The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ by Langston Hughes

The poem 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' is the earlier production of Langston Hughes' poetic career. He was only eighteen years old and a recent graduate from high school. He wrote this poem on a train while he was going to Mexico to live with his father. When the train was crossing the Mississippi River, the sun was setting, and the poet was attracted by the beauty of the sight. He was reminded of its role in thriving and sustaining human civilization, along with its role in slavery and the slave trade in America. He had a long journey ahead of him. He took out an envelope containing his father's letter, and at the back of it he drafted the poem within ten to fifteen minutes.

Sociolinguistics and The Sociolinguistic Development of the Child

I defined sociolinguistics as 'the study of language in relation to society', implying (intentionally) that sociolinguistics is part of the study of language. Thus, the value of sociolinguistics is the light which it throws on the nature of language in general, or on the characteristics of some particular language. As we might expect, students of society have found that facts about language can illuminate their understanding - after all, it is hard to think of any characteristic of a society which is as distinctive as its language, or as important for its functioning. 'The study of society in relation to language' (the converse of our definition of sociolinguistics) defines what is generally called THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE.

At a glance: 'The Death of the Hired Man' by Robert Frost

 The poem "The Death of the Hired Man" is a dramatic narrative poem. It describes the death of an old servant (hired man) in the house of his master, Warren. Warren and his wife, Mary, have sharply divided opinions on the old servant, and their attitudes to him are diametrically opposite. It vividly describes the humane considerations of Mary, and the cruel feelings and unkind considerations of Warren, for their old servant Silas, who comes back to their house after quite a long time in a very weak condition of health, and dies there within a short time after his arrival.

How We Learn to Speak: The Stages of Language Acquisition

 

First language acquisition refers to how infants and young children acquire their native language naturally, without formal teaching. It’s a universal process that happens in predictable stages, although the exact ages may vary slightly by child. Studies of linguistic development have revealed a series of crucial stages in children as they master their native languages. Though the correlation of age with the given stage can vary remarkably from child to child, the particular sequences of stages seem to be the same for all children in first language acquisition.

Syntactic process

 The syntactic process of a language refers to the way words are arranged and combined to form phrases, clauses, and sentences according to the rules of grammar. It is the mechanism that allows language to create complex and meaningful sentence structures from simple elements. There are some major syntactic processes, and these are given below:

Discontinuous constituents:

Discontinuous constituents are when a phrase or clause is broken up by other words, yet the separated parts still form a single grammatical unit. For example, in the English language, the phrasal verb ‘pulled down’ in the sentence ‘he pulled the thief down’ is a discontinuous constituent separated by the ‘the thief’.

Recursion:

Recursion in syntax is the process by which a grammatical rule can be applied to its own output, allowing structures to be nested inside each other indefinitely. Recursion explains why human language can generate an infinite number of sentences from a finite set of rules and words.

Concatenation:

Concatenation in syntax is the process that places words one after another to build larger structures. For example, in the sentence ‘the boy runs’, we see that the structure is subject ( the boy)+ verb (runs).

Conjoining:

Conjoining or coordination is the process that links two or more units of the same type using conjugations. For example:

the scene of the movie was in Singapore.

The scene of the play was in Singapore.

The two sentences can be turned into a new sentence by the process of conjoining: the scene of the play and the movie was in Dhaka city.

Embedding:

Embedding in syntax occurs when a subordinate clause is embedded within a superordinate or main clause, as in the example: "The boy who spoke to you is my brother."