1.-What is
more common in language uniformity or variability?
In Language is more common the
variability because the words are always incorporating to the language and
suffer changes. Moreover, uniformity only exists in death languages like latin.
2.-What kinds
of variability exist?
There are three
main kinds of variability:
·
Dialect:
geographical variability
·
Social:
a speech can be rude or polite.
·
Register:
the registers are sets of vocabulary items, structures, etc., associated with
discrete occupational or social groups.
- Tenor: the personal
relationship: colloquial or formal.
- Mode: the medium of the
language: written or speech.
- Field: according to the
subject matter: politics, religion, etc.
3.-How do we
decide if a particular group of speakers belong to a particular dialect or lanuage?
We can decide it, using Shibboleth which gives you a way
to know where somebody comes from, or maybe we can also decide it focusing on
historical, geographical, economical and political factors. (As the accent, the pronunciation, some specific
words, sentences...)
4.-Saussure
emphasized the importance of synchronic descriptions of languages rather than
diachronic. He and is disciples (structuralists)
focused on language at different periods as finite entities. Is this
reasonable?
·
Synchronic:
relating to a language as it is at a particular point in time.
·
Diachronic:
relating to the way a language has developed over time.
In my point of view, it’s unreasonable because language is always changing
and developing and I think that is better to study the diachronic point to
obtain information and the changes of the language.
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?
No, it is not abnormal. The disturbed structured of a language can explain
us that all the languages make a progress and development and that allow us to
adapt them to new situations and circumstances.
6.- 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”.
Can you think of any
example of non-professional attitudes to your own language?
This can be applied to the
languages which I speak normally, valencià (my mother
tongue) and castellano. The first think to say is
that the language català has many varieties in which
we include the valencià and mallorquí,
so valencià is considered non-standard because the
speakers use ‘barbarismes’, words of other languages
like castellano, and it’s considered as a dialect.
The examples
that we can found in valencià are:
-
‘al tuntún’= a la babalà -‘gasto’= despesa
- ‘adelantament’= avançament -‘interrumpir’=interrompre
-‘abono’=abonament
The examples that we can found in castellano
are:
-‘dejao’= dejado
-‘haiga’=
haya
- ‘asin’= así
8.-Why
does Milroy use “scare quotes” around non-standard and errors?
Milroy uses ‘’scare quotes’’ around non-standard
and errors, because he thinks that the word is grammatically incorrect but it’s
used by the people, and he is not agree with the meaning of the words.
(‘scare quotes’ is when we said a word but we
don’t believe in the meaning of that)
9.-Are
non-standard dialects “incorrect, irregular, ungrammatical and
deviant.”?
Grammatically, I think that
non-standard dialects are incorrect and irregular, they are also ungrammatical.
But I’m not agree with that the dialects are deviant because I think that it
may depends on the context and the situation in which dialects are used,
because the non-standard dialects are used in informal situations, and only in
speech form.
10.-Which of these systems is more
irregular? Why?
|
Myself Yourself Himself Herself Ourselves Themselves |
Myself Yourself Hisself Herself Ourselves Theirselves |
The second column is more regular
because the terms ‘hisself’ and ‘theirselves’
are grammatically incorrect but they are used by the speaker in speech form,
but in the second column the terms are grammatically accepted, are standard.
“… much of the generally
accepted body of knowledge on which theories of change are based depends on
quite narrow interpretations of written data and des-contexutalized
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?
I think that
many people speak a language without following the norms and the rules, they
uses colloquialism and ‘’create’’ a new and irregular language.
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?
Any language includes
rules and norms which must be followed by the speakers, but these norms and
rules are sometimes not used by the speaker because of the variety, the
register...etc, in other words, in a colloquial register we tend not to follow
the rules. In this way,” He ate the already” must be said: “he has already eaten the pie”.
12.-What is the difference between
descriptive and prescriptive grammars?
·
Descriptive grammar: Refers to the structure of a language as it is
actually used by speakers and writers
·
Prescriptive
grammar: Refers to the
structure of a language as certain people think it should be used.
http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/prescriptive-grammar.html
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?
·
The prestige motivation for change is when the people want to speak in
a “right way” to show a certain level or status, and they tend to use a correct
and grammatically correct words and specific terminology.
·
The solidarity constraint is when we use the language to identify us
with the society around our quotidian environment, that is, to integrate
ourselves.
In other words, I think that
solidarity constraint is when someone changes the way he/she speak depending on
the circumstances and the situation: status, job, etc.
The ‘prestige motivation for
change’ and the ‘solidarity constraint’ are totally opposed because though in
both situations exist a change in the way people speak, in the first one, the
speaker change the language in order to looks in a superior social status and
in the second one, the speaker tries to adapt in a social group and adapt
his/her language the
circumstances and the situations.
14.-Sound change: post-vocalic /r/ in New York. The change from long ā to ō in some dialects of English.
·
Post-vocalic /r/ in New York
English
pronunciation is divided into two main accent groups: A rhotic
(pronounced /ˈroʊtɪk/)
speaker pronounces the letter R in hard or water. A non-rhotic speaker does not. In other words, rhotic speakers pronounce written /r/ in all positions, while non-rhotic
speakers pronounce /r/ only if it is
followed by a vowel
sound in the same syllable (see "linking and
intrusive R").
In linguistic
terms, non-rhotic accents are said to exclude the phoneme
/r/ from the syllable coda.
This is commonly referred to as the post-vocalic R, although that term can be
misleading because not all Rs that occur after vowels are excluded in non-rhotic
English. Pre-vocalic and post-vocalic rules only hold true at the syllable
level. If, within a syllable, an R occurs post-vocalically, it is dropped from
pronunciation in non-rhotic speech.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-vocalic_r
·
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.
15.-Actuation: Why did /k/ palatalize before certain
front vowels? PrsE: cheese, German käse English/Norse doublets shirt/skirt?
16.-What is the biological metaphor in language change?
This maybe means that languages are transmitted from one generation to
another, and they also vary or is developed through these periods of time.
Like a
biological species defined by the potential of its members to interbreed and
procreate offspring of the same kind, a language can be defined as “a
population of idiolects that enable their hosts to communicate with and
understand one another”
(Exploring
Language Change By Mari C. Jones, Ishtla
Singh Edition: illustrated, revised. Published by Routledge, 2005).
17.-What is the difference between internal and external histories of a language?
If every
productive form of linguistic expression can be described by some idealized
human grammar, an individuals's variable linguistic
behavior (Weinreich, Labov,
& Herzog, 1968) can be modeled as a statistical distribution of multiple
idealized grammars. The distribution of grammars is determined by the
interaction between the biological constraints on human grammar and the
properties of linguistic data in the environment during the course of language
acquisition. Such interaction can be formalized precisely and quantitatively in
a mathematical model of language learning. Consequently, we model language
change as the change in grammar distribution over time, which can be related to
the statistical properties of historical linguistic data. As an empirical test,
we apply the proposed model to explain the loss of the verb-second phenomenon
in Old French and Old English based on corpus studies of historical texts.
All kinds
of language change can basically be assigned to one of two types: either the change is caused by a structural requirement of
the language — this is internally motivated change — or it does not in which
case one speaks of externally motivated change.
Internally
motivated change usually leads to balance in the system, the removal of marked
elements, the analogical spread of regular forms or the like. As language
consists of various modules on various levels, a change in one quarter may lead
to an imbalance in another and provoke a further change.
With the
current kind of change the available structure of the language plays an
important role. For instance English has maintained a distinction in voice
among interdental fricatives as seen in teeth
/ti:þ/ and teethe /ti:ð/ although the functional load is very slight.
http://www.uni-due.de/SHE/HE_InternalExternal.htm
18.- Look up Neogrammarians and lexical
diffusion. Why are they often found in the same paragraph or chapter?
The Neogrammarians were a German school of linguists,
originally at the University of
Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change.
According to this hypothesis, a diachronic
sound change affects simultaneously all words in which its environment is met,
without exception. This hypothesis was the first hypothesis of sound change to
attempt to follow the principle of falsifiability
according to scientific method. Today this
hypothesis is considered more of a guiding principle than an exceptionless fact, as numerous examples of lexical diffusion have been
attested.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neogrammarian
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.
William Labov, in Principles
of Linguistic Change, takes the position that there are two types of sound
changes: regular sound change (respecting the Neogrammarian
hypothesis) and lexical diffusion. Labov lists a
typology, according to which certain phenomena are typically or exclusively
regular (example, vowel quality changes), while others (example, metathesis, or
vowel shortening) tend to follow a lexical diffusion pattern.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_diffusion
19.- Look
up social norm-enforcement, childish errors and slips of the tongue. What
have they to do with language change?
·
The function of a social norm is to coordinate people’s
expectations in interactions that possess multiple equilibria.
Norms govern a wide range of phenomena, including property rights, contracts,
bargains, forms of communication, and concepts of justice.
Social norms consist of rules of conduct and models of behaviour
prescribed by a society. They are rooted in the customs, traditions and value
systems that gradually develop in this society. Performance is an example of a
value assimilated within the prevailing social norm. Resisting it can lead to
exclusion.
·
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. EX: (Mummy, I eated my dinner.)
http://www.english-online.org.uk/englishblog/profblog.php?st=20
Children make these errors because
they do not know their language in its totality, due to this fact, they are
still learning.
·
A slip of the tongue is an error in speaking in which a word is pronounced
incorrectly, or in which the speaker says something unintentionally.
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/slip+of+the+tongue