1. Welcome
18-03-2013

2. Discussion
1. In times like these you‟re better off with just any job instead
of no job at all.
2. I do not care about my salary as long as I enjoy doing my job.
3. Your job defines who you are in society.
4. I would rather have a company car and a lower salary.
5. If I ever win the lottery, I will stop working straightaway.
6. Unemployed people have to do community work.

3. Adjectives and adverbs
“There was a … fall in profits last year.” (dramatic)
“Shares fell … on the news.” (sharp)
“His anger and pride became … apparent.” (quick)
“The similarities between Ahold and Enron are ....” (striking)
“He spoke … of her.” (high)
“This figure will increase … over the next quarters.” (considerable)
“… five percent of the population suffer from dyslexia.” (approximate)

4. Text
1. A tongue twister is a word (or a phrase) which is difficult to say because it contains
many difficult sounds, especially ones that are very similar. A suitable title for an article in
search of the world‟s hardest languages.
2. “But English is pretty simple: verbs hardly conjugate; nouns pluralise easily (just
add „s‟, mostly) and there are no genders to remember.”
3. “Because Chinese vowels carry tones: pitch that rises, falls, dips, stays low or high, and so
on. Mandarin, the biggest language in the Chinese family, has four tones, so that what
sounds just like “ma” in English has four distinct sounds, and meanings. That is relatively
simple compared with other Chinese varieties. Cantonese has six tones, and Min Chinese
dialects seven or eight. One tone can also affect neighbouring tones' pronunciation through
a series of complex rules.”
4. “Consonants can come in a blizzard of varieties known as egressive (air coming from the
nose or mouth), ingressive (air coming back in the nose and mouth), ejective (air expelled
from the mouth while the breath is blocked by the glottis), pharyngealised (the pharynx
constricted), palatised (the tongue raised toward the palate) and more.”
5. “They are technically ‘non-pulmonic’ consonants that do not use the airstream from
the lungs for their articulation.”

5. Text
6. “Gender often has little to do with physical sex. It is related to „genre‟, and means
merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists talk instead
of „noun classes‟, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate,
but often rules are hard to see.”
7. “Agglutinating languages pack many bits of meaning into single words. Linguists call
a single unit of meaning, whether „tree‟ or „un-‟, a morpheme, and some languages bind
them together obligatorily. ”
8. “Because these are languages that require English speakers to think about things
they otherwise ignore entirely. Take „we‟. In Kwaio, spoken in the Solomon Islands,
„we‟ has two forms: „me and you‟ and „me and someone else (but not you)‟. And Kwaio has
not just singular and plural, but dual and paucal too.”
9. “Aboriginals of northern Australia have no words for ‘left’ or ‘right’, instead they use
absolute directions such as ‘north’ and ‘south-east’ (as in „You have an ant on your
south-west leg‟). Ms Boroditsky says that any Kuuk Thaayorre child knows which way is
south-east at any given time, whereas a roomful of Stanford professors, if asked to point
south-east quickly, do little better than chance.”
10.“Because it is an evidential language. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard
about how they learned what they say they know.”

6. Text (ctd)
VERB ADJECTIVE NOUN
1 to imagine imaginary; image;
imaginative; imagination;
imaginable imagery
2 to harm harmless harm
3 vary varied; variety;
varying; variation;
various; variability
variable
4 to distinguish distinct; distinction
distinctive
5 to think thoughtful; thought
thoughtless

7. Text (ctd)
To extol
e.g. The salesman extolled the new medicine as a cure-all.
To cluster
e.g. The birds clustered around the chimney top to keep warm.
To cower
e.g. The wolves cowered from the flames.
To coin
e.g. He was, to coin a phrase, as sick as a parrot.

8. A letter of complaint
1. Reference to the order
2. Reasons for the complaint (non-delivery, late delivery, wrong goods,
faulty or damaged articles, mistakes in invoice, etc.)
3. Drawing attention to the inconvenience or the difficulties caused
4. Request for measures or sometimes suggest a solution
5. Possibly warning in case of several complaints

9. Reply to a complaint
1. Expression of regret and an apology
2. A decent explanation (human error, shortage of staff, etc.)
3. A solution (replacement, financial compensation, etc.)
4. Reassure the customer that similar situations will not recur
5. Positive ending

10. Assignment 2
INSTRUCTIONS
- Writing a letter of complaint
- Pick 1 of 2 situations
- Check information sheet
- Maximum one page
GUIDELINES
- Deadline: Saturday, April 20 at 8:00 p.m.
- Send to sven.cerulus@khleuven.be

11. Money, money, money …
Is it really so important to you?