Accent and Dialect theorists

Question 1

Peter Trudgill

Answer 1

Research in Norwich on the substitution of velar nasal ‘ng’ for alveolar nasal ‘n’.
His study was more in depth than Petyt, was placed in different contexts such as reading and writing and speaking formally and informally.
He found that men are less formal than women in all classes

Question 2

Labov - New York study ?

Answer 2

Looked at 3 different department stores (Saks, Macys and S.Kleins) in New York and asked for directions to departments on the fourth floor and then asked them to repeat it.
Looks at different classes, conscious and unconscious speech.
264 ‘interviews’ which were representative of numbers in each class
Lacks some validity as relies on perception.
Found an increase of ‘r’ in careful speech, Saks used the rhotic ‘r’ the most and was used most in word final position.

Question 3

Labov - Martha’s Vineyard

Answer 3

Study into how people adapt to accents and dialects over time. Looked at an island with 6000 people but had over 40,000 visitors each summer.

Residents adapted their speech to accommodate visitors and over many years the islanders adapted their speech to the majority and it became the norm.
Younger generations spoke most like the visitors (popularity and socio-linguistic maturation)
Fisherman changed their vowel sounds to sound different to the visitors to seek solidarity/covert prestige

Question 4

lesley and james milroy

Answer 4

Looked at inner-city Belfast in the 1970s and 3 working class communities.
Milroy lived within the community which reduced Hawthorne effect but also meant more bias and human error.
They looked at the correlation between the integration of people in the community and they way they speak.
Each person was scored between 1-5 about how integrated they were/

They found that a high score was correlated with the use of more non-standard forms.
This suggests that accent/dialect was strongly influenced by the level of integration into a social network.
Close-knit networks are important for dialect maintenance as it promotes solidarity and identity

Question 5

Cheshire and Edwards (1997)

Answer 5

Looked at Grammatical Variations found in over 80% of schools in Britain:

• Unmarked plurality
• Demonstrative use of them/those
• Should of/Could of
• Never as a past tense negation for a single event
• What as a relative pronoun
• Ain’t/in’t
• Present participle use of stood/sat
• Adverb minus ly

Question 6

Bernstein

Answer 6

Classified language into ‘restricted code’ and ‘elaborated code’ as believed that the titles ‘Standard English’ and ‘Regional Accent’s detract from observing the complexity of language and only look at the use of regional words.
Elaborated Code - formally correct syntax, more subordinate clauses, fewer unfinished sentences, more logical connectives such as ‘if’ and ‘unless’.
Restricted Code - looser syntax, simple connectives like ‘and’ and ‘but’, more clichés, compound sentences and pronouns