Вступительный письменный экзамен по английскому языку. Учебные материалы, методические указания и рекомендации. Пособие для абитуриентов

not in very wide use for individuals aged over about 20. On the other hand, girl can be used for women considerably older than this, and it is not unusual to hear of a group of people that it consisted of, say, five men and six girls. It has been, in other words, more usual to use the more childlike word for women than for men.

As we have said, the implications of this unequal usage have not escaped notice in recent years, and increased awareness of the discriminatory nature of this differentiation seems currently to be leading to a linguistic change for some speakers. A number of speakers have begun to avoid using the word girl to refer to adult women. For some of them, however, it is not entirely clear what they should use instead. Some young women are happy to be referred to as a woman, but some are not, and it is not always easy to know what reactions will be to the words woman and girl. This seems to be leading, as a way of avoiding this problem, to an increase in the usage of the word lady where formerly girl would be more usual — and in a manner which shows that the sexual implications of woman have now been acquired by lady also, as in: Steve is going out with a new lady tonight. Lakoff writes that it would not make sense to say something like After ten years in gaol Harry wanted to find a lady. This would formerly indeed have been anomalous. For many younger speakers, however, it would now be quite usual.

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Mr, Mrs and Miss as Courtesy Titles

Mr, the abbreviated form of mister, dates from the 16th century. Mister as a courtesy title was an adaptation of ‘master’, a title of respect for a man of authority. Mrs and Miss both began as abbreviations for mistress. Before the 20th century, it was quite usual for a woman to address her husband as Mr…, just as a man would introduce his wife as Mrs…. But now everyone wants to appear relaxed and informal: we are invited in brochures and advertisements to ring freephone numbers and ask for ‘Shirley’ or ‘Karen’, and the chattering classes are immediately on the first-name terms with professors, bishops and other dignitaries.

In the 1990s it is not always easy to know when to use Mr, Mrs, etc. without sounding over-formal and stuffy. Even with important people, there is a tendency to use just their first names plus surnames; ‘John Major slapped down Margaret Thatcher’s attack…’ began a story in The Independent, and in the headline there was even less formality: ‘Major hits back at Thatcher’. At other times, Mr is used when it seems quaintly inappropriate: a news item in the same newspaper about a man who ran amok with a large pistol reported: ‘Mr. Dryden opened fire at random on the crowd…’.

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Mr, Mrs, etc. are useful when introducing people whose first names are unknown, although if they are wearing T-shirts and jeans, it can sound silly. To announce oneself, as some people do on the telephone, as Mrs. Whoever-it-is or Mr. So-and-so is now distinctly downmarket.

These titles have not by any means dropped out of use, and still have a place when a certain level of formality is in order. On other occasions, they can seem old-worldly. There are people who still prefer to use Mr, Mrs, or Miss on their business cards or even typed below their signature, but the general custom now is to use first name plus surname. As you can see, it is difficult to lay down rules and principles about these courtesy titles.

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The Use of the Hyphen

The use of the hyphen is a particularly variable and unpredictable feature of English spelling. The editors of the first Concise Oxford Dictionary wrote that ‘after trying hard at an early stage to arrive at some principle that should teach us when to separate, when to hyphen, and when to unite the parts of compound words, we had to abandon the attempt as hopeless, and welter in the prevailing chaos’.

However, certain trends in modern use are clear. Most modern writers tend to use the hyphen much more rarely, and write many compounds as single words, especially where the two components are single syllables. Words such as birdsong, eardrum, figurehead, lawbreaker, playgroup, and scriptwriter are now more common without a hyphen. In the Introduction to the eighth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the editor remarked, ‘This is a welcome tendency, because the hitherto much overused hyphen can now enjoy an enhanced role as a syntactic link to avoid ambiguity.’ In other words, the hyphen is most useful in linking two words which are used together with a particular meaning, as in cost-benefit analysis, and in making the distinction between confusing pairs: twenty-odd people vs. twenty odd people; a third-world conflict vs. a third world conflict; a red crested bird vs. a red-crested bird.

In certain contexts several hyphens may be used: two-hundred-year- old trees means ‘trees aged two hundred’, but two hundred-year-old trees means ‘two trees aged one hundred’, and two hundred year-old trees means ‘200 seedlings planted last year’. The hyphen also functions in distinguishing word pairs such as reform and re-form (form again), and may distinguish noun and verb uses: Rubber-stamp each page with a rubber stamp. It usefully separates suffixes where a solid word would be confusing, e.g. in words ending in -like where the first part has more than one syllable (violin-like, saucer-like) or ends in

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the letter l (eel-like, bell-like). It is usually taken to be unnecessary in goalless and soulless, and is rapidly falling out of use in words such as coordinate and cooperate.

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The Past of English

The past can help to explain the future. Before considering the ways in which spelling is going to develop for the rest of this century and into the twenty-first, it is instructive to see what happened in the past. Unlike a Romance language or a purer Germanic language, English is not a seamless robe woven from a single thread from the past, modified by local custom and colour. It is a patchwork of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, Norman French and clerks’ Latin, Wessex and Kent, Mercia and Northumbria, the conventions of printers and the customs of pedagogues. England has always been a refuge for exiles and a new home for immigrants from around the world. Their languages have enriched English, and complicated English spelling.

In the beginning was Old English. In the fifth century AD waves of Germanic invaders from the continent invaded and subjugated the Celtic and Romano-British inhabitants of Britain. The immigrants came from two principal tribes, the Angles and the Saxons. They were pagans, boasting ideals of loyalty and vengeance, and walking in fear of fate. There is evidence to suggest that they brought the Germanic runic alphabet with them.

Within two hundred years they had been converted to Christianity, to such effect that England was the centre of missionary endeavour, and, for a time, the heart of European civilization. Their Anglo-Saxon language began to grow away from its Germanic roots as soon as they landed, in the same way that American English began to grow away from British English as soon as the first settlers landed. The written word was an important medium for spreading the Word of God. In addition, the Church took an immediate interest in the codification of law. English orthography starts to evolve in Bibles, service books, and law-codes, almost immediately after Augustine landed in Kent on his mission from Pope Gregory the Great to convert the English, and, incidentally, to start the long story of English spelling.

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Language Development after the Norman Conquest

Generations of social, political, and orthographic upheaval followed the Norman Conquest. Slowly the two languages amalgamated as the

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two races grew together, helped by such linguistic bridge-builders as clerks, bailiffs, nurses and foremen. It was a time of rapid development of the language. But it developed piecemeal and regionally, not nationally, because nobody was setting a national standard at the centre. The rulers were issuing no secular or ecclesiastical documents in English. The feudal system favoured local and regional isolation. And the language itself was becoming looser and mongrel. In 1350 the Black Death wiped out a third of the population in less than two years. Those who were left to speak English were speaking a less elaborate language that was ceasing to be inflected. Gender was going. The English no longer wanted to remember that while woman was masculine, wife was neuter. French words, spelling, and pronunciation invaded English. Something like forty per cent of the English vocabulary in a dictionary today is derived from French: the proportion of Gallic words in an average sentence is much smaller, because most of the basic words, the nuts and bolts of the language, are English. After the Conquest the Englishmen had to recognize (and pronounce, and spell) an alien government, royalty, authority, and parliament. Even if his sovereign was a tyrant, he had to pay his taxes to the exchequer, or exchange his liberty for a dungeon.

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The Dark Side of the Spread of English

The darker, aggressive side of the spread of global English is the elimination of regional language variety, the attack on deep cultural roots. Perhaps the most dramatic example of the power of English can be found in Canada, which shares a 3000-mile border with the USA. Canadian English has been colonized by American English, especially in the mass media, and the French-speaking third of the community, living mainly in Quebec, has felt threatened to breaking point. Formerly the ‘two solitudes’, living an uneasy co-existence, Canada since 1945 has had a powerful Quebec separatist movement, sustained as much by opposition to that northward glacier, the American language and culture, as by historic resentment of English-speaking Canada. It developed enough political steam to elect a provincial government in 1976 which, the next year, enacted the notorious ‘charter of the French language’ — better known as Loi 101. English billboards, posters and storefronts were banned. Students were not allowed to attend English-language Quebec schools unless one of the parents had been educated in English at a Quebec elementary school. Many other minorities — Greek, Italian and Chinese — protested. One result is that there are now more than a thousand unregistered students in Montreal Catholic schools illegally studying English.

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The explanation is simple. Parents want their children’s education to be useful to them. As one businessman commented: ‘I don’t mind having to Francicize my business. Here we do everything in French. [Only about 12 per cent of Quebec province’s six million inhabitants consider English to be their first language]. But when it comes to my family, I’m going to fight like a tiger’.

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Computer Language and Its Influence on English

The computer industry in Silicon Valley is a textbook illustration of the way in which the language coined in California is quickly adopted throughout the English-speaking world. The heartland of America’s electronics industry is a super-rich suburb immediately north of San Jose, about an hour’s drive south of San Francisco. It is the home of more than 3,000 companies, including such famous information-tech- nology names as Apple and Hewlett-Packard. Alongside the giants there are dozens of smaller companies spawned from the frustrated talent of other companies and from the computer science graduate programmes of nearby Stanford University at Palo Alto. The streets have names like Semiconductor Drive. The valley is the home of the video game, the VDU, the word processor, the silicon chip and, for the English language, it is a rich jargon factory. Words like interface, software, input, on-line, data-processing, high tech, computer hacker, to access, diskette and modem are already in most dictionaries of contemporary English.

To be able to use such words easily is to be computer-literate. But it is the jargon phrases of Silicon Valley, reapplied to non-computing circumstances to make a kind of high-tech slang, that may eventually prove as influential on the language in the long run. In 1985 John Barry, a columnist on one of Silicon Valley’s myriad journals, Infoworld, had a list of such usages, plus their slang translations:

He doesn’t have both drives on line (he isn’t very co-ordinated). He’s a read-only memory. (He never learns anything. He keeps

saying the same thing over and over again — from ROM, a computer part that cannot be altered by the user.)

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Social Stratification of Language

The social stratification of the language appears in syntax and vocabulary as well as in pronunciation. The speaker higher in the scale describes many of the usages of lower strata as ‘ungrammatical’: it would be more accurate to say that the grammar of these dialects is different

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from the grammar of his own. In vocabulary, one can sometimes find a whole series of words used at different social levels: a good example for this is the word for the course of a meal which follows the main course; there are regional variations in this, but the general pattern of usage is as follows: pudding (upper and upper-middle), sweet (middle), dessert (lower-middle), afters (lower-middle and lower), and pudding (lower). The coincidence in usage between top and bottom is interesting and is found in some other things.

Such differences are often marked by referring to the speech as ‘educated’ and ‘uneducated’; to some extent, ‘education’ is here merely a euphemism for ‘class’, for, although class has for centuries been a topic of the greatest interest in England (as the novel reveals), our own age seems to find the subject a trifle indelicate, and only to be referred to, indirectly (like sex, war, death, lavatories, and economic depressions). However, ‘education’ in this context is not only a euphemism for class, for it is in fact true that our style of speech is affected by our education. This can often be seen where members of the same family have been through different parts of the educational machine: one may have left school at fourteen and gone into the mill; a second may have gone through grammar school and got a job in business, while a third may have won a scholarship to Oxford and ended up in one of the learned professions; even if they make no conscious effort to adapt their speech to their milieu (which of course many of them do), such sets of siblings will end up with markedly different styles of speech, simply from the influence of their varying speech-environments.

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English Drama and Shakespeare

To the public theatre of the sixteenth century came William Shakespeare (1564−1616) as actor, playwright, and shareholder in theatrical undertakings. So much has been written about his plays, and so much speculation evolved from the few known facts of his life, that any brief treatment may easily be a rehearsal of commonplaces. Of his life, it is clear enough to say that, to any unprejudiced view, it is clear that the Stratford man wrote the plays, and that he had a wider reading and more opportunities for mingling with the great than is sometimes realized. Of his personality, it can be affirmed that he had, in an absolute form, the intuition for gathering every ‘unconsidered trifle’, and every weighty matter, that could profit his art, with, in addition, the concentration which is a necessary attribute of genius. Of his art in its relationship to ideas, it remains clear that, despite the divisions made in his plays by categorizing historians, he held to a consistent outlook.

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In human conduct, he was everywhere possessed by the conception of loyalty and disloyalty, and their consequences in human life. In the exercise of the passions, which often entranced with their delights, he contemplated the strange conflict of reason and emotion, and the disorder that arose when reason was obliterated. He allowed his characters a freedom to live their own lives to the uttermost confines of good and evil, but he was ever conscious that they existed in a moral world, functioning under a divine Providence. While this consistency is maintained, his art permits of an almost indefinite variety of mood, and, as he progresses, the vision deepens.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Attitude towards Life and His Characters

Hawthorne’s acquaintances knew him as a man of taciturn disposition and thoughtful mood. Wherever we have a glimpse of him, in his writing, in his response to affairs of his time, or in his relations with his contemporaries, he is thoughtful. His usual attitude is one of doubt and general scepticism; his usual approach is to question, to look at the other side, to ask whether a matter will seem different when viewed from another angle or in a different light. A student of history and literature, human nature, and things about him, he was the enemy of sham and pretence and shallowness. An optimism based on a false or inadequate view of human character and social realities seemed to him a species of whistling in the dark. He had a firm awareness of human frailties and shortcomings and the suffering which results. One after another of his characters acts from insufficient knowledge or inadequate understanding and therefore moves inevitably to an end which is tragic or pathetic or ludicrous. So it is with Aylmer, Rappaccini, Ethan Brand, Hollingsworth, Septimius Felton at the tragic end of the scale; and so it is with Dr. Heidegger, Peter Goldthwaite, and Robin of My Kinsman, Major Molineax at the other.

Not given to dogmatizing, and preferring to display aspects of character rather than to propound moral precepts, Hawthorne found indefiniteness and ambiguity to be tools well adapted to his purpose. His works testify that he was steadily alert to the affairs of his time and that he viewed them with the questioning, sceptical outlook habitual with him.

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Approaches to Foreign Language Acquisition

The success with which nearly all of us acquire our mother tongue has for long prompted the question: Can one learn a foreign language

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Часть 3

Образцы материалов для подготовки к вступительному

экзамену на гуманитарные факультеты

3.1.Материалы для подготовки к вступительному экзамену

на факультеты и отделения истории

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Wayfarers and Pilgrims

A long journey in medieval England was never undertaken lightly, although the roads were not as bad as has sometimes been maintained, and, as the maps of Matthew Paris show, a network of highways did exist. It had been accepted in Norman times that a road should be wide enough for two wagons to pass each other, for sixteen knights to ride abreast, or for two oxherds to touch together the tips of their goads. And on most stretches of the main roads which led out of London this width seems to have been maintained, then and thereafter. But on minor roads constant encroachments caused maddening bottlenecks, while the surfaces were repeatedly falling into ruinous disrepair either through neglect or through wilful destruction. In 1286, for example, the people of Cambridge were prosecuted for ploughing up the road to Hilton. Packhorse routes were notoriously difficult. Although often paved in boggy terrain, and then known as ‘causeys’, a corruption of the Latin for trodden, they were usually so narrow that two trains of horses could not pass each other and after long arguments one or other of them would have to give way and move down into the mud.

Foul weather, snow and floods were likely to close any road in winter when the very track itself was difficult to discern, even though large stones often marked the verges in desolate country. In the winter of

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1324−1325 a man from Nottingham, travelling on the king’s business in the eastern counties, managed to cover only six miles a day, though he usually covered over twenty-five; and in 1339 Parliament had to be adjourned because those who were due to attend it were prevented by bad weather and impassable roads from doing so.

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Homes and Holidays

In 1925, in the publication Metro-Land, a Middlesex builder advertised for sale ‘Semi-Detached Brick Built Villas within 3 minutes of North Harrow, 5 minutes West Harrow Stations. Train journey about 16 minutes to Baker Street or Marylebone’. The three-bedroomed houses with bow windows to ground and upper floors, electric light, ‘large gardens’ and ‘facilities for garage’ were offered for £750 leasehold, and £920 freehold. Four-bedroomed houses were also advertised from £950 to £1450. Rates were 8s in the pound, and advances were granted on the properties by the Middlesex County Council under the Housing Acts 1890−1924. ‘Hundreds’, the advertisement claimed, ‘have been satisfied’.

The Housing Act of 1924 was the most recent of several Acts which had encouraged house building by granting subsidies. An earlier Act of 1922 had subsidized building by private firms; and the 1924 Act had subsidized houses built by local authorities. By the late 1930s well over 300,000 houses were being built every year; and when war was declared in 1939 more than 4 million houses had been built since 1918, about half of them for sale, most of the rest for rent by local councils. By 1940 the total amount outstanding on mortgages was nearly £700 million; and there were 1.5 million borrowers in the country, one in eight of all families, many of whom had been required to put down no more than £25 as a deposit. The houses they occupied in the sprawling suburbs that encircled the large towns were neat and comfortable. The specifications for a typical semi-de- tached house erected in North Ilford in 1934 and costing £745 had three bedrooms, all with electric fires; a bathroom with ‘white glazed tiles to dado height’, ‘porcelain enamelled bath with marbled panels’, ‘lavatory basin bracketed out from wall; heated linen cupboard; heated chromium towel rail. Separate W.C.’ On the ground floor the draw- ing-room had a fireplace with tiled surround and mahogany mantel, and ‘a five-light, semi-circular bay window’; the dining-room had casement doors to the garden; both floor and walls of the kitchen were tiled. There was a gas cooker in the kitchen and electric power points in most rooms.

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