Attitudes to Language Change Flashcards
Deborah Cameron
‘Verbal Hygiene’
Used grammar as the metaphorical correlate for a multitude of related political and moral terms: ‘order, tradition, authority, hierarchy and rules’.
According to Cameron, bad grammar equates to ‘bad behaviour.’
Norman Fairclough
His book ‘Language and Power’ is an example of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).
Believed language is often used as a mouthpiece for political and ideological views; social situations are shaped by power dynamics.
Synthetic personalisation: how media can make members of a mass audience feel as if they are spoken to as an individual.
Lynne Truss
Wrote zero-tolerance guide to grammar ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’. Stickerlist with prescriptivist views that language is declining due to laziness.
Equates incorrect grammar to “a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement”
Johnathan Swift
In 1712, Swift proposed that the English language was in a state of anarchy, and should remain frozen; sheltered from the ravages of social trends.
“some method should be thought on for ascertaining and fixing our language for ever … it is better a language should not be wholly perfect, than that it should be perpetually changing”
John Humphrys
Argues that we must protect language from technology and compares users to:
“vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.”
Jean Aitchison
Damp Spoon Syndrome: the idea that language change is a result of laziness; akin to the shift in consistency after leaving a damp spoon in a bowl of sugar.
Crumbling Castle: English is a language which has been primed over hundreds of years into its current splendour and should be protected like a ‘listed building’. It is losing its ornate prestige as a result of language change.
Infectious Disease: language ‘catches’ like a disease through social contact. People pick it up and apply it in their own speech.
David Crystal
Tide Metaphor: language is like a tide, constantly changing in ebbs and flows. Bringing in new words and taking out others.
Lane Green
Developed the theory of declinism- the idea that language was better yesterday and will be worse tomorrow. However, there has never been a ‘golden age’ of language.
