Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Breast Cancer The Epidemic Essay - 1332 Words

Are you a woman over 40? If so, do you get regular mammograms? Breast cancer is an epidemic that plagues women, even though some men can get it. According to the American Cancer Society, â€Å"breast cancer is a malignant tumor that starts in the cells of the breast. A malignant tumor is a group of cancer cells that can grow into (invade) surrounding tissues or spread (metastasize) to distant areas of the body. The disease occurs almost entirely in women, but men can get it, too† (Breast Cancer). Today many women are becoming diagnosed with breast cancer. It has become the most type of cancer in women, regardless of ethnicity or background. There are many risk factors that can cause breast cancer. Factors such as family history, obesity,†¦show more content†¦As stated before, many factors can cause breast cancer. Family history is a major cause of breast cancer. The risk of breast cancer is higher among women who have relatives with the disease. Having a close relativ e with the disease (sister, mother, and daughter) doubles a womans risk. Obesity can cause breast cancer. Women who have had not had children, or who had their first child after age 30, have a slightly higher risk of breast cancer. Being pregnant more times and at an earlier age can reduce breast cancer risk. Being pregnant lowers a womans total number of lifetime menstrual cycles, which may be the reason for this effect. Hormone changes such as birth control pills and hormone replacement therapy often increase a person exposure to cancer. Smoking increases risk to not only lung cancer, but also breast cancer. Not enough physical activity can cause breast cancer. Every day we are sitting at the job, sitting in school, sitting in front of a computer or a television. Regular exercise keeps us lean and reduces our food cravings, helps us get a good night’s sleep, all of which lowers the risk of not only breast cancer but any kind of cancer. There are many risk factors that can cause breast cancer, but why are so many women uninsured? Many women with breast cancer have become uninsured because of the economic recession. The number of uninsured, after the recession increased. Family incomes shifted down and manyShow MoreRelatedEssay about The Risk Factors of Breast Cancer1244 Words   |  5 PagesBreast cancer is the second leading cancer killer among women, after lung cancer (Breast Cancer , 2014). Cancer is a word that puts fear in many people, especially if they have family members who have either died or survived the disease. No one wants to hear that he or she has been diagnosed with any disease, especially cancer. Many women do not take breast cancer serious until they are diagnosed. Sadly, once diagnosed with this epidemic, a person’s life is altered forever. Breast cancer does notRead MoreThe For Breast Cancer Action1612 Words   |  7 Pagesintention to give some part of the profit towards breast cancer causes. Ironically, the money made from this marketing will often not significantly benefit som ebody with breast cancer. The pink ribbon was originally created by the Susan G Komen foundation yet anybody can use this symbol, because there is no intellectual copyright on it. Pinkwashing is term was first coined by the organization called breast cancer action, whose mission is to â€Å"Breast Cancer Action’s mission is to achieve health justiceRead MoreDeveloping A Health Advocacy Campaign846 Words   |  4 Pagesmany Americans strive to make into a reality. Unfortunately, HIV/AIDS epidemic has deprived many people of this dream. HIV/AIDS is one of the worlds’ most serious and the deadliest diseases and a $30.4 billion drain on healthcare cost in the United States, and of this figures’ 57% is appropriated for routine care, 10% for housing and social support assistance, 9% for research and 22% for global assistance to address the epidemic (The Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, 2016). 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There are risk factors that may lead to breast cancer. There are 4 stages of breast cancer and several treatments, although treatments vary from types and stages of breast cancer. Breast cancer is the leading cause of death among women who areRead MoreThe Food Proportions Of The United States1066 Words   |  5 Pageshealthy heart and achieving a possibly longer life. With cancer becoming a looming threat to the lives of many, the simple switch of diets can significantly lower the looming risks. In a study from the Nurses’ Health Study, women who ate higher fiber foods - mainly fruits and vegetables - have a significantly lower risk of developing breast cancer later in life (Vegetarian Times 26). Along with the threat of breast cancer, colorectal cancer is reduced as well. In JAMA International Medicine’s studyRead MoreThe American Association Of Nurses907 Words   |  4 Pagesthis epidemic, will continue pose severe threat to human health and many lives, thereby, increasing the devastation cause by this deadly disease. Both issues identified and undertaken by APHA remain of great importance in the present society. An effective solution to either of these, will constitute to great relief to the world at large. Consequently, the identification and implementation of solutions to the identified problems, would be beneficial to the hum an health. Historically, cancer has been

Sunday, December 22, 2019

Head Start Participation And School Readiness Evidence...

Head Start programs have been around since 1965, when there were many children living in low income households. The purpose for Head Start was to provide an education, health services, nutrition, and other helpful services for the children. President Lyndon B. John wanted all children from low income families to be prepared for school when it came time for them to start school. In the study, Head Start Participation and School Readiness: Evidence From the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort by Lee, Zhai, Brooks-Gunn, Han, Waldfogel in 2014, it showed that there a few benefits and some things that needed to be worked on to help children more. There are a few reasons though why this could be, such as how the theory of the study would suggest that effects of Head Start vary depending on arrangements with which it is compared, then not taking this into account could obscure those effects and could help explain why studies from different periods or areas produce in consistent results (Lee et al. 2014). Looking at the rest of the study will show how Lee et. al took their observations and saw the benefits that happen and do not happen because of Head Start. In fact, Lee et al. looked at the effects of Head Start on children s school readiness at kindergarten was looked at in four different ways by using the data from the study to get as much out of their observations as possible. 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These are some of the questions we will explore: †¢ Do children develop in distinct stages, or is their development smoother and more continuous? †¢ How do children develop physicallyRead MoreStephen P. Robbins Timothy A. Judge (2011) Organizational Behaviour 15th Edition New Jersey: Prentice Hall393164 Words   |  1573 Pages10.5/12 ITC New Baskerville Std Credits and acknowledgments borrowed from other sources and reproduced, with permission, in this textbook appear on the appropriate page within text. Copyright  © 2013, 2011, 2009, 2007, 2005 by Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Prentice Hall. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. This publication is protected by Copyright, and permission should be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrievalRead MoreContemporary Issues in Management Accounting211377 Words   |  846 Pagesinsights. 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Saturday, December 14, 2019

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Mixed Code in Hong Kong Speech Free Essays

string(131) " its meaning is more general or specific compared with its near-synonymous counterparts,† \[7\] in either low or high Cantonese\." 2012 International Conference on Asian Language Processing A Corpus-based Analysis of Mixed Code in Hong Kong Speech John Lee Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics City University of Hong Kong jsylee@cityu. edu. hk Abstract—We present a corpus-based analysis of the use of mixed code in Hong Kong speech. We will write a custom essay sample on A Corpus-Based Analysis of Mixed Code in Hong Kong Speech or any similar topic only for you Order Now From transcriptions of Cantonese television programs, we identify English words embedded within Cantonese utterances, and investigate the motivations for such code-switching. Among the many motivations observed in previous research, we found that four alone account for more than 95% of the use of English words in our speech data across genres, genders, and age groups. We performed analyses over more than 60 hours of transcribed speech, resulting in one of the largest empirical studies to-date on this linguistic phenomenon. Keywords-code-mixing; English; corpus linguistics. code-switching; Cantonese; II. PREVIOUS RESEARCH I. INTRODUCTION While Cantonese is the mother tongue for the vast majority of the people in Hong Kong, English is also spoken by 43% of the population [1], reflecting the city’s heritage as a British colony. A well-known feature of the speech in Hong Kong is code-switching, i. e. , â€Å"the juxtaposition of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or sub-systems, within the same exchange† [2]. Specifically, in the case of Hong Kong, the two grammatical systems are Cantonese and English. The former serves as the ‘matrix language’, and the latter as the ‘embedded language’, resulting in Cantonese sentences with English segments such as (example taken from [3]): canteen heoi3 canteen jam2 caa4 ‘let’s go to the canteen for lunch’ Here, the English segment contains only one word (‘canteen’), but in general, it can be a whole clause. We will use the general term ‘code-switching’ rather than the more specific term ‘code-mixing’, which refers to switching below the clause level, even though most English segments in our corpus indeed contain only one or two words (see Table 3). There is already a large body of literature devoted to the study of Cantonese-English code-switching from the theoretical linguistic point of view [3,4,5]. This paper investigates the motivations behind the use of mixed code, on the basis of a large dataset of speech transcribed from television programs. In Section II, we outline previous research on the motivations of code-switching, and discuss how our investigation complements theirs. In Section III, we describe our methodology for corpus construction, in particular the design of the taxonomy of code-switching motivations. In Section IV, we present an analysis of these motivations according to genre, gender and age. The first major framework for classifying codeswitching motivations in Hong Kong consists of two categories: ‘expedient’ and ‘orientational’ [6]. Central to this framework is the distinction between words in ‘high Cantonese’ and ‘low Cantonese’. In everyday conversations, a speaker sometimes cannot find any word from ‘low Cantonese’ to describe an object, institution or idea (e. g. , ‘application form’). Using a word from ‘high Cantonese’ (e. g. , biu2 gaak3), however, would sound too formal and therefore stylistically inappropriate. In expedient mixing, the speaker resorts to an English word; the mixing is pragmatically motivated. In contrast, orientational mixing is socially motivated. The speaker chooses to use English (e. g. , ‘barbecue’) despite the availability of equivalent words from both ‘low Cantonese’ (e. g. , siu2 je5 sik6) and ‘high Cantonese’ (e. g. , siu1 haau1), since he perceives the subject matter to be inherently more ‘western’. This dichotomy has been criticized as overly simplistic, because of the ambiguity in defining lexical and stylistic equivalents among ‘low Cantonese’, ‘high Cantonese’, and English. Instead, a four-way taxonomy is proposed: euphemism, specificity, bilingual punning, and the principle of economy [7]. This taxonomy is then further extended, in a study of code-switching in text media [8], to include quotations, doubling, identity marking, and interjection. These categories will be explained in detail in Section III. While these classification systems are comprehensive and well grounded, they do not per se convey any sense of the relative importance or distribution of the various motivations. Our goal is, first, to empirically verify the coverage of these classification systems on a large dataset of transcribed speech; and, second, to give quantitative answers to questions such as: Which kinds of motivations are the most prominent? Does the range of motivations differ according to the speech genre, or to the speaker’s gender or age? We now turn our attention to the methodology for constructing and annotating a speech corpus for these research purposes. III. DATA A. Source Material Our corpus is constructed from television programs broadcast in Hong Kong within the last four years by Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB). The programs belong to a variety of genres, including two drama series, three current-affairs shows, a news program, and a talk show. The news program, TVB News at Six-Thirty, carries the most formal register, containing mostly pre-planned 165 978-0-7695-4886-9/12 $26. 00  © 2012 IEEE DOI 10. 1109/IALP. 2012. 10 speech by the anchor. The current-affairs shows, Tuesday Report, Sunday Report and Hong Kong Connection, are serious in tone but contain spontaneous discussions. The talk show, My Sweets, is about food and drink. It also contains spontaneous discussions, but the topics tend to be lighter. Although pre-planned, the speech in both drama series, Moonlight Resonance and Yes Sir, Sorry Sir, is arguably the least formal in register, designed to reflect natural speech in everyday life. Details of these TV programs are presented in Table 1. Table 1: Television programs that serve as the source material of our corpus. Genre Program Length Current Tuesday Report ( ), 135 episodes affairs ), X 20 minutes Sunday Report ( Hong Kong Connection ( ) Talk 24 episodes My Sweets ( ) show X 30 minutes Euphemism: When a Cantonese word explicitly mentions something that the speaker finds embarrassing, s/he might opt for an English word that contains no such mention. For example, to avoid the female body part hung1 ‘breast’ in the word hung1 wai4 ‘bra’, the speaker might prefer to use the English ‘bra’ (all examples are taken from [7]): bra tau3 bra gaak3 gaak3 ‘A princess whose bra is visible’ Specificity: â€Å"Sometimes an English expression is preferred because its meaning is more general or specific compared with its near-synonymous counterparts,† [7] in either low or high Cantonese. You read "A Corpus-Based Analysis of Mixed Code in Hong Kong Speech" in category "Papers" For example, the verb ‘to book’ means ‘to make a reservation for which no money or deposit is required’, which is more specific than its closest equivalent in Cantonese, deng6 ‘to make a reservation’. It is often used in sentences such as: book ngo5 soeng2 book saam1 dim2 ‘I want to book 3 o’clock’ Principle of Economy: â€Å"An English expression may also be preferred because it is shorter and thus requires less linguistic effort compared with its Chinese/Cantonese equivalent. † [7] While the word ‘check-in’ has two syllables, its Cantonese equivalent baan6 lei5 dang1 gei1 sau2 zuk6 ‘check-in [on a plane]’ has six. The principle of economy is thus likely the reason behind mixed code such as: check-in nei5 check-in zo2 mei6 aa3 ‘Have you checked in already? ’ The taxonomy in [8] builds on the one in [7], further enriching it with categories2 below: Quotation: When citing text or someone else’s speech, one often prefers to use the original code to avoid having to perform translation. An example is direct speech: â€Å"What do you think? † jau5 go3 pang4 jau5 man6 ngo5 what do you think ‘A friend asked me, â€Å"What do you think? ’ Doubling: Originally named ‘Emphasis or avoidance of repetition’ [8], it will be referred to as ‘Doubling’ [9] here to make it explicit, as this category refers to English words that are embedded alongside Cantonese words that have the same or nearly the same meaning. The purpose is to emphasize the idea or to avoid repetitions. In the following sentence, it serves as an emphasis: 2 News Drama TVB News at Six-Thirty ( ) Moonlight Resonance ( ), Yes Sir, Sorry Sir ( Sir Sir) 5 episodes X 20 minutes 4 episodes X 45 minutes B. Data Processing From the television programs listed in Table 1, all code-mixed utterances were transcribed, preserving the original languages, either Cantonese or English. Following standard practice, loan words are not considered to be mixed code; in our context, all English words (e. g. , ‘taxi’) that have been adapted into Cantonese phonology (e. g. , dik1 si2) were excluded. The TV captions corresponding to each of these utterances are also recorded as part of the corpus. These captions are in standard Chinese, rather than Cantonese. Furthermore, alignments between the Chinese word(s) in the caption and the English word(s) in the utterance are annotated. This information will be used in the classification of motivations. Finally, two kinds of metadata about the speaker are recorded: gender (male or female) and age group (teenager or adult). C. Taxonomy of Code-Switching Motivations Our goal is to quantitatively characterize the motivations behind code-switching; to this end, each English segment in the Cantonese sentences in our corpus is to be labeled with a motivation. Due to time constraint, this classification was performed only on the currentaffairs and talk shows. The ‘expedient’ vs. ‘orientational’ classification system is too coarse for our purpose. Instead, we adopted the taxonomy in [7,8] as our starting point, then introduced some new categories to accommodate our data. The categories in [7] are1: 1 A fourth category, ‘bilingual punning’, is excluded from our taxonomy. As may be expected, punning is rarer in speech, and is indeed not found in our corpus. Among these categories is ‘identity marking’, for mixed code that marks â€Å"social characteristics such as social status, education status, occupation, as well as regional affiliation. [8] We found it difficult to objectively identify this motivation, and excluded it from our taxonomy. 166 Very good very good m4 co3 aa1 ‘Very good, very good! ’ Interjection: English interjections may be inserted into the Cantonese sentence. For example: Anyway anyway nei5 hou2 sai1 lei6 ak1 ‘Anyway, you are awesome! ’ A signi ficant amount of mixed code in our corpus, however, still does not fit into any of the above categories. Most fall under one of two reasons, ‘Personal Name’ and ‘Register’. We therefore added them to our taxonomy: Register: This is roughly equivalent to the ‘expedient’ category in [6], but will be referred to as ‘Register’ in this paper to make the motivation explicit. Sometimes, the speaker cannot find any equivalent ‘low Cantonese’ word, but feels awkward to use a more formal ‘high Cantonese’ word (e. g. , paai1 deoi3 ‘party’). As a result, s/he resorts to an English equivalent instead. For example, party hoi1 ci2 laa1 ngo5 dei6 go3 party ‘Our party is starting’ Personal Name: It is common practice among Hong Kong people to adopt an English name. Although this phenomenon may be considered ‘orientational’ codemixing in terms of the ‘western’ perception [6], it is given its own category, because it is very specific and accounts for a substantial amount of our data. A typical example is: Teresa, Teresa ngo5 dei6 zing2 dak1 leng3 m4 leng3 ‘Teresa, did we make it nicely? ’ D. Annotation Procedure We thus have a total of eight categories in our taxonomy of code-switching motivations. Five of these categories – namely, ‘euphemism’, ‘quotation’, ‘doubling’, ‘interjection’, and ‘personal name’ – can usually be unambiguously discerned. The annotator, however, has often found it difficult to distinguish between ‘specificity’, ‘register’, and ‘principle of economy’. To maintain consistency, we adopted the following procedure. When an English segment does not fit into any of the five â€Å"easy† categories, the annotator is to decide whether it has the same meaning as the Chinese word in the caption to which it is aligned. If it is deemed not to have the same meaning, then it is assigned ‘specificity’. If it is equivalent in meaning, and the annotator cannot think of any equivalent in ‘low Cantonese’, then it is labeled ‘register’. Lastly, if there is a ‘low Cantonese’ equivalent, but its number of syllables is larger than that of the English segment, then the motivation is ‘principle of economy’. IV. ANALYSIS English segments in Cantonese speech (section A), then discuss the distribution of the categories of motivations, both overall and with respect to genres, genders, and age groups (section B). A. Density and Length of English Segments It is well known that English words are sprinkled rather liberally in the Cantonese speech in Hong Kong. We measure how the frequency of English segments varies across different genres. As shown in Table 2, the frequency correlates with the register of the genre (see Section III. A). In the drama series, the most colloquial genre, one and a half English words are uttered per minute on average. The talk show occupies second place, and the current affairs shows have slightly less frequent English words. In the news program, where the speech is preplanned, the anchor did not utter any English word. Table 2: The total number of Cantonese sentences containing English segments, and the total number of English words transcribed. The last column shows how often an English word is uttered. Program genre Drama Talk show Current affairs News # sent with English 219 487 1495 0 # English words 259 625 1995 0 Frequency (words/min) 1. 4 0. 87 0. 74 0 Second, we measure the length of the English segments. Table 3 shows that the vast majority of English segments contain no more than two words. Across all genres, more than 80% of the English segments consist of only one English word. This figure is comparable to the 81. 4% for text data reported in [8]. Table 3: Proportion of English segments with only one (e. g. , â€Å"canteen†) or two words (e. g. , â€Å"thank you†). Program genre Drama Current affairs Talk show One-word 85% 85% 81% Two-word 11% 11% 17% This section presents some preliminary analyses on this corpus. We first consider the frequency and length of B. Motivations for the use of mixed code A plethora of motivations have been posited for the use of mixed code in Hong Kong (see Section II). Applying our proposed classification system (see Section III. C) on our corpus of transcribed speech, we aim now to discern the relative prevalence of the various kinds of codeswitching motivations. Table 4 shows the distribution of these motivations in the current-affairs and the talk shows. Four dominant motivations – chiefly ‘register’, but also ‘personal name’, ‘principle of economy’, and ‘specificity’ – are attributed to more than 95% of the English segments. This trend is the same across genres (current-affairs and talk shows), genders (see Table 6), and age groups (see Table 5). All other categories, including quotations, euphemism, doubling, and interjection, are relatively infrequent. Genres. Among the four dominant motivations, ‘register’ – the use of appropriately informal words – is the most frequent motivation in both the current-affairs and 167 talk shows. Its proportion, however, is significantly more marked (47. 4%) in the talk show than in current affairs (36. 4%), reflecting the more informal nature of the former. Table 4: Distribution of code-switching motivations, contrasted between genres. Motivation Current affairs Talk show Register 36. 4% 47. 4% Personal Name 26. 8% 24. 5% Principle of economy 19. 0% 17. 6% Specificity 13. 2% 8. 2% Quotation 2. 1% 1. 0% Doubling 1. 4% 0. 4% Interjection 0. 9% 1. 0% Euphemism 0. 3% 0% Age groups. Table 5 contrasts the distributions of code-switching motivations between adults and teenagers in the current-affairs shows 3 . As mentioned above, the four major motivations remain constant. However, teenagers are much more likely than adults to use English words to achieve more informal register (52. 4% vs. 35. 1%). They also tend more to opt for English to save effort (23. 8% vs. 18. 6%). Somewhat surprisingly at first glance, teenagers address others in English names less often than adults (2. 4% vs. 28. 8%); it turns out that in the conversations in our corpus, teenagers often prefer to address adults with the more formal Chinese names, likely out of respect. Table 5: Distribution of code-switching motivations, contrasted between age groups. Motivation Adults Teenagers Register 35. 1% 52. 4% Personal Name 28. 8% 2. 4% Principle of economy 18. 6% 23. 8% Specificity 13. 1% 14. 3% Quotation 1. 9% 4. 0% Doubling 1. 3% 2. 4% Interjection 0. 9% 0% Euphemism 0. 3% 0. 8% use English names to address others (32. 9% vs. 18. 9%); men, on the other hand, more frequently use English words to reduce effort (22. 9% vs. 14. 8%). V. CONCLUSIONS We have described the construction of a corpus of Cantonese-English mixed code, based on speech transcribed from television programs in Hong Kong. Drawn from more than 60 hours of speech, this corpus is among the largest of its type. A novel feature of the corpus is the annotation of the motivation behind each code-mixed utterance. Having proposed a classification system for these motivations, we applied it on our corpus, and reported differences in the use of mixed code between genres, genders and age groups. A key finding is that four main motivations – ‘register’, ‘personal name’, ‘principle of economy’, and ‘specificity’ — account for more than 95% of the embedded English segments. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This project was partially funded by a Small-Scale Research Grant from the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics at City University of Hong Kong. We thank Man Chong Mak and Hiu Yan Wong for compiling the corpus and performing annotation. REFERENCES [1] K. H. Y. Chen, â€Å"The Social Distinctiveness of Two Code-mixing Styles in Hong Kong,† in Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, MA: Cascadilla Press, 2005, pp. 527541. J. Gumperz, â€Å"The sociolinguistic significance of conversational code-switching,† in RELC Journal 8(2), 1977, pp. 1—34. J. Gibbons, â€Å"Code-mixing and koineizing in the speech of students at the university of Hong Kong†, in Anthropological Linguistics 21(3), 1979, pp. 113—123. B. H. -S. Chan, â€Å"How does Cantonese-English code-mixing work? †, in Language in Hong Kong at Century’s End, M. C. Pennington (ed. ), 1998, pp. 191—216, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. D. C. S. Li, â€Å"Linguistic convergence: Impact of English on Hong Kong Cantonese,† in Asian Englishes 2(1), 1999, pp. 5—36. K. K. Luke, â€Å"Why two languages might be better than one: motivations of language mixing in Hong Kong†, in Language in Hong Kong at Century’s End, M. C. Pennington (ed. ), 1998, pp. 145—159, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. D. C. S. Li, â€Å"Cantonese-English code-switching research in Hong Kong: a Y2K review,† in World Englishes 19(3), 2000, pp. 305— 322. H. Cao, â€Å"Development of a Cantonese-English code-mixing speech recognition system,† PhD dissertation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. R. Appel and P. Muysken, Language contact and bilingualism. London: Arnold, 1987. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Table 6: Distribution of code-switching motivations, contrasted between genders. Motivation Female Male Register 37. 5% 40. 7% Personal Name 32. 9% 18. 9% Principle of economy 14. 8% 22. 9% Specificity 10. 9% 13. 2% Quotation 1. 9% 1. 7% Doubling 1. 1% 1. 3% Interjection 0. 7% 1. 1% Euphemism 0. 3% 0. 2% Genders. Finally, we investigate whether codeswitching motivations are biased according to gender. Aggregating statistics from both the current-affairs and talk shows, Table 6 compares the motivations of males and those of females. Females are shown to be more likely to 3 [7] [8] [9] The speakers in the talk show are predominantly adults. 168 How to cite A Corpus-Based Analysis of Mixed Code in Hong Kong Speech, Papers

Friday, December 6, 2019

A Literary Critique of C. S. Lewis Essay Example For Students

A Literary Critique of C. S. Lewis Essay A Relativist said, The world does not exist, England does not exist, Oxford does not exist and I am confident that I do not Exist! When Lewis was asked to reply, he stood up and said, How am I to talk to a man whos not there? C. S. Lewis: A Biography Clive Staples Lewis was born, in 1898, in Belfast. C. S. Lewis was educated at various schools in England. In 1914, Lewis began studying Latin, Greek, French, German and Italian under the private tuition of W. T. Kirkpatrick. He then moved to Oxford where his studies were interrupted by World War I 1917. Two years later he was back in Oxford resuming his studies. In 1924, Lewis was elected to teach Literature and Language at Magdalen College, Oxford and remained there till 1954. During this time period in his life, Lewis wrote the majority of his work. Lewis moved to Cambridge for the remainder of his life teaching Medieval and Renaissance Literature.1 C. S. Lewis was a man dedicated to the pursuit of truth who believed in argument, in disputation, and in the dialectic of Reason. . .2 He began his pursuit of truth as an atheist and ended up as a Christian. His works the Problem of Pain and Mere Christianity dealt with issues he struggled with. Mere Christianity consists of three separate radio broadcasts. One of the broadcasts was titled The Case For Christianity. In The Case For Christianity, Lewis discussed two crucial topics in his apologetic defense of Christianity. They were the Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe and What Christians Believe. This critique will address the first chapter. Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe, can be broken into three parts. The first deals with moral law and its existence. The second addresses the idea of a power or mind behind the universe, who, is intensely interested in right conduct. Also that this power or God is good. Good as in the area of truth, not soft and sympathetic. The third point moves to Christianity, its attributes and why it was necessary for the long round-about approach . The law of nature binds humans as would the laws of gravity apply to a falling stone. It is called the law of nature because it does not need to be taught. Lewis points out that an odd individual may exist here and there who didnt know it, just as you find s few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of Decent Behavior was obvious to every one.3 Lewis brilliantly defended his statement of natural laws existence. Two arguments, which argue for relativity, posted against him are the herd instincts or genetic inborn in us i.e. motherly love, survival or sexual impulses and that which is taught socially or learned. Historically, these to interpretations of human behavior  have clashed, however, he suggest that reason is above both. He clarifies his position by classifying impulses as separate from the decision to follow the impulse itself. The learned argument is refuted by his analogy of a boy on the island who is unaware of the existence of the process of multiplication. He never attended school and learned them. The education would be classified as human convention. This human convention, consequently, did not invent multiplication just as it did not invent the law of nature. However, this comparison is based on a false assumption. The law of nature, as Lewis argued, is not taught but some how exists as an inherent part of the human psyche. This law also presents itself in the form of decisions and actions in line with what ought to be done. There is no school-room which imparts this law and the practice of it. Consequently, mathematics needs to be taught and learned. The attempts to equate the law of nature with mathematics in an analogy is misleading. The only connection between mathematics and the law is the nature of its existence and the commonality of not being a human convention. The Great Gatsby and the American Dream EssayLewis dedicates a chapter in his work, The Problem of Pain, to explaining this apparent contradiction. He also tackles the concept of impossibility in relation to omnipotence. The dialectic analysis consists of things intrinsically possible and the things intrinsically impossible.7 A God of omnipotent power can do all things intrinsically possible. The reference to God performing the intrinsically impossible is nonsensical and foolishness to Lewis. The attribution of miracles and supernatural occurrences to God can be explained as possible, though humans perceive it as impossible. Clyde S. Kilby argues the point of free will and Gods power in context to Lewis work on the existence of pain. Kilby states that: Suppose that in my eagerness to be perfectly happy I persuade God day after day to change all prevailing conditions to my wishes. But if all conditions follow my wishes, it is obvious that they cannot possibly follow your wishes also and you will therefore be deprived of your freedom. Freedom is impossible in a world subject to  whim.8 Therefore, pains existence in a universe created by a good and omnipotent God is logically feasible. The next work by C. S. Lewis is The Worlds Last Night. This work contains an essay on prayer. Lewis examined prayer and its purpose by asking certain questions. Questions like, What evidence would prove the efficacy of prayer? 9 If a prayer is answered, how can you ever know it was not going to happen anyway?10 The answer to a prayer does no provide irrefutable evidence of the efficacy of prayer. Does prayer work? Lewis states that prayer is not a machine by which one could plug in the right phrases and get the results. He defines prayer as either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons ourselvesand the utterly concrete Person.11 If in fact prayer is a sheer illusion its purpose would be for the vocalization of wishful thinking. Whether the desired result comes to pass is completely based on fate or the simple fact that it was going to happen anyway. If is indeed a contact to an utterly concrete Person to what avail? What advice can a finite and intellectually limited person give to an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being? Lewis states, Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separate from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate.12 Prayer, according to Lewis, is a statement according to the will or actions of God. The will of God is knowable according to Lewis. However, he does not mention what Gods will was/is. In the following paragraphs Lewis conveniently changes his direction addressing an other aspect of prayer. He also does not explain how one goes about finding Gods will or why would God want to hear billions of little voices telling Him what His will is. Lewis does a poor job justifying the efficacy of prayer. It can be seen that C. S. Lewis analysis was always in terms of black and white or extremes. Any other alternative is either foolishness or unthinkable. He wielded the dialectic process of analysis as though it were second nature to him. His well trained mind synthesized theological dilemmas for the layman. Constantly referring to himself as a layman himself, Lewis left the details of theological doctrine and philosophy to those who were experts. He was only interested in his own personal questions concerning Christianity and sharing his well thought out answers to others. This critique of C. S. Lewis contains various selections from three of his books. The first work address the topic of Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe. In this section Lewis argues for the existence of absolutes, God and the validity of Christianity. The second work which was examined was The Problem of Pain. A selection on the omnipotent power of a good God was discussed in terms of the intrinsically impossible and the existence of pain.  Thirdly, the efficacy of prayer was addressed in critical questioning of the purpose its existence.