Linguistic Analysis Quotes

I can't help but admire the structural linguists who have carved out for themselves a linguistic discipline based on the deterioration of written communication. Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less-filling volumes and libraries with the subtle linguistic analysis of the grunt.

Things had changed between them nevertheless. They were children of a time and culture which mistrusted love, 'in love', romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared.

Many of the most profound discoveries were reported to have come through intuition rather than sequential analysis processed by linguistic understanding.

Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world.

The tyranny of words is only slightly less absolute than that of men; but whereas elections, revolutions, or just the dreary passage of time can do away with human tyranny, patient analysis and redefinition are required to remedy the linguistic affliction.

What really happened to JonBenet Ramsey? Was her death intentional or an accident, covered up to look like a botched kidnapping? What are the facts about the case DNA? What does it really tell us? Is it relevant to the crime or is it contamination? Can it be tied to an intruder, or was Mary Lacy’s attempt at exoneration of the Ramseys based on faulty interpretation of the actual lab results? “Listen Carefully: Truth and Evidence in the JonBenet Ramsey Case” contains 16 pages of explosive DNA reports from Bode Cellmark Forensics that had been hidden until recently, as well details of the 2013 shocking revelation John and Patsy Ramsey were indicted by a Grand Jury in 1999, but the district attorney declined to prosecute. Exposing the many myths and misrepresentations of facts in the Ramsey case, the book uses documented evidence and detailed research, as well as extensive interviews with many who were involved in the case, to present the truth surrounding JonBenet’s death and the 20-year investigation. With a thorough linguistic analysis of the ransom note, as well as handwriting comparisons, crime-scene photos, footnotes, a bibliography for further reading and five appendices (including timelines, Ramsey house plans, and a guide to understanding DNA), the book is essential for anyone interested not only what happened to JonBenet, but why.

GAMMA: Your first mature intuition led you to your 'perfect proof-analysis'. You thought that your 'pencil' was absolutely sharp. ALPHA: I forgot about the difficulties of linguistic communication -especially with pedants and sceptics. But the heart of mathematics is the thought-experiment-the proof. Its linguistic articulation-the proof-analysis-is necessary for communication but irrelevant. I am interested in polyhedra, you in language. Don't you see the poverty of your counterexamples? They are linguistic, not polyhedral.

Dave does extra-mural work for the University, and collects about him many youths who have a part-time interest in truth. Dave’s pupils adore him, but there is a permanent fight on between him and them. They aspire like sunflowers. They are all natural metaphysicians, or so Dave says in a tone of disgust. This seems to me a wonderful thing to be, but it inspires in Dave a passion of opposition. To Dave’s pupils the world is a mystery; a mystery to which it should be reasonably possible to discover a key. The key would be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some eight hundred pages. To find the key would not necessarily be a simple matter, but Dave’s pupils feel sure that the dedication of between four and ten hours a week, excluding University vacations, should suffice to find it. They do not conceive that the matter should be either more simple or more complex than that. They are prepared within certain limits to alter their views. Many of them arrive as theosophists and depart as Critical Realists or Bradeians. It is remarkable how Dave’s criticism seems os often to be purely catalytic in its action. He blazes upon them with the destructive fury of the sun, but instead of shrivelling up their metaphysical pretensions, achieves merely their metamorphosis from one rich stage into another. This curious fact makes me think that perhaps after all Dave is, in spite of himself, a good teacher. Occasionally he succeeds in converting some peculiarly receptive youth to his own brand of linguistics analysis; after which as often as not the youth loses interest in philosophy altogether. To watch Dave at work on these young men is like watching someone prune a rose bush. It is all the strongest and most luxuriant shoots which have to come off. Then later perhaps there will be blossoms; but not philosophical ones, Dave trusts. His great aim is to dissuade the young from philosophy. He always warns me off it with particular earnestness.

All texts are, always, to various degrees, contradictory, multifarious, polysemic. This is not license for epistemological anarchy, according to which anything, any reading, always goes. But it is to acknowledge that no next, whatever its author's (or reader's) intent, can have a simple, singular meaning. Every text will generate something like a tangle of meanings and connotations, more or less concentrated around a core, more or less protean or stable, according to political, social and linguistic context. As one playful formulation has it, rather than being straightforwardly 'about' something in particular, every text is inevitably surrounded by a 'vibrating aboutness cluster'. The context, content and range of that cluster must be accounted for as part of an analysis. Some writers in some situations may strain against rhetorical shenanigans, for example striving for the specificity of logical notation: the cluster of reasonable meanings of such texts may well thus be less diffuse than for those which, say, revel in pun and performance. But a text with one 'true' meaning is a chimera. Analysis is not closure, but an attempt to discern reasonable meaning(s) close to the core of that cluster, and to contest those that range too far from it.

As social phenomena, languages are tied up in world of unequal power relations, gaining or losing status not based on technical linguistic grounds but on social judgement, biases, and stereotypes that are based on the status of their speakers. As such, we argue that white America's love-hate relationship with black modes of communication can only be interpreted within a framework that considers language a primary site of cultural contestation. It should be clear by now that it's about more than a mothafucka, right? Our analysis of Black Language forms that the dominant culture considers inflammatory, controversial, or stigmatized allows us to make several observations. First, building off what anthropologist and linguist Arthur Spears noted in his discussion of uncensored speech, Black verbal culture, like all cultures is "a complex network of predispositions, values, behaviors, expectations and routines." Language practices, in their varying sociocultural contexts, can only be understood if read within the full range of the community's speech activities, and that requires rigorous ethnographic search and analysis. Second the community's beliefs and ideas about language- it's language ideologies- should be the primary point of departure for investigation and interpretation.

A famous British writer is revealed to be the author of an obscure mystery novel. An immigrant is granted asylum when authorities verify he wrote anonymous articles critical of his home country. And a man is convicted of murder when he’s connected to messages painted at the crime scene. The common element in these seemingly disparate cases is “forensic linguistics”—an investigative technique that helps experts determine authorship by identifying quirks in a writer’s style. Advances in computer technology can now parse text with ever-finer accuracy. Consider the recent outing of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as the writer of The Cuckoo’s Calling , a crime novel she published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. England’s Sunday Times , responding to an anonymous tip that Rowling was the book’s real author, hired Duquesne University’s Patrick Juola to analyze the text of Cuckoo , using software that he had spent over a decade refining. One of Juola’s tests examined sequences of adjacent words, while another zoomed in on sequences of characters; a third test tallied the most common words, while a fourth examined the author’s preference for long or short words. Juola wound up with a linguistic fingerprint—hard data on the author’s stylistic quirks. He then ran the same tests on four other books: The Casual Vacancy , Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter novel, plus three stylistically similar crime novels by other female writers. Juola concluded that Rowling was the most likely author of The Cuckoo’s Calling , since she was the only one whose writing style showed up as the closest or second-closest match in each of the tests. After consulting an Oxford linguist and receiving a concurring opinion, the newspaper confronted Rowling, who confessed. Juola completed his analysis in about half an hour. By contrast, in the early 1960s, it had taken a team of two statisticians—using what was then a state-of-the-art, high-speed computer at MIT—three years to complete a project to reveal who wrote 12 unsigned Federalist Papers. Robert Leonard, who heads the forensic linguistics program at Hofstra University, has also made a career out of determining authorship. Certified to serve as an expert witness in 13 states, he has presented evidence in cases such as that of Christopher Coleman, who was arrested in 2009 for murdering his family in Waterloo, Illinois. Leonard testified that Coleman’s writing style matched threats spray-painted at his family’s home (photo, left). Coleman was convicted and is serving a life sentence. Since forensic linguists deal in probabilities, not certainties, it is all the more essential to further refine this field of study, experts say. “There have been cases where it was my impression that the evidence on which people were freed or convicted was iffy in one way or another,” says Edward Finegan, president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. Vanderbilt law professor Edward Cheng, an expert on the reliability of forensic evidence, says that linguistic analysis is best used when only a handful of people could have written a given text. As forensic linguistics continues to make headlines, criminals may realize the importance of choosing their words carefully. And some worry that software also can be used to obscure distinctive written styles. “Anything that you can identify to analyze,” says Juola, “I can identify and try to hide.

All use of speech implies convention and therefore at least duality of minds. The problem of communication through language may in this light be seen as the search for the means supplied by the conventions (or code) to transmit a message from one mind to another. (This definition is as applicable to "literary" communication as it is to "non-literary.") ...Is the code exactly the same for transmitter and receiver? Indeed, can it ever be? It hardly seems likely, since in the strict sense no two people have ever acquired exactly the same code. Consequently, the correspondence between the writer's understand of his writing (I do not, of course, mean merely a conscious or reflective understanding) and the reader's understanding of it will be at least approximate. Another variable is the mental, emotional, and cultural constitution of the being who used the code to transmit a message, and of the being who decodes it. To what extent are they capable of understanding each other? To what extent will they be willing to cooperate in dealing with the inevitable problems in communication? To what extent will anticipated or actual reaction ("feedback") from the receiver affect the framing of the message? Perhaps more important than any of these variables, there is the as yet unresolved question of the very nature of language, and therefore of communication through language. What do agreed upon symbols stand for? Is it conceivable that they correspond to something objectively identifiable? Perhaps not. But even so, is it conceivable that a given message can recreate in another mind whatever it is supposed in the first place to represent in the mind of the sender? All of these questions are in the last analysis as relevant to literary studies as they are linguistics

See? I long to be your spiritual guide. I really do, and I will. Love is my motive, rather than any elevated belief in my own knowledge, contemplative work, experience, or maturity. And may God correct what I get wrong. For he knows everything, and I only know in part.1 Now to satisfy your proud intellect, I will praise the work of contemplation. You should know that if those engaged in this work had the linguistic talent to express exactly what they’re experiencing, then every scholar of Christianity would be amazed by their wisdom. It’s true! In comparison, all theological erudition would look like total nonsense. No wonder, then, that my clumsy human speech can’t describe the immense value of this work to you, and God forbid that the limitations of our finite language should desecrate and distort it. No, this must not and will not happen. God forbid that I would ever want that! For our analysis of contemplation and the exercise itself are two entirely different things. What we say of it is not it, but merely a description. So, since we can’t define it, let’s describe it. This will baffle all intellectual conceit, especially yours, which is the sole reason I’m writing this letter. I want to start off by asking you a question. What is the essence of human spiritual perfection, and what are its qualities? I’ll answer this for you. On earth, spiritual perfection is only possible through the union between God and the human soul in consummate love. This perfection is pure and so sublime that it surpasses our human understanding, and that’s why it can’t be directly grasped or observed. But wherever we see its consequences, we know that the essence of contemplation abounds there. So, if I tell you that this spiritual discipline is better than all others, then I must first prove it by describing what mature love looks like. This spiritual exercise grows virtues. Look within yourself as you contemplate and also examine the nature of every virtue. You’ll find that all virtues are found in and nurtured by contemplation with no distortion or degeneration of their purposes. I’m not going to single out any particular virtue here for discussion. I don’t need to because you can find them described in other things I’ve written.2 I’ll only comment here that contemplative prayer, when done right, is the respectful love and ripe fruit that I discuss in your little Letter on Prayer. It’s the cloud of unknowing, the hidden love-longing offered by a pure spirit. It’s the Ark of the Covenant.3 It’s the mystical theology of Dionysius, the wisdom and treasure of his “bright darkness” and “unknown knowing.” It takes you into silence, far from thoughts and words. It makes your prayer very short. In it, you learn how to reject and forget the world.

Introducing the No More Tears Slicer, which lets you slice your prep time in half! With the No More Tears Onion Slicer, you can slice your way through onions, dice vegetables, and slice cheese in minutes! This is one kitchen tool you don't want to do without! Order this time-saving instrument NOW for the TV-price of only $19.99! The University of Portlandia is seeking a research fellow to work on the Multilingual Metrolingualism (MM) project, a new five-year NSF-funded project led by Dr Hannelore Holmes. We are seeking a highly motivated and committed researcher to work on all aspects of the MM Project, but in particular on developing a coding system suitable for urban youth language use. Applicants should have a PhD in a relevant area of sociolinguistics or a closely related field. Proficiency in at least one of the following languages is essential: French, Swahili, Mandarin, or Tok Pisin. Candidates must also have good knowledge and understanding of discourse analysis, semiotics, and grammatical analysis. Applicants should demonstrate enthusiasm for independent research and commitment to developing their research career. The post is fixed-term for five years due to funding. The post is available from April 1 or as soon as possible thereafter. Job sharers welcome. The University of Portlandia is an Equal Opportunity

this type of analysis combines the three target-situation analyses (use, linguistic, and learning) and the present-situation analysis to

Inexorably accurate translation from Latin provides a training in observation, analysis, judgment, evaluation, and a sense of linguistic form, clarity, and beauty which is excellent training in the shaping of one’s own English expression,” asserted Frederic Wheelock.

We are merely epigones. The events, the discoveries, the visions are those from the period between 1910 and 1940. We live on like weary commentators on that frenzied period in which the whole invention of modernity (and the lucid presentiment of its end) occurred in a language which still bore the brilliance of style. The highest level of intensity lies behind us. The lowest level of passion and intellectual illumination lies ahead of us. There is something like a general entropic movement in the century, the initial energy dissipating slowly in the sophisticated ramifications of the structural, pictural, ideological, linguistic and psychoanalytic revolutions - the final configuration, that of 'postmodernity' marking the most degraded, most factitious and most eclectic phase, the shattered fetishism of all the idols and the purer signs that have preceded it. Even the great burst of light in the years 1960-80, seen with some critical distance, will merely have been an episode in the involutive course of the century, in terms of powerful new ideas. But a portent all the same. Might a new event produce some surprise? We can say nothing of this, since archives and analysis are twilight tools.

The flooding continued. In about 5600 BCE the Mediterranean Sea rose so high that it crashed with great violence through the land bridge joining Turkey to Bulgaria, creating the Bosphorus Strait. The seawater from the Mediterranean Sea transformed a small freshwater lake, Lake Euxine, into the vast saltwater Black Sea. Displaced people appeared in various places—Hungary, Slovakia, and Iraq—as evidenced by linguistic analysis. This astonishing flood became seared into the memory of its survivors as the myth of the world flood; accounts of floods are included in about 500 of the world’s mythologies.17

Any one-level theory of objective reality that ignores the separate reality-tunnels in which these people are living existentially has no validity in psychology, and, with a little analysis, it is obvious that no such one-level theory has any general validity in sociology either. To understand human behavior, we have to understand human evaluations (neuro-linguistic programs) and modern social scientists of all schools increasingly recognize that human evaluations (internal reality-tunnels) depend on both the external environment (setting) and the internal environment (neuro-linguistic programs).

This, probably, is why Nietzsche, who understood this pathology from within, raged against both the modeltheistic epistemology — denying The "Real" Universe entirely — and against what he called the Revenge motive. Even if The "Real" Universe were real, he said again and again, we could not know it, since all we know is the existential world of experience. Besides that, linguistic analysis indicates rather clearly that The "Real" Universe is our creation, made up of our metaphors and models. But his deepest attack goes at the psychology of The "Real" Universe and its connection to Revenge, and the disguises of Revenge. If a man feels overwhelmed by The "Real" Universe, he will seek to destroy what oppresses him. Since we cannot get at The "Real" Universe, revenge must be directed at symbolic targets in the existential continuum. The Will to Power — which Nietzsche held was essentially a will to self-overcoming: to neurological self-criticism in my terminology: to become more than one was — then becomes deflected into a Will to Destroy.

Marx inspired Bourdieu’s understanding of society as the embodiment of concrete relationships rather than separate, abstract entities, like individuals and rules. Weber had formulated concepts such as domination, which Bourdieu developed as unconscious internalization of relations of subjugation. Ernst Cassirer* wrote about violence, power, and capital as “symbolic forms,” which is very similar to the symbolic capital conceptualized by Bourdieu. From Durkheim, as much as from structural linguistics, Bourdieu borrowed the notion of structure and its reproducing mechanisms

In cold fact, all three statements [1, 2 and 3] contradict my actual ideas. I just wanted to remind you how easily humans can go from statement S1 to conclusion S5 without noticing that the inferences in between — S2, S3 and S4 — have no basis in logic, and result only from mechanical reflex. I already quoted Andre Gide about that. Now I quote the father of linguistic analysis, Josiah Warren; “It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly.

(Post-modernism, in art and theory, evolved out of the linguistic analysis of recent semantic/semiotic philosophers, who have discovered that [1] any system of words or concepts covers part, but not all, of human experience, and that [2] social factors play a role in which systems dominate at a given time. The opposition consists mostly of Christian theologians like Jacques Maritain and C.S. Lewis, who claim the total truth remains accessible to us through Faith in the Christian mythos. More recently two blokes named Gross and Levitt, in a curious book called Higher Superstition, repeat most of the Maritainish and Lewisoid arguments for Faith in Authority and rejection of relativistic skepticism — except that Gross and Levitt believe that current mainstream science, not mainstream Christianity, contains the repository of Total Truth which skepticism should never question. More about those extremely odd birds later.)

It happens to be the case that we cannot, in our language, refer to the sensible properties of a thing without introducing a word or phrase which appears to stand for the thing itself as opposed to anything which may be said about it. And, as a result of this, those who are infected by the primitive superstition that to every name a single real entity must correspond assume that it is necessary to distinguish logically between the thing itself and any, or all, of its sensible properties. And so they employ the term “substance” to refer to the thing itself. But from the fact that we happen to employ a single word to refer to a thing, and make that word the grammatical subject of the sentences in which we refer to the sensible appearances of the thing, it does not by any means follow that the thing itself is a “simple entity,” or that it cannot be defined in terms of the totality of its appearances. It is true that in talking of “its” appearances we appear to distinguish the thing from the appearances, but that is simply an accident of linguistic usage. Logical analysis shows that what makes these “appearances” the “appearances of” the same thing is not their relationship to an entity other than themselves, but their relationship to one another. The metaphysician fails to see this because he is misled by a superficial grammatical feature of his language.

It happens to be the case that we cannot, in our language, refer to the sensible properties of a thing without introducing a word or phrase which appears to stand for the thing itself as opposed to anything which may be said about it. And, as a result of this, those who are infected by the primitive superstition that to every name a single real entity must correspond assume that it is necessary to distinguish logically between the thing itself and any, or all, of its sensible properties. And so they employ the term “substance” to refer to the thing itself. But from the fact that we happen to employ a single word to refer to a thing, and make that word the grammatical subject of the sentences in which we refer to the sensible appearances of the thing, it does not by any means follow that the thing itself is a “simple entity,” or that it cannot be defined in terms of the totality of its appearances. It is true that in talking of “its” appearances we appear to distinguish the thing from the appearances, but that is simply an accident of linguistic usage. Logical analysis shows that what makes these “appearances” the “appearances of” the same thing is not their relationship to an entity other than themselves, but their relationship to one another. The metaphysician fails to see this because he is misled by a superficial grammatical feature of his language.

It happens to be the case that we cannot, in our language, refer to the sensible properties of a thing without introducing a word or phrase which appears to stand for the thing itself as opposed to anything which may be said about it. And, as a result of this, those who are infected by the primitive superstition that to every name a single real entity must correspond assume that it is necessary to distinguish logically between the thing itself and any, or all, of its sensible properties. And so they employ the term “substance” to refer to the thing itself. But from the fact that we happen to employ a single word to refer to a thing, and make that word the grammatical subject of the sentences in which we refer to the sensible appearances of the thing, it does not by any means follow that the thing itself is a “simple entity,” or that it cannot be defined in terms of the totality of its appearances. It is true that in talking of “its” appearances we appear to distinguish the thing from the appearances, but that is simply an accident of linguistic usage. Logical analysis shows that what makes these “appearances” the “appearances of” the same thing is not their relationship to an entity other than themselves, but their relationship to one another. The metaphysician fails to see this because he is misled by a superficial grammatical feature of his language.

Very broadly, empiricists were (and are) concerned with the recording and analysis of observable facts of language structure as revealed in speech and writing, while rationalists seek to account for language in terms of innate abilities or ideas. Linked to the latter is a concern with finding universals, i.e. features common to all languages rather than just to individual ones.

…the idea of morphemes with constant phonetic and semantic identity is fully appropriate only to the agglutinative languages. Morpheme analysis, therefore, is essentially an attempt to mould all languages (including those that are inflectional) into the form of the agglutinative

French provides a very striking case of multiple meta-analysis. Our word unicorn derives from Latin, in which it is composed of uni- ‘one’ and cornu ‘horn’. In English, nothing much has happened to this word, except that most speakers, knowing nothing of Latin, probably don’t assign any internal structure to it: they just regard it as a single morpheme, on a par with horse or giraffe. Most European languages have the identical word, but the French word is the curious licorne. Where did this come from? The original word, of course, was unicorne, a grammatically feminine noun. But the French word for ‘a’ with a feminine noun is une – and hence unicorne was misinterpreted as une icorne, and icorne therefore became the French name of the beast. But the French word for ‘the’ before a noun beginning with a vowel is l’. Hence ‘the unicorne’ was expressed as l’icorne – and this form in turn was reanalysed as a single noun licorne, producing the modern form.

The difficulty rating of words in the Scripps National Spelling Bee is based on a very complicated mathematical algorithm involving a linguistical analysis of the origin of the word, the syllables, and expected phonetic construction. Just kidding. A couple of wordsmiths sit around a table and throw out difficulty ratings like they’re judging a swan dive.

With the natural caution of a scientist venturing outside his field, Dr. Cannon concluded his study of 'The Wisdom of the Body' with the suggestion that the model of the living organism might be applied with advantage to the larger human community. Since technologies and economic systems are themselves products of life, it is not strange that, to the degree that they work effectively at all, they have incorporated many organic devices not in line with their own abstract ideological or institutional premises. But because brain physiology, dream exploration, and linguistic analysis were all outside his are of high competence Dr. Cannon never faced the central problem that arose, at a very early point, I suspect, once the enlargement of man's neural functions enabled him to escape the automatism of his reflexes and hormones. how under those conditions to prevent the brain from succumbing to its own disorderly hyperactivity, once liberated from the bodily functions and environmental contacts and social pressures necessary for its existence? The need to recognize this special source of instability coming from the extraordinary powers of the mind, and to take measures for overcoming it, is not the least lesson to be drawn from man's historic development. In so far as automatic systems become more lifelike as well as more powerful, they carry with them the threat of increasing human irrationality at higher levels. To follow an organic model, then, not only the system as a whole must be kept in view, but each individual part must be in a state of alertness, ready to intervene at any point in the process and take over.

What we are concerned to provide throughout this book is in- stead a prerequisite to any such discussion, namely, a linguistic and rhetorical analysis of the role of metaphor in the way we understand a poem.

This is where the scholastic method comes in. The method consists of five parts. 1. Ask a question. 2. List the authorities that addressed the question and divide them into categories, pro and con. 3. Using a combination of logical tools from Aristotle and surprisingly sophisticated methods of linguistic analysis, analyze the authorities with the goal of resolving as many of the apparent contradictions as possible. 4. Present the solution to the problem. 5. Argue against your solution from as many angles as possible and respond to these anticipated objections. Scholasticism was tailor-made to allow large amounts of new material to be integrated into an existing body of knowledge.