Grammar & Conversational Routines Flashcards
Why are language myths a problem?
They seem familiar, often assumed to be an accurate representation of English. Inconsistent with empirical evidence. Can have a profound effect towards the language.
What is the Reversed Standard Ideology?
An ideology parasitic on the myth that posh people pronounce all letters. Evaluative beliefs of SLI.
Why could spelling be considered as chaotic?
No 1-1 strict letter - sound system.
Doesn’t represent the pronunciation if words. - complex vowel sounds.
What historical explanations are there for English spelling?
Borrowing: Latin consonants, digraphs, French digraphs promoted by Norman scribes > this complicated English spelling.
Legibility: made with downstrokes of a pen and so was chaotic, so the was introduced to join words.
Printing and standardisation: Caxton Printing Press 1476 attempt to standardise spelling, Dutch printers. Mass production, line justification meant that spelling still varieds
Etymological spelling: 18th century, tried to spell words how they viewed correctly this was based on Latin, so words like debt emerged from Latinate debitum. This mean words were no longer spelt phonetically, how they were pronounced.
Loan words: brought their own conventions.
What was the first alphabet in Britain?
Runic, derived from Etruscan, earliest inscription 400AD.
What are Ivanic’s learner’s strategies of punctuation? (1996)
1- ratio between number of words to mark punctuation marks.
2- marking off units of speech, e.g breathers, pauses
3- marking off units of meanings e.g shifts in topic
4- marking off units of grammar.
Different strategies for different learner’s.
Explain the history of English letters.
- Letters emerged from hieroglyphs, Greek alphabet, Roman alphabet, etc.
-Christian missionaries 597AD spread literacy, bringing forms of the Latin alphabet with them - 23 letter alphabet. Some sounds of English had no counterpart. For example; did not exist in the language until 17th century and was a development from
<i>. was used for both [f] and [v] sounds. ‘Th’ sounds were represented by the ‘thorn’ symbol. and were little used before Norman French conquest.
Diacritics were borrowed from other languages. I.e. é [w] was written as <p> and was later replaced by and . </p></i>
Who gave the development of punctuation a boost?
Scribes struggling with foreign language and by the church’s concern for the misinterpretation of texts.
Why is the auxiliary ‘do’ such an important development in the English language?
Crystal (2003) claims it’s the most important development in the history of grammar. It developed doing the role of inflections.
It allows to form questions, negation a and can be used for emphasis.
‘Do’ in questions = reverse subject - verb order. Before questions would begin with a lexical verb.
‘Do’ in negative statements - ‘ne’ usually before the verb ‘ne + not’ multiple negation used to be accepted, Early Modern English, in this period it became increasingly usual to insert do forms into negative/interrogative statements.
Explain the development of inflections in the English language?
In O.E there were noun inflections for number, gender and case e.g. Nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. There were 6 noun declensions, so the language was more complex. Inflections would tell you everything in the sentence, such as the subject etc. whereas now we used word order to do so which is why we are an isolated language rather than and synthetic one such as Latin.
Describe the internal sources for the development of the lexicon
Morphology - the internal structure of words - inflectional morphology - grammatical characteristics of words and derivational morphology - how words are constructed.
Morphemes- smallest unit of meaning in the language. Allomorphs can be realised in different ways. Bound morphemes (cannot stand alone) Free morphemes (can easily stand alone).
What are the processes of word formation?
Affiliation - adding affixes to form another word, prefixes, suffixes can change grammatical function of words too.
Back formation- when something, usually the affixes, is removed to form another word.
Compounding - two words combined together to form another.
Functional conversion - using one part of speech as another e.g. A noun becomes and verb.
Blending - fusing elements of words together to make another, not whole words.
Clipping - shortening a word by removing syllables.
Aphetic forms - dropping the unstressed vowel at the beginning of a word.
Acronyms= combining the initial letters of a word.
What is the difference between how we use modal verbs and how they were used in old English?
Today there is no tense distinction between them, whereas in old English tense was marked e.g. Should was past tense. Also modals could operate on their own, whereas now they need a main verb to join to in a sentence.
What are strong and weak verbs and where did they originate in the history of english?
Early Modern English.
Weak verbs: irregular verbs that do not add on an inflection but rather change the form of their base. E.g. Drink > drank > drunk
Strong verbs: regular verbs that add a -d or a -t to the end of the word to form a past or a past participle.
What is a language myth?
A belief about language held by a particular community, part of a cultural ideology used to evaluate language.
