General semantics

Lost in Translation: In her article “Lost in Translation,” Lera Boroditsky discusses the many aspects of language and how it may influence the way we perceive, think, and even act towards certain situations in our everyday life. Throughout the article, Boroditsky is addressing those who are either highly educated or those who work in a more “professional” business scene that may deal with linguistics on an everyday basis. She attempts to show that language is more than just words and to be more

What is a discourse community? A discourse community is an interactive group that shares common discourses. Meaning that they share a common set of values that similar towards others. Most of society belongs to a discourse community that share values or even similar personalities. The discourse communities I joined needed to reflect my personality. For example, I like culture and I like to involve myself in some culture-based activities such as Art or even Culinary Arts. Ideally experiencing diverse

Signs can take many forms and how we interpret them can vary as well. The 2002 film, John Q, is a complex story with many signs that convey a warning message. The film gives a warning and helps the audience come to an understanding of how fundamentally flawed our medical system is. We will use semiotics and dialogism to understand how the film John Q signifies the importance of a comprehensive medical system in America. Prior to looking at the plot of the film, we must first define semiotics and

Semantic Illusion and its Role in Sentence Processing The idea of semantic illusions is where people tend to not recognize an inaccuracy or inconsistency in a text.. This tendency is now known as the Moses Illusion. Erickson and Mattson (1981) presented subjects with questions such as ‘ How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?’. People answered ‘two’ even when they knew that Noah was the one who took the animals. Even when told that there may be distortions, people still overlooked

Discourse has many definitions and can be interpreted several ways. The one that got to me the most was when Gee says, “To enact identities people people have to talk the right talk, walk the right walk, behave as if they believe and value the right things, and wear the right things at the right time and right place. Identity is a performance” (Gee 102) This explanation brought discourse to life. It shows how people constantly must put in the effort to maintain a certain identity, but once they have

The author’s main argument in “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” is that the focus of literacy studies or applied linguistics should be social practices (Discourse) rather than language. Many people tend to think of language as ‘perfect grammar’, but language is about what you say, how you say it, what you are, and do when you say something. Gee elaborates on this claim by describing two responses of women in an interview that each show different dialect. Overall, the saying-doing-being-valuing-believing

Poets use imagery and words with different connotations and denotations. Connotations are the sets of ideas associated with a word in addition to its explicit meaning. An example of a connotation is "The huts of Caroline". It's not the figurative meaning but its actual meaning the homes in Carolina. The people in the Carolinas will be freed from their slavery. Denotations are the dictionary definition of a word, independent of other associations a word may have. An example of a denotation is "With

A discourse community is defined as groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals. John Swales is a professor in linguistics and received his Ph. D. from Cambridge University. John Swales’s Six Criteria is a perfect setup for a discourse community, and some of the steps are setting a common goal, mechanisms of intercommunication; provide information and feedback, genres, lexis, and threshold level of members. James Lee is a professor who taught linguistics at Stanford

Discriminative which is generally the location where you feel the pain, such as if you’re poked in the left hand, you feel it in your left hand. The second feature was Affective (emotional), which is an emotional symptom associated with pain such as a general feeling of discomfort that

LA 10 Pre AP Summer Project Question Answers 1. An allusion is a part of the text that readers are already supposed to know because they have read or heard of it before. Its purpose is to give more meaning to what is being portrayed in the specific text. In other words it is supposed to poke at some background information to make readers understand it more. The two allusions in “The Masque of Red Death”, are to Shakespeare and to the Bible. The quote, “He had come like a thief in the night"(Poe