#TeamEnglish@CMS_Kottayam: The learner in me, hand in hand with the teacher in you!

  Additional Materials. Courtesy: https://beamingnotes.com/2019/09/26/quality-summary-and-analysis-by-john-galsworthy/ Quality John Galsworthy Summary This summary explains in detail the events that take place in the story. The narrator has been acquainted with the Gessler brothers from the time of his youth, for his father was a patron of the shoemakers. The two brothers occupied an ordinary store in the once fashionable West End area. It was a simple store without any great signage or advertising, and they only took custom orders – making unique boots according to each client’s feet. Their storefront was humble, displaying only a few pairs of boots as if to declare to the world that they did not subscribe to mass production. As the narrator grows older, he realizes that the Gessler brothers were not just shoemakers but expert craftsmen and that their shoes were nothing short of a work of art. While describing the younger Gessler brother, the narrator said that his yell...

 Savouring the Classics - Module III: Novel Excerpts Don Quixote by  Miguel de Cervantes Chapter VIII “Don Quixote” is a novel by Cervantes, the great Spanish writer. It speaks of the adventures of a man who reads many stories, and decides to set out for adventure. Chapter VIII describes a few of his adventures. Cervantes considers himself as the second author, who tells us that he got this story from another source. Don Quixote considers himself as a knight, and travels with his friend Sancho Panza. Sancho is the neighbour of Don Quixote. He acts as the knight’s squire. Sancho is a poor and simple farmer but more practical than his friend. One day, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were travelling together. Don Quixote thinks that he is a knight, and Sancho Panza is his squire. They see some windmills in the countryside. Don Quixote believes that these are giants. So, he decides to fight and kill them. Sancho Panza tries to tell Don Quixote that they are windmills, but fails. Don...

  I See Kashmir From New Delhi at Midnight Agha Shahid Ali The Poet Agha Shahid Ali was born in 1949: just one year or more after Independence, and also after partition. His birth was in Delhi, but he was raised up in Kashmir. Life in Kashmir was difficult in those days. The problems of partition, with India and Pakistan holding claim to the territories there, made the place a constant field of fights and tensions. The poet moved over to the USA in 1976. This poem forms part of a collection “The Country without a Post Office”. which came out in 1997. Agha Shahid Ali is a representative of diaspora. He has childhood memories of Kashmir. He spent his youthhood partly in Delhi, where he had his college education. Then he moved over to the United States of America, where he became a teacher and emerged as a noted poet. In most of his poems, Kashmir and its problems form the theme. The Poem “I See Kashmir From New Delhi at Midnight”, by Agha Shahid Ali, is a diasporic poem, where the po...

  Propositions (statement) A sentence or statement viewed from the perspective of its meaning is called proposition. A proposition is a technical term used by philosophers, and they distinguish it from a sentence (syntactic entity) and a statement (a unit of pragmatics). Hence, for example, the same proposition might be said to be expressed by both "I understand French" and in Italian, ""Ca pisco il Francese". It is a property of propositions that they have truth values. Thus, this proposition would have the value "true" if the speaker did understand French and the value "false" if the speaker did not understand, that is, "positive proposition" (yes) or "negative proposition" (no). The "propositional content" of a sentence is that part of its meaning which is seen, in some accounts, reducible to a proposition. Eg: The porters had shut the gates.                                  ...

 Compositional Procedure Principle of Compositionality is the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the rules used to combine the,. This principle is called Frege's Principle after Gottlob Frege.  The principle of compositionality states that in a meaningful sentence, if the lexical parts are taken out of the sentence, what remains will be the rules of composition. Eg: The sentence "Socrates was a man". Once the meaningful lexical items are taken away - "Socrates" and "man"- what is left is the "pseudo sentence", "Socrates was a Man". The task becomes a matter of describing what the connection is between Socrates and man. The meaning of a complex expression is uniquely determined by the meaning of its constituents and the syntactic construction used to combine them. Predicate A verb or other unit which takes a set of arguments within a sentence. Eg: In ...

Truth Conditional Semantics/ Formal Semantics Artificial theory of semantics that is based on the notion of truth. By "truth conditions", we mean "the conditions under which a sentence, or a proposition is expressed by it, is true". Eg: "I have red hair" is true under the condition that the speaker has, in fact, red hair. Truth Conditional Semantics is an account of the truth conditions of sentences, often one in which the meaning of a sentence is equated with them, that is, it is the study of the propositional meaning of utterances (is from the perspective of meaning) and the logical conditions for establishing their truth or otherwise.  Truth Conditional Semantics is concerned with how languages relates to reality, the other theories like componential theory, is concerned with exploring the conceptual structure which underlies language. This is conceptual structure which underlies language. This is so because the other theoretical approaches see human be...

 Semantic Theories Semantic theories are based on three approaches: Structuralist (form) Logical Generative Some linguists have named the logical approach as premise, that is, a statement or an idea that forms the basics for a reasonable line of argument. The basic semantic theories are: a) Analytical/ Referential Approach Analytical or Referential Approach has been formulated by Saussure b) Distributional Approach Distributional Approach studies the structural treatment of linguistic meaning.  We cannot find two words in any language sharing exactly the same lexical environment (distribution). So, this approach studies meaning as syntagmatic (collocations) and paradigmatic (sets) relations. Paradigmatic relations deals with the lexical meaning of the words of the same lexical set. Lexical meaning is the dictionary meaning. c) Operation (Contextual/ Functional) Approach In this approach, we study meaning or concept as a set of operations. The real meaning of a word is underst...