Wallace Stevens, Death of a Soldier Essays

Wallace Stevens, Death of a Soldier Essays Wallace Stevens, Death of a Soldier Paper Wallace Stevens, Death of a Soldier Paper Alita Wright, ENG 311 Module 4, February 6, 2011 Depicting war into words is a strange and melodramatic practice, which can mean something different to each person. When my grandfather thinks of war, he thinks of friends and family that have lost their lives and the pride he feels that he defended his country and came home. My father, his own son, believes that war is a useless practice that wastes money and lives and holds no real purpose. My own beliefs are such that I can see the value in defending democratic beliefs, knowing that there is a price that must be paid to defend them. I am not so naive to believe that there is not a price for our freedoms and that many people all over the world would like to have the same freedoms and others would like to take them all away. Each author writes their story in their own words to share their views and leave them open to our interpretations. In Wallace Stevens’ poem, â€Å"The Death of a Soldier† he depicts that death is swift, unemotional and comparative to the season of autumn. Just as autumn dies swiftly and poignantly, a soldier’s death is just as cold and ill fated. â€Å"As in a season of autumn. The soldier falls. He does not become a three-days personage,  imposing his separation, calling for pomp. † This statement reflects that no time or expectation of memorial is taken or required. Comparatively William Faulkner’s â€Å"Two Soldiers† depicts this same kind of defense and pride. The story is about two brothers, one older, one younger who hears of the bombing of Pearl Harbor at the same time, but has different thoughts and views. The older brother leaves to enlist in the military and join the war. The two brothers are inseparable in their life and the youngest brother believes that this will continue. In his eyes he can bring water and firewood for the soldiers, being too young is not even a thought for him. He wants to do his part as well, as long as he is with his brother. The brother feels that he has to defend his country. The two brothers have the same type of pride and spirit that a soldier should. No expectation or belief of coming home is thought of in either the story or the poem. A soldier does what he has to in order to defend his beliefs and is proud of the accomplishments made for their country and for the freedoms being ttacked. Whether or not someone believes war should happen, it does occur and lives are lost. The best memorial we can give is to be proud of the sacrifice and remember that the price is high and we should never take it for granted. : Stevens, Wallace. The Death of a Soldier. Select Writers of the Twentieth Century. Boston, MA: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2005. Faulkner, William. Two Soldiers. Select Writers of the Twentieth Century. Boston, MA: Pear son Custom Publishing, 2005.

Lexical Competence Definition and Examples

Lexical Competence Definition and Examples The ability to produce and understand the words of a language. Lexical competence is an aspect of both linguistic competence and communicative competence. Examples and Observations Anna GoyDuring the last decade or so more and more philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists have become convinced that no complete account of our competence in the domain of word meaning can be given without a link between language and perception (Jackendoff, 1987; Landau Jackendoff, 1993; Harnad, 1993; Marconi, 1994). Moreover, it has been claimed that the boundary between lexical and encyclopaedic knowledge is not clear cut (or may be completely absent): the way we use, perceive and conceptualise objects is part of a kind of knowledge that not only belongs to our lexical competence, but is precisely what allows us to know the meanings of words and to use them correctly.Diego MarconiWhat does our ability to use words consist of? What kind of knowledge, and which abilities, underlie it?It seemed to me that to be able to use a word is, on the one hand, to have access to a network of connections between that word and other words and linguistic expressions: it is to know that cats are animals, that in order to arrive somewhere one has to move, that an illness is something one may be cured of, and so forth. On the other hand, to be able to use a word is to know how to map lexical items onto the real world, that is, to be capable of both naming (selecting the right word in response to a given object or circumstance) and application (selecting the right object or circumstances in response to a given word). The two abilities are, to a large extent, independent of each other. . . . The former ability can be called inferential, for it underlies our inferential performance (such as, for example, interpreting a general regulation concerning animals as applying to cats); the latter may be called referential. . . .I later discovered, thanks to Glyn Humphreys and other neuro-psychologists, that empirical research on brain-injured persons confirmed, to some extent, the intuitive picture of lexical competence I had been sketching. Inferential and refere ntial abilities appeared to be separate. Paul Miera[D]eveloping good test instruments for evaluating hypotheses about vocabulary development may be more difficult than we have typically supposed. Simply comparing the associations of L2 learners and native speakers, using ad hoc lists of words, as much of the research in this area has done, begins to look like a very unsatisfactory approach to assessing L2 lexical competence. Indeed, blunt research tools of this kind may be intrinsically incapable of evaluating the hypothesis we think we are researching. Careful simulation studies provide a way of testing out the capabilities of these instruments before they are widely used in real experiments.Michael Devitt and Kim SterelnyWhen we talk of an ability to use a name gained at a dubbing or in conversation, we are talking of competence. So competence with the name is simply an ability with it that is gained in a grounding or reference borrowing. Underlying the ability will be causal chains of a certain type that link the name to its bearer. Since the names sense is its property of designating by that type of chain, we could say that, in a psychologically austere way, competence with a name involves grasping its sense. But competence does not require any knowledge about the sense, any knowledge that the sense is the property of designating the bearer by a certain type of causal chain. This sense is largely external to the mind and beyond the ken of the ordinary speaker.