Английский язык учебник

LANGUAGE FOCUS

Exercise 1. Match the words in the left hand column with the definitions in the right hand column.

Exercise 2.

A.Guess the meaning and give the appropri ate translation of the following English ter minological word combinations:

complex: cognitive ~, chromosome ~, culture ~, fear ~, inferiority ~, superiority ~;

complexity: cognitive ~; elaboration: primary ~, secondary ~;

generation: filial ~, parental ~, rising ~, sexual ~, suc ceeding ~;

perception: associated ~, binocular ~, depth ~, intersen sory ~, time ~;

productivity: ~ of labour;

property: additive ~, functional ~, kinetic ~, physical ~, spectral ~;

resemblance: physical ~, remote ~, superficial ~, vague ~;

significance: biological ~, diagnostic ~, physiological ~, statistical ~;

utility: marginal ~, subjective ~; violation: ~ of order, ~ of rule; vocalization: socialized ~.

B.Convey the meaning of some terms above in your own words.

Exercise 3. Fill in the columns with the proper deriv atives of the following words whenever possible.

Exercise 4. Put the words from the following list into the gaps making necessary changes when ever necessary.

Property, arbitrary, elaborate, displacement, sign ing, communication, social, referent, resemblance, productivity, enterprise, shared

1.Language symbols need to have _____ significance.

2.We need to have a clear difference between _____

and language.

3.Animals have _____ communication systems.

4.The symbols of a language are _____.

5.Because of its semanticity language can be used as a social _____.

6.Chimpanzees have no capacity for _____.

7._____ means that we can produce a great variety of ideas with a limited number of language symbols.

8.Other ways of expressing language include writing, coding, and _____.

9.This _____ means that there need be no _____ be tween a word and its _____.

10.Language is a _____ process.

Exercise 5. Arrange the following words in pairs of

(a)synonyms and (b) antonyms:

a)quality, to appreciate, initiative, resemblance, elab orate, to arouse, boring, similarity, momentous, pro ductivity, to evaluate, use, complicated, property, enterprise, efficiency, repetitive, significant, utili ty, to evoke;

b)arbitrary, complex, insignificant, definite, without detail, easy, observance, gesture, to share, violation, significant, to keep it to oneself, elaborate, vocaliza tion.

SPEAKING AND DISCUSSION

Exercise 1. Answer the following questions on the text.

1.What is language?

2.Why is language called a remarkably generative pro cess?

3.How does it differ from communication?

4.What is arbitrary symbolic reference?

5.What is semanticity?

6.What do we call productivity?

7.What is displacement?

8.Does any animal communication system have produc tivity?

9.Why do chimpanzees lack productivity?

10.Do animals have a true language?

Exercise 2. Retell the text using your active vocabu lary.

Exercise 3. Give a summary of the text.

Exercise 4. Scan the text and do the tasks below.

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

One of the most significant achievements of child hood is the acquisition of language. Few, if any, cogni tive skills can compare to language use in complexity and utility. Language acquisition is nothing short of mirac ulous. Think about it for a moment. When you were a newborn you had no capacity for language production. The only way you could communicate was through cry ing. Over the course of the first year you began to modi fy your crying pattern to communicate different mes sages (hunger, anger, pain). You eventually began mak ing speech sounds (cooing) and began stringing them together (babbling). By the time you were one year old, you used your first word. By eighteen months you were stringing two words together into simple (although grammatically incorrect) sentences. By the time you were five years old, you had mastered most of the complexi

ties of language and were a proficient language user. In five short years you acquired language.

It is important to understand that you did not spe cifically set out to “learn language,” as you would in your college Spanish or French class. Instead, you set out to learn how to communicate with other members of your species. The way humans communicate is through a structured, rule governed language. In order to fit in with other humans and adapt to your world you had to learn to communicate. Along the way, you learn lan guage.

What Happens in Language Acquisition

Infants create sounds spontaneously. They come into the world with a cry and make noise with regularity for ever after. At about the age of six months, random cries and noises are replaced by the more regular sounds of babbling. Babbling is the production of strings of pho nemes which begins somewhere between four and six months of age (Shaffer, 1999). Babbling occurs in re petitive, rhythmic patterns, such as “ma ma ma” or “lu lu nah nah.” All babies babble in the same way for the first six months of the babbling period. An adult cannot distinguish the babbling of a Chinese infant from that of a Greek or an American infant. This shows that the onset of babbling is related to the maturation of the in fant’s brain. However, the course of babbling is related to the language environment to which the infant is ex posed. Eventually, phonemes that are not part of the na tive language are dropped, and babbling of babies from different language environments begins to sound differ ent.

Another piece of evidence that the onset of babbling is maturational comes from the fact that congenitally deaf infants begin to babble at the same time as hearing infants, and that their early babbling is indistinguish able from hearing infants. However, the babbling of the deaf infant begins to fall off just as the babbling of the

hearing infant reaches its peak. Deaf babies also “bab ble” with their fingers and hands. These motions are meaningless, but are the basis for what will later become (for many of them) their native sign language.

Does the frequency and nature of babbling relate to later language acquisition? Strictly speaking, there is virtually no relationship between how frequently and what an infant babbles and the later acquisition of the verbal aspects of language. However, during the babbling period infants learn about important nonverbal aspects of language such as control of attention, turn taking, and beginning and ending a conversation. Parents often engage their infants in face to face “interactions” dur ing which the parent says something to the infant and waits for the response from the infant. The infant re sponds with babble, and the parent waits while the in fant babbles. The parent will then respond to the infant. It is through these early face to face language sessions that the infant begins to learn about the nonverbal as pects of language.

The acquisition of vocabulary follows soon after bab bling begins. In all cases, comprehension, or understand ing, comes before production. Children understand and respond appropriately to the meaning of utterances long before they are able to produce those utterances them selves. A child’s first word or two usually appears at about the age of one (parents often argue that the onset of speech is earlier, but independent observers often fail to confirm what may be parental wishful thinking). Once begun, word acquisition is remarkable. A one year old may produce only two or three words. By the age of two, word production is up to 50. In terms of comprehension, by age two, a child understands 200 to 300 words; by age three, over 1,000; and by age six, between 8,000 and 14,000 words (Benedict, 1979; Brown, 1973; Carey, 1978).

Describing the development of syntactic rules in chil dren has proven difficult. As linguists began to under

stand the rules of adult language, it seemed reasonable to look for the same rules in the language of children. What soon became apparent was that the syntax of adult forms of language does not emerge until long after chil dren have begun stringing words and morphemes togeth er in utterances. Even though we do not find adult struc turs or rules in the language use of young children, they still use language in a rule governed way. In other words, children do not speak adult language badly; instead, their language follows its own rules (e.g., Radford, 1990).

The first use of vocalization as language is called holophrastic speech – the use of just one word to com municate a range of intentions and meanings dependent on gestures, intonation, and so on. Before this stage a child may produce words, but only as a naming exercise. Words are used as labels for concepts and nothing else. With holophrastic speech, individual words are used to communicate a range of possibilities. Imagine it your self. Picture a young child sitting in a high chair. Can’t you just see how the utterance milk could be used to com municate such things as “I want my milk!” or “Uh oh, I dropped my milk,” or “Yuck, not milk again.”

Around eight months, the child begins to produce simple sentences comprising two words. When careful ly analyzed, these utterances are very regular, as if they were being put together according to strict rules. Given an understanding of the words big and little and many nouns, a child may say, “big ball,” “big plane,” “big dog gie,” “little stick,” or “little cup.” What is interesting is that the child will never reverse this word order. He or she will not say “ball big” or “cup little” (Braine, 1976).

During and immediately after the two word stage a child’s language is known as telegraphic speech, which is spoken language consisting of short sentences resem bling a telegram. In telegraphic speech the child uses content words that convey meaning. Content words in clude nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The child drops func

tion words from their telegraphic sentences. Function words include articles, prepositions, and conjunctions. We hear children say such things as “want ball” rather than “I want ball” or “throw the ball.” The simple sentence “want milk” conveys meaning to the listener efficiently. Imagine a parent’s confusion if the child said, “I want.”

At roughly 2.5 years of age, language use expands at an explosive rate. There really is no noticeable three word or four word stage of development. Phrases are lengthened, noun phrases first, so that “Billy’s ball” be comes “Billy’s red ball,” which soon becomes “Billy’s red ball that Mommy got at the store.” When children are ready to begin grade school, at age six , they demonstrate both the understanding and the production of virtually every acceptable type of sentence structure in their lan guage.

Task 2. Ask 6 special questions to the text while your partner will answer them.

Task 3. Develop the idea of the text using the vo cabulary.

Task 4. Give a summary of the text.

Exercise 5. Choose one of the following topics con nected with language and prepare a re port on it.

1.The distinctive characteristics of language.

2.Language and communication.

3.The properties of language.

4.Language acquisition.

WRITING

Exercise 1. Write a short summary of the report you have made.

Exercise 2. Render the following text into English.

ОБЩЕНИЕ И ЯЗЫК

Язык является средством общения. Он обеспе чивает коммуникацию между общающимися, потому что его понимает как тот, кто сообщает информацию, кодируя её в значениях слов, отобранных для этой цели, так и тот, кто принимает эту информацию,

декодируя её, то есть расшифровывая эти значения и изменяя на основе этой информации своё поведение.

Человек, адресующий информацию другому человеку (коммуникатор), и тот, кто её принимает (реципиент) для осуществления целей общения и совместной деятельности, должны пользоваться одной и той же системой кодификации и декодификации системы значений, т.е. говорить “на одном языке”. Если коммуникатор и реципиент используют различные системы кодификации, то они не могут добиться взаимопонимания и успеха в совместной деятельности. Библейская легенда о строительстве вавилонской башни, сорвавшемся вследствие неожи данного “смешения языков” строителей, отражает факт невозможности взаимодействия при блокиро вании процессов кодификации и декодификации, так как говорящие на разных языках люди не могут договориться друг с другом, что делает совместную деятельность неосуществимой. Обмен информацией становится возможным, если значения, закреплённые за используемыми знаками (словами, жестами, иероглифами и т.д.), известны участвующим в общении лицам.

Значение – это содержательная сторона знака как элемента, опосредствующего познание окружающей действительности. Подобно тому, как орудие опо средствует трудовую деятельность людей, знаки опосредствуют их познавательную деятельность и общение.

Язык как средство накопления и передачи общественного опыта возник в процессе труда и начал развиваться ещё на заре доклассового общества. Для передачи друг другу существенно значимой инфор мации люди стали пользоваться членораздельными звуками, за которыми закреплялись определённые значения.

Пользоваться членораздельными звуками для общения было удобно, особенно в тех случаях, когда