Language Change/Technology Theorists Flashcards
Halliday (Descriptivist)
- Functional Theory
- Langhage changes and adapts to fit the needs of its users
Shakespeare (Descriptivist)
- Frequently used/documented neologisms
- Experimented with language and is appreciated today for this
Stephen Fry (Descriptivist)
- People prioritise criticising language use over finding the pleasure it in
- “sound sex”
Theory of Lexical Gaps
-Changes are needed to fill the gaps and ‘complete’ language
Samuel Johnson (Prescriptivist)
- A Dictionary of the English Language
- “tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration”
Joel Golby (Prescriptivist)
-Wrote an article on his hatred for portmanteau words
Aitchison’s Metaphors
- Crumbling castle
- infectious disease
- damp spoon syndrome
Thomas Wilson (Prescriptivist)
- “strange ynkehorne termes”
- People through the words brought during the renaissance would corrupt the English language
- They thought they were elaborate, overly rhetorical and sometimes pompous
Johnathan Swift (Prescriptivist)
- A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue
- Disliked polysyllabic words, neologisms etc
Noah Webster (Prescriptivist)
-In 1832 he established a model for American English
Robert Lowth (Prescriptivist)
- Short Introduction to Grammar
- Followed Latin and logic
- Wanted rules like no split infinitives, prepositions before nouns etc
Lindly Murray (Prescriptivist)
- English Grammar
- Heavily reliant on Lowth
John Humphreys (Prescriptivist)
- Wrote article on dictionaries removing hyphenated words because they take too long to type
- “pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary”
Norman Fairclough (Descriptivist)
- Theory of Informality
- language has seen a restructuring of the boundaries between public and private orders or discourse
- and a shifting of the boundaries between speech and writing
- leading to a more colloquial style of language use
George Pettie (Descriptivist)
- stressed the need for inkhorn terms
- it would be hard to speak because “our mouths would be full of ink
John Honey (Prescriptivist)
- The standards of English are falling
- Believes that grammar should be taught and that standard English should be maintained
Aristotle (Prescriptivist)
- about writing: a new invention at the time
- “a dangerous invention which will interfere with human thinking and memory”
William Caxton (New Technology)
- 1476
- popularised the printing press
- encouraged standardisation
Alexander Graham Bell (New Technology)
- 1876
- invented the telephone
Guglielmo Marconi (New Technology)
- 1901
- developed first wireless telegraph and broadcasted the first transatlantic radio signal
Tim Berners-Lee (New Technology)
- 1989
- invented World Wide Web
Guy Deutscher (Descriptivism)
- theory of economy
- we are constantly finding ways to streamline language and make it easier to understand (abbreviations, slang, etc)
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
- linguistic determinism
- the idea that language determines thought
- this is an outdated theory
- people incorrectly use Orwell’s ‘newspeak’ to support this
Technological Determinism
-the idea that the information and communications we encounter online is changing the way we use language in all aspects of life
Linguistic reflectionism
- opposite of linguistic determinism
- the idea that thoughts are reflected through language
Thurlow
-2003
- there are sociolinguistic maxims:
- >need for speed and brevity
- >the need to express non verbal and prosodic features missing in written texts
Goffman
- 1981
- communication can be split into two types of constraints
- system constraints-> nature of any technology used
- ritual constraints-> conventions of the language community in question
Crystal
- 2011
- talks about CMC in terms of accordances and constraints
