Language Change Flashcards
Jean Aitchison
descriptivist
- Crumbling castle view
- infectious disease
- Damp spoon syndrome
Fairclough
Noticed advertisements and marketing texts are increasingly attempting to mimic speech. He labelled this ‘conversationalisation’
Sharon Goodman
Said we are living in a time of increased informalization. Language forms that were traditionally reserved for close personal relationships are now used in wider social contexts.
Bollinger
Highlighted the increasing use of euphemism in advertising.
Charles Locket
Random fluctuation theory - belief that random events and errors lead to language change.
Suzanne romaine
believed language change may occur in two ways:
- Internal changes - the factors within the language.
- External changes - changing social contexts ideologies, technology and inventions
Halliday
Functional theory- language changes according to the needs of its users.
Can be used to explain archaisms and the use of slang.
David Crystal
Tide metaphor - language is constantly changing like the tide.
he says that if changes don’t hinder communication then surely change is good.
Damp spoon syndrome
Prescriptivist view: view that language use has become lazy.
Crumbling Castle
Prescriptivist view: language is like a a perfect castle that must be preserved
Aitchisons criticism: language has never been at a pinnacle, it is in constant state of flux. Also, a rigid system is not
Infectious disease assumption
- Language is contagious, bad habits spread to others.*
- Aitchisons criticism: people adopt new language habits because they like them and want to- it is not done to people against their will.*
Gradddol, Leith and Swann four key processes in the standardisation of a language
- Selection- east midlands dialect (dialect spoken in seats of power- London, Oxford, Cambridge)
- Elaboration- writers produce a growing body of written work in many different fields using this form of English
- Codification- with English growing in prestige, many attempts are made to draw up a set of rules to codify its use, especially in its written form
- Implementation- this ideology about
Johnathon Swift
dislike of Vagueness in language: the ‘poverty of conversation’, Shortened words, Unnecessary contractions, Unnecessary polysyllabic words
Robert Lowth
Leading figure in the establishment of grammatical rules
Joseph Priestley
He had grammatical biases, but liked the idea of simplicity and strove to pare English down to its English roots.
He particularly disliked what he called ‘Gallicisms’ (words recently adopted from French)
Inkhorn controversy
Writers of the Renaissance began to expand the vocabulary by coining new words, using compounding or affixation, or borrowing extensively from the classical languages Latin and Greek and from the romance language French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.
Robert Lane Green
writes about Caxton’s frustration at finding so many dialect words for the same thing Certainly it is hard to please every man by cause of diversity and change of language.
Sapir Whorf
sums up the concept of linguistic determinism. Linguistic determinism is the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorisation, memory and perception.
