lang change theories Flashcards
michael halliday’s functional theory
“language changes and adapts to the needs of its users”
- new words are created due to new inventions and these require a new word e.g. ‘large hardon collider’ as we have the knowledge and technology to develop this, old words become obselete and the word is lost as we no longer require it e.g. ‘ballista’ as we have better weaponry and no longer use this
- technology also causes change in the meanings of words as they adapt to express concepts that previously didn’t exist (semantic change) e.g. mouse, bug, virus, crash all relate to computers
- changes to understanding eg. ‘carbice’ means the concept of eating too many carbohydrate-rich foods, whereas previously the focus was on eating less fat if you wanted to loose weight. this reflects a changing understanding of science, weight and diet
- graphology/orthology = digital messaging has led to inreased innovation in graphology as texts often convey short, demotic and phatic messages associated with speech e.g. emoji variations
CRITICISMS = only explains lexical and semantic changes, sometimes new words replace existing words and sometimes words die out for no apparent reason
ed sapir and ben wharf
reflectionism = a persons words reflect their was of thinking e.g. using ractist words suggests your internal prejudice against ethnic groups
determinism = if a person can be pursuaded not to use prejudice terms and adopt new, socially acceptable words, this will determine a new way of thinking e.g. theoretical basis for PC
melinda chen - reclaiming
reclaiming = “collective arts where a derogatory sign/signifier is consciously employed by the original target of the derogation, often in a positive sense”
when a previously pejorated term is adopted by the original target of the term and self-applied to the group my members. e.g. young, back people referring to themselves as the “n word” or “dykes on bikes”
criticisms of sapir and wharf
stephen pinker argues that language and thoughts are independent in the brain so there is no direct link between the words you use and your attitudes. Humans do not think in ‘communication language’ , instead they use mentalese
guy deutcher
radical descritivist and thinks that lang is getting better and more suited to the world we live in
language changes for 3 reasons
1. economy = short cuts of pronunciation saves effort for the speaker e.g innit. these are NOT LAZY as they’re predictable changes, because they happen in other languages like france where n’est pa became shepa
2. analogy = applying the rules of one words to another by analogy to make language more regular and make unusual words more predictable e.g. the s inflection replacing the +en inflection on words like ‘housen’/’shoen’ to create ‘houses’/’shoes’
3. expressiveness = speakers using a wider range of language to try and sound more vivid and avoid predictable language e.g. ‘awesome’ not ‘cool’
stephen pinker
Euphemism Treadmill – If we adopt a euphemism to avoid prejudice, we’ll just make the euphemism pejorative.
thoughts are in charge of words so if we give a concept a new name, the name becomes coloured by the concept (not the concept being changed by the name) so the new ‘correct’ word becomes pejorated and a new word must be found
e.g. ‘n x’ ‘negro’ ‘coloured’ ‘black’ ‘afro-carribean’
a harmful side effect of constant changing terms is people who are not aware of this constant lang change (e.g. older people) can appear as bigots for innocently using an ‘old-fashioned’ word e.g. crippled
donald mackinnon
language changes due to people’s attitudes about weather a variation is
- socially acceptable VS socially unacceptable
- morally acceptable VS morally unacceptable
- useful VS useless
william labov - change from above
some language changes are imposed upon by powerful groups (auhority) e.g. criminal sentences can be increased if they are due to prejudice and involve discriminatory language / instagram has punishments for sexual harassment between users and TikTok doesn’t allow sexually explicit messages to be sent between users.
charles hockett
“fashion in language is as unpredictable as fashion in clothes”
the constant changing of the world means that changes in language need to occur. this creates unpredictable errors and fluctuations within English that’re adopted and reproduced by speakers.
small, seemingly insignificant changes can occur without any deliberate intention or external force driving them. these changes to not follow a clear or consistent pattern, but simply just occur due to the unpredictablilty of lang.
e.g. donald trump used the word ‘bigly’ which meant ‘in a big way’ and people chose to reproduce and spread it as they found it funny.
CRITICISMS = if this where true lang would be chaotic and not obey the rules it clearly does, lang change is too consistent to be explained like this. e.g. new verbs tend to be weak and have the +ed past tense inflection.
william labov - substratum theory
the movement of poeple
how languages evolve and change over time due to influence from other languages or dialects and contact with non-native/regional speakers.
when people learn a language they learn it imperfectly, even though the community adopts the dominant language, elements of the original language may remain embedded in their speech. e.g. New Yorkers using the open-mid back rounded vowel sound /:c/ to pronounce ‘coffee’ as ‘kawfee’ as this is what jewish new yorkers did, this is now typical of the city accent. coffee -> cawfee = k)?fi? hypercorrected to cAffee cAp
CRITICISMS = can only explain a narrow range of changes and change only happens in places and at time when there isn’t a significant number of non-english speakers learning the langauge
love and wegner
communities of practice = groups of people who share a common interest/activity use language as a group identity marker and to show group membership. this language sticks and doesn’t leave the community to enter mainstream language. e.g. ‘gg’ means ‘good game’ ‘noob’ means an inexperienced player.
norman fairclough and sharron goodman
goodman = claimed we are living in a time of increased informality and language that was traditionally reserved for close relationships is now being used in wider contexts .e.g using first names
fairclough = claimed that spoken language has risen in status and prestige and informal writing has risen in usage e.g. NEWS being delivered on TV (by speech) and not on a newspaper (words)
characteristics of informalisation
- increased use of given names
- shortened terms of address e.g. pal
- contraction of words and auxilaries e.g. won’t
- the use of active rather than passive sentence constructions
- colloquial language and slang
dan jurafsky
words loose their intensity of meaning, meanings of words weaken, this is especially common with emotional words e.g. love or ‘horrible’ no longer means to inspire horror in someone, just means bad
Michael Halliday - lexical gap
words can be created to “fill a gap” where a word does not currently exist as sometimes we do not have words for things
e.g. in english we do not have a word for ‘the joy of seeing your enemy fail’ - schadenfreuder (german) OR kummerspeck (german) - ‘the weight gained from being dumped’
CRITICISMS = only explains lexical change and some gaps still remain unfilled
jonathan swift
1712
“a proposal for correcting the english tongue” - an early prescriptivist attempt to standardize english, claimed that english was “extremely imperfect” and changing too fast. said english should have an academy to protect it like the french academy, he didn’t like clippings.
CRITICISMS labov change from above, academy francaise hasn’t changed french lang and the changes they have tried to make have been ingnored by everyday people e.g ‘fin de semain’ not ‘le weekend’
jean aitchison
wrote from a prescriptivist point, but she was a descriptivist herself
created 3 metaphors for why people worry about language being in a ‘decay’
1. the damp spoon syndrome = people have become lazy with language, some people view language change with distaste and believe it is becoming slovenly e.g. g-dropping
CRITICISM = Aitchson said ‘the only truly lazy speech is drunken speech… and English is not getting like drunken speech. Language change isn’t actually lazy as the glottal stop t in ‘water’ /t/ to /?/ is actually more effort - prescriptivists just do not like this change.
2. the crumbling castle view = the idea that english was, at some point, in its golden age and is now in a state of dispair and is decaying
CRITICISM = aitchson said that there has never been a time when english has reached “peak perfection” and english has never been ‘finished’ and is always changing so how can it be restored. english isn’t declining, it is just constantly changing
3. the infectious disease assumption = the view that people can ‘catch’ language from other people without meaning to, their languges changes because they’re trying to fit in with whats ‘new’ in society
CRITICISM = aitchson says that language change is normal social behaviour, we do it for a reason e.g. covert prestige, in-group codes, convergence. language serves a purpose.
Charles-James Bailey - wave model
geographical, social and temporal distance will have an effect on language change
the closer you are to the change, the more it will effect you e.g. MUE impacted speakers in London more than it did those in rural areas
a person closer to the ‘epicenter’ of the change will be affected the most by it, a person further away is less likely to adopt the change
1. a new aspect of language (an innovation) is invented at one place (epicenter)
2. it spreads outwards, but the center is the point of maximum effectiveness
3. as the circles spread from the center, they act like waves, and become weaker
the theory argues that different innovations spread at different rates, and in different directions
e.g. ‘swurve’ to mean avoid used in liverpool in 1990s and has spread to southern scottland and birmingham, and is still spreading
peter trudgill - criticisms of C.J bailey
changes do not ‘ripple’ outwards, they move from big cities, to smaller cities, then to towns and misses out countryside dwellings
melinda chen’s S-curve model
identified 3 stages for how language change happens
1. initiation - language change starts and the progress is slow as the change is usually limited to a small group e.g. a social class or geographical area
2. expansion - the rate of language change increases and starts to gain momentum as more speakers start to use the new feature, including those in different social groups or regions.
3. termination - the spread slows, and the feature reaches its peak in terms of usage. it might become entrenched in the language, used by nearly all speakers, or it might plateau, with little further change occurring. the linguistic feature is fully integrated into the language system.
e.g. using ‘like’ as a filler “that was, like, so amazing” -> origionated in subcultures in california in 1990s and spread among teenagers and young adults, even spread to mainstream media.
‘LOL’ as an initialism = used among teens over texting, adults have adopted it, not as effective though because some adults think it means ‘lots of love’
william labov - social bonding theory
a small group pronounces a word uniquely and this becomes an identity marker, and others who wish to be part of the group adopt this difference. if this change is given enough time, it will affect all words with the same sound. e.g. people who wanted to appear cooler (covert prestige) would apply the jamican feature of metathesis to ‘ask’ making it a:ks, and this is now an MUE feature that may also develop to words like ‘task’
the process of standardization
the process of standard english (a dialect) being developed
johnston’s dictionary
1755
first major dictionary
attempted to fix the spellings and definitions of words
realised change to english was going to happen anyway, so he became a descriptivist
said trying to fix english was trying to “lash the wind”
lowth’s grammar
1762
tried to make english grammar logical, so it obeyed the same rules as latin
- will (choice) and shall (definite) should be differented
- thou should no longer be used
- multiple negation, comparatives and superlatives should not be used
- prepesitions should come before the noun (solecism)
- infinitives should not be split (solecism)
all of his rules either happened naturally or no one cared about them, ‘thou’ was dying out anyway, no one but prescriptivists care about the ‘will’ and ‘shall’ distinction, everyone uses multiple negation and solecisms are pointless rules that no one follows, made for latin but not english
einor haugen - the process of standardization
standardization happened in 4 stages
1. selection - the east midlands was chosen as the basis for standard english
2. elaboration - the eastern midlands dialect was used for an increasing range of functions and so they added new words so it could do new, posher things e.g. ‘gravity’
3. codification - the rules of spelling and the definition of words and the norms of grammar are decided and written down
4. implementation - the standards is used by writers and academics, and they criticise those who do not use the standard form, that is why not using standard english is stigmatised
the inkhorn controversy - tomas wilson and the arte of rhetorique
writers in the 17th century began to expand the vocabulary of english was it was increasing in prestige. however some writers objected to these new words as they thought they were artificial and pretentious
tomas wilson - the arte of rhetorique = a book telling people how to write and speak in an ‘impressive’ manner
clayton’s benign prescriptivism
says that prescriptivism isn’t always a bad thing and that the label that prescriptivism is bad is untrue as prescriptivism can sometimes be good. e.g. the ‘clear english campaign’ aims to make documents and things cleaer to understand by saying what langauge can and can’t be used e.g. NHS healthcare services enure their policies are easy to read and understand by everyone. prescriptivism also helps with political correctness as it tells us we can and can’t use some words e.g. shouldn’t use racist words.
lane-greene’s sticklerisms and decliniom
use with jean aitchson
says that prescriptivism falls into two catgegories - sticklerism and declinism
sticklerism - describes what others say as wrong because it is illogical
declinism - the perception that our language is in a stage of irreversible decline from a once great past. prescriptivists blame young people, technology and immigrants with the reason english is broken and for this decline (crumbling castle)
criticisms of declinists - lane and greene
they do not consider how english is actually being used e.g. english is not in decline, it is just being used by more people and in more places
doesn’t acknowledge that language is changing to also add new words and structures, its not crumbling away
grenne claimes that english is cleary not declining
