#incorrect analysis of linguistic patterns

[langslingslinger]

@official-linguistics-post

Six year old, bouncing up and down with glee as desserts are unpacked: "I'm so appointed!"

Took me a moment to realize she had logically assumed "appointed" must be the opposite of "disappointed" and used it as a synonym for "excited."

[skyefeys]

A Comprehensive Guide to Writing Gina Dialogue!!!

Do YOU like writing tgaa fics, but find yourself struggling to understand the speech habits of Gina Lestrade? Well, fortunately for you, I love linguistics and accents almost as much as I love Gina - so I've compiled a breakdown of every quirk in her speech!

(Full analysis under the break!)

Most of Gina's speech patterns can be broken down by three fundamental facts:

She speaks with a thick Cockney accent

She's uneducated, which leads to various grammar troubles

She uses a lot of informal cockney terms/slang

Let's get into it section-by-section!

(Note: Formatting looks a lot better on mobile!)

Section 1: Cockney Accent

So I’m an theater kid, and I've done dialect training for Cockney accents before - it's one of my best ones imo - so that certainly helped me write this section! Even without that, though, it's pretty easy to identify how her accent appears in her speech. Let's break it down!

Drop h's

Example: Here becomes 'ere

Drop g’s at the end of words

Example: Going becomes goin'

A few other word ends that get dropped:

Of becomes o'

And becomes an'

Th changes depending on the word - Thank you to annoyingloudmicrowavecultist for properly explaining how this works in the tags!

Voiced th becomes v

Example: With becomes wiv

Unvoiced th becomes f

Example: Nothing becomes nuffin'

For writing purposes, if a word would become unrecognizable with this change, it's left the same (but in actual speech, it would be pronounced differently)

Example: Father remains as father (but would be pronounced like fovva)

Th always remains intact at the start of words

Example: Thing remains as thing (but would be pronounced like fing)

Miscellaneous word changes

Something becomes summat (but other times is just somefin' - she's not consistent with either)

What becomes wot, whatever becomes wotever

Tomorrow becomes tomorra

Because is often shortened to 'cause, which becomes cos

Isn't almost always becomes ain't

Thank you / no thank you becomes ta / no ta

Some words spill together or are slurred

With that becomes wivvat, with it becomes wivvit (This one isn't actually used in-game, so you don't have to use it either, but it reflects how she'd actually be pronouncing it)

Isn't it becomes innit

Doesn't it becomes dunnit

Suppose becomes s'pose

Don't know becomes dunno

Probably becomes prob'ly

You might change - Another loose/inconsistent rule. Can depend on how the sentence would be pronounced out loud, but mostly is just a vibe

You becomes ya

Your/you're becomes yer

Yourself becomes yerself

Section 2: Grammatical Errors

Gina is an uneducated East End orphan, so it should come as no surprise that she makes mistakes here and there. Here are her consistent ones! Some of these are confusing/hard to explain, so I included specific examples.

Will say me instead of my, and meself instead of myself

Example: "I dunno much about guns meself."

Incorrect tense usage of was/were in negatives - Instead of I/it wasn’t, she’ll say I/it weren’t

Example: "I was up in a balloon, weren't I?"

Incorrect tense usage of does/do in negatives - Instead of he doesn’t, she’ll say he don’t

Example: "Somefin' wot 'e don't want people readin'."

Double negatives

Ever becomes never in negative statements

Example: "I swear on my life, I ain't never laid eyes on that dandy before."

Never + anything becomes never + nothing

Example: "I never done nuffin' o' the sort!"

Never + anyone becomes never + no one

Example: "All me life, growin' up in the slums, I've never trusted no one."

Haven't you ever becomes ain't you never

Example: "Ain't you lot never gone over an 'ouse lookin' for dough when the owners are out o' town?"

The word that or who in the context of ascribing a feature to a subject is replaced by the word what

Example: "She's always goin' on about all them cases wot Sholmes is lookin' into."

Other example: "I think I wouldn't fancy me chances wiv a lawyer wot lives in a place like this."

Will say them instead of those

"All them skylights open, dead easy."

Will say no more instead of anymore

"Ya dropped it, so it ain't yours no more."

She’ll sometimes mess up bigger, unfamiliar words. This one's entirely in your discretion what words she might mess up. Some canon examples:

“Supperment” instead of supplement

“Mantlescript” instead of manuscript

On a similar note, she'll sometimes confidently get sayings wrong and think she sounds smart

“Toby's...'ow did they put it...? ...Oh, yeah! A 'bone-fide' detective!”

Section 3: Cockney Terms/Slang

In addition to her thick dialect, growing up in the East End means Gina has also adopted a plethora of unique words and phrases. This'll be more like a vocab section!

Cockney rhyming slang - Some words are replaced with phrases that rhyme with them. She uses a few in canon:

Instead of believe, she’ll say Adam an’ Eve

“Would you Adam an' Eve it, eh?! Wot a mug!”

Instead of face, she’ll say chevy chase

“Yeah, I can see it written all over yer chevy chase!”

Interjections/Exclamations

Blimey - Express surprise or shock

"Blimey, yer right! That streak o' light in the photo looks just like an arrow, dunnit?"

Cor - A general interjection, kind of a euphemism for god

"Cor, listen to you! Ya stumble across a bit o' balloon an' suddenly yer the best investigator in the world!"

Oi - I doubt I need to define this one, but it's basically the equivalent of "hey"

"Oi! That's off limits up there!"

Words for people

Cove, bloke - A boy or man. Gina tends to use cove more often than bloke.

"That's where the cove ended up after 'is 'instant kinesis' or wotever they call it."

"When I lifted the last bloke's purse, 'e got wise to me."

Dandy - A conceited, fashionable upperclass man. Can be used as a noun or adjective.

In reference to Ashley Graydon: "I swear on my life, I ain't never laid eyes on that dandy before."

Dee - Thank you to uzukirie for figuring this out in the replies of this post - dee is short for detective!

To Sholmes: "I don't need no 'elp from some stuck-up dee!"

About Gregson: "Yeah, the dee let me keep it. After I looked daggers at 'im for long enough."

Swell - A wealthy or elegant person. In canon, Gina uses this exclusively in reference to McGilded.

"It's because o' that, this swell found me. …'E did 'elp me get away, mind."

Miscellaneous vocab

Dodgy - Suspicious

"It was amazin' when you showed that dodgy professor's dodgy experiment was a total fix!"

Rum - Odd or strange

"I mean, wot's the point of spendin' a joey to make a few bob, eh? That's a rum idea, innit?"

Coppers - Cops

"If you do wot the grown-ups tell ya, it'll get yer mates dragged off by the coppers. Or worse."

Scarper - Flee/run away/leave in a hurry. Also comes from rhyming slang - Scarper = Scapa Flow = Go

"If I did that, 'e said 'e'd let me scarper before the coppers showed up."

Have a butcher's - Take a look. Also comes from rhyming slang - "butcher's hook" = look

"Most days I push the cushion up wiv me 'ead an' look out the crack. Then I can 'ave a butcher's at who I'm gonna fiddle."

Rude words/phrases :)

Gordon Bennett - Expresses surprise or contempt - kind of a euphemism for goddammit.

"Gordon Bennett! You lot!"

Flamin', bleedin', - General emphasis. Pretty much just gentler ways of saying fucking.

Note!! You might be tempted to make Gina say "bloody", since that's well-known British slang, but she never says that. She says bleedin' in its place.

"Don't be so flamin' rude, 'Oddo!"

"It's lies every bleedin' place ya look in this world, innit?"

Bleedin’ Nora - A variation of "Bloody Norah", a surprised/irritated interjection.

"Wot the bleedin' Nora, 'Oddo?! Wot 'ave you gone an' done?!"

Bogtrotter - A derogatory term for an Irish person. She uses this to refer to McGilded.

"Look at the mess it's got you into, believin' in that bogtrotter!"

Mug - An idiot.

"You can't do it from inside, you mug."

Blue blazes - An alliterative exaggeration of "blazes". A euphemism for hell.

"Where the blue blazes 'ave you been, eh?"

Cobblers - Rubbish/nonsense. Literally, it means testicles - derived from Cockney rhyming slang, where "cobbler's awls" = balls.

"All this nonsense about the boss plannin' to kill people… It's cobblers!"

And 1.2k words later, that's pretty much it! Now you can write Gina dialogue spot on <3

Feel free to suggest anything I'm missing/got wrong - I come back and edit this for accuracy's sake every time I notice something I left out, or when people in the replies/tags point things out!

[damnmmmmmmmmmm]

"While it’s true that individual grammatical mistakes can be widespread, the specific combination of syntactic structures, punctuation habits, rhetorical choices, and emotional engagement across both samples points strongly to a single author rather than coincidence."

They really don't. But sure, let's argue.

First of all, both pieces are far too short to derive any conclusive evidence from them. You're allowed to have your opinions, but presenting your observations as though they're conclusive is fallacious at best and also deeply unconstructive.

- "Run-on sentences and comma splices used in the same way."

They're not used in the same way, unless by "the same way" you mean that "they are present at all". The presence of run-on sentences in online discourse is extremely pervasive because the boundaries around sentences in spoken communication are much more flexible than in written communication. In addition, most people online write in a far more stream-of-consciousness cadence than is typical in formal writing. All that this tells me is that both of these pieces were written by someone with low professional writing skills and a highly-online social milieu.

- "A conversational yet aggressive tone with abrupt sentence shifts. Rhetorical questions to emphasize frustration."

You've used very similar tonal shifts when engaging with hostile shippers. Am I to presume that you're one/both of these authors from that evidence? Of course not.

Are you to presume from my use of rhetorical questions in this response that I'm one/both of these authors? Again, of course not.

These are both extremely common internet discourse standards. Their presence in two short texts obtained from the internet is hardly groundbreaking.

- "Unstructured, stream-of-consciousness rants that blend casual and formal phrasing."

Again, welcome to the internet. Both of these point to similar emotional disregulation in the authors, sure. They also point to authors who lack training in rhetorical strategies and formal argumentation. That could literally be anyone these days.

- "The odds of two different people exhibiting the exact same mix of errors and stylistic habits are incredibly low."

You're going to have to quantify that. How are you determining that it's the exact same mix beyond just identifying that there are superficially common traits? Where's your statistical analysis on the frequency with which these same strategies are used in other texts in order to establish a firm control?

Come on, now. You're a PhD candidate, you know you can't just assert that something is rare or unlikely without substantiating it when your entire argument rests on that assertion being true.

- "Some of your corrections were incorrect. I’m open to re-evaluating specific points, but minor corrections don’t change the bigger picture. The overall structure and linguistic patterns across both pieces remain too similar to ignore."

Let's go into the incorrect observations then, because they eradicate two of your proposed pieces of evidence.

- "lack of commas"

The evidence provided from text A ("I just wanted to make my post simpler to comprehend" "no comma before simpler") is outright incorrect. There is nothing wrong with the sentence in text A. A comma would only be required if there were a clause boundary there, because English does not use commas to offset descriptive phrases.

The evidence proposed from text B ("at the end of the day she is a human being someone's child sibling aunt cousin family friend and partner" "should have multiple commas") is an accurate observation of incorrect grammatical structure and punctuation usage. The problem here is that ALL punctuation is missing; it's another run-on sentence, which is far more significant than the fact that multiple serial commas which should separate the items in the list are absent.

The error in appropriately punctuating text B is a majorly different category type from the proposed change to text A. Issues with serialization have nothing to do with issues around phrasal boundaries and clause structures. The only thing that links these two issues is punctuation, but not in a way that indicates the same kind of struggle with appropriate text-based communication.

- "incorrect pluralization"

The evidence from text A ("people's kindness doesn't mean much to me anymore" "should be people's kindness doesn't mean as much") has nothing whatsoever to do with pluralization or agreement issues. Indeed, "doesn't mean much" is a thoroughly lexicalized phrase at this point. "Doesn't mean as much" indicates a negative comparison to a positive prior state, whereas "doesn't mean much" indicates a complete absence without specific comparison. It's maybe not the most effective way of communicating the point, but there is nothing objectively wrong with it.

The evidence from text B ("these woman commenting on her looks" "should be these women") is again an accurate editorial observation.

However, AGAIN, we have an analytical error on your part in comparing two dissimilar categories. A clunky colloquial phrase that any native speaker of English might use is a totally different category of error than an incorrect plural of a very common, core vocabulary item.

Furthermore, in looking at your other assembled evidence, these types of apples-to-oranges comparisons of errors between the two texts persist. You are using categories which are defined far too broadly to draw accurate evidentiary comparisons.

More examples:

- "inconsistent capitalization"

Text A ("i'm still not sure how to feel about it" "lowercase i") vs text B ("she not insecure like people trying to drag her down" "missing is")

Typing in mostly lowercase even at sentence boundaries is common internet syntax and therefore not particularly strong evidence of shared authorship. Furthermore, the MUCH more significant error in text B, which you called out yourself, is the lack of subject-verb agreement (via the complete lack of the copula). Text A doesn't share this problem. For this to be a strong comparison, I'd expect text A to also lack its copula and read as "I still not sure..."

- "run-on sentences"

As mentioned above, superficially these seem similar. However, they are functionally very different types of run-on sentence.

Text A ("I also hate how he's been everywhere recently, and there's been so many good things happening for him, and...") is a badly constructed list of independent clauses. The mistake it makes is gluing a series of sentences together by way of commas in order to build the list. It wouldn't actually take much editing to put all of the items together into a grammatically correct list ("I hate that he's been everywhere recently, that there have been so many good things happening for him, and that (xyz).") Notably, this contrasts with the lack of serial commas in a list of items from text B as mentioned above, indicating that the writer of A knows that list items must be separated while the writer of B dispenses with that formality. This provides more evidence of divergent authorship. (And, as a freebie, the agreement issue of "there's been so many good things" is again a different type of agreement error than we've seen in text B.)

Text B ("First of all these woman commenting on her looks and then seeing their pictures it's like yikes that is very clear jealousy and bitterness") is a very different type of run-on. This isn't a list, it's multiple competing thoughts that are never quite completed. "First of all, these women commenting on her looks" is not a sentence, it's the start of one. "Seeing their pictures it's like yikes" is also not a complete sentence. "That is very clear jealousy and bitterness" could be a complete sentence, but it doesn't actually logically flow from the first two clauses.

Text A is significantly more cohesive and coherent. It strings together independent clauses incorrectly, but a minor edit to convert those to dependent clauses corrects the error. Text B would need to be completely rewritten. The rhetorical flaws are not of the same kind or category. Again, this points to differing authorship.

- "repeated sentence beginnings"

Text A ("I hate that he's perceived as kind... I also hate how he's been literally everywhere... I hate how people refuse to acknowledge it...")

Text B ("They are ashamed to show their faces... They are ashamed to show who they really are... They know what they are doing is hateful..."

These are the hallmarks of amateur writers with limited vocabularies and even more limited rhetorical strategies. Superficially, they seem similar because of that shared attribute; however, on closer examination they again constitute different rhetorical categories.

Text A repeats "I hate" followed by a conjunction and then an independent clause. Any of those complaints would be complete on their own ("he's perceived as kind", "he's been literally everywhere", "people refuse to acknowledge it"). Text B on the other hand essentially repeats the same sentence ("They're ashamed").

Text A focuses on how the writer feels about the situation while providing something concrete as attempted evidence; text B is entirely constructed of accusations of what the author seems to believe about others without anything to ground those beliefs. These do not indicate similar thought processes originating from the same mind. They don't indicate similar rhetorical or pragmatic strategies. They don't even indicate similar levels of verbal fluency in English.

Honestly, I could go on but this is getting to be quite long enough. Literally every single point you made in your comparison of the two texts demonstrates multiple fundamental miscategorizations of the kinds of errors that the two authors are making. While they share high-level, superficial similarities, they don't hold up to a close linguistic evaluation by someone with actual background in this field.

If I had to hazard a guess, my personal analysis is that text B demonstrates errors more consistent with an L2 speaker, while text A demonstrates errors more consistent with an L1 speaker of either a non-standard native dialect or a poor education in the standard dialect. They are fundamentally different from top to bottom, and only share a similar me-centric attitude, an ax to grind, and a tendency towards verbosity.

- "The fact that you recognize the pragmatic similarities actually strengthens my argument rather than disproving it. When someone’s tone, sentence structure, punctuation habits, argument style, and emotional cadence all align across multiple texts, the likelihood of them being from two different authors becomes incredibly slim.If you have specific counterpoints after a closer comparison, I’d be open to discussing them- But please, let's stay away from backhand complements in future discussions."

As I've shown, the nuts and bolts of the writing styles don't align. As a result, the pragmatic similarities actually weaken your argument when further syntactic and semantic analysis is undertaken. As a final note, when I said you seem to be a very advanced L2 speaker, it was not a backhanded compliment, merely an observation. This type of analysis would be exceptionally difficult even for a native speaker without formal experience in this field. You made a good effort, but unfortunately your evidence is weak and as a consequence the conclusion doesn't hold up.

I have to hand it to you; you put in some effort here. But there’s a massive flaw in your analysis: you don’t even have the full text.

Look, if you're going to do a linguistic analysis, you need the entire dataset. You can’t just take a few snippets and expect to draw conclusions. Since I never posted the full text, your entire argument is built on incomplete data. As Fairclough (2003) says, "analysis is always tied to the textual data at hand, and partial data cannot provide a complete analysis" (p. 6). So yeah, your conclusions are already a little wobbly.

Now, here’s the real kicker: I do have the full text of both writing samples. You don't. And since I never disclosed the author of the second sample, there’s absolutely no way for you to know who I’m talking about—unless you’re the author of that second sample. And if that's the case, well, that would also make you the author of the first one. Which is a bit too convenient, don't you think? Just sayin’.

Now, I know this might be a tough pill to swallow, but if you're going to present yourself as some kind of expert, you need to do better. I just wrapped up my PhD, and trust me, I’ve got sources, bitch! So when you said, "Come on, now. You're a PhD candidate, you know you can't just assert that something is rare or unlikely without substantiating it when your entire argument rests on that assertion being true," it’s almost laughable. You’re right—that’s exactly what you did, but you didn’t bother substantiating it with any evidence. It’s kind of like you forgot the whole point of academic discourse—support your arguments with evidence.

Here’s the thing: you approached this from a linguistic point of view, while I was looking at something completely different—grammar, structure, stylistic patterns. The fact that you didn't even realize we were analyzing the text from two completely different perspectives is concerning. For someone who claims to have formal/professional experience in linguistics, this is pretty basic stuff. Gee (2014) reminds us that “linguistic analysis is about language itself, while discourse analysis focuses on how language works within social contexts�� (p. 8). You didn’t even seem to notice that we were working in two different domains of analysis. Major red flag.

Now, let’s talk about your credentials—since you seem to want to play the "I'm the professional" card. Come on, bitch. If you’re going to come at me with this, you better cite your sources and back up your “professionalism” with some actual academic credentials. Otherwise, you’re just talking out of your ass. How about you drop some names of the linguistics experts you actually reference? Since I’m so “unsubstantiated,” let's see you put your academic credentials where your mouth is.

Lastly, I specifically asked for this to be a logical discussion and for you not to make it personal. But clearly, that request was too much for you. I didn't insult you or make backhanded comments, yet you turned this into a defensive, personal essay. This says less about me and more about you. As Fairclough (2003) points out, "Discourse is never just a matter of language; it is also a matter of social relations, power, and identity" (p. 14). So, it seems this whole thing is more about your need to defend your ego than it is about addressing the actual content.

In the end, your response didn’t disprove my argument. In fact, it just proved that I struck a nerve. Nice try, though.

References:

Fairclough, N., 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. Routledge: London.

Gee, J.P., 2014. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. 4th ed. Routledge: New York.

[prollcmatchdata]

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[empiricomr]

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Developing internationally needs a in-depth knowledge of market space and consumer requirements. Of course, companies that funding in wide market research are highly equipped in order to make a best decisions and evade high mistakes. By getting knowledge from international market research companies, business can get high competitive benefits and effectively steer the risk of the internal marketplace.

[lingbooks]

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

While I know a lot of linguists who are feminists, there is some tension between feminist ideals and the anti-prescriptivist approach that linguists take towards language. Linguists, as a general rule, aim to document and examine language as it is used, without providing their own opinions on how they think language should be used. This approach to language allows linguists to show that certain forms of language, from split infinitives to singular they, are not bad or wrong or “grammatically incorrect.” However, when it comes to sexist language, it’s a lot harder to say that there’s no such thing as “bad” language use. 

Some of the questions that arise are easily answered. It is fairly easy to distinguish between using slurs and splitting infinitives, as slurs are meant to hurt or disparage people, while split infinitives only offend the sensibilities of some long dead men who desperately wished English were more like Latin. But what about less malicious language use that still has sexist undertones? What about calling ships or storms she? What about using the word guys to refer to groups that contain women?

 I thought a lot about this contradiction while reading Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell, a book that attempts to cover a wide variety of topics related to language and gender. Montell’s background in linguistics admittedly isn’t particularly extensive—she has a bachelor’s degree in linguistics, but she’s primarily a journalist who only occasionally writes about linguistics. (I should probably also state that, depending on how you count my graduate work in a related field, I have the same amount of linguistics education, so I’m not going to make any judgments on who “really counts” as a linguist.) That said, Wordslut is definitely a linguistics book—and a pretty good one at that.

 Wordslut covers a broad variety of topics in sociolinguistics. Some are expected. The first chapter discusses the variety of (often derogatory) slang words used to describe women, while another chapter discusses the ways women speak to each other. Other chapters cover topics I see less frequently. One chapter, for example, looks at how women swear, while another looks at the vast array of slang words used to refer to genitalia. (I’d warn you that this book is NSFW, but if you’re reading a book entitled Wordslut at work in the first place, you’re a braver soul than I am.) One of my favorite chapters focused on how gay people speak, including both discussions of gay slang as well as examining why there’s a “gay voice” but no real “lesbian voice.” While I already was familiar with some of the topics in the chapter, I was not aware of Polari, a sort of code once used by British gay men as early as the 1500s that gave us such words as twink, camp, and fantabulous, and now I definitely want to know more about it. On a similar note, throughout the book, Montell makes sure to discuss queer, trans, and nonbinary experiences when relevant, which provides perspective that’s usually lacking in older writing about language and gender.

I did find that the quality varied from chapter to chapter—or even within the same chapter. Consider, for example, the chapter on catcalling. One section of the chapter compared catcalling behaviors with linguistic studies on compliments, breaking down precisely why catcalling is not a compliment. I thought this was a really interesting analysis, but I found the rest of the chapter fairly dull; some of it discussed facts I (and most other feminists) already know about how men dominate conversations and interrupt women, while other parts talked about the act of catcalling more generally. (A problem I found throughout the book is that Montell sometimes chose to discuss general feminist issues without really tying them back to linguistics.) While some of this unevenness is to be expected in a book with such a broad scope, one pattern emerged: I generally enjoyed the portions discussing how women speak, such as the chapter about conversational norms in groups of women or the section about the many uses of like, more than the portions discussing how women are spoken about. Perhaps this is because the former read like a celebration, while the latter was more of a rant. Montell is not happy about how our culture talks about women, and while I don’t disagree with her, I often found myself more frustrated than properly fired up.

It is worth noting that Montell is not an impartial voice throughout the book. She wants our language to become more equitable. Mostly, her ambitions are good. (And in her defense, she notes that certain approaches to making language more equitable, such as attempts in 70s to create a “women’s language” or storming a dictionary headquarters to demand the word slut be removed, are unlikely to be successful.) But in doing so, sometimes her own linguistic biases shine through. Consider, for example, an anecdote from the intro of the book, where Montell gives the following speech to a woman who critiques her use of the word y’all:

I like to see y’all as an efficient and socially conscious way to handle the English language’s lack of a second-person plural pronoun. I could have used the word you to address the two girls, but I wanted to make sure your daughter knew I was including her in the conversation. I could also have said you guys, which has become surprisingly customary in casual conversation, but to my knowledge, neither of these children identifies as male, and I try to avoid using masculine terms to address people who aren’t men, as it ultimately works to promote the sort of linguistic sexism many have been fighting for years. I mean, if neither of these girls is a guy, then surely together they aren’t guys, you know?

 It’s a nice “take down the prescriptivist” story in some ways, but while I agree that y’all is a perfectly acceptable and useful word, Montell tries to argue that she chose to use y’all not just because her geographical and linguistic background make it the natural choice for her but because it’s the best choice, thereby turning an anti-prescriptivist argument into a prescriptivist one. Later in the same speech, she dismisses the option of using the pronoun yinz because it “doesn’t roll off the tongue nicely.”  I’m more intrigued, however, by her insistence that it would be sexist to use you guys. Montell notes, “Many speakers genuinely believe guys has become gender neutral. However, scholars agree that guys is just another masculine generic in cozier clothing. There’d be no chance of you gals earning the same lexical love.”  However, she provides no real evidence that guys isn’t truly neutral to speakers who use it, only that it is less marked than gals and that only masculine terms can ever reach this level of unmarkedness. I can’t help but wonder if it’s speakers who are excluding women when using phrases like you guys or if Montell simply hears it that way due to her own linguistic background.

 Another issue I had with this book is that it heavily focuses on English. While the topics discussed throughout the book are fairly universal, only one chapter provides any non-English examples. However, given how Montell handles these non-English examples, especially those from non-Western languages, in that one chapter, that might be for the best. The chapter examines how grammatical gender affects speakers’ perceptions of natural gender, as well as the political consequences, and at points, it’s very effective. I was particularly intrigued by her discussion of French feminists’ attempts to introduce feminine terms for certain jobs in a language where words like doctor are obligatorily masculine (and l’Académie Française is trying very hard to keep them that way). A few pages later, Montell moves onto talk about more complex gender and noun class systems. She gives the now famous example of Dyirbal, where most animate nouns belong to one noun class but “women, fire, and dangerous things” belong to another. She then concludes that this demonstrates that this shows something about Dyirbal speakers’ worldviews—that they see everything as masculine unless it could “literally kill you.” It’s a compelling argument in some ways, but it’s hard to discuss Dyirbal speakers’ worldviews without remembering one thing: Dyirbal is an indigenous Australian language with a single-digit number of native speakers. Yes, it has an interesting—and perhaps problematic—approach to gender, but it’s tied to a very specific (and mostly eradicated) cultural context, and it simply isn’t problematic in the same way as l’Académie Française. 

Overall, while I had my issues with Wordslut, I had a good time reading it . It’s not a must read, but if you’re looking for a fun, modern source on gender and language, it’s certainly entertaining and informative. It’s also a book that can definitely be enjoyed by linguists and non-linguists alike; there’s not much jargon that would trip up a non-linguist, but it covers a wide enough variety of topics that linguists (at least those who don’t specialize in sociolinguistics) won’t already know everything it covers. In general, if you’re interested in linguistics and feminism, you’ll probably have a good time and learn something new.

TL;DR

Overall rating: 3.5/5 Good for linguists? Yes, unless you’re already an expert in sociolinguistics Good for non-linguists? A definitive yes, since this assumes no background in linguistics Strong points: Broad scope and a fun, modern overview of the intersection between language and gender Weak points: Very English-centric, and the author’s outrage overshadows the actual information sometimes

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Language and Media: Ways on How to evaluate Language use in the Media by: Van Naputo

Media is a term which covers all the means of communication which have functions such as informing, raising awareness, education, socialization, entertainment and agenda setting, including all kinds of oral, written and visual images. (“What is Media”, n.d.) Upon the dawn of technology, many types of Media came into existence; media people tried to made use of technology to still give the people the pieces of information they want to have and as time passed, people came up with different modes to provide news to the public. Based on the type of medium, their role may be different, but they all exist to communicate to the audience and affect their perceptions. Today, people do not have to travel oceans or wait for a pigeon to get the latest news, they just have to look for the different forms and types of media to find what they are looking for. (Gooseberry, n.d.) However, the media must know who their audiences are, and they must know what proper language approach to use for them to serve the best to the people.

Moreover, people must also know how to critically evaluate the media content and information since not all contents served in those different types of Media are valid.

Definition of Terms

Media linguistics is composed of two words which are “media” and “linguistics” which means it investigates the relationship between language use and public discourse conveyed through the media. (Wyss, 2019) In other words, Luginbühl (2015) stated in Media Linguistics: On Mediality and Culturality, “Media linguistics studies how language is used in the media”

Language Register 

In linguistics it is defined as the way a speaker uses language differently in different circumstances. Think about the words you choose, your tone of voice, even your body language. You probably behave very differently chatting with a friend than you would at a formal dinner party or during a job interview. These variations in formality, also called stylistic variation, are known as registers in linguistics. They are determined by such factors as social occasion, context, purpose, and audience. (Nordquist, 2019) Language register is the level of formality with which you speak. Different situations and people call for different registers. (Eaton, 2018) According to Montano (n.d.), there are five language registers or styles: Frozen, Formal, Consultative, Casual and Intimate

Stylistics 

Stylistics is a branch of applied linguistics concerned with the study of style in texts, especially, but not exclusively, in literary works. Also called literary linguistics, stylistics focuses on the figures, tropes, and other rhetorical devices used to provide variety and a distinctness to someone's writing. It is linguistic analysis plus literary criticism. (Nordquist, 2019) In addition, Stylistics is the study of the devices in languages (such as rhetorical figures and syntactical patterns) that are considered to produce expressive or literary style. (Britannica, 2016)

Grammar 

The grammar of a language includes basic axioms such as verb tenses, articles and adjectives (and their proper order), how questions are phrased, and much more. Language cannot function without grammar. It would simply make no sense—people require grammar to communicate effectively.

Speakers and listeners, authors and their audiences must function in like systems in order to understand one another. In other words, a language without grammar is like a pile of bricks without mortar to hold them together. While the basic components are present, they are, for all intents and purposes, useless. (Nordquist, 2020)

Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of sign systems. It explores how words and other signs make meaning. In semiotics, a sign is anything that stands in for something other than itself. This lesson focuses primarily on linguistic signs.

The word 'semiotics' dates back to ancient Greece, but its use in modern linguistics was propelled in the 19th century with the research of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure was a Swiss linguist who contributed greatly to the study of semiotics, also sometimes referred to as semiology. (Taylor, n.d.)

Pragmatics 

Pragmatics deals with utterances, by which we will mean specific events, the intentional acts of speakers at times and places, typically involving language. Logic and semantics traditionally deal with properties of types of expressions, and not with properties that differ from token to token, or use to use, or, as we shall say, from utterance to utterance, and vary with the particular properties that differentiate them. Pragmatics is sometimes characterized as dealing with the effects of context. This is equivalent to saying it deals with utterances, if one collectively refers to all the facts that can vary from utterance to utterance as ‘context.’ One must be careful, however, for the term is often used with more limited meanings. (Pragmatics, 2006)

PRINT MEDIA

Print media refers to paper publications circulated in the form of physical editions of books, magazines, journals and newsletters. (What is the meaning of Print Media?, n.d.)

In addition, Millenger, (2018) said that, print media is the printed version of telling the news, primarily through newspapers and magazines. Before the invention and widespread use of printing presses, printed materials had to be written by hand. It was a painstaking process that made mass distribution impossible.

The following are the ways on how to evaluate Print Media in terms of:

Register

Usually, print media uses Formal Register because it is a one-way process that does not demand any quick response from the audience.

Stylistics

Print Media uses formal type of writing. Also, it gives the readers the taste of excitement for the readers to be carried unto the important part of the topic or the article. The information of the author is detailed for an easy access if the author committed some mistakes or problems in his/her published content. The articles, statements, news or etc. that are in Print Media usually have evidences that supports every claim.

Grammar

Print Media uses correct grammar: it uses formal register and formal type of writing; hence, it must contain correct grammar and of course with correct spelling. If authors will use incorrect spelling and grammar, it might affect the credibility of the news.

Semiotics

For a powerful media design, print media must use effective font styles and font sizes to capture the attention of the readers: bold and formal font style must be used. For an eye-grabber, print media must use graphics that could highlight certain parts: it should not create disastrous graphics and should relate to the topic presented.

Pragmatics

Readers are more focused on the headline before reading the entire article or news; headline is already speaking to the audience. They imply either literal meaning or sarcasm. Hence, headline sets the mood of the reader towards the media; it must create an effect to the audiences’ minds. Putting metaphorical statements, questions, quotes, full-of-feeling words will help the media have a powerful effect to the readers.

VISUAL MEDIA

Visual Media is a colloquial expression used to designate things like TV, movies, photography, painting and so on. (What are the types of effective Visual Media?, 2020) Visual media are sources of information in the form of visual representations. These can be abstractions, analogues, rough illustrations, or digital reproductions of the objects. There should be an interpretation of data, and sources may be hosted on the internet, printed in publications, displayed through broadcast media, or otherwise disseminated. (What is Visual Media and Information?, n.d.)

The following are the ways on how to evaluate Visual Media content in terms of:

Register

This type of media uses different kinds of register basing on the content. In news, it uses formal type of language register. On the other hand, movies use different types of language registers: consultative, to casual, to intimate depending on the content and the characters.

Stylistics

Visual Media is using different styles and that this type of media is exciting because it uses comparison between things: light versus dark, good versus evil, life and death, especially in movies. Though this media is using various styles, it will not be detached from its way of interpreting things and its meaning. As Weber (n.d.) said, “Images have an effect on communication. They initiate and control communication. And they change communication.”

Grammar

Visual Media uses a non-standard grammar. This type of media uses informal grammar: slang words, contractions, and new words that are not seen in the dictionary especially in movies depending on the theme or setting of the movie. Moreover, images have their own language and that sometimes they use informal grammar and sometimes, unidentified --- abstract images or paintings.

Semiotics 

In movies, signs that are shown are not that emphasized because the focus of the audience are the main characters in the movie. However, these signs: road sign, signage in malls, traffic signs and etc. are there to imply that it should be followed. Moreover, in images: photographs or paintings, there are certain signs that connotes meaning to the public audience. This type of media is more on symbolization to interpret certain things.  For example, in colors, black is a representation of mourn or sad, white for purity and peace, red for love and blue for loyalty and wisdom. However, these interpretations vary depending on your sense of geography – culture. These signs are shown in this type of media because they let the image, colors, shapes and etc. speak for itself.

Pragmatics

Images such as photographs and paintings cannot utter words because its way of communicating to the audience is by speaking through every single detail of the photograph or the painting. On the other hand, movies’ way of conveying its message is by the use of body language, gestures and how characters use stress and intonation in throwing their lines; how will they convey the message without literally implying the point.

ELECTRONIC BROADCAST MEDIA

Historically, broadcast media has been a public service, as with public radio which is funded by the government. This includes the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Canada and National Public Radio (NPR) in the United States. Broadcast media can also be private and includes advertising. Global TV and CTV are examples of commercial television. The term 'broadcast media' covers a wide range of different communication methods that include television, radio, podcasts, blogs, advertising, websites, online streaming and digital journalism. Broadcast media provides valuable information that can inform and educate and includes public service announcements, daily news, weather forecasts, interviews, and documentaries. Broadcast media is also recreational and includes reality television, situation and sketch comedies, movies, sports and advertising. (What is Broadcast Media?, n.d.) Broadcast media describes the traditional forms of media that include television and radio. Technically, the term ‘broadcast media’ can include the internet as well… (Broadcast Media Definition, 2004)

The following are the ways on how to evaluate Electronic Broadcast Media content in terms of:

Register

Electronic Broadcast Media is using formal register: not a full-blown formal register since they are not expecting feedbacks from the audience, but less formal. Sometimes, they use consultative register in asking people or experts about a certain matter.

Stylistics

Electronic Broadcasting Media uses electromechanical or electronic devices to access the content given. Moreover, they are not practicing excessive foul words and language because they are more of a family-friendly media form. Main resources of electronic media are CD-ROM, online content, slide presentations, audio recordings, video recordings and multimedia presentations. Emotional appeal and repetition are highly observed.

Grammar 

This type of media often uses correct grammar in relaying news to the audience and sometimes, their choice of words used are those surface words not the highfalutin words for the better understanding of the audience listening, watching or reading the content.

Semiotics

Electronic Broadcast Media is mainly using TV and Radio. Televisions uses two types of media: Visual (moving images, videos, clips, images) and Audio Media (sound: voice, music and etc.) On the other hand, Radio uses Audio Media, but in present times, Radio is accessing Social Media and broadcasting their news at a live setting. However, traditionally, Radio is mainly using Audio Media. This type of media --- Electronic Broadcast Media --- is presenting their news content in a hierarchical manner: from the very important (politics, economy, and the most trending topic/s) and to the least important (entertainment, sports and etc.)

Pragmatics

TV newscasters or anchors uses scripts in relaying news to the public, but some of what they are uttering in the news are in their own opinion. Some of them are speaking sarcastically to make it not so direct to point as to who or what the anchor is referring to. However, in radio, some anchormen are not sticking to the scripts given to them; they prefer speaking on whatever they want to speak: some might be biased, and some might be abstain. Sometimes, anchormen are uttering things in manners depending as to who is he/she talking to.

OUTDOOR MEDIA

It typically consists of any advertising seen outside of the home, and is primarily grouped into a few specific categories: Billboards, posters and transit etc.

The following are the ways on how to evaluate Outdoor Media in terms of:

Register

Outdoor Media sometimes uses consultative type of register. Overtime, they use casual register for them to be able grab their client or their audience for a better advertising. They use this type of register to somehow create a chill and friendly environment.

Stylistics

This type of media is mostly using figurative languages: personification, hyperbole and metaphor as it grabs the attention of the audience. Also, they make use of interrogative sentences to make the audience think about what the billboard or poster suggests.

Grammar

Billboards and posters is using limited words for it to be catchy to the audience. Hence, this type of media mostly uses informal grammar: using of contractions, slang words and they even use new morphemes --- those that are not seen in the dictionary. They have to use these informalities of the grammar because they address all types of audience; may it be from high class audience or from the lay audience.

Semiotics 

In this type of media, they use signs to give out meaning; the sign could mean its literal meaning, sometimes they use it as symbolism. Moreover, outdoor media mostly uses visuals to give an impact to what they are advertising and to give additional effect to what they want to convey.

Pragmatics

Outdoor media is using limited use of words for it to be catchy and easy to read. With that, they use different styles in conveying what they really want to convey and some of their sentence structures are different. They also use some lay terms such as new-word expressions that could attract to the audience. Also, outdoor media uses images and words with big letters for it to be readable especially in billboards.

TRANSIT MEDIA

Transit media refers to advertising placed in, on, or around modes of public transportation: buses, subways, and taxis, as well as at bus, train, and subway stations. Transit media can be a great way to reach a really diverse audience: families traveling to day cares, professionals heading to work, tourists navigating a new town, or even students making their way to a local coffee shop. (Hendricks, n.d.) 

Transit media advertising is a mass media marketing tool which mainly use public transport to display an advertisement such as displays on buses, autos, cabs, trains, or any transportation mode that consumers use to travel during the course of a day. The idea of transit advertising is not only promoting a product or service outside the vehicle but also consist of displays placed inside the vehicles. Transit is an important medium for reaching an audience of all ages and backgrounds. In the last few years Transit media advertising has become more popular than ever. (Transit Media Advertising, 2020)

The following are the ways on how to evaluate Transit Media in terms of:

Register

Transit media can use different kinds of language register, it can be formal, casual, consultative or static, depending on their target audience.

Stylistics

This type of media uses limited choice of words. Sometimes they could use either formal or informal style of writing given that is should be limited depending on what they want to convey.

Grammar

Transit Media uses informal grammar, and at times, they break some rules of grammar to make it very catchy to the audience. Since they have limited use space, they usually use contractions, slang words more often, and using new words -- expressions to exact -- for it to be easy to read; they use limited words such as 3 – 5 words.

Semiotics

This type of media would not try to overdo things since they are just posted mostly in vehicles. Hence, they do not use symbolism for the audience to not consume that much time thinking of what the content means.

Pragmatics

Transit media tend to just present what is literal than letting the audience think. However, this matter is depending on their target audience and what are they advertising.

DIGITAL MEDIA

Digital media is any form of media that uses electronic devices for distribution. This form of media can be created, viewed, modified and distributed via electronic devices. Digital media is commonly used software, video games, videos, websites, social media, and online advertising. Even though digital media is part of our everyday culture, business owners still find themselves uncomfortable with replacing their paper advertising with digital marketing services.

However, with the constant shifts in technology, one cannot deny the influence that digital media has over our way of life. It changes the way we educate, entertain, publish and interact with one another on a daily basis. And, as a result of this influence, digital media pushes the business world out of the industrial age and into the information age. We’re no longer writing things with pens on paper, but instead communicating through digital devices. (Preston, n.d.)

The following are the ways on how to evaluate Digital Media in terms of:

Register

Digital Media uses more of informal register: casual and consultative, than formal register. However, this is just depending on the content and target audience. Social Media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and etc. uses casual register and consultative, at times, even intimate register. They just use formal register when their content is for academic and professional purpose.

Stylistics

This type of media mostly uses new style of writing. For instance, in Facebook or Twitter, they tend to use more punctuation marks: commas, periods, exclamation points and question marks, to emphasize their feelings and what they want to mean; mostly, they put more emotions in posting feeds. Moreover, styles of writing in digital media would depend on the content they want to portray.

Grammar

In digital media, usage of correct grammar is not that required because most digital media users are lay people especially in Social Media. However, this will just depend on the purpose of the author or might depend on how will a person relay his/her message to the public. Digital media might use correct or incorrect grammar, but its purpose will not change but could somehow affect the perspective of the reader.

Semiotics

This type of media uses a lot of details to capture the audiences’ attention. They use graphics that are pleasing to the eye and use icons that symbolizes something in the content. Visuals are usually used in digital media to better explain the statements -- if any -- with the help of images. Moreover, with the use of texts in digital media, certain things like example if a post is encoded in all capital letters, it might mean disappointment, anger or shouting.

Pragmatics

Language use here might not be literally implied; some might use words like “HAHAHA” but does not mean that someone is happy. In this type of media, you cannot tell when someone really means what he/she want to mean, especially in text messages, posts or chats. People might mean literal; some might mean something. Hence, you should be careful in understanding and be aware in pragmatic functions to be able to communicate well.

CONCLUSION

As time passed, people came up with different modes to provide news to the public; people use different types of media to find out news, learn new things, communicate, and entertain themselves. Based on the type of medium, their role may be different, but they all exist to communicate to the audience and affect their perceptions. With the advance in technology, people can choose the type of media they want to use, no matter the time or place. Moreover, they can hear the radio while driving to work, can watch their favorite show on their phones, and they can find out any information and news on their laptops or mobile devices. Media and language can really prosper by the use of internet and by the use of technology. We just have to use those properly and religiously for it to prosper and serve its purpose. Today, people do not have to travel oceans or wait for a pigeon to get information, they just have to look for the different forms and types of media to find what they are looking for.

REFERENCES

Bean-Millenger, B. (2018, August 08). Introduction of Print Media. Retrieved from BizFluent: https://bizfluent.com/facts-6852659-introduction-print-media.html

Britannica, T. E. (2016, April 14). Stylistics. Retrieved from Encyclopaedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/science/stylistics

Broadcast Media Definition. (2004). Retrieved from OpenPR Worldwide Public Relations: https://www.openpr.com/wiki/broadcast-media

Hendricks, B. (n.d.). What is Transit Media? - Definition, Advantages & Disadvantages. Retrieved from Study.com: https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-transit-media-definition-advantages-disadvantages.html

Hobbs, L. (2020, January 2). What is outdoor media? Retrieved from Effortless Outdoor Media: https://www.effortlessoutdoormedia.com/what-is-outdoor-media/

Luginbühl, M. (2015). What does Media Linguistics Study? Retrieved from Media Linguistics: On Mediality and Culturality: http://10plus1journal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/00_OPENER_Luginbuehl.pdf

Nordquist, R. (2019, July 16). Stylistics and Elements of Style in Literature. Retrieved from ThoughtCo.: https://www.thoughtco.com/stylistics-language-studies-1692000

Nordquist, R. (2020, January 27). English Grammar: Discussions, Definitions, and Examples. Retrieved from ThoughtCo.: https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-grammar-1690909

Pragmatics. (2006, November 28). Retrieved from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatics/

Preston, L. (n.d.). What is Digital Media? Retrieved from DigitaLogic: https://www.digitallogic.co/blog/what-is-digital-media/#:~:text=Digital%20media%20is%20any%20form,social%20media%2C%20and%20online%20advertising.

Taylor, D. (n.d.). What is Semiotics? - Definition & Examples. Retrieved from Study.com: https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-semiotics-definition-examples.html

Transit Media Advertising. (2020). Retrieved from Excellent Publicity: https://www.excellentpublicity.com/media/transit/default/transit-media-advertising

Weber, W. (n.d.). In brief: Media Linguistics with a Focus on Visual Communication. Retrieved from Zhaw: https://www.zhaw.ch/en/linguistics/research/media-linguistics/

What are the types of effective visual media? (2020). Retrieved from Purple Cow: https://purplecowagency.com/what-are-the-types-of-effective-visual-media/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CVisual%20Media%E2%80%9D%20is%20a%20colloquial,photography%2C%20painting%20and%20so%20on%20.&text=All%20the%20so%20called%20visual,(especially%20touch%20and%20hearin

What is Broadcast Media? (n.d.). Retrieved from Introduction to Accessible Design in Media: http://www.humber.ca/makingaccessiblemedia/modules/01/02.html

What is the meaning of Print Media? (n.d.). Retrieved from SoyangGroup: http://www.soyang.net/blog/what-is-the-meaning-of-print-media-2/

What is Visual Media and Information? (n.d.). Retrieved from Media and Information Literacy e-portfolio: https://ewikstar.wixsite.com/mil-eportfolio/visual-media-and-information

Wyss, V. (2019). Media Linguistics. Retrieved from Zhaw: https://www.zhaw.ch/en/linguistics/research/media-linguistics/

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Evaluation of a Theory : Behaviourism

Behaviourism originated as a psychological theory in the first half of the twentieth century. Founded by J.B. Watson and further developed by psychologists such as Ivan Pavlov and B.F. Skinner, behaviourism set out to analyze and explain human behaviour through stimulus-response interaction and association (Demirezen, 1988). This theory gained prominence in education due to its implications for learning. Through the lens of behaviourism, learning is viewed as an unconscious process of habit formation where links between stimuli and responses are strengthened through repetition and reinforcement (Piccardo & North, 2019). Behaviourism in education was strongly influenced by B.F. Skinner’s model of operant conditioning, which “considers all learning to be the establishment of habits as a result of reinforcement and reward” (Demirezen, 1988, p. 136).

Within second language education, behaviourism gained traction due to its ability to explain complex processes, such as language acquisition, through the process of habit formation. Behaviourists noted that children could, without instruction, learn the language of their social surroundings (Demirezen, 1988). Behaviourist language education thus employed a similar method of acquisition. With influence from structural linguistics, which viewed language as distinct structural units arranged pyramidically from least to most complex, behaviourist language education began with habit formation at the simplest structural unit of phonetics. Once a level of mastery was achieved, students moved up the pyramid, with the habits to be formed increasing in length and complexity (Johnson, 2008). This order produced a linear sequence of stimulus-response chains, increasing in length as complexity increased (Demirezen, 1988).

The idea of learning as habit-formation was also used to explain learner errors. As learners had already acquired a set of habits for their first language, developing a new set of habits for an additional language could produce conflicts; when difficulty resulted, it was explained as interference from the learner’s first language (Johnson, 2008). The appearance of errors was to be avoided, as they were viewed as incorrect habit formation. These incorrect habits were either explained by the learner’s failure to imitate the patterns presented by the teacher, or by the teacher’s inability to provide the learner with appropriate assistance and models (Johnson, 2008). To prevent the latter from occurring, the method of contrastive analysis emerged, which aimed to create teaching materials “based on a thorough scientific description of the learner’s first language, which, in turn, should be carefully compared to the language to be acquired” (Johnson, 2008, p.22). Through this controlled view of teaching, the role of the teacher was simply to be proficient in the structures to be acquired, and to stick to scripted presentation of information (Piccardo & North, 2019; Celce-Murcia, 2014). The learning environment in a behaviourist setting is therefore highly programmed, with the teacher presenting “all relevant learners with the subject matter in bite-sized chunks in a logical order for repetitive practice” (Piccardo & North, 2019, p.59).

Behaviourist influence birthed several language teaching methodologies, including Total Physical Response, the Silent Way, and notably the Audiolingual Method (Demirezen, 1988). This approach, which became dominant in North America from the late 1940s to the 1960s, prioritized the mimicry and memorization of spoken language (Celce-Murcia, 2014). Accurate pronunciation was stressed, with significant effort made to prevent errors in the pronunciation of new items. Following with behaviourist traditions, linguistic structures were sequenced according to complexity, and grammatical rules were not explained, but taught inductively using scripts and pre-planned exposure (Celce-Murcia, 2014). The Audiolingual Method faded along with behaviourism as cognitive approaches emerged in psychology, education, and linguistics. Now, the controlled repetition employed by behaviourists is normally reserved to pronunciation work and remedial work for learners with low language proficiency (Piccardo & North, 2019).

Behaviourism had some benefits as a theory of language learning. It is true that “in general we also learn by repetition and reinforcement” (Piccardo & North, 2019, p.60). It also provided insight into the laws of behaviour through controlled observation and analysis of stimulus-response links (Demirezen, 1988). However, behaviourism was criticized as overly simplistic. According to behaviourism, learning should be equal across individuals as long as the learning environment and materials are the same; however, this ignores the unobservable intervening variables that may affect the creation of stimulus-response links (Demirezen, 1988). Notably, the influence of social surroundings on learning is not addressed in behaviourism (Demirezen, 1988). It is also important to note that, even among children learning their first language, there is considerable variation among the rates of imitation and, therefore, the rates of learning; thus, it is unlikely that older learners acquiring an additional language will follow similar or the same rates of learning (Demirezen, 1988). As such, behaviourist notions are now regarded as useful only for very early stages of learning, rather than as an explantion for the entire learning process (Demirezen, 1988; Piccardo & North, 2019).

References

Celce-Murcia, M. (2014). An overview of language teaching methods and approaches. In M. Celce-Murcia, D. Brighton, & M.A. Snow, Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (4th ed., pp. 2-14). National Geographic Learning.

Demirezen, M. (1988). Behaviourist theory and language learning. Hacettepe Üniversitesi Egitim Fakültesi Dergisi, 3, 135-140.

Johnson, M. (2008). Behaviourism and second language learning. In A Philosophy of Second Language Acquisition (pp. 18-29). Yale University Press. https://doi-org.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/10.12987/9780300129410

Piccardo, E. & North, B. (2019). Towards an action-oriented approach: Theoretical underpinnings. In The Action-oriented Approach: A Dynamic Vision of Language Education (pp. 57-110). Multilingual Matters. https://doi-org.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/10.21832/9781788924351

[sciforce]

NLP vs. NLU: from Understanding a Language to Its Processing

As artificial intelligence progresses and technology becomes more sophisticated, we expect existing concepts to embrace this change — or change themselves. Similarly, in the domain of computer-aided processing of natural languages, shall the concept of natural language processing give way to natural language understanding? Or is the relation between the two concepts subtler and more complicated that merely linear progressing of a technology?

In this post we’ll scrutinize over the concepts of NLP and NLU and their niches in the AI-related technology.

Importantly, though sometimes used interchangeably, they are actually two different concepts that have some overlap. First of all, they both deal with the relationship between a natural language and artificial intelligence. They both attempt to make sense of unstructured data, like language, as opposed to structured data like statistics, actions, etc. However, NLP and NLU are opposites of a lot of other data mining techniques.

Source: https://nlp.stanford.edu/~wcmac/papers/20140716-UNLU.pdf

Natural Language Processing

NLP is an already well-established, decades-old field operating at the cross-section of computer science, artificial intelligence, an increasingly data mining. The ultimate of NLP is to read, decipher, understand, and make sense of the human languages by machines, taking certain tasks off the humans and allowing for a machine to handle them instead. Common real-world examples of such tasks are online chatbots, text summarizers, auto-generated keyword tabs, as well as tools analyzing the sentiment of a given text.

What NLP does

NLP in its broadest sense can refer to a wide range of tools, such as speech recognition, natural language recognition, and natural language generation. Yet, the most common tasks of NLP are historically:

tokenization;

parsing;

information extraction;

similarity;

speech recognition

natural language and speech generations and many others.

It real life, NLP is used for text summarization, sentiment analysis, topic extraction, named entity recognition, parts-of-speech tagging, relationship extraction, stemming, text mining, machine translation, and automated question answering, ontology population, language modeling and all language-related tasks we can think of.

NLP Techniques

The two pillars of NLP are syntactic analysis and semantic analysis.

In sum: NLP relies on machine learning to derive meaning from human languages by analysis of the text semantics and syntax.

Natural Language Understanding

While NLP can be traced back to the 1950s, when computer programmers began experimenting with simple language input, NLU began developing in the 1960s out of a desire to get computers to understand more complex language input. Considered a subtopic of NLP, natural language is narrower in purpose, focusing primarily on machine reading comprehension: getting the computer to comprehend what a text really means.

What NLU actually does

Similarly to NLP, NLU uses algorithms to reduce human speech into a structured ontology. Then AI algorithms detect such things as intent, timing, locations and sentiments. However, when we look at the NLU tasks, we’ll be surprised how much NLP is built on this concept:

NLU Tasks

Natural language understanding is the first step in many processes, such as categorizing text, gathering news, archiving individual pieces of text, and, on a larger scale, analyzing content. Real-world examples of NLU range from small tasks like issuing short commands based on comprehending text to some small degree, like rerouting an email to the right person based on a basic syntax and decently-sized lexicon. Much more complex endeavors might be fully comprehending news articles or shades of meaning within poetry or novels.

In sum: it’s best to view NLU as a first step towards achieving NLP: before a machine can process a language, it must first be understood.

How NLP and NLU correlate

As can be seen by its tasks, NLU is the integral part of natural language processing, the part that is responsible for human-like understanding of the meaning rendered by a certain text. One of the biggest differences from NLP is that NLU goes beyond understanding words as it tries to interpret meaning dealing with common human errors like mispronunciations or transposed letters or words.

The hypothesis that has been driving NLP is the one set by Noam Chomsky in Syntactic Structures, 1957: “The fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis of a language L is to separate the grammatical sequences which are the sentences of L from the ungrammatical sequences which are not sentences of L and to study the structure of the grammatical sequences.”

Syntactic analysis is indeed used in multiple tasks to assess how the language aligns with the grammatical rules by applying grammatical rules to a group of words and deriving meaning from them in a number of techniques:

Lemmatization: reducing the inflected forms of a word into a single form for easy analysis.

Stemming: cutting the inflected words to their root form.

Morphological segmentation: dividing words into morphemes.

Word segmentation: dividing a continuous text into distinct units.

Parsing: grammatical analysis of a sentence.

Part-of-speech tagging: identifying the part of speech for every word.

Sentence breaking: placing sentence boundaries on a continuous text.

Syntactic analysis techniques

However, the grammatical correctness or incorrectness does not always correlate with the validity of a phrase. Think of the classical example of a meaningless yet grammatical sentence “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”. Even more, in the real life, meaningful sentences often contain minor errors and can be classified as ungrammatical. Human interaction allows for errors in the produced text and speech compensating them by excellent pattern recognition and drawing additional information from the context. This shows the lopsidedness of the syntax-focused analysis and the need for a closer focus on multilevel semantics.

Semantic analysis, the core of NLU, involves applying computer algorithms to understand the meaning and interpretation of words and is not yet fully resolved.

Here are some techniques in semantic analysis, to mention a few:

Named entity recognition (NER): determining the parts of a text that can be identified and categorized into preset groups.

Word sense disambiguation: giving meaning to a word based on the context.

Natural language generation: using databases to derive semantic intentions and convert them into human language.

However, to fully understand the natural language, machines need to take into account not only the literal meaning semantic provides, but the intended message, or understanding of what the text is trying to achieve. This level is called pragmatic analysis which is only beginning to be introduced into the NLU/NLP techniques. At present, we can see it to a certain extent in the sentiment analysis: assessment of the negative/positive/neutral feelings contained in the text.

Future of NLP

Pursuing the goal to create a chatbot that would be able to interact with human in a human-like manner — and finally to pass the Turing’s test, businesses and academia are investing more in NLP and NLU techniques. The product they have in mind aims to be effortless, unsupervised, and able to interact directly with people in an appropriate and successful manner.

To achieve this, the research is carried out on three levels:

Syntax — understanding the grammar of the text

Semantics — understanding the literal meaning of the text

Pragmatics — understanding what the text is trying to achieve

Unfortunately, understanding and processing natural language isn’t as simple as providing a big enough set of vocabulary and training your machine on it. To be successful, NLP must blend techniques from a range of fields: language, linguistics, cognitive science, data science, computer science, and more. Only by combination of all possible perspectives we can crack the mystery of the human language.

[ebenvt]

Builders of the Stone Ruins – From Antiquity to the Pô By Eben van Tonder 4 August 2019

I was hiking in Gauteng, looking for its soul.  Tribes emerged out of the bush.  It seems like every site I visit, I find circular or semi-circular rock ruins, validating that my visions are about real historical people.  Most of these ruins predate the Mfecane,  the isiZulu word for “scattering” that took place in the decades preceding the 1830’s when white settlers started arriving in the region.  The earliest mention of the Magaliesberg and Witwatersberg mountain ranges was when Sir John Borrow marked it on his 1802 map of the region with the remark “Gold Bearing.”  I try and understand their culture in order to reproduce their food!  Their culinary heritage is hands down, just as rich as the German, Italian, Spanish and English traditions.  Understanding their best dished begins by an understanding of where they came from, their history, building styles and where they settled.  As always, the goal is to produce the most authentic and exquisite dishes.  True to the land that people who call it home!

Ancient Migration:  300 AD to 900AD

At the north of the Congo basin, local inhabitants changed from hunter-gatherers to animal husbandry, metalworking, crop farming and making pottery. Linguistic analysis and studying pottery patterns shows that this area is the site where the Bantu-language speakers of Southern Africa hail from.  (Carruthers, 2014)  This point dovetails beautifully into two major areas of interest for me being the domestication of cattle, sheep, and pigs in Africa and secondly, the development of “salt-related technology”, important in food preparation and in the metalworking industry.   A closely related development is pottery which completely changed the way that food dished were prepared and stored.  The look at these tribes, their movement into southern Africa and their development of this new frontier offer insight into a unique culture and in particular, for our purpose, the development of food dishes.

From around 200 until 900 AD the people from north of the Congo basin started migrating south.  Two migration streams have been suggested who entered the Magaliesberg around 1200 years ago.  The one group was from the Kwale branch from East Africa and the other was the Kalundo from West Africa.  The first group arrived in the Magaliesgurg region around 300 AD.  They established an extensive settlement at what is now Broederstroom near Hartbeespoort Dam.  (Carruthers, 2014)

It would be completely incorrect to think of these people as “primitive”.  They established very sophisticated societies which clearly indicate a very sophisticated pallet and approach to food.  The evidence clearly points to that.

 They had in their hands all the foods that we have today to create our most exquisite dishes.  The reasoning is as follows.  If you have the same variables or ingredients, then the likelihood is there that they would eventually end up with results (dishes) that are similar to what we have today.   We have had meat, grains, milk, herbs, roots, edible leaves, fruits, and vegetables.   So did they.

They planted crops on land best suited for it showing that they had great insight into their food production arts.

They stored food for future use to supplement time of want from times of plenty.  They knew that food could be traded which again necessitates or at least would lead to technology of preservation of food.  They dub pits that they lined with a mixture of dung and mud to store grain in.  Methane gas from the cattle dung killed insects that may have spoiled the grain.  The created thick-floored storage bins which they elevated on stones to keep them dry.

They worked metals and located in close proximity to the different ores.  They identified with the land and were willing to defend it against invaders if necessary.  The fact that they worked metals shows us that they had an understanding of the chemical properties of the minerals in their environment, such as sodium bicarbonate to be used as a flux in the metal smelting process to manipulate the melting point.  The Broederstroom sites may have been the center of iron production in the region.  The iron was possibly traded and the forging of usable implements was probably done at other locations.

They identified with the concept of capital wealth and developed hierarchical structures with leaders endowed with authority and power.  Exquisite dishes was without a doubt part of the courts of people in authority in these societies, as was the case around the world.

(Points by Carruthers, 2014 and conclusions related to salt and food, my own)

More Recent Migration:  1300 AD to 1820 AD

From 1300 AD, migrants arrived in the Magaliesburg area and established settlements on the southern slopes.  They came from regions north of Botswana and Angola.  For many centuries they did not use stone as building material for houses or cattle enclosures.  The first stone walls in the region were built around the 1600s.

Enhancements were in all likelihood done to existing structures with stone.  It is interesting that the iron age communities of the region continued to co-exist with Late Stone Age people as is shown by sites near Olifantshoek.  Here it is seen how these two cultures existed in close proximity for around 500 years.

One of the earliest groups who migrated from the regions of Zambia and Botswana is the Hurutshe.  Possibly during the late 17th century, they subdivided and one of the offshoots were the Kwena.  Many of the Bakwena moved eastwards under Kgosi Modimosana across the Kgatleng (Elands) River.  They settled at Molokwnane on the Ngwaritse (Koster) River on the Western edge of the Magaliesberg region.  They flourished until they too split into smaller groups.    (Carruthers, 2014)

The story is that one of Modimosana’s sons, Mogopa, broke away with some of his father’s followers and established a chieftainship on the Oori (Crocodile) River near present-day Madibeng.  This was followed by further splits.  The Kwena be Maake and the Kwena Modimosana ba Mmatau were established.  The latter remained at Molokwane.  The sprawling stone ruins of the area is a must-visit!  Another important Kwena site is located on the farm Olifantspoort. near Olifantsnek Dam.  (Carruthers, 2014)

In terms of building technology, from about 1650, the Twana in the Magaliesburg started to build dry-stone walled enclosures or huts.  By the 1800s, these structures were elaborate.  They often built newer buildings on top of the foundations of older ones.  The Kwena Modimosana ba Mmatau built settlements along the lower slopes of the southern Magaliesburg. from Magatasnek to near the present village of Maanhaarrand.  The chief at this time was Kgosi Kgaswane.  He was one of the most respected chiefs of the region.  The Griqua and Korana traders who traveled to this region called the mountain range “Cashan”, a corruption of Kgaswane’s name.  The name persisted until around the 1840s.  (Carruthers, 2014)  In the 1690s, a drought caused the BaKwena to the south to Lesotho. This group became known as the Sotho in an area today known as Phokeng, about 10km north of Rustenburg.  (SAHistory)

Another tribe who settled in the region was the Fokeng who settled in the north, close to the present-day Rustenburg.  Some say that they preceded the Hurutshe while others believe there is evidence making them one of its splinter groups.  Other subgroups settled in the area such as the Phiring, Tlokwa, Taung, and Kgatla.  These or some of them may be offshoots from the Kwena and the Fokeng.  During this time, under the leadership of chief Musi, a number of Nguni people moved into the region.  They came from the eastern coastal lowlands and occupied the present-day Mpumalanga and regions east of the Magaliesburg.  These people were later known as the “northern” Ndebele.  They are distinct from the Ndebele invaders under Mzilikazi in 1817.  (Carruthers, 2014)

One of the subgroups of these Ndebele was the Pô.  They migrated further westwards into Twana territory than any other Ndebele group.  They settled in the Wonderboom area and from there moved further west to Tlhogokgolo Mountain (Wohluterskop).  They were surrounded by the Twana people of the Fokeng and Kwena and gradually took on their culture and language.  (Carruthers, 2014)  It is the iconic leader of the Pô, Chief Mogale, gave his name to the Magaliesberg.

It is the quest for the origins and fingerprints of the Pô people who was my first glimpse of the heart of the region and I went looking for it.  I discovered a mountain top settlement on the farm, Eastwick, comprising of 4 or 5 houses and a large cattle byre, stretching almost 100m, no more than 10km away from Wolhuterskop and the valley where the Pô settled.  I know that they were settled in the Broederstroom valley years later and of course, the possibility is there that more of the Pô were settled there due to the fact that they were already in the area. That would make the hilltop settlement on Eastwick probably a Pô settlement.  I hiked the likely route up Piesangkloof.

Here is a video I did of the site:

Archeology

Analyzing the ruins in the area, scientists conclude that originally there were small and dispersed homesteads.  People had cattle and farmed the land.  It was subsistence living as opposed to large-scale communal living.  Over time, these dispersed homesteads were morphed into aggregated communities.

Starting in the early 1800s, there is a move towards the establishment of towns with a social hierarchy.  These communities were complex and interrelated.  Unfortunately, they were wiped out by the Mfakane.

Typically there was a capital with secondary and tertiary settlements.  This is seen in many of the ruins where there is a megacity surrounded by smaller settlements. This is the pattern found at the Suikerbosrand and the Kungwini 4 x 4 treck at Bronkhorstspruit.

The community at Bronhortspruit was an iron age community.  Johan Klopper found iron arrowheads buried at the site.  There is no reason to think that this was not smelted and forged at the site.

The fact that the larger kraals are seen as cattle kraals is something that is disputed in academia.  Robert Thornton from Wits University concludes that such stone-walled structures were the sites of ancient rituals.  “There’s no conceivable way they could have been for cattle. Ask m farmer. He’ll laugh at you. They have no doors, and the stones are not high enough [to keep them enclosed],” according to Thornton.

He points to a site he is working on, located north of Machadodorp in Mpumalanga.  “They’re not random. They’re along mineral lines.”  “I think some were used as metalworking ritual sites … Southern African sangomas are the descendants of earlier guilds of technical specialists.”

The people from these communities produced iron, glass and gold objects using high-temperature technology, according to Thornton.  According to him, it was when European products (with their more advanced technology) began flooding into Africa, it destroyed the local trade.  This contributed to the Mfecane as peoples livelihoods were destroyed.

A paper was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2012 by Karim Sadr of Wits and Xavier Rodier of the Université de Tours in France where the “conventional” view was presented that breaks the stone-walled ruins down into three groups:

 The first group is early Sesotho-speaking immigrants.  The structures set up by them have an outer perimeter wall, with smaller circles inside.

The second group is Setswana speakers who constructed a scalloped perimeter wall, which wasn’t always enclosed but contained clusters of smaller circles.

The third group descended from the first group of Sesotho speakers.  These came into contact with the Tswana. These kraals are characterised of being a hodgepodge of the first two styles: “a confusion of inner enclosures within a continuous perimeter wall”, which was sometimes straight, sometimes scalloped.

Sadr and Rodier make another important “evolutionary” note related to the formation of hilltop settlements such as the site at Suikerbosramd.  They wrote, “Around Kaditshwene, Boeyens (2003: 69) has observed that the dispersed sites from AD 1675 – 1750 had no scallops in their outer walls, while aggregation was a feature of settlement patterns from AD 1750 -1790, followed by a move to defensible hill-top mega-sites which took place in AD 1790 – 1823.”  (Sadr and Rodier;  2011)

Food for Thought

The technology related to iron and building style has traditionally been the area of focus when talking about these late stone age and early iron age people.  The use of plants for medicine is dealt with in great detail, but what did their everyday food look like in terms of meat.  How did they cook their meat and how did they prepare it for future use?

Ashes to Ashes

The people who settled in the Magaliesburg knew salt well and was able to extract it from trees and bush through its ash.  Thys Koen is the manager of the Eastwick Stud Farm and tells me that the local people of the region use sickle bush as their source of ash or hard-wood.  He confirms the practice of salting meat with this ash before it is hung out to dry.  After three of four weeks hanging outside in the wind and sun, it turns black like biltong.  He also confirms the practice to cook the dried meat in water before it is consumed.

The other way that prepared it was to knock the ash off the meat and to braai (BBQ) it.  They would sometimes pulverize the meat after drying, before cooking.  In a world where energy sources are scarce, it is a natural way of reducing the amount of fuel needed in the form of cow dung or dead trees to soften the meat. It struck me that this exact characteristic of tenderizing meat is at the heart of much of our cooking technology.  The reality is that meat, especially game, is tough and may even be one of the reasons why we started cooking and roasting our meat.  We have seen before that fermentation (leaving the carcass to ferment and “soften”) was in all likelihood the oldest form of meat storage and preparing it consumption.  (How did Ancient Humans Preserve Food?)

Thys refers me to a kind of a cake that formed in the ash that woman would dig up and apply it to their skins for moisturizing.  His memories go back to him as a child, growing up in the Benoni area on the East Rand.  In all likelihood, a mixture of ash and fat.  Thys commits to interrogate Bedwell, someone who still works for him and who grew up with him.  It was this mixture of ash and fat that was used as toothpaste.  For the full discussion with Thys, see:

There is ample evidence from around the world about the preparation of sausage meat.  The intestines naturally lent itself to be stuffed with components of meat.

Sausages from the Stone Age

Nothing in an animal was discarded or lost.  The effort in securing the food source was too valuable.  A document from the archives of the University of Pretoria describes some of the slaughtering techniques of people who lived contemporaneously with the late stone age and early iron age people in the Magaliesburg region, the San Bushman.

“Once the animal has been found (after it was wounded) it is skinned quickly and the head and legs are removed. The body is then dissected into loads, which can be carried by the men. The horns are disposed of, except when needed to make a new axe handle or cultural object. Almost nothing is left behind, except the stomach, intestines and their contents which are sour and bitter in taste, they are however a valuable source of water in the dry months.”

“The hide is tanned, sectioned and used for food, clothing and skin carry-bags. The blood is poured into the stomach sack and hardened, then mixed with fat found around the intestines and put into the duodenum and small intestines to make sausage. The liver, heart, and kidneys spoil easily so they are cooked and eaten immediately. Ribs are also eaten the night of the hunt.  Women never eat the heart, as it is believed this will bring bad luck to the men’s hunt and for this reason it is never brought back to camp. If the animal brought down is too big, the bones are discarded and the meat is cut into strips and dried, thus reducing the weight of the load and preventing spoilage. Animal flesh is never eaten raw, but cooked in melon water, with a little added fat for flavour.” (Repository, UP, Ac.)

The use of intestines to hold blood and fat is particularly interesting.  There are good records from the Khoe that woman would hang such intestines that have been stuffed with fat, blood and pieces of meat around their legs.  Sweat from their bodies that came into contact with the meat would have cured it as a source of salt and nitrates.  The fact that it was around the body would have made it easy to deal with flys and other scavengers.  The practice was elegant and would have had the added advantage for the woman to have moisturized the skin. There are reports of sausages from the Germanic tribes and it is easy to see how the practice, in one form or the other, was universal.

The Twana-speaking farmers/ herdsman/ traders/ metalworkers of the Magaliesburg lived in relative tranquility until the early 1800’s when events tore the society apart.  The winds of war swept through the region and transformed its nature.  This, despite the fact that how food was prepared and what was on the everyday menu for ordinary people and royalty probably did not change much, irrespective of who was in charge, as far as the indigenous (as in non-European) people were concerned.

Conclusion

Understanding the ancient cultures of this region leads us into an appreciation of their culture and in particular, their food.  We live in a unique land where cross currents and flavours from around the world converge to give South Africa a unique food heritage.  Understanding it and reproducing these traditions for future generations is the adventure of a lifetime!  It is, in particular, the African cuisine that takes front and center stage in these considerations.

Photos from my hike up Piesankloof to the mountain top settlement on Eastwick.

References

Layout and structure based on an article by Wild, Sarah.  2013. Walking in the ruins of a lost world in Melville Koppies.  5 Nov 2013. Mail & Guardian.  https://mg.co.za/article/2013-11-14-walking-in-the-ruins-of-a-lost-world.  

Carruthers, V.  2014.  The Magaliesberg.  Protea Book House, Pretoria.

Sadr, K,  Rodier, X..  2011. Google Earth, GIS and stone-walled structures in southern Gauteng, South Africa.  Journal of Archaeological Science.  Journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jas

Discussion with Thys.  https://photos.app.goo.gl/3DuKrLEQMW3fafw59

The Magaliesberg or ‘Cashan Mountains’, Repository, UP, Ac.  The Magaliesberg (UP.ac)

  Builders of the Stone Ruins – From Antiquity to the Pô Builders of the Stone Ruins - From Antiquity to the Pô By Eben van Tonder 4 August 2019…

[theurbaneducator]

by S.M.A.R.T.L.I.E.

Meet Michelle…

Michelle is one of many upper elementary and secondary students across America who is scheduled to take a grade-level Computer adaptive test on the comprehension, analysis, and summary of complex grade-appropriate text across subject content areas.  In April, Michelle and many other upper elementary students will be expected to answer a question such as….

Question 1:     3,023.8 = 3×1000 + ×10 + 3×1 + 8×(1/10)

Question 8:     15.693 – 6.891 = 

7.672 8.802 8.492 9.002

Domain: Number and Operations in Base Ten    Item: MC 1(10,000) + 2(1,000) + 4(100) + 3(10) + 2(1) + 5(1/10) + 3(1/100). Which number below is one-tenth of the expanded form above? A 12422.53 B 1243.253 C 12432.53 D 12432.43 Key: B Aligned CCLS: 5.NBT.3a and 5.NBT.2 Commentary: This question aligns with CCLS 5.NBT.3a and 5.NBT.2 because it requires students to write decimals in equivalent forms and apply understanding of place value. Rationale: Option B is correct. 1(10,000) + 2(1,000) + 4(100) + 3(10) + 2(1) + 5(1/10) + 3(1/100) in standard form is written as 12432.53. One-tenth of this value moves the decimal point one position to the left to yield 1243.253. Option A indicates an incorrect change in the tens place (decreasing the digit in the tens place by one) rather than finding one-tenth of the number. Option C is the correct form of the original number in standard form, but does not include the movement of the decimal to represent one-tenth of the given number. Option D involves no movement of the decimal and incorrectly changes the digit in the tenths place rather than taking one-tenth of the number.

Domain: Number and Operations—Fractions Item: CR Half of a school auditorium is needed to seat 3 equal-sized fifth-grade classes. Part A: Make a visual fraction model to represent the whole auditorium when each class is seated in separate sections. Part B: Write an expression to determine what fractional part of the auditorium one fifth grade class will need. Part C: What fraction of the auditorium will one of the fifth-grade classes need? Key: Part A: Auditorium Auditorium or equivalent model. Part B:  1/2 ÷ 3 or 1/2 x 1/3 Part C: 1/6 Aligned CCLS: 5.NF.7c Commentary: This question is aligned to CCLS 5.NF.7c and assesses a student’s ability to solve a real-world problem involving the interpretation of division of a unit fraction by a non-zero whole number and computation of the quotient.

However, as one can observe from the video, up until the intervention, Michelle was unable to compute basic addition and subtraction math facts.  Yet, each year she fails to succeed on a test that is far above her skill and confidence level.  As educators, it’s our job to S.M.A.R.T.L.I.E. engineer a personalized learning program for Michelle and each of the other 20+ students within the self-contained classroom.

 No child left behind, common core, and high stakes standardized test such as SBAC, OAKS, & PARCC have done that, left many children in the educational gutter.  An integral part of an educator’s a job is to provide universal access that provides success for all students.   High Stakes Testing such as OAKS, PARCC, & SBAC steals back academic creativity from the teacher and the student because it depletes the good intentions of many educators who succumb to the enormous amounts of performance pressure.  High Stakes Test also assumes that students are reading, writing, and conceptualizing math at their grade level, not multiple grade levels behind such as the student, Michelle in the video below.  Although the SBAC is a CAT (Computer Adapted Test) that adjusts the difficulty of questions throughout the assessment based on the student’s response, it doesn’t accommodate the anxiety students such as Michelle may feel when taking such assessments that may not meet her learning style or intelligence.   As a result of the buy-in to High Stakes Testing and College Racketeering, many students are falling through enormous, gaping, and sinkholes located in a plethora of schools across the nation.  

     Not only are educators of students at this level expected to teach grade-level standards to mastery, they are also expected to increase their achievement levels to their current grade level so that they can successfully read/comprehend complex text, as well as apply and communicate knowledge gained. If these expectations are not met, many students will not perform proficiently on the state’s high stakes standardized test taken within eight months after the start of school.

    A Multi-Tiered System of Support

In classrooms across the country, not only are educators expected to close the academic achievement gap of students such as Michelle, they are required to close the achievement gaps of students at multiple levels, as well as maintain or increase the achievement levels of those groups performing at or above their current grade level. In Educationese, this is called Differentiation, an analytical nightmare, but when done accurately, a masterpiece.  Molding/Sculpting an intelligent, aware, self-confident and autodidactic being out of a poorly esteemed, unknowledgeable, and co-dependent learner is the result of superb Educational Engineering and Artistry.

That sort of artistic and scientific feat requires a teacher that is… S.M.A.R.T.L.I.E._Educated 

One who utitlizes….

Strategic

Manageable

Academic

Resources for

Teaching and

Learning

In

Education

  STRATEGIC 

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S – Specific, systematic, scalable, & simple

T – Thoughtful, targeted, thorough, team oriented

R – Reasonable (in the circumstances), responsive (to the environment), realistic

A – Appropriate, anticipatory, active, actionable, & achievable

T – Timely(why this?, why now?), task-oriented (mission minded not nebulous), possibly trending

E – Engaging, Explicit, Executable, Emotional, Explorative, and Explicable (understanding of process & interrelationship)

G – Goal-directed and Goal oriented (connecting means to an end)

I – Intriguing while yielding valuable results & yielding flexibility (Not stuck in same old patterns)

C– Culturally relevant and responsive

  MANAGEABLE 

Accomplished without great difficulty

  ACADEMIC  

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Subject Matter Content Related

Reading, Writing, Language, Speaking, Listening, Math, Science, Social Studies, Health, Physical Education (Visual and Performing).

Elementary=Multiple Subject

Secondary =Single Subject

  Resources 

Beyond the textbook, worksheet, and teacher’s voice

Technology (mobile devices, apps, websites, virtual reality, games, etc,.)

Instructional (Curriculum, Videos, Vlogs, Songs, Experiments, Guest Speakers, Field Trips, etc.)

Assessment (Student Response Systems, Informal, Summative, kahoot, etc.)

Support Staff (Administrators, PSA Counselor, Nurse, School Psychologist, Resource Specialist, etc.)

Family (Parents or Guardian)

Communication (Class Dojo, Google Classroom, Learning Management Systems, etc.)

For

  Teaching

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An extremely complex social practice activity of helping others acquire knowledge, (that takes place in a specific context time, place, culture, socio-political-economic situation, etc.[3]  

A role that may vary among cultures.

A role influenced by history and tradition, social views about the purpose of education, accepted theories about learning etc.[4]

Provision of instruction in multiple areas such as: literacy, numeracy, communication, & life skills

The act of preparing lessons according to agreed/mandated curricula, presenting lessons, and assessing student progress.

The act of performing professional duties that may extend beyond formal teaching (Social skills, discipline, field trips, study hall, P.E. instructor, etc.)

And

Learning

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Knowledge of skill acquired by instruction or study

The process of acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences.

The process of modifying existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences.

Acquired in multiple styles (Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, & Tactile)

Visual (spatial): You prefer using pictures, images, and spatial understanding.

Aural (auditory-musical): You prefer using sound and music.

Verbal (linguistic): You prefer using words, both in speech and writing.

Physical (kinesthetic): You prefer using your body, hands and sense of touch.

Logical (mathematical): You prefer using logic, reasoning and systems.

Social (interpersonal): You prefer to learn in groups or with other people.

Solitary (intrapersonal): You prefer to work alone and use self-study.

Used across multiple intelligences

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  Musical (sound smart)

Logical-mathematical (number/reasoning smart)

Existential (life smart)

Interpersonal (people smart)

Bodily-kinesthetic (body smart)

Linguistic (word smart)

Intra-personal (self smart)

Spatial (picture smart)

  In

Within the realm of …

  Education

The process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits.

Frequently takes place under the guidance of educators,

Shifting to personalized learning where learners may also educate themselves.

Takes place in formal or informal settings

Any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts may be considered educational.

Uses methodology of teaching, called pedagogy.

Commonly divided formally into such stages as preschool or kindergarten, primary(elementary) school, secondary(middle/high) school and then college, university, or apprenticeship/internship.

It is the goal of this blog to…

Plan!

Aim!

Persevere!

Succeed!

plug the concrete sinkholes in schools that allow a student such as Michelle to fall through.

supply educators with strategies to cultivate themselves and their students into S.M.A.R.T.L.I.E._Educated and empowered individuals. 

  Please subscribe, like, share, dialogue, and act!

http://www.smartlie.wordpress.com http://www.Pinterest.com/smartlie_educated http://www.Instagram.com/smartlie_educated http://www.Facebook.com/SmartlieEducated @educatesmartlie

SMALL VICTORIES! by S.M.A.R.T.L.I.E. Meet Michelle... Michelle is one of many upper elementary and secondary students across America who is scheduled to take a grade-level Computer adaptive test on the comprehension, analysis, and summary of complex grade-appropriate text across subject content areas. 

[psychstuffing-blog]

Humanmetrics Jung Typology Test

Your Type

INTP

Introvert(28%) iNtuitive(3%) Thinking(3%) Perceiving(19%)

You have moderate preference of Introversion over Extraversion (28%)

You have marginal or no preference of Intuition over Sensing (3%)

You have marginal or no preference of Thinking over Feeling (3%)

You have slight preference of Perceiving over Judging (19%)

INTP

Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving

INTPs are pensive, analytical folks. They may venture so deeply into thought as to seem detached, and often actually are oblivious to the world around them.

Precise about their descriptions, INTPs will often correct others (or be sorely tempted to) if the shade of meaning is a bit off. While annoying to the less concise, this fine discrimination ability gives INTPs so inclined a natural advantage as, for example, grammarians and linguists.

INTPs are relatively easy-going and amenable to almost anything until their principles are violated, about which they may become outspoken and inflexible. They prefer to return, however, to a reserved albeit benign ambiance, not wishing to make spectacles of themselves.

A major concern for INTPs is the haunting sense of impending failure. They spend considerable time second-guessing themselves. The open-endedness (from Perceiving) conjoined with the need for competence (NT) is expressed in a sense that one's conclusion may well be met by an equally plausible alternative solution, and that, after all, one may very well have overlooked some critical bit of data. An INTP arguing a point may very well be trying to convince himself as much as his opposition. In this way INTPs are markedly different from INTJs, who are much more confident in their competence and willing to act on their convictions.

Mathematics is a system where many INTPs love to play, similarly languages, computer systems--potentially any complex system. INTPs thrive on systems. Understanding, exploring, mastering, and manipulating systems can overtake the INTP's conscious thought. This fascination for logical wholes and their inner workings is often expressed in a detachment from the environment, a concentration where time is forgotten and extraneous stimuli are held at bay. Accomplishing a task or goal with this knowledge is secondary.

INTPs and Logic -- One of the tipoffs that a person is an INTP is his or her obsession with logical correctness. Errors are not often due to poor logic -- apparent faux pas in reasoning are usually a result of overlooking details or of incorrect context.

Games NTs seem to especially enjoy include Risk, Bridge, Stratego, Chess, Go, and word games of all sorts. (I have an ENTP friend that loves Boggle and its variations. We've been known to sit in public places and pick a word off a menu or mayonnaise jar to see who can make the most words from its letters on a napkin in two minutes.) The INTP mailing list has enjoyed a round of Metaphore, virtual volleyball, and a few 'finish the series' brain teasers.

INTPs in the main are not clannish. The INTP mailing list, with a readership now in triple figures, was in its incipience fraught with all the difficulties of the Panama canal: we had trouble deciding:

whether or not there should be such a group,

exactly what such a group should be called,

and which of us would have to take the responsibility for organization and maintenance of the aforesaid group/club/whatever.

(INTP stands for Introvert, iNtuitive, Thinking, Perceiving and represents individual's preferences in four dimensions characterising personality type, according to Jung's and Briggs Myers' theories of personality type.)

Functional Analysis Of The INTP

Based on Jung’s framework of cognitive functions

Introverted Thinking

Introverted Thinking strives to extract the essence of the Idea from various externals that express it. In the extreme, this conceptual essence wants no form or substance to verify its reality. Knowing the Truth is enough for INTPs; the knowledge that this truth can (or could) be demonstrated is sufficient to satisfy the knower. "Cogito, ergo sum" expresses this prime directive quite succinctly.

In seasons of low energy level, or moments of single-minded concentration, the INTP is aloof and detached in a way that might even offend more relational or extraverted individuals.

Extraverted iNtuition

Intuition softens and socializes Thinking, fleshing out the brittle bones of truths formed in the dominant inner world. That which is is not negotiable; yet actual application diffuses knowledge to the extent that knowledge needs qualification and context to be of any consequence in this foreign world of substance.

If Thinking can desist, the INTP is free to brainstorm, calling up the perceptions of the unconscious (i.e., intuition) which are mirrored in patterns in the realm of matter, time and space. These perceptions, in the form of theories or hunches, must ultimately defer to the inner principles, or at least they must not negate them.

Intuition unchained gives birth to play. INTPs enjoy games, formal or impromptu, which coax analogies, patterns and theories from the unseen into spontaneous expression in a way that defies their own comprehension.

Introverted Sensing

Sensing is of a subjective, inner nature similar to that of the SJs. It supplies awareness of the forms of senses rather than the raw, analogic stimuli. Facts and figures seek to be cleaned up for comparison with an ever growing range of previously experienced input. Sensing assists intuition in sorting out and arranging information into the building blocks for Thinking's elaborate systems.

The internalizing nature of the INTP's Sensing function leaves a relative absence of environmental awareness (i.e., Extraverted Sensing), except when the environment is the current focus. Consciousness of such conditions is at best a sometime thing.

Extraverted Feeling

Feeling tends to be all or none. When present, the INTP's concern for others is intense, albeit naive. In a crisis, this feeling judgement is often silenced by the emergence of Thinking, who rushes in to avert chaos and destruction. In the absence of a clear principle, however, INTPs have been known to defer judgement and to allow decisions about interpersonal matters to be left hanging lest someone be offended or somehow injured. INTPs are at risk of being swept away by the shadow in the form of their own strong emotional impulses.

INTP Career Choices

Introvert(28%) iNtuitive(3%) Thinking(3%) Perceiving(19%)

Generally, INTPs build successful careers in areas requiring quite intensive intellectual efforts and calling for creative approach. INTPs are often found in research, development and analytical departments. INTPs often make a very successful career in academia thanks to their strong and versatile way of thinking and originality.

Jung Career Indicator

determines occupations and areas in which people of your type find themselves most fulfilled and content, are most successful, and likely are most represented in. The following table factors in the expressivenes of each of the four characteristics of personality type. It lists the most suitable areas of occupation, from personality type standpoint, along with some examples of educational institutions, where you can receive a relevant degree or training. The most preferable areas appear first. Click occupation names and school logos to request program information.

Technical/Science Careers

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Engineering

Mechanics and automotive repair

Social Service Careers

Law

Librarian

INTP Learning Style

How INTPs acquire, memorize and recollect information

An INTP’s interest in learning a subject is driven by the search for an answer to the question, “How is this structured?” The more in-depth and multi-faceted the answer they receive during the learning process, the greater their interest in the topic and the greater their desire to figure it out.

Their desire to study something is driven both by the search for solutions to fundamental issues, as well as by the desire to get to the bottom of how complex systems work.

INTPs easily comprehend learning material when it is presented in a conceptual form and new information flows logically from that given before. They constantly look for a theoretical basis to which new information can be linked.

Their understanding of new material is deep and analytical. INTPs are capable of independently studying expansive and complex material. In addition to learning well systematically (e.g., an organized degree or certification program), they are also capable of learning from sources not unified by a single formal learning process (e.g., individual courses or readings).

INTPs can accurately reproduce received information, especially if it is mentally organized in a conceptual form. They essentially reproduce information based on its theoretical foundation. Active learning methods such as debates, presentations, and educational games do not significantly improve their learning.

INTPs are capable of actively applying material they have learned well and understood to their work, and they can further develop it in a direction that interests them. Working with this material engages them and fully absorbs their attention.

INTPs have a significant degree of tolerance to high levels of learning related stress. They do not always balance their efforts in learning new material but are capable of learning it through short periods of intensive effort.

An INTP’s learning is improved when:

Learning is systematic and intensive

They work independently with the study material < Material is delivered at a moderate pace (INTPs can get distracted, trying to come up with a theoretical connection between pieces of information)

The same material is presented from different points of view (improves retention)

The subject significantly expands and deepens their knowledge and understanding of the topic and is presented on a conceptual basis

The material is complex (increases drive)

An INTP’s learning is hindered when:

Material is trivial (sharply reduces interest)

The knowledge gained does not significantly broaden and deepen their understanding in the given field

They participate in group work with the study material

Significant amounts of information lacking logical flow are presented at a fast pace (INTPs try to find a unifying pattern and lose acuity and focus in receptiveness)

INTP Communication Skills

INTPs try to categorize everything around them and to validate the logical rigor of these categorizations. They feel the best when their categorizations turn out not only to be logically correct, but are also confirmed in real life.

When communicating, INTPs come across as respectful, well thought out, and to the point, but at times may appear a bit remote. They may appear lacking warmness and cordiality. But, with people of equal intelligence they may enter into discussions or debates. INTPs often distance themselves from superficial acquaintanceship and keep to a social circle of colleagues and like-minded individuals.

INTPs try to maintain an objective assessment, even when discussing topics relating to the finer feelings of the soul. Thus, for instance, discussions of love and lyric poetry do not elicit in them as much of an emotional resonance compared to the drive to analyze the subject of the feelings.

At times, INTPs seem a bit closed and distanced in conversation. But it is during this time that they revise their categorizations and/or engage in the creation of new ones. Those who can gather the reasons behind INTPs’ tendency to seem distant can easily initiate a conversation by making a critical comment regarding categorizations they build.

The social contacts of INTPs can be few in number and are mostly limited to their circle of relatives and friends - the majority of the latter are made up by people from the same intuitive/thinking typological group (NT).

Although INTPs often do not have that many business contacts, nonetheless, their business communication can be fairly intense. This is explained by the fact that their colleagues (or other people working in the same field) find it important to get an INTP’s in-depth expert opinion on many professional issues. Their business communication usually includes exchange of opinions, ideas, concepts, and methodological approaches.

INTP: Strategies for Successful Communication When communicating with people of intuitive/thinking types (NT) including ENTJ, INTJ, ENTP, and INTP personality types, i.e. with people in their own typological group, INTPs can be open to an active discussion. People in this group have about the same way of looking at the world as this type does and therefore INTPs find it easy to share their views with other NTs and in turn comprehend their reasoning and views.

When communicating with sensory/thinking (ST) people including ESTJ, ISTJ, ESTP, and ISTP personality types, INTPs should keep to communication based on facts and their direct consequences. This type of communication is fairly acceptable for INTPs on the one hand, and on the other it seems to be best suited to the way ST people think, and they comprehend it well.

When communicating with people of intuitive/feeling types (NF), including ENFJ, INFJ, ENFP, and INFP personality types, it’s preferable for INTPs to keep to communication that is mostly based upon ideas, concepts and theories.

Communication between INTPs and representatives of this group often touches on a multitude of aspects of topics being discussed. However, sometimes the parties can find it difficult to move from discussions to a practical reality. This probably happens because a significant proportion of NF people judge based on their feelings whereas INTPs strive to maintain the most objective and impartial view. Because of this, in many cases their opinions can contradict each other’s when it comes to how to act.

The most complicated is communication between INTPs and sensory/feeling types (SF) including ESFJ, ISFJ, ESFP, and ISFP personality types. When communicating with SF people, INTPs should keep to communication that is based upon feelings, facts and concrete sensations. The problem, however, is that INTPs find it difficult to maintain dialogue in this way.

They end up straining to put forth argumentation that can be easily comprehended by the SFs, which often leads to INTPs trying to wrap up the conversation. In order to reach an acceptable level of communication for both sides, INTPs have to prepare themselves for a communication style best suited for representatives of the SF group, beforehand.

What helps successful communication for an INTP:

There is enough time available for thinking about the topic

The topic of discussion is conceptual in nature

A need to find hidden, unobvious possibilities

A need to clearly understand how events may unfold

The topic calls for a creative approach

The other party is an NT or ST person

What hinders successful communication for an INTP:

Fast-paced conversation on a topic with weak logical connections

The topic is of purely practical nature

The topic heavily involves the finer feelings of the soul for too long

Long communication with SF people

Famous INTPs

Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving

Socrates

Rene Descartes

Blaise Pascal

Sir Isaac Newton

U.S. Presidents:

James Madison

John Quincy Adams

John Tyler

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Gerald Ford

William Harvey (pioneer in human physiology)

C. G. Jung, author of Psychological Types, etc.)

William James

Albert Einstein

Charles Darwin

Tom Foley (1989-1995: Speaker of the House--U.S. House of Representatives)

Henri Mancini

Bob Newhart

Jeff Bingaman, U.S. Senator (D.--NM)

Rick Moranis (Honey, I Shrunk The Kids)

Midori Ito (ice skater, Olympic silver medalist)

Tiger Woods

Fictional INTPs:

Tom and Fiona (Four Weddings and a Funeral)

Dr. Susan Lewis (ER)

Filburt (Rocko's Modern Life)

Typology of Westeros: personality types of the characters from A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novel series (you may have seen its Game of Thrones TV adaptation).

(by Joe Butt - published under license)

[damnmmmmmmmmmm]

This suggests that the same person could have written both, adapting their tone based on the subject matter but maintaining their natural tendencies in sentence structure, grammar, and expression. //

I have formal/professional experience in linguistics and related fields; this analysis doesn't actually check out to me. Some of the similarities you called out are common errors made by less proficient writers and therefore not significant evidence toward shared authorship. Some corrections you suggested were actually incorrect (one of the comma examples and one of the agreement examples from the first text immediately jumped out at me as such. You seem to be an incredibly proficient second-language speaker of English, so please don't take that as an insult.) There was something else, but I'm on my phone so I can't easily compare the data to elaborate further right this second. I can follow up later if you want.

If anything, I'd say the two texts demonstrate more similarity in pragmatics than in actual syntax, and therefore demonstrate a similarity of thought processes by the authors rather than shared authorship. To be fair, that fact is itself an interesting point to consider given all the drama in the Sebastian Fandom. What is it about this man that brings all the psychos out of the wood work?

I appreciate the critique, but I stand by my analysis. The argument that the similarities between these two texts are just "common errors" or merely a reflection of "similar thought processes" doesn’t hold up when you break down the distinct linguistic patterns both pieces share. While it’s true that individual grammatical mistakes can be widespread, the specific combination of syntactic structures, punctuation habits, rhetorical choices, and emotional engagement across both samples points strongly to a single author rather than coincidence.

"These are just common writing errors made by less proficient writers."

While many people make grammar mistakes, the precise pattern of mistakes matters. Both samples feature:

Run-on sentences and comma splices used in the same way.

A conversational yet aggressive tone with abrupt sentence shifts.

Rhetorical questions to emphasize frustration.

Unstructured, stream-of-consciousness rants that blend casual and formal phrasing.

The odds of two different people exhibiting the exact same mix of errors and stylistic habits are incredibly low.

"Some of your corrections were incorrect."

I’m open to re-evaluating specific points, but minor corrections don’t change the bigger picture.

The overall structure and linguistic patterns across both pieces remain too similar to ignore.

"There’s more similarity in pragmatics than in syntax."

I actually agree that both samples share a strong pragmatic similarity (i.e., the way they express opinions and engage with the reader). However, pragmatics doesn’t exist in isolation.

Syntax and pragmatics are deeply connected. A person’s way of thinking influences how they construct sentences, how they structure arguments, and how they use punctuation—all of which match across both texts.

The rhetorical structure is nearly identical:

Long, emotional rants with minimal breaks.

Parentheticals and asides used in a specific rhythm.

A mix of informal phrasing ("yikes," "have a word with yourself") and more formal argumentation.

"It’s a similarity in thought process, not shared authorship."

A shared ideology might explain some overlap in themes, but it doesn’t account for the deep linguistic similarities.

If this were just about "similar thinking," we’d expect differences in sentence construction, punctuation, or pacing—but we don’t see that. Instead, we see the same phrasing habits, the same structural choices, and the same rhetorical style

The fact that you recognize the pragmatic similarities actually strengthens my argument rather than disproving it. When someone’s tone, sentence structure, punctuation habits, argument style, and emotional cadence all align across multiple texts, the likelihood of them being from two different authors becomes incredibly slim.

If you have specific counterpoints after a closer comparison, I’d be open to discussing them- But please, let's stay away from backhand complements in future discussions.

[guns0nyall-blog]

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