GL 3120 Introduction of Linguistics (Final)
By
Panawat Buapa
5514841
Yada Muenthabut 5515936
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Language and Society
Dialect and Accent
A dialect is usually spoken by people who live in a
certain region of a country. Those people speak their mother
tongue in their own individual way. For example, many
Scottish people have a dialect.
An accent usually describes the way people pronounce
words of a language that is different from their mother
tongue. For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks
English with an Austrian accent.
Stylistic Variation
Stylistic - veriation in language whose properties position
that in language context . For example, the language of
advertising, politics, religion, individual authors, etc., or the
language of a period in time, all are used distinctively and
belong in a particular situation. In other words, they all have
‘place’ or are said to use a particular 'style'.
Stylistics also attempts to establish principles capable of
explaining the particular choices made by individuals and
social groups in their use of language, such as socialisation,
the production and reception of meaning, critical discourse
analysis and literary criticism.
Other features of stylistics include the use of dialogue,
including regional accents and people’s dialects, descriptive
language, the use of grammar, such as the active voice or
passive voice, the distribution of sentence lengths, the use of
particular language registers, etc.
There are many differences between the processes of
speaking and writing. Writing is not simply speech written
down on paper. Learning to write is not a natural extension
of learning to speak. Unlike speech, writing requires
systematic instruction and practice. Here are some of the
differences between speaking and writing that may clarify
things for you and help you in your efforts as a writer and
speaker.
SPEECH
WRITING
The worst part about it
was I had a friend
Sitting up here and she’s
saying “ha ha”… And I
was saying “Go get the
police… go Get
someone”…I later
learned that there are
Some people who do
that in the face of
disaster…I mean they
just start cracking up as
opposed to crying.
My helpful friend,
perhaps not realizing
that I was serious, began
laughing. Sue roared all
the harder as my
situation became more
difficult. She claimed I
looked funny, clinging
there screaming. I
realized that she was
laughing Because she
was incapable of acting:
the situation must have
been greatly disturbing
to her, and so she
treated it as if it were
another situation.
Chage in language style
Language also changes very subtly whenever speakers come
into contact with each other. No two individuals speak
identically: people from different geographical places clearly
speak differently, but even within the same small
community there are variations according to a speaker’s age,
gender, ethnicity and social and educational background.
Through our interactions with these different speakers, we
encounter new words, expressions and pronunciations and
integrate them into our own speech. Even if your family has
lived in the same area for generations, you can probably
identify a number of differences between the language you
use and the way your grandparents speak. Every successive
generation makes its own small contribution to language
change and when sufficient time has elapsed the impact of
these changes becomes more obvious.
Bilingual and multilingual communities
The question of how to define bilingualism or
multilingualism has engaged researchers for a very long
time. Some researchers have favored a narrow definition of
bilingualism and argued that only those individuals who are
very close to two monolinguals in one should be considered
bilingual.
More recently, however, researchers who study bilingual
and multilingual communities around the world have argued
for a broad definition that views bilingualism as a common
human condition that makes it possible for an individual to
function, at some level, in more than one language. The key
to this very broad and inclusive definition of bilingualism is
'more than one'.
From the perspective of this framework, a bilingual
individual is not necessarily an ambilingual (an individual
with native competency in two languages) but a bilingual of
a specific type who, along with other bilinguals of many
different types, can be classified along a continuum. Some
bilinguals possess very high levels of proficiency in both
languages in the written and the oral modes. Others display
varying proficiencies in comprehension and/or speaking
skills depending on the immediate area of experience in
which they are called upon to use their two languages.
According to this perspective, one admits into the company
of bilinguals individuals who can, to whatever degree,
comprehend or produce written or spoken utterances in
more than one language. Thus, persons able to read in a
second language (e.g. French) but unable to function in the
spoken language are considered to be bilinguals of a certain
type and placed at one end of the continuum. Such persons
are said to have receptive competence in a second language
and to be 'more bilingual' than monolinguals who have
neither receptive nor productive abilities in a language other
than their first. The judgment here is comparative: total
monolingualism versus a minor degree of ability to
comprehend a second language.
Pidgins and Creoles
Originally thought of as incomplete, broken, corrupt, not
worthy of serious attention. Pidgins still are marginal: in
origin (makeshift, reduced in structure), in attitudes toward
them (low prestige); in our knowledge of them.
Some quick definitions:
1. Pidgin language (origin in Engl. word `business'?) is
nobody's native language; may arise when two
speakers of different languages with no common
language try to have a makeshift conversation. Lexicon
usually comes from one language, structure often from
the other. Because of colonialism, slavery etc. the
prestige of Pidgin languages is very low. Many pidgins
are `contact vernaculars', may only exist for one speech
event.
2. Creole (orig. person of European descent born and
raised in a tropical colony) is a language that was
originally a pidgin but has become nativized, i.e. a
community of speakers claims it as their first language.
Next used to designate the language(s) of people of
Caribbean and African descent in colonial and excolonial countries (Jamaica, Haiti, Mauritius, Réunion,
Hawaii, Pitcairn, etc.)
3. Relexification The process of subst
Historical Linguistics
Language Change
There are many different routes to language change.
Changes can take originate in language learning, or
through language contact, social differentiation,
and natural processes in usage.
Language learning: Language is transformed as it is
transmitted from one generation to the next. Each individual
must re-create a grammar and lexicon based on input
received from parents, older siblings and other members of
the speech community. The experience of each individual is
different, and the process of linguistic replication is
imperfect, so that the result is variable across individuals.
However, a bias in the learning process -- for instance,
towards regularization -- will cause systematic drift,
generation by generation. In addition, random differences
may spread and become 'fixed', especially in small
populations.
Language contact: Migration, conquest and trade bring
speakers of one language into contact with speakers of
another language. Some individuals will become fully
bilingual as children, while others learn a second language
more or less well as adults. In such contact situations,
languages often borrow words, sounds, constructions and so
on.
Social differentiation. Social groups adopt distinctive
norms of dress, adornment, gesture and so forth; language is
part of the package. Linguistic distinctiveness can be
achieved through vocabulary (slang or jargon),
pronunciation (usually via exaggeration of some variants
already available in the environment), morphological
processes, syntactic constructions, and so on.
Natural processes in usage. Rapid or casual speech
naturally produces processes such
asassimilation, dissimilation, syncope and apocope. Through
repetition, particular cases may become conventionalized,
and therefore produced even in slower or more careful
speech. Word meaning change in a similar way, through
conventionalization of processes
like metaphor and metonymy.
Some linguists distinguish
between internal and external sources of language change,
with "internal" sources of change being those that occur
within a single languistic community, and contact
phenomena being the main examples of an external source
of change.
Sound change
All aspects of language change, and a great deal is know
about general mechanisms and historical details of changes
at all levels of linguistic analysis. However, a special and
conspicuous success has been achieved in modeling changes
in phonological systems, traditionally called sound change.
In the cases where we have access to several historical
stages -- for instance, the development of the modern
Romance Languages from Latin -- these sound changes are
remarkably regular. Techniques developed in such cases
permit us to reconstruct the sound system -- and some of the
vocabulary -- of unattested parent languages from
information about daughter languages.
In some cases, an old sound becomes a new sound across the
board. Such a change occurred in Hawai'ian, in that all the
"t" sounds in an older form of the language became "k"s: at
the time Europeans encountered Hawai'ian, there were no
"t"s in it at all, though the closely related languages Tahitian,
Samoan, Tongan and Maori all have "t"s.
Another unconditioned sound change that occurred
between Middle and Early Modern English (around
Shakespeare's time) is known as the Great Vowel Shift. At
that time, there was a length distinction in the English
vowels, and the Great Vowel Shift altered the position of all
the long vowels, in a giant rotation.
The nucleus of the two high vowels (front "long i" /i:/, and
the back "long u" /u:/) started to drop, and the high position
was retained only in the offglide. Eventually, the original /i:/
became /ai/ - so a "long i" vowel in Modern English is now
pronounced /ai/ as in a word like 'bite': /bait/. Similarly, the
"long u" found its nucleus dropping all the way to /au/: the
earlier 'house' /hu:s/ became /haus/. All the other long
vowels rotated, the mid vowels /e:/ and /o:/ rising to fill the
spots vacated by the former /i:/ and /u:/ respectively, and
so on. That is why the modern pronouns 'he' and 'she' are
written with /e/ (reflecting the old pronunciation) but
pronounced as /i/. In the following chart, the words are
located where their vowel usedto be pronounced -- where
they are pronounced today is indicated by the arrows.
Adding New Word to a Language
Shortening or Clipping
Clipping (or truncation) is a process whereby an appreciable
chunk of an existing word is omitted, leaving what is
sometimes called a stump word. When it is the end of a word
that is lopped off, the process is called back-clipping:
thus examination was docked to
create exam and gymnasium was shortened to form gym.
Less common in English are fore-clippings, in which the
beginning of a word is dropped: thus phone from telephone.
Very occasionally, we see a sort of fore-and-aft clipping, such
as flu, frominfluenza.
Functional Shift
A functional shift is the process by which an existing word or
form comes to be used with another grammatical function
(often a different part of speech); an example of a functional
shift would be the development of the noun commute from
the verb commute.
Back-formation
Back-formation occurs when a real or supposed affix (that is,
a prefix or suffix) is removed from a word to create a new
one. For example, the original name for a type of fruit
was cherise, but some thought that word sounded plural, so
they began to use what they believed to be a singular
form, cherry, and a new word was born. The creation of the
the verb enthuse from the noun enthusiasm is also an
example of a back-formation.
Blends
A blend is a word made by combining other words or parts
of words in such a way that they overlap
(as motel from motor plus hotel) or one is infixed into the
other (as chortle from snort plus chuckle — the -ort- of the
first being surrounded by the ch-...-le of the second). The
term blend is also sometimes used to describe words
like brunch, from breakfast plus lunch, in which pieces of the
word are joined but there is no actual overlap. The essential
feature of a blend in either case is that there be no point at
which you can break the word with everything to the left of
the breaking being a morpheme (a separately meaningful,
conventionally combinable element) and everything to the
right being a morpheme, and with the meaning of the blendword being a function of the meaning of these morphemes.
Thus,birdcage and psychohistory are not blends, but are
instead compounds.
Acronymic Formations
An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of a
phrase. Some acronymic terms still clearly show their
alphabetic origins (consider FBI), but others are pronounced
like words instead of as a succession of letter names:
thus NASA and NATO are pronounced as two syllable words.
If the form is written lowercase, there is no longer any
formal clue that the word began life as an acronym:
thus radar ('radio detecting and ranging'). Sometimes a form
wavers between the two treatments: CAT scan pronounced
either like cat orC-A-T.
NOTE: No origin is more pleasing to the general reader than
an acronymic one. Although acronymic etymologies are
perennially popular, many of them are based more in
creative fancy than in fact. For an example of such an alleged
acronymic etymology, see the article on posh.
Transfer of Personal or Place Names
Over time, names of people, places, or things may become
generalized vocabulary words. Thus did forsythia develop
from the name of botanist William Forsyth, silhouette from
the name of Étienne de Silhouette, a parsimonious French
controller general of finances, and denim from serge de
Nîmes (a fabric made in Nîmes, France).
Imitation of Sounds
Words can also be created by onomatopoeia, the naming of
things by a more or less exact reproduction of the sound
associated with it. Words such
asbuzz, hiss, guffaw, whiz, and pop) are of imitative origin.
Folk Etymology
Folk etymology, also known as popular etymology, is the
process whereby a word is altered so as to resemble at least
partially a more familiar word or words. Sometimes the
process seems intended to "make sense of" a borrowed
foreign word using native resources: for example, the Late
Latinfebrigugia (a plant with medicinal properties,
etymologically 'fever expeller') was modified into English
as feverfew.
Combining Word Elements
Also available to one who feels the need for a new word to
name a new thing or express a new idea is the very
considerable store of prefixes, suffixes, and combining forms
that already exist in English. Some of these are native and
others are borrowed from French, but the largest number
have been taken directly from Latin or Greek, and they have
been combined in may different ways often without any
special regard for matching two elements from the same
original language. The combination of these word elements
has produced many scientific and technical terms of Modern
English.