Characteristics of Slang Language

Some of slang expressions are acceptable and the others are a rude and impolite. Words or phrases may be considered as slang if they fulfill one or more these characteristics (Slang of Duke.http://www.epinions.com):
1. Creative
Slang is created from a new term, so it needs the creativity of the creator. The creator is encouraged to produce new terms, which are imaginative, innovative, productive, even shocking, and amusing. The example of teenagers’ creativity is creating slang terms from the existing words. In this case, teenagers still use the original words, but acquire a new meaning, which is different from its original meaning. Some of them is constructed from the kind of colors, animals, and numbers,
2. Flippant
It means, slang produced has irrelevant meaning with the context. That makes this term considered as a rude, for instance, fucking chicken, bitch, motherfucker, and shit.

Reduce Your Prostate Cancer Risk With Coffee

Drinking a coffee has been an inseparable lifestyle for the people in this era. it recognizes a lot of various taste in coffee. Those are from moccacino, chapuccino, latte, even a tradtional taste like Tubruk Coffee which is popular in Indonesia or a very expensive one, Kopi Luwak (Luwak Coffee). Some people are even willing to go overseas to study about coffee, to discover the new taste for a coffee.

Drinking coffee is not merely to relieve your sleepy feeling or to strengthen the spirit for your daily activties. This beverage is able to reduce the risk of prostate cancer. People who drink more than six cups of coffee in a day will have 20 percent less possible to suffer that serious disease. The risk is lower than 60 percent for the people to suffer other type of cancer.

      The study invites 48 thousand men who work in the field of health to participate in the research. They were asked to report their average consumption for drinking coffee in a day from 1986 to 2006.

      There is no differences found between the effects of caffeinated coffee and non caffeinated coffee. Thus, it is possible to coffee consists of compounds that can protect the body from prostate cancer. However, Helen Rippon, a doctor from The Prostate Cancer Charity, would not recommend their patients to drink coffee. Excessive consumption can make the symptoms of benign prostatic even worse, "he said. The early symptoms of prostate disease is usually difficult in the process of urination.

Structuralism and Claude Levi Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss is the best known and most influential structuralist. Because of his influence, Lévi-Strauss is an excellent example of structuralist approaches. The main influence on the work Lévi-Strauss' work is multifaceted and that he was influenced not only by other anthropologists but also by linguists, geologists and others. Lévi-Strauss brings into anthropology these and other influences which have shaped his thinking and anthropological thought through his work. The main aspects of Lévi-Strauss' work can be summarized under three headings, they are:
a)    Alliance Theory
Lévi-Strauss' theoretical contributions to social anthropology are numerous and significant. The best known of these is "alliance theory." Alliance theory stresses the importance of marriage in society as opposed to the importance of descent. Its basic supposition is that the exchange of women between groups of related men results in greater social solidarity, and that the result of this cohesion is better chances of survival for all members of the resultant kin group. Lévi-Strauss' claims that the regulating of marriages through prescription and preference and the proscription of other types of marriage creates a "exchange" of women in simple societies. This interchange, accompanied by exchanges of gifts, ensures the cooperation of the members of these groups.
His analysis of the incest taboo is fascinating. For Lévi-Strauss the link between nature and culture in humankind comes from this universal proscription. In the incest taboo nature transcends itself and creates culture as the controlling element of human behavior. Sex and other drives are regulated by culture, man has become a cultural entity.
b)    Human Mental Processes
There is unity in the way the human mind functions. Lévi-Strauss claims that, although the manifestations may be very different, the human mental processes are the same in all cultures. The unity of the mental processes results from the biology of the human brain and the way it works. As a result of this unity, e.g. the classification of the universe by "primitive man" has the same basis as when it is done by any group, it is done through models. The fact that resultant models of this classification may be different is irrelevant for him. The analysis of myth in Lévi-Strauss is also based on the premise about the unity of the human mind.

c)    Structural Analysis of Myth
Lévi-Strauss' work on myth parallels his interest in mental processes. He attempts to discover unconscious the regularities of the human mind. The use of the structuralist models of myth allows for the reduction of material studied to manageable levels. The dominant manner to accomplish this goal is based on the use of the following concepts:
1.    Surface and Deep Structure
To discover the model/structure of a myth one must explore the deep structure of a myth. The surface structure provides us with the narrative, the deep structure with an explication of the myth. This is accomplished by discovering the major binary opposition(s) in the deep structure.
2.    Binary oppositions
These occur in nature and naturally in the human mind. They are such things as night and day, left and right or nature and culture. Nature and culture often functions as a binary opposition in tales. However, depending on the tale or myth the binary opposition changes. For example, the binary opposition life and death is a useful one to explicate "Sleeping Beauty." Here, the deep structure of the story suggests that when the thirteenth fairy declares that Sleeping Beauty is to die at her fifteenth birthday that a life versus death binary opposition is posited. A mediation to solution the problem is now necessary.
3.    Mediation
A binary opposition can be mediated by finding a solution to the opposition created by the binary. The mediation to the culture/nature binary opposition is that culture transcends nature. In the case of "Sleeping Beauty" the nature of the mediation is quite different but equally embedded in within the subject matter. Here the life versus death binary opposition is mediated by the twelve fairy's action: death is transformed into one hundred years sleep.

Hegemony Theory

The word of hegemony is from Greek, from the word ‘hegeisthai’ meaning ‘to lead’. Cultural hegemony is the philosophic and sociological concept, originated by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, that a culturally-diverse society can be ruled or dominated by one of its social classes. It is the dominance of one social group over another, e.g. the ruling class over all other classes. The theory claims that the ideas of the ruling class come to be seen as the norm; they are seen as universal ideologies, perceived to benefit everyone whilst really benefiting only the ruling class. The dominant class controls ideological space and limits what is thinkable in society. Dominated classes participate in their domination, as hegemony enters into everything people do and think of as natural, or the product of common sense—including what is news, as well as playing, working, believing, and knowing.

            Actually, hegemony is a balance between the political Society and civil Society or hegemony of a social group over the entire national society, exercised through the so-called private organizations, such as the Church, the unions, the schools (Gramsci 1994c. ). Hegemony is thus an ideological dominance of society, in which the subordinate levels of society allow the ruling class to exercise social and economic dominance, with the consent of the subordinate classes in the support of the common good. In Gramsci's view, political forces aiming at social change can only gain the upper hand if they are able to mobilize and take charge in society on their own premises (Englestad, 2003).

 The central idea of this theory is the stability of the International System requires a single dominant state to articulate and enforce the rules of interaction among the most important members of the system.

That the concept of hegemony works is evident in that marxism has been able to flourish in the Western Capitalist world and Gramsci's theory of hegemony has been explored further by Althuser, Laclau and Chomsky .

The existance of Hegemony theory nowadays

An example of consent via gentle persuasion and enforcement (force) of a national cultural perspective, could be found in the New Zealand anti-smoking stance, or "Smoke Free New Zealand." Via the media, government departments and places of learning, smoking has been labeled so socially evil, that the idea of smoking in public has become shameful and socially unacceptable. The prohibitive cost of tobacco is punitive and laws have been passed to enforce where people may smoke. (Force). I would argue that the cultural ideology of a smoke free society in New Zealand has been introduced in a hegemonistic way.

Another example is by the fact that we all live in societies where there are power structures. According to Gramsci's theory of hegemony, these systems of power cannot be maintained by force alone. People have to do things, willingly and happily, in their everyday lives that keep the powerful people on top. Coercion alone does not work. If the President of the United States threatened to put to death Americans who did not hang flags from their homes, that president would be overthrown. However, plenty of Americans hang flags from their homes willingly and happily, and this is an everyday behavior that helps the government remain in power.

Hegemony and Marxism

            Hegemony is unavoidable for Marxism; it is either a strong reinforcement of Marx’s theories or a contradiction of them. In an important document, the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx wrote:
            The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
            This is the classic statement of historical materialism. Does not Gramsci’s notion of hegemony run flatly counter to Marx’s words? Gramsci himself, however, thought that his own ideas improved upon Marx rather than discredited him. He said that the materialism expressed in the words just quoted were not truly Marxist but ‘must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx.’ This dispute has never been definitively settled; Marxists in the USSR tended to follow the harsher view - that life is determined by material factors; Western Marxists have, on the whole, favored Gramsci’s view that ideas are at least equally important.
            Gramsci, has some very interesting theories about the role of intellectuals, both in revolutionary movements and in society in general. It is, also, fascinating to look at the many examples in History of groups or classes in societies who owe their power in whole or in part to their intellectual and moral superiority. One may think of the Catholic Church down the ages, and of priesthoods in general. There is the hegemony, up to recent times, in the USA of WASPs - White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. There was the British culture in India under the Raj, and the ‘nomenklatura’ of the USSR.  Nomenklatura means a small elite group within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries who held various key administrative positions in all spheres of those countries' activity: government, industry, agriculture, education, etc., whose positions were granted only with approval by the communist party of each country or region.
            Here are the basic differences between Gramsci’s hegemony and Marx’s marxism: Gramsci supports capitalism, while Marxism is basic theory of modern communism.  Also, Gramsci creates cultural hegemony theory as way to keep the sustainability of capitalism; while Marx thinks that capitalism makes the workers live miserably.

References
Englestad, F. (Ed.). (2003). Introductory chapter. In Power,culture,hegemony. Introduction to comparative social research (Vol. 21) . Oxford: Elsevier science. Retrieved January 15, 2008, from Institute for social research Web site

Language and Dialects

Many speakers do experience difficulty in deciding whether what they speak is should be called a language or a dialect of language. Haugen (1966) has pointed out that language and dialect are ambiguous term. Ordinary people quite freely to speak about various situation, but the scholars often get difficulty to deal with this problem.

In case of the Greek language, Haugen argues that language can be used to refer to a single linguistic norm or to a group of related of related norms., and dialects to refer to one of the norm; but the norm themselves are not static.

In general usage, it remains undefined whether such a dialects are part of the ‘language’ or not. In fact, the dialect is often considered as a standing outside the language. As a social norm, the dialects is a language excluded from polite norm. Language and dialects may be employed virtually interchangeably. In some cases, it depends on entirely on extra linguistic consideration, particularly in certain political or social factors.

Morphology: Morpheme, Free Morpheme, and Bound Morpheme

Morphemes

    Morphology is the study of morpheme obviously. The definition of morphemes is the smallest meaningful unit that has grammatical function. For instance, the word tourist contains three morphemes. Those are one minimal unit of meaning tour, another minimal unit of meaning -ist (person who does something) and one minimal unit of grammatical function –s (indicating plural).

Free and Bound Morphemes

There is a broad distinction between two types of morphemes, free and bound. Free morphemes are the set of separate English word forms such as basic nouns and verbs that can stand by themselves as a single word such as open and tour. Then bound morphemes are morphemes that typically need to be attached to another form, exemplified as re-, -ist. This last set is identified as affixes. When free morphemes used with bound morphemes attached are technically known as stems. For example:
carelessness
care      -less        -ness
stem      suffix        suffix
free      bound    bound

However, there are a number of English words in which their stems are factually not free morphemes. In words such as receive, reduce, re- at the beginning of those words are identified as the bound morphemes but the elements –ceive, -duce are not separate words and free morphemes. So these types of form are described as ‘bound stems’ to distinguish them from ‘free stems’ such as dress and care.

Morphology; Types of the Morphemes

In morphology, there are two broad categories of morphemes: free morphem and bound morpheme

A. Free Morphemes

What we have described as free morphemes fall into two categories. The first category is that set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs which we think of as the word carrying the ‘content’ of message we convey. This free morpheme is called lexical morphemes and some examples are: boy, men, tiger, sad, long and yellow. We can add new lexical morphemes to the language rather easily, so they are treated as an ‘open’ class of words. 

The other group of free morphemes is called functional morphemes.  The examples are: and, but, when, on, near, in, the, that. This set consists largely of the functional words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns. Because we almost never add new functional morphemes to the language, they are described as a ‘close’ class of words.

 B. Bound Morphemes

Affixes are often named as the bound morpheme. This group includes prefixes, suffixes, infixes, and circum fixes. Prefixes are added to the beginning of another morpheme, suffixes are added to the end, infixes are inserted into other morphemes, and circum fixes are attached to another morpheme at the beginning and end. 

Following are examples of each of these:

Prefix: re- added to do produces redo
Suffix: -or added to edit produces editor
Infix: -um- added to fikas (strong) produces fumikas (to be strong) in Bontoc
Circum fix: ge- and -t to lieb (love) produces geliebt (loved) in German