Diversity & Change Mega Pack Flashcards
Pre-English Period (2)
- Dominant language is Celtic and many are Latin-Celtic bilinguals
- Celtic words survive in place names e.g. -tor, -combe, -crag
Early Old English Period (3)
- Fundamental words originate from Old English e.g. in, on, into, drink, come go
- Beowulf is an example of Old English literature
- Still Latin influence in religion: ‘altar’, ‘monk’
Later Old English Period (2)
- Old Norse influence: knife, skull, anger
2. Old Norse sped up the loss of the complex declension system and went from a syntactic to an analytic language
Middle English Period (3)
- French became prestige language: new words included felony, perjury, monastery, cathedral, poetry, literature
- English speaking peasants handled ‘cows’ and ‘pigs’ but the Francophone nobility consumed the ‘beef’ and ‘pork’
- English words for nobility e.g. athel ‘noble’ and atheling ‘prince’ underwent attrition
Early Modern English Period (4)
- Use of ‘more’ and ‘-er’ inflection simultaneously is acceptable, as is negative concord
- Shakespeare’s Hamlet introduced over 600 previously unrecorded terms e.g. laughable, obscene
- Influence of Latin & Greek e.g. heliocentric and satellite
- East India Company borrowed words from India e.g. ‘jungle’ from ‘jangal’
Modern English Period (2)
- RP becomes increasingly popular after being developed by the middle and upper classes - John Walker’s pronunciation dictionary in 1791
- 1762 Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar; some 3500 rules written
Lexical Borrowing
Contemporary: ‘wok’ - Cantonese (1950s)
Historical: ‘purchase’ (vs. ‘buy’) - Old French post-1066
Lexical Attrition
Contemporary: ‘floppy-disk’
Historical: ‘athel’, ‘atheling’
Lexical Derivation
Contemporary: ‘-aholic’ e.g. ‘workaholic’, ‘shopaholic’
Lexical Conversion
Contemporary: ‘to google’ from ‘google’
Lexical Backformation
Contemporary: ‘to televise’ from ‘television’
Lexical Blending
Contemporary: ‘smog’ from ‘smoke’ + ‘fog’
Lexical Compounding
Contemporary: ‘laptop’
Historical: ‘bookcase’ (1720s)
Lexical Clipping
Initial clipping: ‘net’ for ‘internet’
Final clipping ‘deli’ for ‘delicatessen’
Lexical Abbreviation
Contemporary: ‘doc’ for doctor (American English)
Calque
Contemporary: ‘chop chop’ - from Cantonese via Chinglish
Historical: ‘scapegoat’ (1530s) - from Tyndale’s Bible
Acronym
Contemporary: NASA, LOL
Historical: SCOTUS (first acronym - telegram)
Initialism
Contemporary: NAACP
Slang
Contemporary: creps
Historical: batty-fang (Victorian - ‘to beat’)
PC Terms (2)
- police officer
2. head teacher
Semantic Amelioration
Contemporary: ‘sick’
Historical: ‘knight’ (originally meant servant)
Semantic Derogation
‘buxom’
1755: ‘obedient’
1950: ‘bosomy’
Semantic Shift
‘gay’
1940: ‘homosexual’
1400: ‘bright’
Metaphor
‘harrowing’
1790s: ‘distressing’
1300s: ‘haru’ meaning ‘rake’
Semantic Meiosis / Weaknening
‘dreadful’
1200s: full of dread
1680s: very bad or uncomfortable
Semantic Hyperbole / Strengthening
‘decimate’
1600: kill 1/10
1660: completely destroy
Metonym
‘White House’
Synechdoche
‘Brussels’ to refer to the EU
Semantic Broadening
'dogge' = a specific breed of hunting dog 'dog' = any type of dog
Semantic Narrowing
'deor' = any type of animal 'deer' = 'deer'
Labov (1963)
Martha’s Vineyard:
Studied: /au/ and /ai/ vowel sounds
Found:
1. Fishermen centralised /au/ and /ai/ more than any other occupational group
2. People of the age group 31-45 are most likely to pronounce vowels this way
3. Up-Islanders used the centralised diphthongs more than people living in the area of Down-Island
Handbook for Teachers of Public Elementary Schools (1891)
“It is the business of educated people to speak [RP] so that no one may tell in what county their childhood was passed”
Does Accent Matter? (John Honey, 1989)
Cockney is ‘designed to exclude outsiders like you and me’ and is based on ‘tribalism’
Agheyisi & Fishman (1970)
First recorded use of matched guise test; respondents rated English as sounding more intelligent (social judgement) as opposed to French
Giles (numerous studies)
- RP seen as having more status than West Country or Northern
- RP seen as more intelligent, ambitious and confident
- Welsh and Cockney seen as more talkative
Giles & Powesland (1972)
17 year olds lectured by a Brummie and RP speaker saw the RP lecturer as more intelligent despite being given the same lecture
Ball et. al. (1989)
- ‘Cultivated’ Australian English rated higher in terms of intelligence, reliability, honesty, etc.
- ‘Broad’ Australian English seen as more talkative and with a better sense of humour
Peninsula Law Firm’s Study
Eight in ten employers admit to making discriminatory decisions based on regional accents
ITV/ComRes Study
28% of Britons feel discriminated against as a result of how they speak
ITV Tonight Study
- 4% of Britons have attempted to sound ‘less posh’
- 10% of Londoners have tried to sound ‘less posh’
- 1 in 50 Scots have attempted to reduce their natural accent, whereas for Brummies this figure is 8 in 50
Milroy (2002)
Geographical mobility is disrupting close-knit localised networks, resulting in dialect levelling
Rosewarne (1984)
Estuary English defined as “a mixture of non-regional and local south-eastern English pronunciation and intonation”
Gillian Shephard (Minister of Education)
Estuary English said to be “a bastardised version of the cockney dialect”
Coggle (1994)
Estuary English “a bridge between the various classes in South-East England”
Kohlmyer (1996)
Those from traditional RP backgrounds use Estuary English for covert prestige, while those who have the local accent use it for overt prestige and to sound sophisticated
