What formal means are used to substantivize the underlined words.

1) He who has a why to live can bear almost any how (Nietzsche). 2) You do this not because you can figure out the specific whys and hows, but because you trust His love and wisdom (Myers). 3) Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody (Chandler). 4) God is not much interested in my stage image – the me I often present to others (Baty). 5) Discuss the dos and don’ts of choosing a job.

Characterise each noun below following the model.

Model: doctor – common, animate, human, countable noun

John, despair, house, horse, music, water, cattle, sky

Define the gender of the nouns below.

lady, boy, table, cat, mare, parent, chairman, chairperson, father, sun

The new tendency in the English language known as “Inclusive language” implies the use of the special language tactics to avoid emphasising the gender of the noun in order to be politcorrect. Explain how it works in the examples below.

а) hostess, stewardess à flight attendant; statesman à politician, leader; fireman à fire fighter; businessman, business-woman à executive; policeman à police officer; sportsman, sportswoman à athlete

b) 1) …no one can embarrass a young person in public so much as an adult to whom he or she is related (Angelou). 2 ) As is the rule with Chopra’s books, the proceedings finish with clearly laid-out instructions to help the reader find the magic lying at the heart of his or her own world (Time). 3) A tourist, browsing in a Paris shop, eating in an Italian ristorante, or idling along a Hong Kong street, will encounter three or four languages as she negotiates the buying of a blouse, the paying of a check, or the choosing of a trinket (Angelou). 4) These programs and services can make a big difference in helping a child reach her full potential (Woman’s Day). 5) Every student who turns in their paper late will lose half of their grade. 6) One gets into the way of imagining a person when one hears them talked about (Christie). 7) I don’t want to spend an hour listening to someone blame their mother (Ladies’ Home Journal).

Give feminine gender nouns for the given masculine gender. Name the lexical means of gender expression.

boy-friend, landlord, lion, drake, bridegroom, stallion, actor, bull-calf, man-producer, master, wizard, count, baron, bachelor, cock, buck, tom-cat, cock-sparrow, he-bear, jack-ass, businessman, executor, peacock, beau, widower, hero

Characterise the cases of personification below. Describe the grammatical mechanism and semantic grounds for it.

а) 1) “What kind of car do you have?” Ochs’s eyes twinkled. “British Jaguar. She runs like the wind” (Isles). 2)”We have our differences, gentlemen, but the sea doesn’t care about that. The sea – well, she tries to kill us all regardless what flag we fly” (Clancy). 3)”Look at the moon up there. You see her very plainly, don’t you? She ’s very real. But if the sun were to shine you wouldn’t be able to see her at all” (Christie). 4) “It looks like a lot of boats are heading into the North Atlantic… Two old Novembers. One’s a raven conversion doing an ELINT job off the cape. The other one’s sitting off King’s Bay making a damned nuisance of itself. ” Ryan smiled to himself. An American or allied ship was a she; the Russians used the male pronoun for a ship; and the intelligence community usually referred to a Soviet ship as it (Clancy). 5) Russia will not solve the crisis using Western methods or Western thinking. She must turn inward, build on her own spiritual experience and her own spiritual insights to move ahead into a new future... The very least the Russian nation can do now for Orthodoxy is to protect her from the outside world - at least for a few years - to allow her to get back on her feet and to embark on the course that Russia and Russians demand of Her (Moscow News).

b) 1) The Grim Reaper is often thought of as a skeleton in a cloak with a hood, carrying a scythe to reap (=gather) his crop (=the dead) (The Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture). 2) I had been stalking the bluebottle fly for five minutes, wai­ting for him to sit down. He didn’t want to sit down. He just wan­ted to do wing-overs and sing the prologue to Pagllacci. I had the fly swatter poised in mid-air and I was all set. There was a patch of bright sunlight on the corner of the desk and I knew that sooner or later that was where he was going to fly. But when he did I didn’t even see him at first. The buzzing stopped and there he was (Chandler).

 

 

Seminar 4