name of an action," and so on. (Of course, explosion is a noun that names an action and remain is a verb that does not, but such facts have never dented teachers' devotion to the familiar notional definitions.) The eight traditional categories grew out of ancient and medieval attempts to integrate grammar, logic, and metaphysics. The distinction between nouns on the one hand and verbs and adjectives on the other was drawn in ancient Greece on logical grounds: Nouns serve as subjects of a proposition, verbs and adjectives as predicates. During the Middle Ages, when Scholastic philosophers tried to use language instead of observation to analyze the structure of reality, the parts of speech were metaphysical conceptions, and grammar was assumed to be the same in every lan guage. The history of the parts of speech is long and com plex — and unrewarding. Its principal value is to show (if a demonstration is needed) that the Big Eight are not as selfevident or obligatory as they are made to appear to school children.
T e x t 16
Earnestness and Comedy
... One of the major points of interest o fJumpers lies in the fact that the philosophy, however comically presented, comes across as the serious centre of the play while para
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doxically 'the real world' that surrounds it appears crazily surreal in its bizarre and dream-like progress. On closer scrutiny, however, this world is revealed, within its farcical framework, as a singularly bleak one. The Radical Liberal Party has come to power in what looks more like a coup d'etat than a general election. It is overtly militaristic and the Police Force is soon to 'be thinned out to a ceremonial front for the peace-keeping activities of the Army'. Jour nalism has been muzzled and we are told that 'the academ ics can look forward to rather more radicalism than liberal ism' [p. 36]. Religion too is under fire. The new Arch bishop of Canterbury is the erstwhile spokesman for Agri culture, an agnostic who plans to rationalize the Church; and the chapel of the University where George Moore, the
.philosopher, works has been convertedinto a gymnasium. Tne most sensational illustration of the extinction of moral values in this era is the grimly comic travesty of the hero ism of Captain Oates of the Scott expedition, 'out there in the Antarctic wastes, sacrificing his life to give his com panions a slim chance of survival'. For now a latter-day Captain Scott has found himself on the moon's surface with an Astronaut Oates and with enough power in the rockets to get only one of them back to earth. Knocking Oates to the ground, Scott has left him on the moon, 'a tiny receding figure waving forlornly from the featureless wastes of the lunar landscape'.
Unsurprisingly Stoppard revisits further the glimpses of the moon. George's wife Dorothy has had a blooming ca reer as a musical-comedy actress whose ideas of romance are inextricably linked with the subject of her songs, 'that old-fashioned, silvery harvest moon, occasionally blue, jumped over by cows and completed by Junes, invariably
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shining on the one I love'. When the first moon landing oc curred and she saw 'those little grey men in goldfish bowls, clumping about in their lead boots on the television news', it 'certainly spoiled that Juncyold moon'.
T e x t 17
Public Journalism and Democracy:
Scope ofthe Debate and Agendafor Research
The latter half of the twentieth century has seen at least two distinct but related movements affecting what is re ported and how it is presented in American newspapers: the "New Journalism" of the 1960s and the heyday of investi gative reporting in the 1970s and 1980s. Now, a third movement is gaining adherents and foes as practitioners and investigators debate what is being called public jour nalism.
This latest perspective on news coverage may be seen to have clear antecedents,in the two earlier phenomena, but it is drawing its own levels of interest and acrimony in the industry and in academic circles.
Although public journalism is relatively new on the journalism scene and so far defies agreement on just how to define it or even what to call it, the concept has been de scribed as encouraging "newspeople to help solve society's problem rather than simply report on them and advocates including the general public in the editorial process."
Critics, however, "fear the movement poses a threat to traditional journalistic values."
As occurred with the earlier perspectives, public jour nalism is confronting journalists with questions of ethics, credibility, professionalism, and performance. Indeed, it is prompting questions about the future ofjournalism and die definitions of news. Confusing the issue is that in the best tradition of media pluralism there are multiple working definitions of public journalism. The activities these several
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definitions encompass range from simply listening to read ers, to convening "town meetings," to actively taking charge in solving problems that the journalists perceive in their communities.
The issue also has been taken up by academics whose enthusiasm for or disparagement of public journalism mir rors the arguments in newsrooms and at conventions of journalists.
For the investigator, the discussion of public journalism offers opportunities to explore wide-ranging sets of ques tions involving media effects, agenda setting, ethics and professionalization, media uses and gratifications, the edu cation of journalists, legal issues, management practices and organizational communication, the roles of institutions in a democratic society, and the history of journalism, to name some of the possibilities.
Although the concept reportedly is gaining adherents across the country, it may be too early to tell whether pub lic journalism marks a major turning point in the develop ment of journalism and its relationship of audiences, or simply represents " the latest idea".
T e x t 18
Pop Music
Record companies by nature don't much care what forms music takes as long as they can be organized and controlled to ensure profit — musics and musicians can be packaged and sold, whatever their styles. But the music business is not without prejudices. Music was a commer cial product long before rock 'n' roll, and the industry's val ues and preferences derive from its own origins as a pub lishing business at the beginning of die century. Tin Pan Alley practices were developed to promote songs rather than performances, and while it was transformed in the
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1920s — from a system for selling goods for musical crea tion (sheet music and pianos) to a system for selling goods for musical consumption (records and record players and radios) — the "bland universal well-made song" (Ian Whit comb's description) remained its essential product.
From the 1920s to the early 1950s the music industry aimed its products at the family audience. Records reached the public on family radio and on the family phonograph — most homes had only one of each. The development of the record business in this period involved two processes (both of which systematically excluded black musicians from pop success, despite the starring presence they had won in vaudeville). First, to be popular a record had to transcend the differences between listeners: it had to appeal to all ages and classes and races and regions, to both sexes, to all moods and cultures and values. Second, musical pleasure had to be moved from the dance hall and bar into the living room — popular music lost its edge of risk, its emotional critique of social routine; pop records had to be cheerful and uplifting, they had to fit into the domestic round. Such "nice", music was determined, too, by the technological limits of early radio and recording. Subtlety of tone and harmony and melody were impossible to reproduce; noth ing too long or discordant or intricate or noisy could sur vive the primitive recording techniques; songwriters were advised to stick to the notes in the middle range of the pi ano.
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T e x t 19
Claude Monet A Feastfor the Eyes
Monet correspondingly sought to express die connec tion between the phenomena which arose purely from his own visual experience Monet believed we have only visual access to objects; their relationships, even when we think we intellectually comprehend them, ultimately escape our knowledge. He had always reacted with protest, therefore, to theories and scientific interpretations of his works.
The turning away from an illusionistic reproduction of reality precipitated the need for a formal as well as con ceptual renewal of art, and was ultimately to lead to the modem art of the following century. The new art was to remain open to the mysterious powers of the viewers imagination and was thus unable to commit itself to pre cisely-defined form. Monet pursued such ideas from the nineties onwards in the ambiguity of the series, in which the individual picture became an extract from a larger, su perior and extendable whole. The same effect was achieved through his increasingly abstract and expressive style of painting, which no longer described the object but instead evoked its image. Pictorial content was rendered ambigu ous and robbed of definitive interpretation. The theme of the water landscape in Monet's work also reveals an intel lectual reference to the various artistic currents prevalent at the turn of the century, including Symbolism and Jugendstil.
Monet applied his artistic beliefs to the design of his water garden in Givemy and created a garden of forms and colours which was a masterpiece in itself. The garden was
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both a translation of nature into art and a longed-for inner landscape. Such enclosed and artificial gardens became particularly popular in the art of the turn of the century as ideal, unspoilt images of nature. It was in this context that die motif of the water lily with its feminine associations, made its appearance. The water lily, a flower which flour ishes only in warm, swampy waters symbolized — not just in Mallarme’s poem The White Water Lily (1895) — the mysterious sources of life and the undividedness of being.
T e x t 20
Fashion: 1960-1983. The New Social
Conditions
The profound transformation of the fashion world that became apparent in the 1960s had begun at the end of World War II, but not until the Western world had been re constructed did fashion's revolution flourish. "At the start of the seventh decade of this century", writes Bruno du Roselle "it was impossible to imagine the topsy-turvy era to come, an era of umparallelled change in the history of fashion."
The high birthrate between 1945 and 1965 almost dou bled the prewar number of children throughout the world. By 1965, when five to ten percent of the world population was under twenty years old, a new clientele of young peo ple had emerged whose financial resources were by and large superior to those of their parents at the same age. The young were staying in school longer, and the number of students with access to free education had greatly in creased. For the first time, "the kids," as they were called with a hint of apprehension, were being considered a sepa
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rate group, with their own activities, tastes, and modes of dress. Until then, fashion had been designed for adults; now, the young were demanding a wardrobe of their own to suit their style of life.
The youth movement was bom in the United States, a country of abundance where children had not known the miseries of the war years. They scorned the consumer soci ety in which they were submerged and showed their disgust with bourgeois comforts by adopting the appearance of poorer classes: blue jeans, shirts without ties, and leather jackets. This became the costume worn by American col lege students of both sexes, practically the combat uniform of the "beat generation."
In Europe young people dressed like beatniks less to antagonize society than to show an alliance with their age group. They rode motorcycles and covered their jackets and helmets with both innocent and provocative decorations. A little later, T-shirts displayed pictures of favorite celebrities or emblems of the latest craze. This way of dressing, at first limited to a select few, spread to every social class. The ef fect was clear in the youth demonstrations of 1968, when it was impossible to determine the social origins of the par ticipants, so similar was their dress.
T e x t 21
Beliefand Set
If you have just bought a new coat, you may start no ticing a lot more people wearing the same or similar coats. The number of such coats may not have increased signifi cantly, but your mind has become tuned to these particular coats and picks them out from the crowd. This is an exam-
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pie of what psychologists call set. The mind will tend to pick out whatever it is "set" for.
If we are expecting someone to call us on die telephone, we will immediately recognize their voice on the other end. If, on the other-hand, we are not expecting them and have not heard from them for some time, it may be a little while before we recognize the voice. Or again, die postman may be easily recognized when we see him standing outside the door early in the morning, but it may be much harder to recognize him when we meet him on a holiday in Spain. These are examples of negative set — missing that which is not expected.
Psychologists have measured the role of set in percep tion by asking people to recognize words flashed briefly before them and giving them different expectancies of what was to come. In one experiment, subjects were very briefly shown the name of an animal, such as horse. One group was told that they were going to see the name of an animal, another group that they were going to see the name of a flower, and a third group that they were just going to see a word. Those who were expecting to see the name of an animal recognized the word most quickly and made the least errors. Those who were expecting any word did sec ond best. And those who were expecting to see the name of a flower did worst of all, reacting more slowly and making more mistakes.
In a similar experiment using single letters it was found that if the flashes are made very brief indeed, the subject could still be correct nearly every time if the choice was between two letters, for example, A or B, but almost always incorrect when the choice was one out of twenty-six.
Thus, set can be deceiving in that you may sometimes
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