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Zhemaiah Oze Harefa - Language and the self Revision Document (1)

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Language and the self: Revision Document
Section
Summary
EVIDENCE
Useful studies to quote. Quotes. ETC
10.1
Roles of language in our sense of self-identity:
➔ Idiolect
➔ Sociolect
➔ Influences of gender, age, ethnicity, religion,
education, work, and social patterns
‘Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions’ by
John Donne.
➔ We are affected by the attitudes of
others.
➔ Close links between ourselves and
other people.
Cooperative principle
➔ Express relevant information in a clear manner.
Paul Grice’s Maxims (1975)
➔ Maxims of quantity: informative as necessary
➔ Maxims of quality: evidence
➔ Maxim of relation: relevance
➔ Maxims of manner: be orderly
What is conversational face?
The image that a person has of themselves as a
conversationalist.
Erving Goffman (1967) & Penelope Brown
and Stephen Levinson (1987)
➔ The positive public image people
seek to establish in social
interactions
➔ Suggests that individuals are
emotionally attached to the face they
have constructed for social situations
and feel good when their face has
been protected or maintained.
Strategies to manage face-threatening acts:
1. Positive politeness
Being complimentary
Make the listener feel good
2. Negative politeness
Mitigate a request by the speaker
3. Adversative conjunction
changes what has just been said in some way
10.2
Key terms:
1. Cognitive skills
2. Perception
3. Attention
4. Memory
5. Motor skills
6. Language
7. Visual and spatial processing
Use the brain:
➔ Put meaning to the words and phrases learned
➔ Cognitive skills involving brain development + lexis
and grammar of a language learned
Descartes (1596-1650)
‘It requires very little reason to be able to
speak.’
➔ Philosophers had no awareness of
cognitive abilities.
B.F. Skinner (1938)
➔ Behaviorism theory
➔ Thought and emotions are
explained in terms of encouraging
desired behavior
➔ Language develops as a result of
children trying to imitate caregivers
➔ Children have no innate ability but
they rely on operant conditioning to
form and improve understanding
John Locke (1690)
‘Concerning Human Understanding’
➔ Empiricism
➔ Knowledge comes through senses
and experiences, not through
reasoning or logical argument
➔ Mind at birth was a ‘clean state’
Philosophy of Plato (427-347 BCE)
➔ Innatism
➔ Mind is born with ideas against the
‘blank slate’ and given by a supreme
being
Chomsky’s ‘Nativist Theory of Language’
10.3
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
➔ Words of a language directly shape the thoughts
of its speakers
Ideas relating to the link between language and
thought:
➔ Linguistic determinism: language determines the
way we think
➔ Linguistic reflections: language reflects the
thoughts of its speakers but doesn’t determine it
➔ Linguistic relativity: structure of language affects
speakers (study of lexis and syntax)
Boas-jakobson principle (1950s)
➔ Every thought can be expressed in every
language
➔ Languages differ in the types of information they
require speakers to mention when they use the
language
Theory of Universalism
➔ Language is a reflection of human thoughts
➔ All languages are similar with shared patterns and
concepts
➔ Idea: humans share the same cognitive processes
Examples of language changes that have reinforced
greater social equality:
1. Gender: ‘policeman’,’ fireman’
2. Comedy: personal or derogatory comments at the
expense of people’s physical appearance are
unacceptable
3. Ethnicity: illegal to use racist language, gestures,
and acts
4.
5.
6.
7.
10.4
1.
2.
Workplace changes
Age: changing attitudes about aging have made
people aware of words that reinforce stereotypes
Disability
Religious beliefs
Convergence: the process through which an
individual shifts speech patterns in interaction so
that they more closely resemble the speech
patterns of speech partners
Divergence: make language distinctively different
from those around us
Prescriptivist view of language
➔ Prescribes how language should be and how you,
as its speaker, must use it.
➔ A prescriptivist most often promotes Standard
English.
Main categories of different contexts for language:
➔ Formal: Standard English is followed on both
speech and writing
➔ Colloquial/Casual: Everyday language is used
➔ Slang/Non-standard: informal variety of English
➔ Frozen language: unchanging and full of
archaisms.
Howard Giles (1973)
‘Communication Accomodation Theory’
➔ Language used by group members
can influence an individual’s sense
of self
➔ People aim to make their speech
more like that of the majority in the
group
➔ People interact, they adjust their
speech
Research studies on language and social
class:
1.
➔
➔
2.
➔
Peter Trudgill (1974), Norwich, UK
Study
Working-class women were more
aware of the more prestigious form
of pronunciation
3.
Great British Class Survey
4.
Basil Bernstein (1971), Restricted
and elaborated codes
Restricted code is most commonly
linked to lower social classes,
whereas elaborated code is linked
to higher social classes.
Bernstein believed that students
from working-class backgrounds
performed poorly in language-based
subjects due to their use of
restricted code.
➔
➔
10.5
Positive and negative features of teenage language:
➔ Early adopters of popular culture (innovators of
William Labov (1966), New York
Study
Pronunciation of a separate
consonant after a vowel
Respondents from ‘working class’
and ‘lower middle class’ groups
were more likely to change the way
they spoke to reflect what felt was
‘right’ way of pronunciation
➔
➔
➔
➔
10.6
➔
➔
language)
They talk a lot, their language may be unclear or
even incomprehensible to those outside their
group
They may reduce their language from a lexis of
several thousand words acquired in childhood
Teens language acquisition is clearly not about
learning language / they need to learn to adapt
and use language in adult situations
They can create online virtual lives, they use their
own lexis
Language can contribute to the inclusion or
exclusion of certain groups in society
Linked to politics and social concerns
England in 2066
➔ William the Conqueror invaded
England
➔ Norman French replaced the
language spoken by the defeated
Anglo-Saxons
➔ French and English gradually
merged into important components
of present-day English
Roman Catholic Church, in the 1300s
➔ They opposed the first translations
of the Bible into English from Latin
➔ People were burned as heretics
➔ Became a matter of life and death ->
langauge elected by a group for
their religious worship was so
important to their self-identity
10.7
Speech
➔ Primary medium of language
➔ Sounds are produced as we breathe out
➔ Vowels are sounds made with no restriction of air
through the mouth
➔ Consonants are sounds made with some
restriction to the airflow
Irregularities and inconsistencies in sounds of speech :
➔ Words with same pronunciation are spelled
differently
➔ Words with the same spelling are pronounced
differently
➔ Words may diverge with the Engish or American
system of spelling
➔ Many words have silent letters
Additional
Research
Stuart Hall (1997) on Language and
Cultural Identity :
➔ language, identity, and cultural
differences are strongly connected
due to the strong relationship
between representation and culture
➔ as a group of shared meanings, is
presented through language, which
is a tool that works as a
representational system.
Grosjean (1997, 2016)
➔
Bilinguals usually acquire and use
their languages for different
purposes, in different domains of
life, with different people
Sample
exam
questions
(link if
preferred).
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