Events Leading Up To The American Revolution Essays - Free Essays

Events Leading Up To The American Revolution Essays - Free Essays Events Leading up to the American Revolution With the research that I have done, I have come up with the following information on the events leading to the American Revolution. After the French-Indian War the British Government decided to reap greater benefits from the colonies. The colonies were pressed with greater taxes without any representation in Britain. This eventually lead to the Boston Tea Party. In retaliation the British passed what are now considered the Intolerable (or Coercive Acts) to bring the colonies to the heal of the King. The Intolerable (or Coercive Acts) *Quartering Act: Effective March 24, 1765 This bill required that colonial authorities to furnish barracks and supplies to British troops. In 1766, it was expanded to public houses and unoccupied buildings. *Stamp Act: Effective March 24, 1765 This bill raised revenue in the American colonies. The bill require that all legal documents, licenses, commercial contracts, newspapers, pamphlets, and playing cards to have a tax stamp on them. This act was already in place in Great Britain and just extended itself into the colonies. It was put in place to raise money to cut the costs of keeping the military troops in the colonies. It was undebated in Britain, but it brought much opposition among the colonists, who said that it was because they had no representation in Parliament, and that they couldn?t be taxed without having some voice in the matters. Colonial businessmen stopped importing British goods until Britain would repeal the act. Most of the colonists refused to use the stamps on business papers and courts would not use them on official documents. Since it was opposed by the British business community the act was repealed by the British Parliament on March 4, 1766, after Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania?s representative in London, spoke on behalf of the American colonists. It?s repeal was followed by the Declaratory Act which gave the British Government the right to legally tax the colonists by any acts they wanted. *Boston Port Act: Effective June 1, 1774 This bill closed the port of Boston to all colonists until, the damages from the Boston Tea Party were paid for. The bill also moved the seat of government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from Boston to Salem. Most of the colonists were upset and showed sorrow for the town by setting, the day that the bill went into effect, aside as a day of fasting and of prayer. To make sure that this act was enforced correctly British troops were sent to Boston, along with enough boats to blockade the port. however there where towns in New England that sent grain and other types of food to Boston. *Administration of Justice Act: Effective May 20, 1774 This bill stated that British Officials could not be tried in provincial courts for capital crimes. They would be extradited back to Britain and tried there. This effectively gave the British free reign to do whatever they wished, because no justice would be served while they were still in the colonies. *Massachusetts Government Act: Effective May 20, 1774 This bill effectively annulled the charter of the colonies, giving the British Governor complete control of the town meetings, and taking control out of the hands of the colonists. *Quebec Act: Effective May 20, 1774 This bill extended the Canadian borders to cut off The Western Colonies of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Virginia. Although this was not passed as one of the Intolerable Acts it is considered to be one of them because it stopped forward progress of the colonies and took some of their land. Events *Sugar Smuggling trade flourished for many decades, while the British government made few attempts to enforce the Molasses Act. In 1764, realizing they had massive losses of potential revenue, the new prime minister of Britain, George Grenville, started a policy of strict enforcement of the customs laws, and later that year the Molasses Act was replaced by the Sugar Act. The provisions of this new act raised the tax on sugar and lowered the tax on molasses; added a tax to Madeira wine; and imposed a difficult bonding procedure to be applied to all shipped merchandise. The Sugar Act was generally enforced although its tax was eventually lowered. *Townshend Acts: This bill was passed by Parliament in 1767, affecting the Thirteen Original Colonies The first part of the bill suspended the New York Assembly, penalizing it for not complying with a law, that was enacted two years beforehand. That reprimanded the colonies to house the

Definition and Examples of Linguistic Variation

Definition and Examples of Linguistic Variation The term linguistic variation (or simply variation) refers to regional, social, or contextual differences in the ways that a particular language is used. Variation between languages, dialects, and speakers is known as interspeaker variation. Variation within the language of a single speaker is called intraspeaker variation. Since the rise of sociolinguistics in the 1960s, interest in linguistic variation (also called linguistic variability)  has developed rapidly. R.L. Trask notes that variation, far from being peripheral and inconsequential, is a vital part of ordinary linguistic behavior (Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics, 2007). The formal study of variation is known as variationist (socio)linguistics. All aspects of language (including phonemes, morphemes, syntactic structures, and meanings) are subject to variation. Examples and Observations Linguistic variation is central to the study of language use. In fact it is impossible to study the language forms used in natural texts without being confronted with the issue of linguistic variability. Variability is inherent in human language: a single speaker will use different linguistic forms on different occasions, and different speakers of a language will express the same meanings using different forms. Most of this variation is highly systematic: speakers of a language make choices in pronunciation, morphology, word choice, and grammar depending on a number of non-linguistic factors. These factors include the speakers purpose in communication, the relationship between speaker and hearer, the production circumstances, and various demographic affiliations that a speaker can have.(Randi Reppen et al., Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation. John Benjamins, 2002)Linguistic Variation and Sociolinguistic VariationThere are  two types of language variation: linguistic and sociolinguistic. With linguistic variation, the alternation between elements is categorically constrained by the linguistic context in which they occur. With sociolinguistic variation, speakers  can choose between elements in the same linguistic context and, hence the alternation is probabilistic. Furthermore, the probability of one form  being chosen over another is also affected in a probabilistic way by a range of extra-linguistic factors [e.g. the degree of (in)formality of the topic under discussion, the social status of the speaker and of the interlocutor, the setting in which communication takes place, etc.](Raymond Mougeon et al.,  The Sociolinguistic Competence of Immersion Students. Multilingual Matters, 2010) Dialectal VariationA dialect is variation in grammar and vocabulary in addition to sound variations. For example, if one person utters the sentence John is a farmer and another says the same thing except pronounces the word farmer as fahmuh, then the difference is one of accent. But if one person says something like You should not do that and another says Ya hadnt oughta do that, then this is a dialect difference because the variation is greater. The extent of dialect differences is a continuum. Some dialects are extremely different and others less so.(Donald G. Ellis, From Language to Communication. Routledge, 1999)Types of Variation[R]egional variation is only one of many possible types of differences among speakers of the same language. For example, there are occupational dialects (the word bugs means something quite different to a computer programmer and an exterminator), sexual dialects (women are far more likely than men to call a new house adorable), and educational dialects ( the more education people have, the less likely they are to use double negatives). There are dialects of age (teenagers have their own slang, and even the phonology of older speakers is likely to differ from that of young speakers in the same geographical region) and dialects of social context (we do not talk the same way to our intimate friends as we do to new acquaintances, to the paperboy, or to our employer). . . . [R]egional dialects are only one of many types of linguistic variation.(C. M. Millward and Mary Hayes, A Biography of the English Language, 3rd ed. Wadsworth, 2012) Linguistic Variables- [T]he introduction of the quantitative approach to language description has revealed important  patterns of linguistic behaviour which were previously invisible. The concept of a sociolinguistic variable has become central to the  description of speech. A variable is some point of usage for which two or more competing forms are available in a community, with speakers showing interesting and significant differences in the frequency with which they use one or another of these competing forms.Furthermore, it has been discovered that variation is typically the vehicle of language change.(R.L. Trask,  Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics. Routledge, 1999/2005)- Lexical variables are fairly straightforward, as long as we can show that the two variantssuch as the choice between soda and pop for a carbonated beverage in American Englishrefer to the same entity. Thus, in the case of soda and pop, we need to take into account that for many U.S. southerners, Coke (when used to refer to a beverage and not the steel-making fuel or the illicit narcotic) has the same referent as soda, whereas in other parts of the U.S., Coke refers to a single brand/flavour of the beverage . . ..(Scott F. Kiesling,  Linguistic Variation and Change. Edinburgh University Press, 2011)