Institutt f or litteratur, områdestudier og europeiske språk
TAKE-HOME EXAM
2009/SPRING
ENG4115: TEXTURE AND LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE
3 days
3 pages, including text for analysis.
02.06.2009
Submit your paper in Fronter (blyant.uio.no) no later than 5 June 2009, at 12.00 noon.
Both questions must be answered.
Question 1 counts 20% and Question 2 80% of your final mark.
Your answer should not exceed 10 standard pages, though your list of works consulted may
come in addition.
1
Define and discuss the following terms / concepts with reference to relevant literature
on the subject. Illustrate your discussion with examples. (Answer both a and b.)
a.
b.
2
Theme in Functional Sentence Perspective vs. Systemic-Functional Grammar
Writer and reader reference in academic writing
Give an analysis of the attached text “Fossil Ida’s great big family” by Colin Tudge. In
your analysis you should focus mainly on one of the following aspects of the text:





Cohesion (lexical and/or structural)
Thematic structure (choice of themes, thematic development)
Thematic progression
Information structure
Choice of particular grammatical constructions in the light of information
structure and/or cohesion
In your discussion, take care to formulate your research question and to draw on
relevant literature on the subject.
You may choose to compare the attached text with other texts (in which case you must
provide the source of your additional examples).
(The text appeared as a comment article in the Guardian online on 19 May 2009)
Page 1 of 3
Fossil Ida's great big family
This 47m-year-old bears out Darwin's belief that all creatures
now on Earth are, literally, related
Colin Tudge, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 May 2009 17.38 BST
Ida is a truly extraordinary find. The 47 million-year-old remains of a plausible
human ancestor, with structural details still intact, can teach us an enormous
amount. But what I really like about her is what she tells us about evolution in
general, and – in this year of his bicentenary – what she tells us about Charles
Darwin; and what she can tell us about our attitudes to nature and our own survival
on this Earth. So many years after her death, this humble creature could help to
restore a little sanity in a world that seems to have run short of it.
Yet she is not the kind of ancestor most modern evolutionary biologists would have
been looking for. She is the right general kind of creature – very clearly a primate, as
we are. But modern primates are divided into two main groups: the lemurs and bush
babies on the one hand, and the monkeys and apes on the other. Zoologically
speaking, human beings belong firmly among the monkeys and apes. The first
primates probably appeared about 70m years ago. The lemur lineage and the
monkey-ape-human lineage are thought to have separated soon after the dinosaurs
disappeared, probably about 60m years ago. The two groups still have much in common, but after all that time there are significant differences.
Ida has much in common with lemurs and so – surely – she is ruled out of our own
dynasty. But she also shares many features with monkeys. In other words she could
be close to the common ancestry of both groups. The monkey-ape-human group and
the lemur group may not be so very distant after all.
The discovery of the beautiful fossil primate Ida is a triumphant vindication of the
greatest of Darwin's insights – but not, alas, the one for which he is best remembered:
natural selection. Selection, the mechanism he proposed as the driving force of
evolution, is of course important – it is one of the most important insights of modern
humanity, with implications that extend far beyond the living world.
But the concept of natural selection, and Darwin's own presentation of it, has one
very unfortunate aspect. For it is rooted in the idea of competition. All creatures are
perceived to be locked in mortal combat from the time they are conceived until they
finally lose the battle, either with each other or with their own inevitable decay.
Indeed, Darwin's Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, published in 1859,
seemed to vindicate Tennyson's adage from 20 years earlier, of "nature red in tooth
and claw". Herbert Spencer, in the decade after Darwin, summarised natural
selection as "survival of the fittest" – a slogan Darwin only later adopted.
Now we have a global economy based on to-the-death competition and strongbashes-weak, and various intellectuals make a living telling tycoons and politicians
Page 2 of 3
that this is a good thing because it is the "natural" way of the world. Of course what is
natural is not necessarily good, but Darwin's notions are taken nonetheless as a
bedrock justification for universal viciousness. Darwin was a humanitarian, and in
some ways deeply religious, so this, surely, is not what he would have wanted.
But Darwin's conception of evolution had another thread to it – altogether more
cheerful, but nowadays less prominent. For he also suggested that if evolution is a
fact then – whether or not natural selection is the principal mechanism – all
creatures might trace their ancestry back until they find that they derived from the
same common ancestor.
In other words, all creatures now on Earth are literally related, one to another. We are
closest to African apes, but only slightly less distanced from monkeys, and slightly
further from lemurs. But we are also related, albeit more and more distantly, to mice
and fish and beetles and mushrooms and oak trees and so on, outwards to the
humblest bacterium.
Some people find this idea distasteful. Many don't want to be related to chimps, let
alone snails. Some religious people find it blasphemous. But many do not. St Francis,
often considered as the saint who was closest in spirit to Christ, spoke of the other
animals and plants as his brothers and sisters. It is this that Darwin's idea – and now
Ida – truly vindicates.
In this vision, Ida sits at the cusp. Miraculously preserved though she is, she may look
to the untrained eye like a roadkill squirrel, and she belongs to a time – 47m years
ago – too remote to contemplate. Yet the details of her skeleton proclaim her human
affinity. She is indeed a "link", not only with our own ancestors but with all the rest of
the living world – indeed to all the creatures that have ever lived on this Earth.
These days lip service is paid to the idea of conservation. "Biodiversity" is dimly
supposed to be a good thing because it represents a "resource". It is also thought that
some creatures and ecosystems are proving more useful than suspected – like tropical
forest, which moderates the world's climate.
At best, though, other species impinge on conventional politics only insofar as they
are commodities. What isn't useful is irrelevant, or even a "pest", to be destroyed at
all costs. Perhaps if we once admit in Franciscan and Darwinian vein that the
creatures we so insouciantly brush aside are our relatives, we would treat them
differently. And that would be good for every living creature on this planet.
Source: www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/19/ida-fossil-evolution
Page 3 of 3