Evolutionary linguistics

PART B: EXPLANATORY NOTES Assessment Summary Besides having good grammar, the narrative analysis revealed several indications that Oliver’s performance was below age-expectations in terms of his surface structure, cohesion and overall organization. Firstly, his surface structure was not age appropriate and lacking in certain aspects. Children age 4 or 5 generally achieve complexity in more than 20% of their utterances (Paul, 1981). With 26% of his narrative being complex sentences, it indicated that his level of sentence complexity was about 4 years below chronological age expectations, which also reduced his ability to express complex thoughts and ideas (Vasilyeva, Waterfall, & Huttenlocher, 2008). Hence, his story was significantly shorter than expected for his age. His retell also had 6 disruptions due to several instances of word finding difficulties, which could imply a possibility of an expressive language disorder (Guo, Tomblin, & Samelson, 2008). Next, Oliver’s overall narrative cohesion was not age appropriate with only 62.5% complete ties despite being in his third year of formal education. Children should present with less than 15% incomplete ties by the first formal education (Beliavsky, 2003). Hence, this difference in cohesion abilities as compared to the age-expected level was indicative of a language disorder (Liles, 1985). School-aged children could be considered to have difficulty generating a cohesive text if they produce less than 70% complete cohesive…

Language evolution is viewed as a controversial topic across many disciplines. Psychologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists and other members of academic community attempt to provide theories, which would explain such a complex phenomenon. The difficulty in doing so arises from the fact that there is very little evidence that would help to identify the most accurate theory (Pinker, 2003). One of the leading experts in the field of linguistics, Noam Chomsky, suggests that when exploring such a…

Language Diversity Language Diversity The diversity of languages is a fact of life There are about 6,500 different, mutually unintelligible languages, which belong to 250 large families. There is immense diversity in terms of contrastive sounds (phonemes) from a dozen to 100; in word order - Subject-Predicate, or Topic-Comment; some use inflections while others use particles. Linguistic diversity is related to the diversity of life—humans, animals, plants, and microbes. Every being communicates…

beneficial thing. Is a language more effective at conveying information if it uses imagistic communication? Is imagistic communication naturally a good thing? I don’t know, but I have no reason to believe that imagistic languages are inherently better. Hence, I don’t understand why the author decides to mention it in her oral vs manual modal debate, without first substantiating that imagistic communication has merit. In her conclusion, the author also doesn’t include any positive points as to…

Outside of linguistics how spoken language is used is a topic that insights vigorous debate amongst peers, different generations and can affect ones chances for employment. What fails to be acknowledged is the need for language change over the course of time and environment. There was an era in Greek poetry when they were looking to the past for poetic structure in order to relay the importance of history in their culture. Then the formation of Koine Greek was imperative to the growth of the…

Galapagos is a science fiction-fantasy story set in a third person narrative that was written by the author Kurt Vonnegut. Most of the story is set in the hotel of El Dorado in Ecuador and is spent introducing the characters of the story. The main characters are Mary Hepburn a widow from America who was a biology teacher at Ilium High School recently laid off from her job and mourning the death of her late husband Roy Hepburn who died of a brain tumor that slowly robbed him of his judgment and…

tomato, tiger, etc.…That common ancestor produced descendants, and those descendants produced their own descendants and modification takes place for each generation of descendant eventually leading to the wide variety of Earth’s lifeforms we have today. Common descent with modification occurs due to mechanisms of evolutionary change. A mechanism of evolutionary change requires for the process to affect the allele, gene variant, frequency. Natural selection is one of these mechanisms. The process…

Human mating is observed in almost every culture, leading us to the diverse world we live in today. This signifies our existence and should be important to us. To better understand this behavior, we can take a look at different explanations which shape human mating behavior. Researching this topic we can find evolutionary perspectives, which delve into topics, such as parental investment, survival, and sexual selection. There is also an opposition to these evolutionary ideas which suggest that…

Feeding the world, a feat that has never been fully completed. What is the opposing force that keeps this goal from completion? If food is produced worldwide and locally, with the utmost efficiency, distribution would be the only opposing force. The chapter on agriculture involving the farmer is closing, and a new chapter in autonomous robots is beginning. Robotics has made a quake in agriculture, and farmers have become aware of the benefits resulting from autonomous robots. From vehicle…

data, not a conclusion. Keeping in mind that it is called Darwin’s theory of evolution, not Darwin’s Law of evolution, therefore it can be disproven. According to Casey Luskin, a graduate of the University of California with a master’s degree in earth science and a research coordinator at Discovery Institute from 2011-2015 says, “If common descent is leading to so many bad predictions, why not consider the possibility that biological similarity is instead the result of common design? “ Thus…