Language variation and change Flashcards
Who influenced early english to become more like the language that we know today?
The children of the nobility
What distinguishes a dialect from other ones?
There will very often be a different phonology and lexis
Variation doesn’t necessarily have to be
geographically determined
Name the different types of change
Semantic
Syntactic
Morphological
Phonological
Variables in english can include
driving vs drivin’ and lack/ surplus of inflection eg ‘i wants’
How can we analyse data from early periods?
We have to rely on written data that may remain
Problems with written sources may include mistakes…
Texts copied by hand
copies of copies of copies
could it just have been a slip of the pen or was the person meant to write it like that?
What is dialect interference?
We can’t always be sure that the text represents a single dialect
There is also the problem of decipher ability
What does language reconstruction usually involve?
Using stages and filling in the gaps
It is also plausible to look at related languages to compare possible outcomes
What is a null hypothesis?
A type of hypothesis that suggests that there is actually no type of statistical significance to a set of data
The chi square test tells us the probability of this being an accurate representation of what is hypothesised
Data collection
in contemporary sociolinguistics studies often employ interview- the aim being to get the speaker to talk in a natural way
Neogrammarians
Linguists should search for predictable laws of sound change rather than word change
Tyranny of correlation
We must not attribute too much interpretation to the correlation
judgement sample
criteria for how many people of certain characteristics should be included
Stratification
How language is used differently by two different groups on a prestige scale
Change by diffusion
spread of one variant from one geographic area to another
Change by transmission
new learners acquiring variety
Enregistrarion
the adoption of a local variety as a known language
Koine
new dialects that form a mixture of a previous varieties
gender paradox
men use higher frequency of non-standard forms than women do yet women often initiate the change
register
connected linguistic practices associated with a group of speech situations
indexicality
connection between a sound variant and facts about the speakers that use that sound frequently
frames
how speakers orient to what is going on in an interaction
the varieties of old english
Northumbrian, Mercian, ANGLIAN, West Saxon and Kentish
