Rethinking Marx’s Concept of Class Does the emergence of...

It is doubtless that Marx’s concept of Class was very remarkable particularly at the 19th century era, when the implication of The Age of Reason (Aufklarung) in Europe had contributed significant supports of changes in the development of sciences and the historical of thought at that time. Nevertheless, Marx progressive thought that was manifested in the concept of class has been questioned for decades since its capacity is considered ‘limited’ and somehow ‘irrelevant’ if it is applied to the contemporary social phenomena in the late 20th and the beginning of 21st century. Therefore, class as the unit of analysis is viewed to be no longer applicable and comprehensive to answer the complex and ‘sophisticated’ problems prevailing on recent†¦show more content†¦Identity in postmodernist tradition is seen as a construct shaped in a discursive context. The concept of identity politics is under the light of anti-essentialism that later widely acknowledged among the â€Å"subalterns†. The postcolonial studies used this term to â€Å"those social groups—migrants, shantytown dwellers, displaced tribes, refuges, untouchable castes, the homeless—that either do not posses, or are prevented from possessing class consciousness†¦Ã¢â‚¬ (Glossary of Postcolonial Reader: 509). Similar explanation proposed by Young that subaltern is a name for subordinate individuals and groups who do not possess a general ‘class consciousness’. Moreover, Chatterjee highlights that they are both subordinate by ‘accepting’ the immediate reality of power relations, which dominate and exploit them; but on the contrary has the will to assert their autonomy (Slemon, Postcolonial Reader: An Anthology: 110) Let’s again draw our attention to the matter of Identity Politics versus Class Politics. However, I am not completely agreed nor disagree with Gitlin and Tomasky’s statement inasmuch as it sound to ‘dogmatise’ the modern politics perspective with its universalism and radical humanism of collective consciousness of class. It is true that there is â€Å"a cul-de-sac of ethnic particularism, race consciousness, sexual politics, and radical feminism† nowadays, but we ought to be very careful notShow MoreRelatedOne Significant Change That Has Occurred in the World Between 1900 and 2005. Explain the Impact This Change Has Made on Our Lives and Why It Is an Important Change.163893 Words   |  656 PagesHistory and Public Memories Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life Lisa M. Fine, The Story of Reo Joe: Work, Kin, and Community in Autotown, U.S.A. Van Gosse and Richard Moser, eds., The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., History and September 11th John McMillian and Paul Buhle, eds., The New Left Revisited David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape Gerda Lerner, Fireweed:Read MoreOrganisational Theory230255 Words   |  922 Pagesdone some sterling service in bringing together the very diverse strands of work that today qualify as constituting the subject of organisational theory. Whilst their writing is accessible and engaging, their approach is scholarly and serious. It is so easy for students (and indeed others who should know better) to trivialize this very problematic and challenging subject. This is not the case with the present book. This is a book that deserves to achieve a wide readership. Professor Stephen Ackroyd

The Problem Of Eating Disorder Recovery - 3374 Words

Maria and Katy Campbell were 11-years-old when they overheard their father say to their mother, â€Å"Gosh, those girls are becoming young women, aren’t they? They’re getting hips.† Devastated by the seemingly normal remark a father would make of his preteen daughters, the twins made a pact that night to help each other â€Å"lose their hips†, and lose their hips they did. For the 22 years that would follow both women would advance their education to receive their doctorate degrees, and try to live somewhat normal lives- all while weighing less than 84 pounds and suffering in and out of eating disorder recovery clinics. At 33, both women are hopeful that they will someday recover; however, due to the societal misunderstanding that those with eating†¦show more content†¦Bulimia nervosa is an eating disorder distinguished by its psychological, physiological, developmental, and social components. The disorder is characterized by binge eating shortly followed by harmful compensatory behaviors, such as abuse of laxatives, diuretics or enemas, stimulants, vomiting, fasting, or excessive exercise. This is known as the â€Å"Binge-Purge Cycle†. Unlike anorexia nervosa, those with bulimia nervosa fall within a normal or slightly overweight weight range and usually perform their eating disordered behaviors in secret due to the severe feelings of shame and disgust which accompany the binge-purge cycle. Due to the intensity of the combined mental and physical assault bulimia has on the body, complications of bulimia can stay with a patient long after recovery is achieved. Such complications include, but are not limited to: Decaying tooth enamel (tooth rot) due to the stomach acid constantly eroding the protective layering on the teeth; those who have suffered from this eating disorder for more than seven years (the average time of recovery for those with bulimia nervosa) have a great likelihood of rupturing either their stomach o r

Bananafish Essay Research Paper In the short free essay sample

Bananafish Essay, Research Paper In the short narrative A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J.D. Salinger, the fact that Seymour Glass is sing terrible mental jobs is undeniable. The manner in which he conducts himself, and the manner the order of events took topographic point on the twenty-four hours of his decease brand for a bizarre scenario, which makes his unusual sickness evident. Although he goes about his twenty-four hours with certain uneven features of his visual aspect and his actions, he seems to be at peace with himself for the bulk of the narrative ( while he was with Sybill ) . It is when he goes place and takes his ain life in the direct presence of his married woman when 1 can state that this adult male had many upseting ideas crammed in his fragile head. When picking apart the full narrative, there are infinite possibilities for the ground in which he acted so eldritch and ended up perpetrating self-destruction. We will write a custom essay sample on Bananafish Essay Research Paper In the short or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The lone cause that seems to be definite is his engagement in the war. It is clearly apparent that the war invoked serious psychological harm within the head of Seymour. Due to the province of head that he is in, the manner he views the encompassing universe is as an highly contaminated and corrupt topographic point. He is really peculiar in the manner that he thinks of things and can be set off every bit easy as a clip bomb. The ground in which Seymour takes an immediate liking to the small girl Sybil is that he sees the priceless artlessness that lies within her. At such a fragile, immature age, a individual s head is still fresh Rifkin 2 and has yet to b e impacted by the negative facets of the universe. Throughout the war, Seymour likely experienced such atrocious things runing from killing an enemy soldier in cold blood to seeing his ain companions lying dead on the land, covered in blood and ravaged by slugs and explosives. It is these experiences that have led him to the realisation that the universe is a barbarous topographic point in which he can non get away from. Therefore, he envies the small miss because she has non seen such things yet and has her whole life in front of her. He sees all of the possibilities in Sybil and hopes that she cherishes this clip in her life and rises above the immoralities that are ubiquitous in this universe. With all of the mercenary people and attitudes about, he does non desire a negative impact exerted upon her due to these tainted ideals. This whole compulsion of artlessness that Seymour has explains some of the things that he does during the twenty-four hours. One illustration is the whole ordeal with his pess when he flips out on the adult female in the lift. When Seymour busss Sybil s pes at the beach, he sees a pure and guiltless pes, stand foring what he envies among all other things in life at this point. When he looks/thinks of his pess he sees the pess of a adult male bludgeoned by terrorizing experiences, and one who has seen excessively much of a mercenary universe in his clip. He hates the fact that he is populating with all of these awful things running through his head at all times. These are the violent ideas perverting his head, taking him to blatantly perpetrate self-destruction.

Year 2000 And Computers Essays - Computing, , Term Papers

Year 2000 And Computers The year 2000 represents more than just an end to the 1900s. For computers worldwide, it can mean major problem. When software for many of the business computers in use today was in development, many programmers tried to save space by programming computers only to deal with years in the 20th century. Today, though, many computer users discover problems anytime they are dealing with a date that falls after the next turn-of-the-century. When calculations involving the year 2000 or after come up on the computer screen, many computers only read 00 and not know the correct date. They malfunction or fail. "The looming prospect of disabled computer systems and paralyzed enterprises around the world makes the year 2000 one of the most critical and universal challenges to ever face the IT industry," the magazine Managing Office Technology reported in December 1997 ( Marcoccio and Matthew, online). Talking of GartnerGroup research, it added, "While the date change crisis has achieved maximum awareness, 30 percent of all companies worldwide have not yet started on any Year 2000 compliancy efforts, and 40 percent have not progressed to a point where they will be certain not to encounter significant mission-critical failures by 2000." Having the most problems are health, care, education, government agencies and small and medium-sized companies (Marcoccio, online, 1999)Large companies seem to be the farthest along, perhaps because they have the greatest resources from which to pull money and help. The leading large company industry is insurance, with financial services trailing just slightly, and banking behind that. Yet many businesses have been hard at work trying to update their source code, sometimes by reprogramming and sometimes by replacing rather than reprogramming software. Sometimes they must replace with a vendor package, retire the application, or even get rid of the entire business prospect. Managing Office Technology said that most enterprises expect to repair at least 40 percent of their applications (Marcoccio and Matthew, online, 1997). The effort is expected to cost nearly a trillion dollars, and some say there aren't enough knowledgeable programmers to fill the demand for these fixes. Upgrading software has become a booming business, one that some say isn't booming enough to meet all the demand. While mainframes may have the biggest problem, desktops aren't immune, even if they have been manufactured fairly recently. PCs manufactured in the past two years have exhibited some BIOS-related year 2000 problems. These are low-level instructions for the keyboard, monitor, and disk drives. Craig Luis, computer service manager at Linfield College in McMinnville, OR, said he just bought a logic board last November and it wasn't year 2000 compliant. To cope with this problem some are buying a millennium bug fix and detection tool as part of a Nuts & Bolts Deluxe utility suite for PCs (Ung, online, 1998). No individual, company, or country is immune because many computer programs are inter-linked and because there aren't enough engineers and programmers available to deal with it even if they knew where to look and what to do, according to the paper "The Year 2000 Computer Problem," put out by Action 2000. Industries in the United States, Canada, and Australia lead the pack in dealing with the problem, while Western Europe, South Africa, Japan, and other countries follow. Parts of Asia, central Africa, central South America, Mexico, Thailand, and other countries are behind even farther (Marcoccio, online, 1997). To cope with the situation, Europe has set up Action 2000 to coordinate public sector contingency planning so that public services such as telecommunications, health services, transport management systems, social security, and emergency services do not suffer major disruptions. The European Commission also is concerned because the need for programmers comes at a time when Europe is trying to change to one currency, and the workload may be too much for the available manpower to handle. Not only is there that problem, but the workload overseas has been hampered by extensive computerized preparations for the introduction of a single currency in 1992 (Bevins, online, 1998). It's not just mainframe computers that have the problem. Security alarms, credit card machines, elevators, and hundreds of other appliances with computer chips could fail, says U.S. Rep. Stephen Horn (The Year 2000 online, 1997). He says the U.S. government is only 20 percent ready. Although warnings are very clear, governments are slow to act. While the U.S. Senate has at least two bills in committee, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 3116 in February. The Examination Parity and Year 2000 Readiness for Financial Institutions Act requires federal financial regulatory agencies to

Do fathers use the same features of child-language as mothers and how does parental usage of CDS compare The WritePass Journal

Do fathers use the same features of child-language as mothers and how does parental usage of CDS compare Do fathers use the same features of child-language as mothers and how does parental usage of CDS compare CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION1.1 TOPIC AREA1.2 FOCUS OF STUDY1.3 RESEARCH QUESTION1.4 STRUCTURE OF STUDYCHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW2.1 FIRST STUDY IN THE FIELD 2.2 – DIFFERENTIAL EXPERIENCE HYPOTHESIS2.3 – FINE-TUNING HYPOTHESIS 2.4 – TOTAL LANGUAGE PRODUCED 2.5 – STRUCTURAL AND LEXICAL ASPECTS2.6 – FUNCTIONAL AND CONVERSATIONAL ASPECTS2.7 – SUMMARY AND RESEARCH QUESTIONSCHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY  3.1 – PILOT STUDY3.2 – THE SUBJECTS3.3 – DATA COLLECTION3.4 – DATA TRANSCRIPTION3.5 VARIABLESCHAPTER 4: RESULTS4.1 – THE AMOUNT OF PARENTAL SPEECH4.2 COMPLEXITY 4.3 – THE FUNCTIONS OF PARENTAL SPEECH Related CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 TOPIC AREA Child-directed speech (CDS) has been central to research ever since Noam Chomsky declared it to be a ‘degenerate’, ‘deficient’, ‘impoverished’ form, (Fletcher MacWhinney, 1995) stating children could not learn the rules of a language by hearing such complex input. Other studies have shown that adult input is by no means as complex as Chomskyan theories had assumed. Such studies have observed that adult-child interaction is somewhat different from adult-adult interaction, giving rise to the finding that adults generally adapt their speech when talking to children, which is termed ‘CDS’ or ‘motherese’ as it is otherwise known. Some common features have been attributed to this unique speech register. These features are said to include shorter sentences, clearly segmented slower speech, phonologically simplified utterances, restricted vocabulary, exaggerated prosody, repetitions and expansions. The language used is said to be constrained to ‘the here and now’ and related to the child’s focus of attention and ongoing activity (Harley, 2008), which all in all result in effective communication between parents and their children and also contribute to the speed and ease of a child’s language acquisition (Snow 1972). 1.2 FOCUS OF STUDY As child-directed speech is often termed ‘motherese’ it gives a misleading impression that fathers have a negligible impact upon child language development. Hence, why the verbal environment provided by the father has been largely ignored until recent years. However, the ever-changing family roles and changes in typical male-female stereotypes in western society have influenced a change in the nature of parenting, which has given rise to the introduction of research into paternal input to children. The late twentieth century has seen an increase in fathers adopting the primary caregiver role, which has led to the popularity of ‘stay-at-home dads’. While tending to the immediate needs of children was traditionally considered to be a female responsibility, nowadays that is not the case as it is becoming increasingly popular for mothers to be in employment. Therefore, a number of studies since the 1970’s have discovered fathers as well as mothers produce the typical modifications of CDS in their speech to children, hence the suggestion that males provide an equally large facilitation to child language development as females (Berko-Gleason 1975). The scope of the literature in this area is somewhat limited, however research has indicated that the most important features of CDS are maintained by paternal input; simplicity, well-formedness, repetition and immediacy, (Berko-Gleason 1975) which has given rise to the newly-coined term ‘fatherese’. Nevertheless, there is an inconsistency in the findings of the studies in this domain. 1.3 RESEARCH QUESTION The research question central to this dissertation is do fathers use the same features of child-language as mothers and how does parental usage of CDS compare. The focus will consider the parental input to two language-learning siblings, at different stages of language development. 1.4 STRUCTURE OF STUDY Following this introduction, a literature review addresses the findings of numerous existing studies in the field of gender-specific child-directed speech. The methodology section explains how this investigation was carried out, including a description of the subjects observed, the methods of data capture, transcription and the variables used for analysis, followed by a description of the results gathered in the investigation and a discussion of the findings and problems encountered throughout the study.   To conclude the investigation, the outcome of the study will be related back to the review of literature in order to address how the findings fit in with what is already known in the field of gender-specific CDS. CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 FIRST STUDY IN THE FIELD The research of Jean Berko-Gleason (1975) was the first in the area of CDS to consider a paternal contribution. She conducted a study to determine whether the defined features of CDS were limited to the speech of mothers or if they could be characterised as a function of adult language to children. Before the conduction of the study it was of question whether there was such a thing as men’s speech to children at all, as a previous study made a bizarre statement that men only spend an average of 37.7 seconds per day engaged in speech interaction with their children (Berko-Gleason 1975). Berko-Gleason overruled this finding stating fathers do talk to their children, but her research was not solely orientated around paternal input. She discussed unpublished studies into the speech of mothers and fathers in interactions in their home settings and also reported upon studies of interactions in a day-care setting, exploring more broadly the speech of ‘non-mothers’. When addressing children in a home setting, the research indicated that there are some similarities in the speech styles of male and female adults, but it also asserts that differences arise due to the father’s role. It was asserted that fathers perform many of the characteristics attributed to â€Å"motherese† such as restraining their speech to the ‘hear and now’, and considerably simplifying the length of their speech, as fathers were found to use a similar mean length of utterance (MLU) to mothers. However, it is asserted that mothers are more sensitive to their child’s ages in families of more than one child, stating they directed less complex utterances to their younger children and more complex utterances to the older of the siblings (Berko-Gleason 1975). An instance where a father addressed the younger of his children with a more complex utterance is mentioned, suggesting a lack of sensitivity on paternal behalf. The study concerned also distingu ished between the types of sentences used by each of the parents, generalising in a qualitative sense that fathers use more direct imperatives and produced more threats as well as rarer vocabulary. This more frequent use of rare vocabulary could also suggestively contribute to the judgement that fathers are less sensitive than mothers. The research gathered in the interactions of day-care teachers further supported the findings regarding sensitivity, as the data observed an unexpected lexical usage by a male teacher towards a three year old. This suggests that weaker sensitivity is characteristic of ‘male’ language towards children as appose to the more constricted ‘father’ language. Berko-Gleason asserts that even though â€Å"fathers are not as well tuned-in to their children as mothers are in the traditional family situation: they do not have to learn to attend to subtle signals from the child, and frequently have no penalty to pay for any lack of atten tionthere are probably serious and far-reaching effects that result from the fact† (1975; 293). She also examined a study of gender-specific CDS in a storytelling situation, in which fathers were said to concentrate on the activity of telling a story rather than using the story to facilitate interaction with the child, which was characteristic behaviour of mothers. The mothers in this study were reported to ask a lot of questions to ensure their child fully understood the activity. Berko-Gleason maintained that â€Å"the children had to exert themselves more for the fathers, and try harder to make themselves both heard and understood. In this way, fathers can be seen as a bridge to the outside world, leading the child to change his or her language in order to be understood† (1975; 293). This gave rise to the ‘Bridge Hypothesis’ proposed by Berko-Gleason; (Dato 1975; 294) maintaining that speaking to fathers who are less sensitive than mothers in terms of la nguage use, provides children with the linguistic skills required for talking to strangers and people in more abstract contexts. Contextually speaking, Berko-Gleason notes that â€Å"the fathers’ language clearly demarked their role within a family: a father playing with his small son might break off the game to send the child to his mother to have his diaper changed† (Dato 1975: 291). 2.2 – DIFFERENTIAL EXPERIENCE HYPOTHESIS Similar to the Bridge Hypothesis in terms of sensitivity is what is known as the ‘Differential Experience Hypothesis’, (McLaughlin, White, McDevitt Raskin 1983, Lewis Gregory 1987) which is theorised on the basis of findings that mothers provide more linguistic support for their children due to the fact they are more attuned to the child’s needs and abilities. Fathers, on the other hand, are seen to be less sensitive to children’s’ capabilities, which sees them being more linguistically demanding than mothers. This hypothesis maintains that fathers instigate a greater performance from children due to their lack of sensitivity. However it does not insinuate that fathers are better language facilitators than mothers, on the contrary, that the functions of each of the speech styles give equal contributions to child language development, in the sense that they offer experiences of a differing nature. In sum of the above hypotheses, mothers and fathers are suggested to engage in different kinds of interactions with their children. It is not to be believed that one of these speech styles is in any way superior to the other, they are viewed in a complementary manner to one another and interpreted to manifest and reflect each of the parental roles (Chanu Marcos 1994). â€Å"The mother’s specific role is to provide a feeling of security by avoiding situations where the child’s established acquisitions would be challenged, while still stimulating the child. The father’s specific role is to prompt the child to attain higher levels of success, even if it means momentarily destabilising the child† (Chanu Marcos 1994; 3). Due to these observed differences in parental speech behaviour in terms of CDS, the communicative behaviour of children should also be expected to differ when conversing with mothers and fathers. 2.3 – FINE-TUNING HYPOTHESIS Many studies (Snow 1972, Berko-Gleason 1975, Sokolov 1993) have found that mothers seem to ‘fine-tune’ their speech when talking to young children. Cross (1977) proposed the ‘Fine-Tuning hypothesis’ based on correlations between the measures of maternal input structure and child competence. It has been theorised that mothers adjust the length and complexity of their utterances in line with the increase in their child’s mastery of linguistic competence. This implies that parent’s decrease their use of CDS as their child’s linguistic ability develops. This is observable in terms of mean length of utterance (MLU) as it is expected that parental growth in the use of word classes and word order will occur in accordance with the growth of child comprehension and production levels. Cross observed that individual differences were found to reflect the speech styles of mothers in some cases; however, statements have been made that a mother more cl osely ‘fine-tunes’ her language to the child than any other family member. It is a possible point of analysis in this study to test these statements in order to see how the MLU of mothers and fathers compare. It has been noted that mothers ‘fine-tune’ their speech to young children in more ways than one. As well as lexical and structural adjustments, prosodic adjustments are also said to be found. Prosodic fine-tuning is said to be marked by higher pitch and exaggerated intonational patterns which appeal to infants’ attention patterns (Fletcher MacWhinney, 1995). â€Å"Manipulation of these prosodic characteristics is very high at precisely the age when infants are most responsive and by age five children receive almost no prosodic adjustments† (Fletcher MacWhinney 1995, p.182). Such adjustments are said to be tuned to the child’s responsiveness and attentiveness whereas phonological and syntactic adjustments are tuned to the child’s production and comprehension levels respectively. Phonetics are said to be adjusted from the one-word stage onwards and include enhanced clarity of vowels and full production of often-reduced consonants. (Fletcher M acWhinney, 1995). 2.4 – TOTAL LANGUAGE PRODUCED In terms of analysing how much mothers and fathers speak to their young children in mean number of utterances, there is a general agreement that mothers speak more than fathers on the whole (Golinkoff Ames 1979, Rondal 1980, Davidson Snow 1996, Pancsofar Vernon-Feagans 2006). However, McLaughlin et al (1983) and Lewis and Gregory (1987) found no significance in mean number of utterances. Golinkoff and Ames (1979) found situation to have a bearing on conversational turns. They recorded parents in dyadic and triadic situations, reporting fathers to produce half as many utterances and take fewer conversational turns in a free-play situation with the mother present. However, in a dyadic play situation, mothers and fathers were reported to produce the same number of utterances and take the same number of turns. McLaughlin et al (1983) found parents to take relatively equal conversational turns while Rondal (1980) proposed that mothers take more turns. 2.5 – STRUCTURAL AND LEXICAL ASPECTS The complexity of the parents’ sentences can be measured by making comparisons between their mean length of utterance (MLU) and number of verbs per utterance. However, there is large differentiation in the results regarding their MLU. Giattino and Hogan (1975) carried out the first published study in the field of ‘fatherese’. They provided a father-only speech analysis with which they made comparisons to previously reported investigations of mother-child data of the same nature. For the means of comparison for MLU, they recorded the father in adult-adult interaction, in which his MLU was recorded as 9.7 words. In his interaction with the child, his MLU was recorded as 5.2 words which was found to be closely correlated to the child’s MLU of 4.5 words. This evidence supports the finding that the father was aware of the child’s level of comprehension, which in turn influenced his language as he directed considerably shorter sentences to her than he did in adult-adult conversation. Discrepancies occurred in the conflicting results regarding MLU. Some studies found that mothers and fathers have similar MLU (Golinkoff Ames 1979, Lewis Gregory 1987, Pancsofar Vernon-Feagans 2006) while other studies found that mothers produce a significantly longer MLU (McLaughlin et al 1983, Davidson Snow 1996). Rondal (1980) supported the ‘Bridge Hypothesis’ and the ‘Differential Experience Hypothesis’ with the finding that although fathers’ speech was found to be shorter in length, the longest utterance in the study was also addressed by a father, portraying the lack of sensitivity central to the hypotheses. McLaughlin et al (1983) also reported that although the utterances spoken by mothers were significantly longer, they were more ‘well-tuned’ into the child’s abilities, also in support of the hypotheses. Lewis and Gregory (1987) and Pancsofar Vernon-Feagans (2005) are in agreement that fathers use fewer verbs per utterance. This is troublesome evidence as this variable is said to contribute towards complexity as it is evidence of low sensitivity, meaning it shows conflict with the ‘Bridge Hypothesis’ that fathers are less sensitive than mothers. In the means of vocabulary, Davidson and Snow (1996) asserted that mothers talked more complexly, in that they used more low frequency words. They also stated that children spoke more complexly themselves in maternal dyads, showing a greater use of low-frequency vocabulary than in paternal dyads. Previous studies, the ‘Bridge Hypothesis’ and the ‘Differential Experience Hypothesis’ all undertake the belief that fathers create a more linguistically challenging environment for the child, however this study has shown that this is not always the case as it has proven an instance where mothers have provided a more sophisticated input than fathers. It was assumed that the mothers’ linguistically challenging behaviour in this study had prevailed over the stereotypically female behaviour of ‘fine-tuning’. This was attributed to the mothers’ advanced scholarly background as they were said to be as highly educated as the fathers (Davidson S now 1996). Lexically speaking, there is said to be little difference in the speech of mothers and fathers measured by the type token ratio (TTR) (McLaughlin, Schutz and White 1980, Ratner 1988, Pancsofar Vernon-Feagans 2006). Rondal (1980) found the speech of fathers to be more diverse, and Ratner (1988) in a more detailed analysis of vocabulary, found fathers to be more lexically demanding through their frequent use of rare nominal words and infrequent use of common nouns. Both of these findings are in support of Berko-Gleason’s theory that the linguistic style of fathers provides children with a ‘bridge to the outside world’. Giattino and Hogan (1975) stated that declaratives were used in 35% of the corpus, interrogatives 34%, exclamatory sentences 9% and imperatives 6%. Giattino and Hogan (1975) and Golinkoff and Ames (1979) are in agreement that mothers and fathers use these sentence types to similar proportions. Further conflicting evidence has been found in the area of questions. Some studies found that mothers and fathers ask the same number of questions, (Davidson Snow 1996, Pancsofar Vernon-Feagans 2006) whereas other studies found that mothers ask more questions, (Lewis Gregory 1987) although other studies concluded that fathers ask more questions (McLaughlin et al 1983). Such contradictory findings are difficult to deduce an inference from. The ‘Bridge Hypothesis’ maintains that fathers are more challenging interlocutors than mothers, therefore in the means of interrogatives it is to be expected that fathers ask more wh-questions (questions that require a more elaborate response) than yes/no questions (questions that require the child to answer with a one-word answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’). Several studies (Giattino Hogan 1975, McLaughlin et al 1983) support this finding, however there are studies opposing this evidence (Lewis Gregory 1987, Pancsofar Vernon-Feagans 2006). Wh-questions are said to be a challenge for children as they require the child to construct a lexical response rather than repeat the parents structure or simply give a non-verbal response (Berko-Gleason 1975). In terms of question types, Golinkoff and Ames (1979) and McLaughlin et al (1983) agreed that yes/no questions are asked more frequently overall than wh-questions. This makes sense in the respects that mothers speak more than fathers and mothers are more inclined to ask yes/no rather than wh-questions. â€Å"Many researchers have studied ‘language-teaching’ aspects of parental speech. These include explicit educative behaviours such as corrections, expansions and self repetitions. Although all parental communicative behaviours are ‘educative’, considering a child can learn by observation and imitation, these specific behaviours manifest the parents’ intentional effort to teach their child† (Chanu Marcos 1994; 7). Some research has concluded that fathers use repetitions more frequently than mothers (McLaughlin et al 1983, Lewis Gregory 1987) while others have concluded the reverse (Ratner 1988). Giattino and Hogan (1975) found that repetitions made up 9% of their corpus. These were said to always be repetitions of the child’s preceding utterance, not self-repetitions. When compared to a set of previously recorded female-child data, a difference was realised in the respect that mothers’ repetitions are repetitions of themselves. The conflicting findings of Golinkoff and Ames (1979) recorded that both genders use repetitions to the same frequency, and that when they occur they are always repetitions of themselves not their children. They stated repetitions are more likely to be found when requesting action rather than giving information. Giattino and Hogan (1975) found very few instances where the father used corrections and Rondal (1980) found that mothers correct their children more than fathers. While comparing their data to data from previous investigations, Giattino and Hogan (1975) found that fathers rarely used grammatically incomplete sentences where as mothers are far more likely to do so. They found very few instances where completion sentences were used and said that expansions made up a mere 0.5% of the corpus whereas they contributed 30% to the previously conducted investigation of female CDS. The explanation attributed to the low frequency of expansions in the male corpus regarded the child’s production level. As the child was considered to be linguistically fluent, the need for the father to expand her utterances was eliminated. 2.6 – FUNCTIONAL AND CONVERSATIONAL ASPECTS Berko-Gleason (1975) found trends in the studies he examined, in that fathers produce more requests for clarification. This finding was later supported by Rondal (1980). This suggests that fathers do not understand their children as well as mothers, possibly a consequence of fathers who assume secondary caregiver position due to their employment status. Research which has focussed on directives separates imperatives; the most direct form of directives, from interrogatives; an indirect form. â€Å"The use of more direct or indirect forms of directives challenges the child’s comprehension level to differing degrees. When a parent uses a direct form (‘be quiet’) it is much easier to understand the communicative intention than when a parent uses an indirect form (‘can we reduce the noise level in here?’)† (Chanu Marcos 1994; 8). In agreement with Berko-Gleason (1975), several studies found that fathers use more direct imperatives than mothers (Rondal 1980, McLaughlin et al 1980, McLaughlin et al 1983). Interestingly, McLaughlin et al (1980) found that fathers directed more imperatives at their sons than their daughters. Berko-Gleason attributes the finding that fathers use more direct imperatives to the fact that fathers cast themselves into the role of disciplinarian in the home setting, and he states the finding that fathers direct more imperatives to their sons than their daughters â€Å"gives the impression that in our society males become accustomed early on to taking orders, and, if their fathers provide role models, to giving them† (1975; 294). McLaughlin et al (1980) found mothers use more indirectly controlling language whereas fathers use more directly controlling language. Berko-Gleason proposes that â€Å"mothers tend to couch their imperative intent in question form† (1975; 295) wh ich conflicts with research that has evidence that fathers ask more questions overall. Golinkoff and Ames (1979) found that the situation has a bearing on parental use of directives as the amount found in dyadic situations increased from the amount used in triadic situations regardless of the gender of the parent. Parents were said to fall into a directive mode in dyadic situations. 2.7 – SUMMARY AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The examination of the literature in the area of caregiver input shows that there are a number of similarities and differences between mothers’ and fathers’ speech. Parental interactive styles in dyadic behaviours have been the primary focus of research, and it has been proven, despite the many discrepancies in the research, that both parents play an important effective role in child language development. Berko-Gleason asserts that â€Å"when men occupy a nurturant role they become increasingly sensitive to the needs and intentions of the child† (1975; 296), suggesting that fathers who adopt the primary caregiver role because their female partners are in employment, are more sensitive to their children’s needs, assumingly so because they spend more time with them. The ‘Bridge Hypothesis’ and the ‘Differential Experience Hypothesis’ have been theorised based on the notion of sensitivity, proposing that mothers are more sensitive of a child’s needs as they are found to ‘scaffold’ children’s utterances more often. Fathers on the other hand, are seen as more insensitive interlocutors in comparison, as they are generally found to provide children with a bigger linguistic challenge. Generalisations have been made in summary of the variables recorded by previous studies. It has been found that mothers address more speech to their young children than fathers, both in terms of mean number of utterances and conversational turns, asserting that mothers are more talkative. Dependant on context, it has been found that fathers are capable of producing the same number of utterances and turns in dyadic situations with a child, however there is consistency in the results in the fact that it has never been proven for fathers to speak more than mothers, neither in terms of mean number of utterances nor conversational turns, withholding the hypotheses mentioned above in the respect that fathers provide the child with a more challenging conversational partner as a result of not making themselves as linguistically dependable as mothers. Mothers seem to take more responsibility for sustaining a conversation through their more frequent vocalisations. Differences between mothers and fathers have appeared in a number of areas of research, including vocabulary and use of directives. The vocabulary of fathers is said to be more diverse and lexically demanding which contributes to the challenging linguistic behaviour fathers demonstrate towards children. Fathers are said to direct more imperatives at children than mothers, and fathers are said to direct more imperatives to their sons than their daughters. This distinction between the behaviour directed at children is attributed in relation to the socialisation of gender as males in society are said to need to become accustomed to giving and taking orders. Fathers are more likely to use an imperative whereas mothers are said to frame their directives in interrogative form. Fathers are said to engage in such usage because they adopt the role of disciplinarian. Research shows that mothers and fathers use sentence types to relatively the same proportions, using declarative and interrogative sentences most frequently. It is commonly postulated that when repetitions occur in parental input, fathers are more likely to repeat their child’s preceding utterance whereas mothers are more likely to repeat themselves. It is generalised that mothers make more corrections to their children’s speech than fathers and mothers are significantly more probable to produce grammatically incomplete utterances. The speech of mothers is also expected to contain more expansions: a notable contributor in aiding the ‘scaffolding’ of children’s utterances, therefore showing support for the ‘Bridge Hypothesis’. Inconsistencies have occurred across numerous variables that have been tested, including questions and MLU. Given the somewhat sceptical findings of previous studies in the area, the aim of this study is to provide a clearer insight through my own investigation of gender-specific CDS, which will hopefully shed light on the discrepancies that have occurred. Previous research has shown that findings between parental input can largely differ based on the situation they occur in (dyadic or triadic) and the context in which the interaction is held (free-play or structured play), therefore these factors will remain constant in this study. The nucleus of this analysis is the difference in gender-specific CDS styles. A mother and father each in dyadic interactions with a child of approximately two years old will be recorded and then the study will be extended in order to observe the same parents in a dyadic interaction with an older sibling. Few studies in the existing research have explored the nature of gender-specific CDS in this way; however Broen (1972) found that when mothers spoke to younger in comparison to older children they used a lower rate, fewer disfluencies, and smaller type-token ratios. They also used smaller vocabularies, but they repeated their utterances more frequently (Giattino Hogan 1975). Davidson and Snow (1996) suggest that fathers become better conversational partners as children get older. This is an area for examination in this study. Reviewing the variables of a number of previous investigations in order to highlight comparisons and discrepancies in their findings regarding parental speech styles has allowed me to establish a set of variables for analysis in my own investigation. Since very few conclusive results have been established by previous studies, my analysis will provide a clearer explanation to these somewhat ambiguous generalisations. Due to the inconsistent results of previous studies, the following research questions will be attempted: Do fathers use the same features of CDS as mothers? How, if at all, do the parental speech styles differ? and due to the lack of information regarding the differences in parental speech styles in families with more than one language-learning child, the following question will be aimed at: Do parents direct the same linguistic behaviour towards an older and younger sibling? In line with the ‘Fine-Tuning’ hypothesis, it is expected to find that parents ‘fine-tune’ their speech more towards the younger of the siblings. Prosodic features are expected to become seldom used to the older of the siblings and it can also be hypothesised that the parent’s MLU will increase with the older child.   Since the ‘Bridge Hypothesis’ and ‘Differential Experience Hypothesis’ entail that mothers are   more sensitive interlocutors, my experimental hypothesis is that mothers will ‘fine-tune’ their speech more than fathers. If this is the case, it will entail the mother having a MLU score lower than the father’s and closer to the MLU of her children. The null hypothesis is identifiable if the mother and father do not produce significantly different measures of ‘fine-tuning’ or MLU. It is important to note that individual differences may arise in the study and have a considerable b earing on the results, e.g. culture, socioeconomic class or parent’s level of education. CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY   The purpose of this study was to analyse the speech of a male and female parent in dyadic interactions with their language-learning children, in order to produce a cross-sectional analysis which will lead to answering the central question of whether fathers as well as mothers use the features of CDS. The following general observation questions were considered: Do fathers use the same features of CDS as mothers? How, if at all, do the parental speech styles differ? Do parents direct the same linguistic behaviour towards an older and younger sibling? 3.1 – PILOT STUDY Prior to the actual recordings, I conducted a small preliminary investigation using only two of the subjects (the mother and child O) in order to test whether the ‘Observer’s Paradox’ would arise. I wanted to be present for the recording; however, as a consequence of this child Y was not responsive to her mother’s speech. I vacated the room, leaving the mother to start the recording after my departure. In my absence the mother described child O’s language as typical entailing that my presence gave rise to the ‘Observer’s Paradox’. I therefore ensured that only the subjects involved in any one interaction were in the play-room at the time of the recording in order to eliminate the effects of the ‘Observer’s Paradox’ altering the authenticity of my main study recordings. I attempted a preliminary transcription exercise from the results of my pilot study, in which I was exposed to the problems associated with the calculation of mean length of utterance (MLU). I carried out online research in order to obtain a protocol for such calculations (see variables below) and followed this protocol when transcribing the data. 3.2 – THE SUBJECTS There were four subjects in the main study: the mother, the father, the older child who I will refer to as child O and the younger child who I will refer to as child Y. At the time of the recording, child Y was 1;10 and child O was 4;4. I chose the children in my investigation not to be of similar ages so that they were not at similar stages of language development. Child Y was at the one-word stage, occasionally using two-word utterances and child O was at the grammatical stage, producing utterances relatively adult-like. Both of the parents in the study were of similar ages, there was an eighteen month age gap between them. In order to make accurate comparisons with the existing results identified in the literature review section, I ensured I maintained the social class variable of the majority of those studies by recording a family representative of middle class. In terms of occupation, the mother is a part-time psychiatric consultant and the father is a full-time college lecturer , therefore both parents are university-educated. In the means of family structure, I ensured that the parents in the family I observed were the biological parents of both children, i.e. to ensure that neither child O nor child Y were step children to either parent through divorce and remarriage as atypical linguistic behaviour may be expected from a non-parent towards a child and vice versa. 3.3 – DATA COLLECTION The speech of the family was recorded on a digital voice recorder. All recording was done during periods of free-play and all interactions took place in the family play-room, as this is the area where the subjects engage in free-play on a daily basis. I obtained four recordings in total: the mother and father both in a dyadic interaction with each child. Each separate recording consisted of at least twenty minutes of speech. The lengths of the recordings slightly differed in total as the children terminated their play sessions at different times; however, I extracted exactly fifteen minutes from each recording for analysis. I anticipated that the adult subjects may have been inhibited to behave differently with anyone other than the subjects in the room; therefore the parents began the recording after I vacated the room. The inherent problem in such a recording is the subjects’ awareness of the recorder as the investigation had to be carried out obtrusively. This could have ha d a possible bearing on the naturalistic nature of the data; however none of the subjects seemed to be concerned that they were being recorded. In order to eliminate the possibility of the presence of the recorder having a bearing on my results, I overlooked the first two minutes of each recording as literature advises that most people forget about the recording as they engage in activities (Wray Bloomer 2006). Neither of the children were unfamiliar to the tape recorder as they had been recorded by their father in this way previously. The subjects were not given any special instructions in the means of expected behaviour and they were encouraged to ignore the presence of the tape recorder.   Throughout the session the parents and children engaged in spontaneous play: in activities such as a scrabble board-game, an ‘etch-sketch’ drawing toy, a wooden shapes toy, a plastic utensils game, an ‘aqua beads’ shape game, a ‘guess-who’ game, playing with a ball, building blocks and making a cup of tea. After the recording I gave the adult subjects a self-completion questionnaire (see appendix 2). Questionnaires are advantageous in the fact that they are efficient to administer, they eliminate interviewer effects and they are convenient for the respondents to complete. In order to eliminate respondent fatigue, I limited the questionnaire to eight questions and ensured that they were simple and unambiguous. I asked two open questions in order to obtain qualitative data. 3.4 – DATA TRANSCRIPTION After obtaining the four separate recordings of conversational data, I made a copy of the original recordings. I discarded the first two minutes of each recording before analysis, in order to eliminate possible effects caused by the ‘Observer’s Paradox’. I decided to transcribe exactly fifteen minutes of each recording in order to ensure a fair test overall. I orthographically transcribed the data so that the speech could be represented in order to be analysed structurally and accurately (see appendix 1). Using the set of variables below, I then analysed the data. 3.5 VARIABLES In order to answer the observation questions mentioned above, the following variables were measured: Communicative Turn (CT) this is analysed as everything a speaker says before the next speaker begins. This could be one word, one sentence or several sentences. Total number of utterance – number of utterances produced. Mean length of utterance (MLU) – measured by the total number of morphemes divided by the total number of utterances in the dyad. An utterance is a word or a string of words identified by a pause, grammatical completeness (Golinkoff and Ames 1979) or other indication of new thought. When counting MLU the following are counted as a single morpheme: a)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   -s plural marker e.g. letter-s b)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   -ed past tense marker e.g. finish-ed c)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   -ing present participle marker e.g. smil-ing d)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚     -s 3rd person regular tense marker e.g. plays-s e)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Possessive -‘s marker e.g. daddy’s bike f)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Compound words e.g. teapot g)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Proper names e.g. Hazel h)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Irregular past tense verbs e.g. went i)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Irregular plurals e.g. children j)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Diminutives e.g. horsy k)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Catenatives e.g. wanna l)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Contractions e.g. let’s, don’t and won’t (but the following contractions are counted as two morphemes e.g. she’s, he’ll, they’re, what’s, she’d, we’ve, can’t, aren’t) m)  Ã‚   Reduplications e.g. daddy daddy daddy are counted as one morpheme unless the repetition is for emphasis (Speech Therapy Information and Resources 2009-2010). n)  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Fillers e.g. mm, ah, oh are not counted as a morpheme Sentence types Declarative sentence – (including one-word declaratives) used to make a statement. Interrogative sentence – used to ask a question. Wh-questions – questions that employ the use of: what, when, where, why, who, whose, which or how. Yes/no questions – questions that require a yes or no answer from the hearer. Intonation questions – questions marked by a rise in intonation. Tag questions – a question attached to the end of a statement, usually seeking confirmation. Imperative sentence – used to give command, request or give instructions of some kind – orders, warnings advice etc. Exclamatory sentence – emphatic sentences used to express strong emotion. Repetitions Self-repetition Repetition of child    Grammatically incomplete sentence – sentences involving the deletion of some words. Sentences which could be categorised in more than one way were placed in the highest category in the order of priority list: repetition, interrogative, declarative, imperative, exclamatory, and grammatically incomplete (Giattino Hogan 1975). CHAPTER 4: RESULTS    MOTHER FATHER CHILD Y CHILD O    CHILD Y CHILD O CHILD Y CHILD O MOTHER FATHER MOTHER FATHER Conversational Turns (CT)729463134776294132Total utterances1821751632118462104152Total number of morphemes794104954995012593571660Mean length of utterance (MLU)4.3663.374.51.491.55.494.34Declaratives42422469  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Wh-questions3234916  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Yes/no questions12321136  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Intonation Questions7291130  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Tag questions5503  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Imperatives1585726  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Exclamations 35162714  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Parental self repetitions101164  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Repetitions of child 227612  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Grammatical incompletions2121    TABLE 4.1: Summary of means and amounts of parental speech and child vocalisation. Most of the measures used in the speech analysis were simple counting procedures, using relatively straightforward criteria. In order to ensure reliability in the findings, I recalculated the data twice which removed any data verification errors that had occurred the first time.    4.1 – THE AMOUNT OF PARENTAL SPEECH The parents‘ total utterances to child Y suggest that the mother and father direct a similar amount of utterances to the younger, in comparison to the older sibling. The results show that the mother produced approx 12 utterances per minute to child Y, while the father produced approx 11 utterances per minute to the same child. The parents’ total utterances to child O show a significant difference. The father was found to produce almost 2.5 more utterances per minute to child O than the mother. In terms of conversational exchange, there are conflicting findings in the means of conversational turns (CT). The mother was found to take 9 more CT’s than the father in the dyad with child Y, however she was found to take 30 fewer turns in the dyad with child O. Though it is not to assume that the father spoke more to child O on the whole, as although his total of utterances was greater, his turns were also shorter, shown by his MLU in the dyad with child O (4.5), which wa s 25% less than the mother’s rate of MLU to the same child (6), as show in FIGURE 4.1a. The father also made fewer utterances (19 less than his partner) and addressed shorter utterances to child Y, which is again evidential in his MLU. This is contrary to existing research and hypotheses that propose fathers to be more challenging, demanding interlocutors than mothers. All in all, the mother consistently talked more than the father, speaking for 68% of her dyadic interaction with child Y and 63% of her dyadic interaction with child O. 4.2 COMPLEXITY The complexity of parental speech In terms of MLU, the mother and father were found to show a significant difference. The father’s MLU to child O is almost equal to the mothers MLU to child Y (as shown in FIGURE 4.1a). Although the MLU of the parents conflicts with evidence from previous research, the MLU of each parent in the separate dyads correlates with the MLU of each child in the specific dyad (as shown in FIGURE 4.2a). Albeit the exception to this finding is the dyadic interaction involving the mother and child Y, which stipulates the mother’s MLU to be triple the child’s measure. This finding contradicts the ‘Fine-Tuning’ hypothesis. The complexity of children’s speech Although child Y made more conversational turns with the mother than the father, her MLU value was the same with both parents. It is plausible to say from this finding that the father elicited more complex speech from child Y as although she measured the same MLU with both parents, she made 22 fewer utterances with her father. The reverse can be said for child O. The findings show that the mother elicited more complex, longer speech from child O than the father, due to the fact child O’s MLU value with her mother is over 1 morpheme per utterance longer than with her father and she produced 48 less utterances in total with her mother. Repetitions FIGURE 4.2b shows the percentages of repetitions used in each of the dyads. The repetitions made by the mother were more consistent than the repetitions made by the father. The majority of the mother’s repetitions were repetitions of the child rather than herself. The findings regarding the repetitions made by the father show an inconsistency as it was found that the father made 3 times as many self repetitions with child Y than he did with child O. 4.3 – THE FUNCTIONS OF PARENTAL SPEECH TABLE 4.3a presents the proportions of utterance types employed in the parental speech. It shows the proportion of each utterance type as a percentage of the total utterances in each dyad. Totals add up to 100 per cent as sentences which could be categorised in more than one way were placed in the highest category in the order of a priority list (see methodology). FIGURE 4.3b shows the findings in table 2. FIGURE 4.3a shows the frequency of the utterance types in each dyadic interaction in the form of a clustered graph.    MOTHER FATHER CHILD Y CHILD O CHILD Y CHILD O Declaratives 23% 24% 15% 33% Wh-questions 18% 19% 5% 7.5% Yes/no questions 7% 18% 7% 17% Intonation questions4%16.5%7%14%Tag questions3%3%0%1%Imperatives8%4.5%35%12%Exclamations19%9%16%7%Parental self repetitions5%1%10%2%Repetitions of child12%4%4%6%Grammatical incompletions1%1%1%0.5%                                           TABLE 4.3a: Summary of distribution of utterance types in parental speech (% of total utterances). The mother used the same proportion of declaratives in both of her dyads with the children. These included one-word declaratives and statements. In contrast, 15% of the total utterances produced to child Y by the father were declaratives, as were 33% of the total utterances he produced to child O. Examples produced by the father included: â€Å"I’ve got three now† â€Å"one† Examples produced by the mother included: â€Å"I didn’t hear you properly that time† â€Å"Uh-huh†    MOTHER FATHER    CHILD Y    CHILD O    CHILD Y    CHILD O    Number of questions asked Percentage of total of questions asked in dyad (%) Number of questions asked Percentage of total of questions asked in dyad (%) Number of questions asked Percentage of total of questions asked in dyad (%) Number of questions asked Percentage of total of questions asked in dyad (%) Total questions 56 100 31 85 Wh-questions 32 57% 34 34% 9 30%

Portmanteau Words

Portmanteau Words Portmanteau Words Portmanteau Words By Simon Kewin The English language is constantly evolving. The meanings of words drift or even change completely. Sometimes words stop being used altogether and they die out. But at the same time new words are constantly being added.   These new words – neologisms – can be a source of some irritation to traditionalists, especially when there is already a perfectly good word that could have been used. But when neologisms work, when they fulfill a need, they can add greatly to the richness and diversity of the language.   A particular sort of new word are those formed when two existing words are merged to form a new one whose meaning, combines that of the two root words. These are called â€Å"portmanteau† words.   The word â€Å"portmanteau† originally meant a sort of large traveling bag. The writer Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland etc., was the first to use it to refer to a merged word. Carroll employed quite a few portmanteaux himself. The poem Jabberwocky, for example, contains the word â€Å"chortled†, probably created by combining â€Å"chuckle† and â€Å"snorted†. Similarly â€Å"mimsy† is generally taken as a mixture of â€Å"miserable† and â€Å"flimsy†. Both of these new words are now in the dictionary. For example, the OED defines chortle like this :  Ã¢â‚¬ ¨Ã‚   chortle:   verb laugh in a breathy, gleeful way.  noun a breathy, gleeful laugh.  ORIGIN coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass; probably a blend of CHUCKLE and SNORT. It’s likely that most people who use â€Å"chortle† are unaware it was a word made up in the 1870s.   There are now very many portmanteau words that have become accepted as valid in their own right : â€Å"smog†, â€Å"brunch†, â€Å"infotainment†, â€Å"dumbfound†, â€Å"fanzine†, â€Å"genome†, â€Å"sitcom† and so forth. They key point is that the meaning of the new word is mid-way between the two original words in some way.    Some portmanteaux are less successful. For example, it’s quite common to hear people using the ugly jargon-word â€Å"guesstimate† (or â€Å"guestimate†). This word, clearly, is a mixture of â€Å"guess† and â€Å"estimate†. But all-too often it is employed when â€Å"guess† or â€Å"estimate† would be perfectly clear and accurate.   So should writers feel free to just invent new words? Clearly many have done in the past. Shakespeare, for example, coined a variety of new usages. Perhaps the best advice would be to stick to existing words where they work as this helps keep your writing clear. At the same time, be aware that coining a new word is a possibility. In part it depends on what you are writing. It’s very common, for example, for reporters discussing some new scandal to form a portmanteau with the –gate suffix (i.e. as a reference to Watergate). Thus there is â€Å"Irangate†, â€Å"spygate†, â€Å"climategate† and so forth. A reader seeing one of these new words will instantly be able to grasp its meaning without its needing to be explained. If readers can’t make such an interpretation, however, they won’t know for sure what you intended by the word and your writing will suffer. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Vocabulary category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:12 Greek Words You Should Know20 Rules About Subject-Verb AgreementMay Have vs. Might Have

Corporate Ethics from a Bottom-up View Point Research Paper

Corporate Ethics from a Bottom-up View Point - Research Paper Example In establishing an ethics program, a bottom-up approach is recommended (Brown, 2005). This entails engaging all the employees in the discussion and thinking about ethics. This makes it easier to implement as everyone in the company may feel that they had an input in deciding about ethics program. As fact, top-down nostrums are less effective in most organizations. They tend to perpetuate even further, the varied perception toward corporate ethics as perceived by the employees and the top management. Nevertheless, senior managers are known to influence the character and the scope of the organization’s corporate ethics program. They are charged with the responsibility of ensuring the integration of the ethics into the day-to-day routine of the organization. In general, senior managers have much to play in the successful implementation and management of ethics in an organization. Thus, their take and perception on ethics matters a lot. Research has evidenced that senior manager in most companies exhibit a more positive perception towards organizational ethics as compared to the lower level managers and employees. On the other hand, lower level managers and employees tend to be more cynical when it comes to business ethics in organizations. Thus, there is a clear contrast in perception towards organizational ethics between the two groups. Even so, many senior managers have proved to be ignorant of the ethical problems and matters affecting their organization. This plays a pivotal role in discouraging ethics as well as perpetuating the differences in perception towards ethics in most organizations.... Thus, there is a clear contrast in perception towards organizational ethics between the two groups. Even so, many senior managers have proved to be ignorant of the ethical problems and matters affecting their organization. This plays a pivotal role in discouraging ethics as well as perpetuating the differences in perception towards ethics in most organizations. On the other hand, a substantial number of lower level managers and employees perceive ethics programs, mission statements, codes of conducts among other ethics-related programs to be of little help or of no value to them. The employees also believe that the top managers usually are out-of-touch in matters concerning ethics. They believe that the top managers tend to avoid any discussion about ethics. According to Byron (2006), this is attributed to the fact they are too busy for ethical issues or they are just deliberately avoiding responsibility. There is also escalating tendency of cynicism of the lower level employees and the higher level managers. The lower level employees tend to psychologically distance themselves from the top managers in several instances. The positive perception towards organizational ethics as exhibited by senior management has been attributed to various reasons. Their social interaction and their role expectation is one of the reasons. Another reason is the link between the senior mangers identity and that of the organization. In this regards, senior managers usually play a significant role in the establishment of the organization reputation. According to Trevino, Weaver and Brown (2007), they tend to identify themselves strongly with the organization as well as its image. On the contrary, lower level managers and employees are less likely to identify themselves with the

Three Main Stages in a Listening Lesson and Activities Suitable For Essay

Three Main Stages in a Listening Lesson and Activities Suitable For Each Stage - Essay Example It is evidently clear from the discussion that when the learners have been able to listen accurately, they are in a better position to refine their understanding of the grammatical structure of the content being taught and also apply it to develop their own vocabulary. The planning of a listening lesson should be systematic  so that the teacher can prepare the students for listening just before the actual listening lesson begins, and continue to prepare them during the actual listening lesson and even after the lesson. The systematic planning is necessary, owing to the fact that learners can experience problems in understanding and the subsequent interpretation of the content of the listening lesson. Thus, there are three main stages that a listening lesson should undergo in order to enhance the chances of the students’ understanding, comprehending and interpreting the content accurately. These stages are: Pre-listening is the first stage in a listening lesson, which occurs before the actual listening of the text by the learners begin. Pre-listening is a vital stage in the listening lesson, due to the fact that it acts as a preparation stage for the learners to get an idea of what they are going to listen. One of the major goals why the Pre-listening stage is important in a listening lesson is that it is the necessary stage for offering the necessary motivation to the learners. Motivation is important because it is the element that arouses the interest of the students in the text, making the students ready to listen keenly to the content. Therefore, the role of the teacher at the Pre-listening stage should be that of motivating the learners through creating interest and raising their curiosity regarding what the listening text contains.

Orhan Pamuk, The Art of Fiction Essay Example for Free

Orhan Pamuk, The Art of Fiction Essay Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 in Istanbul, where he †¨continues to live. His family had made a fortune in railroad construction during the early days of the Turkish Republic and Pamuk attended Robert College, where the children of the city‟s privileged elite received a secular, Western-style education. Early in life he developed a passion for the visual arts, but after enrolling in college to study architecture he decided he wanted to write. He is now Turkey‟s most widely read author. His first novel, CevdetBey and His Sons, was published in 1982 and was followed by The Silent House (1983), The White Castle (1985/1991 in English translation), The Black Book(1990/1994), and The New Life (1994/1997). In 2003 Pamuk received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for My Name Is Red (1998/2001), a murder mystery set in sixteenth-century †¨Istanbul and narrated by multiple voices. The novel explores themes central to his fiction: the intricacies of identity in a country that straddles East and West, sibling rivalry, the existence of doubles, the value of beauty and originality, and the anxiety of cultural influence. Snow (2002/2004), which focuses on religious and political radicalism, was the first of his novels to confront political extremism in contemporary Turkey and it confirmed his standing abroad even as it divided opinion at home. Pamuk‟s most recent book is Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003/2005), a double portrait of himself—in childhood and youth—and of the place he comes from. This interview with OrhanPamuk was conducted in two sustained sessions in London and by correspondence. The first conversation occurred in May of 2004 at the time of the British publication of Snow. A special room had been booked for the meeting—a fluorescentlit, noisily air-conditioned corporate space in the hotel basement. Pamuk arrived, wearing a black corduroy jacket over a light-blue shirt and dark slacks, and observed, â€Å"We could die here and nobody would ever find us.† We retreated to a plush, quiet corner of the hotel lobby where we spoke for three hours, pausing only for coffee and a chicken sandwich. In April of 2005 Pamuk returned to London for the publication of †¨Istanbul and we settled into the same corner of the hotel lobby to speak for two hours. At first he seemed quite strained, and with reason. Two months earlier, in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Der Tages-Anzeiger, he had said of Turkey, â€Å"thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.† This remark set off a relentless campaign against Pamuk in the Turkish nationalist press. After all, the Turkish government persists in denying the 1915 genocidal slaughter of Armenians in Turkey and has imposed laws severely restricting discussion of the ongoing Kurdish conflict. Pamuk declined to discuss the controversy for the public record in the hope that it would soon fade. In August, however, Pamuk‟s remarks in the Swiss paper resulted in his being charged under Article 301/1 of the Turkish Penal Code with â€Å"public denigration† of Turkish identity—a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. Despite outraged international press coverage of his case, as well as vigorous protest to the Turkish government by members of the European Parliament and by International PEN, when this magazine went to press in midNovember Pamuk was still slated to stand trial on December 16, 2005. INTERVIEWER How do you feel about giving interviews? ORHAN PAMUK I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences. I OrhanPamuk, Interviewed by à ngelGurrà ­a-Quintana have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there. INTERVIEWER You‟ve generally received a positive response to your books in Europe and the United States. What is your critical reception in Turkey? PAMUK The good years are over now. When I was publishing my first books, the previous generation of authors was fading away, so I was welcomed because I was a new author. INTERVIEWER When you say the previous generation, whom do you have in mind? PAMUK The authors who felt a social responsibility, authors who felt that literature serves morality and politics. They were flat realists, not experimental. Like authors in so many poor countries, they wasted their talent on trying to serve their nation. I did not want to be like them, because even in my youth I had enjoyed Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Proust—I had never aspired to the social-realist model of Steinbeck and Gorky. The literature produced in the sixties and seventies was becoming outmoded, so I was welcomed as an author of the new generation. After the mid-nineties, when my books began to sell in amounts that no one in Turkey had ever dreamed of, my honeymoon years with the Turkish press and intellectuals were over. From then on, critical reception was mostly a reaction to the publicity and sales, rather than the content of my books. Now, unfortunately, I am notorious for my political comments—most of which are picked up from international interviews and shamelessly manipulated by some Turkish nationalist journalists to make me look more radical and politically foolish than I really am. INTERVIEWER So there is a hostile reaction to your popularity? PAMUK My strong opinion is that it‟s a sort of punishment for my sales figures and political comments. But I don‟t want to continue saying this, because I sound defensive. I may be misrepresenting the whole picture. INTERVIEWER Where do you write? PAMUK I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me. The domestic, tame daily routine makes the longing for the other world, which the imagination needs to operate, fade away. So for years I always had an office or a little place outside the house to work in. I always had different flats. But once I spent half a semester in the U.S. while my ex-wife was taking her Ph.D. at Columbia University. We were living in an apartment for married students and didn‟t have any space, so I had to sleep and write in the same place. Reminders of family life were all around. This upset me. In the mornings I used to say goodbye to my wife like someone going to work. I‟d leave the house, walk around a few blocks, and come back like a person arriving at the office. Ten years ago I found a flat overlooking the Bosphorus with a view of the old city. It has, perhaps, one of the best views of Istanbul. It is a twenty-five-minute walk from where I live. It is full of books and my desk looks out onto the view. Every day I spend, on average, some ten hours there. OrhanPamuk, Interviewed by à ngelGurrà ­a-Quintana INTERVIEWER Ten hours a day? PAMUK Yes, I‟m a hard worker. I enjoy it. People say I‟m ambitious, and maybe there‟s truth in that too. But I‟m in love with what I do. I enjoy sitting at my desk like a child playing with his toys. It‟s work, essentially, but it‟s fun and games also. INTERVIEWER Orhan, your namesake and the narrator of Snow, describes himself as a clerk who sits down at the same time every day. Do you have the same discipline for writing? PAMUK I was underlining the clerical nature of the novelist as opposed to that of the poet, who has an immensely prestigious tradition in Turkey. To be a poet is a popular and respected thing. Most of the Ottoman sultans and statesmen were poets. But not in the way we understand poets now. For hundreds of years it was a way of establishing yourself as an intellectual. Most of these people used to collect their poems in manuscripts called divans. In fact, Ottoman court poetry is called divan poetry. H alf of the Ottoman statesmen produced divans. It was a sophisticated and educated way of writing things, with many rules and rituals. Very conventional and very repetitive.†¨After Western ideas came to Turkey, this legacy was combined with the romantic and modern idea of the poet as a person who burns for truth. It added extra weight to the prestige of the poet. On the other hand, a novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience. INTERVIEWER Have you ever written poetry? PAMUK I am often asked that. I did when I was eighteen and I published some poems in Turkey, but then I quit. My explanation is that I realized that a poet is someone through whom God is speaking. You have to be possessed by poetry. I tried my hand at poetry, but I realized after some time that God was not speaking to me. I was sorry about this and then I tried to imagine—if God were speaking through me, what would he be saying? I began to write very meticulously, slowly, trying to figure this out. That is prose writing, fiction writing. So I worked like a clerk. Some other writers consider this expression to be a bit of an insult. But I accept it; I work like a clerk. INTERVIEWER Would you say that writing prose has become easier for you over time? PAMUK Unfortunately not. Sometimes I feel my character should enter a room and I still don‟t know how to make him enter. I may have more self-confidence, which sometimes can be unhelpful because then you‟re not experimenting, you just write what comes to the tip of your pen. I‟ve been writing fiction for the last thirty years, so I should think that I‟ve improved a bit. And yet I still sometimes come to a dead end where I thought there never would be one. A character cannot enter a room, and I don‟t know what to do. Still! After thirty years. The division of a book into chapters is very important for my way of thinking. When writing a novel, if I know the whole story line in advance—and most of the time I do—I divide it into chapters and think up the details of what I‟d like to happen in each. I don‟t necessarily start with the first chapter and write all the others in order. When I‟m blocked, which is not a grave thing for me, I continue with whatever takes my fancy. I may write from the first to the fifth chapter, then if I‟m not enjoying it I skip to number fifteen and continue from there. INTERVIEWER 3 OrhanPamuk, Interviewed by à ngelGurrà ­a-Quintana Do you mean that you map out the entire book in advance? PAMUK Everything. My Name Is Red, for instance, has many characters, and to each character I assigned a certain number of chapters. When I was writing, sometimes I wanted to continue â€Å"being† one of the characters. So when I finished writing one of Shekure‟s chapters, perhaps chapter seven, I skipped to chapter eleven, which is her again. I liked being Shekure. Skipping from one character or persona to another can be depressing. But the final chapter I always write at the end. That is definite. I like to tease myself, ask myself what the ending should be. I can only execute the ending once. Towards the end, before finishing, I stop and rewrite most of the early chapters. INTERVIEWER Do you ever have a reader while you are working? PAMUK I always read my work to the person I share my life with. I‟m always grateful if that person says, Show me more, or, Show me what you have done today. Not only does that p rovide a bit of necessary pressure, but it‟s like having a mother or father pat you on the back and say, Well done. Occasionally, the person will say, Sorry, I don‟t buy this. Which is good. I like that ritual. I‟m always reminded of Thomas Mann, one of my role models. He used to bring the whole family together, his six children and his wife. He used to read to all his gathered family. I like that. Daddy telling a story. INTERVIEWER When you were young you wanted to be a painter. When did your love of painting give way to your love of writing? PAMUK At the age of twenty-two. Since I was seven I had wanted to be a painter, and my family had accepted this. They all thought that I would be a famous painter. But then something happened in my head—I realized that a screw was loose—and I stopped painting and immediately began writing my first novel. INTERVIEWER A screw was loose? PAMUK I can‟t say what my reasons were for doing this. I recently published a book calledIstanbul. Half of it is my autobiography until that moment and the other half is an essay about Istanbul, or more precisely, a child‟s vision of Istanbul. It‟s a combination of thinking about images and landscapes and the chemistry of a city, and a child‟s perception of that city, and that child‟s autobiography. The last sentence of the book reads, â€Å"„I don‟t want to be an artist,‟ I said. „I‟m going to be a writer.‟† And it‟s not explained. Although reading the whole book may explain something. INTERVIEWER Was your family happy about this decision? PAMUK My mother was upset. My father was somewhat more understanding because in his youth he wanted to be a poet and translated Valà ©ry into Turkish, but gave up when he was mocked by the upper-class circle to which he belonged. INTERVIEWER Your family accepted you being a painter, but not a novelist? PAMUK Yes, because they didn‟t think I would be a full-time painter. The family tradition was in civil engineering. My grandfather was a civil engineer who made lots of money building railroads. My uncles and my father lost the money, but they all went to the same engineering school, Istanbul Technical University. I was expected to go there and I said, All right, I will go there. But since I was the artist in the family, the notion was that I should become an architect. It seemed to be a satisfying solution for everyone. So I went to that university, but in the middle of architectural school I suddenly quit painting and began writing novels. INTERVIEWER Did you already have your first novel in mind when you decided to quit? Is that why you did it? PAMUK As far as I remember, I wanted to be a novelist before I knew what to write. In fact, when I did start writing I had two or three false starts. I still have the notebooks. But after about six months I started a major novel project that ultimately got published as CevdetBey and His Sons. INTERVIEWER That hasn‟t been translated into English. PAMUK It is essentially a family saga, like the Forsyte Saga or Thomas Mann ¸s Buddenbrooks. Not long after I finished it I began to regret having written something so outmoded, a very nineteenth-century novel. I regretted writing it because, around the age of twenty-five or twenty-six, I began to impose on myself the idea that I should be a modern author. By the time the novel was finally published, when I was thirty, my writing had become much more experimental. INTERVIEWER When you say you wanted to be more modern, experimental, did you have a model in mind? PAMUK At that time, the great writers for me were no longer Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, or Thomas Mann. My heroes were Virginia Woolf and Faulkner. Now I would add Proust and Nabokov to that list. INTERVIEWER The opening line of The New Life is, â€Å"I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.† Has any book had that effect on you? PAMUK The Sound and the Fury was very important to me when I was twenty-one or twentytwo. I bought a copy of the Penguin edition. It was hard to understand, especially with my poor English. But there was a wonderful translation of the book into Turkish, so I would to put the Turkish and the English together on the table and read half a paragraph from one and then go back to the other. That book left a mark on me. The residue was the voice that I developed. I soon began to write in the first person singular. Most of the time I feel better when I‟m impersonating someone else rather than writing in the third person. INTERVIEWER You say it took years to get your first novel published? PAMUK In my twenties I did not have any literary friendships; I didn‟t belong to any literary group in Istanbul. The only way to get my first book published was to submit it to a literary competition for unpublished manuscripts in Turkey. I did that and won the prize, which was to be published by a big, good publisher. At the time, Turkey‟s economy was in a bad state. They said, Yes, we‟ll give you a contract, but they delayed the novel‟s publication. INTERVIEWER Did your second novel go more easily—more quickly? PAMUK The second book was a political book. Not propaganda. I was already writing it while I waited for the first book to appear. I had given that book some two and a half years. Suddenly, one night there was a military coup. This was in 1980. The next day the would-be publisher of the first book, the CevdetBey book, said he wasn‟t going to publish it, even though we had a contract. I realized that even if I finished my second book—the political book—that day, I would not be able to publish it for five or six years because the military would not allow it. So my thoughts ran as follows: At the age of twenty-two I said I was going to be a novelist and wrote for seven years hoping to get something published in Turkey . . . and nothing. Now I‟m almost thirty and there‟s no possibility of publishing anything. I still have the two hundred and fifty pages of that unfinished political novel in one of my drawers. Immediately after the military coup, because I didn‟t want to get depressed, I started a third book—the book to which you referred, The Silent House. That‟s what I was working on in 1982 when the first book was finally published. Cevdet was well received, which meant that I could publish the book I was then writing. So the third book I wrote was the second to be published. INTERVIEWER What made your novel unpublishable under the military regime? PAMUK The characters were young upper-class Marxists. Their fathers and mothers would go to summer resorts, and they had big spacious rich houses and enjoyed being Marxists. They would fight and be jealous of each other and plot to blow up the prime minister. INTERVIEWER Gilded revolutionary circles? PAMUK Upper-class youngsters with rich people‟s habits, pretending to be ultraradical. But I was not making a moral judgment about that. Rather, I was romanticizing my youth, in a way. The idea of throwing a bomb at the prime minister would have been enough to get the book banned. So I didn‟t finish it. And you change as you write books. You cannot assume the same persona again. You cannot continue as before. Each book an author writes represents a period in his development. One‟s novels can be seen as the milestones in the development of one‟s spirit. So you cannot go back. Once the elasticity of fiction is dead, you cannot move it again. INTERVIEWER When you‟re experimenting with ideas, how do you choose the form of your novels? Do you start with an image, with a first sentence? PAMUK There is no constant formula. But I make it my business not to write two novels in the same mode. I try to change everything. This is why so many of my readers tell me, I liked this novel of yours, it‟s a shame you didn‟t write other novels like that, or, I never enjoyed one of your novels until you wrote that one—I‟ve heard that especially about The Black Book. In fact I hate to hear this. It‟s fun, and a challenge, to experiment with form and style, and language and mood and persona, and to think about each book differently. The subject matter of a book may come to me from various sources. With My Name Is Red, I wanted to write about my ambition to become a painter. I had a false start; I began to write a monographic book focused on one painter. Then I turned the painter into various painters worki ng together in an atelier. The point of view changed, because now there were other painters talking. At first I was thinking of writing about a contemporary painter, but then I thought this Turkish painter might be too derivative, too influenced by the West, so I went back in time to write about miniaturists. That was how I found my subject. Some subjects also necessitate certain formal innovations or storytelling strategies. Sometimes, for example, you‟ve just seen something, or read something, or been to a movie, or read a newspaper article, and then you think, I‟ll make a potato speak, or a dog, or a tree. Once you get the idea you start thinking about symmetry and continuity in the novel. And you feel, Wonderful, no one‟s done this before. Finally, I think of things for years. I may have ideas and then I tell them to my close friends. I keep lots of notebooks for possible novels I may write.Sometimes I don‟t write them, but if I open a notebook and begin taking notes for it, it is likely that I will write that novel. So when I‟m finishing one novel my heart may be set on one of these projects; and two months after finishing one I start writing the other. INTERVIEWER Many novelists will never discuss a work in progress. Do you also keep that a secret? PAMUK I never discuss the story. On formal occasions, when people ask what I‟m writing, I have a one-sentence stock reply: A novel that takes place in contemporary Turkey. I open up to very few people and only when I know they won‟t hurt me. What I do is talk about the gimmicks—I‟m going to make a cloud speak, for instance. I like to see how people react to them. It is a childish thing. I did this a lot when writing Istanbul. My mind is like that of a little playful child, trying to show his daddy how clever he is. INTERVIEWER The word gimmick has a negative connotation. PAMUK You begin with a gimmick, but if you believe in its literary and moral seriousness, in the end it turns into serious literary invention. It becomes a literary statement. INTERVIEWER Critics often characterize your novels as postmodern. It seems to me, however, that you draw your narrative t ricks primarily from traditional sources. You quote, for instance, fromTheThousand and One Nights and other classic texts in the Eastern tradition. PAMUK That began with The Black Book, though I had read Borges and Calvino earlier. I went with my wife to the United States in 1985, and there I first encountered the prominence and the immense richness of American culture. As a Turk coming from the Middle East, trying to establish himself as an author, I felt intimidated. So I regressed, went back to my â€Å"roots.† I realized that my generation had to invent a modern national literature. Borges and Calvino liberated me. The connotation of traditional Islamic literature was so reactionary, so political, and used by conservatives in such old-fashioned and foolish ways, that I never thought I could do anything with that material. But once I was in the United States, I realized I could go back to that material with a Calvinoesque or Borgesian mind frame. I had to begin by making a strong distinction between the religious and literary connotations of Islamic literature, so that I could easily appropriate its wealth of games, gimmicks, and parables. Turkey had a sophisticated tradition of highly refined ornamental literature. But then the socially committed writers emptied our literature of its innovative content. There are lots of allegories that repeat themselves in the various oral storytelling traditions—of China, India, Persia. I decided to use them and set them in contemporary Istanbul. It‟s an experiment—put everything together, like a Dadaist collage; The Black Bookhas this quality. Sometimes all these sources are fused together and something new emerges. So I set all these rewritten stories in Istanbul, added a detective plot, and out came The Black Book. But at its source was the full strength of American culture and my desire to be a serious experimental writer. I could not write a social commentary about Turkey‟s problems—I was intimidated by them. So I had to try something else. INTERVIEWER Were you ever interested in doing social commentary through literature? PAMUK No. I was reacting to the older generation of novelists, especially in the eighties. I say this with all due respect, but their subject matter was very narrow and parochial. INTERVIEWER Let‟s go back to before The Black Book. What inspired you to write †¨The White Castle? It‟s the first book where you employ a theme that recurs throughout the rest of your novels—impersonation. Why do you think this idea of becoming somebody else crops up so often in your fiction? PAMUK It‟s a very personal thing. I have a very competitive brother who is only eighteen months older than me. In a way, he was my father—my Freudian father, so to speak. It was he who became my alter ego, the representation of authority. On the other hand, we also had a competitive and brotherly comradeship. A very complicated relationship. I wrote extensively about this in Istanbul. I was a typical Turkish boy, good at soccer and enthusiastic about all sorts of games and competitions. He was very successful in school, better than me. I felt jealousy towards him, and he was jealous of me too. He was the reasonable and responsible person, the one our superiors addressed. While I was paying attention to games, he paid attention to rules. We were competing all the time. And I fancied being him, that kind of thing. It set a model. Envy, jealousy—these are heartfelt themes for me. I always worry about how much my brother‟s strength or his success might have influenced me. This is an essential part of my spirit. I am aware of that, so I put some distance between me and those feelings. I know they are bad, so I have a civilized person‟s determination to fight them. I‟m not saying I‟m a victim of jealousy. But this is the galaxy of nerve points that I try to deal with all the time. And of course, in the end, it becomes the subject matter of all my stories. In The White Castle, for instance, the almost sadomasochistic relationship between the two main characters is based on my relationship wi th my brother. On the other hand, this theme of impersonation is reflected in the fragility Turkey feels when faced with Western culture. After writing The White Castle, I realized that this jealousy—the anxiety about being influenced by someone else—resembles Turkey‟s position when it looks west. You know, aspiring to become Westernized and then being accused of not being authentic enough. Trying to grab the spirit of Europe and then feeling guilty about the imitative drive. The ups and downs of this mood are reminiscent of the relationship between competitive brothers. INTERVIEWER Do you believe the constant confrontation between Turkey‟s Eastern and Western impulses will ever be peacefully resolved? PAMUK I‟m an optimist. Turkey should not worry about having two spirits, belonging to two different cultures, having two souls. Schizophrenia makes you intelligent. You may lose your relation with reality—I‟m a fiction writer, so I don‟t think that‟s such a bad thing—but you shouldn‟t worry about your schizophrenia. If you worry too much about one part of you killing the other, you‟ll be left with a single spirit. That is worse than having the sickness. This is my theory. I try to propagate it in Turkish politics, among Turkish politicians who demand that the country should have one consistent soul—that it should belong to either the East or the West or be nationalistic. I‟m critical of that monistic outlook. INTERVIEWER How does that go down in Turkey? PAMUK The more the idea of a democratic, liberal Turkey is established, the more my thinking is accepted. Turkey can join the European Union only with this vision. It‟s a way of fighting against nationalism, of fighting the rhetoric of Us against Them. INTERVIEWER And yet in Istanbul, in the way you romanticize the city, you seem to mourn the loss of the Ottoman Empire. PAMUK I‟m not mourning the Ottoman Empire. I‟m a Westernizer. I‟m pleased that the Westernization process took place. I‟m just criticizing the limited way in which the ruling elite—meaning both the bureaucracy and the new rich—had conceived of Westernization. They lacked the confidence necessary to create a national culture rich in its own symbols and rituals. They did not strive to create an Istanbul culture that would be an organic combination of East and West; they just put Western and Eastern things together. There was, of course, a strong local Ottoman culture, but that was fading away little by little. What they had to do, and could not possibly do enough, was invent a strong local culture, which would be a combination—not an imitation—of the Eastern past and the Western present. I try to do the same kind of thing in my books. Probably new generations will do it, and entering the European Union will not destroy Turkish identity but make it flourish and give us more freedom and self-confidence to invent a new Turkish culture. Slavishly imitating the West or slavishly imitating the old dead Ottoman culture is not the solution. You have to do something with these things and shouldn‟t have anxiety about belonging to one of them too much. INTERVIEWER In Istanbul, however, you do seem to identify with the foreign, Weste rn gaze over your own city. PAMUK But I also explain why a Westernized Turkish intellectual can identify with the Western gaze—the making of Istanbul is a process of identification with the West. There is always this dichotomy, and you can easily identify with the Eastern anger too. Everyone is sometimes a Westerner and sometimes an Easterner—in fact a constant combination of the two. I like Edward Said‟s idea of Orientalism, but since Turkey was never a colony, the romanticizing of Turkey was never a problem for Turks. Western man did not humiliate the Turk in the same way he humiliated the Arab or Indian. Istanbul was invaded only for two years and the enemy boats left as they came, so this did not leave a deep scar in the spirit of the nation. What left a deep scar was the loss of the Ottoman Empire, so I don‟t have that anxiety, that feeling that Westerners look down on me. Though after the founding of the Republic, there was a sort of intimidation because Turks wanted to Westernize but couldn‟t go far enough, which left a feeling of cultural inferiority that we have to address and that I occasionally may have. On the other hand, the scars are not as deep as other nations that were occupied for two hundred years, colonized. Turks were never suppressed by Western powers. The suppression that Turks suffered was self-inflicted; we erased our own history because it was practical. In that suppression there is a sense of fragility. But that self-imposed Westernization also brought isolation. Indians saw their oppressors face-to-face. Turks were strangely isolated from the Western world they emulated. In the 1950s and even 1960s, when a foreigner came to stay at the Istanbul Hilton it would be noted in all the newspapers. Do you believe that there is a canon or that one should even exist? We have heard of a Western canon, but what about a non-Western canon? PAMUK Yes, there is another canon. It should be explored, developed, shared, criticized, and then accepted. Right now the so-called Eastern canon is in ruins. The glorious texts are all around but there is no will to put them together. From the Persian classics, through to all the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese texts, these things should be assessed critically. As it is now, the canon is in the hands of Western scholars. That is the center of distribution and communication. INTERVIEWER The novel is a very Western cultural form. Does it have any place in the Eastern tradition? PAMUK The modern novel, dissociated from the epic form, is essentially a non-Oriental thing. Because the novelist is a person who does not belong to a community, who does not share the basic instincts of community, and who is thinking and judging with a different culture than the one he is experiencing. Once his consciousness is different from that of the community he belongs to, he is an outsider, a loner. And the richness of his text comes from that outsider‟s voyeuristic vision. Once you develop the habit of looking at the world like that and writing about it in this fashion, you have the desire to disassociate from the community. This is the model I was thinking about in Snow. INTERVIEWER Snow is your most political book yet published. How did you conceive of it? PAMUK When I started becoming famous in Turkey in the mid-1990s, at a time when the war against Kurdish guerillas was strong, the old leftist authors and the new modern liberals wanted me to help them, to sign petitions—they began to ask me to do political things unrelated to my books. Soon the esta blishment counterattacked with a campaign of character assassination. They began calling me names. I was very angry. After a while I wondered, What if I wrote a political novel in which I explored my own spiritual dilemmas—coming from an uppermiddle-class family and feeling responsible for those who had no political representation? I believed in the art of the novel. It is a strange thing how that makes you an outsider. I told myself then, I will write a political novel. I started to write it as soon as I finished My Name Is Red. INTERVIEWER Why did you set it in the small town of Kars? PAMUK It is notoriously one of the coldest towns in Turkey. And one of the poorest. In the early eighties, the whole front page of one of the major newspapers was about the poverty of Kars. Someone had calculated that you could buy the entire town for around a million dollars. The political †¨climate was difficult when I wanted to go there. The vicinity of the town is mostly populated by Kurds, but the center is a combination of Kurds, people from Azerbaijan, Turks, and all other sorts. There used to be Russians and Germans too. There are religious differences as well, Shia and Sunni. The war the Turkish government was waging against the Kurdish guerillas was so fierce that it was impossible to go as a tourist. I knew I could not simply go there as a novelist, so I asked a newspaper editor with whom I‟d been in touch for a press pass to visit the area. He is influential and he personally called the mayor and the police chief to let them know I was coming.