The Mockingbirds in To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee...

Walt Whitman’s 1859 poem â€Å"Out of the Cradle Rocking Endlessly† depicts the mockingbird as a symbol of innocence that chants or sings of fond memories from the past. By contrast, Harper Lee’s famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, written almost a century after Whitman’s poem, portrays the mockingbird as innocent but as a fragile creature with horrific memories – memories of discrimination, isolation, and violence. Harper Lee wrote her novel, which is rooted in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, in the Deep South, during a time of segregation and discrimination, social issues which can be seen not only in the novel but were witnessed by Harper Lee in her own life. While Lee does insert bits and pieces of her own life†¦show more content†¦She was part of a southern family related to the confederate general Robert E. Lee. Her father was a lawyer and newspaper editor. Harper Lee attended Huntington College and then the University of Alabama as well as attended Oxford University as an exchange student for one year (McGovern 2). Lee entered law school briefly but soon left for New York to pursue a writing career. Harper Lees father, similar to Atticus, Scout’s father, had defended two black men who were accused of killing a white storekeeper; both men, father and son, were later hanged (Big Read). Although the Civil Rights movement had begun and society was making some positive changes such as Brown versus Board of Education (1954) which â€Å"held that the racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment† (PBS). While these events were creating positive changes in society and in the government, real-life injustices such as Amasa Lee’s case and the Scottsboro trials still remained. It was events like these which helped to inspire Lee to write a book that brings to light the social issues of the day such a s social class distinction and, of course, racism. However, the novel also establishes the idea that not all were guilty of heinous behavior and ideology – some, like the mockingbird, were innocent. To understand the importance of the theme of the mockingbird in Lee’s novel, one must understandShow MoreRelatedKill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee1049 Words   |  5 PagesTo Kill a Mockingbird: How a Story could be based on True Events in Everyday LifeDaisy GaskinsCoastal Pines Technical Collegeâ€Æ'Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama. Her father was a former newspaper editor and proprietor, who had served as a state senator and practiced as a lawyer in Monroeville. Also Finch was known as the maiden name of Lee’s mother. With that being said Harper Lee became a writer like her father, but she became a American writer, famous for her race relations novel â€Å"ToRead MoreTo Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee1000 Words   |  4 Pagesworld-wide recognition to the many faces of prejudice is an accomplishment of its own. Author Harper Lee has had the honor to accomplish just that through her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, a moving and inspirational story about a young girl learning the difference between the good and the bad of the world. In the small town of Monroeville, Alabama, Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926. Growing up, Harper Lee had three siblings: two sisters and an older brother. She and her siblings grew up modestlyRead MoreKill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee1290 Words   |  6 PagesHarper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird during a rough period in American history, also known as the Civil Rights Movement. This plot dives into the social issues faced by African-Americans in the south, like Tom Robinson. Lee felt that the unfair treatment towards blacks were persistent, not coming to an end any time in the foreseeable future. This dark movement drove her to publish this novel hopeful that it would encourage the society to realize that the harsh racism must stop. Lee effectivelyRead MoreKill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee873 Words   |  4 PagesIn the book, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee illustrates that â€Å"it†™s a sin to kill a mockingbird† throughout the novel by writing innocent characters that have been harmed by evil. Tom Robinson’s persecution is a symbol for the death of a mockingbird. The hunters shooting the bird would in this case be the Maycomb County folk. Lee sets the time in the story in the early 1950s, when the Great Depression was going on and there was poverty everywhere. The mindset of people back then was that blackRead MoreKill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee1695 Words   |  7 PagesIn To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee presents as a ‘tired old town’ where the inhabitants have ‘nowhere to go’ it is set in the 1930s when prejudices and racism were at a peak. Lee uses Maycomb town to highlight prejudices, racism, poverty and social inequality. In chapter 2 Lee presents the town of Maycomb to be poverty stricken, emphasised through the characterisation of Walter Cunningham. When it is discovered he has no lunch on the first day of school, Scout tries to explain the situation to MissRead MoreKill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee963 Words   |  4 Pagesgrowing up, when older characters give advice to children or siblings.Growing up is used frequently in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Harper Lee uses the theme growing up in To Kill a Mockingbird to change characters opinion, develop characters through their world, and utilizes prejudice to reveal growing up. One major cause growing up is used in To Kill a Mockingbird is to represent a change of opinion. One part growing up was shown in is through the trial in part two of the novelRead MoreKill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee1052 Words   |  5 PagesTo Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee takes place in Maycomb County, Alabama in the late 30s early 40s , after the great depression when poverty and unemployment were widespread throughout the United States. Why is the preconception of racism, discrimination, and antagonism so highly related to some of the characters in this book? People often have a preconceived idea or are biased about one’s decision to live, dress, or talk. Throughout To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee examines the preconceptionRead MoreTo Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee567 Words   |  2 Pages To Kill A Mockingbird is a novel written by Harper Lee. It is a novel that addresses issues of race, class, gender roles and destructions of innocence. The title is symbolic to the plot of the novel. Moreover, it serves as a metaphor which in turn serves as a warning for people to judge their own souls, rather than what is seen by the eyes. The mocking bad is used as a symbol of innocence, yet people are hurt throughout the novel. As a metaphor because, initially, the author writes, to kill a mockingRead MoreKill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee1656 Words   |  7 Pagesâ€Å"Mockingbirds don’t do any harm but make music for us †¦ that’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird†, is a famous quote from the book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Atticus, the father of the main character Scout, says this to her and her brother Jem when they receive rifles for Christmas. This book is considered a classic due to the allegory between the book title and the trial that occurs about halfway through the book. In the beginning of To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout is six. She is an innocentRead MoreHarper Lee and to Kill a Mockingbird931 Words   |  4 PagesHarper Lee and her Works Harper Lee knew first hand about the life in the south in the 1930s. She was born in Monroeville, Alabama in 1926 (Castleman 2). Harper Lee was described by one of her friends as Queen of the Tomboys (Castleman 3). Scout Finch, the main character of Lees Novel, To Kill a Mockinbird, was also a tomboy. Many aspects of To Kill a Mockingbird are autobiographical (Castleman 3). Harper Lees parents were Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Finch Lee. She was the youngest

Media Collapse And The War On Iraq - 1626 Words

Media Collapse and the War on Iraq During Bush’s War on Terror, the US media unquestionably fell short of its normative function, a point argued by Gary Kamiya in his article for Salon, by failing to provide factual, unbiased and relevant information on the war in Iraq. This essay will use Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model to explain how flak and sourcing forced the majority of journalists to report only news that backed the government’s arguments for war, thus skewing the public’s perception of events in the aftermath of 9/11. It will then explain, with reference to John Reith’s Public Service Principles and Johan Galtung’s public sphere model, what the normative function of media in a Libertarian society should be, and how this could be better met by the media during wartime by a better balance of published opinions for and against the war, and better fact checking by journalists. In order to assess how the media â€Å"collapsed† we must first know its normative function. The Public Service Principles, an idea commonly associated with the BBC’s first Director General John Reith, tells us that the media must provide a â€Å"diversity of content reflecting the social and cultural diversity of the public and reflecting a full range of public opinion† (Thompson, â€Å"Media, Society and Politics†). During Bush’s War on Terror, the media failed to present a balance of views both for and against the war. When Charles Kennedy, the â€Å"most famous democrat in the country, raised questionsShow MoreRelatedEssay about U.S.-Middle East Relations724 Words   |  3 Pagescountries in the past. It goes without saying; the most recent is the current gulf war led by George W. Bush and of course the previous gulf war led by his father George H.W. Bush. With neighboring Iran, there have been quarrels such as the Iran-Contra affair. This involved a political scandal in which Ronald Reagans administration sold military arms to Iran. 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The Important of Semantics Knowledge in Teaching English Free Essays

Speech act theory and the analysis of conversations. Sequencing and interpretation in pragmatic theory Jacques Moeschler Department of Linguistics University of Geneva 1. Introduction Conversation has recently become a focus of interest for speech act theory and several proposals have been formulated concerning the possible extension of speech act theory to the analysis of conversation. We will write a custom essay sample on The Important of Semantics Knowledge in Teaching English or any similar topic only for you Order Now This debate (cf. Searle et al. 1992) has to be interpreted as a reactive move rather than as a natural extension of the domain of speech act theory. Nevertheless, this reaction, either sceptical (cf. Searle 1992) or optimistic (cf. Dascal 1992, Vanderveken 1992 and 1994), has brought interesting issues which contrast with the various attempts by linguists at extending speech act theory to the domain of discourse1 . The first purpose of this paper is to explicit the divergence between philosophers and linguists about the possible extension of speech act theory to discourse analysis. This paper has another purpose : it also deals with the possible domain of pragmatic theory with respect to discourse analysis. I shall argue that the main purpose of discourse analysis is the definition of necessary and sufficient 2 MOESCHLER conditions for sequencing and interpretating utterances in discourse. I claim that these two aspects of discourse (sequencing and interpretation) are intrinsically related and cannot be accounted for independently from each other. I claim furthermore that speech act theory cannot give any insight into the sequencing and interpretation problems, because speech act theory is neither a theory of interpretation (it is a theory of meaning) nor a global theory of action. Finally I show how a radical pragmatic theory (in the Gricean sense) accounts for the sequencing and interpretation problems. 2 2. Speech act theory and conversation There is a common sense argument shared by philosophers and linguists in favour of the possible extension of speech act theory to discourse analysis. This argument is the following : Speech acts are not isolated moves in communication : they appear in more global units of communication, defined as conversations or discourses. Vanderveken (1994, 53) gives an explicit version of this thesis when asserting that speakers perform their illocutionary acts within entire conversations where they are most often in verbal interaction with other speakers who reply to them and perform in turn their own speech acts with the same collective intention to pursue with success a certain type of discourse. Thus, above all, the use of language is a social form of linguistic behavior. It consists, in general, of ordered sequences of utterances made by several speakers who tend by their verbal interactions to achieve common discursive goals such as discussing a question, deciding together how to react to a certain situation, negociating, consulting or more simply to exchange greetings and talk for its own sake. For terminological convenience, I will call such ordered sequences of speech acts conversations. SPEECH ACTS AND CONVERSATION 3 The basis of this argument is that conversation is made of sequences of speech acts. This certainly is a plausible theoretical claim3 , but gives rise to a certain number of objections, raised mainly by Searle (1992) in his skeptical argument. These objections concern essentially the possible relations between questions and answers in conversation, and can be stated as follows. First of all, questions are defined in speech acts theory as requests for information, and as such impose representative acts as replies. But this cannot be correct, since a reply may have another illocutionary point (as a promise) if the question is a request for a promise. Secondly, certain questions require a directive as a reply, and not a representative, when the question contains a modal auxiliary verb (cf. the exchange : â€Å"Shall I marry Sally ? † – â€Å"Yes, do†/ â€Å"No, don’t† / â€Å"*Yes, you shall† / â€Å"*No, you shall not†). The third counter-example is given by indirect reponses, which do not satisfy syntactic conditions, although the answer is pragmatically appropriate. To these three arguments, we could add an even more embarrassing one : answer is not a specific illocutionary force, which could be analysed by the seven components of illocutionary force (cf. Searle Vanderveken 1985). Answer is a functional discursive qualification, but certainly not the semantic definition of a speech act type. These objections make explicit an important difference between the structure of illocutionary acts and the structure of conversation. In speech act theory, and more precisely in illocutionary logic, illocutionary force is decomposed into seven components, which are all necessary conditions for the successful and non defective accomplishment of illocutionary acts. These components (cf. Searle Vanderveken 1985, 12-20) are the illocutionary point, the degree of strength of the illocutionary point, the mode of achievement of the illocutionary point, the propositional content conditions of the illocutionary act, the preparatory conditions of the illocutionary act, the sincerity conditions of the illocutionary act, and finally the degree of strength of the sincerity conditions. That predictions 4 MOESCHLER bout the sequencing in conversation are difficult to come by follows from the fact that the internal structure of illocutionary acts (and more specifically the set of conditions for success) cannot determine the set of possible replies for any type of illocutionary act. By contrast, discourse analysis, while specifying sequential relations in discourse between speech acts, does not constrain sequencing in conversation depending on the set of possible components of illocutionary force. The constraints are not structural, in the sense of speech ac t theory, they are on the contrary functional. This means that the basic structures of conversation (exchanges) are made of lower order conversational units (moves) which carry functional properties. If speech act theory has been used so extensively within this paradigm of discourse analysis4 , it is because the functional properties associated with speech acts as units of meaning have been exported to speech acts as units of communication and discourse. This has several consequences for the description of speech acts within discourse analysis. The first consequence is that the structure of conversation is not only based on a hierarchy of constituency, but is also functional. To take a classical discourse model (cf. Sinclair Coulthard 1975), discourse categories (exchange, move, and act) are defined functionally. For instance, an act of ELICITATION is part of a move of ELICITATION, which governs an exchange of ELICITATION. Thus all discourse constituents receive a communicative function, that is, an interactive meaning. But we are here far from the conventional and semantic-meaning defining speech acts in speech act theory5 . As we have just noticed, discourse analysis supposes principles of constituency which allow interpretive or functional inheritance. If we assume, as above, that an ELICITATION is a two-place predicate relating utterance-units and discourse-units, we must assume too that the functional properties of the smallest discourse units (acts) are inherited by the larger constituents (moves and exchanges). This principle is structurally identical to the projection principle in generative grammar : a phrase is a maximal projection of a lexical head (for SPEECH ACTS AND CONVERSATION 5 instance NP is a maximal projection of a N); in discourse, then, an exchange is thus functionally a maximal projection of an act. The principle of functional projection is not a necessary consequence of discourse analysis. Another classical discourse model, the Geneva hierachicalfunctional model (cf. Roulet et al. 1985, Moeschler 1985, Moeschler 1989a) makes a different claim : functional values do not stand in a one-to-one relationship with discourse structures. In this model, there is a basic difference between rules of discourse formation and principles of functional interpretation. The structural dimension is based on the following rules of formation : R1 Units of type Exchange are made of units of type Move. R1’ Exchanges are composed of at least two Moves. R2 Units of type Move are made of units types Act, Move or Exchange. R2’ Moves composed by a single Act are well-formed. R2†Moves composed by an Act and another discourse-unit type (Move or Exchange) are well-formed. R2†Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ Moves composed by a single Exchange are ill-formed. Thus, the following discourse structures are well-formed : (1) a. b. c. where E = exchange, M = move, A = act The structures in (1a-c) are the hierarchical representations corresponding to the following short exchanges in (2)-(4): (2) A B A B A Are you ready ? We can leave. Are you ready ? Why ? We must leave now. (3) 6 B (4) A B A B A MOESCHLER Okay, but when I am in a hurry, I always forget something. Are you ready ? Because we must leave now. Yes I am Good. Let’s go Let’s go Okay We can represent the bracketting structures given in (1) by the following tree-schemata : (5) (a) E M2 A We can leave. M1 A Are you ready ? (b) E E M2 M M1 M1 M2 M M1 A A A A A A A A A A A A A Are you ready ? Why ? We must leave now. Okay, but when I am in a hurry, I always forget something. (c) M1 E M2 M3 E M2 M3 Are you ready ? Because we must leave now. Yes I am Good Let’s go Let’s go Okay These structures mean that in (5a) the exchange is made of two moves both composed of a single act, in (5b) the exchange is composed of two moves, the second of which is made of an exchange with two moves, and a move composed by an act and a move, and in (5c) the three-move exchange contains in the first move an exchange made of three moves. SPEECH ACTS AND CONVERSATION 7 What are the functional counterparts of the structural aspects of conversational discourse ? There are two dimensions of functional properties associated with the structural device : the first dimension is a restricted inheritance principle, and the second, a general procedure for assigning interpretation to discourse constituents. The first principle is a principle of functional composition : Principle of functional composition (i) Constituents of exchanges bear illocutionary functions. (ii) Constituents of moves bear interactive functions. Definitions (i) Illocutionary functions are of three types : initiative, reactive, and reactive-initiative. (ii) Interactive functions are of two types : directive, and subordinate. The first move of an exchange (M1) is always initiative; the final move of an exchange is always reactive. For instance M2 in the exchange is the reactive move, and M1 is the initiative move. An inserted move (for example M2 in the structure ) is a reactive-initiative move. A directive (D) constituent is of the type move or act, and contains the act from which the move receives its illocutionary function; a subordinate (constituent (of rank act, move or exchange) is cancellable, and generally completes, argues for, or justifies the main or directive constituent of the move. We can now ive the complete hierachical-functional structures given in (1) and (5) as (6) and (6’) : (6) a. b. c. 8 MOESCHLER where E = exchange, sE = subordinate exchange, M = move, sM = subordinate move, dM = directive move, sA = subordinate act, dA = directive act (6’) (a) E M2 dA We can leave. M1 dA Are you ready ? (b) E M2 dM sE M1 M1 M 2 dM dA dA dA sA sA dA dA sA dA dA dA dA dA Are you ready ? Why ? We must leave now. Okay, but when I am in a hurry, I always forget something. (c) M1 E M2 M3 sE M1 M2 M3 Are you ready ? Because we must leave now. Yes I am Good Let’s go Let’s go Okay The second functional counterpart of the stuctural device is a procedure of interpretation assignment. It is not sufficient to have functional values assigned to discourse constituents; required is also to have a procedure governing the assignment of a functional interpretation to each constituent. In other words, the types of structures given in (1), (5) or (6) are syntactic representations of discourse; we need in addition a semantics, which can for instance assign to the hierarchical-functional structures given in (6) the following functional interpretations : SPEECH ACTS AND CONVERSATION 9 (7) a. b. How to cite The Important of Semantics Knowledge in Teaching English, Essay examples