1) What is more common in language uniformity or variability?
Although one of the most important facts about human language is that it
is continuously changing, sometimes it can cause problems because people like
uniformity. Languages have changed in the course of history. At this very
moment changes are being implemented and diffused: old varieties are dying out
and new varieties are springing up; pronunciations are changing, new words and
constructions are being adopted and old ones adapted to new uses. Sometimes
change is rapid, and sometimes it is slow, and at any given time some
linguistic structures are changing while others remain stable. Indeed, change
seems to be inherent in the nature of language: there is no such thing as a
perfectly stable in human language.
2) What kinds of variability exist?
There is social variability, geographical variability, historical
variability, there are also variations depending on the field (religious,
politic…), on the mode (written or spoken), and on the tenor (it refers to the
degree of formality, to the relations between the participants in the event).
An example of geographical variability could be the dialect of English
spoken by the Geordies (inhabitants of
3) How do we decide if a particular group of speakers belong to a
particular dialect or language?
Shibboleth is a word or pronunciation that
distinguishes people of one group or class from those of another, but in many
cases it is not easy to establish if two different varieties are from the same
language or not (as for example the case of catalán-valenciano) and this is
because there is not consent. In those cases we have to pay attention only to
grammar, vocabulary, syntax morphology… aspects and not to political ones.
4) Saussure emphasized the importance of synchronic descriptions of
languages rather than diachronic. He and his disciples (structuralists) focused
on language at different periods as finite entities. Is this reasonable?
I think it is not reasonable and my opinion is that languages are always
changing so they are not finite entities and that’s why it is better to
emphasize the diachronic description.
Synchronic description deals with changes produced in a language in a
particular period of time while diachronic description deals with changes
produced in a language from one period of time to another.
5) The unattested states of language were seen as transitional stages in
which the structure of a language was, as it were, disturbed. This made
linguistic change look abnormal. Is it abnormal?
If linguistic change were an abnormal state of affairs, this would not
be an unreasonable way to look al language: change could then be seen as
something that strikes a language from time to time like a disease. We could
talk of healthy languages (where everything holds together) and sick languages
(where it does not). But this is not how things are: no real language state is
a perfectly balanced and stable structure, linguistic change is always in
progress, and all dialects are transitional dialects.
Milroy (1992: 3) says “the equation of
uniformity with structuredness or regularity is most evident in popular
(non-professional) attitudes to language: one variety –usually a standard
language – is considered to be correct and regular, and others –usually
‘non-standard’ dialects – are thought to be incorrect, irregular, ungrammatical
and deviant. Furthermore, linguistic changes in progress are commonly perceived
as ‘errors’. Thus although everyone knows that language is variable, many
people believe that invariance is nonetheless to be desired, and professional
scholars of language have not been immune to the consequences of these same
beliefs.”
6) Can you think of any example of non-professional attitudes to your
own language?
For example, some non-professional common attitudes among the speakers
are these:
“I don’t like how the Catalans speak, I don’t like their pronunciation”
Or when a native says “Yo hablo fatal el español” just because he/she
doesn’t speaks the standard variation.
7) Why does Milroy use “scare quotes” around non-standard and errors?
Because he is writing it but is not really
his opinion, or maybe there aren’t his words or to indicate that you’re writing
an error, for example “me se cayó”.
8) Are non-standard dialects
“incorrect, irregular, ungrammatical and deviant.”?
Of course they are not. They are as respectable as the standard ones and
we can’t aim at a standard unique correct dialect because language is
constantly changing and as we have seen in question number 2, there are many
geographical variations.
Uniform states of language are idealizations and that variable states
are normal; furthermore, variation in language may itself be structured and
regular. Languages are not in reality completely stable or uniform, and there
is absolutely no reason why they should be.
9) Which of these systems is more irregular? Why?
|
Myself Yourself Himself Herself Ourselves Themselves |
Myself Yourself Hisself Herself Ourselves Theirselves |
The second system is more regular although is not standard, while the
first one is standard and irregular. The first column is not regular because
neither him nor them are possessive pronouns.
10) “… much of the change generally accepted body of knowledge on which
theories of change are based depends on quite narrow interpretations of written
data and contextualized citation forms (whether written or spoken), rather than
on observation of spoken language in context (situated speech). (Milroy 1992:
5) Why do you think this is so?
“The drama of linguistic change”, according to Wyld, “is enacted not in
manuscripts nor inscriptions, but in the mouths and minds of men”, and
historical linguists have generally insisted that the history of language is
primarily the history of spoken language. Traditionally, however, it was no
possible to follow this out very thoroughly because investigators did not have
the technology to study spoken discourse in extenso, and could hardly
have imagined how complex the 2 patterning of spoken interaction in situational
contexts would actually turn out to be when it did become possible to analyse
it.
11) Any description of a language involves norms? Think of the
descriptions of your own language. Why is this so? For example: He ate the pie
already is considered to be non-standard in which variety of English and
perfectly acceptable in which other?
Only the standard ones involve norms but the non-standard varieties
accept other formations.
In my own standard Spanish are norms of grammar, pronunciation… but in
the different dialects we can find either “se me cayó” or “me se cayó”.
This example would be considered barely acceptable in British English
but it will be incorrect in American, Irish and Scottish English.
12) What is the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammars?
Descriptive grammar: the systematic study and description of a language.
Descriptive grammar refers to the structure of a language as it is actually
used by speakers and writers.
Prescriptive grammar: a set of rules and examples dealing with the
syntax and word structures of a language, usually intended as an aid to the
learning of that language. Prescriptive grammar refers to the structure of a
language as certain people think it should be used.
Both kinds of grammar are concerned with rules--but in different ways.
Specialists in descriptive grammar (called linguists) study the rules or
patterns that underlie our use of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. On
the other hand, prescriptive grammarians (such as most editors and teachers)
lay out rules about what they believe to be the “correct” or “incorrect” use of
language.
Information taken from:
http://grammar.about.com/od/basicsentencegrammar/f/descpresgrammar.htm
Weinreich, Labov and Herzog’s (1968) empirical
foundations of language change:
Constraints: what changes are
possible and what are not
Embedding: how change
spreads from a central point through a speech community
Evaluation: social responses
to language change (prestige overt and covert attitudes to language, linguistic
stereotyping and notions on correctness).
Transition: “the intervening
stages which can be observed, or which must be posited, between any two forms
of a language defined for a language
community at different times” Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 101)
Actuation: Why particular
changes take place at a particular time.
13) What do you think the “prestige
motivation for change” and the “solidarity constraint” mean? How are they
opposed?
Some varieties of languages are more prestigious that others. These
prestigious varieties can influence less prestigious ones, which tend to
incorporate some features in order to become more “prestigious”.
e.g. The use of post-vocalic /r/ in
Solidarity constraint, on the other hand, requires the speaker to
conform to local community norms rather than norms that are viewed as external.
For example, in the British T.V channels all the journalists used to speak the
standard variety of English, but now people speaks with their native accent or
pronunciation as a kind of solidarity with the people of their city.
e.g. This would be a solidarity constraint attitude: “I am from
14) Sound change: post-vocalic /r/ in
Traditional codifications of sound-change have generally focused on
sound-segments as they “change” across time. Thus a linguistic change can be
described as a change from A to B in some lexical set, such as that of Old
English [a:] in stan, ham, which in the course of time “becomes” an [o:]
–like the vowel in PresE (Present English) stone, home.
Linguistic change is to be understood more broadly as changes in
consensus on norms of usage in a speech community. During the process there
will be some disagreement or conflict on norms at some levels in the community,
but if a change is ever “completed”, then it will be possible to say that what
was formerly A is now B. but this can apply to a language state as a whole. Thus
–to take a much more generalized case than, say, post-vocalic /r/ in New York
city –if a language state is observed to become more (or less) homogeneous
within itself in the course of time, then the trend to greater or lesser
homogeneity is itself a pattern of linguistic change that has to be accounted
for in terms of consensus or conflict amongst speakers within the speech
community.
15) Actuation: Why did /k/ palatalize before certain front vowels? PrsE:
cheese, German käse English/Norse doublets shirt/skirt?
What we observe here are conflicting patterns
of change and stability in languages and dialects of similar structure. In
these examples it seems that the proximity of the velar consonant to a front
vowel may be a necessary
condition for palatalization, but as it does not happen in every case, it is
not a sufficient condition.
We need to find out what the other conditions favouring or preventing the
change might have been, and it seems that in cases where the change was adopted
the social
conditions must have been favourable; conversely, when it was not adopted, it
may again have been social conditions that prevented the change.
16) What is the biological metaphor in language change?
The biological metaphor says that language has a life “as surely as a
man or as a tree2, and creativity in language in developing new forms is
attributed by Max Müller not to the creativity of speakers, but to the
“marvellous power of language” itself: according to him “it is not in the power
of man either to produce or prevent” linguistic change.
The metaphor has weakened since Müller wrote, but there have been based
on the idea of the independent “life” of language. Indeed, the metaphor is by
no means dead: this is amply demonstrated by continued references in recent work
to “language birth”, “language death” and the “roots” of language.
17) What is the difference between internal and external histories of a
language?
The history of a language is intimately related to the history of the
community of its speakers, so neither can be studied without considering the
other.
The external history of a language is the history of its speakers as their
history affects the language they use. It includes such factors as the
topography of the land where they live, their migrations, their wars, their
conquests of and by others, their government, their arts and sciences, their
economics and technology, their religions and philosophies, their trade and
commerce, their marriage customs and family patterns, their architecture, their
sports and recreations, and indeed every aspect of their lives. Language is so
basic to human activity that there is nothing human beings do that does not
influence and, in turn, is not influenced by the language they speak. Indeed,
if Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) was right, our very thought patterns and view of
the world are inescapably connected with our language.
It is, of course, possible to view the history of a language merely as
internal history – a series of changes in the inventory of linguistic units (vocabulary)
and the system by which they are related (grammar), quite apart from any
experiences undergone by the users of the language. We can describe how the
vocabulary is affected by loanwords or how new words are derived from the
language's own lexical resources. We can formulate sound laws and shifts,
describe changes that convert an inflected language to an isolating one, or a
syntax that puts an object before its verb to one that puts the verb before its
object.
Both of these
approaches can of course yield insights; however, it is commonly believed that
the ‘real’ history of a language is its internal system- based history and that
the external history is relatively unimportant.
Information taken from:
http://histories.cambridge.org/extract?id=chol9780521264792_CHOL9780521264792A002
18) Look up Neogrammarians and
lexical diffusion. Why are they often
found in the same paragraph or chapter?
Because they are two opposite theories or hypothesis:
In historical linguistics,
lexical diffusion is both a phenomenon and a theory. The phenomenon is that by
which a phoneme is modified in a subset of the lexicon, and spreads gradually
to other lexical items. For example, in English, /uː/ has changed to /ʊ/ in good
and hood but not in food; some dialects have it in hoof
and roof but others do not; in flood and blood it happened
early enough that the words were affected by the change of /ʊ/
to /ʌ/, which is now no longer productive.
The related theory, proposed by William Wang in 1969 is that all sound changes
originate in a single word or a small group of words and then spread to other
words with a similar phonological make-up, but may not spread to all words in
which they potentially could apply. The theory of lexical diffusion stands in
contrast to the Neogrammarian hypothesis that
a given sound change applies simultaneously to all words in which its context
is found.
Information taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_diffusion
This page was last modified on 14 December 2008, at
09:56.
19) Look up social
norm-enforcement, childish errors and
slips of the tongue. What have they to do with language change?
Social norm-enforcement are the rules
which decide what is correct and what is not in a language, they decide if a
change would ever reach its completeness or would remain in thee same state for
long periods of time. Normally these social norms will try to preserve a
“correct” standard language.
Slips of the tongue are errors
involving the uttering (Versprechen), or hearing (Verhören), or
writing (Verschreiben), or reading (Verlesen) of a word and which
entail an involuntary parody of the
word, assuming the word is known. This
kind of slip is an ordinary occurrence but is structurally related to the
paraphasias found in pathological conditions.
Humans are creatures that use
language, and once they get the idea, there is no stopping them. In fact, many 'childish'
errors in language occur because children instinctively understand the
rules too well, and have to be taught the irregularities. (Mummy, I eated my
dinner.)
Information taken from: http://www.english-online.org.uk/englishblog/profblog.php?st=20
http://www.answers.com/topic/slips-of-the-tongue
