Words shape our lives
An introductory writer to the operational system of English
Written By Dr. Xu – a Chinese speaker who began to learn English at the age of 23 in China
Beginning with A, B., and C
Chapter 1: Words
What is a word? Is it an “idea” or a “fact” or a “label”? Whatever it is, I’d say words have the power to affect our thought and shape our lives. Believe it or not, words are really powerful and we all fall for them even when they play tricks on us. When kids at school, for instance, are asked to recite “to write is to live forever,” they go hysteric about learning to write but they have no clue that the person who wrote that line is actually dead.
Words are so powerful that the advertising world has become the prime example of using them to persuade or to dissuade. We are persuaded by industry, for example, that “receiving waters” are the lakes or rivers into which industrial wastes are dumped and that “assimilative capacity” refers to how much of the waste you can dump into the river before it starts to show. In the case of housing that has been sapped of the most appealing bait by the financing process, many people take up mortgages even if they cannot possibly pay the monthly rates but they are told: “You’re richer than you think.” Many more people are convinced by the knowledge enterprise that “knowledge is power” and that they can “do good, win big” by getting an advanced university degree within a year or just a few months thanks to the digital infrastructure in the global era of the 21st century. In the case of immigration, immigrants are counseled and advised time and again that a successful integration into Canadian society depends on their ability “to communicate in the official languages” (CIC 1991, p.1).
Words indeed affect our thinking, but the way they are phrased or structured in a sentence affects nuances of meaning. In an experiment study, for instance, upon viewing a film of a car accident, subjects were asked questions like: “Did you see thebroken headlight” in some cases; and in other cases “Did you see a broken headlight?” The question using “the” tends to produce more false recognition of events. That is, the presence of the definite article “the” led subjects to believe that there was a broken headlight, whether they saw it or not. Examples like these are common of the influence of language on our cognitive and affective organizations
Words can truly amuse and intrigue us because some of them are inspiring and rousing, others holy and magic, and still others puzzling, shocking or even less than desirable. Then again, words alone or in dictionary lists can’t add up too much unless they are put together into grammatical units, as Shakespeare illustrated in Hamlet. When he wants to appear mad to members of the court, Hamlet enters the stage reading a book. Polonious asks what Hamlet is reading, and the melancholy prince replies, “Words, words, words.” Hamlet’s answer makes it seem as if the words come from the page free of grammar, a system whose design enables us to put words into meaningful units. How better to appear insane than to read words without understanding the system that glue them together as a whole? Words without grammar would be odd: they would become a swarm of objects flying at us from all directions - messy and incomprehensible. We will never read, write, speak or hear words that explode before us like lave from a volcano. Only when merging or merged with one another into phrases, clauses and sentences in organized systematic ways, do words get their force.
In order for us to be able to make words make sense, we need a basic understanding of word categories which are called parts of speech. Nouns, verb, adjectives and adverbs are content words that refer to actions, objects and ideas in the everyday world. Auxiliaries, determiners, pronouns and conjunctions are functional words that refer to concepts within the grammatical text. Functional words express grammatical features like mood, definiteness, and pronoun reference; or they may facilitate grammatical processes like rearrangement, compounding and embedding. Prepositions are quite unique for having characteristics of both content and functional words, though often deemed as the latter.
It is also important for us to be aware that in nature content words are open and functional ones are closed. While the former is flexible and changeable in meaning and distribution, the latter is just the opposite - inflexible and unchangeable in patterning. To be or to become responsible and responsive language users, we need to pay attention to both in order to produce what is not only possiblein structure but also effective in related ideas expressed in a given context.
