South African Population Registration Act of 1950

South African Population Registration Act of 1950 South Africas Population Registration Act No. 30 (commenced on July 7) was passed in 1950 and defined in clear terms who belonged to a particular race. Race was defined by physical appearance and the act required people to be identified and registered from birth as belonging to one of four distinct racial groups: White, Coloured, Bantu (Black African), and Other. It was one of the pillars of Apartheid. When the law was implemented, citizens were issued identity documents and race was reflected by the individuals Identity Number. The Act was typified by humiliating tests which determined race through perceived linguistic and/or physical characteristics. The wording of the Act was imprecise, but it was applied with great enthusiasm: A White person is one who is in appearance obviously white - and not generally accepted as Coloured - or who is generally accepted as White - and is not obviously Non-White, provided that a person shall not be classified as a White person if one of his natural parents has been classified as a Coloured person or a Bantu... A Bantu is a person who is, or is generally accepted as, a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa... A Coloured is a person who is not a White person or a Bantu... Racial Test The following elements were used for determining the Coloureds from the Whites: Skin colorFacial featuresCharacteristics of the persons hair on their headCharacteristics of the persons other hairHome language and the knowledge of AfrikaansThe area where the person livesThe persons friendsEating and drinking habitsEmploymentSocioeconomic status The Pencil Test If the authorities doubted the color of someones skin, they would use a pencil in hair test. A pencil was pushed in the hair, and if it remained in place without dropping, the hair was designated as frizzy hair and the person would then be classified as colored. If the pencil dropped out of the hair, the person would be deemed white. Incorrect Determination Many decisions were wrong, and families wound up being split and/or evicted for living in the wrong area. Hundreds of colored families were reclassified as white and in a handful of instances, Afrikaners were designated as colored.  In addition, some Afrikaner parents abandoned children with frizzy hair or children with dark skin who were considered outcasts. Other Apartheid Laws The Population Registration Act No. 30 worked in conjunction with other laws passed under the apartheid system. Under the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, it was illegal for a white person to marry someone of another race. The Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 made it a crime for a white person to have sex with someone from another race. Repeal of The Population Registration Act The South African Parliament repealed the act on June 17, 1991. However, the racial categories set forth by the act are still ingrained in the culture of South Africa. They also still underlie some of the official policies designed to remedy past economic inequalities. Source War Measures Continuation. Population Registration. South African History Online, June 22, 1950.

How-to prepare for a literature review

How-to prepare for a literature review How-to prepare for a literature review Definition of literature review A literature review provides a general idea of the amount of publication on a certain topic that has been written by credible professors and researchers. The literature review can either be an initial step of a research project, a chapter in a thesis or a stand-alone assignment. A literature review comprises: A synopsis of your research topic and precise statement of the objectives of your research A thesis of the main ideas and concepts of your topic A detailed analysis of the resources you find. For instance, you can point out if the topic you are researching on is not supported by scholars or it is controversial in any way. Steps on preparing your literature review Ensure that you understand the topic and the research objective very well. By this, it means you need to know the scope of your literature review. 1. Conduct your research Conduct a thorough research on the topic; alternatively, you can have sort of a plan. A perfect way of doing this is by looking for significant and all-encompassing sources first and then work on them. For topics about sciences and art, beginning with resources that contain an overview of your research topic is a perfect idea. For technical disciplines such as psychology, find out if there are systematic reviews or meta-analysis on the subject you want to research about. For you to see if your review aligns itself with the other aspects you have read, go through the literature review sections of other sources. Lastly, search for more controversial or most recent research on your topic. This kind of information can be extracted from journal articles. 2. Use an extensive variety of resources Depending on journal articles and books alone on your research will not be of much assistance. Your prof will provide the details on their expectations; however, while researching, ensure that you do not miss out important research by just using one type of resource. 3. Evaluating the resources Once you have found the research you will be using, evaluate them. While evaluating, the materials that should be included must provide substantial and reliable information on your topic. Once more, for almost all the literature review, you are not supposed to write about every resource you come across, but only the fundamental discoveries or major assumptions about the topic. 4. Analyze your research For you to provide a comprehensive account of unknown and known things in your literature review, search for the most important points and common themes about your topic. On top of that, you may mention the areas of controversy in the literature. In a situation where your literature review is supposed to include an argument, utilize enough time to look for evidence so that you can support this argument. Write your literature review While writing your literature review, ensure that you are clear on instructions provided in your assignment. Find out what the instructions states, do you prove something or argue. You can organize your literature review in the following ways: By methodology By theme Sequence of importance Various perspective Chronologically is one of the companies that offer excellent dissertation and thesis services in Canada. For more information about dissertation and thesis services do not hesitate to

Method and Meditations on First Philosophy Essay

Method and Meditations on First Philosophy - Essay Example This essay essay that God is not a receiver; human beings can attain the truth and thus the connection to nature. The idea of nature can be explored in two ways, firstly, there exists no doubt that every aspect that nature teaches people has some truth in it, and thus it is naturally general that God is the greatest as he is the creator of things. This implies that if human beings are careful, they can learn a lot of things from nature as nature were created by God. God plays in the attainment of positive knowledge, a reader can realize that, even though, the objectives of the Cartesian project remains to be credible, the existence of several ethical discrepancies and probable speculations destabilized its legitimacy beyond repair. This paper makes a conclusion that the presence of God and further significant role of God in the lives of human beings has remained an extensive and diverse topic all through the history of philosophy. Descartes’ epistemological influence to Western philosophy is the start of his attempt to create a coherent method of analysis on the knowledge concerning the world that can be acquired from the information in the Church or the Bible. Nevertheless, Descartes’ development was not to take away God from the lives of human beings. God’s Existence is consequential instantaneously from the pure and discrete idea of a totally perfect and great being. Oddly, the simplicity of this discussion has also created several misreading’s, aggravated in part by Descartes' catastrophe to articulate a sole version of this argument

Career Development Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words - 1

Career Development - Essay Example My acumen on the technical skill rapidly becomes well established each day to an extent that they were delegating very technical and intricate work to be done. I easily I adopted to the Chinese working culture. The roles that I widely worked on included the following: When repacking the bearing for the wheel of car, I was involved in, jacking up the car and removing the wheels. Then checking the drum and ensures it is rubbed. Then prying the grease drum and also removing the cotter pin, and sliding all the castellated nuts off the spindles. In addition, I used to slide the outer bearing, with the washer in front of it, off the spindle and check the grease availability in all the spaces between the bearings. The second contact that gave a wealth of experience in my field of automotive was very satisfying. It was in a very renowned club of Manchester that involves international countries in racing competition of Manchester. I used to work for 2 hours per day earning a wage of 100$ per hour. It is contract that lasted for three years that is from September 2007 to September 2010. I finalized by getting a contract of supplying the very Manchester club with the spare parts. The contracts were for two years. I have registered with professional bodies that are affiliated with car repackaging to ensure that I get any updates involving the field of car repackaging I am at abreast with the knowledge. I have registered with the following professional bodies that allow keep me updated with the very current knowledge. Communicating ones conviction can be hard verbally compared with written. In my resume, words have been given power to communicate my convictions. In my resume I have one single conviction in life that has been the drive of my life. The drive that I intend to impact with on the institution that I place my bid for employment. The

Riordan Manufacturing Staffing Strategies Essay Example for Free

Riordan Manufacturing Staffing Strategies Essay One of the most difficult challenges an organization can face is the ability to find the right employees to do the job. A well developed staffing strategy can help an organization eliminate problems before they start. A staffing strategy provides overall guidance on how an organization deals with staff. This can include how the organization identifies with new staff, the types of people the organization wants to staff, and how to retain them. Once this strategy is decided upon, the human resource department should build some policies and procedures to support the strategy. This paper will evaluate the recruitment and staffing strategies and the legality of the staffing strategies of Riordan Manufacturing. History of RiordanRiordan Manufacturing, Inc. is one of the industry leaders in the plastic injection molding field. Founded by Dr. Michael Riordan, a chemistry professor, Riordan Manufacturing, Inc. is owned by Riordan Industries which is considered to be a Fortune 1000 company. The initial focus of the company was on research and development but expanded into the production of plastic beverage containers. The company has earned international acclaim for their innovative plastic designs. Riordan Manufacturing headquarters is located in San Jose, California where the research and development is done. The company also has plants in Georgia, Michigan, and China. Recruitment Strategies PamStaffing Strategies PamLegal Compliance TracyConclusion TracyReferencesRiordan Manufacturing. (2007). Virtual Organization. Retrieved on April 26, 2007from the World Wide Web: athttps://ecampus.phoenix.edu/secure/aapd/CIST/VOP/Business/Riordan/RioMfgH ome002.htm

Energy Bars: Glycemia and Insulemia Essay -- Health Nutrition Diet Ex

Energy Bars: Glycemia and Insulemia   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Today many people are substituting normal meals with energy bars in hopes of losing weight. These energy bars seem to be an easy way to diet without having to hunt down the proper nutritional meals; the meal is already prepared for you in the bar. There are a few questions being raised about this method of dieting however. The issue addressed in this paper is the use of energy bars that either have low carbohydrate levels or that use lower glycemic index carbohydrates. The idea behind using an energy bar of this type for dieting is to lower the levels of insulin in the blood, reduce cholesterol levels, and prevent the drop in blood glucose that is thought to be associated with feeling hungry. Insulin is a hormone that is produced by specialized cells on the surface of the pancreas called pancreatic islets or Islets of Langerhans. It causes changes to occur in the plasma membrane of the cell that cause the cell to pull in glucose from the blood stream. The hormonal counterpart of insulin is glycogon, which serves to promote the rele...

“Nature and Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson Essay

Ralph Waldo Emerson, nineteenth century poet and writer, expresses a philosophy of life, based on our inner self and the presence of the soul. Emerson regarded and learned from the great minds of the past. In his writings he says repeatedly that each person should live according to his own thinking. In Nature and Self-Reliance the central theme is do not seek answers outside of yourself. This main idea of Emerson’s philosophy states that a man should learn to express himself. Being yourself will help you to solve the problems of your life. We need to trust ourselves in order to improve our life, like all great men have done. Self-Reliance expresses that the Truth stems from within deep in our soul which is the pillar of our personal power and self-respect. This source of all greatness sets us free form the ego and helps us to transcend through the ideals of love, truth and justice; some people call this â€Å"the moral sense†. The soul cannot be completely defined or described but it is the only thing we can be absolutely sure of, since all other facts are temporary. Being ourselves allows us to obtain many more answers and to understand our unconscious intentions. Humans may exceed their limited ideas by realizing that God does exists and that in Him, we will find the Truth and answers if we open ourselves to Him. Self-Reliance also expresses the need for creative thinking. Society during Emerson’s era resisted reform and scorned the reformer. Emerson saw individualism in direct conflict with society. Although he often criticized society, he stressed more importantly the openness of the individual through the soul. The soul is the creative essence all of creation including art, which is human unity with natural things, which is expressed in Nature. In Nature the soul sees the picture of its own pure essence manifest, seeing beauty, truth, and justice in its laws. Nature in life teaches us understanding and is a practicing tool for the intellect to use in learning how to deal with life’s problems. From Emerson’s transcendental view the natural figures are also symbols of spirituals facts or philosophy. That by interacting with nature, people learn not only what is practical but also what is good; for Emerson nature and the soul are perfectly complementary. Emerson also states that it is good to learn from the books as long as the reader keeps his creativity and way of thinking and that by practical experience we learn quickly and well. Emerson tries to makes us realize that by our own virtues and by calling on our own internal means we can find the answers to many questions, and even answers for the question we have not even shape which will help us to keep the integrity of one’s internal evolution. Emerson believed that when people begin to realize that autonomy and the expression of your thoughts is right for them, then many good changes will happen in society. Emerson’s was one of the leaders in the extended view of progressive learning, but also offers insights into age-old or â€Å"natural method† as better than new technology based on experimentation. In many of his writings he compares the beauty of the nature, and expresses, in the writings of Nature and Self-Reliance that we can find the answers to all challenges.

Linguistic Research Essay

When does language begin? In the middle 1960s, under the influence of Chomsky’s vision of linguistics, the first child language researchers assumed that language begins when words (or morphemes) are combined. (The reading by Halliday has some illustrative citations concerning this narrow focus on â€Å"structure. †) So our story begins with what is colloquially known as the â€Å"two-word stage. † The transition to 2-word utterances has been called â€Å"perhaps, the single most disputed issue in the study of language development† (Bloom, 1998). A few descriptive points: Typically children start to combine words when they are between 18 and 24 months of age. Around 30 months their utterances become more complex, as they add additional words and also affixes and other grammatical morphemes. These first word-combinations show a number of characteristics. First, they are systematically simpler than adult speech. For instance, function words are generally not used. Notice that the omission of inflections, such as -s, -ing, -ed, shows that the child is being systematic rather than copying. If they were simply imitating what they heard, there is no particular reason why these grammatical elements would be omitted. Conjunctions (and), articles (the, a), and prepositions (with) are omitted too. But is this because they require extra processing, which the child is not yet capable of? Or do they as yet convey nothing to the child—can she find no use for them? Second, as utterances become more complex and inflections are added, we find the famous â€Å"over-regularization†Ã¢â‚¬â€which again shows, of course, that children are systematic, not simply copying what they here. Chomsky’s Influence Research on child language was behavioristic in the years that preceded Chomsky’s critique of Skinner, and his publication of Syntactic Structures: â€Å"though there had been precedents for setting problems in the study of child language acquisition at a more abstract, cognitive level by continental scholars–most notably, Roman Jacobson (e. g. , 1941/1968)–much of the research on child language acquisition at midcentury was influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the highly concrete, behaviorist orientation of B. F. Skinner and others. Two events were of major important in the change from behaviorist to cognitive thinking in research on child language. The first was Chomsky’s classic review (1959) of Verbal Behavior, Skinner’s major book-length work on the learning and use of language; the second Handout for Psy 598-02, summer 2001 Packer Two-Word Utterances 2 was the detailed longitudinal study of the acquisition of English by three young children conducted over a 17-month period by Roger Brown and others in the early 1960s (Brown, 1973). † Ritchie, W. C. , & Bhatia, T. K. (1999). Child language acquisition: Introduction, foundations, and overview. In W. C. Ritchie & T. K. Bhatia (Eds. ), Handbook of child language acquisition, (pp. 3-30). San Diego: Academic Press, p. 3-4 note 2. â€Å"A child who has learned a language has developed an internal representation of a system of rules† (Chomsky, 1965, p. 25). The psychologist’s task, it follows, is to determine what the child’s rules are. â€Å"The linguist constructing a grammar for a language is in effect proposing a hypothesis concerning the internalized system† (Chomsky, 1968, p.23). Up to the 1950s, people simply counted characteristics such as sentence complexity, proportion of grammatical utterances, etc. After Chomsky, the search was on for child grammars, assumed to be universal. Roger Brown’s Research In 1956 Roger Brown heard Chomsky for the first time, speaking at Yale. In 1962 he began a five-year research project on children’s language at Harvard University. The historical significance of Brown’s laboratory at Harvard can hardly be exaggerated. The names of students and colleagues who worked with Brown pop up all the time, to this day, in psycholinguistic research: the list includes Jean Berko Gleason, Ursula Bellugi, David McNeill, Dan Slobin, Courtney Cazden, Richard Cromer, Jill de Villiers, Michael Maratsos, Melissa Bowerman, Eleanor Rosche, Sue Ervin (now Ervin-Tripp), Steven Pinker. Brown set out to write grammars for each of the stages of language development, by looking at the distribution of forms and construction patterns in spontaneous speech. In most cases the data allow for more than one  grammatical description. â€Å"The description to be preferred, of course, is the one that corresponds to the way the speaker’s linguistic knowledge is structured, the one that determines the kinds of novel utterance he can produce or understand, how he constructs their meanings, and what his intuitions are about grammatical well-formedness† (Bowerman, 1988, p. 28) â€Å"Every child processes the speech to which he is exposed so as to induce from it a latent structure. This latent rule structure is so general that a child can spin out its implications all his life long†¦. The discovery of latent structure is the greatest of the processes involved in language acquisition, and the most difficult to understand† (Brown & Bellugi, 1964, p. 314) Brown collected samples of spontaneous speech from three children, given the pseudonyms Adam, Eve, and Sarah. The corpus of collected data can be found in the Packer Two-Word Utterances 3 CHILDES archive. Eve was visited from age 18m to 26m, Adam from 27m to 42m, Sarah from 27m to 48m. Dan Slobin described the project: â€Å"We paid close attention to the auxiliary system and to word-order patterns, because these had played a central role in Syntactic Structures. We kept track of sentence types—affirmative, negative, and questions—in which use of auxiliaries and word order would vary. Linguistic growth was assessed in terms of things to be added to childish sentences to make them adult-like: the additions of omitted functors (inflections, prepositions, articles, and the like) and transformational operations. We did not categorize utterances in terms of communicative intent—that is, in terms of semantics or speech acts or extended discourse skills—and so we did not look for growth in terms of additions or enrichment of such abilities. Our central concern was with syntax and morphology, with some later interest in prosody. We worried about such questions as whether child grammar was finite state or transformational, and whether syntactic ‘kernels’ were the first sentence forms to appear in child speech† (Slobin, 1988, p. 11). Mean Length of Utterance This simple measure of syntactic complexity was introduced by Roger Brown. Table 7. Rules for calculating mean length of utterance and upper bound (Brown, 1973, p. 54) 1. Start with the second page of the transcription unless that page involves a recitation of some kind. In this latter case start with the first recitation-free stretch. Count the first100 utterances satisfying the following rules. 2. Only fully transcribed utterances are used; none with blanks. Portions of utterances, entered in parentheses to indicate doubtful transcription, are used. 3. Include all exact utterance repetitions (marked with a plus sign in records). Stuttering is marked as repeated efforts at a single word; count the word once in the most complete form produced. In the few cases where a word is produced for emphasis or the like (no, no, no) count each occurrence. 4. Do not count such fillers as mm or oh, but do count no, yeah, and hi. 5. All compound words (two or more free morphemes), proper names, and ritualized reduplications count as single words. Examples: birthday, rackety-boom, choo-choo, quack-quack, night-night, pocketbook, see saw. Justification is that no evidence that the constituent morphemes function as such for these children. 6. Count as one morpheme all irregular pasts of the verb (got, did, went, saw). Justification is that there is no evidence that the child relates these to present forms. 7.  Count as one morpheme all diminutives (doggie, mommie) because these children at least do not seem to use the suffix productively. Diminutives are the standard forms used by the child. 8. Count as separate morphemes all auxiliaries (is, have, will, can, must, would). Also all catenatives: gonna, wanna, hafta. These latter counted as single morphemes rather than as going to or want to because evidence is that they function so for the children. Count as separate morphemes all inflections, for example, possessive {s}, plural {s}, third person singular {s}, regular past {d}, progressive {ing}. 9. The range count follows the above rules but is always calculated for the total Packer Two-Word Utterances 4 transcription rather than for 100 utterances. The title of Brown’s 1973 book, summarizing of a decade of research (his own and other people’s), was A First Language: The Early Stages. A follow-up was planned, describing the â€Å"later† stages, but never written. What is this book about? â€Å"It is about knowledge; knowledge concerning grammar and the meanings coded by grammar†¦. The book primarily presents evidence that knowledge of the kind described develops in an approximately invariant form in all children, through at different rates. There is also evidence that the primary determinants of the order are the relative semantical and grammatical complexity† (58) Here is an early attempt to write a â€Å"syntactic† grammar of two-word speech, first describing only 89 observed utterances (Table 4), then going â€Å"beyond the obtained sentences to the syntactic classes they suggest (Table 5) (Brown & Fraser, 1964, pp. 59, 61): Packer Two-Word Utterances 5 Brown’s Two Main Findings Two main findings are described in A First Language. 1. The â€Å"Semantic Look† of Stage I Speech First, that the organization of early word-combinations cannot be described in purely syntactic terms. Brown and his coworkers quickly had to change direction. Syntactic descriptions didn’t suffice. That’s to say, Stage I constructions couldn’t be satisfactorily explained either as â€Å"telegraphic† speech, or in terms of â€Å"pivot-open† grammar. Telegraphic Speech One of the first ways of characterizing 2-word utterances was to say that they omitted â€Å"function words,† such as articles, auxiliary verbs, inflexions, prepositions, and the copula (is). The words that are spoken tend to be nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and their order tends to resemble the order in what one presumes the adult sentence would be. These characteristics make early utterances sound like telegrams. But inflections are omitted too, and these are free in telegrams. And a few functors such as more, no, you and off are found. More important problems are that this description uses adult categories. And it doesn’t explain the productive character of children’s two-word utterances. Pivot-Open grammars Martin Braine suggested that children have simple rules they use to generate two-word utterances. Each pair of words selects one from a small set of words—called â€Å"pivots†Ã¢â‚¬â€that occur in many utterances, and always in a fixed position (either the first word, or the second). For example, â€Å"Allgone† is a first-position pivot: allgone egg, allgone shoe, but not shoe allgone. A second-position pivot â€Å"off†: shirt off, water off, etc. The choice of the second word is more â€Å"open. † Packer Two-Word Utterances 6 But â€Å"the rules simply do not fit the evidence; pivot words do occur in isolation, pivots occur in combination with one another, sentences longer than two-words are fairly common in I, and there is distributional evidence which indicates that more than two word-classes exist† (Brown, 1973, p. 110). Brown and his colleagues noted that adults â€Å"expand† children’s utterances. These expansions don’t seem effective in teaching the child anything new (Cazden, 1965). But they do provide important clues to the researcher. If one assumes that adult expansions are generally accurate interpretations of the child’s utterance, then pivot-open grammars are inadequate because they underestimate the child’s knowledge. (Both would simply be described as O + O. ) For example, Lois Bloom showed that when one attended to context the utterance mommy sock was used by her child in two different ways. The first could be glossed as â€Å"It’s mommy’s sock,† while the second could be glossed â€Å"Mommy is putting on your sock. † A pivot-open grammar would not be able to distinguish these two. From Non-Semantic (Lean) Grammars to Semantic (Rich) Grammars So Brown and his co-workers started instead to describe two-word utterances in semantic terms. They employed a process that Lois Bloom called â€Å"rich interpretation†: using all the contextual information available to infer what the child meant by an utterance. As Lois Bloom said, â€Å"evaluation of the children’s language began with the basic assumption that it was possible to reach the semantics of children’s sentences by considering nonlinguistic information from context and behavior in relation to linguistic performance. This is not to say that the inherent ‘meaning’ or the child’s actual semantic intent was obtainable for any given utterance. The semantic interpretation inherent in an utterance is part of the intuition of the child and cannot be ‘known’ with authority. The only claim that could be made was the evaluation of an utterance in relation to the context in which it occurred provided more information for analyzing intrinsic structure than would a simple distributional analysis of the recorded corpus† (Bloom, 1970, p. 10). The result was the identification of a small set of basic semantic relations that the children’s utterances seems to be expressing. The eight most common of these are summarized in the following table (cf. Brown, p.193-197): â€Å"Major Meanings at Stage I† Two-Word Utterance mommy come; daddy sit drive car; eat grape mommy sock; baby book go park; sit chair cup table; toy floor my teddy; mommy dress Semantic relation expressed agent + action action + object agent + object action + location entity + location possessor + possession Packer Two-Word Utterances 7 box shiny; crayon big dat money; dis telephone entity + attribute demonstrative + entity It seems that children when they first combine words talk about objects: pointing them out, naming them, indicating their location, what they are  like, who owns them, and who is doing things to them. They also talk about actions performed by people, and the objects and locations of these actions. Brown suggested that these are the concepts the child has just finished differentiating in the sensorimotor stage. This kind of semantic characterization of children’s speech continues in current research. For example, the following table is redrawn from Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek, (1999, p. 151. ) The terminology differs a little, and Recurrence and Disappearance have been added (or at least were not in Brown’s â€Å"top eight†), but other than this the picture is the same. Two-Word Utterance Mommy sock Probable meaning expressed Possessor-possessed or Agent (acting on) an object Recurrence Disappearance or Nonexistence Action on object Agent doing an action Object at location Object and property Naming Possible gloss â€Å"That’s Mommy’s sock† or â€Å"Mommy, put on my sock† â€Å"I want more juice† â€Å"The outside is allgone† (said after front door is closed) â€Å"(Dad) is throwing the toy chicken† â€Å"The car is going† â€Å"The sweater is on the chair† â€Å"The dog is little† â€Å"That is Susan† or â€Å"Her name is Susan†. More juice! Allgone outside Throw chicken Car go Sweater chair Little dog That Susan What Grammar to Write? How to represent the knowledge that underlies children’s utterances viewed in these semantic terms? What kind of grammar can one write? Brown (1973) reviewed several possibilities are concluded that â€Å"No fully explicit grammar proves to be possible† (p. 244). Bloom wrote essentially syntactic grammars, which however included information necessary to give an appropriate semantic interpretation. Schlesinger (assigned reading) wrote a semantic grammar. Antinucci & Paresi (optional reading) wrote a grammar that included some pragmatic information too. The following is a grammar for one of the three children Bloom studied: it â€Å"consists of (1) the phrase structure, (2) lexico feature rules, and (3) transformations (Bloom, 1970, pp. 67-68): Packer Two-Word Utterances 8 Packer Two-Word Utterances 9 Criticism of Interpretive Analysis An interesting criticism of these semantic analyses was made by Howe in 1976. Howe noticed a lack of consistency across semantic categorization of two-word utterances by Bloom, Slobin, Schlesinger and Brown, and suggested that the identification of semantic relations actually tells us more about adult interpretation of children’s speech that is does about what the child has in mind. â€Å"Overall, the existence of contradictions between the categories presented in Table 1, the fact that some of the categories are not always mutually exclusive and the fact that it is hard to demonstrate that some of the so-called ‘semantic’ distinctions are more than syntactic alternatives for expressing the same meaning, make it unlikely that Bloom, Brown, Schlesinger and Slobin have produced an adequate categorization of the meanings common to the speech of children at the beginnings of word combination or indeed of adults†¦. [A]ll four writers tacitly assumed that the two-word utterances of young children always express a meaning adults might express using these words and hence their aim was to specify which of the meanings adults might express occur in the first word combinations† (Howe, 1976, p. 34). Howe asserted that (as she later put it) â€Å"there was no evidence that children at the beginning of word combination recognize a world containing agents, locations, and so on† (Howe, 1981, p. 443). It is interesting to read the next rounds of this debate: Bloom, Capatides, & Tackeff (1981), Golinkoff (1981), and Howe’s reply (1981). Bloom is witheringly derisive (and seems to miss the point of Howe’s article), Golinkoff is more constructive. Howe accepts Golinkoff’s suggestion that non-linguistic data will show us how a child understands their situation, and she concludes that so far the research shows â€Å"that children do not discover that language encodes roles [played in actions and states of affairs, as distinct from entities involved in actions and states of affairs], until some time after their first word combinations† (451). But I  think there’s a larger point here that I’ll explore in class. Brown’s conclusions about Stage I Brown drew the following conclusions about Stage I: â€Å"The Stage I child operates as if all major sentence constituents were optional, and this does not seem to be because of some absolute ceiling on sentence complexity. In Stage II and after we shall see that he operates, often for long periods, as if grammatical morphemes were optional. Furthermore, the child’s omissions are by no means limited to the relatively lawful omissions which also occur in adult speech. He often leaves out what is linguistically obligatory. This suggests to me that the child expects always to be understood if he produces any appropriate words at all. And in fact we find that he would usually be right in this expectation as long as he speaks at home, in familiar surroundings, and to family members who know his history and inclinations. Stage I speech may then be said to be well adapted to its communicative purpose, well adapted but narrowly adapted. In new surroundings and with less familiar addresses it would  Packer Two-Word Utterances 10 often fail. This suggests that a major dimension of linguistic development is learning to express always and automatically certain things (agent, action, number, tense, and so on) even though these meanings may be in many particular contexts quite redundant. The child who is going to move out into the world, as children do, must learn to make his speech broadly and flexible adaptive† (Brown, 1973, p. 244-245). 2. The Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes in Stage II  The second major finding that Brown reported in A First Language was that â€Å"a set of little words and inflections begins to appear: a few prepositions, especially in and on, an occasional article, an occasional copula am, is, or are, the plural and possessive inflections on the noun, the progressive, past, and third person present indicative inflections on the verb. All these, like an intricate sort of ivy, begin to grow up between and upon the major construction blocks, the nouns and the verbs, to which Stage I is largely limited† (Brown, 1973, p.  249). Brown found that the 14 of these grammatical morphemes of English that he selected for detailed study were acquired in a fixed and universal order. These are the grammatical morphemes we discussed in an earlier class: affixes like –s, -ed, {PAST}, and small function words like on, in, the. We’ve already noted that these morphemes are omitted from the first word-combinations. Brown studied the way they are gradually added to a child’s speech. This takes place in what he called Stage II. The child begins to explicitly mark notions such as number, specificity, tense, aspect, mood, using the inflections or unbound morphemes. Of course, Brown was studying only three children, but the finding of invariant order has stood up when larger numbers of children have been studied. For example, de Villiers and de Villiers (1973) replicated his finding with a sample of twenty-one children. Brown offered evidence that the order of their acquisition was determined by their linguistic complexity. (That’s to say, the number of features each of them encoded.) (Though he noted too that children differ greatly in their rate of acquisition of these morphemes. ) Order 1. 2/3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Morpheme present progressive prepositions plural irregular past tense possessive copula uncontractible articles regular past tense third-person present tense regular Example singing; playing in the cup; on the floor books; dolls broke; went Mommy’s chair; Susie’s teddy This is my book The teddy; A table walked; played he climbs; Mommy cooks Packer Two-Word Utterances 11 11. 12. 13. 14.  third-person present tense irregular auxiliary uncontractible copula contractible auxiliary contractible John has three cookies She was going to school; Do you like me? I’m happy; you are special Mommy’s going shopping Brown examined each utterance is see whether it required any of these morphemes to make it fully grammatical by adult standards, attending to both linguistic and nonlinguistic context. E. g. , when the child points to a book and says that book, Brown inferred that there should have been a copula (‘s or is) and an article (a). Then he checked how many of these obligatory positions for each morpheme were actually filled with the appropriate morphemes at each age. Acquisition—defined as the age at which a morpheme is supplied in 90 percent of its obligatory positions—was remarkably constant across Brown’s three subjects. Why did Brown study these morphemes? Presumably because they are at first omitted. But more importantly, he was trying to test the hypothesis that children are taught grammar by adults. And Brown found that frequency of exposure (in adult speech) was not a predictor. For example, adults used articles more frequently than prepositions, but children acquired these in the opposite order. Brown suggested that linguistic complexity does predict acquisition. The morphemes differ in both semantic complexity (the number of semantic features encoded) and syntactic complexity (the number of rules each requires). For example, the copula verb encodes both number and temporality. These two types of complexity are highly correlated, so they cannot be teased apart, but in either case they predict order of acquisition. The other important change that occurs in Stage II is that, as utterances grow in complexity, the child begins to combine two or more of the basic semantic relations from Stage I: Adam hit ball = agent + action + object = agent + action, plus action + object The Other Stages of Language Acquisition Each of the five stages that Brown distinguished is named for the linguistic process that is the major new development occurring in that stage (â€Å"or for an exceptionally elaborate development of a process at that stage† p. 59). Thus we have: Packer Two-Word Utterances 12. Stage I. Semantic Roles & Syntactic Relations. MLU: 1. 0 – 2. 0 agent, patient, instrument, locative etc. expressed (in simple sentences) by linear order, syntactic relations, prepositions or postpositions. Stage II. Grammatical Morphemes & the Modulation of Meaning. MLU: 2. 0 – 2. 5 Stage III. Modalities of the Simple Sentence. MLU: 2. 5 Next the child forms transformations of simple declarative sentences: yes-no interrogatives, question request, negation, imperative. During the earlier stages children use intonation to mark different sentence modalities. Now they begin to use morphosemantic devices to mark negatives, questions, and imperatives. Stage IV. Embedding of Sentences One simple sentence will now become used as a grammatical constituent or in a semantic role within another sentence. Stage V. Coordination of Simple Sentences & Propositional Relations Sentences are linked together with connector words. Individual Differences Brown also noted some individual differences among Adam, Eve, and Sarah. Two of the children combined V with N, and also used N for possession: eat meat, throw ball, mommy sock. But the child third combined V (or objects of possession) with pronouns: eat it, do this one, my teddy. These two strategies were found by other researchers too. Catherine Nelson called them pronominal & nominal strategies (they have also been called â€Å"holistic & analytic†; â€Å"expressive & referential†), and noted that they could be seen in one-word utterances also: some children tend to produce single-word utterances that are nouns, other children tend to use social or personal words such as hi, bye, and please. Subsequent research has explored the connections between these strategies and later development, cognitive style, and input differences (cf. Shore, 1995. Individual differences in language development, Sage). However, these strategies converge over time. By MLU=2. 5, sentence subjects (agents) are typically pronominal, and predicate objects (patients) are typically nominal. Packer Two-Word Utterances 13 Directions After Brown By the mid-1970s grammar-writing was dying out. Incorrect predictions had discouraged researchers, as had the problem of indeterminacy: the fact that more than one grammar could be written. Interest was growing in other considerations: in the role of semantics; in cognitive precursors to syntax, and to language in general; in mother-child interaction; and in the pragmatic uses to which early speech is put. In the view of some people, linguistic structures and operations became neglected. 1. How Does the Child go from Semantics to Syntax? We’ve seen that Brown’s research found that the grammar of children’s early word combinations was better described in semantic than in syntactic terms. If this is so, how does a child make the transition from a semantic grammar to the adult grammar? Researchers continue to argue about this. Steven Pinker (1984, 1987) suggests that children use semantics to enter the syntactic system of their language. In simple â€Å"basic sentences† the correspondence between things and names maps onto the syntactic category of nouns. Words for physical attributes and changes of state map onto verbs. Semantic agents are almost always the grammatical subjects of sentences. This semantic-syntactic correspondence in early utterances provides a key to abstract syntactic categories of grammar. Paul Bloom has argued that children actually are using syntactic categories from the start, and he cites as evidence for this the fact that children will they place adjectives before nouns but not pronouns: big dog but not: * small she Some linguists have offered a syntactic description of Stage I utterances. They argue that at this stage children merely have a lexicon and a limited set of phrase structure rules in deep-structure. They lack functional categories such as INFL (inflectionals) and COMP (complementizers). No transformations exist at this stage: instead, elements of the deep structure are assigned thematic (i. e. semantic) roles to yield the surfacestructure. And they have proposed that the lack of grammatical subjects in Stage I utterances reflects the default setting of a â€Å"null-subject parameter. † (Since in languages like Italian and Spanish a subject is optional. ) Lois Bloom (1990b) has suggested that children simply have a more limited processing capacity at this age. Sentence subjects are often provided by context, and so can be safely omitted. Dan Slobin has proposed that â€Å"children create grammars in which clearly identifiable surface forms map onto basic semantic categories† (1988, p. 15). Packer Two-Word Utterances 14 For example, locative prepositions—in, on, under—are omitted in early child speech. They are used earlier in languages when they are encoded more saliently—as noun suffixes or as postpositions following nouns. At the same time, there is a common order of emergence across languages: simple topological notions of proximity, containment and support (in, on, under, next to), with locative relations embodying notions of perspective (back, front) always later. Slobin infers that â€Å"conceptual development provides the content for linguistic expression, while linguistic discovery procedures are necessary for working out the mapping of content according to conventions of particular languages† (p. 15). Slobin has looked carefully at the English grammatical morphemes—and their equivalents in other languages—to see how they are used before they are completely acquired (by Brown’s 90% criterion). He finds that children generally use the morphemes systematically, though their use is still â€Å"incomplete† by adult standards. For example, a Russian child applied the accusative inflection only to nouns that â€Å"were objects of direct, physical manipulation, such as ‘give,’ ‘carry,’ ‘put,’ and ‘throw,’ omitting the accusative for less manipulative verbs such as ‘read’ and ‘see. ’† Children will â€Å"organize systems of pronouns and case inflections; but, to begin with, children will organize these various forms to express particular, child-oriented speech functions† (p. 18). They are using the resources of the adult language to mark distinctions that are salient to them. Slobin has also proposed some â€Å"universal language-learning principles. † These are an attempt to explain observed cross-language regularities in order of acquisition. â€Å"According to Slobin, the child has certain concepts, based on cognitive growth, that are expressed through the language system. Using certain principles of acquisition, the child scans the language code to discover the means of comprehension and production† (Owens, 2001, p. 214-215). 1. Pay attention to the ends of words 2. Phonological forms of words can be systematically modified 3. Pay attention to the order of words and morphemes 4. Avoid interruption and rearrangement of linguistic units 5. Underlying semantic relations should be marked overtly and clearly 6. Avoid exceptions 7. The use of grammatical markers should make semantic sense Knowledge of Verb syntax Lois Bloom asserts that learning the argument structure of verbs, and the syntactic differences for different thematic relations is the foundation for acquiring a grammar. Verbs play a central role in further multiword utterances. Opinions differ, however, on how knowledge of verb syntax is acquired. Bloom suggests that the first verbs are those that name actions (do, make, push, eat). Nouns and pronouns take thematic roles (agent, object) in relation to these actions. Bloom says that this implies that children’s â€Å"theories† of objects, space, and causation are important here. Packer Two-Word Utterances 15 A few all-purpose verbs—â€Å"pro-verbs†Ã¢â‚¬â€are used for most early sentences. E. g. , do, go. With these, verb argument structures, verb inflections, and Wh-questions are learned. Subsequently, the child adds the syntax for negation, noun- and verb-inflection, and questions. And then moves on to embedded verb phrases (â€Å"drink [Mommy juice]†) 2. From Semantics to Semantics Language involves a great deal of categorization. â€Å"The forms of language are themselves categories, and these forms are linked to a vast network of categorical distinctions in meaning and discourse function† (Bowerman, 1988, p. 28-29).

Africa Cokes Last Frontier

Africa Cokes Last Frontier Article Summary This article gives an overview of Coke’s presence in Africa. The author begins by giving a case study of a shopkeeper in Kenya who sells Coke products in her retail store. In the case study, an estimate reveals that per capita consumption of Coke products is 39 servings in one year.Advertising We will write a custom article sample on Africa: Cokes Last Frontier specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More Stanford compares this consumption with Mexico, one of the biggest consumers of Coke, and mentions that it consumes 665 servings of Coke in the same duration (Stanford, para. 1). The author surveys various markets around the world, such as South Africa, China, India, Zambia, United States etc, and makes interesting observations. He concludes that Africa seems to have a lot of potential as a marketing area for Coke. The CEO of Coke, Muhtar Kent, asserts that Coke seems to be potentially in danger of losing its market share. In 1989, Americans bought $2.6billion worth of Coke, yet over the next two decades, this figure rose only by $0.3billion. This seems to be the case for most developed countries, making continents like Africa a potential â€Å"savior† for this multi-million dollar company. Implications for Professionals Involved in Coke’s Strategic Management The strategic management team must consider the above statistic in creating their strategic plan over the next decade. As it seems, developed countries like the USA do not promise a brighter future for the company. Nevertheless, the volume of money changing hands in developing countries like Kenya and South Africa implies that Coke has a better chance of scoring in third-world countries. This means that the company should make more investments in these countries as they have the potential to generate the much needed 7-9% growth investors expect from Coke Corporation. This means that the management needs to boost its distribution t eam so that more supplies and more product varieties reach such shops, as those analyzed in the case study. Some of the strategies that the managerial team needs to implement in these countries include making the products more affordable for the market, though one has to consider the budget that will make this to work out. The other strategy that Coca-Cola can employ is making sure that distribution channels are effective. This way, the company can cut down on transportation and distribution costs thereby lowering operation costs and hence product prices. The product’s packaging should also be strong enough to withhold some of the harsh conditions in these war-torn countries. In other words, the maintenance costs of the products should be minimal. Finally, Coca-Cola should consider economics of scale, and sell the product more in mass numbers rather than on a retail basis in these developing countries.Advertising Looking for article on business economics? Let's see i f we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More The professionals in the managerial team may also have to look deeper into ways of combating their competitors all around the developed world. For example, China’s Coca-Cola Company is facing stiff competition from Wahaha, a beverage company owned by the richest man in China (Stanford, para. 5). This means that their marketing team needs to come up with strategies of drawing more customers to their side. In countries like India, where Pepsi is the main competitor, the company needs to adopt newer ways to increase sales and improve profit margins (Stanford, para. 7). Conclusion There is still a bright future for Coca-Cola, but there needs to be keenness in handling some of the managerial decisions in the executive team. Competition against Coca-Cola is intense, and it will take a bit more aggressive marketing techniques to win over more customers. Work Cited Stanford, Duane. Africa: Cokes Last Fron tier. Bloomberg Businessweek. October 2010.  Web.

Heres why youre never too old for a career change

Heres why youre never too old for a career change It’s always scary to change jobs. But it can seem downright terrifying if you have given years (or decades!) to traveling one career path and want to make a complete switch. Don’t let fear hold you back- sometimes, circumstances call for bold strokes. Whether you have a goal your current position won’t allow you to reach, a list of regrets, or simply are bored and want to make a change, you can do it. Here are a few reasons why it’s never too late for you to get the job (and the career) you’ve always wanted. Making a change might involve hard work and risk, but if you focus and really want it, change is attainable at any age.Your skills can transfer.You’ve already spent time in the working world, which means you’ve acquired two sets of skills: general soft skills that apply to any job  (think time management, communication, office etiquette) and skills specific to your chosen industry. The former will serve you well no matter where y ou land.What you don’t know, you can learn with time and hard work. And what you do know can easily be transferred into another field, position, industry, or path. Your job-specific skills might even bring a fresh element to your new career that would make you an attractive candidate.You’ve earned enough to float.At this point in your career, you’re probably comfortable enough to have provided yourself a nice cushion for taking a pay cut to do what you love. That doesn’t mean you should go into debt or work for less than you are worth- just consider it not the end of the world to make less for a little while. Weigh your happiness against the salary loss and see what comes out on top.You will NOT seem flaky.Just because you picked a field in your early twenties doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it for good. Wanting a change, even a major one, doesn’t make you fickle or indecisive. It just means you’ve grown up and identified your p references. Good news! You’re supposed to grow! Ignore people who say you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The opposite is true: you  do know, and you’re actively pursuing it.Your passion will be infectious.Wouldn’t you rather be bright, shiny, and positive about something again? If you’re waking up every morning dreading your work day, it might be time for you to consider a change. Life’s too short and you’re running out of time! Make the changes you need to live the life you want. Your drive and excitement will bleed into everything you do inside and outside of work.It’s never too late to start something new, so don’t hold yourself back because you think it’s inappropriate. Keep in mind: you might have to start slowly, which is fine! You’ll need to assess the gaps you might have in your skills or education, and then work to fill them before you become an attractive candidate. But if you th ink there is a way, you should probably go for it.  You’ll never know until you try.

Toxoplasmosis Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Toxoplasmosis - Term Paper Example It was found in a survey that approximately 1% of household cats had the organism present (Robbins et al 2005 & Levinson 2008). The infection spreads by means of intake of the cysts of the organism by human beings either through intake of meat that has not been cooked properly or via any other eatables that have been infected. Contact with the fecal matter of the cats which also contain the infected cysts can also result in infection. The other mode of transmission is via the placenta to the fetus during pregnancy or during invasive procedures which include transplantation of organs or during blood transfusions (Rao 2004, Brooks et al 2004 & Levinson 2008). In the human beings the infected cysts reach the small bowel and split over there. This leads to liberation of products which enter the gut wall where the macrophages become activated and engulf these foreign bodies. They multiply within the cells and form trophozoites which destroy the cells within which they are engulfed and then move towards acting on other cells. If the immune system is intact the cell mediated immunity restricts the trophozoites and the proztozoa then gains entry in the cells of the brain, muscle and other tissues and forming cysts which do not multiply at a very fast rate. This form of cysts within which the protozoa is replicating at a very slow pace is referred to as bradyzoite. There is danger of these cysts getting ruptured in people whose immunity is not intact and is compromised. These cysts also serve as diagnostic tools for concluding the presence of the organism in the body (Levinson 2008 & Brooks et al 2004). Toxoplasmosis does not present any severe manifestations or symptoms in people who have an intact immune system. It does not also spread from one person to another apart from the transmission via the placenta. The dissemination of the protozoa from the small bowel can be to other organs