Questions:

 

1. Variability -Because they speak with diferents words.

 

2. Synchronic: changes on time

 

3. Diachronic: the changes from one period to the other. –

 

4. Weakening, the bad pronunciation

 

5. He does this because he is expressing non-professional ideas which he does not agree with.

 

6. This would depend on what we consider to be a non-standard dialect. Any language which serves for the purpose of communication and which has a set of grammatical rules that are complied to shouldn’t be regarded as incorrect, irregular, ungrammatical or deviant, they are simply different to the languages commonly thought of as “standard” ones.

 

7. Myself, yourself, hisself, herself, ourselves and theirselves

 

8. People don’t tend to follow the grammatical rules and colloquialism, this goes to the destructuralization of language, and people who have their own personal speech patterns, Due to these factors, complications can arise when we interpret the changes that occur in speech, and because of this, theories are generally based on decontextualized language.

 

9. The phrase “he ate the pie already” might be considered as acceptable in colloquial speech, however, in a more formal, academic context, we ought to say “he has already eaten the pie”.

 

10. Descriptive Grammar: A descriptive grammar looks at the way a language is actually used by its speakers and then attempts to analyze it and formulate rules about the structure. Descriptive grammar does not deal with what is good or bad language use; forms and structures that might not be used by speakers of Standard English would be regarded as valid and included. It is a grammar based on the way a language actually is and not how some think it should be.

 

11. Prescriptive Grammar: A prescriptive grammar lays out rules about the structure of a language. Unlike a descriptive grammar it deals with what the grammarian believes to be right and wrong, good or bad language use; not following the rules will generate incorrect language. Link:( http://www.english-for-students.com/Descriptive-and- Prescriptive.html)

 

12. Because contrait is what changes are possible and what are not, and the prestige, the change is not possible. -Post-vocalic /r/ in New York Many of us who speak English as a native language pronounce words like darling, far, bore or near the same as we write them: with vowel followed by r in the same syllable. But there are many other English speakers who do not pronounce the r - sound in this place (called ‘postvocalic r’)

 

13. Although they have the sound everywhere else, like at the beginning of a word. Linguists use the classy terms rhotic and non-rhotic for these two pronunciations. In some people’s speech this ‘dropped’ r reappears when the word is followed by a vowel, so you sometimes hear nevah but never again. Such speakers occasionally go on to insert an r where it doesn’t belong, and say sofa but sofer and chair . Looked at geographically, American speakers who most commonly drop the r (in what follows we’ll occasionally call this the ‘r-less’ pronunciation) are those from Eastern New England and parts of the South, particularly the coastal area where the old ‘plantation’ culture once existed. It is also part of Black English Vernacular speech. Until recently, dropping the r was part of New York speech as well, though more and more New Yorkers seem to be perceiving it as ‘vulgar’ and avoiding this pronunciation. Even though there is no officially recognized ’standard’ English in the U.S., ‘r-speakers’ are clearly an overwhelming majority, something you hear reflected in the mass media. British speakers today whose speech is closest to standard British English (called ‘Received Pronunciation’) do not pronounce r after vowel. Postvocalic r was still regularly pronounced in English speech back in Elizabethan times, and it was around that time (l6th century) that the ‘r-less’ pronunciation started spreading across much of England. It did not spread as far as Ireland and Scotland, which is why we hear the ‘r’ pronunciation from the Irish and the Scots today. Many of the original immigrants to the colonies were from Scotland and Ireland, although at the time of settlement most English speakers were still pronouncing r after vowel too. http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/southern/dahling/ The change from long ā to ō in some dialects of English. The father-bother merger is a merger of the Early Modern English vowels /ɑː/ and /ɒ/ that occurs in almost all varieties of North American English (exceptions are accents in northeastern New England, such as the Boston accent, and in New York City). In those accents with the merger father and bother rhyme, and Kahn and con are homophonous as [kɑn]. Unrounding of EME /ɒ/ is found also in Norwich, the West Country, the West Midlands and in Hiberno-English, but apparently with no phonemic merger. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_low_back_vo wels#Father.E2.80.93bother_merger

 

14. The place and degree of palatization varied in order to differentiate the meaning between the word doublets. -The biological metaphor in language change can also be related to the fact that languages are passed from one generation to the next, evolving step by step.

 

15. The internal History will include all aspects of the development of the language structure itself: i.e. the evolution of phonology (and writing), grammar, vocabulary and semantics. The external history deals with all non-structural factors which have exerted certain influence on the development of the language. These factors can be of a different nature: Political: invasions, wars, the formations of states,… Social: changes in social structure and in social prestige, etc…

 

16. The terms are often found in the same paragraph because the theory of lexical diffusion is opposed to the Neogrammarian hypothesis. As Milroy explains, lexical diffusion (a theory proposed by William Wang in 1969) refers to the fact that all sound changes derive from a variation of a single word or a small group of words that later affects other words with similar characteristics, but don’t necessarily have an effect on all words that they potentially could do. The Neogrammarian hypothesis states that a given sound change applies to all words with related features simultaneously. Milroy tells us that sound changes have normally been observed to spread gradually through the lexicon (lexical diffusion), and that there is no evidence to support the Neogrammarian assumption.