Aristophanis essays

Aristophanis essays By most accounts Aristophanes was the greatest comic writer of his day. On his shoulders alone rests an entire age of comedy. By the time Aristophanes began to write his comedies, the people of Athens were increasingly demoralized by the ongoing conflicts of the Peloponnesian War. That is why in most of his plays there are tones of apprehension and grief. Lysistrata was written twenty-one years into the Peloponnesian War. Although the play is light-hearted, it was written out of the writers grief over the thousand of men who died in the terrible defeat that the Athenians suffered in Syracuse. The play begins in a public square in Athens. There Lysistrata awaits the other women to explain to them the details of her plan to bring peace in Greece. At the time Athens was at war with Sparta and other cities. Most of the men where at war, a lot of them died, and the rest would come back only to relax for a few days enjoy the pleasure of their wives and go back to war. To Lysistrata that was unacceptable, so she gathered the women from Athens, Sparta and the rest of the cities that were at war and made them take an oath that they will not sleep with their husbands until peace was made and the war would be finally over. The other women were against it at the beginning, but soon they realized that a sex strike was the only thing that they could use to convince their husbands to make peace. At the same time that the meeting was going on the elderly women of Athens took over Acropolis. Acropolis then became their fortress, all the women gathered inside and would not come out until peace was made. They were constantly threaded by the men to stop their strike but with no results. Some women did break but Lysistrata was always there to convince them that this had to be done. Her plan worked and Aristophanes used the example of Myrrhine and her husband Cinesias to show us how the women tortured the men and made them get toge...

Definition and Examples of Speakers in Language Studies

Definition and Examples of Speakers in Language Studies In linguistics and communication studies, a speaker is one who speaks: the producer of an utterance.  In rhetoric, a speaker is an orator: one who delivers a speech or formal address to an audience. In literary studies, a speaker is a  narrator: one who tells a story.   Observations On Speakers The average adult English speaker has a vocabulary of around thirty thousand words and speaks ten to twelve sounds per second. Most of us in modern America, apart from the very solitary and the very garrulous, speak anywhere from 7,500 to 22,500 words a day. Grabbing these words, one every four hundred milliseconds on average, and arranging them in sequences that are edited and reviewed for grammar and appropriateness before theyre spoken requires a symphony of neurons working quickly and precisely. Pronouncing (or signing) words in any language requires that your brain coordinate with your body in order to turn the electricity of nerve impulses into waves of sound (or, if you sign, of gesture and motion). So far, scientists have been able to draw only simple models of how the control of language toggles back and forth between the brain and the body.(Michael Erard, Um, Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean. Random House, 2008)Since native speakers of a language can not have memorized each phrase or sentence of their language, given that the set of phrases and sentences is infinite, their linguistic knowledge cannot be characterized as a list of phrases or sentences. . . . If a list of phrases is insufficient, then how can we characterize the native speakers linguistic knowledge? We will say that a speakers linguistic knowledge can be characterized as a grammar consisting of a finite set of rules and principles that form the basis for the speakers ability to produce and comprehend the unlimited number of phrases and sentences of the language.(Adrian Akmajian, et al., Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication, 5th ed. MIT Press, 2001) We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearers knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations). . . . A record of natural speech will show numerous false starts, deviations from rules, changes of plan in mid-course, and so on. The problem for the linguist, as well as the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that have been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance.(Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press, 1965) Pronunciation: SPEE-ker Etymology: From the Old English, speak Source: Adrian Akmajian, et al., Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication, 5th ed. MIT Press, 2001 Michael Erard, Um, Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean. Random House, 2008 Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press, 1965