What is more common in language uniformity or
variability?
The most common feature of the
language is variability. According to Milroy there is not such thing as a
perfectly stable human language because the language is changing all the time and
there isn’t any reason why it should be uniform.
What kinds of variability exist?
There are different kinds of variability:
- social variability including gender,
geography, age, accent
- linguistic variability including style (
formal, casual, careful), syntactic
patterns, particular sound…
- geographical variability like dialect
- register
- idiolect (individual style)
Accent:
“The mode of utterance peculiar
to an individual, locality, or nation, as ‘he has a slight accent, a strong
provincial accent, an indisputably Irish, Scotch, American, French or German
accent.’ Without defining word: of a regional English accent.
This utterance consists mainly in a prevailing quality of
tone, or in a peculiar alteration of pitch, but may include mispronunciation of
vowels or consonants, misplacing of stress, and misinflection
of a sentence. The locality of a speaker is generally clearly marked by this
kind of accent. (A. J. E.)
* (Oxford
English dictionary)
There are different accents in English: for example BBC English accent also
known as Received pronunciation or American &
Irish accent, which are said to be rhotic accents.
Dialect:
1. Manner of speaking, language, speech; esp.
a manner of speech peculiar to, or characteristic of, a particular person or
class; phraseology, idiom.
2.
One of the
subordinate forms or varieties of a language arising from local peculiarities
of vocabulary, pronunciation, and idiom. (In relation to modern languages usually spec. A variety of speech differing from the standard or literary
‘language’; a provincial method of speech, as in ‘speakers of dialect’.)
Also in a wider sense applied to a particular language in its relation to the
family of languages to which it belongs.
* (Oxford
English dictionary)
The most prestigious dialect in
There
are different dialects in English such as
Register: is a result of differences in the social situation of use (word
choices, syntactic ordering of utterances). Is socially motivated and it is
defined by the circumstance and purpose of the communicative situation. It has
three dimensions:
v field à social setting (medicine…)
v tenor à refers to the relations between the participants in the event ( the register used by doctor in the conference is different to register he used while talking to his/her patient.)
v
mode à the medium of the communication ( written, spoken or written to be
spoken)
Style: is a variation within register that can represent individual
choices along social dimensions.
How do we decide if a particular group of speakers
belong to a particular dialect or language?
We can decide it according the
pronunciation, word choice, syntactic structure used by the speaker.
For example in the Spanish, if speaker
says “VOS” we already know he/she is from Argentine or “USTEDES” with meaning
of “YOU” which is typical for Mexican people.
Can you think of any example of non-professional
attitudes to your own language?
A non professional attitude to
language is when somebody offends the way of speaking of another person by
saying for example: I hate the way they speak. In
Why does Milroy use “scare quotes” around non-standard and errors?
Milroy uses these scare quotes in order to represent his disagreement
with the idea that some varieties (non-standard ones) are errors in the
language. He says that words between scare quotes are not his.
Are non-standard dialects “incorrect,
irregular, ungrammatical and deviant.”?
In my opinion it
is not correct to say that these dialects
are ungrammatical, deviant… Usually each language has one standard form which is
considered to be the “good one” and it has also some dialects. I think we
shouldn’t see these dialects as incorrect because they really enrich the
language and they are developing all the time.
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?
It couldn’t be acceptable by the majority of the speakers of British
English whereas it could be correct in
What is the difference between descriptive and
prescriptive grammars?
Descriptive grammar (definition #1) refers to the
structure of a language as it is actually used by speakers and writers. Prescriptive
grammar (definition #2) 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.
* http://grammar.about.com/od/basicsentencegrammar/a/grammarintro.htm
What do you think the “prestige motivation for change”
and the “solidarity constraint” mean? How are they opposed?
Some varieties of language are more prestigious than others. These
prestigious varieties can influence less prestigious varieties which usually
incorporate some features in order to become more prestigious. For example: the
use of post-vocalic /r/ in
Solidarity constraint requires the speaker to conform to local community
norms rather than to norms that are viewed as external.
It means that for example in the case of
Which of
these systems is more irregular? Why?
|
Myself Yourself Himself Herself Ourselves Themselves |
Myself Yourself Hisself Herself Ourselves Theirselves |
I think more irregular is first column, the standard one. Second column
seems to be more regular because there are no changes in the words like hisself and theirselves.
Actuation: Why did /k/ palatalize before certain front
vowels? PrsE: cheese, German käse English/Norse doublets shirt/skirt?
According to Milroy one condition could be that the
proximity of the velar consonant to a front vowel may be necessary for the palatalization, but it is not a sufficient condition. He
says that especially social conditions must be favuorable,
which means we must take into account the activities of speakers in social
contexts in addition to the internal structural properties of language
What is the difference
between internal and external histories of a language?
In
my opinion internal history of language refers to internal system of the
language focusing in sound-change and morphological change whereas external
history of the language refers to political, social and attitudinal context of
language. Speaker-attitudes to variation are also important for external
history.
Look up Neogrammarians and lexical diffusion. Why are they often
found in the same paragraph or chapter?
They
are found in the same paragraph because Neogrammarian
theory is opposed to lexical diffusion. According to Neogrammarians
sound-change is phonetically gradual and in the relevant class of items all
items undergo the change at the same time. However, by
the term lexical diffusion we understand sound-change as lexical gradual change
and not all the items must be changed.