AtL Test 2 Flashcards
The two key focuses in pragmatics
Speech acts (Austin)
Implicatures (Grice)
Constative sentences
Sentences that say something that might be true or false (i.e. have truth conditions) e.g. it’s raining
Performative sentences
Sentences that ‘do’ something e.g. promise
locutionary act
the act of uttering a sentence
Illocutionary force
What the utterance of the performative sentence does
Felicity conditions
Conditions that specify what makes a speech act work
Perlocutionary effects
results of a speech act e.g. being under obligation (promise)
Example: felicity conditions for asking questions
- you don’t know the answer
- the person you’re asking has a reasonable chance of knowing
Grice’s co-operative principle
Presupposition that people want to cooperate when they exchange meaning. Regulated by Four conversational maxims - principle of rational interaction (requiring good faith) - as a listener we assume speakers obey
The Gricean maxims
- Maxim of Quality (be truthful)
- Maxim of Quantity (be brief - not too much/little)
- Maxim of Relation (be relevant)
- Maxim of Manner (be clear)
Maxim of quality
sarcasm will violate this
Theory of Mind
the ability to think about and recognise someone else’s intentions, thoughts and beliefs, recognising they are different from your own
Implicature
utterance that conveys meaning beyond its proposition (semantic meaning)
3 kinds of implicature
- Conventional implicatures
- Generalised conversational implicatures (employ cooperative principle)
- Particular conversational implicatures (employ cooperative principle)
Conventional implicatures
Words that, by convention, have extra meanings e.g. “some” or “but” - CI that there is contrast
Generalised conversational implicatures
Only loosely context-bound: illocutionary force is disguised e.g. can you pass the salt? - violates the cooperative principle (relevance), so must be related to something els - commonly used therefore generalised.
Particular conversational implicatures
We apply them as and when the situation demands i.e. “on the fly” e.g. A: Do you want to go to the cinema? B: My little sister is coming for a visit
scalar implicatures
We denote a degree of something, thereby implicating the negation of all degrees above this chosen degree (likewise truth of all degrees below)
Canonical Declarative sentence illocutionary acts
Can be assertion, promise or declaration
Canonical Interrogative illocutionary acts
yes/no polar questions, wh-question
Canonical imperative illocutionary act
command
Three areas of historical linguistics
- correspondences among languages
- systematic sound changes
- reconstructing lost languages
Systematic sound correspondence
Sound correspondence that occurs in every instance e.g. wherever there’s a <th> in English, there’s a <d> in German // wherever Spanish has single non-initial consonant, Italian has a double (<p> and <pp>)</pp></d>
Proto West Germanic family
English, Dutch, German
Latin family
Romanian, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Proto Indo-European
parent of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, proto-germanic (north, East, West)
Grimm’s law and First Germanic sound shift (1)
First sound shift: voiceless stops correspond to voiceless fricatives at almost the same place of articulation.
IndoE /t/ –> German /th/
IndoE /p/ –> German /f/
IndoE /k/ –> German /h/
Grimm’s law and First Germanic sound shift (2)
First sound shift: initial voiced stops correspond to Germanic voiceless
IndoE /d/ - German /t/
IndoE /g/ - German /k/
Second Germanic sound shift
Correspondence between Eng voiceless stops and combo stop/fric except in velars
Eng /p/ - German /pf/
Eng /t/ - German /ts/
Exception to Grimm’s law (later explained by Verner’s law)
Lat /pater/ –> fader
Lat /frater/ –> brothor
Per Grimm’s law we expect <th> in fader.
Verner’s law
Grimm’s law doesn’t hold where the consonant begins a syllable following an unstressed syllable according to the original stress pattern. In that case, different correspondence:
IndoE /t/ –> Germanic /d/
Consonant shift and stress shift
- 2 consonant shifts (vless stop-fricative, voiced - vless, 2nd P/T - pf/ts)
- germanic changed all stresses to initial stress
We can tell order because if stress first, then father/brother same consonant change
Comparative reconstruction aka “the comparative method”
technique of recovering languages for which we have no or incomplete records, indicated by *. We use:
1. Phonemes (as in Grimm/Verner)
2. morphemes
3. other relevant information e.g. syntax, orthography
Steps to answer questions about systematic sound changes
- Look at manner, place of articulation.
- Is the change consistent? Is there a pattern?
No exceptions allowed - must exclude loanwords e.g. numbers, body parts
Other possible patterns in language change
Grammaticalisation:
1. Change from open-class to closed class
2. Verbs turning into aspect markers
- Open-class to closed class
open = accept new words, express meaning independently
closed = don’t really accept new words.
e.g.
oldE /lic/ (form or body) –> ly (meaning bleached)
/willan/ –> will (lost desire meaning, now just auxiliary)
Semantic bleaching
meaning becomes broader or more abstract, e.g. will an - loses desire to be future marker. Can go with phonological reduction e.g. ‘ll
- Verbs become aspect markers
For example “going to” semantic bleaching
Why do words grammaticalise
- metaphorical thinking (physically passing similar to experience)
- pragmatic inferences - e.g. I am going - implies future
- morphosyntactic reanalysis e.g. will and shall – used to be inflected, but lost over time.
- language contact
Consequences of language contact
- We may result in multiple ways to say the same thing e.g. lawful and legal (Germanic, Latinate)
- Word order e.g. dative alternation only with certain words e.g. gave versus donated (X)
- pidginisation, creolisation, language mixing, borrowing, code switching
Pidgins
Created to facilitate communication between speakers of two languages e.g. bazaar Malay - no native speakers, rule governed
Creoles
combination of two languages, with native speakers and more elaborate grammars. The two parent languages may be otherwise totally unrelated
Lexifier
If a language contributes the majority of lexical items - superstrate
Substrate
if a language contributes the grammarIf
Adstrate
if no obvious superstate or substrate - the two languages may be totally unrelated
correlations morphology and syntax
often, with simpler morphology, correlation with complicated syntax e.g. Russian - complex morphology e.g. case, gender, aspect, but free word order.
Three areas of sociolinguistics
- Accents of English
- Social stratification of speech (Labov and trudgill)
- Negation in non-standard E
Isogloss
line we draw on a map to separate variants e.g. the foot/strut split in England
Social value of variants
Arbitrary ascription of social value to pronunciation e.g. Britsh vs AmE different rhotic prestige
Labov (1972) on rhoticity
Saks (upmarket), Macy’s and S. Klein (downmarket). Elicited ‘fourth floor’ Incidence of rhoticity reflected social cachet of department store - awareness of overt prestige and hypercorrection
Labov hypercorrection overt prestige
Overuse of prestige form - most common at Macy’s the middle store - middle-class women show highest incidence of hypercorrection and therefore greatest sensitivity to overt prestige (i.e. women more conservative)
Overt prestige
linguistic features associated with dominant group in a society
Covert prestige
Speakers use low-prestige forms to distinguish their social or regional identity e.g. nonrhotic forms at S. Klein - most common amongst middle and working class male speakers
Trudgill (1970s)
Norwich -ing as -in’: found class more of a determiner of non-standard usage than gender, though women more likely to use overt prestige forms i.e. standard, esp. in careful speech
Negative concord
negation whereby several bits of the sentence are negated at once e.g. I ain’t done nothing or je n’ai rien fait
Key purpose of sociolinguistics compared with e.g. CDA
Social distinctions detected (by applying scientific method) in language use (predictability)
Eckert 2000
Burnouts (working class) vs Jocks (tend middle) - students can switch between categories depending on occasion
Northern Cities Shift
vowel sound realisation change
Diglossia and diglossic language
Where there are multiple varieties of one language e.g. Japanese - low, med, high - there is never mixing of the features of these varieties They are used in certain occasions
hyperarticulation
realisation of features indexes certain stances and characteristics - when code switching, speakers emphasise certain stances, perhaps to index certain associations
Semiosis / Semiotics
study of how symbols are used meaningfully
Discourse
language in action - no such thing as ‘non-social’ use of discourse.
Fairclough’s distinctions (3)
- Description of material
- Participants’ interpretation
- REsearcher’s explanation of interpretative procedures
Potential problems with CDA
Blommaert:
1. Fuzzy or weak theory
2. Might just demonstrate the obvious
3. Researcher biases in interpretation and analysis
4. Forgotten discourse - certain kinds of discourses not considered - focus on “North” societies lack of generalisability
Voice
complex with various definitions (Bakhtin 1981) Blommaert - the way people manage to make themselves understood or fail to do so - capacity to cause an uptake close to one’s desired contextualisation
How can we categorise varieties of English
a) channel of communication e.g. spoken
b) geographically identified dialects
c) socially identified sociolects
d) situationally or domain-id varieties e.g. dinner table conversation
e) styles, genres, formats e.g. formal vs informal
5 key points of Blommaert
- Focus on what language means to its users
- Language operates differently in different environments
- Focus is actual contextualised forms in which language occurs in society
- users have repertoires
- communication events are influenced by the structure of the world system
Blommaert’s ethnography
analysis of small phenomena is set against analysis of big phenomena
Contextualisation
the ways people ‘make sense’ in interactions - become meaningful - considering something in relation to the real context in which it occurs - so misplacing utterances in contexts results in misunderstandings or conflict - performed by recipient - analysis is a form of contextualisation
Entextualisation
2 processes: decontextualisation and recontextualisation - extract from context and re-set in a new context e.g. re-tweets with commentary
Intertextuality
when we speak, we constantly cite and re-cite expressions.
Ethnocentrism
evaluation of others according to preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of one’s own culture.
Aphasia
language disorders arising as the result of brain damage. Two types:
1. Broca’s aphasia
2. Wernicke’s aphasia
Broca’s aphasia
aka expressive aphasia / agrammatic aphasia has: 1. halting speech
2. functional categories missing e.g. auxiliaries and determiners
3. missing inflections and other morphology
4. disturbances to intonation and stress
5. Generative capacity for syntax is disturbed - confuse passives and actives
Wernicke’s aphasia
fluent and in control of grammar e.g. auxiliaries inflections. However, speech doesn’t make sense
1. lexical words e.g. nouns missing (paraphrased in confusing ways)
2. trouble understanding others and their own speech
Neurolinguistic perspective of Broca and Wernicke’s aphasics
Damage is to different parts of the brain:
1. Broca - Broca’s area - structural
2. Wernicke - Wernicke’s area - lexical
Internal (I) language
internal to the individual - property of the mind or brain - psycholinguistics
External (E) language
language property of societies and cultures - sociolinguistics
Competence
Ability to control aspects of language structure - pure linguistic abilities
Performance
Actually speaking and understanding e.g. memory, concentration, theory of mind etc.
Processing lexical ambiguity
Swinney 1979 - bugs - priming lexical decision experiment - we access multiple interpretations of an ambiguous word, then choose. We have expectations that come from preceding words in the sentence - process incrementally
N400
negative wave observed 400ms after word is presented - indicates that brain processing something unexpected
McGurk effect
your perception of sound is affected by what you see
FMRI
measures blood flow and changes in oxygen levels - changes magnetic properties around the brain
Magnetoencephalography
neural activity – electric current – changes in magnetic field around brain
