Findings: Respondent 5

Lastly, the final respondent 5 who I assumed to be in neuroticism category for her personality based on her postings in Facebook. Below are the results of her answers from the given questionnaires:

Questions & Answers from Respondent 5

As for respondent 5, she, herself admits that she is an anxious, insecure and a sensitive person. She also confessed that she would feel bored, lonely and sleepy during her leisure time. This shows that the respondent is always moody and tense once in a while. Next, she shows that she is feeling sensitive as she is still unable to figure out her ambition just yet. She also would not lend her friend some money without knowing the purpose of borrowing beforehand. It portrays that she is being insecure and sensitive towards money. However, through her feedback of the questionnaires, I found out that the respondent is not being neuroticism in most issues. She eventually shows strong support to those who married at young age by congratulating them. She also shows her concern towards baby dumping cases as she wonders on whose the one at faults for such issues to occurred. In addition, her favorite quote is, “Strangers think I’m quiet, my friends think I’m outgoing and my best friends think I’m insane.” This shows that the respondent is not all neuroticism as she is actually an outgoing person. Thus, my assumption towards respondent 5 is not true.

 

Findings: Respondent 4

As for respondent 4, she portrays a lot of agreeableness personality characteristic in which I believe she belongs to that category. Therefore, the respondent’s answer on questionnaires can be view as below:

Questions & Answers from Respondent 4

Eventhough respondent 4 believes that she is more towards domain 1 personality characteristics, her answers from the questionnaires has shown that she fits to be in domain 4 category; agreeableness. The respondent likes to watch comedy movies rather than other movie genre such as horror, action or mystery which emphasized that she is a peace- keeper and nurturing person. She also likes to post about rightfulness or righteous actions and issues which further focused on her cooperativeness and peace-keeper personality.  The respondent is an optimist individual as she responds positively towards those who married at young age and showed her interest to be married at young age too. In addition, she wants to be an educator which shows that she is a cooperative and helpful citizen who wants to educate the youngsters of becoming great people. She also would lend her friend whom in need of money and give them time to pay her back. It portrays her attitude of being cooperative and helpful towards her friends. Thus, the respondent’s feedback has proven my assumption to be true.

 

Findings: Respondent 3

To continue with, I labelled respondent 3 to be in domain 3 of personality’s category which is extroversion. The reason is basically through the way she posts and comments upon her status update in Facebook. The following are her answers to the given questionnaires as to prove on my assumptions:

Questions & Answers from Respondent 3

Based on the respondents’ feedback, my assumption is proved to be true. The respondent herself admits that she is a cooperative, helpful and nurturing person. These are all the criteria of an extroversion individual. Next, she likes to posts about her feelings on that particular day which portrays her outgoing personality as she is willing to share her stories with others. She also shows her friendly attitude as she responds positively towards the idea of early marriage as she trusts that those newly weds would be blessed by God. Moreover, the respondent is an energetic person as she puts her ambition as an educator which is a noble and rather challenging carrier to pursue. In fact, she shows her assertive personality as she wishes to take care of the baby who is the victim of baby dumping cases. As an extra, the respondent’s favorite quote is, “Craziness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.” It simply emphasized on the respondent’s assertiveness as she realized that there is no good in repeating the same actions without any improvements.

 

Findings: Respondent 2

In particular, I believe that respondent 2 belongs to the conscientiousness category as reference to her posts in Facebook. Similar to respondent 1, same questionnaires were given to Respondent 2 as to strengthen my view upon her personality’s category. The results of her answer are as the following:

Questions & Answers from Respondent 2

First of all, the respondent believes that she is a responsible, organized and persevering person which fits the characteristic of domain 2 personality; conscientiousness. Her response towards those who married at young age shows that she is a responsible and planner-type of person as she figures that studies must come first instead of rushing for marriage. Furthermore, the respondent is a reliable person as she would simply treat her friend who wants to borrow some money from her.The respondent also sensed a great responsibility that must be done by both government and mass regarding the baby dumping issues.

Regardless of these answers which strongly support my assumption, respondent 2 actually has the characteristics of other personality’s domain. She shows her neuroticism side as she would feel bored, lonely and sleepy during her leisure time. She also shows her anxiousness as she still has not figured out her latest ambition, yet.

 

Findings: Respondent 1

My first assumption of respondent 1 is that she belongs to the openness to experience’s category based on her facebook postings. In order to strengthen my assumption, related questionnaires are given to both respondent 1 and her friends. The results are as in the following link:

Questions & Answers from Respondent 1

However, from her feedback of the questionnaires, the respondent admits herself as someone who is cooperative, helpful and nurturing  rather than being curious, intelligent and imaginative. Nevertheless, her next following answers to the questions have proved my assumption to be true.

She answered that she would be observing her surroundings in her leisure time which shows her curiosity and imaginative personality. She also likes to post about humanism which portrays her openness to experience personality. Besides, she responds positively upon the issue of early marriage by congratulating them. It shows that she appreciates the view of being married at young age. In addition, she portrays her sophisticated personality as she chose her current ambition as a businesswoman which is a highly respected and successful carrier. For extra input, respondent 1’s favorite quote is, “I’m not pessimistic about people in general but only about the way they live.” Eventually, it shows her intelligence on way of thinking that is to not judge people on who they are but on what they do.

 

The Big Five Personality Survey (for respondent’s friends) – via SurveyMonkey

1. Your Facebook’s username is

2. Your friend is a/an

• • curious, intelligent and imaginative person.
  • responsible, organized and persevering person.
  • outgoing, amicable and assertive person.
  • cooperative,helpful and nurturing person.
  • anxious, insecure and sensitive person.

3. Your friend’s favorite movie genre is

• science-fiction
• comedy
• action
• horror
• mystery

4. In your friend’s leisure time, he/she would

• observe on his/her surroundings (people/animals/nature/events).
• do volunteer work (help their parents/siblings/friends/school).
• go for outing (shopping/sports/picnic/events).
• make handcrafts or build some chairs and tables.
• feel bored, lonely and finally sleeping for the whole day.

5. Your friend like to post about

• humanism.
• his/her feelings on that day.
• funny stories.
• rightfulness.
• questions to answer his/her doubts.

6. Your friend’s view upon those being married at young age

• Good for them! Congratulations!!
• Lucky them..! Huh!
• What’s the rush? Finish your studies first wouldn’t hurt, you know?
• It’s a good thing to celebrate and they’ll be more blessed by Him.
• I want to marry early too..!

7. Your friend’s latest ambition would be

• a professional motivator.
• a private investigator.
• an educator.
• a businessman/businesswoman.
• err..he/she cannot figure it out yet..!

8. If someone wants to borrow your friend’s money, your friend would

• ask for their purpose of doing so i.e borrowing his/her money instead of using their own.
• ask them to pay back as soon as possible.
• simply give them and make it as a treat instead.
• lend and give them some time to pay him/her back.
• refuse nicely with acceptable excuses.

9. When your friend heard of baby dumping, he/she

• wonders who are the ones at faults.
• teared up and filled with remorse.
• wants the government and mass to play their part efficiently!
• wish he/she can take care of the baby instead.
• won’t be bothered as it has become too common lately.

10. Your friend’s favorite quote is

• “Sometimes questions are more important than answers”. – Nancy Williard
• “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today”. – Abraham Lincoln
• Strangers think I’m quiet, my friends think I’m outgoing and my best friends think I’m insane”. – Anonymous
• “Craziness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result”. – Tom DeMarco
• “I’m not pessimistic about people in general, but only about the way they live”. – Claude Chabrol

Cool Facts For You, Readers!

• ‘Queue’ is the only word in the English language that can be read in the same way as the four last letters removed.

• ‘Rhythm’ is the longest word in the English language that contains no vowels.

•  ‘Almost‘ is the longest word in English that are arranged alphabetically.

• ‘Go‘, is the shortest complete sentence in English.

• There are four words in the English language that end with the syllable ‘dous‘, namely: ‘tremendous‘, ‘horrendous‘, ‘stupendous‘ and ‘hazardous‘.

• The phrase, ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every letter in the alphabet.

• ‘Stewardesses‘ is the longest word you can type with the left hand on your keyboard.

• ‘Lollipop‘ is the longest word you can type with your right hand on your keyboard.

• ‘Typewriter‘ is the longest word you can type using the letters only on one row of your keyboard.

• ‘A‘ to ‘Z‘ has a symbol (and the sound itself), but, the letter ‘W‘, ‘W’ is the letter ‘uu’ or ‘double u’.

—> source: http://translate.google.com.my/translate?hl=en&sl=ms&u=http://www.mymedia.my/fakta-menarik-tentang-bahasa-inggeris/&ei=h7fDT6rRLcTrrQeCv_27CQ&sa=X&oi=translate&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CGEQ7gEwBA&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dfakta%2Btentang%2Bbahasa%26hl%3Den%26biw%3D829%26bih%3D523%26prmd%3Dimvns

It’s Semantic, People! ^__^

 

Some important areas of semantic theory or related subjects include these:

• Symbol and referent
• Conceptions of meaning
• Words and lexemes
• Denotation, connotation, implication
• Pragmatics
• Ambiguity
• Metaphor, simile and symbol
• Semantic fields
• Synonym, antonym and hyponym
• Collocation, fixed expression and idiom
• Semantic change and etymology
• Polysemy
• Homonymy, homophones and homographs
• Lexicology and lexicography
• Thesauruses, libraries and Web portals
• Epistemology
• Colour

How meaning affects word associations in language

The purely linguistic side of meaning is equally evident when examining how words combine with one another to produce phrases.  The set of restrictions on how a word may combine with other words of a single syntactic category is referred to as the word’s collocability.  Two words may have the same referent, and yet differ in their ability to combine with particular words.

In English, the word flock collocates with sheep ; and school with fish, although both flock and school mean group.

Also, addled combines only with brains or eggs (one must steam rice and boil water), blond collocates with hair, while red may collocate with hair as well as other objects.

Every language has its own peculiar stock of set phrases.  In English we face problems and interpret dreams, but in modern Hebrew we stand in front of problems and solve dreams.  In English we drink water but eat soup.  In Japanese the verb for drink collocates not only with water and soup, but also with tablets and cigarettes.

    From the point of view of etymology, set phrases are of two types.

1.) The first type of set phrase, the collocation, may be defined as “a set phrase which still makes sense”: make noise, make haste.  Since collocations still may be taken literally, they can be paraphrased using regular syntactic transformations: Haste was made by me, noise was made by the children.

2.) Phrases whose words no longer make sense when taken literally are called idioms.  The semantic relations between words in idiomatic set phrases may be illogical to varying degrees: white elephant sale, soap opera, to see red, break a leg, small voice, loud tie, wee hours of the night.

Thus, meaning involves real-world concepts and logic but it is at the same time a linguistic category.  The semantic structure of a language is the language’s special system of conveying extra linguistic relations by idiosyncratic linguistic means.

 

—> sources:

• http://www.teachit.co.uk/armoore/lang/semantics.htm
• http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/semantics.htm

Morphology

The peculiar nature of morphology

From a logical point of view, morphology is the oddest of the levels of linguistic analysis.

Given the basic design of human spoken language, the levels of phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics are arguably unavoidable. They needn’t look exactly the way that they do, perhaps, but there has to be something to do the work of each of these levels.

But morphology is basically gratuitous, as well as complex and irregular: anything that a language does with morphology, it usually can also do more straightforwardly with syntax; and there is always some other language that does the same thing with syntax.

For instance, English morphology inflects nouns to specify plurality: thus dogs means “more than one dog”. This inflection lets us be specific, in a compact way, about the distinction between one and more-than-one. Of course, we could always say the same thing in a more elaborated way, using the resources of syntax rather than morphology: more than one dog. If we want to be vague, we have to be long winded: one or more dogs.

In fact, one of the ways that morphology typically differs from syntax is its combinatoric irregularity. Words are mostly combined logically and systematically. So when you exchange money for something you can be said to “buy” it or to “purchase” it — we’d be surprised if (say) groceries, telephones and timepieces could only be “purchased,” while clothing, automobiles and pencils could only be “bought,” and things denoted by words of one syllable could only be “acquired in exchange for money.”

Yet irrational combinatoric nonsense of this type happens all the time in morphology. Consider the adjectival forms of the names of countries or regions in English. There are at least a half a dozen different endings, and also many variations in how much of the name of the country is retained before the ending is added:

-ese: Bhutanese, Chinese, Guyanese, Japanese, Lebanese, Maltese, Portuguese, Taiwanese

-an: African, Alaskan, American, Angolan, Cuban, Jamaican, Mexican, Nicaraguan

-ian: Argentinian, Armenian, Australian, Brazilian, Canadian, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Iranian, Jordanian, Palestinian, Serbian

-ish: Irish, British, Flemish, Polish, Scottish, Swedish

-?: French, German, Greek

~ And you can’t mix ‘n match stems and endings here: *Taiwanian, *Egyptese, and so on just don’t work.

Despite these derivational anfractuosities, English morphology is simple and regular compared to the morphological systems of many other languages.

Know Your Pronunciation

“The Chaos” – G. Nolst Trenite a.k.a Charivarius

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation — think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough —
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

—> source: http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html

 

– using the(International Phonetic Alphabet) IPA –

• INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET

Origin

The IPA was first published in 1888 by the Association Phonétique Internationale (International Phonetic Association), a group of French language teachers founded by Paul Passy. The aim of the organisation was to devise a system for transcribing the sounds of speech which was independent of any particular language and applicable to all languages.

A phonetic script for English created in 1847 by Isaac Pitman and Henry Ellis was used as a model for the IPA.

Uses

1. The IPA is used in dictionaries to indicate the pronunciation of words.
2. The IPA has often been used as a basis for creating new writing systems for previously unwritten languages.
3. The IPA is used in some foreign language text books and phrase books to transcribe the sounds of languages which are written with non-latin alphabets. It is also used by non-native speakers of English when learning to speak English.

—> source: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ipa.htm